Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where's our fucking airplane? What's inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it?
Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers' movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. Did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a 'perfect' movement, one that would 'change everything'?
An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan, as well as his collaborators and shadowy antagonists, across geo-political fault lines and experimental zones: medical labs, CGI studios, military research centres . . . Places where the frontiers of potential - to cure, kill, understand or entertain - are constantly tested and refined.
And all the while, work is underway on the blockbuster film Incarnation, an epic space tragedy. Commercial box-office fodder? Or a sublimely mythical exploration of the animation, contemplation and possession of flesh - ours and others' - traumatised, erotic, beautiful, obscene...
Audacious and mesmeric, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual-motion machine. Tom McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying historical and symbolic structures of human experience.
In the third of four school buses edging their way up Camberwell New Road sits Markie Phocan. The buses process in formation, a cortège. Taxis, vans, double-deckers, dustbin lorries and the odd rag-and-bone cart alternately hem them in and, turning, parking or reversing, create pockets for them to slip, if not through, at least into, claiming a few yards before they run up against hard fabric of immobile bumpers and exhaust pipes. Winter sunlight falls across the scene; if they’d been new, or clean, it would have made the buses glint, but since they’re neither, it just coats them in a dust and diesel aura. Across the side of one someone has finger-scrawled the word Fuck; beneath this, somebody (the same person perhaps) has written Thatcher; but this name has since been scored through, substituted by GLC Commies—which, in turn, has been struck out and replaced with You.
Markie’s sitting in the fourth row, by the window (driver side). Next to him, Nainesh Patel is thumbing through a set of football cards, picking out swaps. On the aisle’s far side Polly Gould’s tipping her head back, tapping space dust onto an extended tongue. Trevor Scotter leans in from behind her and, sliding his hand horizontally across the plumb-line between packet and mouth, interrupts the flow for long enough to grab some of the powder in his upturned palm. Polly spins round, but by the time she’s facing him her outrage has already lost momentum. What’s she going to do? They’re not allowed sweets. Trevor throws his palm up to his own mouth, gloating at her. Then, swinging his eyes sideways, he brings both his and Polly’s gaze to rest on Vicky Staple’s head, above whose curly hair he rubs his hands, releasing a fine sugar and E-number fallout. He and Polly laugh.
“She got pink dandruff . . .”
Vicky, staring at the seat in front of her from behind thick NHS glasses, says nothing. Paper planes and spitwads soar through the loud air. In the door-side front seat Miss Sedge sits impassive, shoulders sagging. No one’s getting injured. They’re crawling round the Oval now. Markie can see, over the wall, the scoreboard and the top rows of the upper stands; then, further round the ground’s perimeter, rising above it, the gas holders. The tallest one is about two thirds full today, its green dome’s convex meniscus giving over to a skeleton of interlocking diamonds. Vauxhall Gardens’ hot-air balloon floats, tethered, to the gas holders’ north, ropes on its underside converging on a flimsy-looking basket. Lowering his back and craning his head as the bus traces Harleyford Street’s curve, Markie tracks the balloon across the windscreen until it slides from view beyond the upper border. The aluminium of the vehicle’s carapace behind which it disappears is thin and translucent; the sun, head-on to them now, shines through it to illuminate the letters SCHOOL BUS stamped across it, broadcasting them to passengers in reversed form: SUB LOOHCS. Below this the same letters, smaller and similarly reversed, though this time through reflection of the front shell of the bus hugging their tail, run across the driver’s rear-view mirror: sub loohcs. To Markie, these are real words, drawn from a hybrid language whose vocabulary and grammar he can just about intuit; doubled, they present a header and subtitle, repeating a single cryptic instruction: sub loohcs—look below . . .
Now the last two buses have got stranded in the middle of the Vauxhall Cross box junction, blue-and-white insects caught in a yellow web, old chassis shuddering while cars honk and weave around them. The driver of Markie’s, unconcerned, leans on his outsize wheel and picks his teeth, ignoring other motorists’ shouts and V-signs. As Nainesh murmurs “Heighway . . . Shilton . . . Coppell . . .,” the lights release them. Markie wonders if the two events, the intoning of footballers’ names and the release of buses, are connected; whether Nainesh has just caused the captive spell to break. To a last, long horn-blast, whose tone falls off as they pull away, they speed on to Vauxhall Bridge. Beside it, on the south side, a giant lot sits cleared, sticks and surveyors’ string dotted and threaded flimsily about it. Nainesh looks up from his spread and, pointing at the empty space, announces: “Going to be a secret headquarters for spies.”
“How do you know?” asks Trevor.
“My dad told me.”
“If it’s secret, then how does he know?”
“He knows,” mutters Nainesh, burying himself back in the cards.
Polly tilts her head back and taps out another load. In the seat in front of her Bea Folco, headband knotted at right temple, stares out of her window. There’s no rear-view mirror, nor any other reflective surface, showing Bea to him and vice versa, but Markie senses nonetheless a symmetry—both of them turned or folded outwards from the bridge’s cambered spine, he facing east, she west—somehow connecting them. On his side, on the water, tugs from Lambeth River Fire Station are testing their cannons. The water jets start at their bases bold and firm, then jag towards their apex, morph into a set of liquid hooks from which hangs a mist-curtain inlaid with small rainbows. Is this salute for them? For Lyndhurst Primary’s four-bus procession? Markie, even at ten, understands that it’s not, that the world goes on doing what it does when he’s tucked away in classrooms; that this snatched peek at its weekday workings is a special and uncommon thing—almost illicit, as though he were spying on it: embedded in forbidden territory, reconnoitring the buildings and the traffic, the embankments and dilapidated barges, towers and cranes and church spires, Parliament downriver, through the haze; dispatching back (to whom?) some ultra-classified report, compiled in mirror-alphabet, or just in thoughts . . .
Polly, without warning, throws up. She pukes first on to the floor between her legs, then, turning in disgust from what she’s brought up, out into the aisle. It triggers screams and raucous laughter, sudden drawing up of legs to chests, a simultaneous evacuation of all bodies from the event’s epicentre and, pushing back against this from the seats on its periphery, a wave of curious encroachment. Miss Sedge has stridden over—a little too briskly, almost landing knee-length leather boots in vomit that is pink and lurid and still, as per the manufacturer’s design, cracking and popping as the upthrown enzymatic juices release from melting flakes the pressurised carbon dioxide trapped inside them.
“She was eating Pop Rocks, Miss,” says Vicky.
Miss Sedge plants her feet on the vomit lake’s shores, leans over and winches Polly from her seat. As she’s led to the front, the girl turns back and shouts at her informer:
“Four-eyed cunt!”
For the rest of the ride, the lake shape-changes with the bus’s movement, spawning pools and channels, oxbows, forks and branches. Trevor, playing the joker, hooks his arm between two seat-backs and hangs right above it; when the bus, clearing the bridge, turns sharp right into Millbank, he loses his balance and starts to slip—or is this still part of the act? No one gets to find out: Miss Sedge strides over again and plucks him away too, slaps his face one-two with both sides of her free hand, then bundles him into the front row beside her and Polly. As he turns round to take a curtain call, leering back glow-cheeked at his classmates, his smirking eye catches Markie’s; Markie looks away. The vomit’s smell’s coming on strong now; children start lifting scarves and collars to their noses. Markie wedges his gloves, conjoined by outward rolling of the cuffs into a ball, between his face and the window, seeking in their softness and sweet counter-smell a passkey to release him from this cabin, magic him outside to merge with cleansing spray, with light’s extracted spectrum . . .
They’ve arrived now. Into the parking bay the buses pull, two on each side of the Mr. Whippy van that’s blocking out the central stretch. In Markie’s there’s a rush towards the door, which remains closed while Miss Sedge shouts instructions for outside assembly. When it finally accordions back, children tumble on to the pavement and suck air into their lungs like surfacing free divers. High above them, from atop the Tate’s stone portico, armed with flag and trident and flanked by her lion and unicorn, Britannia stares down like a disapproving headmistress. Orders go ignored as busloads mingle, bringing one another up to date: Cudjo Sani, on the lead bus, threw up too; on the second one a fight’s left Jason Banner with a bleeding scratch across his cheek . . . Some children slink away into the garden; others hop up and down the building’s steps. It’s on these steps that teachers re-corral them into class-groups: four inclining columns that are led up past the Tate’s vertical ones—only to crumble, bottlenecked by the revolving door. Beyond this, the marble atrium’s an echo chamber, multiplying cries and whistles to unbearable cacophony; all four class teachers shout in an attempt to bring the noise under control, which only makes it louder. One of the Tate’s guards, whose burly figure and demeanour mark him as an ex-serviceman, steps in, unleashing a deep bass that quietens the children less from obedience than from curiosity: his voice seems to rise from the whorled depths of the staircase down which the floor’s two-tone mosaic disappears. Their attention won, he orders them to leave their coats in the cloakroom’s group area, then oversees this order’s execution, mess-inspection memories flickering across his eyes as arms wriggle out of anorak- and duffel-sleeves.
Markie hangs his coat up on a hook, but keeps the gloves. Holding them up to his face again, watching Bea drop her parka to the floor and step out of it (the zip’s stuck), he starts experiencing a sense of overlay—the same effect as when Miss Sedge, back in the classroom, slides one sheet of acetate above another on her overhead projector to create across the wall an image not found on the individual sheets themselves. For a few moments, he’s half here in the Tate’s vestry, and half in the changing rooms at Peckham Baths—in both locations without really being in either. It’s not just the mass transit and disrobing, nor that the same type of metal coat-hook lines both spaces’ walls. No, this composite effect is pegged on something more particular: an afternoon, a little more than two weeks ago; Markie paired, as today, with Nainesh, two to a cubicle, peeling off socks and trousers—and realising, from the voices sailing past the flimsy metal panel separating their stall from its neighbour, that Bea and Emma Dalton were changing right next to them.
The understanding hit the two boys simultaneously; both suddenly fell quiet, eyes moving up and down the flaked partition, which rose far too high to allow over-peeping—but (eyes signalled one another) its base . . . Its base gave off at shin-height, leaving a low, narrow void-strip. Nainesh, smiling, slowly crouched down to the floor, beckoning Markie: Here, come . . . They had to press their cheeks right to the quartz-and-granite slab to reach the vantage point: from there, the hidden space swung into view around the panel-base’s hinge; and, as though looking upwards while passing through some portico as lofty as the Tate’s, they saw two sets of bare legs towering above them like the trunks of redwood trees, parallels playing perspectival tricks by narrowing and widening out into thighs before converging, at what should have been infinity but was in truth a mere two feet away, into unfoliaged waist-canopies, joins forming folds that bracketed more folds, all flesh-lines moving in strange synchronicity as Bea and Emma, oblivious to the perverse gazes being directed at them from below, marched up and down on the spot, singing the aria they’d been learning for the upcoming school concert:
Toreador on guard now, Toreador! Toreador!
Mind well that when in danger thou shalt be,
Fond eyes gaze and adore,
And true love waits for thee, Toreador,
And true love waits for thee!
The angle prevented Markie from seeing Bea’s face; Emma’s either—but Bea was closest to him, and it’s Bea around whom the visual conundrum has accreted in the fifteen-day interim: how to reconcile the two views, the two angles, the two vistas—trunk and visage—two parts of a whole whose wholeness he would love to somehow hold to him, clasp and sink into; but . . .
They’re being handed over to one of the Tate’s school-group guides. A slight woman in her twenties, she starts telling the children all about Joan Miró.
“Miró,” she trills in a voice full of what Markie instantly recognises as not enthusiasm itself but rather an intent to enthuse, “learnt to paint when he was about your age. He loved the shapes and colours of his native Barcelona, which were bright and curvy and just full of life. He loved these shapes and colours so much,” she continues, “that he’s carried them inside him ever since. Although he’s an old man now, and one of the world’s most famous living artists, he still paints with the imagination and the vision of a child—which is why we’re always particularly happy when children like you come and look at what he’s done. Now, I’m going to pass round these . . .”
Worksheets are distributed. There are shapes to spot and tick off; symbols (sun, moon, woman) ditto; then questions about how the paintings make the children feel; a box to fill with their own bright and curvy drawings; and so forth. Trevor rolls his into a hardened tube and swats Jo Fife over the head with it; Vicky starts worrying at the edges of hers, tattering them. They’re instructed not to touch the artworks, nor to stand too near. Then they’re led, past two more sets of columns, through the polished mausoleum of the building’s inner hall to the side galleries. Once in, they fan out through the rooms, zigzagging from wall to wall as they I-spy; clustering in twos and threes to compare notes and rates of progress; squeezing on to benches or planting themselves cross-legged on the floor to copy titles. Markie ambles his way past hangman figures, scribbled stars and charmingly imperfect circles, undulating harlequins, hanging pendula of heads and limbs, past kites and suns (he ticks that one off) and a snakes-and-ladders game that’s left the board to take over a house—up, down, diagonal, the whole space—with cats and fish and jack-in-the-boxes joining in, while the game’s die, which has mutated into a cuboid chrysalis, hatches a dragonfly or hornet or who knows what other manner of misshapen insect. He holds his glove-ball to his face each time he pauses in front of a painting, and breathes in its compacted softness while he contemplates the image. The glove-ball is misshapen too; not, strictly speaking, a ball—at least not a sphere—but elongated and with finger-tentacles, also turned felt-side outwards, protruding from its base, a fragile home-made teddy squid or octopus . . .
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