Still

by Adam Thorpe

  I’m sorry, I lost the thread of my spool, the screen’s a white-out and the audience are putting on their Polaroids, a cheery groan goes up with the smoke, the projectionist takes his hand out of his trousers and doesn’t even smell it, he’s so keen to rectify the situation. With a razor.

  OK. Splice. Sorry about the hop, the razor was blunt, he’s only a projectionist.

  that there’s a view of the downs groany cheer near Hamilton Lodge with nothing but a few juniper bushes on it and a lot of sheep plus shepherd of which the bottom has definitely not yet been sounded and it’s hard to say why. Or why not. It certainly has nothing to do with grammar. It might have something to do with it being incredibly spacious and having a lot of sky thrown in, but that’s just too visual for my grandfather and me. I’m not a very visual person, it may surprise you to hear. This I think is the reason why I’ve never made complex masterworks before and why I feel basically lonely. I mean, the world is really into visuals. Cor blimey innit ’arf. When I said this to Zelda recently through my paper bag she couldn’t hear me so OK OK I took the bag off and repeated myself with my eyes closed. She said I’d been taking drugs and I said not the mind-bending ones just a lot of Aspirin for my broken heart cross my fingers hope to die which was a calculated risk and she sighed and said anyway Baudrillard got there before you concerning this visuals thing. I said Baudrillard could be a Swedish dental surgeon for all I’ve read the guy and the way you pronounce him. What’s interesting is that Zelda did not say anything about Zen Buddhism. Dr Tosh has entered her in more ways than three. How did I get onto this. I was doing really well. The game is doing really well too. Willoughby-Vern is being Whirled. This is pretty well a tradition. Willoughby-Vern has a monocle and no chin and can gallop in a straight line on his own land until the priceless chestnut drops dead under him from exhaustion, theoretically. I’m sorry if this guy sounds too clichéd but there we go, THIS IS THE TRUTH. Withery-Vermin gets whirled really spectacularly at about this stage of every game because it’s at about this stage of every game that he’s discovered trying to look like a thorn bush instead of playing up and playing the game and wheeeeeeee round and round and round goes W-V until his brain is separated into its constituent parts which makes very little difference to his thought-patterns because his thought-patterns are basically a series of parallel lines to do with horses and money and monocles and stuff and now he’s shrieking that he’d only stepped out because he was feeling dashed seedy. What his parallel lines have never picked up on is the possibility that his shrieks are what make whirling him so incredibly satisfying for the chaps and also that you can’t step out of bladderdash because theoretically the bladder-dash pitch has no limits and you can run with the bladder to Land’s End if you’re so inclined and the only reason Hastypudding (the original and authentic tinted-by-hand name of the field, dumbos) is churned to treacle is owing to the position of the ditches at either end. NOTICE I DID NOT SAY TRENCHES. I AM NOT ONE FOR OBVIOUS PARALLELS. MY MIDDLE NAME IS SUBTLE.

  I’m afraid to say that my grandfather really enjoys watching the Willoughby Whirl, it gives him a quite delicious thrill, it says so in his diary. HOWEVER, a week from now there’ll be an exception. Didn’t enjoy the WW today, too cruel to my mind even tho’ the rotter was grinning all the way through the cestus this morning. If this whole beastly episode makes me a better person then some good will come of it. I pray it does. Wheeeeee. While Willoughby-Vern’s bowels are turning to custard the bladder lands in the enemy ditch for the fifth time and it’s a dunk hooray dammit. Not that Giles my grandad could care a toss. The virgin damsel in the silk mantle is binding his wound while the nymphs and various assorted elfine spirits watch from the skirts of the greenery his shy fortitude. Willoughby-Vermin travels through the air as usual and vanishes. The victors return to the middle over where he was last seen. He’s there, actually, but he’s very well camouflaged. Maybe if he’d rolled around in the mud just before the First Day of the Somme instead of striding out in clean togs with his stupid swagger-stick and the Willoughby-Vern coat-of-arms stitched brightly on his tunic by his dear mama Lady Ursula Augusta Branswick Throckmordant Willoughby-Vern née Huck and known affectionately as Poppy for some really insider reason ironically he wouldn’t have had his head blown off. But there we are. The sole scion of the family, too. Hard cheese, Willers. Hard fucking cheese.

  OK, I’m not a better person. I’m not my grandfather. I didn’t watch my brother go through Hell and out the other side. Actually, if I’d watched Des go through Hell up the linden tree avenue I’d have probably been pretty happy. And vice-versa, speaking for him. Des is my brother, in case you’ve forgotten or just come in disgustingly late or don’t know me too well. Frankly, we would not have chosen to come into the world out of the same womb only three years apart and to share the same bedroom for most of our youth so that each night I went to sleep with the smell of Des’s socks up my discerning nostrils but there we go. Fate accompli. At least we only shared the same bed for seven years. Kids tended to in them days. Nuffink improper. Des did have this thing about his bottom, though. He’d show it to me every night and laugh. Eugh. He was always fundamentally thick, was Des. Something interesting’s happening on the pitch. Some of the guys are edging towards the school side. Nyah nyah I know why and you don’t. It’s a historical secret. It’s extinct. It’s gone down with stuff like fossing and pluved and a perspers to the Five-Mile Hump.

  Aw shucks, OK, I’ll let you in on the biggest secret of the century. The reason these guys are edging towards the school side instead of floundering after the ball on the wood side like the sporties and the thickies is because the ten-past-three bell is about to clang and bladderdash changes into hotbathdash because first come first in and the boiler has a limited capacity despite its titanic proportions. And we’re talking jugs and basins, remember, not high-pressure taps and showers and Jacuzzis and stuff. Now you know. Giles starts to edge over which is risky because edging over like this can get you a Guinea Whirl and that’s the whirliest and the whirler can grab anything, not just your right sleeve as in the Penny and either or both sleeves as in the Shilling, he can swing you round by your hair or your ankle or even by your testicles if they could stay on long enough. It’s called the Schoolside Forfeit and you have to weigh up having hot steamy water being nice to your limbs against the possibility of the worst Whirl in the world and actually that’s how the one bladderdash death occurred, his name was Julian Tremlett and he was really cold and so new he didn’t understand that hovering around North-West Thorn at five-past-three when the ball was flopping around South-East Thistle was running an incredible risk but he did have a dicky heart, it wasn’t really the fact that they spun him by his right foot so many times and he couldn’t keep his face up that long. I don’t know why I’m going into this thing so deeply, maybe it’s because I am probably the world expert on the game of bladderdash, I could start a Bladderdash Club in Houston and charge the earth and clinch the TV rights and it’d be like Eton fives and its crazy court, we’d have to recreate Hastypudding down to the thistle patches and the slippy ditches and the big dead rotten log across the middle and the kind of boggy miasma which has a lot to do with the school’s sewage outflow or so the legend went. Something tells me it could really take off, only the stadium would have to be ginormous because it’d have to have the oak wood for Outers and the school buildings for Schoolers or at the very least the school bathrooms because this edging towards schoolside thing is an intrinsic and very exciting part of bladderdash, don’t get me wrong, without this life risk involved the game’d be a whole lot less complex and it comes right at the end, it’d keep the stadium on its tippy-toes to the final ten-past-three clang which is right now ringing out and no one’s got a Guinea Whirl or as it’s called affectionately a Dead Tremlett, I’m sorry, I was really hoping you’d get to see one, it’s disappointing, they’re all floundering and sliding and loping out of it and off and my grandfather’s pathetic bit of edging over has got him
nowhere because he’s slipped, he’s going to be the last off apart from Willoughby-Vern who’s that walking silo over there looking for his monocle.

  I mean, to be really authentic you’d have to recreate the whole planet because bladderdash had no boundaries. Think about it. Bladderdash has no boundaries.

  What a concept.

  I cornered Todd the Backward Dot about this last week. He was stuck in this corner with a fire-extinguisher nozzle up his arse because I admit I was over-excited, I got too close, I didn’t give him enough space and the rubber plants grow really big here, I guess the corner couldn’t really handle him too. Hey easy, Rick, he kept saying. Easy, easy. I know it’s easy, Todd, you just gotta have nerve and an extremely large stadium. A stadium as big as our planet. Because the bladder can go anywhere. You can theoretically be whirled on the Graham Land peninsula or in the suburbs of Bujumbura. Though edging schoolside would be fairly tricky, what with the time-zones and the compass points to be got right. But it’s all feasible. Everything is feasible. Aim high, I say, aim high. Grab what you can. Make a buck out of a doe, Todd. He actually pushed me off in the end, he tore my paper bag which I’d forgotten to doff because we were only just outside the library, it was my favourite paper bag, I could sue him for assault and invading my personal development. Rat-arse.

  Giles Trevelyan is standing. I mean, he’s not moving. Even Lord Walking-Silo is half across the meadow and the meadow is between the treacle and Back Wall and not slippy. But Giles Trevelyan is standing in the treacle. I think I said before that because of the cesspool outflow or whatever the treacle stinks. You can’t show a stink in a movie except through reaction shots and Smell-O-Vision never took off – but since Giles is really adapted to stinks by now, Randle stinks I mean, and since this is 1913 and most places stink of horse dung and urine through the coal smoke anyway my grandfather is not too bothered by the whiffs so there’s no reaction shot available. I could cut one in like a noddy in an interview but there’s no one else on the pitch and anyway this is a complex masterwork, not a fake pile of glossed-up junk. You’re very lucky that I’m telling you about the smells as we go along because most movies don’t and that cuts out a great deal of the orfentic trouf, dunnit? I mean, eyes are just spectators, it’s the other four or maybe five but let’s not get too furry that go right in there and ravish, OK? Like for me the Blitz is basically brick powder on the tongue and the stink of burst gas pipes, the stink of burst gas pipes being extremely relevant to this heyar location shoot and you’ll see how in a minute, tight-rein the horses of impatience (shuddup, Henrik). OK, OK, I exaggerate: the pert finesse of Zelda’s profile particularly from the right side does something to my bowels even through the safety glass of the HCDVA library but I’m talking about calling up, not reading the moment. I’m talking Proust here, I’m talking dunked madeleines, I’m talking Pears soap lathering to my infancy and stuff and the fact that Giles Trevelyan is stood stock still in the middle of the bladderdash pitch is important because it’s not just the churned-up treacle he’ll be recalling pretty soon it’s the stink, the stink peculiar to the bladderdash pitch and ten times ten to the power of ten THE FRONT LINE TRENCHES. Holy Moses, I’ve just blown the Brian de Palma Prize for Discreet Allusion ’96. We’re circling Giles right now, he’s quite small and distant in the middle, Pierre has built an amphibious tracking rail like a Hornby-Dublo Set No. 2008 right round the pitch and we’re travelling on it wheeeee. It’s not a Whirl, but it kind of recalls one. It’s slow. There’s mist blowing up. The colour’s bleached right out to variations on the colours blue and brown. Giles in his cutaway breeches is stock still and small out there or in there I suppose and definitely sad and he must be fairly cold too. I’m cold. I can’t get used to this lousy climate, it’s like living at the bottom of the Atlantic in a cold current without a wet suit, it’s amazing anybody can sum up the zip to keep going, guv.

  I’m hanging on for the summer. I happen to know that the summer of 1914 will be twenty-four carat, you won’t see the hayricks for boaters and blazers and their impossibly lovely cousins in embroidered lawn squealing oh so prettily when they flit barefoot over some expired gramophone needles. Bet you didn’t, nyah nyah. You did? Oh. OK, but I’ll bet you half the cost of the total this party of mine you’re leeching off’s putting me back that you didn’t know that the spring of 1914 is going to be really wet and nasty and’ll nip most of the fruit-tree blossom dead just to give a very large clue but no one spots it.

  Around we go. It looks like the pitch with Giles shivering in the middle is turning but that’s an illusion. There’s so much mud it’s kicking up from the tracking wheels and spotting the lens, so what, it’s looking good. My brass megaphone’s saying so. It’s also telling my grandfather to hunch his shoulders a bit more. The rest of the guys have been sucked into the Back Wall. The mist’s creeping and it smells evil. Maybe it’s coming out of the ditches. If I was really naff I’d have a kind of echoey shells-exploding-and-bullets-whistling effect suggested quadrophonically and maybe music but I’m not, I hate quadrophonics and background music and I spent twelve years at the feet of M. Bresson and M. Bresson said to me once in about 1953 when my blackheads made smiling dangerous It is only recently that I have suppressed the music and have used silence as an element of composition and means to emotion. So this circling scene is in silence. If you have a crisp packet in your hands freeze. If there’s anyone insensitive enough to be yakking in the other room or on the veranda or even in this room for crying out loud throttle them somehow but silently. Thank you. We’ve nearly done a complete revolution. Giles is turning on the turntable of the world and his face is turned away and down and I haven’t the foggiest idea what he’s thinking, it doesn’t matter, what’s important is the image and holy shit he’s moved, he can’t hear me yelling, he can’t hear me even through the brass megaphone and Christ if he keeps to this trajectory we’ll go straight into him and he’s kind of walking and turning at the same time which makes me feel very giddy and I’m saying hold on to his face, we’re all phantoms, we’ll pass through each other and out the other side and maybe there’ll be this little ripple of a chill through the broader chill but basically that’s it, his face is coming really close, I think we’re going to meet, Gordon’s getting shake because he can’t believe he can be a phantom and I say there’s Mike over there with his funny little cardboard thing and he’s definitely a phantom just hold on to his face, you mean Mike’s face, no dope I mean the face that’s filling the screen right at this moment and is nicely streaked with black miasmic mud we’re in his head now, it’s really echoey, we’re inside the great whale of my grandfather’s head and it’ll be fine once we’ve found the eye sockets to look out of but right now it’s pretty jolty in here, it’s like that London trip in the growler we took two years back, I feel seasick, we’re heading over the meadow and because the tussocks are big he’s taking big steps, it’s dark, it’s booming, it’s trickling with something, things are really active in here, I know exactly what Pinocchio felt like when he found his poppa in the belly of the Great Shark, I know what he felt like in more ways than one, it must be the hashish but I’m kind of melting into my grandfather, it’s a wild and frightening trip this, I reckon I AM my grandfather, I’m walking towards Randle College for Gendemen’s back wall over a damp meadow and I’ve had a person transplant, I’ve overdosed on the diaries, I’ve not slept enough, I’ll hang in here until I find his tongue.

  On the other hand, mebbe I won’t.

  I’VE HAD A break. I just got back. I’m still glowing and leaving sand around the place because I have some impenetrable crevices on my custom-built body. Hi. I hope you got to the loo and had a great jive or whatever in the meantime, m’dears. I sold my Michelangelo sketch of a foot and flew to, wait for it, St Lucia. Zelda knew this. I made sure she knew it. I sent her postcards c/o Dr T. F. Lazenby Jnr with Wish You Weren’t Here and Not Thinking Of You and stuff. Hey, it was a great break. I’m cured. I’ve thrown away my paper bag,
I’m not jerking so much. He didn’t. Sorry, that was a bad cut, we jumped some, I’ve razored out some garbage about not meeting Derek Walcott, forgive me, every movie must have its flaw, it’s hop, it’s hair in the gate, it’s clock on the mantelpiece that wasn’t there a second ago, it’s bendy arrow, it’s wrong stuffed fucking lemur. Actually, I told Zelda in some of my cards how we were getting on fine, Derek and I. She’s a fan, she thinks he’s the Greatest Living Poet. I also told her that Paradise is overrated, here is better, you don’t have to lose your soul to reach it. Youch. When I wasn’t hunched over my picture postcards trying to juggle space for the amazing stamp without wiping out half my message I spent most of each day trying to leave my body to enjoy itself in the sea, on the sand, on the wicker bar-stool. Not a lot on the wicker bar-stool. Mostly flat out on the sand with my eyes closed. It was hard work but by the second week I’d got my eyelids to stop blinking too much when they were shut. That was the secret. I thought about things like surf and Zelda and surf and surf and my complex masterwork and Zelda’s chin and nose and eyes and breasts sometimes when no one was looking or I was rolled over on my tum-tum and surf and surf and surf and why the hell surf sounded like it was just about to stop. And then I’d wake up again and the surf’d be going on just the same and it was quite a relief. You see how difficult I found it to relax. But it got easier. I snorkelled and snorted and used the pool and stuff and didn’t drink too much. I relaxed totally on the last day or would have done if I hadn’t had a background atmospheric of nerves about the flight back and packing and unpacking and term starting up again and my program or pogrom as Rick the Wag heads it for the totally humourless stoodents who wouldn’t know what a pogrom was if it hit them in the face and hey, I’m getting worked up again, total relaxation is only available the day you’re on the flight back from it. Sayings of Thornby, Volume 28, Personal Development section.