‘I have a call for you from Sol Mazzaroth,’ said Lucretia.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘bring forth Mazzaroth in his season.’
Sol stepped out of the telephone and looked at me in disbelief. ‘Herman,’ he said, ‘was it a bad dream or did you actually phone me at three o’clock this morning and say you couldn’t do it?’
‘Yes, it was a bad dream and that’s what I said.’
‘But why, Herman? Surely you’ve done tougher adaptations for me: look at War and Peace, how you got through it in twenty-five pages, I still tell people about that.’
‘I know, Sol. This is just one of those times when something that was whatever it was becomes something else and all of a sudden it’s too much.’
‘Herman, when I think of what we’ve been through together since the old Hermes Foot Powder days I can’t believe this is happening. Together we built Classic Comics and made it a beacon of literacy at newsagents everywhere. John Buchan, Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo - you name it, we put it in speech balloons.’
‘Believe me, Sol, I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. If it weren’t for you I’d still have to bath and shave and go to an office every morning if I could find an office to go to.’
‘And you’re going to throw it all away.’
‘You know how it is,’ I said. ‘There comes a time when a road comes to an end and you have to say, “This is the end of the road.’”
‘But it’s not the end of our friendship,’ he said.
‘Of course not.’ We both looked at our watches.
‘Well, it’s going to be a more hectic day than usual. Take care, Herman.’
‘You too, Sol,’ I said as he climbed back into the phone and was gone.
So here we are then, I thought. This is the first day of the rest of my life. I got dressed, had breakfast, hurried to my desk. The corpse of the current account was half-buried under discarded pages. I uncovered it, went through its pockets and found enough to live on for six months if I managed very carefully.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s get organized.’ My voice was frightening in the silence. I switched on the radio and got the Voice of Greece with male and female singers one after another singing songs with ‘S’agapo’ in the refrain. All of them sang the words soothingly, almost lullabyingly. S’agapo, s’agapo. I love you, I love you.
‘All right,’ I said again. The football was still on my desk. I took it to the usual place near Putney Bridge and dropped it into the river.
When I got back I sat down and typed on to the screen:
1 LOOK FOR FREELANCE COMIC WORK.
2 TRY TO FINISH ORPHEUS STORY WHEN HEAD TURNS UP AGAIN.
3 NO MORE OTHER PEOPLE’S ORPHEUS.
Ring, ring, said the telephone.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ said a vigorous female voice, ‘this is Hilary Forthryte, I’m with Mythos Films. I hope you don’t mind my ringing you up out of the blue like this.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Can you talk for a moment or are you in full spate?’
‘Not yet, I’m a late spater.’
‘Ah! I know what you mean. What I’m phoning about is to ask you whether you might like to do a film with us. We’ve got Channel 4 funding for six one-hour films under the series title The Tale Retold; we’ll be doing new versions of old myths and legends with six different directors. The first one I’ve spoken to is Gösta Kraken and he said he wants to work with you and a composer called Istvan Fallok.’
There was a pause at my end.
‘Do you know Kraken well?’
‘No. I’ve only met him once.’
‘But you’re familiar with his work.’
‘I’ve heard about Codename Orpheus.’
‘But you haven’t seen it?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘We’ve got a print of it, I can arrange a screening any time you like. What’s interesting is his use of Orpheus as semiosis rather than as story.’
‘Ah.’
‘We’ve also got prints of Bogs and Quicksand - those were the last two before Codename Orpheus and you can see his obsessions developing, his preoccupation with wetness and ooze as primal mindscape and his vision of a discarded world. Anyhow, without committing yourself at this point, do you think you like the idea in principle?’
‘Have you got a subject in mind for our film?’
‘Eurydice and Orpheus.’
‘But he’s already had a shot at that.’
‘As I’ve said, he’s obsessive. He says it’s an inexhaustible theme and he’s got a lot of new ideas for another approach.’
‘What sort of money are we approaching it with?’
‘We’ve got a budget of £250,000 per film; that works out at £8,000 each for director, composer, and writer, plus residuals. That’s not a lot of money but you’d be completely free to do what you like and I should think it might be quite fun if you’ve got the time to take it on.’
‘All of us getting paid the same, I’m surprised that Kraken agreed to that.’
‘He looks on this as a necessary exploration and he’s particularly keen on an equal partnership with no ego trips. I thought perhaps the four of us could meet for lunch. Would Thursday be all right for you, one o’clock at L’Escargot?’
‘That sounds fine.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to see Bogs and Quicksand and Codename Orpheus first.’
‘I’ll just have a look at Bogs to begin with, I’ll save the others for later.’
Forthryte arranged a screening of Bogs at Mythos for the next day, Saturday. I rang up Melanie to ask her along.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been phoning you for days.’
Oh yes, I said in my mind. Did you phone me on Monday as you said you would? Did you phone on Tuesday? ‘I went to The Hague,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Would you like to see Bogs with me tomorrow?’
‘The Kraken film? Yes, please.’
16 Blvgsvo
The plain white gothic capitals on the flickering black said:
BOGS BLVGSVO
‘What language is that?’ I said to Melanie.
‘He makes it up,’ she said. ‘He likes the effect of subtitles. In his book, The Flickering, he says that under our ordinary speech there are always invisible subtitles in an unknown tongue. In all of his films since 1975 the actors speak in English and the subtitles are in Krakenspeak.’
There was music, something rather like the Bach B Minor Mass played backwards, as words appeared on the screen:
Between the dead city and the threshing floors lay the bogland.
NIM VUGMIS NIM DENGSVO ZOKNIS NA BLVGSVODMA.
Squelching and sucking sounds were heard and from a very low angle we saw, black against a dark sky, bulky figures in wellingtons crossing a boggy landscape:
Three times daily came the messengers.
TIMTAM TOM RIG SHOLDIK.
Over the music there came snippets of voices speaking in several languages at irregular intervals as the scene cross-dissolved to two bearded men, well wrapped up, inside a very dark hut:
One day…
TOMZO…
‘I’m going to the bogs,’ said the man on the left.
VLAJO BLVGSVO.
‘Why?’ said the one on the right.
ZOM?
‘Why not?’ said the one on the left.
DOMZOM?
The two men stared hard at each other and cross-dissolved to a bog under a dark sky. The camera moved in to look at some water. Under the water was a woman in a wedding dress. Her mouth moved as the water became ice. She seemed to be saying, ‘Never.’ There was no subtitle.
‘Did she say “Never”?’ I said to Melanie.
Melanie nodded.
A man sat by a blackboard with his head in his hands. ‘There is only one quintessential image,’ he said.
ZVEM NULZI LODZA NURVURLI
A little boy appeared and opened a
newspaper-wrapped parcel to show a small severed hand. ‘Look what they gave me,’ he said to the camera.
NAL ZAL RIN DOMZI
A flight of white pigeons filled the dark sky as the camera tilted down to their reflection in the water which was no longer frozen.
‘The blackness is the ultimate dialectic,’ said the bearded man who had been on the left in the hut. He was sitting in the water.
LEVSNOK FURMIL SNEV.
‘I think I want to go now,’ I said.
‘I’ll see you later then,’ said Melanie. ‘I want to see the whole film.’
I sneaked out of the building without meeting anyone - the place was mostly empty - came out into the thin wintry sunlight of Wardour Street and went home.
The film had started around two o’clock in the afternoon. I was expecting Melanie by five or six at the latest but she didn’t turn up till well after eight.
‘I thought I’d get here sooner,’ she said, ‘but Gösta Kraken turned up at Mythos and we went for drinks after the screening.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Did he show you his ultimate dialectic?’
‘Ah. Here we go.’
‘No, there you went.’
‘That sounds rather final.’
‘There you went for drinks.’
‘Yes, there I went for drinks, I do that sometimes, I’m a drinkivorous person. Why’d you walk out of Bogs anyhow?’
‘I find that I don’t want to be with Gösta Kraken’s mind all that much.’
‘That’s going to be a problem if you’re working on a film with him, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe I can live with it. I need the money.’
‘Are you sure it’s his mind that’s bothering you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean him and Luise.’
‘He’s told you about that, has he.’
‘Yes, he has. It seems to have a mystical significance for him, as if it’s created a metaphysical bond between you and him and Istvan.’
‘Feels more like bondage.’
‘Maybe bondage is what you really like. You seem to enjoy harnessing yourself with regrets and chaining yourself to the past.’
‘I’m not even sure there is a past,’ I said. ‘My life is littered with old action like empty beer cans but it’s all in the present.’
‘Let’s get some full beer cans and some fish and chips,’ she said.
We went to a place near her flat in the North End Road. The fluorescent lighting and the white tiling amplified the roads and voices in my mind while asseverating the particularity of this only, this distinct and unmerged moment. I noticed again Melanie’s eyes as they had looked the first time I saw her, open wide, with white showing all round the pupils. Clip-clop, her little black boots had gone in the shady grove of her sudden woodland. She had just said something.
‘What did you say?’ I said.
‘I said that fish and chip shops are metaphysical.’
‘Everything is.’
We took the fish and chips and beer up to her flat near the West Kensington underground station. The room that overlooked the street was large and uncluttered; the walls and ceiling were white, the overhead light was an orange paper globe; there were blue drapes on the wide window; there were a drawing table with a typewriter and an Anglepoise lamp on it, a blue wooden chair, two red filing cabinets, and some unpainted bookshelves in which among the books and typescripts were a tape deck, amplifier, tuner, turntable and speakers. There was a large print of Rousseau’s Sleeping Gipsy. Under the desert moon the gipsy woman slept, the lion watched, the stillness waited. In the background a green river and a range of mountains.
I wondered what was moving at this moment in Gerard David’s mystic wood at the Johan de Witthuis, I wondered what was rising from the pinky dawn water between the beach and the Island Tamaraca. I’d told Melanie about everything but Medusa.
Looking at the Sleeping Gipsy, I said, ‘What do you think is going to happen in that picture?’
‘First tell me what you think.’
‘I think the gipsy is in a dream. The lion isn’t in the dream so the gipsy is safe for the moment. But if the gipsy wakes up or the lion falls asleep there could be big trouble.’
‘You’ll notice’, said Melanie, ‘that the gipsy’s got a lute or a mandolin.’
‘Yes, I notice that.’
‘Well, this gipsy’s been busking around for a while and she’s tired of doing it alone. Her birth sign is Leo so she’s put an ad in Time Out: “MUSICAL LEO SEEKS PARTNER.” The lion answered and they’ve arranged to meet by the river but he’s late and she’s fallen asleep waiting for him.’
‘The question is’, I said, ‘has he got any talent?’
‘If not he can always get by on his looks,’ she said.
We ate our fish and chips and drank our beer contentedly; our windows were golden in the night. From the front window I looked down on the Saturday night North End Road and saw Gom Yawncher go unsteadily past with a bottle in his hand. He was singing:
Yessir, I can boogie
but I need that certain song –
I can boogie, boogie-woogie
all night long.
Yes, I thought, maybe I’ve got that certain song now. She was so beautiful, there was in the air such bright promise of nights following nights. I walked around the room taking in the herness of it, looking at book titles, picking up small objects. On the drawing table next to the typewriter was an A4 folder. Eurydice and Orpheus, it said.
‘Eurydice and Orpheus!’ I said.
‘Yes. I’d rather you didn’t look at it.’
‘You’re writing something.’
‘Yes.’
‘For yourself? Off your own bat?’
‘For Classique. It’s the one Sol wanted you to do and you turned down.’
‘He didn’t waste any time, did he,’ I said.
‘There’s no mandatory waiting period before someone else has a go, is there? Especially as you’d already wasted whatever time there was to waste.’
‘Sol told me to give it my best upmarket thinking. Are you thinking upmarket?’
‘For four thousand quid I’ll think however he likes. It’s a commercial proposition.’
‘And you’re a commercial person?’ As I said that I told myself there was no reason why Sol shouldn’t offer her the same money he’d offered me; looking at it with strict objectivity and grinding my teeth a little I accepted that all those years of speech-ballooning hadn’t made me worth any more than the rankest beginner. And the novels, after all, counted for nothing.
‘I’m no more commercial than you are,’ she said. ‘I’m just doing what you’ve been doing with your comic-writing all these years - I’m buying time.’
‘You’re working on a novel.’
‘Don’t worry, it isn’t catching.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, you recoiled so violently that I thought I’d better reassure you.’
‘Reassure me that there’s no danger of my writing a novel.’
‘That isn’t what I meant but if that’s how you choose to take it then all right.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m being stupid.’
‘You said it, I didn’t,’ she said.
‘I wonder if we could possibly wind back the evening to where we were just before I saw that Eurydice and Orpheus folder?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Now the gipsy’s wondering whether the lion really is a lion or maybe just two very small blokes in a lion suit.’
‘Two very small blokes,’ I said to my face in the mirror as I brushed my teeth alone at home, ‘and no boogie-woogie for either of them.’
17 Where Do We Go from Here?
‘Veuve Clicquot,’ said Hilary Forthryte to the waiter. She was a vivid-looking woman with long dark hair and she was wearing a Ralph Lauren safari outfit with very expensive boots. Sitting next to her was a small gimlet-eyed bearded man in a leather jacket. ‘My
partner Ivor Dreft,’ she said. ‘We thought it might be a good idea for him to be in at the beginning of this.’
The skylight in the top-floor dining-room of L’Escargot let in a better class of daylight than was available in the street; the people in the room all looked as if they were in full colour in a Sunday supplement. Youth and beauty, talent and fame were all around me.
‘Hilary!’ said an immense bearded man, also in safari clothes. He kissed Forthryte on the mouth and during the kiss they both said, ‘Umm-mmhh!’ When they’d done that he made signs of professional recognition to Kraken, Fallok, and Dreft and nodded pleasantly to me. You may be nobody, said his look, but you might have money or influence and what does it cost me to nod pleasantly. ‘Are we going to see you on Sunday?’ he said to Forthryte.
‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ she said, and immediately I imagined a great coruscation of youth and beauty, talent and fame. ‘Ferdy Phyvemill,’ she said, ‘Herman Orff.’
‘Hi,’ said Phyvemill, getting the better grip and crunching my hand.
‘I’ve got your Lost Incas of the City on tape,’ I said. ‘I’ve watched it four times so far.’
‘Piracy,’ said Phyvemill. ‘Send me money. Are you in the business?’
‘Herman’s working on a Channel 4 film with us,’ said Forthryte while I manifested humility.
‘Doing what?’ said Phyvemill.
‘Speech balloons,’ I said.
‘Herman’s a writer,’ said Forthryte.
Phyvemill withdrew his earlier pleasant nod. ‘Watch him,’ he said to Kraken, made his farewells, and hulked off.
‘His last picture was a disaster,’ said Kraken.
‘It grossed $50 million last year,’ said Dreft.
‘Plus it came top at Cannes and kept a lot of people in work for almost two years,’ said Forthryte.
‘Most of them were shooting documentaries on Ferdy Phyvemill at work on his film,’ said Kraken.
‘Was that The Secret History of the Mongols?’I said.
‘More like the secret history of the Brits,’ said Fallok. ‘The only Mongols were the extras, the horses, and the porters.’
‘Here’s to Eurydice and Orpheus,’ said Forthryte as the waiter filled our glasses.