Karen dresses for work in an A-line skirt with back zip fastening, a short sleeve turtle neck sweater in purple, a pair of ankle boots with inside zip and strap detail, while I shoot her, dreaming of how my life fits me. How firmly and simply it fits. Like a glove, a form-fit platform boot. Whatever!
She says to the mirror that I have fixed with double-sided tape to the wall beside the toilet: “I’m in love”—subjective camera: Karen in the mirror watching Karen watching Karen in love, just a hint of me to the right side like a busboy waiting for some crummy tip—“with my life.”
Downstairs the mail arrives. I slip down to find it in the stairwell like Kleenex boxes discarded by who? Halfmarket whores possibly (probably), but none of this mail is ours. There is some for Alice who is studying social work, Cole who is in Archaeology, Piper who skis, Susan who slings sandwiches at El Monkey on Tuesdays and Thursdays and also is doing some sort of degree in History, for Kevin and Grace (straight above us), Sophie who drives a beach cab part time and doesn’t attend Southport, Vern who apparently is a tutor but I don’t know what in, Monika from Pencils and Colleen Donnelly who first met Karen when they both took Nightline Counselor training, Helen who’s working this week in a stock broking firm on placement from her degree program, Fynella who is a new house officer in general surgery, Tony who is a flight attendant for Midland and can get cheap flights but not overseas actually, Kyle, who just moved in with Fynella, is a minor animation student, and works in the cafe, Candia, across the mall.
Is that groovy or what?
They do not, however, come to collect. Not in my phone film. They stay in their flats, on their own phones, eating Rice Krispies, Corn Pops, Hi-Fiber and watching Anne and John, Penny and Paul, Brian and Denise, Terrytoons, Street Sharks, Bear in the Big Blue House, Kickstart, or sleeping it off. My film shows none of this but that’s not the point. It’s suggested. It’s there like an undercurrent of absolute mediocrity which in my film is what I’m trying to avoid.
I precede Karen downstairs, bracing my right arm with my left like I’m wearing a Steadicam, and film her from the shoulder emerging from the entrance with her head thrown back in the sunlight and her Side-Street tortoise-shell Ray Bans down on the end of her subtly angular nose. I’m actually using a Nokia G567, the 16x zoom GPS model (VMPS120). Hey, but so what, Rodrigez shot El Mariachi on beta tape with a wireless mic and one jib-armed dolly. And look what he got!
Karen lets her cranberry colored backpack slip down on her left arm and thumbs me from the right as she passes, grinning like Elsa Cardenas in Fun in Acapulco, though what I’m actually after, as I’ve explained to her, is kind of a homage (pronounced hoe-marge, naturally) to Schlesinger. Essentially Midnight Cowboy, with Karen playing Sylvia Miles to my Jon Voigt.
For fun, we call Helena McCabe from a payphone on the corner near Langford. The payphone is rancid and stuck with cab cards. I make a note to call Eve who has (quote) “the body of Uma Thurman.” Brilliant. Karen explains the situation. If there’s one thing about Karen it’s that I can count on her to explain things better than I do. It is, notably I think, something to do with her substantial right brain ascendancy. She’s also an Aries.
She says, brightly: “Hey Ms McCabe, it won’t take too long.”
I jump in with a simple and obvious explanation.
“Tell her,” I say, “that we need back story.”
Back story has a pretty annoying spiritual air to it actually and I repeat it with a touch of urgency to try and flush the thing right away. “Back story, tell her. . . You do know what I’m talking about?”
I hear down the line Helena jabbering about something to do with her plans, her job, her life, her, her, her until then, as I suspected, agreeing to meet us at Candia.
3
Incidentally:
The telephone is connected with two branches of science—acoustics and electricity. The veriest tyro in the former branch of science knows that sound is caused by the impinging of sound waves upon the ear, and that the kind of sound if dependent upon the velocity and length of the waves. Thus the ear-splitting shriek of the advancing railway whistle is caused by the sound waves being driven one upon the other and so shortened—for the shrill tone is caused by short waves of great velocity, whilst the deep base tones are caused by much longer waves of less velocity.
(Library Shelf: B02318: The Engineer, No.1, July 1877)
Go figure!
4
Now here’s the back story I was talking about, but I’m not going to waste too much time on it because I, for one, am not convinced by flashbacks. Just a quick cut then, and save the ripple dissolve for Preminger.
For one thing, Helena McCabe (Irish parents, 25), who’s on the way now, is cutting through traffic at the corner of Pitt and George in her Morgan (that’s a Plus Eight, if anyone’s interested. Though—Poke alert!—I’m not), works in an office, the office of Lystead and Wishhart, L&W, and has done since she left Roeford before even starting a degree here at USP, rented a place right out near the marina, overlooking the Aquarium, Aqua Park and Oceanarium, and started her stumble up the corporate ladder. L&W, that’s Insurance, Life Policies, Pensions, Death, Destruction, Dental Plans, all the big words. She wears her hair in a short bob, because it’s that thin hair that some people have, wispy kind of, and if those who are watching her pass with the top down and those optional dual airbags neat as flowers in the bud of her dash (to quote some modern looove poetry) mention that there’s no reason to have her hair that way, that in this day and age she could have any damn hair she wants and, likewise, with a little Night Secret lose those frown lines already appearing around her otherwise shining eyes, she’ll merely point out that in her profession a retro attitude pays its way. Today she wears a Happy Joe watch, in the rear tray there’s two pieces by Maslankowski and one by Pauline Parson (don’t know?) that she’s picked at a house clearing that she found out about through L&W, but she isn’t choosey (she’s left at home in the glass mirror display unit a cheesy pewterware dragon on a motorcycle by Myth and Magic), and the one real memory I keep of her is that one of her tripping down the black marble stairs into the dim-lit foyer of Langford Terrace like some kind of baby giraffe while her boyfriend, Calum, who now lives in Lucaya running Guanahani’s, or so he says, and claims to have been the inspiration behind their papaya ginger pork, just taps away at his discman and swears he should never have missed Edge of Darkness to pay a visit to a place like this.
As to the business with Lystead and Wishhart—let me try and get this straight because, even though it frankly bores me brainless, there’s no avoiding it and, by tomorrow every little suburban outcrop from Southport to Roeford will know that the University audit office is finding “inconsistencies” (read: “one of the bank accounts is missing”) in one of our quaint College arts festivals’ accounts, a subject on which the University of Southport Arts Festival Committee will issue a statement denying there’s any problem (“whatsoever.” Yeah, right.) followed by several long blasts out its collective artistic poke probably, and two senior charity managers at Arts for College Old Folks or The Arts ‘n’ Farts Foundation or whatever, who are probably, as far as I know, screwing each other like what?, minks I guess, really old minks, will eventually resign, and disappear in the direction of the Palais Schwarzenegger Hotel, Vienna, probably . . .
“They do a real nice green apple chutney, Harold.”
“Oh yes, Maude, so I see.”
The trouble with back story is that it is so incredibly trite, so totally stalled, so plain monkey-headed dull, that nobody in their right minds wants to watch. Back story’s like some mopey foster kid turning up in a house of real cute brothers and sisters, and if it wasn’t for the connection with the Festival of the Waters Film Festival I wouldn’t mention it at all. The best thing to do is just to get on with your film—that is, with the forward movement of your film. But the