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Movie
Michael Hulme
Michael Hulme lives and works in Norwich, England and is the editor of
creative writing magazine nr1. His short fiction has been published by the BBC and in
various print and online magazines including Ink Pot, Aesthetica and
Defenestration. An inveterate coward, he's still thinking about giving up the day job.
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For the whole of my
life, my father's always worn the same look. You could call it a poker face, only he
doesn't gamble. His mouth's this tight thin line and his eyes are grey-bagged and heavy.
It's the look of someone who's been hit by one custard pie too many and doesn't see the joke
any more. He looked this way when I told him Ellen was pregnant, when I told him Ellen
miscarried, when I told him I'd scraped into film school. He looked this way when he told me
my grandfather was dead, when he told me to use my knife at the table, every year when he
handed me a red-wrapped gift and wished me a Merry Christmas.
Not that I can see, but I bet he looks that way now, sitting
at my bedside as machines burp and gurgle. In an hour or so, when the sun throws slats of
light through the blinds and across his eyes, he'll move to the other chair on my other side.
I wonder if the stripes of sun will tan his bald head if he sits there too long, that he'll
find a dark line looping his forehead like an American pool ball. I wonder why he doesn't
sit on the shaded side all the time. It would save him having to move. I probably have more
time to think than he does. If I could talk, I'd suggest it. I was hoping, in a way, I'd
remember nothing about what happened, that I might wonder what I'm doing here, who these
strange people are.
The irony--I finally got the source material Ellie, Will and
I wanted. Something that means something. On the assumption I get out of this, we'll plan
the movie of the whole story. It's going to be wild, and I'm clinging to it. I need to cling
to it, or I'll drift away on self-pity. The hardest part is seeing my father and mother--their
shapes--taking turns to watch this jumble of bandages, tubes and wires. It's like I'm looking
through gauze, and I can only look straight ahead, so they're nothing but blurs in my peripheral
vision.
In an hour, my father will stop being a blur on my right, move
through my cloudy arc where I can see him, and become a blur on my left. I have to imagine him
and his old habits--when he wants to scratch his nose, he dips his head and uses his finger like
a bow across a violin. Sometimes he tips his head to one side, has a good dig around in his
ear, then inspects his fingertip like he's expecting gold.
* * *
The movie opens like this: an overhead of the city, a spider's
web of streets, then we drop down, straight down until the roofs vary, some faded terracotta,
some grey slate. Traffic snakes the streets. Keep dropping, drop to ground level. Close in
and tilt, so we're going forward, down and along at ground level, the cars parked either side
of the street, tall skinny houses of identical mud-grey brick. Roll a sharp left at number 98,
through the open gate where the rubbish is stacked for collection and the green box overflows
with green bottles and pizza flyers for recycling, up to the door which opens--no. The door has
to be open to start with; it's the only way to keep it fluid.
You can't stop the shot there.
But my mother would never leave the front door open, and I want the film to feel true. Do it
this way. Swing round through the gate, soar high over the two officers at the door and as my
mother opens the door, duck and swoop into the room. Pan left a hundred and eighty degrees, so
you can see her back, the tea towel dangling in her hand as she invites them in, then cut.
It's not quite there and I'd like to finesse it some more. I'm
sure there's time for that. I can make and unmake it here in my head, but I keep coming back
to the long, fluid opening shot. What I'd really like right now is music. I think better with
music. Not the radio, because they're always playing crap that make me want to break things,
but some of my CDs would be good. Perhaps I got that from a TV movie. My father would look
funny carrying my silver stereo down the hall, my mother walking behind him with a clumsy stack
of CDs under her chin. Seeing them sitting there twitching to Soundgarden. I don't think I
could do it to them.
I hear the door, and another shape blurs across my line of sight.
It's my mother. I picture her behind my father with her hands on his shoulders. She does this
each Christmas, part of the carving ritual.
| "I have an aversion to any cultural product my
parents may like. The sunlight leaves the room and my mother's there in shadow. The door goes
again. My younger brother takes the seat on my left. There's a thump as his school bag hits
the tiled floor"
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She puts the bird on the candled table, lays the
knives by its side, and then stands behind my father with her hands on his shoulders. There's a
dry smack as they kiss. My father blows his nose, which sounds like someone letting air from a
birthday balloon.
Up until a week or so ago, they had another ritual.
"How is he?" My mother, her voice daring optimism.
"No change." My father, deadpan.
Each time she arrived, she asked, he answered. Then he swapped
"no change" for silence. He probably shakes his head. Now she doesn't ask. They just re-enact
the Christmas scene, and they might not even do that.
My mother crosses to my right, to the seat with the sun in her
eyes. She's wearing her heavy black coat, the one just too big for her she bought in a closing
down sale. She wasn't going to buy it until another woman, wise to a bargain, tried to snatch
it from her. A woman from the next street, a friend of my mother's, took up the hem so it
didn't sweep the floor as my mother walked. When she got it home, my mother passed it round
the room and made each of us stroke the coat to see how soft it was. It felt soft, warm, like
the puppy I imagined I wanted.
My father leaves the room. He'll be back in a few hours for the
night shift. He'll sit until some faceless doctor opens the door and says "it's time, Mr.
Jacobs," then he'll stand up, plant a dry kiss on me I can hear but not feel, and leave. Right
now it's just me and my mother, blurry in the sunlight on my right. It's quiet, so she's not
crying. Not yet. Two days ago, she cried for an hour, maybe more. It was hard to take. They
weren't angry cries, the sort that shake your body - they were soft, breathy, so gentle she
could have been giggling. It's the crying of acceptance. Something about hearing your own
mother cry makes the world small and mean.
I don't want to show her face in the film. You see her back, at
the door, in the first scene, and that's enough. You see her wearing the red cardigan she keeps
round the house for when she's cold, when she doesn't want to climb the stairs to the wardrobe,
or for answering unexpected knocks at the door. Old faithful, she calls it. She's short. You
can see the beard of the taller policeman over her head. Her hair's pulled back and the light
falling through the door plays up the white and grey streaks.
It's the nurse's entrance next, the regular check and oil change.
Her uniform's a dazzle of white. Either she's dyed her hair dark or she's a different nurse.
I can't feel her touch. I don't feel anything as she disconnects one tube from my arm. For
a few seconds, everything's slow-motion swimmy, then clouds roll back over my eyes as she clips
it back in. My mother's voice drifts across and over. She asks if there's been "any progress,"
which is probably what I'd ask; it's the sort of question people find themselves asking because
it's the bedside question people on TV always ask. The same way when people die, someone fairly
close to you says, "If there's anything I can do..."
Still, it makes more sense to ask the nurse than it does to ask
my father. Years ago, during long summer holidays in the old house, he took three days off work
with a stomach-ache he swore was appendicitis. He clutched his gut and read aloud each symptom
from the medical dictionary. In the end, my mother threatened him with a rolling pin. Two years
later, my brother was rushed in to hospital to have his appendix removed. "Come on, Tom," my
father told him. "It's just stomach ache. Too many sweets." Tom's white slash of scar tissue
looked so cool, a natural tattoo reminding them both what nearly was. Or wasn't. I envied that
scar. It looked so cool with a summer tan.
"He is no different," the nurse says, her stresses on the wrong
syllables. She's European, maybe. "The doctor will come soon. He will tell you more."
We stay like this for a while, my mother and I, while the
machines hum and count out odd seconds in bleeps. I still know an awkward silence when I'm
wrapped up in one. She starts humming a tune. I've heard her hum it before, in the garden as
she hacked and ripped at weeds. I'm sure it's famous, only I can't name it. I have an aversion
to any cultural product my parents may like. The sunlight leaves the room and my mother's there
in shadow. The door goes again. My younger brother takes the seat on my left. There's a thump
as his school bag hits the tiled floor.
"How was your day?" my mother asks.
"Okay," my brother replies.
"Have you seen your father?"
My brother doesn't answer. He won't speak to my father. He's
angry. My brother's full of ideals about honesty and integrity. He has a hundred and forty
red Marlboro hidden at the bottom of his wardrobe, behind a ball of black T-shirts he never
wears. I have about fourteen more I need to return to him. They're in reception, or the
Emergency department, or wherever they keep your stuff when you're rushed in. Maybe they've
given me a locker.
He can't be too mad over six cigarettes. I had three, one with
every second drink. You can't smoke too much or you start to stink and don't know it. Plus it
makes hangovers worse. Will had two, Ellen one. Ellen doesn't know how to smoke and doesn't
even try until she's drunk. She lights it, sucks on it, closes her mouth and pretends to
inhale, but when she blows it out it's like cigar smoke, too thick to have been anywhere near
her lungs. I don't know why she bothers. It tastes disgusting that way. She says it makes
her dizzy, but I think that's because she gets so hung up on not inhaling smoke, she forgets
to inhale oxygen.
"Please speak to him, Thomas."
She's calling him Thomas. This is serious. My brother says
nothing. I think he's dyed his hair again.
"It wasn't his fault."
There's silence.
"He's suffering too."
Silence.
"He's your father, Thomas."
I wish they'd do this outside. There's got to be a waiting room
somewhere. They could go home and sort it out. I bet Thomas is slouched there right now, one
baggy jean leg stretched out and one leg bent, arms folded, staring at the empty wall. Thomas
is wrong, by the way. It wasn't all my father's fault. Here's what happened.
* * *
Ellen, Will and I picked over our coursework assignment--we
couldn't find one good idea in the whole three hours. The last hour was drunk and useless,
a stream of bad porno ideas. Get close up on the scribbled notes, where Will's drawn a giant
phallus across the page, and you see how low we sank. Will hugged Ellen and I goodnight, and
we stumbled into the freezing night, leaving him to return the camera and explain to our tutor
why we'd only shot about fifteen minutes of blurred stock footage. I suppose he got away
without having to explain anything.
| "I'll perfect the first two scenes. The rest of
it, scene three onward--that's yet to be written. I suppose it involves me getting out of
here, back on my feet, back into film school, back behind the lens." |
Ellen and I crumpled our way through the snow, across the town
centre, past metal-grilled stores. The snow was tumbling orange under the glowing streetlights.
Ellen slowed as we passed the music store, looked at the acoustic guitar hung in the window,
body gleaming as it reflected light. She tightened her grip on my hand. "That's the one," she
said. She'd was trying to save the six hundred pounds, taking extra shifts in the pizza place.
On nights where she worked late, and didn't have college the next day, she'd come round after in
her black trousers and white shirt, her hair tied back tight. She brought her overnight bag,
the faded blue rucksack. I'd bring out the bottle of wine, the corkscrew, the glasses I'd
smuggled from downstairs, and we'd drink and cuddle up together, watch films, play cards.
Like friends, with bonus sex.
"I can lend it to you," I said.
She bent to scoop a handful of snow. "Start that again," she
said, "and you'll be wearing this."
She wasn't staying over that night so I walked her home. Her
house was ten minutes walk, straight into the snowfall. We laughed then cursed as snow blew
horizontal, drifting one minute, beating down hard the next. We kissed outside her house as
the snow caked our clothes and hair, then I said goodnight. I dug my headphones in and fired
up the music. All sorts of thoughts swirled in on each other--Ellen's hot-mouthed kisses,
what we'd tell our tutor, my brother's reaction to the great cigarette heist, the name of
this tune, when it was I last slept with Ellen, Will's idea to fake a documentary, why Ellen
wouldn't take my money, the name of this band. I wasn't really there until it happened.
* * *
Here's the second scene,
in close-up, the killer music from my headphones as soundtrack. I step off the kerb and into
the street, a street so familiar I barely bother to look any more. The glow of snow and
streetlights washes away the beam of headlights. This is not my fault, unlike the drink and
the music and the snow and my flurry of thoughts. I stop and look at the car rushing me, its
brakes useless on snow. Before the cut, my eyes widen as I recognise the car. The instant
before the cut, I want to cut to the driver. My father still wears that hangdog face, though
his eyes also widen. We'll need an actor for him. It wouldn't be fair to put him through it
again. We'll hire someone who looks like his soul turned cold when they wrung him out one time
too many. Close up of me. Close up of him. The music pumping through the headphones.
Then cut to darkness. Cue silence.
I wish I could write this down. Remembering, that's the difficult
part. When I think about it hard enough, I can see every frame of the first scene unfolding in
my mind. It's so graceful and fluid, so elegant, no detail missing--how the house plant's
longer leaves shiver in the draught, the hole in the heel of my mother's socks, the way the
videos are stacked in the cupboard horizontally then vertically just to cram every last one in,
the scratches in the paintwork where my father botched the hanging of the silver-framed
mirror.
I'll perfect the first two scenes. The rest of it, scene three
onward--that's yet to be written. I suppose it involves me getting out of here, back on my
feet, back into film school, back behind the lens. At least the whole thing's given me some
ideas. Don't worry, I'll be fine. Between you and me, I'm also working on a sitcom.
* * *
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