A Haunting of Words

by Brian Paone et al.

  “You took your sweet time.” Big Joe’s face crinkles into his familiar smile.

  “Sixty years?” I hesitantly ask, looking from the face of my gorgeous husband to the wrinkled papery skin and sunken features of the woman on the bed.

  “Sixty since little Joe and Rufus. Sixty-five since me.”

  “I missed you so much,” I say, “but I didn’t know little Joe and Rufus had gone too.”

  “That’s why we’ve stuck with you. Every day since, he and that dog have been here. I knew you didn’t realise they were gone, but you knew I was, so I had to stand back and watch. I’ve wanted this day to come so badly!”

  “But I’m old and decrepit now!” I wail.

  He laughs and draws me to my feet and into his arms. “No, you’re really not.”

  When we finally draw apart, big Joe tucks me firmly under his shoulder and kisses the top of my head, and I remember instantly where little Joe’s smell comes from. He reminded me in his own way all his life. I reach up to return my husband’s kiss, then I slide myself out of his grip. Big Joe understands without me needing to say anything.

  I walk to Lydia and put my arms around her. “I know you can’t hear me, but thank you. Thank you for your care, and thank you for finding Pudge and the leash. It meant the world to me, if you’d only known it.” I kiss her cheek.

  To my surprise, she looks directly at me and her features soften. “Oh I can hear you, my lovely, and you’re welcome,” she says with a wide smile. “I promised you’d see your son soon, didn’t I? Your hunk of a husband told me where the bear and leash had been hidden, so you can thank him for that. They’ve both been waiting patiently for you.” She turns to big Joe. “So don’t you think it’s time you took her home? Although I have to say that I’m going to miss you all. Especially you, young man,” she tells my little Joe.

  “Thank you for having us,” Joe tells Lydia politely as he puts his small warm hand into mine. “Yes, let’s go home, please. It’s not very nice here, is it? Sorry, Lydia. Come on, Mommy, Daddy, Rufus.”

  My husband holds out his hand to us both, and Rufus comes to heel, carrying his own leash.

  “That sounds like a good idea,” I tell him. “Have I told you that I love you all? So much?”

  “We love you more,” they tell me.

  Even Rufus chuffs.

  “But I love you most.”

  I smile from the heart at my son, my husband, and my good dog as love radiates over us, and the brilliant light makes the room, and my body, fade from my view.

  “I found a worm in my pasta today,” I said.

  Linda turned her head toward me before returning to her book. “I didn’t cook you any lunch.”

  “I didn’t say you did. It was from the shops.”

  “Hmmm.” Linda turned a page.

  “Tomato and mascarpone.”

  Another page.

  “And worm, apparently.” She turned back a page, then two. I heard her breathe. “Did you keep it?”

  I tapped my pen on the blank paper that sat before me. The piano was to my right, waiting. “I chucked it. Straight in the bin.” I pressed a couple of keys experimentally before letting my hand drop to my side. Nothing. “Shit.”

  She ignored my swearing. “I would have gone down to the shop.”

  “I was working.” I used the pen to scratch the back of my neck.

  Linda placed a fingertip to her forehead, finished the page, and pulled a strand of hair over her ear. I couldn’t remember if I’d told her that the action annoyed me to my prickly core, but I probably had. She did it again and then turned the page.

  I pressed another key. The tone slunk away into the house, embarrassed about its own existence.

  Linda looked up. “What was that?”

  The truth. “Nothing.”

  Her voice was a plateau. “Was that a new hit?”

  I stood up. “I’m going out.”

  I went to the hallway. I had left the keys on the squat dresser that my mother-in-law had burdened us with—I usually put them there so I’d be able to find them easily. They weren’t there. I eventually found them on a hook next to the coats. It had a small framed picture of a keyhole above it. I picked up my keys and knocked the picture with my wrist, maybe accidentally, but it was glued to the wall. I slammed the door on my way out, threw my notebook on the seat of my car, and pulled out into no traffic at all.

  It was Sunday. It was hot. There were waves dancing over the tarmac, like the lines on the button that turned the heater on in my decade-old silver hatchback. I turned on the radio, heard that song—my song—and turned it back off.

  None of the shops were open yet. I drove out of town, which only took a few minutes thanks to the carefully chosen location of our two up, two down—close to the station, close to the countryside that we never visited—and took a snaking road toward the horizon.

  It seemed that even farmers had a weekend, because there was no one about. Animals stood or sat, their minds empty and their mouths full of grass. There were fields of dancing crops that were on the turn from green to gold, but I had no idea if that was what they were bred for or if they’d just been left to die. It occurred to me that if I were the last human, I would be gone within a day.

  Every time I drove out of town, I somehow found myself on an unfamiliar road, which usually meant that I had to pull out the satnav, but today it was just what I was after. Hills dotted the fields like lumps of fat in old milk. I found a particularly inviting one and stuck close to it, taking a turn that circled its base. The side of the hill was overflowing with old trees, the kind that looked like crooked fingers, old hags, and other things that spoke of fancy. Dried giant’s bones. There wasn’t any music in the land, no structure. It was a discord. It was wild. It was my job to bring some order.

  I wanted to get to the top of the hill, but the rocks bulged and the trees wagged their branches at me. I drove faster, daring the land to keep denying me and my crappy 1.2 litre engine. I took a corner quickly, almost ending my journey in the front of a burned-out cottage. Its garden was walled by drystone and had become one large bramble, with stems as thick as my wrist. I moved on.

  There were no sign posts, but the air clawing at my face through the open window was fresh. I was heading toward the sea. I didn’t want to go down to the beach, I wanted to go up, and I was damned if something as insignificant as geography was going to stop me. I slowed down, hunching over the wheel as I willed the forest to open up. The trees must have known I was serious because they relented.

  A road of broken tarmac and opportunistic weeds peered back at me. It was barely wide enough for one car. Bushes on either side scraped my doors as I squeezed my way through. There were no passing spots. If a car had come the other way, it would have been a battle of wills to see who would have budged first. If a car came from behind me, then it could have trapped me on the top of the hill until I dried out like an old apricot.

  The peak was bald of grass and dry as coconut husk. The sun paid more attention to the top of a hill than the land below. The heat made me want a drink, ideally a milkshake—one of the fancy ones with ice cream and a really offbeat flavour, maybe pecan. Birds stayed down in the trees, and I couldn’t even hear crickets, or grasshoppers, whichever one lived in Britain. It was quiet, and that was what I needed.

  I sat down on a patch of grass curved like the bow of a violin, planted my notebook on my knees, and drew five lines across the paper, from left to right. The surface was a starburst to my eyes, and I had to shade the paper with my hand, but finally, out here with the countryside at my feet and no one at my side, I felt ready to write another hit. I either needed a piano or silence to write, but nothing else. No distractions.

  I’d had success before, but just once. Some said it was more to do with the lass who was singing, and that was partially true. She was the working class success—all salt and swearing when she was speaking, with a laugh like a blocked gutter; but, when she sang, the critics and the pub
lic alike agreed they could hear the heartbeat of her soul. All I heard was the money falling into my bank account, although I realise that analogy doesn’t work well now that hardly anyone uses cash, but you get the idea. I didn’t care about who sang it, as long as the song was mine.

  Someone was humming.

  I think I’d noticed it a few minutes ago on some level but was too caught with the music inside me. Christ, that sounds pretentious … but it was true in that I had to turn my senses off in order to come up with something new. It had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?

  They were still humming.

  “Who the f—” I started, before holding my tongue. I saw her.

  She was sitting on a rocking chair on the porch of her house, which I’d somehow missed while parking and walking and sitting and looking about myself. It was nestled between a couple of trees that bowed over it like protective parents.

  The woman hummed and I listened. The first thought that crossed my mind was that nobody sat in rocking chairs any more, but I soon forgot the detail as I started to nod my head along to the melody.

  “That’s electric,” I said. I’d never used the word in that context before, but I knew that it was the best fit. “Who wrote it?”

  She stopped humming and replied, “I did.”

  She looked to be about seventy but also in her mid-twenties, by which I mean that her body was physically young when first glanced, but the skin around her eyes creased into familiar lines when she blinked, and the manner in which she had settled in the chair spoke of many years on her bones. She looked like she’d worked out exactly how she needed to sit for hours without her feet getting numb, a skill I still hadn’t learned. Her hair was long, but I couldn’t say how long, as most of it fell behind the rocking chair.

  The house was squat, one storey, and maybe even one room. It was so deep in the trees that it looked more as if the frontage of a house from a high-budget theatre production had been pressed onto the woods. The door of her house was open. Her hair trailed back inside, into the thick brown shadows.

  “It’s brilliant,” I said. I longed to hear the melody again.

  The tune had been simple, but such a quality can often be a sign of greatness. The oldest values were the most important: family, community; and the most vintage stories speak to all of us no matter what complicated brushstrokes of politics or taste we lay over ourselves.

  I’m mixing my metaphors, but that’s just a sign of how much the song lit me up. It was new, but felt old. It seemed a sin that no one had thought of the tune before. It felt so damn obvious.

  “Does it have any words?” I asked.

  The woman shook her head. “Words would not sit well on it,” she said. “They would kill it.”

  “You might be right,” I said. “A tune like that could be heard the world over, and everyone would think it belonged to them.”

  A breeze licked over the hill and flicked the pages of my notebook into a boat sail on the grass.

  “I write music too,” I said.

  I felt such a compulsion to validate myself, but I had no idea why. After all, who was she? Had she written a number one in seven countries? Although the U.S. should have counted as more than one country in my opinion. It’s as large as an entire continent, after all.

  “Music is important,” she replied.

  “I’ve had success,” I said, continuing my posturing despite myself, or should I say an ever-shrinking part of myself. “People know me.”

  She waited.

  “Can I have it?” I asked.

  She nodded, and that was that.

  I rolled down the hill with a spring in my metaphorical step. The house was empty when I got home, but it didn’t matter. I had what I needed.

  I didn’t even need to write it down. I sat down at the piano, and the tune left my fingers and filled the air, echoing around the house and filling out every inch of silence.

  At some point, when it was night and the room became dark so that I couldn’t see the keys any more, I picked up the phone.

  “Andre,” said the voice at the other end, dusted with nonchalance.

  I didn’t actually know what time it was, but Andre tended to be awake during the darker hours. He was an insomniac and a haemophiliac. He wore black leather gloves with cut off tips. He never took them off. He was a friend, and, more importantly, he was a record producer.

  “I’ve got one, a great one.” I didn’t bother telling him who I was; no one needed to in this time of caller ID. It saved so much precious time. “Can I come down to the studio?” I asked.

  There was a pause. I could hear another voice, higher than his and far less controlled. It laughed.

  “No.”

  Disappointment bloomed but I weeded it straight away.

  “Let me play it for you.”

  More laughter.

  “Fine,” said Andre. “Knock yourself out.”

  I balanced my phone on top of a stack of music books, magazines, and junk mail, and sat down at the piano. I placed my hands at the keys and my stomach lurched. The room spun and righted itself in a heartbeat, and I felt my face pull itself into a smile, one that was just for me.

  I played and Andre listened. When I had finished, I could hear his breathing. There was no other sound on the line.

  “Andre?” I asked.

  “I’m here,” he said. “That was … it was … I …”

  I heard the hum of words in the background.

  “Can we hear it again?”

  I slept, but only on the sofa, and only until it was light. I wasn’t hungry but I forced myself to eat. I was used to getting up before my stomach had.

  When I left the house, it was with my plastic travel mug of coffee in my hand and my notebook nestled in the sweat under my armpit. I had forgotten to shower. I heard the scrape of a trowel and looked over the fence to see that Lola, my neighbour, was already up. She was weeding her flowerbeds, knees to the lawn, in her pyjamas. She was humming, and I recognised the tune.

  “Heard it through the wall?” I asked, wondering if I’d kept her up.

  She looked at me with rheumy eyes and smiled.

  Andre hadn’t asked me to his studio in the end, as I thought he would. Instead he asked me to head straight to the radio station. He didn’t own the radio station, and I reminded him of that, and he said he didn’t care.

  When I got out of the taxi, with the taxi driver still humming my tune back to me—he’d asked me what I did for a living and I’d shown him—I made my way up the concrete steps of the seventies monstrosity that housed KRR Medium Wave: All The Songs, All The Time, etcetera, etcetera.

  I saw Andre before he saw me. He was arguing with the receptionist. He looked like he’d had about as much sleep as me. His hair was flat to his head and greasy. I hadn’t seen him like that before. His shirt was crumpled and unbuttoned. I saw a freckled chest that looked as if it had been splashed with vinegar.

  He was demanding to see the head of broadcasting, and the receptionist was explaining very calmly that “this is a local radio station, sir, and we do not have a head of broadcasting, but Paula Tunning is in charge of the schedule, and we will see if she’s available, and could you please calm down before she arrives, sir.”

  Andre’s eyes lit up like the light inside a rusting fridge when he saw me.

  “Mate! About time. I’m just trying to explain to this jobsworth how important it is to get your tune out there.”

  To her credit, the receptionist kept her eyes on the blue glow of the computer screen in front of her.

  “It doesn’t have any words yet, but I’m working on it,” I said, slipping my notebook out from under my arm.

  Andre waved the notion away, which was good because I hadn’t written any words, nor even started to. I had tried while I was killing time in the taxi, but it had become obvious that there was no way it would work. The woman on the hill was right. You couldn’t add words any more than you could add another set of arms to a person w
ithout changing what it was. It was complete.

  For the first time, I noticed that there was someone with Andre. A woman slid out of the shadows of the pillar wearing a dress that looked like it was only designed for the night. She placed a hand on my shoulder. She smelled of what was probably a body spray but seemed to me more like acid.

  “Play us the song.”

  I looked around the foyer at the abstract art, potted plastic plants, and bevelled concrete columns. “On what?”

  “Wait here,” said Andre, his tongue churning out new-born words before they had formed. “Just wait, okay? I’ve got the gear in the car.”

  The receptionist was watching us. “Sir, if you’d just wait a moment—”

  “Time waits for no man,” replied Andre. “No man, no one.”

  He jogged out of the hallway, his shirt flapping free of his jeans. I looked at the receptionist to see if there was the hint of a smile at Andre’s antics. There was not.

  Moments later, Andre returned, hauling a large black case up the stairs. At the same moment, a tall woman with short hair, dyed the colour of oak leaves, atop a round head that was slightly too small for her shoulders, stepped out of the elevator. She was wearing a blood-red shirt. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone wearing such a red shirt before. She approached the receptionist and muttered something under her breath before approaching with the air of a baroness visiting the peasantry.

  “I was told you wanted to see me.” Her voice was as stilted as her body.

  “You in charge, yeah? You Paula Tungsten?” asked Andre.

  “Tunning,” said the woman. “Can you tell me why you’re here? And why I need to be here too, instead of enjoying my bagel?”

  Andre pointed a finger at me so close to my eye that I flinched. “This guy, this one right here, has something for you. The best piece of music to grace our generation, no word of a lie.”