by Adam Thorpe
Wasn’t I talking about my mother? Bear with me, guv. I’m still lagged. It’s not the right time. I’m wading against the clock. When I smile to myself I feel like I’m one of those old portraits the charm of which is in the craquelure. Ain’t that just a lovely lil’ ol’ English sentence, son? The grey is getting into me. Ma grits is gone cold. Texas is a faraway siren, a ten-gallon pick-up on the wide horizon, the credits about to roll, a disappearing dust cloud, the silhouette at the end of Unforgiven, Clint indistinguishable from a cactus, not wanting to move as the seats clack back all round and the lights drag you back to some lousy multiplex with a built-in depression system and the rumble of Rocky 5 coming up through your boots from Screen 58 and a November evening in Flatulence-upon-Effluent waiting to hug you. I’ve been there, I’ve even opened them. Helped open them in the kinds of places that hadn’t caught up with the fact that Richard Thornby is a no-no these days – and I’m talking about the seventies, for Christ’s sake. I’m one of the guests, the one without a title and a gold harness round his neck, the one who doesn’t look as if he’s been dry-cleaned in his suit because, hey, he’s the artiste, he’s allowed to wear casuals, he’s hip, he’s the one we expect to get legless on the Piat d’Or (thank you, Chairperson of the Council) and hog all the peanuts (thank you, Rapentheft Development Corp) but he doesn’t, he drinks orange juice and is on a salt-free diet and can’t give a hand carrying Lady Toper out because he’s just seen his chiropractor.
Yup, I’m back. I’m in orbit again, I’m circling, I’m bringing a groan to a thousand mouthpieces, a hi and a hey and a here, what’s up next week? Only this time you’re coming to me. I’m paying. I’m providing. I’m promising.
What am I promising?
Phantoms.
The film that never was and never shall be.
The ultimate masterwork.
Stills. A handful of stills.
Thirty-two.
Why the heck thirty-two, Dicky?
Duff-head. Illiterate sponge-brain. Does the name Glenn mean anything to you and not as in Glenn Close, for fuck’s sake?
You mean John Glenn, Dicky? The astronaut? The first guy to orbit –
Oh, you film people. Give me your head a minute. Is there intelligent life on it? Yeah, the lice. Now listen. Picture a big black grand on the TV. A Steinway so buffed it must be giving the studio lights a migraine. Picture a guy crouched at it, keeping osteopaths in a living, attempting to squeeze in between the keys. His fingers are moving. He’s singing but the sound is coming out of his fingers. The sound coming out of his fingers is doing something to you. It’s making love to you like an angel might make love to you if you were incorporeal. You are incorporeal. Even your breakfast isn’t repeating. This is because Glenn as in Gould is playing Johann as in Bach on Channel 98. You’ve hit it by accident, searching for a re-run without either Depardieu or Hopkins or Streep in it. This hasn’t got Depardieu or Hopkins or Streep in it. It’s terrible quality. It’s lit as for open-heart surgery and there’s bad lag on the hands and they’re not even moving that fast, they’re kind of floating. But it’s doing something to you. You decide to change your life. You decide to create something as delicate and beautiful and deep as Glenn Gould playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s 32 Variations. Then it’s the commercial break. Your breakfast starts repeating. You feel sick. The meaty chunks slide onto the plate. You’ve been dreaming. The mouths flap and smile and talk. The dogs gambol. Blip. The screen dies. Your life has changed. You don’t move. You don’t move for an hour.
Got me?
This is personal, by the way. It personally happened to me. In a motel outside Toronto. I was trying to see Zelda. She was cleaning out her mind of material things on some course that was certainly doing that to her wallet. It was mid-winter. I was holed up in a motel where the pipes were still organising themselves into a heating system and the motel manager was called Jeroboam. He bore absolutely no resemblance to Anthony Perkins, unlike in every other motel story you get to hear. He was a lapsed Mormon and drank a Bourbon & Coke an hour and told me not to leave my hairs in the shower or on the pillow or anywhere, because he’d had a lot of problems with hairs, especially the spirally kinda hair, sir. He’d enjoy being a motel manager were it not for the hairs, because you couldn’t find a cleaner these days who’d poke ’em out. He had to use a fork, he said. I hope you wash it after use, I said. He gave me my key which had a sort of rubber sex-aid dangling from it. I stayed three days because it was the motel nearest Zelda’s hideaway. When I eventually caught up with her building her personal image out of snow she was very surprised and I said if I’d known I’d have bought you a carrot for the nose and she glanced at my jeans and said, honey, I think you have. I pulled out my key. My talent falls within definite limits, I japed. She laughed and laughed without recognising it and we had a nice week together motoring about and eating and laughing. Then she left me for A. N. Other Jnr you’ll be hearing about soon, I’m trawling, stick with me, it gets very exciting. But I didn’t mind at that point. I’d caught this Glenn Gould thing on the second night in Jeroboam’s little kingdom and I was somewhere else. Hey, I was orbiting. I was not touching earth. My nose-hairs tinkled but I didn’t feel the cold. I had this Big Idea forming in my head. This Big Idea had to do with me making a comeback. My favourite film is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I even look a bit like Danny Kaye. Shucks.
Get the picture?
Come on, son, pack it in. Anyone’d think you were a bleedin’ Yank, talking like that.
I am, Poppa, I am. Except when I say field or round about especially as in the angels of the Lord shone round about them or start getting unemotional, thinking about you.
Cor. You used to talk posh, too.
I still do. In Houston everyone thinks I’m posh. I could talk like a dishwasher and they’d think I was posh. It’s because I don’t have a drawl so stretched you can pop out and make a nice cuppa while they’re getting through ‘well’. As in ‘Waaaaaaall, whad’ya know some, it’s Tricky Dicky’. Naff, eh? Tricky Dicky. I don’t even look like the bastard. It’s because that’s the only nickname they can think of, they’re so bloody thick. It’s affectionate, of course. Bear-hugs follow, usually. There’s lots of affection around, in Houston. Lots of big grizzly bear-hugs. I like it. Bear-hugs or a silent, mean look over a gun or OK maybe a plate of grits. I like going downtown thinking I’m either about to be bear-hugged or blasted. It gives one zip. Enfield could do with some footpads, I’m thinking, Pop. A few big pick-ups to hold the sawn-offs, a few stretched limos the length of our street, a few deadly youf gangs. Or has it arrived already? I hear Cricklewood has problems, from Geoff. It doesn’t have problems from Geoff, I don’t mean that. Oh, I got bad slick on ma tongue. I mean that it’s as safe as houses. They come in through the roof, according to Geoff. Without lifting a tile. They’re so skilled, the unskilled, they can remove your video in the middle of Suspicion without you noticing. Have style, will steal. End up in Enfield a long long way from the wharves, right, Pop?
Let’s not get onto that, not now.
My kitchen clock hath just spoke. I wound it up when I got in and it’s just shrilled at me, because I did something to the button when I was winding. The alarm button, I guess. Sorry – I suppose. I suppose. I suppose. I don’t want to be taken for a Yank by the Waterfront’s doorman. He’ll expect a tip. I’m skint. This clock, it cost me an arm and a leg duty-free. I’ve had it for five years and I’ve never worked out how to set the alarm. It’s all in sign language, it’s like the console of a jumbo at the back. Perhaps it was Mee. Perhaps Mee and Greg set it for something. Ten-fifteen. That figures. They’re late risers. I like its tick. It breaks the uncanny silence so it’s the first thing I do, wind up the kitchen clock. It’s got a tick so quiet it must be Japanese. Tlick, tlick, it whispers. I wonder what makes it tlick, sometimes. I think it’s admonishing me. Christ, I sound as though I’m writing a novel. Clocks are always admonishing people in novels. I’d like to write a novel. R
ichard looked up. The clock was admonishing him. He grimaced and set to again, flensing her with such delicacy that she didn’t notice her skin had been removed until she saw it on the back of the ottoman. Don’t put it there, she said, Ramona is coming to clean. She’ll only spill something on it. Richard smiled grimly. Ramona won’t be coming, not today. He wiped his flensing tool on the side of his Burton’s handkerchief, size L, and flinched. In his frenzied haste he had forgotten
Give up.
Here I am, in England.
England.
England my England.
Something in Old English finishing in wod.
A verray parfit gentil knight
Unsex me here, you murthering ministers
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single bloke with his arse on a fortune, must be in want of a wife. Something like that, guv.
Fog. Fog and more fog. Fog fog fog, fog in the guttering and in the funnels and up the costermonger’s nose. Fog everywhere. Fog. I could go on. I will. Fog…
Grey fog of a winter dawn. I had not thought death had undone so many. Too right.
Yeah, I could go on. I’ve read a few modern novels in my time, for the film rights. I just missed The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for starters. I don’t have the clout now, and didn’t then. Bloody producers. Illiterates. They dream in figures. Edicated, too, most of ’em. I mean, they’ve got an O level or two. Know what I mean?
Ponce. Spotted Dick. Fancy ideas, eh?
Oh yes, I went up, grammar school genius, cleverclogs of the Sixth, hoity-toity of Enfield, did English with Mr and Mrs Leavis, no less. Old English, Middle English, Golden English, Midden English, Old Heap of Junk English (speaking chronologically) – you name it, I’ve done the lot, mate. You should have heard my accent then. I mean, when you’ve got dons what make BBC Home Service announcers sound like my old man the dustman, you can’t do nuffink at all, can you? So I gave it a good thrashing, bashed all the muck out, and opened me gob at the fifth seminar. Silence. Mr and Mrs Leavis Enterprises looks askance. The mob hath spoke. The masses have given voice. Actually, they liked me. Frank and I got on. Q. D. was a bit tricky, but she made good buttered buns. I can’t deny it. I was a cocky sod. I got a third, just. I was far too busy to get anything else. I was the Jean Cocteau, fuck it, of Magdalene with an e. I got my Orphée to wade into the Cam where we had to fish him out because the stupid bastard couldn’t swim. Lost his bloody wings, too. Christ, it was hard work, starting out with that bunch of public school nitwits. Casts of thousands all looking suspiciously the same. They were the same. They were mostly Dickin Cartwright and Gerald Haller by-Baste and me.
Great days, great days.
Have a bit of my nice white wall to go fix another drink and watch a rocket. Get some popcorn. Be my guest.
YOU KNOW WHAT Kubrick used to do? He’d control his films to The End. I mean The Very End, The Popcorn-Down-The-Edge-Of-The-Bleedin’-Seat End. He’d get the family to check out the movie theatres (sorry, Mr Doorman – the cinematic establishments). He had family in every major capital. He’d get them to go along and check there wasn’t light bouncing off the walls or the seats weren’t too close or the screen was nice and smooth and didn’t have a bulge or a patch or a rip or so much as a fag scorch. Because when you’ve made Paths of Glory or 2001 (sic) you’re not going to have it fucked up by some lousy flea-pit of a nickelodeon charging a half-bottle of Laphroaig a throw, are you? For Kubrick it had to be OK Corral until the hordes descend blinking into the house lights of Earth and close their parched mouths and check for their wallets and their pardners. So you jes make darn sure that projector blonde ain’t a-dazzlin’ some and that the ol’ sound track ain’t out o’ sync with the lips a-flappin’ real big up there and lie back and don’t rustle your popcorn while the action’s rollin’. Or I is gonna get riled.
OK.
Hey, you see why I go down a bomb in Texas?
I said I’d write the trailer in England on the first – the last – OK OK, the last-but-one with the last for trimming up and stuff – day. Ah declare, ah declared, it’ll be the last act of the twentieth century and of the second millennium following a certain little scuffly spot of pother in Palestine. So be it. I’ve got to come into this new one on a high, shed skin left on the flanges of the security wall that’ll shield us from that bad past and let us roam forward with our backs covered. I said it would be mildly (nay, allusively) poetic, recalling my early scenarios, my early poetry, my early letters, my early unfinished novels, my early angry young plays I had to pay my students to perform because there was some essential nudity involved, my early just about everything before the vision flickered out and the spool spun round, empty, because some mad bastard had run off with the only darn print. I said all this on my Marilyn inflatable one morning, so excited that I’d gotten myself my own wave machine, so high that I could have taken the stopper out of her bum and still floated. Hey, the millennium’s just about tailed out. Everybody is miserable because the tenth instalment went real hairy in the fourteenth minute and wasn’t just unsuitable for kids and dogs – it should never have been screened at all! I mean, it was more than murders and tongues, Mum. It was massacres and violations. It was even worse than the ninth instalment. And the ones before that weren’t so great, either. We’d tried, we’d tried. Am I mad? Am I insane? Am I twelve screws loose thinking we might just be able to start all over at sixty? Hey, this is going to be one hell of a party. I’m high. I’m back on my inflatable getting avocado all over my chin it’s all so swell and I’m thinking big, I’m thinking Texan, I’m thinking we don’t have a problem, Houston – or if we do we’re gonna make it back. Lovell, Halse, and Swigert. Frontier spirit. The third millennium. I’d really like to make a movie but no rich bastard’s gonna stump up the spondulicks, guv, so over to you. Settle down. Enjoy the comfy seat with no gum on the base, the perfect air-conditioning, the hush-hush Bach over the system, the guy/gal sitting there in prime position, really nice and sensitive people all around discussing in low voices just about everything from Pete Abelard to Zoroaster, really great hand-tossed popcorn, lots of elbow room, a mathematically-calculated rake so even a middle-aged Mohican bang in front of you would be just fine, and no shiny walls. In fact, it’s Stanley himself sitting bang in front of you and he’s nodding happily. He likes it. It’s his perfect picture-house. Pity about the picture. Let’s roll. Duck if your head lights up.
Not quite. Hands off the halogens. You’re in the Enfield Ritz in 1951, I’m afraid. Sorry about that. It won’t take long. It’s a short. Saturday morning drizzle. You’re in the lobby, in actual fact. It’s your first time. You’re early. You’re the first mug there. You’re so early the ticket woman’s putting on her lipstick in the kiosk. You didn’t realise she ever wore lipstick. It’s crimson. You’d always thought it was her real mouth. She puts it on badly. She looks as if she’s just got back from a round of blood-sucking with Boris Karloff. She scowls at you. No one comes this early. Your sixpence is melting in your hand. It’s turned to goo. It wasn’t your sixpence. Your sixpence is in your secret pocket which is hell to get even your small fist into. The goo was a piece of chocolate your mother gave you at the last minute, as if you were off on an Antarctic expedition. The chocolate will reappear in the last frame, it will be your salvation, you won’t have to eat Bingo the husky who earlier on licked you awake out of a deadly nap. She’s rearranging the popcorn and the toffee bars and even the chocolate-boxes that are only for the very rich and so have dust all over them. The kiosk woman, not your mother. You wish your mother was the kiosk woman, then you wouldn’t have to pay and you could eat up all the chocolate-boxes and you could go to every showing except the late night ones where they peck, apparently, and don’t watch. The whole of the back row pecks. It’s part of the thing about a late-night showing. You can’t go in on your own. You have to have someone to peck. If there’s no room in the back row you can’t peck, you just have to hold hands. Some in the back row use their tongue
s. You can’t quite put a picture on this one, but as the kiosk lady rearranges her blouse you try to. Perhaps they show their tongues to each other and place expensive chocolates on them. You can’t think of anything else more pleasurable for the moment. It’s 1951, for God’s sake. You look at the stills. You have the stills for this week’s film and the stills for next week’s film. They’re outside and they’re inside. Inside they’re easier to see because outside the rain has spotted the glass and seems to have got inside because half of the stills are curled and one of them has dropped to the bottom where it just looks like any other snap. In here it’s like looking into an aquarium full of exotic fish. You don’t think that, of course. You’re not old enough to be that pretentious. There’s enough poetry in the stills for you to think of them as just that. You’re staring up at this week’s stills in little brass frames because next week’s stills are next week and next week is unimaginable while the Hoover purrs beyond the magic door and the kiosk lady is phoning someone and giggling. You’re happy she’s not scowling at you. You’re happy that she’s otherwise occupied because you have the feeling she might snap and toss you out into the street at any moment and the street is somewhere else, the street is not in here, the street is far far away and in some other universe you can vaguely remember because your duffle-coat is still smelling of it and its dampness. The stills. You gaze at them. The colour isn’t very good. They look as if they’ve been up a very long time. They look as if the sun has been on them too much, which is unlikely, because you haven’t seen the sun over Enfield for three weeks. But it doesn’t matter. This is the film you are about to see. You don’t know what the film’s about. You don’t care what the film’s about. You look at the photos and you think you’re going to like the film. You have a terror that this is all you’re going to see of the film because it’s floor-wax early and probably the cinema’s about to burn down and some nutter’s run off with the print. I threw my toilet roll away by the way so I’m gonna do a slow tilt on this long one starting high up because I don’t want to interrupt, it’s all one take, it’ll be fine so long as the print doesn’t smear. You don’t know the word print, of course. You know only screen, projector, film. That’s enough. And Action. You know Action. When you play at making films with the dog and your hand-cranked Oxo box you say Action. The dog takes no notice. The other kids on the street think this game is bloody boring. They prefer to kill each other because that’s what their fathers have been doing recently, according to their mothers and their grandmothers and the Prime Minister. You shout Action at Rufus and Rufus begs, which is something. Back to the stills. You’ve licked your hand clean of chocolate but your mouth is now soiled and you’ve forgotten your handkerchief like your mother said you would forget it if you didn’t put it in your pocket right now. Your tongue comes out and you wipe all around your mouth with your tongue which is probably what they do in the back row in late night shows so you make sure you’ve got your back turned on the kiosk lady who’s now rearranging her hair. You can’t actually see she’s rearranging her hair because your back is turned but take it from me that’s what she’s doing. I’m the guy waiting for his girlfriend at the door, looking in, cheek on the glass. I’m watching you gazing up at the stills. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about what happens either side of each still. You’re thinking whether that tall handsome bloke with the quiff has just raised his hand or is in the middle of lowering it. You’re thinking whether the blonde lady with the big bosoms lying on the sofa is asleep or whether she’s just been murdered. You don’t think she’s been murdered because the film is suitable for kids and your mother checked there wasn’t anything scary by phoning someone. Perhaps she phoned the kiosk lady. Perhaps the kiosk lady tricked her with a cruel crimson smile and the film will be full of murders and tongues doing things. You’re thinking about going home and just checking again with your mother. Then you’re thinking how it might be quite fun telling the other kids about the murders and tongues. There aren’t any tongues on the stills. You’re glad to see a dog in one. It’s a big, hairy sort of dog and there’s someone, a boy, good, kneeling by it and pointing. You wonder what’s going on. Your favourite still is of a man on a horse with big mountains behind him but it’s not like in the cowboy films. He doesn’t have a big hat. He has a sort of tartan thing with ear-flaps and a thick coat with, hey, toggles. There’s snow on the mountains. There are forests with snow on them. The horse is rearing up. It’s white. You wonder what happens just before and just after. You want to see more of the mountains. You think that when you get into the film you’ll see more of the mountains because the horse will move along and probably gallop. For some reason you can smell the mountains, you can smell the forests on them. They’re high and cold and full of snow but it’s not the slushy brown muck you get in Enfield. It’s white and cold and high and you can breathe it in and the horse is panting and you can practically sit on the horse and move along very fast but actually it’s me giving up on Barbara and opening the door and entering, panting the chill away, giving you a wink because you’ve turned round and I know just what you’re thinking, kid, I know just what you’re thinking.
