Camera Phone. Brooke Biaz

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СКАЧАТЬ is strictly pre-industrial, pre-sound. The light is florescent. There’s cold creeping out of the sick green stucco. This is no place to take a crap. The hand-dryer sounds like a chain-saw. The atmosphere is pure noir. And the music, which is something by someone called Peaches and Herb, I believe,—“Shake Your Groove Thing” by Peaches and Herb—is literally being piped through the walls. The place looks over the beach and the movies run all night.

      Meanwhile, into the bar comes Karen, flanked by Helena who has arrived straight from work and, dressed in mid calf height boots and animal print stretched jeans, walks like she’s bungee jumping.

      “Ciaran!” she cries out, literally. “Ciaran. I don’t believe it. You are incredible! So tell me: what happened?”

      “Come on,” she says, lowering her voice and stretching right across the table towards me with her lips glittering in pearl and her earrings a full 1/2 carat each, “I mean, what fucking happened?”

      “Calm down,” I suggest.

      She eats me with her eyes.

      Naturally, I have no choice but to lie. I am obliged to do it (I am Kevin Costner in No Way Out; Marco Leonardi in Like Chocolate for Water), and joke to myself (though it is only half a joke) that because Helena is Miss Marpley in Accounts she will respect me for this.

      I say to myself, referring to a part of the plot which amounts to nothing and is, in itself, absolutely uninteresting: “There wouldn’t be some poke auditor about to go through the Festival of the Waters Film Festival accounts if office feeders like you, Helena dear, hadn’t practiced a little truth ping-pong, a little financial hide-the-puppy, a little computer fraud. Now would there?”

      Karen is asking: “So how did he do it, anyway?” But for the moment, though I’m aware of Karen hanging on my next word, but pretending not to, kind of weirdly doe-eyed up against my shoulder, I’m still concentrating on Helena. I’m thinking that without her clothes on she would look like a seagull. Her neck craning thick and white. Her chest out. I am sitting in El Monkey, the decor a jungle of potted palms and stuffed brown monkeys in cages and Vox posters and blackboard menus, the music of Portishead, and a gull is trying to make my two-shot into a big close-up, demanding: “Come on, Ciaran! Come on!”

      “With a razor blade,” I lie. “Very traditional.”

      “God!”

      “That’s crazy,” says Helena who, of course, knows Milroy from her early, amateur film days.

      “Sure,” I say. “Sure it is.” Even weirder, I think, because in actual fact he did it in exactly the same way that Michael Hutchence from that ’80s rock band INXS did it. And because, of course, no one was quite sure if Hutchence had really meant to commit suicide or if he had, in fact, been engaging in some kind of bizarre sexual game, something borne in the angst that the corporate mentality of the ’80s, the terrible dissolution of that period, produced in the young that grew up amongst it. Or whatever.

      “But he’s alive, is he?” asks Helena, lighting a cigarette, inhaling.

      I start doing this great voice-over (in the tradition, actually, of Adrian Lyne’s Lolita. “O gentlemen of the jury,” that kind of thing), but Karen stops me, almost distraught:

      “And then what? You went in, and then what?”

      So now I’m explaining to her how it happened, though I’m lying of course. How I cutaway from the corridor into his office. How it is difficult to know whether the books, many of which have glossy covers, will reflect comet tails through every phone shot. How the background music is “Solved” by Unbelievable Truth, playing out on the front lawn. And his office walls, “Which are plastered,” I lie, “with Def Squad posters, pictures of Bill Murray” mask the set, as does the stippled ceiling, and slowly, panning, the colors “like something out of Hairspray,” hitting the first sunlit aspects of his desk, until my lie somehow finds its way back to the truth and I’m describing the doctor with his head in a plastic bag and the way his face had turned a deep shade of red and his flickering bulging eyelids and the clutter on his desk, at which point I am tempted to freeze frame but instead I’m lowering my phone so it’s recording just Dr Steven Milroy’s mouth, his now gaping mouth, and the spot effect of sirens (off) tells everyone that the ambulance is arriving, the police also, one of whom turns out to be some character actor whose name escapes but looks a bit like Mel Gibson if not for having absolutely no chin, and the other is Jamie Lee Curtis, taking a statement as Steve Milroy, now revived (because he had clinically died), and conscious again, is crying something like “Tell Leesa . . . ,” by which I figure he means Leesa Kennedy who lead for him in Judgment Nights, and works for the Film Festival.

      “Oh, God, tell Leesa will you, please?” he’s yelling as they wheel him out (they’ve bought a chair) and just at that moment there’s this clatter and murmuring (off) and from along the corridor (pan slowly right), the whole freshman cohort is being shown into the building as part of their introductory library tour, it is Orientation Week after all, and they prop at the sight of him being wheeled out. The whole set falls silent. There’s an old wall clock (you know the type) and it clocks out the seconds like a drum beat as Milroy is wheeled right down the corridor past them (me not letting him out of left frame for ten, twelve beats; the corridor checkered black and white, receding busily away), and I know exactly what the undergrads are thinking? They’re thinking:

      “Hey, I want to make movies. There is nothing else.”

      “And the thing is,” I say, “later the police wanted to know if I had anything ‘on tape.’” (?)

      Helena is silent, inhaling, exhaling. Karen is clenching her fists over her eyes.

      “Tape? ‘Film?’ I said. . . . Well, I’m not going to tell them, am I?”

      “I don’t believe this,” says Karen, her face suddenly annoyingly hidden by the rim of her cup.

      3

      It doesn’t stop there:

      Baked Sultanas and Red Cabbage with Yogurt and Honey

      (Serves 2) For this recipe you can use bulk sultana buys. If Red Cabbage is unavailable, ordinary cabbage will do. Plain yogurt is best; but sometimes this is expensive. So, flavored yoghurt is okay, as long as you use some of the less powerful flavors, such as applesauce, peach, guava, custard or caramel.

      1.5oz caster sugar

      2lb Yogurt

      4lb ripe sultanas

      4 tbsp wine (such as red wine)

      1 Red Cabbage

      1¾oz unsalted butter

      freshly ground black pepper

      6 tsp honey

      4oz peanuts

      crème fraîche, on top

      Cooking time: 20–25 minutes

      1. Place the caster sugar and yogurt in a saucepan and stir over the heat until the sugar has dissolved. Remove the pan from the heat.

      2. Preheat a normal oven to 400F. Prick the sultanas all over using a fork and place them on a baking tray.

      3. Swiftly heat the wine in СКАЧАТЬ