by Adam Thorpe
I’ve swerved. Excuse me. I want to do this scene with Big Cunt and my great-uncle before my great-uncle starts his little trip down the boulevard. Hoi hoi, git yer act togever, guv. Move up close, gerronwivyer, number one cameraaaa.
Play it, Sam.
Ahem. When my great-uncle was stood in front of Big Cunt, something weird occurred. That big burning bush of beard wiggled and the little hole in it opened. It spoke. It said, I have said what I have to say, Trevelyan. But there is one more thing to be said. Or rather, done.
Hands, just hands. Boulter’s hands. They have hair on them. Boulter is a hairy man. He has orange hair in places you etc. There are tufts between every joint of each of his fingers. He is like an orang-utan. It’s amazing that I can find no record of his ever having been likened to an orang-utan. Perhaps it’s because his arms were stubby. These hairy hands poking out of these studded cuffs have a piece of paper between them. This piece of paper has a watercolour painted on it. It might be a person, maybe two, it’s not clear. There are limbs, peachy limbs, a huge shock of blue, a really nice deep cerulean blue the colour of the Mediterranean or the Aegean or someplace. It might be a peacock! (I checked up cerulean with my son Greg, long-distance. He does beautiful gouache still lives of jugs and curtains. [I’ve left that. I wrote this before he got into carpets recently. I’ve left that because it’s poignant and he might be watching this. Greg, they were really beautiful. Really, they were. Grandma in the back says so, too.] Cerulean or midnight or peacock or azure, Dad, he said. In films, I said, we call it Bardot’s Bust. Why? It’s complicated, Greg. It’s folded up in the unwashed seams of film history. It’s something to do with her getting chilled one time in a skin shot. My lighting guy called it Siberian Dick. He worked down at Ealing Studios for years. They loved blues. Talking of The Ladykillers [hey, I did, a few moments ago, it’s scrolled up and gone forever, it was a discreet reference for the buffs, for Ossy, for the guy in the bobble-hat talking to himself at the back, for all you dumbos who haven’t even heard of Miss Wilberforce and the trapped cello case] – you watch it sometime, Greg. King’s Cross at night. That’s cerulean, all right. Righty-ho, Dad. He sighs and the transatlantic cable brings his sigh to me like surf. I will, Dad, I will. The fact is, he hates anything not by Japes Jarman or Fake Greenaway, for God’s sake. He’s a purist. He thinks painters can make films better than anyone. I say painters cannot. I say painters make terrible film makers. I’m not going into this here.)
Now, if I was a half-naff director I would include a half-naff shot of this watercolour between a pair of thumbs belonging to the hairy guy playing Second Groundsman because the guy playing Boulter’s gone off filming the next Bond in Madagascar and hold it for five seconds or something, but I’m not half-naff or e’en a quarter-naff, am I? Am I, yer bastards? Do I hear a cheer? Hey, thanks. Drink more of my drinks, eat my nosh, watch my lips. I’m not naff. I have never been naff. OK, once. Once I was so naff it got it out of my system. Ossy knows about it. He was A Danish Berk. Everyone makes mistakes. Listen, I’m not even pastiche naff. I’m a brutalist. So you hip-hoppers’re just getting a tweekiest glimpse of it as it’s held up in front of my great-uncle. From the other end of the avenue all you can see, Chum of Trevels, is a flash of white. Hey, Mr Boulter might be holding a dove for all you know. Then the hands part from each other, one up, one down, and there are two doves, or the dove has been ripped apart, and you guess what the dove is. The dove is a painting. Your face above the rugby shirt spasms, because it might be your face that’s getting ripped apart, and the spasm goes all the way down through your chest and right between your testicles where it stings and you let out a grunt which Cowdrey somehow catches opposite and his grin is infectious, everyone’s glancing at you with terrible grins that are leers really, it’s really beastly, you don’t know where to look through the heat of your face so you study ‘the infinite precision of the lime tree’s bark’ (Henry Peterson, The Avenue, 1965) and you let your face burn up and float away in little embers but it doesn’t, it’s asbestos. Asbestos? It’s me who’s thinking that, you’re not, you’re not because asbestos belongs with the new science laboratories and the new pottery classes and the new Panasonics in the studies and we’ve half a century to go yet. But I’m thinking it’s like asbestos. It’s like a fire made of fake coals. It keeps on burning but it doesn’t burn up. And you know what you’re thinking it’s like? You’re thinking it’s like the eternal lingering fires of Hell. Because I’m afraid you believe in Hell, deep down. You believe in Heaven and Purgatory and Hell and phantoms and elves and that your mama isn’t really dead and that if you fiddle with yourself you will lose your sight. You also believe that somehow this painting that’s being torn up way over there by Boulter is your own graven image and that it’s tearing your hope for salvation up. You see the doves becoming feathers, the feathers are scattering about but you’re not, you’re tearing and burning but you’re staying whole, you’re a great lump under the linden tree that Cowdrey and the other beasts are leering at and snorting at. You’re a great naked lump of boyhood in the wrong togs and you want your mother to take you away but she’s sorrowfully regretted. You’re burning but the wind is getting up into your testicles, they’re shrivelling into themselves, you know that tonight something awful will be done to you after the gas pops out because it has to be done to you after all this tearing and burning and shame. The horrible beasts will probably strip you so that you look exactly as you looked like in the painting except without the wings. They will probably throw shoes at you and flick you with ties. They will probably do the really terrible things they used to do in the old days and which Cowdrey wants to do again and which resulted in death or maiming, sometimes. One thing you really don’t want to be is a ghost stuck haunting Randle with his screams and whimpers and maybe a soft whistle. You think of this time tonight coming towards you like a great black ship and you want to yelp but of course you don’t, you stare at the infinite precision of the lime tree’s bark over which some kind of little winged insect’s crawling and you wish you really were that insect, you really do. No, you wish suddenly you were a deer loping deeply out of sight in the deep forest that must be somewhere near, though actually it isn’t. You haven’t realised yet that England is denuded. You haven’t realised yet that England is not medieval England. You haven’t realised yet that the great secret about England is that THERE ARE NO DEEP FORESTS WITH KNIGHTS AND DAMSELS TRIPPING THROUGH THEM. There are no deep forests without knights and damsels tripping through them, for that matter. Not to speak of, anyway. Not the kind you’re thinking of that a knight can get lost in for a week – not the perilous, wolvish, witchy kind with green men and goblins and stuff. Why you love Trevels is that between the water-pipes of the bathroom after lights out, after the pummellings, after Bates has done with you, after the little secret squeaks of bed-springs, after even the prefects have retired from their cigarettes and porter and their unimaginable chat around the smoking coals, Trevels’s whispers scroll up an England chock-full of deep forests and tripping knights, of lily-white ladies and murky towers rising out of murkier mere and mist, of all that Tennysonian crap you’re really into and that you’re really inside between the gurgles and growls of the cistern’s pipes cooling after another day’s bash. This is why you love Trevels. Trevels leaving like this is a psychological catastrophe for you – though you don’t put it like this, you just feel it in your head and your chest and your testicles. You’ll sit alone between the water-pipes and try not to think of your mother. You’ll think of ladies in medieval gear and you’ll realise your cock’s going up. You’ll think of ladies taking off their medieval gear and your cock’ll go up some more. You’ll crouch alone in the dark corner of the enormous bathroom and imagine this medieval lady looking like those nymphs in that painting in that book in the school library and you’ll screw your eyes up tight and start fumbling down under and you’ll try not to think of your mother and try not to think of Hell and try not to think of losing your s
ight and try not to think of Hylas getting dragged down under the lily-pads by those lily-white naked nymphs prettier than any lady you have ever seen and you’ll feel your mouth fill up with saliva and realise that it is going to happen – little golden stars of pleasure are bursting all around you and you don’t care if you get dragged under by the medieval lady prettier than any lady you’ve ever seen and you don’t care if the nymphs in the background tear you up into little burst stars of pleasure because this is so frightfully pleasant and her flesh is of the purest white and upon her breasts are two little roses you are pressing with your hands as the water enters your mouth and you lose your sight in the utterly stupendous unleashing of all the slippery pleasures you could ever have imagined but never did over your fingers and even up onto one of the hot water pipes, oh golly gosh.
And afterwards, you’ll feel terrible. But that’s not my problem. You’re not my problem. I’ve got the Great War coming up. We’re talking epic here, son. The Great War’ll burst out and you’ll still be crouched there in the midnight blue corner summoning yourself from the nymph-pond, smelling of the deeps, water-weed in your hair, until you’re caught at it one night by Cowdrey in 1915, Cowdrey the prefect, Cowdrey who’ll exact a most beastly retribution the details of which you’ll just have to wait for because you’re not my problem, I’ve got the Great War coming up, I’ve got my relations to think about, this is all taking so much longer than I imagined. I mean, he hasn’t even got to the first bloody linden yet.
Move up close. Look at the little shreds of paper fluttering down at my great-uncle’s feet or blown about around Boulter’s head. One gets stuck in his beard. It’s flesh-coloured, peachy-pink, it might be a bit of a buttock. Anyway, it gets stuck in his beard and my great-uncle, through his dizziness, thinks of Mr Lear’s limerick about the fellow with the big beard and the bird’s nest in it and he wants to giggle. Isn’t that incredible? INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE! AMAZING TALES #39!
Hey, that’s the scene. That’s the scene wrapped up, just about. There’s Mr Philips standing to the left of my great-uncle and there’s the shreds of paper on the gravel and there’s one in Big Cunt’s whiskers and there’s another thinner one on my great-uncle’s shoulder, as if the black cloth’s been torn (did I mention my great-uncle is in Sunday black, with a dinky black Sunday cap on his head?) and there we go. That’s it. That’s what I forgot. Amazing, innit?
I hope you had time to powder your noses before the second reel. I wouldn’t want you to have missed that scene.
I hope your glasses are full and tinkling and the nuts are roasted. I hope you’re not feeling short-changed. England always short-changes me, as a matter of fact. I say this to our local barman out of Terminator 2 back in Houston and because he’s English he beats me up. He never short-changes me. He always gives me a double, as in nelson, bom bom. I might tell you about him sometime. He’s probably Holloway-Purse’s illegitimate son’s grandson or something. He has the same eyes. They’re quite common, these days.
He’s moving up. My great-uncle. He’s, ahem, running the gauntlet. Prissy phrase, huh? Someone got gantlope and gauntlet mixed up around the time Shakespeare was making a buck and putting it into property and it stuck. Gantlope means ‘course’, of course. Running the course. I like to check things up. I went to Magdalene with an e, I did Danish and then English and made films with rivers and nitwits in them and there was always a fucking punt coming in at the back with a deadhead in a boater screwing the scene up and they didn’t have punts like that in Arthurian Britain. In Randle they call it (I mean, they did then) passing the pricks. That’s because they poke you when it’s done in the dorms because there they do it like it should be done. They throw boots, too. They hiss as they throw the boots or prick you. It’s a long dormitory, it’s always a long dormitory. The posh version is called walking the cestus. Roman boxing-gloves or something. Oxhide and nice metal strips over the knuckles. I mean, they’re Roman, baby. They don’t say it’s time for a box at Randle they say it’s time for a caedere. Or they say today, chaps, it’s cesti off, it’s up with the knuckles as our fathers did it, and our grandfathers. The place runs with Latin blood. Sanguinary faces of boys (Henry Peterson, Remembering Them, 1967). Our boys. Lads. Our lovely lads. I’m talking about then. Now – I mean these days – it’s soft as Dunlopillo. There’s no boxing, no caedere, there’s only one guy doing Latin and he’s effeminate. But out on the rugby field they’re still breaking their backs and getting their mouths extended several inches. There’s still the playing fields. All is not lost. I tell this to our barman back in Houston but he thinks I’m being snotty. That’s his word. Snotty. Or rather, sno’y. Sno’y, don’t be sno’y, Tricky Dick. I say to him, there’s a t in it, Jason. Two ts, as a matter of fact. Queen’s English. He socks me one. Queensberry Rules, Jason, I say, spitting out my priceless plate, insured against fire and theft but not socks. Lapsus caedere, no doubt, Jason. Cedant arma togae. Good old Jason.
How did I get onto him, for Christ’s sake?
Trevelyan is walking the cestus, Trevelyan is passing the pricks, Trevelyan is going out the way he came in, feeling his legs turn to suet, or maybe it’s the air, feeling a sense of heightened reality, feeling horrible and sick, feeling this isn’t reality at all, feeling that maybe he’s in the wrong century and underneath he’s wearing chain-mail, thigh-pieces, gauntlets, holding his helm, embarking to fight alongside the Lionheart, and then he sees his brother. Under the second linden. His brother with the head down and eyes screwed tight shut. Oh, Giles, this is horrible, horrible! Perhaps that’s what he thought.
I didn’t do a close-up of him watching Mr Boulter tear up The Lament for Icarus. I only did the hands and the feet with the bits of paper floating down. It doesn’t matter. He wasn’t watching. He was fogged up with tears. It was like opening your eyes in the pool. I’m talking about the pool in the wood near Hamilton Lodge. We’ll come on to that. It’s a very important pool. I’m certainly not talking about a fucking swimming-pool. I’ll come on to Hamilton Lodge, too. My grandfather lived there. Along with my great-uncle and great-aunt. And grandmother. They lived there in the summer. They were a two-home, two-carriage, two-car family. If Robert Bresson was directing this he’d tell the guy playing William my great-uncle to think about what he’d had for breakfast. Bresson hates acting. He’s about 105 or something but he’s the greatest. I hate acting, too. I love actors but I hate acting. Maybe Bresson would’ve done the squeezed onion treatment, but that’s about it. So here’s a close-up of my great-uncle with wet eyes and looking like he’s considering what he had for breakfast just after the shot of his best watercolour getting ripped to pieces.
OK?
Hey, I thought I’d finished with this scene. I don’t want to go back to that. He was my great-uncle. His blood flows in my veins. It’s complicated. Blow, bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying! That was Louisa’s favourite poem. Or rather, song. She knew it as a song, the Britten thing, we had a Decca recording circa 1956 with a scratch and she’d play it over and over, despite the scratch, she’d kick the gramophone to get it over the scratch, she didn’t seem to mind, she was crazy right from the start, she was a great actress, she was wasted.
Blow, bugles, blow, set the wild ech-ech-ech ing,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
I brought her a new one, a glistening pitch-black new one without so much as a thumb-print. It took a lot of research to track it down. She dumped it. Actually, she lifted it up in both hands and broke it against the banister. She was always a nutter, OK?
O-o-o the mind has mou-ountains. All that. Scratches, too.
Back on the gravel in 1913 the bits of paper are getting blown over and up, twirling and fluttering, cerulean blue and peachy pink and snowy white and even olivey green – just a swatch of green here and there. The cerulean ones seem to be particularly active. They’re going higher than the others, they’re getting caught in eddies of wind, they’re going up and up and like little blue bu
tterflies against the boring sky. Can a sky be boring? This one is. It was interesting when this thing started but the wind’s brought a thick blank of stratocumulus opacus, blotting-paper stuff, really boring English stuff – it sucks up all the coloured inks out of the scene except these cerulean butterflies and it reminds Hibble standing there beneath them of the field in Tuscany and of his lady’s mouth and the jolly queer warmth of it and of her spittle and him having not the faintest what to do with so much spittle and it was just possible he was kissing her in the wrong manner because when he lifted his face it was all over Frenella’s cheeks, it was frightful, it was glistening all over her cheeks as if they’d been eating large juicy apples and this thought, as he looks up at the little blue butterflies, makes him blush and he blinks and his Renaissance-style eyebrows quiver and he looks down at his shoes. And if we can just for a moment sidle onto the echoing parade-grounds of Holloway-Purse’s mind we’ll find it even more interesting, my my we will, because somewhere in there is the flicker of a memory of a picnic, and this memory has to do with deep blue ribbons against a creamy silk dress, and his pater swiping at wasps, and his sister sobbing frightfully, and the governess with the blue ribbons holding Pater’s hand at one rather queer point. I look at that flicker and I don’t really want to because it makes me feel sorry for Holloway-Purse. I’m feeling sorry for the bastard because that was the first picnic without dear Mater and little HP’s world was swirling about with dark mists instead of sunshine but he wouldn’t show it, he wouldn’t, not like sissy Sis. I could make a movie about HP. I could get really caught up in the guy. He thought of this gauntlet idea so I suppose I ought to get caught up in him but I haven’t the time. What I find really interesting about him is that when the war comes along he’s not a cad or a coward but a fearless fellow, a fine officer, an exceptionally devoted leader of men. I’m quoting from the citation that was typed out to try to get him off the hook. Because he cracked. He was fine and fearless and devoted and then he cracked. He strangled this old lady. I’m serious. In church. Hey, in a ruined church. This old lady was bringing flowers into this shelled-out church and this English officer just started screaming at her and she spat in his face or something and he strangled her until she was dead. And that was it. That’s how this creep ended up. My analyst would say it was to do with his mater, it was to do with things like that picnic and not breaking into sobs for years and years but I dunno, guv. I dunno. And you know what? HP got off the hook. He went back home and it was hush-hush for the rest of his long life at Randle. Yup, at Randle. Because he got Boulter’s job. Big Cunt became Bigger Cunt. I want to advertise this thing I know about HP but no one would be interested in the way I want them to be interested. I’d be waving this fact around and people’d be talking about how interesting history is as if it was some kind of college course when I’m waving this thing about and screaming my head off like I think there’s justice in the world. I mean, I wrote about this to Randle College in ’94 and didn’t even get an embossed Basildon Bond aka The Master’s Secretary reply. One of your headmasters was a murderer, I wrote. I didn’t even mention the word sadist. I just gave them the facts about this little old French lady choking between the broken pews with HP’s hands around her neck back in 1917 with some photocopies of my research on the subject and they didn’t even reply. They probably thought I was a hate-mail freak. They probably didn’t even know his name, they probably had to look it up, because they’re into coeducational opportunities and business studies and close links with Saudi Arabia and classes in fucking Chinese or something and those old guys are prehistoric. (Hey, I’ve read the brochure. They sent me the brochure. There was a fucking swimming-pool on the cover, a heated fucking swimming-pool. They do summer courses in everything but sex, which is up to you. I could go there any summer I fancy and do Film Making for Beginners and Judo for Beginners and Tai-Chi-Chow-Chin for Beginners and get my rocks off with some lonely lovely widow gasping for comfort and understanding between the five-course meals in the lovely gentle surroundings of the Hampshire countryside, ideal for excursions on foot and laying skirt. I could. I could’n all. If they’d let me. I’d say my great-uncle and my grandfather were here. The lonely widow would rise up on one elbow and some of the exceptionally attractive Hampshire countryside would be imprinted on her breasts so deeply Pottery for Intermediates might take moulds off them. Were they really, Richard? They were, my lovely. And were you? Was I what? I mean, Richard, are you an Old Boy? I am an old boy. I’m slowly approaching fifty-five. I only look like I do because I have beautycare treatment. It’s one of my perks. It comes with the job. Oh darling, she says, twisting round idly to brush some of the remarkable flora of Hampshire off her naked buttocks and loosening her hardly-greying hair with its highlights of gouache and charcoal from Landscape Sketching for the Advanced, you’re so terribly droll. Over the summery air comes the fitful clapping from the cricket pitch where the Under-Fifty-fives are getting trashed. Droll, but not too droll, I say, with a knowing flicker of a leer. She sighs an eloquent, under forty-fiveish sigh and a bee sips at the nectar of the buttercup I’ve just placed on the downy knuckle of her coccyx. The bee’s coaxed off and my mouth takes its place. She giggles. I mumble something about liking butter more than marge. She sighs again. We have a quarter of an hour, she murmurs, before my Indian Dance for All Levels. I’m getting behind with my kissing, I joke. And swallow the buttercup. She has to slap my back. Buttercups are poisonous, she says. Cows avoid them. My mouth fills with acrid bile. She cradles me. I’m dying of England, I say. She laughs and I notice her gold tooth. That does it. A deer nuzzles us. Out of the deep deep forest. We hump away as a mounted posse passes so close we can hear the clink of their bugles against their cuisses. A toad apologises but could we help him, he needs to be kissed, he was a prince once in a John Boorman extravaganza, he’d rehearsed for days, they said he wasn’t needed, he’s weeping, I tell him that’s movies for ya, go find Fergie, get stuffed. We grind away through all this, somehow, even through the flitter-flatter over our heads, the thunks and screams of collateral damage from Archery for the Under-Fives. No peace, I gasp, no peace anywhere. I don’t care. We set the echoes flying. She’s incredible. She was a ballerina, a mime, a black belt in yoga. She’s left the Kama Sutra way behind, she’s challenging Venus, she does things only water ought to do. Hey, she is water, she turns to water under my rocks, she fills my mouth, there’s a stink of the underside of lily-pads, I’m drowning, my feet touch bottom, it’s slippery, they cloud things up, I blink it clearer, there’s a guy down here, he’s draped with the loveliest nymphs I’ve ever encountered, with Alma-Tadema breasts and Burne-Jones tummy-buttons and Herbert J. Draper bums the minnows seem to like. Hi, he says. I’m Hylas. Join the party.)