Still

by Adam Thorpe

  It’s the cat. Actually, it really is a creature in torment. It clears the table from Giles’s sight-line and brushes his leg. Giles goes hmph because he’s embarrassed at getting into such a funk and shoves the thing away with his shin I have to say gently in case you think there’s any violence being done to animals in this movie except for the kittens, OK, the kittens were a problem, I’ll tell you later, I STILL FEEL TERRIBLE ABOUT IT then checks his turn-up for smears. The cat is looking for its brood, obviously. Giles has no idea where they are and as a matter of fact couldn’t care a jot. Willo’s the one who likes animals and birds and butterflies and all that. Giles likes sheep, though. The landscape down here is covered in them and they’re pretty much like shrubs that move when you get close and he also likes shepherds mainly because of their leading role in classical love poetry although the shepherds round here with their prematurely-aged skin and hand-me-down bowler hats and completely out-of-date capes don’t quite fit the bill when you get up close, like the local milkmaids when you get up close. His turn-up seems to have a smear although the light’s not good, it might be a shadow. The cat’s really mewing now, it’s painful, it even gets through to Giles’s miniscule St Francis area and he starts to frown a little in sympathy. This is where everything went wrong. Or right. Depending on whether you think Ricky Thornby is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. It was one of the staging posts, anyway, with a fork off to the left saying This Way just As Interesting but he didn’t take it. My grandfather looks at this cat which is now by the open door and remembers all those stories Nurse Ginger-Moustache Hallam used to read to him about animals leading people to someone in distress and takes out a Jeremiah Woodbine from his inner pocket and places it between his lips and touches the tobacco with his tongue for the dashed gorgeous tangy savour then tucks the treasure back again and says righty-ho, beastie, show me the damsel! which is incredible when you think about it because he was joking, what he really expected was the beastie to lead him to her kittens in distress from a local badger or fox or whatever – not the damsel my grandmother, not my mother, not me for God’s sake whose little face he knew by touch which is better than nothing but I cannot eat hard-boiled eggs. I cannot even shell them without wanting to throw up.

  I don’t want to get onto this now. The crew are following the cat and my grandfather up the back stairs and if I turned round now and said hey, hold it, I want to show this thing about my grandfather and Hubert Lightfoot and the gas mask’s eyepieces they’d probably trample me underfoot because they’re really committed now, I’ve never had a unit so committed, it’s like they want to get this domestic scene over with and onto the epic war stuff as soon as permissible and not be screwed around by me anymore. Hey, I don’t blame them. I’m hyper at the moment because Zelda still hasn’t called but here we go up the back stairs and I’m very nervous, if the cat suddenly decided to jump out the window or Giles Trevelyan decided to take the left fork and go back down and out the back door and suck on a Woodie behind the rhododendrons I’d be less than a nice thought, I wouldn’t even be a phantom no one remembers the original owner of, I’d be not-I and non-attainment and Zelda’d say lucky you, you’ve achieved the totality of void or some crap like that. Cor luvaduck.

  But, hey, it’s all on the pianola of life. It’s all on the big roll that plays the same tune using thirty-five notes simultaneously at moments. I’m using this profound metaphor only because as we’re mounting the stairs after the cat and the teenager in the natty white flannels the pianola is playing again, it’s coming over from the sitting-room like fairy music with some bass vibrations and it’s quite creepy, actually. I keep seeing those ivories moving up and down by themselves and it reminds me of a very terrifying moment in the Enfield Ritz, it was a Phantom of the Opera rip-off and this grand piano started rippling its keys and the guy who’d murdered the virtuoso out of jealousy screamed and I screamed and it was very embarrassing, Des and his girlfriend sniggered and moved places, I think it was called The Revenge of the Concert Pianist or something but I can find no trace of it, it must have been a very rare print, maybe it was so bad the studio furnaced it, maybe its phantom print lives on, maybe if you got yourself locked into an ABC somewhere and the caretaker’s footsteps have died away there’d be this click and whirr and up there on the curtains’d ripple the same grand piano clip over and over, totally silent, while you try to scream but no sound comes out, I’ve got myself sweating again, it’s the concept of all those furnaced silents playing sight unseen somewhere with this blind guy at the back suddenly leaning forward to touch my face, maybe I’ve drunk too much this week, I need my leading lady to climb up to me on her telescopic ladder, I’ve got my first sophomore class tomorrow, we’re doing the treatment of water in Psycho for crying out loud.

  We’re on the top floor now. We were going to do a shot of Giles looking out the same little stair-window William had looked out of about half an hour ago but Calypso just kept on going up and so did my grandfather. Never mind. The top floor is very dim, there’s just one inky-dinky lamp hissing away under its broken tulip, this is really the roof, I think my great-great-grandfather converted it when he bought the place so as not to waste a floor on the servants because in those days there were hundreds of guests all the time and it was crazy trying to negotiate the crinolines. There’s this little spill of light from under one of the doors up here, Mike’s telling Gordon to zoom in on it because the cat’s already there, it’s kind of sniffing the light like the light might be butter, Gordon’s saying he doesn’t like to zoom at this point, not when he’s walking with a camera anyway, what does Mike think he is, the trombone-line in a military band or something – and Mike gets huffy, he’s tense, we’re all tense, the corridor’s narrow and there are too many of us, it’s always like that for the big scenes, everyone and their lover comes along to watch, the whole village, the whole goddam universe suddenly including Hilda my granddaughter who’s operating the clapper-board, I like that, it makes me feel like Jean Renoir, but there are too many of the others and I’m saying I want Camera Two in the old vegetable garden where Norma’s waiting with my great-uncle and Norma Talmadge does not like waiting but no one’s listening to me any more, the pianola’s rolling, they’ve pulled the celluloid from under my feet, maybe I should let it roll and see what happens, Robert as in flair would’ve let it roll, my grandfather’s stopped now and everyone’s bunched up behind him jabbing their elbows into each other’s faces and Bosey’s making rude hand-signals at this best boy’s boyfriend who’s stepping on the cable and it’s bleedin’ chaos, guv. I cover my eyes. I want to shout cut but I can’t, this has got to be a running take, I keep thinking of the last running take in The Sacrifice which lasts as long as a reel for crying out loud and how Andrei must have been so nervous and maybe he knew he was dying, maybe he knew that if the house didn’t burn up like it should or one of the tracking-rails screwed up he’d die for nothing, and maybe he was smoking and coughing while the whole thing went right and the house burned up and the ambulance came and went and the little boy watered the dead tree and I stood up in the National Film Theatre London and applauded which was very embarrassing because none of the other really anal pale people there joined me but I couldn’t stop, my eyes were streaming, even when somebody said sssshhhhh I couldn’t stop. Ssssshhhhh as if the most important thing in a movie’s working out the date by the fucking roman numerals, ass-hole. I clapped and clapped and clapped some more. Even when the theatre was empty I was clapping. So what’s wrong? I expect you all to show your appreciation at the end of my complex and extremely moving masterwork by doing more than raising your eyebrows at your partner and looking for your coat, as if you’ve just watched a bus-stop for God knows how many hours. I expect you to clap and cry like it’s, I dunno, Verdi – Verdi’s Requiem and you’re a Neapolitan, OK?

  I’m alone in the corridor. I’m leaning against the wall and it’s still damp from the winter and so is my shirt from exertion and I’m completely alone. They’re all
in there, they all went in while I was jabbering about Andrei Tarkovsky. I’ll watch the rushes tonight, I’ll have the dailies printed up and run them through tonight. I trust these people. I can hear murmurings through the slightly open door. I can hear my grandfather and my grandmother about to become my grandfather and my grandmother. I don’t feel like going in. I feel a snoop going in. The door clicks shut now. What you can see of this corridor is very unpleasant, its roof is leaning and low, there’s brown wallpaper up to my hips and then it’s distemper of the kind of yellow you don’t want your teeth to turn into. It was amazing the way Calypso the cat pawed the door. She actually hung on the handle and opened it. I’ve never seen a cat do that before. The light went up a few notches and my grandfather’s face in the corridor had this sort of golden glow on it like he was looking in at the stable in one of those Old Master Christmas cards because the light in that room is candlelight. Even if the cat hadn’t done that I think my grandfather would have found his way in because he’d had his ear to the door and was looking concerned. Bosey’s cans were picking up sobs. My grandmother was sobbing in there. I know why she was sobbing, actually. It’s because up in the old vegetable garden my great-uncle had decided her moonlit mouth was definitely wanting nothing more in the world than to have him approach and stick his lips out and rest them on it and then to see what happens, maybe a bit more pressure or something or even this thing about tongues Pantile was always going on about. It’s a mistake many have made. At HCDVA many have made this mistake. If a boy student wants to do a bit of courting he has to take his lawyer along with him or forget it and have three ice-cold showers a day. Maybe I’m Granny in the back of the Morris but I think it’s a shame the girls are so uptight about the boys, most of these boys are not sexual psychotics, they’re just as scared as the girls, everyone should be going into it together. I wish my grandmother had not reacted so dramatically but maybe in her case there were complicating factors, like the religious maniac back home and her never evers and the whole socio-economic set-up in 1914.I mean, my great-uncle and my grandmother were not equal in this, it’s worse than me trying to move my mouth towards a desirable T-shirt during a tutorial, there’s this whole thing of taking advantage, Dr Lecherby takes it all the time but he’s OK because he does it kind of sneakily and the girls hang all over him. It’s the spotty hunchbacks with polystyrene teeth who get it in the neck, they just need to say Hi, Candy, I was just wondering if you’d like to come back after Ricky Thyroid’s drone and see my unique collection of Japanese nose flutes or something and thunk, they’re strung up for rape. Right now what is going on in that room is probably rape. I’m not looking forward to watching the rushes but I have to. I said to Mike the minute they actually start doing it you leave the room and take the unit with you, OK? He said I was a prude or words to that effect and I said I am not a prude or words to that effect I am just aware that most people know what happens when a boy gets into bed with a girl, this is not a movie for people who need to be reminded, it’s like Candice Bergen said, you just rock your head from side to side for about ten seconds and have a mild asthma attack and roll your eyes up until you see the whites and die a little, it’s easy as butter. Anyway, my grandmother is under age. We could get arrested.

  Hey, look, why am I here? Why am I standing in this corridor like a sneak or like that time Mr Rowlock asked me where King Harold met his end and I said in the eye sir because he didn’t keep it skinned sir and he really exploded over the snorts? Do they know this gas-lamp leaks a bit? Do they care? Or maybe it’s the diesel fumes off the cherry-picker’s hydraulics. I’m wondering if Mike really needed the cherry-picker’s hydraulics for the approach shot through the window because apart from the fumes it’ll have screwed up that lovely lawn, we’re vandals, we don’t need to drop onto that little window under the eaves like we’re Special Branch or filming a Grand Prix race or something, this is possibly the most private moment of my grandparents’ life and I’m tearing it open, I don’t know how everyone could’ve fitted in there, the pianola’s stopped, I feel sick from this gaslight and the diesel fumes or maybe I’m claustrophobic, I need a big space to breathe as a matter of fact – I occupy whatever volume I’m placed in, I thin right out over the hills, I really feel I could hike right now actually, I could go out onto the high chalk hills and roam free or maybe tramp the Ridgeway track in the footsteps of the ancient nomads following the wild deer and wild oxen or something and probably drown in a moto-cross rut. Christ, the door’s opening. It’s the cat, the cat’s out. The door’s closing again. The cat’s coming towards me. I really think the crew should be leaving now. They should’ve followed the cat out and wrapped it up on that. I think I hear voices through this kind of skylight next to my head, I think it’s my great-aunt and my great-uncle, their voices are floating up from the garden and the cat’s stopped, it’s turning back before it gets to me, maybe it has a sixth sense, it’s tail’s vertical in case I want a close-up of its butt which I don’t thank you, it still needs cleaning up, it’s kind of dried out now which is worse. Hey, I really hope William and Agatha don’t get messed up with what’s happening in that room, the diary doesn’t mention them at this stage but you never know, there might have been some tactful scissoring, the cat’s scratching on the door again, the door’s staying shut, the crew aren’t showing, I’m very angry at them, it must have started by now, this is breaking all my rules, I think I’m going to go in there and pull them out physically, all twenty-four of them, it’s crazy, I’m striding up the corridor, I’ve got my hand on the door handle and actually I’m scared, I’m pushing the door handle down, I’m pushing the door, I’m opening the door, I’m chilled but it’s February so the sunlight’s just blinding and when I shield my eyes there’s bare floorboards with mice droppings and a smell of wet paper and a broken chair and a cast-iron bed but it’s folded up against the wall and the main body of it has a bungee-tie woven between the springs for some reason and a plastic I think Cindy doll with rocking eyelashes and no legs and a roll of lilo and a dead ESSO can and a fairly successful fly paper and an upside-down beetle in the sink which has no tap and a pile of very damp 1983 Swindon Evening Mails under a roof-leak which make for great reading if you’re in here for eternity and have time to turn the pages without rending them but I’m not, not really, not this side of life anyway. I just stand here and wonder where everybody has got to.

  Nobody has a monopoly on the truth.

  Actually, that’s Zelda. It’s one of the many things she said to me last night. My Dr Dot identification alarm bleeped instantly and I silenced it with a slug of whisky. I was hoping Zelda’d be rolling her head from side to side and having a mild asthma attack and stuff by now but instead she was perched on the end of my sofa and I was in my cane chair only Mr Agility knows how to sit in without buckling. She just turned up, by the way. It was really pouring and there she was in the porch with rain streaming off her leather skirt like she’d been to my class on the treatment of water in Psycho and she even has blonde hair, Norma won’t like this, Zelda’s gone platinum in some kind of protest, she has a sixties wave and bob, if I screw my eyes I get Louisa looking at me all over again, I must not mention my mother or my grandmother I must not mention my mother or my grandmother I kept murmuring to myself the whole time she was patting her hair with my Secret Life of the Owl dishcloth and talking. Yeah, yeah. Zelda knew about the Problem right from the start and doesn’t mind it as long as he clears up afterwards, it’s her who has the Problem, she reckons the Todd with the luminous brain is not quite synched in with her soul situation as it stands at the moment and wants out but there’s this teeny little hitch and it’s Weeny Todd Jnr sucking his thumb and peeling his eyes or just about inside her belly and waiting for lift-off. Hey, the way she talks about him he is definitely the kid at the end of 2001 come to save the planet or whatever in Cinerama. Cor blimey luvaduck. I kept saying Zelda, I have to watch my rushes and she said just put them in soak Rick, this is so important, she wasn’t ev
en blahdy listening to me, guv, after five years of intermittent communication here she was and I was just a noddy, I might as well have put a screen around her and bought some popcorn, it was about as uninteractive as Interactive TV or whatever. She kept fidgeting with her nails and I loved her so much but she was way up there, on the screen, it was hopeless, I realised with the force of a gong-strike that frankly it was all over, the lights were coming up, I’d dropped popcorn all over the floor, there was one sticking to my sock, I couldn’t squeeze the bag into the ashtray, it kept expanding and dropping onto my knees like The Non-Biodegradable Thing From Mars or somewhere, but I felt a great calm. I felt reborn. I said this to Zelda, I said I’m experiencing a great Zen satori here because I realise you are completely unattainable in this life but I don’t hold it against you, I want things to work out very well for you and weeny whatsit, I think you should leave the father by ten o’clock tomorrow because he has a lecture to give at 10.05 on the latest Coca-Cola commercial Pepsi, she interrupted, it’s always Pepsi, I’ve typed it out six times for him now, he likes clean copy but it’s practically the same lecture every year and ditto for the Levi’s and even the Volkswagen number, it makes me sick. She said all that, not me. My satori was deepening. She has little worry-lines at the corners of her mouth now and I wanted to smooth them away but no, I had accepted the truth and this truth I most definitely had the monopoly on, son. I wanted her to go far away with her weeny whatsit and live by a lake with a nice gentle guy into trout fishing and composing kind of Philip Glass stuff with polished pine timbers everywhere. Houston doesn’t suit her. It doesn’t suit me but hey, I’m leaving too. She was talking and talking and this is what I was thinking the whole time and that I had to go view my rushes but remember Fellini, don’t get stressed about it, it’s all in the can, Mike told me it was all in the can and I trust Mike Avens, the Cindy doll is on my mantelpiece, I must not mention my mother or my grandmother or owls.