Still

by Adam Thorpe

  There’s something else about those eyes that’s different – and none of you noticed, huh?

  They’re different from each other, even in silver-tinted monochrome. The guy has eyes of different shades, of a different hue. I’ve done my research. His nephew gave it to me down the Transatlantic Cable or however it works now. His nephew is ancient, he has throat cancer, he was kinda hoarse and the computer had problems unscribbling his digitals or something. But I got the gist. Right eye blue, left eye green. Between Mr Philips and us there’s someone signalling he’s really interested in this fact about the eyes. It’s Dr Mengele. He’s got a scalpel and a little knife. I tell him Mr Philips is not a gypsy and he’s only half-Jewish. That’s sufficient, says Dr Mengele. In the interests of medical science. How do I explain this guy to Mr Philips? How do I explain anything to Mr Philips? No wonder our eyes have changed. Kinda shrivelled up and dusty. They’ve looked at Dr Mengele. And they’ve turned away. I’ve thought about this. I think about this a great deal, out in Houston, hearing the cries of despair on the fairway, hearing the whine of the trolleys, hearing the cheers. I think mainly about the Romany girl, the Romany girl with eyes of a different hue in Birkenau. There should be a ballad about her. Eyes of grey and blue, like a sun bar crossing the sea and so forth, Arlo Guthrie or someone. But there isn’t a ballad about her. The door slid shut. It slid shut on her and they held her down and Dr Mengele padded up to the Romany girl with eyes of a different hue in Birkenau. That’s our century, for Christ’s sake. It’s not prehistory, it’s not the time of the dinosaurs or the Crusades or the invention of the steam-press. I was alive, I was up and walking, I was arsing about with my mother’s pinny as Dr Mengele padded up to her. The Romany girl, I mean. Whoever she was.

  Hey, wake up. How do I talk to Mr Philips, Samaritan Man, about kindness and civility and oyster-coloured light after storms with that guy stood between us, waving his little cut-throat?

  How do we talk to anyone after that?

  Really, I’m serious.

  You know what happened to Mr Philips? He was spinally damaged by bloody Streadnam and whirled away by that creep Jefferies. His green and blue eyes looked out on Passchendaele. And I’m worrying about talking to him? Yes. I’m worrying about talking to him as he used to be, before his eyes changed. Because looking at him, in his photos, afterwards, when he came back, you could see they were really changed. He lived until 1955. He knew it all. The guy with the scalpel, the lot. I’m not interested in Acting-Major Philips with the glass eye. (The green one, if you want to know. He lost the green one. OK, so they were really really changed, but give me a poetic break.) I’m interested in the guy in the wing collar, in the fossil who ain’t, in the one talking through all the scratches and dust and jerking about. Because he’s the guy who held my great-uncle’s arm and helped him down the steps and spat in Holloway-Purse’s eye, an eye worth spitting into, metaphorically speaking.

  Yeah, yeah, the glass eye was blue. He wasn’t fussy. Maybe he thought it was an improvement. Why d’you have to be so blahdy lichrel, guv?

  Look: Mr Philips and my great-uncle William are two black dabs on the grey steps, descending. The dab at the top is Streadnam. The swirl of purple and orange is Boulter. The black smudge to the left is beaks, three rows of them. I’ve got fog on my lens, or maybe it’s Jefferies’ thumbprint. Jefferies’d be that sort, the sort you see in war zones advancing on the picture, waving his thumbs, blocking it out. Remember Europe in, say, ’92? That little shemozzle in Bosnia-Hurtstocoughinher? No? Well, take it from me, there were lotsa Jefferies in Bosnia-Hurtstocoughinher, pissed on grandma’s plum brandy. If Jefferies could see me now, he’d thumb my eye and bottle it.

  Hey, it’s the smoke from his fag, drifting across the gates, blown from the side of his mouth.

  That’s disrespect.

  Y’know, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the fucking disrespect. If there’s one thing worse than kicking an old lady you’ve just shot dead, it’s kicking an old lady you’ve just shot dead with a fag hanging aht the side of y’mahf. We’ve all seen it, in those glossy albums of twentieth-century delights. You know what I mean. The barbarians are coming to town with Marlboros hanging aht the side of veir mahves. And some of them talk public-school posh, don’t get me wrong, don’t get me hung up, Greg. Marlboro, Marlborough, Judge Goddard went to Marlborough. Forgotten goodly Goddard, Greg? The year you were yanked out of Deirdre’s nether regions by that pissed midwife because you couldn’t wait, 1962, your old dad outside the Old Bailey, yelling Fudge Goddard’s a public school sadist, ’cos he’d just condemned poor simple muddled David Bentley (Give it to him, Chris) to the twist. Don’t think I didn’t do my bit. Don’t think Mr Holloway-Purse (Eton, Life Guards) died out on the Hun wire or under Cunty Lives in the Carlton. Oh no. Give me a break, son.

  And he calls me a pig!

  Yarroo!

  Jefferies is stamping out his fag in the chalk dust of the road. He’s got gloves on, if Sylvia wasn’t on continuity it might have been a thumbprint, well done Sylvia. Tarmacadam’ll be laid up here in ’62, coincidentally. Tyres’ll thrum smoothly round their oiled hubs, Jags and Jensens thrumming smoothly through the open gates, barely feeling the bump as the tarmacadam gives out to the same old reddish grit of the school drive. Not avenue, chum – drive. What we’re seeing here, this Edwardian perspective under the lindens, the two figures dabbed in front of Boulter, some intercourse we’re missing out on – well, it’ll all be gone by then, rubbed out, lindens succumbing to honeydew or something, felled in a week, Still Four, look, the woodsmen standing on the fallen trunks, 1953, year of splendours, the New Elizabethan Age, the fly of the avenue zipped open, the light flooding in on the woodsmen’s caps, the thresh of leaves, the thud of boles, the howl and whine of progress. How splendid now the broad expanse of pasture, the house seemingly smaller in its tundra of tussocks and cows, the approach airy and petrifying, clean and new, unshadowed by sticky secretions, hints and whispers, or the cell bars of shadow and light climbing up the filmed windscreen!

  I’m lifting, I’m virtually realising, I’m malquoting again from one of Henry Peterson’s, the most famous poet ever to have never left Randle. It’s called The Lindens. It’s in his Five Borrowings from the Chinese (Amoeba Press, 1967). He was into Mao. He was a duffled duffer, a boorish bore. He once lent me a fiver. He nearly drowned in the Yangtze River, if you remember. One of the lesser losses of the Cultural Revolution, almost. He hated the lindens. He was doing a kind of lob return to Binsey Poplars. He reckoned the limes’d eaten into his soul. Their sticky secretions had burned his finish. I couldn’t have cared one way or t’other, in those days, because Randle meant nothing to me, I was forging a future in film, I was up to my ankles in celluloid, I was burning up the Marylebone road in my Bond Equipe GT 4S Saloon and my great-uncle was a mere rumour on the sidewalk, a murmur from my mother, something about never putting his name up in the Memorial Hall, she would write to them about it, she did, she got a brush-off with a posh header on the Basildon, an embossed RC on the envelope, which I thought was the other Church, I thought she’d broken her covenant or whatever, when really she’d broken the seal on her past and let me have it. I waited. Now the trumpets soundeth and the horse doth pound up the eternal beach.

  Oh yeth.

  Jefferies is thinking, in his dapper little way, how he could scupper the lot with his Martini Henry, one by one, in the back, grinding his fag into the chalk with his coachman’s heel. His claw comes up and scratches at his forehead just beneath the brim of his topper. He has hair on his cheeks, curved towards his big nose. The two horses chomp at the tussocks on the greensward. He leers at Mr Carlins. Mr Carlins is the man who will open the gate. Mr Carlins, thinks Jefferies, is a tuppenny prick who should’ve been a vicar. Mr Carlin’s spectacles flash the sun as he turns his head towards the school coachman, whom he is rather afraid of. Jefferies gives a nasty little nod, which sets Mr Carlin’s mouth twitching towards a smile without q
uite getting there. Mr Carlin is a pale man, he’s anxious, he’ll end up in a flooded culvert near Boisleux-au-Mont on the Vimy Ridge with the rats all over him turning to ivory under the flares while Jefferies wangles himself some poncy little job as a driver so far behind the lines the booms are like tummy-rumbles.

  But Mr Carlin doesn’t like his position at the end of it all. The boys bob in and out as they peer, golly, it’s rather like the keys of a pianola, thumping a mad hatter’s tune either side of the avenue, automatically, a thing he’s never liked. He blushes because Jefferies is saying whoa hoot y’fucker to one of the horses – oh, he hopes it’s to one of the horses! Mr Carlin’s job is to lift the latch on the gate and push it open and hold it thus as the boy comes through. It’s straightforward, it’s not complicated, but goodness me he’s nervous about it. Mr Carlin has been at Randle one whole year but he still feels squeaky new. He doesn’t fit the boot, quite. He’s in love with Hibble but that’s about it. Everything else he doesn’t love, doesn’t love at all. He’s a man who feels pain with the merest gust of a north-easter on his cheeks, with the merest scrape of his knee on the edge of his high desk, and yet it is demanded of him that he must thrash and rap and cuff and pinch. Which he doesn’t do a great deal, but when he does he puts a lot into it because he must not fail, and he generally wricks his wrist. When the shrapnel finally gets him he’ll enter into a night of dreams, dreams and discomfort, his spectacles flashing the flares and the shell-bursts, his right hand bobbing in the fouled water on its thread of flesh and so on and so forth – a night through which the wide lipsticked lips of each remarkable laceration will be striving to say how perfectly penitent they are, when he’d rather they wouldn’t. This Mr Carlin knows nothing about, waiting under the last linden. He can’t even begin to imagine a shell bursting – or a shell not bursting, for that matter. Why the hell should he? He’s never even considered it. A shell is something you put your ear up to, trumpet the death of Pan on, try not to walk over at the beach when you’re bare of foot and hitching up your cream flannels, goodness gracious. The loudest sound he’s ever heard is a station-master’s whistle once, right in his ear. I say, my man, do you mind? His life is leaning on the little foot-bridge and watching the boys float under, past him, on to their wide and noisy oceans of life. He likes it on the little foot-bridge. He’ll get down once a year to go to Greece and Italy, pining for Hibble, having his hole filled now and again by Billy Budds and smelling fish on his fingers for days afterwards, padding back to his post on the foot-bridge until the quiet white-haired furling of his personal flag in a small cottage near Oxford, near the music and the young, punting fellows among the reeds and the nut-brown little Alices trailing their pale hands. But some fucking Serb had to blow the Archduke’s brains out, and Mr Carlin got eaten by rats at twenty-five. I like this guy Carlin. Let’s not beat about the bush. His depths are hidden. He said something kind to my great-uncle and fucked up the exit by getting the latch stuck, which is just great, it’s just blahdy great, mate. Hey, we need these guys, these guys on the foot-bridge, chucking us crusts of Ovid, Petrarch, Theocritus – or whatever they throw down now, whatever wholemeal crumbs of something literate. There aren’t many of them left. There aren’t many foot-bridges. We’re all in the swirl, baby, gasping for air.

  Did I say ‘blow his brains out’? Waal, I’ve always seen it like Kennedy in ma home state, that stupid student jerk the Lee Harvey Oswald of Sarajevo, blowing the Archduke’s fancy brains out, getting the plumes on the cocked hat nice and sticky for the museum case, the Archduke nuzzling what remains into the Archduchess’s taffeta blouse, raising a last hand up and blowing his whistle, blowing his last whistle for the crowds crouched in the trenches, waiting to pour over and get blown away with the rest, the rest of the century a tattered sleeve on a stump, the bloody consequence, the flag of conflagration, a sticky plume. Thank you, thank you.

  Wipe that lady’s speech of appreciation. He’s coming up.

  The two dabs in front of Boulter have separated. One’s coming up. He’s the small one. He’s my great-uncle. He has half a Roman mile to walk. He’s the guy at the end of Stanley’s Paths of Glory, one of those three ordinary trench characters about to be shot for nothing. No, he isn’t. He’s my great-uncle. He’s real. He’s no one else. Forget the allusions. Forget the name-pellets. He’s a dab and Jefferies isn’t smoking any more. My lens is fogged. I’m choked. I can’t stand it. Mr Carlin’s lips are looking penitent. The boys are turned away, I can’t see them – yes, one turns to see what his chum thinks of it, turns so I can see his face, and Christ I wipe my eyes and I see him grinning from ear to ear, my heart jumps, I think I could hate this kid for ever and ever, there’s a squeak, Jefferies the fucker is mounting his fucking break, high up, taking the reins in his claw, looking poncy, like a fucking undertaker, like the Death in a top hat, Coachman Death, while the horses chomp and the carriage rocks and squeaks and I want to scream out, I want to open the fucking gates and run down the avenue raising the dust at my heels screaming this is what went wrong you stupid bastards or something like that and taking my great-uncle in my arms and hugging him tight and daring them, daring them to come get us.

  Then walking with him slowly, held in my arms, up the linden tree avenue, in the great and awful hush, walking slowly and steadily past the faces, past Mr Carlin’s amazed lips and through the gates, past Coachman Death who en’t doin’ nothin’ about it, mate, past all hatreds and all wrongs, past all peevishness and all cowardliness, past all absence of love and life out onto the high chalk road where the sun thrills through the elms and the wind is good and we can both walk slowly and steadily towards reparation, forgiveness, humility, an uneventful year and then another, and another, and another.

  But I wasn’t there.

  And I probably wouldn’t have done.

  I mean, I can hear you chuckling and snorting, you bastard bums. Dick ‘Clint’ Thornby, taking ’em on single-handed, shooting from the hip, ridin’ outa town over the tumbleweeds into the credits, what crap. Huh? Is that what you’re saying?

  Friends, I wave my hands apologetically. I know myself. I would, sure – I’d have just bloody stood there, son. That’s why I’m fogging up the lens. OK, OK. Dickhead Thornby confesses. I’d have been like you, you in the wrong togs, you Chum of Trevels. Flushed and shivering. Grinning back when grinned at. Saving yourself a spot of bother in the dorm. Looking to your back.

  Heh?

  He’s coming down.

  He’s past the second linden.

  He’s past his brother.

  Change reels, for Christ’s sake.

  I FORGOT. I forgot something vital. There’s so much, I keep forgetting things. And this is really important. This reel is starting with an apology.

  I apologise. But I’m not stupid.

  I mean, you know how many years I’m working on this baby? Hoi? Yer fink I’m stupid or somefink? Yer fink I’d forget de cello case wiv de money in it?

  I did forget. I got carried away and my great-uncle got past the second linden’n his brother with the eyes screwed shut before I could stop him. But I could have corrected myself. I didn’t. Instead of splicing in what I forgot I’m telling you I forgot. This thing is revolutionary. Even Godard never apologised. I’m showing you my workings. I’m showing you that there’s this key scene and I forgot it. But I’m not stupid. This is what happens. But no film I’ve ever seen shows you what happens. Not in this way. The mind has holes and you fall into them screaming. You know what my second wife wrote in her suicide note? She wrote that thing from Hopkins, I know it by heart and wish I didn’t, I’m clearing my throat, here it is:

  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

  May who ne’er hung there.

  Except she didn’t quite write that. It bothered me. There was something wrong. I checked it up in my Norton an hour before the funeral. Louisa’d got it wrong. She wrote ‘O the mind has
mountains’ instead of ‘O the mind, mind has mountains’. There’s no comparison. She screwed it up. The most vital note of her life and she muffed it. You can’t meddle with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Louisa was like that. She didn’t choose a high enough window, either. I don’t want to be talking about this but I am. ‘O the mind has mountains’ goes round my head every day to the tune of As Time Goes By. Can you imagine what that’s like? Perhaps she knew what she was doing. Perhaps she did it deliberately. Perhaps she wanted to torture me. Perhaps she wanted to torture herself by jumping from a window that didn’t break her neck soon enough, and perhaps she wanted to torture me by getting my favourite licherary quotation wrong. One of my favourite licherary quotations. My other one is ‘Take a little time – count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram’. (Dickens, dumbos.) I say this to myself every day, every time I want to rip the hide off of some jerk who’s getting up my nose. You don’t know what Houston students are like. They come from all over but they’re made in Taiwan. They come from anyplace that breeds dildos who want to study Cocoon, The Return until they burst. They come from anyplace that breeds deadheads who think Andrei Tarkovsky’s about as interesting as moving grass. Moving grass is interesting, I say to them. I say Andrei Tarkovsky had a thing about moving grass and leaves in a wind and water rippling with stuff under it. I say to them he’s the only guy in the world who ever made moving grass interesting and why is that? They don’t know. They don’t care. They nod because Bruce Springsteen’s on their Walkmans and if they don’t nod it’s because they’ve just scored in the toilet and they’re numb or if they haven’t just scored they’ve seen Jesus behind me and He’s kinda sore about my swearing.