Still

by Adam Thorpe

  I say, he says very softly, how absolutely bloody.

  My grandmother lowers her head and my grandfather pulls out his handkerchief which is pretty clean if a little linseedy from his hands and she takes it so the nasal mucus and most of the tears never make it to the floorboards. It’s quite all right, contributes my grandfather to the general welfare box of human kind, leaving his hand on her head and realising that heads are actually a lot smaller than they look. Because he’s taller than her and looking down he gets a bird’s-eye view of her blouse and what happens inside it beyond the poverty-exaggerated clavicles which is not much because her chemise breaks its foamy lace or maybe lacy foam against the golden sand of her chest about an inch above where it gets interesting. Nevertheless the well-held position of her arms each side of her ribs and joined at navel height by the finger-bones as if in prayer kind of presses each side of her chest and makes the blouse and the chemise fall away a bit from the neck so there is a kind of an extra plunge into the dark he just stares into with the iron-smelting process doubling its production. Any really naff poetic reference by the way is not screwed out of my Muse but Giles’s, I very much doubt whether my grandmother’s skin was anything but Worksop white with industrial air-pollution pimples but candlelight does wonders for flesh tint, whenever I’m wooing I always use candles, it softens the blow when I take my Lon Chaney mask off after the HCDVA Fancy Dress Brunch, the Lana Turner cut-out doesn’t scream and run out the sliding doors and fall into an unflooded bunker as happened in my first year, she just carries on smiling at me wherever I stand in the room even if I flatten myself against the same wall wot she’s leant against, guv – trusting my neighbour doesn’t try to knock a nail in behind her head she stays like that all evening without flinching even when the doorbell rings, it’s the special delivery postman who always rings twice ho ho with a letter from Zelda ex-Lazenby now back to Wick I feverishly tear open while this guy’s still standing there expecting a fifty-dollar tip or something for getting his motorbike wet. This is a terrible admission but I hugged him. It’s a terrible admission not because it might suggest I’m keen on young guys dressed up in leather motorcycle gear the colour of newly-applied tarmac which is fine by me even if it were one hundred per cent true but that it meant Zelda saying she was thinking again by Hotpost Services wiped out any profound reassessments I’d recently made of her position vis-à-vis me and got the Victoria Falls unblocked again except I was going over in a barrel. The young guy got fairly excited too and said he’d one more Extra Hot to make and then he’d be right back and he didn’t mind keeping his motorcycle helmet on but not his leathers, he wasn’t into that, and I had to pretend I was and that I was also into flagellation and laceration and suffocation and tying my guys up in barbed wire with the odd tenacious strand of slightly scorched traveller’s joy still clinging to it dressed only in the rank badges of a second lieutenant in the Wiltshire Yeomanry which got him incredibly excited so eventually I said I had a bit of a headache as a matter of fact what with my Lassa fever playing up and he backed off so I could Chubb the door and read the letter again. I’m sorry about this kind of extended cross-cut but I have to share my life sometimes, this happened about twelve hours ago, I haven’t washed any more undies since, my grandfather has spent twelve hours contemplating the darkness beyond the golden beach and the chemise foam, he’s gone deep, he’s probably lost all sense of time down there where the world shuts off and only coral blows. Basically Zelda my lovely my honeydew my linden tree avenue with the Elysian fields at the far end instead of Jefferies and his coach wants, yeah, to settle by a lake with her weeny Todd and a very sensitive guy who’ll fish and compose and make her laugh but she wants to do it in Canada for crying out loud and I’ve got to get learning how to fish and compose fast. Yup, I’m Henry Fonda with less cracks. I keep telling myself it’ll work, I’ve got at least ten years of total bliss before my casting-arm starts to get stiff or I forget my one-liners or my Indeterminate Variations for Five Aspens and a Woman Bathing Naked shows a certain lack of youthful vigour. Oh, and she’s had the baby. It looks exactly like him. I can handle that. It would be worse if it looked like his great-uncle or something. Anyway he has the kind of face that gives Identikit artists a bad name, it’s incredibly unseizable, when I think of his face I think of basins, I don’t know why, the features just kind of slip my sprockets and get swooshed away – I mean, I really know what Zelda means about the totality of void at the centre of being when I stare at her ex-husband over the french fries he never likes to share with me. His attraction for the desirable T-shirts is that they can decal their fantasy man onto it very easily for Pete’s sake – with me they just see five generations of costermongers and two generations of dog shit gatherers overlaid very successfully by two generations of antiseptic and disinfectant manufacturers and the nose of the rich layabouts on my great-grandmother’s side. I’m serious about the dog shit gatherers, by the way – my great-great-great-great-grandfather and his son got fruppence a bucket from the tanneries, you’re very lucky you don’t live next to a period tannery actually. OK, the family business had to start somewhere and it wasn’t like you think it was, the pooper they scooped by hand was called Pure and my great-great-great-great-grandfather and son were Pure-finders and they were trusted, they didn’t leave a whole load of air between the turds like some of the really enterprising ones did, they pressed it down firmly even though it was never weighed because as long as there was some of it higher than the rim of the bucket it was OK, they’d have got on very badly nowadays, people who don’t leave a lot of air between their dog turds have basically had it. Every year I put on my Gregory Peck look and say to my classes that when your ancestors were stretching American Indian private parts over their pommels or strapping General Houston into his stomach girdle my family were finding Pure so folk could go out in decent hand-stained leather without soiling their homes or the homes and shops of others. Clink clink. Cor luvaduck. You’re a swell toff, guv. Ta.

  Hey, beforehand I was too depressed to watch the rushes. Now I’m too happy. I can’t phone her because she’s in this Zen nunnery on some lake north of Ottawa. She’s there for weeks and she wants me to think about it. She says they have a great crèche set-up. I think weeny Todd might be getting a bottle instead of Zelda’s breast. That surprises me. I’m frankly surprised she’s on a Zen retreat at this time but I think it probably means Tiny Todd is not everything to her. There is absolutely one hundred per cent zilch doubt about her feelings this time: she said I want you my closest friend to share my life with me, you always said you changed all your kids’ diapers each time, I think we can make it work, when I shut my eyes in zazen meditation you always float into view on this orange cloud holding an Alfa Romeo magazine like that time I drove us out to Austin for that illustrated lecture on Suzuki by his oldest pupil and you vomited because you were reading the magazine and NOT because of my driving!! It’s a great way to start because I can clear you very quickly and still myself before having to nod for the keisaku stick. The keisaku stick kinda hurts! The head nun doesn’t hold herself back, she’s called Jean Riley and is from Montreal originally and is very aware and watches TV a lot, especially the cop serials and she has them on really loud but nobody likes to say anything and anyway they can’t because we all have to take this Vow of Silence, even me (!!), we can talk for ten minutes when the sun clears the pylon cable. Although she’s so enlightened I think that nothing disturbs the still pool of her mind. There’s going to be a lot of snow here. Rain makes these great gurgly noises and touches my cheek with tiny fingers. Please take lots of still time and reflect deeply on everything I’ve said. With meant love, Zelda. See what I meant? I’ve reflected deeply for about one second and am ordering up some snow chains by Hotpost Services because no way can you get snow chains in Houston. I like the sort of poetic line about the rain, it means Zelda’s going back to her haiku, it’s a good sign, she’s probably rinsed out the platinum and gone back to natural brown and moccas
ins with something billowy in between, it reminds me of my late youth and early middle age, it tells me that time can stop. Sod the movie. I’m sorry, guv, a hartist has to live too. My grandfather can carry on looking at the coral in a comfortable vertical position flippers up high for another few days, I’ve reported sick, my Africa period has come in useful again, nobody calls round to check on my progress, my stoodents will be universally deprived of my classes on Carl Theodor Dreyer but since it takes about five sessions just to get through to these thinking telegraph-poles that he’s Dreyer as in live wire and hair-drier and hell-fire not threadbare or hair care or Lord’s Prayer or even the brassière of yesteryear which gets a few shocked inbreaths and some forms completed, I don’t think they’ll be in their deathpods weeping about it on their grandchildren’s silver foil all-in-ones around the middle of the twenty-first century somehow.

  Ho I’m so excited.

  Forget the snow chains. I’m going up anyway. I’m flying up. I’ve looked at the map and remembered that I am at the bottom of an extremely spacious continent and Zelda is fairly near the reasonably habitable top before it gets to be timber wolves and instant melanomas for several thousand miles till you hit the duty-free igloos and my beat-up 1958 DAF Sedan max speed fifty-seven m.p.h. would take so long to make it I’d be dribbling onto my bunions at the lakeside instead of showing Zelda my swan-dive and it’s dangerous going out in it anyway, the low-loaders and the stationwagons and the refrigerated trucks don’t notice me, I come up to about their hub-caps if I’m lucky, a ’58 DAF Sedan is 142 inches long from chrome to chrome, it’s my Monsieur Hulot hommage but no one in Texas has ever heard of Monsieur Hulot or even of hommages, they think you’re imitating the local swamp frog or whichever – hey, most people round here have stuff parked in their driveways with ten-gallon cans on the top like they’re ready to scatter some cattle skulls across the Staked Plains or take a splash up to their canvas through Big Bend country and come back with a cougar or two stretched over their hoods when all they’re used for is to go grab a drive-thru burger at three a.m. one block up and knock my geranium pot off with their buffalo guards, it’s ridiculous, I mean I could just tootle along the interstate and hold people up a little and then wave to them nicely as they eventually pass but waving nicely does not stop the rolled brolly pointing at you from turning into something you think you recognise from that computer-enhanced blow-up of maybe a person on the knoll in that TV documentary about One Day in Dallas too late to duck – let’s face it, you’ve irritated them and these are not the right guys to irritate, apparently about ten per cent of the human population outside of your regular homicides would very much like to kill people if given the social opportunity like war or civil anarchy or religious strife or being born in Sicily or Miami or São Paulo or my part of Houston or a jerk holding them up in a DAF Sedan with a hole in the floor and MY OTHER CAR’S AN ALFA ROMEO, SERIOUSLY in the rear window and there are a lot of faces behind the wheels on the interstates, the chances are not good of having Thomas Jefferson behind you all the way to Ottawa back. Hi. That was a bad splice. I’m back. My soul has been trampolined and the stretched fabric couldn’t take it, I hit the concrete, I wasted an airline ticket, I’ll tell you sometime but I have my art to get on with.

  I thought about getting my Congo machete and trimming out all that stuff about Zelda’s letter but it’s evidence, it’s evidence that I am at heart a passionate and irresponsible dickhead.

  O O O Yarooo

  Christ, Hotpost Services just called with my snow chains and it was the same guy. I hope you were joking about your Lassa fever, he said, because here are your chains. I undid them in front of him and wrapped them round his neck very tightly I’m afraid to say. Thank you, he said, thank you so much. I slammed the door on his nosepeel and pulled down the blinds and tried to think Howard Hughes. I even pissed into one of my jam-making jars and it was quite sexual so I’ve stopped that. Hey, maybe Howard Hughes is not the right model, he had this private screening room at Columbia Pictures where he’d jack himself off for God’s sake. I am not going to jack myself off in front of you while watching my own rushes, this is not a pornographic movie, there are all sorts of people out there who would be very upset. The guy keeps tapping on my window, I can hear his chains rattle, if I didn’t possess a clear and rational mind I’d be holding Des’s hand by mistake or something. Instead I groan now and again and yell out that I caught it off one of the original missionary nuns but he just says thank you so much and could I sign the Hotpost Safely Received form or something which is a clever one, everyone’s so darned clever, they keep pulling me around because I don’t get air between my dog turds and he’s probably one of the ten per cent, it’s lucky for Zelda that I’m not one of the ten per cent as a matter of fact, I just feel sorry for the very old nun with the rake, if she’d waited two more minutes before sweeping her first-ever perfect circle of one hundred maple leaves in fifty-eight years of continual sweeping I’d have been out of there, I wouldn’t have rearranged it with my foot into a broken heart, it just looked like a pretty regular O to me but I guess these nuns know when they see the real thing, I can still see her sobbing on Zelda’s crew-cut because this old nun was not short, in fact she was taller than me and really thin, I hope I haven’t snapped her into pieces. This was last month. Today is the first of the month. Fooled ya. She might be dying of grief by now. Zelda with a crew-cut’s just as beautiful surprisingly because she has very reliable features. I shouldn’t have gone up. Jean Riley the head nun must be a very impressive woman to overrun my charms but maybe Zelda will be happier with the pure life. I hope she presses it down. I told her this, I told her while the dust was still settling from her dumb show I guessed was the Complete Story of Human Kind from the first slow motion kill to the last slow motion kill but it wasn’t, about a minute from the end I realised it was Why I Am Staying Put & Don’t Need You Anymore and I started to do some semaphore because the vow thing was very strong, I stayed mute, I looked like I was guiding about five jumbo jets into their landing bays simultaneously but basically I was saying hey, I don’t believe this, this is terrible, you can’t do this to me, why why oh why etc. and then eventually I did a Marcel Marceau thing about how my great-great-great-great-grandfather & Son always pressed it down, they were totally reliable and deeply honest people and I hoped that she would learn from them and not leave lots of air between or use a bucket with a false bottom which was the other trick, guv, there were lots of tricks, there are always lots of tricks, the people with lots of tricks ended up flattening the honest-to-God buckets plus attached fingerless mittens with their BMWs, whoops, never saw it mate, that’s how it goes, here’s what I think is the state of my inner void, Zelda O Prisoner of Zenda.

  That’s when I did the maple leaves thing. It was quite difficult, actually, making it look like a heart broken in two, the jagged bits were really unclear and so was the arrow, she probably thought I had a couple of sperm whales on a barbecue stick in my inner void but I wasn’t exactly about to put a title on and sign it, now was I? If the ancient nun had actually once opened her mouth and told me to fuck off or had stooped down to my level and whispered that this was the amazing zenith of her long and tortuous spiritual path and could I not grade her life’s peak flat for my particular ten-lane superwide I might have stopped, I might even have tried to mend it or at least got it roughly back into a perfect circle, but she kept her vow of silence all the way through except for this incredible yip that suddenly came out as I tried to make the last maple leaf look like the tip of an arrow which is not easy and I really jumped, I think I might have had a satori or something if I hadn’t been so keyed up and suffering from some awful stress-induced indigestion from the celery salad on Air Canada and it was her, it was the first big sound she’d made for fifty-eight years and it was not happy, I could see that, she was sobbing on Zelda’s skull which must have been like sobbing with your cheek on a cactus but I guess that was the point.

  Hey ho. Everything
I do leaves this tacky stuff at the bottom of the glass which turns out to be guilt. I wish I could come out of things really clear. I wish these experiences could kind of burn me into something pure and clean enough to be poured into a Bugatti Type 35E radiator or whatever. I’d be so lucky. I think I’ll go clean my teeth instead. I need to take another time-lapse snap in the bathroom mirror for my art house short The Rise & Decomposition of Richard Thornby (USA, c. 1983–?, 2 mins).

  Hey, Dean Lazenby sidled up to me this morning and asked if I had heard anything. Yip, I said, your wife is a Branch-of-Something-Zen nun for life vowed to silence and your son is going to be reared speaking in Kojak reruns. You know what he said to me from under his fatigue shadows? He said Thornby, the nicest sight of my life’s gonna be seeing your butt walk out that door for the last time. Can you imagine? The first straightforward and understanding We Try Harder man-to-alien helpful answer I’ve ever given him and he chooses that moment to hit back, finally. Thank you for using my surname, I replied. You’re the first person in twelve years in this country to do so. I appreciate that. Then I ducked because he swung his Samsonite and hit the fire-alarm instead and emptied the building. I don’t think my gold watch has even been ordered from the special hand-sewn place in Geneva Makers of Timepieces to Rich Ass-Holes Since 1234.I think I’ll be lucky if I get an unframed biro doodle by the assistant security officer of the front of the HCDVA building by night with various armaments and exaggerated genitalia and wrongly-taken telephone message as a matter of fact. I hope they don’t try to dock my pension, guv, that’s all. I’ll fire-bomb the place if they do. No I won’t. I’m all lip. I’ll stand outside with a HANDS OFF MY PENSION placard and bob it up and down every day until the pension’s no longer required. Meantime the seasons will pass and nice students will put blankets over my knees and wheel me up and down in coffee-breaks and feed me tidbits and I’ll tell them stories of cabbages and kings and Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky and they’ll all pronounce Carl Theodor Dreyer like they were born in Esbjerg or somewhere. I’ll have a role in life, I’ll have so much of a role that when I’m gone the Ingrid Bergman look-alike who liked to hug me lengthily will organise a plaque welded into the pavement with a brief but moving inscription like RICKY STUCK OUT FOR JUSTICE HERE 1999–2038 or RICKY THORNBY: HE SHALL ALWAYS BE RECALLED, THE STOODENTS.