Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Tosh, all tosh.

  He wouldn’t know what a barn door was if it trapped his dick, Jason. No, Mr Thornby? No, Jason. Fill ’er up, lad. Don’t repeat me for Christ’s sake. Don’t repeat me. There’s a good Englishman, there’s a fine builder of bridges between nations, there’s a worthy forger of links between the British National Party and the Ku-Klux-Klan, southern Texas branch.

  Jason of the Largolouts. She used to chuckle at my jokes.

  When we kissed, the hesitant flicker of her tongue in my mouth bespoke her youth. God I love her still. God? Hoi, I’m speakin’ to yer, switch yer deaf-aid on and swivel yer Zimmer this way for once.

  That’s blown it. I’d better grope for Jesus if I don’t want to end up less than cinders. Sometimes I feel like I know exactly what George feels. It’s creepy.

  Doomed. Aye, doomed.

  She’s coming in.

  I mean Agatha my great-auntie, not Zennor or whatever her name still is. IjuswannasayveryquicklyihopeyouraspissedasIam, folks. Otherwise this might have gotten irrititus of the spleen or something.

  She’s comen in like the dewe on the flue.

  Not quite, to be honest. She closed the door behind her with a degree of force unnecessary in the technical circumstances, everything being well-oiled and pretty well hand-constructed in this house. Bosey’s needles jumped. It was a mistake. It was nerves. Right now she’s just standing a little in front of the door, nor-nor-west of her father my great-grandfather’s right shoulder and overlapping slightly with Mike’s elbow so clear it, Avens yer bum.

  Thank you.

  I find these family occasions very difficult. I had a family once and now I just have a kind of testical familiarity with various photos pinned up in my kitchen so it’s a shock to see the real thing, to see Greg with eye-bags or Maura with sagging breasts or Hilda with breasts. They never smile like they do in the photos. Here’s a still of my kitchen pin-board. Still Ten or maybe Eleven, I can’t keep count, I never watch my rushes. Go see it. Anyone’d think my family were beach bums but that’s the way it is, everyone in family snaps is having a whale of a time on the beach or in front of castles or round a table with pink eyes but that’s the flash, not the Australian turps. I look at this still and I think, hey, I created all this. All these good times, all these weird people with shifting hair and lousy cameras, they’re to do with me and my sex drive. If it weren’t for my sex drive my kitchen pin-board would be empty, or at least it’d have only the Rothkos and the Blackfoot calling an echo out of the canyon and the Houston Big One ticket and the garage bill and Dr Lazenby’s face out of the HCDVA staff journal which I use for dart practice ’cos one day I’m gonna thrash Jason in the Green Man championships and the quote from Tarkovsky on the back of the Dunkin’ Donut napkin and stuff. No, it wouldn’t have the Lazenby picture. If it weren’t for my sex drive I wouldn’t have noticed the guy existed, probably, because he’s indistinguishable from all the other androids out here who jog and play tennis and work out and cheat their wives and think Robert Redford’s their shaving mirror.

  Go see my pin-board. If you think it has no place in a historical drama then you’re wrong: these people are intimately related to the people who are sitting in this dining-room frowning and they’re frowning not because me and the crew have suddenly become visible or audible, no – there ain’t a cable or a lens in view, not a click or a shuffle in earshot, they’re sealed tight in 1913 and we’re behind the glass watching the bellies of the sharks swoop over us so close it makes us scream but don’t worry, the glass’ll never ever break, the water’ll never ever gush out along with its sharks and sea-snakes and polyps and trilobites in long shot-silk skirts and top hats and detachable wing collars because the glass is not glass it’s perspex, it’s spun out of where you’re at, we can even stick our tongues out and go nyaaaa.

  OK? RIGHT. ACTION. Take however many it takes. As was my famous hallmark phrase. I was a cocky bugger in them days, great days.

  My dear, what is the matter? That’s Mr Trevelyan, twisting round in his chair. Agatha attempts to swallow but her throat’s pistons have grit in them. There is a jug of water on the table. She picks it up. Ah, Kenneth appears to be in on it, whatever it is, says Mrs Trevelyan. Mrs Trevelyan’s uncoiling her venomous side. Actually, you’d have to be an invertebrate not to notice Uncle Ken’s gaze fixed on his plate instead of on Agatha as it would have been if he had not been in on it or had been a less lousy actor and now his head jerks, a dead give-away, he doesn’t know where to put his face because snake-woman is glinting in every shot – he grins ridiculously at the Victory figurine like he’s admiring her breasts and snake-woman’s this formless shadow on the edge, it’s like the way he makes his ectoplasmic presences, controlled light spill, oh good grief the breasts are moving, it’s blebs of candlelight sliding over them because Agatha is replacing the crystal jug, maybe he should be looking at her, he drops the grin like a curtain and looks at the base of this glass flaring the candlelight and her eyes closed above it.

  Right, she’s drinking. He has time to check up on his brother. The whites of his eyeballs show as he does so because he doesn’t want to move his head, he doesn’t want things to get more blurry than they are already. Arthur is blinking nervously. OK, he’s blinking nervously because a goblin in his brain has its hand up, its suggesting that Ags is about to pull back the plush and show Ruthie Dunnet in a loose corset smoking. The goblin wears spectacles and has a book under its arm and looks as if he knows about these things. Mr Trevelyan stares hard at the winks and snatches of candlelight in the cut crystal of the base of the glass. Surely not, he thinks. He glances at his brother glancing at him. Oh good God. He thinks oh good God because the whites of his brother’s eyeballs get instantly closed down by a reflex action of contact-avoidance to use Zelda’s phrase after this course she went on called, I dunno, How To Open Up or something, like you’re a tin of cat-food, and it looks very suspicious. Ken is currently auditioning for the part of The Man Who Has No Idea What It Is He Might Be In On Even If He Were, but he hasn’t got a hope of getting it. Surely to hell not, thinks Mr Trevelyan, surely to bloody hell-fire not. His wife is a black rock at the far end. He refuses to smash himself upon it, he steers his head back to Agatha. She is clasping her hands tightly in front of her and looking at the corner of the table ditto. At some point she must have put down the glass, we missed it, I can’t do everything. It’s William, she says, in a shaky voice. The little bespectacled goblin is taken outside to be tossed twenty-five times on the end of a hay-fork while Mr Trevelyan provides drinks all round and dancing long into the night gratis.

  Oh? he says, frowning slightly, inclining his head forward, like he’s releasing a mildly difficult turd. For those who don’t know English people we’re talking Pavlov here, it’s a classic response to a very dramatic situation. Mrs Trevelyan is not classic, she’d have sent Pavlov screaming out the laboratory.

  William? she cries.

  Her sickly boy. Her favourite son. She can see the coffin draped in sable already, she’ll have to order it and no flowers, the whole procession’s disappearing down a vast chasm that used to be William, her lovely little boy and such hair, such eyes, such teeth!

  William?

  Her little cunning snaky construction has been demolished as decisively as Milly’s slum will be in 1963, it’s been replaced by an enormous tower-block of dread with broken lifts and Evelyn’s piss-smell. I received a telephone call from the school, says her daughter, my great-aunt, William’s sister, Hilda’s great-great-great aunt. Hilda was the one waving a spade in the middle, next to the Rothko. Hiya, Hil. I hope you’re still with us out there. You got her brains, baby.

  A telephone call? quavers Mrs Trevelyan. She’s blinking very rapidly. Her breath has gone into short supply. She was asleep, knocked out on tonic wine, for most of the afternoon. The telephone would not have woken her up. When? she demands. Mrs Trevelyan is a very demanding person, especially when she’s nervous. When? comes out like the ya
p of an unpleasant little dog, something like my neighbour’s which has a personal dislike of me and pisses against my garage door so I get wet when I swing it up. Agatha lets out a short sigh. This is going extremely well. It’s going like clockwork, thinks Uncle Kenneth, smiling encouragingly at Agatha. He really is hopeless. He’s smiling at her like she’s doing a party turn or something, like she’s reciting the whole of Dream-Pedlary by Thomas Love Beddoes – If there were dreams to sell, What would you buy? and so on. She stands in just the same way and recites it in the same sort of sing-song. OK, she’s not a wonderful actress either, but Uncle Ken’s not helping her. He should be screwing up his napkin with one hand and his face with the other, if you see what I mean. Or something less melodramatic, perhaps, less like the penny awfuls where they keep throwing their arms around and swooning just because Frankenstein’s come out of the cupboard and more Stanislavskian, thinking about what he had for breakfast if he were playing this guy who hadn’t spent the whole of luncheon discussing exactly what Agatha’s now saying, and how to say it, and in what order. But he’s lucky, because the small glinty part of Mrs Trevelyan that notices Uncle Kenneth practically mouthing Agatha’s next line like some hopeless kid in a school play just thinks he’s had too much sherry and wine and probably opium because the block of dread is overshadowing every damp mean slum of suspicion and she probably didn’t unscrew her face-powder lid right. She’s just flicking the day back to see if she can recall unscrewing the lid with three revolutions because if she did it with four or five that would explain it. That’s why he’s dead. That’s why in the middle of a trigonometry class he just keeled over and went pale and passed away. But she can’t recall anything revolutionary or devil-may-care in the way she took off the lid of her face powder.

  Ye-es? comes from Mr Trevelyan. His goblin party is over and he’s getting the hangover now, he’s thinking maybe it’s even worse, the goblin with the specs is to be replaced by a goblin in a black hood with skeletal fingers. He swallows reasonably successfully and wipes his top lip with a forefinger which smells of pea soup and eau-de-Cologne. Oh God comes from somewhere in his belly. Uncle Ken however is leaning forward and almost gesturing go on, you’re doing jolly well, and I took the call, and – wow, he’s so totally hopeless, but Agatha turns her face towards him and gives him a look of such incredible anguish that Uncle Ken momentarily believes it and sinks back into his chair. Agatha is good on looks but not so good on the lines. The reason she’s looking at Uncle Ken with incredible anguish is that she’s completely forgotten what comes next. She knew she should never have learnt it all by heart but Uncle Ken absolutely insisted at luncheon, he dipped his spoon into the raspberry jelly and insisted so absolutely he let go of the spoon which slowly disappeared from sight never to be seen again this side of the kitchen. Talking of downstairs, I ought to mention what the servants are doing upstairs. George has got his bottom teeth in front of his top teeth and his eyes are popping out because he’s remembering Evelyn and William is his next favourite bairn and something’s up wi’ the wee one. Hey, does nobody like Giles, my grandfather Giles? Milly is looking mentally subnormal or challenged or whatever it’s called in the corner, trying to work out what to do with the gravy boat she’s holding because it’s quite heavy but you never ever plonk a dish down when someone is making a speech. William is the young master she didn’t spot going up the stairs but she’ll turn out his room any road. The stuff is welling at the spout and she rights it. From where she is the young lady looks like a ghost. Now that’s ironic.

  Agatha is looking ghostlike for obvious reasons, one of them being the fact that she has dried up. If I’d thought about it I’d have brought a crib card and got Julie to hold it up by Camera Two ho ho. Now I think I’ve mentioned already – hey, cut the old ham bit, I know I’ve mentioned already – the fact that Agatha’s favourite party-turn apart from playing Schumann’s Rêverie on the piano-forte and singing one or two French folk songs is reciting Beddoes’s Dream-Pedlary. I promise you this isn’t a set-up. That’s what she recited until recently, until Christmas 1912 to be precise. It’s a great poem. Dr Lazenby had never heard of it or even of Thomas Lovell Beddoes because culturally-speaking he’s a prime-time yob. Anyway, there’s this great stanza in it all about raising the dead because that’s the most expensive most desirable dream of all if the dead you wish to raise were desirable and how that really is just a dream. Agatha looks at Uncle Kenneth but he isn’t any help and then she looks at the room in general without pulling focus on anyone in particular and she just knows that everybody is hanging on her every word and if she screws it up now it’ll be for ever but her brain is working overtime in the back recesses full of adjustable metal shelving and filing cabinets and the indefatigable little clerks with their little typewriters and rubber bands who can locate you anything if you can locate them and these are the guys who are yelling at each other with the red light flashing on off on off and the electric bell ringing and the telephones going which means a real emergency and there’s this one little fella with a skin problem and a stutter who has just found the Beddoes file underneath a pile of Gamage’s catalogues and he’s waving this verse around and the guy on the trolley snatches it from him and hurls it into the suction tube and phhhooooit out it comes, clear as daylight, exactly as she always recites it, too high and too earnestly but still clear as daylight and with a heavily pregnant pause after joy and this kind of siren that turns out to be the vowels on vain—

  If there are ghosts to raise,

  What shall I call,

  Out of hell’s murky haze,

  Heaven’s blue hall?

  Raise my loved long-lost boy

  To lead me to his joy.

  There are no ghosts to raise;

  Out of death lead no ways;

  Vain is the call.

  Uncle Kenneth brings his hands together but a single soft clap is not clapping and he gapes with his hands stuck together wondering if the whole caboodle has just skidded off the road or shot right ahead. Agatha doesn’t say the last verse. She just wonders how to fill the next hole for about ten seconds until she hears the sobbing, the snorts from the other end of the table and realises that it has gone better than she could have dreamed of and it’s all she can do to stop herself skipping on the spot. Uncle Kenneth turns round and watches Mrs Trevelyan looking remarkably unattractive as she quietly weeps and almost unsticks his hands and shakes them in the air as one does at a football match when a goal is scored. Mr Trevelyan is gazing at his napkin on his lap. His boy is dead. It is quite the most devastating news ever inflicted on his personage. Because Evelyn’s was expected. It is worse even than if Agatha had told him Trevelyan Disinfectants & Antiseptics shares had completely collapsed and Izal and Sanitas had joined forces and conquered the subcontinent with their damn travelling packs and easy-to-carry pails. Just worse, because that would be confoundedly ghastly. But this is definitely ghastlier. He’s trying to remember exactly what William looked like, because it’s three months now since the trot down to Wiltshire and really since then he’s been so confoundedly busy and of course school. His pictures of William are not up to date. In fact, some of them are as up to date as my pin-board pictures and one or two of them show Evelyn’s face instead. The main one shows William on the lawn in the arms of the governess. Ah, the governess. Stroking the blond top of his boy lapped in her fragrance. When he lapped her she fled back to Switzerland and his wife started that queer thing. His wife is Mrs Beatrice Trevelyan. He has to remind himself sometimes. He raises his head a sufficient number of spinal notches to bring noli me tangere into view. She’s a pale ovoid with glittery bits that are not all jewellery. There are glittery bits on her cheeks and on the tip of her nose and just underneath it and he thinks Beatrice. I’m sorry about the stuff glittering on her nose, I really hate that in the cinema because the screen is SO BIG but she’s not going to wipe it, her hands are numb, out of it, neurasthenically traumatised, sleeping it off in her lap. Good God comes out o
f Mr Trevelyan like he’s been punched in the belly. Then a groan because he’s just remembered what Willo looked like, serving on the sloping court, not a bad swing, decent sportsman underneath it all, tolling of the bell, sunk too fast to call ’em down, no holding of his little hand in the Sanny, short quick gasps, not so little hand, quite big really, lifeless now, my son is dead with the golden top. There’s a hole in the pale ovoid over there which is a mouth. His own is also open, he discovers. Grief is so damned ugly. His neck gives way and he has to catch his head before it rolls off onto the plate. His napkin takes a drop of nasal mucus in its stride just as the parquet takes the gravy-boat. This is the worst never ever shattered but no one reacts except Milly’s feet. They have never been mutton before and the gravy is mucus warm. She dropped it through an involuntary action of her hands. Involuntary is my word, not hers. You can tell a lot about me from my use of the word involuntary. She wants to stoop to pick it up but the whole situation says don’t stoop, don’t stoop. Her feet remove themselves before they’re eaten and she watches the gravy advance as if the world is on a slope but stays blank. George growls somewhere deep inside his throat, I don’t know exactly where but it’s deep, it’s practically in his stomach, maybe it is his stomach. He’s confused, awful confused, which is not surprising. The serving-maid has dropped the gravy-boat and the main course has been interrupted by a party turn and there’s snortin’ and snivellin’ all over the shop and Uncle Queer-Arse is beaming from ear to ear. Basically, he’s not at all certain what the fuck is happening. If someone could tell him what the fuck was happening he’d get the drap to mop up then take her down to the kitchen and welt some sense into her but he’s not quite sure what the fuck is happening. He would like to switch on the electrics. If he switched on the electrics this carry-on wouldn’t carry on. He doesnae ken it, he doesnae ken it at all. Not quite true. There’s a little ken that kens it but it’s been walled up by the rest of him, which is quick-dry cement. This wee ken is beating its fists against the wall but the wall is set rigid, glaring at the drap’s ankles with the sauce all over them and aye he could eat ’em he could to the shapely bone. Amazingly but please take this on trust ’cos there are kids out there and the screen’s SO BIG there’s a wee mouse moving aneath his britches, fattening itself up on these ankles. If you find that gross or unlikely then I’m sorry, go watch the dead rockets bob on the water.