The Qliphoth

“Where did you get hold of that? Where?” He just kneels there stupidly,
clutching the remote control like a protective talisman. “You’ve been scavenging
in my bedroom. My personal space. You’ve been going through my things . . .”
Her voice swells with anger. “I don’t believe this,Lucas, it’s really hurtful, my own
son fingering through my private stuff, it’s horrible. You’ve no bloody right.
What the hell’s got into you these days? Why do you do these things?”
“I was just looking for a used tape. To record Solaris. I didn’t bring any of
my own tapes with me.” For a moment he is feeble with pretence and
self-loathing. But he’s right, he has a basic right to know, doesn’t he? Doesn’t
she support the universal right to knowledge? Isn’t that her business? He’s
going to put it to her but she’s already away, firing on all cannons.
“I suppose you just found it accidentally. On purpose. Maybe you’re compiling
a dossier on me. Parental failures you have known . . .”
“I just remembered bits about the show. As a kid . . . Look, I only wanted to
know . . .”
“You didn’t have to watch this far. You could have had the decency to stop,
couldn’t you?” She’s quivering with anger, hurling down her jacket and bag as
she paces furiously about the room. She starts to snatch up books, magazines,
papers—and as she swings round and thrusts his tattered college applications
into his face, he can see she’s in tears. “It’s not as if you didn’t have more
important things to do. That is, if you want a future of your own. Instead of
rummaging about in other people’s utterly finished business.”
“But it is my business . . . And Dad’s, as well. Look, Pauline, I’m not trying
to take sides . . .” He’s not sure if that’s true. His parents can’t both own the
truth. Maybe somehow they’re both wrong, and nothing is true. But somebody
owes him an answer. Something that will structure his shadow . . . This
dark matter is clouding his life, it’s in his blood, so what the hell are the material
facts?
She’s gone into the kitchen. She’s lighting a cigarette, the first for months,
and her small fingers are trembling—but to hell with her fragile game, sometimes
you have to break heads, break the silence. He’s sorry, sorry, Mum, but
he can’t let her get away, not now.
“I just don’t get it. You could talk about Dad, Nick, call him what you like,
to thousands of invisible TV voyeurs. That’s what you’d call them now, isn’t
it? You could share him and his illness, no, let’s get it right, his madness, his ‘
mania’, those were some of your words, you could share him, warts and all,
with all those TV amps—but years and years later you still won’t tell me, your
son, anything, not one damn real thing. I’m not a camera, I guess. ”
“That film was a violation, Lucas. A travesty. It misrepresents me. I’d been
promised greater control, but—”

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The Qliphoth

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 . . .”

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