Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Ivory Zelda with the yellow front tooth. That was the loveliest thing about her and the rest of her was pretty lovely, too. No dentist should ever touch it. That little bit of canker on the glossy apple’s what every painter craves, innit? Tarkovsky would have really liked her. Fellini did. She was one of the Serbian refugees in E La Nave Va. She joined the queue of hopefuls outside his office and he picked her. There were thousands and thousands of hopefuls and he picked her. I know, because I was there. He didn’t realise I was just holding her hand. He wanted me, too. I said, Mr Fellini, you’re talking to Richard Thornby, the film director. I don’ care, he cried, you are parrfet. Parrfet for what, Mr Fellini? Ambidextrous Siamese twin? Grizzled cherub with club-foot? The lead role? I can’t juggle with my toes, by the way, but I can skip on two legs without a rope. Ha ha, he laughed. You are parrfet for dead man on wharf who is trampled underfoot. Percipient, was our maestro. I’ll let you know, I said. I didn’t. I’ve got it on video. There is no dead man on wharf trampled underfoot in E La Nave Va. There’s not much of Zelda, either. But enough. The greatest moonlight scenes in the history of film making and Zelda’s tooth flashes for an instant – pure rotten gold, guv. That’s all I’d watch it for, towards the end.

  So my sixtieth, the door into senescence, the gateway to the wintry, my farewell to the last loony pulse of youth, is gatecrashing itself. How about that? Intruder at the feast. At its own feast. I hope Zoë’s remembered the cake, that’s all. And wow, the candles!

  Has she remembered the cake?

  This is audience participation, dumbos. Dick Whittington on ice. Oh no he isn’t. Oh yes he is. Come on, come on. Did I hear a murmur?

  Talking of noise, I reckon it wasn’t the bomb on poor Mrs Jackson’s. I reckon it was my father. I reckon it was one of his little jokes. I reckon it was him got my mother going that starlit night under the rumble of the Heinkels, under the corrugated iron of the Anderson, under this lyrical bit of English prose. Nice number, guv. It’d come up lovely, spotlit.

  I reckoned he got her going, frankly. On purpose. He was capable of that. And he was pissed. In sixty years time, lovely me duck, he’ll have the birthday of his life, I don’t think. Eleven-firty. The bomb dropped at eleven-firty, me mum said. The poor souls were having a quiet get-together for the new decade. Total shash then quiet again except for the water-pipes. Did for the lot. All the family. Not a Jackson left. Just the dog, in his kennel. Horrible dog, too. Mind you, said me mum, in her quiet way, they weren’t everybody’s cup of tea, the Jacksons. Half an hour later – whaaaa! No wonder I’ve always been susceptible, like. To noises and cold, oh Zelda my love, to noises and cold. I came out to the All Clear and the comforting wails of ambulance sirens and drunks and the rasp of a lotta Brooke Bond being sipped and was wrapped in a blackout cloth, which I’ll have you know prickles dreadful. What an entrance. What an entrance. None of my students understand. They’ve never heard of the Blitz, out in Houston. They think London’s a waxwork you have to queue five hours for. They’re right.

  The phone has just rung. It was Ken, another Ken. Incredible, the number of people I know called Ken. Ken Loach, it was. The great Ken Loach. Kes, Raining Stones, Ladybirds or whatever it’s called – they’re all bloody masterworks. What did he want? I’ll tell you. He wanted another number. For some inexplicable reason my name was in his address book. It’s crammed with the great and the good, Ken Loach’s address book. Is that Bertrand? he asked. No, I said. It’s Dicky. Dicky? Yup. Alias Richard Thornby. Silence. Oh, Christ, I’m sorry, it’s Ken here. Ken Loach. I wanted bloody Tavernier. We’re doing a big thing together. Top secret. Well you’ve got Richard here, Ken. Christ, I’m sorry. Did I wake you? How’s tricks, ah, Richard? I can hear him pounding through his memory cells. He must know who I am, for Christ’s sake! I’m just over for a few days, er, guess why? Oh, that, says Ken Loach, yeah – we’re just having a quiet do at home. Well you can come along to my do, if you want, at the Waterfront Hotel, Ken – we’d be honoured. A bit of a knees-up. Silence. He’s probably handing out soup to dossers tonight, or something, and too damn modest to say it. Change the subject. This big proj, sounds great. You know what it is, Richard? He sounds upset. No no, I hastily respond. But working with Bertrand and all that, y’know? I’ve diminished in size. Literally. I’m crouched over the bloody phone as if I want to get into the mouthpiece. Ken, on the other end, is enormous. He’s a granite cliff. He’s a masterwork. I nearly call him sir. Sorry, sir – Ken? Not yet, not yet, Richard. There’s interference, sounds stellar. He’s probably phoning from somewhere bloody interesting, like the multistorey in Salford. Somewhere with lots of texture.

  Yeah, well, says Ken. Great talking to you, Richard. Still out there, then? A spark of interest! But he’s bluffing. He doesn’t know where out there is. It could be the Riouw-Lingga Archipelago, for all he knows. (The what, son? I did a shoot out there, long ago. Great surf. Great girls. Indonesia, by the way. The shoot for my unfinished masterwork, After the Bounty. My first unfinished masterwork. Actually – honest now, guv – it was for Let’s Go Places on ITV. Nicest job I ever had. Just before Clive’s Seasons. ’87, or something. Probably ruined it. The archipelago, I mean. Mind you, it doesn’t exactly trip off the package holiday tongue, Riouw-Lingga, does it? Sounds a little like what I got up to one night, under the coconuts, our toes tickled by surf, her skin as warm as sand and the colour of the opening shots in Stalker. Blimey, son. ’Nuff said. Over to Ken and me.)

  Yup, I’m still out there, Ken. Teaching. Till recently. I haven’t done a thing in ages, except yak. Except what? Yak. Oh, yak! Giggle, north of England style. I bring the receiver back to my ear. But I’ve got something up my sleeve, something big. Oh, yeah? Yeah, Ken. Poor sod wants to phone Bertrand Tavernier and he’s wasting his priceless time listening to some clapped-out jerk kidding himself he can make a comeback. Must happen all the time. Silence. Well, good luck with it, Richard – sorry to bother you. Hey, Ken, you can phone me whenever you like. Any hour of the day or night. When I’m over. You can phone me in the States, you can phone me when you’re out there. I’ll put you up. I’ll put you up and we can talk far into the night about kestrels, about Manchester, about the revolution, about the cosmos. I’ll tell you about my mum and my project. You’ll fall off your chair and I’ll carry you to bed. I’ll tuck you up. I’ll lie on the sofa and watch the fire die and listen to the toads and the ambulance sirens and think this is a very important day in the history of British film-making. Merchant-Ivory, get lost. M. Tavernier, je m’excuse. Ken and I have shared something infinitely precious. The films we are going to make together are all going to be infinitely precious. They are going to be the early jewels of the lustrous twenty-first-century renaissance. The renaissance that’ll spread its brilliant peacock tail through all the arts. Unstoppable. Magnificent. Fanned out, flowering out of the dung-heap of the twentieth century, out of the million upon million of the murdered and abused and forgotten of the twentieth century, out of their hearts and minds and Technicolor mouths. Ken, we can do it.

  Click.

  Heck, I wish I’d said it. It’s down there, curled on the cutting-room lino. The lost rushes of Orson Welles That Ends Well. Unspliceable. Be content, be content with stills. With frightening stills. Frightening, unflickering, slightly tramlined stills.

  I think I said, instead – good luck, Ken, thanks for calling. What a jerk. Thanks for calling! But he didn’t mean to call! Why do I always fuck it up at the end? I sounded like I felt, that’s why. I sounded miniscule. Bet you my last Wrigley’s he hated my accent. He’s from nowhere and he’s going nowhere, I bet he thought. Treading water in mid-Atlantic, riding the big swell to nowhere. It’s not my fault, Ken! I’d love to be real, I truly would! No froth, no chemicals, just handpicked and yeasty in my own china mug unhooked from the ocean-hardened truss, spit on the floor, sawdust on my toes, the old geezers singing their incomprehensible songs and me – me joining in because I know the words backwards and no one’s snigger
ing behind their Woodbine-kippered, England-encrusted nails!

  Aw, shucks. Cor, blimey. Well, that’s the cue for me mum. And behind me mum, the phantoms.

  Chill. They’re in here. OK. Let’s go.

  ZOë RANG. I gave you a lot of held white wall and was just about to start the countdown when Miss Tiggywinkle rang. Zoë is, if I remember rightly, nothing like Miss Tiggywinkle. She is slim, dark-haired, efficient. Get that. Slim, dark-haired, efficient. Zoë, I really lust over your voice. I lust over what you embody. I would like to have married you, thirty-odd years ago, before you were born. Now it’s too late. You are the mistress of the ceremonies that are about to consign me to senescence. (Look it up, Ossy, look it up, I’ve used it before.) I don’t feel my age. I feel very young. I feel, as a matter of fact, as if I’ve only just been born. Hey, no, don’t go back to that bloody terrible night, those bloody awful nights of infancy, the night skies raining terror, bright as day up there and dark as the pit down here, serious testicular abrasions from the war-issue diapers, Des’s shell-case rattle with my fontanelle coordinates on it, superficial crush injuries against me mum’s Oxo pinny every time the siren went, stuffed onto a train, getting out at somewhere unspellable even by a grown Englishman ’cos there were literally thousands of ls in it, guv, bundled past scowling chapels and friendly sheep, mired thigh-deep in sopping grass as we crossed the field’s short-cut look you, hugging my teddy, what the hell is happening, where am I going, who are you, what is this country, and where are the whales that are going to save me? Because I have a great and abiding terror of them. They’re too large. Call me Ricky. Ricky please, not Dick.

  Above all – where’s me mum?

  Ah, Zoë. How I wish you were running my life perpetually. How I wish you were running the world. One big party. Remembering the candles. Remembering the doilies. Remembering that I liked pink marzipan and – oh joy, FRESH CREAM ECLAIRS which have to come as you bite them or they’re inauthentic. Not that you used that term, come. Not that I used it, either. Oh no. You are brisk, slim-haired, darkly efficient. Zoë Moneypenny. I could hear your horn-rims cluck against the earpiece as you noted, noted my desires down in your little electronic pad. Cool, calm, collected second cousin of Hilda and something-not-too-close of me. What opposites! All the women in my life have been wild, wild and brunette and emotionally awry. Dark-tressed Zoë, you are my salvation. I can splice and edit my wet green rushes all day, rise from the table at six, change and scrub myself (maybe not in that order) by seven, saunter by foot with my film cans in the old perambulator through the gaily-apparelled and pissed throng to the Waterfront, ascend in the whispering lift, hush-puppy along the corridor to Suite Y, open the door softly to a forest (OK, a small but intimate English copse) of applause, the last balloon in place, the last doily settled, the sago browning, the screen up and the projector set (thanks, Joe, thanks), the terrace garlanded with winter roses, a well-rendered chorus of Happy Birthday plus serial descant from Ossy and the other event temporarily forgotten.

  Thank you, my dearest Zoë, Zoë my lass! (Mind you, guv, I’m paying her enough. Fifty per cent up front, too. Orfenticity, see. Cor.)

  Where’s me mum?

  Me mum is dead.

  Rough justice. I bet she wore herself out tending to your horrible dad, you’re thinking. I bet she laboured over the iron and the stove and maybe the haberdashery-till on Saturdays ping till, tucking her loose strand of once-lovely locks into her headscarf, she turned and said to your belching pop with his feet up on the meticulously-scrubbed table: I don’t feel well, Douglas. Grunt, because Douglas is tackling the Enfield Times crossword: six across, begins with C, ob-lit-er-ate at once, lovely me duck. I have to tell you it’s cancer, Doug. Thank you, Marge. You’re a doll.

  Not quite like that, but all but. Steady decline, put put, bits of her going, not enough to excuse herself from duty. Hip joints ground down to powder waiting for the op, a list of ailments ending in orosis, the coup de grâce indecipherable on the death certificate but probably something nasty and Victorian from the lousy hospital, crawled out of the peeling woodwork, a sort of Fagin bacterium last heard of in 1848. Thatcherismus stridulus, most like. Hospital knocked down a year or so later. Made into a car-park for tax-perks. Amen.

  Phantoms. Hey, she never told me much. Let’s get this straight: she was not posh. But she had class. You could tell. You could tell she had some right royal blood in her. Cor, I’m sounding just like David Herbert Lawrence in that massive biopic proj Ken (as in Russell) wouldn’t bloody touch in ’65, holed up in Zennor, getting flat-irons chucked at his head by that horrible Frieda and shouting it was all his dad’s fault, or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was his overweening mum had made him go after spit-cotton slick-saddled Boche aristos who didn’t wash a dish if they could chuck it some, son. Anyway, I loved me mum and I still do. I’ve got to visit the cemetery day after tomorrow. OK, I haven’t got to, but I will, come hell or hangover or, hey, death by drowning. It’s the worst cemetery this side of Calcutta, it’s practically on the North bloody Circular, the ground throbs, I bet there isn’t a corpse with a tooth still in its head. There’ve been incidents, naturally. Great-great-grandsons of Burkett and Hare, pillaged plots, hearse thefts, abandoned mourners. Me mum’s grave had its begonias pinched, along with the pot. It was her favourite pot. Bastards.

  I’ve thought of moving her but it’s too complicated. She wanted to be buried out to sea, would you believe. Well, scattered from a cliff-top, that nice romantic and extremely filmic type of thing. The relations wouldn’t hear of it. She’d not got it written down. It had to be Enfield. They’re rather cocky about Enfield. They’re so darn cocky about it they’ve never left it, except to go along to Epping Forest to do a bit of flasher-spotting. My cousin Rog (hang your head in shame, Dicky, dim the lights) is on the council. He’s Tory. He’s Tory to the last bubble of spittle on his niblick. Like Des is something worse. Talking of golf, I’ve got a return match with John Schlesinger that’s been waiting for twenty years. My clubs have congealed, rusted, coagulated, back in Houston. They’re all too keen out there. But they’re not much cop, I can tell you. I abut a golf course. Weekends and it’s like the hammattan, they’re that bad. I step out onto my porch and get half a bunker down my throat when the wind’s right. I tell yer, it’s bleedin’ Paths of Glory out there, guv: divots the size of shell holes, massive eruptions, fat Texan wives who forgot to let go of their Number Ones whining over your head, overweight trolleys lumbering into trenches, the rattle of machine-guns resolving a quibble up at the eighteenth. I’ve thought of moving, but I like my wee hame. I do. Maybe my mother likes to be juddered by trucks. Who knows? Who knows why we end up where we do?

  Sorry about the golf act. It’s my after-dinner number, I don’t get to use it much these days. I tend to spray my Scotch when I do. My fifth double, usually. That’s what it takes. I’ve never seen it in black and white before. It looks weird. And trite, over-ambitious, seriously unfunny. (Philip French on Will There’s a Way. Or Barry, me old ex-chum Barry Norman. Hiya, y’bum, if you’re out there. Treachery. Life’s all blahdy treachery. Me table’s scratched, for God’s sake.)

  Where was I? Ha, me golf party pooper. Hey, and I’ve been using it for years. Zelda would scream with laughter. So would my mother. That’s what I liked about my mother. She laughed at me jokes.

  Phantoms.

  Sing willow, willow, willow etc.

  I wanted this whole thing to be poetic. It started out poetic. Now it’s just me, yaketty-yak.

  I’ll let you into a secret: I spent half a night-flight on the first three paras. I think I might have mentioned this already. I didn’t read Norman for more than about ten minutes. Mailer, not blahdy Barry. I spent four and a half hours composing the start. That’s why it’s so damn good. The bit about the hand flat against the wall was composed in my sleep, in my dreams, because the moment breakfast came and everyone woke up and started yelling hi at each other I couldn’t keep awake. When I started I had
to memorise it because the fucking stewardess didn’t respond to my panic-button. I needed a pen. I hadn’t got a pen on me, would you believe it. I was in the middle of the middle row. My knees were up to my chest. I couldn’t move yet again to check out this wing-inferno thing or go see Miss Buck-Teeth-But-Very-Nice-Everything-Else ’99 because I might wake up my enormous neighbour from a little village fifteen und a half kilometre souse of Düsseldorf and he’d start on yet a-bloody-gain about his fucking little village fifteen und a half kilometre souse of Düsseldorf like he was doing a one-man Heimat, Parts 1 to 28, no commercial breaks. So I memorised the beginning. It was good for me. I had this crazy notion that the plane would crash flaming into the ocean if I didn’t memorise it before my enormous neighbour woke up for breakfast. He stirred once and I hummed him a little lullaby and this sweet smile broke across his face and he snuggled up to me. My heart was hammering. I was sure it would wake him and we’d go crashing into the sea, the night sea, the murky not even moon-glittering sea and down, down, down we’d go with bubbles coming out of our mouths and giant creatures of the deep nosing at the windows until we bumped bottom where the blind fish roam and gobble through their pointless, unobserved existences, to quote me old mucker Henry Peterson the unobserved poet, long dead. But we didn’t, quite possibly because he started snoring to my lullaby. The ghosts of my grandfather, great-aunt and great-uncle, I murmured. Yah, he grunted. Then snored again. That didn’t count. He had not woken up. There was a jolt. The whole plane jolted. Oh well, I thought, wanting to check out the sick-bag but my knees were in the way. I have so many plans. So does everyone else on this plane. So many plans. But my plan is more important than anybody else’s and all the fucking cans are in the hold forgive my language just this once. Please, O Lord, give me a bit more time. He did. My neighbour only woke up for breakfast. He laid his enormous hands on the Continental and it kind of vanished. But I loved him, by then, for not waking up. I manœuvred my marmalade onto the croissant and I loved him. Dawn shone on his nose-hairs. In my villedge, he started. I woke up. Go on, go on, I said. In your village. I fell asleep again. He had a soothing voice. My favourite blonde student was undoing my fly. We were on a boat. You don’t have the right, Candidia, I protested. Relax, she said. I was trying to get my shoulder round but it wouldn’t come. A flotilla of pleasure-seekers with blue hair were looking on. They were prim. They had guard-rails round their teeth. They were humming with their mouths open. My (sorry about this) dick pressed against her cool hand. I don’t want to éclair just here, I protested. The boat rocked. In my villedge, came the announcement over the swimming-pool tannoy. Candidia turned into oh no Zelda surprise surprise and bent her face down and her loosened locks swept across my chest. There are seat belts for every person on the planet, she enunciated, her lips striking the top of my swollen microphone in time to the plosives. We haf much manufacture of small parts, before. My shoulder came off. It was the stewardess. I blinked. Your seat belt, sir, she said. We’re about to land. She nods towards my lap. She must be able to see it, it’s through my underpants and against my zip, it’s about to be lacerated. Christ, I think. I could be chucked off. She leaves me with no further comment. She’s probably used to it. Like nurses. Und the immigrants, don’t you sink, hm? Eh, what? Oh yes. Und the immigrants, und the immigrants.