Still Read online

  Cor blimey luvaduck. I hope I’m not repeating myself. I’m thinking about y’all. I’m thinking about all those people who’re going to be there tomorrow. I’m thinking about you reading this and saying, hey, he’s still repeating himself. I can see your faces. I can see you squinting at this. At this. At this.

  At this.

  Wow, that’s weird. Some of these faces I know so well I don’t even have to imagine them, they’re just kind of more slouched with bad hair around them. Hiya there, Ossy, y’bastard!

  Some of the other faces I’m not so sure about. The phantoms’ll be in the front row. Hoi, it’s their film. Don’t sit on their laps. Just don’t get in their way.

  Christ, this party. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand the fact that it’s tomorrow. As long as it was next week, or next month, or next year, or in nine years’ time, I could stand it. But it’s tomorrow. My party’s tomorrow. Tomorrow is my birthday. Tomorrow is the Big One. Once this tomorrow was in nine years’ time. I mean this. It was, once. Hey, seriously. What d’you expect? You’ve got a suite, a suite with a terrace, a suite with a terrace overlooking the fucking Thames. I booked the last one available. I booked it nine blahdy years ago, mate. I worked out how, leaning out a little, you’d get the official fireworks, the big jobs, the ones that burn out their hundred quid in ten seconds of the Second Coming, then pop some more, then bloom into a thousand crimson blooms, then go quiet and dark, then spray a million peacocks over the city with a Semtex bang and a mass whoo from underneath and a yaroo from whoever’s got it melting their shoe. I thought, there won’t be room for everyone to lean out. There’ll be shifts, or some people won’t like bangs and whizzes and stay inside, or others’ll be English and stay pissed off and polite at the back, seeing only the rockets if the arc is tight. The bigger ones were all booked. They were booked ten years ago. Hey, I apologise. At least you’ve got the bleedin’ river, mate, the cobbled wharves slapped at an’ all that, ghost ships swingin’ their crates, the sound of peg-legs tappin’ an’ inn signs creakin’ an’ me dad wiv his barrer, yellin’ ’orribly. There’ll be some minor B-rated fireworks around. People will bring their personal squibs. We can light the blue touch-paper on the terrace and stand back and try to look impressed for Christ’s sake. There’ll be boats. There’ll be pleasure-boats plying up and down gushing with peacocks and their reflections we can all ooh and aah over. If anyone’s grumbling I say to you hey, why didn’t you git up off your fat arse ten years ago, huh? Because that’s when the big suites were booked. I thought ahead. I mean it – this was the last one available, on the blahdy river, anywhere. Now hold up yer mitts and count the fingers if you can count that high ’cos that’s what it cost me, guv. A cage o’ monkeys at bun-time. Poetic thought, faintly Japanese: no party tonight will be quite right unless it faces flowing water. Hey, way above y’heads, dumbos.

  Oh Zelda.

  I haven’t invited my first wife. My second is dead, of course, some of you know this, so she might or might not be there. If she is and she’s not snoring – ignore her, she doesn’t mean it. My first wife is currently under the notion that I’m tacky, that I’ve done a very tacky thing with Hilda, which is simply not true. Hilda wanted to be present. She wants it. She wants to be with her grandad. As her grandad, I can only open my arms and say, honey-bun, come right in. Just don’t bring any of your Friends of Woodstock ’99 to shame us. It’s my party. I did not write to Hilda insisting. There were no bribes. Hilda’s had nothing more than a box ticket for Hotchpotch (the crap musical, not the great film) from her grandpop for two years. (Lighting box, I mean. My friend Joe the Gel was doing lights.) No bribes, no bribes whatsoever. I’m too damn skint, for starters.

  That’s me dad speaking. Nasal, Enfield coming on Cheshunt. He never had no pretensions. Too damn skint, for starters.

  Hoi, listen. The Earl of Sandwich saved the King. Naval battle. Can’t recall the details. Charles, it was. Poncy Restoration types lining the poop, misty, a slight swell, moisture beading in their wigs. You’re an earl, says Charles. Cor, says the Earl of – oops! Earl of what, Your Highness? Earl of wherever we touch first, says Charles. The Earl of Wherever We Touch First is quite excited, standing on the poop, his toff gloves feeling the wetness off of the poop-rail. The coast looms. He quite fancies the Earl of Dover (my father winks at me mum, I fake a grin). Cor, says a partially deaf ancient mariner, it’s England. Where are we exactly, where is that? lisps the Earl of Whatever-the-ancient-mariner-is-about-to-reply. Sandwich? says the partially deaf ancient mariner, undoing his greaseproof. I’ve got tomato-and-herring, if you’re partial.

  Yup, that’s how Dicky Thornby learnt history, at his father’s elbow, jabbed on the end of it – oof! Geddit, son? He had one book. The Percy Anecdotes. Anecdotes collected by the Percy family. They’d sell books off the barrows, along with the fruit and veg. Our lot, not the Percys. Old books. Books from bookclubs run by crooks as cover for the white slave trade or whatever. This one they couldn’t sell. He claimed he’d filched it off the barrer. Crap, Pop. It slipped into the interstices (now that’ll fox you, mate) of the free market. He still has it. It’s his Bible, for crying out loud.

  Sing willow, willow, willow.

  None of the uncles is coming. They weren’t invited. Anyway, most of them are dead. The least dead one got out years ago. He’s in Melbourne. Eighty-eight and fighting fit. He writes to me. He wants to be in one of my movies. He thinks I’m still in movies. Well, I AM. He’s seen Ridden Out, Honky Tonk and Honky Tonk Two (the better half, if you harken to the critics. Derek Malcolm said so. The lesser of two evils. Yah, yah). The others weren’t dizzed in Australia, not on the big screen. He has a video but I haven’t told him. Anyway, they’re rare, they’re collectors’ pieces, they’re hard to track down. I’m talking of Will There’s a Way and Homhitch. These titles. They’re like a woman you wake up to in the morning and don’t recognise but she’s made you tea in the right mug.

  I should be so lucky.

  The second least dead one most of you know. He’s been in all my films. He was Kierkegaard in my first short, print lost, history down the plug-hole. But he can’t come. Gerald can’t come. He’s busy. He’s building a wind machine on the beach of Bognor or someplace. He’s tied his trilby to his head with elastic. Otherwise it’d bowl along like nobody’s business, way off along the sands of Bognor, the shingle of Bognor, the fucking agonising pebbles of Bognor – whatever, I haven’t been there. Gerald Ursule Thornby. Ursule? Is that a slip of me blotty biro? Nope. Ursule it is. Like some medical appliance one don’t mention, as my pop would say, what didn’t like Gerald very much. Gerald’d only have to crack his knuckles to get everyone falling about, that’s why, and he was too feeble as a kid to push a barrer the requisite distance. My old man always was a bully, not so deep down. He lacked ’uman sympafy. My films lack ’uman sympafy. Derek says so – has said so on many occasions, I can show you the cuttings if you handle them carefully ’cos they tend to crumble. Toff. Ponce. Wouldn’t know what ’uman sympafy was if it smashed him in the teeth.

  Yup, I’ve always had a soft spot for Gerald, if I could find it.

  Listen. I’m getting derailed. It’s not deliberate, it’s not me being smart, it’s me with an iced nose still winding the big hand in me small brain forward, OK? I’m no moth, mate. I’m lagged. Yeah yeah, I kipped. I kipped for ten minutes on Norman Mailer’s latest and I need to see my chiropractor, bom bom. Have I said we had turbulence? We had turbulence. I hate flying in the winter. I have this thing about snowstorms at night twenty thousand feet up. This film I went to see as a kid, the first film I ever went to totally on my own, I was nine, the old Enfield Ritz, Saturday morning, a drizzle, it always drizzles on Saturday morning, it was called, it was called – heck, I’ve forgotten – anyway, it had this sequence which had me sucking on my duffle-coat’s top toggle so hard it came off and I nearly died. These toggles were the size of enemas. I reckon they were enemas. It got caught in me red lane. They fitted a young
boy’s red lane (look it up, look it up) exactly. I didn’t try the other place. If I’d had a sister I’d have hired it to her. For a shilling, of course, ’cos I wanted to haggle with Donald Benson for his Lotts Bricks Box, Set E. You could build a Municipal Sewage Works with it, Tudor style, with gables, mullioned windows, the works. Blow me down. This sequence, I was talking about this sequence – it was great, it was awful, you were looking at the cockpit, the lens was set on the twin-prop’s nose and it made me feel carsick. Screams. Snow. Oh crikey, thick swirls of it, against the cockpit, just about see the pilot’s eyes, oh crikey. Wind machine going flat out, buckets of fluff tossed in front, cockpit bouncing like crazy, pilot’s knocked out or got the vapours, hero grappling with joystick, joystick comes off, top toggle comes off, sticks in throat, I’m dead. My fear of flying is nothing to do with sex, OK? I explained all this to my analyst when I had one. (A phase, a phase.) She said I was projecting. I said hey, I’ve always wanted to project. Sweeping the smoke for the screen, finding a film at the other end, hoping it doesn’t bomb. Miraculous. Works every time. She nodded carefully. I had to be carried out. Of the Ritz, I mean. They whacked me on the back and out it shot, rolling under the Number 49 to Palmers Green. Me mum’ll kill me if I don’t get it back, I rasped. True. The Number 49 ran over it, Stevie Smith bumped her head on the top-deck rail, I got my top toggle back, intact. The Princess and the Pea, Enfield version. They knew how to make stuff in those days. Oh yes.

  That thing about projecting. Part of another little party popper. Blitz in the Ritz. Hoi, geddit? Me dad’s legacy. Jokes that need explaining. Damp squibs. Fireworks and a torch with the jitters. The Catherine wheel that believes in only one revolution a century until you get too close. Whop! The sound of fireworks even cheaper than your neighbours. I mean, even cheaper. At least their rockets fart.

  Hey, why am I so angry?

  This was going to be cool and explicatory, not angry. My classes’d start cool and explicatory, I knew the ropes, I got angry later. My kitchen table’s been scratched. I don’t care. I feel terrible. I’m nervous. I’m about to be sixty. I’m about to be old. Do not go gentle into that good night. My father’s still alive. I’m about to be old and my father’s still alive. We’ll both be old at the same time. It’s not fair. How can he do this to me. How can He do this to me? I jog now and again, I wear casuals, I don’t have a tie, I’ve never seen The Sound of Music, a million-to-one-chance, I know, it’s never seeing snow on a mean person in Switzerland or seeing my lips flapping in slomo with the sound not off, it’s incredible but possible, I was avant-garde, I had the film rights to Narziss and Goldmund before Hermann Hesse was invented, I made love while John Lennon was playing with his lead soldiers, I was hip, I was cool, I was outrageous, I bombed up the Marylebone Road in a Daimler Conquest Open Roadster once, I took drugs, I took Diana Rigg to the movies, it was my movie, I had a Cocteau cap and cigarette holder, I chortled in French. Remember?

  Hoi, I’m talking to you people. Remember?

  Great days, great days.

  I think of Roy, Roy Plomley. I knew Roy, Roy Plomley. He promised. He promised I’d be on it (Desert Island Discs, deadheads.) One day Dicky, he said, you’ll be washed up, I’m sure.

  Great joke, huh?

  Actually, I never thought that others’d creep up on you so quick. I’m talking about youf. I’m a grandad! You know who I hate? I hate the boomers, the groovy boom-babies, the boom-baby-boomers in their tie-dye bloomers. (Opening song from Hotchpotch, you ignorant bastards.)

  Seriously, I have relational problems with a generation.

  You don’t know this?

  I wasn’t one. You know that, you know what I was. I was a BOOM-boomer, born in an air-raid shelter, the stupid type which killed you. They took away my youth, that peacetime polio washed-in-Daz lot. I’d just got rid of my spots and they made me feel old. Christ, I was on the edge of thirty in ’68. Thirty, sixty, what’s the difference? I’d made a few movies but suddenly I was old, comfortable, clapped-out, a fucking Morris 1100 Saloon with Grandma in the back feeling very comfortable, thank you dear. I was idiot enough to wear a black polo-neck when bandannas were in. I looked like Colin Outsider and felt it. I made the right noises, oh yeah. I squirmed naked in some mud, once, on stage, for Ken. Ken Campbell. Made no difference. It washed off. Very comfortable, thank you dear.

  Phantoms.

  I’m not feeling angry. I’m feeling nervous. I’m still feeling nervous. That’s why I’m not going to have a coffee. I drank coffee all the way over. My ears are still humming, humming One of Our Aeroplanes is Missing. Hey, yeah, I know it’s safe as houses, million-to-one copper-bottomed safe, the flames were the fucking wing-lights given the nadgers by the ice particles, etc etc. But you know what keeps a big heavy jet high up in the sky? A vacuum above the wings. Think about it.

  And thrust.

  Thrust and vacuum. That’s me. That’s my life.

  Sing willow, willow, willow or whatever.

  Anyway, who said houses were safe? Most accidents are in the home, for God’s sake. And mine’s been smashed up twice, back in Houston. Nice neighbourhood. Nicely distressed fronts. Nice English statuary, authentically nicked, lifted out of some forgotten corner of a genuine English lawn so big they thought the Sikorsky was the flymo – Echo with hand up crotch, Pitys scratching her moss, Syrinx squeezing into her swell reed outfit, dip the hysterical laughter, I haven’t finished. Tudor Mansion Kits (real woodworm, real woodworm, guv). Sprinklers with built-in radar, mastiffs who don’t like their analysts, gravel driveways you have to wade up – get the picture? I say to them, what’s so great about England? It’s a dump. It’s mean, peevish and little, as my pal Jonathan Windmiller put it once peevishly ’cos someone had said his Show wasn’t the greatest thing since the Siberian shamans. They love it. The Texans, I mean, not the blahdy shamans mate. They’ve only been to Windsor Castle and they love it. We even have a pub. It’s an exact copy of a pub I happen to know, back in the old country. I say, sipping my Pigge Swille, shielding my eyes from the flare off of the horse brasses, this isn’t England. This is about as English as the set of Suspicion. People drift away like I smell. Maybe I do, but that’s not the point. I stand alone. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to know the genuine cast-iron authentically traditional hand-buffed troof, guv. I try not to get pissed. When I get pissed I get magdalene. I went to Magdalene College, Cambridge, I say. Magdalene with an e. If it hasn’t got an e it’s the Other Place. I wasn’t a blue, I was a red. OK OK, maybe I start to shout now. Dudley was at the one without an e! That’s why he’s a scug! I made love with my bedder! I bet he didn’t! They don’t understand what I’m yelling. I feel Union Jacked down to my underpants, my tinnitus is whistling the Selected Beatles, I raise my glass and look around with this Alec Guinness grin playing over my bottom lip. There’s a crop-headed barman out of Terminator 2. He wears these terrible sort of solarised shirts. I thought, the first time I went in, he’s the only orfentically English thing in here. I was right. My act gets nowhere when Jason’s about. Tinkerbell’s tiddly again, he says, so why doesn’t Tinkerbell fuck off out and join Wendy in Never Never Land, eh? I don’t know why he has this nickname for me. It’s worrying. It takes the wind right out of my gaff topsail. The beer’s terrible. He waters it down. He mixes the IPA with some American junk that has a big head and a big flavor. Otherwise no one’d come. Who can blame them? Real real ale’s so real it tastes like it isn’t. That’s why I like it.

  Sorry about the corner on that last one. I could wind it up, scroll it up on a toilet roll. I’d have problems with the focus. Stay with me and ALERT. Anyway, I’m out. Retired early without honours. The Houston Centre for the Dramatic and Visual Arts (Film Section) is gonna be sunk without me. I’m shaping the future. I’ve seen it, it aches, it needs a massage. At least I have a walk-in swimming pool. I walk into it every morning and eat an avocado. Seriously, I do, a whole one and they’re Texan. The pool’s small but it can take my Monroe infla
table and the ripples cluck like my mother used to when I chewed my Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum and I was doing the advert for Christ’s sake. Very early days, but still. Have style, right?

  So, about this plane trip: I drank coffee through the night when I wasn’t tucked up with Norman Mailer and my neighbour’s elbow and now I feel terrible. I’M OUT OF CHICORY AND THE LAST TOILET ROLL’S DOWN TO THE SUTURE. I can’t cope with having two homes each side of the Atlantic either financially or mentally. Someone’s used up all the chicory and not replaced the essential. That’ll be Mee and Greg respectively – Greg has always spun the roll until it touches ground before tearing it off seven times over, it’s a childhood habit, he practically ruined us, maybe I should have lowered the holder, maybe I should have done a lot of things when I think about it. Have I mentioned Mee? Mee, or Mi, is my son’s partner. She’s Chinese-American with a pinch of St Helena. St Helena! Hey, she could be related to Napoleon in some sneaky way! She’s beautiful but she’s a health freak. She uses up all my chicory powder and all my lentils and anything in big chunky blue-glass jars with cork lids because anything in those looks pure, unmilled, all that crap, even if it’s not. I’ll lay traps for her. I’ll empty the best the US can offer into one of those jars – real Agent Orange schmuck the colour of bri-nylon striped underwear and see if it goes. It will, it will. When I’m next over.