Still

by Adam Thorpe

  I forgot to say incidentally that instead of smiling gently and getting the hard-hat housewives of Ohio swooning and immediately telebooking their UK trip Oxford-Stratford-London-Solihull food poisoning and coach crash included Giles my grandfather frowned. God knows why he frowned, let him frown, he probably doesn’t even know he’s frowning although he’s finished with his glance towards the window beyond which the floating voices are no longer being relayed by Bosey on the cherry-picker who suffers from vertigo for crying out loud so get him down, get him down, I’m shouting through my cupped hands because we’re post-megaphone, it’s too late, I’m watching the rushes, I’m in Houston in the monsoon season and there are probably twelve bloated golfers floating past if only I had the courage to shield my eyes and look, it’s all wrapped and in the can, it’s way too late, my grandfather is already taking my grandmother in his hands and breaking her up in a manner of speaking, he nosedives into her nape under the black curtain and takes a deep breath of the pheromones situated there while Milly my grandmother stares with really wide eyes at some mould in the shape of Borneo on the wall, she’s being jogged around a little by this head sucking or whatever at her neck. I wish I knew what she was wondering. Because my grandfather has some minor acne at the end of its cycle on his right forelip and isn’t too adept with his cutthroat yet she’s probably feeling a bit of roughness and also some warm maybe wettish exhalations on her jugular as he breathes in and out very deeply. A part of her is probably also wishing she could join her Sis in front of the Soap Works’ boiling pans in spite of the caustic soda suds and jets of steam and sudden hisses and burbles and occasional unfortunate disfigurements and horrible smell and having to go up the clang-clang ladder and stuff and the fact that the one day she replaced her poorly grandmother it reminded her of what was to come to the sinful herd into which one is at every single instant of one’s earthly breath within one and one only plucked hair’s breadth of being tugged into save the Lord. The mould of Borneo is becoming her sister’s face shouting to take every article off and turn the bed-cover back in front of a huge boiling pan Sis’ll fall into at the age of fifty-one in the Year of Suez, it’ll get a mention on the front page of the Worksop Weekly Post but they’ll spell the name wrong a year before the Soap Works’ official closure and the dismantling of the boiling pans and five and a half years before the last person to know the one about the little grey curly-wurly right in the middle of the cake of yellow De Luxe tells it during the Worksop Ex-Soap Works Workers’ Weekly Social and upsets a distant relation of mine. Now my grandfather has emerged from the curtain and removes a strand of it from his lip. God he tries to comment but the word gets caught up with his Adam’s apple and comes out like a cough and he has to swallow again. Now he’s smiling a bit because he’s embarrassed by this high register cough and his breath is too big for his lungs, he needs lungs like eighteenth-century iron-smelting bellows operated by donkeys or whatever. Every time he breathes in he’s getting what can only be described as a succulent helping of Milly the maidservant’s personal fumes and there’s something very sweet in there which if he wasn’t standing under the mental and in my case visual equivalent of the Victoria Falls would recall the lawn newly mown by Jeremiah or maybe the bluebells around the nymph’s pool after an April shower, something erotically poetic or poetically erotic anyway which would not explain the eighteenth-century iron-smelting process going on in his groin. I have to be absolutely straightforward about this: he’s basically right up and running now, he’s bolted, his flannels are under strain, he’d need to be high-pressure hosed by melt-water pumped straight out of the East Siberian Sea or something to slow him down and get his tie looking at least straight. The point is that her neck was not just a divine rose-garden at dawn it was soft and very fairly pleasantly warm and he did actually feel the blood beating beneath his lips but hey, only the flickeriest flicker of that Dracula picture he saw with Uncle Kenneth at the Bioscope entered his head at that moment and was instantly outscreened by the Battle of the Alamo flashing away in his forebrain and which is still flashing away right now while his eyeballs take in Milly the maidservant’s blouse’s slightly lowered neckline because he is only three buttons away from bliss now, the bud is a rose is a rose and the nymph raises her hands to be pursued through lime grove and thicket to her pool in the woods where Echo calls and calls and Pitys turns into a fir-tree and Syrinx whispers from the reed-bed, the tallest and loveliest reed of them all – hey, he’s not really thinking all this while his palms get to find the knobbly bits on her shoulders fairly exciting and his thumbs feel the collar-bones are pretty alarming even through the pleats, it’s what he wrote down afterwards in green ink in the bald light of the breaking day in the small shed with the torn tennis nets and the freshly-oiled croquet mallets and Jeremiah’s trays of scrunchlings he and Willo’d giggle over for obvious reasons in the far-off innocent days and which I spilt some Tesco’s Instant Arabian Gut-Ache over at Mrs Halliday’s in ’93 my hand was trembling so much. I was upset, I mopped it extremely delicately with my British Airways throw-away personal face-freshener I’d kept for my weird son-of-godson’s cabin handouts wall collection but it was OK, the ink was so old it was permanent if it wasn’t permanent before, my half-aunt won’t know the blemish is not period in the extremely unlikely event of her opening the diary because she is totally disinterested in her father’s intimate life, it’s like the fact that she does not know about my grandmother. Once he’d met Elspeth Marjorie Clinch at the end of a long corridor in St Thomas’s in 1935 he was taken in hand, he was plucked out of the gloom of that dreadful house with its unhinged domestics and all the shutters perpetually shut, Mr Thornlight, for reasons to do with the war and grief, the first one I mean, and he and Mama bought a dear little flat in South Kensington cross-cut to me nodding and fade.

  Crap. I was there. You were there. I am not Mr Thornlight but little Dick Thornby, you smiled at me just once a year, I had a big wet leaf once stuck to my shoe, my mother hadn’t noticed, it had survived the brutal interrogation of the doormat, it came off on the parquet, you gave a little giggle, your father tilted his head enquiringly and I felt this flush, you looked so lovely and kind in that yellowing dress, in the candlelight, I was deeply attracted to you, you had such lovely grey eyes because in those days you didn’t wear thick bifocals, oh his hand on her bosom, his head on her knee, sing willow, willow, willow!

  OK, OK: I didn’t say it. I didn’t take a high-dive into her calm and rock her off her inflatable with my belly-flop yarooooouch. Pink halo time, Mike, breathe on the lens. Thank you. Elspeth read books to my grandfather and he played her Rachmaninov on the pianola and’d pop out for his aromatic Turkish dark twice a week and once a year in grim November this little snot-nosed scamp’d take him out to the pictures or vice versa, it was never quite clear to Victoria probably, dear dear Victoria, who liked Papa’s eyeballs the way they were and took him for long walks in her best white kid gloves. She was and is a very proper person with my nose. If she’s out there – SORRY, AUNT VICTORIA if you don’t mind me calling you that, just this once. Comfort her, give her a hug and a highball or something, take her out for some air, hey, I haven’t got all day.

  She’s out? She’s stopped trying to rip up my screen? OK.

  He was knocked over by a bus, for God’s sake. It slew him before the days of bleeping pelicans, blimey, never saw him guv, just stepped straight out under me nose, came straight outa that posh baccy shop and wallop, won’t never get over it. Clip of some archive stuff of big red London buses and those terrible coats. Clip of a vicar with one of those terrible haircuts throwing some soil in and Victoria helpless with grief yelling Daddy, Daddy, oh my daddy. Fade, because the Thornbys weren’t invited or anything but it was OK, the Enfield Ritz was a whole lot easier on the nerves.

  Now go see the still of Mrs Halliday waving her hand at me. It’s right at the bottom under the one of the croquet match I didn’t bother you with because we cut that scene, it went on and on,
my grandfather came last and William ribbed him and Agatha won as usual despite her dress, you try operating a croquet mallet in a long summer dress of this period, the swing between your knees is severely affected, she was a remarkable person, she nursed soldiers with stuff like I dunno fractured olecranons and cross paralysis and corrosives poisoning and lacerated pretty well everything it’s possible to get lacerated and remain alive and how to bandage every part of the body right up to the little fingertip without looking in her British Red Cross Society First-Aid Manual No. 1 all the time which I’m afraid I took, it has her name in pencil on the front, she’s underlined some bits and I like looking at the bits she’s underlined, Mrs Halliday won’t miss it, it’s just a crummy little soiled contusion-blue clothback with the pages falling out and there’s nothing about Spanish ladies but I think it was in her pocket when she keeled over in the corridor with a sputum jug in her hand they had to deal with very carefully because the lid came open and the stuff was purulent, the mops were out, the place stank of Trevelyan’s Carbolic Acid Solution Invaluable In Our Present Emergency Ideal for the Tropics Be Safe Be Sure Says Leading Nurse In One Of Our Foremost Teaching Hospitals as she was carried away on a blanket because, hey, the stretchers couldn’t keep up with the cases, tens of thousands of people were keeling over and dying and William got turned into a lower jaw and maybe the phalange of his little finger before the news got through to him, it was a terrible week for my relations, the bells were ringing and people were whooping and fireworks were banging and Mrs Trevelyan was on her bed staring up at the ceiling with a touch of the influenza herself watching a fly negotiate two of her children waving over Evelyn’s golden head just where the hairline crack behind the light-flex started to open dreadfully frightfully wide. Mrs Halliday could be waving hallo too but she’s actually telling me not today, not today, we are indisposed or words to that effect. The pavement slabs are the ones right outside her house where I’d crouched behind some uncollected burst bin-bags with, a scarf around my nose to filter out the odours unfortunately for the return from her daily outing to Tesco’s, it was a little aggressive of me but it didn’t work, I stood up and forgot to lower my gas scarf, she started to shout and the street’s Neighbourhood Watch scheme dropped from the trees, I spent about three days in hospital with a bald Securicor guard sitting on the end of my bed and telling me about his poetry just in case I released myself, I got absolutely no compensation when my jaw worked enough to explain the situation, England really terrifies me, it’s full of big slobbering dogs only just keeping their owners in check and mothers on leads, if I smile at the kids they report me, I have to go round like a bit-part in Return of the Zombies or risk an interactive complication. Aw hell, let’s haul up for a second and count dead glasses, folks. Go bring to bay some highballs for y’hangovers and eye the dead ringer for Ricky’s nose. Go see the still. It’s good for your circulation. I hope you’ve been circulating anyway in the breaks. I have some very interesting friends and I have some relatives too. Aw hellsapoppin. Here come the tumbleweeds a-blowin’.

  WELCOME BACK. IT’S still raining. I’ve stood outside, I’m cooled down, it’s safe for you to come out from behind the chairs now. Click ’n whirr. If you need this detail, I hope you notice that exactly one tear has made it over the top of my grandmother’s right lower eyelid, it’s broken through the oil barrier and the lash barrier and once the oil barrier has been broken through you’re pretty well crying, it’s to do with films and suspension, if it wasn’t for the oil barrier we’d be going around with tears hanging off of our chins the whole time. There’s another one just above that fucking fly and now they’ve got it in extreme close-up, the tear I mean, it makes the fly look like a miniscule foreign body, I can always rely on Mike and sometimes on Gordon. These physical details speak volumes, son. While I was shuffling for a position at Robert’s feet he spoke one day, he spoke about involuntary actions, he said the hands par exemple get a cigarette to your lips without you knowing it, you find the cigarette in your lips and light it, hands are mainly their own masters like your bodily secretions are their own masters – hey, my movie will be the first movie to show war as basically a great quickener of bodily secretions, the First World War was the most bodily secretory yet, it was incredible, the classic opening shot’ll be of this glittering saliva string as Second Lieutenant G. S. A. Trevelyan lifts his gas helmet at the end of gas drill and snucks out the rubber flange and the nose-clip with about a pint of nasal mucus attached and that’s just for starters, he’s still in fucking Aldershot, wait till we get to the Continent, mate, just you bleedin’ wait you bleedin’ bleeders etc. Hey, I’m going to slow-pan this Vista Vision cavalry attack over long autumn grass at dawn and follow it up with a panaglide of these humps with a brown liquid oozing out of their unlaced breeches the dungflies really go for. I’m going to have a very long held shot of this guy walking away to the water-point with a billy can like Bresson had this very long held shot of this guy walking away with an old lantern in Lancelot du Lac except my guy’s muddier and has a limp and is singing over and over again until it’s so distant even Bosey gives the thumbs up and takes the windshield off the mike

  O Mary Anne

  fill up the can

  for your honour, John Reilly,

  is dry

  and then when he’s just a kind of khaki nick in this extremely broad vista of mud he’ll stop because that’s the water-point and the wind’ll be sounding and there’ll be this faint kind of gonging and from right to left something’ll scrim the light a little floating across and he won’t come back, we’ll just hold that shot so still you’ll realise the nick is no longer upright and you’ve already forgotten the song.

  OK, the secretory aspect in that last shot is fairly concealed but you get my drift, guv, you get my drift. Hey, my grandfather is now wiping away the tears from my grandmother’s face. She would really like to be in front of the boiling pans instead of right here under the rainlight on my plain wall. My grandfather smells of tobacco and biscuits and linseed oil, he’s been oiling the croquet mallets this afternoon following that croquet game we cut. There’s also some tangy sweat around even though he’s changed since the croquet. Right now Agatha and my great-uncle are playing croquet verbally with my great-grandmother who suspects something’s up, they’re in the drawing-room and Julie Patchouli’s in charge, she’s doing just fine, the canteen staff are not drunk and Willo’s struck cheek has just about returned to its normal tint and he’s not angry, he’s just pretty dashed ashamed and humiliated and expecting to be blown sky bloody high any mo, actually – there’s this superimposition of a linden tree avenue over his face surprise surprise but in fact the old bag gives up just maybe because Martita’s had what the canteen staff would’ve had but it’s great anyway, she goes over and operates the pianola instead so we quick-fade the linden tree avenue and the potentially dramatic encounter just goes kind of puff, the love of his life whose ripe lips just kind of rolled away in the moonlight like an apple in the dashed impossible bobbing apples barrel at the Fawholt Summer Fête where Ags always cleans out the hoopla just looks awfully pasty the next day and incredibly unmashable all of a sudden and Giles smokes his head off by the pool in the wood and Ags reads, then they all whirl down to the sea and I have to waste a whole day hiring the wrong type of period bathing huts because Sylvia’s got sunstroke thank you Sylvia.

  Did you really and truly hit him? my grandfather enquires.

  My grandmother nods. There’s something about this beastly hitting thing my grandfather doesn’t awfully like, frankly. His lips purse which is an ugly habit, they got very pursy in the trenches and his platoon went round mimicking him and he blushed the colour of his blisters when he realised but that’s to come, it’s all sketched out, the poppies are looking droopy because we’re way over schedule, if I don’t look pretty zippy they’ll be baling up the wire and filling in the trenches and the steam train people’ll be organising Weekend Tours of the Battlefields Via Zeebrugge alrea
dy, we’ll have missed the whole thing, it’ll get reduced to a voice off and those establishing shots and some stock clips out the library for crying out loud. My grandmother’s lower lip has kind of swelled up, it has a tear which refuses to fall off it and instead rolls into her mouth and naturally the salt sample makes her feel she’s really sobbing her eyes out which she’s not, she’s keeping herself in check, her nose is running a little though, it’s got a catchlight off the candles, sorry about that, I did warn you people out there and hey, the reason my grandfather’s developing his mouth pleats while he wipes away her tears and the iron is being smelted is because some fairly green and unpleasant corner of his stomach reckons that William has somehow received a more intimate interindividual communication than he Giles has and this little reckoning is screwing up the smelting process, there’s dirt in the bellows, one of the donkeys has a severe limp.