by Adam Thorpe
Oh, fuck it. I’m so embarrassed telling you all this.
I thought you’d be pleased, she said. I know it’s crazy but I thought it might make things more definite, bring some closure into the thing. It certainly does that, I said, trying to look like Paul Muni in Scarface. Oh, Ricky, she said, is your indigestion back? No, I said, I’m working out how to end my life as messily as possible. Ricky, oh Rick, you couldn’t have seriously thought…?
Great, huh? Hold ellipsis while the whole of the Holy Rickety Empire tumbles into the panicking togas, polystyrene pillars bouncing around and stuff, flames shooting out the sinking triremes, the Colossus’s head rocking and rolling, D.W. Griffiths swearing into his megaphone, Nero on the balcony with his fake lyre looking fat, Burt Lancaster in the wrong film again, basically fucking catastrophe with no sound but the jet-engines of my tinnitus taking off and the ticking of my eyelids which I thought I’d got under control but it’s been a very bad week.
Yeah, I said, I guess I did. I’m just an ordinary Enfield boy, really. You’re a what? An ornery Enfield boy, Mrs Lazenby. Rick, you’re the only person who’s miserable about this but I think that’s because you’ve gotten too much attachment generally speaking, you’re trying to hold the running stream between your hands, you have to try to let the water go and enjoy the sparkle and the gurgle. The gurgle? Or whatever, she said, fairly impatiently I noted. Christ, what a load of crap. What a load of codswallop as me dad used to say. I’ve got to get on, I can’t waste any more time with people like this. I thought Zelda had a brain. The Dot has rewired it. Or maybe she always talked like that and I didn’t notice. Yeah, yeah, love blinds, throws acid in your face, wears dark glasses in the cinema when you’re trying to find a vacant seat and the movie’s started with a night-scene, all that. People in love ought to have white sticks. They go on cliff-top walks when they shouldn’t. I give it a year, before she finds out about his problem.
Because Dr Lazenby has a problem.
Hooked now, huh?
His problem. Everyone has problems but I mean this is a Problem. I have not been pretending to be his shrubbery or his shower-attachment or a louvre on his louvres but my neighbour with the inoperable wife knows someone who knows The Dot’s cleaning lady and this cleaning lady blabs. I can’t bring it to the attention of Vyshitface or someone because they’d just say I was oppressing a minority of one or whatever. I say a minority of one because I cannot believe anyone else in the world would share this Problem. But then I’m just an ornery Enfield bloke, guv, as me dad was wont to say when I started shouting at him about D. H. Lawrence and stuff. What a son I must have been. I ought to fly over right now and nip down to Havant and apologise. Anyway, for all I know everyone except me is doing it and it’s me who has the Problem because I’m not doing it. Zelda wouldn’t believe me if I told her, she might get her fiancé to sue me for slander, it’s incredibly easy to find yourself in a sued situation these days. I think I’ll just hang fire and wait, mate.
Zelda couldn’t have been serious about not being serious.
I may edit all this crap out but not now. I want you to understand the terrible conditions of this movie’s production. My golf-game’s collapsed. My favourite goldfish is listing. The weather’s the kind that’d wipe out an army in the old days and there are big problems in the Crimea. Maybe we’re running the general feature backwards.
Zelda, Zelda. Zelda. My great-aunt is talking on the lawn. When one looks at something, does it change? How do you mean? says Giles. Well, how can that tree be there and here at the same time? It’s not here, says Giles my grandfather aged seventeen on a warm lawn in 1914, just outside Fawholt, Wiltshire. Yes it is, says Agatha, it’s in me, it’s making me feel jolly and pleasant, looking at it. Therefore it’s sort of inside me, it’s sort of changed. Giles sighs and lies on his back and looks up at the sky. I know this guy in Houston who has a huge TV screen and all he plays on it is ambient stuff, clouds and sky mostly, occasionally tossing tops of trees, sometimes just the ocean breaking against sand for three hours. He likes Mark Rothko, too, he sits for hours in the Rothko Chapel, that’s how we met. The sky Giles is staring up into is fairly ambient, there are just these tiny puffs of white cloud which look like they are meteorologically impossible because the rest of it is so blue. I’m talking English blue, not Texas blue or Mediterranean blue or St Lucian blue. I’m talking 1914 blue, too. The right side of 1914. I just had to get onto this lawn or I’d have cut my wrists or something. I’m running out of time, actually. Between Zelda, Zelda. Zelda. and My great-aunt is talking on the lawn there were about a hundred yards of rushes, two years’ work, but I got my razor out and practically waded through them to answer the phone. It was Greg, my son. He’s got an exhibition at the University to which the College is fellatioed. Well done, Greg, I said. There are some people over there who’d really appreciate your work. How are things, Dad? Things are swell, Greg. You sound more Yanky every time I phone, Dad. That’s because you don’t phone very much, next time you phone you won’t be able to understand me, unless you’re into Mickey Mouse on slomo. You sound upset about something, Dad. That’s because Zelda got married and is still in there. Zelda? You remember Zelda, Greg. You met her when you came out in ’93. You mean that nice brunette with grey eyes? I do mean that startlingly attractive brunette with grey eyes, Greg. She got married? She got married. When? Two years ago. Hey, bad luck, Dad, you should’ve told me. Naw, it wasn’t worth it. I’m coming round.
It was a great exhibition. He’s into carpet squares now. Just carpet squares laid out like a carpet and called things like Carpet Squares #3, Pink Series. He doesn’t even lay them himself, he got Easifit Floorings Inc. of Houston to lay them. The prick from the literature department thought it was the most exciting thing he’d seen since, aw, since Sherrie Levine’s photographs of Ed Weston’s photographs three years ago, aw, how do you find her work, Greg? I expected my son to say who? but instead he said really quite interesting, actually, if a little latent.
Latent?
I’m just a ornery Enfield bloke, guv.
I burned the rushes, by the way. My friendly neighbour complained. He’s got really tetchy since his inoperable wife finally went the way of all inoperables. I said to him just after the funeral how we’re all inoperables when you think about it and he didn’t like that. I meant it to be comforting but the thing about round here is that old people do not really believe they are going to die. They’ve all watched Cocoon and even Cocoon The Return, for God’s sake. They reckon if they work out enough and have enough sexual activity and dress in shellac shorts and tennis shoes they’ll just keep on treading water forever. Anyway, my golfing partner is my golfing partner no longer. He complained about the smell. Sure, celluloid is fairly evil-smelling when burned but I couldn’t find a refuse bin big enough to handle it. You’ll want to know what classic shots went up in smoke, I guess. Hey, some great ones. But all art is mortal. You wouldn’t believe how much art and books and stuff has sunk to the bottom of the ocean or been blown up or burned down or flooded out or whatever. It’s amazing there’s any art left, actually. Time had made the highest bid/and fire was the fastest reader, to quote dear old Henrik ( The Vandals, Maggot Publications, 1974). When the talkies came they put the silents into the furnace. You wouldn’t believe how many were put into the furnace or anyway used as ashtrays by peg-head projectionists. About EIGHTY PER CENT, actually. All those silents and no one said a word. They just curled up and glowed and turned into dribble. All those beautiful golden women up in smoke. Now they’re being screened night and day in the great Cultural Centre in the sky where God and the angels get free admission to everything that’s gone from this world worth crying over. They had to build a very large extension after Dresden went up but it’s OK, it’s not made of concrete with hand-painted rain smears but of gossamer with the dew still on it, for crying out loud. It’s hell to hang pictures on, actually. I’m back on the Laphroaig, by the way. It’s so pricey out here, guv, I though
t it might curb my consumption but it hasn’t, I’m just going without me HP Sauce. Shaaaddaaap.
Time had made the highest bid
and fire was the fastest reader.
Art was a scratch on a dustbin lid
and Orpheus, the little bleeder,
It goes on, it goes on. Twelve hundred lines of it or something, most of it lost when he exploded. Did I tell you he exploded? Pretty well exploded, anyway, in the way flambées explode. He was drinking brandy and he kept missing his mouth. Then he decided to light his briar pipe. He had the full text and only copy of The Vandals on his lap. It was his life’s work. Bits of it survived. A team from the British Library or somewhere spent about five minutes piecing it back together until they realised it was crap. I have a few more verses. I will one day publish them in an extremely limited edition. Somewhere in the manuscripts department of the great Cultural Centre in the sky they’re using it as lavatory paper. OK OK, maybe angels don’t crap. But maybe they do! According to Henrik this was a vexed question in the Middle Ages, the best minds tussled for months over stuff like this. Hey, I miss Henrik. He knew things. I didn’t appreciate him, I was too busy swinging my arse off, man. At least he could read Latin and Ancient Greek fluently. He really could read it like he was reading the newspaper or something. He was born in 1914 for crying out loud. Maybe as Agatha’s brushing her hand over the cropped lawn and making the cut grass blades jump up Henry Peterson is pushing his head out between Mrs Gertrude Peterson’s thighs perish the thought.
I’ve just realised over the last few days that I haven’t got very far.
I mean, I cut two hours’ or something worth because it wasn’t strictly relevant it was just atmosphere building thinking that might speed things up somehow but hey, we’re still nowhere. Mrs Trevelyan and the others are still frozen I hope in the dining-room because I wanted to Put Things Into Context. I’ve wasted two years of my life. Zelda is happily married. I’m nearly fifty-nine. I have a heart murmur. My jowls need a pulley system. It was never serious between Zelda and me.
My complex masterwork by which I shall become immortal is about an eighteenth into the storyboard and way way way over budget. Time is the highest bidder. William is up in the attic. The whole crew are sunning themselves in Wiltshire, it’s very nice actually, we’ve been hallooed to by a vicar in a floppy hat with kind of mutton-chop whiskers because he thought we were someone passing but we weren’t, we were a shadow scrimming a sunny patch of greenery and afterwards he prayed, you could tell. The sunny patch of greenery is now an Ideal Home Exhibition gone wrong, there are real people with problems in there, they have strimmer problems and marital problems and Edwardian-style conservatory leak problems and next door’s TV problems. It wasn’t there in 1985. I’ve been away a long time. I reckoned that if I didn’t go back I wouldn’t ever go back. It’s very nice being in Wiltshire with the sun on your face but we have work to do, for Christ’s sake. Norma Talmadge is on the lawn stroking the cropped grass. I was very lucky to get hold of her. She’s been playing Zelda as well as Agatha, by the way, if you haven’t noticed the likeness. She’s very glad to be speaking. Her greatest work went into the furnace and now she’s getting to speak. I take back everything I said that upset Crew-Cut and Vyshitface and Hal the Computer and Soggy Ass two years back. She has a golden voice, too. She’s very adaptable. She can play an American screwball badly into Zen, birdsong and these green suspenders holding in some kind of lower form of life as well as my great-aunt aged eighteen going around in white muslin that mustn’t get stained on the lawn or else. That takes some doing. I don’t mean that my great-aunt is in the suspenders along with Toadlice, Ossy. Give me a break. What have you ever created except fuzz, huh?
