Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Chuck me some secateurs. This blackberry’s sucker’s on Last Warning.

  So, Gavin me old mucker. When Startlingly Fluorescent Cagoule One screams there’ll be just the skeleton with this rusty scale model of the Eiffel Tower attached to its right hip kind of spreadeagled under the Coke cans and used boom-arms and the other half of the Cindy doll. We won’t require you then, Gavin, you’ll be out on the Big Trail by that juncture.

  If we cut the whole drowning thing don’t get upset, for God’s sake, don’t go running out and jump into the Hemel Hempstead Municipal or something, it’s all a question of time and motion and being a nut.

  Yeah, the old lady with the incredible boil on her eyelid was right, I think she had some romance in her and I love her because she’d only drink lemonade, it was a pity she had to slip in the snow or she’d still be around to clutch my elbow and tell me things between the gravestones – she even kicked Calypso once when she was ten, the cat went feral and nicked her bread ’n dripping or something. Hey, she understood what it takes. She understood what a very strong commitment to the fact that you have loved someone even though that someone has pretty well ignored you and your needs it takes. I told them this after they’d given me an HCDVA Executive Half-Page Diary for the year 2000 with full colour portraits of the management instead of the quadrophonic megawatt hi-fi system plus A Sentry of Your Favourite Melodies (great joke, great joke) in a five-volume set they lavished on the assistant security officer for a lifetime of devoted terrorising while pumping his hand and hugging him – January was Crew-Cut in shorts and August was Vyshitface with his five kids at his boots and December was Dean Lazenby holding his Samsonite in front of a rubber-plant before his breakdown obviously, it must have been too late to change it, you can even see a fire-alarm but I don’t think it’s the same one. Shame, I’d have preferred a doodle by Baldie Head actually, my ten-minute speech of thanks was greeted by the sound of the air-conditioning and someone’s electronic wristwatch alarm or maybe it was the secure hospital’s secure-van reversing for me, I dunno, I made a crack about the sound of one hand clapping which reminded me of Zelda so I waved my glass around so much my lemon flew out and said hey, the fact that this is probably the crappiest arts college in the universe run by people who would sell our ass-holes in plastic bags if it turned a buck and who wouldn’t know a good movie from Baldie-here’s dick and you’re subserving it does not prevent you from walking through some long grass into a pool in an English bluebell wood for love and grief so slow and steady it stays as still as it was before you entered right up to your neck and beyond though it probably will, it probably will. I was very heated by now, Vyshitsky removed the lemon from his lapel after some new guy who picks the management’s noses for them had pointed it out to him and he didn’t know what to do with it or me, so he gave it to the nostril-crawler and left. They all left as a matter of fact and without so much as a bleedin’ by-your-leave, guv, just a kind of mumble and one of them broke wind I think accidentally and none of them looked at anything except the carpet squares and then the door-knob. All except Baldie Head who wanted to get even about this heyar reference to his total heyar-loss and the other praaavit thing the Lord forgive me in that order so I stopped doing my hand-cranked projector mime and gave him my executive diary I’d tucked under my armpit in the kidneys and tried to walk through the glass door like that shot cop in Bullit but just kinked my straight Trevelyan nose. Then Baldie kinked it some more and I’ve had to sell my Oscars to pay for my bridge replacement, I’m sorry, I was hoping to do a slow pan of my several Academy Awards at this point ending on my bare feet about halfway up the wall turning slowly from side to side. Shucks. Too bad. My nose is better, thank you. I look like my dad now. Or maybe Steve McQueen.

  You’re ripening. Stay put.

  The moonlight is definitely my grandmother’s right shoulder and clavicle and not my fern, by the way. Plus dear Christ a bit of her hip. The ghoul hopping around is my unclothed grandfather taking his final sock off, probably. There’s a smell of snuffed candles which makes him sneeze and he says sorry and shakes his thumb because he didn’t wet it enough. Now my grandfather’s where my grandmother is which is on the bed. Rosebud, he whispers. Seriously. The picture-hook kind of travels over his mouth and then his ear and ends up just above his head over the mould stain and her hand. What the hell is her hand doing up there. It’s laid flat against the wall and the only giggle is some faint laughter from the wood where she really ought to be situated right now, bathing, bathing happily and nakedly and forever with the others in the silvery pool by the light of the moon laid like a silver salver in the darkness with my head hovering over it not knowing which to take, the pound note, the pound note or the one bob ticket, the one bob ticket or the pound note ‘cos SPECIAL CHILDREN’S MATINÉE ONLY meant as much to me as GREAT HEXPECTORATIONS in them days, son – cor blimey, I couldn’t even read me own future.

  Hey, there’s never enough time to choose. The third gong is striking. The door opens and this ancient ape with frost on his shoulders and a glittering forelip enters. My mother steps away smartish. He’s holding this woodland pool under moonlight. I’m projecting, I’m not thinking that at the age of five or even nine, it’s just that we’ve done some aerial shots of the woodland pool and it’s an obvious Thornby cross-cut, he’s coming right over and up to me and the woodland pool is thrust under my badly wrinkling nose, I’m looking into it and I see myself, maybe I’ve drowned, maybe I know the undersides of lily-pads intimately, Christ, the white-gloved thumbs each side are getting a bit shaky and their owner’s breath’s whistling like it’s about to depart for Paddington toot toot and there’s another drop of mucus on the nicely buffed silver with my face in it, my face oh Gahd, my sweet little nippery face down there with a pursed mouth, a fat pound note with the King of England over one eye and a little yellow one bob ticket over the other, I could read that much, I could read 1/- for Christ’s sake and I wanted to take both plus a Dinky flat-bed and Smarties after but life’s not like that, my face is really huge down there and this voice comes out of the darkness and says choose, dear lad, choose – it’s really loud despite the hoarse quality because there’s an All-Comers Niteplay and they’re thousands of ’em, I’ve had to keep my head down, they’re swinging some very wild shots and getting Texan angry about it, I’m crouched very low for my age watching my big face up there looking down at me and this hand’s coming out, I can’t decide which side this is being shot from, maybe I’m the reflection side for fuck’s sake if the face is on high, it’s terrifying, there’s this growl in Sensurround willnae ye make up ye mind shrimp which helps this 3D silvery hand come right out and you should see the actual hand but you don’t, it’s just coming straight for us like a fucking steam-train, the whole cinema’s full of screams, these huge fingers are lunging right out for my throat but it’s OK, before I scream it takes the yellow thing floating between us because it likes the fancy curly-wurly way BIOGRAPH is written for crying out loud, it was as stupid as that, I raise my head an inch above the sofa-back and a golf ball practically shaves my left eyebrow but the face with the giant hand has evaporated, the silvery mirror has evaporated, it’s been taken away along with the pound note and the lavatory smell, there’s just a couple of eyeballs left, a giant pair of white rolled-up eyeballs in a stripe of Niteplay lights or maybe it’s Mike come back with his specials or maybe it’s bastard Des my bruvver or maybe it’s Lightfoot gagging or maybe it’s my mother’s eyes getting checked for death by Doctor Orwell or maybe it’s Jefferies playing the beast through the carriage window suddenly upside-down and hissing who’s a dirty rascal and I gasp a sweet little high kind of asthmatic gasp that makes the eyes sink back and down into the darkness because listen, dumbos.

  You missed it. Happy New Year. Hey, before you all tip over the chairs and the glasses and my antique projector in the rush out just take it easy, slow down, the rest is in the cans and they’re fairly waterproof.

  This ebook is copyright
material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446498194

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  A Minerva Paperback

  STILL

  First published in Great Britain 1995

  by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd

  This Minerva edition published 1996

  by Mandarin Paperbacks

  an imprint of Reed International Books Ltd

  Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 6RB

  and Auckland, Melbourne, Singapore and Toronto

  Copyright © 1995 by Adam Thorpe

  The author has asserted his moral rights

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 7493 9622 9

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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