Still
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Mee’s coming, I know this. She wrote me. Hiya, Mee! My son might be out there with you, too. He’s not getting on with his mother, so it’s touch and go. (Hiya Greg, if you are.) Mee wants to come because she thinks I’m famous. She’s a sucker for fame. I’ve touched her knee. I was pissed, Greg! It was in Ashby-de-la-Zouche. Remember the Green Horn, Ashby-de-la-Zouche? August 1995? (Hey, is that 19 looking antique already? Does it wear a high collar, does it talk kinda funny?) We were jerking up to Edinburgh for some private view (the car was fine, it was the traffic) because my son’s an artist, in case any of you deadheads didn’t know. He lays carpets. No, he doesn’t even lay them. He gets the carpet layers to lay them while he lays Mi, probably. He’s into carpet squares, these days. This is a big development. It used to be nothing but fitted stuff with one end left unrolled. They’re called deep things like CARPET SQUARES #32 and sell for a THOUSAND BUCKS A YARD OR SOMETHING. I’m a Morris 1100 with Grandma in the back. Fuck the carpets. I put my hand on Mi’s knee in Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Greg. You were out at the toilet. Her knee was bony. There was a stretch of naked thigh above it, like a beach. My hand wanted to move up there. It wanted to leave the bony country and make out for the beach, maybe hit the frilly white surf. It did so. The going was easy, soft, warm. No thunder. Only a giggle. A Chinese-American-St Helena giggle, soft as breakers heard from a far hut.
Then you came back in, Greg. There were some interesting beer-mats. We did the quizzes on them and I said Miami Dolphins to every one and got a point. You said well done, Dad, and bought me a half. Hey, Gregory is a saint. He’s a nice bloke, guy, whatever. He’s a saintly fool who makes bucks. Somewhere between him and what he creates there is a gulf with a swing-bridge. He shouldn’t be creating what he creates. He deserves Mi, or Mee. He really does. But so do I. I’ve seldom met anyone I thought I deserved more. But the thing is, I think she feels sorry for me. She thinks I’m more famous than I really am (wow) but she still feels sorry for me. I don’t know why. It’s just a feeling I get. She borrows my flat now and again, when they’re down from Stoke-on-Trent (it’s hip, it’s hip, you’re out of sync), and she sits there in the empty kitchen and I think she thinks it’s sad. She thinks it’s sad to see my posters, my old movie posters, nicely framed and ranged on the kitchen walls. They’re terrible posters, most of them. The colours are going. All except the red. Not even Technicolor red. Oh no. Not the ripe incarnadine throb of Technicolor, to quote myself (A Student’s Introduction to Film Techniques, Nonumque Press, Houston. It bombed at $5. It bombed at $1, remaindered. I shipped some to Manila. It bombed. No student buys a book, period. Not by me, anyway).
Yup, cheap carmine red, on my posters. Which is just as well, because most of it is on the mouths of the posters. There’s a lot of mouth on my posters. I was always into mouths. They’re leaning up against the miniature dishwasher now because I needed the white walls for this. Otherwise I’d pan them to remind a lot of you of old times. Your hot cheeks would go with the mouths.
Sorry, I’ve interrupted. So she sips my chicory coffee and looks around and says, Greg, don’t you think it’s sad? And Greg pauses. If he was in one of my old films he’d say whassat or come again or sing a song for about ten minutes. But he doesn’t, because he’s not. And she doesn’t reply oh, it doesn’t matter, in close-up, blinking fretfully. Nope. He just pauses and then he nods. He nods and gives a little snorty sigh. Yeah, he says, softly. Yeah.
I was never that blisteringly realist. Till now.
Christ, I’m getting myself worked up. I can’t stand people feeling sorry for me. I want people to think I’m so great they hate me deep down under. I’ll bet everyone hated Andrei Tarkovsky deep down under. I’ll bet Alfred Hitchcock got right up their noses. Ford, too. Bresson and Godard and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Gods. All of them. They tower above me, gloating. No, not even gloating. Great men don’t gloat. They don’t need to. They don’t notice me. That’s it. They don’t even notice me. They think I’m Second Grip. They think I’m the jerk with the walkie-talkie who keeps the onlookers out of line and kicks them if they cough. They think I’m the one who oils the tracking rails and can’t get the coffee machine to work. They think I’m practical with limits. That’s it. Christ!
But what Mee doesn’t appreciate is that Gregory has crept up on me. He’s overtaken me. He has a quietly solid reputation. I’m not Dicky Thornby any more. I’m Gregory’s father. I’m Any Relation, question mark. A few fucking carpets and some crap about the I Ching (I’d forgotten the I Ching crap, it’s normally at one end of the room so you have to walk across the carpet, innit brilliant?) – this lousy scam has overtaken all my years of hard graft, all my aeons of blood and sweat and tears and, OK, semen. That’s why I deserve Mee. He can’t have the whole bleedin’ can, can he?
Sorry, Greg, if you’re out there. I’m emoting. Take no notice.
I’M GETTING MYSELF so worked up I’ve left a bit of white wall for you to kind of space out on or go get another drink. In that beat I’ve drunk some real coffee. I feel better. My apartment’s born again. The air is roasted, ground, and boiled. There are some fings in life better than Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, I can tell ya.
Also, I’ve been to the lavatory. I eked out the roll, I managed, I found some face fresheners in my back pocket, it was a new sensation, my butt never gets that kind of privilege normally. Hey, I feel nicely voided, I can begin to picture the curry I’ve been picturing for six months now, the airline food did something, I don’t know what, it always does. Perhaps it’s not the food. Perhaps there’s something about turbulence that stays. Like my English accent. Gregory’s posh pretending to be not. I’m not, pretending to be posh. By posh I don’t mean Harrods posh, I mean International Artiste posh. But Pop won’t let go. Enfield-coming-on-Cheshunt’s got its claws in. It’s got its claws in my nose. Just when it’s safe for my voice to go out the Thing From Enfield-Coming-On-Cheshunt pops out of my nose and screeches. No, it whines. It slobbers over my wotsits, my my my my diphthongs. It particularly tucks into the word ‘field’. If the aliens in Alien could speak, they’d speak Enfield-coming-on-Cheshunt. Eighteen years in the States, all in the state of Texas, and it’s still slobbering. But no one over there thinks it’s ugly, no one over there thinks it’s anything but quaint. Like Tomato’s four parnd fifty. Only the English barman knows. Jason knows I’m not a gentleman. He knows that, because I’m not a gentleman, he can say fuck off and pitch me out on the end of his tie-pin, the rotter. He knows this because he’s English, he’s from Wokingham of all bloody places. I revile him. I’m going to send him a postcard of the High Street of Wokingham with WANK OFF OVER THIS, YOU BASTARD, under highlighter on the back.
No, no, Dicky. About as subtle as a gas – hey, sorry, petrol pump (Derek on Honky Tonk). Let us think.
MUCH MISSED, FROM ALL AT THE EARLY LEARNING CENTRE.
Maahch better.
No. He won’t get it. You can’t have a chortle at someone’s expense unless they Geddit. He’ll show it to the customers and they’ll all shake their big, stubbly, Texan heads and say, sorry, Pat, me neither, as if they’re bit-parts in The Searchers, the stupid cunts. Nope. How’s about: Thank you for your enquiry. A post is currently available for a traffic bollard on the A327 turn-off.
Hey, hey, that’s good. I could filch some Berkshire County Council notepaper from somewhere. I could make this my first big proj for the new millennium.
OK, I had to look up the road. The A327. I’ve got a Great AZ Britain Road Atlas with an Index to over 30,000 places and it was in the right place. That’s because I hadn’t unpacked it yet. I keep it in my suitcase, and I haven’t unpacked my suitcase. It fits right at the bottom of my green Globetrotter that’s been a constant companion since, ah, 1963. (1963. Where’s my plume?) So after traffic bollard on the, I went over to my bedroom about ten paces across some coconut matting that’s hell on bare feet but aw shucks and through a door because right now I’m in the kitchen (have I said that?) and worked hard at this tricky-d
icky lock on the Globetrotter until as usual it ended up embedded in my nostril and had to rummage through two pairs of sneakers, ten underpants, five clumps of socks, my inhaler, the Norman Mailer whopper and a dirty magazine. The dirty magazine is called the Spectator. Yes, the same. I admit it. It’s my sort of magazine and its lousy politics keeps me on my toes. It reminds me of pigeon shit on the church porch of Bloody St Mary’s, England. It reminds me of the Golden Age of British Cinema just round the corner, if only the steeple-fund barometer would hit room temperature. Its very own Auberon Waugh once called me the faintest hope of British film ever to have flickered out. Yup – I’m that guy who had thirty years of the Listener bound in leather and they blew my cover, the old devils. Or was that in Private Eye? Same gang-bang. All ye who enter here, wear a tie and testicles and chortle in Latin, or else. I’ll send them a postcard, too. From a Reader in Houston. Hi. I think you’re all great. All my friends think you’re great. We’re coming over next week and we’ll be dropping by. We admire your deeply held convictions and want to meet up in person. Mothers of Serial Murderers Friendship & Support Club, Houston.
Kill the roars. That wasn’t very funny.
I’m even getting to look like him. My pop, I mean. My old dad. Grey hair out the ears, Goofy’s dewlaps, lousy double-act in They Came from Planet Age. He tells ’em backwards, now. Tomato-and-herring, if you’re partial, he says. That’s right, Dougie, says the nurse. She never stays long enough to get the opener. The Earl of Sandwich saved the King makes a great punchline, but she’s off hospital-cornering some other poor bastard with no teeth. Poor bastard? Sucks. She can hospital-corner me any time. I like to trampoline. She murmurs to me – well, he does talk but it’s all nonsense, I’m afraid. ’Twas always thus, I say, in my RSC croak. Prithee, unpin me. These nurses, they never geddit. They glance at their stop-watches instead. What a carry on. No need to hold their stop-watches up because they’re rested horizontally on their chests. It’s all rather confused, Mr Thornby. Nonsense, I say, you just have to put him on rewind. Then you’d get the joke.
Hey, I really do find nurses’ uniforms attractive. I really do. I want to die in hospital. I want to go out with them perched on my bed like starlings about three minutes after they’ve given me my daily all-over soap. I want to go out clutching one of them by the ass, and she not minding. Perhaps minding a little bit. A giggle. I hope you don’t mind my old geezer’s reverie. I couldn’t say this kind of thing where I worked. I had to hold myself on a very tight rein. I had to look at my male and female students equally or I’d get hauled up for one of the seven deadly sins, I forget which. It was tiring, I didn’t have a stopwatch, I got migraines. I want to go out clutching a nice little nurse’s starchy ass. Or arse, if it’s over here. They’re nicer over here, nurses are. They’re starchier. They’re young. They’ve got tiny teeth.
Hey, I’m getting myself really excited. I’m bursting through the mould on my chakras. The coffee’s coursing. I was talking about my father. Why am I always talking about my father? Why not my mother? It’s because he’s a malicious person. Even backwards, he’s malicious. You look younger every day, Cyril, he says, tucking into his Smarties. I’m not Cyril, I say, I’m your son, I’m Dick. Spotted! he cries, and rasps. The rasp is him chortling. The bed shakes and squeals. There’s a tip-tap over the lino. Everything all right, Mr Thornby? Nurse Luscious is bending so close over me I can tell the time to the millisecond. No, I say. He’s just dusted off my school nickname and I feel very upset. He’s still a right bastard. When’s your shift over? Let’s go out. Let’s go out and skiffle a bit and then nip back to my flat and discuss your favourite operations over a pillow or two with the lights out and that dicky street lamp giving a great strobe effect on your hip-bone.
Uh-huh.
Actually, I clear my throat and enquire if there’s a cup of tea available by any chance. In about an hour, she snaps. It’s always in about an hour, whatever, whenever. Not that I’ve visited more than about once a year. I can’t afford the Smarties. They’re a shocking price, don’t you know. And he never chokes on ’em. Never offers me one, neiver. His Norf Lunnun’s got thicker. I can’t pretend he’s Michael Caine any more, it’s kind of brewed over the years, it’s got this whine in worse than Steptoe Senior, it makes me jump up and look for the shelter practically. When he begins the ends of his jokes, I wince. When he ends the beginnings I sigh with relief because hey, you get about a minute’s break before the beginning of the next end. I try not to look at him. He’s unpleasant to look at. It’s not the forgotten-satsuma-found-behind-the-fridge face so much as the eyes in it. The eyes weep a kind of pus, a kind of snot-green pus no one does nuffink abaht. Son, he says, these eyes have seen so much in their time they’ve rotted, they’ve gangrened: LOOK! I wish he did say that. It’d make a great line. But he doesn’t. He whinges on instead about there being no white ones. All the colours of the rainbow, he says, that’s the trouble. Like he used to talk about the immigrants. Oh, I remember, I remember the Book According to Enoch glossed by Douglas Thornby. Suck ’em, I say, before he can start shouting. Suck ’em and then look, Dad. He scowls at me and rattles the packet. Or maybe it’s his cough. Cyril, he says, you’re a ponce. I’m fit as a fiddle! Fit as a fiddle!
Cyril, by the way, was his pal in Forsyte Avenue. Are you all sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin. So shuddup. Once upon a time there was Cyril. Cyril’s father was a baker, a rump-cut above the costermonger lot. Cyril died in the rubble of his shop, three o’clock a.m., baking wartime bread out of road-grit and boiled fag-ends. Direct hit with a V1. Um, I think my father’s shrieking off-set, excuse me a moment, something about a V2, sorry, I think it was a V2, that’s an important correction, we’ll trim this up later, meanwhile let’s have a slow pan of CYRIL HATH RISEN wot some berk with a great sense of humour scribbled on the brick wall opposite. You had to laugh, apparently, in those days. You had to laugh, or weep. Same difference. Cor. Poor old Cyril. Maybe I look like him. Hang on, I’m twice his bloody age. Work it out! I’m older than Sid James in Carry On Camping. Oh, crokey. (Would you believe it? That was a slip!) Hey ho the wind. I’ll be fancying Hattie Jacques, this rate.
Jokes flying like penguins, eh, son?
Thank God Cyril didn’t die in the first wave. I’d have been called after him, for certain. No person called Cyril Thornby could ever have made it as a really great movie director so IT WAS JUST AS WELL, HUH? Dick was bad enough. After – wait for it – Dick Whittington. Naff, eh? Then my progenitors rubbed wartime lard into my cheeks and stuffed me full of fake sausages to get me spots just right because they’d heard the bells of Ponders End and the bells of Ponders End had said I would be called Spotted Dick. And lo, I was. I had the worst fucking spots in Jubilee Road, not counting Stephen Arkwright, who’d walked into a blowlamp or something. Jubilation. The Thing from Jubilee Road, The Gong with the Luminous Zits, all that. Wandering the early fifties with his hand-cranked Oxo box, too busy tracking old ladies with hairnets yelling bugger off or zooming the wheezy old weirdo in gumboots waving his medal at the ducks or panning the grey early-morning light on trampled fish-guts in his grim social comment phase to be a great costermonger. The early fuck-all Fifties. Who remembers them? Who remembers him? Who but he has framed his mum’s ration cards and hung them in a Houston lavatory (his own)?
Me mum. I must talk on me mum, guv. The sun is now as risen as it’ll ever rise, the shops are open, I’ll nip out in a tick and smash-grab the fireworks and sundry other items that’ll get the party swinging groovily. I’m not organising it, I’ll have you know. I’ve paid good money to get it organised. Actually, it’s Hilda’s second cousin/my whatever who’s got a little catering business and I hope she’s got the date right because I couldn’t get hold of her from Houston. This is my opening line to her. Her name is (I’m checking up) Zoë Brand. How could I forget? My opening line is: Hi, Zoë, it’s Richard, Richard Thornby. Hallo. Great weather (first joke). It’s about my birthday party. I hope you’ve got
the date right, Zoë (second joke).
Zoë Brand, Miss Tiggywinkle Catering. Hey, that’s awful. Miss Tiggywinkle, I ask you. We got organised last year, over a Sarf Bank sandwich. I had to check up on her. I mean, she’s English, she might have been into Tanzanian goulashes or supp’n. I had a Brie & Cranberry Sauce Wholemeal and she had a Taramasalata & Prince Albert’s Green Chutney Brown and I said hey, I hope that’s just his chutney, Zoë. She didn’t click, she just flushed so I waved my sandwich around and said, so what’s your professional verdict? She said, extenuating circumstances, it’s an English sandwich. She smiled. I tried to smile back but the brie had kind of glued itself to the roof of my mouth, my tongue was planing it, I think I frightened her because she showed her profile against St Paul’s (it’s a montage shot, give me a break, London’s always got something in the way, for Pete’s sake) and then, over some fairly sinister strings, I realised I knew her from somewhere.
Maybe in a past life. Maybe Zelda is a red herring, Ricky.
I got excited for about as long as this pigeon took to haul the rest of my sandwich off the ground before I remembered she was related. Yeah yeah. Just my luck. I’d taken her in at all those family occasions through fans of twiglets and the chronic congenital deformities I have to be nice to because you NEVER KNOW, you never know what they’ve got stashed away and some are very old. Each time I’d thought it was a different person but she’d just grown. She was the only catering outfit not booked for my birthday. I don’t mean I’d booked them all, either. I mean that my sixtieth birthday is in competition. If I called it my sixtieth birthday and had a quiet do in here I’d get no one, probably, except my neighbour overhead with the cockroaches and, of course, Ossy. Huh, Ossy? No? Aw, shucks. I mean not even Mee’d make it. So I’ve had to relent. My birthday’s barely mentioned on the invitations –which, I’ll have you know in case you’ve forgotten, y’all, I sent out THREE YEARS ago. So did everyone else. Like panic buying in Russia. Cor blimey. Remember? One fucking paranoid with halitosis sent his invitations out three years ago and, waal, whad’ya know – every dinner table got to hear of it and panicked. I was in Houston. If I hadn’t read about it in the Guardian Weekly or someplace I’d have been sending my stack off about two years late. They’re coming through so fast it’s like flash cards, yelled the report. They’re smothering the doormat and they are (oof) flashy. Two types. Huge’n apocalyptic with bloody tasteless terrible jokes or small, gilded, classy. Take your pick. Mine were a third type, unique type. Hand-crafted, I’ll have yer know. I spent two weeks painting each one. OK, two weeks preparing myself and humming and then a couple of seconds for the artwork. Chinese ink onto silk paper. They were Zen. They were minimal. They were brill. Don’t say you haven’t bloody well framed them. Hey, I look at them now and I feel, well, bashful. But we’re talking aeons ago, the last millennium, we’re talking three years ago, when Zelda was still around. Zelda. I call’d my love false love; but what said he then? Look it up, dumbos.