“The disintoxication.”

I understood that I had been forced to “forgive” so that I could be moved on to this final humiliation; a metaphorical, if not a literal, flogging.

I had still not reached the bottom.

I was alone with the whirring projector and whatever lay beyond the curtains. The emblem faded and words appeared.

POLYMUS FILMSPRESENT

The screen went white for a moment. Then:

THE SHAMEFUL TRUTH

The black wheel. Then:

WITH

THE FABULOUS WHORE

IO

A blank.

WHO YOU WILL REMEMBER AS

ISIS

ASTARTE

KALI

A long blank.

AND AS THE CAPTIVATINGLILY MONTGOMERY

There was a brief shot of Lily kneeling behind a man. It had almost ended before I realized that the man was myself. Someone, Conchis, must have taken us with a telephoto lens, the day she recited “The frog he would a-wooing go"; she had even warned me he was using exactly such a camera.

AS THE UNFORGETTABLY DESIRABLE

JULIE HOLMES

Another brief shot: I was standing and kissing her in bright sunlight. The vegetable-garden terrace. She wore the white linen suit. It had been done on that last morning at Bourani, after the others had left.

AND AS THE LEARNED AND COURAGEOUS

VANESSA MAXWELL

This time it was a still. She was behind a desk, a laboratory desk covered with papers. A rack of test tubes. A microscope. Madame Curie.

AND NOW IN HER GREATEST ROLE AS

The wheel reappeared for a moment.

HERSELF!

Blank film.

Then a fade-in shot of Joe in his jackal mask running down the track towards the house at Bourani; a devil in sunlight; he ran right up into the camera lens, blacking it out.

CO-STARRING

THE MONSTER OF THE MISSISSIPPI

A blank.

JOE HARRISON

The wheel again.

AS HIMSELF

Then there were words in an over-ornamented frame:

——————-

Lady Jane, a depraved

young aristocrat, in her

hotel room

——————-

I was going to see a blue film.

It began: a lushly furnished, frill-laden bedroom in Edwardian style. Lily appeared in a peignoir, her hair down. The peignoir gaped absurdly over a black corset. She stopped by a chair to adjust a stocking, in a hackneyed leg-showing routine, though the close-up also allowed her to show the scarred wrist. She looked suddenly towards the door, and called something. A page entered with a letter on a tray. She took it and the page left. Shot of her opening the letter, sneering, and tossing it aside. The camera closed on the letter on the floor.

The quality of the film was bubbly and blistery, badly synchronized, like early silent film. Another ffickering framed title appeared.

———————————-

… now I know the abominable truth about

your perverted lusts, all is over between us.

I remain, but not for long, your disgusted

husband… LORD de VERE!”

———————————-

A new shot. Lily was lying on the bed, with the camera shooting down on her. The peignoir had gone. The corset, fishnet stockings. She had managed to give her heavily rouged and mascara’d face a suitably pouting and femme fatale look, but the visual effect was not far removed from the verbal: like so much pornography—in this case I supposed intentionally—it was dangerously near the ridiculous.

It was all to end in a joke; a joke in bad taste, but a joke.

———————————-

Panting with desire she waits for the arrival

of her coal-black partner in unspeakable sin.

———————————-

Back to the same shot. Suddenly she sat up with a leer on the French brothel brass bed. Someone else had come in.

——————

The entry of Black Bull,

a vaudeville singer

——————

A shot of the open door. It was Joe, dressed in absurdly tight trousers and a sort of loose-sleeved white blouse. More like a black bullfighter than a black bull. He closed the door; a smouldering look.

———————-

The only language they know

———————-

The film veered into nastiness. There was a shot of her running to meet him. He stepped forward and gripped her by the arms and then they were kissing wildly. He forced her back to the bed and they fell across it. Then she rolled on top of him, covering his face, his neck in kisses.

An echo of the hotel on Phraxos.

————————-

A buck nigger and a white woman

————————-

She was standing in the black underwear, against the wall, her arms out, another vicious echo of the night in the hotel. Of course the incidents of that night had been echoes of the already made film. Joe was kneeling in front of her, bare above the waist, feeling with open hands up over her corset to her breasts. She caught his head and pressed it against her.

—————————

For this she has sacrificed a loving

husband, lovely children, friends,

relations, religion, all.

—————————

Next there came a five-second fetishist interlude. He was lying on the floor. There was a close shot of a naked leg ending in a foot in a high-heeled black shoe resting on his stomach. He caressed it with his hands. I began to suspect. It could easily have been any white woman’s leg; and any black man’s stomach and hands.

———-

Passion rises

———-

A shot across the room of her pressing him back against the wall, kissing him. His hand slipped round her back and began to unhook the corset. A long bare back, a very short echo, bound in black arms. The camera closed, then tracked down clumsily. A black hand moved suggestively into shot. Joe was now apparently naked, though hidden by her white body. I could see his face, but the quality of the film was so bad that I could not be sure it was Joe. And her face was invisible throughout.

——-

Shameless

——-

I forced myself to be more suspicious than shocked. A series of very short shots. Bare white breasts, bare black thighs; two naked figures on the bed. But the camera was too far back to make identification possible. The woman’s blonde hair began to seem too blonde, too shiny: wiglike.

—————————

Decent people lead ordinary lives

while this bestial orgy takes place.

—————————

A street shot in a city I did not recognize, though it looked American. Crowded pavements, a rush hour. It was of better quality than the other sequences and had obviously been cut in from some other film; and it made the “blue” sequences seem even more antiquated and claustrophobic.