Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Try all three, old son, try all three. Stick with it. Be content. Don’t interrupt. I’ve eaten my toast. The meter’s getting into calculus. Nurse Luscious is getting into you and drinks will be served on the house and there’ll be time to hose down the porcelain before the feature. OK?

  OK, sir.

  Fawholt. I’m standing on the porch. I say to this guy – it is a guy, forty-nineish, beige-skinned, plump, little veins in the ear lobes, nicely controlled nose hairs, a tarmac executive hoping to go it on his own with a loan from his banker pal, hoping to get into managerial consultancy and earn five thou every time he farts – I say to this guy, hey, I’m a movie director. I mean to say, a film director. I’m making a film next door. I mean, in the next town. That is to say, the next village. So you’re the bastard that held me up, he says. Probably. It was probably us. I’m sorry. Film crews are very demanding people. I can hear my Enfield breaking through like the alien in Alien. I think: how did Andrei Tarkovsky avoid these people? Why does every beautiful house have one? Why can’t they be full of dust’s footfalls and phantoms and angels and sweet little mice and those echoes that come before the sound? Why the fuck do I have to endure these fuckers?

  Sir—

  Shuddup!

  The girls are saying—

  OK, OK, I’ll try to temper my language. I’ll try. I’ll try. Christ – sorry. Just don’t act the mufti and lay a fatwa on me, OK?

  A what, sir?

  Have you ever been abducted by aliens, M. A.?

  Yes, sir, as a matter of fact.

  No no, just a joke—

  Sir, it wasn’t a joke, I can tell you. They took–

  OK, OK.

  It happened, sir. They left a burn on the grass. They took off all of my clothes except my sneakers. There were lots of rubber knobs. Christ rescued me. He bungee-jumped me out. I was very, very lucky.

  Right. Marcus Aurelius etc Jr has hit me way out of play with a juicy B film for the real buff, the real smelly type of buff, the buff smelling of damp mops and engaged to his duffle coat, the one with 3-D contact lenses smirking at everyone through The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Brilliant tactic. Chromium bumpers on the spacecraft, Cary Grant haircuts, aliens with wireless antennae on their skull-caps and Cyrillic name-tabs on their bin-lid chests, the whole damn works. The girls are crowding round him. Nurse Luscious and Zelda and the desirable T-shirts. Commander Marcus Cody Jnr’s gesticulating and they’re nodding and rubbing their hands on his stomach. It’s what the aliens did, apparently. M. A. was abducted by aliens. R. T. was abducted by phantoms.

  Phantoms. They rose up and they said—

  What’s that? snaps the Tarmac executive.

  I was just reflecting, I reply, on the curious fact that we are what we believe. Don’t you agree?

  Are you one of these people they’ve let out into the community?

  Yes, actually. I’m on a year’s sabbatical.

  Ah, I see. Well, if you’ll just be running along now. My neighbour – our neighbour might need some work done on his hedge. Run along there and see, would you?

  I put my foot in the door like they do in the crime reality junk on TV, so it must be real. Youch.

  The Tarmac executive groans, because his wife is out and he’s alone and this is how people are murdered deep in the country. He wonders which photo they will use in the papers, he wonders if he’ll be important enough to be in colour, he wonders whether that depends on how grisly it is, he wonders whether the lousy tabloid print will catch the tan and he feels sick. He’s frightened. I’ve frightened someone. I’ve got their attention again. The girls in desirable T-shirts are leaving M. A. alone, they’re turning to look at me again, even Zelda with her hair grown back, even Nurse Luscious. They’re getting hooked by reality, by words like frightened, the frightened face of the Tarmac executive, the sweat on the faint white tidemark over his cheeks where his ski-goggles lay, the damp collar, the ruffled nose growth, the pudgy hand clasping the door, my I Am a Fugitive from a Chain-Saw Gang stare, my foot in the door, the ivy and the ash-can, the slightly-out-of-focus poetic symbol of the abandoned bicycle still upright with the help of some convolvulus, the capless bell, the delicate eggs in the nest in the carrier, a pigeon bursting out of the woods, a white horse pounding an endless beach –

  Shit, I’ve lost ’em again to It Came from Outer Space 2, they’re gawping, they’re all in their 3-D cardboard shades practically. What hope is there for art? What hope is there for poetry? Gee, the Tarmac executive is talking about the police. He’s standing there and shivering and talking about the police. Get off my property, he says. I reply, hey, this is not your property. We’ve exchanged! he cries, with a gleam of triumph between his youthful crowfeet. He’s a child, underneath. He had the biggest Meccano set in the avenue. He built the biggest Working Derrick and everyone knew it. I tell him this and how he never let anyone else work it. How the hell do you know? he stammers, terrified suddenly by something deeper than murder. I smile my Ingmar Bergman smile, a flicker of a suggestion on the breeze of a summery day of raspberries smile. It reassures him, because it’s wickedly meant. I know your sort, he says, I know your sort. We’re moving into a very special genre, gals. Leave M. A. alone. Zelda, stop humming. Nurse Luscious, you’re being beeped. We’re moving out of reality junk, we’re moving out of horror, we’re moving out of psychological thriller, we’re moving out of anything with noir on the end of it, or itis, or ist, we’re moving out of rock ’n roll because no Tarmac executive’s ever gonna do his Elvis turn in public, we’re moving out of light light and heavy heavy, we’re moving out of classic adaptation with English nobs on and out of urban grittiness with no English nobs on, and I could go on but I won’t because the Tarmac executive is really sweating. He wants to know what genre he’s about to inhabit. He wants to know, if it’s an action picture, where the helicopters are gonna land because he’s just laid some new turf and it’s delicate. This is his other side. He loves his lawn and delicate blue flowers. If he’s gonna be in an action movie he wants a slice of it without getting hurt. He wants compensation if I so much as lay a finger on his lawn or his house or his wife. He’s forgotten about himself. He’s too frightened to think about himself. He very much wishes it will be a frankly erotic movie with no discernible plot and lots of swinging basket chairs and then he remembers himself. He’s more and more convinced that this is the beginning of the movie and he’s the schmuck that says five lines and then gets brutally dumped and it’s not even the fulcrum, the crux, the McGuffin, the thrust – just a way of getting the audience hooked and he’s the dope at the end of the casting credits, the unnamed one, the Man At The Door, the guy no one even remembers because there were so many others hit and it was 135 minutes ago. Christ, he thinks, I should never have bought this bloody place. It was Suzie’s fault. Country living. Knock-down price ha-ha. Dry rot, I’ll bet. Please don’t kill me, he says, weakly. I smirk. I can offer you monthly at reduced rates, I mumble, not quite bold enough to go for it. He swallows and tries to look pompous. Look here, he begins –

  Sir?

  Do you mind?

  Not at all, sir. I was just wondering, I mean the girls are just wondering, when you’re gonna get to let us know.

  Let you know what, smidgeon?

  About the genre, sir. What real special genre this is. Because I’d got to the scene where the aliens are pulling back my foreskin and the girls are getting kind of impatient.

  This cinema is only big enough for one film, junior. It’s an art house. It’s not a multiplex crap house. Scat.

  Oh, sir.

  OK, OK. But I’m not letting you. Girls, spread out. I mean, find a seat. Leave him alone. Apart from anything else, it looks bad. Dated. Like a lousy forties musical. We’ll be arrested for vulgar behaviour in a public place. This is the century of women’s liberation, for God’s sake. Take off those desirable T-shirts. Thank you. Where was I?

  You’re about to murder this creep, sir.

  Thank you
, Hilda. Hilda! What the hell are you doing here?

  Taking off my T-shirt, grandad.

  No, no don’t. Not my daughter’s daughter. Oh, cripes. Put them back on, all of you. Hilda, honey-bun, you’re practically under-age. Scat.

  No way, grandad.

  There’s murders and tongues. There’s massacres and violations. There’s—

  You’ve said that before, grandad.

  That was pig chitterlings, buckets of them. You laughed. You laughed because your mother told you they were the small intestines of porkers.

  I laughed because the acting was real naff, grandad.

  OK, OK. But this is different. This makes Psycho look like a commercial for Badedas, The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre look like a DIY promo, your Jap cyber-snuff movie look like a Zen garden on long hold. I’m telling you, Hild, those guys in three-piece tweed and pipes and spectacles who flicker across our silver screens and grin and can’t talk because the coming of sound has not yet come – those cuddly little guys who laugh and stand like they’ve got something wrong with their underpants and move only in black and white under toff hats or with big ostrich-plumes on their helmets – don’t be fooled. Behind them lurks the nastiest movie you’ll ever not see. And it got worse.

  Sounds great, grandad.

  Maybe your mum’ll turn up. You can hold her hand. Give her a purpose in life.

  Tlic, tlic.

  OK. Nearly home. I say to the Tarmac executive, sorry, chum, I don’t need you. I’m on a recce. What I need is the house. Location shoot. My grandmother’s house. I need the rooms, the garden, the trees, the moon. The moon through the window. This is my grandmother’s house. Ah, there’s my wife, the Tarmac executive cries. He’s weeping with relief. The Range Rover growls over the weedy gravel. She alights and smiles. He pushes past me and takes her to one side, murmuring urgently. I’m trying to smile back, because she’s wildly attractive. She’s tall and fit and seasoned and scarfed. She’s fantastically English. Her smile is the sweetness of English apples, the wrinkled kind, the windfall beauties, the profound and the sublime and sometimes the tart. I miss her sort. They were never around when I was sniffing skirt. They’d bound over far-away hedges, just out of sight, sleek and trained and stupid. They’d cook apple charlotte and shoot. They’d screw dukedoms and—

  Sir?

  Oh, Chri – what?

  Your nails are dirty, sir.

  So they are, so they are, Squeaky Clean the Second.

  That’s possibly why you never made out with that kinda classy dame, sir.

  Marcus Aurelius etc Jr, you sound like James Cagney. Congratulations. I was indulging. You fucked up my punch-line. Listen: she comes up to me and I open my mouth and she opens hers and out comes this whine, this Toujours del Sol, Costa del Provence, spumante-air-freshener-mushroorning-over-the-toilet-seat’s-mohair-cardigan kind of whine and I think it’s the Range Rover. I think it’s the Range Rover’s security alarm. I say so. Well, it is. It’s both. The Range Rover is being dubbed over, into plain English. It’s saying: would you mind pissing off out of here, at once, this is our property, you are actually trespassing, Brian please fix that bloody thing. Brian is struggling with the Range Rover’s dashboard. I could slaughter his wife and burn down my grandmother’s house while he’s struggling. Instead I draw myself up to my chiropractor’s height and say: whose bicycle is that? The whine replies, it came with the property. It was thrown in. Do you want us to call the police? I stare at the bicycle, then at the house. No, I reply, I don’t think that’s necessary. I’m sure it wasn’t stolen. Brian, I shriek. They both look aghast. They both, for an instant, look like two little kids caught torturing a bird.

  That’s nice. You’re all so intent.

  I smile like I’ve just come outa the Staked Plains and seen a lot. This cat’s sniffing my trouser-leg. I ignore it. Yeah, we’re birds of passage all, I say – loud enough for Brian to pick it up. Birds of passage all. I hope the phantoms bother you. Goodbye, goodbye.

  I scrunch up the English lane doing a Godard with the trees, the leaves above my head, the leaves flashing the sun as I take these big strides. Hell, I feel good. I feel ready. Birds of passage all. The alarm’s shut off and it leaves my tinnitus in good shape as I reach the village, the coach pub, the very bright and blaring Half Moon with an inkie-dinkie snug on the dark side where I sup alone on undiluted ale and non-terrestrial chilli con carne and talk to the labrador over his snores. I know what I have to do. I know it. I stare at this big blow-up of an old wagon and the wheel starts going round and I have to shake my head. It’s a sign. I’ve loaded my spool. It’s all in there, in the Enfield Ritz or maybe (careful, little Ricky) the Biograph matinée of my skull. It’ll take nine years, ten, maybe twelve. I know it. It’ll ripen and sigh in the hogshead of my head, it’ll strengthen, it’ll grow rich and dark and old and ready. It’ll be ready. I’ll be ready. I never want to see the house again.

  Let’s splice.

  Let’s splice it open.

  Let’s splice it open and swallow.

  House lights – someone’s hit the fucking house lights.

  Thank you.

  PHANTOMS, PHANTOMS.

  Mist. More mist. Mist curling over a river, perhaps. Maybe a marsh. I don’t want to lay an image on you. You’ll have your own. But let’s have some studio fog, for the hell of it. I just want to git on thar. The millennium’s already five seconds in. Nothing achieved. The bells are still ringing and nothing achieved. We’ve got the biggest clean-up operation ever and we’re going into it pissed. I ask you.

  Fog. Swirling about. You’re moving into it, it’s parting, you know the kind of thing: grainy black and white, creepy billows, hair-tingling but you know it’s inside, it’s a studio thing, Ealing or Pinewood, the jets hissing as they pour out the fog. Let’s have it. Jesus, our budget’s limitless. (As my old producer Elijah Wannamakit used to shrug: did He claim expenses or did He not?)

  Fog parts, you’re going quite fast, it parts to itself, to more fog, my old dad’s proper kind of Shadwell greasy wharf mother-fucker Thames pea-souper lamps out consumptive bastard sort of fog, thick and yellow and a killer. We’re talking swirls and lumps and flops of fog, we’re talking fog that costs a fortune and gets Second Grip hacking, we’re talking about the fog of memory out of which anything can lumber, and it’s just about to, it’s swirling to trees, big trees, dark boles and branches. Trees in a line. The big flat heart-shaped leaves of lindens. Falling, falling yellow. Crushed little fruits underfoot. You know the trees, they’re all over London, dog shit piled under the uncropped suckers, never park your car under a lime, honeydew eating the metallic finish, hell to get off, but we’re not in London.

  A linden tree avenue. Or lime, if you prefer.

  Fog fades and swirls away. You’re in the avenue. Your feet munch the fruit and the leaves, the dead leaves of the linden trees every issue of the school magazine has a poem to. Christ, you’re in a bloody school. The school squats at one end and the laundry chimneys behind and the air is autumnal, fine, smoky with groundsmen, near the beginning of things. You’re not quite sure whether you’re coming or going, arriving or leaving. The linden trees rear up and shake the sun but the leaves, the big leaves, drop. You could run. You could run but there is an awful quiet and it is probably the quiet of lessons. If you ran you would shake the quiet and bring faces to the distant windows, hundreds of faces pressed against the distant windows, gargoyle faces all yelling behind the glass SCUG because that’s the way their mouths are moving. It’s that sort of school, mate. It’s that sort of date. It’s before the introduction of girls, business studies, the cosy corner of pottery classes. It’s way before the Sony in the study, it’s before electricity practically, it’s before your life. You scan about for a handle, for a main thrust, for a fulcrum, for a core, for a little red cross on a calendar or maybe a date reading backwards in front of your ankles. There ain’t none.

  But hey, the fog’s gone, or thinned into the light mist clinging abo
ut the lime trunks and thicker in the meadows where the poplars blow, thicker in the damp meadows where the grass looks churned by some rough game and there are horrible horse-flies. You get the feeling that the school likes its games rough. You get the feeling that you’re togged out for some rough game, because you’re cold and breathless and your breeches end where your shins begin. You must have been running. You’ve done something wrong and you’re on a run, you’re on a three-mile run, the sun’s still low and there’s a scent of sausages, sour tea, and early morning.

  With a terrible shock you know that you know the building.

  You know that you know its grand if a little crumbling front ranged by long windows some earl’d gaze through before the invention of the train, before the great days of the Empire, before the stove-pipe hat. You know that you know the grand if a little crumbling sweep of steps, the Corinthian columns supporting the porch, that big mouth with its big teeth waiting to gnaw you. And the fact that you know this, know it like it’s a feared hard-faced mother, know it like it’s occupied one of the small forts in your head – makes you smaller. You’re smaller than you should be. Your knees are a boy’s. You are a boy. You’re a boy at this school, for certain. The camera on its rails ready to track your hesitations down the linden tree avenue has gone. All the people with their walkie-talkies and clipboards have gone. The girl with the pony-tail you really fancy has gone, along with the leather jacket you were hoping to compliment her on. There is no director with his soft jokes and greying sideburns puffed at the ears. There is no other actor to jape with in the interminable delays. There were never any fog machines. There is only the light early clinging mist that you know won’t lift all day because the school’s damp, a damp pile in a damp low place, and it killed the earl’s heirs one by one and their funeral carriages haunt the avenue, the wail of their mother haunts the Upper Dorm, the sobs of the earl can be heard through the drainpipes on certain nights depending on the moon, though you don’t really believe that rot.