Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Agatha is not Medusa. These classical allusions are fog. They just hold out their gentlemen’s cards and cough politely, OK? I mean that’s how they did things then. And it’s coming back. Everyone has their card out in Houston. Everyone’s hustling each other with these damn little cards and they build up above the freezer because you never know. Agatha or maybe the maid takes the card and they lift their hats and maybe they come to tea. She doesn’t go on a date with them. When do you think this is? This doesn’t mean that no one’s getting their leg over behind the thick curtains, because they are, the human race continues, there’s a lot of sex, dirty postcards, wild orgies. D. H. Lawrence is in town. The clitorises are beating away happily under the petticoats and corsets and things. I’m not obsessed. Dicky Thornby’s appetite is normal. I’m just making things clear to you guys ’n gals who think no one said penis before 1963. Just because they used breadcrumbs to clean their white silk knickers doesn’t mean nothing went on inside them. It did. They got hot. Sodomy and gonorrhoea. Panting under the parasols. It took half an hour to unribbon a dame and unbutton a gent. Imagine it. Now we have T-shirts. It ain’t the same. I look at my students (furtively, furtively) and there are the nipples. I mean, there they are, under KEEP KINDA KOOL or GRAMSCI VOTES WOMBAT or a nice picture of a beluga surfacing in the swell. It’s instant mash desire, it has no depth, no taste, no nothing. I’m old. They don’t fall in love with me any more. I just kinda leer furtively, furtively. Yesterday I was young. They were queuing up. I sweated for three years before I got myself a test. I couldn’t open the envelope. I couldn’t believe I had not got It. I was getting through two a week. Students, I mean. I was pooped. Now I’m old. Now I’m washed up. I was talking about my great-aunt Agatha. She never got to be old. Neither did my great-uncle William. They stare at me out of their youth, off the hall wall of their home, through this ripply glass with this kind of frozen gilt ribbon between them and it needs a dust, it needs some Windolene, it needs to be buffed up. They just stare at me. They’re thinking about what they had for breakfast. They don’t know me. I’m holding me mum’s hand. There’s no recognition in their grey and umber eyes. That’s spooky. That really is spooky, mate. I don’t want to get onto this now. But Stella with her hoover got closer to me than they ever will. Five minutes of Stella with her hoover on the steps of Cavendish with the same worn bits and nicks my great-uncle saw, plus a few more, I suppose. Plus a few more.

  OK, I’ll tell you why it’s spooky. It’s spooky because I’m in love with my great-aunt Agatha, and kind of the same with my great-uncle William. I love them more than love can say. Am I crazy? I want to hug them. I hug them and they vanish. I love them as little kids running across the lawn and as big kids looking serious over books in the drawing-room and as woman and man teetering on the edge of death and not knowing it, not really, because the sun is in their eyes and the grass moves in the wind and they’re talking gaily but deeply about life.

  It breaks my heart. Nothing else in life has broken my heart like this. My analyst says I have a problem. Not in so many words, but I know what she’s thinking. I don’t think I have a problem. If I have, I want to keep it. I want to hug it. I want to sit in the Rothko Chapel in Houston tomorrow (I mean, the morrow of the day I’m writing this, OK? Not THE day) and hug my problem to me. I have fallen in love and grieved several times in my life. I say this to my analyst. I have plumbed the depths and soared to the heights and all that. But this is something else. This is looking for the snow leopard so far up above the snow-line there’s no one else, not even a monk, not even an Australian in sneakers. This is finding the tracks of what might be a snow leopard and seeing snow puff out and slip from a high ridge as something that might have been a snow leopard skids away out of sight. This is never actually seeing the snow leopard, like in that great book. You mean Matthiessen? my analyst grunts, noting it. Probably, I say. Does it matter? It might, she murmurs, it might. Sucks.

  Mr Philips is doing a great job. I’m yakking away and he’s doing a great job. He’s a doer. He’s a great man. He has the boy’s elbow cupped in his palm and his other hand is on the shoulder. They’re moving slowly up, between the ranks, between the faces, between the linden trees. I’m going for a long shot, from right the other side of the meadow with its jewelled tussocks and morning wisps of smoke or maybe mist or maybe the phantoms are crouched down to watch. Mr Philips and my great-uncle appear and then disappear between the boys and between the trees. It’s like a peep-show. It’s like the first movies. It’s like the thick cards flapping past the slit and hey, it makes that idiot move, it makes the dame lift her leg, it makes them hug each other and kiss and you giggle on the pier in your petticoats, your turn-up flannels – and you all have a red mark on your nose, you’ve been looking so long.

  The mist’s thickening. Either that or the phantoms are crowding. It’s studio fog, there’s a hiss, there’s a shout, the beautiful sound assistant with the delicate ears taps me on the hand, the mist is getting into my lungs, I’m getting a cold, my feet are wet, her scent is the same as Zelda’s, there’s so much love in the world and I’ve avoided it, ducked it, muffed it, out they come again from behind the tree, Mr Philips and the boy, shadows in the mist, other shadows like paper cut-outs, stretched-out paper-chains, she’s shaking my shoulder, I’m sleeping again, I’m drowning, I’m Hylas, I’m nothing, nothing, nothing but fog, fog, fog.

  Too right! Ossy shouts, no doubt.

  My father was a costermonger, of sorts. He ruined my reading. He told me who dunnit, and chortled. My mother tutted but to no avail. I’ve always known how things would end. The first day I met Louisa on the set of Rough Justice I knew how it’d end. Louisa and me, not the lousy film. Not exactly how, but roughly. Deirdre was there. She could see I’d taken a shine. I was drooling out the corners of my mouth, I was ruining the paintwork on the rhododendrons. It’ll kill you, Miss Sway, she said. Then walked out the door and broke her ankle. It was the wrong door. It was fake. The other side of it was blackness, a two foot drop. Pinewood was like that, Elstree, Ealing. You never knew which steps to take. Some of them ended in a mirror, which hurt. Louisa didn’t know what Deirdre was talking about, because Louisa didn’t know she had fallen for me – she thought it was just the actress/assistant director thing, it would pass, Deirdre had five more lines than her and didn’t get to die. Louisa had the most perfect lips. It was her Jewish blood blooming and she never once used lipstick. She didn’t have to. In any other country but Great AZ Britain her lips’d have made her. But they were too big for Great AZ Britain. Great AZ Britain likes its lips thin, tight, Anglo-Saxon. They ended up sucking Corona muck, fizzy garbage, out of a straw, in close-up, between Magpie and the Six O’Clock News. The last straw, as it happened. She was a nutter, everyone knew it, even my mum, even Grandma in the back sucking her Altoids. But she was driven to it, and not by Dick the Prick, OK?

  What I’m trying to say through all this fog and over the patchouli scent of the pony-tailed sound assistant who’s wrecking my shoulder is that we know how this is going to end. Mr Carlin will lift the latch and Jefferies will lean down and show his missing tooth from under his black topper and my great-uncle will out and up and off. Out and up and off. Behind him the school will squirm back into its usual bottle and only Mr Philips will be left on the avenue, shaken but not stirred, requested to see the Master before dinner who was stirred but not shaken, though certainly rather cross with Mr Philips for the indignity, the sheer indignity, the sheer crass indignity that had Holloway-Purse thumping the desk so hard one could hear the rum bottles roll, clink, roll.

  Only Mr Philips? Not quite. There’s the young groundsman with the rake, raking way off up the other end, gilded in the sudden light, the golden light through the leaves and the dust of his raking, thoughtfully and methodically way beyond shaken Mr Philips with the head down and gown wrapped round tight raking through the golden light before the shut gates, held like that with a minimum of sound for three minutes, four minutes, f
ive minutes – because a moving rake is interesting, a man raking is interesting, far off down a golden misted avenue of linden trees in the amazing hush, with no jets to fuck it up.

  Fog.

  Loads of it. No expense. Canister after canister after canister of the highest quality fog. Blot it all out. We’ll come back to the end that we already know, at the end. It’s called structure. My films were not supposed to have it. What’s up, pussycat? Can’t take the wild side? Can’t take the groovy commotion? Well, this one’s got structure, right? Ossy won’t recognise me in it. He’ll feel betrayed. Sorry, Ossy. Sorry, Sylvia. Sorry, gang. The guy who’s playing Jefferies, I’m paying him a retainer. We’ll come back next year, when the leaves are dropping again. Madness, huh? But it’ll all be the same, exactly the same. There won’t be so much as a growth-ring under the infinite precision of the lindens’ bark. I tell you, nothing will have changed. Jefferies won’t have aged a carbuncle. I won’t have aged. My great-uncle won’t have aged. Jefferies the coachman doesn’t age, I tell the guy playing him. I look up. Jefferies is grinning at me. It’s really unpleasant. He does smell of bogs, he does. The guy playing him is him. I forgot to say that. This is a quality movie. It’s art house. I could’ve got, I dunno, Roger Rees or someone – no, Ken, Ken as in Branagh, King Ken perched up on the carriage in natty grey gloves and the world falling over itself to see it, even out on the Amazon, even up in Alaska, the film a sell-out forever and ever ’cos our Ken is in it, Ken the Bran-tub with infinite gifts, infinite draw.

  But no. ’Cos Jefferies is playing Jefferies. It takes a real cunt to play a real cunt. I press a guinea in his grey glove. It’s not a glove. It’s his skin. Fank ye, sir, he says. Cut the antique accent, I say. The fog’s getting on my chest. The canisters are finito, says Pierre the mechanical genius from Jersey, it’ll have to be ordinary mist, Chef. (Hoi Ossy, hoi gang, remember Pierre?) The black lorry’s backing up the avenue. It’s enormous. It goes right through Mr Philips. The young groundsman’s ninety-three, standing wry and erect next to patchouli girl, who’s got him on her arm. My shoulder still aches. What did she want? I’ll need a bleedin’ massage, mate. The tracking rails go in, the scaffolding, the blind screens, Joe with his yellow gels (thanks, Joe, thanks). Why do they have to shout so much, these guys, these Steves, these bobble-hatted hunks? What the fuck is Mr Philips hanging around for? It’s his first class. It’s Theocritus. The boys’ll be running riot. He can’t be that shaken. Maybe he is. It’s embarrassing. Nobody knows what to do with him. The Steves in their Doors T-shirts walk through him, no respect. The clash of the scaffolding’s a desecration. I want to be left alone. I want peace of mind. My brass speaking-trumpet’s nose down in the tussocks. My chair’s sinking into the exceptional countryside. I should be on a duck-board. I don’t even know her name. I’ll call her Julie Patchouli. She has no right to dislocate my shoulder. She has every right to make it better. I wish Mr Philips would go. He’s a great man, but he’s gotten embarrassing. The Steves are rolling the canisters. Where the fuck are we going to get refills? I should have a duck-board. Stella’s talking to the ex-groundsman. Are you an Old Boy? I bet she’s saying. There’s more boring sky all of a sudden. Christ, careful with them lindens. Polystyrene chips like crazy. Beggars can’t be choosers. We’ll put the real ones back, I promise, I promise.

  Great days, great days.

  Bleedin’ phantoms.

  Check out those whizzes and the boiled whiting while there’s still some. Gimme a break.

  THE THICK CARDS are flapping. Flap, flap, flap. I remember I remember the house where I was born and me mum and Des and I at the buttons in the Science Museum, things flapping and bouncing and grinding and dead, Out of Order, conked. I could make a horse gallop. Round and round and round, cedunk cedunk cedunk. A black horse as ah remember, galloping, mah first motion picture thru’ the slit. I went back in ’92, research reasons, couldn’t find the horse, hey, it was all different, last time was with Maura and Greg somewhere in the psychedelic era when it was the same but smaller. They made the horse gallop and they cooed and I wanted to weep. In ’92 I couldn’t find the horse. It was all different. It was all explained. You could get a doctorate in physics just walking round for an hour. Hell, it wasn’t a playground any more. They have glass lifts which gave me vertigo. I have bad vertigo. The old lifts used to give me claustrophobia. I have bad claustrophobia. It’s either vertigo or claustrophobia, take your pick. I’ll use the stairs, two at a time, have a little flutter with Old Man Death. I win every time. I’ll go on winning. It’s all in the attitude.

  Science. The, ha, science of hoptics. Ha yes. I made films and I didn’t know how. The light fell and I caught it. I left the science to Joe and Pierre and Michael. Remember Michael? Mike Avens? The greatest, the greatest. Shame he had to work with a dope like me, instead of Fellini or Truffles or whoever. I mean, I’d say I want a sad kind of light and he’d say, mournful blue or melancholy blue? I’d say hey, just sort of sad, mate. He’d drench it with a triple bank of cerulean floods and stand there like he was underwater and say howzat? – ’cos he was disgusted. He was disgusted I could be so crass. He was into Monet. He was into Claude Lorrain. He was into John Constable. I mean, Michael was not your ordinary camera guy. He’s lighting this one, by the way. He’s come back from the grave with his palette of Myrals and his light meters and his little funny cardboard thing and he’s in seventh bloody heaven. ’Cos this is quality. This is the first quality thing he’s ever done. This is the first movie up to his bloody standards. There are Monet mornings and Constable afternoons and Claude Lorrain evenings, OK? There’s gaslight, there’s fog, there’s the big wide chalk country and there’s the trenches. The trenches, Ricky? The trenches, Mike. Poppies? A few poppies, Mike. Blood. Mud. White bandages. Dirty bandages. No bandages. Lots of smoke. Big white puffs of smoke. Gas. Yellow, white, hazy gas, ground-hugging gas, invisible gas. Murk. Sunlight through murk. Cross-lighting, lots of specials, the works. Night scenes, Ricky? Night scenes, Mike. Moonlight on barbed wire, maybe. No, bound to be. Moonlight on blood. Moonlight on water, craters full of water, you know the scene. Rats plopping about. Sweaty skin, Ricky? Definitely sweaty skin, Mike. Lots of sweat, lots of gleam, but not Hollywood gleam, Mike. Who d’you think I am, Ricky? I’m going to do it in browns, in umbers and greys, I’m going to drain it, I’m going to use bloody soot for highlights. You’ll see. Sounds great, Mike. Sounds exactly what I want. And will there be eyeballs, Ricky? Close-ups? There will be close-ups, say I, hesitantly. Mike comes so near I can smell the weed-killer they put on his plot up at Highgate (Remember the funeral? Dirk Bogarde all choked?) and he murmurs at my eyelashes a big sooted muck of a face, Ricky. The darkest filter. Burnt sienna of a face. Touch of moonlight on the bridge of the nose. Then it opens its eyes. Eyeballs. White. Pure bloody slaps of white, impasto white, a great gleam, kind of uncomfortable gleam ’cos it’s body-fluid, it’s not bloody varnish, it’s not gloss, y’know? It’s eyes, it’s eyes.

  I know, Mike, I know. It’s not gloss. Sod the gloss. This is art house. This is quality.

  We shake hands. His are cold. I forgot to say that his eyes – his eyes aren’t there. Mike has sockets. What d’you expect? He’s still a fucking genius.

  Wasted, wasted. So many wasted.

  I want a rustling fern. I want a Steve with a ginormous rustling fern. I want china above the door. Above it? Yeah. In dose days, guys, dey put crockery on de liddle lintel above de door an’ a big plush curtain in front of de door yerked back wid a big fat dressing-gown cord an’ crockery in every nook an’ crannery you can tink of so no kid, absolutely no kid, could move a fucking muscle widout dere being a catastrophe. They put antimacassars on dey fine chairbacks an’ dey put Macassar oil in dey hair an’ de antimacassar fought it out wid de macassar an’ lo, de laundry maid lost every darn time. Dey put photos in all de spaces dat were left by de china an’ under everyting dey put liddle lace doilies an’ under de lace doilies dey put wobbly tables wid whippet legs
an’ funny liddle rat’s claws for feet an’ where dey didn’t have de fucking grand piano an’ de liddle wobbly tables an’ de Empire cabinets an’ de huge open dresser wid de Ming vases an’ stuff dey put fucking great ferns an’ under de ferns dey put slippy liddle rugs in case you were tinking you were sure on your feet wid your wobbly liddle cup of tea but stick to de rugs, stick to de rugs, ’cos between dem dey waxed dem darn floorboards every day in case it wasn’t slippy enough, OK?

  You get de picture, Steves?

  Set it up.

  Holy shit, that’s twelve crates of crockery.

  Sylviaaaa? We forgot to swag the chandelier.

  I mean, how could they’ve hoovered this stuff even if they’d had one? Ramona moans about my coconut matting. I have one coconut mat in all my apartment. It’s by the futon, it’s for my morning handsprings, it barely prickles. Otherwise the place is stripped to the boards, it’s varnished, it’s clean, it’s Filipina-friendly. Carpets give me the heeby-jeebies, especially fitted. I mean, all that dirt! I mean, where does it go to? Des my brother has carpets so thick you’d lose a bloody hoover in it. But they don’t hoover, they don’t. Des and Muriel, I’m talking about. I reckon they use herbicide. Every time I visit Des has risen and so has the pile. I wouldn’t mind, mate, if it was naaaatural fibres – but it bloody sparks the minute I touch it with me knee-caps (OK, we wear shorts in Houston – so?). I stand there in the living-room propping up the hopelessly-irresponsibly-harvested-mahogany bar and shout, your lawn needs cutting again, I see, Desmond! I always do this when he’s in the toilet. He has this thing about being addressed in the toilet. He has a bashful side. Muriel doesn’t like me. She doesn’t understand me. She takes me licheral, like. I pour out me Grant’s. She looks out at the bloody lawn. The lawn’s about as unkempt as her hairdo. Not a blade out of place. Des breaks his back doing it, she says. Does he? I say. Well, poor old Des. He ought to give it up at his age, Muriel. Every Saturday afternoon, she says. Well, it’s all right for some, I say, giving the soda syphon a good spurt. I pick up the Grant’s bottle. There’s always this little biro mark on the label. I scuff it out with my nail and fish out my Nixon rotary (collector’s item, guv) and correct it. I’m a stickler, Muriel, I’m a stickler: it was at least three inches out. I do believe you don’t have lawns where you are, she says, woundingly. Where we are, I say, we have golf courses for lawns, Muriel. Something in the carpet nips my toes. That’s another thing Des and Muriel can’t abide: I like to take off my shoes and socks. I like to pad about with nude feet. They think I’m looking for the swimming-pool. I am. One day, Ratty, one day. It’s the heat, Des, it’s the heat. And it’s December. Every time I visit Des has risen and so has the thermostat. When I imagine Hell, I imagine my brother’s living-room. I imagine Des and Muriel in it. There’s no door. There’s Muriel’s curried-eggs special every day, for ever and ever and some more. There’s their conversation and their fave TV programmes and there’s nothing else. Des has not mentioned my film work since 1973. Not once. Not to me or anyone else. You in the same line as Des, then? his chums say to me when they come over for some Chilean clutch top-up. You’d think he’d be fucking proud. I’ve got this brother in films, you’d think he’d say. From time to time. Over the sudded Volvo, the gin and limes, the leatherette attaché case he likes to remote lock whenever I get near it. He was always beastly to me, was my brother. He was always a rotter.