8

Maria surprises everyone, including herself, by demonstrating a talent for acting. The film is about a woman who's being chased by the mob and by the Vatican. She meets a man who wants to help her. He comes up with a plan to get the Vatican and the mob fighting each other. "They chase wild horses out in the wilderness," Harold says to Maria when he explains the plot on the first day of shooting. "They catch one or two horses and ride away. Let's say two. Or one. The two of them together on one horse, riding happily away into the night. Leaving behind the sound of submachine guns produced from the black cassocks of cardinals, with cigars in their mouths along with grins. Or is it red for cardinals? The mobsters are dressed in dark greys and blacks. Or black. There's only one black. There are lots of dark greys, as many as you can think of."

"Where do they go on the horse?"

"They find an old shack that's been abandoned, or so they think, and they stay there. But then the owner comes back and he's pointing a gun at them too. They barely bat an eye lid at that because he isn't as scary as a cardinal with a submachine gun. If you met him in a dark alley you'd say, 'What the hell are you doing in a dark alley? You should be out in the middle of nowhere, in a shack all by yourself, cut off from the outside world, and with good reason. Kids would stay away from you because of the smell alone. So what are you doing in a dark alley? Get out of here.' They like him when they get to know him and he agrees to help them. He rounds up all of his neighbours. There are hundreds of them -- a lot of them live underground. They form an army. They're big into homemade weapons. The men from the Vatican think it's the work of the devil."

Harold is loud. He shouts through a haze of cigar smoke. "When I was filming 'Land of the Dead Tycoons' I had to punch a man who was over seven-foot tall and he had eyes like pool balls. But if I don't punch him, I lose the respect of everyone. I can't look them in the eye if I don't punch him. I might as well go home if I can't show him who's boss. So I swung and because he's so tall I punched him in the balls, and I thought, 'Aw shit, I've punched him in the balls. Now I've lost everyone. Now I'll have to go home. And I'll have to get married again and start all over'. But he went down like a house of cards. That was his one weak spot. If I had caught him in the stomach I would have hurt my hand and he would have laughed. And then I would have lost everyone and I'd have had to go home and find another wife. But they applauded. I didn't have to say another word."

"That's amazing," Maria said. "So many men have told me about punching other men in the balls. It's becoming a habit."

She loves working on the film. She gets to shoot terrorists and rescue a dolphin from a burning building. When the film is released she's back in the world of parties and premieres, only this time she doesn't need to tag along with her sister to be part of the celebrity world. She's a member of the species that dominate this planet. She knows it's an empty world, but it's an aesthetically beautiful one, like Daniel's paintings.

A man goes to the cinema and watches her performance and there are tears in his eyes. He goes home and looks at the painting over the fireplace.

Maria is busy on a publicity tour. Darren is filming a video with thirty women in bikinis. Daniel and Kirsten go out on the town to get their minds off things. They meet up with some friends of his and they go to see a band called The Piggerels. They both stage-dive. She feels alive again, part of the real world and not the fake celebrity world. It's great to be able to listen to real music. Darren's music sounded real once. She was young then. She loved his music when she was seventeen. Seventeen-year-olds love it now.

The Piggerels have become her favourite band. It's music to jump up and down to. There's nothing fancy, like moving from side to side or spinning around. You don't need lessons. You don't need tuxedos and gowns and ball rooms. Jumping up and down with the idiots feels like a release, like she's been freed from the strait jacket of celebrity society, where even if you jump up and down in the privacy of your home you'll end up in the papers under the heading 'Darren's other half jumps up and down'. Daniel can put an arm around her and jump up and down too, freed from the strait jacket of not being able to put an arm around her.

Someone throws a bottle and it hits the lead singer on the head. He falls backwards. His leg twitches in time to the music. He manages to get to his feet for the start of the next song. He looks as if he doesn't know where he is, but he still remembers the lyrics, all three of them: 'I eat rats'.

The audience spill out on the street, and so does the contents of some audience members. One of Daniel's friends knows someone who's having a party and they go there. The music sounds as solid as the walls. It makes some people jump up and down. It makes others hit their heads off the walls. Others would hit their heads off the walls even if they didn't have a musical accompaniment. Some people are actually talking to each other through the solid concrete of the music, and some couples are lost in their own world, immersed in each other. Daniel's friend introduces them to people. They meet a woman who looks as if her mind is somewhere else. She talks and talks, letting words out into the wild to be killed instantaneously by the music. Kirsten's mind wanders. She wonders about this woman. Is her mind somewhere nice? Does it know where her body is? Does it know that her head has pink hair and that she could stab a cat with the metal in her nose?

Kirsten drinks too much. She knows she's drinking too much and she wants to drink too much. When she wakes up on the floor in the morning it feels as if her head has been pierced and there are cigarette butts in her hair, but she can smile and say, "I drank too much. I wanted to do that." There are cigarette butts in Daniel's trousers. He didn't want that. He doesn't want the pounding headache with music still reverberating around the cold concrete walls in his head, or the black eye or the smell on his clothes that borders on a stink, something he didn't create himself, and he'd prefer to have created it himself because at least he'd know where it came from, but it's all worthwhile when she smiles and thanks him for a fantastic night. That's what he wanted.

They leave, stepping on the stepping-stones of floorboards between the motionless limbs of sleeping or dead people. The woman with the pink hair is still talking, though she may be asleep, or dead.

They go out into the dawn. They don't know where they are, so they walk, and they keep walking until the streets start to look familiar.