Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Sorry, she says, I’m sorry.

  Lily’s at the door. Milly looks at her. Lily’s mouth rumples up, it might have been a smile, it might have been sympathy, but Lily has to be careful. Despite the domestics crisis, she has to be careful. George is in with Mrs T, hand in glove and dick also once long ago as goes the legend. You have to look to your own. Milly’s too new to have crossed into Lily’s sympathy room. Blimey, they’ve hardly spoke. Lily’s one side of the ropes and Milly’s the other. There’s even a teeky bit of Lily that likes seeing Milly screwed down by Georgie Porgie, though Lily hates the guy. Humanity is like that. It can’t bear too much unfamiliarity.

  Plop.

  Agatha’s clapping, at least. She knows what all this means. White against the dark woods. There are no dryads in those woods. Only the phantoms of Injuns long ago slaughtered.

  Go see Still Nine. I’m taking a break. Go see Milly Looking Terrified Next To An Aspidistra With Background Of The Heaviest Curtain Ever To Have Not Broken A Curtain Rod, by E. S. Cummins, Photographer to the Anonymous, Worksop. I think she’s looking terrified because Mr Cummins has just told her that if she moves her head the clamp will snap it off. This guy still uses a clamp? Uh-huh. For kids, for kids. Also, the mad spittly minister does not like photography and he’s told her so. He’s Primeval Methodist or something and thinks it’s frippery and takes away your soul. He’d have made a great ayatollah. But you see what I mean about her lips, in the still. She’s keeping them firmly shut because she has this idea that your soul can escape out of your mouth. At least, it can do if you take the name of Our Lord in vain or laugh too much and too loud.

  Go look at those eyes. I’m taking a break. I hate looking at the issue desk with this student in a Hawaiian shirt instead of Zelda in anything.

  HAPPY NEW YEAR.

  I just remembered that. I don’t think I’ve said it yet. Happy New Century. Happy New Millennium. The dancing should’ve started. I debated with myself about the dancing. It’ll mean some of you people won’t watch every minute of the film. It’ll inevitably be a distraction, like the hammer drill that always starts up as soon as my class on the Silent Film begins. But this film doesn’t have a sound-track. The sound-track is life, it’s ambient, it’s wild. It’s Ossy next to you sucking the wodka out of his lemon slice and it’s my granddaughter snucking her ballet feet under her thighs and sighing and it’s the dance music swilling over from the next room and it’s the bells of London saying turn again Dick you’re gonna be a hit this time and it’s the pooping and snorting of pleasure boats and the unemployed silence I hope of dredgers and the whittering of bats and the murmuring of a thousand million mouths and hey, I could go on but I won’t, it’s too complicated unthreading the woof or unwoofing the thread and right now I’m a long way away from this party, I’m in the hum of a place where only books talk and it’s so quiet I feel like bringing in a personal stereo and some of that chill-out New Age stuff Zelda’s lent me to create an atmosphere conducive to gentle thought because there’s something incredibly violent about this quiet, it’s like it’s waiting for me to get up and start screaming at her over there because of what she’s just done.

  She’s told Lazenby about my project.

  Lazenby said two things in reply. He said Jarman’s got there first. He said this to Zelda. Then he said it to me. He said it to me yesterday, in the corridor, looking concerned. The other thing he said was that he didn’t know I had it in me. He didn’t say that to me, he only said it to Zelda. I can’t believe that Zelda has told him. I feel raped. I hadn’t heard of this Jarman thing. I only know the guy has recently died. It’s really bad luck – he’s made a film with no pictures. It’s called Blue. Lazenby says it’s a masterpiece. It’s a blue screen and that’s it. With a sound-track. It’s DIY cinema. He was telling me all this in the corridor but I knew it already because Zelda had told me what he’d told her on their date together at Seebug’s Fish Restaurant. It had to be Jarman, because I don’t like Jarman. I mean, I don’t like his work. He laughed at me once, in ’69, off the Old Kent Road. It was a matey sort of laugh but it made me angry. He was on my set. He thought the set was naff. Plywood Studios, he joked. I said this is a Victorian drama, it has to be accurate, we have to hide Mr Wu’s Fish Bar and Ali’s Kebabs. No you don’t, he said, and laughed. Now he’s gone and kicked me in the groin and I have to be nice about him because he’s dead. That’s really bad luck, Ricky, said Lazenby. That’s kinda taken the punch out of a great revolutionary concept. He had his concerned look all over him, his fob watch was dangling in sympathy, I could’ve nutted the guy. I hope you didn’t have too many fish bones last night, I replied. I find Seebug’s is heavy on the fish bones. His hands. I was looking at his hands curled around some jerk’s thesis on some other jerk fattening a clip folder. They were pale and unpleasant, like, I dunno – like he bleaches them every evening or something because the rest of him is fairly carefully tanned. They have small black hairs between the knuckles, but not many, you can count them on one finger. I was thinking about maybe what the fingers had done with Zelda the previous night. Paddled with her. Paddled. What a great word. Shakespeare. Hengest and Horsa. Oak trees. I happen to believe Zelda when she says there is nothing physical between them. They just copulate mentally. Staring into each other’s eyes. She didn’t put it like that, of course. She said it’s swell, he is really illuminating on certain theoretical aspects of life and art. But he must have touched her, if only fleetingly, fleetingly. You know, paddling with the palm of her hand, borrowing her Kleenex, helping her fillet her monkfish. Shakespeare. I’m sounding like Shakespeare. She probably tingled. They have only candles in Seebug’s. That’s why it’s dangerous. You can’t fillet properly. A guy died there, a rich Indian guy, a lawyer in real estate, they thought it was poison but it was a monkfish’s sternum or something. You can’t fillet efficiently, I added. Because Lazenby was looking puzzled. My voice was a semitone above the usual. I cleared my throat. Anyway, he said, it still sounds very interesting, this project of yours, Rick. Yeah? Yeah, uh-huh, very interesting. Todd, my son? Yeah, Rick? Go fuck yourself.

  Wasn’t that unfair? Hey, look, I barely said it. I was already turning away and blushing when I barely said it. He probably thought I said, go for a car sale, or gofer cures elf, or go far go slow, or something that would keep him puzzled in between jacking off over his students and belching monkfish and fennel until lunch. I wish I’d said it loud and clear but I didn’t, I dipped it down to about one and a half, it was really ambient, it was more like surf and breezes and Tibetan wind-chimes, it probably really relaxed him. Anyway, it’d only encourage the guy. I mean, if I’d stood there and screamed go fuck yourself so close to his ear I’d have got wax on my nose instead of off-mike and so close to my shoes I practically dubbined my forehead it would’ve encouraged him to go further with Zelda. He likes competition. What he doesn’t understand is how profound my feelings are for someone he just wants to play around with for a while like he plays around with the desirable T-shirts. I feel sick talking about it. I wish I could plant a monkfish’s sternum in his morning cereal. Zelda is right now reaching up and planting a book in the shelf where it will smell slightly of her scent for a while. I go round sniffing books every evening, I go round getting high on the day’s returns. I’m like a dog, it excites me, we haven’t made love for weeks because she has a headache. She has a headache and I had my cerebral malaria. I don’t want to go on and on and on and on and on about Zelda but it’s killing me. I’m wracked by jealous pains. I am jealous. I want to be very upfront about this, guv. I AM EXTREMELY JEALOUS. Jarman and Lazenby are ganging up on me artistically and emotionally, they make a great team, they completely complement each other. They have already winded me. I never get anywhere before anybody else. I’m Scott of the Antarctic. I eat my huskies. I practically kill myself but it’s OK because no one in the history of the world has ever reached this place before and then there’s this fucking flag there. Hey, I want to establish a st
able relationship. I want Zelda to fill my future forever. She makes my fingertips tingle. We could even marry.

  Christ, guvnor, Daisy Daisy an’ all that? Get me to the church on time? Eh? Third time lucky or somefink, Cyril?

  Mike, kill the lights. I want to listen to my head.

  Mike?

  Shit, the guy’s cans are around his neck. I’m rapping on the glass, the gallery glass. I’m mouthing obscenities silently, I’m a goldfish, all the plugs are out, everyone’s cans are around their necks, the actors are farting about with coffee down there, laughing. I hate TV work, I did Play for Today once in the really early days and it was a catastrophe. It was such a catastrophe they only pretended to wipe it, they wiped everything in those days, even priceless stuff like Laurence Olivier tap-dancing with Dudley Moore they wiped, it was amazing, it was great, it gave everything an edge, it was like you couldn’t care a fuck because you knew it was going to be wiped except I cared a fuck because I was very insecure about my career and Deirdre was in it and she was drunk. My first wife was drunk and it was live. And it wasn’t wiped. I mean, it was but there was a bootleg the tech guys showed newcomers to terrify them, it was an initiation rite, it was cruel. It was so live in dem days it went out before it had happened, almost. Before we knew what had happened, anyway. It was like life but worse. It was supposed to be exciting. Everyone’s sideburns sparkled because it was so exciting. My sideburns were like the crown jewels I was so excited by the idea that I could make the biggest asshole of myself ever in the history of the world because at the other end of the line there were about a hundred and two screens like submarine portholes and all these pipe-smokers and cardigan-knitters and dwarves in ties and shorts who turn out to be kids watching and waiting for me to fuck my career up. Edward Woodward was in it. He was Harald Hardraade. My first wife was Mrs Hardraade, daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, grand prince of Kiev, which suited her down to the toe-nails she used to stab me with in her sleep. I had to do eleventh-century Europe with a couple of box sets and three cameras and a lot of north light fill on a huge blank float which kept running over my wife’s toes. She said oh goodness fuck twice, not quite off mike. None of the pipe-smokers and cardigan-makers and dwarves in ties knew what oh goodness fuck meant in 1961 but the crew did and they started to giggle. It was like there was a serious unrecorded earthquake in Old Norway because the grips were giggling so much. My wife kept fluffing and her torque fell off and this boom-arm swung over right behind Tostig’s big speech and there were so many noises off it was like it was experimental, it was like it was Lindsay Anderson or something, but it wasn’t, it was by Eldegard Peach in his dog-days and we even had coconut shells and the Battle of Stamford Bridge was on hand-held with lots of smoke several centuries before the cannon was invented and afterwards there was me goldfishing through the gallery glass because they were sick of my voice.

  I hope you’re not sick of my voice.

  Fucking goldfish!

  That was Deirdre. She hated me by then. We went to Cromer for our honeymoon. I could go into that but I won’t. Off-season Cromer. It’s not interesting. When I’m tanked up I do a party piece on it but not now. Look at me. I’m shouting but no sound’s coming out. I’m yelling at Zelda but she’s stamping something, head down, hair beginning to slip out of its complications. I like her with her hair complicated and I like her with her hair all slipped out, it reaches the undercurve of her breasts where the sun doesn’t, she looks like Mary Magdalen in the wilderness, I can snuggle up under her hair while she’s standing there naked and it’s like walking behind a waterfall only warmer. She’s caught my eye. Her mouth goes up at one side which I reckon is a smile but it’s kind of sardonic, mate. She has this side of her. She’s stamping again. At least they still stamp in libraries. At least there’s something to hold on to in this chaotic and fast-changing world. I wish I could stand between Zelda’s hair and her body right now because there’s no nicer place in the whole world and it’s so close but my nose is pressed up against the glass and no one can hear me and, shit, they’ve locked the door. I hadn’t seen Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate then, this was primordial days, so I didn’t think how I looked like Dustin Hoffman in the last reel of The Graduate yelling silently through the glass door of the church but I am now. The bastards had locked me in. Then they all turned and looked up at the gallery and laughed. I couldn’t hear them laugh but their mouths were opening and closing and they were spilling their coffee and I was a schmuck and there was Deirdre in her cloak, pissed out of her head, smiling up at me in a really triumphant way, twirling her fucking torque.

  Horrible, horrible.

  A Shepherd’s Bush legend. Maybe it’s still doing the rounds, creeping about with a trail of slime and rotting fins. Maybe not. Maybe when sideburns come back it’ll pop out of the cupboard and get folk chortlin’ again, like in the old gold days. Last known sighting, Maida Vale, Sound Studio 3, 1971. I hope some of you lot bloody chortled, at least. Fucking goldfish. Great days, great days. Nostalgia gives you neuralgia, ouch, ’n raking up the past gives you back ache. Bom. Hotchpotch, Scene Eight, Song Two. Swell, huh?

  Back ache.

  Bom.

  Rake. C’mon, rake it all up. Rake, rake, rake. Don’t let pseud creep spoil things, Dickhead. Don’t let him in. He’s dust. He’s debris. He’s Hair In the Gate. He’s HIG. Hi, HIG. Three chest-hairs and they’re in my gate. Blow ’em away, Ossy, blow ’em away. We want a clean picture, clean print, clean as dawn dew.

  Right, guv?

  Sweep of a brush, as it happens. Silver-backed hearthbrush held by a small hand with a boniness about it. It’s Milly’s. Milly is raking the hearth in the dining-room and she has an ache. It’s deeper than her spinal column. It’s kind of fear and loathing combined. She chokes on the ash. The room clears its throat. A wagon goes past, etc. Last night’s dinner is about three centuries back, but there’s a scent, a staleness, a trace. I hope you all notice the fancy plaster on the ceiling. Grapes or something, leaves, leaves, leaves. Chandelier. Tints of blue. Mediocre pictures. Mr Trevelyan’s grandfather at the end, needs a scrub, cream highlights on nose and buttons and that’s about it, the rest is murk. She wants to write to her mam. Or Sis. She feels she is slipping towards the mouth. The fireplace is dark and draughty and maybe it is in fact the mouth. Maybe the mouth isn’t like a toad’s or a dragon’s but like a very large fireplace wi’out a fire because the fire is going to come in a bit, and forever. Maybe it’s like a very large fireplace turned upside down, so you fall down th’shaft and into th’Devil’s arms. If only Milly could scrape out the ash of this minister’s ravings she might have a chance, but she can’t. The down-draught plays on her neck and she shivers. Then she looks up. There’s a darkness because there’s a kink in the chimney. There’s no sky. She knew a sweep in Worksop who died. He had horrible growths on his elbows. He was about seventy, mind. He remembered going up as a boy. The growths were where he’d levered himself up as a boy. He’d try to get her to touch them but she screamed. They were like baby cabbages. Then they went bad and he passed over. He probably went to Hell because he drank spirits and never washed, he was black, he was black as night and his eyes rolled and he cursed. She shivers again and sweeps and coughs. The naked man in the Wheel of Life walks through her head. She canna stop it. It’s like there are thousands of him, o’ them, naked, walking through her head. Her dustpan scrapes the tiles of the fireplace

  Holy shit. Hey, I’m sorry to chop like this. But Zelda has just come over and said, how’s the eternal autocue? Then she laughed. What’re you talking about, honey? I replied. She just walked away, sniggering. It’s not like Zelda to snigger. It’s also not like Zelda to make a technical joke like that. Sure, this thing is like an autocue, it’s a rolling script, a portaprompt, one or two of you will have made the same observation, but the way Zelda said it was like it was a running joke. She’s never not taken this thing seriously before. It’s a Lazenby joke. He’s infecting her. Hair In the Gate’s trying to break m
e. HIG’s trying to break us. I’m sorry. I’m shaky. It’s working. He’s screwing me up. I have to talk to her about this. Right now I have to keep going, I have to believe in myself, I have to get my immune system on red alert, I have to prove to Zelda that I am stronger than this virus. She hasn’t seen him for a week, he’s busy or something, maybe his wife is acting up at last. THERE ISN’T ANYTHING BETWEEN THEM. I’m not jealous. I love Zelda. She loves me. She’s said so at least twice. I must stop cracking jokes about maple leaves and perfect circles. Our love is stronger than – shit, I’m not a poet. Steel cables will do. Our love is stronger than steel cables. I could cut the guy’s dick off.