Still

by Adam Thorpe

  All these things, I forgot them for years, now they’re coming back clearer and clearer.

  OK. I’m watching. My grandmother’s mouth is filling the screen. There’s a specular on the upper lip where it’s wet. Clifford’s going great guns again with the thunder-sheet but this ain’t Texas, Clifford. Out of the mouth peeps this red tongue. It wipes away the specular which returns instantly and that much clearer. It’s definitely a flame.

  He tried to have his way with me, sir.

  Human lips are a miracle, the way they flex and touch. Hey, the flame’s still there. For once my crew obeyed my dope sheet precisely so here’s to they. No more lips. No more whisky. I’m sucking it off the fleece, I’m getting a thistle up my nose. Tant pis.

  My grandfather keeps staring at this apron in his hand. The apron is her. It’s developing very slowly into a fetish but he doesn’t know this, he just finds holding it fairly strange in terms of its effect on his sexual chemistry. It kind of overflows all creamy out of his hand and its tie is dangling onto his shoe and he might as well bury his face in it like those weirdo fin-de-previous-siècle poets did with their mistress’s lavender-sprinkled soiled underpants but he doesn’t, thank God, he just tries to say instead I say, you can’t be serious, old girl but he knows he’s in a complex masterwork not a big-budget British feature in drip-dry gloss for the hard-hat housewives in Ohio so instead he mumbles, he mumbles God, how appallingly silly. My grandmother’s brought her hands up to her face and her face is emerging from her fingers like, say, a mayweed from its calyx (I learnt so much from your ripples, Miss Bellerby) and there’s this gust that hits the window-pane. It must be Pan, thinks Giles, it must be Pan trotting over the lawn with his pipes and without really thinking about it he brings the apron to his chest and holds it there like a teddy bear or an article of clothing belonging to someone he feels very strong sexual and maybe emotional feelings for. This is taking years, I’m sorry, I had no idea it was all so delicately-wrought, I really hope the critics use the term delicately-wrought about this scene because I’m generally associated with fairly broad-stroke stuff but I’ve changed, I don’t have dowel-head producers breathing down my neck who think delicate films die.

  How appallingly silly of him, he adds in a murmur. He definitely murmurs it this time. Actually, I thought he meant the first time how appallingly silly the whole idea was and that we were going to have at least a few minutes of my grandmother persuading him it was true and that sweet Wiliam did try to have his way with her and then my grandfather stomping about the room denying it and waving his hands around but no, this is not photographed theatre, this is irresistible reality, and in irresistible reality people believe things really unexpectedly, like I believed Zelda was going to leave me for ever the minute I saw her out there in the streaming rain waiting to come in and I was right. Anyway, my grandfather looks really terrified all of a sudden because his younger brother might have kissed a girl before he has. He knows for definite now that his younger squit of a mildly tubercular brother has tried to have his way with a girl before he has, but trying to have your way might not include much of your way, it might not have included any way at all beyond the first step, the beginner’s lunge, the grip at the wrist or the elbow or the waist or wherever – I mean, the mouths might not have come into contact, my grandfather’s reputation might be intact, tomorrow or even tonight he could sally forth and seek some incredibly loose woman on one of the farms or something and damn well do it until her eyes pop out and the hayloft collapses. Then he remembers that the last of the hay has just been gathered and that probably all the haylofts are booked for the night. He feels quite angry now in amongst his terror, it’s like Willo getting a Rudge-Whitworth bicycle before him three years ago – Willo didn’t get a Rudge-Whitworth bicycle before him three years ago, Giles got it three years ago and Willo got his last year, but it’s like Willo had got a Rudge-Whitworth bicycle before him three years ago for Christ’s sake, do I have to explain everything in five stages like an air-stewardess conducting a slow movement with an orange inflatable nobody watches because the in-flight magazine has some nice turquoise beach pictures and they reckon that if the plane has to land in the sea knowing which toggle to tweak between finger and thumb in a gradual forward motion while blowing into the red one marked D or whatever isn’t going to be the primary concern, the primary concern’s going to be how hard can I pray and scream and hang on to my loose bowels simultaneously?

  Oh cor lummy, he’s doing it.

  He’s kissing her.

  I missed it. I mean I missed exactly how he got from a state of Edwardian or OK Georgian respectability into this mess. I got too worked up about this anger thing. Christ, now they’re being zoomed up on. We don’t need it. All you can see is my bare wall covered in snog, and there’s a lot of saliva bubbles, it’s unattractive. This isn’t important, basically. What’s important is at what point and how he lunged. Unless he lunged out of nothingness like Zelda says you should lunge or go to the toilet or whatever, but my grandfather is not Zen, he always lunges etc. out of something.

  I wish they’d dunked the lip-mike off. It sounds like my neighbour’s jacuzzis emptying simultaneously.

  I’ve turned my back. I’ve always hated kissing in the cinema. Actually I missed the crucial crux because I was thinking of Des the whole time and how Des got his Hornby-Dublo before I did. OK he was older, there’s no comparison, but the point is – I didn’t get it even when I was eleven. It was a crappy hand-me-down little circular basic set No. 2008 with rusty points but it was Des’s and I didn’t get to use it until I was seventeen when I could put my fags in the funnel and stuff and make my first girlfriend not laugh by laying myself down in its path or doing Keystone Cops gags with my Dinky Humber. I think she just thought I was underdeveloped emotionally. Elizabeth Margaret Heel with an e. She became a beautician, she runs some place in Waltham Forest for the removal of unwanted Waltham wattles or whatever – she moved up in the world, she missed the tramp-steamer out, she could have dealt with my eye-pouches, she could be power-sucking my ass right now. Hey, she probably still wears a beehive and a giant striped brooch and snogs like a rubber doormat and hates Aertex short-sleeves because blokes have bony elbows or something. Or maybe she’s dead by now. The faces behind me have become two again, they’re reflected in Stendhal’s bowl, it’s a great fish-eye effect in there, it needs cleaning actually.

  I mean like that, says my grandfather. He’s looking awkward and not just because of the Van Eyck distortion and Stendhal listing in his head. He’s wiping his mouth now. Clearly he must have mumbled something we didn’t pick up about whether Willo actually kissed her and she didn’t give a snappy enough answer so he lunged. I’m feeling uncomfortable, Stendhal. I was born out of original jealousy. Cain and Abel stuff. Very negative vibrations. Maybe it’s inheritable.

  My grandfather’s looking unpleasantly aggressive. I’ve kind of seen enough I’m thinking and maybe you’re thinking after ten hours. Here’s some deluxe fish-feed, my finny friend. Actually, one of the fins is looking frayed, his list is back, he’s no longer able to explore the bit between the wreck of the Titanic and the cliff of flint off Wot Hill because he can’t steer very well. My grandfather’s either moved completely out of shot or the goldfish bowl’s not inclusive enough, he might have slid round the side of it, I’m turning to check. OK, he’s not out of shot, he’s standing near the window far right in kind of shallow focus and Milly’s in the middle with her arms held over her chest although she’s not stripped yet. Now he’s looking surprised, it’s like April, it’s being very changeable up there.

  I think he’s surprised by the way the kiss felt.

  You know why he’s so surprised and why my grandmother’s just standing there looking totally blank, staring at this completely worn-out little rug at her feet which has suddenly appeared, I thought this was a continuous take, I wonder sometimes if Sylvia’s got my nerves in her sights – it’s because the first sexual kiss of someone
else’s mouth is fairly surprising. It’s like you’ve never realised before how biogenetic everything is. It’s like everything is mouth creating more mouths, that’s all there is to life, you forget to breathe or swallow because you’re concentrating hard on not hitting their nose too much with your nose but it doesn’t seem to matter, the world is basically very wet and warm and out of this primordial saliva this fish thing is crawling up and it means business, it’s turning into a fat toad that’s no longer going to toe the line – fuck it, you’ve gone through life with this kind of bony elbow feel to everything once your mother’s stopped squeezing you and stuff and suddenly the bony elbows are gone and you’re somewhere plump. Oh Zelda. Oh grey-eyes. Oh show me a hayloft and let’s loosen all the crucks.

  I apologise. Sigh bubble. There’s a little bit at the bottom, about half a gill. It’ll see me through, thank you. Asses up.

  OK, my grandmother’s nodding. Her hair’s right out of its pins again. Some voices come up from the lawn and go away again, the pianola’s just registering in the floorboards, the nightingale from Abyssinia’s in its usual position on the second branch of the third hazel beyond the potting shed and the fiddle’s fiddling afar thank God because the local musicians are terrible and the songs go on for three hours each especially when the hay’s brought home and just in time because hey, it’s about to bucket, the gusts are full of an impending storm.

  I’m not sure why she’s nodding, but each nod’s getting more hair falling over her face and it’s attractive. I did not inherit my grandmother’s beauty. It’s a very particular kind of beauty. It’s not beauty beauty. It’s the beauty of something that might have been happy. Right now this beauty is not really formed, she’s only fourteen for God’s sake, her skin’s still recovering from thirteen years next to the Worksop Soap Works and other gunk like a virtually vitamin-free diet – she still keeps her head too low and sniggers nervously at George’s jokes and negotiates her never evers but she might have made it, she might have developed into something amazing, maybe Agatha would’ve helped her to night classes if not day classes and talked to her fairly unpatronisingly about suffrage and stuff like she did in actual fact but it was too late by then, my grandmother was already broken.

  Crack. Thunder and lightning. Seriously. Maybe my projector will blow up. We have Texan storms out here in Houston. We have the Rothko Chapel. We have people leaving Earth without having to die first, we have an eye-research unit at the forefront of world sight, we have some fabulous golf-links. I’d like to show y’all round some day. Maybe I had better switch off. Go see the new day for a minute. Go sing your hosannas while I find my axe. These crates are hell to open, guv.

  POWER ON. I’LL take the risk. I can’t stand the dark any longer, hey, I’ve kept all the house lights off, you can’t bring up the house lights before the end of the movie unless it’s the interval and we’ve had that, I’m a professional, the ghoul in the garden’s just Ricky in a flash of lightning the dry side of the patio glass but it’s sheer terror each time.

  Look, I’m very sorry to have kept you people. If you leave right now you might just catch the £19.99 one-finger buffet in Trafalgar Square with a free Twiglet if you show up by midday and maybe a stack of sherry trifle if you’re willing to use your elbows because we know the English like their desserts, they like them more than they like sex or social welfare or the blue whale. We’re basically a mixture of bony elbows and puddings, bony elbows and puddings creamed over with this money thing – if you hike up an English person by their loud ankle socks and shake them really hard out drips this unpleasant kind of detritus and it’s all the times they’ve thought about saving money mixed up with all the times they’ve thought about having more pudding, it’s extremely unattractive, all that’s left for me now in my mother country is meanness and lemon cheesecake, everything else is non-essential outlay or something, it’s bleedin’ depressing guv, that’ll be thirty-two quid and we don’t mind if you rahnd it off to forty not having no smallish and don’t forget the little blessin’, it’s not easy negotiatin’ life and keeping you hentertained, all these people and all these bleedin’ turns, never a dull moment, lucky I has the Knowledge and you has the wherewivals. Ta mate. You’re a toff. Enjoy yer Twiglet in the fahntin and don’t get it wet. Cor luvaduck. Reminds me of V. E. Day – V. D. Day as we used to call it. CAT, wrap up, print that, get rid of the guy. Or there’s the £2,000 two-fist buffet at the Hilton, if you’ve not cleaned me out with your mouth sufficiently. They have this great swing band there I do believe, it’s playing a hundred years of Your Favourite Classic Melodies, it works out at about £50 a twist with half a glass of wine included but all the nice people’ll be there of course, all the nice people who’ve made me ache for England, they’ll all be there with their huge mouths and horizontal bosoms and self-adhesive ostrich plumes twisting and shouting themselves into pole position for the new one just in case you lot out there reckoned the new one was gonna be in good bleedin’ taste, roight? So where’re you goin’ then, guv? Shad Thames? Ratcliff Highway? The end of the bleedin’ road?

  The projector’s spooled out, by the way. There’s just this light, this nice white light which cuts out the terrible strobe effect off the lightning because even my walk-in pool’s lapping in darkness, it’s the way it has to be, I have to frighten myself, I have to wait for the usherette to show her nostrils above the red torch of desire, I have to sit out the spooks and the thunder and the awful daring of a moment’s surrender which was Henry Peterson’s fave line, he’d fill himself up to the eyeballs with barley wine and his bladder’d definitely surrender, he’d sway to his fave line then yell DAMYATA while the only thing that was getting wet were his slippers, those were the days, all of us with our mackintoshes on and swaying along in Frank’s place, The Jack of Spades, ha yes, The Jack of Spades known affectionately as The All Trades or sometimes The Jack Off – remember, Ossy, me old mucker? And Christ, whatever happened to Frank? Dear old Frank the Lisp and his splendid aspidistras on the bar we spent ten yearth requethting the name of with our umbrellath at the ready for crying out loud but he never fell for it, dear old Frank, he never fell for it, just went on sucking up his liquid fortune out of our livers – great pubs, great days, great sodding shame they turned them into wine bars for drip-dries with interindividual assignments, sodding great tragedy, nothing stays still unless you switch the bugger orf.

  You know what’s wild, man?

  I’m more and more sounding like my close relative in Havant used to sound before he got jammed on rewind. Help. At least I don’t look like him. At least I got away with something.

  I cut the rushes because I needed a break, incidentally. I needed to get over this Zelda thing before watching my grandmother Doing It. I’ve been looking at this blank white wall of mine if you discount the picture-hook in the middle for about five hours now, it’s very interesting, it’s stayed blank, surprisingly.

  Hey, I haven’t even asked the unit what happened. They came out from my grandmother’s room and looked at me like I was Bluebeard on the prowl then made straight for the bright side of the Half Moon where apparently they misbehaved, they made fun of the karaoke evening in aid of the £1 billion Dick Scanner or something, Gordon especially lost his grip, he did his Gene Kelly routine where there wasn’t room. So? Listen, they’d worked hard, it was a difficult shoot, plus one of the Steves is not happy about his overtime rate and is trying to turn them all against me, I think he’s a plant, he’s a very rare member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Family or something so I don’t like to step on him. At some point I am going to have to wash the rest of my undies, they can’t stay dirty for ever, they’ll fester, my mother’ll shout at me, I’ll be locked in my room with Des’s football socks which she never notices because of her adenoids – hey, I liked not changing my undies, Blisto for Whiter Whites gave me testicular pimples, or maybe it was the scourge of nits my dear family tended to be blamed for because Mr Munro without an o or an e so there’s no relation in sp
ite of his hamster eyelashes and total absence of body hair reckoned my father wasn’t a stickler for baths which he wasn’t oh no but neither was Queen Elizabeth one had to point out sir and one what had just done the pointing-out sir was given the opportunity to help Mr Munro find his psychological wholeness of being and flogged stupid until one what had done the original pointing-out pointed out once more fairly quietly while tipping the blood from his shoes into the nearest aspidistra because it keeps their leaves shiny as does milk sir that one had not meant the newly coronated royal sovereign herself by St Harry and King George good gracious no but the first one, the one wot stuck pancake all over her face and smelt dead, sir, by your living grace.