SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (12 page)

The world had changed, then, and changed for ever
-
through lenses. The telescope started to habituate the mind to a vastness never previously conceived. Then the microscope extended perception in the other direction. Robert Hooke's
Micrographia
had become one of the most famous books in the world soon after its publication in
16
65. When Pepys collected his copy, he sat up until two in the morning reading it, and described it as 'the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.' Lenses alter our perception of reality and the old reality never entirely comes back again.

Now what I want you all to do, Sylvie said to her imaginary audience, is to consider this week how many of the images in your memories, and how many of the images before your eyes, arrive through lenses. If you think it's less than 50%, then I'd suggest you're not thinking hard enough. Each single one of us is a photographic, microscopic, telescopic and cinematic museum. And we barely notice. We've become our own images. We've become the afterlife of our own images.

Through a Lens Backwards

While Sylvie was delivering this lecture the next day, Owen sat at home and waited for the doorbell to ring. Which it duly did. Johnny Tamworth had come to deliver the advance DVD of
Deva.
Owen had forgotten how well he knew Johnny. This was happening every day now. A void suddenly filled up with a voice, a face, an embrace. The space was there to be filled. Only one clue was required. Owen stared down at the familiar stubble of grey hair, the wire-rimmed glasses, the brackish little beard. Johnny was somehow simultaneously fastidious and tainted. Owen liked him for it.

'It's powerful, Owen, if that makes you feel any better about things. We're still hoping to hold the screening in a couple of months. But there's a big argument going on now about where and when it could be run. I'm half-inclined to cut most of the warehouse scene, to be honest. That's the one causing all the problems. Inevitably.' That was right. They almost always had problems of one sort or another, didn't they? But they got there in the end. Johnny knew his way around. Owen didn't want to think about this particular problem at all. Certainly not the warehouse scene. It was at the end of a very dark corridor, anthracite black, and he was more than happy to leave it there. To leave it all there along with the word Alex.

'Did you bring the camera?'

'Yes. But what is it exactly you want to do, Owen?'

'Will you trust me?'

'I think I sometimes trust you altogether too much.'

'Just film. Don't worry about the soundtrack in the cafe. It will be a voice-over when we edit. Hand-held. Documentary stuff. '

*

Twenty minutes later they were in the cafe, and the same woman with the thick-lensed glasses was staring over at them warily as Johnny pointed his video camera at her. With video, they were mobile and unencumbered with film crews. They could do what they liked.

'It's for a feature about Chester,' Owen said, 'and its more notable characters.' Then more softly, to Johnny: 'Film the table.'

'How do you mean?'

'The surface, the stains, the butt-marks. Give me close-ups of the table. Linger on it as though it were some precious medieval manuscript. That's the way it felt. Like the long water-shot in Tarkovsky's
Stalker.
Let the camera look at everything as though it had never seen it before.'

'I suppose it hasn't, if you think about it.'

Then they went to the hostel. 'Just walk in casually,' Owen said, and as they stepped past the man in his little glass box of an office, he smiled and said, 'Don't worry, Walter, it's all been arranged.'

'Has it?' Johnny asked as they went up the stairs. 'No. But we'll be out of here in no time.'

They walked down the corridor to the room. Alfred was sitting on the bed, as usual, his Bible open on his lap before him.

'You've brought a friend.'

'This is John Tamworth, the film-maker I told you about.

We're going to do a bit of filming. You don't mind do you?' He didn't wait for an answer. 'Actually you'll need the sound on for this bit. Pan very slowly between the empty bed and Alfred. Who was it sat there last week, Alfred?' Alfred looked at them both with extreme suspicion before answering slowly.

'A man who had lost his memory. Found himself in the middle of a mystery play. But he was still full of words that had their own memories. So maybe his memories didn't really matter. Maybe his own memories had only really got in the way of the real memories underneath. How am I doing? How's the audition going?' Owen looked at
J
ohn
, suddenly focusing, his lens probing Alfred's face. I think he might be beginning to see the point, Owen thought. Then Alfred turned down to the Bible on his lap and started reading from it.

'And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again and said, "Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth."

'And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, "Give me the little book." And he said unto me, "Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey." And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.'

'Alfred is a great Bible-reader, Johnny. He's read it right through many times. '

Afterwards, Owen insisted they drive to Llandudno. Johnny didn't like this. He'd had had no prior notification. Owen did this to him; took over his life as though there were never any other demands upon him, as though there wasn't anyone else in the world apart from Owen. That, for what it was worth, was his personal theory about Owen's amnesias: they were a way of clearing the world of everyone but himself. Clearing the world of all the debris that wasn't Owen Treadle. But he went, all the same. As usual. Whatever else Owen was, he was rich in suggestiveness. Rich in the potency of his own will. And if his instincts pointed him in a certain direction, it was usually worth going there on a visit, to see what he'd sniffed on the wind.

So they drove to Llandudno.

'Film the sky,' Owen commanded. 'Film the road.'

'Film the estuary over there.'

'Film the hard shoulder.'

Then they were there. On the pier, looking back at the arc of houses along the front. Down on the beach, focusing on the incoming waves. They went to the small hotel. They only wanted the room for an hour. The landlady seemed hostile, particularly when she realised she was being filmed.
Johnny
was uncomfortable with this, as usual, but Owen had insisted, as usual. 'We walk in filming. I need to see the expression on her face before she has time to decide which expression to put there.'

'Thirty pounds,' Owen said. 'We'll only be an hour. Shan't make any mess. Promise.'

Bed. Dressing table. The mirror. The camera could see the mirror, but the mirror couldn't see the camera, of course, only the room. Then out of the window. The street. The lower reaches of the Orme.

'Long shots,
J
ohnny.
Give yourself plenty of time.' Then they were on their way home.

'How bad is it?' Owen asked as they drove.

'A fucking mess. I wouldn't bother remembering anything if I were you.
I'll
let
you know when it's safe to return to the land of memory.'

'What did I do,
Johnny
?'

'What you normally do, Owen. Forget the distinctions.'

'Which ones?'

'Between living a life and having it written. Between making an image and being one. Alex, Owen. Alex Gregory. Remember her? You'd better do because memory's all that's left. Apart from the film we put her in:
Deva.'

A Man of Peace

Owen sat in the small cafe down by the river and nibbled at a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich. He wondered who had invented toasting. Had it been an accident? A primitive figure sitting too near the fire on a winter evening?

The man came in. He was wearing a hat that had once been white, a seaside hat, an ersatz panama, entirely impractical and out of place, soaked through now from the rain. His glasses had steamed up out there and he let them perch on the end of his dripping nose, where they couldn't have been much use for visibility. He walked to the middle of the floor, bowed three times, removed his hat and began to speak. To everyone and no one.

'I do not look for trouble. My father never looked for it either. He was a man of peace and
I
am very much his son.
I
did not invent my troubles;
I
inherited them. We've all got holes in our head but we don't all have gypsies camping in them. Midnight dances. Flamenco guitars. Rubbish that has to be taken away by the council.'

'Toast, Samuel?'

'Two slices with butter and marmalade.'

'Why don't you sit down and get comfortable, then?' The woman in the white overall behind the counter looked across to Owen and smiled.

'Don't trouble yourself about him, love. He was caught worrying sheep again at the weekend, weren't you Samuel?'

The man had sat down but now stood up once more.

'I do not seek trouble, but it follows me around all the same.

Doesn't it, Bethany?'

'You've got cognitive deficits, haven't you love?'

'More of them than you've had hot dinners. And now
I
am
abused on the street.'

'Who's been abusing you out on the street, then?'

'A tall lad with ginger hair.'

'Lot's of freckles? A ring on his nose?'

'That's the one.'

'Nathaniel. Little bugger. Knew his mother. Imogen. She wasn't all she seemed either. Her name was lah-di-dah but nothing else about her was. What did he do this time?'

'He called me an old wanker. Now
I
do not look for trouble.

Like my father
I
am essentially a man of peace.
I
know that
I
am old but I'm not senile, funnily enough. I've always been this way. Just as bonkers when
I
was twenty.'

'You've got Aspergers, haven't you love? And dyspraxia. And lots and lots of cognitive deficits.'

'Various psychological dysfunctions. A hole in my head like my father before me. And why wanker?
I
know we live in a surveillance society but there are no CCTV cameras underneath my eiderdown, not that I'm aware of, anyway. What goes on between the sheets ...
I
mean my nocturnal activities are my own affair. A man of peace should be left in peace.'

'Don't take any notice of that Nathaniel. He's on his way to becoming ... ' She faltered.

'An adult male inebriate,' he suggested brightly, which seemed to fit the bill. Bethany nodded.

'Got it in one, so you can't be entirely bonkers, can you?

Now sit down and eat your toast. Here it is.' He did as he was told.

'I should be put away,
shouldn't
I
Bethany? But then I
suppose I will be before long. In a pine box. Put away for ever in that.' He looked across at Owen. 'And might I ask your trade, sir?'