Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Action.

  The Devil finally leaps in the dining-room. Pssst, milt, d’ye ken where he is? She finds her mouth is too dry to reply to the Chief Tempter. She shakes her head. The frilly detachable collar buffs her chin. The silver forks in her hand have smears. She’s only just noticed them. Brillo For A Brighter Finish. Turn out the young master’s room anyway, just in case queer uncle was having her on as is his wont. A finger in front of her face. It has a queer nail. It’s grown funny. It would, belonging to the Horned One. She can’t pray because she’s holding silver. Oh ay, he is a clever-clogs, that one. The finger is old and hairy. As old as sin. It points at a picture on the wall opposite, th’other side of table. The table is a very very very very long one. She put that in her letter to Ma and it weren’t a bull. It is a very very very very long one. It’s very very very very dark, too, and takes an age to bring up right. George the Devil-In-Pathetic-Disguise has a spatula in his hand, not a toasting-fork. The spatula is for measuring, it has notches in it, it’s laid between glass rims and edge of table, glass and napkin, plate and side-plate, candelabras and salt-cellars, pepper-pot and wee bronze figurine of Victory with the bubbies, and top and tip of the Devil’s dick when it’s saluting the Queen, as George jests inaccurately – I mean, everyone knows the Queen is dead and the Devil is nae able to get it up high enough, ho ho ho.

  That was lousy. Take it again. From the top. I’m a genius. Dicky Attenborough would be satisfied but Dicky Thornby ain’t Dicky Attenborough, OK?

  The Devil leaps on her weak spine in the dining-room. A finger obtrudes in colossal close-up. Beyond it in deep focus a picture of Mr Trevelyan a few years back in morning-suit and tie, albeit the same gold as the studs in the leather chair, Mr Trevelyan the Big Wallah in his office, pigskin-gloved hand on a bronze figurine of Victory with pert breasts, no grey hairs as yet. D’you ken where he is? Again. D’you ken where he is? Nope, again. D’you ken where he is? Pssst milt. You forgot the pssst milt. Keep the pssst milt. Spray her detachable collar and the exposed nape above it where the hair’s drawn tightly up. Rock and roll. Take twenty-eight or whatever it takes. Action. We’re losing the light outside. Get a move on. Pssst milt, d’you ken where he is? That’s great. Think about breakfast. Don’t act. Robert Bresson’s primary rule: actors get in the way. Pssst milt d’you ken where he is shake of head he grins oh the Devil’s smile he takes her chin in his hands and brings her ear up to his mouth her eyes are blank her mouth pouts under the pressure of the fingers on her chin snibbin’ in the front parlour he whispers so her ear floats away on a foaming wave snibbin’ an’ snortin’ in the front parlour aye gettin’ his wee pinkie to plug the gap o’ some downy doll-mop aye we ken it all we ken it all we keep our eyes skinned ha haaar.

  I’ll buy it up to doll-mop. The rest sounded like Long John Silver practising in the mirror.

  To plug the gap o’ some downy doll-mop. She swallows. Smears. Mr Trevelyan stares across and down at her over the table. He looks surprised. Chin released. Skin springs jauntily back to its usual position because she’s only thirteen. But spots. Bound to be spots. Soap and water. Pear’s For a Better Complexion. Don’t say nowt, by ’eck. Just nod. She nods. She lays the silver with him watching. Think about breakfast. He begins to measure. We ken it all, aye we ken it all. We keep our eyes skinned, aye. There’s a tremor in his voice. He sounds uncertain about something. I’ll tell you why. It’s because he doesn’t know this squit of a wench, maybe she’ll shop him, maybe she’ll keep it all to herself till one day she’ll write a letter to someone high and heavy and the ceiling will come down on his head. He moves a glass a quarter of an inch till it meets the notch. He glances at her from under his eyebrows. A squeeze and a squirt. That’s what he’d like aye out of her but these squits niver come on easy. Side-plate to candelabra. He stiffens underneath his breeches. He leans across for ha silver salver (totally insignificant, oh Christ) to Victory figurine and the edge of the table presses against his Jack Robinson. Aye aye, we ken it all, he sighs. He sounds sad, she thinks. At least he didn’t. He’s not the Devil any more. He was never the Devil. The Devil smells of soap and hair-oil and sulphur because you can’t hide that. Stink of sulphur. Can’t be hid. Gets under the nails. His nails smelt of cabbage and he didn’t. The Devil would’ve. He’s just a poor lost soul. When the Last Day comes and th’Trumpet blares he won’t even be cinders, won’t even be ash, nay, he won’t even be enough to prick wi’ a pin-’ead. She hears the echo the Prehistoric Methodist-or-whatever-it-is Chapel makes after Mr Dougal has blared. A fine echo. Never ever hold it by tangs. Smeared any road. There’s this part of her I don’t like, even through a scrim of dope. It’s all bunched up and knotted and even if you dropped acid on it it wouldn’t uncurl. It’s like a tumour, it’s a tumour of primordial bigotry that sits cruelly in a fair young lady, hey ho the wind and the rain and the rain it raineth every day in Worksop, that’s the trouble. Mr Dougal rubbed up against her brain until the tumour took seed and grew. It bleeds, it’s a bruise, it’s tough, it keeps her going because the fallen won’t even be cinders. She places the last fork and thinks about Mr Trevelyan doing something in the front parlour, sniffing and snorting or whatever it was, and playing with dolls. Or a mop. A doll out of a mop-head, like Sis’s. Funny folk, down here, Ma. Probably picking his nose. A gentleman never picks his nose. Dear Ma, Mr Trevelyan picks his nose (snibs, they call it) in the front parlour. She isn’t sure where the front parlour is in this queer house. Maybe it has summat to do wi’ them creaks. His nibbs snibs. A bubble of laughter escapes her mouth. She puts her hand to it. Oh ’eck. Mr MacPhearson pats his hand with the spatula like he’s about to welt her.

  Pat pat, pat pat.

  Moral worth is in the consequence. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be finally good. That is Mr James, not myself. I subscribe to it totally. The important word is proves. One has in one’s thoughts the ideal as well as the purposive. Good is an active sort of realising. It is not a marble statue. It is not an idol. It is more, let us say, an electrical current that lights a lamp, or rings the bell, or—

  Yah, yah. This is Uncle Kenneth sounding forth, or off, in the drawing-room. No one talks like this any more. Not many talked like this then. It’s because he lives alone, whispers Mrs Trevelyan. This is what stops Uncle Kenneth in mid-flow. Mrs Trevelyan is whispering to the cat. Mr Arthur Trevelyan, amazingly, is picking his nose. Hey, he’s doing it as a gentleman should, discreetly, pretending to examine one of a pair of spatterware vases on the dresser. Actually, Uncle Kenneth is incredibly nervous. This is why he’s talking so much. He’s talking about Pragmatism. He could have talked about freshwater fish or the history of Bolivian tin-mining for all anyone in this room cares. Anyone being his brother and his sister-in-law. Mr Arthur Trevelyan has cleared his left nostril and is turning, nodding his head as if he’s understood which he hasn’t because he’s still pooped after Ruthie’s little giddyup. The three of them are pretty smartly dressed but they’re not going out. This is how people dress for dinner EVERY DAY in 1913. Uncle Kenneth is as smart as he ever will be. Rumpled, spattered with ash, odd spats, crooked collar, but SMART, basically. He’s blinking through his spectacles at his sister-in-law. His brother goes hmmm. Then he says, and what about God? He has found that what about God can be interjected at almost any point in a conversation provided the content is of sufficient substance to take it as a cover for not having the faintest idea of the thread, hey ho. Hashish does amazing things to one’s intelligence, huh? Uncle Kenneth is on opium. Now and again. For his gout. Ah, he says. He points a finger in the air. Mr Trevelyan looks up as if he’s admiring Orville and Wright conducting a loop-the-loop. Very droll, very droll, 1913 humour. Quite quite alone, whispers Mrs Trevelyan to the cat, who purrs because she is pragmatic and no great judge of human character. Mr Kenneth Trevelyan takes a pretransmission sip of his sherry. He smacks his lips. He withdraws his finger from assertive service. What is this dope doing to me? He opens his mouth. God, he says.
A very pertinent point, Arty. Mrs T flinches. She can’t stand their nursery relationship. She closes her eyes as if she is enduring with enormous fortitude someone ramming a needle up her asshole. What a saint. The point being, says the Bore For Tonight, that as my friend Mr Ferdinand Schiller pointed out in his most recent lecture, Pragmatism cares for we humans more than it cares for an abstract, you see. Of course, I am not by any means stating that God is a mere abstract, but that our belief in Him most certainly is, if it is not rigorously examined AS AN IDEA. An idea with decent, or shall we say otherwise, consequences. He pauses. Mr Arthur Trevelyan is inserting his jiggamy into Ruthie’s thingummy all over again and jerks. Hm, I see, yes, yes indeed, indeed, Kenny old chap. Mrs Trevelyan is looking tragically at the carpet. For instance, continues Kenny old chap, if you were to call this little glass of mine an idea, then whatever use I make of it, or do not make of it, you see, will change the, ah, the meaning of it, of the idea, of the glass of sherry, d’you see? Beat. Two beats. But it’s still a bally glass, for all that! cries Mr Arthur Trevelyan, waving his own glass about and letting loose a few drops over the rim. Mrs Trevelyan shudders because she can’t stand and never has been able to stand the sound of her husband’s voice raised higher than a murmur. Mr Kenneth Trevelyan blinks benignly at his brother. In the Idealist sense, yes, says he. But our world is a frightfully mucky place, don’t you know, and full of stuff. And stuff says bunkum and fiddlesticks to Idealism. Bunkum and fiddlesticks! Where is Agatha? asks Mrs T. It is not like her to be late. Bunkum and fiddlesticks adds Uncle Kenneth very weakly, nervous again and really failing to disguise it. I’m sorry? Mrs T eyes him sharply. I still think the drift is dashed off course, says Mr Trevelyan. Dashed off course. He blinks determinedly. Or deterministically, because that’s how he likes to think of himself. A determined Christian determinist. Anything that’ll show up the flippy-flappy nature of his wife’s brain, or of women in general, as a net does a species of butterfly, or better a pin.

  Catch that one, PIG. Match that.

  OK buy it, I’m gonna hug my pillow.

  Tomorrow same time don’t be other than too early. Bring the Asprol, Julie. And the Brasso. I’ve never been more on form. Don’t forget the Brasso. The Brasso, OK? I can’t work without I can shave in my megaphone.

  Great days, great days ha haaar.

  A MATCH FLARES.

  Big deal. It’s George lighting the candles. It’s nobody’s birthday. Actually, today is my birthday, remember? Hope you liked the steam train cake. Yeah, it was supposed to be a steam train. Exact repro of the Flying Scotsman attempt by my father on my eighth birthday, the one and only time he made an effort, green icing all over the kitchen walls, the fact that it looked like the Blob from Venus was neither here nor there, I was warm and tingly all over because he’d made an effort, when I think of that day I think of my father as my father with green icing on his nose grinning at me and not some guy who’d shuffled on in place of my real one while my real one was circumnavigating the globe on a raft armed with nothing but a bow and arrow and a fishing rod and nineteen packs of Bisto gravy and the Meccano set I never had in case he got bored mid-Pacific. I hope you’ve sung Happy Birthday to Me. The day this particular match flares it was nobody’s birthday. Nobody’s birthday in Number 25 Albermarle Terrace, that is. Milly thinks of Lucifer when the match catches on the side of George’s shoe. Seriously she does. Those of you whose brains are irredeemably damaged by drink and drugs and automobile exhausts and nuclear leaks and pesticides and stuff will need to be told how matches used to be called lucifers or lucifer matches just as I used to be called Spotted or Spotted Dick. And also how matches are no longer called lucifers generally speaking in 1913 except by stone-deaf hags in remote little villages like Bracknell or Milton Keynes or certainly Zennor because Zennor is the last place on the list of the guy going around with his megaphone telling everybody to drop the lucifer and he’s slow and old because he’s been doing this since about 1871. He struck out from Abbas Combe in Somerset for Abberley way up near Droitwich and then down to Essex for Abberton and then back up near Droitwich again for another Abberton for crying out loud and then he looks at his list and groans because Abberwick’s Northumberland and huddled up in Abberwick with the wind moaning off the North Sea about men not being men any more as in the days of St Cuthbert as if anyone called Cuthbert could be anything but a wimp he orders another malt because Abbess Roding is south of Bishop’s Stortford and anyway he’s not sure anyone’s taking any notice and these are the days before tarmacadam and it was a bad winter but he has faith, he has a mission, he is systematic, he isn’t fooling around, he tosses back his malt and clutches his little lamp and wraps his cloak tight around him and out he goes into the freezing Northumberland air with his tinderbox dry and so stumps on through mud and storm and snow drawing a line through his names with a great quill, dreaming of the warm hearth and warmer ale in The Tinner’s Arms in Zennor, of the ancient sea-pickled Cornishmen striking their lucifers against hob-nails and hearth-stone and hearkening to his tales as they make bubbling noises in their clay pipes and laugh ha haaar.

  You might meet his ghost one day, on the road to Manderley or wherever he snuffed it from old age and exhaustion in 1915, with the Ws still to go. You know how many places beginning with W there are in the British Isles? Over 2,250. The last place he visited was Vulcan Bridge, Cheshire. Vulcan. God of fire. Fitting, huh? Hot pants of the Industrial Revolution, I presume, where England first gave the world the Judas kiss of Vulcan’s devotion. Sounds pretty unlikely, doesn’t it, even without the poetic flourish? Like it sounds pretty unlikely how this septic isle, this dearth of majesty, this bleat of Mars, this Antony-Eden-semis’ paradise, this abortion forced on Nature by some sod to breed insurance salesmen and the perfect lawn, this crappy bunch of inebriates in their little world, this old turd bobbing in the grisly sea, could once have stained so much of the planet in imperial red, as every classroom in 1913 was witness to on at least one wall, oilcloth maps bumping their rollers in a breeze, waking Henry Peterson from his poetic slumber and giving him another idea for a scathing pastiche (England & Other Versions, Gooseberry Press, 1958).

  George’s lit the candles. I’m sorry I’m just trying to impress I know, I know. I’ve got 2,250 takes to go and most of the story is not yet rolled and I’m running out of raw stock. You know why? Because Zelda fair lady of Zennor I don’t think (Duluth, her folks are from Duluth for crying out loud) is not around me to cajole and curmudgeon and cosh.

  Or cuff. Or click her fingers. Or kiss me on the nape and say, honey, it’s story time. We want the story. Then it was: honey, it’s narrative that should be foregrounded if you want to hold our attention and remember the use of the colons and the kiss was gone, it was a light touch of the fingers. Then it was the expectation of a touch which was unbearable because it prickled my neck and how’s it going in a really flat Duluth kind of voice as she passed with three volumes of Howard Hawks’s memoirs between her thumb and forefinger. It’s going fine, I’d say, it’s going fine. I’m foreplaying the narrative but not grinding yet. Then she’d cuff me and chuckle. Her chuckle was enough to get me leaping out my chair and pressing myself to her but I never did because there are video cameras in the HCDVA library just in case there’s any groping or profound intellectual enquiring going on in college time. Aw, shucks. Cor fuckaduck. Cockalorum I’ll be dandy. Wot, me be ’arf a crahn abaht it? Nail me in me cawfin on me old cock-sparrer I’ll be singin’ diddledee doi dow. I’m a chickaleary cove, when it cometh to it, cor blimey blow me dahn guv luverly toms at twice the price mate.

  Grope for Jesus, grope for Jesus. This is going through Milly’s head like one of those naff crawler captions on bigots’ TV. It’s what Mr John Dougal yells when he lights a lucifer. Then he blows it out. Like George blows his out. And grins. Dim the lights, Mike. More. OK. Merry blaze of fire George stoops to poke unnecessarily but it’s habit. Aye, we ken it all, squit. He sounds sad again, thinks Milly. He leans again
st the mantel stiffly in all senses of the word and pokes. Firelight picks out the sweat and grease on his face, the shadows of his boils move around like they want to get away. His eyes blaze. The sulphur is matches, thinks Milly. Ay, it is matches, it’s only the matches. She’s too nervous about dinner and the soup and not spilling the soup to think any deeper on George and Hell-mouth for the moment. She pats a napkin into a more erect shape. It flops. It’s like a rabbit’s ear in a picture she once saw in a toy shop. This makes her feel homesick for Worksop. Not really for Worksop, more for her lean childhood and the smell of her mother’s frayed apron-hem which was a mixture of brats’ saliva and boiled apples and raw herring. Roughly. The slap of her little bare feet on the damp cobbles of Worksop is interrupted by a growl from George. It’s not a growl, he’s hawking into the flames. They hiss and recover. He’s staring into them like he’d watch TV if it were around now. Hey, he’s a flames addict. In millions of homes around the country people are settling into an evening of flames gazing. Sure, they’re knitting and sewing and playing cards and chess and reading the newspaper and books and periodicals and getting plenty of exercise bobbing up and down to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony because each disc lasts about three minutes and there are twenty-two but mostly people will just be staring into the fire watching the coal flutter or the logs flap and thinking about things for themselves, rewinding the day for the edited highlights, musing on the future and the past and why beef always repeats on them and how his false teeth always click into place when he’s finished doing that acrobatic thing with them’n his tongue and whether there’ll be mutton on the menu tonight because the wife’s looking like the Lady of Shalott’s come round again for cocoa and whether Ta-Ta Ragtime at the Hippodrome is as saucy as Hullo Ragtime last year and why God allows children to fade away and debts to accumulate and earthquakes to happen in faraway places and the privy to foul each time Aunt Violet Maud stays the week and on the meaning of life. Now we have it all done for us. Now the soft flickering chattering glow’s just converged primaries signalled to a four by three aspect ratio out of C-format head drums turning and ticking slowly someplace faraway and writing onto our broccoli the gabber and gash and gunk that no one really wants in their own living-rooms but it’s better than musing deeply on the meaning of life, the fickleness of love, the random access of misery, the WYSIWYG of fortune, the accumulating zits of time on the epidermis of memory, or maybe it’s vice-versa, I can’t quote my own verse perfectly because I giggle too much, I blush and I giggle and I tear it up, I trash it, I watch TV instead because there are some great late-night movies on PBS.