Still

by Adam Thorpe

  It’s peaceful here, huh? Maybe the conversation isn’t that interesting. It’s only politics, actually. That tubercular bearded student-guy Princip shot the Archduke about a week back and Giles and Agatha are telling their mother who Princip is. It’s coming kind of muffled through the open windows behind us. I don’t think I’ll shoot it because Ossy’ll say it’s too predictable, next thing you know Ricky’ll be inserting that clip of the Archduke and his consort coming down the stairs to their motor car with about five minutes of life to go except the quality’s so terrible you can hardly see them, there’s this weird burst of light like an omen, maybe a burn-out or a specular, and then that’s it: nobody was cranking away next to this Princip guy or on that particular street as the vintage car with the ostrich plumes sticking up out of it and blowing around approached – it wasn’t like Jack Kennedy in Dallas and the guy whose name began with Z, Zap-something, Zapludel – anyway the guy with the home cine whose little spools took the dime-store Kodak past the shutter without a hitch into the most famous clip in the history of humanity. Imagine taking that little number out of the camera without widdling in your underpants. Someone’s laughing. I know why it is, it’s Giles’s joke about Princip having no princips. They’re laughing because actually they’re not really aware of the situation. They’re not really aware that this conversation about the Balkans and where exactly Sarajevo is and what’s the difference between Servia and Bosnia makes me want to cry because they’re quite enjoying it, it makes them feel intellectually excited, they can show off in front of their mother and Dorothy, they’re that kind of age, they’ve both of them read the papers down here because the days get kind of baggy and playing Chopin in front of billowing curtains all day is OK if James Ivory is the director but not OK if Ricky Thornby is on the megaphone and they don’t realise that this conversation has about seven million phantoms listening in including a pair of spectral teeth in a jawbone which is all anyone ever found of Willo although they didn’t know it was Willo’s jawbone, they just put it in a sack with the other bits and pieces and carried on hoeing. I’m talking about 1953. These seven million phantoms are having problems fitting in, they’re jammed onto the lawn and beyond and maybe we’ll have to relay the conversation on loudspeakers Bosey wherever you are but it’s OK, it’s very calm and peaceful out here in the summer moonlight and English nocturnal wildlife is relatively low-key, there aren’t even cicada and a billion crickets to drive you round the bend or some fucker playing his parents’ Doors album so the whole block can appreciate how wild he is or maybe to drown out my neighbour’s TV. These seven million phantoms are just listening very very quietly, they aren’t even nodding their heads and grimacing wryly like I’m doing, they’re just holding themselves very still and very evenly spaced even through the rose-beds and stuff just listening to the conversation as it sort of pads out over the air about as softly as a moth trying to get through a closed window or whatever until it peters out about a wood and a field away where the last few latecomers are joining up but they’ll have it explained to them, don’t worry. I’d like to be able to say that Willo the jawbone is right in the room behind Agatha’s head or wherever but he’s not, he’s somewhere out there with the others, I can’t even see him and I don’t really fancy moving, if I turned my head round they’d probably just kind of all vanish and we’d be back to the lawn with just blue moonlight and long shadows over the grass and very pleasant smells because the last of the hay’s been cut today which is why you can just hear some group-singing from the village direction thataway and I think a fiddle, I’d like to think it was a fiddle, I’m a sucker for

  The older England of byways and slow apple turnovers

  And the steep-stacked haywain,

  The brand-new England of highways and spaghetti flyovers

  And the jam-packed airplane

  leaves me chilled. Hey, Henry, sorry for taking liberties but there were some things we saw eye to eye on and no one else reads you anyway, not these days, you’re not so much neglected as abandoned. OK, that brand-new stuff’s not so brand-new now but it seemed that way when Henry wrote it in 1961, like the millennium seems brand-new to you people out there but hey it’s not, it’s only new in name and number, it’s actually got all the same sparkles and tramlines and thumb-prints and vibrating hairs because you handled it too quickly, it was still green and wet and you were clumsy, you should have laid it out on the table and let it dry really slowly and given it a chance, you’ve fucked the print, there’s only one, you’ve already gone into it all wrong, all the same pinheads are running the screening and all they want is money and power and fuck the cost – hey, you’re caught right between Princip’s gun and the big guy’s ostrich plumes as they flounce and bob after his head that’s turning round in slomo to catch a specular off the muzzle, I’m sorry about that, if I was very naff I could superimpose my great-uncle’s lips approaching my grandmother’s mouth but this is an art-house movie of the highest quality and I won’t and anyway I’ve got so excited the seven million phantoms have sighed and turned to blue moonlight which Mike’s done just a fabulous job on, the moths love it, Agatha’s leaning out of the creepered window we swooped down through if you remember and breathing in the night air and saying how sweet it smells so Gavrilo Princip must have bitten the dust as the evening topic and by tomorrow Mrs Trevelyan will have forgotten the difference between Bosnia and Servia and where exactly on the map Giles’s finger tapped Sarajevo because there’ll be other more urgent stuff to chew on like domestic rape.

  The cat. We forgot the cat. It’s here, it’s by my legs. It’s called Calypso. My grandmother made a fatal mistake: she should have left Calypso one kitty, she shouldn’t have wiped out the whole lot. That’s why the cat’s kind of upset, y’see, son. She’s mewing and looking around for what’s supposed to fasten on her teats like I once fastened on my mother’s would you believe. Agatha’s looking out the window and saying what’s the matter with Calypso and Dorothy’s replying with some nugget of wordly wisdom but I can’t catch it. I think Bosey’s still up in the old vegetable garden with his goose-neck or I’d have stuck it through the window above Agatha’s head and picked up the nugget but sorry, let’s just assume it was something like Calypso hev goed an hed her little-uns most like, chit. She shouldn’t really be calling Agatha aged eighteen chit but old habits die hard, like overcooking the sago or sucking her teeth and her dialect always thickens when she comes back to Wiltshire anyway, by the end of August she’s practically indecipherable. Agatha’s disappeared from the window. In about fifteen seconds she’ll be out on the lawn in the blue moonlight looking stunned because the cat’s not got a big belly any more and there’s blood on its tail and no sign of the kit-kits. She wasn’t party to the plan. It was Mrs T’s plan, actually. She just about stomachs Calypso who is a kind of summer visitor from Littlejohn Farm up the lane knowing which side of her paw is buttered but the idea of a heap of squirming mini-Calypsos makes my great-grandmother vapourish, as a matter of fact. It’s not really my grandmother’s fault, she was carrying out instructions, it’s what she’s paid peanuts to do by these people, like I’m paid peanuts to carry out instructions by HCDVA and most people are paid peanuts to carry out instructions by the jerks in charge under their fucking ostrich plumes. If I drove around Houston in a vintage De Dion Bouton wearing ostrich plumes on my head and carrying a sabre they’d probably shoot me too or maybe drag me around behind a pick-up next to Gomez or Felipe or whoever but it wouldn’t fuck up the century and kill my great-uncle and seven million others too just for a start-off because I am incredibly insignificant, I’d just be another tiny addition to the long list of Houston homicides and in fifty years my grandson would not be making a film about me, I’d be about as obscure as the sexual behaviour of Tyrranosaurus rex and that’s very obscure, it’s one hundred per cent guesswork as a matter of fact. Hey, a Tyrranosaurus rex coupling with another Tyrranosaurus rex must have been one of the grandest most awesome most thought-provoking sigh
ts in Nature but phooey hard cheese it’s as lost as Calypso’s kitties’ little skulls because NO ONE GOT IT DOWN ON CELLULOID. It thought-provokes because watching from behind some scrubby little shrub and chewing the dust-clouds an extremely unintelligent two-storey eight-ton killing machine reproducing itself might get you wondering what the purpose of life on earth might be, like seeing the Western Front even on a good day got my grandfather and great-uncle wondering what the purpose of life on earth might be but I don’t want to jump the gun. Here’s my great-aunt. Her dress looks great in the moonlight. It rubs against the lawn and makes a sound like the sea just before you clear the dunes and see it and shade your eyes if the weather’s jolly. They’re all going down to the sea in about three weeks’ time and it’s that particular little trip William and Giles will keep reconstructing in their heads moment by moment when they’re stuck up to their pips in slime and listening to the gas-gong and various metal things pretending to be yachts’ masts tinkling and clinking as the wind blows down the trench and how the sea’s backing down the shingle and sucking at the pebbles’n their hot toes but it’s only the machine-guns having a crack way up the line even though they can catch a whiff, they can catch that really special whiff of the sea and it’s not gas blowing from way down the line and making the back bit just where the palate goes soft you can’t reach with your tongue even though you curl it right back all tingly. Hey, I’m terrified of injections for God’s sake. The idea of some person I don’t know very well puncturing my fairly immaculate and completely bio-degradable wet suit with an inch of sharpened steel deliberately is only outdone by the actuality, like thinking about Mr and Mrs Lazenby kissing one another on the lips is only outdone by the actuality. I mean, I only have to smell the antiseptic interior of a clinic to feel the terror of all mortal creatures in the face of personal extinction, it’s a real problem, I think if I’d have been in my great-uncle’s or my grandfather’s puttees I’d have been very unhappy and extremely anxious while serving my country. My great-aunt has followed Calypso and Calypso is heading where the iodine smell of her kitties tells her to go, which is fairly unfortunate because a cat’s nose is never mistaken. Agatha’s rustled past me but I’m staying put. I like this lawn, it’s the kind of soft lawn Texans only know when they’re handling a putter and even then there is no comparison because a putting-green in Texas has about as much charisma as the Vice-Principal whereas my great-grandparents’ lawn makes me want to take my sandals off and quote poetry and think about the mystery of existence until dawn streakes the empyrean and the birds wake up. What’s amazing is that my great-uncle and grandfather did think about the mystery of existence while waiting for the dawn to streak the empyrean standing up to their pips in slime which is probably more than you’ve done while dry and warm and having a very nice time at my fucking expense, thank you. Judging from the letters I have perused and am no longer allowed to for crying out loud they certainly considered the mystery of personal existence out there. I mean, if you were stuck on night-watch next to some block capitals in red paint on a plank saying FOR FUCK’S SAKE DON’T FUCK ABOUT HERE! in a sap-head on the Somme in exactly two years from the lawn as it is at this moment you’d be fairly philosophically inclined, too. FOR FUCK’S SAKE DON’T FUCK ABOUT HERE is about as straightforward as you can get and comes after the day Willo’s had his typhoid inoculation back in the medical tent with the ginger nurse who likes to cut round bullet damage with her nail scissors and pour in boiling Jay’s Fluid or something so he isn’t feeling tiptop anyway. Coupled with that is the nuisance of probably the most frightfully unpleasant stench he has ever encountered, because to make a stench like that takes an awful lot of long-dead people lying around and pretty non-existent lavatorial facilities for the ones who are still living along with details like two-week old unfinished tins of beef lumps and mud fairly well rinsed by chlorine gas and deep green pools with some kind of froth on top you try not to dip your toes into and think about what might be swaying at the bottom. Willo spits like his mother does after George has passed through but it makes no great impact, like air-freshener makes no great impact on the HCDVA lecture hall after Doc Lazenby has wowed the T-shirts with his Pepsi commercial and I’m trying to get both my audience members to come a bit closer so I don’t have to shout. The night is fair and there are stars and Very lights and flares and flashes while against the firmament the nearest iron posts grow coils of black barbed wire and that’s all I can see of terra firma unless I take a peep through the periscope where everything looks like my train set has just been trampled on in the dark, it’s all so d— shrunk and smashed, Ags. I’m so sorry to hear your holiday weather was variable.

  For Christ’s sake, I’ve taken notes. I’m not inventing any of this. This is just a teaser promo for what’s coming. There are great epic sweeps of wide-screen format downland and touching details and the noise is Sensurround and will give you temporary tinnitus, I’m sorry. We’re talking yer actual Western Front, mate. I have laid twelve miles of tracking rails and fifteen hot-drink dispensers and as for machinery we have three moonshots and four cherry-pickers and five cranes with twenty-one-foot pythons hired by some pinhead who thought that soldiers had telescopic necks and the seven million phantoms are my extras, actually. There is a liquid mud section of about fifteen square miles and a cornfield-blowing-with-poppies section of one square mile and a meadow-dotted-with-cows section of a half square mile and an uncut grassy section of no established dimensions they have a very interesting way of mowing using machine-gun bullets. We have corpses in varying states of decomposition down to the semi-liquid with hatching eggs of flies and a great drone effect from their parents I’m thinking of playing some sitar over if Robert will allow that. There’ll be cracked mugs meeting dented lips or maybe vice versa and circles of Highlanders playing concertinas and singing softly in bare knees and slomo spews of brilliant white chalk-dust twirling up into the summer blue and sudden rain streaming over this head wound while the owner’s cheeks and lips suck in and puff out like he’s a mental deficient trying to blow out a candle and very gradual pans of prayer parades with now and again a chap keeling over until the dumbo of a chaplain realises they’re being snipered and a long interior take of a stoup by a church door rocking its water back and forth as some bombardment proceeds way off and the water is oily with a fly struggling on its back who’s nevertheless been places.

  I’d like to have Tyrranosaurus rex coupling but Spielberg has the rights. Yeah, yeah, I know, he’s got everything covered.

  The lawn’s so quiet. I’m walking out to the middle. Maybe I should just carry on walking out until this picture’s behind me. Maybe I should just let everyone do it without me or just pull the plugs. Maybe I shouldn’t put my grandmother through more than she is about to go through. English grass is always cool at night. It’s very cool on the soles of my feet. I’ll probably get a cold and then a fever and wonder where Zelda’s got to because she’s a great nurse. Thinking about Zelda these days leaves me numb and hysterical simultaneously like I’ve just had dental treatment and somebody’s cracked me a great joke about the US cocaine trade. Bosey must be waiting for us back at the old vegetable garden because this conversation in the sitting-room wasn’t ever slated up. I almost love Bosey. He has a mug with IT’S ALWAYS FRIDAY on it and permanent kind of brown lip-marks because it’s fifteen years old, he hangs on to things, he kind of stoops over it and sips, he’s six foot four with a frame like a boom-arm, it’s useful for a sound person, dwarves would be very bad sound people. He’ll go on recording without me and you dumbos will have to work out what’s going on from the sound track only. It’ll be good for you, it’ll do your hangover a great service working out what these rustles and clicks and gasps mean until Agatha says in about three minutes oh Willo, what have you done? with her voice flopping back off the old walls of the old vegetable garden like Echo is now on crutches or something. It could be the National Knitting Colloquium 1914 or it could be manslaughter or it could be David Atte
nborough getting very close to that little shimmery beetle if you remember it and looking like he’s got no problems wondering what the point of life on earth is, it’s to give him a great career.

  I think I’m highly strung tonight. I need this lawn. The world’s falling apart around me. We don’t need to dunk our biscuits but we do, we take the risk, my mother always took it and she spent half her life getting her fingers scalded hooking out the bit that had stayed dunked too long and fallen in, she was like that, she was heroic in her own way, she came from a great line.

  Behind me there’s a flash and a glimmer and another flash. That’s my grandmother running out of the old vegetable garden, the moonlight’s picking up her white bits and her face, she’s got her skirt up to clear the weeds but I’m imagining that, I can’t see clearly enough from out here in the middle of the lawn and the soft kind of coppery light out the windows is enough to get in the way because she’s run between the old vegetable garden and the stables and past Agatha and this is over beyond the lit windows of the sitting room where Mrs T’s actually playing some Rachmaninov incredibly proficiently on the piano, it’s really amazing, it’s floating over the lawn and it’s like Rachmaninov himself is playing it and we’ve got to see this, it’s not dubbed over or anything, I’m padding back to the house on this soft cool grass and the music’s getting louder, she’s a concert pianist, my great-grandmother was undervalued, I’m looking in and there’s the cards on the card-table and there’s the rocking-chair emptied of Dorothy and still in shock and there’s the piano and oh fuck there’s nobody playing it, the keys are moving up and down like a virtuoso ghost has sat down and I’m so scared I have a saliva problem, I need to spit, I’m getting swish on the picture because I’m turning to spit, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be using a video camera in situations like this but I was afraid I’d miss something, it’s just a backup, I have to keep all my options covered, there are so many holes in the world, there’s a real live phantom in there for crying out loud and maybe it’ll come up on the playback like a kind of burn in a top-hat – we don’t know about phantoms and we don’t know the sexual maturity of the Great White and we don’t know what Zelda sees in Dr Dot Laserprinter or why people like to kill each other as much as they like to procreate or whether beyond the two foot of peaty gloom in front of our Loch Ness bathysphere there might be the most important scientific presence of the millennium passing by.