Ever since I gave up my job and started waiting for the film to happen, I too have felt like a gap in between things. So how can you expect someone like me to deal with the day? I have no ideas on this one. Tell me, please. Money doesn’t tell me. I lie clueless in the cot until — until when? How is it that the experience will ever end? Up, get out, do it now — now, now. Now! I drift, dither, grope, fumble … and there I am at last, half-dressed in the kitchen with cigarettes and coffee-filters. Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them. I look through the window—the streets, the sky the colour of wet sugar—and I am simply stumped by this, dumbfounded, nonplussed. The windows themselves, they make a little more sense. They are doubleglazed with dirt. The glass looks like the Fiasco windscreen after a thousand-mile drive, stained with the blackened blood of insects nine hundred miles ago, the dottings of soot, the fingerprints of filthy phantoms. Even dirt has its patterns and seeks its forms. .. When I quit my job it felt like the end of term, it felt like Saturday morning, it felt great, it felt illegal. But the end of something ought to be the start of something else, and I can’t yet feel what’s meant to be beginning. In my head it feels like nothing, like fuck-all. Selina is an early riser. Her High Street instincts (detectable in the sharpness of her face, even in the sharpness of her teeth) propel her into the world of money and exchange. She has an interest in a boutique run by that useful friend of hers, Helle, down Chelsea way, the World’s End. Selina wants me to put money into it. I don’t want to put money into it, but I probably will. If I do, I know I’ll never get it out again.
So I play patience, and solitaire. Martina’s book lies closed on my bedside table: I haven’t got into it yet, and I still don’t know what pop-holes are. I look to the TV, the video recorder. Once I had a pretty decent collection of films on tape, but I can’t handle anything continuous any more. I’ve seen all the video nasties, and I don’t need pornography, now that Selina’s here. I fill the reels with nightly squirts of random TV traffic. Nature shorts, comedy shows. Football, snooker, bowls, darts. Darts! Dah! Oh man … soon I’ll look like those fat brutes with the beer mugs and the arrows. And then with shoulders bunched and my eyes on the messed pavement I shuffle off down the drinker, and sit with tankard and tabloid in the corner by the fire.
Russia is going to beat Poland up. If I were Russia, that’s what I’d do, just to keep up appearances—I mean, you can’t let the word start to get about. Seems that Prince Charles had a thing with one of Diana’s sisters, way back, before he fingered Lady Di as the true goer of the family. Another pussy-whipped judge has given some broad a ten-bob fine for murdering the milkman — pre-menstrual tension, PMT. The Western Alliance is in poor shape, I’m told. Well what do you expect? They’ve got an actor, and we’ve got a chick. More riots in Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, the inner cities left to rot or burn. Sorry, boys, but the PM has PMT. Here is a woman who gave her five-year-old child away to a stranger in a pub for two barley stouts. She’s separated from her common-law husband, who is unemployed.
I do the quick crossword. I play the spacegames and the fruit-machines. I feel like a robot, playing a rival robot, for a price. We are both one-armed bandits. Hold, nudge, spin, kick, shuffle, double, win, lose. It’s all done for you nowadays — Prizefinder, Holdamatic, Autonudge. The machines nauseate me whether I win or lose. But if they had a hole in the wall here I think I’d put money into it. I go somewhere else and eat junk food and drink junk wine, I hit the betting shop and lose dough perched on a stool. I wander through the newsagents and check out the chicks in the magazines. I go home and lie down and then it all starts again. What is there to help me make sense of things? Time has me dangling on its tenterhooks, I used to run on energy. These days, saying energy makes me black out with exhaustion. I can’t do any storyboarding until Doris Arthur shows with the script. As for budgeting, my first assistant Micky Obbs is on a half-pay retainer until the first day of Principal Photography, along with Des Blackadder and Kevin Skuse. He can fucking do it.