Lost at sea

That night, his landlady phoned and said, “Ray, you didn’t do it! You were in France. Don’t you remember?”

At that, he says, the spell was broken. And then, a few days later, Ray was arrested on suspicion of murder.

On his first night in the cell, he says, they let him have a notebook, which he filled up right away with “different stories, memories, reminiscences,” covering the floor with piles of papers.

Although he’d told everyone he wouldn’t reveal the identity of his dead lover, “even under torture,” he gave them Tony’s name on day two, having been warned by his lawyer that if he didn’t, he could be placed on remand for two years. Even though the police quickly proved he’d been in France at the time of Tony’s death, they began investigating the possibility that he might be a serial smotherer of boyfriends. “They trawled through my love life, from Brighton to Plymouth to Blackpool to Bristol.” He pauses. “No wonder I wasted eighteen hundred hours of police time.”

Mid-afternoon, and Ray’s friend Keith offers us the use of his house so we can talk quietly, away from the noisy pub. Things are turning quite chaotic. The man who was eloquent and fu

“Have you read up about false memory syndrome?” I ask at one point.

“Go on. Go on. Go on,” Ray snaps. “What’s your degree in? Psychiatry? Are you a proper psychiatrist?”

And then, a few moments later, “Are you coming to me with clean hands, Jon? Have you ever been sued?”

I shake my head.

“You bloody white clean Daz clean brilliant white man,” Ray says. “I’m human. I’m a human being.” Then he gives me a look as if to say, “Are you human? Coming here asking me all these questions?”

I’m finding his position really a

“It was sixteen years ago,” he says. “You were where? Jewish Lads’ Brigade?”

“Yes, but if I’d killed someone in the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, I’d remember,” I say.

There’s a silence. “You do seem to have a self-destructive streak,” I say.

“Absolute bollocks!” Ray yells. “Absolute bollocks, that is. Do I fuck. You look at me with those London eyes. I know who you are. I know where you’re coming from.” And then, a few moments later, “You’re not a pretty man. You’re ugly.”

There’s a short silence. Everyone looks at one another, a bit stu

“Well, you certainly know how to ensure a good write-up,” I say.

“One day, you’ll have what I have,” Ray says.

“A criminal record?” pipes up his boyfriend, Mark, from across the room.

“Oh, fuck off,” Ray says to everyone.

Later, a friend of Ray’s—the photographer Mary Stamm-Clarke—tells me that the heavy drinking, the nastiness, is new. It’s all emerged since the conviction, she says. “It never crossed his mind that the mercy-killing story might backfire. I think he thought everyone would love him for it.” She says the stress has taken a terrible toll, even if he doesn’t know it. He looks very different from how he did six months ago: older, frailer.

As I wait for my taxi to arrive, I feel quite remorseful. Ray spent a lifetime beautifully documenting life’s ordinariness, but then a generation of documentary makers like me came along for whom ordinariness wasn’t enough. We wanted to document life’s extremes, and so his gentleness became passé and he unraveled into chaos. And now I’ve come along to document it.

“I’ve got to go and see the probation office on Monday,” Ray says as my taxi pulls up. “They’re going to ask me about my dependency on alcohol. Am I a fantasist? They’re going to ask me all these terrible . . .” He falls silent.

“Maybe you can see me as a dress rehearsal for that?” I say.

“I can do. Yeah,” says Ray.

And I realize that, beneath the hostility, the unpleasantness, what he really is is embarrassed.

I’m Loving Aliens Instead

On December 18, 2006, Robbie Williams played the last of fifty-nine stadium shows in a row, a

Today he unexpectedly calls me to ask if I want to go with him to the desert in Nevada to meet UFO abductees.

“I’ve been spending so much time at home on the Internet on sites like AboveTopSecret.com,” he says. “I want to do something. I want to go out there and meet these people. I want to be a part of this. I want to do something other than sit in my bed and watch the news. And it starts with the UFO conference.”

I log on to the conference website. It’s taking place at the quite down-at-heel-looking Aquarius Casino Resort. The conference slogan is “Educating the World One Person at a Time,” which makes it sound as if there won’t be many people attending. The speakers will include A

“I wonder if he’ll bring the implants along,” I say.

“So you can see with your own eyes whether they’re earthly or not?” Robbie asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“According to Jon,” Robbie says. “I don’t want to hear any debunking because I want to believe.”

I fly to Los Angeles. When Robbie comes to his door, I hardly recognize him. He’s put on a lot of weight and has grown a very bushy beard. I stare at it. “OK,” he says. “I’m piecing it together now. I’ve grown a beard and I’m going to Nevada to speak to people about UFOs. I think I should shave so I don’t look so mad.”

We go to his TV room. It’s bright outside but the curtains are closed. His girlfriend, the actor Ayda Field, is in there, watching a UFO DVD. We all watch it. This isn’t all he does nowadays—he has been writing songs and playing golf too—but the paranormal has become a very big part of his life since he disappeared from public view.

Robbie first contacted me in 2005. He telephoned me out of the blue from a hotel in Blackpool where he was filming the video for his song “Advertising Space.” He said he liked a book I had written and was thinking of spending a night in a haunted house.

“Do you know any?” he asked.

I spent a week sending e-mails: “Dear Lady      , I’ve read that, if the portrait in your drawing room is moved, a ghost is apparently disturbed and manifests itself. Recently I have been contacted by the pop star Robbie Williams who would like to spend a night in a haunted house and so I wonder whether he and I can pay a private visit.”

I expected not to hear back from anybody, but, in fact, once I invoked Robbie’s name, owners of country piles started flinging their ghosts at me as if they were their debutante daughters.

“One of the guest bedrooms is definitely haunted by a young woman called Abigail who was starved to death by a monk in 1732,” e-mailed one baroness. “Robbie is more than welcome to spend the night.”