Still

by Adam Thorpe

  I think you should take a long shot hower, honey, I said. Correction, great slip. I think you should ease out under my jet-powered shower unit, honey.

  She didn’t even chickle.

  Hey, c’mon, cor blimey, who do you think I am? I don’t even have a blade big or certainly sharp enough. It was just to get her out of the way while I watched my rushes. I love Zelda. But if I look too hard she vanishes. This whole thing has nothing to do with the kid waiting for lift-off inside her. Even if the kid looked exactly like its father down to the green suspenders I’d rear it with my own hands around its neck. No, seriously, I’d bring it up like me own, guv, like one of me own, ’cos it’s kind of in the family, innit? It’s kind of a family tradition, innit?

  She took a shower while I watched my rushes. It was soothing, thinking of her soaping herself under the shower without me watching. It was also comforting because it meant she couldn’t hear the rushes, all showers completely deafen, someone could walk right up to the plastic shower-curtain with an upraised cleaver and you wouldn’t know, not even if they yelled out just before the blur established itself as an old lady holding something above her head. I don’t want Zelda to hear my grandfather and my grandmother on the soundtrack ever, I want her to go and live by a lake with this very gentle guy and watch the herons glide low with her kid next to her, laughing and so forth. I don’t know if she will do this. She’s talking about going back home to her mother in Duluth, which is not on the lake I had in mind, not at all mate, cor luvaduck no.

  The rushes were remarkable. Here’s the unedited version. We’re all proud of what we did. We were so happy afterwards we had a big barbecue on the lawn. Uncle Kenneth turned up. He’s a vegetarian, he got on pretty well with Mike. Then this helicopter landed and blew the barbecue over and we leaned into the air and our dresses and flannels went kind of ecstatic. Hey, it was CNN. They’d heard that things were going on following the seeding of my mother, they wanted in on it, I said listen, preserve your energy for the War To End All Wars that’s about to fuck up the century, have a sausage, there are no fake ingredients at this time, relax, your helicopter has completely wrecked the azaleas and the lawn doesn’t need combing, leave off the media attention, these people are going through a bad time, the vicar hallooing over the gate has lost his floppy hat and his side-whiskers have turned into rabbit’s ears, Zelda has walked out of my life, seven million people are packing their suitcases and feeling nervous about dying before they grow old, Hubert Lightfoot is on a motoring jaunt in the highlands of Scotland and my grandfather’s eyes are very well thank you but the old guys with ostrich plumes and very bad posture and terrible breath are getting generally disgruntled, forgive me if my speech is a little slurred, let me introduce you to Gavin Simpson originally from Hemel Hempstead England, he plays a Wiltshire shepherd, he’s been incredibly patient, his big moment’s soon to be here, do those rotor-blades have to keep turning, it feels a little windy, it feels like an Altman wedding or the end of Vietnam, why are you bristling with cameras, you’ve fucked up the private party, isn’t anything sacred any more, I think they’re in the sitting-room, I hope this isn’t going out live, it is, OK, I’ll shaddap, I’m shaken by events and up to my main neural highway in Laphraoig or however you spell it.

  Click and whirr and kill the lights. You know what it’s like watching rushes? It’s like the end of your dream when you’re turning over and not finding anyone next to you and then touching flesh and you know the dream’s spooled out and you’re not where you were just now but here, in a hotel in Sweden with Ingmar Bergman’s latest after all, and there’s a lot of work to be done and Zelda’s gone. Basically, it’s a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly. The good parts are chance, the bad parts are not, the ugly is in between. It helps to be situated near a litre of some great Scotch. There’s Hilda with the clapper-board. Great days, great days. I’m never going to finish this movie. It’ll rank as the most unfinished great unfinished movie ever made. I can’t believe she forgot to hug me. I’ve expended so much of my energy on this woman and she forgot to hug me. Actually, she came in and had this shower and some lasagne and some sleep and some burnt toast and some honey-nuggets and some coffee and walked out without ONCE TOUCHING. Not even my hand on her shoulder or her hand on my shoulder. Not even elbow on elbow by mistake. I’d never ever do a scene like that in a movie. It’s too ridiculous. She just said thanks for the breakfast, Rick, I think I’d better be going, you’re a good person basically, if our lifeways don’t meet again then may reality bless you and went. It was still raining a little. Instead of saying hey, Zelda, our lifeways have been meeting ever since we bumped into each other and paired up in the Upper Cretaceous, all that bloody giant bracken and bog-asphodel to negotiate if you remember and they’re going to go on meeting until the sun turns the Eiger into the kind of ice-cream I used to serve up in the glow of those honey-candles if you also remember I nodded and then called out do you want an umbrella? She didn’t hear me and I didn’t grab my umbrella and lope after her in my slippers and we didn’t embrace on the sidewalk in the streaming rain with Mike’s crazy little cardboard thing waving at the rain-machine operator to open it right up, I just frowned a bit and then closed the door and sat down to watch the rushes and then remembered the breakfast stuff because I can’t stand working until the breakfast stuff’s cleared. So maybe the very final word passed between me and Zelda is umbrella.

  I wish she hadn’t dyed her hair, that’s all.

  I just wish she hadn’t.

  I just wish my neighbour’s daughter hadn’t chosen that day to visit. I just wish she’d stayed on very bad terms with her father.

  Because the rain wouldn’t have sneaked in between her tyre treads and the tarmac and made her slide towards the sidewalk and Zelda.

  And the way Zelda screamed at her made me go to the window. OK, it’s fairly irritating having someone almost clip your ankle with their hub-cap and then lift a curtain of dirt-brown water which has to drop somewhere but, hey, it wasn’t my neighbour’s daughter’s fault, and you don’t need to scream at them like that. And watching Zelda looking like Louisa screaming at people was incredibly unpleasant. It’s kind of screened out all the other Zeldas I knew. It was a shock to see Zelda screaming at someone, actually. It was like she couldn’t care less about anybody, not me or Doctor Pepsibrain or her mother in Duluth or anyone. The way she screamed under her platinum and then walked away around the corner and out of sight, she could have been anyone. Anyone.

  I’m sorry. We’ve missed some.

  He’s looking down, he’s watching the cat sniff my grandmother’s hands right now. She’s on the bed and so is the cat. There’s this stain on the bed. There are only two candles in here but he can see it’s a fairly unpleasant stain because the bedcover is cream. We keep jerking between the stain and the cat sniffing my grandmother’s hands. The damp patch behind is out of focus but it still looks like India with Ceylon too big. This is a shot of the dressing-room table now. It has a bottle of facial lotion and a circle of crochet and a yellow – hey, give me time, we’re onto my grandfather’s face now, these guys are jumping around like hell, anybody’d think there was a fire-fight going on in here or something, my grandfather’s mouth is opening and closing because someone’s fucked the sound, it’s probably to do with the cat, we need Hilda because she’s working with deaf people at the moment, maybe the best boy’s boyfriend walked on Bosey’s cable and snucked the jack out, Bosey’ll go and throw himself off the Telecom Tower or wherever when he sees this but it’s coming back in about three seconds, don’t get stressed up, the talkies are about to surround us with barbed wire, I could have shot this on an antique camera with a hand-crank like they’re about to shoot the War To End All Wars on a couple of hand-cranks but you bastards would only have yelled and stood up and got my grandfather and grandmother on the back of your heads and fists and stuff and here’s the sound, it’s like coming up out of water, it makes my grandmother’s shudders look reasonabl
e because we can hear them, the shot is of my grandmother down to her boots on the edge of the bed looking over at something and we’re checking up on it, OK – it’s that crappy little picture of St Francis in a bamboo frame Sylvia upturned about fifty junk boutiques to find and we’re coming up very tight, it’s enormous, it’s bigger than the screen, you can see there’s a dead mite trapped between the glass and the right eye, it’s a great shot, that’s what you call divine or maybe benign chance, it recalls the icons of Andrei Roublev at the end of Andrei Roublev except it’s nineteenth-century Sunday School junk and has a ripple in it from damp or something and his face is the colour of rhubarb pie and the birds on his arms are unidentifiable they’re so botanically indecisive and now we’re cruising down his torso onto his naff sandals where a red squirrel’s looking for protection and there’s this crop of yellow primroses and another squashed gnat, I’m glad they obeyed my directions, sometimes the crew go AWOL and do all the obvious things like not pan over in microscopic close-up a crappy picture of St Francis circa 1880, they think stuff like that’s pretentious, they think the kind of jump-cuts I do are schizophrenic, they fear for my mental health, they think I’m going to go the way of all Rothkos or at the least end up making video shorts three hours long of red circles floating slowly down or white light extremely gradually slanting across a blank sheaf of heavy art paper to a Bali gong or whatever when all I want to do is touch bottom.

  SERIOUSLY.

  You can hear my grandmother’s breathing, she’s miked up so close. The bed doesn’t have a creak it has a kind of mild asthma attack every time she shudders. No wonder they put in the bungee-cord about seventy years later, it clearly needs some firming up – it’s a very bad bed for young growing backs and reminds Giles my grandfather of the cast-iron Randle beds and glancing off that particular neural pathway is a left turn sign-posted Self-Abuse he tries not to look down, instead he takes the right fork where Poole’s waiting like he waits pretty well every night with this amazing shaggy-dog story that kind of unrolls and unravels through the darkness or maybe some faint moonlight falling across bright red blankets the colour of bright red blankets and finally everyone still vaguely awake groans because the Mystic Hindoo Candle the height of the Great Pyramid or twenty thousand and one school brekkers kippers balanced nose to tail is reached and climbed up perilously by Ug-Kaar-Spat the ne plus ultra of the ancient seekers of the meaning of life and THERE IS THE TINY SHIVERING FLAME and he sneezes.

  Dark, all dark.

  Oof. Youch. You rotter, Poole.

  What happened actually was that the summer storm that’s brewing up sent a gust through the crack in the window and the candles momentarily horizontalled, they were really hanging on by their finger-tips to the lip of the wax for several seconds and my grandmother went eh. So did I. I thought maybe someone had walked in front of the camera or stepped on my shadow or something. The light’s back upright and there’s Calypso, she’s slipping out the door, she’s nosing it open and slipping right out – she must be very confused by all the pheromones of her birth fluid, it must be tough. The candles are smoking quite a bit from their bad experience. There’s a strong smell of candles in here. I think I’ve got time to give you a sneak teaser of this great scene in Amiens Cathedral of all places because they’re not saying anything at the moment and I might as well make some effort to stop you leaving to stand in the cold grey drizzle of the new dawn or whatever and link arms and sing with total fucking strangers just to have something to tell your grandchildren about instead of telling them what a great movie you saw, THE movie for Christ’s sake, the one that only had one screening so if you missed the end you missed the secret, the clue, the syzygy to rhyme with whizzy guy, the burning sledge, the here’s looking at you kid with the propellers strobing on the tarmac, the girl walking right on past down the long probably lime avenue so he lights up, he just lights up, the puff, the payoff, the oof, the pummelling of Poole sometimes if it wasn’t good enough, the darkness, the real darkness, OK, I haven’t.

  so kind, sir, as to shut it tight?

  There are these shadows all over the walls. It’s fairly expressionist but that’s Mike’s thing. In fact it’s nothing to do with Mike it’s to do with the position of the candles.

  Would you be so kind as to shut th’door, sir?

  My grandfather closes his mouth which is not what she meant. Up through the floor comes this vibration which is the grandfather clock in the study sounding nine o’clock and because this is Sensurround it gets my priceless collection of fake Roman tear-vases from Pergamum tinkling and the Oscars in the hallway nudging each other. Now he’s closing it. That’s an incredibly sexual moment, obviously. Unless you’re very extrovert or get turned on by risk even very slightly ajar doors cause problems – with a slightly ajar door you don’t know whose eyeball might be catchlighting in the crack or whose ear for that matter but as soon as an inch of hollow plywood’s set between you and the rest of the planet you have the impression you’re secure, you’re private, things can start heating up, they get done to a turn, it’s crazy.

  And things are definitely starting to heat up up there now. The swallowing’s me, by the way, I have a loud swallow, especially when it’s a gill at a time. Now it’s my grandfather’s swallow. He’s just swallowing his nerves while keeping his back to the room. I think he’s studying the flies preserved in the varnish or maybe the grain of the woodwork for the moment because he can’t face this little sloping room with its small feminine articles and major feminine article he’s just shut in. With him on the right side or maybe the wrong side depending on which self-adhesive moral sticker you want to apply. Owing to the fact that he’s closed the door or blame the Phantom of the Corridor the cat’s returned and is nailing the varnish on the other side.

  Good grief, that cat, says my grandfather. I’m about to have the maid.

  He doesn’t say that last bit, he thinks it, but it’s like he’s said it. He can’t bear the fact that he’s thinking this and the maid in question’s about two feet away with her feminine articles. He can’t believe that two people can be so close together without knowing everything about each other instantly, but I could tell him right now that I know about one per cent of anybody else including Zelda Lazenby née Wick and about five per cent of myself. And given that the only contact between him and her has been over silver salvers and wobbling rougemanges or now and again a brief encounter of sleeves on the stairs followed by a whiff of wax polish and maybe the armpits again if it has been buffing day, he knows about 0.01 per cent of her. But knowing 0.01 per cent about somebody does not stop a person from having extremely intimate physical contact with that somebody, it’s very very strange. And the fact is that my grandfather has about twenty-four stage and screen melodramas to fall back on if he dries up, along with all that rot the chaps go on about in the dorm. All that sexual rot. With an all-star cast of house laundrywomen and dining-hall servants and milkmaids on the local farms let alone the pubescent domestics back home generally unclad and giggling and the shape of keyholes so it’s like he’s walked into the penny pictures with the projector whirring and found himself up there on the screen which is quite a coincidence actually, if only my grandmother was Mary Pickford it’d be perfect because my grandfather aches for Mary Pickford’s curls and neat chin and so forth like about seven million other chaps. I need to put this whole thing into context or I’ll feel I’m the result of a crime without attenuating circumstances which ain’t a cosy feeling, guv. And these guys in ostrich plumes are getting ready to screw the century and hand Randolph his duck-board and William his howitzer shell and Giles his fucked-up gas mask and nervous problems which I feel for one outdoes my grandfather’s crime by about seven million to one. His buttocks are tingling right now. Mine are, anyway. He’s turning round finally, it’s like the biggest effort of his life to turn round finally, it’s like he’s in liquid mud up to his breast-pocket or something, but he makes it. The most obvious thing would be to mention the cat b
ut he’d rather not, the stain’s still glistening on the bed-cover. My grandmother blows her nose on her handkerchief which uses up a bit of time. Those shadows are amazing, every time they move an inch it looks like an earthquake or the Ice Monster’s in town.