by Adam Thorpe
I say, Willers, don’t get this opportunity every day, do we?
That was a murmur. Well done, Bosey. It was so private and murmury it didn’t even echo. We caught it clean. There’s something coarse now stroking my grandfather’s scrotum. I’m sorry about this. There’s no certificate on this movie but I know there might be children out there so all I can say is that the water is very opaque. Actually, it’s grey. The coarse thing is Kidlinton’s foot. Anatomically speaking it’s the big toe’s ball-joint. Fortunately Kidlinton opens one eye and so retracts everything into his half of the basin and his half of the basin’s water empties itself over his end, which is a frightful bore because, I don’t know how to say this, but the lowered water level exposes the top of my grandfather’s member. So there.
Gawdelpus.
Actually, I’ve had enough of this bathroom. It’s the echoes, partly. They’re really over-assertive. I reckon the echoes talk to each other at night, snigger and snort and stuff while the boys are sleeping away their youf. I can’t stop thinking of Kidlinton’s stumps. He’s really embarrassed and blushing and doesn’t know where to put himself and there’s only about two inches of grey water between himself and my equally embarrassed grandfather and all I can think of is these stumps. It’s probably because of the underwater scene with Kidlinton’s toe-joint. I mean, it’s really weird to think of it not being around in about a year’s time because Kidlinton joined up very fast. He joined up very fast because he writes poetry and is very sensitive and went to France on holiday in 1911 where he fell in love with a farmboy, surprise surprise. He was in France the second time about three weeks when his legs converted fairly instantly into stumps from the knee down, or up, or whatever. Go see the still. The guy in the trendy jacket with a fag and limp trouser-legs stuck in the Bath chair next to the toothy nurse is Kidlinton. The fact that he’s smiling is not because he’s happy. He ended up being trundled around the shrubbery every day by his mother and went alcoholic, which is not surprising. I’m sorry about this. I like to think he went alcoholic after Willoughby-Vern got his head blown off but I don’t think there was that much between the two, actually. The diaries reckon there was cash involved. I dunno, guv. This is really depressing. Go see the still anyway, people. Go get your dose of pro patria mori as a little teaser promo for the Big One Coming Up. I mean, it’s going to be the most orfentic recreation of ve Great War ever screened, innit? No holds barred, mate. No holds barred.
I’ve just got to get through some narrative thrust first and we’ll be there behind the old barbed-wire tralala. Don’t go. I mean, just go look at Legless (not my nickname, the world’s cruel, his cronies harshly laughed their way through the brittle twenties etc. etc. while he dribbled and belched) and come back. Forget the Hyde Park thing. There are no fountains spewing out Bollinger anywhere, that is an evil rumour, this is Great Britain, the fountains are probably not spewing anything out, the basins are full of fag-ends and lynched revellers and empty – I repeat empty – lager cans. This is the dawn of a new millennium. Legless we stumble into fresh fire and feel the something something about each something heel. You know what Henrik should have done? Started a Rent-a-Quote service. It’d have cost me a fortune. I hope his executors aren’t watching. Greg and Maura’s inheritance is not infinite. Nothing is infinite, these days. See ya in a mo, people. See ya the other side of my golf-game, at least, with Glenda my only friendly neighbour who’s got a great handicap. He’s visually challenged in one eye. Seriously. Oof again. Touch. Hey, my elbow’s out of practice, I hit my funny-bone on your breastplate, I need this little break, I do.
I HOPE YOU don’t think I’m making anything up. That would upset me. Kidlinton pays Willoughby-Vern to play around with him and clearly it was very exciting to bag a bath together. Hey, it’s all down in the diary. Trust me. Willoughby-Vern is hanging around the boiler, by the way. I don’t know if he was actually paid to get in the bath with Kidlinton or whether it was synchronicity. It’s amazing that anyone’d even think about getting in the bath with someone as soiled as Silo but maybe Kidders was into bad smells and fouled water too. Actually, I’m not bovvered. What does bovver me is that my grandfather found himself in a very awkward situation and that maybe the way he reacted, which was to think of his great-aunt in her adjustable spinal carriage in order to get his member at least below the water surface and then write all this up in his diary, means that at the time he was totally sane. What I mean is, he didn’t bottle anything up like my analyst claimed I always have done. Actually she didn’t say that, she didn’t say anything at all except hi and thank you when I signed her over my week’s wages so she could keep her couch in Leathero, she just nodded, but I could tell absolutely and without a shadow of a doubt that that’s what she was thinking all the way through my gabble, my really intimate gabble, and it made me really paranoiac to think she was thinking that. I had to stop after twelve years or I’d have gone crazy, I’d have started to think that she was doing this just for the money and that basically there was a world-wide professional conspiracy going. Whatever, when my grandfather got out the Beastly Thing Was Down and W-V got in and said ouch because the water was frigid but he had it to himself ‘cos Kidders was already rubbing himself awfully vigorously & for a v. long time by the window as if Roma te tenet et amor.
Hey, I’ve only just realised. That little Latin bit’s a palindrome – it says the same on rewind, Ossy. roma te tenet et amoR. See? Now that’s smart. Like Madam, I’m Adam or Able was I ere I saw Elba or Todd, evil-lived dot. My grandfather’s writing’s really neat, by the way, but I have problems reading it because he uses a bin taf I mean a fat nib in Welsh bom bom. I reckon the Latin’s ten out of ten, however. I’m not bothering with the Greek. This is the Dark Ages, OK? Actually, the real Dark Ages was quite a nice time. Houston was a prairie with little animals and some quiet Indians who knew them and the oil industry was just something you did in olive orchards around the Mediterranean and if you kept your head down you could spend your life growing oranges or illuminating books or selling unguents door to door between the forests. I could have snucked down nicely into the Dark Ages and maybe learnt Ancient Greek for a start-off. These are the Darker Ages by about fifty lumens. I mean, no one reads Ancient Greek any more and about thirty-five million people have died in wars since me mum danced in the street for the one and only time with Mr Glover the nice Air Raid Warden or with anyone else for that matter and that’s being on the safe side, I may have missed a million or two here and there but generally not here. Snug & raw was I ere I saw war & guns. Hey, we’d best be gittin’ on thar, Toto. Yip haieee. Crank that scenery roll till it smokes.
I hope Mrs T is not getting cramp with her hand up like that. I hope there aren’t too many draughts in the attic with William’s condition and so forth. It’s hell keeping everyone happy. They’re setting up in Barstow’s study but there’s very little room. They’re always moaning. They want me to build a set. They say I should’ve built the whole school like Fellini built a hydraulically-tipping ocean liner and Joffre built the teeming wretched unbelievably poverty-stricken slums of Calcutta but what do they think my budget is? Twenty million? I lost my golf-game, by the way. I always do with my neighbour. He’s not trying to direct a movie and teach pea-heads and study the art of homicide all at the same time while suffering the agonies of unrequited love. Or requited, I can never remember which. I have not made love to a single girl since Zelda picked Toadflax. Bastard Toadflax, to be botanically precise. BASTARD TOADFLAX, Thesium humifusum, prostrate to spreading, inflorescence terminal, flowers five-merous, calcareous grassland, local. Sounds bad, huh? I ringed it in my wild flower book and Xeroxed it and faxed it over to them a couple of days ago. He’s developed this tic. I don’t know whether he’s developed this tic because of my one-way correspondence or whether it’s just age or his wife getting at him from Vermont in every which way but it’s ugly. It involves one nostril, it’s difficult to explain, no two tics are the same, I should know, I’ve stud
ied my mirror for years. He’s cracking. Actually, the reason I lose my golf-game with my neighbour is because whenever I start to win I feel bad about his eye and his breakdown five years ago and his wife’s inoperative cancer and the fact that he’s fat and his underpants show and his daughter hasn’t kept in touch. As soon as I start thinking this he streaks ahead and I feel really sore but I guess I’m just too nice for this world, huh, guys? Weren’t you always saying I’d make a lousy Joseph Losey? Aeiough and other naughty noises. One step nearer and I fire. Fool – you can’t shoot a banana! It’s— BANG! BANG! Swine – it was loaded! Of course – you don’t think I’d threaten you with an unloaded banana? Now come on, tell me – where is Fred Nurk? I used to know them all off by heart like Greg knew Monty Python off by heart and drove me round the bend but you know what? Apart from the rent-a-quote stuff like Dear mother she was like one of the family or You’re acting suspiciously suspicious that’s all that’s left from all those times crouched at the wireless negotiating a ceasefire with my blackheads and then at the gramophone spraying my gin and wondering why Peter as in Sellers refused to work with me when I could do Bluebottle and Bloodnok like no one else could and word perfect too and even to his face at those great Chelsea parties, remember? Aeiough. Ha ha he he. The egg stains were holding my suit together. I’m not the Laramie man, I’m the Harry Lime-type man. Silly zither music. Holy shit, it’s all gone, the whole works, even The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-on-Sea has evaporated. Louisa broke my albums, no one in Texas laughed, Zelda laughed but only when I was trying to be serious. Nothing happened, but it happened suddenly. He’s fallen in the water. You filthy rotten swine, you. That was The Goon Show. Hey, the worst thing about being alone is laughing, because you start to worry.
OK, they’re ready. Action.
Giles Trevelyan goes up the back stairs and along the passage to Barstow’s study. Barstow is struggling with his fire and looks rather black. There’s no poker so Barstow takes Trevelyan’s toasting fork and deals for rummy. Sorry. Aeiough. This is school days but not the 1950s and me muvver bringing the Bovril and pretending to chuckle. I’m looking at me muvver’s father in 1913 watching his best friend poke the grate with a toasting fork at school but otherwise there’s no connection. Barstow exits to lavatory and scrubs his hands while my grandfather skewers a slice of bread on the fork and props it on the fender. Barstow comes back in and wedges a chair against the door. The film crew are down to the minimum but it’s tight. Mike is half out the window watching the sky, because it’s very changeable. Giles opens the tin of tongue. The porter bottle is hidden in the coal basket under a layer of coals and it’s taken out and wiped down with Giles’s handkerchief ’cos Barstow lost his up on the eleven yesterday. Detail, detail. Giles gets rather black and so the chair is removed from the door while he goes out and cleans himself up in lavatory. The film crew are muttering mutinous and fairly rude things which I ignore. They want everything easy and clean but I can’t oblige. My grandfather hears someone coming up the passage and thinks it might be Willoughby-Vern so he hides himself behind lavatory door. (It’s always called just lavatory in the diaries. Lave as in wash. Stick with me.) It isn’t. It’s Pantile’s fag. Pantile’s fag is pretty astonished to see Trevelyan behind the door and thinks he is about to be jumped. He’s also pretty. He grabs a plate and flees. Giles goes back to the study and this time Barsity produces a pair of laces and ties the handle to the fairly sturdy gas-pipe that runs along the ceiling from study to study for reasons of illumination. Slow pan of gas-pipe for those who’re not concentrating, tighten on string tied round it, tilt down string to handle it’s also tied round. GEDDIT? The porter goes down splendidly. Bosey’s getting cramp against the desk. There’s a knock on the door.
I say, chaps, are you in?
You know who it is. For latecomers – too bad. Ask the attractive person sitting next to you but whisper and don’t keep your hand on their knee for longer than is essential. Good luck. Invite me to the wedding but I’m allergic to duck. Seriously. I like ducks. My first word was quack because me muvver wheeled me through Enfield Town Park every day. We couldn’t throw them bread because this was the war and we ate right up what only a duck would eat in peacetime so they just quacked and quacked and I didn’t understand why we couldn’t satisfy them like the black marketeer’s kids were doing and basically I think all of my problems go back to that. I blame Hitler. My analyst opened her mouth at last and said that’s projection. She’s Jewish, by the way. Hitler wiped out her parents and grandparents and just about everybody else in her family and there was I going on about ducks in Enfield Town Park. It’s not surprising she broke her professional silence. Actually, she made me jump. Barstow chews his toast and winks at Trevels. Trevels has raised his hand to warn Barstow and kept it there, because the chair he’s on has a Devilish Creak. He has a mind to reply no, we’re not in, because the inbred halfwit would probably go away but he doesn’t reply at all. The door-handle moves timidly but makes no impression on their patent lock save a squeak from the gas pipe which is sagged anyway. I like this, it’s moving, my middle name’s Carol Reed, we’ve got tilt on the camera. Footsteps die down the corridor, even. The rest of the school is quiet because it’s hunched over its desk preparing for class and this makes my grandfather and his best pal both uneasy and stimulated so Barstow waves the elegiacs around in front of Trevels’s face but they make no impression. It seems Trevels has broken the deal and Barstow is getting aggrieved so my grandfather gives him the last slice of tongue.
What was Willers wanting with us, Trevels? Giles’s mouth is full of tongue so he can’t speak. I say, you didn’t tell him, did you? I’ll bet you made a wager. The guilty party swallows his tongue and washes it down with a swig of porter. Porter is not port, by the way. It’s beer. It’s really dark. It tastes like someone’s left their burnt toast in it for about a term. Trevels holds his mug out but Barstow puts his hand over the bottle. Buggering hell, says my grandfather. Elegiacs, says Barstow. I know something you don’t, Barsity, murmurs my grandfather. He belches. Barstow waves the miasma away but it doesn’t have many places to go to. Actually, with five members of the film crew crammed in here and Ossy’s underarms even with the window pulled up it’s pretty objectionable. Barstow has just asked what it is that Trevels knows that he doesn’t. Ah-ha, says Trevels. Ah-ha! echoes his pal. And this is before A. A. Milne got his act together. You’re a qualified scug, says Barstow. I think we can safely say that that was an affectionate piece of abuse, by the way. Trevels nods his head. Definitely mashed, he murmurs. Mashed, who’s mashed? Ah-ha, says my grandfather, waving his empty mug about and passing right through Mike’s waist which freaks him out because it’s like an omen. Who’s mashed on who, you dirty prawn? demands Barstow. My grandfather’s elbow or maybe it’s his thigh hurts and he discovers the two are connected. He removes one from the other and gets it right. He holds out his mug. The elbow was on his bladderdash bruise. That’s great continuity, Sylvia. Sylvia is currently negotiating some personal space with a gas-lamp bracket and a camera crane. Who the hell thought of bringing a camera crane in here for crying out loud? I did. OK. I wanted the crazy overhead angles apparently. Just watch yer heads and cor blimey stop moaning. Barstow’s pouring the rest of the porter into my grandpop’s mug. It’s swallowed. The mug won’t go past my grandpop’s teeth so he. removes it from his mouth and places it on the floor. The floor’s on hydraulics and tips up and down, up and down, and you thought this was a dime movie, huh? But he gets it there, he gets it there.
Kidders, he says. Barsity is clearly fairly piqued that the mug took the last of the porter for granted and he’s looking pale, too. Barstow, not the mug. As a matter of fact, the porter smells more like port than beer so maybe it’s kind of old and strong and wired-up like me. Somebody is playing squash. Hey, you can flick matches into one of the squash courts from Barstow’s study. The chicken-wire is pretty active so the play is not exactly top-hole, don’t you know. Mike’s st
ill out of the window and I reckon he’s watching the game but he’s not blocking the light so I’ll leave him, he’s not on camera for this one, he’s given precise instructions, he’s only got a few years to live, give him a break. Three shillings, says Barstow, it cost me three shillings. He’s staring at the fat but empty bottle on his desk. The name Kidders eventually makes it to his cerebellum and his face swivels back to his pal. It’s plump and sweaty, this face. It looks younger than it is. It could be about ten. On the other hand, it could be forty-two if the lens was fogged up, which it isn’t. It’s one of those faces which never go ripe. It kind of hangs around the ten-years-old phase while its hair goes grey and its eyebags baggy until suddenly it withers up completely around seventy-one and looks ninety. There are worse fates.
Kidders? ventures Barstow. Mirabile dictu, yes! cries my grandfather. Oh Christ more Latin. Mirabile dictu what, exactly? presses Barstow. My grandfather holds the chair together and blinks at Barsity. Kidders and Willoughby-Vermin, says my grandfather. A door slams way down the corridor but Barstow jumps anyway. And vice versa, adds my grandfather. Now he’s flicking at his tie for some reason. It’s blue with orange spots which are meant to be there and it’s silk. Barstow’s tie is regulation black and cotton. Giles Trevelyan is something of a daredevil, I’ll have you know. If you cross the Pod wearing a non-reg tie without being snaffled and hung up by your thumbs and lashed forty times or whatever the forfeit is you get a cad point, don’t you know. Giles Trevelyan has run up three points and only eighty lashes or whatever it is. That’s fairly good going. He’s flicking his hair back. There may be some kind of oil in it. He spreads his arms carefully in case the hands go flying and one passes through my waist this time. My kidneys chill.
