Still

by Adam Thorpe

  I knew my Marcel Marceau act hung in the balance. I said, Nimbies is what my dear old dad used to call my mum when he was feeling like it. Jeremy exploded. I didn’t mean it to be funny. I stepped back and fell over a gantry. Jeremy wiped his eyes and didn’t apologise. Public school sod. Anyway, I got the job. Some of you know this. I got Clive’s Seasons. Incredible, huh? It’s really because the other creep in Viper’s Bugloss wanted his girlfriend to direct the shoot and his girlfriend didn’t know a barn door from a gobo and I stepped in cheap to save the day. I did it for halves, I did it for halves – but still. I couldn’t believe it. Better rub than rust, as my old grandad used to say, dying in the best chair. Thank you, Jeremy, you mean hard bastard. Thank you for everything.

  Everything?

  Let me grab a crust. I have a mini-freezer. I ask Ramona my favourite Filipina to switch it on and throw in a bagel or two and a Homepride white and some pizzas and a Jaws-size packet of Findus fish fingers and a Waitrose curried toad-in-the-hole or whatever so I can arrive at some unprincipled hour and feast on England. Wowee. It still tastes of the packet it came in, does England. Cor blimey luvaduck.

  Sorry about the nadgers. This fucking camera’s tilt’s sticking and Mee’s used up all my walnut oil. Bear with me, the main feature’s about to be spliced and technically the main feature makes Moby Dick look lame. Let me put the toast on. I’ve checked out the lime marmalade situation and it appears Mee doesn’t like lime marmalade, which is the best news I’ve had yet because my first wife did and I never liked her. Seriously, I never ever liked her. I only got hooked up on account of her being exceptionally beautiful, extremely intelligent, and rich. Men get hooked up for less. But there was a primary flaw in her personality: she really hated me. She thought if she married Ricky Thornby she’d skip a few rungs on the way up to being a great film actress. The truth hurt. It was on the honeymoon. I’ve put the toast in, by the by. I got the loaf out of the freezer and chipped it out of the berg because Ramona always turns everything right up and popped five slices in because I’m famished, guv – and the toaster appears to be functioning, which is amazing. I did all that between intelligent, and and rich. And you didn’t even notice. Waal, whad’ya know. It’s just occurred to me that I could show you my face for a minute and wave but I don’t want you all to rush out screaming and fuck up the traffic or hurl yourselves off the balcony, the water’s really cold at this time of year.

  Actually, I’m clad only in my Kyoto underpants. The heating’s been up too high. I hope you don’t mind. Zelda bought them for me when she was over there. They have these beautiful Japanese letters on the front which say wu-shih which means ‘nothing special’. Zelda told me that this was the core of Zen but I wonder. Maybe she was telling me something early on and I didn’t hear it.

  Hey, I was onto my first honeymoon and now I’m onto Zelda and I’m thinking maybe there’s a lovely unbroken curve between the two. Holy shit. This wasn’t supposed to happen, honest. I mean, who’s paying for this? I mean, what do you think this is? A licensed black cab? We’re on the roundabout route with a tricky-dicky meter, mate, and I haven’t handled your luggage yet. So sit tight and enjoy the lovely unbroken curves of the scenery.

  She thought we’d got fixed up at some mystery destination like Polynesia or the Riouw-Lingga Archipelago or wherever with palms and an above blood-temperature ocean. Deirdre I’m talking about, not Zelda. But I was a busy man. I was also slightly short of the readies. That is, I’d invested unwisely. To be blunt, I’d put it all in me own hole. I’d stumped up when the producer’s feet got frost-bite just thinking about it. It was a terrible film. You won’t have seen it, not ever. It’s due to be rediscovered by some outfit specialising in Great Gaffs so I’m tracking down every last copy. For the personal safety match. My first wife is in it. She plays King Alfred’s Queen. It was filmed on location at Wormhill Bottom, Berks, England. I should’ve known. Michael Caine played A Danish Youth with a great accent. I played King Alfred because I couldn’t get Richard Harris to do it for a fiver. And he was a mate. It rained every day for a fortnight. It was a deeply dampening experience. Our extras for the Battle of Ashdown were locals, local youfs let out on remand from their remote downland village pumps. They had this game. It was to see how many watches they could get the camera and no one else to spot. There was a strike or something at the labs. We didn’t watch the rushes till the end of the shoot. My middle name’s Federico. We offered the Battle of Ashdown sequence to Timex. Well, they didn’t want to know. Too historical, they said.

  No bloody imagination, these people.

  My wife and I, we turned up at Cromer. Her name, as you probably know, was Deirdre Townsend. Not Townsil. Townsend. Her nickname was Dreary. I thought it up on our first night, but didn’t tell her. She was displeased with our mystery destination. I said I was killing two birds with one stone, which she took ill. She wouldn’t get out of the Morris 1100. The hotel manageress stood on the crumbling doorstep and sipped her tea right through it all. Deirdre asked, why Cromer? I said I’ve told you but you were too busy shredding the leather off my dashboard. She said, I should never have married you, you bastard. I said, don’t jump to conclusions. Look, this is the film business, Deirdre. We’re gonna make a great film out here. It’s about these newly-weds stuck in Cromer off-season when a catastrophe has smitten the rest of the country. What catastrophe, for God’s sake? Deirdre, I’m working on it. It could be the Bomb. It could be the Plague. It could be a Comet. It doesn’t matter except it’s not the Blobs from Sirius, that stuff is out. The film’s going to be poetic, allusive, and in muted tones of grey. You mean mostly out of focus, she snapped. Not necessarily, I chuckled indulgently. But it is definitely going to rain a lot and when it’s not raining there’ll be sea-fogs. Yet through all this love survives. There’s gonna be an amazing amount of sex, by the way. And a murder. There’s gonna be a murder. Not the wife, I might add. And a white horse moving very fast along the beach. Why? she asked. I don’t know. It’s just an image. It’s poetic. We’re going to keep cutting to this white horse moving very fast along the beach and the beach seems to go on forever. They do out here, she said. I know they do, I said. Could you at least leave the knob on the gear-stick legible? I can never remember where Reverse goes. She was stubbing out her fifteenth Pall Mall on it. She’d locked me out of the car. I forgot to say that I was shouting all this through the window at this grey fog in which I could just about see Deirdre’s fabulous face. The hotel manageress had finished her cup of tea and was shaking her head. I could see her in the wing mirror, shaking her head and looking melancholy. Sorry, somebody’s shouting again off-set, apparently the Morris 1100 of this period had no fucking wing mirrors, I’m about to be arrested for inaccuracy, well done Hercule alias some jerk called G. W. R. Ashby (Mr) who never left me alone, every movie I made he wrote me with a list as if I could rewind and correct it all, hey, never work with any form of motorised transport or uniforms, stick to symbolic nakedness on a beach. I had to admit Cromer in November made this pretty difficult. Eventually Deirdre relented when I told her how Jean Cocteau would be visiting the set. I’d thought this up on the spot. I didn’t know Jean Cocteau personally. I knew his films backwards but not him. I learnt French via the subtitles. That’s why my French is so admired but I can’t ask for a room without sounding brilliant. Our first marital night was first of all marred by having the hotel manageress’s wireless right below and she had a hearing problem. Believe it or not, Deirdre was a virgin. I’d never seen her with her clothes off. I was very worked up by the time we’d had our quick stroll along the sea front. She wasn’t. She was thinking of Polynesia, shaking out the scurf and the greased scraps of Daily Heralds from her fedora and thinking of Polynesia. She was thinking how she could have got her rich dad to help out. But Dad didn’t like son-in-law, that was the problem. We got upstairs. I sat on the bed and I have to tell you this: every time you so much as winked the bed sounded like the Titanic hitting the iceberg. You know wh
at the Titanic hitting the iceberg sounded like? Like someone tearing tissue-paper, they said. Heugh. Yeah, yeah. Who’re they kidding? It sounded like our honeymoon bed. Not even the wireless popping its valves out in the room below would have drowned it, because I’m talking about each spring. Each spring sounded like the Titanic hitting the iceberg, not fucking tissue-paper. So in actual fact when we both lay down on it in our respective night attire it sounded like fifty Titanics hitting fifty icebergs. In order to speak to each other we had to stop blinking and open our mouths slowly. But you have to breathe, even you really intent people out there are breathing. The sexual act was out of the question. To have had sex would have shashed Cromer in white noise. People would have come out of their houses screaming with their hands over their ears. I suggested we have sex on the rug in front of the electric two-bar like at Cambridge or in Women in Love but Deirdre had not been to Cambridge and Ken Russell was still in his non-pansexual phase so she just lay there under a pall of smoke, not saying anything. Dreary, I thought. Underneath it all she’s dreary. When she went to sleep she snored. I couldn’t even work myself off because of the bed. Every down-stroke deafened me. I went to sleep. I dreamed. I dreamed I was in Polynesia under the coconuts taking Deirdre’s clothes off one by one. I éclaired and woke up. I’m sorry about this sensual detail but it had got onto the front of her nightie. I tried to scrape it off with my comb but she woke. She stared at me. You’re disgusting, she said. I didn’t mean to, I replied. Even monks don’t mean to. We were yelling over the springs. She started thumping me, rhythmically, with her feet. I got out of the bed and went straight to the door because I couldn’t stand the noise and needed to relieve myself. I opened the door and the hotel manageress keeled over on top of my slippers. Her left ear was red and had an attractive drypoint of our keyhole on it. She picked herself up. A cup of tea? she said. That would be very nice, I replied. You could tell we were both embarrassed by the situation, mainly becauses the front of my pyjama bottoms was still sticky. A stiletto shoe flew over my head but not the head of the hotel manageress. It stuck in her beehive and she didn’t notice. I didn’t like to say anything. She went round with it for days and no one said anything. They don’t, in Cromer. She had a room full of caged birds and a dicky television striated with guano. Deirdre spent most of the rest of our honeymoon blowing Smoke at crazed budgie eyes and watching the test card, dreaming of surf. Somehow, we managed to make Gregory. I don’t remember how. Christ, I hope he doesn’t read this. Ach, we were so young.

  The toaster’s popped. Toasters popping always make me chortle. They remind me of Danny Kaye as Mitty. You know it’s going to pop and make him even scareder than he already is and you wait for it and you wonder how he’s going to do it every time but he does he yowls like it’s the first time he’s ever done it and you weep like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen it and you both join hands and are glad. That’s genius, mate. That’s why I chortle. No one’s got it these days. No one can hang from a window-ledge like Danny Kaye could. No one.

  I’ve just been chipping away at the butter without my safety visor, I’m irresponsible in my twilight. I’m waiting for it to soften on the toast, because I can’t stand English toast without butter. It’s not even cold in here. Romana had put the heating on. I’ve just remembered it’s Romana not Ramona, it’s because she complains the whole time, G. W. R. Ashby (Mr) will be having a field-day if he’s out there amongst you all, he’ll be the one with binoculars and a little pad and a V-neck smelling of sheep-dip. I invited him. I invited all the people I have strong feelings about, except Jerry. Romana turns everything right up. I’ve told her, I’ve told her. That’s why the windows are open and I’m in my wooshy underpants. It’s like the Kalahari without the breeze. But I trust Romana. Everyone has their little blind spots, their little foibles.

  So I got to make Clive’s Seasons. What a doddle. Four weeks shoot, two weeks in the can, a day for Jeremy to unravel all my good work but I can’t complain, he knows he’s hopeless, underneath. I couldn’t have cared two roubles either way. Journeyman stuff – just point the lens at human kind and nod, it makes it feel important, it falls right into it, it yaks. It’s all in the editing, mate, it’s all in the editing. The only trouble was, it had to be spread throughout the year as thin as marge. No wonder no one wanted to touch it. Seasons, geddit? You can’t just put cotton wool on the hawthorn, now can you? Oh no. You can’t fool Mother Nature, dear old soul, hey ho the wind and the rain and the rain it raineth every day on location, that’s the rule. Otherwise it was cast iron, guv – villains and goodies over the hedgerows, defence of the elm and the natterjack and the cleg horse-fly what jabs in complete silence and did, on my shin, chatty Clive the underdeveloped developer versus the trees and the meadows and the folk what like their back yards nice and leafy. Does it have to be all year, Jerry old soak? Yes, Rick. That’s the notion, the core, the nub, the fulcrum, the cleg, the main thrust. He chose the weeks, too. One for each season, in case you haven’t got the main thrust yet. And you know what I did? I quit the city, the main thrust, the fulcrum, the pussy, the nub – and hit the hedgerows. I rented a wee cottage, fourteenth-century, thatched. Honeysuckle Cottage. OK, it would have been smothered in honeysuckle if there’d been more than a duck’s arse between it and the main road. Hey ho. I crouched behind the front door waiting for a gap. I threaded a volley of wing mirrors to go get my sliced white from the Co-op. I ducked the trucks and jumped the coupés. There wasn’t a lot of choice. All the wee cottages smothered in honeysuckle had been appropriated by retired high-rise architects and Blue Circle Cement executives. Still, it was my fault. I’d picked an emsav (much-sought-after-village, noodles) with a church that gets a whole half page in mingy old Pevsner on account of the Victorian corbels and a great pub known for miles around with room for coaches where the hay-barn used to be and a firm promise of a bypass through the water meadows if the Stinging Fawholt Cleg’s rehoused or something and roots. Roots? Yup, Jerry, roots. How’s the push-ups? Sixty. Congratulations, Jerry. What roots, Dicky? Ricky to you, Jerry. My roots. My maternal roots. What, you mean Ulverton? No no, not that dump. Next one on. Fawholt. Tiny. One church, one spittoon, one retired banker, ten yobs. Would have been eleven but young Spearhafoc was slain at the Battle of Ashdown. Or Arsedown. What are you on about, Ricky? Your family village or something? Ah, there a tale I shalt woof, some day, Jerry: make it a hundred and I might tell you. A hundred? I’ll have a coronary, Ricky. I’m not talking push-ups, Jerry my chinless nitwit, I’m not talking push-ups.

  He put the phone down. Mean hard bastard. A hundred for expenses, that’s all I was asking. I had to hitch up the M4, practically, carrying the boom in me backpack and Second Grip on me shoulders.

  Seriously: it wasn’t a chief dover, but it was run-of-the-million good. Eh? I tried to keep it balanced and all that, son, but you knew which side me apples rolled off, you knew which side. No voice-overs, nothing overt, Rick, more fly-on-the-wall than spider-in-the-pantry, tender shots of misty cows, sunsets over the dolmens, easier to sell to the Yanks, OK? OK, Jerry my bean. I gave Clive the Cleg plenty of rope to have his swing. He was a right thick dickhead. Full one minute, bust the next. I thought I’d given him enough but no, Nancy Banks-Smith felt sorry for him. She would. I was back in Houston by then. Pat Batskin sent me the clipping. So I got the whole review off Pat. Let’s have uncontrollable hysteria on that one, full up. I have, actually. I’ve copied it so many times I’ve got ultra-violet burn on my corneal epithelium. Look it up. There’s a lot about eyes in this film, it’ll come in useful, I spent my life making movies without knowing how an eyeball makes movies. Hey, I copied it for my students, who’d otherwise reckon I’m as faky-flaky as all my colleagues with their PVC CVs and 50,000 word faeces on Streep’s left nipple in Kramer vs Kramer. Wowee. You mean you did make films, Mr Thornby? Then we’d spend two hours deconstructing the review and get nowhere. They’d love it. HCDVA is behind the times. They’re faithful P of C and they’re into L
acan and Derrida instead of Dorothy Parker. I’d say, listen, the only thing I like about Doc Diarrhoea is that he’s a Sephardic Jew. He’s a what? they’d expostulate. A Sephardic Jew, I’d say. He keeps it hush. But that subverts everything we know about Derrida! went the cry (I’m talking here about my graduate students, OK? The ones who had some brain left after high school crack and video sex and swimming in their pools without ear plugs. Not a lot, but some. Enough to say the right things about the right things). Touché, I’d quip. Isn’t he swell?