by WALL, ALAN
'Hello Henry.'
'Hello Bernard. Still thinking about the Nolan then?'
'It's a powerful piece of work.’
'But where on earth would it go, Bernie?' his wife asked. 'We can hardly have it in the front room. The man looks positively demented.'
'He has shuffled off the coils of civilisation,' Henry said. 'Well he might have kept one or two on, if only for decency's sake.'
'He has got down to the essential core of things,' Henry said, now in his curatorial role. He could prattle on merrily like this for hours. 'He is a poor, bare, forked creature. As are we all, up on the heath, if old King Lear is to be believed.' Mrs Bernard
Trasker MBE gave Henry a look of severely disapproving incomprehension.
'It would have to hang in my study. Then it wouldn't need to bother you, would it dear?'
Awful lot of money for something that's only ever going to hang on the wall of your study.
Henry was in a dilemma. He badly wanted to get back to his wine, but couldn't really go and get it without offering his potential clients one as well. He also needed to sell that painting. He decided on a strategy.
'Can I offer you both some red wine? Sadly, it's pretty ropey stuff. Cheap French plonk, but until I manage to sell one of these paintings here, I'm afraid it's all I can afford for the moment.' He hoped two birds might be slain with this one stone.
'No thank you,' said Mrs Bernard Trasker firmly. 'Very good of you, Henry. Don't mind if I do.'
As Henry went to fetch the wine, Mrs Trasker found herself listening to the music. When the gallery owner returned, she fixed her stare on him once more. He knew that stare. It was a stare that existed even when not attached to Mrs Bernard Trasker.
'He's playing the wrong notes, that piano player.'
'No,' Henry said evenly, 'he's playing the right notes. Your ears may not be accustomed to them. He is playing a lot of second intervals, where you're probably used to thirds, fifths and sevenths. But Monk himself said that there are no dissonances, only consonances we haven't got fully acquainted with yet. Schubert plays a fair number of second intervals in his Sonata in B Flat Major, but you've probably got used to them by now.
'Monk?'
'That's the piano player you're listening to. Thelonius Monk.'
'What a very odd name. Was that his real name?'
'I believe so, yes.'
'Can't imagine any of Bernie's colleagues in Whitehall with a name like that.'
'Thelonius Monk, OBE. No, it doesn't sound quite right does it?'
Bernard was still squinting admiringly at the Nolan. He was in fact a very knowledgeable collector. Henry found it utterly baffling that he could endure living with this wife of his for more than a day. Might she have brought money to the union? Could that have been her house at the top of the hill? Or was it possible that once upon a time she had been the most amazing fuck? Henry felt that the human imagination was in the process of reaching its limits here. Her suit was immaculately tailored, and she had evidently been to the hairdresser's recently. Her hair had been dyed, and had now attained the texture of illuminated hay. It reminded him of those Knossos pizzas. Blinded minotaurs and beautiful women. The two men sipped at their wine, which wasn't all that bad, in fact. They'd both swigged worse in their time. Still, it was nothing like the Chateau Neuf he'd be returning to later.
'Tell Henry about Ludlow, Bernie,' Mrs Trasker said. Bernard was jolted from his reverie. 'Go on, tell him. You'll like this, Henry.’
Bernard sighed, turned away from the Nolan, and proceeded.
'We'd gone down to Ludlow for the day. Even before we set off I had this pain in my thigh, but I get so many pains these days I decided to ignore it and while we walked round town, up and down the streets to the castle and what-have-you, I forgot all about the blessed pain. It was only when I was climbing into the car again that it hit me. But this time it had moved up to the ... well, you know.' The two men looked at each other. They knew all right. What man doesn't?
'Right slap-bang in the middle of the whole caboodle. But by now it was so sharp, such a lethal stinging sensation that I suddenly knew what it had to be. I just knew it couldn't be anything else. The black proboscis of some malignant insect was injecting my tackle with its poison.' At this point Henry stopped drinking and put his glass down on the table. He stared at the other man with grave concentration. 'So I jumped back out of the car, unfastened my trousers and pulled down my underpants. There and then.' Mrs Trasker now interposed.
'I had to shout at him, "Bernard, have you gone barking mad?
This isn't the beach at Tenerife." There was a poor woman crossing the car park with her shopping bags who turned tail there and then. Obviously thought she'd finally come face to face with the phantom Shropshire flasher. Dropping carrots out of her bag in her haste to be gone.'
'So what was it?' Henry asked. 'What was what?'
'This poisonous creature that had decided to make a meal of your ... well, of you?'
'That was the extraordinary thing, you see,' Bernard said, turning up to the ceiling a mild look of philosophic distraction, the look of a veteran recalling distant battles, 'because it wasn't an insect at all. It was a needle.'
'A needle? What sort of needle?'
'Just an ordinary sewing needle. With its point a full half inch into my scrotum.' As if moved suddenly by the extent of the ordeal, Bernard walked back to the painting, put his halfmoon spectacles on, and gave it a good long look. Henry picked up his wine glass and drained it. He stared at Mrs Trasker: 'I think you'll find in future that a small wax doll will normally serve just as well.'
Then the telephone rang. It was Sylvie.
'Excuse me,' Henry said, 'but I need to take this in the other room.' He went through to the kitchen and, with the handset crooked between his shoulder and his ear, he re-filled his glass. 'So how are you?'
'Confused Henry. I'm a very confused girl at the moment.
You're not planning on confusing me any more, are you?' He knew exactly what she meant.
'Try not to.'
'We're friends who meet sometimes for a little comfort.'
'Don't leave it too long then, will you?'
'Did you by any chance get a caller with a Scots voice yesterday?' Henry thought for a moment.
'Yes, I did, funnily enough. It was a wrong number.'
'It wasn't actually. It was our Director of Studies, a grubby little schmuck called Hamish Flyte, who has taken to keeping records on us all for future use. All our little peccadilloes noted down.'
'Like a Chief Whip.'
'What do they do?'
'Keep tabs on everyone, dark notebooks filled with all your nastier moments, in case it all comes in handy for a bit of blackmail, when a division's looking iffy. But this isn't 1890. You're not breaking any laws, for God's sake.'
'I think he's just building up collateral. He reckons there might be a plot against him. He thinks we all hate him.'
'Why does he think that?'
'Because we all do. Nobody can even remember how he got in to the Institute; let alone how he ended up almost running it. He can still make the difference between grants and fellowships being renewed, all the same. Poisonous little toad. If he phones again, tell him to fuck off.'
'From both of us?'
'From both of us.'
'You could always come over and tell him yourself.' There was a pause. 'When will you come and visit me again, Sylvie?'
'I don't know, love. If it's regular comfort you need, I think you should tryout one of those fragrant Shrewsbury ladies.'
'Would it help if I turned vegetarian?'
'Wouldn't make much difference with those pizzas. You even said that yourself.'
*
Why vegetarian? The ancients believed in a homeopathic diet: if you want to be strong like a lion, then eat a lion; if lustful like a goat, eat goat. If you want to be cunning like the snake, cut the snake from its skin, cook it slowly with herbs and then consume it. T
o sing sweetly, swallow the nightingale before the song in its tiny throat starts congealing. To swim with savage grace, catch, roast and eat your shark. If you want to mock the gods and defecate in their sacred places, chew monkey in great quantities.
Now as for Sylvie, all she really wanted was to be as calm as a tree in the shade, quiet as grass in a storm, and so she had become a vegetarian. No blood would ever again pass her lips, not even the blood of the lamb. She reckoned slaughter's debris clogs the mind, making the spirit viscous and sluggish. It coarsens the delicate ganglia that connect us to time's wounds. And yet she was fascinated by Picasso, the least vegetarian of artists; he ate the world's flesh raw so as to make it his own. Ate years; became history. Swallowed ancient art, the flesh of unimaginable times and unimaginable minds, vivid traces of lost worlds, so as to become the one great primeval heir; Pablo, unquestionable Iberian son of the ages, erect in his cloak of flesh. Sylvie believed that her diet explained in part her equable temperament, though she didn't feel all that equable at the moment, if the truth were told. Work. She had some work to do. Constellations and lenses. Lecturing tomorrow.
What she was trying to get across was how reality was always lensed. And the easiest way to do this was to point to the seventeenth century. There the telescope and the microscope expanded the human imagination at both ends. The great vision of falling bodies which opens Paradise Lost would not have been possible without Galileo's telescope. The English poet had visited the Italian scientist. Milton even pays a handsome tribute to him in Book One. Now in fact we don't know how far back in history the invention of the telescope goes. We're not sure what the merkhet of the Egyptians was; or the 'queynte mirours' and 'perspectives' mentioned in Chaucer. Roger Bacon's 'glasses or diaphanous bodies' were evidently optical devices, and in the sixteenth century Thomas Digges and John Dee both appear to have made use of 'optic tubes' of some sort, but as far as we know they employed them solely for the magnification of terrestrial objects, to bring faraway visions closer to the eye.
The truly momentous year in the history of this device, the one which had made its use obligatory and shifted the perceptions of humankind irrevocably, redefining in the process the extremities of perception, was 1609 to 16I0, when Galileo stared through the telescope he had made for himself. Here Sylvie drew a red line down the side of her margin. She must get this across clearly, or there was no point in any of them being there at all. So what did Galileo see? Lionel, will you take your beady little eyes off my legs for two bloody minutes, and focus on the overhead projection please?
Galileo saw that the Milky Way was more crammed with stars than anyone had previously dreamt, and that Jupiter had four planets, previously undetected. He could see a covering of earth-shine on the moon's surface, our own sunny reflection handed back into the darkness of space, but noted also our moon's asperities, its ragged, pock-marked surface, its irregularities and protruberances. Aristotelianiasm began to die there and then, for there was not, as the Greek philosopher had asserted and the European intellectual tradition had maintained for nearly two thousand years, perfection in the celestial sphere. The same laws applied up there as apply down here. This fitted in nicely with Galileo's previous discoveries: that bodies fall, all bodies fall, unless a force acts upon them with sufficient potency to prevent them from so doing. Soon enough everyone would have to accept that the planets didn't move in the celestial perfection of circles either, but described instead a circuit of imperfection, the gravitationally distorted ellipse. Soon everyone in Europe who could afford it, wanted to have one of these telescopes. Galileo tried to make sure he had a few spares with him whenever he performed his demonstrations before princes, since even scientific geniuses need to make a living. And later that year when Galileo's book, Sidereus Nuncius, was printed, every fellow of means had to get hold of a copy. Sir Henry Wotton wrote a letter to the Earl of Salisbury on March 13, 16I0, in which he said that the work 'is come abroad this very day'. Pirated editions were soon far more numerous than the authorised imprints. The heavens were at last yielding their secrets, though some of the defenders of heaven itself weren't best pleased at this turn of events.
The world had changed, then, and changed for ever - through lenses. The telescope started to habituate the mind to a vastness never previously conceived. Then the microscope extended perception in the other direction. Robert Hooke's Micrographia had become one of the most famous books in the world soon after its publication in 1665. When Pepys collected his copy, he sat up until two in the morning reading it, and described it as 'the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.' Lenses alter our perception of reality and the old reality never entirely comes back again.
Now what I want you all to do, Sylvie said to her imaginary audience, is to consider this week how many of the images in your memories, and how many of the images before your eyes, arrive through lenses. If you think it's less than 50%, then I'd suggest you're not thinking hard enough. Each single one of us is a photographic, microscopic, telescopic and cinematic museum. And we barely notice. We've become our own images. We've become the afterlife of our own images.
Through a Lens Backwards
While Sylvie was delivering this lecture the next day, Owen sat at home and waited for the doorbell to ring. Which it duly did. Johnny Tamworth had come to deliver the advance DVD of Deva. Owen had forgotten how well he knew Johnny. This was happening every day now. A void suddenly filled up with a voice, a face, an embrace. The space was there to be filled. Only one clue was required. Owen stared down at the familiar stubble of grey hair, the wire-rimmed glasses, the brackish little beard. Johnny was somehow simultaneously fastidious and tainted. Owen liked him for it.
'It's powerful, Owen, if that makes you feel any better about things. We're still hoping to hold the screening in a couple of months. But there's a big argument going on now about where and when it could be run. I'm half-inclined to cut most of the warehouse scene, to be honest. That's the one causing all the problems. Inevitably.' That was right. They almost always had problems of one sort or another, didn't they? But they got there in the end. Johnny knew his way around. Owen didn't want to think about this particular problem at all. Certainly not the warehouse scene. It was at the end of a very dark corridor, anthracite black, and he was more than happy to leave it there. To leave it all there along with the word Alex.
'Did you bring the camera?'
'Yes. But what is it exactly you want to do, Owen?'
'Will you trust me?'
'I think I sometimes trust you altogether too much.'
'Just film. Don't worry about the soundtrack in the cafe. It will be a voice-over when we edit. Hand-held. Documentary stuff. '
*
Twenty minutes later they were in the cafe, and the same woman with the thick-lensed glasses was staring over at them warily as Johnny pointed his video camera at her. With video, they were mobile and unencumbered with film crews. They could do what they liked.
'It's for a feature about Chester,' Owen said, 'and its more notable characters.' Then more softly, to Johnny: 'Film the table.'
'How do you mean?'
'The surface, the stains, the butt-marks. Give me close-ups of the table. Linger on it as though it were some precious medieval manuscript. That's the way it felt. Like the long water-shot in Tarkovsky's Stalker. Let the camera look at everything as though it had never seen it before.'
'I suppose it hasn't, if you think about it.'
Then they went to the hostel. 'Just walk in casually,' Owen said, and as they stepped past the man in his little glass box of an office, he smiled and said, 'Don't worry, Walter, it's all been arranged.'
'Has it?' Johnny asked as they went up the stairs. 'No. But we'll be out of here in no time.'
They walked down the corridor to the room. Alfred was sitting on the bed, as usual, his Bible open on his lap before him.
'You've brought a friend.'
'This is John Tamworth, the film-maker I told you about.
/> We're going to do a bit of filming. You don't mind do you?' He didn't wait for an answer. 'Actually you'll need the sound on for this bit. Pan very slowly between the empty bed and Alfred. Who was it sat there last week, Alfred?' Alfred looked at them both with extreme suspicion before answering slowly.
'A man who had lost his memory. Found himself in the middle of a mystery play. But he was still full of words that had their own memories. So maybe his memories didn't really matter. Maybe his own memories had only really got in the way of the real memories underneath. How am I doing? How's the audition going?' Owen looked at John, suddenly focusing, his lens probing Alfred's face. I think he might be beginning to see the point, Owen thought. Then Alfred turned down to the Bible on his lap and started reading from it.
'And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again and said, "Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth."