by Adam Thorpe
Moira’s gone out. I think she might have gone out to get her Kentucky Fried. I hope she brings back some grapes for my grandfather but washes them first, you never know what agent they might have applied.
OK, you’re all on tragedy-overload, I know, boats tip over and planes crash and schools get sludged and there’s famine and slaughter and rape and plague but to put you right into the medical picture I just have to tell you that he got severely ulcerated corneas and was one of the very small minority to suffer total loss of vision from mustard gas, he was unfortunate, he might have stuck around and got his head blown off like Willoughby-Vern or serious brain damage like poor old Barstow had already got in the first minute of the First Day of the Somme, yup, the really serious drooly kind which left Trevels wondering what the point of existence was as he walked out between these cleverly-clipped rose-beds on a fine spring day a few months before without a stick or a zigzag because, God, Barsity was a terrific chum and still is if only he could do more than dribble on the pillow and say heugh now and again.
Heugh.
Where was I, Moira?
Wet, cold, scared. But I’m not up to my knock-knees in a scummy pool of this 1917 shit-hole, my Darling, my Sweetheart, I’m talking 1945, this is nearly six months into peacetime, this is London about to have a ball under Cripps and it’s drizzling. My soaked groin is getting pressed against the basket with the nice old morning lady’s hand on the back of my head kind of thrusting my face into her neck which smells like the dead mouse I’ve kept for a month in a matchbox as an experiment. Both are kind of sticky and yellow with this lacy stuff over them and I’m wondering if it’s because it’s the afternoon that she’s decaying, I’ve always been the speculative type, I want to be a ministry scientist when I grow up and save the world from diseases and Martians and darkies. I’m sorry about the darkies aspect, I am only five, I am still catching things off my dad who is always right. My dad is the same in the afternoon as he is in the morning so I don’t have a lot of evidence to go on. My face unpeels from the neck and I can’t help it, I wipe my mouth on my sleeve which is a neverever as my mother keeps saying.
Now the photo, Moira. Moira. Please keep your eyes open when you eat. I’m paying you to keep your eyes open at least.
I can see there’s this photograph of me. It’s on the table but cupped by the hand that isn’t circling around looking for impetigo or whatever on the back of my head which is of course shaved to the bone and permanently chapped I suppose from exposure. The terrifying man at the other end clears his throat, he seems to have a problem, he makes funny little raspy noises like our old dog who’s dead, son, dead as a nit. I was never coddled, Moira, I was never coddled. Hard-boiled, maybe. Scrambled definitely.
This photo in the other hand is the type that if you dropped it it’d break – we have one at home of my mother looking young and beautiful about three hundred years ago on our mantelpiece, it’s jenwin paw shlin and don’t you lay a paw shlin on it, son. I’m really hoping the nice old lady with the decaying neck’ll be careful with this thing because it’s me, it’s me in an even toffer outfit leaning on this pillar with a plant on the top and not really smiling and I’m a bit older at this juncture, which is clever. I’m wondering through the crackle of her fingers on my shaved nape if my face in the photo is going to move like hers is moving but it doesn’t, it stays exactly as it is and I stay exactly as I am.
As I always have done, Moira. Leave me your thumbs to lick, at least.
And then her fingers find my impetigo just when she looks into my brown eyes so close I’m practically knocked out by the fumes on her breath like I knocked out the mouse and she says it.
So I jerk back instead of looking sweet, this time. Every other time to come when she says it I’ll look as sweet as you look right now but without the frown, Moira, without the frown under your eyebrows and the grease all over your cheeks.
Ah Willo, Willo, don’t be afraid.
But because I jerk, this time, she jerks too and her cracks kind of bunch up into one and the photo gets gripped so tightly I’m afraid for it and then worse-than-Des-as-Blind-Pew at the other end of the table starts singing softly about willows and a bosom and a knee and the nice cracked lady goes sssht so that dribble buzzes the sago and side-slips the nude lady next to the salt and prangs into one of the candle flames which ducks for a second but Blind Pew doesn’t sssht, he hisses what the Devil is there to be afraid of, Mother?
And, OK, I explode into snivels because I am so afraid. But not the other times. The other times I’ll be damaged enough, Moira honey. Time’s up? Too bad. You’ve got grease on your sapphires.
We haven’t done the silver salver routine. Aw hell.
We haven’t even started watching the rest of the rushes.
I’m almost sixty.
Sixty. That’s incredible.
Sorry, folks, I was mumbling at the back, people like that are extremely irritating. IT’S GREAT BEING SIXTY, HIYA, THANKS FOR ALL THE BIRTHDAY GIFTS, I’VE BEEN CRAVING FIFTY-EIGHT CAST-IRON BOOT SCRAPERS SENSITIVELY REPRODUCED FROM THE ORIGINAL VICTORIAN MODEL FOR MANY YEARS NOW AND THE NINETY-THREE DISCREETLY PERSONALISED EDWARDIAN SPIRIT FLASKS WILL COME IN VERY USEFUL ON ALL THOSE SPORTING OCCASIONS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. YOU’RE ALL SO INCREDIBLY IMAGINATIVE.
It was too long, that room was too long. You’ve no idea how long it went on for. I’m very glad it was divided for the dental surgery. If I can just finish. Thank you. I did this only six years running according to my mother on her deathbed and the next four times we did it properly all the way down from the attic because the witch was locked away, and because that was practically the first time my mother was really talking about this very important thing I’d thought maybe was a B thriller or even chiller in the Enfield Ritz that I had badly suppressed all this time I got up out of the chair and held her upper arm very delicately and lovingly and would have hugged her, naturally, if I knew it wouldn’t have made her scream. Because she was already gripping that wooden bar thing on chains freely supplied on demand by the National Health Service in those days, you’re supposed to yank yourself into a sitting position with it so you can tuck into your cauliflower cheese while your loving sons and daughters arrange the pillows behind your back but she was using it to get her body up and out of the pain while I just kind of watched with my mouth open like I was watching a Rin Tin Tin rerun or something but this was my mother, this was not a Rin Tin Tin rerun or something – this was the dying of the person who gave birth to me and suckled me and gave me meals and held my head when it hurt or stroked my forehead when I was being sick and took me out to the pictures holding my hand because I didn’t choose the pound, I chose the ticket, the first movie I ever saw was Great Expectations which was crazy with a big iron gate in it and there were sandbags in the lobby and a guy with a black moustache on his mouth and gold moustaches on his shoulders showing me and my mother our seats, it made me stay in my seat with my mouth open for longer than anything else in my five years of life had ever done, especially more than going to speak to God in the place that smelt of rubber boots did. Then she lowered herself back onto the pillow and sighed and I let go her arm and stroked her forehead but she winced so I didn’t ask any more questions, I decided to wait a bit, I got Des and me a cup of tea at his helpful suggestion and when I came back upstairs I’d forgotten the sugar because I always forget my brother takes sugar apparently so I went downstairs and tried to get my feelings about Des separated from my feelings about Mother and when I went upstairs with the sugar bowl she’d fallen asleep and before she could wake up to look at me one last time trying not to think really negatively about Des she’d started that weird kind of shunting thing with her breath with a name like a short and probably really crabby headmaster of a lousy public school but it’s the guy who invented it and it means the final curtain, it’s like the credits going up all the way to the bit about Sweets & Soft Drinks are Available for Your Refreshment in the and the doctor came in and pulled off his Georg
e Orwell spectacles and told Des while I tried to get into the doctor’s sight-line too this thing about the weird breathing like he’d just made a guinea on the two o’clock at Aintree or something, which he probably had as a matter of fact, he cleaned his spectacles on the edge of his jacket really vigorously, there was dandruff stuck to the ear-clasps, I couldn’t ever imagine him dying, he hooked them back on and hummed to himself and adjusted the Gough’s Stalactite Caves Cheddar ashtray on my mother’s dressing-table like it had been a couple of inches too far to the left for thirty-five years and there was this dust and a curly black hair where it had previously been which I don’t think he noticed even though he looked up kind of frowning. I think he thought because I was dressed like an existentialist I didn’t care about my mother so he didn’t make an effort to soothe me at all and Des by that time was phoning whoever you phone, he’s a great organiser, he came back in and he and the doctor had this very organisational conversation I didn’t understand and then the doctor said he’d be back straightaway but I don’t remember anything else very clearly except nodding and having this used hairbrush down my throat I couldn’t swallow while Des talked very impressively. I don’t know how I can watch the rest of these rushes. Maybe I should get my razor and wrap up on that shot of my grandmother’s hairstyle loosening up. We have so much to get through. We have to plot out really carefully this scene with Hubert Lightfoot and the gas helmet, we have to get the right kind of gas helmet or there’ll be about fifty letters a day from gas helmet experts who go to gas helmet conferences and swap rubber flanges and nose-clips or whatever, we have to get that take right first time because eyes are eyes are eggs, you can’t de-coddle them or put the shells back on bit by bit like you can’t ever put my grandmother back again by not watching the rest of the rushes. I have to accept that. I have to accept that she’s very cross and hates me and is standing at the top of the stairs in her stained apron between the stuffed lemur and the fern for ever, I really have to accept that, I really do, because she loved my mother. And as I said to Maura I mean Moira the fact that she loved my mother so much is a very impressive thing, it’s even noble really, and her hate was kind of noble too, Moira’s murmuring standard archetypes, I ignore her even though it’s incredible that she should say something, she has flakes just of batter I hope all over her neck, I carry on as usual, I say how there was no going back on this love because once it had turned to hate there was only the standing at the top of the stairs and the looking out of the long landing window by the stuffed lemur there for hours and weeks and years until the morning the neighbour with the Kenneth Williams nose noticed you could see her feet. Maura wouldn’t understand this, she said did anyone put their hand on my knee during one of these movies. I said hey, I looked up and I saw her at the top of the stairs looking down very cross and hating me because I had taken away her daughter finally in a manner of speaking, she was clearly mentally unbalanced by everything, she was holding a buffing-cloth but five years running everything I touched left dust on my hands, everything was either sticky or dusty, there were these candles burning but there was still no shine anywhere except off the eye-whites and on the ape’s forelip which hasn’t featured yet and off my new shoes and at the corners of my great-grandmother’s mouth and stuff if you don’t count the silver salver of course, that comes with the ape’s forelip – hey, it was the kind of light Mike Avens’d come back from the grave for. I would have noticed that, Moira – my mother was very particular with our very few polishable objects. I learnt how to buff off of her in fact, my bronzed Oscars are much shinier than Spielberg’s, I know in which compass direction to apply the leather and how to breathe at the end and how to kind of flick away the fog so this face looms up. I also know how to lay a ten-course table for civilised people with incredibly refined taste and inflatable stomachs, I know where to place the thing that tips the plate so you don’t waste the melted butter after your asparagus c.i.f. Londun steam-tugged off of a big ship that very same dawn and carted straight onto the slippery-lippery cobbles of Covent Garden fresh as a daisy guv has been swallowed silently. I know how to apply eyewash without wasting a drop. I know a lot of things you people don’t know for that matter.
I hope you people appreciate that. I’m waving from the back row. Hi there. It was a great party. My mother and my grandmother’ll be clearing up, relax, we have a lot of scenes to tail out, my crew are waiting for me as usual, they’re amazing, I underestimated them, they’re still up to their pips in blood and water and Mike is already out there in the barbed wire walking steadily forward with his funny cardboard thing over the exact point my great-uncle landed a shell on his scalp and Mike carries on walking straight through the barbed wire because once he gets an idea in his head you can’t stop him, nothing’ll stop him, he’ll keep on going now until the mist and smoke swallow him up forever and I’m crying, there’s a fly on the wall, the light’s superb, it’s light through water streaming over my patio glass and the fly just stays there with the light streaming over it like a waterfall and Mike’s disappeared, he’d really appreciate the subtlety of the light on the little wings so I won’t swipe it, I’ll let it roam over the faces and bodies of my grandparents and the really staggering epic sweep of the war scenes if I can find the cans because we’ve shot the establishing stuff, between matter and I hope you about a minute ago we actually got to shoot a hundred yards of guys struggling over parapets and lifting up into the air and very gradual pans of blacknesses with these lights rising and falling slowly now and again on a hand-crank. We may not use any of it but who knows, who knows. I’m so tired. I’ve stopped crying now. I threw Moira out of the window and came straight back but she’s used to it, she has a safety net to stop anyone on the sidewalk getting flattened. I’m wiping my swollen eyes so I can see better but it’s still crazed because of the rain, the weather’s terrible, the helicopter’s taking off in a storm and my hand around the whisky is moving slowly underwater. Actually, I don’t think anyone including my neighbour’s been out on the golf course for a week. The divots are full of frog-spawn or a chemical leak from Mexico or somewhere, maybe it’s something they put on the grass, they’re kind of sudding over and it’s the same with the bunkers, the water in the bunkers has got this weird frothy stuff on it like they’re modelling for the Third Battle of Ypres sequence but they’re all the wrong shape and the new Niteplay floodlights show them up really clearly, OK, thank you, we’ll let you know, I want my shell craters to be round and silvery under the Very lights and shell bursts and stuff like some age-challenged nose-dribbling manservant’s tripped up with a big stack of silver salvers buffed to mirror-glass by my grandmother or something, the flood-lights are shielded somewhat by the streaming rain which explains the waterfall on the wall and all over this room and my gutters are playing, I dunno, Indeterminable Variations for Twelve French Canadian Lead Conduits #XXXII by John Milton Cage Jnr extremely proficiently given they are solidly American and plastic. The air is miasmic as a matter of fact, there are lots of pretty fatal illnesses hanging around in it, the skeeters don’t have enough needles to go round so they re-use them on my ankle-bones. HCDVA’s had three power cuts and the brand-new CD-ROM unit with its General Houston paunch roof is a swimming-pool which I think is a much better idea but Dean Lazenby doesn’t agree, he’s quite upset about it actually, he says it has nothing to do with General Houston’s paunch problems, it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright reference making play with the concepts of ingressive growth and textual creatressism that was not sealanted good. I’m having to push the sound up really high because it’s loud out there, there’s a lot of indeterminate music being created but we haven’t time to hum along, my grandfather’s in molestation mode and my grandmother’s remembering what her Sis told her which is that if a young gentleman wants to have his way boing boing remember to take your clothes off and fold back the bed-cover and put a handkerchief under your bottom or it’s extra work after. I’m sorry about this, Sis was only trying to be of assistance, she knows the
score, she was in service herself until the Soap Works needed to replace her grandmother in the boiling-room which was better remunerated if a little less comfortable. A little advice goes a very long way sometimes, some people base their whole conduct on a little advice given at a crucial life-stage like your first day at school or your first day at college or your first day in the office or your first day tucked up in the terminal ward – hey, there’s always some lifewise person ready to grab your elbow and yell something at you in your sensitive ear you’ll bring up all those decades later in your retirement speech after they’ve handed over the office Warhol’s rollerball-and-ink of The Exterior of the Main Building By Day Signed Andy in a clip-on frame for forty-five years of complete subservience you’ll smash the corner off of staggering home on petrol substitute from California wondering if maybe you took that little long-ago advice a little seriously because even the senior executive’s representative sniggered but then he’s only young with spots. Hey, I’m not expecting a gold watch next month. I’ll be very lucky if I get a farewell party because the only other person retiring is the totally bald assistant security officer I’m very frightened of actually, he still challenges me very sharply after all this time, all the other departures are nonessential layouts or layoffs or louts or whatever, they’re just going to kind of slink away. Nothing much is happening up there, by the by the by, they’re just looking kind of blank with water streaming over their faces and clothes and their hands are wondering what to do with themselves other than cover their owners’ faces. At least my grandmother’s stopped nodding but not quick enough to save her hairstyle, which is tumbling over her shoulders and practically down to her waist and certainly down to my Congo poof if you count the waterlight effect – I cannot believe that it could’ve been so incredibly long when you think how neat it looked on her head, it’s like it’s grown instantly and her face is very small inside it, it’s like she’s disappearing behind this black curtain and my grandfather hey ho nonny nonny no is parting it, he’s got a hand in there and he’s just holding back this raven curtain of hair and waterlight and he doesn’t say anything, he just clears his throat and then his Adam’s apple kind of squeezes up and pops into view from behind his tie. The face inside the curtain seems anxious now, the blank look has been replaced by this fairly anxious kind of unstable one which isn’t just the terrible weather here because let’s face it my grandmother has committed probably the biggest never ever outside of stealing a silver fork which is to strike your employer or close relation of. Meanwhile my grandfather’s feeling this great bond with this person because of the kiss, he can still taste her mouth, it seemed frightfully easy and straightforward and it’s still sending out jolly pleasant warm types of ripples all the way to his toes and his top-knot across which the fly is now walking and out onto the out-of-focus window beyond and on to his huge mouth suddenly because he’s smiling gently. Hey, fooled ya. He’d smile gently in a Merchant Livery but he’s not in a Merchant Livery he’s in a Richard Thornby and going places. This rain is remarkable. Voices float up again from the garden as voices only ever floated up from the garden in those days and Giles the sexually-aroused glances at the window with the fly on his eye. Actually, I’m getting irritated by this fly. But it has this connection with Mike now I can’t shake off, it might be Mike come back with compound lenses for eyes and a pair of wings for the aerials. Leave it.
