by Adam Thorpe
Chopper over the roofs of London, why not, we’re in a hurry, it’s only my salary a minute. Smoke, smoke. 1913 roofs of London with amazing telephone poles like combs with handles and someone’s severe hair loss, 1913 pigeons swaying in clouds around that crazy Column with the amputee on top, as my dad’d put it, who had no bloody respect for nuffink, still hasn’t, by Gad, traffic, terrible traffic, I mean really terrible, all complicated bits and pieces with horses on the end and buses holding on to their hundreds of hats, squiggly lanes, the flash of the river, no blocks on the docks but of bales and tea-chests, bless my socks no aeroplanes, not today anyway, they’ve only been going about ten years, vitamins less, seven according to my Cyclopaedia, bet you don’t know Who Discovered the Vitamin and, hey, you’re into your health, you’re into your rattly supplements and you don’t know the name of the guy who discovered the vitamin in 1906 because the really useful people in this world, the quiet and good ones, are never recalled except in dusty lessons on afternoons too long and hot to be real. Right, we’re nearly there, Biggles old boy. We’ll land in the square at the top of the street. Clip the branches, raise the leaves, flatten the grass, meet our shadow, a shadow unknown on this earth in 1913, a shadow out of H.G. Wells, we’re scaring the daylights out of that nanny with the perambulator, we’re blowing her dress right up and out, her straw hat’s flying, she’s shielding her face, she thinks it’s the end of the world or a very large fly, we’re floating over a 1913 lawn, I’m jumping out, I’m running at a crouch like they do in the cop films, I love it really, I’m James Bond in 1913, the very large fly swoops away to a dot, I swat it, the nanny has passed right out, I wave my smelling salts under her nose, she swears which really surprises me, but she’s OK, she knows who invented the mass motor car, she says Henry Ford, but she can’t put a name to the Man Who Discovered the Vitamin, to the quiet and good one, to the chap who brought nothing but the wealth of health to millions, so I tell her anyway, she has a nice smile.
Go look it up, potato-brains. Make it the first information byte of the new millennium. Get off on the right foot. Maybe he was a relation to the other one. I should’ve asked Louisa.
Here’s the house. Aw, hell. Just get straight in through the roof. We’re phantoms, aren’t we? I’ve got a quarter of a century to go before my very first crap pleased my mother no end because it meant I worked, I could join the human race, I wasn’t a rough guess.
Darkness. Blink it thinner. Mike, this is barely stirring the emulsion. The oil-lamp’s shielded by the joist. We’ve come in by the wrong side. Hey ho. Float straight over, cutaway joists and junk, not too close, aaaand stop. Pull focus. Rack down. William’s profile floating. Agatha submerged because she’s stepped away. They feel a chill. That’s us. We carry a draught around with us. Is it surprising? Given everything?
She hasn’t replied to his clever-socks question. That’s evasion. It’s like when Zelda asked me how’s the dramadoc going? and sniggered, like the autocue time. I evaded. I asked her that thing about vitamins, which she’s really into. She didn’t know. Dramadoc. That’s HIG. Blow him away, blow him away. Agatha’s wringing her hands. She has smooth soft hands because she never wrings anything else. She applies cream every evening as part of her toilet on her face and her hands and, I feel embarrassed saying this, her breasts. They tend to chafe against the starchy corset, they need it, especially the nipples. I feel shy about this because she’s my great-aunt and I’m in love with her in a totally phantasmal way and it’s nothing to do with the shapeliness of her bosom. She sighs. There’s a lot of sighing in this film.
Oh, Willo, I do so want to do the right thing. I do so want us all to be happy.
What a word, huh? Happy. The way Agatha says it, it’s like it’s got to be picked up with tongs. Sugar-tongs, coal-tongs, whatever. Don’t touch it with your fingers. Don’t dirty your dress. Happy flits through William’s mind like a dryad. I don’t personally think in terms of dryads and stuff but Willo does. He kind of believes in them, like Zelda believes in auras and I believe in Zelda. He’s not even chasing this dryad, he just watches her pass, because he’s accursed. It’s a great word, accursed. In the school carriage, bouncing around because Jefferies is the kind of driver who’d pass you on two wheels in a souped-up crap convertible if he was around now, my great-uncle decided this. He watched the trees and hedges flash past in the railway train and decided this even more decidedly. Things are so frightful and beastly even Nature and all her attendants will surely shrink from him. He might wander forever, forever accursed. Yes, he has always felt sorry for Marsyas. (Marsyas. Marsyas the satyr, dumbos. Don’t you know yer Ovid? Flayed by Apollo for cheek, for playing the pipes way way better than him, Charlie Parker versus the tin-whistle. Ye gods, what DO people learn these days? Sorry, Willo. Carry on.) Yes, he feels the same, he feels flayed – he feels as if Apollo’s minions have taken his skin off and pegged it to the tree just because he played the pipes a touch better than number one. Now he wants to tell Ags this but can’t summon up the energy. The main thing is not to keep thinking he’s about to wake up any minute in the dorm at Randle. It’s all real, dashed real. From the shake of his shoulder before early call to the sneaking up the stairs while Uncle Ken boomed at the new maid who’d emerged unexpectedly from the dining-room, it was most definitely and decidedly in veritas. Yet he’s numb. It’s exactly like the time he fell off his bicycle and got the bump on his head, the concussion, the queer noises when people spoke. I hope you noticed that thing about Milly. She’s flitted in and out but it’s important. The queerest thing is that although he can’t summon up the energy to move or to say much or even to feel frightened by what Ma and Padre might do when they find out despite Ags’s best efforts there’s a little excited elf in him running round and round and round. It’s like going really awfully fast on one’s bicycle down Parson’s Bottom even though one knows it’s terribly dangerous and could jolly well finish in a broken neck the other side of the bramble hedge. We know what he means. He’ll be blown away too soon to fall in love but if he had done, if my great-uncle had made it through just one more day or the war had finished just one day sooner he’d have gone on to fall in love and lived frightfully dangerously for as long as the madness was on him. You know what I mean – it’s love, it’s amour propre, it’s Michelle ma belle, it’s amor vincit omnia, it’s crazy, it’s thinking you’re the only one on the planet smitten like this. Zelda tells me there was this guy who loved her so much he put a paper bag over his head each time he came into college in case he saw her because she’d said definitely no way, Otis. How did he not bump into things? I enquired, circling her navel. She reckoned he had pin-holes or something. He taught TV studio lighting. He lost his job. That’s living dangerously, guv. Ho yes. I bin my paper bags the second I empty them. I’m a coward. I’m into safety. I don’t want my head where the soft fruit was. Hey, William’s head’s shifted. Look at it. In about three years’ time it’ll be wearing a stupid tin hat and it’ll have barely stopped growing, it’ll be tender, it’ll be soft and the air’ll be full of stuff trying to pulp it. Right now it’s full of thoughts that are pretty bruised. The fact that he doesn’t reply to Agatha’s sugar-tongs makes her unhappy. She looks away, down to where there’s just the sneakiest slit of light making it through the door but not much further. There’s a smell of oil from the oil-lamp. London is rumbling outside. It’s a different rumble to the rumble you can hear right now in the early hours because I’m presuming, guv, that even though everyone’s partying and stuff the rumble will be carrying on, it never stops, the day it stops something really terrible will have happened, like mass extinction of the human species, or maybe something good, like totally silent motor vehicles – but even with totally silent motor vehicles there’ll be the movement of people over pavements and people jabbering at each other or ringing each other up or whistling while they’re building things and generally shoving stuff around because the rumble is not just traffic it’s the mulch of every sound that’s m
ade, it’s brown noise, it’s compost, it breaks down even a baby’s scream or the monkeys in the zoo or Zelda grinding her coffee or me grinding with Zelda or HIG practising his heckelphone, for God’s sake. He plays the heckelphone. He plays it really well, apparently. I don’t even know what a fucking heckelphone is.
I was going on about this 1913 rumble. Bosey is saying something to me: he’s sticking his mike out through the roof and saying the audio signals are different because this rumble is mainly hooves, there’s something bumpier about this rumble. I say, yeah, Bosey, like it’s not quite mulched down, like the hooves are a whole load of brambles that don’t quite mulch down properly. He’s wearing his cans, I’m goldfishing. But, yup, I can believe it. It was shattering down there, my ears practically bled, it was cast iron striking stone to the power of ten. Roll on Mr Whoever Discovered the Pneumatic Tyre. I’m so ignorant.
The rumble is a sea lapping at the house, thinks Agatha. Great thought. The flood lapping at the ark. The ark is full of beasts saved from the waves. Nice beasts, dangerous beasts. Stupendously dangerous beasts. Oh, gosh. Devouring types of beasts. The sea is full of fish. Sea-serpents, monsters, aquatic dragons. They’ve found skeletons, fossils, terrible lizards with teeth the size of perambulators. Dinosaurs. Giles draws them. Tyrranosaurus Rex. Brontosaurus something. Uncle Kenneth has pictures of dinosaurs for his kinetoscope. They wobble and loom above the aspidistra, snake up onto the ceiling, shiver and gnash and wail. Maybe not wail, but she used to imagine them wail. She used to gnaw her ribbons and sit tight. Scaredy-waredy. There are so many things to be scared of: injury, disease, mental affliction. Incredible. I’m saying incredible, not her. It’s because I’m reflecting, I’m reflecting how in a year’s time she’ll be handling broken bodies and won’t think anything of it. She’ll be suturing and bathing and unpeeling pussed lint and won’t think anything of it. She’ll be feeling the knobbles of split bones and the warmth of vomit over her fingers and won’t think anything of it. She’ll see shit in a man’s trousers and a penis go up when she swabs around it and won’t think anything of it. War will get her onto a set that suits her, suits the kind of person she is, because right now she doesn’t ken who or what she is. She just flaps her hands helplessly and reads and sews and waits. That’s why she’s kind of excited now. She’s made for better things, tumtitty-tum. The thunder sheet’s in action, there are villains to be squashed, she’s got her stage paint on, she’s screwing up her courage, her hand is at her forehead but it’s her doing the saving, not being saved. Actually, she’s got it all worked out.
