Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett

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СКАЧАТЬ an implement inside an elderly man and rob his things’. He wondered about how easily these words had come from the old man and whether this was so because he had been violated in a natural or surgeon-made opening of his body by angry young people. Many muscles contracted in him at the thought of several gruesome scenarios and he felt these contractions as empathy. He pondered the cruelness of this city with its dry-eyed young people who would cull their living forebears. It was a city, he would later see confirmed, where even the young and the avant-garde spoke very well the language of money; a city that called on you to keep a hard ferocious focus. But he appreciated too that the young people were angry because they were afraid, for he understood that America was dying. Another old man, an Indian-Ugandan in a coffee shop, said that India was taking over and that perhaps Uganda would too if its ‘this’ levelled out to ‘this’ and ‘this’, and he appreciated that the new generation of young people must have felt great pressure to earn money in order to continue to enjoy the luxuries they were used to.

      Their efforts in the early weeks to secure concert bookings were frustrated. Denny rang some likely venues – supper clubs and cabaret rooms – but all responded by requesting a sample of music on an internet website. This was something none of the men were either capable of providing or inclined to provide. Besides, as Denny asserted, an Irish tenor concert was about more than just the sound of voices; it was the experience of the live performance: seeing the joy and melancholy of song in the faces of three men; borne in their deportment, the plight of an injured linnet as a symbol of the plight of a nation.

      Denny also contacted an Italian entertainment agent he had known many years before but had not been in touch with for a long time. The agent, Denny said, had promised to enlist a theatrical-set designer of his acquaintance who could create cycloramic backdrops for them. There was talk too of elaborate three-dimensional stage props, round towers and passage tombs and such, from which one or all of them might emerge as part of their act. The agent said that he knew opera-house managers in Campania and Sicily, including that of the San Carlo in Naples, and that if all went well the Free ’n’ Easy Tones would soon be touring the south of Italy and that they would be millionaires. It all sounded too wonderful to be true, and of course it was. Some days later, after another phone call to the agent, Denny was told that the trio would have to audition for a place on his roster.

      The old man fumed.

      ‘I have offered him a private concert in these rooms yet still he demands we line up outside his decrepit offices with the sword swallowers and the cowgirl troupes. Well schist and frack to that! He can stick his auditions in his cameo locket and stuff it in his cannoli! And curse his dead mama! We’re better than this, boys!’

      Then one Sunday evening Denny told Clive and Rickard that he had had a dream during a nap that afternoon. He described it with the solemnness and detachment of a religious mystic, looking away and into himself in recollection of the vision.

      ‘I saw loudspeakers attached to telegraph poles in a bocage-like landscape playing the music of liberation.’

      ‘Were they playing our music?’ said Clive.

      ‘They were playing Al Jolson. They were playing Al Jolson. Listen now – we must find a mosque. I believe hundreds have sprung up around the city in recent times. We’ll get a willing muezzin – bribe him if necessary – to play our music over his loudspeakers and have it echo down the avenues.’

      ‘We’ll need to make a record first, to play it on his stereo,’ said Rickard.

      ‘We’ll look in the Yellow Pages!’ said Clive.

      ‘Yes!’

      Denny bounded humpbacked from his chair like an excited monkey. They were all excited – at the way they seemed to harmonise and relay on this gathering idea. They ripped leaves and sheaves from the directory – the hand of one beating away the hand of another – until they reached the R listings. They found a number – one of several under ‘RECORD COMPANIES’. Aabacus Records. Denny straightened his back and went to his phone. Rickard took a deep breath, went to the window, tore back the Turkish curtains. To the south, a huge glowing nebula that changed through phases of intensity and colour hung between the great entertainments of Midtown and the proscenium of cloud above. All seemed poised and possible.

      ‘Fellows!’ called Denny in a loud rasp with his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. He beckoned the others near. ‘“The Caul That Jack Was Born With”, all right? When I slide my hand away. On three …’

      Some twenty-five minutes and ten songs (‘The Caul That Jack …’ / ‘Cogitations of My Fancy’ / ‘’Tis Very Cold For June’ / ‘The Malefactors’ Register’ / ‘Empress of the Americas’ / ‘Evidence of the Glimmie Glide’ / ‘The “Celebrated” Windy Song’ / ‘Letters from France’ / ‘A Pike in the Eye’ / ‘What I Shall Have Been For What I Am in the Process of Becoming’) later they took a pause, took a step back, and Denny signalled that that was enough. They had given the best possible account of themselves. They would change the world.

      With the return of the wail of far-off sirens, and as the light in the room seemed to pulse and pitch as on a boat adrift, Rickard realised that it was ten past eight on a weekend evening and that no record company would be open for business. Also, he noticed that the year on the front of the directory was ‘1961’.

      There came then the sound of laughter – cackling laughter, as troubled as it was troublesome – from up the hallway and out in the landing. Denny swung open his front door. A big man, broad as a sandwich board, was creased over on himself.

      ‘Jeremiah! What are you doing?!’

      The man stretched to full height, rising to six and a quarter feet. He had flaccid dangling arms like downed electric cables, and his shoulders were held confidently apart. He had short black coarse hair, pale pimply skin on a babyish face, and unclear milk-blue aboriginal Irish eyes.

      ‘Jeremiah! Were you laughing?’

      ‘No, sir. I was crying. I was weeping at the sound.’

4

      The thought came suddenly to Clive Sullis that the creatures who had returned him to his body had at last caught up. He began to run – crab-ways, turning, instep patting into instep. In so far as he was in any state to be observing anything he observed all of the colours at once and only grey. A weather condition rose above the trees of the park. Any and all of the trees, they all looked the same. So did the grassy areas. There was no telling where he was, or in which direction he was going. The sky was the sky; towers towered beyond like the fairy follies. Pathways of chewed chewing gum. Choo choo along, he said. Just keep on, keep choo choo-ing. He spun around and the man in the chewing-gum trench coat was gone. The world continued to spin. He was in a cartoon. More like it he’d had a stroke and all this had been assembled using a computer. He wondered when he’d had his stroke. Because it seemed likely that recently he had had a stroke. He was bothered lately. He took more time with decisions. He sometimes did things and was not sure when or why he had done them. The delicate man he was outwardly had started to seep inwards. Fears he had not had since the nineteen pissstained seventies were coming back more wretched, more fawsach, than ever. Irish words had been creeping into his speech. Rude words had been creeping into his speech.

      He plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his long black overcoat, narrowing his already thin frame, and hurried along a path towards a bright open area. Ah, but he knew this place. The Conservatory Water, according to all the maps and guides; the toy-boat pond, as he thought of it. He would stop by here sometimes, on the way back from the Boathouse, СКАЧАТЬ