An Unusual Angle Read online

  Sudden panic: what if all five years at this place leave me with identical lumps, identical reference grids? How will I tell them apart? Distance is no absolute aid, because the whole point of having reference grids is to make distance easier to measure. I will have to take steps to make certain that there is some observable criterion allowing me to distinguish between the years.

  —You take steps? That’s a laugh!

  Arrogant animal!

  The cheering-squad/Byron girl has forced me to think of the contributing components of character in terms of continuous interaction rather than periods of alternating absolute dominance. I contemplate the possibility of a new technique, a new way of using a split screen, to demonstrate the interaction.

  Rather than splitting the screen in two, with one half showing shots with a specific character aspect apparent, and the other half showing the complementary character aspect, the screen is split in three, with the rightmost third showing the action that would take place if only the most pleasant aspects of the character were present, the leftmost third showing what would happen if only the most malicious and barbaric aspects were present, and the centre showing the actual events with the actual, mixed-up character.

  Mostly the three scenes would run together, and viewers would recognise many independent events occurring together for all three scenarios. However, to avoid confusion at major points of divergence, the vital segment would be shown, filling the whole screen, for each of the three versions, while the action in the other two remained suspended. This would highlight the differences between important events, without the confusion of running them simultaneously. Before any changes, the three would be virtually identical, and after a major divergence they would be so different that the audience would follow them as distinctly separate sequences. I’m sure that nobody would have trouble understanding the point of it, except for the critics. They would never understand.

  Chapter 3

  TEDIUM

  Of course most days are like most other days.

  I wake to see what life has vomited into my breakfast plate. Gulp it down fast to avoid the taste, wonder why I’m hungry.

  Walking to school I always shoot straight through my eyes, giving me the greatest possible sense of presence in case something interesting happens, but usually (always) what I get is scenic shots rather than drama, and believe me after the first few times my three-block walk is no longer even scenic. No mountain-building takes place before my eyes. Something’s missing.

  But the cloud patterns are different every single day, so I make a point of always capturing them.

  If I look at the clouds long enough I am always amazed that primitive people didn’t think they were solid structures floating around in the air (perhaps some did, but I have never heard of it). Of course, many types of clouds are obviously intangible, insubstantial … but not all that rarely there are ones which look so solid that I find it hard to persuade myself that they are not enormous floating castles and mountains and creatures. The wind pushes them along without changing their shapes at all, and I can imagine them rushing overhead at incredible speeds like the stone head from Zardoz.

  Even more wonderful is seeing the moon during the daytime. (It is wonderful at night, too, but in the day its magic is so much greater from its intrusion into the mundane dayworld.) It is so easy to think of the moon as commonplace, and to just glance past it, but if you stare long enough the full circle becomes visible, and your brain starts to interpret the perspective intelligently, and you really start to appreciate that it actually is an enormous ball of rock hanging in space a very long way away, half-lit by the sunlight.

  The sun, unfortunately, is just too big and too bright and too far away to be grasped correctly visually.

  Ever since I can remember, nameless grey people have popped out from behind bushes and told me, warned me, to use the sun only passively, for illumination. Always point the camera away from the sun; always make sure your subject is lit from the front. They’d print their advice on cards to fit in my pocket, and put asterisks next to each point.

  Naturally I ignore them and try to get the sun into my shots, directly, whenever I can. Which is probably why I prefer to shoot in the morning or evening. If I can’t get it in directly, there’s always a way to manage a bright reflection, from water, a window, a watch.

  Not that I’m obsessed. I just think there’s nothing more boring than flat lighting.

  Walking across the oval I pan back and forth, looking for areas of interest. The oval itself is usually empty in the morning, but as I cross diagonally, there is a road running past the swimming pool and the front of the hall, far ahead to my right, where there are usually three or four games derived from hand tennis going on, often interrupted by teachers’ cars and delivery trucks. The road goes on past the hall, and alongside the main rectangle that is the school. Straight ahead is the library. To my left is a long, wide parking area perpendicular to the road, which meets it at a point hidden by the library. Behind the parking area are basketball courts, also, closer to the school itself, manual arts classrooms, arranged in the familiar introverted square.

  Occasionally there are sprinklers on the oval: long brass pipes made up from jointed segments, stretching from one end of the oval to the other, with a punctured head at the centre of each segment. Alongside the road, opposite the swimming pool and the hall, there is a row of bores to supply the sprinklers. Often there is water fountaining feet high into the air from these bores, and the grass around is flooded ankle-deep. I never find out exactly why this happens.

  It may be some kind of ritual.

  As I get closer I can see the entrance to the library: a kind of half-open corridor, a strip of concrete with an aluminium roof but only rusty metal railings along the sides, except for the very beginning where the sides are made of bricks and there are racks for bags inside.

  I could delight in these details once, but a hundred times makes them dumb enemies.

  Exactly opposite the library is an entrance to the Western Quadrangle. I turn left. The way is lined with thin, grey wooden benches, set close to the wall, and moderately populated.

  I pass out of the quadrangle and into the concrete rectangle, and in the centre of the perpendicular section housing toilets is my locker, my tiny sanctuary, my little home.

  Well, in a hostile place it is nice to have a cubic foot to call your own.

  Each time I open it, I change the combination, but I must be sure not to forget. I do not photograph it, for security reasons. I take out my books for the morning, then swing the heavy steel door shut. It is my third Chubb for the year, and they are not cheap.

  Waiting for the siren I circle the school, hoping to wander into something interesting, but always it is so like the day before that the differences are almost too small to perceive.

  This morning the siren brings one period of phys ed followed by one period of French, as it has for a million Fridays before.

  Watch the aimless movements of a hundred people suddenly become polarised as they are given direction and purpose.

  Through the exit there where for some unknowable reason only one of the half-doors is ever open and hence it is always crowded, to line up outside the change room built into the hall which is abused as a gymnasium.

  Five impatient minutes and then we are let in.

  The floor is cold.

  Because it is first thing in the morning, the change rooms are relatively clean and dry and the smell is bearable.

  Inside we sit on the expensive wooden boards and look up at the ceiling dented by many hard red balls. Strange acoustics in this strange barn, no privacy, vulnerable in the volume.

  The air is cold, although it’s sunny outside.

  Today we will set up an obstacle course in the gymnasium by pulling out machines and structures from the wall, and taking some from cupboards in strange places, and putting all these machines and structures in a closed path which we must run through with maximum effort and m
inimum efficiency.

  This cannot be to train us to go through real obstacle courses, or we would have to do it with minimum effort and maximum efficiency.

  I am told that the purpose of it all is to prevent my otherwise inevitable middle-age heart attacks.

  Isn’t science wonderful.

  I am told that this is also a great deal of fun, and I ought to enjoy it tremendously.

  It is difficult to complain out loud to such sincere and benevolent despots. They are moronic shits. I deny common ancestry. The irritation they cause me is my only reason to acknowledge their existence; they are so boring and stupid that if they didn’t prod me with their idiot activities I would never need to know the smallest thing about them. I resent having to take an interest in them.

  Always these periods have the greatest subjective length.

  Especially near the end, when the subjective length of an interval in objective time is distorted by a factor almost inversely proportional to the time remaining to the end of the period. Marginally greater distortion would trap me in there forever. This may seem impossible, but (purely an analogy) remember that God is everywhere, inside black holes and outside black holes, and there is only one God.

  Then we push some of the machines and structures back into the wall, and return the rest to their cupboards in strange places.

  Inevitably we finish after the siren, and must change in negative time, but for me teacherless French follows so there is no problem. Others will be rebuked. Sure, it’s a small thing, but it makes me angry (and that’s what matters).

  Always French starts with a determination to work solidly and successfully, to bound over chapters and exercises absorbing all with infinite clarity born of infinite concentration.

  So much for the theory.

  Decay is started by frustration. As one or two of us lose comprehension, they lose concentration, and almost telepathically it spreads by a kind of avalanche effect until we are all involved in a debate on war or crime or censorship or last night’s episode of Star Trek … or we are fighting each other with rulers, pens, books, and whatever else is at hand, always vigorously but rarely with real hostility. Sometimes a few try to cling to original intentions. If they do not try to shut up the rest of us, then they will end the period neither having learnt anything, because their concentration could not survive the noise, nor having enjoyed whatever improper activity or discussion took place. If they do try, and they fail, then their hostility destroys everyone else’s enjoyment, and if they succeed, then everyone else’s hostility destroys their powers of concentration.

  So even teacherless French is not ideal.

  Recess shows me consistent consumption assumption correct and I wonder how the school can ever be short of funds considering canteen profits but that is a dangerous thought so I suppress it.

  Wander around randomly until siren brings double Maths.

  Then graph dozens of dozens of identical single-variable inequalities and each one involves ruling a line and marking off equally-spaced intervals and numbering the points of division and putting arrows on the ends and writing the name of the variable and graphing the inequality.

  There are twenty questions we are given; fine, just enough to be sure you can do it, though perhaps twelve or ten or eight or five or two would be better because really they are all so similar that repetition is pointless when it is only possible to have tiny variations from question to question.

  Then open the book and see that each question is subdivided into fourteen parts (a) to (n) and that is real cowardice doing that instead of coming out and calling them questions 1 to 280.

  And we would all love to sleep instead because the air is so drowsy, but they will be checked so they must be done, to avoid Consequences, and neither anger nor apathy can change that fact.

  Eighty minutes is of course not enough time … so half must become homework. Why? Well surely the brilliant and talented and highly-paid people who designed our toilet-paper textbooks would not include all those problems unless they were sure it was essential to complete every single one. The fact that every chapter in the book is exactly ten pages long and the exercises at the end are always just the right length to make this so is, of course, just a coincidence …

  Always just before lunch the public address network is used to keep us informed on important events but like the six o’clock news it seems to be largely trivia and sport (not that I’m implying that these are mutually exclusive; what I mean is trivia related to sport and trivia not related to sport).

  It would be nice to have zero response to all of this, to filter all the inputs and block out the garbage, but no tuned circuit is perfect, no signal is monochromatic (in any space); the world is too sloppy to contain only things of importance.

  Then quickly change books because eating lunch must stop at precisely 12.15, no earlier, no later.

  Then dutifully I begin filming randomly Just In Case and I must never miss even one lunchtime because the probability of an important event is 0.9999999999999 if I am not prepared. I am tempted to test this but I never have enough courage. I wish it were possible to appear to be unprepared and thus trigger an important event but the all-knowing cosmos cannot be fooled.

  Not that I believe this superstitious nonsense. I merely film everyday because it is safest that way. And it is ridiculous to think that my observation of the world can change the world when the camera is hidden so deep in my skull and is only millimetres across.

  No matter what Heisenberg said.

  It worries me that the Big Event of my camerawork career could come on the opposite side of the school to my position at the time. I could send out a lot of viewpoints, but it’s well known that being there is as important as actually taking the shot, so I clone myself and send me to the library, while I stay in the quadrangle, thus covering a wider area.

  By the end of lunchtime my clone is usually dead because the technique is not perfect.

  Unless it is me who dies.

  Not that I mind I don’t think if I cannot tell but …

  Confession: I don’t really clone myself, I just run back and forth from the library to the quadrangle a great deal, very very quickly, hoping not to miss the Big Event which never comes.

  Well, no, actually I do send out viewpoints.

  Keep still!

  Instead of the Big Event I capture boring brawls and dull discussions and colourless conversations and jejune jovialities which are almost indistinguishable from the footage of two days before or two weeks before or two months before …

  And despite my attempts to make lumps, I find it hard to form a meaningful reference grid. My consistent attempts to make lumps are so consistently unsuccessful that they form a bland, unresolvable background. I am always so frightened when long periods of time pass without any distinctive events to give scale to them; when a week of school is as exciting as sitting in a dentist’s waiting room for two hours, then the two become effectively equivalent.

  Often unpromising material can be made to stand out by catching it from the right angle to give the greatest contrast and the sharpest relief, but this can only be achieved at the time of experiencing it, because there is no ingenious process or method to alter the angle of a shot after it has been taken.

  —Ladies and gentlemen …

  says the rabbit, on top of the flag pole.

  —Mesdames et Messieurs, Damen und Herren …

  says the rabbit, doing a very good Joel Grey.

  —Allow me to present the one, the only, the sensational, the fabulous …

  Carbon arc spotlight brighter than the sun beams down from the top of the pole, blue dust motes fill the lightcone, all else pales in comparison with:

  —Patch Of Lawn!

  Oh joy after lunch is double Science which is reasonably lumpy as we learn about the crust and the mantle and the Mohorovic Discontinuity. To spoil it all there are the inevitable inane questions involved at the end, like: What are the major theories concerning t
he source of heat in the Earth’s core? (We are never told, we have no reference facilities. What are we supposed to do? Work it out logically? Guess?) Discuss. List their advantages and disadvantages. (Ditto.) Where is the deepest ocean trench? (Ditto, with high irrelevance added.)

  Out of twelve questions seven need reference facilities and time which we are not given, so we jot down meaningless short sentences. Of course from a purely rational point of view inability to answer satisfactorily questions which I find irrelevant should not bother me, but who is purely rational?

  —Not I! Not even I!

  says the rabbit, twitching pointy ears then dissolving into points of light.

  Try not to worry about it.

  Enervating English offers imbecilic questions after a comprehension passage written in the 1950s to brainwash American high school students. Sounds fine on the face of it. But the imbecilic questions (which we are expected to ‘get right’) were written in the 1950s to test the brainwashing of American high school students after reading the same passage.

  With this in mind, I don’t find either the passage or the questions terribly relevant or interesting. And I still can’t see the connection between long hair and totalitarian communism.

  —Year’s free subscription to Reader’s Digest?

  offers the rabbit. I can’t seem to get rid of him.

  It is after two o’clock in the afternoon and hence the perfect time for a siesta but as always the threat of Consequences is there to guarantee at least a little effort no matter how blatantly stupid it all is.

  Sleepy Social Studies and our mummified teacher whispers through our minds his views on Ancient Egyptian Religion through years of plague. His sightless blue-veined eyes and his soft, sad speech hypnotise us in the warm cotton air. His vivid descriptions of sacrifices to appease angry gods suggest that he has actually seen them …

  Sacrifices or angry gods? Both? Wake up, he’s stopped.

  Then there are surprisingly sensible questions to answer on the effects of Egyptian philosophy on social structures. After a day of moronic pap this sign of mild intelligence surviving somewhere in the machinery which churns out our courses and texts stands out as quite a lump and I dwell deeply on it.