Still

by Adam Thorpe

  That it was frightfully blown up, and that it was all for art – and nothing, you know, outrageous, and that he was just a scapegoat.

  For what? asks Head of Household by Law. A scapegoat for what, dash it?

  I’m not sure, says Agatha in a rather uncertain manner, which is a big mistake. But I suppose—

  Suppose what? snaps the Mother of Mothers.

  I suppose that it was all – for all the usual reasons, Agatha says finally. Limp, huh? Really limp. An undefended rear. Roland in the Pyrenean pass not blowing his trumpet. Pearl Harbour in the sun, shirtless guys in dark glasses lounging on the decks, gazing up into the clear blue welkin of Hawaii, that Sunday morning feel-good feel as the face warms up. Me just nodding like an idiot as Todd Lazenby starts borrowing books out the library for the first time in years. Agatha has not examined this thing about the scapegoat. It’s confused in her mind with the idea that actually it was better being the scapegoat than the other goat, the one upon which the LORD’s lot fell and who was killed and had his blood sprinkled with a finger of the priest whose hands were full of incense beaten small until he threw it on the mercy seats and clouds covered everything and in went the blood. It was one of the Swiss governess’s favourite passages. Lo, she came for a year between Nanny Dreadnought and Ginger-Bits Hallam from some Alpine slope where the church was Zwinglian or something and had a penchant for the gory bits or the bits that if you did the same thing now you’d end up in a great deal of trouble. She’d always say the bit about the goat getting patted on the head and sent off into the wilderness by Aaron like it was the worst thing that could happen to you, yah? But Agatha reckoned that the goat didn’t really know it was stuffed full of the iniquities of the children of Israel, it just trotted out into the wilderness with the run of all the juicy little thistles, or whatever goats like to munch on. She ventured to say this once as Miss Schimff was tucking her up in the nursery but Miss Schimff really abreacted, her nostrils went all huge over the candle and her eyeballs rolled up to Heaven where they were given a polish and bowled back down again to crush Agatha against her pillow and her doll, the woman was actually sick in the head and became a branch of the Eighth Day Adventists or something. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Willo actually murmured something about it being jolly to be back home when they were up in the attic because anywhere’s better than Randle. A further possibility is that Willo will only become the real scapegoat if he’s sent out into the wilderness now, because getting sent back home is like getting sent back into the byre, not into the wilderness. This implies that if Madre and Papa do what was done to the second cousin once removed they will be visiting their iniquities on Willo’s head which opens up a whole new vista for Agatha, because up to now she’s never thought of her parents in terms of bearing iniquities, just that they could be a bit more like Amy’s parents who are frightfully decent and jolly and spend most of their time having musical soirées and talking about the latest books, instead of bickering or looking depressed or spending the whole afternoon lying down with a headache in Mother’s case. I’m sorry about having to have dredged all this up out of Agatha’s mind but, hey, this isn’t a soap opera, this is an extremely complex masterwork and extremely complex masterworks don’t treat people like most of us treat people normally, they treat them like their minds are more than a lump of sago, they turn them round and round in their hands saying O what a wondrous thing is man and then drop them on the floor usually, because life is not about dropping sago on the floor it’s about dropping glass, priceless glass, glass from Mesopotamia or sixteenth-century Venice or someplace, the only known example of, because each of us are only known examples of, and we need to remember that.

  OK?

  Don’t complain. You haven’t had a lot of Today’s Thought in this film. It’s just that Zelda and I passed in the corridor this morning and she had a different perfume. That’s really serious. She always had this kind of musk and patchouli fragrance before and now she’s into something they spray around shopping malls, the kind of stuff that gives artificial flowers black spot and if you’re under a paper bag it can be dangerous, I practically suffocated, but it’s OK, I have to know what it’s like because in a few reels’ time we’re gonna get a lot of gassing and guys in gas masks thinking the sound of their breath is the seaside. And I reckon that under this air freshener she’s the same person but unhappy. I think she’s unhappy. I’m freeze-framing the dining-room scene because what I have to say is really important, so Mrs Trevelyan’ll just have to lump being stuck with her hand in the air and her mouth open and wait a minute before she attacks out of the clear blue welkin of Hawaii or whatever.

  She’s definitely unhappy. Zelda, I mean. Her eyes had red rims, she didn’t look like she’d just blown in from the Garden of Eden as she usually does, she had a coffee or some such stain on her jacket. She wears a jacket these days with fairly powerful shoulders. Believe it or not she wore a black leather skirt last month with a zip down the side and it finished above her knees. It’s getting crazy. I left her an outaprint Pelican book on Zen Buddhism which I picked up in London last fall and it came back into my tray with In one blink of your eyes/You have missed seeing p.!!! written in red biro on the cover, which is not easy because the cover is the glossy kind biros slip over and it looked very ugly. It hurt me. Actually, I couldn’t understand it. I mean, I couldn’t work out what p. stood for. I thought about it all through my class on Bergman’s symbolism and it was a lousy class, I’ll admit. I kept saying The Seventh Peel and Piled Strawberries and Persona which was OK. Persona was OK I mean. I also said Alexandra’s Fanny instead of Fanny and Alexander which is a very in-joke between me and Ossy, remember m’old fruit? It was embarrassing. Dirty jokes are banned on pain of castration in this college, it’s like working in a Victorian convent or something except that Victorian convent girls didn’t wear desirable T-shirts without any engineering and shorts so short you wonder where the thighs are going to end. But these girls are really sensitive. I take a cold shower every morning in case their libido detectors start bleeping. Then when I got back home for me cuppa char I looked at it again under my Pinewood pup and realised. I’m talking about the book here. It was Zelda all over. Zelda the hyper-efficient librarian. In one blink of your eyes/You have missed seeing p. 111. I certainly had, honey. So, hey, I looked up page 111. Dried Dung. The verse appears under the heading Dried Dung. Hold the book open and keep the camera still, OK? (Ignore my thumb, I’m sorry, I tried to get Sean’s – Sean Connery’s – but he never takes bit-parts these days.)

  DRIED DUNG

  A monk asked Ummon: ‘What is Buddha?’ Ummon answered him: ‘Dried dung’.Mumon’s comment: It seems to me Ummon is so poor he cannot distinguish the taste of one food from another, or else he is too busy to write readable letters. Well, he tried to hold his school with dried dung. And his teaching was just as useless.

  Lightning flashes,

  Sparks shower.

  In one blink of your eyes

  You have missed seeing.

  His teaching was just as useless. Yeah, but whose? I’ve put the haiku down in my chapbook, after Zeffirelli. Zen or Zelda, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about movie-making, really. Zen and the Art of Making Better Movies. I was talking about Zelda in distress. Basically, as I see it, she’s losing her grip. Her core silence is getting filled up with dried dung. I think that’s what she is trying to tell me. She needs rescuing. But she’d never admit that she needs rescuing. I don’t think for more than about three hours that she’s saying I, Richard Thornby, am dried dung. The point about the storm and missing the lightning flash is interesting. I think it means that she was really in love with me but I missed it somehow, I didn’t do the right thing, we should have gotten married or whatever. Either that or this paper-bag-over-my-head business is the wrong attitude and Sir Lancelot would never have done that, he’d have kept his eyes wide open and seen how Arthur was away the whole time and Guinevere was sighing a whole lot and ga
zing at him over the drinking-horns – which Sir Lancelot did realise, and pretty soon got his hands under her mantle and plugged the holy in her grail. Cor blimey. People are so blahdy complicated, son. Like your muvver. Your muvver is so blahdy complicated. Thank Gawd I’m not. I’m simple. Oh you are, Dad, you are. You gettin’ cheeky again, Dick me boy? Probably, Dad. But I’m so complicated I’m not quite sure. Thwack. Complicated enuff for yer, son?

  Good old Pop. Down in Havant, now, in a Home for the Unbelievably Old. Havant and Houston. How can Havant and Houston exist on the same planet, for God’s sake? How can Dad and son be so blahdy different? Zelda. Stick to Zelda. That’d be nice. What do I do? Maybe the pornographic magazine thing was a mistake. Maybe I should just act diffident. It was a whole load easier when you could go out and kill dragons and green giants and stuff for ten years and then come back a bit dusty and browned with bow-legs and maybe a dented bascinet and some hauberk sores but basically intact and heroic and with a lot of Personal Development. Sir Lancelot acting diffident under his bascinet would make for a dull movie. Maybe I should challenge Dr Trash Loosebowels to a joust. Or a duel. The thing is, he’d probably take me up and come along with some serious armaments, this being Texas. I probably wouldn’t even be able to hold the pump-action wotsit up and I’d just get spattered all over the cacti. It wouldn’t be worth it. Hey, I’d rather act really diffident.

  Holy shit.

  I’ve just realised something. You haven’t met my grandfather yet. I mean, you have but only in a non-speaking part and he was lowering his head. You’ve been watching this thing for about five hours into the next millennium and you still haven’t met my grandfather. I’ve screwed this whole movie up. I should have been in the trenches by now making sure the special effects guys had got their act together for, wait for it, you’ve guessed, don’t go OTT about it ho ho, THE FIRST DAY OF THE SOMME but instead we’re still stuck in fucking 1913, we haven’t even finished dinner, I don’t know what I’ve been up to for the last five years. It was thinking about what my grandfather would’ve done in this situation vis-à-vis Zelda and Toerag Liceface that made me jerk. I literally jerked. It was like I’d got a golf ball in my mouth – which actually has practically happened several times here because of the crazy lie of the fifteenth green which I can piss on from out my study window and do so pretty often in the early hours which is why it’s been returfed so much not taking into account the fat-arses who can’t swing a club to save their lives. It’s incredible how I never realised before that we hadn’t got further than one day and how my grandfather’s still on hold, getting really bored in the caravan. It’s a nice well-stocked caravan of course, but he’s been waiting in there five years for crying out loud except for one stint standing under a lime tree for nine hours plus. There’s lots to read but I mean back numbers of Screen International and Alfa Romeo News and some toilet paperbacks with cinched pages along with Sylvia’s Continuity Monthly and Ossy’s Just Seventeen and Mike’s Practical Fishkeeping and Bosey’s International Broadcast Engineer and my Making Better Movies which I’ll have you know I contribute to under a pen name and have done so for many years can’t keep you going forever and a doi, can it? I think I owe it to him and to you to get his call sheet ticking. This means keeping my great-grandmother on freeze for quite a while but that’s OK, you won’t mind, there’s so much to get through and so much to explain.

  If she starts to thaw out, alert the army.

  Shaddap.

  I hope the toilets are not blocked, by the way. I think the millennium will start with blocked toilets from all the throwing up that’s bound to occur. I really hope you’re not suffering from that. Don’t start snoozing or snoodling too much, though. Maybe you should snort some ground coffee beans or something, because this is going to need some concentration. There’s so much to get through I’m going to have to step up the leisurely pace somewhat. Before we Sikorsky over to Randle, though, I have to tell you something I learned today because if you were in any doubt about what a complete jerk Dr Lazenby is please don’t be. I sat down right opposite him at lunch in the HCDVA canteen and we got talking. I didn’t even spill my coffee accidentally over his french fries or tell him all about the various hiccups with me old man’s artificial sphincter because this is my new policy. I’m being nice to him so he’ll eventually tell me how Zelda’s doing. My other policy is to sneak up on his – Christ, their – house at night and hook my fingers on the sill and listen in, but that gives me the creeps because look what happened to wotsername or was it the rabbit in Fatal Attraction (another of Tosh Lipflap’s fave clips, I haven’t actually seen the fucker) and I don’t want crickets in my pants. Anyway, we got onto books because I know he likes to flaunt his ignorance and I asked him what his favourite twentieth century novel was and he said In Ballast to the White Sea by Malcolm Lowry. Oh yeah, I said, I really like Lowry too, Under the Volcano of course, great portrait of a personal disintegration, yup, In Ballast to the White Sea, pretty good, but by no means one of his best. This was supposed to be my diffident put-down, really subtle, but he just laughed, the cunt. I could see his french fries mushed up in his mouth because he’s got no manners, he’s American remember, his grandfather stretched the severed vulvas of Apache women over his pommel probably. Anyway, when he’d quit spraying me with french fries out of his mouth I asked him what on earth was the matter in my David Niven voice, which made these coke-sniffers from my Cahiers seminar snigger at the next table. It’s not easy being diffident in Texas. Then about five desirable T-shirts came up and asked him something inane about their assignments and when they’d levered themselves off him and the air had stopped wobbling up and down and pretending to be a multiplex-brassière he leaned forward and said, Ricky, the thing is, you couldn’t have read it. My suit of diffidence was getting metal fatigue but I was still David Niven and when I’d got my oesophagus back into action I said, oh, really? No, he said, it was never published and the one and only manuscript was lost in a fire back in 1944. The way he said back in 1944 like it was the Golden Jubilee of Queen Adelaide or something was almost as irritating as the fact that I’d just made a prime-time berk of myself. So how come you say it’s your favourite book, smart-arse? I didn’t actually say smart-arse I said Todd but he’d have got the message, you wouldn’t believe how much emotional colouring you can give the name Todd, you can really cram the sub-text into that cute little holdall. Then I got this lecture for about three hours on Absences. I thought until halfway through that he was talking about abscesses because I don’t know if I told you my tinnitus is getting worse, I keep thinking I’m about to take off down a runway or sitting in a dentist’s waiting-room or something, but by the end I’d very much got the point, he wasn’t talking dental at all. I couldn’t really see him clearly because of the desirable T-shirts hanging off of his every word but I didn’t need to. The guy is a complete fraudster. He likes In Ballast to the White Sea because it is a complete not said, it is all intertext, it is a margin of margins, it is an event in metalanguage as the Big Bang is an event on radiowave receivers, it is a whisper of white noise, it eavesdrops on us but not us on it, it remembers nothing, it is what will have been done and does not allow the return of the same, it is ultimate rupture and total non-closure, he really talks like this when he gets going, Zelda used to echo it, I’m Granny in the back of the Morris, I think it’s a load of frightful twaddle, the guy’s a jerk, I wish I could figurally disrupt him with a loaded Magnum. OK. Nuff said. Giles Trevelyan’s call sheet. Tick tick tick.

  But I just have to add, which is the whole bleedin’ point, that as he was spraying me with this gunk I really did feel seriously homicidal towards him. It’s worrying. I’m actually a very unaggressive person to the point of being a nancy yeller-belly knicker-skidder, in the local parlance. Zelda once gave me Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway as a birthday present but I can’t handle reading it. You’ve no idea how my wrist trembled when I was filling in the form for that pornographic magazine. A lot of you wo
n’t find this easy to believe out there who knew me once. I left How to Deal with Difficult People in Zelda’s tray last month and actually ran out of the building like I’d left a bomb or something. Flippin ’eck, son. Your dad crawled up French beaches under withering fire an’ that. Yeah, yeah. That’s probably the whole problem. Never mind yer grandads, son. Never mind yer grandads.

  Mind yer grandad, OK?

  While we’re choppering over a lot of 1913 gorsey scrub where Heathrow now is and highwaymen once were or so they tell ha haaar you can take a stretch on the veranda and check out how the sun’s doing beyond the horizon curve. Because I reckon it must be the First Day fairly soon. As in First Light. As in It’s the Dawning of. That’s exciting. It’s not? Hey, you shouldn’t have drunk so much. Just because it’s Ricky Thornby Enterprises Inc. wot picks up the tab. There goes Greg and Maura’s inheritance. Dig in, dig in. Neither of them need it. Maura doesn’t speak to me anyway so she and the bloke wot stole her from me can fuck off. Hilda’ll manage. She’ll manage whatever, come rain or shine or whoever doesn’t deserve her. Good old Hil. My genes, my genes!

  Naah. Her great-great-great-aunt Agatha’s. Obviously.

  POETRY BREAK. I hear poetry’s very popular again in England, ever since that film a couple of years back, the one about funerals and marriages that grossed the mostest bucks in the history of British film-making hey wow. You think I’m out of touch? Actually, I was lucky. I picked it up on the flight over just a couple of months ago when I had to stay a night with my brother Des, it’s complicated, there was this funeral of the only nice aunt in the whole phalanx so I said over a pre-transmission Scotch, hey, maybe I can read some Auden in thick Scots and Muriel replied in her frostiest mode, the chapel is always well-heated, Dick, which would have been a great joke if she didn’t need her ears syringed. Des knew what I was on about. He’s my bruvver. We have things in common, unfortunately. He didn’t say anything, he just did something hypertechnical with the CD and there it was, the Scottish gay guy sobbing over Auden. We listened to the poetry in dead silence except for Des and Muriel’s dog, it’s a Mexican Hairless, it has complex stomach problems since it swallowed a barbecue stick at the Theydon Bois Summer Whoopee and that is NOT a joke, it’s called Cheryl, I call it The Thing from Stanmore Kennels in Smell-O-Vision which upsets Muriel so I keep saying it. The poetry continued. I blushed, I felt like a surf-bum in Switzerland, I wanted to bury my head in the carpet which is the easiest thing in the world at Des and Muriel’s because apart from anything else they were staring at me triumphantly, they’d made it onto my closed set of dropped quotes in leotards swanning around with long cigarette-holders swooning over daffodils and stuff and were saying howzat, prick? So after the first track I waved my hand around and it was very lucky, the film was dire rear but I’d waited for the credits as usual to see if any of the old gang were focus pullers or dandruff creators or whatever and a couple of the stars’ names had stuck so I poked my neck right out and said yeah, yeah, Andy told me he’d done a bit of Wystan. Actually, I don’t know Andy McDowell from Robert Burns but I got away with it because the doorbell rang and it was the phalanx led by Cousin Frank with the loud voice and colour-matching problem so Des and Muriel swallowed it like a peanut going down the wrong way, I hope it’s still mouldering in there.