Still

by Adam Thorpe

  What did you just say?

  Rot?

  Ha!

  You’re in.

  The bright red tongue behind the teeth blackens. Someone’s opened the main door, obviously. You’re way up one end of the linden trees and you’re looking all the way down and it’s so deep with perspective you want to tap the air just to check it out, just to check it’s not trumping your eye with paint or celluloid, a nifty exercise in depth of field across which the leaves float down. But the word rot rings through your head and you daren’t lift your fist because someone’s appeared, the throat’s coughed up someone who stands at the top of the sweep of steps and, anyway, the air is fine and cold and smoky with groundsmen. Shit, if you can see him he can see you, it’s a rule of optics, it’s the law according to everything. You slip to the side, behind a big bossed bole, and the fumes of wet leaves are already clinging to your shirt. The sweat chills on your shoulders and down your back. You think you might get a chill, the chill might occupy the small fort of your chest, might overrun your lungs and the whole of you might fall to the Gauls.

  The who?

  The Gauls. The barbarians. The heathen hordes. The white areas on the map that are full of blackness. The ghosts of dead boys. The ghost of the boy who fell. Who was made to. The ghost of the new boy who fell while the others stopped jeering and gazed. The sound of a sheet tearing. The scream of the new boy who plunged. Crikey – you know this place so well you know its phantoms, you know its white areas that are full of blackness, you know its names and the names of its enemies. The swollen bark of the linden tree your fingers are picking comes into focus. You like the name linden, there’s a boy called Linden, you like his nose and his mouth but his eyes are murky. You peep out from behind the trunk and it’s Streadnam.

  Christ. Streadnam. How did you know his name? How come your heart’s turned your tonsils into a punch-bag all of a sudden? Why do you fear him? Why do you hate him? Who the heck is he? What’s he got that ridiculously tall hat on for and why are his whiskers so enormous? Why, just below his lower lip, is their pepper-and-salt stained orange? How do you know his beard’s stained orange just below his lower lip without a pair of telescopic sights on your nose? How do you know so much when all you can see is a dark blob with something puffy and a flue on top in front of the door? For you know the foul redness of his nose and the orange stain on his whiskers as if they were monuments and they stand over you, these things, they stand over your small life as if they have and always will be here.

  Not bad, huh? You want out? You want to go out and watch the fireworks? There are still some crazies swimming in the river? There always are and there always will be. Some of them will drown. There’s bound to be a drowning tonight or this morning. In the Eros fountain, say, or the big brown superwide himself muscling along, clucking under the barges and the wharfs and the phantoms of the barges and the wharfs, clucking and clopping and rolling the corpses over until the early morning walker with his dog spots them and underacts beautifully because there’s no one watching him, just the dog wagging its bloody stupid tail. Hey ho.

  But listen – you can’t up and out of this one.

  If you so much as move Streadnam’ll spot you. He’ll give you a yell. You’ll have to walk the whole length of the lime tree avenue and it’s half a Roman mile. By the time you get to Streadnam your knees’ll be clutching each other. He’ll clip your ear ’ole. Your ears are cold. You don’t want them clipped. Even when they’re snug and warm it hurts to have them clipped. You have this idea that Streadnam might not realise how much it hurts because he chortles when he clips. You have a fear, generally, of getting hurt. Perhaps this is why you’re on a sweat. Scug. Scugs skip games. Or they don’t play up.

  Play up, or pay up?

  Play up.

  Perhaps both, in certain circumstances.

  Play up is not a misprision.

  I don’t think the blob has spotted you, you’re lucky. It pauses on the top of the steps and then it descends. It’s limping. It limps down and the flaps of its black coat are like a crow’s wings when a crow hops. Your heart’s now practising its upper-cuts and your tonsils are taking it in the way punch-bags do. Streadnam is bad. He locked a boy in a cellar. He locks boys in the cellar where the rats run. He forgets them. The masters forget them. No one remembers them till the end of term because their parents are far away and don’t expect letters. By then they’re bones stirred by a rat’s foot only.

  Wassat? Eh? Sounds familiar, does it, that last growl?

  Well done, Hilda. Exam text, huh? No? Ha, ’course not – it’s all Superman comics now, innit? Even better done, honey-bun. Even better done ’cos you were only an egg when me and Ken as in Russell were hustling The Wasteland proj down Sunset Boulevard OK up at Shepperton and everywhere else, same difference, same bloody no-no to the most exciting idea since The Ten Commandments remake. Imagine it. Gielgud narrating, Larry doing Tiresias if he didn’t mind the dug-girdle, Michael ‘Carbuncular’ Caine no marks for guessing opposite Maggie ‘Fiery Hair’ Smith in not even a camisole, My nerves are bad tonight, Alfie, cor, that’s a shame, Hattie Jacques as Interfering Old Bag in Pub wot likes hot gammon, Sid James as the Barman yelling last orders in slomo between a couple of glass-polishing gags, something for everyone, lots of montage and fade-outs and way-out angles, homages to everybody worth homaging, outside shoots at Margate and the Kew Gardens Palm House and just over the water there, the rest all studio, magic but no one believed, all they believed in was bedsit dance-routines and the bloody Beatles. They’d only do it with Julie Andrews and songs and without the wrinkled dugs but I said yes and Ken said no and they wouldn’t do it without Ken, they didn’t trust me, I said yeah yeah, I’ll give you a lot of Julie on the sled and great numbers like Marie, Marie and Hold On Tight but they lost their initial enthusiasm after about ten minutes in this great lung-cancer habitat, I didn’t even try Jack Warner with it. I’d have grabbed the money and run, by the way – fired Andrews, quit Austria, shot The Wasteland in secret over at Cromer probably like Kubrick shot 2001 in secret, we’d have had an immortal classic to chalk up on our National Achievements Board. Instead they gave you Camelot.

  But, hey, you’re brighter than your Dad, Hilda. You’re brighter than anyone here, I reckon, ’scuse my imbalance. But your great-great-great-uncle was brighter still. He was very bright. He was a beacon on a moor, a lighthouse, a lamp shining in the shepherd’s fist, a wise guy. Everyone said so. A brilliant brightness for the fresh century. Hey, you OK there, behind the linden tree? Hilda’s my granddaughter. Her great-great-great uncle is about to appear. Don’t fuck things up for her – or for him, come to that. Though things are pretty fucked up for him already. And they didn’t get better. They didn’t.

  OK.

  Streadnam’s surveying from the gravel drive. He doesn’t see you. He sees the avenue dwindling to the gates and maybe a flash of cream but he thinks it’s the sunlight, or a pigeon. He’s in need of a change of spectacles. His spectacles are furred with use, with dirt. When he wipes them on his sleeve they’re worse, because his sleeve is greased. But he’s settled into his dirt, his use, his grease, and doesn’t want out. To take him out would kill him unless it was done like the cleaning of a Goya. The mark of the dribbled cud on his beard deepens each year, but that is all that changes. Streadnam is Streadnam, and always will be. Your mother calls him frightful, but not to his face. Sometimes you have pictured your mother calling Streadnam frightful to his face, but the picture is about as lifelike as your own paintings of cats and dogs Nurse stuck up that time in your room.

  PAINTINGS.

  That word looms enormous at the back of your mind, it fills this day and is terrible.

  PAINTINGS!!!

  You press your chilled back against the linden tree and listen to the crows rising above Inkblot Copse.

  PAAAAAAAAAAAINTINGS, PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINT-INGS, and so on.

  There is something so terrible about this word you want to really bawl it out
and see what happens.

  Paintings.

  An even feebler echo returns. Basically you’re a craven scug. You didn’t dare to more than kind of yip it because Streadnam might hear above the cawing of the crows and give you a yell. As you wait for what happens something does, but you don’t connect it with your pathetic yip.

  The gates fill up with a shape and a noise.

  The noise is of a clopping and a whoa. The shape is of a horse and a carriage. It is black, all black, an ex-hearse they got on the cheap because it’s that kind of mean, peevish school. The out-of-date carriage is so polished you can see the gates and the trees and the dwindling of the trees to the school in the side of the carriage where the door’s shut. That also means you’re close, three trees away, and Jefferies’ll spot you. Jefferies. The name is something dark and rat-like. The coachman. Oh Christ, there aren’t any cars, this carriage thing isn’t to get the Japs enrolled, it’s functional, we’re that far back. Or are we? Jefferies drives motor cars fast when he gets the chance. Mr Boulter has a motor car. There are motor cars, but not that many. Your image of motor cars is obscured by dust, by white dust billowing behind and gleeful shouts and this faint feeling of fear and sickness. You’ve seen one in a ditch with its top ripped and its brass horn turned into a flugel. It probably had trouble changing gear when it was going up the hill, it didn’t have the sprag down to stop it running back down the hill, you’re surprisingly technical about an area you thought you were totally ignorant of apart from nine viewings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang until a few minutes ago – uphill and downhill are dangerous without functioning brakes and a sprag to dig into the grit, you know that, you also know that once you’re running backwards down the hill and you let down the sprag you’ll leapfrog over it and die. You know hills are tricky from your bicycle, too. You know that even from horses because a horse can refuse to brake. You feel the world tipping up into a hill and you close your eyes to stop yourself sliding and rolling down it. You dig your heels in. You open your eyes and there is Jefferies, standing by the gate, his nose touching the wrought iron of the great gate. Actually, gates. They have a bolt connecting them on a huge latch that sends a shudder through the spikes and the whorls and the plumes of the black iron. Jefferies is looking at you. He’s got his mouth open just enough to show off his teeth glint. You’re not quite sure why his teeth glint, but they always do, it’s connected with the way he rubs them against the ball of his thumb when he’s thinking, maybe. Right now his thumbs are on the iron and they’re in grey gloves and you know without seeing that the wrists of the gloves have tortoiseshell buttons that Jefferies likes to finger in turn as if they’re never quite done up.

  You may or may not know that I live next to a golf course out in Houston, Texas.

  Forget it. Because if I said it’s like you’re tied to this dented tree on the practice fairway on the day before the All Comers Championship it would only confuse you. It is, but it would only confuse you. Instead, I’ll say this: you’re in a pretty negative situation, kid.

  But you’re not thinking this. You’re thinking: this is black-rotten awful, I’ll say. This is very fairly hideous. This is a qualified quagmire and I’ve got the wind up. These words roll through your head like there’s someone who knows what they’re doing but a bit bored winding the roller. You’re surprised at these words. They fit inside you like polished pebbles fit into the pocket of your breeches, like marbles once fitted into your little felt belt-bag in those far-off hols with naughty old Uncle J-J. But they don’t get rid of Jefferies. Jefferies continues to show off his dental glint through the gate. But, hey, instead of trying to shrink into an ancient pruning scar on the linden something fairly weird happens: you stand erect and look away, over towards the bladderdash pitch and Fenny Bottom. You casually dismiss the fellow with a casually assumed air of indifference. This is amazing. This is not something you thought you had in you. Your heart’s going into the twenty-first round with your tonsils but your bones and tendons know better. Streadnam is a servant. Jefferies is a servant. Jefferies is a servile little rat, actually, a nasty little fellow who some prefects once chucked in the marsh because he crawled from its slime before history started and the smell of his breath proves it and he had to wade back in for his hat, snivelling. He can’t do anything to you. He is only the coachman. He can’t lay a finger on you, not one jot.

  Nevertheless your blood’s pummelling and you want to run.

  I’m tracking out, up the linden tree avenue. I’m leaving you there, OK? Don’t fuck things up by bolting. Stay put. Jefferies is ogling you through the gate, that’s all. I’m tracking up the linden tree avenue, towards Streadnam, and it’s pretty scary. It’s pretty scary approaching Streadnam with the lindens floating past each side and him just watching, staring out through me at Jefferies because I’m invisible. I am, you’re not. Bad luck. This is my privilege: the perk of Mr Important, the Number One, the guy in the canvas chair with the giant name-tag on the back and tea on tap and a girl to hold his megaphone. Tea? Whisky, in the old days. The grand old days. I had an antique bronze OK brass speaking-trumpet, in the old days. It shone. Seraphs would polish it. It flashed on set, under the lights. Great days, great days. When I think of them I get a tang on my lips, of Grant’s and Brasso. I’m gliding over the morning’s leaves, over the red grit of the avenue swept by groundsmen with long rakes each damp twilight. So many have fallen, since. Groundsmen, I mean. There’s a plaque of wood in the scullery. 1914–18, and names. Professionally done, raised by subscription, basically the prizefighter cook’s fairly large hat. Not now, of course, not now as I’m gliding towards Streadnam, leaving you in a fix by the fourteenth linden. None of that has happened yet. This is not yet then. This is Before.

  Are we that far back?

  Yup, we are.

  We’re following the ground, close. There are no tyre-tracks on the red grit of the avenue because visitors are rare but there could have been, there could have been. There are light combings of groundsmen and the deep thrustings of a carriage and not many heels. There are leaves and the linden trunks’ angled autumn shadows, in out, in out, in out, reminding y’all of that creepy ascent in The Spiral Staircase, naturally. Now there is gravel beginning, spilt out from the drive. Then there is gravel with the ruts of wheels but only gravel, only gravel passing under with the odd dead leaf. Andrei Tarkovsky would now be adding things, of course. An inch of water all over, dolls with missing eyes, a champagne cork, a revolver, a yellowing journal, you name it, passing slowly beneath us but very close. Thornby tells it as it is. Then suddenly we have boots, scuffed at the caps, prehistory’s Doc Martens ending at the knees. Stop. This is Streadnam. I look up and his nostrils are caves through the foliage. I climb into them and inhabit his head. It is not always a privilege, guv, being Number One.

  OK. I’m settled in. He has a really disgusting leather chair up here with bad warble-fly holes but it’s surprisingly comfortable. He sees you as a dab of sunlight, but he sees Jefferies, he sees the carriage. It is all spick, he thinks. All spick. His head is fumy with porter, because he drinks it and that’s what he is, the head one. He found this amusing, once. He nibbles the cud stain on his lower whiskers, as is his wont, baring his teeth like a rabbit as he chews and nibbles. His beard crackles through his head like the fire in his lodge he crouches to most of the day in his disgusting warble-fly homage, keeping one eye out for the truant, the scug, the unwanted bloody visitor rapping on his window. I’m very crammed in up here by curses – big old trunks and valises and strapped-down crates of curses, ten-ton curses he drops now and again, as he drops now and again the little bastards’ luggage, just in case they’ve forgot him. Tuppenny-ha’penny little bastards. Jefferies is waving, the rat-cunt’s waving, like it’s a fucking fair. It’s not. It’s a fucking funeral. It’s somebody’s fucking funeral. Not mine, not his, but one of the tuppenny-ha’penny bastards with golden hair.

  Streadnam is talking about my great-uncle. I’d like to hit him, I’d li
ke to clip his lug-’ole from the inside because the inside of one’s lug-’ole equals the nipple in pain count. But I’m not there to hit him. You are. You could hit him. You can hurt and you can suffer in your boy’s body. From Streadnam’s blur you’re getting to be a suspiciously bright dab of sunlight, actually – I think it’s your elbow or your shoulder, I’m glad his head doesn’t have a built-in visual information enhancer to make up for his glasses. But keep in. I don’t want Streadnam to see you. I don’t want you to hit him, were that in any crazy way possible. That would really foul things up, OK?

  How are the fireworks? Hey, how about a little toast, a toast to the not-yet-slaughtered groundsmen with their rakes and struggling bonfires? Huh?

  Thank you. Keep the Brut flowing and the buck’s fizz out of it. Pass those fabulous canapés around. Be comfortable. Remember one thing, though, and murmur this to the guys ’n dolls out on the balcony or in the lavatory or the cunts among you talking loudly in the corners: I’m going to chuck this print in the river, after. Hey, seriously. There won’t be a second screening. That’s life. It’s up to you to remember.

  Don’t believe me, huh? We’ll see.

  Right.

  Streadnam.

  He died in 1923. Fact. Another decade to breathe and torment and swill and curse by. He retired in 1920 against his will then skulked about the porter’s lodge, a cud-dribbling white-bearded dinosaur getting under the heels of Travis, the new sleek kind of mammalian one with what turned out to be Hitler’s forelock and nose-bush. Right. I’ve told you the date, you behind the linden. On the ball, mate? 1913. No-man’s-land year, the year Before, the year no one talks about, the non-entity, the non-year, unlucky for some, but for most, in recollection, blahdy wonderful, son. The year my old dad was born so actually he couldn’t have remembered it, he wasn’t that precocious. Blahdy wonderful. Under a barrer or something, covered in fish guts and apple pulp on the Radcliff Highway with blinkered nags snorting past and right past this ’ere bleedin’ wharehouse you’ve parked your butts in for the night. Amazing, innit?