Contemporaneous activity changes her perception of the co-generated emotional content occurring on the back of a failed reflex. For example, she is raking grass in her back garden and detects movement in peripheral vision. She reacts mildly, she turns and looks. Imagine, however, that there have been rumours of an intruder in the neighbourhood; perhaps earlier in the day she had seen a rat. Her reactions are more extreme.
There is a time before I am rich and famous. It is the time before Big Bang. The birth of the universe? Not quite.
It's 1985, I am twenty-three, my father is rich and famous. He writes and directs movies and lives in California. I never see my father. Sometimes, very occasionally, we talk on the telephone but mostly The Lawyer handles everything. The Lawyer has taken care of the Hilltown family’s affairs ever since I can remember. We have never met, however, and I don’t even know his name, no one does, apart from my father. The Lawyer is a Brahmin; he only meets with other Brahmins, men like my father.
I am re-learning the art of breathing: something extraordinary has happened to me and it has made me strange. I’ve been living for some time now in Kent, in a small but comfortable hotel for strange people. The proprietor of the hotel is Julius Wayne-Grove M.D., M.R.C.Psych. I’m due to check out soon.
One of The Lawyer’s business cards visits me. Its bearer, it tells me, is Peter Clarke. He isn’t a lawyer; he’s the Lawyer’s Personal Assistant. I wonder if he’s ever met The Lawyer. I conclude he must have. You can’t be a Personal Assistant to someone you’ve never met, can you? And if you have a Personal Assistant you have to have personal contact, surely?
The Lawyer’s Personal Assistant has slicked-back hair with auburn highlights. He wears a loose-fitting, big-shouldered suit, braces, aviator sunglasses – although today the sky is overcast and threatens rain – and a pager clipped onto the waistband of his trousers whose purpose, I assume, is to facilitate contact between himself and The Lawyer (this is a time before everyone has a cell-phone). He calls me ‘Jon’ at every opportunity, and insists that I call him ‘Peter’. I wonder why he assumes that I would call him anything else, apart from, perhaps, ‘Personal Assistant’ or ‘Errand Boy’.
I’m ready to file him in a fake-crocodile-skin personal organiser labelled Misguided Yuppie Losers when something about his anxious eye-flicker makes me pull back.
Sympathy is problematic when you live in the present tense but I still have this strange, very English and often paradoxical weakness for animals, especially dogs and horses.
My father talks about the dogs, in the early hours when everything is still and the only important thing is to keep life moving, away from the east end, away from the past, away from poverty, away from crime. That’s his motivation, not to be like the dogs, and it’s a goal he never quite achieves. The dogs conceptualise, the dogs are instinctive, responsive and reactionary, like my father. He feels what the dogs feel: comfort, warmth, pain, hunger, cold and fear.
He tells his friends, as they relax on his private beach or gaze luxuriously out from his city penthouse window, immune to the unmentionable fetors of the sea or the city’s unpublished skin, that sometimes he can still hear the dogs thinking.
I can hear The Lawyer's Personal Assistant thinking. I decide to call him Duke, after my uncle’s pet Doberman. I always wanted a dog for a pet but my father wouldn’t have one in the house.
The Lawyer has found me a new apartment, on the top two floors of a converted townhouse in London Fields. Duke has some papers for me to sign. I sign.
The Lawyer has organised a new bank account for me, with the Very Special Bank.
I’m no good with money, I tell Duke, I already have a bank account and it’s a mess. Of course, he says, but my father wants me to start afresh, and with the Very Special Bank. Come on, Jon, what can be wrong with that? He launches into this spiel, like he’s trying to sell me the fucking company. When I bank with this bank, no matter what stage of my life or career I’m at, I benefit from a wealth management service that includes banking and investment and financial planning expertise delivered in a personal way with an extensive range of flexible products and services specially designed for clients such as myself who are seeking a full, private banking service etc, etc ...
I mean…
Duke has some more papers for me to sign. I sign, but my signature turns out to be a formality: The Lawyer, it seems, has already taken care of everything – Duke hands me my Very Special cheque book, my Very Special bank card, and my Very Special Classic Card, which is a credit card but not just any credit card. No, Duke stresses, this Very Special Classic Card, with its understated design, is useful for those circumstances where discretion is important.
Discretion is like water to me. Look in my eyes, kid, and tell me what you see. Fields of green? A rabbit with one eye? A room full of art? There’s nothing else. What else should there be, another dawn breaking, maybe; a new day banging on your door, embracing you, screeching like murder at the edge of the forest, tearing pages from your book of sleep like a fascist, dragging you from your dreams like a detective, a negro double bass-player’s vacuum-cleaner smile at twilight, with a gris-gris sack full of honey for the Jazz Bear?
Get real. Have a drink with Judas Iscariot, son, good old Judas with his aviator sunglasses and his big-assed suit, oh yeah, the big J.I., he can show us all a trick or two and God made everybody, right? That’s the nature of blood, right? The blood of our fathers? The blood of our children? That’s what eternity is and Duke’s going to be right along with me any time I need him, to help me out with any problems I have re-adjusting, he’ll be my Personal Assistant, my own private Judas.
When he mentions Cloudy, briefly, time jumps, and a crack appears in the present tense experience; I see myself twenty years from now:
I love her. Late at night I think about her, slip a disc in her and turn her on: her darkness hugs me like velvet. The low lights create highlights that shimmer, then I cry. So I drink and listen to the Bird and imagine her playing that beautiful jazz. Nobody’s fooling anyone. For twenty years she mixes that brass and breath and now it’s a hymn from the other side of heaven. The sax teaches her to sing and the traps and the bass and that belligerent guitar unite and become her heartbeat and her rice-paper-thin-voice-skin freezes beneath those lime-lights. She is born for this; I’m just a pair of ears. But I still feel her nerve-ends stinging like a hi-hat shimmy slightly but workably out of time, still recall her touch, almost like being alive again but ever so secretively, and when the music’s over I sleep and dream she still lives and when I awake I walk naked through the rooms and when I have searched every one in vain I make coffee and dress and realise that I will always be a honey for the Jazz Bear.
That negro double-bass player clinks some ice into a glass just after midnight and I call a taxi.
One-thirty in the morning at the top of the Funny Farm steps. It’s an amazing space, the doorman’s always there, always looks the same, ill-fitting Crombie and a bad-luck smile, a raindrop for every tear, an epic Queen’s lament:
‘Fear the bandanaed man,’ he cries, like a swallow hovering over a dead city, sweetly but darkly, and ever so out of context.
My friend, the taxi driver, my non-existent friend, thinks he may be a bat. The doorman doesn’t hesitate, just pencils him out – one cab-driver that’s never coming in here as a guest – like the artist he is, in a simple one movement exploration through a savannah ruin: a farm, a Funny Farm, a Spandex hill, Lemmy at a corner table; the Highlanders to his right; a couple of record company execs with hookers; the guy who plays keyboards with The Specials; whosoever-cool-has-been-gigging-in-London-tonight-and-every-waiter-and-bar-tender-and-hooker-in-the-know taking up the slack, the union delicately defining the horizon…
I pay my imaginary friend and tell him to hover around upstairs sometime just before dawn.
I am a turtle abusing a violin, dying, a mouthless man with a trumpet, famous for nothing and nobody knows why but somebody says my father’s a Hollywood big-shot, falling over, as everything falls into place, or space, or doesn’t, his latest movie’s the best, and the guy is so cool even though he must be a hundred years old…
So, as his son…
But I’m welcome here, anyone who’s anyone knows who I am. I’m at the bottom of the steps, the restaurant screaming and stinking above me, endless labyrinthine corridors all the way to nowhere reeking of expensive piss and facing me an entrance that declares, in obvious, un-white horror:
‘This Door Is Alarmed!’
I throw up. That makes two of us. Then it’s Bridget, hanging on my collar. I kiss her, softly at first, then, as it senses her heat, my tongue parts her teeth and savours her palate, with extreme prejudice, and, fearful still, she opens. I can’t remember climbing the stairs but I obviously did. I shout for a large Irish and extra ice and a new, ever so young waitress whom I’ve never seen before brings me a pint full.
‘You stink of vomit.’
‘Well, I have just thrown up.’
‘Never mind. Toot?’
‘Toot? Sure, oh, yes, absolutely,’ slipping Bridget’s purse into my coat, sipping the top off my Irish, manoeuvring myself gracefully and with great cool out from behind our table, winking at the new, ever so young, waitress, whom I’ve never seen before, but who’s been making it plain since I got here that she knows damn well who I am… And then it’s back down those creepy steps again to that terrified gateway.
There is a time before I am rich and famous. It is the time before Big Bang. The birth of the universe? Not quite.
It's 1985, I am twenty-three, my father is rich and famous. He writes and directs movies and lives in California. I never see my father. Sometimes, very occasionally, we talk on the telephone but mostly The Lawyer handles everything. The Lawyer has taken care of the Hilltown family’s affairs ever since I can remember. We have never met, however, and I don’t even know his name, no one does, apart from my father. The Lawyer is a Brahmin; he only meets with other Brahmins, men like my father.
I am re-learning the art of breathing: something extraordinary has happened to me and it has made me strange. I’ve been living for some time now in Kent, in a small but comfortable hotel for strange people. The proprietor of the hotel is Julius Wayne-Grove M.D., M.R.C.Psych. I’m due to check out soon.
One of The Lawyer’s business cards visits me. Its bearer, it tells me, is Peter Clarke. He isn’t a lawyer; he’s the Lawyer’s Personal Assistant. I wonder if he’s ever met The Lawyer. I conclude he must have. You can’t be a Personal Assistant to someone you’ve never met, can you? And if you have a Personal Assistant you have to have personal contact, surely?
The Lawyer’s Personal Assistant has slicked-back hair with auburn highlights. He wears a loose-fitting, big-shouldered suit, braces, aviator sunglasses – although today the sky is overcast and threatens rain – and a pager clipped onto the waistband of his trousers whose purpose, I assume, is to facilitate contact between himself and The Lawyer (this is a time before everyone has a cell-phone). He calls me ‘Jon’ at every opportunity, and insists that I call him ‘Peter’. I wonder why he assumes that I would call him anything else, apart from, perhaps, ‘Personal Assistant’ or ‘Errand Boy’.
I’m ready to file him in a fake-crocodile-skin personal organiser labelled Misguided Yuppie Losers when something about his anxious eye-flicker makes me pull back.
Sympathy is problematic when you live in the present tense but I still have this strange, very English and often paradoxical weakness for animals, especially dogs and horses.
My father talks about the dogs, in the early hours when everything is still and the only important thing is to keep life moving, away from the east end, away from the past, away from poverty, away from crime. That’s his motivation, not to be like the dogs, and it’s a goal he never quite achieves. The dogs conceptualise, the dogs are instinctive, responsive and reactionary, like my father. He feels what the dogs feel: comfort, warmth, pain, hunger, cold and fear.
He tells his friends, as they relax on his private beach or gaze luxuriously out from his city penthouse window, immune to the unmentionable fetors of the sea or the city’s unpublished skin, that sometimes he can still hear the dogs thinking.
I can hear The Lawyer's Personal Assistant thinking. I decide to call him Duke, after my uncle’s pet Doberman. I always wanted a dog for a pet but my father wouldn’t have one in the house.
The Lawyer has found me a new apartment, on the top two floors of a converted townhouse in London Fields. Duke has some papers for me to sign. I sign.
The Lawyer has organised a new bank account for me, with the Very Special Bank.
I’m no good with money, I tell Duke, I already have a bank account and it’s a mess. Of course, he says, but my father wants me to start afresh, and with the Very Special Bank. Come on, Jon, what can be wrong with that? He launches into this spiel, like he’s trying to sell me the fucking company. When I bank with this bank, no matter what stage of my life or career I’m at, I benefit from a wealth management service that includes banking and investment and financial planning expertise delivered in a personal way with an extensive range of flexible products and services specially designed for clients such as myself who are seeking a full, private banking service etc, etc ...
I mean…
Duke has some more papers for me to sign. I sign, but my signature turns out to be a formality: The Lawyer, it seems, has already taken care of everything – Duke hands me my Very Special cheque book, my Very Special bank card, and my Very Special Classic Card, which is a credit card but not just any credit card. No, Duke stresses, this Very Special Classic Card, with its understated design, is useful for those circumstances where discretion is important.
Discretion is like water to me. Look in my eyes, kid, and tell me what you see. Fields of green? A rabbit with one eye? A room full of art? There’s nothing else. What else should there be, another dawn breaking, maybe; a new day banging on your door, embracing you, screeching like murder at the edge of the forest, tearing pages from your book of sleep like a fascist, dragging you from your dreams like a detective, a negro double bass-player’s vacuum-cleaner smile at twilight, with a gris-gris sack full of honey for the Jazz Bear?
Get real. Have a drink with Judas Iscariot, son, good old Judas with his aviator sunglasses and his big-assed suit, oh yeah, the big J.I., he can show us all a trick or two and God made everybody, right? That’s the nature of blood, right? The blood of our fathers? The blood of our children? That’s what eternity is and Duke’s going to be right along with me any time I need him, to help me out with any problems I have re-adjusting, he’ll be my Personal Assistant, my own private Judas.
When he mentions Cloudy, briefly, time jumps, and a crack appears in the present tense experience; I see myself twenty years from now:
I love her. Late at night I think about her, slip a disc in her and turn her on: her darkness hugs me like velvet. The low lights create highlights that shimmer, then I cry. So I drink and listen to the Bird and imagine her playing that beautiful jazz. Nobody’s fooling anyone. For twenty years she mixes that brass and breath and now it’s a hymn from the other side of heaven. The sax teaches her to sing and the traps and the bass and that belligerent guitar unite and become her heartbeat and her rice-paper-thin-voice-skin freezes beneath those lime-lights. She is born for this; I’m just a pair of ears. But I still feel her nerve-ends stinging like a hi-hat shimmy slightly but workably out of time, still recall her touch, almost like being alive again but ever so secretively, and when the music’s over I sleep and dream she still lives and when I awake I walk naked through the rooms and when I have searched every one in vain I make coffee and dress and realise that I will always be a honey for the Jazz Bear.
That negro double-bass player clinks some ice into a glass just after midnight and I call a taxi.
One-thirty in the morning at the top of the Funny Farm steps. It’s an amazing space, the doorman’s always there, always looks the same, ill-fitting Crombie and a bad-luck smile, a raindrop for every tear, an epic Queen’s lament:
‘Fear the bandanaed man,’ he cries, like a swallow hovering over a dead city, sweetly but darkly, and ever so out of context.
My friend, the taxi driver, my non-existent friend, thinks he may be a bat. The doorman doesn’t hesitate, just pencils him out – one cab-driver that’s never coming in here as a guest – like the artist he is, in a simple one movement exploration through a savannah ruin: a farm, a Funny Farm, a Spandex hill, Lemmy at a corner table; the Highlanders to his right; a couple of record company execs with hookers; the guy who plays keyboards with The Specials; whosoever-cool-has-been-gigging-in-London-tonight-and-every-waiter-and-bar-tender-and-hooker-in-the-know taking up the slack, the union delicately defining the horizon…
I pay my imaginary friend and tell him to hover around upstairs sometime just before dawn.
I am a turtle abusing a violin, dying, a mouthless man with a trumpet, famous for nothing and nobody knows why but somebody says my father’s a Hollywood big-shot, falling over, as everything falls into place, or space, or doesn’t, his latest movie’s the best, and the guy is so cool even though he must be a hundred years old…
So, as his son…
But I’m welcome here, anyone who’s anyone knows who I am. I’m at the bottom of the steps, the restaurant screaming and stinking above me, endless labyrinthine corridors all the way to nowhere reeking of expensive piss and facing me an entrance that declares, in obvious, un-white horror:
‘This Door Is Alarmed!’
I throw up. That makes two of us. Then it’s Bridget, hanging on my collar. I kiss her, softly at first, then, as it senses her heat, my tongue parts her teeth and savours her palate, with extreme prejudice, and, fearful still, she opens. I can’t remember climbing the stairs but I obviously did. I shout for a large Irish and extra ice and a new, ever so young waitress whom I’ve never seen before brings me a pint full.
‘You stink of vomit.’
‘Well, I have just thrown up.’
‘Never mind. Toot?’
‘Toot? Sure, oh, yes, absolutely,’ slipping Bridget’s purse into my coat, sipping the top off my Irish, manoeuvring myself gracefully and with great cool out from behind our table, winking at the new, ever so young, waitress, whom I’ve never seen before, but who’s been making it plain since I got here that she knows damn well who I am… And then it’s back down those creepy steps again to that terrified gateway.
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