The Water-Method Man

Cut: a series of stills, family photographs of Trumper, Biggie and Colm. Ralph's voice-over: 'Well, he ought to be aware of the dangers, of course. He was married before ...'

Tulpen: 'He misses the child.'

Ralph: 'And the wife?'

Cut: Earphones on, Bogus is working on the tapes in Ralph's studio. There is no sync sound. The sound track is a montage of fragments we've already heard from the various voices-over: 'It's natural, I guess ...' 'I think that's a good thing ...' 'You live with him ...' 'And the wife?'

Trumper appears to be switching these fragments on and off by his fingerwork at the tape recorder. Then Tulpen comes into frame, says something and points to something out of frame, just beyond the two of them.

Another angle: with the bits from the voices-over still the only sound, Trumper and Tulpen are looking at a tangled mess of tape which has spun off a reel and is spilling into a great wormy pile on the floor. Trumper shuts something off: clunk. With this noise, the frame freezes to a still. There continues to be no sync sound. Ralph's voice-over says, 'Stop it, right there! Now the title - hold it right there ...' Then the titles for Fucking Up appear over the frozen image. 'Music,' says Ralph's voice-over, and in turn they appear over the frozen image: Bogus Trumper, in stop-action, is stooping to attempt to untangle a mess of spilled tape. Tulpen is looking on.

22

Slouching after Overturf

HE WAS VERY lucky to hitch a ride from Frankfurt Airport to Stuttgart with a German computer salesman who was proud of his company's Mercedes. Trumper wasn't sure whether it was the drone of the autobahn or the salesman's own peculiar drone that put him to sleep.

In Stuttgart he spent the night at the Hotel Fehls Zunder. Apparently, from the rows of photographs in the hotel lobby, Fehls Zunder had been a diver in the German Olympic Team of 1936; ther

e was a photo of him in midair at the Berlin Games. The last photo showed him on the deck of a German U-boat, leaning on the port rail beside the Fregattenkapitan; FEHLS ZUNDER, FROGMAN, LOST AT SEA, read the caption.

There was also an unexplained photograph of dark, empty ocean, the shoreline - France? England? - in the distance. A white X had been painted on the crest of a heavy swell. The caption, ripe with irony, said: HIS LAST DIVE.

Trumper wondered where Fehls Zunder had learned to swim and dive in Stuttgart. From his fifth-floor window, Bogus contemplated a double-gainer which would have placed him precisely in the middle of a glistening puddle in the tram tracks below the hotel.

Bogus's longest dreams are about heroes. Accordingly, he dreams of Merrill Overturf sterilizing his hypodermic needle and syringe in a little saucepan, and boiling a test tube of Benedict's solution and pee to check his urine sugar. Merrill is being almost dainty in some impossibly large American kitchen; it's the kitchen at Great Boar's Head, where Bogus has never seen Merrill. Dr Edmund Trumper is reading the newspaper and Bogus's mother is making coffee as Merrill squeezes a medicine dropper of pee into a test tube, plinking exactly eight drops into the Benedict's solution.

'What's for breakfast?' Trumper's father asks.

Merrill is watching the timer on the stove. When the little bell rings, Dr Edmund Trumper's soft-boiled egg is done, simultaneously with Merrill's urine.

Merrill cools his pee in a fancy spice rack while Trumper's father fingers the steaming eggshell. Merrill shakes his test tube; Dr Edmund strikes the egg a glancing blow with his butter knife. Merrill announces that his urine sugar is high. 'At least two per cent,' he says, waving the opaque reddish mixture. 'Clear blue would be negative ...'

Something hisses. Actually, it's a large Mercedes bus below Trumper's Stuttgart window, but Bogus concludes that it's Merrill loading his syringe.

Then the three of them are sitting around the breakfast table. As Bogus's mother pours coffee, Merrill lifts his shirt and pinches up a small roll of his belly. Trumper smells alcohol and coffee as Merrill rubs his bit of fat with a cotton wad, then flicks the needle in like a dart and smoothly pushes the plunger.

Another hiss, louder than before, and Bogus rolls over and bumps into the wall of the Hotel Fehls Zunder; for a moment, the kitchen at Great Boar's Head tilts and slips off the bed. Hearing the crash, and other hiss, Trumper wakes up on the floor, with a fleeing vision of Merrill pumping himself full of air.

Now Merrill floats near the ceiling of Trumper's strange room, at the Hotel Fehls Zunder, and somewhere, dimmed by the hiss of the bus doors opening and closing outside, Bogus hears his father say, 'This is not a usual symptom of insulin reaction ...'

'My urine sugar is too high!' shrieks Merrill, skidding like a helium balloon across the ceiling to the transom above the door, where Bogus sees the girlish face of a total stranger peering through one of the transom's tiny windowpanes. Actually, the glass is in splinters on the floor of Trumper's room, and the embarrassed hotel maid, on her hall stepladder, tells Trumper that she's sorry for the disturbance; she was just wiping the glass when a pane fell out.

Bogus smiles; he doesn't catch the German right away, so that the maid is forced to carry on. 'It just fell right out when I was wiping it,' she explains, then tells him she will come back with a broom.

Trumper dresses himself in the bedsheet; draped in it, he moves suspiciously to his window, trying to locate the real hiss. Whether the Mercedes bus looks so new and shiny and inviting, or whether he actually notes how much money he has, he splurges and takes such a bus to Munich - riding high and drowsily on the sightseeing deck through Bavaria; dreaming vaguely a sort of stepped-up cycle to Overturf's careless treatment of his diabetes. Merrill shooting the insulin, watching his urine sugar plummet; Merrill suffering an insulin reaction on a Vienna Strassenbahn, jangling the dog tags around his neck until the conductor, who's about to throw this weaving drunk off the tram, reads the bilingual messages printed on the tags:

Ich bin nicht betrunken!

I am not drunk!

Ich habe zuckerkrankheit!

I have diabetes!

Was Sie sehen ist ein Insulinreaktion!

What you're seeing is an insulin reaction!