When the moon landings happened (or did they?!) a phrase was made that should be inscribed on the hearts of everyone alive: "We now live on a world that has put a man on the world."
There are many poeople who insist that we don't, in fact, live on a world that has put a man on the moon. They insist that the whole endeavour was a Hollywood fabrication, done to scupper them dirty ol' Reds in Russia and their filthy Communist dreams of Space Domination, and to demonstrate that the Mighty You Ess of A was that greatest nation in the world. Ever. So there.
A Cold War lie,in other words. I have two close friends - people whose minds and reasoning abilities I otherwise admire and respect - who hold this belief. This astonishes me, and gives me cause to stop and investigate my prejudices once again. My unthinking mind tells me that people who are capableof independent, critical thought would never hold such viewes. Just goes to show. These people, of course, remain respected friends. It's just that I now look at them a little differently.
A year or so ago I was having a quiet yarn with my father, and he told me that he was a part of the radar team who spotted a Japanese reconnaisance aircraft, escorted by several fighter aircraft, on its way to New Zealand's pacific shores during the Second World War. The RNZAF radar team he was a part of directed a squadron of New Zealand interceptors to the Japanese craft, and the enemy planes were destroyed. My relationship with my father changed at that moment. I had never known that he had been wholly or even partially responsible for the deaths of about a dozen fellow human beings. His rationale for doing so was exemplary, of course - but I had always imagined his war years to have been unstained by combat of any description. Now, crushingly, I saw that he still felt the burden of that occasion. That day in 1944 changed him, and the day he told me about it changed me, and my perception of him..
The day Armstrong stepped onto the moon changed everyone on Earth. The vast majority, of course, knew nothing about it. Vast swathes of Africa, India, and Asia still had no radio or television communication: they were lucky if they had sporadic electricity. But to the hundreds of millions who had access to a television set or radio, the future suddenly changed. We now lived on a world that had put a man on the moon.
The conspiracy stories started almost immediately. With a staggering lack of evidence or proof - but with a determined hatred of tall poppies - nay-sayers picked up their bullhorns, and started spouting their bull. Their reasoning was (and remains) that it's a lot easier to have tens of thousands of individuals join together in an enormous lie, and for many hundreds of journalists suddenly and completely lose their incredulity and investigative powers on this one topic only than it is to actually acheive something magnificent.
I have friends who believe in a god of some description, and I would never reject them for that - so I must make allowances for the friends who believe, against the evidence, that the moonlandings where all faked.
My real concern for the past thirty-odd years is that despite the fact that we live on a world that has put a man on the moon... we've forgotten it. Right now we're indulging in a bit of a PR orgy of hey, wow, gee whiz we did it-mania. But what will be top-of-mind in three months time?
I think mankind needs something magnificent to do. Getting mack on the Moon, and using it as a springboard to the planets would be a fine thing indeed. And it's something we can all have a part in... and it's something that will benefit us all.
If we set aside $10 for every man, woman, and child in the developed world twice a year for the next ten years, we'd be able to contribute $60 billion a year to the international space exploration agency. And even though I am currently very poor, I have my first ten dollars in small change available right now. I won't miss it. And I won't miss watching thye tele for the next time we get a man on the moon.
LISTENING TO: Blind Faith. Clapton at the height of his powers. Brilliant.
READING: Neil Gaiman, "American Gods" and JK Rowling "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".
WORD OF THE DAY: Curiosity. Without curiosity, mankind would still be in the trees.
MORE HARRY! Time to find out about The Painting....
“The painting?” There was a small smile on Henry’s face, and Buster Gibbs later swore that Henry Talbot’s face glowed when he turned to the portrait.
“Yes, Sir. The Painting.”
“Everyone wants to know about the painting.” And Henry’s mind flashed back all those years. He still remembers what he had been doing when the knock came at his door on the second floor of 147 Upland Road, in Wellington’s leafy Kelburn. He had managed, just, to do three hundred press-ups on the trot. He didn’t really know why he needed to do them, but there was something black and nasty at the back of his mind, a heavy despair, and he wanted to sweat it out. The blood was pounding in his ears, his arms and neck and shoulders and back and gut were quivering, and perspiration was running into his eyes and he was thinking that he had another twenty in him, and there came three sharp raps on the door.
He stopped, and his muscles immediately started to freeze and lock in place. He let go, collapsing, and called out “half a mo’, be right there.”
And, yes, in half a mo’, he was. Mind you, it was a mo’ that seemed to last for a few decades. His right arm was cramping up, the bicep turning into a vicious little ball of steel-hard acid, and he turned the doorknob, and pulled the door open towards him.
“The top right hand corner of the frame smacked me right between the eyes. Not this frame: it’s been changed half-a-dozen times since then. Whims and fancies. The frame it had then had sharp corners, and this one opened up a wound. The scar’s still there.”
Gibbs looked. A triangular scar, right where Dirty Harry shot the bad guys.
The painting had only been started then, but Henry wasn’t to know that. All he knew was that his arm hurt, he had a five-foot high thing that was trying to kill him, and blood was pouring into his eyes.
He heard a whistle from the front of the house, and raced to his window. Looking down on the steep walkway which led up to his bed-sit, he saw her: flame red hair, pale oval of a face, flashing green eyes, and a cheesy grin. She waved, and trotted down the step to the roadside, where she hopped into the passenger side of a red Mini with a Union Jack painted on the roof, and raced off. The painting thumped to the floor, and he turned back to it, wondering who was driving the Mini. Then he thought of Hazel, and he blushed, knowing what the black thing was that had made him hammer his body. Not Hazel’s fault, of course. He could have said no. Yeah, right.
The painting was, happily, face up. There were five brush-strokes on the prepared canvas, and a few dots. The background had been prepared and painted a reasonably uniform grey, a little paler where there was a flash of curling red. A dot of green with an even tinier golden dot, a sensuous brown slash down one side, and, looking at it, Henry immediately knew what Mary would look like, naked. He blushed. Two more lines showed where the hands would be, and there was a vague hint, a mere wisp of shadow of a fog of, my god, it’s her, her, and he grabbed the painting and pulled it into his room, and made a space for it on the wall, and hung it. It wasn’t until the next week that he noticed her signature: Mary Talbot.
“She came by again, a month later, and added a couple of lines, a shadow, and now, after nearly, what, 25-odd years, give or take, with an addition here, an erasure there, that’s it. So far. It’s a work in progress, and probably will be until the day I, well, the day I die. Or the day she dies, probably.”
“It’s stunning, Sir.”
“Hank.”
“Right,” said Buster Gibbs.
“Look there: that’s Adam, our son. See him? He’s in Greece now, with Gussy, his grandmother, my Mum. And there, in that curve: our first holiday away, overseas. We went to Rarotonga.”
It has, in fact, taken Mary a little over 26 years to get to this stage of the painting. Buster Gibbs doesn’t know it, but he is the first person to have heard Henry Talbot be vague about numbers. If Mary had been listening to the conversations, she would have fallen from her chair with shock.
The two men talked about the painting for another twenty minutes (well, 17 minutes 37 seconds, if you must be Henry-ish about it), and by the time Barry Thorndike came to collect him, Buster Gibbs was another Henry Talbot convert. Not that it did Henry any good: Buster couldn’t bring himself to call the older man Hank, and never would.
Buster’s hero-worship of Henry that day wasn’t to last too long, however, because immediately following his Senior Sergeant into the Talbot’s living room was Mrs Talbot herself.
“Ah, sweetheart: you’ve not met Barry’s youngest and latest addition,” boomed Henry. “Brian Gibbs, a.k.a. Buster; Mary Talbot, the painter.”
“Gosh,” said Buster Gibbs. A woman of forty-something shouldn’t look this good. I thought Charlie was a looker. Oh, hell: she’s almost old enough to be my Mum, and I’m thinking dirty thoughts. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs Talbot.” All he’d done was look into her eyes. The whites were clear, the green irises were as deep as a forest pool. Funny: is that a gold fleck there?
Many people think Mary Talbot’s eyes to be her best feature, which is saying something. Their perfect oval shape makes them appear larger than they really are. They are set quite deeply, and when she smiles her cheeks rise over those perfect bones, and the eyes become half-moons, cheeky and laughing.
“Please, Buster. Call me Mary.”
“Yes, ma’am.” And Buster blushed. Barry Thorndike snorted, and grabbed the Constable’s arm, and pulled him away.
“Come on Gibbs. We’re on a hiding to nothing here.”
Charlie came in, and raised her hand. “Sir?”
“Mmm?”
“Would you mind terrifically if I took the day off? My desk’s pretty clear, and I think that Henry and Mary might need me for the next few hours.”
Not the way I’ve needed you, thought Gibbs, and blushed again. What was it about older women?
“Righto,” said Barry Thorndike, the boss with a heart of stone. “We owe you a couple of month’s-worth in lieu anyway.”
“Thankyou, Sir.”
That night, Henry slept, and dreamed of broken glass clogging his throat, staining his lips red.
Q: So the whole thing was a waste of time, then?
A: No, not really.
Q: You sure?
A: No.
Q: You said that Mary was your strength through that first month.
A: She always has been, hasn’t she. Yeah, I was all at sixes and sevens. The only way I knew which way was up was by checking which way my bum pointed when I was on my feet.
Q: Very droll.
A: Oh, up yours. Look, here I was at the ragged end of life, shocked, and for the first time ever in my life I didn’t know what to do.
Q: So – what did you do?
A: I asked Mary. Of course.
Q: And?
A: And she asked me if I wanted to die. I said no. It’s a pretty unusual sort of person who has a burning desire to go shuffling off the coil, mortal or otherwise.
Q: Yes. And?
A: She told me not to.
Q: Not to?
A: Yes. Not to die. It was the most perfect thing she could have said.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Bombs, and bad manners
I just don't get it. Maybe I'm dim, but it seems to me that if I had a political cause I wanted to promote then I probably wouldn't immediatelty reach for the bag of explosives. The latest round of explosive political argument in Indonesia is not only stupid, it's also, well, bad manners.
The idea of slaughtering innocent people to promote your polical or religious cause in time-honoured, of course. Mankind's been doing it for millennia. And it can hardly be described as a bad thing to defend yourself from such hairy-eyed idiots. But what I don't get is why they think it's a really good idea to turn a bunch of of strangers into jellimeat? how is that ever going to helppeople understand or sympathise with their arguments?
Yes, of course they're fanatics. They are incapable of listening to another's point of view. Their way is the only way. They have no tolerance for argument, for nuance, for empathy. They are emotionally and intellectually stunted. Even so, they must have the odd rational moment. I can imagine their boardroom meetings (and, in order to not sound racist, or culturalist, or even istist, I'll name my Terror Executives as B1, B2, B3, and so on. The "B", of course, stands for Bomber.):
B1: Order. The Hairy-Eyed Terror Executive must come to order. Thankyou.
B2: Thanks, B1. Now, like all true Hairy-Eyed believers, I know that it's impewritive that everyone we know, and as well as everyone else, must follow the hairy-Eyed creed. Am I not right?
(General mutterings of yeah, too right, well said B2, etc.
B2: So what I'm suggesting is a nice ad campaign. We'll start of small, and,as funds roll in from new Hairy-Eyes, we'll expand it out so that by the time the World cup comes around we can make a positive statement to the entire world. Remember that 17 billion people will be watching the Grand final, live from Eden Park: a well-placed message there will surely help everyone see us as the serious candidates for world supremacy that we really are.
B7: Nicely put, B2. I have a friend in advertising. She can help us draw up the positive paradigms of our campaign. Put an emotionally uplifting spin on our objectives. It's not much we want, after all: simply world dominance. And who doesn't wnat that for their children, eh?
B1: Hang on, B7. Nice offer, but aren't you forgetting rule 3 (B[iii]IV) of the Hairy-Eyes Charter? The one that says that even before we try winning their hearts and minds, we have to kill a whole bunch of people? I've perrsonally always found that killing strangers has been of enormous benefgit in promoting a cause. Why, when i was in the Jolly Rogers -
B2: (sotto voce) Here we go again, guys*.
B1: We blew up a holden Commodore full of Trappist monks. Worked a btreat. One minute nobody knew about us, the next minute we had a Trappist jam, and the whole world knew of us. Brilliant. Ah, those were the days.
B7: Right, B1, thanks for that. So we bomb the Grand Final, kill a lot of folk, and immediately everyone else in the world will come flocking to our cause? That's the basic argument?
B2: Flocking well said, B7. Calm, rational, didactic. Whatever that means.
*They're always guys.
Dumb. The terrorist in Indonesia are just dumb. Brutally so. Andwe can'tgo easy on them. It's up to Key and his cronies to offer the peoplef Indonesia all the help we can give to stamp these mad buggers out. Remember that Indonesia's the fourth most populous country in the world... and they're our neighbours. It's only good manners to offer to help your biggest neighbours. it's also good politics.
READING: Kelly Armstrong's "Bitten". Hilarious - a modern day feminist werewolf yarn.
LISTENING TO: Ry Cooder's "My Name Is Buddy". Excellent.
WORD OF THE DAY: Polemic. lookiit up.
Time for more Henry, folks!
My Mother, who can be an appalling creature at times, has told me that she thought it was delightful.
My son? Well, I think Adam’s still working it through, but he will get it. Actually, I rather think that he may understand that the shooting was a good thing in its context, but the – hell, how can I expect him to understand it? I barely understand it.
The other first – well, it wasn’t, really. I know that Charlie is dining out on the story of how I told people to go away, yes, all right, to fuck off, and how it was the first time I had ever used “bad” language, but it’s not true. I well recall when I was in the 7th Form at Northbridge High, and we were playing our annual First XV game against the Marist boys, and Bill Townsley, the Marist First-Five coat-hangered me: a rigid forearm against my throat when I was running flat out. I well recall telling him exactly what I thought of him, and it did include the use of that word. In fact, I told him he was a fucking loser.
He apologised later, and we became rather good friends.
Anyway. Where was I? Ah, yes. Oddly enough, Wolf – Charlie’s hubby – helped the whole thing along. The telling the family thing, I mean.
The night seemed endless. Mary and I sat together, and sometimes there’d be a burst of words, sometimes we sat in that silence in which we tell each other so much more than we ever can verbally. Charlie was a brick. She phoned around, eventually getting in touch with Sybil at two in the morning. She made no mention of what was going on, simply told the Sybling she had to be here later in the morning. She made sure everyone was set up to come around at 10.30, 11. See, I had to see Barry Thorndike first thing in the morning. Joe Know had apparently called him and told him that I shouldn’t be interviewed, that taking a statement when I was still groggy from Joseph’s gentle and tireless ministrations would not serve justice at all well. Baz had called Charlie’s cellphone, and together we made an 8.30 appointment.
Q: How did that go? The first police interview?
A: You know, I think I can remember the conversation verbatim. Barry knocked on the door on the stroke of 8.30. He was all very fine in his uniform, with that young C.I.D. plain-clothed copper, one of Charlie’s colleagues at his side. Funny guy: he was hugely embarrassed, and very quiet. Well, initially, anyway. Here’s how it went.
Charlie was rinsing a few dishes at the sink, and making a hell of a din. Her mind was still filled with the thought that she’d be losing Henry. Well, no, it wasn’t guaranteed yet, tomorrow’s appointment up in Auckland would sort that out, but still. And Henry just up and deciding to resign! Well, retire, really. Still, he’s always been good with money. Thank god Wolf’s a he-man with a chequebook and credit card: I was zillions in debt when we got together. Anyway, what’s that bloody noise? Oh. The door. Bloody reporters.
“Coming, hold your dick!” She went to the door, ready to slug the reporter who would be standing there. She opened the door to see the heavy blue uniform with the sparkly little silver bits. Barry Thorndike, her boss. Shit. Hiding behind big Baz was a smaller man, younger, a lad trying to grow a moustache. Brian Gibbs, aka Buster, due to an unfortunate incident involving half a dozen coffee cups at the canteen on his first day.
“Oh. Sorry Sir. Thought you were another blood – another reporter. Is it that time already? Come in, come in,” Christ I’m babbling like a schoolgirl. “Henry’s just having a quick shave, cup of coffee or tea? Hello, Buster. Here to take notes? If you can get something out of our Henry then you’re a better man than I am.”
Brian looks at her, knowing full-well that she can slaughter half the men on the force at arm wrestling. “I’ll never be a better man than you, Sergeant,” he replies.
“How sweet,” she smiles at him, and yes, he is dazzled. She is quite an amazing looking woman.
“Coffee, please,” says her boss. “And you, Gibbs: stop looking at Sergeant Schmidt as though she’s the treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
“Sir?”
“Shut your mouth, man: you’re drooling.”
“Sir.”
Charlie smiles at Buster Gibbs again, is rewarded with another blush, and heads to the kitchen. Really, it’s too easy.
The Senior Sergeant walks through to the living room, and raises his eyes to the painting beside the fireplace. Barry Thorndike’s been in this home more times than he can count, and he’s seen the decor change on almost a seasonable basis. Mary has always been a firm believer in colour, dammit: the beiges and taupes of this world were not, and will not be an option! White, maybe: in fact, she had once tricked out the entire interior of the house flat white – but changed it the moment she saw the same thing on “Miami Vice.”
But one thing remained the same, and that was by Henry’s firm dictum, made more than twenty years ago:
“I don’t care what you do to the rest of the house, my dear, but there are two things I must put my foot down about. One: you leave my study alone. It is for my pleasure, and my pleasure alone, and if I want a brown study, then a brown study I shall have!”
She dabbed some lime-green paint on the end of his nose, and said “I hear and obey, my lord and master!”
“Cheeky wench. I’ll lord and master you.”
“Oh, please!”
“Hmph. And second, that picture must remain there. Please?”
The painting in question is a large piece, perhaps 1700 mill high, 800 wide, and is an early-and-middle-and-late Mary Talbot full-length self-portrait. It is the first piece she gave Henry, and it had arrived on his doorstep in his third year at Victoria. At the time she had signed it “Mary Talbot.”
“Use your own name, Mary. Your own name.”
“I’ll use the name of my love,” she replied. And dazzled him with her smile.
The painting in question is one of two things – well, maybe three - of Henry’s that Barry is desperately jealous of. The other is his collection of single-malt whiskies, maintained at an even thirty bottles, all opened, all tasted, all appreciated. And we’ll leave Mary out of the rest of this equation, despite her membership.
Henry limped into the room, carrying a tray with coffee and buttered toast. He set them down on the table, and poured three cups. Not a word was spoken. Henry knows all too well that Barry needs time with the painting, and respects that time. After all, Henry himself still got lost in it several times a week, even after all these years.
Barry Thorndike drew in a deep breath, sighed, and said “A spot of milk today, if you’d be so kind, Henry.”
“Already done, Baz.”
Gibbs nearly choked. Baz! There’s someone in this world who called The Boss “Baz”? And it’s this bloke! I mean, look at him. All right, a big fellow, obviously fit, but a face that’s as plain and bland as Mum’s vege broth. Nondescript hair, bit of a nancy wave in it, green corduroy trousers! Who wears green corduroy trousers, hell, any corduroy trousers, these days? I’ll bet he’s got one of those tweed jackets with bits of leather on the elbows. And oh good grief, a red and blue-check flannel shirt. Still, they do say heroes come in all manner of shapes and sizes, and he did stop an armed man, getting himself shot in the process.
“And you would be?” Henry asked, with a gentle smile.
“Eh? Oh, sorry, Sir, I’m Brian Gibbs. My friends – including your sister, call me Buster.”
“Well, I hope you’ll extend the privilege to me – Buster.” Henry held out his hand, and Buster Gibbs took it. Christ all bloody mighty! The man’s got a grip of iron. Buster looked a little deeper at Henry, and saw something he hadn’t expected. Something feral. Something with a wicked grin. This can’t have been the same man The Boss had talked about on their way over here.
“Right,” said Thorndike. “I’ll be talking with Mary a little later, Henry. But I need to have a few words with you first. You OK with this?”
Henry sighs. He knows he must do this, but he desperately doesn’t want to. Actually, a part of him is intrigued: he’s never had any dealings with Baz as a copper before, and he’s an entirely different man. “Yes,” says Henry to the stranger in the blue uniform. “Yes, let’s get it done.”
Thorndike looks at Henry closely, and turns to the junior officer. “Gibbs, start the recorder. Good lad. This is an interview conducted on Wednesday June 4th, the time is 8.37, I’m Senior Sergeant Barry M. Thorndike, with me is Detective Constable Brian Gibbs, no middle initial, and we’re talking to?” He invites the answer.
“Henry Talbot, Baz. The one and only Henry Talbot.”
The tape, when you hear it now, has a long pause at this junction. Then it carries on.
“Are you all right, Henry? You don’t seem to be quite yourself.”
“Of course I’m not myself, Baz. I’ve been shot. I am holey, I have been perforated, a perfectly good suit has been ruined, you can bet that the insurance company won’t pay out for it, my car’s headlamp, almost irreplaceable now, has been thoroughly buggered up, I slept very little last night, and I have an important family conference happening here very soon. So, if you’d be so kind as to ask me your Constabulatory questions, we’ll get this whole business done with so I can carry on with my life.”
Six months, Henry thought.
He said, “buggered up,” Barry Thorndike thought. How extraordinary.
“How’s your coffee, young Buster?” asked Henry.
“Oh, good, Sir. Thanks.”
“Call me Hank, there’s a good little Detective Constable.”
Hank? “Yes, Sir,” quaked the boy.
Thorndike took over. “Right, let’s keep this official then, shall we? Now, can you describe, in your own words, what happened yesterday?”
“In my own words, Baz? As opposed to, say, Mahatma Ghandi’s words? And what part of the day. Come on man, be specific! You’re a gentrified Copper, worked hard to get where you are, got a good mind, stop waffling.”
“Eh?” It must be, what do they call it, Post Stress Syndrome.
“Oh, forget it. Look: I left Joe Know’s little house of horrors,” six months, he thought, “ and crossed the road to 1: get some cash, and 2: get my car. I had just hauled three hundred bucks out of the infernal machine, the ATM, not my car, when I heard a bang, saw a hole appear in the bank window, then this chap came barrelling out and shot a monitor camera thing, so I flung my money in the air, he watched it, I hit him, the gun went off with a surprisingly small bang –“
“That’s when he shot you, Sir?” Young Buster.
“No, I didn’t say that. I said the gun went off. It is, yes, when I was struck by the bullet, but I can’t say that he shot me.”
“But you were shot.” Barry Thorndike is wondering just what has happened to his old friend. In fact, Barry is three years older than Henry, but has always looked on Henry as being the older man. Now, he’s concerned. Henry’s behaviour is not the behaviour of Henry. And what’s this Hank business?
“But not purposely, Baz. I’m sure that it wasn’t done with any malice. If you charge that young man, whoever it was, with malicious wounding, I’ll haunt you so you die young and white-haired.”
“Hmph. You’ll outlive me, Henry. And you know who it was.”
“Nothing is guaranteed, Baz. Not any more. Now, remember, I was in shock, having found myself in the unaccustomed position of being a shootee. Yes, I removed the young man’s mask, but I was in a swoon, having been overcome with the vapours, and I couldn’t swear to his identity.”
“We’ve got him all right, Sir,” Buster says. “James Fletcher. He had gunpowder residue on his hands, three very nice bruises coming up where you socked him, and a sack full of money that wasn’t his.”
“A bit of a giveaway, that,” said Henry. “Nonetheless, I can’t and shan’t swear to anything.”
“How is your leg, Sir?”
“Ha!” said Henry. “Now there’s a thing, young Buster. Baz here, who’s been a good friend of mine for more years than he can count, didn’t ask me that. You want to know why?”
“Sir?”
“Because Baz can only think of two things when he’s coming up my driveway: my whisky, and The Painting.” Henry pointed to the portrait.
“It is quite remarkable, Sir.”
“You know, Buster, I’ve a good mind to leave it to you in my will. Just to get up your boss’s nose.”
“That’s enough, Henry,” snapped Thorndike. He is thoroughly irritated now. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but a screw’s come loose somewhere along the line. Switch the tape off, Gibbs. Henry – do you mind if I speak with Mary? In private?”
“Oh Barry.” Henry’s sigh had the breath of a thousand years behind it. He suddenly sounds exhausted, as though he were insubstantial., thin and wraithlike. “Oh, Barry. Yes, go ahead.”
The recording stops here, but a careful listener (and there have been quite a few) will hear the quiver in Henry’s voice. Barry left the room, in search of Mary, and Henry leaned back, seemingly exhausted. Gibbs looked at him with some concern: the older man’s face was pale, and his eyes were closed.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
Henry’s eyes snapped open. “Yes, fine. Sorry, Buster. I suppose events got on top of me a bit.”
“I can imagine, Sir.”
Henry looked at the young Detective. Was I ever this young, he wondered? The lad can’t have been any more than 22 or 23. The lines at Henry’s eyes crinkled when he watched where the boy’s attention kept wandering.
“Actually, Buster, you can’t. And I hope you never will be able to. But never mind. Now, while the good Senior Sergeant’s busy grilling my wife, what would you like to talk about? Hm? Carry on the in-depth interrogation?”
“Well, actually, Sir –“
“Oh, do call me Hank.”
“Right. Sir. What I wanted to know about is – “
“The painting?” There was a small smile on Henry’s face, and Buster Gibbs later swore that Henry Talbot’s face glowed when he turned to the portrait.
“Yes, Sir. The painting.”
The idea of slaughtering innocent people to promote your polical or religious cause in time-honoured, of course. Mankind's been doing it for millennia. And it can hardly be described as a bad thing to defend yourself from such hairy-eyed idiots. But what I don't get is why they think it's a really good idea to turn a bunch of of strangers into jellimeat? how is that ever going to helppeople understand or sympathise with their arguments?
Yes, of course they're fanatics. They are incapable of listening to another's point of view. Their way is the only way. They have no tolerance for argument, for nuance, for empathy. They are emotionally and intellectually stunted. Even so, they must have the odd rational moment. I can imagine their boardroom meetings (and, in order to not sound racist, or culturalist, or even istist, I'll name my Terror Executives as B1, B2, B3, and so on. The "B", of course, stands for Bomber.):
B1: Order. The Hairy-Eyed Terror Executive must come to order. Thankyou.
B2: Thanks, B1. Now, like all true Hairy-Eyed believers, I know that it's impewritive that everyone we know, and as well as everyone else, must follow the hairy-Eyed creed. Am I not right?
(General mutterings of yeah, too right, well said B2, etc.
B2: So what I'm suggesting is a nice ad campaign. We'll start of small, and,as funds roll in from new Hairy-Eyes, we'll expand it out so that by the time the World cup comes around we can make a positive statement to the entire world. Remember that 17 billion people will be watching the Grand final, live from Eden Park: a well-placed message there will surely help everyone see us as the serious candidates for world supremacy that we really are.
B7: Nicely put, B2. I have a friend in advertising. She can help us draw up the positive paradigms of our campaign. Put an emotionally uplifting spin on our objectives. It's not much we want, after all: simply world dominance. And who doesn't wnat that for their children, eh?
B1: Hang on, B7. Nice offer, but aren't you forgetting rule 3 (B[iii]IV) of the Hairy-Eyes Charter? The one that says that even before we try winning their hearts and minds, we have to kill a whole bunch of people? I've perrsonally always found that killing strangers has been of enormous benefgit in promoting a cause. Why, when i was in the Jolly Rogers -
B2: (sotto voce) Here we go again, guys*.
B1: We blew up a holden Commodore full of Trappist monks. Worked a btreat. One minute nobody knew about us, the next minute we had a Trappist jam, and the whole world knew of us. Brilliant. Ah, those were the days.
B7: Right, B1, thanks for that. So we bomb the Grand Final, kill a lot of folk, and immediately everyone else in the world will come flocking to our cause? That's the basic argument?
B2: Flocking well said, B7. Calm, rational, didactic. Whatever that means.
*They're always guys.
Dumb. The terrorist in Indonesia are just dumb. Brutally so. Andwe can'tgo easy on them. It's up to Key and his cronies to offer the peoplef Indonesia all the help we can give to stamp these mad buggers out. Remember that Indonesia's the fourth most populous country in the world... and they're our neighbours. It's only good manners to offer to help your biggest neighbours. it's also good politics.
READING: Kelly Armstrong's "Bitten". Hilarious - a modern day feminist werewolf yarn.
LISTENING TO: Ry Cooder's "My Name Is Buddy". Excellent.
WORD OF THE DAY: Polemic. lookiit up.
Time for more Henry, folks!
My Mother, who can be an appalling creature at times, has told me that she thought it was delightful.
My son? Well, I think Adam’s still working it through, but he will get it. Actually, I rather think that he may understand that the shooting was a good thing in its context, but the – hell, how can I expect him to understand it? I barely understand it.
The other first – well, it wasn’t, really. I know that Charlie is dining out on the story of how I told people to go away, yes, all right, to fuck off, and how it was the first time I had ever used “bad” language, but it’s not true. I well recall when I was in the 7th Form at Northbridge High, and we were playing our annual First XV game against the Marist boys, and Bill Townsley, the Marist First-Five coat-hangered me: a rigid forearm against my throat when I was running flat out. I well recall telling him exactly what I thought of him, and it did include the use of that word. In fact, I told him he was a fucking loser.
He apologised later, and we became rather good friends.
Anyway. Where was I? Ah, yes. Oddly enough, Wolf – Charlie’s hubby – helped the whole thing along. The telling the family thing, I mean.
The night seemed endless. Mary and I sat together, and sometimes there’d be a burst of words, sometimes we sat in that silence in which we tell each other so much more than we ever can verbally. Charlie was a brick. She phoned around, eventually getting in touch with Sybil at two in the morning. She made no mention of what was going on, simply told the Sybling she had to be here later in the morning. She made sure everyone was set up to come around at 10.30, 11. See, I had to see Barry Thorndike first thing in the morning. Joe Know had apparently called him and told him that I shouldn’t be interviewed, that taking a statement when I was still groggy from Joseph’s gentle and tireless ministrations would not serve justice at all well. Baz had called Charlie’s cellphone, and together we made an 8.30 appointment.
Q: How did that go? The first police interview?
A: You know, I think I can remember the conversation verbatim. Barry knocked on the door on the stroke of 8.30. He was all very fine in his uniform, with that young C.I.D. plain-clothed copper, one of Charlie’s colleagues at his side. Funny guy: he was hugely embarrassed, and very quiet. Well, initially, anyway. Here’s how it went.
Charlie was rinsing a few dishes at the sink, and making a hell of a din. Her mind was still filled with the thought that she’d be losing Henry. Well, no, it wasn’t guaranteed yet, tomorrow’s appointment up in Auckland would sort that out, but still. And Henry just up and deciding to resign! Well, retire, really. Still, he’s always been good with money. Thank god Wolf’s a he-man with a chequebook and credit card: I was zillions in debt when we got together. Anyway, what’s that bloody noise? Oh. The door. Bloody reporters.
“Coming, hold your dick!” She went to the door, ready to slug the reporter who would be standing there. She opened the door to see the heavy blue uniform with the sparkly little silver bits. Barry Thorndike, her boss. Shit. Hiding behind big Baz was a smaller man, younger, a lad trying to grow a moustache. Brian Gibbs, aka Buster, due to an unfortunate incident involving half a dozen coffee cups at the canteen on his first day.
“Oh. Sorry Sir. Thought you were another blood – another reporter. Is it that time already? Come in, come in,” Christ I’m babbling like a schoolgirl. “Henry’s just having a quick shave, cup of coffee or tea? Hello, Buster. Here to take notes? If you can get something out of our Henry then you’re a better man than I am.”
Brian looks at her, knowing full-well that she can slaughter half the men on the force at arm wrestling. “I’ll never be a better man than you, Sergeant,” he replies.
“How sweet,” she smiles at him, and yes, he is dazzled. She is quite an amazing looking woman.
“Coffee, please,” says her boss. “And you, Gibbs: stop looking at Sergeant Schmidt as though she’s the treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
“Sir?”
“Shut your mouth, man: you’re drooling.”
“Sir.”
Charlie smiles at Buster Gibbs again, is rewarded with another blush, and heads to the kitchen. Really, it’s too easy.
The Senior Sergeant walks through to the living room, and raises his eyes to the painting beside the fireplace. Barry Thorndike’s been in this home more times than he can count, and he’s seen the decor change on almost a seasonable basis. Mary has always been a firm believer in colour, dammit: the beiges and taupes of this world were not, and will not be an option! White, maybe: in fact, she had once tricked out the entire interior of the house flat white – but changed it the moment she saw the same thing on “Miami Vice.”
But one thing remained the same, and that was by Henry’s firm dictum, made more than twenty years ago:
“I don’t care what you do to the rest of the house, my dear, but there are two things I must put my foot down about. One: you leave my study alone. It is for my pleasure, and my pleasure alone, and if I want a brown study, then a brown study I shall have!”
She dabbed some lime-green paint on the end of his nose, and said “I hear and obey, my lord and master!”
“Cheeky wench. I’ll lord and master you.”
“Oh, please!”
“Hmph. And second, that picture must remain there. Please?”
The painting in question is a large piece, perhaps 1700 mill high, 800 wide, and is an early-and-middle-and-late Mary Talbot full-length self-portrait. It is the first piece she gave Henry, and it had arrived on his doorstep in his third year at Victoria. At the time she had signed it “Mary Talbot.”
“Use your own name, Mary. Your own name.”
“I’ll use the name of my love,” she replied. And dazzled him with her smile.
The painting in question is one of two things – well, maybe three - of Henry’s that Barry is desperately jealous of. The other is his collection of single-malt whiskies, maintained at an even thirty bottles, all opened, all tasted, all appreciated. And we’ll leave Mary out of the rest of this equation, despite her membership.
Henry limped into the room, carrying a tray with coffee and buttered toast. He set them down on the table, and poured three cups. Not a word was spoken. Henry knows all too well that Barry needs time with the painting, and respects that time. After all, Henry himself still got lost in it several times a week, even after all these years.
Barry Thorndike drew in a deep breath, sighed, and said “A spot of milk today, if you’d be so kind, Henry.”
“Already done, Baz.”
Gibbs nearly choked. Baz! There’s someone in this world who called The Boss “Baz”? And it’s this bloke! I mean, look at him. All right, a big fellow, obviously fit, but a face that’s as plain and bland as Mum’s vege broth. Nondescript hair, bit of a nancy wave in it, green corduroy trousers! Who wears green corduroy trousers, hell, any corduroy trousers, these days? I’ll bet he’s got one of those tweed jackets with bits of leather on the elbows. And oh good grief, a red and blue-check flannel shirt. Still, they do say heroes come in all manner of shapes and sizes, and he did stop an armed man, getting himself shot in the process.
“And you would be?” Henry asked, with a gentle smile.
“Eh? Oh, sorry, Sir, I’m Brian Gibbs. My friends – including your sister, call me Buster.”
“Well, I hope you’ll extend the privilege to me – Buster.” Henry held out his hand, and Buster Gibbs took it. Christ all bloody mighty! The man’s got a grip of iron. Buster looked a little deeper at Henry, and saw something he hadn’t expected. Something feral. Something with a wicked grin. This can’t have been the same man The Boss had talked about on their way over here.
“Right,” said Thorndike. “I’ll be talking with Mary a little later, Henry. But I need to have a few words with you first. You OK with this?”
Henry sighs. He knows he must do this, but he desperately doesn’t want to. Actually, a part of him is intrigued: he’s never had any dealings with Baz as a copper before, and he’s an entirely different man. “Yes,” says Henry to the stranger in the blue uniform. “Yes, let’s get it done.”
Thorndike looks at Henry closely, and turns to the junior officer. “Gibbs, start the recorder. Good lad. This is an interview conducted on Wednesday June 4th, the time is 8.37, I’m Senior Sergeant Barry M. Thorndike, with me is Detective Constable Brian Gibbs, no middle initial, and we’re talking to?” He invites the answer.
“Henry Talbot, Baz. The one and only Henry Talbot.”
The tape, when you hear it now, has a long pause at this junction. Then it carries on.
“Are you all right, Henry? You don’t seem to be quite yourself.”
“Of course I’m not myself, Baz. I’ve been shot. I am holey, I have been perforated, a perfectly good suit has been ruined, you can bet that the insurance company won’t pay out for it, my car’s headlamp, almost irreplaceable now, has been thoroughly buggered up, I slept very little last night, and I have an important family conference happening here very soon. So, if you’d be so kind as to ask me your Constabulatory questions, we’ll get this whole business done with so I can carry on with my life.”
Six months, Henry thought.
He said, “buggered up,” Barry Thorndike thought. How extraordinary.
“How’s your coffee, young Buster?” asked Henry.
“Oh, good, Sir. Thanks.”
“Call me Hank, there’s a good little Detective Constable.”
Hank? “Yes, Sir,” quaked the boy.
Thorndike took over. “Right, let’s keep this official then, shall we? Now, can you describe, in your own words, what happened yesterday?”
“In my own words, Baz? As opposed to, say, Mahatma Ghandi’s words? And what part of the day. Come on man, be specific! You’re a gentrified Copper, worked hard to get where you are, got a good mind, stop waffling.”
“Eh?” It must be, what do they call it, Post Stress Syndrome.
“Oh, forget it. Look: I left Joe Know’s little house of horrors,” six months, he thought, “ and crossed the road to 1: get some cash, and 2: get my car. I had just hauled three hundred bucks out of the infernal machine, the ATM, not my car, when I heard a bang, saw a hole appear in the bank window, then this chap came barrelling out and shot a monitor camera thing, so I flung my money in the air, he watched it, I hit him, the gun went off with a surprisingly small bang –“
“That’s when he shot you, Sir?” Young Buster.
“No, I didn’t say that. I said the gun went off. It is, yes, when I was struck by the bullet, but I can’t say that he shot me.”
“But you were shot.” Barry Thorndike is wondering just what has happened to his old friend. In fact, Barry is three years older than Henry, but has always looked on Henry as being the older man. Now, he’s concerned. Henry’s behaviour is not the behaviour of Henry. And what’s this Hank business?
“But not purposely, Baz. I’m sure that it wasn’t done with any malice. If you charge that young man, whoever it was, with malicious wounding, I’ll haunt you so you die young and white-haired.”
“Hmph. You’ll outlive me, Henry. And you know who it was.”
“Nothing is guaranteed, Baz. Not any more. Now, remember, I was in shock, having found myself in the unaccustomed position of being a shootee. Yes, I removed the young man’s mask, but I was in a swoon, having been overcome with the vapours, and I couldn’t swear to his identity.”
“We’ve got him all right, Sir,” Buster says. “James Fletcher. He had gunpowder residue on his hands, three very nice bruises coming up where you socked him, and a sack full of money that wasn’t his.”
“A bit of a giveaway, that,” said Henry. “Nonetheless, I can’t and shan’t swear to anything.”
“How is your leg, Sir?”
“Ha!” said Henry. “Now there’s a thing, young Buster. Baz here, who’s been a good friend of mine for more years than he can count, didn’t ask me that. You want to know why?”
“Sir?”
“Because Baz can only think of two things when he’s coming up my driveway: my whisky, and The Painting.” Henry pointed to the portrait.
“It is quite remarkable, Sir.”
“You know, Buster, I’ve a good mind to leave it to you in my will. Just to get up your boss’s nose.”
“That’s enough, Henry,” snapped Thorndike. He is thoroughly irritated now. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but a screw’s come loose somewhere along the line. Switch the tape off, Gibbs. Henry – do you mind if I speak with Mary? In private?”
“Oh Barry.” Henry’s sigh had the breath of a thousand years behind it. He suddenly sounds exhausted, as though he were insubstantial., thin and wraithlike. “Oh, Barry. Yes, go ahead.”
The recording stops here, but a careful listener (and there have been quite a few) will hear the quiver in Henry’s voice. Barry left the room, in search of Mary, and Henry leaned back, seemingly exhausted. Gibbs looked at him with some concern: the older man’s face was pale, and his eyes were closed.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
Henry’s eyes snapped open. “Yes, fine. Sorry, Buster. I suppose events got on top of me a bit.”
“I can imagine, Sir.”
Henry looked at the young Detective. Was I ever this young, he wondered? The lad can’t have been any more than 22 or 23. The lines at Henry’s eyes crinkled when he watched where the boy’s attention kept wandering.
“Actually, Buster, you can’t. And I hope you never will be able to. But never mind. Now, while the good Senior Sergeant’s busy grilling my wife, what would you like to talk about? Hm? Carry on the in-depth interrogation?”
“Well, actually, Sir –“
“Oh, do call me Hank.”
“Right. Sir. What I wanted to know about is – “
“The painting?” There was a small smile on Henry’s face, and Buster Gibbs later swore that Henry Talbot’s face glowed when he turned to the portrait.
“Yes, Sir. The painting.”
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Telecom vs 2 degrees
This is the first of my projected TVC critiques,and I thought I'd start on something that's so clear cut as to be unfair.
Telecom, with its budget of mega-gazillions, wanted to launch a new product. OK, not a new product. A product that all Vodaphone subscribers had been using for years - but a product / service that was new for Telecom's patient, long-suffering customers.
And they went at it with a hiss, a roar, and a flub, flub, flub, as the air went out of their tyres.
I can see the Agency's board room now. They were thinking power. They were thinking mass appeal. They were thinking that what their clients and prospective punters wanted was... Richard Hammond. The Hamster. And, to be fair, the pre-launch commercial looked good. American fighter planes, flash speedboats, race cars, Hammond, dressed as the first evil Stig, in a pair of fireproof overalls that are seven sizes too large. Didn't they know Hammond's tiny?
The they looked for a nest, found their own, and crapped in it by carrying the theme on. With Hammond theatrically wincing. With Hammond doing all those cute little Hamster things he's famous for. Oh - and I'd give a doubling of my Telecom bill to have heard the conversations around Telecom's water coolers as they discussed the stock footage of the "their" speedboat turning up in a Lexus commercial this week. Somehow, it's fitting.
They had Hammond wincing and cringing as he statically read some static lines off a Tel-E-Prompter, as a New Zealand fashion designer looked "cross" and "embarrassed" in various places around the world, as she showed that the new service worked in Australia, London, and, oh, there. They had the Hamster taking a photograph of a jet boat with an 800 horsepower that generates 8 gees but no whizz, and - get this - sending a photograph before the boat crossed a finish line. Wince.
It was embarrassing, poorly conceived, and so bloody foreign. It resonated with two or three of the throngs of Kiwis who watch "Top Gear", and the dozens who can afford a flash new designer-label frock.
Compare it to the new 2 degree commercials. A brand-spankin' new company that managed, in a nanosecond, to make themselves a million times more Kiwi than Telecom. Damned if I know who are backing 2 degrees financially. Don't care, either - their TV commercials scream New Zild. Why? Oh, yeah: home-grown talent, home-grown humour, and commercials that stay on message. Does anyone doubt that Rhys Darby had a big hand in writing the scripts? Loggo? I hang out, waiting to hear that line. New Zealand locations... out on a farm! Not in a high-tech studio that looks as though it might well have been TV1's newsroom two years ago.
Telecom 2 out of 10. 2 degrees? 9. Conservatively, that is.
TIME FOR MORE HENRY
Chapter Eight
Even the thickest fog dissolves under heat.
Henry.
Q: Looking back on it, can you describe just how difficult it was? For you?
A: It was Mary who helped me. It has always been that way, and always will be. Always, of course, having a somewhat short-term sound to it now.
You know, I can’t figure out right now whether I’m a human-shaped pain, or a pain-shaped human. I didn’t think this sort of pain was possible.
Q: Why won’t you take some relief?
A: No. Perhaps later. The first week after I had been told that my days were numbered, and the total of numbered days was less or may be less than 180, was a blur. Of course, my little adventure outside the bank had helped crystallise a few things for me. The sudden, awful, realisation that life can indeed be measured not in years or months or indeed days but in nano-seconds brought me up short.
I think it can be fairly said that I have never given the appearance of being an imaginative man, but, in truth, I think that I am not unimaginative. It is entirely possible that I am not a demonstrative person, that I am guilty, if that’s the right word, of maintaining a certain decorum in my demeanour regardless of the circumstances.
Well, as Yogi Bera said: I yam what I yam. Or was it Mayer?
And for those first few days, what I was, was scared. But I was also exultant.
Joe Know told me that there are seven stages we go through when anticipating death: fear, anger, bargaining, rejection, begging, depression, and acceptance. They are similar to the seven stages of grief: one grieves and weeps for what will not be.
And the thing that was not to be was, of course, me.
Q: You had no doubt about that? About the lack of being?
A: Oh, absolutely not. I was convinced that death was final. All things considered, still am. You, of course, may beg to differ.
Q: Oh no. No. It’s entirely your own affair.
A: Well, then. At the very least you’re polite. Let’s move on.
After telling Mary, that first evening, I had the task of telling the rest of my family. Indeed: our family. This, it transpired, was uncommonly difficult. Charlie, of course, knew: she had been with us that first evening. Even now, after so much has happened, I remember that night with a startling clarity. I look back on it, and it is looking through a glass, lightly and clearly.
I had decided, perhaps uncharacteristically, that I was going to resign my position at McAlester, Brunton, and Whey, Barristers and Solicitors. Young Jimmy Fletcher did me an enormous favour. I had initially thought, after my discussion with Joe, that I would carry on as before, ensuring that all loose ends were tied, that I would leave Mary well established, with a nice income, and so on, and then just shuffle off this coil quietly and unobtrusively. Like an old cat going down the back of the garden to die among the nasturtiums and pumpkin vines.
Then Jimmy came along with his silly little gun, and I got shot.
It was a great day of firsts for me: it was the first time I had ever been told I was going to die. It’s not something we dwell on, really: intellectually, we know we’re mortal. In an abstract way, we suspect that death is our ultimate destination. However, we also suspect that it is going to happen to someone who is far older than we are: the death of Henry Talbot was going to happen to a Henry Talbot I didn’t know. At least, that’s the way it was, until Joe Know stuck his nose into my affairs and brought the date, and the reality, forward a bit. Six months, he had told me. It had rocked me somewhat, but by the time I was getting my money from the ATM I had come to a sort of understanding, a stoical and completely ridiculous acceptance, of the fact that I was going to be a 95 kilogram slab of dead Talbot in six months time. Possibly more, possibly less. Then there was the Jimmy incident, and my second first of the day: I got shot.
Now, you’ll notice that I said that I got shot. I did not say Jimmy shot me, because he didn’t. I had hit him very hard, three times, and his finger tightened on the trigger. I hit him because I was starting to feel the initial rage that all but consumed me in that first week or two.
Q: A little earlier you said it was fear.
A: Did I? Fear, rage, what’s the difference? Is there a difference? I don’t know that there is. I rage because I am scared, I am fearful because of my anger. Don’t you see? I had spent a lifetime of being in control. And, for Pete’s sake, please stop interrupting. Just let me tell the story in my own way. I’m sure any little contradictions will be straightened out.
After all, what are we but a mess of contradictions?
Q: I only meant –
A: Sod what you only meant. I don’t care what you “only meant”. If I must tell this story, then you butting in every five minutes isn’t going to be helpful. Frankly, I’d rather tell you to sod off completely, but I’m not sure that that’s an option.
Is it?
Q: No.
A: Right. As I thought. Now, where was I? Ah, yes: Jimmy. I was invited to attend Jimmy’s trial, and condemn him there. Find me one who is without sin, I say. And, to be fair, I was preoccupied with other matters: more on that later.
Mary understood almost immediately that my getting shot was the best thing that could have ever happened to me, regardless of the illness. My Mother, who can be an appalling creature at times, has told me that she thought it was delightful.
Telecom, with its budget of mega-gazillions, wanted to launch a new product. OK, not a new product. A product that all Vodaphone subscribers had been using for years - but a product / service that was new for Telecom's patient, long-suffering customers.
And they went at it with a hiss, a roar, and a flub, flub, flub, as the air went out of their tyres.
I can see the Agency's board room now. They were thinking power. They were thinking mass appeal. They were thinking that what their clients and prospective punters wanted was... Richard Hammond. The Hamster. And, to be fair, the pre-launch commercial looked good. American fighter planes, flash speedboats, race cars, Hammond, dressed as the first evil Stig, in a pair of fireproof overalls that are seven sizes too large. Didn't they know Hammond's tiny?
The they looked for a nest, found their own, and crapped in it by carrying the theme on. With Hammond theatrically wincing. With Hammond doing all those cute little Hamster things he's famous for. Oh - and I'd give a doubling of my Telecom bill to have heard the conversations around Telecom's water coolers as they discussed the stock footage of the "their" speedboat turning up in a Lexus commercial this week. Somehow, it's fitting.
They had Hammond wincing and cringing as he statically read some static lines off a Tel-E-Prompter, as a New Zealand fashion designer looked "cross" and "embarrassed" in various places around the world, as she showed that the new service worked in Australia, London, and, oh, there. They had the Hamster taking a photograph of a jet boat with an 800 horsepower that generates 8 gees but no whizz, and - get this - sending a photograph before the boat crossed a finish line. Wince.
It was embarrassing, poorly conceived, and so bloody foreign. It resonated with two or three of the throngs of Kiwis who watch "Top Gear", and the dozens who can afford a flash new designer-label frock.
Compare it to the new 2 degree commercials. A brand-spankin' new company that managed, in a nanosecond, to make themselves a million times more Kiwi than Telecom. Damned if I know who are backing 2 degrees financially. Don't care, either - their TV commercials scream New Zild. Why? Oh, yeah: home-grown talent, home-grown humour, and commercials that stay on message. Does anyone doubt that Rhys Darby had a big hand in writing the scripts? Loggo? I hang out, waiting to hear that line. New Zealand locations... out on a farm! Not in a high-tech studio that looks as though it might well have been TV1's newsroom two years ago.
Telecom 2 out of 10. 2 degrees? 9. Conservatively, that is.
TIME FOR MORE HENRY
Chapter Eight
Even the thickest fog dissolves under heat.
Henry.
Q: Looking back on it, can you describe just how difficult it was? For you?
A: It was Mary who helped me. It has always been that way, and always will be. Always, of course, having a somewhat short-term sound to it now.
You know, I can’t figure out right now whether I’m a human-shaped pain, or a pain-shaped human. I didn’t think this sort of pain was possible.
Q: Why won’t you take some relief?
A: No. Perhaps later. The first week after I had been told that my days were numbered, and the total of numbered days was less or may be less than 180, was a blur. Of course, my little adventure outside the bank had helped crystallise a few things for me. The sudden, awful, realisation that life can indeed be measured not in years or months or indeed days but in nano-seconds brought me up short.
I think it can be fairly said that I have never given the appearance of being an imaginative man, but, in truth, I think that I am not unimaginative. It is entirely possible that I am not a demonstrative person, that I am guilty, if that’s the right word, of maintaining a certain decorum in my demeanour regardless of the circumstances.
Well, as Yogi Bera said: I yam what I yam. Or was it Mayer?
And for those first few days, what I was, was scared. But I was also exultant.
Joe Know told me that there are seven stages we go through when anticipating death: fear, anger, bargaining, rejection, begging, depression, and acceptance. They are similar to the seven stages of grief: one grieves and weeps for what will not be.
And the thing that was not to be was, of course, me.
Q: You had no doubt about that? About the lack of being?
A: Oh, absolutely not. I was convinced that death was final. All things considered, still am. You, of course, may beg to differ.
Q: Oh no. No. It’s entirely your own affair.
A: Well, then. At the very least you’re polite. Let’s move on.
After telling Mary, that first evening, I had the task of telling the rest of my family. Indeed: our family. This, it transpired, was uncommonly difficult. Charlie, of course, knew: she had been with us that first evening. Even now, after so much has happened, I remember that night with a startling clarity. I look back on it, and it is looking through a glass, lightly and clearly.
I had decided, perhaps uncharacteristically, that I was going to resign my position at McAlester, Brunton, and Whey, Barristers and Solicitors. Young Jimmy Fletcher did me an enormous favour. I had initially thought, after my discussion with Joe, that I would carry on as before, ensuring that all loose ends were tied, that I would leave Mary well established, with a nice income, and so on, and then just shuffle off this coil quietly and unobtrusively. Like an old cat going down the back of the garden to die among the nasturtiums and pumpkin vines.
Then Jimmy came along with his silly little gun, and I got shot.
It was a great day of firsts for me: it was the first time I had ever been told I was going to die. It’s not something we dwell on, really: intellectually, we know we’re mortal. In an abstract way, we suspect that death is our ultimate destination. However, we also suspect that it is going to happen to someone who is far older than we are: the death of Henry Talbot was going to happen to a Henry Talbot I didn’t know. At least, that’s the way it was, until Joe Know stuck his nose into my affairs and brought the date, and the reality, forward a bit. Six months, he had told me. It had rocked me somewhat, but by the time I was getting my money from the ATM I had come to a sort of understanding, a stoical and completely ridiculous acceptance, of the fact that I was going to be a 95 kilogram slab of dead Talbot in six months time. Possibly more, possibly less. Then there was the Jimmy incident, and my second first of the day: I got shot.
Now, you’ll notice that I said that I got shot. I did not say Jimmy shot me, because he didn’t. I had hit him very hard, three times, and his finger tightened on the trigger. I hit him because I was starting to feel the initial rage that all but consumed me in that first week or two.
Q: A little earlier you said it was fear.
A: Did I? Fear, rage, what’s the difference? Is there a difference? I don’t know that there is. I rage because I am scared, I am fearful because of my anger. Don’t you see? I had spent a lifetime of being in control. And, for Pete’s sake, please stop interrupting. Just let me tell the story in my own way. I’m sure any little contradictions will be straightened out.
After all, what are we but a mess of contradictions?
Q: I only meant –
A: Sod what you only meant. I don’t care what you “only meant”. If I must tell this story, then you butting in every five minutes isn’t going to be helpful. Frankly, I’d rather tell you to sod off completely, but I’m not sure that that’s an option.
Is it?
Q: No.
A: Right. As I thought. Now, where was I? Ah, yes: Jimmy. I was invited to attend Jimmy’s trial, and condemn him there. Find me one who is without sin, I say. And, to be fair, I was preoccupied with other matters: more on that later.
Mary understood almost immediately that my getting shot was the best thing that could have ever happened to me, regardless of the illness. My Mother, who can be an appalling creature at times, has told me that she thought it was delightful.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Regeneration
It's been a few days too long since my last posting, and I beg your forgiveness. In my defence, I can state that I've been putting in 12 and 15-hour days on Legends of the Seeker, butg frankly a lot of that was down-time. If I'd taken my notebook with me, I could have spent some time tap-tap-tapping out a blog or two.
I have had several thoughts about things for the future.. and it's the future I want to ruminate on right now.
Because, yes, I have finally become a grandfather. Georgia (Gorgeous Georgia) was born on Sunday the 12th of July, at around 5.30am. Weighing in at a healthy 3.3 kilos, and with the designated number of finger and toes, she's apparently very cute. She obviously takes after her mother, who is actually more stunningly beautiful than cute, but one hopes that Georgia will grow into that.
It's odd, but I feel an overwhelming love for this child. I've not seen her, and the chances are excellent that I shan't see her until she's walking, talking, and exchanging Platonic sophistries on campus at Melbourne's university campus. Hopefully a little before then, of course. But it will be a while - and yet, I feel intensely protective of her.
When Adam first told me that Gabrielle was pregnant, I was so happy I could have farted. It was an exceptional day. The day he told me the name they'd chosen, I wanted to tell every stranger I saw on the street. But on Sunday, I nearly burst with joy after receiving the text announcing her safe arrival. And the following, on set at LOTS, I told one of my friends - and imemdiately word got around. Two of the kids involved in the shoot found out about it, and immediately adopted me as their "Set Grandad". That was very cool.
I know one shouldn't really over-analyse happiness. It should really just be something of the moment: but I can't help asking myself why I'm so damned chuffed. And, so help me, I cannotg come up with an answer. All I can really do is work on the knowledge that georgia will have a better father than my sons did, and hope that I have a chnace to prove to myself that I will be a terrific grandad.
It's likely I will post another blog today: it's afternoon now, and I had a spare half hour. I have some work to do on a couple of projects that I have also been neglecting, and mjust get to those.
In the future I am going to do a weekly TV commercial critique, and I think I shall be kicking off the first one tonight, when Jenny's watching "Coronation Street". Why such an otherwise perfect sheila would indulge in two hours of mind-rotting television every week I don't know - but it's a good time for me to get away and consider life, the universe, and Brighton Rock.
LISTENING TO: Jethro Tull, "Heavy Horses".
READING: T.S. Elliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I spoend a month every year trying to get to the bottom of this poem, and every year I find there's another layer of complexity.
WORD OF THE DAY: Georgia. Of course.
HENRY: Read on....
Mary’s legs disappear. They simply evaporate, like fog under a hot sun. She feels herself falling, collapsing, star-stuff into a black hole, and she sits flat-bang on her bum, and says “No.”
Charlie feels the blood leave her face, and thinks stupidly that she hasn’t put any make-up on and she must look like a ghost.
Christ. Ghost. Henry. Six months? No.
Henry takes a sip of the whisky, and sighs. “I got so scared, Mary. So scared.” He helps her up, and holds her. “I knew that I could cope, but then that silly boy had to rob the bank and then he shot me and I realised I hadn’t told you I loved you today and it could have been six seconds, not six months, and Mary, oh Mary.” He holds her with a desperation that neither one of them knew he was capable of. She smells warm, safe. A refuge. Six months, he thought.
“Why? What is it?” Mary asks. Her chin is up, she won’t say quit, she won’t say pax, she won’t say die. She is a rock, this woman. She is strong, she will not give in to fear.
“Brain tumour. The C.A.T. scan people think so, anyway.” Henry is calm now. Mary sits on his lap, her arms around his neck. Charlie leaves the room, heads into the kitchen. Tea, she thinks. Tea, a sweet biscuit or two with cheese, and a slug of Henry’s whisky. Tea for two. Jesus. Is this what he’s going to tell us? Of course it is.
She makes the tea, pours, and takes the cups back. Henry is sitting, holding her sister-in-law. Her sister. Charlie thinks: he is so gentle. The times I saw him on the footy ground, fierce and strong and proud and always, always so gentle. I used to love watching him play cricket, she thinks. Even if he is my brother, he was the most gorgeous man there: shining in his whites, wielding his bat like a toothpick, punishing any loose ball into the boundary.
And I’ve never known a day when he hasn’t loved this woman, my sister-in-law, my sister. Charlie can hear him murmuring to her, whispering into her hair. She turns to go back to the kitchen, but Henry raises his voice and calls her in.
“Charlie? Is that tea?” He says it and suddenly, just because he said it, and the way he said it, it sounds special. She knows instantly that she’s done something extraordinary. She nods, and brings it in. His smile is broad as he says “And I bet there’s some cheese and Crispies on the go?”
Charlie smiles. “Of course. I’ll bring them in.”
She fetches a plate, biscuits, cheese, the cheese knife, two more whisky tumblers, and the Macallan. She brings a small table over to the chair where her brother and sister-in-law, sister, are, and waits. She looks at them, at the way Mary’s face is buried in Henry’s shoulder.
“Mary,” Charlie asks, ”would you like a drop of whisky?”
Mary turns her face to Charlie, wipes a tear away, and grins. “You’ll never guess what Henry’s just told me.”
“I heard. Six months?”
“Not that. Not that. No. Henry’s told me that he wants to learn how to be a Hank.”
Charlie is dumbstruck, again. “A what?”
Henry’s voice rumbles from behind Mary’s hair. “A Hank. I’ve never had a nick-name. I’ve always been Henry. Not only been Henry – I’ve been a Henry. And before I die, I want someone to call me Hank. Just Hank. And spontaneously.”
Charlie is stunned. Henry wants to be a Hank? A skein of wool?
“What’s a hank?”
“Like Henry Fonda. Hank Fonda.”
The light dawns. Henry wants to be Henry Fonda. Wait - he wants to be artistic. Or brave, or strong, and he’s already all those things and more.
But he’s never been a Hank, has he. “Well, hell,” says Charlie, and laughs. “Why not?”There’s an electric air of hysteria about the house that night. Charlie called Wolf, explained the situation to him. He urges her to stay, and says “Scheizen” a lot. He had told Charlie once, a year or two ago, the Scheizen literally translated into “I love you” when said with the right glottle-stop. But if that was the case, Wolf loved pretty well everyone, including doltish drivers, rubbish-collectors who left half the week’s garbage around the bin, and even abusers of innocent apostrophes.
Perhaps he did.
After hanging up, Wolf dug out one of his famous twisted cigars, lit up, and then drank the better part of a two-litre flask of orange juice.
“Tomorrow,” he thought, “the schnapps. Tonight, perhaps, a prayer to my Bavarian nuns, on whose milky thighs these cigars are rolled.”
It was a night for waiting, for talking of dreams, of dreaming of love. Henry played a lot of music, laughed, drank, and didn’t get drunk. He made a phone call at three, and talked and listened and smiled, and told his son that he would be over in Greece soon to see him.
“Yeah?” said Adam. “I didn’t think you fancied the Greek Islands. Thought Mum’d do a Shirley Valentine on you.”
“Can’t worry about that now. No – I’d like to see those Gates of Fire, that Thermopylae place. And you remember us talking about Uncle Don?”
Don Talbot had gone to be a soldier, and had ended up being a part of the landscape in Greece. Not enough of him was found to fill a soldier’s pack, but a white marble cross with a silver fern and an astonishingly young man’s name had been put into a war cemetery not five hundred yards from where the German 88 millimetre shell had separated him from his life.
“Yeah,’ said Adam. “ ’Course I do.”
“Yes. I feel I owe it to my Dad to go and see where his brother died. Find the grave.”
“I can take you straight there, Dad. Me and Gussy went up there a couple of months ago.”
“Really?” Henry was surprised, and pleased. “That’s good. What are you doing now?”
Adam’s a little puzzled at this phone call. He loves his Dad, and even more important, he likes his Dad. But Dad’s never been one for a chat. Not on the phone, anyway.
“I’m out on the terraces, just below Gussy and Norm’s place. I’ve got the easel set up, there’s a nice French girl, Danielle, watching me – I’m looking dead Greek, Dad. White linen trousers held up with a bit a blue rope, long hair, tanned to buggery. I’ve known Danielle a while now. Polishing up on the parlez vous, nes’t paz?”
Henry imagined the scene. Adam took after Henry’s brother in appearance: lean and shark-like, with an eager, open face. “I don’t know that I need to hear too much about your sex life, son.”
Son? Dad never calls me son. Not unless – “Dad, is everything all right?”
And the conversation went on for another half-hour, with Mary grabbing the receiver every few minutes to make sure the second great love of her life was all right.
“Jesus, Mum! No! I’m not bloody all right! How can he tell me this? And anyway, it might be all up the boo-ai, eh. It’s not confirmed, is it?”
No, it hadn’t yet been confirmed, but both Henry and Mary knew that it would be. They said goodbye to their son, to their beautiful boy, and sat in silence a while.
At four, they went to bed, leaving Charlie with the tidy-up. Henry slept, and dreamed of ants crawling over his body, nipping his skin, carrying him away piecemeal to a destination he didn‘t care for.
Charlie sat at the table, and wept, softly, silently into the dawn.
I have had several thoughts about things for the future.. and it's the future I want to ruminate on right now.
Because, yes, I have finally become a grandfather. Georgia (Gorgeous Georgia) was born on Sunday the 12th of July, at around 5.30am. Weighing in at a healthy 3.3 kilos, and with the designated number of finger and toes, she's apparently very cute. She obviously takes after her mother, who is actually more stunningly beautiful than cute, but one hopes that Georgia will grow into that.
It's odd, but I feel an overwhelming love for this child. I've not seen her, and the chances are excellent that I shan't see her until she's walking, talking, and exchanging Platonic sophistries on campus at Melbourne's university campus. Hopefully a little before then, of course. But it will be a while - and yet, I feel intensely protective of her.
When Adam first told me that Gabrielle was pregnant, I was so happy I could have farted. It was an exceptional day. The day he told me the name they'd chosen, I wanted to tell every stranger I saw on the street. But on Sunday, I nearly burst with joy after receiving the text announcing her safe arrival. And the following, on set at LOTS, I told one of my friends - and imemdiately word got around. Two of the kids involved in the shoot found out about it, and immediately adopted me as their "Set Grandad". That was very cool.
I know one shouldn't really over-analyse happiness. It should really just be something of the moment: but I can't help asking myself why I'm so damned chuffed. And, so help me, I cannotg come up with an answer. All I can really do is work on the knowledge that georgia will have a better father than my sons did, and hope that I have a chnace to prove to myself that I will be a terrific grandad.
It's likely I will post another blog today: it's afternoon now, and I had a spare half hour. I have some work to do on a couple of projects that I have also been neglecting, and mjust get to those.
In the future I am going to do a weekly TV commercial critique, and I think I shall be kicking off the first one tonight, when Jenny's watching "Coronation Street". Why such an otherwise perfect sheila would indulge in two hours of mind-rotting television every week I don't know - but it's a good time for me to get away and consider life, the universe, and Brighton Rock.
LISTENING TO: Jethro Tull, "Heavy Horses".
READING: T.S. Elliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I spoend a month every year trying to get to the bottom of this poem, and every year I find there's another layer of complexity.
WORD OF THE DAY: Georgia. Of course.
HENRY: Read on....
Mary’s legs disappear. They simply evaporate, like fog under a hot sun. She feels herself falling, collapsing, star-stuff into a black hole, and she sits flat-bang on her bum, and says “No.”
Charlie feels the blood leave her face, and thinks stupidly that she hasn’t put any make-up on and she must look like a ghost.
Christ. Ghost. Henry. Six months? No.
Henry takes a sip of the whisky, and sighs. “I got so scared, Mary. So scared.” He helps her up, and holds her. “I knew that I could cope, but then that silly boy had to rob the bank and then he shot me and I realised I hadn’t told you I loved you today and it could have been six seconds, not six months, and Mary, oh Mary.” He holds her with a desperation that neither one of them knew he was capable of. She smells warm, safe. A refuge. Six months, he thought.
“Why? What is it?” Mary asks. Her chin is up, she won’t say quit, she won’t say pax, she won’t say die. She is a rock, this woman. She is strong, she will not give in to fear.
“Brain tumour. The C.A.T. scan people think so, anyway.” Henry is calm now. Mary sits on his lap, her arms around his neck. Charlie leaves the room, heads into the kitchen. Tea, she thinks. Tea, a sweet biscuit or two with cheese, and a slug of Henry’s whisky. Tea for two. Jesus. Is this what he’s going to tell us? Of course it is.
She makes the tea, pours, and takes the cups back. Henry is sitting, holding her sister-in-law. Her sister. Charlie thinks: he is so gentle. The times I saw him on the footy ground, fierce and strong and proud and always, always so gentle. I used to love watching him play cricket, she thinks. Even if he is my brother, he was the most gorgeous man there: shining in his whites, wielding his bat like a toothpick, punishing any loose ball into the boundary.
And I’ve never known a day when he hasn’t loved this woman, my sister-in-law, my sister. Charlie can hear him murmuring to her, whispering into her hair. She turns to go back to the kitchen, but Henry raises his voice and calls her in.
“Charlie? Is that tea?” He says it and suddenly, just because he said it, and the way he said it, it sounds special. She knows instantly that she’s done something extraordinary. She nods, and brings it in. His smile is broad as he says “And I bet there’s some cheese and Crispies on the go?”
Charlie smiles. “Of course. I’ll bring them in.”
She fetches a plate, biscuits, cheese, the cheese knife, two more whisky tumblers, and the Macallan. She brings a small table over to the chair where her brother and sister-in-law, sister, are, and waits. She looks at them, at the way Mary’s face is buried in Henry’s shoulder.
“Mary,” Charlie asks, ”would you like a drop of whisky?”
Mary turns her face to Charlie, wipes a tear away, and grins. “You’ll never guess what Henry’s just told me.”
“I heard. Six months?”
“Not that. Not that. No. Henry’s told me that he wants to learn how to be a Hank.”
Charlie is dumbstruck, again. “A what?”
Henry’s voice rumbles from behind Mary’s hair. “A Hank. I’ve never had a nick-name. I’ve always been Henry. Not only been Henry – I’ve been a Henry. And before I die, I want someone to call me Hank. Just Hank. And spontaneously.”
Charlie is stunned. Henry wants to be a Hank? A skein of wool?
“What’s a hank?”
“Like Henry Fonda. Hank Fonda.”
The light dawns. Henry wants to be Henry Fonda. Wait - he wants to be artistic. Or brave, or strong, and he’s already all those things and more.
But he’s never been a Hank, has he. “Well, hell,” says Charlie, and laughs. “Why not?”There’s an electric air of hysteria about the house that night. Charlie called Wolf, explained the situation to him. He urges her to stay, and says “Scheizen” a lot. He had told Charlie once, a year or two ago, the Scheizen literally translated into “I love you” when said with the right glottle-stop. But if that was the case, Wolf loved pretty well everyone, including doltish drivers, rubbish-collectors who left half the week’s garbage around the bin, and even abusers of innocent apostrophes.
Perhaps he did.
After hanging up, Wolf dug out one of his famous twisted cigars, lit up, and then drank the better part of a two-litre flask of orange juice.
“Tomorrow,” he thought, “the schnapps. Tonight, perhaps, a prayer to my Bavarian nuns, on whose milky thighs these cigars are rolled.”
It was a night for waiting, for talking of dreams, of dreaming of love. Henry played a lot of music, laughed, drank, and didn’t get drunk. He made a phone call at three, and talked and listened and smiled, and told his son that he would be over in Greece soon to see him.
“Yeah?” said Adam. “I didn’t think you fancied the Greek Islands. Thought Mum’d do a Shirley Valentine on you.”
“Can’t worry about that now. No – I’d like to see those Gates of Fire, that Thermopylae place. And you remember us talking about Uncle Don?”
Don Talbot had gone to be a soldier, and had ended up being a part of the landscape in Greece. Not enough of him was found to fill a soldier’s pack, but a white marble cross with a silver fern and an astonishingly young man’s name had been put into a war cemetery not five hundred yards from where the German 88 millimetre shell had separated him from his life.
“Yeah,’ said Adam. “ ’Course I do.”
“Yes. I feel I owe it to my Dad to go and see where his brother died. Find the grave.”
“I can take you straight there, Dad. Me and Gussy went up there a couple of months ago.”
“Really?” Henry was surprised, and pleased. “That’s good. What are you doing now?”
Adam’s a little puzzled at this phone call. He loves his Dad, and even more important, he likes his Dad. But Dad’s never been one for a chat. Not on the phone, anyway.
“I’m out on the terraces, just below Gussy and Norm’s place. I’ve got the easel set up, there’s a nice French girl, Danielle, watching me – I’m looking dead Greek, Dad. White linen trousers held up with a bit a blue rope, long hair, tanned to buggery. I’ve known Danielle a while now. Polishing up on the parlez vous, nes’t paz?”
Henry imagined the scene. Adam took after Henry’s brother in appearance: lean and shark-like, with an eager, open face. “I don’t know that I need to hear too much about your sex life, son.”
Son? Dad never calls me son. Not unless – “Dad, is everything all right?”
And the conversation went on for another half-hour, with Mary grabbing the receiver every few minutes to make sure the second great love of her life was all right.
“Jesus, Mum! No! I’m not bloody all right! How can he tell me this? And anyway, it might be all up the boo-ai, eh. It’s not confirmed, is it?”
No, it hadn’t yet been confirmed, but both Henry and Mary knew that it would be. They said goodbye to their son, to their beautiful boy, and sat in silence a while.
At four, they went to bed, leaving Charlie with the tidy-up. Henry slept, and dreamed of ants crawling over his body, nipping his skin, carrying him away piecemeal to a destination he didn‘t care for.
Charlie sat at the table, and wept, softly, silently into the dawn.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
On co-operation
It's been a busy few days, and it's a trend that's going to continue for the next week or so. Long may it endure: I'm weary of having too much time on my hands. It seems that the more time I have, there is less time to actually get things done. The paradox of proscrastination is that the time for doing things never seems to arrive.
I have, however, finished "Quiet Woman". The novella is, in fact, a short stopry with chapters. A beginning, middle, and end: I've never truly understood the observational slice of life short stories that never seem to have a story to tell - they merely make minor moral observations. The best of them are, however, elegant - and bloody hard to write.
The play "Quiet Woman" is good. It does need a re-write, and putting the story into a different form has informed me of where and how the changes can take place. Watch this space. I am now looking at an observational short story, of the kind I don't particularly get: I'm considering it more a writing exercise than anything else.
I've just spent a day on-set at "Legends of the Seeker". It's been a long time since I was anywhere near a major movie / television production set, and I was forcibly struck by how smoothly it all works. Hordes of people - there most have been at least 120 people at lunch - involved on creating just a few minutes of television. The attention to the slightest detail is instructional. But what struck me was the collaberative attitudes of everyone concerned, and the respect given everyone. I've become accustomed, over the past 20-odd years, to an environment where competitiveness ruled the day: where the prime objective was to personally get more from the situation than my colleagues did. The standard sales-dominated schtick, in other words. I was astonished and refreshed by the people on the set who worked together in an air of mutual respect. The assumption was made that everyone involved in the day's tasks was not only important but exceedingly competent. The "stars" of the show were not ego-fuelled: they saw themselves as part of the machine. They joked with the extras, they responded to the needs of the sound guy, they were patient and hard-working. The Director had a deep understanding of everyone's parts, and almost never told people what to do: he stated his needs, or vision, and asked people to help him realise those needs.
This was a collaborative effort, and it stunned me - and I couldn't help buy compare it with my previous full time working environment. I know what I'd prefer.
WHAT I'M LISTENING TO: Albert Hammond. English singer/songwriter of the 60s and 70s. Wrote a lot of the hits that other people took to number one.
WHAT I'M READING: New Scientist magazine, talking about climate change, and Darwin's tree-of-life being a faulty image. I like the fact that science is constantly questioning itself. Religion, by contracst, questions others.
WORD OF THE DAY: Rort, as in Wellington bus drivers. I often wonder why the verb rort means to cheat, while the adjective rorty means noisy, fun, perhaps a little orgiastic. Such is life, and the beautiful English language.
A LITTLE MORE HENRY: Enjoy.
Chapter Seven
What a Reason For Waiting, For Walking at Night.
Mary is a painter. A very good one. Henry had supported her for the first fifteen years or so – well, he was making good money, and he knew she had talent. It was only a matter of time before someone else noticed her vision, and slowly but surely they did. An exhibition here, a show there. The sales started, the trade began. It became a cachet at certain plummy addresses in Wellington and Auckland to have an early Mary Talbot.
“Use your own name on your paintings, Mary. Not my name. I don’t have an artistic bone in my body: you got your talent from your Dad.”
“I’ll use my love’s name.”
“But –“
“No buts.”
On this March 3rd, after Mary had gotten over her shock and fear and been reassured by Charlie that Henry was OK, she waited for him to come home. Joe Know had called her, to let her know that Henry was all right, and was fit enough to drive, but should stay off the leg for a couple of days. Joe didn’t tell Mary of the earlier conversation he’d had with Henry.
The wound had been clean and simple: a little hole, a through-and-through it’s called in American emergency room dramas. Henry had been lucky that the bullet had been jacketed: a lead round may have bloomed and blossomed and torn a great hole in his leg. As it was: a quick polish with peroxide or something equally evil, a stitch or two, and some dressing. Nothing to it.
Of course, Henry could say that he’d been unlucky enough to have been there. Luck’s a funny thing: Henry every day marvelled at how lucky he’d been at age seven to have met Mary. Mary, on the other hand, revelled in her good fortune to have met a boy like Henry who became such a man.
And now Henry is limping up the driveway, his arm around his sister’s shoulders, and he’s grinning at Mary as she laughs, and she grins back at him, and then she runs at him and he folds her in his arms and she sobs and sobs and tells him that he could have died and he tells her that he knows but it doesn’t matter but I could have lost you she rages and his splendid tie is soaked with her tears and behind them the video cameras whirr and Charlie turns around and gives the reporters the fingers and then all three go up the steps and along the veranda and in through the marvellous front door of 22 Talbot Terrace.
One of the TV people turns to a newsprint colleague, and suggests a brew and a belt down at the Red Dog. They couldn’t see themselves getting anything more out of the night: may as well get a feed and head back home.
There are compensations in a journalist’s life. Not many, though.
Inside the house, Charlie stands guard at the door, and watches in satisfaction as the journalists leave. Mary has taken her husband, her glorious and heroic husband, her handsome and daring husband, her witty, brave, and wise husband Henry through to the sitting room, and is pouring him a large Scotch. Two thick fingers of the Macallan, and she holds the glass up for his approval. Henry smiles at her, thinks six months, and holds up three fingers. She tilts the bottle again.
Henry thinks six months.
Mary brings him the glass, and tears form at his eyes. She blinks with astonishment: she had seen Henry weep four times. The third was when he held Adam, his son, for the first time. A tear, liquid love, crept down Henry’s cheek, and splashed onto Adam’s startled cheek.
Six months, he thinks. Six months left of being with her.
“Henry?” her voice is hesitant. “Henry?” Something in her tone makes Charlie turn around, and she is just as amazed.
Crikey. Didn’t think he had it in him, she thinks. Our dry Henry? With a tear or two?
The first and second times Henry wept had much to do with Miriam: but more of her later. The fourth time also had to do with Adam.
Henry’s tears had, it seems, been reserved for children. But now there was something different, something that he didn’t know how to cope with, and Henry was always and ever a man who coped.
Mary touches his cheek with a trembling finger, and the tear creeps onto her fingernail. She takes it to her lips, and says again, wonderingly: “Henry?”
“I’m giving up work, Mary.”
“Henry?”
“I had a few words with Joe. Joseph Know. Before the thing at the bank. I was leaving his surgery to come home, and went to get some money from the machine, and I got shot, and now I’m resigning from my job. Taking early retirement. Effective as from two, this afternoon.”
There’s a thinness to Henry’s voice that Mary has never heard before. Henry’s voice, for her, has been the ideal voice of movie stars, teddy bears, and golden tigers: a deep velvet purr. She heard him raise his voice in anger once, and it took on the sound of a great bull. But now his voice is thready, distant. She isn’t at all sure what to think.
She is, suddenly, terribly afraid. A deep chill spreads through her, and she starts to shake. She knows her man, she knows what it takes to upset him like this. She believes, suddenly, chillingly, that she knows what he is about to say, and Henry’s next words are a damning confirmation of how well she knows her husband.
“I spoke with Joe Know,” says Henry, “and he tells me that I may only have six months to, well, to live.”
Mary’s legs disappear. They simply evaporate, like fog under a hot sun. She feels herself falling, collapsing, star-stuff into a black hole, and she sits flat-bang on her bum, and says “No.”
I have, however, finished "Quiet Woman". The novella is, in fact, a short stopry with chapters. A beginning, middle, and end: I've never truly understood the observational slice of life short stories that never seem to have a story to tell - they merely make minor moral observations. The best of them are, however, elegant - and bloody hard to write.
The play "Quiet Woman" is good. It does need a re-write, and putting the story into a different form has informed me of where and how the changes can take place. Watch this space. I am now looking at an observational short story, of the kind I don't particularly get: I'm considering it more a writing exercise than anything else.
I've just spent a day on-set at "Legends of the Seeker". It's been a long time since I was anywhere near a major movie / television production set, and I was forcibly struck by how smoothly it all works. Hordes of people - there most have been at least 120 people at lunch - involved on creating just a few minutes of television. The attention to the slightest detail is instructional. But what struck me was the collaberative attitudes of everyone concerned, and the respect given everyone. I've become accustomed, over the past 20-odd years, to an environment where competitiveness ruled the day: where the prime objective was to personally get more from the situation than my colleagues did. The standard sales-dominated schtick, in other words. I was astonished and refreshed by the people on the set who worked together in an air of mutual respect. The assumption was made that everyone involved in the day's tasks was not only important but exceedingly competent. The "stars" of the show were not ego-fuelled: they saw themselves as part of the machine. They joked with the extras, they responded to the needs of the sound guy, they were patient and hard-working. The Director had a deep understanding of everyone's parts, and almost never told people what to do: he stated his needs, or vision, and asked people to help him realise those needs.
This was a collaborative effort, and it stunned me - and I couldn't help buy compare it with my previous full time working environment. I know what I'd prefer.
WHAT I'M LISTENING TO: Albert Hammond. English singer/songwriter of the 60s and 70s. Wrote a lot of the hits that other people took to number one.
WHAT I'M READING: New Scientist magazine, talking about climate change, and Darwin's tree-of-life being a faulty image. I like the fact that science is constantly questioning itself. Religion, by contracst, questions others.
WORD OF THE DAY: Rort, as in Wellington bus drivers. I often wonder why the verb rort means to cheat, while the adjective rorty means noisy, fun, perhaps a little orgiastic. Such is life, and the beautiful English language.
A LITTLE MORE HENRY: Enjoy.
Chapter Seven
What a Reason For Waiting, For Walking at Night.
Mary is a painter. A very good one. Henry had supported her for the first fifteen years or so – well, he was making good money, and he knew she had talent. It was only a matter of time before someone else noticed her vision, and slowly but surely they did. An exhibition here, a show there. The sales started, the trade began. It became a cachet at certain plummy addresses in Wellington and Auckland to have an early Mary Talbot.
“Use your own name on your paintings, Mary. Not my name. I don’t have an artistic bone in my body: you got your talent from your Dad.”
“I’ll use my love’s name.”
“But –“
“No buts.”
On this March 3rd, after Mary had gotten over her shock and fear and been reassured by Charlie that Henry was OK, she waited for him to come home. Joe Know had called her, to let her know that Henry was all right, and was fit enough to drive, but should stay off the leg for a couple of days. Joe didn’t tell Mary of the earlier conversation he’d had with Henry.
The wound had been clean and simple: a little hole, a through-and-through it’s called in American emergency room dramas. Henry had been lucky that the bullet had been jacketed: a lead round may have bloomed and blossomed and torn a great hole in his leg. As it was: a quick polish with peroxide or something equally evil, a stitch or two, and some dressing. Nothing to it.
Of course, Henry could say that he’d been unlucky enough to have been there. Luck’s a funny thing: Henry every day marvelled at how lucky he’d been at age seven to have met Mary. Mary, on the other hand, revelled in her good fortune to have met a boy like Henry who became such a man.
And now Henry is limping up the driveway, his arm around his sister’s shoulders, and he’s grinning at Mary as she laughs, and she grins back at him, and then she runs at him and he folds her in his arms and she sobs and sobs and tells him that he could have died and he tells her that he knows but it doesn’t matter but I could have lost you she rages and his splendid tie is soaked with her tears and behind them the video cameras whirr and Charlie turns around and gives the reporters the fingers and then all three go up the steps and along the veranda and in through the marvellous front door of 22 Talbot Terrace.
One of the TV people turns to a newsprint colleague, and suggests a brew and a belt down at the Red Dog. They couldn’t see themselves getting anything more out of the night: may as well get a feed and head back home.
There are compensations in a journalist’s life. Not many, though.
Inside the house, Charlie stands guard at the door, and watches in satisfaction as the journalists leave. Mary has taken her husband, her glorious and heroic husband, her handsome and daring husband, her witty, brave, and wise husband Henry through to the sitting room, and is pouring him a large Scotch. Two thick fingers of the Macallan, and she holds the glass up for his approval. Henry smiles at her, thinks six months, and holds up three fingers. She tilts the bottle again.
Henry thinks six months.
Mary brings him the glass, and tears form at his eyes. She blinks with astonishment: she had seen Henry weep four times. The third was when he held Adam, his son, for the first time. A tear, liquid love, crept down Henry’s cheek, and splashed onto Adam’s startled cheek.
Six months, he thinks. Six months left of being with her.
“Henry?” her voice is hesitant. “Henry?” Something in her tone makes Charlie turn around, and she is just as amazed.
Crikey. Didn’t think he had it in him, she thinks. Our dry Henry? With a tear or two?
The first and second times Henry wept had much to do with Miriam: but more of her later. The fourth time also had to do with Adam.
Henry’s tears had, it seems, been reserved for children. But now there was something different, something that he didn’t know how to cope with, and Henry was always and ever a man who coped.
Mary touches his cheek with a trembling finger, and the tear creeps onto her fingernail. She takes it to her lips, and says again, wonderingly: “Henry?”
“I’m giving up work, Mary.”
“Henry?”
“I had a few words with Joe. Joseph Know. Before the thing at the bank. I was leaving his surgery to come home, and went to get some money from the machine, and I got shot, and now I’m resigning from my job. Taking early retirement. Effective as from two, this afternoon.”
There’s a thinness to Henry’s voice that Mary has never heard before. Henry’s voice, for her, has been the ideal voice of movie stars, teddy bears, and golden tigers: a deep velvet purr. She heard him raise his voice in anger once, and it took on the sound of a great bull. But now his voice is thready, distant. She isn’t at all sure what to think.
She is, suddenly, terribly afraid. A deep chill spreads through her, and she starts to shake. She knows her man, she knows what it takes to upset him like this. She believes, suddenly, chillingly, that she knows what he is about to say, and Henry’s next words are a damning confirmation of how well she knows her husband.
“I spoke with Joe Know,” says Henry, “and he tells me that I may only have six months to, well, to live.”
Mary’s legs disappear. They simply evaporate, like fog under a hot sun. She feels herself falling, collapsing, star-stuff into a black hole, and she sits flat-bang on her bum, and says “No.”
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Sunday Scribbles 3
I was walking home from the Supermarket the other day, weighed down with shopping, and I thought: do we have the uniquitous plastic supermarket bag to thanks for the establishment of supermarkets? In times gone by, my Mother got by with a shopping basket, that she took to the shop every day. The butcher delivered the meat, the baker delivered the bread, and she preserved the fruit, etc. Lot of hard work. But of she'd gone to the supermarket with her trusty yellow basket... it wouldn't have worked. Enter the plastic bag. Cheap, strong... it gave the shopper a way of getting the shopping into the car, and of getting said shopping into the house.
Actually, we owe a lot to the plastic bag. There's that scene in "American Beauty"... the dancing plastic bag. There's the novelty things people have made out of them by knotting them together: macrame, by any other name. Bin liners, of course. Osama Bin Liner, anyone? Leonard Cohen wrote a terrific line about those plastic bags that time cannot decay. They've given a couple of generations of sandal-wearing yoof something to get incensed about... and they have led, of course, to the industry of making bags to replace the bags that replaced a lot of labour.
Is the plastic shopping bag a metaphor for modern life? Cheap, and disposable? Terry Pratchett put it nicely, when he said that life wasn't cheap. It was death that cheap. Life was expensive, all too brief, and often ended in great pain.
Read an article about Ursula le Guin. She's 76! How the hell did that happen? She's been a long-time opponent of the occupation of Iraq, and used to keep a poster in her front window shbowing the number of American deaths, updaating it daily. She couldn't, to her chagrin, show the Iraqi death toll, as there was no way of getting to an accurate figure. I guess she could have gone for the nearest 10,000.
Michael Jackson is dead. Well I, for one, am relieved. What a sad, empty life. He was a great dancer who put together a couple of insanely good albums. And that's all. He was also a victim who did nothing about his state of victim-ness. Instead, he made his children victims, as well. Poor little buggers, all carrying some version of his name, all leading a surreal life.. The obscene thing about it all is this: we all allowed and encouraged his increasingly bizarre behaviour. Other fading starts - Liz Taylor, Diana Ross, etc - made excuses for him. But no one pointed out to him that he wasn't healthy. He was ill, and he was abusive. I doubt if he sexually abused any little kids... but he abused them, nonetheless. And he abused his own children. He's dead now... and a cheap death it was. And what a useless, bloated, and excessive thing his funeral is going to be. Sad little bastard.
LISTENING TO: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Best of.." album. Absolutely hilarious - and I only jujst realised (a couple of years ago) that whole Bonzo Dog schtick was about being gay in the 60s. The Love Generation hated gays...
READING: A book by Robert Wilson. I can't remember the title, and it'sin the bedroom where Jenny's still sleeping, so you'll have to wait. It's a police procedural, set in Spain.
WORD OF THE DAY: Birth. I spoke to Adam yesterday. His daughter is due to make an appearance on Tuesday. Holy crap!
MORE OF HENRY'S JOURNEY:
“Ah, yes,” says Henry, and grins. “Fuck off.”
And he turns, and Charlie helps him limp up the path to greet his wife, who is now standing at the door and weeping with laughter.
Chapter Six.
Hank: or a rose by any other name.
When Henry was twelve, he decided that he wanted to be called Hank. Henry, being Henry, didn’t tell anyone. He felt, rightly enough, that a nick-name, or an abbreviation, should be a spontaneous gift from a friend.
Henry was blessed with three extraordinarily good friends, named Roger, Adam, and Patrick. Respectively they were called Bill, Spot, and Murphy. How Roger became Bill is a story of enormous length and little point, involves asparagus, and should never be told in mixed company.
Adam – and yes, Henry named his only begotten after his very good (and twenty-four years dead) friend – became Spot after an equally and fabulously fatuous episode, one involving sunscreen, a girl in a blue gingham bikini, and a rubber glove.
Sometimes it’s best not to know, or ask.
Patrick became Murphy, or Murph, because Patricks often did, and besides which, Patrick surfed. Very, very well.
Murphy, Spot, Bill – and Henry. Henry didn’t really mind his name. After all, it stretched back into antiquity! He was the fifth first-born male Talbot to have been blessed with the burden of the name! Hurrah! Well, blah, thought the twelve-year old Henry, who truthfully did mind his name. He’d noticed that while Henry Fonda was called Henry on the movie posters, in the movie magazines his friends and admirers called him Hank. This is something Americans and Australians did well and still do: they convert, subvert, invert, and revert names. To be fair, the English do, too: John, for instance, become Jack – although a Jack only becomes a John by acquaintance with a certain kind of lady. However, Henry had found the precedent for there being a Henry to Hank conversion, and he desired the nickname with all the passion available to his pre-pubescent soul. The name Henry, he raged to himself, is a burden. Tote that bale, carry that name. Hank. Hank? Hank! Short, sharp, snappy! Muscular and virile! It wasn’t too much to ask, even though he never did ask and don’t ever ask him why.
The name Henry, on the other hand, is, well, it’s soft and doughy. You make bread from a name like Henry: you made hard-tack and scroggin from a name like Hank.
Bill, Murphy, Spot – and Henry. Henry, declared the twelve-year old burden carrier to himself, is a boring name. A dull name. If I’m not careful, I shall become a boring person. My name shall drag me to the clammy pits of adult dullness and putrescence. I shall never wear a Hawaiian shirt, never smoke a cheroot like Clint Eastwood, I shall become a grey and formless ghost. I shall remain what I already am: a Henry.
There are worse things, but don‘t expect a 12 year old boy to know that.
Spot, Murphy, Bill – and Henry. It must be said that, at the beginning, Spot was the serious one. It was a narrow race, but Spot did edge Henry into second place. At age seven, it seemed that Spot was the boy born to be beige. He was quiet, introverted, and much more interested in books that in games. Fiercely intelligent, Spot had been tormented through his first few years at school, until he came to the attention of Murph and Henry. They adopted him into their coterie and protected him, and discovered that under the tweedy pullover he always wore was a loyal and dependable friend.
Despite his early reticence, Spot grew up to be a particularly effervescent character, albeit a short-lived one. He denied the destiny that had seemed carved in granite when he was young, and grew up to be a wild youth who tried to radicalise the world. Oddly enough, though, Spot never called Henry anything but Henry.
It must be said that Mary had a dozen, a score, a simply million billion squillion names for Henry, and he revelled in each and every one of them. Mary was, and always would be, Henry’s greatest friend, his love, his heart’s desire. He saw no fault in her. She was as flawless as a crystal teardrop, as beautiful as all the roses of Picardy bunched together. He loved her with all his heart and all his soul and – but wait: Mary never, ever called Henry Hank.
Actually, we owe a lot to the plastic bag. There's that scene in "American Beauty"... the dancing plastic bag. There's the novelty things people have made out of them by knotting them together: macrame, by any other name. Bin liners, of course. Osama Bin Liner, anyone? Leonard Cohen wrote a terrific line about those plastic bags that time cannot decay. They've given a couple of generations of sandal-wearing yoof something to get incensed about... and they have led, of course, to the industry of making bags to replace the bags that replaced a lot of labour.
Is the plastic shopping bag a metaphor for modern life? Cheap, and disposable? Terry Pratchett put it nicely, when he said that life wasn't cheap. It was death that cheap. Life was expensive, all too brief, and often ended in great pain.
Read an article about Ursula le Guin. She's 76! How the hell did that happen? She's been a long-time opponent of the occupation of Iraq, and used to keep a poster in her front window shbowing the number of American deaths, updaating it daily. She couldn't, to her chagrin, show the Iraqi death toll, as there was no way of getting to an accurate figure. I guess she could have gone for the nearest 10,000.
Michael Jackson is dead. Well I, for one, am relieved. What a sad, empty life. He was a great dancer who put together a couple of insanely good albums. And that's all. He was also a victim who did nothing about his state of victim-ness. Instead, he made his children victims, as well. Poor little buggers, all carrying some version of his name, all leading a surreal life.. The obscene thing about it all is this: we all allowed and encouraged his increasingly bizarre behaviour. Other fading starts - Liz Taylor, Diana Ross, etc - made excuses for him. But no one pointed out to him that he wasn't healthy. He was ill, and he was abusive. I doubt if he sexually abused any little kids... but he abused them, nonetheless. And he abused his own children. He's dead now... and a cheap death it was. And what a useless, bloated, and excessive thing his funeral is going to be. Sad little bastard.
LISTENING TO: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Best of.." album. Absolutely hilarious - and I only jujst realised (a couple of years ago) that whole Bonzo Dog schtick was about being gay in the 60s. The Love Generation hated gays...
READING: A book by Robert Wilson. I can't remember the title, and it'sin the bedroom where Jenny's still sleeping, so you'll have to wait. It's a police procedural, set in Spain.
WORD OF THE DAY: Birth. I spoke to Adam yesterday. His daughter is due to make an appearance on Tuesday. Holy crap!
MORE OF HENRY'S JOURNEY:
“Ah, yes,” says Henry, and grins. “Fuck off.”
And he turns, and Charlie helps him limp up the path to greet his wife, who is now standing at the door and weeping with laughter.
Chapter Six.
Hank: or a rose by any other name.
When Henry was twelve, he decided that he wanted to be called Hank. Henry, being Henry, didn’t tell anyone. He felt, rightly enough, that a nick-name, or an abbreviation, should be a spontaneous gift from a friend.
Henry was blessed with three extraordinarily good friends, named Roger, Adam, and Patrick. Respectively they were called Bill, Spot, and Murphy. How Roger became Bill is a story of enormous length and little point, involves asparagus, and should never be told in mixed company.
Adam – and yes, Henry named his only begotten after his very good (and twenty-four years dead) friend – became Spot after an equally and fabulously fatuous episode, one involving sunscreen, a girl in a blue gingham bikini, and a rubber glove.
Sometimes it’s best not to know, or ask.
Patrick became Murphy, or Murph, because Patricks often did, and besides which, Patrick surfed. Very, very well.
Murphy, Spot, Bill – and Henry. Henry didn’t really mind his name. After all, it stretched back into antiquity! He was the fifth first-born male Talbot to have been blessed with the burden of the name! Hurrah! Well, blah, thought the twelve-year old Henry, who truthfully did mind his name. He’d noticed that while Henry Fonda was called Henry on the movie posters, in the movie magazines his friends and admirers called him Hank. This is something Americans and Australians did well and still do: they convert, subvert, invert, and revert names. To be fair, the English do, too: John, for instance, become Jack – although a Jack only becomes a John by acquaintance with a certain kind of lady. However, Henry had found the precedent for there being a Henry to Hank conversion, and he desired the nickname with all the passion available to his pre-pubescent soul. The name Henry, he raged to himself, is a burden. Tote that bale, carry that name. Hank. Hank? Hank! Short, sharp, snappy! Muscular and virile! It wasn’t too much to ask, even though he never did ask and don’t ever ask him why.
The name Henry, on the other hand, is, well, it’s soft and doughy. You make bread from a name like Henry: you made hard-tack and scroggin from a name like Hank.
Bill, Murphy, Spot – and Henry. Henry, declared the twelve-year old burden carrier to himself, is a boring name. A dull name. If I’m not careful, I shall become a boring person. My name shall drag me to the clammy pits of adult dullness and putrescence. I shall never wear a Hawaiian shirt, never smoke a cheroot like Clint Eastwood, I shall become a grey and formless ghost. I shall remain what I already am: a Henry.
There are worse things, but don‘t expect a 12 year old boy to know that.
Spot, Murphy, Bill – and Henry. It must be said that, at the beginning, Spot was the serious one. It was a narrow race, but Spot did edge Henry into second place. At age seven, it seemed that Spot was the boy born to be beige. He was quiet, introverted, and much more interested in books that in games. Fiercely intelligent, Spot had been tormented through his first few years at school, until he came to the attention of Murph and Henry. They adopted him into their coterie and protected him, and discovered that under the tweedy pullover he always wore was a loyal and dependable friend.
Despite his early reticence, Spot grew up to be a particularly effervescent character, albeit a short-lived one. He denied the destiny that had seemed carved in granite when he was young, and grew up to be a wild youth who tried to radicalise the world. Oddly enough, though, Spot never called Henry anything but Henry.
It must be said that Mary had a dozen, a score, a simply million billion squillion names for Henry, and he revelled in each and every one of them. Mary was, and always would be, Henry’s greatest friend, his love, his heart’s desire. He saw no fault in her. She was as flawless as a crystal teardrop, as beautiful as all the roses of Picardy bunched together. He loved her with all his heart and all his soul and – but wait: Mary never, ever called Henry Hank.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
How Green Is My Valley
There was a rather nice Doonesbury the other day. I'm not up on the strip enough to know all the characters by name (except for the president. It seems Trudeau hasn't yet figured out a way of depicting Obama. I liked his Bush: an empty Roman helmet.) but the slacker character was asked why there's so much green on the protesters' flags in Iran. He guessed that they may be connected with an environmental issue.
The point of the strip was that you don't learn unless you read. In this case, newspapers. This absolutely true. I am concerned that we're losing touch with what's really going on in the world. The "news" we get on TV is an absolute joke. It has as much to do with the real concerns of the world as a bubble-gum wrapper does. It's entertainment, and poorly written entertainment, at that. Tonight's snivelling offering from TV3 included this line: "The French captain saw the yacht on his bridge."
The story was about the plucky Kiwi family plucked from the ocean by the crew of a French frigate. I am reasonably certain that the yacht in question wasn't on the bridge of the frigate. If it was, then the rescue would have been very easy, and not involved the use of the frigate's Zodiacs. Also, I would have been astonished if the captain of the frigate missed seeing it. A 40-foot yacht in your office? Kind of like not seeing the rhinocerous in the bathroom.
Aside: the last time I saw a story featuring Frenchmen and Zodiac semi-rigid inflatable boats, the Rainbow Warrior went to the bottom of the sea. And here we are again....
Back to the protesters, and their green bunting. Green - as you'll know - is a pretty holy colour in Muslim countries. The Q'ran, Koran, or whatever you like to call their holy scribblings, states that Mohammed suggested that green would be the colours the good guys (ie followers of his) both wore and featured on their flags, clothing, and celebratory rags.
It's not surprising that a desert culture should look on green as being special. It is, after all, the colour of life. Vegetation, grass, trees... things that are in short supply in an arid dun-coloured landscape. What I'm curious about is this: why didn't the equally fanatical (but far more murderous) Hebrews proscribe green first?) They were, after all, a desert nation, etc. And as for the bloodthirsty ethnic-cleansing Christians - they got it right. Red, the colour of blood, pain, fire, and destruction. However, from my readings of the bible (Sorry. I just can't bring myself to give the word a capital letter) I don't recall even the one-eyed insane bigot, Saul of Tarsus, recommending the christian mob follow a red flag. It just happened. Murderous evolution in action. And why the Israelis chose a powder blue for their war-flag, I'll never know. It's such a sissy colour. Better than pink, I suppose, but not by much.
WORD OF THE DAY: Agnostic. What a weak, lily-livered word. Either there is a god, or there's not. Agnostics have to learn to piss or get off the pot.
LISTENING TO: Bob Dylan, "Modern Times". Jenny's a major Bob fan, but it wasn't 'til I heard this album that I started to appreciate him.
READING: Nothing new. I finished the Ted Dekker book, "Adam". Up until the last five (short) chapters, I was thoroughly enjoying it. Nice, atmospheric serial-killer with spooky shit going on kind of yarn. Unfortunately, he copped out at the end. Jenny had read it, and was very satisfied with it.
TIME FOR MORE HENRY....
Chapter Five.
Fame, Easily Gained, Joyfully Lost.
Henry checks the old Smith electric clock set into the wooden dashboard of his car when he approaches Talbot Terrace on the afternoon of his shooting. He doesn’t, of course, think of the event as “my shooting”. He doesn’t think much of it at all, despite it having happened only ninety minutes or so ago. Actually, that disturbs him, not knowing exactly when it happened. He thinks back to the incident, and remembers that he’d carefully put the ATM receipt into his shirt pocket. That will have the time on it. Excellent. The time on the car’s clock reads bang on five, which means the eccentric old clock on the mantle in his brown study would have just finished chiming seven.
He carefully clicks the indicator down, and the little green jewel-light on the dash blinks. He checks the mirror, checks the road, and turns carefully into Talbot Terrace.
The Terrace is a dog-leg cul de sac, with Henry and Mary’s home right at the end. Henry always drives more carefully in his own street, and this evening it’s even more important: he does, after all, only have one working headlight, and the Friar’s little Yorkshire terrier loves chasing cars, and the MacIntosh’s four year old is a little tearaway. A few moments longer won’t –
What on earth is this? Henry’s magnificent old Rover has quietly billowed around the dog-leg, and the sight that greets Harry is catastrophic. There’s a mill of people waiting by his gate. People with lights, people with cameras, people with microphones. Damn. Henry turns to his only passenger, and grins broadly. “Well, we thought that something like this might happen, eh.”
His passenger grins in return.
Actually, there is no passenger. But if there had been, he would have been dressed in a black cloak, and carrying a vast scythe. Six months, Henry reminds himself.
Henry presses the horn-ring, and the lovely mellow bugle under the bonnet sounds its brassy note. Faces turn toward him, and the television lights run sparks across his vision. He holds a hand up against the glare, and the reporters immediately surround his car.
“Mr Talbot, Mr Talbot –“
“A few words, Henry, that’s all we want! Just a few words!”
“Henry – over here! Over here!”
“Is that him? Is it?”
Henry brakes, stops, and sits quietly. The clamour outside the car is deafening. Or, at least, it would be deafening if the car’s doors weren’t so thick. Henry reaches into his shirt pocket, and pulls out the receipt: 14.57.
Just on two hours ago. Henry looks up, past the journalists, and there’s Charlie, coming out his front door, and walking down to the gate, which she opens. Henry ignores the throng about his car, and slowly drives through them, past Charlie, and into the garage. He parks carefully, turning off the headlight, sliding the column shift to P-for-Park, shutting off the motor.
He gets out of the car, shuts the door gently, and turns to find Charlie, right there beside him.
“Ignore them, Henry. Mary’s inside. She’s OK, no real need to worry.”
“Thanks. Just a minute, Charlie.” Henry limps back to the gate, and into the glare of the lights. He stands there for half a minute, listening to the mob.
“Mr Talbot, over here!”
“Henry – you don’t mind if we call you Henry, do you?” Actually, thinks Henry, yes I do.
“Is it true you stopped the robber, Henry?”
“How serious is the wound, where were you shot?” This last surprises Henry. For a reporter, this one must write for the Braille Weekly.
Henry Talbot, of 22 Talbot Terrace, holds up his hand, his left hand, sinisterly, imperiously, palm outwards: the babble of the rabble slowly dies down.
“”I have only one thing to say, ladies and… ladies and.. Um. Just one thing to say.” Henry falls silent, purses his lips. He puts his hands’ palms together, holds the tips of his forefingers to his lips. He looks as though he’s praying. The clamour dies down, and Henry looks up, dropping his hands to his side. He smiles. Henry Talbot, standing there in the television lights, is a magnificent sight as the lights create a halo around his head. His driveway slopes up toward the house, so he looks even taller than he is. His shirt is immaculately buttoned. His tie has an elegantly fussy Windsor knot, his suit jacket fits him perfectly, and the only giveaway that anything extraordinary has happened to him is the fact that the right trouser leg of his suit has been cut off at the thigh. Around his calf is a bright white bandage - the wound was, indeed, minor.
“Yes. One thing.”
The silence clogs the air, and someone coughs and farts. A couple of cameras flash and slap, the TV soundman shuffles his feet as he checks his meters. The expectation is rising. Henry thinks it’s risible. Charlie moves to stand beside her brother.
“Ah, yes,” says Henry, and grins. “Fuck off.”
The point of the strip was that you don't learn unless you read. In this case, newspapers. This absolutely true. I am concerned that we're losing touch with what's really going on in the world. The "news" we get on TV is an absolute joke. It has as much to do with the real concerns of the world as a bubble-gum wrapper does. It's entertainment, and poorly written entertainment, at that. Tonight's snivelling offering from TV3 included this line: "The French captain saw the yacht on his bridge."
The story was about the plucky Kiwi family plucked from the ocean by the crew of a French frigate. I am reasonably certain that the yacht in question wasn't on the bridge of the frigate. If it was, then the rescue would have been very easy, and not involved the use of the frigate's Zodiacs. Also, I would have been astonished if the captain of the frigate missed seeing it. A 40-foot yacht in your office? Kind of like not seeing the rhinocerous in the bathroom.
Aside: the last time I saw a story featuring Frenchmen and Zodiac semi-rigid inflatable boats, the Rainbow Warrior went to the bottom of the sea. And here we are again....
Back to the protesters, and their green bunting. Green - as you'll know - is a pretty holy colour in Muslim countries. The Q'ran, Koran, or whatever you like to call their holy scribblings, states that Mohammed suggested that green would be the colours the good guys (ie followers of his) both wore and featured on their flags, clothing, and celebratory rags.
It's not surprising that a desert culture should look on green as being special. It is, after all, the colour of life. Vegetation, grass, trees... things that are in short supply in an arid dun-coloured landscape. What I'm curious about is this: why didn't the equally fanatical (but far more murderous) Hebrews proscribe green first?) They were, after all, a desert nation, etc. And as for the bloodthirsty ethnic-cleansing Christians - they got it right. Red, the colour of blood, pain, fire, and destruction. However, from my readings of the bible (Sorry. I just can't bring myself to give the word a capital letter) I don't recall even the one-eyed insane bigot, Saul of Tarsus, recommending the christian mob follow a red flag. It just happened. Murderous evolution in action. And why the Israelis chose a powder blue for their war-flag, I'll never know. It's such a sissy colour. Better than pink, I suppose, but not by much.
WORD OF THE DAY: Agnostic. What a weak, lily-livered word. Either there is a god, or there's not. Agnostics have to learn to piss or get off the pot.
LISTENING TO: Bob Dylan, "Modern Times". Jenny's a major Bob fan, but it wasn't 'til I heard this album that I started to appreciate him.
READING: Nothing new. I finished the Ted Dekker book, "Adam". Up until the last five (short) chapters, I was thoroughly enjoying it. Nice, atmospheric serial-killer with spooky shit going on kind of yarn. Unfortunately, he copped out at the end. Jenny had read it, and was very satisfied with it.
TIME FOR MORE HENRY....
Chapter Five.
Fame, Easily Gained, Joyfully Lost.
Henry checks the old Smith electric clock set into the wooden dashboard of his car when he approaches Talbot Terrace on the afternoon of his shooting. He doesn’t, of course, think of the event as “my shooting”. He doesn’t think much of it at all, despite it having happened only ninety minutes or so ago. Actually, that disturbs him, not knowing exactly when it happened. He thinks back to the incident, and remembers that he’d carefully put the ATM receipt into his shirt pocket. That will have the time on it. Excellent. The time on the car’s clock reads bang on five, which means the eccentric old clock on the mantle in his brown study would have just finished chiming seven.
He carefully clicks the indicator down, and the little green jewel-light on the dash blinks. He checks the mirror, checks the road, and turns carefully into Talbot Terrace.
The Terrace is a dog-leg cul de sac, with Henry and Mary’s home right at the end. Henry always drives more carefully in his own street, and this evening it’s even more important: he does, after all, only have one working headlight, and the Friar’s little Yorkshire terrier loves chasing cars, and the MacIntosh’s four year old is a little tearaway. A few moments longer won’t –
What on earth is this? Henry’s magnificent old Rover has quietly billowed around the dog-leg, and the sight that greets Harry is catastrophic. There’s a mill of people waiting by his gate. People with lights, people with cameras, people with microphones. Damn. Henry turns to his only passenger, and grins broadly. “Well, we thought that something like this might happen, eh.”
His passenger grins in return.
Actually, there is no passenger. But if there had been, he would have been dressed in a black cloak, and carrying a vast scythe. Six months, Henry reminds himself.
Henry presses the horn-ring, and the lovely mellow bugle under the bonnet sounds its brassy note. Faces turn toward him, and the television lights run sparks across his vision. He holds a hand up against the glare, and the reporters immediately surround his car.
“Mr Talbot, Mr Talbot –“
“A few words, Henry, that’s all we want! Just a few words!”
“Henry – over here! Over here!”
“Is that him? Is it?”
Henry brakes, stops, and sits quietly. The clamour outside the car is deafening. Or, at least, it would be deafening if the car’s doors weren’t so thick. Henry reaches into his shirt pocket, and pulls out the receipt: 14.57.
Just on two hours ago. Henry looks up, past the journalists, and there’s Charlie, coming out his front door, and walking down to the gate, which she opens. Henry ignores the throng about his car, and slowly drives through them, past Charlie, and into the garage. He parks carefully, turning off the headlight, sliding the column shift to P-for-Park, shutting off the motor.
He gets out of the car, shuts the door gently, and turns to find Charlie, right there beside him.
“Ignore them, Henry. Mary’s inside. She’s OK, no real need to worry.”
“Thanks. Just a minute, Charlie.” Henry limps back to the gate, and into the glare of the lights. He stands there for half a minute, listening to the mob.
“Mr Talbot, over here!”
“Henry – you don’t mind if we call you Henry, do you?” Actually, thinks Henry, yes I do.
“Is it true you stopped the robber, Henry?”
“How serious is the wound, where were you shot?” This last surprises Henry. For a reporter, this one must write for the Braille Weekly.
Henry Talbot, of 22 Talbot Terrace, holds up his hand, his left hand, sinisterly, imperiously, palm outwards: the babble of the rabble slowly dies down.
“”I have only one thing to say, ladies and… ladies and.. Um. Just one thing to say.” Henry falls silent, purses his lips. He puts his hands’ palms together, holds the tips of his forefingers to his lips. He looks as though he’s praying. The clamour dies down, and Henry looks up, dropping his hands to his side. He smiles. Henry Talbot, standing there in the television lights, is a magnificent sight as the lights create a halo around his head. His driveway slopes up toward the house, so he looks even taller than he is. His shirt is immaculately buttoned. His tie has an elegantly fussy Windsor knot, his suit jacket fits him perfectly, and the only giveaway that anything extraordinary has happened to him is the fact that the right trouser leg of his suit has been cut off at the thigh. Around his calf is a bright white bandage - the wound was, indeed, minor.
“Yes. One thing.”
The silence clogs the air, and someone coughs and farts. A couple of cameras flash and slap, the TV soundman shuffles his feet as he checks his meters. The expectation is rising. Henry thinks it’s risible. Charlie moves to stand beside her brother.
“Ah, yes,” says Henry, and grins. “Fuck off.”
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