A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.
We had met in a bookstore. She was interested in books. In addition to being a film star, she was the model for a popular brand of face cream, and her image looked out everywhere, from shop windows and hoardings and the rain-streaked Perspex of bus shelters. In the photograph, she appeared very young and happy. Her smile had a sweetness that almost seemed to reproach those who looked at it for their dim and suspicious view of life.
She lived in a large house on the other side of the river. In person, she was very small, and the house was like a big doll’s house, with her as the doll inside it.
We knew a couple of people in common. One of them told me a funny story about a dinner they’d attended at a restaurant, where M’s bodyguard had insisted that she change places with another film star, who was older and less famous, because he was worried that M’s position at the table exposed her to danger.
It was hard not to feel ugly next to M. Part of it was the ugliness of experience. I had never learned how to make experience easier for myself. For M it was the reverse. Her difficulty lay in her distance from the random violence of insignificance. Personally, I felt saturated with that violence. All my life it had been made clear to me how unimportant I was. M and I both secretly felt that it was the ways in which we had been damaged that had given us our power.
It was autumn, and the city became inexorably colder and wetter and grayer. In the face-cream advertisement, M remained wreathed in the pink flowers of spring.
On sunny mornings, people ran beside the river, men and women running past like gods in the sun, tall with dazzled eyes and windswept hair. Other men and women lived in tents beneath the stone bridges and brushed their teeth in the water fountains. Sometimes their shoes could be seen, placed neatly side by side outside the tent’s zipped entrance.
Beside one of the bridges, in the shelter of a high wall, was an outdoor café that was warm in the sun even on the coldest days. People sat there reading or looking at their phones. I was reading a book by a woman who had been sexually abused by her stepfather throughout her childhood. A lot of people knew about this book. It had come into the world and been seized upon and swallowed down, like a draft of something for which people were thirsty. The reason was the unusual tone of the writer’s voice, as she testified to things that by rights should have erased her. This tone was neither personal nor impersonal, it possessed a deep and unmistakable authority, the authority of an object. It was as if some household item—a chair, for instance—had suddenly gained the power to speak. The writer did not feel in any way sorry for herself, and this made her unbreakable. It’s possible that the success of her book was some kind of compensation or reward for the things that had happened to her, but it seemed unlikely. If she was unbreakable, success could have no more power over her than misfortune.
M had told me that starring in a film as a child had immediately brought her childhood to an end. The writer was saying the same thing about the deeds of her stepfather. Not being seen was perhaps equivalent to being seen by everybody. M said that the script of her first film had originally included several scenes in which the child was shown wanting or inviting sexual interaction with the central male character. This need for the child to express volition in the fulfillment of male desires was mentioned in the book, too. The stepfather was always claiming that the abuse was not something he was doing to his stepdaughter but something they participated in together.
M’s mother had objected to those dubious scenes, so they were cut from the script. In the book about the stepfather, the big problem was that the mother didn’t notice what was going on. She didn’t notice acts of extraordinary shamelessness and depravity that were happening for years in her own house. The father, a harmless character who came to visit the children at weekends, didn’t notice either. The writer of the book remembers, as a child, being conscious of the fact that by saying only a few words she could entirely destroy her family. She did not say those words. Why not? It was no more possible for her to say those words than it would have been for a chair. Yet afterward people were always asking her why she hadn’t said something.
To have childhood brought to an end is perhaps also to be placed outside of time. The writer of the book about the stepfather described how other people continued to live in time while she herself was preserved in incidents that perennially recurred, that were eternally still happening to her no matter how old she got. A film is also always happening; its origins in time have been frozen through the process of recording. M could always be found in her films, living the same instants over and over. The stepfather had recorded himself on the writer of the book.
M said that when her first film came out the children at school bullied her. They called her a slut. She decided to study and work hard; she decided to be smart, which was the opposite of being a slut. That she had the capacity to decide was one result of her childhood having ended. It had become obvious to her that reality could be engineered. Everyone else believed in reality: it was as if they, not she, were in a film, a film she was watching. The writer of the book about the stepfather also began to work assiduously at school, getting top grades in every subject. Later, at his trial, the stepfather used this as evidence that no real harm had been done to her and claimed that his actions may even have contributed to her success.
There was a small boules court adjacent to the café beside the bridge, and the café’s proprietor rented out sets of the heavy little balls to her customers. She was frequently to be seen playing there herself, with the three men in her employ, whom she dominated and mesmerized like a matriarch. She was a short, sturdy woman with a broad masculine face. Her voice was loud and hoarse, calling out comments or exhortations concerning the game. Whenever she spoke, the three men would instantly look up like guilty dogs. When it rained there were no runners and the café was shuttered up beside the empty boules court. The tents under the bridges stayed the same.
My partner had to go into hospital: there was something wrong, but no one could work out what it was. The doctors kept telling us to prepare ourselves for bad news but instead there was no particular news. The hospital was on the other side of the city, and it was a long walk each day at visiting hours. The route passed through different areas whose different atmospheres came and went, prosperous stretches giving way to rougher ones and then becoming prosperous again, like a perpetual argument or a struggle for victory. There were always tests and procedures that needed to be done. The doctors had put a three-way valve into the back of my partner’s hand so that they could take blood whenever they wanted. When they needed to do a procedure they wheeled the whole bed with my partner in it out of the room and down the corridor to somewhere else. I stayed in the empty room, waiting on a plastic chair beside the window. The removal and return of the bierlike bed was like a rehearsal for absence.
The walk to the hospital went past an old cinema that was always half empty. You could just buy a ticket at the door and sit down. I didn’t go to the cinema or watch films very often, though my partner always wanted to. I was suspicious of the power of distraction that films possessed. Their total sensory invasion was overwhelming. It could sometimes take days to recover from seeing a film. It was as though, by watching the film, you acquired a set of memories that were not your own. For a while, everything looked different, as if the film were still happening outside in the world. Even in the best films, things were made to seem more possible than they actually were, especially cruelty. The possibility of cruelty was nearly always present in films. It was as if, in films, people could do whatever they wanted and were simply choosing not to for now. It was as if there were no law.
At the hospital it was possible to watch films on a laptop in bed, at any time of day or night. Apparently it was hard to sleep in that neon-lit building, where machines beeped unceasingly and the doctors and nurses came in every few hours to do their checks. My partner complained about the constant interruptions. Yet it also seemed desirable to be constantly interrupted, to have the responsibility for oneself taken away. When visiting hours ended, the feeling of relief I felt at leaving the hospital gradually became a feeling of fear. It was a fear of freedom. Being able to do what I wanted made me afraid that I had never done what I wanted. The things I wanted to do, such as leave the hospital at the end of visiting hours, did not make sense. The next day, I was as impatient to return to the hospital as I had been to leave it.
One day, passing the old cinema on the way home, I noticed that a film was about to start and I went in. The film was about the end of childhood. It concerned a boy who is incriminated by his own innocence and honesty in his dealings with authority. He is an ordinary boy, no better or worse than other boys, except for this honesty which marks him out and enrages his parents, his teachers, society itself. The authorities try to contain and destroy his honesty, and, each time that they fail, authority itself is made to look more and more senseless, which enrages the authorities even more. The boy’s school punishes him, his parents wash their hands of him, and in the end he is sent to a remedial institution, although in fact he has done nothing wrong. He runs away from this place, runs and runs without knowing where he is running to. The camera follows him running, through woods and along paths until he reaches the sea. He has never seen the sea before. He runs into the water and then realizes that he cannot run across it. He stops and he turns around and looks back.
