“To Harry Sheinberg, Pitchfork Pictures. From Geraldine Copper, EBFC.” Geraldine breathed on each lens of her glasses before cleaning them with an impregnated cloth. “Re: The Mortal Sins of Dracula.” (Denise’s keys clattered.) “We have now viewed the above title and I’m afraid the areas of concern we signalled in the screenplay have far from been addressed. It’s a horror film, yes, but in this instance, quite frankly, the horror simply goes over the edge into disgust and distaste.” Geraldine found herself shuddering, as if she’d caught a draught from an open window. “We find it sickening in a way we are sure no normal or healthy person could find enjoyable or entertaining. Our required cuts are itemised below, however our more grievous concern is the general blasphemous content throughout, in conjunction with the most extreme and inexcusable images, which we deem wholly unacceptable.” She paused to water the yucca plant. “New paragraph.

  “To begin with, the title itself, dash—a different one from the one on the cover of the script originally submitted to this office, dash—requires changing. Moreover, most notably, the scene of”—she cleared her throat, and noticed Denise had stopped clattering—“intercourse, bracket, one is unable to say ‘lovemaking’, close brackets—involving as it does an implausible and unrealistic amount of blood, comma, menstrual or otherwise, comma, can only be termed obscene, and cannot be accepted.” Geraldine paced, or rather marched, retracing her steps in front of Denise’s desk, straight-backed to her height of five foot nothing and in full flow now: “Please remove all such bloodshed. Furthermore, please exclude any hint of an ecstatic expression on the woman’s face as penetration occurs. New paragraph.”

  Denise tugged the carriage return arm and looked up, expectantly.

  “Reel one. The chase scene contains a gratuitous knife wound. Please recut this in such a way that that we do not see the blade entering the flesh. To be specific, a close up is not acceptable. The cutting of a throat in sustained close up is, likewise, beyond the pale. We must—repeat must—have this degree of violence kept resolutely off-camera at all times.”

  George Runnymede, watching a mute Geraldine pacing from the silent seclusion of his office, became curious. He closed the script he was reading and tapped out the contents of his pipe into the ashtray on his desk. When he opened the door to the outer sanctum a fug of tobacco accompanied him, as it did everywhere. He leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb, resplendent in his slightly strained Oxford Blues blazer with surprisingly grubby V-neck pullover underneath.

  “Don’t let it get to you, buttercup.” He hit the wood with his pipe to dislodge some stubborn detritus then blew through it, as if he were Pan with his pipes about to tootle a tune. “They always try it on with these X ratings. They push. We pull. It’s all part of the game.”

  “It’s not a game to me, Mr Runnymede,” said Geraldine, and meant it.

  “No, no. Quite...Still...if you prefer, I could take a look at the next cut, you know...to save you the...?”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  His dentures clacked against his pipe stem. “If you’re sure?”

  “Yes. I’m, yes. Absolutely sure, thank you. Where was I, Denise?”

  Denise turned the roller and squinted at her typing. “Reel five, sado-masochistic flagellation, Miss Copper.” George Runnymede returned to The Plumber’s Lovely Daughter, happy to shut his door after him, and pleased at himself for resisting the urge to raise an eyebrow. He’d found from past experience it didn’t go down too well.

  The posters on the wall were cold comfort. Frankenstein Be Thy Name. The Minotaur. Voodoo Goddess. D for Demented. Congorilla! Procession of the Damned. They were merely disdainful ancestors looking down from the walls of a stately home on the antics of the present incumbents.

  “What do they want? Blood?”

  “Quite the reverse. They want a heck of a lot less of it.” Harry Sheinberg threw down the letter onto his desk.

  “Marvellous!” said Marcus Rand, volcanic with rage. “Maybe they’ll be happy when there’s sod-all left. When I’ve got a twenty innocuous minutes of celluloid that doesn’t offend anybody, and sends everybody to sleep. Maybe I’ll have a cinema full of vicars and maiden aunts applauding. For Pete’s sake, what were they expecting, Sooty and Sweep? Sunday Night at the London Palladium? It’s a horror film!”

  Sheinberg threw up his hands, swivelling in his swivel chair. Pragmatic. A realist. He’d had run-ins with the censor more times than he’d had hot dinners. For his young, inexperienced director, however, it was losing his cherry. But he didn’t enjoy the sight of him—leather jacket over scarlet polo neck, bellbottomed jeans—pacing the room like a tiger in a cage.

  “Marcus, Marcus. Calm down, boy.” Sheinberg poured him a drink from one of the crystal decanters. “You’re not going to win. You’re never going to win with these people. Listen. I had hair when I started dealing with them.” Sheinberg was, of course, bald as a coot. The joke was meant to calm Marcus down, but patently didn’t. “Believe me. Save yourself a lot of heartache, son. Just do the cuts. Make her happy. You know how to make women happy, don’t you?”

  Marcus’s dark brown eyes glowered. They combined with his jet-black hair and angular jaw to produce an effect that could only be called vulpine. Yes, he had a reputation for being snapped by the Daily Mirror in the back of taxis with dolly birds in the early hours of the morning, but that had damn-all to do with it. He downed the whisky in one.

  “Ice?”

  The sarcasm went down as well as the joke had.

  “Who is she, anyway?”

  Sheinberg glanced back at the signature on the letter. “GC. Geraldine Copper. Bane of my life. George Runnymede you could reason with, over a few ports and a nice pigeon pie at the club, but she’s got it in for horror films. All horror films.”

  “Great.”

  The producer realised his protégé needed a refill. Badly.

  “They know you’re the most exciting new director of your generation.”

  “I am!” The young man had arrogance aplenty, but far from being an off-putting trait, Sheinberg had found that he actually liked it very much. “And I’m being castrated. Or my picture is being castrated, anyway. By over-sensitive, lily-livered fools. Christ, I think my head is going to explode.”

  “Well, not in here, please. We’ll never get the stains off the upholstery.” Sheinberg handed him the glass a second time, and watched him use the liquid to wash down a duo of small white pills from a brown bottle.

  “What gets me is, it’s a good film, Harry. A bloody good film!”

  “I know, I know. It’s a tough business.” Sheinberg lit a Montecristo cigar. Sharing the same lighter, Marcus lit a cigarette.

  “I can take tough. What I can’t take is narrow-minded and old-fashioned. Evangelical petty bureaucrats with their nine-to-fives and their twin-set and pearls telling me what I can and can’t imagine. The images I can and can’t put up there on the screen.”

  “You can do it. I have faith in you. Look. I trusted you. On the back of a cheap Italian shocker with a dipsomaniac has-been Hollywood star? I saw something. I saw potential.”

  “Of course you did.” Marcus’s chin jutted high. “It was a masterpiece.”

  Harry Sheinberg laughed, slapping him on the shoulder chummily, but his words became firm and unsentimental. “But this is a business, son. My business. The distributor has already got this movie of yours booked into cinemas up and down the land. What am I going to look like if I let them down? Eh?”

  “And what’s my film going to look like if it’s turned into flaccid flannel like most pictures out there? That’s not what I’m interested in. Audience fodder. I want to make films that people remember for the rest of their lives. Films that get under their skin, and stay there. Films people can’t get out of their heads if they tried.”

  “That’s what makes you a damn good director.” Sheinberg handed him the letter—five stapled sheets of typing, single spaced. “But your contract says you’ll deliver a film that’s releasable,” he added, with a fish-like, unblinking glare. “And on time.”

  The look Marcus returned was incendiary.

  He knew when he was being put in his place. He’d stared the same way at that desiccated headmaster at Harrow after he and his pal Foxy put chemicals in the fountain to turn the water bright green. And he knew that grin that Sheinberg wore now. The smile of the “Do As You’re Told” Brigade—and he hated it. Snatching the letter from the older man’s fingers, he departed with a sullen obedience, not disguising an ounce of his anger and exasperation as the slamming of the door shook the walls.

  There were times when those brown-black eyes could be a bit frightening, Sheinberg thought. There was a bit of the devil about his firebrand hotshot. In fact, as the young man left, he almost expected to see the swish of a forked tail.

  “Me and Terry are meeting up with my friend Sue and her boyfriend tonight,” Denise said, covering her Olivetti. “We’re going to Shaftesbury Avenue to catch the new Steve McQueen, if you’re interested.”

  “No thanks,” said Geraldine. “I...er, I don’t really enjoy going to the cinema.”

  “Oh, well. No harm done. Enjoy your evening. See you tomorrow, then. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Denise.”

  Geraldine knew that they all thought her a stick-in-the-mud, and they’d probably talk about her over their Kia-Ora and Treets, or more likely, wouldn’t think about her at all. Why should they? She wasn’t the slightest bit interesting, even to herself. What did she do every night, except catch the bus to Tottenham, get off at the stop near Seven Sisters tube station, walk back under the railway bridge, and cut up Birstall Road, turning left into Roslyn Road, where her parents had a small terraced house opposite the primary school. She sometimes left in the morning to the sound of children playing, and wondered why they weren’t kept under better control.

  She and her mum served up lamb chops, mash and gravy so thick you could stand a spoon in it, while her brother Ron lounged at the table, smoking. Her father fussed over his budgies. He was a manager at Burton’s (‘The Tailor of Taste’) in the High Street. She’d never seen him without Brylcreem in his hair or his top shirt button done up.

  “Hey, Dad.” Ron gave Geraldine a knowing grin. “You make sure you wash your hands after you’ve been fiddling with them birds. Never know what you might catch off of birds.”

  Geraldine’s dad sighed, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, then sat at the table.

  “For what we are about to receive,” said Ron, “may the Lord make us Johnny Dankworth.” Dad remained po-faced, but Ron winked at Geraldine. Silence descended as they ate. After a while the telephone rang and Ron answered it, his voice a mumble till he returned from the hall, picking his teeth with his thumbnail.

  “All right. I’m off.” He kissed his ma on the cheek. “Bye, sis. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Wait a minute. You never do, do ya?” The front door slammed after him.

  “I’ll warm it up when he gets in,” said Geraldine’s mum.

  “Bookie’s dogsbody,” muttered her dad. “That’s what comes of not studying. You had the right idea, you.” He jabbed at Geraldine with his knife. “Never had your nose out of a book, you didn’t. Him?”

  “Oh, Cliff,” protested his wife.

  “Well...” Geraldine’s father filled one cheek with a forkful of potato. “That’s your armour, your education. And your sword. Don’t you forget that, young girl.”

  “She isn’t a young girl anymore, Cliff.”

  “Who isn’t? She is to me.”

  Geraldine rose to take her empty plate to the kitchen. “What’s for afters, Mum?”

  “Pineapple chunks.”

  “Pineapple chunks.” Her father twitched his elbows eagerly, like a chicken flapping its wings. “You can’t go wrong with pineapple chunks, I always say.”

  While Geraldine slept that night she had no thought for the fact that Marcus Rand was working at a flatbed into the wee hours of the morning in a darkened room with his editor, Nick Leigh-Hunt. The two of them had watched and fiddled with the sex scene—the intercourse scene—dozens of times, trimming, replacing, digging once-discarded strands of celluloid from the bin where they hung on hooks.

  “Bloody hell, what are we making, a Norman Wisdom film? This is about as sexy as a wet Wednesday in Builth Wells.”

  The nun was now only shown from the back. No head and shoulder shots of her head rolling in ecstasy. Not so much as a trickle of blood from her nether regions. The whole thing had been made trite, innocuous, and banal.

  The exhausted editor, ever optimistic, shrugged. “It works.”

  “Works?” Marcus almost spat out the idea. “I don’t want ‘works.’ I want passion. I want poetry.” He circled the tiny space, restlessly, as his colleague rubbed his eyes and consulted his watch. “Put back in fifteen frames of the three-quarter shot of her back. Take two.”

  “Breast but no nipple?”

  “Breast but no nipple.”

  “Let’s hope that satisfies her.”

  Marcus sat back down, shoulders hunched. “You worry about satisfying me.”

  The telephone rang four days later. Marcus reached blearily over the inert body of Natasha Selkirk—the blonde who’d played the sexually active nun Sister Ingrid in his latest opus—and picked up the receiver, immediately recognising the voice of Harry Sheinberg’s secretary. He groggily asked what time it was. She told him half past twelve, and it took him a few seconds to realise it was not midnight but gone midday. Sheinberg wasted no pleasantries in reading out the letter he’d just received.

  “‘We have now viewed the new cut of The Mortal Sins of Dracula with interest. Whilst we see an improvement in some ways, the changes are, regrettably, very unhelpful in others...’”

  “What?” Marcus’s eyes popped open. His hangover vanished.

  “‘The film throughout revels in the kind of sadomasochistic overtones that might be commonplace in European cinema of a particularly disreputable kind, but here in—”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous!”

  He left the bed, trailing the cord of the phone with him.

  “It’s no good telling me, son. I’m on your side. But you can’t reason with these people.”

  “Oh, can’t I?”

  Marcus slammed the phone down, hard. Seething. The figure behind him, wound in bed sheets, uncoiled into life nakedly. Yawning, stretching.

  “Did you have a nice night?”

  “Till now,” Marcus said, sitting on the corner of the bed, raiding his cigarette packet, tight-lipped.

  Natasha’s arms wrapped round his bare torso, running her fingers through the hairs on his chest. “Do you want me to relax you? I could run us a shower.”

  “No. Get your clothes on.” He stood up, plucked his underpants from the carpet, pulled them on, crossed the room, threw the wardrobe doors wide and grabbed a garish lilac shirt from a hanger. The phone rang again. “Don’t answer it.”

  “Geraldine Copper?”

  Denise looked up from her paperwork. A maelstrom had entered the office, or the Big Bad Wolf. Her chest tightened with fear—if it was fear. She wasn’t sure. “No,” she said, flustered, her cheeks warming. A sideways flicker of her eyes told him that the woman he wanted to see was on the other side of the glass panelled partition; through the door with George Runnymede’s name on it. “Sir, if you...”

  “Geraldine Cropper.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you ruining my film?”

  Geraldine turned from the filing cabinet. “I beg your pardon?”

  The man was tall, skinny, with that kind of animal, pop-star insouciance that young girls apparently found irresistible but Geraldine found vaguely repulsive. “I’m simply asking why you want to turn a good film into a bad one.”

  “That’s a matter of taste, surely?”

  “And what gives you the God-given right to be the custodian of taste? The fact that you have a desk and a...sheet of blotting paper, and a certificate on the wall?”

  “Mr Rand, I take it?”

  “Correct.” If there was an animality about him, it was only emphasised by the hippy-style Afghan waistcoat he wore, fleece on the inside and embroidered leather on the outside. How very Carnaby Street.

  “You seem angry.”

  “Oh, really? You see, I’ve just spent a year of my life creating a motion picture you would rather see buried under the M1.”

  “I don’t think those were my words at all.”

  “They might as well have been.”

  “And you think you have a special case for The Mortal Sins of Dracula to be treated differently from the dozens of films that pass through this office that are assessed objectively...”

  “Objectively?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well it’s not objective to me. I’m trying to say something. You might see that, if you cared to take your blinkers off for one second. Something about repression of the sexual instinct. Sigmund Freud said...”

  “I’m quite aware what Freud said, Mr Rand. Strange as it may seem.” Geraldine knew what he saw when he looked at her. Prim. Flat chested. Red hair in a bob. Not pretty by a long chalk. Probably never been touched under that old-fashioned dress of hers. Probably never had a hand down her knickers. Probably never been kissed. Not properly kissed, anyway.

  “...And about violence,” he said. “Real violence—not comic book stuff with Jeff Chandler and John Wayne.”

  She took refuge and sat, despot-like, behind Runnymede’s desk. “I see, well, if you have a message I suggest you set up a soap-box in Hyde Park. On the other hand, if you wish to work in the British film industry, sadly, the EBFC has to approve your work.”

  The man came close. Uncomfortably so. She thought she could feel the heat radiating from him, tangibly, as he spoke.

  “I don’t know you. I don’t know what goes on in your mind. Why should I have to obey your misguided opinions?”

  “Because it’s my job, Mr Rand.” She formed a roof with her fingers. “Because, whether you like it or not, I hold your tawdry little film’s fate in the palm of my hand. And if you weren’t so hot headed and arrogant, you’d accept that.”