The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (28 page)

“What did you think this was—a seduction?” The woman on the bed begins to laugh. The girl joins in, and when she opens her mouth there are no teeth in her gums. Flames curl out of her mouth, between her lips and down across her chin. Her cheeks bulge outwards, the skin turning red and almost transparent.

The woman stands up and walks away from the bed. Her tattoos are moving, creating new pictures across the canvas of her body. Each one is a replica of the running girl from the film—the same girl who is now on fire in the corner, blazing away silently. Like an old-fashioned flicker frame, the thin, black figures run on the spot, never really going anywhere, just stuck to the woman’s flesh.

The girl is now nothing but a blackened husk, a charcoal shell. The intensity of the blaze has painted the outline of her form on the white wall behind her; a cinder image, a memory that will never be erased.

You turn away and approach the door. Behind you, the woman is laughing again; she begins to speak in tongues, calling you names in a variety of languages you cannot understand.

You open the door.

Outside the room is a blasted landscape. Blackened ruins, a long dirt road, a wavering thread of fire along the horizon. You spin around and the door, along with the room beyond it, has vanished. All you can see for miles is more of the same empty, smoking landscape. In the distance, a vehicle approaches you at speed. As it gets closer, you see that it is an army jeep, but you don’t recognise the decals and markings on the bodywork.

The man in the passenger seat of the jeep is holding a gun, aiming it in your direction. At this distance he might miss, but if they come any closer he’ll hit you for certain.

These are trained soldiers, possibly even paid mercenaries belonging to no official army. They were taught to kill. No longer individuals, they are now part of a larger project: war as installation art; indiscriminate killing as a means of making an artistic statement.

These are not men; they are symbols, ciphers.

Meat is murder. . . .

War is hell. . . .

Born to kill. . . .

Once the jeep is close enough that you can see the men are smiling and laughing, you turn around and start to run. You try to pretend that you didn’t see the severed head stuck to the front of the car, impaled on a spoke of the shattered radiator grille.

When you glance down at the ground, you see that you are wearing heavy army-issue boots. Your legs are clad in baggy camouflage cargo pants, and you are wearing a green shirt and combat jacket. You do not have a weapon, but there are bullets in a pouch on your belt.

A sudden burst of flames peels first the shirt and jacket and then the skin from your back. You clench your tattered fists and pump your arms and legs, trying to outrun the war—any war; whatever damned war is raging endlessly behind you.

You feel small. Tiny. Defenceless.

Up ahead of you is a naked little girl. She is running, too, and screaming. You grab her arm as you move to overtake her, pulling her up into a tight embrace. You recognise her face as she looks into your eyes, still screaming. The last time you saw her, she was ashes. You keep on going, not letting your stride falter. You need to get away; you have to save her this time.

Her screams drown out your thoughts. All you can think of is that you have to get away and protect the girl.

But there is nowhere for you to run; there is no hiding place for either of you out here, in the war zone, chased by an enemy you do not even know.

You are gripped by a terrible feeling of
déjà vu
:

This could be Vietnam, it could be Cambodia; it might be Serbia, Afghanistan, or the West Bank. It could be anywhere.

It could be anywhere at all. Any time at all.

But it is England.

It is now.

And it is happening to you.

Just as you hear the first gunshot, you see a flash of white light from a mound of rubble at the side of the road—the sun flaring off a camera lens, winking conspiratorially as you finally enter the scene and hit your mark.

A second shot rips the air apart close to your right ear. The impact ruffles your hair, shoves you sideways. You stumble, losing your grip on the girl, and feel your heart drop all the way through your body to your knees. A cry escapes your lips as you realise that you will fail her. You have already failed her.

Then all you know is explosive pain and the sense that an audience is waiting to catch you when you fall.

It ends with a man and a girl. They are no longer able to run. No music. No closing credits. Slow fade to black.

And then it starts all over again.

IF YOU'VE EVER sat alone at night in one of those houses or flats that back on to the overground sections of the Hammersmith & City line, then you will know—as Michael did—that the trains that go by, with images and light shining out of oblong frames, are not trains at all, but movies.

After the many hours he spent as a child watching them day after day, night after night, year after year, Michael knew he was destined for a life in movies. But it didn’t work out the way he might have planned it.

Michael had never set eyes on his mother, a first-reel casualty. His father lived in a world of his own, its dimensions those of his house in Shepherd’s Bush. Michael rented a Hammersmith bedsit. Uncomfortably close to his father, it’s true, but the old man could have had no idea—or even care— that Michael was even still alive, never mind living under a mile away.

Michael worked for one of the big production companies. In Dispatch. In a Great Titchfield Street basement, cans of film stacked up high on the shelves. Videocassette Canary Wharves—U-matic, Betacam, VHS. Michael signed them in and signed them out. A life in movies. The only time he ever saw a piece of film was if a dispatch rider dropped a can and the lid fell off.

“What’s all this about shift work?” his manager asked him.

“Movie commitments,” Michael replied, quick as a flash. “Film work.”

The guy gave him a funny look, but it was true enough and it got Michael the late shifts he was after. All so that when he went home on the overground sections of the Hammersmith & City line, it was nighttime on the other side of the screen.

“Now it’s dark,” Michael muttered in deliberate echo of Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth every time he boarded at Great Portland Street. “Now it’s dark.”

Darkness was the first prerequisite for film projection. Just as matinée shows weren’t proper screenings, so too the trains that ran during daylight were not real movies. The Hammersmith & City line was genuine cinema. They may have only been short films, curtain-raisers, appetite-whetters, but Michael gave it all he had. Every ride home in the dark was a fresh performance, another stab at the part.

He hadn’t satisfied himself that he knew where these films came from or who made them or why they were different from the ones on his shelves at work or indeed, in video format, on his shelves at home. But he took them seriously—as seriously as if the Oscar were up for grabs every night of the week.

As the carriages trundled between Great Portland Street and Baker Street, this was the leader edge of the first reel, black celluloid, no images to project. Sometimes the film would get stuck in the gate of the projector between Baker Street and Edgware Road. The actor-passengers around Michael would cluck with impatience, improvising frenetically as they watch-checked, mobile-phoned.

Michael remained calm. Sooner or later the driver-projectionist would right the film and, once they were out of Edgware Road, the movie proper began. An illuminated strip of celluloid shooting out into the night, its audience the rear mansion flats of Gloucester Terrace, the boxy council apartments of Westbourne Park, the Edwardian owneroccupieds of Shepherd’s Bush—one of them Michael’s father’s place, the portion of the audience Michael kept especially in mind as he worked on his performance night after night. Just as day after pitiless day, Michael had lain in his cot watching, from behind its bars, as the trains went by. Twenty-four hours a day—his father working obsessively on his own doomed projects, his painstaking documentaries of animal life and reproductive cycles.

Michael’s room was at the back of the house. He lay in his cot and he sat in his pram and watched the trains. Lucky if he got fed once a day. He cried and yelled and watched the trains through his tears.

Michael had noticed the blind people at Great Portland Street. Who hadn’t—apart from the blind people themselves? The station saw a lot of white-stick merchants passing through its gates, their reactions to normal acts of kindness—offers of assistance out of the station, across the road—ranging from genuine pleasure to unmasked irritation. Michael liked to help. Liked being thanked, disliked having charity thrown back in his face.

In Dispatch, Michael was ticking off the days. A can of film had sat on the bottom shelf, the bottom shelf at the back, for just under six months, having appeared one day before the start of his shift and never been picked up. Never even appeared on the worksheet.

He gave himself six months. Long enough for a mistake to be rectified. If no one came to pick up the can in six months, not only did Michael feel he could legitimately sneak it home himself, but he could assume it had been put there for him—and he had passed some kind of test by not taking it before.

He hadn’t even opened the can. It could be empty. But something told him it wasn’t. He didn’t even need to check—as long as he left it undisturbed for six months it would turn out to contain film for his eyes only.

He became jaunty with the dispatch riders, cocky with the company runners.

For the final week of the six-month wait, Michael brought a hold-all to work and took it home again at the end of his shift. Hefted it conspicuously whenever an opportunity arose.

On the last day, he slipped the can into the hold-all, zipped it up. Left as if everything were normal. Just another day at the office. Another ride on the tube.

A couple of pavement-shufflers were waiting at Great Portland Street. Michael watched them on the bank of closed-circuit monitors at the same end of the platform where he stood every night. The end which would leave him farthest from the exit at Hammersmith—he didn’t like people coming up behind him on the platform. He still hadn’t figured out the obstacle-dodgers’ significance in the nightly movie show, though the irony wasn’t entirely lost on him—that of these sightless characters appearing in a visual medium to be enjoyed by an audience of west Londoners with eyes in their heads but no love in their hearts.

Michael’s father’s place backed on to the line between Shepherd’s Bush and Goldhawk Road, only the market separating back yard from railway. Michael lived between Goldhawk Road and Hammersmith; his room offered a similar view to the one he’d
not
enjoyed throughout his cheerless childhood. When looking for a place, he hadn’t really considered any alternative to the view he knew.

Michael directed himself all the way home, zooming in on the hold-all—the occasional whip-pan to frame either of the blind passengers. Pretending not to know each other, they were travelling at opposite ends of the carriage.

The only thing Michael had taken with him when he left his father’s house was one of the old man’s collection of 16mm movie projectors. He, too, would have preferred for his life in movies to have been different to the way it turned out, but his later seven-hour natural-history epics fell between two stools, hitting the right note with neither BBC nor ICA. His entry in the record books was for having amassed the world’s largest collection of 16mm projectors owned by an individual.

He didn’t even possess the imagination to switch them on and have them all running at the same time showing different movies, or even the same movie, which
might
have appealed to the ICA.

Michael had never used the projector he’d nicked from his old man. He switched it on now and again to check the bulb, projecting a white square onto the bare wall, but had always been waiting for the right film to come along. In the meantime he’d watched videos. His bedsit contained a rickety unit crammed with cassettes—
Jacob’s Ladder
,
Eraserhead
,
Halloween
,
Blue Velvet
, etc. A decent-sized TV and his director’s chair completed the picture.

Heading home, the film in his bag, Michael did nothing to embellish his performance, to mark it out as different from normal. All he ever did was sit or stand, depending on the time at which he’d boarded, until the terminus. He’d vary the door at which he got off, but he hardly overdid it.

This time, he disembarked at the far end.

In the morning it mattered less where he sat, what he did. Morning trains were rehearsals.

He didn’t need to rehearse. He needed only to get to work and pretend this was just another day. Another autumn day.

The film he’d watched the night before had shown him not only the significance of the eye-test rejects but also where the short films of the Hammersmith & City line came from.

Unlikely perhaps that one short piece of film should have answered both questions, but the answers were the same. Michael knew he heard voices—he’d admitted as much to the people at Charing Cross Hospital— so he’d watched the film a second time to make sure he wasn’t being taken for a ride.

Lying in bed watching the late movies outside his rain-streaked window, he’d realised what he had to do, and, scanning the calendar on his wall, he’d worked out when he would do it.

That very week. Friday. Halloween.

Every evening, walking to the tube, Michael passed the RNIB in Great Portland Street. But, wilfully or not, he contrived not to see it, and the presence of so many blind passengers in the tube station continued to be a mystery—now solved.

Since watching his father’s film, he had all the answers. The film in the can had been his father’s work.

On the Friday evening—Halloween—Michael picked up two blind stragglers on the way, an elbow in each hand. He helped them through the barriers, down to the platform.

Down to the far end they went, away from the few other passengers. “It’s busy tonight. You don’t want to get knocked onto the track.” The indicator board showed that the first train to arrive would be a Hammersmith service, but he told his two unseeing charges that it was a semi-fast Watford train and that he just had to go somewhere for a minute and they should wait for him. He would be back to help them get to where they were going. So saying, he tracked back up the platform. Picking out a couple more blind folk.

“Can I help?” Innocence itself. “Which train are you waiting for?” The Hammersmith train wooshed into the station, doors glided open, none of the blind commuters got on.

Anyone who has ever used the Hammersmith & City line will know there can be substantial gaps between trains bound for Hammersmith. By the time the next one appeared, Michael had assembled eight blind passengers and one guide dog at his end of the platform, having deflected a number of complaints about the delay. Michael watched himself and his flock in the rack of CCTV monitors. He stuck his chin out, punched hands into pockets, struck poses.

The Hammersmith train rumbled in, rattled to a halt. Doors slid open. POV switched to a camera hung in the ceiling arch of the station. The tops of nine heads moved on to the train, disappearing from view. Only the soundtrack records the closing of the doors. The train starts to move.

NEW ANGLE

Train leaving Great Portland Street station. Blurred figures still getting settled in last carriage.

EXT. NIGHT. ROYAL OAK.

Train doors sliding shut on platform. Inside last carriage Michael stands, surveys nine passengers seated around him, one with guide dog—all are blind except Michael. Michael draws a long-bladed knife from inside coat pocket. Flash of light on blade—

DISSOLVE TO—

Shower of sparks from train wheels.

NEW ANGLE. LONG SHOT.

View of train leaving Royal Oak station from rear of flats lining Westbourne Park Villas. Michael playing with knife in front of his fellow passengers. Guide dog begins to bark.

EXT. OUTSIDE TRAIN. WESTWAY. MEDIUM SHOT.

Last carriage from other side. Shot from car passing on Westway near Ladbroke Grove, motorway and railway side by side. Michael mock-balletdancing around carriage, swinging from pole to pole.

INT. INSIDE MOVING TRAIN. MEDIUM SHOT.

Michael bending down, up close to the face of one of the passengers, staring into his filmy, opaque eyes.

PASSENGER (agitated)

What is it?

MICHAEL (looking dreamy, whispering)

I know your secret. I know all about you.

PASSENGER (moving head from side to side)

What’s going on?

MICHAEL (still whispering)

The Ozark cavefish in the subterranean limestone quarries of Missouri. . . . (voice trails off). I saw this film. Last night. One of these natural history films. Never exposed to the light of day, they evolved without eyes. Blind cavefish. Just like you.