Gerry looks abashed. ‘A half-arsed Anglican, me. Not really even that.’
Takes
#1
—What are they doing now?
—They’ve gone to the van for some duct tape.
—Duck tape?
—Duct tape.
#2
—Do they have gin in the van?
—I shouldn’t think so.
—Port?
—I shouldn’t think so, no.
#3
—We’re here tonight in conversation with …
—May I wear my Polaroids?
—We’d rather you didn’t, rather.
—It’s just that the glare off that reflector thingy …
—We push it any further we’re up against …
—You’re up against the tubs and taps and so forth.
—We’re up against the tubs and taps and so forth.
#4
—We’re here tonight in conversation with … the redoubtable Nancy Thring, a woman the LRB has called … well, what have they called you, Nancy?
—I think their term was Ancient Martianess.
—And what was your reaction to that … that characterisation?
—Oh, you know. Hyperbole, you know.
(Somewhere OFF, a very loud heliotrope phut.) –Ah. We seem to have lost …
—Never mind. Could I have a smidgen more ginger ale?
#5
Audio only.
The CONSERVATORY is in darkness. Also, it’s full of botanical entities which complicate the electrician’s task. A brass band can be heard rehearsing in the nearby Masonic Hall.
—Do you dream, Mister Interviewer?
—Sure.
—I had a dream the other night.
—Uh huh.
—A woman I once knew … A woman I once loved …
—Soon have the lights back on.
—I was watching her sleep. She was sleeping very soundly. Hers were all the lineaments of beauty and innocence. Later in the dream—you know how things turn poisonous in dreams—I heard that she’d been charged with shoplifting.
—How very unfortunate.
—It was only a dream, Mister Interviewer.
—Nigel. My name is Nigel.
#6
Audio only.
screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
—Tell a dream and lose a reader. Henry James said that.
#7
—We’re here tonight in conversation with a woman whose work has been likened to that of Kate Wilhelm. Let’s turn the clock back Nancy to a time … when you travelled to work on a tram and wrote your first reviews on an Underwood.
—A Remington, in fact. We didn’t have these modern chaff-cutters. Reviewing was my bread and butter then.
—Tell us about that.
—In any given week I’d find myself reading a liquorice-allsorts mix of Romance, Adventure, Scientifiction …
—Scientifiction?
—Science Fiction in its adolescence. Typical of the genre was Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C41+, originally serialised in Modern Electrics.
—Now we’re getting somewhere.
—Ever hear of Olaf Stapledon? Mathew Phipps Shiel? Lucian of Samosata?
—It isn’t often my notes … come up empty, like.
—The Fifties ushered in luminaries like Heinlein and Asimov, The Green Hills of Earth and The Caves of Steel. And then one day I thought you know by God, I could write this crap!
—You don’t mean crap, of course.
—Don’t I? You know what Nige, I gotta powder my nose.
#8
—By way of resumption, Nancy …
—By way of resumption, yes …
—I’m wondering tonight … which of your hundred and twenty-seven novels … you regard with the least dissatisfaction.
—I’ve always had a soft spot for Crystal Circuit. Transparent Cities too had something I …
At this point in the taping, a bain-marie is wheeled into the CONSERVATORY. The curry has been made with Namjai Curry Paste. The Bombay duck contains no duck at all. Also on offer are seedless mandarins and after-dinner mints.
—Splendid! Champagne at last, Nigel! (Nancy dons her Polaroids, raises her glass of bubbly.)
—I give up. (The CONSERVATORY is thronged by plants both monstrous and sapient—Triffids, probably. That they have somehow mediated his defeat, NIGEL doesn’t doubt. He puts on his own groovy shades, a pair of Dirty Dogs.)
—I’m old. I dream of death. (NANCY’S tone is one of rueful gaiety.) I dream of lovely women I have known … and I dream of being dead. In death I’m flying in my son’s seaplane across a gently undulating desert. It’s very quiet and peaceful, there in the company of my adult son, in the cockpit of his old-fashioned seaplane. The desert below us is pink, as finely wrinkled as skin immersed too long in water—the skin of a finger, for instance.
—What can I say, Nancy?
—Say nothing. And fetch me a Corona.
screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Before sound is lost altogether, the brass band in the distance attempts an air by Erik Satie. Gymnastic bloody pedalling thinks NIGE.
3
WHITE NIGHTS
It is the peculiar power of mirrors to show us what is not there.
E.L. Doctorow
Passion-fruit
This particular city was a place of zigzags, trolley buses and neo-Gothic churches.
The taxis were clean and new, but for a time there lingered chalky-walled old picture theatres whose curtains of faded green velvet creaked and rattled when raised.
The Topaz. The Topkapi. Screening on dismal Sundays, Psycho and Dr Strangelove. Smoking de rigueur in stalls and dress circle.
Bibulous and jadedly ‘showbiz’, the ageing projectionists manned ginger projection booths. Eschewed ties and often neglected to shave. Traipsed home at midnight (those dank zigzags again) to suppers of toast and sardines.
Doing smack in a basement, Ajax Jones.
Jill Bradford’s crowd frequented the Tutti Frutti, a milk bar of mock-rococo charm. Its pink-wafered sundaes came in hefty cut-glass boats, its foaming spiders in thick-stemmed goblets.
Neville was more of a fixture than a feature. His nickel plating had worn off in places, revealing the plumbeous alloy beneath. A robot of the historical ZXJ type, he cleared and wiped the counter and the tables—in pathetic fits and starts.
Jill had her eye on a babe. Long legs and narrow hips. There he was at the far end of the counter, holding a can of creaming soda and looking woefully cute.
‘Do you happen to know his name?’ Jill asked the robot.
‘Indeed I do, Miss Bradford. Got quite a lunch on him, ain’t he?’
‘What can you mean, Neville?’
‘Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but that young man up yonder is Luke Raven, the painter and musician.’
A good night’s work behind them, Ajax Jones and Fat Johnson. They’d just knocked off a pharmacy. Come away with many a pretty capsule, tablet, pill.
‘Listen up, Ajax.’
‘Give it a rest, Fat Johnson.’
‘A basement like this, you want to do it out.’
Ajax Jones affronted. ‘How do you mean, do it out?’
‘Listen to Fat Johnson. With a can of black paint and a red lightbulb, you’ve got yourself a strip joint.’
Luke Raven’s Levis concertinaed blackly above his ankles, just as in their designer’s facile sketches. As gorgeous and undead as a famous suicide, he looked like a version of Hamlet. The troubled Dane of Victorian daguerreotype, all kohled eyes and feathery Roman haircut. He probably dyed his hair that jetty jet, but his sad angelic face seemed wholesomely authentic.
Jill went to the Ladies out the back, contriving to seem to spot him as she returned. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘What gives?’
‘Logic, grammar and rhetoric. You know these terms?’
‘They’re not entirely unfami
liar.’
‘They constituted the trivium of medieval scholarship. A trivium being also a place where three roads met.’
‘And you know this how?’ asked Jill.
‘Neville told me. He dithers and farts about, but he knows his stuff.’
‘I dither and fart about, but I still have an excellent mind,’ the robot warbled.
‘What you have is a brain, whatever its condition.’
‘I stand corrected, sir. Ain’t no flies on you, Mister Raven.’
This particular city was a place of zigzags, trolley buses and neo-Gothic churches.
The YMCA offered cheap rooms. A lofty viaduct attracted the despairing.
Slung above intersections, slack but sturdy nets, the wires and cables of the trolley-bus system. Sketchy webs suggesting the hit-or-miss knitting of mescaline-fed spiders.
You could however do yourself a favour. Before you joined a choir or Scrabble club. Before you joined a choir or Scrabble club, you could check out the torrid Tutti Frutti. Amid the mirrors and ‘onyx’ pillars of which …
‘So what do you put in your paintings?’ Jill was asking Luke.
‘Diesel locomotives. The Pie Kart in rain.’
‘Cool.’
‘No. But listen. My paintings are made of gouts of oil and blood. Gouts of oil and semen.’
‘Way to go, I guess.’
‘No. But hear me out. My studio used to be a warehouse. I live with the sounds of trucks and trains and forklifts. I live with a melancholy, edge-of-the-city vibe.’
‘Like who dumped the mattress in the fennel?’
‘Like, Who dumped the mattress in the fennel? Exactly.’
And Jill had long since glimpsed. And Jill had long since spotted the bulge in Luke’s black jeans, the rubbery-looking bulb of his glans. ‘Gouts of blood and oil, eh? So when do I get to see your studio?’
Luke Raven shrugged. ‘What are you doing when this place closes?’
Neville came to life. The Walter Brennan of robotics stirred. ‘He doesn’t have a kitchen. He’ll feed you jumbo hot dogs from the Pie Kart.’
‘I’m counting on it,’ Jill Bradford said.
Greg Becker
His TV cracks and bangs as it cools down after an evening’s viewing. Crisp reports as loud as pistol shots. But why does he never recall this unpleasant fact of life until his head hits the pillow?
They startle and bore him, both, these resonant detonations. He should never have moved the Sony into his bedroom, but this is where he gets the clearest picture—which isn’t saying much.
Marvellous colours tonight, but only because it rained, bucketed down for most of the evening. His reception comes right with a vengeance whenever it pours. And he watches television for its colours, the brilliance of its hues. Its witch’s oils, its Japanese-tartan dyes.
Or so he tells himself. And when at last he gets to sleep, he dreams. Dreams of a girl he knew some thirty years ago. She’s pregnant now, her belly roundly packed, her belly tautly round and somewhat mottled, and he knows he’s the father of her child before she says a word.
Greg Becker works in what he suspects is really a sheltered workshop. His hours are few and fluid, his tasks uncomplicated; he’s given jobs unlikely to vex and derange him. And Greg has his own tidy bench, his own modest arsenal of tools. He rehabilitates toasters; he disassembles heaters and gives them the treatment, restoring them to glowing states of grace. The innards of your iron need a blob or two of solder? Greg is not unmanned by the pricky guts of things. Those luscious-looking wires of brown and green and yellow, of palest turquoise and rosiest cerise—they soothe and settle Greg, they hold him in the moment.
His therapist trained in Melbourne, Australia. Her name is Helene Wong, and she goes in for doctorly white coats. What did you see on your way to my office, Greg?
I saw the usual fountains. I saw the usual palaces, piazzas.
What else?
The sky, of course. The sky seemed kind of leaden.
The sky looked leaden to you?
All right. Point taken. I’m turning to lead myself is how I feel.
Television. Work.
Helene wears spectacles with pinkish frames. You feel any better today? she asks.
A little. Not much.
You don’t think the implant has helped?
Not much. Not really.
Give me a number, Greg.
On a scale of one to ten, I’m feeling sort of three-ish.
Ah ha.
Three-ish. That’s it. That’s me.
Ah ha. OK. But we have some options here.
We talk to the techies again?
We talk to the technicians. We boost the amplitude would be my guess.
A wingèd lion. A saint on a crocodile. And this is a city in which … Canaletto meets Saatchi and Saatchi.
So let’s get this straight.
Let’s.
You were one of the guys who walked on the moon?
I was.
You were trained by NASA? You wore the special suit?
Copy that, Houston. I’m the guy you never heard about. I walked on the moon when the moon had ceased to be news.
Get outta here.
It ruined my life. It blew my tiny mind.
He washes a drip-dry shirt in the sink meant for dishes.
Greg has never emptied his suitcase, never completely unpacked. His suitcase lies in the corner, its raised lid revealing a jumble of socks and singlets.
It’s good to go, that suitcase. Just shut me and you’re packed, it seems to say.
A wee birdie tells me that you used to play the ukulele.
I plinked and plunked a bit, but I couldn’t make it sing.
Describe it to me, Greg.
It was cherry-red, a glossy cherry-red. It had a little Popeye stencilled in gold paint on the soundbox.
My oh my.
Exactly.
Human Voices
MAORI BILL
What year was this?
This was the year of Beirut. Beirut Beirut Beirut.
CHARLES
The Cars had a record on all the jukeboxes. Who’s gonna drive you home tonight? it went.
Carter liked to shoot at night and in the rain, but I can’t say he was difficult. And another thing. And another thing. He could drink and toke all day, mooch along all day, but when we hit the streets, alleys, zigzags … Instant concentration and control, wherever we were shooting.
TONY
He seemed to think in terms of tracking shots, some of which were actually doable.
We had a way with planks and bits of dunnage, and we built an actual crane out of wood. We should have been a laughing stock, but who the fuck was watching, right?
JENNY
They used a 16mm Bolex throughout.
It was real film in those days. You ran it through a clackety projector.
Real film with sprocket-holes, real film in cans.
MAORI BILL
So Fried is screened to thunderous applause, to wild acclaim I don’t think.
So Carter’s film’s a scandal, an obscene provocation. A monster from the deep, a rotting heap of slime.
They’re baying for our blood is Carter’s take, so he rounds us up and puts us on a bus and we end up in this house he’s rented on the coast. In the middle of winter, dig.
CHARLES
Sand in the bunks, the carpets. Funeral in Berlin and ratty old copies of Penthouse.
We blew some weed and ran the film again. We drew the curtains and blew some weed and looked on what we’d wrought.
MAORI BILL
Rain. Or Night. It should really have been called.
JENNY
Bernard Bliss was fabulous as Mong. And Carter had wanted that nick, that tick, that scar bisecting the eyebrow. Had wanted too of course that beautiful body.
When I saw Jude Law so gorgeously naked in Wilde, I thought of Bernard’s pulchritude. No other word for it, kid.
CHARLES
I
t’s actually quite a sophisticated soundtrack. Niftily layered. Craftily sculpted. If I do say so myself. And we used that Cars number to good effect.
RICHARD
He’d published a book of verse you know. I guess it’d be a collector’s item now, like the poems of Ernest Hemingway.
JENNY
I fucked him and I edited his film.
Slender and nicely made. Slender and nicely made is how I’d describe Carter.
An utter bloody sod, to tell the truth. But still you know if he walked through that door over there …
RICHARD
I was meant to help him write the script, but he already had it in his head. And what he seemed to do was shoot a scene or two and then make a record of what he’d shot, of what he thought he’d captured. All neatly typed it was, and clipped into a binder (this biretta-black antique he’d found somewhere), and each new page was like a prose poem by Jean Cocteau.
FROM THE SCRIPT OF FRIED
Shot 73. Exterior. Night. The rain’s very visible and wet. Neon lies in ribbons on the road. A naked MONG advances goldenly, his bobbly cock aglint like basted lamb. (There’s night oil on our lens. Our clockwork consists of Brylcreem and wishbones.)
TONY
He did direct a picture in the States. We never saw it here, but I caught it in London in ’87. Kris Kristofferson and what’s-her-face. Forget it, just forget it.
JENNY
I often wish I’d seen him again before …
Astonished Dice Page 9