94 Theft five, with suicide and soup-of-the-day
"Are we ready for the last recording?" asks Rik in the studio. "If Jason's client hasn't got enough for a spokes-sheep after this one, then I'm sorry but I can't help them. I only hope the sheep gives all this stuff a good home."
"After tonight, I'll never need to tune in to any of them again—it's the end of an era," I say. "I'm glad it's the last session. I'm starting to feel we should give our targets their privacy again."
"Hear, hear," says Alaia, "I applaud you for that," and I feel as if I've just been given marks out of ten by some strict but strangely glamorous maths teacher.
"OK, we're all set up," says Rik. "What harvest of fruits d'you have for us this time? Once more with feeling, please."
"Oh, something for all the family." I feel an exhilaration of finality infusing me, as I psych myself up to project two tune-ins from last night and five from today, vowing maximum accuracy...
First off is Angel's love for the waxwork, glimpsing himself as an elf in a turret, one dagger in his hand and another in his chest, his heavy violent feelings and his constant excitement.
Next comes the only stoned tune-in I'll have projected (and the only unreliable one), to Shigem in Paradise: his memory of the imperious club owner, the five non-existent bartenders and his weighty conversation with Tapette.
Now here are Kim and Shigem waking up this morning, their pleasure, their remembering Kim's blue elephant dream; and going out and bumping into Evelyn.
Here's Kim leaving Southport alone for London, and meeting people but still being alone; and the Asbury Park waterfront staring at him quietly.
I pump out Angel's foreplay, then his anger and haste, then his relentless nakedness in public and his spiritual enrichment on the crucifix.
Here comes Pippa's rainy walk, her sinking, not connecting on the street, her friend's silence on the phone, and her wander through the lonely edge of town to sit by the highway.
And we coast in for an unforgiving finish, with Angel exhausted in the Cadillac but unlikely to escape Lucan; Angel's Baby Doll on her trapeze, his dancing in the empty hotel ballroom—and grabbed awake.
Half an hour later, still on a glowing high from the session, I'm reclining on a sofa in Rik's and Evelyn's apartment, with Alaia, as the four of us embark on four bottles of red wine.
"Were you doing film stuff in Glasgow?" I ask Rik.
"Yeah, first I was a runner, for pennies, then I was doing the sticks, then pulling focus—all the time living in a squat in Castlemilk. Then one day I was actually allowed to look through a camera. And after I'd worked out which end of the camera you look through, I found they were actually going to pay me to operate it. So I could finally start living in a place with wall-to-wall ceilings, and floor-to-ceiling walls too. Then down to London and slid towards post-production, with all kinds of audio-visual toys in Soho. Then someone said there was a job opening at the GN in New York that needed some of the fine-tuned optimisation stuff I'd been doing between PAL in the UK and NTSC in the States, so I applied. They needed someone who'd been doing all that from the UK side. So that got me a work visa here, an H1B. But even with the GN behind me, getting the actual visa was still a long, complicated process. It turned out, bizarrely, that I had to stay for three weeks on a tourist visa in a small town in East Texas, 'cos that was the only place I could stay for zero money, with somebody I already knew, having run out of credit cards before the GN were allowed to employ me. Not to lapse into any clichés, but it really was all cow-tipping down there, and potted meat and Spam-moulding contests. The whiff of the KKK was still in the air, from the 'fifties, and scary religious people everywhere. If you were looking for a bit of incisive verbal cut and thrust, you were in the wrong place. Try to have an interesting conversation—you might as well watch dust settle. And no fashion show either. Bad clothes happening to good people, everywhere you looked. But you know what they say: when a chicken pecks you on the ass, you do what you have to. It was only three weeks till the visa came through, then suddenly I was working for Jason in Manhattan, so I had to go cold-turkey on the cow-tipping."
Evelyn opens another bottle of red wine, as I recognise within me the first fingers of that familiar melting warmth and sway from the first bottle. My attention wanders pleasurably, taking in the décor and the qualities of the light around me. When I return to the conversation, Evelyn is speaking: "It was funny, Rik and I went to this swanky restaurant the first two times we visited New York, and the first time we went, I ordered soupe du jour. I wasn't used to swanky dining, growing up here, so I didn't know what the words meant but I just loved the soup. So I ordered it again, the second time we went there, a few months later—but when the soup came I was so disappointed because it was different from the first time I had it. So I kicked up a fuss, right? And the waitress didn't understand much English, or any Spanish—I think she was Polish or something—but she knew enough to keep pointing at my soup, saying, 'This is soup of the day! This is soup of the day!...' Well, I didn't like that, I can tell you. So I put my hands on my hips and I glared at her from my seat and I said, 'That may very well be true. But I want soupe du jour...' But whatever words I used, to express this simple truth, she just couldn't understand, until I was so ready to strangle her! She was getting more and more flustered and confused about this simple, easy, straightforward soup I wanted. Then at last I decided she must be just really thick and dense, so I took pity on her and I decided to give up and have the wrong soup anyway, which tasted OK although I was still secretly a bit sad about it—it was the wrong soup, after all, and nothing could take that away, however you cut it and whatever anybody said. Then, months later somewhere, I found out soupe du jour means soup-of-the-day, so of course it's different every day, and I looked back and felt like a right banana!"
"What I've never told you," says Rik, "is that I knew what soupe du jour meant all along, but I didn't like to say anything because I wanted to see how the situation would unfold. It's finally time to tell you this. Reality time, Evelyn."
Her mouth falls open. "Bullshit!"
Rik shrugs. "Maybe so, maybe not... I guess there'll always be that little niggle of doubt between us, from now on..." Then he grins and bursts out laughing and she thwacks him with a pillow.
It's not so long before the third bottle is opened, while Rik changes the music again and lights some candles. The conversation drifts along effortlessly, as it always seems to do here, and by and by I'm gazing with a slight lack of focus at Evelyn. "I remember," she is saying, "once upon a time this town did still have something you could almost call a tourist season. I used to paddle in the sea in flip-flops in the summer, feeling the dead shrimps nestling in between my toes—and all the fluffy clouds in the sky, like dead bunnies. Those were the days. It seemed like the craziest stuff happened near the very end of the almost-tourist-season, just before everything shut down again. I once saw this old biddy go into a phone box and start to take a piss—but the walls were all basically windows, so for the amount of privacy she got, she might as well have gone in the street! I walked up and encouraged her through the windows: I made 'squeeze it all out' type facial expressions. I think it helped her. They've taken that phone box away now, it became such a toilet."
The talk wanders in many unpredictable directions during the fourth and final bottle. "Talking of ducks," says Rik at one point, "my father was once staying in a bed-and-breakfast in the countryside, and he went to the local pub and got drunk, then he tottered back to the bed-and-breakfast for the night. The door was unlocked, because it was the countryside a long time ago, and he went in and made a cup of tea and a sandwich in the kitchen, and went out the back door and down the back garden and started feeding the ducks in the stream at the end there. Very peaceful, very mellow, just feeding the ducks and thinking about life. He was like that—philosophical. Then a hand grabbed his shoulder and he turned and saw this frightened guy with a gun. The guy was saying 'Who are you? What are you doing?' My father just stayed calm and peaceful: 'Feeding the ducks,' he said. 'Just feeding the ducks...' But then he realised: this wasn't the bed-and-breakfast at all, but somebody's private house, which he'd walked into and made a sandwich in!... Not long afterwards he took his own life—hanged himself at home." A silence descends at this, during which Rik gives a gently exaggerated smile, as if to say "But do please talk amongst yourselves, regardless!"
Through the dimness of the room a twist of candle-smoke streaks towards the open window, bends to clear the raised sash's lower edge, and shines intact in outside lamplight. The comfortable, still centre of the room hovers quietly above the coffee table, where three or four feet are resting.
"Evelyn and I were high on Ecstasy about a year ago, one evening in our old flat," Rik continues in a meandering fashion, and she laughs as she pours out the last of the wine for us all. "And we were both floating around like headless truffles ... and at one point, for some reason, she was washing the dishes and I was drying them, and I said to her, 'Evelyn—I don't know whether I'm lying down now or whether I'm standing up now,' which at that moment was the absolute truth. 'Which is it?' I asked, 'I'm curious.' And she thought about that one for a while, as we washed up. She understood that the answer wasn't so cut and dried, if you thought about it ... which it really isn't, by the way. Anyway, then she had a gradual breakthrough at last, and she said, 'I've got it! I've figured it out ... I'm standing up. And I'll tell you how I know. You see—I never do the dishes lying down!...' And I said to her, 'Ye gods, you're a fucking genius, Evelyn. You're dead right. I think I must be standing up too...'"
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For some nice reviews and interviews about The Imagination Thief, in The Guardian and elsewhere, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media/
For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/synopsis-and-characters-list-the-imagination-thief/
For the 12 Films in The Imagination Thief, see http://www.rohanquine.com/video-books-films/12-films/
For the Audio-book version and the Video-book version of each of its 120 mini-chapters, see http://www.rohanquine.com/home-the-imagination-thief-novel/audiobook-tumblr-wattpad/
For links to the retailers, see http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-ebook/ and http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-paperback/
And for its Amazon pages, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909 and http://www.amazon.com/The-Imagination-Thief/dp/0992754909
The Imagination Thief is about a web of secrets, triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories. It's about the magic that can be conjured up by images of people, in imagination or on film; the split between beauty and happiness in the world; and the allure of various kinds of power. It celebrates some of the most extreme possibilities of human imagination, personality and language, exploring the darkest and brightest flavours of beauty living in our minds.