Still

by Adam Thorpe

  My trouble was and is that I have made up for two lives of complete subservience with my lip.

  Complete subservience. I like that.

  There are those who completely subserve, and those who are served. Basicerly, through a fogged lens. I’m going to load the projector again very soon. I may close my eyes but you’ll still be able to see for God’s sake if you’re still out there, if you’re still in your seats and not flinging yourself around to the hip rag of groovy Vera’s latest or something because, hey, I know I have a lot of competition. I hope you’ve wiped out the Hoovers from Mars by now politely.

  Right.

  The first person who can tell me what Amazing Truth is revealed in the last few frames of this complex masterwork by a British director who used to be one of the youngest will receive my deeply cherished Now Showing enamel sign in excellent nick two-by-one off of my bedroom wall bought for a favour off Wilton Road and definitely once screwed to the brick of the very first cinema in London, guv.

  The Bioscope, dumbos. The Biograph in my day but it was still the Bio. Let’s go-o to the Bio-o my perfectly adorable something, maybe just thing. Norma gracing the posters, lots of columns, lots of nice plasterwork, fancy egg-and-wotsit stuff around the top, whirly wallpaper, soft seats, majolica ashtrays. Plush, y’see. Nice’n plush and you didn’t have to be flush. Me dad used to slip in when he was doing his pot-plants-off-the-barrer spell arahnd them parts. Slipped in between the plus-fours below the sightline of the ticket lady and down to the fourpennies, twisted his cap abaht and stretched his pegs and plunged into grey-eyed Norma big as a bleedin’ mansion between the fluted columns. While somebody was nickin’ his barrer wiv firty-two pot-plants hangin’ off of her – me old man roamin’ the streets after lookin’ for a place to throw hisself off ’cos me grandad were terble crooel wiv a belt and practically slept wiv his barrer. So there’s me dad on Waterloo Bridge, the old one what was pulled dahn in the last to-do, past midnight, sort o’ gazing into the swirl, the ’orrible black greasy swirl as is abaht to swallerimup when tap tap tap

  Forget the fake gorblimey act. It doesn’t suit you, Ricco me old soak. It makes you dribble and ache in the wrong places. Cor, hark to that thunder.

  Tap tap tap. Tap. Tap. Tap tap.

  Along the road comes this chap done up to the nines in top hat, tails, cream waistcoat, shiny pumps, white cane, the works. His cane’s tip-tapping the balustrade on top of which is me dad contemplating his demise. The toff stops and taps his cane on me dad’s butt and practically puts an end to him there and then ’cos me dad has to whirl his arms about to keep from toppling right in.

  Oy, wotcher guvnor! comments me dad.

  Then he sits on the granite ledge with his legs the safe side and starts to snivel. This is 1921, year of the BIG HEAT when not a drop fell on the parched ground and hot winds raised eddies of choking dust and the rivers were diminished everywhere according to The Times weather report I caught on microfilm the day before yesterday such is my zeal and in case you thought The Wasteland was straight off the top of his head. Me dad’s eight years old. The posh blokey settles back onto the white cane with the ivory grip and says quietly to the lantern pole what have you lost, dear lad, what have you lost?

  Me dad can smell the drink on the blokey’s breath whirling around in the cold night air what got into your bones like this ’tomic radiation does nah happarently and then this cab clops past and then nothing, just this silence, just me dad snivelling and stuff and the greasy water clapping against the granite footing far below and maybe a horn way off towards the sea and basicerly silence, Bosey. How am I doing? Am I doing OK?

  Hey, please, we haven’t far to go now, stick with it, ignore the blood on my forehead, I’m tailing out what you’ve already seen, it takes time, I forgot to do this before – my grandfather’s running backwards down the stairs now and he’s taking the biscuit out of his mouth, the pianola’s playing John Cage, William’s hurtling out the vegetable garden without looking, the bucket’s getting tugged up the stairs, we’ll be zeroized any moment.

  OK. What have you lost.

  The posh chap puts a fag in his mouth and lights it like he’s cradling a little rabbit or something but there’s no wind, it’s still, it’s force of habit, he doesn’t want his position given away. Then the eyes light up in the flare and they’re blank. It’s like he’s rolled his eyeballs right up but he hasn’t, that was Des’s trick along with farting in time to You Are My Lucky Star and firing bogies from his nostrils at the end of his Stuka dive while I was trying to get through my Schopenhauer. My old man doesn’t think of Des though because Des has not yet been summoned out of non-being by the archangels’ trumpets to play his part but what me old man does think of is shelled eggs, a couple of shelled eggs all glistening and white so we couldn’t have a devilled or coddled or hard-boiled egg in the house, me mum’d have to poach, fry, or scramble, it was his little quirk. And Des’d do his eye-rolling routine behind me dad’s back, which frayed me mum that much quicker, the bastard.

  Then this posh blokey takes a good pull on the fag and it glows and it’s like the mist and the cold go out of him because he sort of smiles and the smoke smells sweet. Me dad wants to ask him why he’s not wearing dark glasses. ’Cos while the topper’s rim cuts the gaslight off from most of the face except the mouth the eyes sort of glow all pinkish every time the fag’s sucked and me dad’s still got The Moan of the Mummy flickering in his head from the matinée for Christ’s sake. And there’s mist curling up off the river and between the balusters and around his ankles and he’s lost the barrer.

  I’ve lost me barrer, sir, whispers me dad.

  How careless of you, says the blind toff but sort of softly, like it’s happened to him or something. How distinctly careless of you.

  He takes another good pull and holds it in, then blows it all out through a very pursed mouth. There’s loads of this sweet smoke and out of this smoke comes a hand holding a thick wad of something. A cart clops past full of fresh fish from the smell of it and me dad snivels all over again and when he looks up the groper’s gone.

  But the thick wad’s between his legs. And it’s all notes.

  Hey, I like to think that toff groper was me old grandad, young.

  But it probably weren’t. There were loads o’ young gropers tapping about in them days, smoking Turkish and saying dear lad. An’ that were that. But you’re well clear of them toffs, I’d say. Well clear. You keep to your carpit squares, son. There’s honest rub in them carpit squares. Oh yes. There’s more than a Conan Doyle on a double-barrelled’s parsley in them carpit squares, son. You’re well bleedin’ clear of them toffs, I’d say. Well bleedin’ clear an’ if you’ve got a spare smoke for yer old dad I’d be very grateful. Ta. Well bleedin’ clear of CAT, print that, get rid of the guy for Christ’s sake.

  Get rid of the bridge and the fresh fish, too.

  Dear lad, says a voice from the darkest corner. It’s a kind of recess actually. Maybe it’s a house porch. There’s a stripe of gaslight and a pair of shiny pumps sticking out. It’s a growly kind of voice in my accent. Dear lad, it says. Hey, all we need is a cat and some slithery zither music and Harry Lime’ll be resurrected in my grandfather’s eyeballs because the very last time, oh yes, when I was not yet ten, oh Mum, I HAD TO TAKE HIM – I’ll get onto that, I get chilled just thinking about his kind of fidgeting flickering stare right next to me, I was too young, I couldn’t tell him who the Third or even the Second man was and I think I failed him, I failed him – he got run over by a No. 77 never saw him guv the next week or maybe the next month and I’ve been looking at this blank wall for five hours and I’m tasting the ashtray for crying out loud and I can see Louisa taking the wrong door at Plywood or was it Peeling and falling away forever and I can see the last held shot of maybe the lime probably the lime avenue in deep perspective and the girl growing and growing and carrying straight on past whoever played Orson Welles’s friend, shit, my memory’s rotting, anyway this famous
actor bending his face to light the fag cupped in his hands so maybe he’d just been in the to-do that had recently finished or maybe there were gusts funnelling down the avenue with THE END twice in each eyeball next to me and hey, I wet my longjohns.

  Great days, great days.

  The house’d smell of muffs.

  I’ve rewound. I’m up and ready to head out the rest of the rushes. All I need to do is turn this big switch and my wall will be full of flesh tints probably. Tears are pouring down my face. I didn’t mean to pick up on that dining-room scene so early. I was keeping it frozen until the very end. We still have the whole war to work through, they’re all waiting for me out there, Mike and Bosey and Sylvia and Pierre and Joe the Gel and Gordon the Grip and Clifford with his fucking thunder-sheet and all the big Steves lined up ready to twirl the flats and floats and dry-ice canisters and eighteen-pounder batteries on the ends of their little fingers, all ready and set up and waiting out there with hundreds of thousands of extras and Hubert Lightfoot and my grandfather and Willo with his lucky flint off Wot Hill tucked in with his butterfly book and forty miles of barbed wire and stuff and wet-hire period artillery and the right type of gas helmets and the perfect kind of light haze to the morning and for once a canteen staff not doped up on the rum rations and the Hawthorn Ridge mine gone up nicely and the sub-Gordons gripping the cranking handles and the Birdsong people tied up and gagged somewhere in GHQ’s enormous wine cellars with their paper poppies stuffed up their noses and this silence, this amazing silence after the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousandth shell has been lobbed over and the games-whistles and the bagpipe-nozzles waiting to be blown in the lips of the non-speaking parts and all the right and meticulously-researched attachments nicely buffed and oiled and catching the sunrise and hey, I haven’t turned up. The brass megaphone isn’t going to flash and the clapper isn’t going to clap and instead there’s Julie tiny and silhouetted against the wide-format perfect morning haze and rolling silvery grass to the horizon where Mike’s got his funny little cardboard thing held up and she’s coming this way and running and panting right up into a close-up so close you can breathe in the sweet patchouli on her long neck and Sylvia says oh fuck, he’s not coming, the bastard.

  So they’ll all go kind of muttering back to the canteen pantechnicons and have some coffee and croissants because what the hell, a blown budget’s a blown budget – and spend about nine days rolling up the barbed wire and filling in the intricate honeycomb of rats’ alleys and pumping out the water from the Ypres salient for the Passchendaele sequence because the local farmers are going down with their pesticide booms and all this time I’m watching my wall in Houston with tears streaming down my face because SHE’S THAWED OUT, you didn’t alert me, the candle-flames are fattening and her arm’s coming down and the curtains have, I think, yes, they’ve settled into their station and you didn’t alert me, we’ll have to make do with a hundred yards of stockshot and establishing sweeps and archive clips and apologise to the phantoms while I’m mounting the steps, the heugh of steps, it’s too late to turn back, my mother’s got my elbow in her glove and her hand’s in her glove and she has a great grip, she could have worked for me, she has such a great grip the enormous door is practically ricking my neck before my little polished shoes have so much as touched the stone, I’ve kind of flown up, I’ve kind of flown up here.

  Heugh.

  That was the noise my mother made at the top. She was already disintegrating somewhere internally important, it started early. Cue in Henrik:

  That high heugh I stumbled up

  Into my rich hell,

  Dashed from my lips the honey-pot of home,

  Its sweet innocence dumb to tell

  How the womb hoards like salt all pain to come.

  And so forth until you run out screaming. I said hey, Henrik, lift your face off the bar and tell me what this word is right here.

  Heugh, he murmured.

  Heugh.

  HEUGH! he yelled.

  OK, OK, Henry, watch the tankards, they’re imitation splatterware or something, I just needed to know, I need to know everything, I need to know above all why the stone steps of Randle College are described with a pant instead of a word, it’s kind of interesting.

  His hand comes down flat on the bar but just misses it and he forward rolls off the stool into my lap. A cliff, he says. A precipice. The steep side of a quarry, an excavation. A mine.

  He didn’t say that, of course. I’m dubbing over with some dictionary definitions his mouth saying it is a fucking word you half-baked bumpkin, you unlettered prole, at the level of my navel while I’m trying to get rid of my glass on the bar without spilling too much. Then he went to sleep and I almost stroked his hair. Almost. Because I was plunged into reminiscence suddenly, my mother was at the top of these other steps and going heugh and I felt very sad and salt was being applied to my early wounds or whatever, I was climbing the cliff again, I wanted to cry like I’m crying now but Frank was wagging his finger over the aspidistras and saying none of that in here, Mithter Thornby.

  Thorry, Frank, I said, without meaning to.

  I think I loved Henry, somewhere very deep down where boys compare their conkers and stuff.

  Oh Gawd. And I’ve run out of even used tissues. Heugh. And when the enormous door opened it was like burying your face in an old lady’s muff. This again, says Moira. Yup, Moira. This again. They’ve thawed out too early, it’s the dead season, the rerun, the same old B chiller out of Ealing you reckoned I’d seen too young or something, you kept asking me for the title and the main actors.

  Aw, I was the main actor, honey.

  You always are, Ricky. There’s the rub. Take a bit-part for a while. You’ll find your whole perspective on life kind of shifts.

  Moira doll, shuddup and listen. That’s what I’m spending my life savings on you to do. I’ve only just realised that this couch is not real leather. Now that’s cheap.

  The door opens and I’m burying my face in an old lady’s muff but there’s no old lady yet. I sneeze as usual. I say as usual but I don’t remember the previous time, I was too young, memory begins at five or something, everything before that’s wiped like most of my early TV stuff was wiped thank God. I say as usual because I’m projecting forward, I sneezed every time after that and there were four more times, I was nine when all this stopped. I’m in an enormous hall with black tiles and white tiles I’m not sure about, there are stains all over them, they feel slippy. My mother did not ring the bell or operate the claw-knocker I would have liked to have operated under normal circumstances, she just turned the big knob and walked straight in like she knew the place, like she’d lived here or something. Heugh, she says again, quietly. We wait a little. My mother is keeping her hand on my shoulder and I’m keeping my hands in my pockets, I have this new jacket with soft pockets I was incredibly against wearing because no one around our street wears jackets with frilly collars and cuffs and stuff, let alone knickerbockers. I feel like I’m someone else, in this outfit. I feel my head is balancing very precariously on my collar. I feel like these shoes and these knickerbockers and this frilly green jacket are about to realise their mistake and eject me. OK OK, Moira, I’m getting there, it’s only your lunch-break, the Kentucky stays open all day and all night down there where the sirens mewl, it’s never not finger-lickin’ gross.

  My face is so scrubbed I don’t know it any more, the loofah’s revealed a whole new level I’m still rearranging my features on. My mother is staring at this picture on the wall. There are two pictures, actually, kind of tied together with a ribbon that would chip if you tried to undo it and with the same kind of shit-brown frame that might have been gold or something once and there are bits of the moulding that have fallen away and it’s white underneath. We need this detail, Moira. That wasn’t your tummy rumbling, it’s distant thunder, there’s another on the way or maybe it’s the old one. It might rain this time. My mother’s staring at the picture but there’s a glare problem, all I
can see is the light through the hall window bouncing off and making me slit-eyed. Then she lifts me up and I see it’s not a picture, it’s a mirror, because behind the dust there’s me grinning out of the glare at me grinning to see me grinning with my hair cut like that and then another me behind me that’s grey and is not grinning, oh dear, but that’s the only difference between us until I stop grinning which I do right now because I’m scared. I’m staring out like the one next door but that’s a girl, she has a ribbon in her hair and pale OK grey eyes. My mother is pointing at the two mes not counting the reflection and saying that’s him, dear. That’s you. Just do as you were told. No crying, this time. Afterwards I’ll buy you a packet of Smarties. Two packets of Smarties. And a lolly. And a Dinky lorry.

  I nod with my frilly collar up over my nose because she’s still holding me up and the jacket’s too big for me and heugh, she puts me down and coughs a little but tries to shut it up because there’s an echo, it’s like a church, maybe the huge stairs lead up to Heaven. I’ve just noticed the stairs. My mother’s looking at her watch and I’m trying to figure out whether the person looking down from the top of the stairs where they go round all flat and start again higher is real or just another picture. I want to point her out to my mother but I don’t want to make the picture come alive, I don’t want the picture person to see me pointing at her because frankly she’s terrifying, she has black hair shooting out of her scalp and these stains on her apron and big jowls and also my mother’s nose. In fact it might be my mother turned into a witch or whatever if my mother wasn’t standing right next to me looking at her watch and dusting something off my shoulders at the same time. The person picture at the top of the stairs has something in her hand, it’s a cloth, it’s the kind of cloth my mother uses to buff our very few buffable objects mainly on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. Also our wireless. Moira’s grunting something about buff. Moira, it was my favourite word, I was five, it made my lips go funny and my head jolt. Hey, where were you at the age of five, checking up on your libidinal development or something? Your curtains are dirty, by the way. It’s no good having a shiny surgery if your curtains are discoloured. You’ve been over-handling them in your lunch-hour. You’re supposed to lick your fingers for Pete’s sake.