by Adam Thorpe
William is sweet on Milly, to use his own lingo. I have to get this across. She’s fourteen. He’s sixteen. It’s sweet and innocent whatever that means. Romeo and Juliet. She’s on the balcony of the class divide. Dig a bit deeper and it goes sour. She’s his servant. She polishes his shoes. She dresses Agatha, tightens her corset and laces her up and stuff. She leans over William at dinner and he gets excited by her sweat and starch and hint of cheap scent and the petrol which is from her trying to get a stain of tomato sauce off not doubling as the house mechanic and hearing her breathe as she doles out the meat or whatever. Her bust is pretty well fully developed and she has a nice smile and raven-black hair and a full upper lip and a kind of calm to her, a something else behind the bustling around that he’d quite like to get to know. I can’t stand telling you about all this when the Hoovers are going to be around my great-uncle’s feet in about four years. He wasn’t even twenty-one, for crying out loud. Mrs T burnt every drawing or painting he ever did in protest at something, maybe war. All I have left of him is the citation and some photographs and Uncle Ken’s decomposing movies for God’s sake. Not that I have them personally. I have to go begging for them when I’m in England, I have to sneak up to the big front door and press the bell and practise my Trevor Howard routine and yell good morning, Mrs Halliday, it’s Richard Thornby here into what I think is the intercom grille and if I’m lucky she’ll open the door or rather the buzzer will go off in my left ear as I’m crouched to it and practically kill me with a coronary but if I’m not really quick I won’t give it a push in time and the buzzer’ll stop and the door’ll dislocate my shoulder practically and she never does it a second time, not in the same day, because she’s a paranoid.
My half-aunt, for crying out loud.
She regards me as a nuisance. She tolerates me. She’s cut-glass, she has a voice like Celia Johnson’s with a few chips off the rim but it’s the real thing. I kind of shamble in like Lon Chaney Jnr in The Wolf Man and ingratiate myself as best I can but basically I’m the virus, I’m the half-blood, I’m the Phantom of the Opera she can’t exorcise, I’m the nuisance on the carpet, I’m the unpleasantness. You don’t know what it’s cost me to get these images for you people. I just hope you’ve stuck it out because you won’t get a second chance: King Kong fell one hundred and something floors but it doesn’t take me one hundred and something floors, it just takes a river. Mysterious, I am being mysterious. Stay alert. Oof. I was born within nasal shot of the Thames, guv, it’s my river, it’s me farver’s river, it’s me grandfarver’s and his grandfaver’s river, they slipped about in its guts and put the shat in Shadwell and the rat in Ratcliff and the fiddle in a ha’porth of liveliness – they could trace their lineage back into the shadder of a tun of porter on a Ratcliff wharf wivart a moon to cut the bilical by, if yer gits me drift.
I’ve got spittle all down my shirt front, I’m getting over-involved in my voice-over. The VO’s OTT RT, as Ossy’d put it. Ossy only ever talked in initials. Hey, Ossy? Y’still aht there, son? IOU a clip or two on the Rs, A, Oss m’boy?
Shaddap.
William is about deblushed by now because he knows it’s all top-hole secret really and while I was emptying out about my grandfather’s only surviving daughter or child come to that Giles has said killing, it’s the killing. Oh no, says William, oh no that’s rot. Giles is looking up at his brother and striking the edge of the pack on the table ready for shuffling – maybe there’s a technical term for that but I don’t want to get anxious about it now, you know what he’s doing and he says what’s rot? It’s rot to say it’s the killing, says William. Agatha’s watching them spar and she has a tweak of a smile in there because she knows that one day one of them’ll win hands down and they’ll both be grumpy and sort of lost. Giles spreads his arms out wide so his jacket lapels stick out. Well if it’s not about slaughtering the poor little things – What is that girl doing then? interrupts Dorothy, looking up. She came in early on her cue but it sounds great, I’ll let it roll, my grandfather’s looking peeved but forget it. The thump and the sort of harder sound have been continuing underneath, it’s pretty creepy, it’s like an ambient slow motion disco or something. Would you go and see, please? says Mrs T.
She’s said this with her eyes closed, so it’s an undirected instruction. William is still fairly worked up about Giles and the killing thing so he doesn’t respond straight away, he just does the buttons on his jacket up like he’s about to go outside, he has to be careful at nightfall with his pulmonary condition. Mrs T opens her eyes and stares at the ceiling. Would someone go and see what is the matter, please? She’s getting anxiety tics on her face, someone had better move. Dorothy begins to fold the curtain. Righty-ho, m’m. This is not really right, Dorothy is into off-duty blue on the dial of her day, everyone knows that – at least until the last little red stripe which is cocoa and locking up and kicking out the cat, hey, it’s always been like that down in Wiltshire. Why do you think the wicker takes her shape so nicely?
Shooing out the cat, this summer. Not kicking. No one kicks a heavily pregnant cat unless they’re my brother Des aged ten. Seriously! I was there. And I didn’t throw myself between them. I didn’t do anything. I am weak. I have no spine. He was into wiping out the local fauna and now he keeps carp and a rare thank God breed of I think dog but he’s still brilliant with chemicals, he takes Pesticide Monthly and they really value him at Bayer, the warble fly doesn’t stand a chance and neither do the cows, probably. If you bring up this thing about warble fly treatment and mad cows and why everyone seems to go senile or at least tremble earlier these days he comes at you with a knife. But he loves his carp, he worries about them, he leans over and talks to them and it’s all I can do not to tiptoe towards him on a hand-held and guess the rest.
I’ll go, says William. I feel a real shiver through my solar plexus right at this moment and not just because of the unpleasant memory trace. I’m thinking that maybe if William hadn’t said that – I wouldn’t be around to shoot this scene, I wouldn’t be haunting Mrs Halliday, I wouldn’t be victimising her in this way. Agatha’s stood up now. I don’t mind going, she says. We’ll all be storming the door at this rate, says my grandfather. He’s shuffling the pack semi-professionally. Dorothy’s twisting around to face Mrs Trevelyan, the wickerwork’s popping out all over the place and it’s sharp. I don’t believe as she’s up to mischief, m’m, she points out helpfully.
I’ll go, honestly, says my great-uncle.
He makes for the door a trifle hastily, he reckons, so he contrives to look stupendously indifferent as he opens it. He turns round and surveys the room definitely stupendously indifferent to anyone not attached to his chest via a stethoscope and clears his throat of a little tumbleweed of sputum.
I’ve got to look up my burnet, anyway.
APPENDIX
THOSE OF US present at the party given by my father on the last day of the twentieth century (the generally accepted last day, not the official one) and the first day of the twenty-first century at the time the film projector was knocked over have all given their own versions of events. Hilda Brand (my niece), Ossy Cohen, the person on the sofa who turned out to be a homeless vagrant called Jock, the projectionist Joe ‘Gel’ Parker, Mrs Victoria ‘Indisposed’ Halliday (my half-great-aunt), and myself. The fact that none of our versions coincided is owing to the fact that we were all in various stages of inebriation or recovering from various stages of inebriation, and that we were in different positions in the room. Or rather, rooms. I believe only Ms Brand was watching the film at the time, as she had done throughout. That’s why I’ve decided to take pen to paper (not my usual line) and give as clear a picture of events as I can, taking into account the various now yellowing press cuttings and unofficial correspondence between those present and myself, as well as the report finally drawn up by the Thames River Police. I am grateful to Ms Hilda Brand for overseeing the typescript.
Perhaps the first point to clear up is the number of reels remaining unshown – ap
art from the half-finished one damaged when my father attempted to remove it from the projector. There were fifteen. If one discounts the suggestion that many of these were blank, that makes another ten hours at least of film. I cannot believe that my father seriously meant Haunting Mrs Halliday to continue for another day. He was well aware of the time problem. The room was booked by others for that night: the hotel staff were adamant that we had to be out by midday on 1 January 2000. In the closing minutes of the film as shown and apparently ‘interrupted’ there were several mentions of Hoovers in connection with death and certainly with the end of the film. We could hear the Hoovers on the floor below – which had been particularly riotous through the night, one person having been ejected summarily through a closed window – at about the time (according to my niece Ms Brand) the Hoovers were mentioned in the film. This leads me to believe that, contrary to press reports, my father was fully aware of the length of his film almost to the minute and had timed it to perfection. Therefore this calls into question the idea that he was a fruitcake and had no notion that his film overran by ten hours or that it would be forcibly halted in mid-showing.
It was, it must be emphasised, my father himself who pulled the film out of the projector at the point just shown. The tear comes a few inches after ‘burnet, anyway’. It was again my niece who pointed out the rather curious coincidence of the word ‘burnet’ (meaning a type of butterfly) and ‘burn it’. Apart from that, it does seem a very odd place to end a ten-hour movie if that ending was, indeed, deliberate.
It might be appropriate here to give the relevant dictionary definition of ‘burnet’ (Shorter Oxford): ‘A day-flying moth of the genus Zygaena, typically dark green with crimson-spotted wings’. Ms Brand (who is, I might point out, at present studying English at Oxford) has drawn my attention to the fact that William Trevelyan (my great-great-uncle) had told his mother he had caught an uncommon burnet. This would probably mean one with four instead of six spots on each wing. There is, as it happens, a very tatty specimen in the glass case thought to have belonged to William Trevelyan and now in the firm possession of Mrs Victoria (née Trevelyan) Halliday, and it does appear to have only four red spots on each wing – however, its colours are so faded it’s pretty hard to tell. Ms Brand has also drawn my attention to the idea of these red spots being somehow a hidden reference to the breaking of Millicent (Milly) Stephenson’s virginity – an event which, everyone agrees, was just about to happen in the movie. From the three reels dredged up with my father’s body from the Thames, and painstakingly repaired with some limited success by Mr S. T. Longley, a retired Pinewood laboratory technician who recalled my father with some affection and who was also responsible for the last-minute processing of the first reel, it appears that it is Giles Trevelyan, and not his brother, who ‘has his way’ with the young maidservant. Zygaena also recalls perhaps Dr Todd Lazenby’s widow, Zelda, with whom my father was besotted – but that’s something else and certainly not my idea.
It certainly wasn’t mine, either.
Phantom of the Opera talking. You’ll never get rid of me that easy. Screams, chairs turned over, Ricky Thornby more Thames slime than flesh making a puddle on the carpet and wondering why no one’s saying hi, good to see you back, come on over, that was a great movie. Greg, I apologise. You sound nothing like that. I’m not great with voices and I’m in England and your new Chinesey girl has nicked my resident umbrella or some sod has and no one’s invited me for dinner. I phoned Mrs Halliday and she said to give over pestering her – if I went on pestering her she’d alert Scotland Yard or whoever. That really screws things up. It really screws me up, too. It’s kind of raining. I’m nervous.
Why am I so nervous?
Maybe I’m not up to it, guv.
Maybe when the crunch comes my teeth’ll just fall out.
Cor blimey luvaduck. I’m feeling slimey. Maybe I should torture myself and take an English shower. Maybe that phone call has screwed me up tighter than I thought. Maybe it’s because I was sitting next to this aircraft mechanic on the flight over with my stubble growing into my knee-caps and my stomach negotiating a cease-fire with some intractable turbulence. And this aircraft mechanic from Vancouver kept telling me how he was gonna give up and open a store because it wasn’t worth his while handling all these crap components these days, all made in Taiwan or someplace, not worth the polystyrene they were badly shipped over in. I had to watch this incomprehensible crap with dicky earphones that picked up the hard rock channel while this small but totally vital component badly lathed by some child slave in Jakarta or wherever was working itself loose and we’d only hit Newfoundland. I wish I could just be beamed up Scottie or something or fly astrally like Clifford says he can, but then he also cheats at Monopoly.
My flat feels creepy actually, it feels like it’s been slowpanned while the phone rings and rings with no one answering and there are these crimson stains on the walls. My son’s got this new girlfriend called Me who eats all my dry goods and leaves bloodstains or maybe paprika splashes on the walls – I was already sore. Now that little sore has been completely out-sored by something that’s gotten right into me and it hurts.
I mean, I’ve kind of been keeping mum about Mrs Halliday, I know, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t very important to me. Like Jason of the Lagerlouts is very important to me. Like the Chairman of the College Pension Committee, Dr T. Lazenby, is very important to me. Like Jeremy Freeman of Viper’s Bugloss Productions Limited (extremely limited) is very important to me. Like Houston and its dot-to-dot college is very important to me. Like Vyshitface and Crew-Cut and Hal the Computer and about nine and a half of my students are very important to me. You know why they’re very important to me. They make me feel nervous. They make my mask go all lopsided. They scrim my life vision and stand in front of my projected image and blow smoke into my self-worth and trample on my head to get to their seats. Maybe I shouldn’t wear sandals. I have very good sandals, actually. Small-country-trampling heavy-duty sandals made in Germany. Listen, if you lived in Houston, Texas, you would wear sandals so as not to get yourself confused with everyone else plus my big toes like being wet-nosed by stray pooches, it’s one of the only times they get appreciated. My problem – hey, my problem is that I’m confused with myself. I was hoping that this complex masterwork of a twelve-hour motion picture would kind of deconfuse me. I was getting there. Lon Chaney Jnr was getting there. But this phone call from my half-aunt has screwed things up. Basically I have no access any more. You know why? Because some prick went and told her I was not writing a history of the Trevelyan family from 1721 to 1918 for the Texan Trevelyans who might think they share three corpuscles with the founder of Trevelyan Disinfectants & Antiseptics big deal but that I was making a movie and in this movie were some dark secrets in Big Close-Up.
True, true. Dark secrets in BCU. The Return Of Spotted Dick. Knock knock, knock knock, knock knocketty knock. Tighten on her eyes, Mike, tighten on the wet whites of Mrs Halliday’s eyes above the tulip-glass of the flickery oil-lamp as she fumbles with the big key and breathes through her mouth because in under the door creeps this puddle and it really stinks, it’s evil, it’s unadulterated Thames sludge, it’s all the drowned of London town including dogs, cats and babies and about two thousand years of tipped shite and industrial effluent and costermongers’ peelings and it encircles her slippers with the pink pom-poms and she screams.
Hey, I can’t examine my great-uncle’s butterfly collection or my great-aunt’s correspondence or my grandfather’s intimate diaries or the fat photo albums or Uncle Ken’s home movies or what remains of the Trevelyan library any more while Giles’s daughter watches TV in the next room with the sound turned up so high I have to stick wax plugs in my ears or go crazy, the canned laughter starts to sound deliberate, I start thinking it’s applying to me, I start to feel as if all this stuff lying around is some kind of joke and that there’s something really hysterical about the old butterflies for instance or Uncle Kenneth’s hom
e movies the time I hauled up my antique projector and threw my relatives onto the wall with various backdrops including Hamilton Lodge plus different shrubs and trees and kind of quick shadows and a wheelbarrow and Agatha jerking from round the corner and shading her eyes in that beautiful long dress and so forth while the elm trees swayed around like they were showing off and me thinking this is probably all that’s left of them even though they look so huge and animated and then this wave of canned laughter coming through like it was all ridiculous anyway and why don’t you give up, you jerk.
Hey, it was very depressing but I felt at home, I felt I was sharing something I had every blahdy right to share, I felt in touch with myself, the Wolf Man began to look vaguely human, I was getting there. She was even making me tea the last two times, she began to lose this thing about being indisposed today and she’d press the buzzer longer than a quarter of a second. Never at no time did she ever use the word pester. It’s a really awful word. Zelda used it last year. She said my husband and I would appreciate it if you stopped pestering us, Rick. Cor blimey, guv, I come over all unnecessary with scabby warts and some disease with a German name which makes you smell and hunch over and dribble and say hey, Zelda, please don’t call it that. Bother or bug or even harass yes but not pester. I’ll stick with pester, Rick. OK, so be it. The Pester Man slouched off up the HCDVA corridor leaving a trail of scabs and green stuff and never approached his true love again. The movie bombed. No one could care less, actually.
That’s it, innit? No one could care less.
Bleedin ’eck.
Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
Oh, Norma. Everything you admire about me is out on loan and way overdue like my Enfield Town Library copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus due back on 3 April 1949. You know one of the three things that wakes me up screaming at the peak coronary hour and if you don’t know which the peak coronary hour is don’t ever find out because if you’re awake at that time you just get really stressed thinking you’re in the peak coronary hour which is probably why it is? It’s Miss L. G. ‘Loofah Face’ Hope waving my fine in front of my spectacles. Not that I go to sleep in my spectacles, but I’m always wearing really thick spectacles in this nightmare and just beginning a productive conversation with the Warner Brothers I’ve waited fifty years for. OK OK, it was Arthur Askey’s Annual 1939 not Wittgenstein but Miss L. G. Hope didn’t split hairs and if you’re wondering why I got the ’39 and not the ’49 Arthur Askey’s Annual it was something to do with the war, blame Hitler, I got the most up-to-date one in the building.