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of stout and extra-strength lager; young men with goatees and shaven heads bowed in front of their heaped plates of carbohydrate, shovelling in the pies and the burgers, the spare-ribs and the bangers, packing their pot-bellies and pot-faces. I can’t finish my Thai chicken.
    I have just pushed through to the bar to fetch another brimming glass of wine. I now realize with some alarm that these are in fact ‘large’ glasses of wine that I’ve been drinking, which is to say one glass contains two normal glasses of wine. No wonder I feel suddenly a little flushed and unsteady.
    How To Become A Successful Film Director
: page one, paragraph one, line one. Don’t fall in love with your leading lady.
    A table of four dapper Japanese businessmen have just asked me to take a photograph of them and I have complied. Little do they know who framed that snapshot. Is there something odd in this image? Perhaps I should use it for the last moments of
Blue on Blue
– just put the four Japanese businessmen in the scene in the caff, before the hero shoots himself – in the background, taking photographs – make no comment. Cool.
    Two foreign girls – nannies? tourists? – one German, one Belgian (?), talking in English beside me on the next table, unconcerned by my drinking and my proximity. I learn that one of them, the German, has finally established a good relationship with a man, which has now endured a full month. Her friend expresses genuine, unfeigned delight. (NB. The happiness of women when a girlfriend gets a man – not an emotion shared by the other half of the sexual divide.) These girls have both been eating green salads: one drinking water, one orange juice. This is lunch for them – astonishing – what would make them come to a heaving, honking, feeding-frenzy like this? These girls are the new internationalists, roving the world, speaking good but accented English to each other, a kind of flawless Euro-English: ‘I am very bad with separation,’ the German girl says as she stands up to leave. No true English speaker would express the idea in this way, but it is perfectly comprehensible.
    Leo Winteringham has passed on
Blue on Blue
.
    Is it fair to say that the only truths in the world you can really vouch for are those you yourself feel and can therefore verify? ‘I am happy’ is something only you can know to be the case, absolutely. All other interpretations of the world beyond yourself are therefore suspect – merely hunches and deductions. ‘Tanja Baiocchiis an unbearably, impossibly beautiful woman’, ‘
The Sleep Thief
is an exceptionally bad film’ – I’m rambling – the rich Australian wine kicking in, taking its heavy toll. How does that line of Tennyson go? Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath can you be too intelligent to live well Leo was my last hope and after many a summer dies the swan but I know nothing nothing not being sure about anything can be very stimulating creatively discuss what precisely do I know right now Tanja Baiocchi has returned to live with Pierre-Henri Duprez I am not happy I too am bad with separation the problem with me is that I never
[The notebook concludes here.]

A Haunting
Part I. Los Angeles
    ‘My name is Alexander Rief. My name is Alexander Rief. My name is Alexander Rief – and I think I may be going mad.’
    I was sitting in the first-class cabin of a jumbo jet, en route for Los Angeles, when I wrote these words in my notebook, thinking – as I recall – that the simple reiteration of my name would give me some kind of hold on my fast-disappearing sanity. I had been looking at my sketches for the Demarco project in Pacific Pallisades and, feeling relatively fine, I had eaten and had drunk no alcohol because of the mild headache from which I was suffering. The headache started about an hour out of London; nothing so unusual in that – except that I rarely suffer from headaches – but I remember this one because it seemed almost physically to