Vanished Years (2 page)

Last week we watched a film called
Black Snake
starring our favourite wank material Anouska (née Hempel, now Lady Wein berg). Elliot claims to have come fourteen times under his anorak watching her. The rest of us are sceptical. However, we have just discovered orgasm and we practise achieving it religiously in our cubicles, day and night, kneeling before our stupas to Anouska and other Blessed Virgins. We have not yet learnt to be secretive about sex. Wanking is still innocent, a gentleman’s pursuit. I am already conducting clandestine homosexual experiments in the classics room, but this is another me, coiled and complicated, and I have learnt to ignore him. He is completely effaced in the present company and I shall be wanking as hard as the others under my anorak during the famous sex scene in
Performance
– the most scandalous and amoral film of the decade, according to Fr Martin in the Art Room.

In York we skulk around the streets biding our time. Being out of bounds – particularly as far away as York – is living dangerously and we face ‘rustication’ if caught. We take every corner like an army manoeuvre, arriving at the swing doors into the alley at exactly the right moment. As the last show’s audience dribbles out, we slip through the gate and run up the fire escape, heading straight for the loos where we hide until the next show starts. For about half an hour we whisper and giggle in our cubicles, dissecting the usual schoolboy issues, the holidays, the people who are pissing us off, looking at the usual pictures of hairy splayed vaginas and cocks shooting sperm. The cistern drips and the occasional man comes in to relieve himself, his footsteps scratching against the concrete floor. At the familiar sound of the Pearl & Dean anthem, we creep from the loo into the
theatre. We do not sit together. It’s a rule. If one of us is caught, we meet at the bus stop later.

The film begins. The voices echo through the darkness from the clapped-out sound system. The stalls are half full. Smoke curls up to the gods from a hundred glowing cigarettes smoked listlessly by ghostly faces intent on the action. The usherette weaves down the aisle with her torch, a busty silhouette in front of the huge screen. I get comfortable with my anorak and open my flies and a glorious feeling of freedom shimmers through my body.

How I love
Performance
. Coming from a solid background of
Reach for the Sky, The Sound of Music and recently All About Eve
, shunted between a Georgian rectory and a freezing dormitory, with its bells, times for meals, respect for one’s elders, tame children’s parties, hunting, stalking and stockbroking, confession and communion, it has never crossed my mind that people like Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg could possibly exist. When James Fox – dazzling as the hit man Chas – walks into their house in Notting Hill, my world stands still.

I completely forget about wanking.

The place itself amazes me. Within the familiar architectural confines of a decaying London mansion, the fuck pad of a down-at-heel Tangier queen has been conjured up, with a dash of Dracula thrown in. I have never seen a place like this. It is the magic island of an androgynous Prospero, decorated with Hammond organs and loudspeakers like upright coffins, afghan rugs and Moroccan cushions, lit by candles and Tiffany lamps.

Fifteen feet high, Anita – naked under a fur coat, with a Super-8 camera rather than a handbag – stalks into a darkened room with a heavily draped bed where two people sleep in one another’s arms. Are they men or women? It is hard to tell. (Mick Jagger’s teats look as tugged as a Jersey cow’s.) Anita stumbles across the huge bed and straddles the sleeping beauties, tweaking a nipple here and licking a giant lip there, before dropping her coat to reveal a lithe boy’s body. Roused and aroused, they all begin to fuck – still half asleep – their
bodies merging into one another until you can’t tell who’s doing what to who. Mick pulls the covers over them. In the tent underneath the
partouze
rolls on. Anita rubs coke on her teeth with her finger and for a second she looks rabid and dangerous. They stroke and squeeze and mount one another, until Anita finally emerges from the sea of soiled sheets exhausted. It is the first full-on sex scene I have ever watched.

Looking across the stalls, I can see that the others are already hard at it, shuddering like washing machines on full spin, but I am in shock and have forgotten to start. These three androgynous beauties are what I want to be, how I want to live. Everything these characters do seems to be incredibly important, intensely real, not like conventional acting. I am spellbound by Mick’s face, his gigantic flesh-eating lips, the rows of teeth, the enormous dog’s tongue, made for licking things out, the eyes caked in kohl, glimmering with scag, not that I have the first idea what all these things are yet. I just know instinctively that they’ve got my name written on them. Anita is staggeringly beautiful and her smile lights up the screen in a new way. I don’t know who I want to be more. Him or Her. They are characters from a fairy story. Anita gives a big magic mushroom to James, nuzzling his ear, and whispering in a breathless European lilt, well mannered, to the manor born but a big slut at the same time, ‘Can’t you stay one more day?’

I am in heaven. I don’t know why. I don’t even know what a magic mushroom is. I am completely gobsmacked.
Performance
is the closing door through which I bolt and now – quite suddenly – the whole of my world is a question mark. On the bus drive back to school nothing looks the same, not even Brock and Elliot and Wynton. They hated the film. Elliot only came once. Our friendships cool from this day on, and I am out of that cloister of black beetles and rugger buggers within six months.

The inn is a blue and white colonial hotel built into the hill above a small bay a couple of miles outside Ocho Rios. Its beautiful gardens
slope down to the beach. There is a croquet lawn with an old roller parked next to it. The sea splashes gently onto the beach and amazing birds – herons, egrets and pink doves – fly from one side of the rocky cove to the other, breathtaking silhouettes against the sky spattered with fluffy clouds.

Mary is the manager of the hotel. She is a white Jamaican lady, extremely thin, dressed to the nines each night, a pirate queen in couture, with two spaniels at her feet. She runs the place as if it were her own home – a benign dictatorship where her rule of law extends to the guests who worship her. They are an eccentric group of upper-class English couples who flock to this time warp like birds to an oasis at sunset. Folded in among them are some old-school Americans, a reclusive model and her boyfriend, and, last week, the Archbishop of York in a kaftan. It is a delightful place, full of surprises, an old photograph come to life. Jackets are worn at night and a band plays oldie hits and comfortable reggae while the guests dine and dance cheek to cheek among the tables.

I never find Honeycomb. All trace of John and Joyce has been swept away. Instead I have strangely – uncannily – found myself. The chance encounter with Anita shines a new light on old times. Sloshed on a deckchair, looking out to sea, feeling rather dramatic, it occurs to me that in fact my childhood went down without a trace that afternoon in York.
Performance
was the iceberg. Within a year (it takes a long time to sink a middle-class Catholic upbringing) I had thrown myself into a life of excess on the seabed. Within three I had constructed a new world for myself – or underworld – in similar darkened rooms and dank basements, and if my budget extended only to lava lamps, beanbags and Indian prints from Barker’s Bargain Basement, then those economies were largely written off by an excess of sexual ambiguity and mind-bending chemicals. The contract I later forged with show business – to disastrous effect and a risible blindness: the National Theatre was not a Nic Roeg film after all – was directly inspired by the image of these people: Mick, Anita and Michelle Breton, the third wheel of the act, living outside the law
and writing their own constitution. ‘Sister Morphine’ was my theme tune, and I dreamt of being arrested as much as awarded.

Even now the impact of that crash with
Performance
echoes through my life. My flat is still Moroccan Baroque, and now Anita, the ultimate goddess of my youth, has risen from the sea in wellington boots and a tracksuit, as unrecognisable as the resurrected Jesus on the Sea of Tiberias. The penny has dropped too late. The days turn to weeks but I have no further visions although she has been constantly on my mind.

It is strange meeting famous people. One knows so much about them. Alone at dinner one night I suddenly remember that she shot a young man.

‘No, darling,’ says Bob on the telephone the next day. (Apart from being John and Joyce’s godson, he is an expert on anything concerning the sixties.) ‘He shot himself. It was
her
gun. She had taken a room in Claridge’s and no one could get her out.’

‘She sounds fabulous.’

‘Deranged, actually.’

In his book Keith Richards describes a summer dawn – or dusk, I can’t remember which – in the sixties: he and Anita in a sports car screeching round hairpin bends through clouds of orange blossom in the hills above the coast of Spain. Keith is steering. Anita is sucking him off. The car roars and brakes, grinding through its gears as Anita drives Keith to distraction. ‘You don’t know what a blow job is until you have had one from Anita Pallenberg,’ he writes. With word of mouth like that, who needs a publicist?

It is the last afternoon. Tomorrow I am moving further along the island. It is nearly dusk, that moment on a beach when colours intensify. Anita is walking into the ocean in a red bikini. She splashes at the water, suddenly disappears and surfaces some distance off, standing again, looking out to sea, pushing the hair from her face with both hands. She is a young girl again. She sees me and waves.

‘Where have you been?’ I shout, accusingly.

‘Here.’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow for Firefly.’

‘From Honeycomb to Firefly. What are you? An elf?’

She comes out of the water, tottering slightly as she is carried by a wave onto the beach. She sits down, dripping, suddenly ancient.

‘I’ve had so much to do up at the house. Can’t you stay one more day?’

The same line years later, a different
Performance
. Maybe I should write a short story. A travelling player with broadening hips and a femme fatale from the sixties marooned in a colonial hotel at the end of the world. Complete strangers. Destination unknown. She is wise and childlike. He is foolish and complicated. Both have a shadowy past. Her nerve endings have shrivelled and died in those shadows – hence the codeine. He has lost his nerve coming out of them.

‘How’s your book going?’

‘It isn’t. Actually I might start with a short story about you looking for the missing pimento tree in the park.’

Anita laughs. ‘A very short story.’

The setting sun plays tricks. For a moment it shines directly at her, throwing razor-thin shadows along every line of her face. Suddenly she is the dark witch of legend, the evil beauty whose terrible deeds I have heard of for as long as I can remember. It’s just for a moment. The world rolls over, the shadows deepen and her smile cuts through them as a good-looking waiter with a gold watch and a tight white shirt arrives with a coconut. He gives it to her and she is a child again. He is extremely flirtatious. I am impressed.

‘You’ve still got it, Anita.’

I laugh as we watch his tight arse walk back up to the hotel, dragging a long shadow behind it across the lawn.

‘Not bad for nearly seventy, eh?’

We chat on as the night draws in – old friends catching up after a lifetime, although in fact we have hardly met. Anita is a blonde Buddha, open and empty, affectionate and humorous. She expresses no rancour for the past, nor expectation for the future, beyond the
desire never to winter in England again, if she can help it. She has survived with dignity, on her own terms. Once she was at the epicentre of an exploding universe. Now she is a solitary diamond flickering in the night sky. As the light falls from her face it seems to me that she is changing again, ebbing with it, almost invisible as life reduces to a single point in the darkness. The water behind her is blood red for a minute. The stars appear one by one as the last orange squiggle melts into the sea and we are silent as the same thought hits us both. It is extraordinary just to be here.

Anita is still my ideal. Tomorrow I will begin my book.

I
am sitting at the bar. I am leaving early tomorrow. A man in pink trousers with a matching face introduces me to his wife. Next season I should really get a job playing the piano here. It would be the perfect end. We discuss various films I have or have not made. They are sweet and old-fashioned, extremely courteous.

‘Bad show about
The Apprentice
,’ he says expansively, as they get up to leave.

‘What do you mean?’ I can’t think what he is talking about.

‘Walking out like that. We were watching.’

‘Oh. I see. Yes. Wasn’t it awful.’

‘It showed a complete lack of moral fibre.’ His wife tries to pull him away.

‘Come on, darling.’

‘It couldn’t have been
that
bad?’ He beams ferociously.

‘You had to be there.’

He sits down again. I groan inwardly.

‘Do tell us about it. Dorothy adores Piers Morgan.’

*

I am sitting at a table in a sumptuous hotel suite with three men. I do not know them but we are straining every nerve to connect because we’re a team, taking part in a reality TV show for charity. Circling us silently, like sharks, are three figures with cameras. Their lenses scrutinise us – weird glassy black holes that we try to ignore, dilating as one of us says something funny, coming in close so that our skins shiver. They feel like living creatures, these cameras, while their operators are possessed drones and our brains go into a performance overdrive for their sake. Cables are held by obedient vassals. They are fed with care through doors into other rooms where banks of winking computers have replaced beds and the action next door is compressed into TV screens standing one on top of another. Production assistants watch intensely, making notes on clipboards and whispering to each other. The air throbs with a vibration I have not sensed since leaving boarding school at the age of fifteen.