Read Online The Ravine by Paul Quarrington - Free Book Online Page B

lodgings; I did, after all, labour long in the fields of television, which my colleague William Beckett once described as a “river of money into which we must jump.” (Beckett was my Hermes into the land of television. He took great glee in, and I quote faithfully, “turning a promising young dramatist into a hack.” He didn’t know, because I never told him, that it was a land into which I’d always wanted to travel, having been seduced, at a very young age, when I heard those words, “You are entering another dimension of time and space.”) But my prospects of future income are very dim, so I rent this basement apartment, from a man who was once my employee. Michelangelo Barker was a junior writer on
Padre.
Every script Barker submitted I performed a page-one rewrite on, not that they were all that bad, and likely because they were much too good. Barker didn’t accept this well, and often, when I passed him in the hallway, he bristled with artistic indignation. “Stout lad,” I always thought.
    Michelangelo is an imposing figure, six foot seven or something. Much of his size is concentrated in his legs and feet; he seems always to be shot from a low angle. His head is small, encircled by a nap ofgolden hair, for he wears his hair buzzed short and has cultivated a moustacheless chinstrap for adornment. He wears tiny glasses, the lenses smaller than the glaring eyeballs they serve. Michelangelo lacks shoulders—God just forgot about them. He has a narrow chest, a belly created by a bad diet and endless video rentals, then those legs blast onto the scene, massive thighs, inhuman shins and monumental feet. So he was a hard man to sneak past, as he stood there sipping tea in the hallway outside the kitchen. He was in that position far more often than he was inside the closet I’d assigned him as an office.
    So I’d nod at him and he’d bristle, and sometimes I’d stop and say, “That was a great script. There were just a few little problems.”
    “Like what?” Michelangelo’s voice is very high-pitched and seems to come from someplace other than his mouth.
    “Well,” I say, “Padre knows that O’Grady is really the cattle thief because he compares the
typewritten
letters. But they didn’t have typewriters in 1880.”
    “Yes, they did.”
    “They did?”
    “Certainly. Although they had not standardized the keyboard. Many preferred the Dvorak arrangement. Indeed, Mark Twain invested heavily in the Dvorak, and lost much. Ironically, the man who possesses the title of world’s fastest typist—and yes, it is a man, a soldier in point of fact—employs a Dvorak keyboard. Hmm.” He always adds those little
hmms
at the end of his sentences, impressed with whatever he’s just said.
    “Okay, fine, maybe they had typewriters in 1880, but they had like
two
, and it is just not an effective narrative device.”
    “I see. Fine.” Michelangelo Barker, like everyone else on staff, is paid, and paid well, to be deferential.
    Despite my past treatment of him, he is a very kind landlord. He is respectful of my privacy down there in his basement, although Isuppose I send up enough sozzled ululations that he ’d be a fool not to be. He often effects home improvements on his own initiative, trying to make my life a little more comfy. Michelangelo can’t stand erect in the basement and is constantly bumping his head on the ceiling, which makes his handyman stuff all the more endearing.
    Barker is the only person, other than my children, who has ever been down in my basement. So it’s time to introduce the girls, even though you’ve missed them, I’ve dropped them off at their schools this morning, kissed them goodbye, and it will be a week or so before I see them again.
    Currer is twelve and Ellis is seven.
    I maintain that it is simply a linguistic anomaly that Currer is not a teenager, that there is no logical reason why we say “twelve” and not “two-teen.” Because she certainly acts like a teenager;