Vail Read online

  [9]

  Somehow (Virgie Hance had issued a press release) the newspapers had got wind of the location shoot at the Baths and there was a mêlée of reporters waiting as the cavalcade of trucks, vans, generators and Range Rovers arrived at the door. The house was large and gloomy with crumbling brickwork and a patch of sooty garden at the front. The day was cold and wet, the crew wrapped in waffle-weave thermal underwear, orange parkas and moon boots. So far so good.

  Virgie Hance answers the reporters’ questions and the director sets up his first shot of the house exterior as Vail sits in the back of the Range Rover sipping coffee laced with brandy from a silver hip flask. Small children with noses dribbling mucus like white candlewax watch him through the window with eyes glassily bright from smack. The area is a social worker’s paradise.

  A narrow wind blows down the street, rattling the rusted bonnets of cars. It carries with it the whiff of sulphur.

  A reporter wants to know what kind of wizard jape Mzzz Hance has in mind for the Baths. Virgie winks: wait and see. Another would like to interview the presenter of the show, but Virgie says that Mr Vail is resting and cannot be disturbed. ‘UNAVAILABLE VAIL’ trumpet the headlines the next day, and ‘ALL TO KNOW AVAIL’ alongside a picture of a group of studiously disconsolate photographers standing in the steaming drizzle. Smart cookies, these newshounds.

  Presently Vail’s presence is required and he does his piece to camera with the taciturn house as a backdrop. The windows reveal nothing except grimy torn curtains, and in the blasted heath of garden a pram with a ripped hood and buckled wheels lies on its side, the creamy padded interior invaded by green mould. Parts of what appear to be the chassis of a car lean against the wall. There is a broken oil sump filled with water, a swirling film of rainbows shivering on its surface.

  The introductory piece to camera in the can, the crew break for coffee and hot bacon sandwiches. The director confers with Virgie and together they go over the shooting script they have drawn up. Vail has had no hand in this; he is a minion, an appendage, is content to be so, and sits in the back of the Range Rover snuffled down in a bulky suede jacket thickly lined with lambswool which covers his telly costume of rags and tatters. The faces of the urchins press against the glass, leaving smears and bits of glutinous matter. He wonders why they aren’t in school. Schools are still open, aren’t they? Or if not in school, surely there must be an amusement arcade at the end of the street, or a video shop? He doesn’t like being recognised, it makes him feel exposed and vulnerable, and he resents them for it. It’s as if they’ve peeled him down to raw goosepimpled chicken skin. That and the irritating ticking sensation in his groin combine to make a dull flare of anger rise up in him and he calls the unit manager to clear them off.

  The street reminds him of hell: the drizzle is eating the brickwork.

  After a while the director calls them together and they move inside the house en masse. The researcher has been there since daybreak, preparing the Baths for their ordeal by celluloid. As might be expected, the house stinks to high heaven. The rooms are unheated, with little furniture except for twenty-six-inch colour television, video recorder, rack stereo, and Atari games console with thirty cartridges stacked on top. There are mattresses on the floor in most of the rooms and heaps of mildewed clothing. Damp and decay have taken a stranglehold. Virgie doesn’t think there’s enough debris and orders the researcher to scatter some empty tins, crumpled cornflakes packets, Durex sheaths, margarine tubs and the like. ‘Jesus, you’ve seen enough focking television drama to know what it ought to look like,’ she lashes him. ‘Make it look real. Let’s get some actuality into this, prick face.’

  Father is six-feet-seven-inches tall and built like a brick shithouse, with black greasy hair and sideburns that meet under his chin. His staring accusing eyes are of different colours. The index and middle fingers of his left hand are missing up to the second joint and the loose skin has been pulled over the ends and stitched with all the finesse of a butcher tacking a leg of lamb. Nobody has the raw nerve to look him in the eye, except Virgie, to whom he appears as an outsize extra in her private mad vision. She could out-stare Beelzebub providing a 16mm camera and sound boom were to hand.

  She asks him where the rest of the family are and instead of replying Father asks her about the money. He wants a facility fee up front and guaranteed overseas residuals; dramatic and cold print rights are reserved but negotiable. Virgie placates him by saying that it’s all taken care of and that he has nothing to worry about. And as a measure of goodwill slips him a litre of White Horse. A slow wink hints that he could be in line for something of a more intimate nature if he plays his cards right.

  After a tot of brandy to warm them up the crew start filming in earnest. The director’s plan is to show members of the family greeting the new day in their own individual ways. He films Granny Bertha awakening from wrinkled sleep and crawling out from her piece of sacking; Reet on the lavatory while Father does his ablutions; Auntie Beatrice putting her teeth in and humming a tuneless melody while she rummages in a cardboard box for something to wear. Next he moves to a set-up in the tiny kitchen with Granny Bertha and Auntie Beatrice preparing ‘breakfast’. As breakfast isn’t normally eaten by the Baths as a collective enterprise but carried out on separate mattresses with whatever is available that day, Granny Bertha and Auntie Beatrice have to be prompted step by step, the director calling the moves by numbers.

  Granny Bertha is in possession of her mental faculties but is infirm and dithery, while Auntie Beatrice is vacant and forgetful, in the incipient stages of senile dementia. The ‘breakfast’ they finally prepare comprises two bowls of cold rice pudding, gravy granules (mistaken for instant coffee) made in the teapot with tepid water, some fragments of cream crackers in an upturned saucepan lid, six slices of bread as stiff as and the colour of cardboard, an empty jar of marmalade with something living in it, a packet of ravioli left over from a shoplifting expedition, and a lemonade bottle without a label containing Sandoz bleach.

  The director wants an ‘establishing family scene’, an ‘assembly of disparate discrete elements coming together in friendship and communion at the birth of a new day, rather in the manner of Buñuel’. Virgie tells him to cut the arty crap and not to be such a focking wanker.

  One by one the remainder of the family appears, roused by Father already reeking of whisky fumes with the steel-capped toe of his boot.

  Rita or ‘Reet’ is the seventeen-year-old love-child of Father and his sister, Auntie Beatrice. She is tall and spindly and pale as a living ghost, a semi-imbecile with bowed shoulders and a mouth overflowing with buck teeth taking up the entire lower half of her face, the moist bottom lip hanging below the level of her chin. Her hair is tight and frizzy and she wears large spectacles with clear frames which magnify her bulbous eyes to monstrous size. Not a pretty specimen.

  She enters the kitchen slowly and silently and sits, upon Granny Bertha’s instruction, at the table, head lolling from side to side. When asked by the director what she normally does at this hour of the morning, Reet just grins and dribbles.

  Here comes Uncle Forster. Twenty-nine and Reet’s quarter-brother, he has squinting suspicious eyes, a concave chest superseded by a pot belly like a concealed dumpling under his pullover, bites his nails and smokes incessantly. Uncle Forster is the arch-criminal of the family, having done time in Risley, Strangeways and Pentonville.

  Dumpy and Little Com arrive together, one dragging, the other screaming. As her pet name indicates, Dumpy is a sullen thirteen-year-old with a thick fringe and a pasty complexion who stares fixedly into space and is incapable of uttering a sentence of more than three words which doesn’t contain a blasphemy or four-letter epithet. Little Com, the youngest of the tribe, of indeterminate age and sex, is a whining screaming uncontrollable bundle of animal aggression. He/she is never still for long enough to discern any distinguishing marks or features, so it is impossible to say what Little Com actually looks like, excep
t that he/she is bald, yellow and blind. This brings the director close to despair. He can’t hold him/her in shot for more than three seconds, and in the final cut Little Com appears as a yellow blur of destructive quantum energy.

  The last member of the family, Vic, doesn’t materialise. An undernourished nineteen or twenty, with a wispy moustache and fledgling beard and bad teeth, his chief characteristics are that he is vicious and bored. Vic is the father of the child of indeterminate age and sex, by his own mother, though no one in the family would dare admit to it; the child and everyone else regarded Father as its father and referred to him as such, with Vic a spurious ‘uncle’ or ‘step-brother’ or something. It was acknowledged but unspoken that Vic had committed some ghastly act in the past and was quite likely to do it again if provoked.

  Little Com’s screaming continues unceasingly throughout ‘breakfast’, driving the director insane. The cameraman is spattered with rice pudding. The sound recordist can’t hear anything because Auntie Beatrice has absently poured cold gravy from the teapot into the microphone. Reet rocks to and fro, smiling gently with wet teeth, saliva leaking from her lower lip. Uncle Forster leans against the sink, squinting morosely and pugnaciously, legs crossed, folded arms resting on the round dumpling of his belly.

  A row of grimy grinning faces is propped on the window sill, noses squelched against the glass, mouthing hysterical obscenities. In the backyard murky flaccid washing hangs on the drooping line like prisoners in a Uruguayan death cell. (So far so good.)

  ‘Where’s your focking ‘dissolve through soft focus to granny’s wizened arms’ now?’ Virgie yells at the director. ‘Are you getting any of this, Buñuel, you jerkoff?’

  The scene changes.

  Vail has been surplus to requirements thus far but is now called upon to ‘interview’ some of the family. Presumably the show has a theme, some underlying purpose, but he can’t for the life of him bring it to mind. Is this how television documentaries are made? What, out of all this unmitigated mess and squalor, can there possibly be worth showing to the great British public? And to what end?

  The interviews, conducted in the first floor front bedroom, with pee-sodden mattresses on the bare floor, don’t go well.

  Reet dribbles foolishly into the camera lens, her glasses flaring light. She is a happy, gentle soul, not of this world. The boys in the neighbourhood interfere with her frequently and but for the grace of God and the vigilance of Granny Bertha she would have become pregnant several times over.

  ‘Is it true,’ Vail asks her, reading from the prepared questions given to him by Virgie Hance, ‘that if it wasn’t for the products of large multinational pharmaceuticals companies you wouldn’t be with us today?’ (He raises his eyebrows at Virgie in silent plea, who nods emphatically.)

  ‘Hee-yeee-heee-urrghhh-gurghhh-grhhh-heee-yeee-’

  (With vigorous signals and mouthings Virgie indicates that Vail is to continue with the next question.)

  ‘So you would definitely say then that but for the miracle of modern drugs you’d be incapable of leading a normal life?’

  ‘Hee-yeee-heee-urrghhh-gurghhh-grrhhh-heee-yeee.’

  ‘We can all say that, I suppose.’

  ‘Grrhhyeee-(dribble-suck-dribble)-yeee-heee-heee-heee.’

  ‘I’m sure ninety-nine per cent of the population would echo that.’

  Reet rocks forward, the bottom half of her face agape and dripping saliva, and touches Vail very gently as if he might break.

  ‘Now now now,’ says Granny Bertha. ‘Don’t molest the gentleman. He’s from the television.’

  The crew break for tea, coffee, brandy, toast and hot sausage rolls provided by Suze. The talk is of yachts, house extensions, VAT returns, BUPA, and the competing merits of holiday homes in Scotland and the Cotswolds and time-sharing villas in the Algarve. One of the crew kindly gives half a chocolate biscuit to Reet, who sits munching it with intense dedication, chocolate adhering to her front teeth. Auntie Beatrice, whom Granny Bertha must keep in her sight at all times, absent-mindedly lifts her leg and releases a soft rippling fart, smiling beatifically with pleasure.

  From below comes Little Com’s persistent screeching wail and Dumpy’s tirade of foul-mouthed abuse. The researcher, left in charge, is at his wit’s end: Dumpy keeps taunting him with a flash of her mucky drawers and none-too-subtle sexual innuendo, which disgusts him (he comes of an upper-class Anglo-Irish family and went to Marlborough) but which incites the grubby watchers at the kitchen window to a frenzy of lewd and lustful gesticulation.

  ‘Where are the stumps?’ the director complains querulously to Virgie Hance. ‘And why isn’t the Religious Adviser here? How can I make a decent film when I don’t have the material? I need actuality and you’re not giving it to me!’

  Virgie agrees. ‘We’ll have to think of something. Jack, any ideas?’

  Vail says without thinking, ‘Why not take them to Tesco’s and give them £100 to spend.’

  ‘Wonderful!’

  ‘Mightn’t that cause mayhem?’ the director frowns.

  ‘Yes!’ Virgie is scribbling on a pad, flared nostrils billowing smoke.

  The director gets the drift and catches alight. ‘I could shoot them through the wire mesh of a trolley at floor level. Sort of concentration camp feel. Bounce floods of light around. Spare, austere, clinical.’

  ‘Where is Josh by the way?’ Vail inquires.

  Virgie says, ‘Flew back to LA last night. He’s cutting an album.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to do much preaching.’

  ‘No, but he prays a lot.’

  ‘You know, this Tesco shoot isn’t going to generate much sympathy for the Baths,’ the director says on reflection. ‘I thought the object of the exercise was to garner public support for the DI Fund. And what about our ‘caring sharing’ theme?’

  ‘Use your brain, diarrhoea-face. What better way to touch the heartstrings and whip up sympathy than to see this couple of old crones here with their arms full of products and tears coursing down their flaking sunken cheeks? Or Dumpy and Little Com cramming their faces with all kinds of confectionery they’ve hitherto only dreamt of or seen on the telly? Reet trying on a cross-your-heart bra and pampering herself with lipstick and powder and dreaming of a beau? Father standing there stunned and emotional at the sight of his family enjoying all the things he’s been unable, through force of circumstance, to provide for them? And Uncle Forster and Vic …’

  But here even Virgie’s inspiration, when confronted by a potbellied petty crook and a vicious teenage hoodlum, peters out. What to do about Vic and Uncle Forster? Put them in a wheelchair and walking frame? She says briskly, ‘We’ll shoot round them. In any case we can leave them on the cutting-room floor.’

  ‘You could make them the heavies of the piece,’ Vail suggests (a phrase he has heard Angie use).

  ‘Brilliant!’ chorus Virgie and the director. ‘We can work in incest and child abuse,’ Virgie adds, smiling with all her shark’s teeth.

  ‘It’s a great dramatic counterpoint,’ the director agrees. ‘Love, hate, crime and sexual perversion in a London slum-dwelling family. It’s got to be a BAFTA nomination. Felliniesque.’

  There is a crash of splintering timber and Father staggers in, his thumb and two good fingers wrapped around the neck of the whisky bottle. He is in a rare fighting mood, ready to take on allcomers. ‘Get this,’ Virgie hisses at the cameraman.

  Wails from below as Dumpy smashes Little Com over the head with the teapot. The nerve-shattered researcher has fled to the sanctuary of the front room where he finds Uncle Forster slumped on a couch watching a Selina Southorn movie on video. Vic has yet to put in an appearance.

  The crew have retreated to the corner of the room as Father threshes about indiscriminately with the whisky bottle. His lank greasy hair hangs in front of his staring-mad bloodshot odd-coloured eyes.

  ‘M’ lil gurl,’ he mumbles incoherently, collapsing onto the mattress and smothering Reet in a clumsy emb
race with his heavy tattooed arm.