'A lot of it's the same kind of crap as the intertitles.'
'Ladies present,' I feel bound to mutter.
'You don't say.'
Presumably he's cynical because we know that Natalie has heard and indeed said worse, but I hope Bebe isn't newly offended. 'What's made sense?' I insist.
'If you're putting it like that, not much at all.'
'Anything coherent,' I say, I'm not sure how much on Mark's behalf.
Colin turns his colourlessly luminous face but not his eyes in my direction and begins to intone sentences solemnly as a priest or a celebrant of some other ritual. 'The portal once opened can never be closed. The infinite shall be contained beyond the portal. The known shall never be unknown, nor shall the unknown be. All that cannot be shall be. All shall be revealed to he who searches. The search shall choose the searcher. All doors open to him, and all doors are one. He who opens the portal is the portal.'
Colin's chant has grown increasingly parodic, though I'm unsure of what. It and some aspect of the film I'm unable to define are making me worse than nervous. Tubby has run out of chalk and is trying to write with his forefinger, which – in a gag so gruesome that all by itself it might have denied the film a release – breaks. He clutches his injured hand while he executes a wide-eyed grinning agonised jig until he spies an object on the floor. Whether it's chalk or the joint of his finger, he seizes it and runs at the blackboard. The board flips over, taking him with it, and when it comes to rest his face is dangling upside down beneath it, still lecturing. During all this Colin has been saying 'The searcher is the jester of the universe. He is its jest, which is his search. He shall perform the quest that spans all time and space. The quest is as ancient as the dark. All is created of the dark, and all shall be dark. The searcher shall hear the voice of the dark, which is infinite laughter.'
The student Tubbies fling mud or handfuls of some other glistening substance at their inverted tutor and into his fallen mortarboard. Perhaps that's the coda, though the copy seems incomplete; with no words to announce that it's the end, the film is over. As the screen turns white with the blankness of the rest of the disc, everybody grins at me. In the relentless light they might all be wearing pallid makeup if not masks. The sense that they're all waiting for me to speak makes me do so before I can think, and I hear myself demand 'Was that about me?'
After a prolonged silence Bebe says 'My goodness, what a way to thank a person for a present.'
'Maybe he shouldn't have opened it till tomorrow,' says Warren.
That strikes me as the far side of ridiculous, but no more so than my own thoughts. I'm wondering if Colin invented any of the material he claimed to be translating. Why would he have done so? What possessed me to ask the question I asked? Warren switches on the room light, and I feel so exposed to everybody's scrutiny that I have to struggle not to hide my face. A grinning stillness seems to underlie everyone's features, a buried mask about to be revealed. I must have their bones in mind, although I could imagine that Warren's and Bebe's suntans – perhaps other people's too – have faded so as to betray traces of clownish makeup. Nobody must suspect I'm seeing what I can't really be seeing. I mustn't draw any more attention to myself, and I'm tentatively grateful when Mark speaks. 'Colin?'
'Sir.'
Mark isn't sure what kind of joke this is, but falters only momentarily. 'You know all the things you were just reading to us?'
'All that, I better hadn't call it crap, had I. All that mess.'
'Why is it funny?'
The silence that greets this feels like an enormous held breath. Then Bebe says 'Oh, Mark, you're precious' and leads the laughter.
I have to join in, if only to be less conspicuous. 'I'm not funny,' Mark protests. 'Don't laugh at me.'
His outburst aggravates the hilarity, not least mine. So does his scratching his wrist as if the merriment has been transformed into physical irritation, and his jumping to his feet to stamp his way out of the room. He hasn't reached the door when Natalie finds words, however unsteady. 'All right, Mark, don't put on a show. Let's enjoy the party.'
'It's not a proper one. There's no hats.'
'Perhaps we'll have some of those tomorrow.'
I have a vision of her in a paper crown complete with papier-mache jewels while Mark wears a headband that sprouts a cardboard halo. I might prefer not to know why the image is so disconcerting, and to some extent I'm glad when Mark changes the subject. 'We haven't had any games.'
'I think this is supposed to be a party for a grown-up,' Bebe says.
'Grown-ups can play too. We were going to have games with, with Simon's mum and dad, but we never played any.'
My fingertips tingle with the rubbery sensation of the face that slithered off the skull in the dark. My own cranium feels as brittle as the bones that gave way to my touch. I'm suddenly uncertain whether it's a dream I had on the drive home from Preston or a much earlier memory that I'd suppressed. I yearn to be distracted by the sight of Warren removing the disc from the player and returning it in its case to me, but his jovial face is too suggestively piebald. 'Back to the party, then,' he says. 'Who can I offer another drink?'
I'm doing my best to lose myself in the general movement towards the door when Bebe says 'What were you sitting on, Simon?'
'My arse,' I manage not to retort as I turn and see nothing on the couch.
'It's behind you,' Mark giggles.
His words sound ominous, not only because of their seasonal significance, until I catch up with their meaning. I twist around faster to let him laugh at me – to help him forget he was the butt of so much mirth. 'It's still behind you,' he can hardly say for giggling.
'For heaven's sake,' Bebe protests, apparently missing the joke, and snatches at my back pocket. 'Are you so mixed up with him you even carry him around with you?'
She's holding a strip of half a dozen frames of film. For a grotesque moment I have the notion that she has planted it on me as though it's as incriminating as a drug, and then I remember finding it in Charley Tracy's van. I must have been carrying it about with me intermittently ever since, and at last I see that it consists of footage of Tubby. I've barely glimpsed his face when Bebe holds the film up to the light. She stiffens while her mouth forms an O so pronounced it doesn't need to be audible, and her shocked silence takes hold of the room.
The only sound is a plastic creak from the case of
He heard me use the word earlier. I mustn't make too much of his using it now. Nevertheless I'm scrutinising his grin, which seems rather too wide for the innocence it's claiming, when Bebe says 'I'd call it worse. Put it away, Simon, unless you want me to burn it.'
Is this an offer or the kind of threat you might issue to a child? She holds the film at arm's length as if she's anxious to be rid of it, but now her finger and thumb conceal a frame in the middle of the strip. As I take the film I see that Tubby is wearing a gown and mortarboard. I've been carrying footage from the first scene of
The frame shows two girls crouching over an equally naked man on a bed. One holds his eager penis while the other takes it in her mouth. The solitary reassuring detail is that the man's face is offscreen, though reassuring is scarcely the word. I recognise his body, and the bed, and the girls. They're Julia and Mona, and we're in Willie Hart's house.
A further unwelcome thought surfaces from the chaotic clamour that fills my fragile skull. Though the girls' hair is tousled out of style, they look far too modern for the film. This surely can't betray me, but my lack of expression might. How ought I to react? The best I can produce is a grin so automatic that it hardly feels part of me, accompanied by an incredulous laugh. I'm about to pocket the film and attempt to forget it until I have an
