Clear: A Transparent Novel

A. G. MacK. nods, ‘Yeah. And I definitely think people are confused by him, and that’s half the trouble.’

Girl considers this for a moment, ‘You’re right,’ she says, ‘I think they are.’

‘And sometimes,’ A. G. MacK. continues (as if he’d only just thought of it), ‘when people are confused, they lash out. They do stupid things.’

Girl turns, impressed, the dark pupils in her blue eyes dilating. ‘That’s sad, but it’s so true.’

Insert invisible brackets here: I think I might want to make love with you – so long as I’m

(a) not on the rag;

(b) don’t have a last-minute history essay to write on the Mau Mau for a bastard tutorial this afternoon and;

(c) my Halls of Residence/your London pad isn’t/aren’t too far from here

Oh yeah.

Approach (B) The Girls who Hate Blaine

‘What a twat. What a stupid, self-indulgent, idiotic fucking twat.’

A. G. MacK. (on hearing this seductive mating call), rips off his neat, black pullover to reveal his lairy Gunners colours underneath. He commences a conversation with a remarkably pretty – if slightly loopy – girl about the possibility that David Blaine’s transparent box might actually be made of glucose (when he thinks nobody’s looking, can’t you see the bastard licking?), and puts forward the additional hypothesis that when the autumn weather really kicks in – when it rains – the box will gradually dissolve, and that attention-craving American fraud will take the mother of all tumbles.

Hah!

Approach (C) The Girls who Have Yet to Make Up their Minds

‘I mean what’s he do up there all day?’

‘He pees his nappy, he fantasises about nachos, and he considers the various pros and cons of the British Licensing Laws.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

(Slight pause as A. G. MacK. feels around keenly in his rucksack…)

‘Fancy an Alco-pop?’

Approach (D) Blaine’s Girlfriend

The unbelievably beautiful international model Manon Von Gerkan (hair like wheat. Eyes like forget-me-nots. Lips like a mudskipper – Oh my, she’s spectacular) is reputedly in almost constant attendance (although I – for one – don’t often have the privilege of seeing her because she tends to stay in the vicinity of the TV crews’ caravans in the private car park, to the rear).

Now think about it. Her boyfriend is currently thirty-odd-feet up in the air living on a diet of Evian water.

I am down here.

Va-va-va-voooom!

So far (admittedly) we have only shared one conversation. I was standing directly behind her. She took a small step back (while adjusting her binoculars) and stood on my trainer. She turned round. Our eyes met.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Did I stand on your foot?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, inspecting her indelible bootprint on my incredibly precious soft-shoe fabric, ‘but don’t worry. They’re only my very favourite, pristine quality, two-year-old yellow leather plimsoles from YMC. It’s fine, honestly.’

‘Oh,’ she said, then smiled and turned back round.

Plenty of room for optimism here, then, eh?

Eh?

Approximately twenty yards on and the tourists are swarming. There’s a man demonstrating ‘the world’s smallest kite’, there’s the hot-dog seller, there’s the T-shirts stall and the exotic South American who can effortlessly forge your name out of silver wire. An ice-cream van pulls into a small clearing. A jogger almost runs into him. Bedlam.

And swinging high above us – not a care in this world – that crazy Yank magician, smiling down benignly like this chaos has everything and yet nothing to do with him.

‘Pimp.’

She mutters it again (Good God she’s tenacious). My only compensation (and it’s hardly much) is that she’s plainly no happier with this arrangement than I am. I yank my headphones back over my ears, and in response, she shoves her sick-smeared hanky into the neat, front pocket of my beautiful, brand new Fendi shirt, and snorts (like a pig. I presume that’s how she laughs).

Right. That’s it. ODB again, and at full-bloody-blast this time. The Tupperware clatters in my ‘free’ hand as I grimly adjust the volume. A tug on the river sounds its horn, but I don’t hear it. Aphra does. She glances, then winces.

I turn the head-set off again (Aw, come on!).

‘My name’s Adair,’ I say, ‘Adair Graham MacKenny. Most people call me Adie.’

No palpable response.

‘Aphra, eh?’ I continue, ‘Like the seventeenth-century playwright and novelist, Aphra Behn?’

‘Who?’

She peers up at me, scornfully, ‘You honestly think I have the energy right now to listen to your shit, MacKenny?’

Oh. Right. Good. Fine.

Two (#ulink_d6be030d-e183-5ebc-9f5d-31b68f6778e8)

You know, I always really wanted to make a good film out of that book. Shane. You might almost say it’s been a dream of mine. They made one in Hollywood, 1953 – starring Alan Ladd, and it was an absolute, fucking disaster. Got six (six!) Academy Award Nominations (Including Best Picture, Best Director – George Stevens – Best Screenplay). But how – How? – when it was so bloody mediocre?

Ladd was a blond for starters (Shane was dark, he was the ‘dark stranger’, with this huge scar on his cheek. Lean, hungry, like an uncoiled spring. Ladd? Chronically bloated – from what I can recall – and pretty much a dwarf off his horse).

Nobody takes it seriously now – I mean the book, as fiction. They never took the film seriously…although, having said that, when I looked it up in my flatmate Solomon’s trusty Virgin Film Guide – 6th edition – the critic had given it a spanking four stars (yet then cheerfully starts off his critique with the words, ‘Self-important, overly solemn, middlingly paced…’ Huh?)

He also says – and this is interesting – that Paramount wanted the film to work in their – then, brand new, state-of-the-art – wide screen cinemas, so they hacked the top and the bottom off Loyal Griggs’ – the cinematographer’s – visual compositions. The real irony is that Griggs was the only Academy Nomination on the film to actually follow through and win (is that messed-up, or what? Although I guess the studio had to do something to try to make the short-arse Ladd fill their screens up).

The world has moved on. No point in denying it. Schaefer was writing Shane around 1948, 1949, and I suppose there must’ve been a powerful sense (even then – this was post the first atomic bomb) in which he was already looking back (through Rose Tinteds) to a time when it wasn’t entirely inconceivable that one man (one strong man) might’ve conclusively changed things (this is pre-Kennedy, so I guess there’s still a teensy bit of remaining leeway on that particular score).

The world’s certainly soured since. It’s got bigger (they tell you it’s getting smaller, but they’re just full of bull. That’s how they control you, see? Make you feel significant. Lull you into a false sense of security), it’s also more complicated, more worn-out, more screwed-up.

And no single man – David Beckham, Justin-sodding-Timberlake, US Governor of California, Arnold-blooming-Schwarzenegger – is ever going to definitively resolve this one, almighty, dirty mother-fucker of an unholy mess we’re in.