Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Hey, how did ya get off the fairway again, Ricky?

  Hooked it with a number three, Glenda.

  (Glenda’s my golfing partner. His real name is Glendallen. Jack Glendallen. He’s really fat. He teaches carpentry someplace and is my neighbour. Love thy neighbour. His wife screams at him and has teeth the size of – shucks, she has very large teeth, even for America.)

  Clack. That’s the loose tile in the kitchen. That’s Lily. She’s counting out the cutlery on the tray, aloud, again. George has whipped a white cloth off a wooden rail and slung it over his shoulder. It’s for the hot dishes that never are, but it looks good, it’s his serving uniform, he rubs a fold of it between his thumb and forefinger like it’s his security blanket or something. His stubble is rippling around his mouth because his tongue is pushing against the wall of his cheeks, he’s excited. He opens his mouth and looks at Lily’s back which is already rounded too much for her age.

  Let’s go take a peep then, mite, he says. Dorothy looks up but Lily carries on counting with funny little breaths in between each number. Dorothy’s settled some salt out of the salt tub on her palm and her palm is upsides over the boiled knuckle of veal knocking in its big pan and her hand must be tough because anyone else’s would have been parboiled by now. She doesn’t say anything but George answers her anyway.

  So we can see what the thing is. We can see what the fucker is.

  Dorothy’s hand makes tiny sideways movements like it’s a shuttle on a loom and the salt’s left in mid-air bit by bit from where it falls bit by bit like all those damned souls some of my students go on about, countless white souls falling through the steam into the pot of eternal damnation because they didn’t have the right teeth or whatever.

  You do be a trial, sometimes, she says. She’s blinking because of the steam. She’s enormous. She scratches the side of her head where the ear grows out of and some hair’s drawn up from into a tight bun. There’s a nice little recess of bone she likes to snuck her finger into. It looks like she’s almost picking her ear, but she’s not. She’s done this since she was three, and you can tell.

  George clears his throat. He has a hand on Lily’s shoulder. Let’s aye take a peep, he says, at this birthday suit gentleman. Lily’s biting her lower lip and not looking at Dorothy. Her sniggers have died, which surprises her. She wipes her hands on her apron, forgetting she’s changed, but her hands are clean. Dorothy slaps her palms together to rid them of salt. She’s just ruined the boiled knuckle of veal, but who cares. We’re not eating it. Lily scoops up the cultery like it’s a handful of thunderbolts and places it on a smaller tray, a round one, a silver salver, hold this for a moment, this silver salver is THE SAME ONE, it must be, I want to cry, I can’t explain this at the moment, we’ll miss something, there’s a queue back there at the tee-off, it’ll take about as long as this film’s gonna take, actually. Ho. My hand’s trembling. Ho. Ha.

  I have to pretend I have never seen this silver salver before, for the moment.

  OK. Hit it.

  There are glasses on this – this thing. I think she must have put them there at some pre-arranged time, or maybe Milly did, I don’t know. Anyway, she picks the insignificant salver up and goes out of the kitchen. She has short strong arms and big shoulders and this is what you think of just after Lily’s left a room. Strong arms and big shoulders. Compact, a compact bundle of muscle and hair and chin. Very fine auburn hair but you don’t notice it, it’s all so compact. Clack. A louder clack because it’s George’s boot as he follows her out. Grunt. You think of grunts and rippling stubble after George has left. Nothing else much. Maybe a white napkin over a black shoulder, if he has it on. And the smell. Certainly nothing about salvers.

  Dorothy looks up at the flex. She thinks of it growing out of the ceiling like a tree root. The old gas fitting looks very old, next to it. The bulb hurts her eyes. She misses the soft gassy light. I’m on the putting green in three. Ten yards. She folds her arms and sighs. The steam has returned to water. It shimmers on the ceiling, it always does, it sticks like sweat. She feels wrong, today. Her antennae are picking up trouble. She doesn’t think this exactly. She thinks how her throat is hurting and of melted snow. Melted snow for sore throats. And burns. Her bare forearms are notched with old burns. They seem to be remembering themselves today. Any road, there’s hardly ever enough snow, and if there is she forgets to bottle it.

  Plop. Down in four. Great run, Ricky, great run.

  OK. Number Two. Big bunkers but straight, rolling only a little, a high green on which Mrs Trevelyan’s waving at me. George wanted to hump my golf-bag but I gave him a trolley. Glenda uses electric, I use George. It’s OK, I wear gloves. My swing’s great. Agatha’s watching from the woods. She’s found a ball. She looks great, white dress against the woods, the dark woods. Texan woods are dark. The leaves begin too low. They’re forever green. They have jogging and bike tracks through them in case you forget civilisation and kids and overweight people. Lily is caring for my tees. She has a habit of standing directly behind me. I tell her, think of me as a horse. I nearly took her head off three strokes back. Milly is nowhere to be seen. Ah, there she is. She’s standing in the bunker. If I slice I’ll hit her. It’s the most dangerous place to be on the course, a bunker. Balls like them, they like the sand, the softness. They like to snuck up under the lip and watch you flailing with your niblick, thinking the world is coming to an end and your life is a waste of time.

  Tee up. I’m feeling on form.

  George and Lily come up the stairs and stand in the hallway. The door into the living-room is shut. George can tell that there is no one in there. He just can. There’s silence and there’s quiet. Silence is uninhabited and quiet is not. Behind the door there’s silence. Once he’s established this he moves forward over the lozenge tiles (Bishop to Knight 3) and opens the door. He looks. There’s silence and then the clocks ticking and also the chairs hunkered down and relaxing or little and uptight but no one in them snoring or turning their face or not turning their face because he’s only the butler. He feels Lily’s breath behind him. I’ll put this down, she hisses, where I oughta. She’s talking about the TOTALLY INSIGNIFICANT salver. She goes off with it into the conservatory. The conservatory is at the end and on the left of the passage that sneaks off into the twilight of the back of the house, beyond the staircase. George feels abandoned. He curses softly (OK, he says fuck) and steps into the room. He knows there’s no one in here but he thinks they might all be disguised as furniture, they’re going to jump him, Mrs Trevelyan’s going to whip off her antimacassar and shriek at him. He grunts and sits on her. He likes to do this. He likes to sit and soil the furniture, it gives him a feeling of reckless abandon just descending from the vertical more than a small bow. He really goes for it today: he spreads his legs wide and rucks up a rug from Hindustan with his heels and allows his hands to loll either side of the low arms. It’s one of those antique padded chairs with low arms and a seat that just clears the floor and legs with rickets. When Mr Trevelyan does this he’s drunk. When George does this he’s being a revolutionary, he’s smashing the class barriers, he’s subverting the imperial order but only in his skull. If he so much as heard a pin drop behind the curtain he’d be vertical in about an eighth of a second. It’s one of the escape valves, it takes off the pressure – if he had a whistle attached to his head you’d hear it peep right now. There’s sunlight falling across the floor. It’s nice. The polish picks it up where the rugs aren’t and throws it onto George’s face, so he can’t see very clearly. But in the general glare there’s something black on a table. The ball’s on a terrific lie, bang in the middle. It didn’t hit Milly, yet. It hasn’t got that far, but I’d have to slice it at right angles practically to hit her now. I’m taking a number one wood, for the hell of it. Here goes.

  The something black on the table is like a tiny coffin. This is what George thinks. A child’s coffin covered with a black drape. He’s thinking of Evelyn’s, actually. He liked the bair
n. Well, he didn’t know he liked that bairn until the bairn was dead, but that’s good enough. He mainly liked the bairn underneath because it was the first bairn, and when he was born George was still young enough not to ache all over. Twenty years ago. He doesn’t like thinking about the coffin. He doesn’t like thinking about the maid coming down into the kitchen steady steady with a bowl and a white cloth over it and him fritting her with a growl so she tipped the bowl a mite and half of the white cloth went red and so did they jes looking at it bloom like a red red rose that’s newly sprung in June O. He doesn’t like thinking about the way he acted the loon all the way through the illness, down in the kitchen, making fangs out of potato flesh and fritting the maid every time she came down with a bowl full of arterial blood and scummy bits of sputum. He doesn’t like thinking about the cough cough cough that was like a clock it was so regular, it filled the whole house, when the coughs stopped you noticed, it was dead queer, it was so quiet. Maybe it was a miracle. Maybe Big Bastard up there had got it into his head to be nice for once and sucked everything rotten out of the bairn’s lungs. But no, the coughs’d get going again and one’d get a mite angry with Big Bastard and a wee bit peevish at Evelyn himself for carrying on so. And the missus was terrible, shouting and that. Aye aye. Everyone padding about like bogies. George’d have to bring up cocoa or hot lemon and knock and Nurse Gulliver’d take it with a glare, as if he was Mister Death or something. Then one time when the toffs were out Mister Death took up the hot lemon instead and George was just too late, he knocked and Nurse had a hand over her mouth and wide eyes, she couldn’t believe it, he’d choked or something when she was on the toilet, she went into shock and the hot lemon went down again and stayed all day calmly and quietly on the kitchen table while the whole house exploded upstairs but quietly, quietly. The hot lemon was cold lemon by the evening and with a scum. George drank it without thinking and afterwards felt queer. The bairn’d looked like he’d pulled a jolly wheeze, the way he lay there, stark white over a waistcoat of blood and stuff beyond the nurse’s shoulder. George grimaces because he’s remembering that and the way he was trembling the next morning, serving toast, while the family sat there as usual as if nowt had happened. Only the eyes, all the eyes were bloated, like fish, and it was a bit quieter. He’d had a need to cough. Aye. He’d tried to swallow it out but it crawled up his throat and out it came, and Mrs T had whipped about and fixed him with an awful stare as he wiped his mouth. This is what the something black on the table has tweaked out of his brain, it’s like that thing at the music hall, that magic blokey pulling a hundred knotted scarves out of that wee box as the monkey claps. He grunts. He hears a step in the hallway and he’s vertical but the rug slips away from under him and he’s horizontal again.

  Lily puts her hand to her mouth.

  Blimey, you all right? She nearly chuckles but it’s a sigh instead. You all right, Mr MacPhearson?

  He’s not dead. He thought he might be. What does it fuckin’ look like, he growls. I came over all queer and decided to die. He drags himself upright. He shakes his head. I’ve sliced. I did something very weird. I clipped the ball and it’s heading towards Milly. She’s got her back to it. Christ. There’s another footfall in the hallway. George and Lily stare at the door like it’s about to explode. It opens. It’s Milly. I hope she ducks. Golf balls have been known to kill. They can hit the temple and kill. They have terrific velocity. Even my balls have terrific velocity. She doesn’t. We’re all running over to her because it’s like she was karate chopped in the neck and she dropped out of sight behind the lip of the bunker. As I run I’m thinking it wasn’t my fault, she shouldn’t have been standing there, will I get done for homicide, am I insured, will she sue me if it’s not fatal, will she have brain damage, they say there’s a ghost of this guy who had a coronary after missing a two-inch putt on the eighteenth, there will definitely be a ghost in this bunker, there are ghosts everywhere, some people walk into these things, they invite it, Milly didn’t have to be standing where most golf balls like to go, she didn’t have to come into the living-room right at the moment I’m talking about, which is now. And always now.

  And now now? TODD LAZENBY IS DATING ZELDA. For definites. He actually comes into the library. We have just purchased the twelve-volume World History of the Movies on CD-ROM and he keeps on calling it up. He and Zelda giggle together. It’s disgusting. They had a great night out last week. If I show up all possessive she’ll run straight into his waistcoat, I know it. He has a waistcoat, a kind of multicoloured Paisley thing, with a fob-watch on a chain in it. Seriously. A fob-watch. Lazenby the laser brain has a fob-watch. I reckon it’s this and his lazy eye that clinches it with women. Anybody who tries to compete gets accused of rape. He doesn’t. Seriously. It’s terrifying. There was this guy called John Blean who was such a sop you could’ve picked his ear for him and he’d have thanked you. He was the world expert on John Huston. Perhaps he was John Huston underneath. Call me John. Anyway, he winked at a girl in the front row when he was giving a mass seminar on Cultural Identity in the Western and he was up in front of the college tribunal. They did him for ocular harassment or something. He claimed he had a sty and it was weeping which was probably true but they’d gone too far, they’d pulled all his nails out by that stage or something and he had to leave. It was a major victory for the forces of progress, I guess. A major victory for the forces of progress would be to crucify Todd Lazenby. You know what he did yesterday? (I won’t be long on this, I’m waiting for the ambulance to arrive and I’ve got sand in my shoes and it looks bad for Milly, but we’ve time, this is important, I have to get it off my chest and on to the screen where it can snivel and snort to its heart’s content forever.) He called up the twelve-volume $1200 plus tax World History of the Movies and looked for me in it. Hey, let’s find Rick, he said. Zelda stopped massaging his shoulders or whatever she was doing and clapped her hands with delight. He was on this swivel stool in front of the VDU and he swivelled and looked over to me and said, hey, Rick, do you know if it’s nice about you? I pretended I was coming out of a trance state of profound concentration and looked over his way (I have changed my place to be in sight of the issue desk, by the way) and said, I’m sorry? I like to be quite English when talking to this creep. I feel an advantage over him, being English, British English. I feel the oaken-hearted ancientness of being British English coursing through my veins and this turns him into a squeaky kind of American hologram, it really does. That fucking waistcoat and fob. I don’t need appurtenances like that, old fellow. My blood goes back to Hengest. Or maybe Horsa. Anyway, the ones that cut some softy Romano-British hands off and left the rest on the beach. I’ve picked up a bit of Viking on the way, the nasty bit that plundered and raped and slew monks. I retroactively acquired some Beaker brain cells and a portion of my DNA is definitely Arthurian Celtic. No Norman. It may seem amazing, but I have no Norman. I know, I know, Normans were really Vikings but you know what I mean. I am pure. I am not continental filth. My seed is so British and ancient it’d grow an oak clump if I jacked off in a meadow. Todd Lazenby is so recent he’d leave a UFO burn if he jacked off in a meadow. Now I have to say that under my British sang-froid I was curling up, guv. Because I knew. I knew that nowhere in the million corridors and rooms of those twelve little discs was there anybody resembling Ricky Thornby, or who answered to his name (because Danny Kaye resembles me, but he doesn’t answer to my name). I am not even the son of a footnote. I had spent two whole days hacking into those discs just in case the microscopically reliable index had slipped up. Mike was there, as an assistant lighting guy on Waterloo. Bosey was there, as a footnote to Blow-Up. Fuck it – even my first wife Deirdre was there, under The Significance of Names to Screen Failure or something. I wasn’t. My presence in the Grand Canyon of World Cinema was less than the echo of that dropped rose petal some very successful poet went on about. It wasn’t even the torn-off wing of a tsetse fly hitting the gulch. There was nothing. It was as if I hadn’t even stoo
d on the edge and dropped anything down into the Colorado at all. And I get vertigo. OK, I didn’t get vertigo when I looked into the Grand Canyon a few years ago, it was too high, it was too big, but I got vertigo looking down into that CD-ROM and not finding myself. I nearly threw myself over the edge in recompense. I nearly smashed it up. That is, I nearly took out the CD and did whatever you do to the thing to ruin it. But I thought of Zelda and how proud she was of this thing, how amazing it was to have got them to swell the budget to buy it. Anyway, I’m a coward, I didn’t want to lose my job, and I thought how in the 2001 edition I’d be there, the only guy to have screened a masterpiece with no pictures, no sound, and ONCE ONLY, unique screening, like a great meal, like your one great night with your pinup. I’d be a crazy ghost trace, a rumour, a cult. So I got up and went home and drank eighteen straight Dylans. Small ones, so I didn’t die. I lied when I said I was playing golf. I’m sorry. I was actually drinking and sleeping and telling them I was having a recurrence of my cerebral malaria from the VSO days. I feel better now. At least, I did until yesterday. Until Todd Lazenby tried to call me up, tried to listen out for an echo, with Zelda next to him. It’s incredible that Zelda hadn’t tried already, but she doesn’t really know how to handle machines. This doesn’t matter, because no one uses the CD-ROM except weirdo and he can make it talk, literally. The other students are too busy learning to read. I wanted to leave the room, actually. It was like Todd Lazenby and I were struggling on the edge of the Grand Canyon, we had our hands under each other’s chin, but I was on the bad side, I had zilch but air the other side of my heels, little rocks were skittering down and he had a definitely evil gleam in his eyes, he was pushing my head right back and my body was following. It wasn’t that he was stronger than me or anything, it was just that he was taking unfair advantage of my position, and Zelda was watching, not realising what the hell was going on, just thinking we were having a harmless little tussle on the edge, it’s what boys do, it’s fun. The only echo was of my long scream. I was screaming inside. Lazenby shakes his head in disbelief, staring into the screen, some junk playing in his eyeballs.