Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘You’ll not be wanting rain on your fillum, will you?’ said Mrs Clohessy every day as I left for the set. ‘Let’s hope you’re lucky again.’

  The odd thing is that we were. ‘Tip’, as they called the local town, has one of the highest annual rainfalls of any town in Europe, you half expect it to have gondolas, but we never saw a drop.

  Day after day the sun shone. The lawn of the old country house began to look bare and brown. The owners worked in horse-breeding and they had stables with thoroughbreds, but they hadn’t had much luck at the market or the races and they took in guests whenever they could. They were pleased to be full up, but after a week they said they wanted a day off, so we’d have to do dinner for ourselves.

  In the morning I hitchhiked to Tip, where I found an off-licence. I’d noticed that the drinks stores were running down and I bought a dozen bottles of cider, some seven-pint tins of beer and half a dozen glass carafes of wine with sealed metal tops. The Clohessys’ rent was so small that I still had plenty of cash left from the paper mill. I bought a tray of cut-price chicken pieces from a supermarket and the ingredients for a barbecue sauce. I’d done a lot of cooking as a child because I got hungry waiting for my parents to come home. I had to feed Julie as well as myself and she was quite fussy about the way I did it.

  It was tricky getting all this stuff to a point where I could hitch a lift back, but the man in the supermarket lent me a trolley. Everyone was off filming in a wood in the furthest part of the estate and there was no one around except a small girl called Jude, who had straight brown hair wrapped in something I think might be called a snood. She wasn’t needed that day and had been told by Stewart to get a meal together. She was sulking about this; she said he’d picked on her because she was a woman and that he’d never have told a man to cook. I gave her a Glynn Powers roll-up and said I could look after the dinner.

  At five, I put up a trestle on the gravel by the kitchen garden and laid out the drink with some paper cups I’d got from the village. I stuck the chicken under a marinade in a huge pan I found in the kitchen. With old bricks and bits of stone I picked up near the bonfire site I built a base for a barbecue with a good draught running under it, laid some wire netting over it, then gathered armfuls of wood from the parched grounds. By seven I had orange-grey embers, and by eight I was ready to offer marinated grilled chicken with barbecue sauce, baked potatoes and salad to thirty people.

  I tried to pass it off as Jude’s work, but actually nobody seemed to care who’d cooked it; no one even asked who’d bought it or got it to the house. A guy called Andy said, ‘Great sauce, man.’ Maybe he thought I was a caterer.

  I noticed that Jennifer enjoyed it too. I’d bought apple pies and cheese from the village to have afterwards. She laughed when some apple squeezed from the piece of pie she was holding and dropped into her lap.

  Jennifer was playing one of the main parts in the film, as it happened. Stewart Forres gave a talk before the camera rolled. He had a thin brown beard and Christ-like hair parted in the middle. He said, ‘You’ve all seen the script that Dave and I have developed. We started with this heavy concept – an acid Twelfth Night, if you will – but we’ve finished with something more unstructured. Most of the dialogue is going to be improvised, so you’ll be work-shopping some of your scenes with me or Dave first. We’re going to light some Tibetan candles now and sit in a ring. This is a good-luck ceremony. I’d like you to respect it.’

  It looked really good with all the candles and everyone gathered round. The light from the flames shone up on their faces: Kathy and Dave and Amit from King’s, and Hannah and Holly from Newnham, and Hannah’s boyfriend Steve, and Stewart, of course, and Jennifer, who was sitting next to him, and all the others and the ones who did the lights and the sound and the runners and so on. I hadn’t seen the script myself, but there was a feeling of relaxation and people seemed happy to go wherever it took them. The night was warm and someone had a guitar. Sitting there, they looked like Jesus and his disciples. They gave me a feeling I’d seldom had before, like sometimes when I’d watch Julie and one of her friends from school when she was five or six. I used to sit on the other side of the room and just observe them playing.

  Most nights in Ireland were similar, but the night I cooked the chicken was the best. After I’d cleared up the plates and stuff, some of the people went off to their tents or their rooms, but most of us, about twenty, stayed round the fire.

  Steve had a steel-string guitar, and he began to strum it gently, sitting with his legs crossed, pausing to suck on a joint and pass it on. He then began to pick at the strings instead of strumming. He didn’t make a big thing of it; he played quietly, so if you wanted to listen you could, but it didn’t matter if you carried on talking. In fact everyone did stop what they were doing, and edged into the circle, looking over to where Steve sat. They held their paper cups and cigarettes and waited in the darkness.

  The notes picked by Steve’s right hand began to form a melody. He played a Bob Dylan song, ‘Girl From the North Country’, which is like ‘scarborough Fair’, but somehow full of concern. He wants a girl he once loved to be all right. He’s worried that she’s cold. ‘Please see she has a coat so warm/To keep her from the howlin’ winds.’ (He’s already spoken of the snow and ice, where ‘the winds hit heavy on the borderline’.) I used to wonder if this was the border of Canada and America, maybe near the Great Lakes, but now I don’t think it matters. It could be any North Country. He isn’t worried for his own loss or his own feelings – only for the girl he loved. He wants her still to have her hair long, and to be warm. I don’t know why this is so sad.

  We sat out there for hours and drank cider and wine and smoked more and listened to Steve’s guitar. Then Holly played a little, but she wasn’t such a good singer as Steve and she gave him the guitar back and he ended with a song called ‘Fire and Rain’. As he was singing, I noticed Jennifer get up and stretch in the night and she walked right past me and laid a hand on my shoulder as she passed and said, ‘Thanks for the dinner.’

  I let myself in through the Clohessys’ kitchen and went quietly up the stairs and pushed my window open and wondered if I could still hear any music, just faintly on a breeze. It was a very still night, though.

  The boy in charge of the camera was called Nick, and they called him the DoP, which means director of photography, or chief cameraman. ‘Ask the DoP,’ Stewart said ten times a day. I think it was Nick’s camera. It was quite large and could be mounted on a tripod, though for some shots Stewart used to put it under his arm and insist on walking around with it himself to give what he called a ‘New Wave texture’ (which is that thing where you feel seasick). Nick never seemed that keen on Stewart holding the camera and looked relieved to get it back on its tripod.

  The other main female part was played by Hannah, who’d done a lot of stage plays earlier in the year, including Hedda Gabler, I think. She was confident and difficult to deal with; she often said things were ‘getting too heavy’ and she’d stop for a cigarette and Stewart had to be very gentle with her. Steve, her boyfriend, watched carefully.

  There are lots of ways you can make yourself useful on a film set if you’re good with your hands and if you’re patient. When the sound man wants to go for a smoke, you can do the job for him. You put on the headphones and say, ‘Just hold it there, everyone, there’s a plane going over.’ It’s not that difficult.

  I can also use a saw and a chisel and make things and paint them if I have to – not that Stewart required much extra scenery, what with it being a pastoral thing set mostly in the woods, except for the bits inside the ‘castle’, which was the house itself. If nothing else, there was always someone who’d like a cup of tea.

  A few nights after the chicken evening, there was a shortage of dope and I had to go back to the Clohessys’ and dip into the stash I had in my sponge bag. I had a brought a hell of a lot over on the ferry from Fishguard. Glynn Powers had told me, just before the end of term, ‘Mi
ke, you’ve been my best customer. I wonder if you’d like to do a bit of work for me. It’s like I can’t really handle it all.’ He opened his locker and showed me these spherical lumps of hash the size of tennis balls. He had half a dozen and I took a couple off him to dispose of and split the profit.

  When I got back to the garden, I chopped some up into five-pound deals but sold it for a pound a go, credit accepted.

  ‘Hey, man,’ said Andy, ‘Mike the cook’s turned into Mike the pusher.’

  The next morning, Stewart was serious when he called everyone together. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re having a closed set this morning. Just Geoff on lights, Tom on sound, DoP of course, me, and the actors – Alex, Jennifer and Hannah. No one else at all. Is that understood?’

  ‘What’s a closed set?’ I heard Steve ask Hannah.

  ‘It means Jenny has to take her clothes off.’

  ‘Tom’s not back from Tip,’ said Dave. ‘You know he and Bob went last night? He rang in to say he’s got a migraine. He gets them.’

  They needed someone to do the sound because they couldn’t delay the scene. It was on the schedule for today and, who knows, it might rain tomorrow. I told Stewart I could do it.

  ‘You happy with the machine – the cans and everything?’

  I told him I’d done it before, which I had, when Tom was off one morning. Tom’s heart wasn’t really in sound; he wanted to act.

  Stewart nodded. ‘Everyone cool?’ He looked at Jennifer and Alex and Hannah. Alex looked terrified. Jennifer seemed close to tears.

  It was a rape scene of course, but it was feminist in the way Stewart filmed it so you were meant to share the rage of the woman character, played by Jennifer.

  There were a lot of planes going over towards Dublin, so we had to keep redoing the bit where Alex’s character pulled Jennifer to the ground and lifted up her dress. There was a problem with her underwear. It was difficult for Alex to rip it off without tearing it, and they didn’t have enough spare pairs. Also, it took too long to get it off and it looked as though the camera was sort of dwelling on it.

  Jennifer didn’t seem to be enjoying any of this, but when Stewart asked if she wanted a break she made as if it was a test of her integrity not to complain.

  Hannah suggested Jennifer should be naked under her dress because the pulling off the underwear was too much like a ‘male fantasy’, so it was agreed she shouldn’t wear anything.

  Then the lights weren’t working so Stewart decided to start again using available light only and Hannah told him that’s what he should have been doing all along anyway, and that made an even tenser feeling on the set.

  Everything seemed to go wrong that morning. Hannah said she didn’t think Jennifer should be naked if Alex wasn’t because that would exploit the woman, but the trouble with having Alex naked was that he was always excited and that was exploitative, according to Hannah, because no one was meant to be enjoying this. Alex said that if he wasn’t excited then there could be no rape and no point made, and presumably a rapist did enjoy it anyway, that was the point: he was sick.

  Hannah told him not to give her any of that Method shit, but Stewart persuaded Hannah that Alex’s point was reasonable, but by this time Hannah had said so many disparaging things about Alex that he couldn’t get excited any more. So then we couldn’t film him naked because it was obvious that he couldn’t rape someone, so we were back to having just Jennifer naked beneath her dress when he lifted it up. Stewart said it didn’t matter in the long run if Alex was excited or not because these shots would be cut in the edit anyway.

  Then Jennifer began to cry because . . . I don’t know why Jennifer cried.

  Perhaps it was because she felt Alex didn’t desire her any more – even though it was only his character that was meant to desire her character, and even though he was a rapist and if you were a woman you wouldn’t want him to want you in that way.

  She seemed really upset, though, and she couldn’t stop crying for about twenty minutes. Hannah told Alex he was a pig, and other things. Geoff the lighting man had been told to leave the set with his lights and the only person in the wood who seemed calm was the DoP, Nick. He had a pair of purple crushed velvet trousers.

  I don’t remember how it got resolved. I know there was a tender scene when Hannah’s character came over from the big house to comfort the Jennifer character. Hannah said she should herself be naked for this, but Stewart would have none of it.

  Then he and Hannah had another row about who was in charge and it was clear that Hannah knew more about acting, but it was Stewart’s film, and it was Nick’s camera.

  Personally, I found it an interesting morning, but for fear of seeming voyeuristic and because I was only a stand-in for Tom, I never let my eyes leave Jennifer’s face.

  The shoot took three weeks in all. Towards the end, the evenings started to draw in. There was some rain at night. People seemed tired. I heard Jennifer say she really wanted a hot bath, though I’m sure there was hot water in the main house, where she had a room. Perhaps she was thinking of her parents’ house in Lymington, or of a particular bathroom.

  Stewart kept going well. He said he’d had inquiries from an ‘independent distributor’ and from the Student Film Council, who had partly funded the operation.

  A week before the end, Steve discovered that Hannah had switched her affections to Nick, the DoP. Steve was angry. Hannah told him he was immature. He said he was sorry to get heavy about it, but he thought she’d been dishonest. She said he was possessive and she couldn’t stand that. So he took his guitar and left in the night, like a thief, and it seemed to be his fault for not being cool about things.

  I missed the music. Nick looked pleased but surprised, the new man in possession who has not sought greatness but had it thrust upon him. He was careful not to seem possessive, but Hannah was always lighting a cigarette then putting it in his mouth or listening with intense respect when he talked to Stewart about a shot. These break-ups often happen in September, I think. The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

  We had a party on the last night and Stewart told us all we’d be invited to the screening room at Film Soc to see a rough cut in due course. The party was a good one. Everybody seemed to be back at their best and all the differences were forgotten. I made some chocolate cakes with about an ounce of hash in them and bought a whole lot more cider from Tip. The people who owned the house seemed sorry to see us go and they made a big casserole of beef that they’d bought from Clohessy’s, and rice with apple and raisins and red peppers for the vegetarians.

  With the cider I took some Mandrax I’d been saving. Stewart did the thing with the Tibetan candles again and we all held hands – and this time I was in the circle, two away from Jennifer, and the light flickered up into her face.

  And that was the really good thing that happened. I thought it would carry on, this communal feeling when the new term began in October.

  We’re now in the third week of it and final exams are still a long way away, next summer, but somehow people already seem preoccupied. I’ve been to Film Soc a couple of times, but not many of the Irish people have been there: Nick (without Hannah, who was in Uncle Vanya at the ADC), Amit and Holly are the only ones who’ve looked in so far. Stewart’s working with Dave on the edit. Apparently the rushes are promising.

  But it’s already cold outside, the leaves are wet on the pavements and it seems a long way from Tipperary.

  I have a new room this year, in Clock Court. It’s got its own pantry with a gas ring so I don’t bother to go to the dining hall any more. There’s no shower, but there’s a bathroom I share with only five other people and few of them seem to use it. So I work the bath over with a cloth and some Vim from a saucer that the bedmaker replenishes, rinse off, fill up and listen to The Archers on my small transistor radio. There’s a Northern Ireland barmaid called Norah who takes up too much story time, but I like the old man, Walter Somebody. He reminds me of the old men in the almshouse
in the street where I was brought up. ‘Heh, heh, me old beauty, me old darlin’,’ he says. Or something like that. I don’t listen that carefully.

  I’ve changed my routines a bit. For a start, I’ve almost given up drugs. This is partly due to the fact that my supplier has disappeared. I used to buy pills from a man in the Kestrel called Alan Greening. He had an executive metal briefcase that looked as though it might hold the secret plans of a Ukrainian nuclear reactor. All it had in fact were bottles of pills. He’s been in and out of various hospitals and he’s signed on with three different GPs. He has a pharmaceutical directory and he looks up the drug he wants, then describes the symptoms it’s prescribed for. He goes to different chemists to have them made up and no one checks up on the others. Tricyclics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, benzodiazepines, all sorts of stuff – they make an awful rattle in his bag and most of them don’t do anything at all for you. There’s one called Nardil, an MAOI, that you have to take for weeks for any effect and if you eat cheese or Marmite or broad-bean pods it can give you a brain haemorrhage. Where’s the fun in that? But Tuinal, Nembutal, Amytal, I quite like them; and Quaaludes go well with gin. It all depends. I’ve tried almost all the sleeping pills, even the banned ones, and they don’t even make me feel tired. On the other hand, I’m susceptible to a patent hay-fever cure you can buy over the counter at Boots, which goes to show.

  The only thing I wouldn’t do is amphetamines – or LSD. They synthesised that stuff in a lab twenty-five years ago when they were trying to induce human madness in guinea pigs. Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane? If you’d even glanced at neuroscience in Nat Sci Part One, then, believe me, you wouldn’t go near those things.