Still

by Adam Thorpe

  We’re not really, it’s just that William’s got his night vision sorted out and he’s crossing across the yard. The cobbles are fairly plump under his pumps and for some reason Daddy Has a Sweetheart and Mother is Her Name is running through his head, maybe because Giles has played it fifty-one times on the wind-up this hols already with Lillian Lorraine’s voice kind of floating over the lawn like the garden should shut up and listen – especially the innumerable murmuring bees and Ags’s croquet mallet. The historic door bumps shut behind him and makes his needle jump a bit. He’s really edgy. He tacks up to the stable wall the other side and listens. She’s dematerialised.

  How black-rotten hugely damn tedious.

  Ich habe gelebt und geliebet.

  I refuse to have Uncle Kenneth’s amazing baritone singing Thekla’s song from The Piccolomini dubbed over the night breeze through the elms just because the moon’s riding up and William’s murmuring this line from Schiller which Uncle Ken has rendered over his brother’s and then Agatha’s so-so keyboard accompaniment ever since Willo can remember, I refuse to cosset your romantic sensibilities, so be happy with a little helpful sub-title jittering around under his youthful moonlit profile, OK?

  I have lived and loved.

  Look, at sixteen all your past lives were close enough to touch, bunched up right behind you, you had this great world-weariness, the older you get the thinner they get until at about twenty-five they leave you to it and go phut out of your present life, by the time you’re sixty all you’re left with is yourself and the mirror. Let’s have it, hopelessly scratchy plus hiss, me in the mirror looking out at you expertly spliced in for the half-minute it takes:

  Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer,

  Und weiter giebt sie dem Wünsche nichts mehr.

  Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück,

  Ich habe genossen das irdische glück,

  Ich habe gelebt und geliebet.

  Softly from the German trenches over no-man’s-land it’ll waft, of course, but Willo won’t be anywhere near the right sector so some totally philistine twerp’ll yell fuck off and the beautiful tired voice’ll stop and the Brit trench’ll chuckle and jeer quite a way along its length. Some of the cobbles are glistening. There’s wet on the yard. Go softly with that flicker-stick, Clifford, there are no leaves between the moon and this yard and we have to see this glisten clearly, it’s a kind of flaring wake my great-uncle takes about five seconds to follow. He’s practically decapitated by the washing line. OK, I exaggerate, but it’s a shock, his head is young enough to be full of ogres and elves and squeaky night gibberers as well as Schiller songs, Arthur Rackham has patted it and muffed up his hair and sniggered. He smooths it down again and follows the gleam and glisten past the new garage to where the cobbles shrug and give up and hand over to earth and stones and then weeds to you and me but probably some really interesting wild flowers to people like William who bother. He doesn’t bother right at this moment, he just walks right over the ramping fumitory and the scented mayweed and the yellow vetchling and I could go on but it’ll take all day because it’s so rich. Bats flit and stuff. He’s pretty certain she’s gone up to the old vegetable garden. It’s where potato peelings and cabbage-leaves and all that rot end their days, anyway, if Cheery Matt the pig-man doesn’t come by with Carrot the one-eared donkey. It’s got a brick wall around it that looks as if it could be about ninth century and someone maybe Uncle Kenneth said something about a monastery and the brothers hiding their jewel-encrusted valuables from the Vikings. Actually the wall was built in a fortnight in 1803 but don’t disappoint the kids.

  The old vegetable garden is now rank, to use my great-grandmother’s term. It was rank in 1914, I mean. It’s currently a lawn clipped to about a molecule thick with a brick-and-glass receptacle at one end where this creep lives who shouted at me in 1992 just because I was trying to locate exactly where the kittens were interred and my great-uncle had his First Kiss. OK, this fancy metallic-finish puce Vauxhall cavalierly turned up groan and there was a pause and then this guy got out and came across the lawn and asked if he could help me and I said yes you can lend me a spade, I’m trying to locate where my grandmother buried the kittens and my great-uncle kissed her and my biro has made very little impression but he disagreed, he called me a Vandal and shouted at me to clear off immediately. I mean, I’d poked a hole about the diameter of a niblick’s divot off a bad lie but everything’s relative, he was very upset. There was a sweat stain beginning under his armpit and ending under his tie knot. You couldn’t see the other armpit because he had this pale jacket slung over his shoulder hooked on to his finger by the tab and he smelt of hot interior extras and lousy aftershave and something that told me his pink shirt was 89% polyester. The only sign of the wall was a low thing at the back with cement pots at very regular intervals. There was a fairly hefty pause after he’d shouted at me to clear off, I could hear the Vauxhall-something tapping a toothpick against its teeth, all we needed was a swirl of dust and a few tumbleweeds and maybe a barber-shop sign swinging. I cleared my throat of my summer asthma and said I’m sorry about your turf but I reckoned the bones might still be in this world or under it to be precise. Actually I said I’m sorry about your smell but corrected myself, I was a little edgy, I don’t believe he heard however. He took two steps back but left me the personal odour in question to deal with so I wheezed through my mouth. He started snapping at me. I mean snapping like dogs snap. I nearly fell into his pond. It’s hard backing away holding a video camera but it turned out to be a great shot, jerky for a jerk. I slipped out between the Arizona cypresses before he could turn the sprinklers on me and spot the lens. The woman in the big-house-which-once-belonged-to-my-grandfather was watching from an open window. I’d already encountered this woman on my production recce a couple of years earlier, she had a voice like a car-alarm. She yodelled Well Done John and that if I came again she was going to alert the police pretty well as Mrs Halliday said it last week although Mrs Halliday sounds like sloping English lawns with big copper beeches and this crappily-paid gardener raking on it somewhere. Maybe the police are snoozling all the time in their leather chairs with bluebottles circling their truncheons and need alerting, I don’t know. I shot her yelling at me and she shielded her face and backed off out of sight into Agatha my great-aunt’s bedroom. I wish I could have taken a shot of Hamilton Lodge and her backing off into the interior shadows through the spokes of this really great bicycle that was kind of stuck upright on the front lawn and overgrown but it had been removed about two years before, there were just about five hundred turf-squares and some pastel-hued all-weather paving and these fancy shrubs with the price tags fluttering in the very pleasant breeze bringing the perfume of cut hay from another planet. I waved goodbye though from where my great-uncle’s having breathing problems because he’s in amongst the weeds and it’s thistles and old man’s beard and stuff and it makes him even wheezier. There is a sort of trampled path but he can’t locate it. Jeremiah was supposed to have scythed it all two weeks ago but Jeremiah’s slow, he’s eighty or something and the boy he works with is mentally challenged so Mrs T gets very sweaty under her lace collar about it all but reckons he’ll grind to a halt this winter and she can get someone of incredible drive with huge muscles and flowers woven in his pubic hair or whatever but she’s in for a surprise because anyone of incredible drive and huge muscles and flowers woven in their pubic air is about to be seriously indisposed for four years and Jeremiah is all she can get so this rank section stays rank for quite a few more seasons but it’s OK because Willo’s the only one who gets wheezy off the rankness and before Jeremiah grinds to a halt in 1919 he meaning Willo’ll be dead along with all Jeremiah’s replacements with incredible drive and huge muscles etc. except for one called Enoch who’s fairly close to Mrs T’s fantasy model except that he now wheezes more than William and Jeremiah put together and only makes it through a couple more seasons before the war finally taps him on the shoulder in the main ro
se-bed where he breaks a few rose-buds tight shot of scratch across pale cheek under half-lidded eye just too late for the memorial mason so he gets a little brass plaque all to himself after a helluva lot of pushing and shoving on the part of his widowed mother kind of set into the base in 1929 for God’s sake by which time she’s passed on but only just and the main rose-bed’s a tennis court, tic tac, tic tac, tic tac oh shot, jolly well done, deuce. And you think I’m gonna get the girl in the end. Well I never.

  William meanwhile is battling on through the weeds because he’s driven by something that’s making him salivate, frankly – along with the night conditions, the summer night conditions. Hey, you don’t need a Bel-Air Convertible and a West Coast road to feel excited, you can feel excited in the weedy bit of an English country garden in July 1914 if the set-up’s right. There’s the old vegetable garden wall. He can tell it’s the wall because the moonlight’s catching the ivy that’s all over the brick. Mike’s saying is this what you meant all those years ago about great night effects? and I’m saying Mike, take it one luminaire at a time. Where the ivy’s not gleaming fairly eerily is a black arch-shape because that’s the arch with the door wide open on one hinge and several ivy-tendrils and William makes for it and steps through and stops to let his wheezes ease a bit, which they don’t really, they’ll probably keep him up all blasted night. Maimed animal floats through his head now. He spits softly onto the old vegetable garden which is basically lumpy earth covered in places with loops of stuff like wild clematis and bramble along with the odd prehistoric-looking cabbage and plants that smell like fennel but aren’t really and some black nightshade in flower right now which Jeremiah and Uncle Ken had told them was deadly after Giles had swallowed a berry by error when conducting a theosophical ceremony in 1911 but Giles didn’t even have gripe, the rotters. William swallows and calls her name as loudly as he can without bringing everybody to the glimmering windows of the house about fifty yards back, which means he sort of hisses it into the darkness.

  Milly?

  Aye?

  He jumps. He didn’t expect a reply, leave alone a reply from the region of his right knee and so dashed quick. He wants to run because it must be an ectoplasmic entity or the Queen of Elfland or something but sees the water silvery in the pail and the little lacy bits on her blouse moving around like those really embarrassing parties where they had ultraviolet lights and you’d come out of the toilet with glowing flies if you were careless and had white underpants and you’d keep wondering what it was about you that people found so funny and if you were a teenager (I wasn’t, I was always about forty-nine with dazzling dandruff) it could really screw you up for life, a thing like that. Actually, she’s about five yards away and ultraviolet light has not yet been invented or maybe discovered or perhaps harnessed is the best term. I’ll just superimpose a really embarrassing fact on this shot of my grandmother dealing with the kittens in the old vegetable garden while my great-uncle is getting his head back on – Dr Dott put on a wild show with the stoodents called Sigfreud’s Follies last year and, wait for it, he used ultraviolet light and a stroboscope. Whacky, huh? I told him afterwards I’d worked for correction with Peter as in Brook and Peter hated UV and strobes and that was in the early seventies when they weren’t embarrassing for second-rate discos only. Actually, I started to say this but some jerk interrupted me saying how wonderful the show was and hugging him so I tipped my Californian dental mouthwash over the Doc’s pansy dance-pumps instead and retired early. I should have been a missionary in the Congo after all but it was me dad’s suggestion so I never took it up, guv.

  It’s so quiet in the old vegetable garden you can hear the moths or maybe it’s my grandmother’s fingers in amongst the weeds. We’ve got sound back, by the way. I could do all the voices but the effects were beyond me and Bosey told me he was going to play some Deep Purple at full volume out of his Bose two thousand-or-whatever-watters at the crucial moment if I didn’t go back to doing a talkie and I know when Bosey says something he means it and hey, playing Deep Purple in a little country village in July 1914 might upset one or two people, especially the hallooing vicar and the alcoholic squire and certainly my great-uncle although it would’ve prepared him some for the kind of aural levels he’s going to encounter in a couple of years, I suppose. Bosey’s really looking forward to those trench scenes, it’s the greatest challenge of his career, the sound’s going to make The Who look like they’re playing through a wind-up and it’s going to go on and on and on – I really hope we make it before the Hoovers come and I jump from the veranda into the greasy waters of oblivion with all those reels because it’s going to be the summit of my artistic career, those battle scenes.

  Did you bring th’spade, sir?

  She’s looking up at him. The oval of her face is slanted across by the moonlight, it makes her nose look kind of hooked and catches her right eye and neatly sculpted ear.

  Oh, crikey, says my great-uncle. There’s another silence filled with an incredible multi-track collage of extremely soft rustlings and whoopings and I think clickings and probably the black nightshade curling up for the night. I forgot, confesses my great-uncle. Dashed silly.

  She appears to be scrabbling in the earth with her bare hands. I’ll do that, he says. He could go and fetch the spade but his wheezes and the fact that she might disappear into patches of moonlight in the mean time stop him. Honestly, he adds. I’m not quite sure why he added that because he has no intention of getting down on his knees and making a hole with his bare hands because of a slight technical problem, which is to do with his white flannels and the fact that Madre would have his guts for green garters if he so much as flecked them with the tiniest crumb of Wiltshire sod. So he kind of hovers uselessly listening to his own breath and trying to stop it whistling so much. He can see the kittens in the pail, they interrupt the moonlight, it makes him feel nauseous again. Milly the maid goes on scrabbling away and a weed flies over her shoulder. He looks up at the stars. Faint gulfs of white light and the wink of eternity. He’s not sure where that line comes from but it’s dead I mean jolly accurate. The elm-tops look very high and sway but they can’t be swaying really because saying there’s a breeze would be overdoing it. By the way, the light that reaches his retina from one of these stars started out at exactly the moment a young female iguanodon was crossing the point on the planet taken up by the old vegetable garden and masticating some bracken at the same time, which is more than some people over Houston way can do. He looks back at my grandmother. The iguanodon light wastes itself on the weeds and the ivy and the back of a shimmery beetle snootling around by my great-uncle’s left foot. This beetle couldn’t care less whether this is 1914 AD or 50,000,000 BC it’ll look and act pretty much the same either way and will continue to do so although life’ll get tough around the 1980s when this lot’s grubbed up and some Bayer killer chemical’s put down for the creep’s lawn by Walters Homes Ltd.

  My grandmother’s looking up again. The moonlight catches the bottom lip and now the top lip. Her eyes too.

  This is where Bosey would’ve played Storm on the Water, OK?

  Instead there’s the multi-track collage of night sounds and my great-uncle’s wheeze. Very very very very faintly there’s the sound of talking through the open windows of the house about fifty yards away but you’d only register that if you had supersonic ears. I’m travelling away from my great-uncle and my grandmother at this juncture, I’m afraid. There’s something called privacy. I’m feeling a snoop. The arch is over us for about a second and there’s a naff movement of the ivy at the top because Gordon’s wearing his stupid hat and it caught and you can see the leaves flapping back like a camera’s just tracked through but I’m not retaking this, we haven’t time, you dumbos won’t notice. There’s an interesting conversation going on in the sitting-room, we’re almost there, we’ve got a bit of lawn to go now, get that honeysuckle scent, maybe we’ll stop for a few seconds just to admire this garden. That dark humpy mass at the botto
m is the woods. Otherwise it’s rhododendrons and azaleas and fancy roses and stuff with a sloping lawn and that big creepy tree is a yew and over there is a hornbeam and that one’s a tulip tree and you can see them all again on Uncle Kenneth’s home movies looking really agitated beyond the sparkles and the tramlines and Mrs Halliday’s or whoever’s thumb-prints as if they’re afraid we’re not going to notice them or something just like lousy extras are. I mean, even a game of croquet between the kids looks neurotic unless you’re on slomo but then they kind of get overwhelmed by the celluloidal deterioration, it’s difficult, and, hey, now I don’t need to think about it because I have no access to my family’s archives, for Christ’s sake.