by Adam Thorpe
I’m not very nice. Hey, I realise this. No one’s perfect. This air-conditioning system gives me a sore throat. I would work at home if I could stand being away from Zelda and if you didn’t have to sign in and sign out because the Mussolinis that run this place think your brain dissolves as soon as you step out of this dump. Hey, I’m getting nowhere again. It’s HIG, he’s fiddled with my clubs, he’s sent me swinging away into the juniper and gorse stuff that shreds a Reebok in about five seconds. Big deal. See if I care, mate. I’m putting on my rhinoceros hide. I’m hosing myself down in iced water, I’m standing under Niagara, I’m aloof, I’m British, I’m going over in a barrel, I’m going right in, I’m going to stick at it, I’m going to do the longest single take since The Sacrifice, OK?
What time are we? There’s a clock on the mantelshelf. We’re in the dining-room, remember? If you’ve just gatecrashed on my party because Sting’s little raver got too earnest then fuck off out, this is 1913, you’re not wanted yet, Ossy has just shot the last Famous Grouse, there are only pork scratchings, there’s vomit in the handbasin, I’ll invite you next time. Milly is standing up. She’s thirteen and her shoulders are rounded already. That’s ridiculous. Maybe her birth was awkward. Mine was. I came out crab-wise, according to my father, like I was looking for the John – it was in the blackout, it was in the Blitz, you can’t blame me for being cautious. That’s why I have a kinked spine, a very slightly kinked spine. Shut up. Milly is standing, just standing. She’s staring at the highlights that are supposed to be Mr Trevelyan’s grandad, he’s somewhere in there, he’s lurking, it terrifies her, the door opens.
Mill?
It’s Lily. She has one hand on the door, she keeps it there, she leans in and whispers.
Mill? Don’t take no notice, girl. Don’t take no notice.
Mill blinks and looks away. The whisper is tossed about a bit by the room then slips away into the shadows of the portrait like its lips didn’t move, not really. Don’t take no notissss.
Lily winks and then the door is where she was. Milly feels really lonely at this point, in this room, really small and lonely and crumpled because the room’s full of stuff that is gleamy and unrelaxed and waiting to service mouths that open and close cleverly, without showing anything, and say clever things, and then are gone till the next day. Her cap itches her. Her collar itches her. Actually, it chafes her. She’s allergic to starch. She doesn’t know this. She just accepts that a starchy collar chafes like a horse-collar chafes a horse. Don’t take no notissss. She has this dustpan full of ash in one hand and the brush in the other. The ash-bucket is at her feet. She bends down and slips the ash out of the dustpan into the bucket and there’s a small cloud, it rises up, a small cloud of grey ash she steps back to avoid because she doesn’t want to grey her pinny. Don’t take no notissss is like a key to all problems because Lily doesn’t have any problems – it’s better than never ever, even. The time, by the way, is seven minutes to four o’clock. Luncheon has been served. Afternoon rests have been observed. Lily’s gearing herself up for tea. Dinner is a cloud on the horizon, a dust cloud, it’s getting bigger and bigger, it’s coming this way, if you put your ear to the ground you can hear the hooves. The ash is cleared. Milly lays the fire. She lights it. She’s good at laying fires. The flames are happy, they like the way she’s done it, they’re settling in for the evening, they relax, they swap gossip and tut and hiss and the log on top of the coal hunkers down to its immolation, dribbling a little at each end. Milly watches all this for a moment, her face quite close, the flames in her eyes, Mike loves it, it’s modelling her beautifully because flame does this, it brings out the best in people, it’s the best kicker in the business according to Mike, her tongue’s showing, it glints, she’s thinking, we’re very close, she’s big, her lower face is enormous, the flames gleam on her tongue, on its tip, because there’s only the tip of it sticking out, like a kid concentrating, because she is a kid, concentrating, concentrating on how to save herself from th’mouth.
All the clocks chime. Bells bong outside. Somewhere quite close Virginia Woolf closes her eyes and nods appreciatively at the four circles dissolving in the air. For someone who never had to wash her own underpants or handle a broom, she has a copious imagination.
Whassat? Four o’clock? Hey, I can hear you really razor-sharp people yelling, you’ve jump-cut four and a half hours, Dicky. Where’s William got to? What happened at luncheon? How did they sneak him in? What are they gonna say to—?
OK, OK, don’t claw the screen to shreds, don’t lose your toupées, go back to your seats, pour yourselves some orange juice, I’m gonna tell ya in ma own good time. My time is your time is their time. Real time is unreal time, and vice-versa. I’m getting to talk like Todd Lazenby. Zelda says I should read this guy Baudrillard because—
Chop, chop.
William is in the attic. He’s trying to piece together his life. He was hustled up there by Agatha while Uncle Ken boomed in the dining-room to cover up the creaks on the stairs. William’s life was torn up into tiny pieces by Boulter, you remember. You’d better remember. That outside shoot cost a fortune. It’s a modern classic. It’s in the same league as the last frame of Buñuel’s El, almost. You don’t know it? You don’t know the last frame of Buñuel’s El? When you think this guy driven nuts by jealousy is cured, become a nice quiet monk instead of a murderous paranoiac, and then this last shot of him taking a walk in the monastery garden, up the path towards this hole, this tunnel, this mouth in the hedge, and he’s zigzagging? He’s gently zigzagging? And you know what – I caught myself zigzagging today, up the HCDVA driveway? You know that?
William is in the attic, in amongst the big iron bed-ends clutching each other at last and the ridiculous prams with torn hoods sliced by baby-snatching gypsies and the bust of Venus with the big tits Mr Trevelyan’s great-aunt objected to because it made her come over very queer (it turned her on but she didn’t know she had a switch) and the army tent which is not an army tent but a crinoline belonging to his grandmother when she was a healthy young woman which turned nobody on except those with an incredibly fevered imagination and which had to be lowered over her head by two maids with poles as she was always telling William wistfully and a wash-stand with a china dog waiting for the water which will never come though its thirst be great and bustles bustling out of baskets because the Last Day has been sounded and the bustles are trying to find their owners’ butts and medical illustrations of lungs and brains and malignantly tumorous tissue on thick board suitable for hanging as demonstration used in all leading hospitals faded by years of nobody looking at them in a leading hospital and Grandpapa’s butterfly table with no glass and five butterflies huddled in one corner wondering when someone’ll take the pins out and a contraption. None of the kids has ever worked out what this contraption really is. It’s huge. It has cogs and springs and wheels. It is black and won’t move. But every time they come up here and look it has moved, very slightly. It is not a traction bed from the old St Bartholomew’s Orthopaedic Hospital. It is an instrument of torture. It has the mind of a tarantula. It schemes its freedom. It clanks into their dreams and used to make them jerk bolt upright with wild eyes in Big Close-Up, panting, stifling a scream and mostly managing to so that Nurse Ginger-Nob Hallam wasn’t disturbed and they weren’t cuffed into sense, silly-billy fools.
William is by the water tank. There’s a stool with arthritic bamboo legs there and he’s sitting on it. There’s an old baize card table with cigar burns all over probably because the contraption has been trying to get it to confess but William’s elbows are not rested on this table. His head is not in his hands. If this was one of my lousy early films he’d have his head in his hands and his elbows on the table and I’d circle him in medium close-up with a 300-watt yellow-gellied kicker just catching his knuckles and the highlights in his hair. But this is not one of my early lousy films it’s my final masterwork and he’s just sitting there with his hands in his lap and slumped a little an
d he’s definitely staring out. There’s a tiny oil-lamp on the table and that’s it as far as luminaries are concerned. The tiny oil-lamp with its little wavering tulip glass is having a hard time making inroads into the shadows, because the shadows up here are well established, they’re not often disturbed, they’re fat with not having to flee and curl up in corners, they’re thick and wheezy and the only thing that’d get them moving is Pierre with his cobweb gun but he’s not needed here and the little oil-lamp is nervous about its situation, you can tell that, it’s turned up too high and it’s emitting a thin vertical of black smoke. But you can just see enough of William to get the general picture. He’s very still and he’s staring out, out of himself and into a particularly unexercised shadow in the corner that’s hunkered down around a really antique web William has examined over the years because it has an amazing number of skeletons in it, it’s a family plot, it’s still used by the great-great-etc.-grandson who comes out and crawls all over his ancestors like he doesn’t care. The light is picking up his white collar, his eyes, his jaw-line, a lock of his hair. (I’m talking about William, not the damn spider.) That’s it. If I were to go into his head I would have to pick my way through an awful lot of debris, an awful lot of torn-up things, before I reached whatever is holding him so still. I’m staying out here because apart from anything else there’s a fleet of what look like used chamber-pots and some unidentifiable stuff with poles between me and him and I don’t want to break this stillness by clattering and banging around, OK?
Ssssh.
The mad brother in the attic.
That’s what Agatha is thinking right now, on the edge of her bed in her room two floors below William. She knows her Charlotte Brontë. Except her brother is not mad. William came off the train and promptly went queer, he almost fell, she had to support him in the middle of suitcases and huge white clouds of steam and a lot of highly-paid extras in wide straws or small bowlers jostling and barging all around her while Uncle Kenneth stood there like a lemon saying poor boy, poor boy. She had no idea what she was going to do with him now. Uncle Kenneth had no idea what they were going to do with him, either, but he felt excited.
Right, let’s replay. They’re standing there. Railway stations always make Uncle Kenneth excited. The whistles and hisses and clanks and shouts bear him up up on a wave and he doesn’t have to think, he’s hurly-burly, he’s hustle’n bustle, he’s off somewhere even when he isn’t. The trains are ridiculously large. The pistons are gigantic. William looks like an elf. The train belches and wheezes and Uncle Kenneth’s mouth is full of its taste. Ah, what we’re missing. The Age of Steam. Civilisation now and again finds itself, now and again but never for long – some jerk comes up with something that doesn’t grease your face and fill your eyes and nose with smuts and choke you every time you enter a tunnel. Big deal, smart-ass. This scene with Agatha and William and Uncle Kenneth is God’s gift to a camera, there’s light slanting down like rods through the muck, there’s a heap of trunks and the light’s catching their brass corners and the gilt on the huge station clock up there which has either lost its small hand or it’s exactly midday but either way it’s a pleasure checking your fob-watch against it – it wouldn’t be the same these days, it wouldn’t be the same. Nostalgia gives you neuralgia. Sometimes it’s worth it. Agatha is shouting something but so is the train, so are the porters, so is the world because it is midday and everything’s bonging. Pigeons aloft in the girders. It looks quiet up there. That is where God resides, no doubt, Uncle Kenneth would’ve thought if he hadn’t been on this hurly-burly high – He’s vacated the cathedrals for the railway stations, He knows where the action is. Uncle Ken’s thoughts are like that. They’re pretty modern but not ahead of their time. His wing collar is askew. His lunettes are steamed up. The noise and steam bear him up. He lands with a bump in the growler cab. Agatha is next to him. William is outside, in front, next to the driver. This seems all wrong but it happened, the driver assumed the young gentleman would ’op up next to him and there was no room for a third inside, of course. I say of course but maybe you don’t know a lot about old-time transport. I’m sorry. It’s the same cab, they’re suicidal, the guy’s emptied half a flask of brandy down his throat while they were waiting in the station, he’s kicked the horse, he’s pissed down an alley where three whores were pissing down the other end and the cab-driver and the whores laughed at each other or at the general situation and the alley fair echoed, it did, it did indeed, it fair echoed with the laughter of the London poor in them bygone days, ho yes, as the trickles met and warmly seethed between the cobbles! – and shrieks too, of delight, of pain, this alley could do you shrieks, mainly towards the night, or in the night, three murders in total and about five thousand four hundred and twenty-two ahem tuppenny uprights, cheap at the price, 2d a rump, luverly out in the air where the fog blows cold and the gaslight’s crook and if you’ll just come this way please it is probably here by the greasy window that something really horrible happened but all record of it is lost under the Red Star Delivery forecourt the alley’s ghost does not frequent any more and neither do we, this way please, hold on tight to your handbags and toupées and arseholes.
So the ridiculous situation occurs: William is outside on his own conversing with the driver instead of his sister. Clip-clop. She slides the window down and sticks her head out to check he hasn’t fallen off or been snatched or something. This is when Uncle Kenneth, wiping his lunettes, says, my dear, he hasn’t passed away, he has merely been inconvenienced. Uncle Kenneth has this very downbeat approach to life alternating with sudden bursts of hysteria. Right now he is downbeat, he’s come down with a bump and he’s attempting to clear his lenses of the Glorious Age of Steam. Agatha sticks her head back in and straightens her hat and blinks away some coal-smoke particles and brushes her cheek where a minute piece of crushed tomato and dung has been flung up by the cab-horse’s hooves and says, what are we to do, Uncle? It seems so jolly queer not to be able to talk with him. All he has said to us so far is good morning and sorry.
Uncle Kenneth smiles and in front of thinking how lovely his niece looks in plum, wheels the following: Let the boy say as much as he wishes to say. It may be he does not wish to say anything at all. As to what we are to do (here he sighs and replaces his lunettes and looks out of the window at the filth and toil that is and was and always will be London, seeing a donkey sunk under a hod of bricks and a policeman next to it bending his back and guffawing, which is fairly amazing in itself) – my dear, that is altogether in the lap of the gods and they are notoriously unhelpful unless one trusts ’em. This being one of the most unhelpful remarks Agatha could imagine, she peers out of her window again without opening the glass, seeing just enough of William’s cape to know that he has not dissolved and thinking how at least he is not dead, that there are many things worse in life, and oh God that’s it. She turns round to Uncle Ken who has his mouth wide ready to deliver a second homily even more unhelpful than the first to do with degrees of misfortune and a saying of Mr Newton’s for crying out loud when Agatha’s gloved hand seizes his forearm so tightly it actually aches and he finds himself looking into a pair of extremely excited eyes. He has often conjectured how two lumps of glistening gristle can take on such vivid and varying states of emotion and has reckoned it is as much to do with the surrounding variations of puckering and expanding muscle as the actual organs themselves – and I myself have ventured to peruse aloud this very question when pissed, considering carefully the eyes of Jason, whose said organs are generally twin vessels of bile and hatred, but getting nowhere, getting nowhere.
What, my dear?
That’s Uncle Ken. Cueing in his niece because it seems that otherwise she’ll just go on staring at him like one of those mad Bohemian types on opium. The growler jolts and sways through Regent Street. The word Liberty&Co passes just above Agatha’s straw four times before she answers. She does so in something like a rasp, or maybe a hiss.
Liberty&Co Liberty&Co Lib
erty&Co Liberty&Co I think I know what we must do, Uncle.
Why does putting it into italics make it hissy? God alone knows, so I’ll ask Him. I’ll ask God when I get Up There in the clouds and the station girders. The angels have pigeon-shit on their bottoms, they perch so much. The laundry bills in Heaven are outrageous. All that white. Sacred breadcrumbs, holy mangles. Agatha’ll get there – she won’t even stop to hover and bite her nails while they temporarily lose her papers and murmur in the back room, she’ll go straight up, she’ll leave St Michael whirling in her jet stream, there’ll be feathers flying, she’s half there already because the intensity of her goodness is incredible. It’s this intensity that’s gripping Uncle Kenneth’s arm right now as the growler leans over to take the kink past Air Street without clipping a delivery wagon stuffed to the canvas top with tea-chests actually full of tea for once. Isn’t that amazing? If I’m not careful the intensity of Agatha’s goodness will get us burn on the lens and every shot’ll have this phantom on it. Of Agatha. Of Agatha’s goodness.
That might be nice, thinking about it. Hey, she’s opening her mouth.
Suffering is partly degree, is it not, Uncle Ken?
Uncle Kenneth frowns a little and nods. He’s sure he’s just said something to that effect but maybe he didn’t actually get it out. Something about the swaying of a carriage gives him mild amnesia quite apart from the slight but perceptible sexual excitement the swaying motion and the bumpy padded leather of the seats imparts to one. He blinks to clear this thought and inserts a rose in the magic lantern of his head. Agatha is a rose. The rose is blooming. She’s blooming instantaneously, thinks Uncle Kenneth. It’s true. Something incredible is happening inside this shit-splattered horse-drawn cab nearly into Piccadilly Circus but not quite because there’s a jam. Virginia Woolf is on the pavement passing the cab right at this moment but Uncle Ken doesn’t see more than a hat with a feather beyond Agatha’s left ear – he certainly doesn’t see Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf doesn’t even notice the cab because first there is still a lot of horse-drawn traffic in 1913 and second she’s very uptight about her shopping because Virginia Woolf was the world’s most uptight shopper, it was hell shopping with her, I know this because I once had tea with Quentin Bell her nephew but he didn’t like the idea. My biopic idea didn’t grab him. It didn’t grab anyone. Virginia’s gone. It was a happy coincidence. If I was still keen on my biopic idea I’d hop out of this cab and follow her with a camcorder at the very least but I’ve grown up, I’m beyond fame and fortune, I’m serious, I’m really serious, I’m practising my swings at first light and at the setting of the sun and in my sleep.
