excerpt
a fatal error. Guys he knows are hitching round Hungary or driving down
Route 66. Why on earth has he made this West Country retreat? The whole
notion of being-in-time is deeply obscure. He’s been going in circles, but his
centre is nowhere. He tried to tell Katie this but she wouldn’t listen and
ditched him a month before the exams for a trainee accountant, which didn’t
help, he couldn’t/can’t focus on anything, but it’s no excuse. This tape looks
like another dud. Keep it rolling just a little bit longer.
There goes an hairy old rock band; and something about a drug trial. He
never knew his mother cared about such things, not these days. But there’s
layer after layer of items on the tape, the years keep cutting into each
other—he can’t place them all—and now some of them look like dubs of dubs,
the picture breaking up as it goes down the generations.
But here’s a BBC2 logo, and rolling titles. Hang in there, bump up the volume:
“. . . In tonight’s edition of The Lifeskills Show we look at the problems of
living with mental illness, taking a dark journey into the nightmare world of
manic depression. We ask—what can it do to a marriage . . .?”
Oh shit. Holy holy shit.
Long shot: an institutional garden, Victorian gothic buildings. Autumn
oaks, drained greenish skies, brown bushes where someone loiters. The camera
starts to zoom in, slowly but relentlessly. His scarecrow father, his actual
grey-faced father Nicholas Oscar Beardsley, stands under the big tree. He is
shuffling his feet through dead leaves. Then, perhaps dazed by the lens, the
sudden attention, he waves a hand feebly, in a purely gestural shielding of his
face, like a criminal celeb arriving at court. The shot slowly dissolves into a
montage of still snapshots, underscored by sixties fuzz/wah-wah rock.
Lucas can hardly believe this. There’s his handsome aquiline daddy, no
more than twenty-five with long curving locks, headband, beads, epaulettes,
saffron shirt; and Pauline, hardly seventeen, has her auburn hair cut like a warrior’s
helmet. She’s striking, almost pretty in her floating blue robe. His parents
are apparently immortal, smiling as they silk-screen posters together in a
white studio, ignoring naked flower people thronging the doorway. Perhaps
this is a Love Happening. Which fades into wedding pics, everybody grinning
in kaftans and flares outside the registry office.
The voice-over intrudes—male, charged with synthetic urgency and portent:
“Nick and Pauline were filled with the heady optimism and vibrant energy
of the sixties generation. After their marriage Pauline did her teacher training
and plunged into the hurly burly of inner-city schooling, while Nick, with his
art-school flair, entrepreneurial drive, and the help of a small legacy, started a
life-style shop—The Great British Time Machine . . .”
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 