The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

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СКАЧАТЬ an estimated ton and a half – into the vehicle.

      ‘What do I do with it?’ he asked as he climbed into the cab. ‘Take it to the museum?’

      ‘No!’ I almost screamed. ‘Get rid of it. Bury it somewhere, or better still, have it melted down. As soon as possible.’

      When they had gone Blackett and I walked around the garden together. It looked as if a shrapnel shell had exploded over it. Huge divots were strewn all over the place, and what grass had not been ripped up by the statue had been trampled away by us. Iron filings lay on the lawn like dust, a faint ripple of lost notes carried away on the steepening sunlight.

      Blackett bent down and scooped up a handful of grains. ‘Dragon’s teeth. You’ll look out of the window tomorrow and see the B Minor Mass coming up.’ He let it run out between his fingers. ‘However, I suppose that’s the end of it.’

      He couldn’t have been more wrong.

      

      Lorraine Drexel sued us. She must have come across the newspaper reports and realized her opportunity. I don’t know where she had been hiding, but her lawyers materialized quickly enough, waving the original contract and pointing to the clause in which we guaranteed to protect the statue from any damage that might be done to it by vandals, livestock or other public nuisance. Her main accusation concerned the damage we had done to her reputation – if we had decided not to exhibit the statue we should have supervised its removal to some place of safekeeping, not openly dismembered it and then sold off the fragments to a scrap dealer. This deliberate affront had, her lawyers insisted, cost her commissions to a total of at least fifty thousand dollars.

      At the preliminary hearings we soon realized that, absurdly, our one big difficulty was going to be proving to anyone who had not been there that the statue had actually started growing. With luck we managed to get several postponements, and Raymond and I tried to trace what we could of the statue. All we found were three small struts, now completely inert, rusting in the sand on the edge of one of the junkyards in Red Beach. Apparently taking me at my word, the contractor had shipped the rest of the statue to a steel mill to be melted down.

      Our only case now rested on what amounted to a plea of self-defence. Raymond and myself testified that the statue had started to grow, and then Blackett delivered a long homily to the judge on what he believed to be the musical shortcomings of the statue. The judge, a crusty and short-tempered old man of the hanging school, immediately decided that we were trying to pull his leg. We were finished from the start.

      The final judgment was not delivered until ten months after we had first unveiled the statue in the centre of Vermilion Sands, and the verdict, when it came, was no surprise.

      Lorraine Drexel was awarded thirty thousand dollars.

      

      ‘It looks as if we should have taken the pylon after, all,’ I said to Carol as we left the courtroom. ‘Even the step-pyramid would have been less trouble.’

      Raymond joined us and we went out on to the balcony at the end of the corridor for some air.

      ‘Never mind,’ Carol said bravely. ‘At least it’s all over with.’

      I looked out over the rooftops of Vermilion Sands, thinking about the thirty thousand dollars and wondering whether we would have to pay it ourselves.

      The court building was a new one and by an unpleasant irony ours had been the first case to be heard there. Much of the floor and plasterwork had still to be completed, and the balcony was untiled. I was standing on an exposed steel crossbeam; one or two floors down someone must have been driving a rivet into one of the girders, and the beam under my feet vibrated soothingly.

      Then I noticed that there were no sounds of riveting going on anywhere, and that the movement under my feet was not so much a vibration as a low rhythmic pulse.

      I bent down and pressed my hands against the beam. Raymond and Carol watched me curiously. ‘Mr Hamilton, what is it?’ Carol asked when I stood up.

      ‘Raymond,’ I said. ‘How long ago did they first start on this building? The steel framework, anyway.’

      ‘Four months, I think. Why?’

      ‘Four.’ I nodded slowly. ‘Tell me, how long would you say it took any random piece of scrap iron to be reprocessed through a steel mill and get back into circulation?’

      ‘Years, if it lay around in the wrong junkyards.’

      ‘But if it had actually arrived at the steel mill?’

      ‘A month or so. Less.’

      I started to laugh, pointing to the girder. ‘Feel that! Go on, feel it!’

      Frowning at me, they knelt down and pressed their hands to the girder. Then Raymond looked up at me sharply.

      I stopped laughing. ‘Did you feel it?’

      ‘Feel it?’ Raymond repeated. ‘I can hear it. Lorraine Drexel – the statue. It’s here!’

      Carol was patting the girder and listening to it. ‘I think it’s humming,’ she said, puzzled. ‘It sounds like the statue.’

      When I started to laugh again Raymond held my arm. ‘Snap out of it, the whole building will be singing soon!’

      ‘I know,’ I said weakly. ‘And it won’t be just this building either.’ I took Carol by the arm. ‘Come on, let’s see if it’s started.’

      

      We went up to the top floor. The plasterers were about to move in and there were trestles and laths all over the place. The walls were still bare brick, girders at fifteen-foot intervals between them.

      We didn’t have to look very far.

      Jutting out from one of the steel joists below the roof was a long metal helix, hollowing itself slowly into a delicate sonic core. Without moving, we counted a dozen others. A faint twanging sound came from them, like early arrivals at a rehearsal of some vast orchestra of sitar-players, seated on every plain and hilltop of the earth. I remembered when we had last heard the music, as Lorraine Drexel sat beside me at the unveiling in Vermilion Sands. The statue had made its call to her dead lover, and now the refrain was to be taken up again.

      ‘An authentic Drexel,’ I said. ‘All the mannerisms. Nothing much to look at yet, but wait till it really gets going.’

      Raymond wandered round, his mouth open. ‘It’ll tear the building apart. Just think of the noise.’

      Carol was staring up at one of the shoots. ‘Mr Hamilton, you said they’d melted it all down.’

      ‘They did, angel. So it got back into circulation, touching off all the other metal it came into contact with. Lorraine Drexel’s statue is here, in this building, in a dozen other buildings, in ships and planes and a million new automobiles. Even if it’s only one screw or ball-bearing, that’ll be enough to trigger the rest off.’

      ‘They’ll stop it,’ Carol said.

      ‘They might,’ I admitted. ‘But it’ll probably get back again somehow. A few pieces always will.’ I put СКАЧАТЬ