The fountain was a stagnant sump. For weeks, it had been used as a general refuse bin. Everyone threw their cigarette butts in it. The grips extinguished brands in it. As the scene of Schloss’s and his character’s submersion in the filthy water approached, we were sitting around in the sand between the arches of the McMahon house, watching the grips set up the camera and the lights, rekindling the flaming torches around the fountain. Schloss appealed to us as to the legitimacy of having his head shoved into the water. He looked at us each in turn, his face mournful with foreboding, orange from the lights in the plaza. We all agreed that the water was noisome and in all likelihood toxic with the fuel they put on the flaming torches.
‘People probably piss in it too,’ someone said.
‘It’s a film for Christ’s sake,’ Schloss said. ‘It’s supposed to be pretend.’
We all agreed that just because films looked real, they didn’t have to be.
Emboldened, Schloss got up and walked across to where Cox was leaning with a foot up on the camera dolly and his long arms dangling crosswise over his knee. The conversation between them was inaudible. Suddenly, Cox stood upright.
‘My God!’ he shouted over Schloss’s head. He tore his bandana off and threw it into the sand. ‘You want to know how easy it is?’ he shouted, as he strode past Schloss in the direction of the fountain. ‘It’s this easy!’ He stopped at the low wall. ‘This is all you have to do!’
In one movement, Cox plunged his head down over the edge of the fountain wall into the rank water until all we could see were the treads of his boots and his arse. After a few seconds, his head burst back into view with an explosion of breath and a cascade of water. He strode back to where Schloss had timidly returned to sit with us, stooping to retrieve his bandana on the way.
‘Got that?’ he said, his face dripping. ‘Just keep your eyes closed and your mouth shut!’
*
Soon we all started to be killed off. First, Jem’s head was stove in by a Mayan sculpture and his body pushed off a roof. Spider, his chest full of buckshot, died in his mother’s arms. In the dénouement, the McMahon family fanned out, to be dropped one by one: Shane by Strummer; Philip by Rude with a bullet in the middle of the forehead; me by our mother, the blaze-haired Sue Kiel.
As the tyranny of the heat, the boredom, the dehydration and the director set in, not to mention the sexual tension and the line that separated what was real from what wasn’t, Shane seemed to have started to lose it. A couple of days later I came across him in our baking changing room, sitting on the lath bench.
‘Can’t you see what he’s doing?’ he said, his eyes staring out of his head. ‘He’s brought us out to the desert and he’s going to kill us all out here! That’s the plan! It’s been his plan from the beginning, to bring us all out here and kill us all!’
I tried to reassure him. We were on a respite from the slog of touring, with plenty of time between scenes to doze in one of the hammocks that were slung in the shade in one of the crumbling buildings. It was pleasant to stretch out on the sand beyond the plaza and listen to the wind blow across the mouths of the empty bottles of San Miguel that were stuck in the sand.
Four weeks of desert heat, dust, sweat, filth, ill-fitting clothes, fireballs, gunfire, manic cackling, mock menace and sexual tension seemed to have turned his head.
*
At the end of the last day of shooting I dumped all my filthy clothes in the hamper in the wardrobe and got into the van back to the hotel. There was going to be a wrap party at a restaurant in town. Jennifer had consented to be my date. Strummer’s wife and kids had arrived in Almería. The film finished, the tyranny of the script would be forgotten. In the course of the next few days, we would all be going home – myself to London, Jennifer to Los Angeles. I showered and, finally, after five weeks, shaved.
I found Jennifer in the darkened back room of the restaurant. The place was as yet fairly empty. Chairs had been backed up to the wall for dancing. Fairy lights hung over the doorways. A mirror-ball hung from an extension cord in the middle of the ceiling. I was happy to be back in my suit and shirt. Jennifer was wearing a black satin dress, mascara and lipstick. I put my arm round her waist. She pulled away.
‘He might walk in!’ she said. I was stunned. I saw how Shane had come adrift of where the line was between real and pretend. I had thought that all the on-set relationships would end simultaneously with the wrapping of the film and the reversion to real life. Neither the end of shooting nor the arrival of Strummer’s family changed anything, in effect. Strummer and his wife came in. The transformation from Simms into Strummer was hardly dramatic. He looked clean and wore a new pair of black jeans. His wife was blonde with long hair, parted in the centre. She looked round the room with neutrality. Jennifer stepped a couple of inches away from me.
It was hard to leave Jennifer. She was standing beautifully in an archway in the room, her eyes darting across to where the Strummers were standing. I ended up getting drunk and walking back to the hotel alongside the park, which crepitated with the sounds of the Feria.
Twenty-Three
At the beginning of October we went up to rehearsal rooms in Islington. In a month we would be going away to France, again, and Germany. We had been invited, with Irish musicians such as Paddy Reilly, Finbar Furey and Stockton’s Wing, to record with the Dubliners to mark their twenty-fifth anniversary. There were a couple of songs they wanted us to learn: ‘The Irish Rover’ and ‘The Rare Old Mountain Dew’. In addition, Shane had written a couple of songs for Something Wild, one of the scripts Frank had slapped on his thigh on the flight back from Los Angeles two months before. The songs were a departure from the kind of music that we had made our own. One of them drummed home, on end, the title of the film. I hoped the departure was temporary.
After rehearsal, the day before my thirty-second birthday, we packed up to leave. Cait laid her bass in its flight case, fastened it up, said cheerio and went home. We had never seen her take her bass home. Rehearsals were booked until the end of the week.
‘What she take her bass for?’ Spider said.
‘She’s going to practise, obviously,’ Shane said.
‘She never practises.’
The following day we remarked upon Cait’s absence, but still thought little of it. I had brought champagne to celebrate my birthday. After an hour or two of rehearsal, I got drunk for the rest of the day.
By the end of the afternoon on the Friday, Cait still had not shown up. When I got back to my flat, I set about finding out where she was. I listened to half of Costello’s outgoing message on the machine, in which his voice apologised for being unable to come to the phone due to a Bulgarian Secret Service poison-tipped umbrella, and then rang up his management.
Costello was in the United States on tour. The day Cait left rehearsal, Costello had been due to start three dates at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco.
Without much of a plan, equipped with the phone number of the hotel where Costello was staying under his current nom de guerre, Napoleon Dynamite, and careless of the time difference between London and California, I rang Costello up. He put Cait on the line.
‘I’ve left the band, James,’ Cait said in a tone so derisory that I found myself stumped as to what to say next. As in February, when I had taken the phone from the receptionist at the Iroquois Hotel in New York, I chastised myself for my lack of strategy. I had been naïve to expect her to give some sort of explanation. I put the phone down and sat for a minute staring at the carpet between my shoes.
We continued the rehearsals with Darryl once more standing in for Cait. He played the bass with sure upstrokes of his pick. Andrew was thrilled to play with someone who instinctively understood the importance of synchronising the bass guitar with the bass drum. Andrew’s relief at not having to play with someone he had ended up loathing was palpable.
At the end of October the Dubliners arrived at Elephant Studios. Ronnie Drew was moist of lip and had doleful eyes which s
eemed eternally teary. John Sheahan wore a cheap jacket unbuttoned over a portly tummy and carried his violin case under his arm. An endearing derangement, as if he were continually getting his bearings, accompanied Barney McKenna as he went around greeting everyone, getting our names wrong. Eamonn Campbell, the Dubliners’ producer and guitar player, had a head swathed in a Christmassy mist of nicotine-tinged white hair. With their hoary ostrich-feather-shaped beards they filled the control room with an air of the nineteenth century. A guy called Sean Cannon seemed to be the fifth Dubliner. Compared to the others, he seemed a boy with bum-fluff.
Terry quickly became the liaison between the Irish and the London-Irish, between the old guard and the vanguard, between the folk and the punk. Taking the Dubliners under his wing, he conducted a quick rehearsal, came up with a connecting figure between the umpteen verses of ‘The Irish Rover’ and otherwise guided us through the simple arrangement.
It was a hoot to play with the Dubliners, particularly with John Sheahan whose smile, exaggerated by his grey beard, never left his face as he gleamed in avuncular approval of me over the top of his fiddle.
After a couple of days in the studio, we applauded ourselves on our collaboration, sanguine with the consensus that it had been long overdue. Frank’s suggestion that we should release ‘The Irish Rover’ as a single provoked Eamonn Campbell to give double-handed handshakes all round. We all parted company amid robust, manly body-hugs and fare-you-wells.
*
Our tour of Europe started off in Brittany. Such a bank of dry ice swathed the stage at L’Escalier in Saint-Malo that we were able to crawl undetected under it while our intro tape played. When the music had finished, we stood up into view.
The following morning at four we left the hotel to catch the train for Berlin. We were only one show into the tour and already we were done for. We were strewn around the waiting room at Saint-Malo Station in various postures of exhaustion. Shane was lying on his back on one of the wooden benches, his hands joined over his stomach, and his head tilted forward so that his chin was on his chest. Spider’s hands dangled from his knees as he squatted on the floor with his back to the wall, his head sagging. Andrew sat cradling his head on top of his luggage. Frank came in to tell us that our travel agent had mistaken the weekday train timetable for the weekend’s. It was a Sunday. I collapsed into hysterics.
In Paris, on our unexpected day off, Philip and I were crossing the Pont de la Concorde when we came across Costello and Cait coming in the opposite direction. Costello and the Attractions happened to be playing the first of two shows at the Olympia near the Boulevard des Italiens. Costello, dressed all in black, held his hat onto his head against the wind blowing up the Seine. Cait was tall in a long coat and felt hat. She’d dyed her hair red again. Costello hung back as she greeted us with a merriment that was brittle with froideur. Breezily, and I guessed to shorten the interaction, she invited us both to the Olympia that evening.
‘Fuck me,’ Philip said. ‘What were the chances of that?’
I ended up going to the Olympia by myself. Neither Philip’s name nor mine was on the door. I was about to turn away and go back to the hotel when I happened to see the Attractions’ drummer Pete Thomas’s face peering through the door which the security guy was about to close on me.
‘I know you,’ Thomas said. ‘Don’t I?’
After the show, I talked my way backstage. I paid my respects in the general dressing room where someone gave me directions to Costello’s. I found myself in a plush chamber with damask wallpaper and red velvet upholstery where Costello and Cait were sitting on a sofa in a regal tableau. I said nothing about the absence of my name on the guest list. I hardly said anything at all. I could see that Cait’s contentment to see me was that of a monarch for a public appearance at the crowd-control barrier. Cait’s transformation from a kind of Olivia to Shane’s Orsino, to a kind of Cleopatra to Costello’s Mark Antony was complete. I didn’t overstay my welcome.
We left the next morning for Hamburg and then to the Ruhr Valley. Throughout the tour so far, to let Darryl carry on playing bass had been the most straightforward solution to Cait’s quitting. Yet we were persistent in our quandary about who should permanently replace her. We would find ourselves in huddles on the tour bus, muttering the names of various prospective candidates.
One of the names mentioned was that of Ron Kavana. I liked Kavana. I knew him to be a talented guitar player, he was good company and he was Terry’s friend. The prospect of replacing the slender and proud, and above all female, form of Cait with such a boulder of a man – with the complexion of a rustic and the physiognomy of a pugilist – seemed wrong. We continued on our way down to Bavaria and into Switzerland.
In Geneva, Scully, Jem and I sat at the window table in the elaborately furnished upstairs room of a café, talking about Cait’s replacement.
‘I can’t see what your problem is,’ Scully said. ‘You’ve got your bass player right there in the band already!’
Disinclined as I was to have Kavana play bass in the group, I baulked at admitting Darryl as a permanent member.
‘He’s just not cool,’ I said. I sickened with shame as soon as I said it. It didn’t help that Jem seemed to agree. I blenched at the idea that Scully might think we had such an elevated idea of ourselves. In an instant, the idea that we thought ourselves too cool for Darryl detached us, and without recourse, from any ‘coolness’ at all.
Scully laughed in our faces.
‘What’s not cool about him?’ he said. We stared at him like a couple of schoolchildren caught in a lie. I willed Jem to take up the explanation, hoping to be able to hide my wretchedness behind Jem’s authority while pretending that in fact we were shoulder to shoulder on the matter.
‘I don’t know,’ Jem said.
The assumptions I had made about Darryl – that he was in some indefinable way not a ‘Pogue’ – were difficult to dislodge. Darryl was as indefatigable and as uncomplaining a musician as he had been our roadie, our driver, our sound and lighting engineer and our tour manager. Whenever one or other of us fell ill on the road, he was ‘Dr Daz’. In the past couple of months we had given him the title ‘factotum’. Yet his transition to band member remained unthinkable. It was as if the various manifestations of his uncomplaining devotion to us were accretions, like the unprepossessing shell of a geode, which prevented us from seeing the crystal core of Darryl as a member of the band.
When it came to our resolution of the problem of Cait’s permanent replacement, Scully, Andrew and Philip shamed us out of our reluctance to take Darryl on board. As the rhythm section, Andrew and Philip were relieved to play with someone so dependable and so benevolent.
*
To share rooms with someone so carefully respectful as Paul Verner had been a relief. Though P.V. was predisposed to fretting and grumbling, he had been courteous in the extreme. When he had been in the room for some time, though, I noticed a strange smell of solvents. Not being able to pinpoint it, wanting to reciprocate his courtesy, I never remarked on it.
It didn’t surprise me to learn that, rooming with Andrew since Frank had separated us in New York, Philip had formed an attachment to his new roommate.
The days of outvying each other with our acrobatics seemed to be over. Philip tended to range behind Shane no further than a couple of yards to either side of the centre microphone. His capers – pointing his guitar at the audience, twirling it round in mimicry of the tango, or spontaneously springing into the air with his feet tucked under his arse – he executed with a po-face. The byplay that I got up to became equally insular. For a time it was restricted to wagging my head a lot, stamping my feet or dropping to my knees at the end of a song.
In a beer hall in Germany though, I watched an accordion player in full regalia – lederhosen, Tyrolean hat and white knee socks – turn around in tiny shuffling steps, holding his accordion over his head. It looked stupid, but the image of someone holding an accordion over his head – even s
omeone looking as though he’d just stepped out of a Grimm Brothers’ illustration – was so improbable that I wanted to try it. My accordion was twenty-five pounds in weight, not to mention the three microphones that were gaffer-taped to it. I was hampered, too, by an udder of XLR connectors and their cables. Aided by something I’d read in a teach-yourself-judo book when I was a child – which stressed using your assailant’s weight to your advantage – in the middle of one of the gigs, I managed to hoist the accordion in an arc over my head and to sweep it down as if it were a flag. I was so chuffed with myself that I made sure not to betray the slightest sense of pride in what I’d done by doing something so crass as to look to see if anyone had noticed.
As the tour continued I persuaded myself to become inured to the volume Terry played at. If I could, I got out of the way and into whatever safety zone I could find. I decided to regard his amp as if it were a turbofan I could be sucked into at any moment if I stepped too near.
Shane spent most of the time in the back lounge of the bus, writing and drawing cartoons crowded with hideous, densely drawn characters called Bim and Bom, a Russian clown duo from the 1920s whom Samuel Beckett featured in his writing. Occasionally he came aft to sit at one of the tables where he would sit and talk, tap the tabletop or the side of his bottle of wine, sniff, clear his throat. He never set his drink down in one of the holes in the Formica table for the purpose. He preferred to let it dangle between his knees. He never reached over to the ashtray to flick ash off his cigarette. He preferred to let it smoke away between his onionskin-coloured fingers. After a while, he would fall asleep.
It was seldom that I sat near him. On a recent flight I had had the misfortune to be seated next to him. I was relieved that he had fallen asleep, his tray full of various drinks, one of his hands, again, unwilling to let go of the glass of wine on his tray. My relief was short-lived. He woke with a spasm that caused him not only to shout out loud, but also to jerk his knees upward and send everything on his tray everywhere.
Here Comes Everybody Page 25
