Still Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  Dedication

  Title page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Appendix

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956 and brought up in India, Cameroon and England. He has published two collections of poetry, Mornings in the Baltic (which was shortlisted for the 1988 Whitbread Award for Poetry) and Meeting Montaigne (1990). His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992. He now lives in France with his wife and three children.

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  POETRY

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  FICTION

  Ulverton*

  *available from Minerva

  In memory of

  Samuel, Malcolm and Nancy

  The most beautiful thing of all is the complete stillness of an audience so intent that it hardly breathes.

  Charles Laughton

  The author was the grateful recipient of a Wingate Scholarship from the H. H. Wingate Foundation during the writing of this book.

  Extracts from Notes sur le cinématographe by Robert Bresson appear with the kind permission of the author. Extracts from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones appear with the kind permission of Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company Inc.

  HANDSPRING OVER MY neighbour and check out the wing fire fairly frequently. Hey, it was hard manœuvring my own face out the way, it looked very old and lonely out there and wanted to tell me things, the pallor was exaggerated I hope by the cabin lights and three inches of perspex. I’m guessing three inches, by the way. Three inches sounds dense enough because any less and I’d start to get worried, I’d start to think twice about placing my face so close to somewhere very high above the Arctic Ocean and there’s still a draught that gets your nose iced over. You’d thought the whole thing was sealed up and triple-checked because if it isn’t sealed up the eccentric but adorable bobble-hatted old lady or whoever sitting next to you gets sucked out screaming suddenly and you’re only staying put because you’re clutching your in-flight movie headphones or the stewardess’s thigh or whatever. I thought about showing my movie in a 747 actually but I had to pay a pilot, they didn’t do a self-fly. Anyway, this wing fire was doing fine despite the ice particles, I could see it clearly beyond my wide and terrified eyes if I barn-doored the night lights, there was a kind of red flame and sparks and the wing looked like it was about to fall off, it was doing hand flexions or whatever, these 747s are getting old, they can’t just go on forever, something’s gotta give if you’re a lump of metal ploughing through alien air at some God-forsaken hour in some totally God-forsaken place just under outer space with only five hundred military personnel in ski suits and maybe a few white seals below you for thousands of miles and this ectoplasm over your shoulder that turns out to be the aurora borealis. I must have been saying oh God oh God or something over the snores of every single other passenger dribbling onto their neighbour’s shoulder or groin or even sockettes in some cases if they’d really slumped because this stewardess came up to me and said relax, sir, it’s only Arctic thermals, is this your first time up and I unstuck my nose and my twin plunged away screaming and I said, no, if you’re talking about aeroplanes, it’s my seventy-seventh, actually.

  If you’re late and you missed the beginning then frankly you won’t understand a single thing for the next twelve hours, you might as well go learn some manners someplace else.

  OK OK, it was the traffic, London has terrible traffic, you didn’t think of leaving an hour early despite the fact that you have lived here all your life or whatever and know for sure that you can only jerk anywhere. So you got very stressed up and kept looking at the invitation and pointing out to your chauffeur or whoever that it started at eight o’clock and you still had to park, Richard would be very upset if you came in late and then your chauffeur told you to shuddup for Christ’s sake because living together’s like that, instead of chilling each other out in a five-mile tailback with some vertebral massage you work each other up and shout and jerk and then say what you’ve actually now you’ve mentioned it been meaning to say for five years ever since and by the time I open the door and say hi, you people, come on in, you’re late you’re already negotiating on the splatterware vase with the chip you paid through the nose for but what the hell on that amazing weekend in Cromer when you couldn’t stop looking at each other in the bus shelter.

  Call me Ricky. Richard is granted to a select few, mostly dead.

  The bit you’ve missed was vital but I’m not rewinding and this is a unique screening, so shucks. It was something I wrote on the flight over, which if you weren’t trying to find your seat or grabbing a highball at the bar or yelling hi to everybody as if everybody wasn’t staring up here with their mouths open and their eyes flickering because they’re hanging on to EVERY WORD you’ll have realised I’ve just been talking about, so concentrate. It was a pretty scary flight because all the cans were in the hold and all of me was in the cabin and if the thing went down blazing and got the polar bears looking up for a moment there’d be nothing left of me anywhere else and NO COMPLEX MASTERWORK either, you’d just have been drinking highballs and jiving and cramming your mouths on my tick and maybe mentioning me about once, yeah, what a shame, they’ve found the wreck with sonars I think but it’s too cold to go down, what are you doing these days?

  Because I know this is a very exciting time, I know there are distractions.

  I hope you’re keeping your head dipped if you’re stood up in front of this, because if you have a large head or a ridiculous coiffure for the occasion or some fucking stupid fedora that keeps knocking everybody’s glasses off then you might be wiping out several days’ work on my part, light travels in straight lines, it doesn’t curve for anyone, not even you. Unless your brain’s a prism or you are a very special visitor from some hitherto unknown galaxy with an important millennial message to impart, biding your time. Bide your time a little longer and duck, will ya? You have another thousand years in front, don’t panic.

  This is the trailer, by the way. Or maybe the foreword. It’s filling in some large holes. It’s important, you’re not looking up and seeing this giant Coca-Cola can waterfalling while you’re treading on everybody’s toes nor are you wincing while everybody seems to be shooting everybody else one hundred times too big and missing the gangway step because Next Week is Mad Bastard 3 now the school vacation is over – we’re talking serious informational content here and if it’s smeared it’s not your contact lenses playing up it’s because this reel’s a daily and going in practically green, I’m scribbling in my kitchen, I’m between time zones and feeling like the Blob from Sirius after Commander Cody’s dealt with it, bear with me, I know this ninety-nine-year-old who’s got the keys to the Shepperton processing lab, they fired him or something for hand wobble or head shake, he’s worked with Max Sennet and maybe Frank Tuttle and he
’s a genius, he has nitrates instead of blood, he’ll rush my rushes through and it’ll be rolling loud and as clear as can reasonably be expected given this fucking biro and my brain and the fact that it’s TOMORROW you’re gonna be looking at this, cor blimey luvaduck guv, if only I had a little more peace of mind ummmmm.

  It’s certainly not the camera and it’s certainly not the projector if Joe the Gel’s on it. The projector is antique, it’s reliable, it cost a bucking bronco off a specialist dealer with sprocket holes each side of his brain, it takes 35mm silent like you’ve given it a free trip to the Seychelles or someplace, oars included. Don’t knock it. Don’t give Joe the Gel anything that might make his breath inflammable. If you feel a warmth on your head, DUCK. Crawl to your seat. Don’t wave your arms in the air. There’ll be intervals for your bladder contents to get recycled in, OK?

  I was never late, actually. I was always very early. I got there so early I was scowled out by the kiosk lady and sometimes by the big padlock and chain across the double doors made of laminated bronze or something. I’d go round the side and look at the back of the screen like I was looking up a girl’s skirt, it was all raw naked brick and there were no windows, the drizzle played on it, there were stains off the gutters at the top and it frightened me because it was so BLANK. I’ll talk about this in about two hours, right now I need to cover some lost ground before the main feature. I was talking about the flight. I think I nearly died from heart strain over this wing blaze because I was the only one awake who realised except for the stewardesses who were either very cool or androids, they had built-in gyroscopic stabilisers or something – I’m checking out the conflagration trying to count the red sparks and then the nose-cone hits a very tall iceberg or whatever and Miss Gotta-Be-A-Wig comes running up to tell you to keep your voice down and your language clean because, sir, EVERY SINGLE OTHER PASSENGER is asleep. Hey, they are, it’s true, it makes you feel lonely and unwanted under your nose-bleed and if Miss Gotta-Be-A-Wig wasn’t actually only about five years younger than you if you were to peel everything off of her face you’d try maybe to start something at 3.21 a.m. But she trips back down the aisle as you’re zigzagging on the spot and you haven’t even mentioned the wing falling off in a fire-ball, she looks the kind of person who might scoff and make you look a real jerk. On the other hand, you don’t want to be the jerk who killed five hundred people because I didn’t want to look a jerk, he commented afterwards. From fifty feet down in this chance snowdrift.

  My table’s scratched. OK. Leave it.

  Planes are ships on borrowed time, you yell after her. But she’s already straddling the navigator behind that creepy closed door at one end the stewardesses always come out of with a sly smile giving you just a teeky-weeky glimpse of balloons and winking lights and highballs and party poppers like right now, like right now in every house worth peeping into all over the world, heading for the unknown on only one good wing, bub. And now your hands are moving because you’re trying to remember which is port and which is starboard, you’re swaying up the gangway past the galley towards the cockpit because you have to speak with Captain Peck personally but you can’t say there’s a worrying flame situation in the left wing, he’d just shake his peg-leg at you from under Miss Buck-Teeth ’99 and tell you to jump overboard, so instead you just go soak your sockettes in the toilet and pray.

  OK, God listened, obviously. Or He lip-read because I cannot imagine for a moment that He could hear anyone stuck in a stainless steel toilet inside this metal prophylactic Somewhere in the Night over the greatest ice sheet known to man however loud the appeal. My granddaughter can lip-read, by the way. She loves silent movies because they use such filthy language. Hi, Hilda. Glad you could make it.

  Yeah yeah, and the Lord did respond. The landing was hopeless because of the peg-leg probably or maybe Heathrow Inc have put down some authentic hand-chipped cobbles on Runway Three for the Japs or whoever but the trees slowed down and so did my heart and I fell asleep for fuck’s sake, I slept for the five miles it takes to get to passports on that moving belt that turns your stroll into a joy-ride and I slept on the baggage carousel until some amazing Colombian brunette picked me out and also in the train despite all the jerks and all the way up the stairs to here. To my ridiculously dear walk-in England so tiny the broom has to wait outside.

  Ho ho. You know what this is called? It’s called a warm-up. It’s called a dope-massage. It’s called firing-the-brain-dead so they actually move their jaws to the right position every now and again. I hope y’all doing that. Ricky Thornby’s back in town.

  I fell over. Kind of. I slid off the table. Nervous exhaustion. I woke up immediately but my clock says it’s been two hours. You can’t do that at fifty-nine. You can’t adopt a position with your butt up in the air and your wrist torqued and sleep for two hours unless you’re twenty-two and flexible. But from my general pain situation I think I did. Hey, I feel mentally MAHCH BETTER, GUV. Which means chilled out and dreadful. I’ve just shot what I’ve scribbled and I’m ashamed. But there’s no time for a remake. No time. Cor blimey no.

  I thought the trailer would be finely wrote, as a matter of fact. I don’t mean italic handwriting, dumbos, I mean content, style, all those things you people don’t believe in any more. I thought all you guys and gals at the party’d be drooling over it. Hey, Dick the Prick can write! He took a wrong turn way back! Too bad it’s too late! Maybe it’s not too late! It wasn’t too late for Mary Wesley!

  Mary who? You mean Wesley? You mean the one who wrote that crap my pal Jerry Freeman lost the film rights to back in ’89 and said it was all my fault because I’d kept him too long on the phone and that’s when I told him to fuck off out of my life because I’d talked for about ten seconds and I’d been trying to get him for weeks? Give us a break, I might get jealous.

  That reminds me. Fanfare. A coupla thousand of Cecil’s trumpets and a gong. Now’s the time. It’s as good as any other.

  The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,

  Sing all a green willow;

  Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,

  Sing willow, willow, willow.

  You know something? About this song? (Othello, dumbos. The William Shakespeare version. A great scene. I’ll have you know, who might not for some incredible reason like being in an iron lung for thirty-three years, that I was on set for the Larry screen version in ’66 giving kind of technical advice, I was at my peak, my advice was ACTUALLY BEING SOUGHT AFTER, I fell in love with Maggie as in Smith, I watched her sing it and cried – I really cried, my nose ran, I was sacked because I became totally useless. I started at the top and worked my way down etc. Big deal. No one knew why I cried. It had nothing to do with Maggie, it had everything to do with the raising of some titanic memories best left to the barnacles. So stick around.)

  You know something?

  I want it carved into my tombstone. The willow song.

  Seriously. It’s in my will ho ho. It’s written down. I’ve written it down because if it wasn’t in black and white and blotted carefully my lousy relations wouldn’t do it. I mean, Gregory my son might, and Hilda my granddaughter might, but my nearest and weirdest and their terrible spouses’d stop them. They’d say it’s too expensive, they’d say it’s not done, they’d sip Australian brake fluid at my funeral and say it’s not done, he was always barmy, what’s good enough for Mum is good enough for Dicky, and I’ll end up with just my initials and a couple of dates and my initials are R.A.T. Des’d love it. Des my brother has been waiting for me to cop it for years so as he can put RAT on my tombstone. Richard Arthur Thornby. Christ, my parents were thick. Nay – my mother was thick, my father was (is) malign. He did it deliberate, dinne? Good for a chortle, eh? Oof. I’ll bet he did. Most of you don’t know this little legacy of mine. I’ve been R. T. for forty-five years. I let the trapdoor open under Arthur when I was fifteen. I heard him scream all the way down, out of my life, and walked forth R.T. for ever and ever amen. But Des remembers.
He’s a fucking elephant. He calls me Ratty. We have to meet now and again, every funeral, every wedding, every so too bloody often. Hallo, Ratty, he chortles, how’s tricks? He likes slapping guys on the back. It’s how the English cope. They don’t kiss, they don’t hug, they just disable you. They? I mean we. I’m one of them. I’m Des’s closest relative after our mutual progenitor. We shot out of the same organ. Imagine that. He takes off my accent. Waal, whad’ya know, it’s the Yank! Over-sexed, over-paid, and over here! Great joke. He’s always joking. Every time he opens his mouth it’s like pulling a cracker. Actually, he’s very depressed. I know. I can tell. He stayed, I got out. But they’re all back there with him, waiting. They’ve got your old skin in their hands. They’re waiting until you’re helpless, dying, dead. Then they’ll zip the skin right over you, the old sloughed skin, right over you and over your head. Hoi, I didn’t want to get on to this. Not yet. I’m scribbling against time. I have to fill in some holes.

  Maybe I should write in block capitals but it’s slower. I don’t know what the fuck the time is. I’m between zones. I’m feeling terrible. I’m thinking – this party tomorrow night, it’s too much, I want to bury my head in the futon, ouch, I can’t face it, I can’t face all those people, I can’t face the most important day of my life, how did I get to this point? I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m doing here, I’m still bucking, the kitchen floor is not stable, I’m nauseous, we’ll crash, we’ll crash in flames at any minute, into the waves, into the anomynomynymous waves of slumber and I’ll wake up and I’ll have blown it, I’ll have missed the party, I’ll have wasted the day, I’ll have wasted twelve years of my life, you stupid cunt.

  I’ll fix myself a coffee in a moment. Right now I’m too stressed. I need the toilet. I’m intercontinent. Hey, that’s the first joke! Dick the Prick’s on form! Things are going to be OK!

  I hope I’m getting the focus right and hey, sorry about my thumb if it’s bothering you. I’m working in terrible conditions, the Sellotape’s run out, Greg and Mee stayed here over Christmas so all the fucking vital things like Sellotape and string and toilet paper and whisky are missing. I’ve picked the pink Blu-tac off of the Christmas cards they’ve stuck up all over my pure white walls which is why you’re getting speculars off the glitter. I apologise. I’ve tried blowing but the stuff catches in the little hairs on my palm. I’ve NO TIME TO CARE. Holy shit, the camera’s making the kind of noise my neighbour with the cockroaches just overhead likes to report, it’s very old, the intermittent’s a couple of pterodactyl claws, the actors had to shout to make themselves heard, you’re lucky there’s no soundtrack on this one or your teeth’d be coming loose. Or maybe looser ’cos, hey, we’re no longer what we were, huh?