by Adam Thorpe
I’ve got myself extremely scared now. There’s the night at my back. There are voices from the old vegetable garden. A man hanged himself in the woods so they do say – on certain windy nights you can hear his boots creak and a face sway or something. 1914’s creepier than 1998, I can tell yer, guv. There are no comfortin’ jet-lights winking at you in the night sky, no street lamps to night for day at the corner by the new estate and no new estate at all just a massive rick you think is a house until you tap on the hay and sneeze, no comfortin’ murmur of the motorway like a way-off bombardment but just very dark hills and clumps of copses and stuff, no TVs winking through Cinemascope front windows but flickery candles illuminating gargoyles peering out to see who it ben’t, no security lamps going incandescent just because you’ve strayed an inch too fucking far for crying out loud but a kind of shuffle of something maybe the mad aunt behind chicken-wire probably, and fairies and stuff. I mean, the place is crawling with fairies and goblins and elves and sprites and various species of ectoplasm and nymphs without corsets or even dresses or even underthings and most of the bit-part gods and goddesses let alone witches. Seriously. It’s all this lack of artificial light, son. The countryside’s like a well when the moon goes in and when it’s out there are faces pretending to be shadows of leaves and branches everywhere, it’s like right now they know they’re in their terminal time, they’re holding the short end, the big scissors are about to trim, they’ve heard the rumours and are coming out in force to get the wind up the chaps. Like the rats. The rats are simply everywhere. We prong them with fixed bayonets or trample them underfoot. It’s bloody awful. Funky Partridge made Bewland pop off a few rounds tho’ Bewland said it attracted return fire from Jerry and ping sure enough it did. Bewland went on firing half-mad with Partridge who said righty-ho, Bewland, you can stop now, but he wouldn’t. Ping ping. All right, Bewland, that’s enough for God’s sake man! Ping ping ping. Rest censored. This piano is crazy, I can’t look, it’s stopping. I’m looking. Mrs Trevelyan’s popping up from the far side of it with a box. I’m tromboning in on the label. Rachmaninov Playing Rachmaninov, Genuine Recording. Hey, that’s a kind of phantom. I saw his fingers hit the keys only his fingers weren’t there. I’m not too embarrassed, just disappointed. She’s taking out this big roll, it’s a pianola, she’s putting another one in and closing the little door, the handle must be the other side because she’s dipping out of sight again – it has a concealed hand-crank option as well as the pedals, obviously, I think she does this every night, it stills her nerves. It sounds like Debussy now for crying out loud. I nearly am crying out loud because Debussy makes me do that. Here’s Bosey. He’s annoyed with RT, I can tell, and Mike behind him with Gordon looking gripey, and Sylvia shaking her head by the rain barrel, and Joe Gel and Pierre and all the great gang hopping from foot to foot on the lawn in the moonlight as if they’re really mad at me and making such long shadows.
Such long long shadows.
With Debussy by Debussy kind of padding over the lawn and into the woods. And they still look blahdy cross but, hey, they’re not, they’re not mad at me. They just want the green light for the big scene. We’ve all somehow got to cram into my grandmother’s little attic room up there, under the eaves. They know why I’m looking up. They’re all looking up too, with Debussy over us as if I’ve forgotten Robert for a minute. Everyone, even Ossy for God’s sake, even the Steves – everyone is looking shy and tender. No film crew ever before in the history of film-making has looked so shy and tender as they look up in the blue moonlight at a tiny window in the eaves and wonder how the fuck they’re going to get the equipment up there and in time. As a matter of fact, no film unit has ever looked shy and tender The End. Mine were always different.
REEL CHANGE. I got back to find a note on my door. It said TO RICK. It was the wrong side of the door, I saw it as I was closing off the world and welcoming myself to my little hallway with its one raffia mat and its two golf cups and its three Oscars and its five Dinky Foden flat-beds in a bullet-proof glass case and its Twenty-Four Views of London Conveniences postcard set no one out here appreciates – they think cast iron went out with the Stone Age, like gaslight went out with Shakespeare, they have a great sense of chronology in Texas. I tell them not to get anxious, they’ll feel at home in London these days, the cast-iron conveniences were not convenient, people could actually see you being convenienced, it was terrifying the number of women who screamed and fainted in the Stone Age when they passed one of these things and saw your elbows jerking either side of your gaberdine – now you get airlocked into your own personal space and it takes American Express and power-jets it so clean you could probably eat your Big Mac off the bowl if you got stuck or the Third World War broke out outside just as you were hiking your pants up or jerking your elbows or whatever and you reckoned it was better to keep your head down until it blew over. They think I’m present-challenged when I go on like this, they think I’d like to spend my life next to the cast-iron urinal with the real live gaslight at the river end of Cheyne Walk watching the sweet Thames run slowly or softly or whatever it is and all my friends bobbing about in their whacky boats, yacking the night through over candles with the sixties ahead of them to go on yacking and being way-out and arty in and watching the dawn come up above the last lamplighter in London Town cadging a Senior Service off of me guv so as we can watch the river togever, ta, watch it take its time to flow and not be existentialist about it, just happy for God’s sake, happy under our natural chin-stubble, the city stretching and beginning to roar, the last lamplighter and the most exciting very young film director since Orson Welles contemplating the first cuppa char comin’ up in the Lyons Corner Arse where Harold Pinter’s takin’ notes and the costermongers are stretching their woolly mitts abaht a bun.
They think I’d really like to go back to that time or something crazy like that, they actually think I’d prefer that to contemporary Houston. I mean, really, let’s be serious for a moment.
This note. It’s very weird finding a note taped to the inside of your front door, actually. It’s like finding a double-glazing call card in your Y-fronts at the end of the day or something, it makes you feel somebody’s been in where they shouldn’t. I handed my suitcases over to the floor and peeled the note off and it took about half the paint with it which was distressing oof yer gettin’ there son. I unfolded the paper and got Sean Connery to do the thumbs at last. Tighten and hold. Oh Rick, I came to TALK but you’re away. I need to talk to someone who’ll UNDERSTAND what I’m going through. I figure you’ve forgiven me enough by now to UNDERSTAND. Everything is entanglement. We must cut ourselves off from objective things. We must stop muddying the past and clouding up the future. We must live pure clear water lives and let the sun touch our pebbles. Basically there is kind of a big Problem I cannot come to terms with so I’m cutting loose. I feel crazy. I have nowhere to go. You’re crazy enough to UNDERSTAND, Rick. You’re so DIRECT. I’ll call sometime. Z.
Z.? You mean, Z for Zelda? You mean it’s not Zoot the window-cleaner saying Hi there I Visited but You Were Out a little over-zealously?
Ah, nope.
Zelda has a key to my house. She never bothered to return it to its original owner and I didn’t encourage her to either. Only a librarian could locate an ex-lover’s key after five years. It probably had its own shelf-mark for crying out loud. Hey, why aren’t I hitting my head on the ceiling with joy, huh? I did. I swung from the chandelier and stuff and ruined this big guy’s five foot putt for a one under par on the fifteenth by opening the window and yelling hi world but it almost dislocated my jaw all over again so I shrieked, I can’t go into that now, a small tactical error, guv, it’s old history, I swallowed some Aspro in whisky and read the note again about one hundred and thirty-one times and held it up to the light and squirted lemon juice on it and generally tried to find some living cast-iron proof that she was about to run up the drive and into my arms forever and I’d better move the car so she didn’t have t
o squeeze past and into my arms forever which wouldn’t be quite as attractive. I poured myself another couple of gills to breathe with and felt the sun touch my pebbles through the translucent water of my jet lag all of a sudden, my pebbles were really sparkling and there were these golden fish now and again and I was cool and sublime and probably full of Suchness or li or whatever Zelda used to call stuff’s innermost reality and my jaw’s stopped aching. Maybe if I changed my name to Ri-Kiu Tonbai which is the way the Japanese exchange students say it I’d fly straight into the bull of her heart with a glass of water on my elbow if you know what I mean. I forgot to say that there is a flower on the dining-room table where there wasn’t before I left for England. I think it’s a Spanish iris. It’s a little jaded but basically it’s the colour of summer skies with a golden heart and the perfume is all that plus Zelda’s right cheek and it’s in the Hopi vase we bought together in ’91 when we checked out Arizona and paid the mesas a call. If it’s Zoot the window-cleaner on a heavy sales pitch after all I’ll be very disappointed and maybe strangle him with his telescopic ladder the next time he visits.
I knew she’d find out sooner or later about the Doc’s Problem, by the way. I thought she’d already found out about his Problem and just been unbelievably Zen about it, actually. You’d probably have to be incredibly enlightened and be able to balance on one elbow on the edge of the Grand Canyon for ten days having your feet tickled with a goose feather or something before you could live alongside the Doc’s kind of Problem. I want to give you all this personal angle before I get onto the big scene in case you think I’m a little hyper or something. The crew are on the lawn looking up and I’m just standing there so happy I am actually crying. I am waiting for her to call me because I tried calling her at her woodlands habitat and I got the guy with the Problem so I just called off without vocalising anything more than a shriek of delight. I keep sighing really profound sighs because if I don’t keep sighing really profound sighs my tummy-button’ll pop or my ears fall off or something. It’s very difficult to make a big movie when your leading lady has fallen back into your arms and is as heavy as a labrador after all and her cheek is actually warm and doesn’t flicker and silver over to nothing or whatever. What’s interesting and I hope it’s interesting for you is that my ardour has not altered or diminished, it’s like my ardour for Zelda is my li which is bleedin’ reassurin’ at this stage of my life, guv. The library opens tomorrow but I don’t want to meet her in the HCDVA library for God’s sake – I’ve left a note saying I’m back, you have brushed me into a perfect circle and the winds of five years have not blown me awry, please call, I’m waiting, your ever-friend R. I didn’t mention love as such. I think we have to tread carefully on this one, I have to be as cool as I dunno my local chemist’s or something or maybe not that cool, that’d be icy. I have to be her calm harbour with little yachts plying around and I probably shouldn’t have said I was waiting even. I also have a movie to wrap up. Hey, the sunlight is touching me pebble bed and the waters are clear all the way to the sea. I must not take conscious aim.
Thwack.
There’s this biscuit in a hand because my grandfather is having a biscuit right at this moment. We’re in the big country kitchen and my grandmother has just flickered across the side lawn but my grandfather had his hand in the Squire’s Chemical Food For Delicate Children jar at that moment so all he registered was the outer door opening and shutting and someone going up the back stairs and the kitchen door sort of bumping on the latch in sympathy. He’s eating the fairly stale Marie at the kitchen window which is open. It’s open because the kitchen is incredibly hot, Dorothy keeps the stove going all summer, you could leave a loaf to bake on the kitchen table and now the cool calm and collected night air is taking over a little and Giles is contemplating. He’s contemplating whether to join Willo in the study and have a titter at some of Padre’s saucier books or slip out to the shed and have a smoke, basically. His favourite saucy book is the one by Mr Muybridge full of butt-naked women doing jolly queer things like cartwheels and leapfrogs and bashing each other with pillows in photographic sequence. It was a present from Uncle Kenneth, naturally. One can see their very fairly pleasant top ballocks and their twat-rugs clear as day and the same with the men, their John Percies are frightfully exposed, if you blink right it all seems to move for real. Golly. Right now he’s happy finishing his biscuit while the garden sort of slides around under moonlight.
Hm.
The flowers are at their strongest in the evening, it’s amazing how really sweet they can smell, you can sup them like you sup blushful Hippocrene cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth etcetera. The clematis over the old well is probably the sweetest. Maybe a pretty lass’s skin smells sweet. My grandfather’s thinking that the sweetest part of a pretty lass’s skin is at the neck, probably. He can really imagine nuzzling into the neck and smelling a kind of night garden scent that isn’t cologne or rosewater or essence of vanilla or whatever but just the natural excretion of a pretty dark-haired lass whose teeth shine when she smiles. He’s leaning on the chapped window-sill and wondering when exactly he’ll clock up something like this on his girlometer. Pretty lasses with berry lips and grassy-scented necks and blouses frilling over what my grandfather cannot actually imagine exposing to the air this side of Paradise are really pretty far and few between. He’d held Amy’s hand about a fortnight ago and that had practically made his head melt and he wasn’t even sweet on Amy but a girl’s hand is a girl’s hand, it couldn’t be more different from a chap’s hand. I mean, a chap’s hand in bladderdash or whatever is thick and blunt and no nonsense whereas a girl’s hand is always about to be the petals of a lily but hasn’t quite decided yet, especially if it’s attached to a slender and animated being descending a rather difficult slope through long grass that catches on skirts frightfully and is dependent on the chap’s hand for balance. The fact that this was the first time since the onset of puberty my grandfather had touched the skin of a girl for more than a few seconds may amaze you but there we are, his hand has still not got over it, it’s still registering the micro-pressures of her palm and the thin undersides of her fingers as they negotiated the slope to the bottom where for a few awesome and rather blushable seconds in which anything could have happened except that the rest of the party were waiting by the car and Randolph gave a blast on the horn, the stinking rotter, which rather queered things, they stood together hand in hand. Randolph is Amy’s cousin, by the way. I’m really sorry about this but he’s leaning there on the hot bonnet of the clapped-out Jowett he’s picked up for a song laughing under his boater in the jolliest possible way because he is basically jolly and decent and has a great tenor voice with a black circle looping his head and I can’t do anything about it. OK, here goes: he’ll disappear into some mud on the Ypres salient carrying a duck-board and the duck-board’ll float up about three minutes later but he won’t. He wasn’t even carrying the duck-board in the right direction, some thoughtfulness-challenged moron had given him the wrong order, his men had to bring all the duck-boards back again and start off in the other direction wondering where their leadyloo with the nice voice had got to. When Zelda used to go on to me from the other side of the beeswax candle about the lotus flower being the symbol of enlightenment because, Rick, its roots are right down there in the deep mud of human passions while its flower is up and turned to the purity of the sun I’d say maybe that’s what happened to Randolph, maybe the fact that he went down without a sound means he’s singing somewhere nice and sunlit now in his spotless flannels and summer jacket with that curl tucked down behind his ear like it always was.
Here’s Randolph. Still Sixteen I think. Get up off your collective butts and pay your respects. The cropped elbow belongs to William. The girl sticking her tongue out between the elbow and Randolph is Amy. The amazing motorbike is Randolph’s, he’s keen on motorized movement and he’s fairly wealthy. The shadow over the lawn from the bottom edge of the frame is yours, you’re a lousy
photographer, while you’re there just check out the Hoover situation in the corridor. If it looks like they’re shooting Worms from Outer Space on a very low budget tell them it’s a Bank Holiday. Tell them if they try to come in Mr Thornby will throw himself into the river then adjust your wraparounds and try to look like Paul Muni. Then say how we’re still on the razzle baby and that they should beat it. If that doesn’t work invite them in for a cocktail. Just throw all the stuff left at the bottom of the glasses into a jug. Call it Rikki-Tikki Snakebite or Pharyngal Flush or Helloover Surprise or something. Play for time. Imagine missing the last reel or even the last five seconds of Citizen Kane. Huh? In case you ever have missed it it was the name of the sledge, by the way. Like the policeman did it. This movie is just as tantalising and me dad in’t around to spoil the finale. He’s hanging on in Havant. At least that’s very likely given how fighting fit he was on this last trip. He calls me Cyril but that’s usual. Cor blimey. The cat’s late. Never work with animals. The kitchen door leading into the tight interior space where my grandmother and my great-uncle played one of the tensest scenes of unrequited love since Francis X. Bushman and Beverley Bayne in A Romance of the Dells opens. Giles turns his head in slomo while the creak increases his heart rate because it always has done, ever since he was teeny in a frilly dress perched on Dorothy’s knee while she podded peas or whatever and sang lost Wiltshire songs of phantom lovers it has done, because the creak sounds like a creature in torment, a phantom lover come to claim his own from o’er the brine O massy me those bogglin’ eyes, those scarlit lips – all it needs is oil but Giles is dressed in white. No one enters which also increases his heart rate. He pooh-poohs the idea of phantoms but the pooh-pooh wouldn’t blow out a match. He swallows and thinks about leaping out through the window but only thinks it, he doesn’t actually move a muscle, the only muscles moving are around his heart and they’re working overtime but he’s young, he’s not approaching sixty with a history, the door bumps to a rest against the kitchen sink which it’s been bumping so long now there’s a little niche for it in the stonework which was there until 1989 when Hob & Home Fitted Kitchen Specialists got invited in with some fairly powerful tools and a big budget and a lot of really-what-you-need-heres so if you want to see this nick go to the back and round until you spot this tasteful plant container against the brick and separate the lobelia a little, it’s there on the left corner, it’s proof that everything I’m pointing at is direct reality, OK? Just don’t get collared by the cunt or the cunt’s wife who think they own the place, he’s a real live professional crook, she’s his moll Best By About 1973, they know all the right people, you’ll be in deep waters with a slow puncture, don’t mention my name, just pretend you have a frontal lobelia problem or summat.