Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Willers is mashed on Kidders, and vice versa, he says. Long live good King George until his due demise. I say, hisses Barstow. So do we all, says my grandfather. The bell starts donging. I don’t know what this bell’s for, I’m consulting my timetable, it’s very difficult to keep track. It appears to be the four thirty-five for tea and sausages in Hall. I’ll give it a miss. Both pals are looking at the door but neither make a break for it. There’s either a lot of boys running down the passage or Bosey’s set the speakers up very cleverly. Now there’s silence and no hiss. It must have been boys. The squash has stopped. We can pretty well assume that the whole of Randle College is in Hall hunched over their tea and sausages with the exception of these two. Trevels has his eyes closed and Barstow has his mouth open. The eyes open and the mouth closes. Barstow’s chair creaks. It’s a great creak. Creaks are some of the most difficult things to get right. I say, Trevels, how the hell do you know? I hope you’re not too shocked by a vicar’s son saying hell and stuff, but there we go. He gets it from his father. His father is not a hallooing-over-the-gate type of vicar but a cantankerous old bastard with a sherry problem and a rectory so big and dark Mrs Barstow gives him a ball of wool if he has to go off up to the lavatory or someplace but if you go into Little Haddlesdon and so much as hint that maybe a fresh young face in the parish would get God’s purpose going a tad more rapidly the little old maenads in crêpe hats there’d tear you into pieces and eat you.

  How do you know, Trevels? re-enquires the vicar’s only son of his errant pal. Dum-dum steep our brows in slumber’s something balm, nor harken what the spirit brings, something joy and calm, why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things! Sorry about the Tennyson bit but this is what is currently rolling through Trevels’s cerebellum and he’s got his eyes re-closed. Dash it I must learn it by heart because it really has got life to a T’s now rolling through, hand-cranked by Enorches the betesticled who’s giggling under his grappa-leaves. His knee is being unscrewed. My grandfather’s, I mean, not Enorches the betesticled’s. And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep, he hears himself murmur about two seconds after he does. My grandfather again, not Enorches the well-hung. I say there, off my knee! also emerges but frightfully loudly and it wakes him up. Barstow’s hand is on his knee. He claps his own upon it. The devil you know, says Barstow, which translated into fin de sickle lingo means you bloody well don’t. ’Cos that’s what poppies do, says my grandad the adolescent prig. You’re allowed to be a prig when you’re adolescent, OK? If you’re not really irritating at the age of sixteen you’ll be really irritating later, when it matters. Des was really sensible at sixteen. So was Maura my daughter who’s not kept in touch and married a very unpleasant person called John-In-Insurance who thinks I’m an Unacceptable Risk. So there. They go to sleep, continues Maura’s great-grandfather who would definitely have been an unacceptable risk. Come to think of it, John-In-Insurance would have had a lean time if he’d been active at this period because a year from now there are going to be a lot of healthy young very low-risk men converted overnight into very unacceptable ones. John-In-Insurance would have been sweating bricks and Maura would’ve had to sell the Toyota Land Cruiser with the buffalo guard because there are a lot of buffaloes in Stoke Poges. What a nice thought.

  They slumber on craggy ledges without falling off, continues shortly-to-be-unacceptable risk. That’s deuced clever of them, I say! He starts falling off. He’s not a poppy, obviously. He’s certainly not a poppy as you or I understand it because poppies blowing in a field of corn do not mean the same thing to my grandfather at this juncture as they do to you or me unless you’ve been sealed off all your life in a loop tape of, I dunno, Dallas re-runs. Or happen to be one of my new students which comes to the same muchness. I mean, most of my noo stoodents only think a lot of Jews were gassed in the follow-up because Spielberg told them so. I ask you. My grandfather hangs on to his straw hat because Barstow is pulling at his roots which is unfair. He hits the floor and the chair hits him and his straw hat goes rolling off through Bosey’s legs. Barstow is now taking the poppy’s shoes off. Giles Trevelyan studies the chair’s canework microscopically. His uprooted feet are being tickled but the giggles are Barstow’s very nearby. It has to be very nearby because the mean dimensions of this room cannot be exaggerated and one’s feet are quite near the rest of one’s body, when you think about it. Sylvia is stretching a little now the chair is down. Mike has fallen out of the window or maybe he’s come in and is trapped behind Gordon the big Grip. The camera cane swings across an inch off from the top of my head and I suspect intimidation. I’m used to it. I intimidate myself. I won’t go into this now. There’s no time. I’d need at least two-score years and sixteen to go into it.

  Barstow looks as if he’s about to say I feel fucking awful. Actually he says I feel hugely seedy but it comes to the same thing. Trevels suggests a cocoa. Wow, an amazing moment of sobriety which can happen when one is completely pissed, but since there’s no response from Barsity he reckons he just might have imagined he said it, or not really said it properly – which is true, because no way can a hum be how about a cocoa, old chap? This reminds my grandfather of relieving oneself in a dream only to wake and find one’s member stiff as a cucumber and heaving oneself out of bed and stumbling through the cold and the dark and releasing oneself into the pissoir with tremendous relief only to find oneself marshalled halfway through into the ranks of the Emperor Napoleon’s guard of honour still bursting and cursing one’s ill fortune because one hasn’t been anywhere but the other side of one’s pillow and Boney is on his way sporting a rhinoceros’s horn and it’s really Ionescoesque. Not that my grandfather thinks it’s Ionescoesque, I’m not that careless, he probably thinks it’s burlesqueesque or whatever if he could manage to say it without his head falling off. Burlesqueesque or not, he’s pretty much that way now bladder-wise. If someone could attach a rubber pipe he’d do it out of the window. A Patent Piss-Pipe for Gentlemen in Need (accompanying ink sketch – seriously). Made out of the Finest India Rubber, new design This Season, Guaranteed to withstand the heaviest Usage, light, fast, cleanly, compact, elegant, comfortable, Adjustable to any Size, durable, easy to Learn, no slippage, no Stooping. Sound familiar? Ddot takes the smallest size, by the way. Don’t ask me how I know. Hey, I’m saying nothing. I’m just commenting. I was told by a school pal in about 1953 that we were all the same dimension when fully up. I harboured this illusion through thick and thin, despite some fairly nasty observations from women I fancied were hung up or trying to be Bette Davis at the time. Now I know we aren’t. There are legends around. So be it. At least Ddot and I share something, except that I’m not screwed up about it. I think he is. When Zelda comes back to me chastened I won’t mention it at first. When I do we’ll laugh. Laugh and laugh. That’ll be nice. On the beach in Antigua or someplace. Cor blimey. Gawdelpus. Vat’ll be ve day.

  I say, Barstow.

  Do you?

  You haven’t got a piss-pot, have you?

  ’Course not.

  Would you mind awfully, old fellow, if I used the empty bottle?

  Yes, actually.

  Thanks, Barsity.

  He lifts the chair off his face. The chair falls onto its side and Gordon says fuck, but it doesn’t record because we’re phantasmal presences and phantasmal presences don’t record. My grandfather sits up. Would you mind closing your eyes out there because this is a fairly undignified action that’s about to take place. My grandfather begins to undo his fly and after about half an hour or maybe five minutes of giant buttons he’s done it. He kneels. He the full bottle back on the floor. Sorry about the jump-cut. It’s just that watching my grandfather piss into a bottle for several minutes is not very interesting so I got the razor out. I could have left it and just put my hand in front of the projector like Mr Malim used to do in the Southgate ABC whenever two mouths approached each other it was said but I may not be amongst you, who knows, who knows what tomorrow will bring let alone th
e dawn of the new millennium.

  I say, you beastly scug, you’ve hit Demosthenes!

  That was Barstow. He’s been practising that line in the caravan for days. He’d tend to over-emote it, make it intentional and personal. I kept saying to him, I don’t want you to act, Fatty. I wasn’t being offensive, I’ve got the young Fatty Arbuckle on this one. Charlie Laughton couldn’t make it. I don’t want you to act, the thing that matters is not what you show me but what you hide from me and, above all, what you do not suspect is in you. Anyway, the line’s fine now. Demosthenes is his little tin soldier in Frenchie uniform which gets thrown across the room fairly often, particularly during a Greek prep. You really are a filthy scug, Trevelyan. Barstow’s looking very pasty, actually. He picks up Demosthenes by his hat and waves it around. Trevelyan’s buttoning up his flies while still prostrate. Demosthenes is wiped on his trousers. Bosey was hit, too, but it went right through him. Mike is definitely stuck behind Gordon, telling him to get more tilt on the camera because Mike has watched The Third Man seventy-one times, for crying out loud. Gordon and Mike have a complex relationship. It ought to be symbiotic but it’s not, it’s tricky, it’s like trying to sweep maple leaves into a perfect circle with someone else holding the broom. Grandpa Trevelyan stands up, kind of. In half an hour he will be exploring the functions of angles in Geometry so maybe he’s started early. They might even do some rotating. Either way it’d be pretty nasty in his condition. I’m also worried about Barstow. He looks like someone’s thrown a bag of non-wholemeal flour in his face. He’s putting Demosthenes back on his desk but slowly. Trevelyan is trying to work out how to rotate or maybe transform the chair so one can sit on it, but it’s tough. There are a lot of mathematics involved, a lot of squiggles and arrows and indices. I say, Barsity, he says, did I mention cocoa a minute ago? No, says Barsity. Ah, I could have shworn I did. The chair is upright with some asterisks and arrows around it. Trevels shakes his head and after holding his ears on he transforms his body into a sitting position on the chair. He doesn’t need to attend Geometry. He knows it all. He’s beginning to think maybe the porter wasn’t such a frightfully good idea after all. Mind you, he’s not eaten much today, it was salt beef and tapioca again for lunch, he’s thinking how he’d better break into his herrings over in his study and then cadge a ciggie off Lyons or some fellow. The door-handle is moving up and down all by itself. Or he could purchase some fags off Jack the Lats, who cleans the school conveniences and does a roaring trade in Woodbines if you don’t mind the marks of his calling on them. Remarkable, how door-handles can do that. I have to point out, by the way, that it’s not one of us trying to get out. Or trying to get in. I know who it is. If you’re thinking it’s Willoughby-Vern, forget it. It’s much much worse/but it’s not Holloway-Purse. The gas-pipe is having a tough time up there, because the string is 1913-tough and well tied. People knew about knots in those days. The pipe’s kind of bouncing up and down and making a weird noise all along its length but the boys in the other studies are used to it making weird noises, like they’re used to the little farts of gas you get when lights are turned out at night and the psychotics are getting ready under their blankets for whatever but it might just involve you, old chap.

  Three guesses what Barstow’s doing. No. No. No. Bad luck. You might have got a free copy of my Maurice Barrymore poster. I could’ve bleached out the coffee stain on his tuxedo and ironed the paper because his legs have got sag, it’s been in my toilet for ten years, it smells of something pretending to be lavender. He’s playing Captain Swift as usual. Zelda hated the centre parting and the arrogance. I said it’s not arrogance it’s swagger, there’s a difference – he was born in a dungeon on the Jumna River, the dungeon had a great view of the Taj Mahal, women fell over their crinolines trying to touch him, he toured Texas where surprise surprise a sheriff practically shot him dead in 1878 – he was a soak and extremely famous and completely forgotten except that his son was John Barrymore. You mean you’ve never seen John Barrymore? Corluvaduck. Me eyes are saucers. You mean you’ve never seen John Barrymore in Beloved Rogue catapulting into the medieval boudoir wiv a fevver in his cap or even in Grand Hotel with that Greta wotsit y’know GARBO for crying out loud? You mean you don’t know how this idol of idols and star of stars became a bit-parter of bit-parters and a tosspot of tosspots, hollering in the hollow rooms of his mansion for the next Jack Daniels and maybe a chair? They don’t make them sink like that any more. Barstow’s snoring. Maurice stays in my toilet. My grandfather’s got hiccups. The door-handle’s causing the gas-pipe a simple engineering problem, as Howard Hughes said of Jane Russell’s brassière. (Hey, I quoted this in my class on Great Screen Idols last week. I’m up in front of the tribunal tomorrow. I think I might just get away with my car, my home, and my job, but I’ll probably have to wear this little yellow S sewn on my lapel for about three weeks. I’m smiling a lot at Vyshinsky, alias the Vice-Principal, alias Dr Smith. He chairs the tribunal. It doesn’t help. I say hi Vyshinsky and smile but he doesn’t get the joke. He’s never heard of Vyshinsky. He probably thinks the Great Purge is some kind of laxative. No one likes to laugh here. Not at my jokes, anyway. People disappear after laughing at my jokes. I have to use the stairs and with my heart-condition because it’s dangerous to go in the elevator with a lone woman and there are lots of lone women. They think if you get in the elevator with them it’s just to snuck up close but hey, the elevator is small, you can’t help invading their personal body space even if you’re pressed up flat against the mirror on the far side and if you actually try to say how nice the weather is or something between floors they scream. I’m serious. The worst thing that can happen is that the elevator gets stuck. It happened to a new guy on the staff with one of my students and although she wears a desirable T-shirt she’s really nervous and it got stuck for an hour. He was up in front of Vyshinsky and the others and really went through it. Apparently all he said into the blackness was hey, I’m a claustrophobe, how about you? with a kind of nervous snigger. Can you imagine? The stoopid idiot. I’ll let you know how I get on.)

  My grandfather looks at the gas-pipe and holds his breath. Because of the hiccups, not the gas-pipe – hey, my grandfather is not that anticipatory right at the moment. The section of the gas-pipe with the biggest problems pops down for a visit as the door opens and John Barrymore practically falls in. I finally got John to play Hubert, Hubert Lightfoot. I thought it would be kind of interesting to have the young John Barrymore play a villain. Anyway, he looks the part. Oh my God, he says, oh my God. What an amazing actor, really. Probably the best Hamlet ever. I’m honoured, guv. Hubert Lightfoot stumbles across to the window and grabs the sash-cord and practically guillotines himself. He yanks the upper section of window back up and takes a breath of ungassed air. Because he’s stepped on Barstow’s toe, Barstow jerks awake. Silly fools, cries Hubert. Barstow says Oh my God and thinks he’s having a nightmare because Hubert Lightfoot is in his study and he meaning himself has just burped. Trevelyan’s thinking how beastly fuggish the air is. Too right. I didn’t think Lightfoot would take so long to arrive. Papers rustle on the desk by the wide open window as if someone’s doing a prep. I thought you’d like that detail. The room feels really crowded again. Bloody fools, cries Lightfoot once more, what the deuce are you up to? Since Barstow is the one being addressed, Barstow makes a small high sound at the back of his throat. He very much wants to go to the toilet suddenly. Lightfoot is Captain of House and has a togy with five knots in it under his waistcoat and Barstow’s bottom is getting really scared. He doesn’t want his bottom to let him down, but there’s nothing much he can do about it. The porter bottle is on the floor by his feet. We’re all being really careful not to knock it over because none of us want piss on our shoes but Barstow doesn’t try to secrete it. He’s given up. His only hope is that he gets the togy from Lightfoot instead of Holloway-Purse because Lightfoot doesn’t break the skin too much. Trevels is pointing to his mouth to indicate that he can’t sp
eak because he’s holding his breath. His face is pretty purple. Hubert Lightfoot is looking up at the bit of the gas-pipe where a gas-pipe should have been. It’s what Ddot the Smallest Size would call a disrupted figuration, but Hubert doesn’t call it that. Instead, being John Barrymore the silver-screen matinée idol and man of action, he stuffs his handkerchief into the open end of the pipe until the hiss dies down. Then he looks at the other open end and turns and whips off Barstow’s tie a trifle brusquely and plugs that one too. My grandfather bursts into the land of the living and raises a finger.

  I don’t think that’s strictly necessary, old chap.

  Barstow picks himself up off the floor and checks his throat’s still roughly where his collar was until a few seconds ago. Lightfoot glowers at my grandfather. It’s a fantastic glower, a classic Barrymore glower, hardly a facial muscle working except for the eyebrows but it gets Giles’s hiccups going again. That thing about the tie not being necessary was fairly impressive given the state of his brain but also fairly unimpressive given the state of the situation. It gets worse. A lot worse, actually. Stick with me. Lightfoot will have a pencil moustache in a year’s time but right now you’ll just have to imagine one because remember he’s still at school. His upper lip curls up and then stretches out into a fairly unpleasant sneer, as sneers go.