Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke

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СКАЧАТЬ and the pale yellow Peabody Trust flats blooming among them, and the little square off High Holborn with its bronze of Gandhi sitting cross-legged; and beyond, all the pubs on Theobalds Road outside which young lawyers in their first suits anxiously smoked, looking pressed for time, and then the Regency terraces of the Gray's Inn Road and the flops of Euston. I had been asked home by somebody and – lo and behold, so to speak – I was home. London. So I kept going home with people. And Mark turned up one day to find he had been deceived. It was the usual sad end to first love. You don't leave them for anyone, you leave them for everyone, and it was as messy as hell. The violence of breaking up was infinitely more surprising and disorientating than losing one's virginity. Mark floored it down the M6 to splinter my door, but somewhere under my own hysterics I was reassured that love was all it was cracked up to be. Telling you this makes me feel old, but it's true.

      In my third year an American entered the Man in the Moon in Camden where I worked and told me that he was looking for a place to live. ‘I've run into some trouble back home,’ he said in a Texan accent. He was the first American I had ever met and seemed almost supernaturally exotic. I brought him home in much the way that Elliot brings home ET.

      ‘Who is he?’ my flatmate Susie said.

      ‘He's an American!’

      ‘But who is he?’

      ‘He's an American!’

      When I got home from the pub, I would get into bed with Wilson and ask about his life in Salado, Texas. His voice was a McConaugheyan velvet coat. He wasn't a man, I now saw. He was just a kid like me. A handsome Texan boy with a twist of a harelip that turned my heart over. In the mornings he would physically open my eyes to wake me. He got a job as a binman and started bringing back gifts for me from work, like out-of-date pancake mix. So I made out-of-date pancakes, and delicious they were too. But I didn't know what to do with the other salvage, like the little wheels off discarded roller-skates: I cleaned and polished them and put them on the mantelpiece as one might arrange an exhibition of totems of a collapsed society. I couldn't understand why he cried so much throughout that autumn until he eventually told me about his trouble back home. He had shot a man dead for two hundred dollars: ‘I didn't think it meant I would never be able to go back,’ he said. It was so dark I couldn't see his face.

      ‘After I did it, I went up and looked at the body, even though they'd told me not to. He had this small tattoo on his arm. Of a Swiss chalet.’

      If it was just acting, it was just acting. And if it were true, then he couldn't be any more unhappy than he already was. The city closed in, black and orange at four o'clock, a world of buses wheezing through puddles, a world covered in leaf mulch or car-shit which seemed as bleary and smeared as if you were seeing it through an uncleanable windscreen, the conditions of life such that you could do nothing but shrivel under them, never quite clean, never quite dry, and all scrawled over with an illegible graffiti of fear, about money, for Wilson, and of guilt about Mark, who had burned everything I had given him in the front garden of my parents' house. Being sacked from both Habitat and the Man in the Moon allowed me to get a job in a travel agency where the more regular hours let me make it home to Wilson before his binman's bedtime. He feared sheep and had to be reassured of their absence from Hampstead Heath.

      ‘Sheep'll watch ya,’ he said. ‘It'll always watch ya, like it watches everything.’

      Bonfire Night shook him something terrible. The smell of the fires in the parks around Muswell Hill, the blackened sparklers on the pavements, the bins full of charred fireworks and ash, the way it seemed to extend for a month of random bangs and shrieks – a season of burning – threw him into prayer. He knelt at the foot of the bed in the posture of the child on the bookmark I had received at my First Holy Communion and gave himself up to a terror of hellfire, craving God's forgiveness. It stunned me. I wanted him to leave, to get away from me, but I knew that I would pay if I asked him to go. I loved him. Yet I had no margin. I envied God the many mansions of His house. It was easy for Him to forgive and accommodate Wilson, yet He never would. At the end of every day, Wilson opened the curtains and looked up at the starless winter sky, and actually – out loud – thanked his lucky stars that he'd found me. I betrayed him then by wishing him away, much worse than I had ever betrayed Mark. I was learning another lesson – that not everybody grew up accustomed to love, and those that hadn't couldn't defend themselves from those that had. But Wilson was a ship going down in a black and cold city, and I wanted only to escape the vortex of his sinking.

      By February, he had stopped talking entirely, merely dribbling a yo-yo up and down for hours on end. At the travel agent's I sold round-the-world tickets to students in my year who looked at me like they recognised me but weren't quite sure how. It made me feel like a ghost. By April, Wilson started to talk again and told the Anabaptists in whose basement off the Archway Road we lived that he was a professional gigolo. They wanted us out. Doing my exams was like writing cheques I knew were going to bounce. On a spring day, while I was basing my Chaucer paper around the one couplet I could remember – ‘And as thou art a fightul lord and juge / Ne yeve us neither mercy ne refuge’ – Wilson had a fight with one of the Anabaptists and cleared out for good, leaving his passport behind in the pocket of his one good winter coat.

       7

      The single greatest performance by a British actor in the 1990s was by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh's Naked, as (say the following very fast from the back of your nose, like John Lennon) a cheeky fucking manky Mancy monkeh called Johnny, a hyper-articulate autodidact ignoramus – are you following me, love? – who flees the north and ends up dropping off the radar enfuckingtirely in London, because it's just such a great warm welcoming fucking carnival out on the streets in the Big Shitty, knoworrimean, that he practically perishes from stuffing himself with the free poxy fucking marzipan the pearly kings and queens are giving out, are you with me, love? Peachy fucking creamy.

      Johnny talks like this all the time. He takes a linguaphiliac delight in polysyllables and goes at everyone like a razorblade with his half-baked conspiracy theories and his patchy understanding of Nostradamus and the Book of Revelation and Chaos Theory – a performance which is forensically accurate about a certain type of smart-arse Mancunian educated at a time when comprehensives still did The Odyssey and Paradise Lost. I knew this Johnny. I had met about six of him. Undefeatable in argument, destructive, self-destructive, too clever by three-quarters, both frightening and irresistible to women. And Thewlis's creation was a note-perfect capturing of a type no one had ever captured before, a type whose essence was that you could never capture him, whose whole raison d'être was to evade capture. This was news, a new species for the zoo, grabbed from the world so gleaming and fresh that the rest of the film and indeed the rest of Mike Leigh's work – which we all regarded as the acme of realism – looked like a cartoon.

      Thewlis's Johnny has those beautiful wrist-bones which you want to grab to stop his even more beautiful hands from slapping you. His voice quarries out every bit of music contained in the Manchester accent. The mouth beneath the ratty overbite is incapable of anything but sarcasm or supersincerity. That fast, straight-backed walk, like a cursor gliding along a line, looks like the walk of someone walking out on you. And all of these – hands, voice, mouth, walk – are fuelled by that peculiar youthful delusion: integrity. Only when you're young are you so hounded and harried by the fear of being fake, as if a single lie will curse you forever. The God of Integrity wants you to keep running, to never do anything twice, to worship the present tense, to reject comfort as a Siren. He is a cold god who would only really be happy if everyone were on their own, and only the young dream of him. But Thewlis is ten years older than Holden Caulfield, and Johnny is ten years deeper into hell, drowning in north London, in Bounds Green and Southgate and Edmonton, among those tall houses whose white stucco СКАЧАТЬ