Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Streadnam. He’s on one of the stills, the stills in the lobby. Our suite’s lobby, dumbos, not the main one. Notice them? Thirty-two variations between the fake bale-hook and the coat rack, framed in genuine brass, cost me an arm and all three legs. You’d have to be blind. Maybe some bastard’s covered them with his wolf pelt. You can check, after. I’d always check, Enfield Ritz, steal a glance at the stills and try to remember.

  Number One, top left. That little blurry fat thing with billows of smoke coming out of his collar, in front of the lodge. Day of his retirement. Dug it out of the school archives. Inkblot genuine. Looks a character, doesn’t he? Oh yes, old Streadnam was quite a bloody character.

  WHERE’S THE ACTION, RICKY?

  There’s always one, there’s always one.

  Friends, relations, the rest, I tell you again if I have already and your hearing-aids are maladjusted: this is not an action movie. It’s an epic movie but it’s not an action movie. It’s hard and big in the saddle but it’s not John Wayne or Brian de Palma or Francis Ford Coppola or even John Ford being thoughtful. It’s Richard Thornby. It’s his deep masterwork. It’s his last stand. Don’t expect Gordon of Khartoum, Apaches turning cavalry into hedgehogs, flash-forwards to stuttering machine-guns for the backward or the inadequate, fucking helicopters. This is 1913. We’re parked outside a peevish little public school in England on the third of November 1913 and the time is nine of the clock and the leaves are falling slowly out of another year to be raked by the last of their kind. I’m inside this creep and he’s waiting. I can’t hurry him. You know why I leave a space between the paragraphs?

  So you don’t choke on your canapés, reading too fast.

  I hope the projector’s not overheating. It’s old, ’56, dug out of the rubble of some Cinema Paradiso in West Norwood. I liked the rattle, the burr, the hefty armour-plated kind of look to it and the built-in ashtray WHICH YOU MUST NOT USE, OSSY. No Jap in sight. But it tends to overheat and smoke the dust on top. Perhaps someone can dust it. I’m too pissed to move, probably. Anyway, the director never cleans the projector. Not even Stanley. Don’t panic if there’s a singed smell. It’s the dust.

  Thank you.

  Ha! Streadnam has lifted a hand for Jefferies.

  It’s a salute. Streadnam has black fingerless mittens on his hands and the left one salutes. There is a military pedigree to Streadnam and it lingers. He was out in India before the beard arrived, surrounded by blinding whites wot clicked and nodded and got him to scrub their saddles. He took it out on the untouchables. He wasn’t kitted out to be a batman. His fart-sucking wasn’t the right sort, as a better batman (retired) put it. The young Streadnam beat up an untouchable, basically. The untouchable had left his broom out on the giant verandah and Corporal Streadnam took a tumble, fresh from his umpteenth fucking saddle, flush with porter. He stuffed his fist into this extremely genial sweeper’s face five times and dusted his hands and saw the blood all over his boots. He bolted. He tumbled again, this time down the blinding white drop of five steps and crooked his leg in five places. He was invalided out on a tramp steamer. His bone is perpetually infected. The salt got into it, the dust, the untouchable’s touch.

  Cannon shot on the Khyber, sir. Near took me leg away. I endure it.

  Streadnam’s hand drops. All spick and in the saddle. It’s times like this that brings out the bloody spine in us all. Order. Show ’em a thing or two. The welting could have been public, could have been now, but the others decided contrary, as is their wont. Soft buggers. Soft as babies. He tastes his breakfast on his beard. He belches into the fine air. He can smell his own unwashed smell and it reassures him. His leg has got the fucking damp in, today. He feels the touch of the genial sweeper’s five fingers and spits. They ought to’ve taken it orf. The hand that touched it. It. A light gust blows down between the lindens, there’s dust raised, it’s India all over again. The avenue blurs further and he blinks it back to the usual. Jefferies is still gawping, it looks like. That’s not right. Should be parked by the fucking carriage, not gawping through. He can’t be bothered to tell him, to yell, to make a pother out of it. It’ll ride. This chair is actually extremely comfortable, I’m sinking into it, it’s worrying. I think I need to read some poetry or something.

  You over there, behind the linden, pressed against its bosses, shins grazed by its uncropped suckers, gazing at Fenny Bottom, DON’T MOVE. It’s good, you’re ignoring the hiss which is Jefferies chuckling for the sound that isn’t the crows, but, hey, it’s like them. You turn to look down the outside of the avenue where the big branches hang over the pasture like they’re relieved to be out of things, but can’t see a jot. You can’t see a jot because the pasture just continues on beyond the avenue, running misty and green down the side of the Pod until the Science Block’s erection in 1963 and the all-weather hockey pitch for the flensing of knees about a decade later. Right now the pasture bumps untramelled by anything but the usual scrubby kind of thorny moments you’ve been thrown into a few times and, beyond the cute wooden fence, brindled cows and some dappled horses. The school is completely masked this side by the giant trunks on parade and then a laurel hedge with ancient dens defended lustily by valiant knights but I think you’re a serf, you’re never quite sure which den you’re supposed to be defending to the death which is why you get hurt a lot. But now something’s happening that isn’t crows. There is definitely something happening in that general direction.

  Shall I tell you? Stay put. If you stick your nose out the other way, someone’ll spot you and there’s always Jefferies. I sympathise. I have to tell you now that you’re in the wrong togs. You should have gone back and changed. You know this. You had time to run to Five Mile Hump and back and change between brekkers and this. You didn’t. Now you’re gonna have to stand like the naked Emperor in a line of perfectly attired schoolboys, boaters nodding, ties flapping, breeches tucked into ruthlessly steam-pressed shirts, dark blue felty jackets tempting hands with their warm pockets. Because they’re pouring out of Cavvie right now and it’s too late. The ears are disgorging them, the two ears of the house with the mouth, Miss Cavendish House, the toothy face at the end of the avenue, the terrifying governess’s face you’ve turned it into and that some fading echo from the future tells you resembles a certain prime minister, ranting. Out they come, from either side, as if from a secret door and you can only hear them, I’m afraid, hear them gathering like starlings and crows who’ve suddenly taken against human beings, what a stupid thought, not the whole of human kind, just certain people, just you as a matter of fact. It’s swelling, it’s getting louder, it’s the voices broken and unbroken, the bullies and the bullied, the brilliant and the stupid, the scugs and the bloods, the keen and the indifferent, the casual and the one who’s about to die of some creeping pulmonary problem and is hectic with life, they’re getting their beaks nice and sharp from the sound of it, they’re ready to swoop. Do you want to make a dash for that hawthorn sprig? Those way-off poplars? That lone ash with its trunk you’d stick out either side of like Badstock’s ears? They’ll see you, they’ll all see you, even without Jefferies waving and hissing. There’s nowhere to go, basically. Chum, you’ll have to stick it out, trying not to shiver too much in the damp, getting pinched by Briggs or Cowdrey on your plump bottom. Bad luck. I’m a bastard. I’m Dick the Prick. Streadnam’s got to me, his chair’s cosy. Lucky you’re not an untouchable. I’m feeling mean. Make my day. Meanness is what this day’s all about. Out of it flowered our century.

  Whassat? Out of it flowered our century?

  I hear murmurings of blimey, it’s getting pretentious. He’s been too long in the US of Ass-Holes. He always was a Russell in the making. Ken, not Bertrand. Nice rib-tickler that, Ossy. Remember it? Ossy ‘Two Shot’ Cohen’s parting jape, summer of ’81. OK OK, I’m not gonna get personal. Just yet. Be my guests. Drink, eat, watch the fireworks and miss a frame or two. Talk, if you want. This is a silent film. But if you don’t watch you won’t remember. You were
actually there, huh? Oh yes, but I didn’t see all of it. Went on for hours. Scrolling up the big screen like a bloody computer. No, like the beginning of, say, Unforgiven, or The Grapes of Wrath, that written bit that tells you you’re in Kansas City in 1879 or something, but it went on and on. It went on and on and on, a fucking portaprompt. And I’ve never been a reading type. Funny thing is, we all watched it, most of it, on and off, and a few just sat there stuck to the bloody screen like it was Emmanuelle 3 with Princess Di or something. Well, it was a story, wasn’t it? I mean, it had that. But he always was a pretentious bastard, was Dicky, was old Dicky the Crown of Thornbies.

  Heh? A few red faces, heh? Where am I, anyway? Skulking in the back row? Testing my tongue out on a walnut ripple? Waiting for the white horse to move the snowy mountains and forests? A little scrubbed Enfield boy on the up and up, peering through the curling smoke and wanting his mum because the woolly dog’s just been shot by hunters and he can’t swallow any more without turning heads?

  Aaaaaah. In’t that sad, eh? True, though. Bloody true, guv.

  I know at this point you’ll all steal a glance at me, so I’ll give a wave from the screen instead.

  Hiee!

  This doesn’t help you wot’s pressed against the linden in the wrong togs though, does it?

  Put up with it. Worse things have happened to kids. Are about to happen. You’ll have a taste, a feel. Take it. When my great-uncle appears they’ll soon lose interest in you, kid. Don’t crack. Stay put in the saddle and don’t let it buck ya. Be a Texan.

  I’m back in Streadnam. I just nipped out for a bit of fresh air. He’s folded his arms against the boys spilling out, he’s folded his arms against the tuppenny-ha’penny little bastards and the Nancy-homeys what are waving them into position like they’re practising for the bloody crucifixion. All the young lot are Nancy-homeys, the young lot fresh out of bloody Oxford where they’re all bloody bum-boys, anyway. Not like the old lot. All except Holloway-Purse, the army chap. Captain Holloway-Purse of the Hants Fusiliers, late of. He’s more bloody like it. Even yours truly’s chilled to the bone-juice by Holloway-Purse. The eyes, the eyes. Saw them out in Inja, tucked beneath the piths, out of the sun. Little glints in the shadow of the pith. Killing eyes. Show no mercy. Nigger-rats.

  Oh yes, yes. WHP has spine, all bloody right.

  The boys are spreading up the avenue, either side of it. Quit Streadnam, track up, track up with the boys spreading up the avenue under the trees, excited, quick, like little pigs with their flushed look from the early morning coldwater scrub, some of them men before they should be, gawky, not knowing what to do with their limbs, high collars lesioning their chicken necks, follow them, follow them up, eyes everywhere, knocking and jolting, knocked and jolted, nervous shrill laughter hushed by hectic young men called beaks funnily enough with old men’s gowns whirling about and waving helplessly under the lindens, terrified secretly of Streadnam, of the Head Porter’s eye, so they try not to shriek, they try to act the beak, the natural commander, they don imaginary helmets with huge plumes and shout in Thucydidean Greek, they flail at heads in the smoky air, they even kick as if at a rugby ball or clutch at arms as in the wrestles of bladderdash, they sort and cajole and somehow out it spreads, the long line of jacketed boys either side of the avenue and now we’ve hit you, you’re there, skulking in your games togs, looking petrified between howling faces, caps, hands and jackets and the flashes of Edwardian collars but for God’s sake stick your bottom in at least, have some dignity.

  Track back, I’m not really interested in your humiliation, you can cope, Briggs and Cowdrey are pummelling another little nanny’s boy, secretly, the other side of the avenue, doing something clever with the wet dead leaves and his Edwardian collar, track on, track up, glide up the pretty-orderly rows of excitable faces under the lindens, the odd one lovely as an angel, most beginning on the long downward slide to looking remarkably like the worst combination of their parents, moving past too quick to identify or of course to love, whipped away by me while you stay put, getting to know everybody again after an hour or two off and trying to be liked. Up past the last ones joining up and up past Streadnam’s scowl and elbows and up the broad stone steps between the pillars into the very throat of Cavendish House, the double doors, the red iron-bossed double doors that open as I approach but it’s not for me, it’s for the guy on the other side, a short guy with great red whiskers that clash with both the door and his purple gown, it’s for Mr Boulter the Master, the Headman, the Chief, the Caesar, disgorged by his school, Big Cunt Caesar hailed by his consuls, by the mob, by the triumphant order splayed before him to the far-flung gates of his conquest.

  OK, Cecil Be To God. Let’s take a breather. Nero needs a small widdle. Move those five thousand horses slightly to the left.

  Dip the chuckles. I have plenty more where they came from, pardner.

  Let’s just hover.

  Let’s stand beside Big Man and view his order. It’s pretty. Under the lindens there are two thin lines the colour of prunes and the one hundred per cent pink faces on top are swivelled this way. There are beaks in gowns, correctly positioned at intervals. There is Streadnam immediately before us of course. He’s turning his beard up this way and giving Mr Boulter a nod, a servile, fart-sucker’s nod in which the military pedigree is snappily recalled. It can hardly be other than servile, actually, because Mr Boulter is towering over them all, his squatness psychologically neutralised. Beyond the far-flung gates there is the black polish of the carriage, and a puff of smoke which is no doubt the coachman. Mr Boulter occupies the position, the only position, from which the perspective is perfectly aligned. He is the King on his throne at the masque. If Ossy’s out there, explain it. And he could wave it all away, or call vale and leave, leave them all gawping, unable to know how to move. Vale, Ossy. Varlay. Oh forget it.

  Mr Boulter’s basically weight-challenged and also height-challenged body tucks into this view like a fat little kid into jam and pastries. His stomach swells against the hidden braces, his shoulders pump up against the weight of the gown, his diddle retracts and expands minutely under the starch of his longjohns. I’m focusing right in on his lower eyelid, left side, and its pouches quiver with pleasure. I could cover every inch of his body like this, if needs be, but needs don’t, and I’d rather not. Hey, don’t push me over my threshold. Do you know what it’s like, getting this close to Big Cunt Boulter? It’s like sticking your head in a fridge because there’s this nauseating whiff and not finding it. Big Chief’s gamey, he’s hung too long, he’s a tangle of trapped snuff, poorly-digested cabbage, badly-ventilated classrooms, something welded into his brain about soap only being good for washing out dirty little mouths, and the kippery beginnings of cancer. He doesn’t even use dentifrice, for God’s sake: a glass of Martell’s swilling between his teeth is all that stands between him and a mouth full of carrion. Hey, don’t push me over. This is a nauseating position to occupy. He’s the guy in the middle in the second still. Don’t rush to look. It’s the school photo and the faces are tiny. His is tiny. If I’d found my great-uncle’s face I’d have circled it, but there were a few blurs, a few whose heads turned out of life and embraced the fog as an old friend of mine put it. Maybe they saw a bird alighting on the last linden, maybe they saw a kitchen maid ogling from the cabbage patch, maybe they’d just been pinched and were telling Cowdrey to fuck off, sotto voce, you beastly rotter. Cavendish House, mainly the steps of, sweeps up behind the terraces of boys and beaks and masters to a pair of feet which are probably Alfred Hitchcock’s, I dunno, you expect me to know everything, just put it down to a crap photographer choking on his flash.

  Wooomph.

  Randle College, Michaelmas Term, 1913.

  So what’re we gonna do about it? Huh? Yell and wave at them to stop, to whatever they do AVOID 1914 to 1918, go take a trip out to the Riouw-Lingga Archipelago and grow Bibles or develop your family’s tendency to club-feet or stress how important the voices in your head are
because you always instantly obey them? You think anywhere or any condition short of the terminal in the next four years is gonna be safe or something? You think their job is as easy as mine was in 1957, when all I had to do was show the Board my painted fingernails not too obviously? Huh?

  Go take a look. Not too obviously. In a minute. When I say.

  Don’t disturb the innocence. Don’t get in the way of the sunlight, the air, the breeze, don’t unblur the leaves against the brick on the left, or kick the fat bearded guy holding the cup with big ears in the front just because it’s Boulter because it isn’t Boulter, Boulter’s the even fatter and smaller one next to the heroically tall chaplain, you’ll go kick Hibble who’s nice and just happens to be in charge of the Terence Cup for Outstanding Performance in Elegiacs which no one won this year, it was nothing to do with his teaching, there are strict standards at this school, you can fail people. OK, what bastards some of them were, and would have become, if the bad dates hadn’t got them young. What nice chaps and brilliant too, didn’t make it past the barbed-wire of the bad dates!

  Yeah, yeah, this is the mythology of the faces burdened with their own futures, the bastards and the brilliants, the dolts and the nice ones – their grins are all burdened with their futures, their ankles are already in the gin-traps set out neatly for them, their felty jackets are catching already on the tangs of the approaching dates if you believe my late friend Henry Peterson’s neglected verse. Yet the fact remains that my great-uncle condemns them all from the grave.

  For they did nothing. They are about to do nothing.

  Big deal. Isn’t that the lesson of history? Hey – you know what I’m doing? I’m shuffling away from Boulter, I’m avoiding occupying his position, because I can’t stand it. I’m sorry. I’d like to be neutral, objective, I’d like to give him his own rope and let him tuck himself for you. But that’d be dishonest, guv. I hate the guy. I can barely look at him. I’m too old to be mature and objective and slippery. I’m crabby and mean and honest. The guy wrecked my great-uncle’s life. Hey, he wrecked mine, too. We’ll come on to that. Look at the still now, if you want. Visit the toilet. Fix yourself a drink. (Not you out there under the linden, not you. Stay put. You’ve got a leading role. I’m talking to my friends in this room. They’re free to choose. You’re not, bub.) Hey, I’ll give y’all some blank screen, a white-out, a few hundred frames’ worth of pause to do that, to go take a peek in an orderly fashion because I’ll bet you were too busy taking your wolf pelts off and hugging each other to even notice the stills. I never had that problem back in ’51. I went alone.