Come Dance With Me

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Their technical and physical fitness, their Make-It-Happen.’

  ‘What was the huddle for?’ I asked her.

  ‘We always have a moment with Anubis before we start work.’

  ‘Anubis!’

  ‘The Egyptian jackal-headed god who conducts your soul from this world to the next.’

  ‘I know who Anubis is, but how come Mobile Mortuary huddle with him?’

  Christabel told me about Sid Horstmann’s suicide and the note he left. ‘We don’t know where he is now,’ she said, ‘so in the huddle we give Anubis the latest news and our love to pass along to Sid.’

  ‘His suicide must still be with you. What an awful thing!’

  ‘Please! People always feel they have to say something when there’s nothing to say’

  ‘Sorry. Do you really believe in Anubis?’

  ‘I believe in everything and nothing. Anubis is a way of focusing our Sid thoughts. Am I too crazy for you?’

  ‘Not at all, I’m catching up fast.’

  ‘Let’s do “Gypsy Me, Django” from the top,’ said Jimmy as he and Christabel stepped up to the microphones. The band started very quietly with a slant version of ‘Two Guitars’ that made my throat ache. The music faded to a whisper behind Jimmy’s guitar as he sang:

  Django, gypsy on the edge of night,

  Long time gone on roads nobody knows, …

  ‘Stop,’ said Jimmy, ‘I want to try it with that new riff I worked out yesterday.’ They fussed over that for a while, then Jimmy started again:

  Django, gypsy on the edge of night,

  Long time gone on roads nobody knows,

  Gone with the singing where the fires burned bright,

  Gone in the silence where the music goes.

  Christabel came in with:

  Gypsy me with you on your road so far,

  Gypsy me fires on the edge of night,

  Gypsy me under your wandering star,

  Gypsy me Django burning bright.

  She was looking right at me so she couldn’t miss the expression on my face. She was singing words that I’d written. Her voice was like breath on a mirror; it came and went with misty transience out of two big flat speakers that stood on legs and were only for the vocal. The way she sang gave me goose pimples and she herself seemed much affected by the song. She was quiet then while the band took over for a bit, then she and Jimmy came in together with:

  Django, gypsy on the edge of night,

  Django, Django burning bright.

  They went through it again, elaborating on it the second time round; they used repetitions, they extended some lines and broke up others in strange ways but it was my poem, ‘Lament for Django’, living a strange new life with Mobile Mortuary. Hearing it come back to me in this incarnation was unsettling. They worked in quotes from Dies Irae and ‘California Dreaming’ in uneasy rhythms and odd intervals and it was unlike any musical experience I’d had before. When they finished they paused to fiddle with the new riff and argue technicalities.

  I said to Christabel, ‘Did you set that poem to music?’

  ‘Yes. How’d you know it was a poem?’

  ‘It’s called “Lament for Django” and I wrote it.’

  ‘No you didn’t, it was written by Rodney Spoor.’

  ‘That’s me. I’m Rodney Spoor.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  “‘Lament for Django” was in a 1978 collection, Litanies and Laments, that I wrote under the name of Rodney Spoor.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Christabel. ‘A poet! And I thought you were a perfectly respectable guy.’

  ‘I’m a doctor as I told you. When I wrote those poems I thought it would be a good idea to keep my literary life separate from my medical career. There hasn’t been any literary life since then so I might just as well not have bothered.’

  ‘I tried to get permission from your publisher,’ she said, ‘but they’ve gone out of business.’

  ‘Never mind that. What interests me is that you’re singing my words and something brought us together.’

  ‘Maybe. But let’s not talk about it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m superstitious.’

  ‘OK. We’ll talk about Django.’

  ‘Django!’

  ‘I’m not surprised that you like him. There’s a lot of you in his music’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘“Nuages”, for example. If he had known you he might have written that as a musical portrait of you.’

  ‘Of me!’ She had her head tilted to one side and was looking at me the way you look at someone when you think they might be getting at you.

  ‘Yes, of you.’

  ‘That’s a very nice compliment.’ Observing me narrowly. Not an easy woman to compliment.

  ‘I’m a very nice man, actually. Would you have dinner with me this evening?’

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘No reason to stop now.’

  From the beginning of the rehearsal one of the crew had been busy at a bank of technology that looked able to handle the Ark Royal. ‘I’ve got that one on DAT,’ he said. ‘Do you Want to hear it back?’

  ‘Later,’ said Jimmy. To Christabel he said, ‘Whenever you can spare the time we’ll do “Did It Wasn’t?’”

  ‘Remember your blood pressure,’ said Christabel. ‘I’m ready now.’ To me she said, ‘This is a new song, all my own words wrote by me.’

  The band did a Very spooky intro and then Christabel came in with:

  Did it wasn’t, did it was?

  Did I walking in the wasn’t, did you

  running in the was?

  Did you always, did you never?

  Did it sometimes, was I clever?

  Was it didn’t going to wasn’t be whatever?

  Am I fuzzy, is there fuzz?

  Did it wasn’t, did it was?

  The words passed through themselves and seemed to take the present through the past and back again: Christabel’s past and mine, spiralled like a double helix. Why was I still single? For one thing, I never wanted to be in a position where a woman could leave me and wreck my life. My mother had been, as far as I could see, a perfect wife. She and my father seemed happy together, they looked at each other with loving looks. Then all of a sudden, with no warning at all, she was gone. Well, life isn’t fair, is it. We all know that and I’m not blaming my woman problems on my mother.

  As a bachelor I’ve never lacked for companionship when I wanted it. Have I ever been in love? I don’t think so. There’s a chasm between men and women, and love is the rope you fling across. If the other person catches it you have the beginning of a suspension bridge. My rope always fell short. There have been serious girlfriends. The last one, when I was forty-four, was Nikki. She was twenty-seven, clever, had a great sense of humour, and was a stunner. Five foot eleven with a face of commanding beauty, blue eyes, and long dark hair. Better-looking than most models because she had lovely round arms and legs instead of sticks. I’m six foot one and considered not too ugly, so we made the kind of couple people turned to look at. She spoke French, German, Russian and Arabic and she worked in the Ministry of Defence. When I asked her what she did there she laughed and said, ‘If I tell you I’ll have to kill you.’ She said it as a joke but I didn’t ask again. I was of course proud to be seen with her and every man who saw us envied me. But it was a terrible strain, I was never convinced that I could hold on to her, and eventually I broke it off before she could dump me. What a relief. Was I in love with her? I guess she was more of a serious acquisition.

  By the time I was in my fifties I was too set in my ways and too sunk in my work to look for a wife. Anyhow that’s what I told myself.

  There’s a bronze nude on the Embankment by the Albert Bridge, just standing there thinking her thoughts. Her face turned to the river. I call her Daphne. I used to go jogging on the Embankment and I always patted her bottom as I went by. A limited relationship.

  When Christabel finished the song, she and the
others talked about the intro and the ending, then the band went into the instrumental bits of other numbers that needed work. Some of the titles were ‘Birdshit on Your Statue’, ‘No More World’, ‘E-mails from Aliens’, and ‘Don’t Upper My Downer’. While the others tinkered with those and talked technical talk Christabel sat down with me.

  ‘Your song took me to places I haven’t been for a while,’ I said.

  ‘Did you find your way back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m here and I’m there.’

  ‘But right now you’re at Waterloo Sunset. How come you’re a diabetes consultant at a London hospital?

  I listened to myself giving her the short version while I mentally reviewed the longer one. I was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, where my father had a print shop with a sideline in novelties and business gifts. When my mother ran off with the tenor my two older sisters shouldered the housewifely duties and I helped with various chores. After a year or so my father took up with another woman but soon after that he was diagnosed as having diabetes meilitus and was put on insulin. Next came gall bladder surgery, then his first heart attack. He died three years later, when I was sixteen. He left us well provided for. I’d already decided to become a doctor. I went to Temple University, then Harvard Medical School. I was beginning to wonder about disease as metaphor. Had my father been unable to metabolise the sweetness his new woman gave him? Did the bitterness in him turn to stone? And did he take it all to heart and leave his body with nothing to say except goodbye?

  When I qualified I decided to put the past behind me and I hoped the future was in front of me. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to be but I thought elsewhere might be good. About that time I had a postcard from London from a school friend I rarely saw. The picture was a 14 bus and the message was: ‘This is a great place to feel strange.’ So I went to have a look at London. I came for two weeks, decided to live here for a time, registered as an alien, and showed the Home Office that I would not be a burden on the state.

  When I decided to stay my qualifications were accepted. This was thirty years ago, so I was not required to sit any examinations. It was a time when England needed specialists and I had an offer from St Eustace. Now at sixty-two I’m a well-established consultant. I do four to five specialist clinics a week and two in-patient ward rounds. The rest of my time is taken up with teaching, research, admin sessions, and my regular stint as specialist in charge of incoming emergency medicine.

  ‘You’ve done all right with what to be and where to be,’ said Christabel. ‘Have you worked out how to be?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Let me know when you do.’ She said this without cynicism, as if she thought I might come up with an answer that had escaped her. The band was ready for her again and she went back to work.

  6

  Jimmy Wicks

  22 January 2003. You work with somebody for years, you go on tour together, you eat and sleep and go to the toilet in the same bus day after day, mile after mile, you get to know each other’s smells but you don’t know fuck all. She talks to me about the music, we work on songs together. Does she think there’s anything else in my head besides a fuzz box and a wah-wah pedal? She’d probably be surprised to know that I have pictures in my mind apart from what I see with my eyes. Pictures of her sometimes. Strange ones. Naked in a high place. Or looking at me through trees. Like dream pictures with sounds and smells. Sometimes the sea.

  How did I get to be what I am, where I am? Nothing unusual about the start of it. Back in the sixties if you wanted to pull the birds you learned how to play a guitar, just like now. And if you couldn’t join a band you formed one, so that’s what Sid Horstmann and I did. We found two other guys for bass and drums and we put together a kind of skiffle band, The Winkle-Pickers. Learned ‘Cumberland Gap’ and after a while we got hold of a bloke with a Vox Continental and we were on our way. Did our first gig at The Cave in Bethnal Green and from then on we went up and down and sideways with changes until Buck Travis came in on keyboards in 1972 and Bert and Shorty joined us shortly after. We called ourselves Ouija Board for the first three years, then we changed our act and became Mobile Mortuary. Christabel didn’t come into the band until 1980, and that’s when we had our first chart record: ‘Haunt Me’ at No. 3. Thirty-one years this band’s been together! A lot of marriages don’t last that long.

  Sid always had to be the alpha male. He didn’t look like James Dean but he tried for a James Dean look. Live fast, die young, and get as much pussy as you can. He wasn’t in love with Christabel but he didn’t like it when she went out with that weirdo from Sayings of Confucius. She didn’t love Sid but she was the one who started this Anubis huddle shit after he was in a body drawer he couldn’t climb out of. By now she’s so used to feeling guilty she’d be miserable without it. She’s fifty-four and I’m sixty. This new boyfriend looks at least as old as I am. I’ve never made a move yet, each time I thought I might the time didn’t seem right. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I think of how I took up the guitar to pull the birds. Tracy was one of the first I pulled and no sooner had I played a few riffs than she got pregnant. With two big brothers and a father with a very short fuse. Hello, Mrs Jimmy.

  After Tracy took the kids and left me I thought I’d come out and tell Christabel how I felt. I didn’t, though. She still looks pretty good. I don’t know, if I’m careful maybe I can outlive the competition. Time will tell, they say. It’s been telling me for years but I try not to listen.

  7

  Christabel Alderton

  22 January 2003. When I got back from Vienna after Sid’s death, Victor, one of my cat-minding neighbours, gave me a recording of ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’. He hadn’t yet heard about Sid, he just gave it to me because he thought I might like it. ‘It’s deep,’ he said. When I played it, it was as if the whales and the sea were singing my thoughts and singing the dead. Sometimes Death himself would sing in a very low-frequency whale voice, grunting and growling, and the whale voice of me would plead with him, weeping and wailing in higher frequencies. And all the time the watery deep-sea voices were burbling and plashing all around. After that first hearing I didn’t want to listen to it again for a long time but every once in a while it was the only thing I listened to. Now after all these years I hear it in my head without playing the CD.

  I didn’t want this dinner date to be too serious and I had a craving for fish and chips so Elias suggested The White Horse in Parson’s Green. ‘They do cod in beer batter,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll like it.’ By the time the rehearsal was over it was almost eight so we took a taxi straight there. On the way we talked a little about music. Classical is what he listens to mostly, he said Haydn quartets would be his Desert Island Discs. He remembered people headbanging to Hawkwind and Status Quo and he liked The Rolling Stones, also Portishead and Garbage but that was about it for rock and pop, he’d never heard of Joe Strummer. He likes blues and Thelonious Monk, he likes country and western and he knows a lot of standards but I wasn’t sure how we were going to get through the evening until we started talking about painters. He’s a big Redon user and he has a thing for Caspar David Friedrich. I have a tattoo of a Friedrich owl, wings outspread, perched on a grave marker just above my bottom cleavage. Not many people know that.

  The White Horse seemed to be popular with Hooray Henrys and Henriettas. Even on this cold January evening they were stood three deep outside the pub and clogging the entrance, none of them over thirty and all of them loud. ‘There’s a dining room at the back,’ said Elias. ‘It’s fairly quiet there.’ We struggled through the braying and the cigarette smoke, reached the dining room and sat down at a table for two. The other tables were braying less loudly than the people in the bar. There were some crap abstractions on the walls doing some visual braying but they went quiet when I looked away. We ordered the beer-battered cod and pints of Bass and there we were then, at the point where one of the two people says, ‘So … This time I said it, ‘So �
�� Here we are. What now?’

  ‘Why do you sound so negative, as if nothing good can happen?’ said Elias.

  Tell me about negative, I thought. My son Django was four when I took him to Maui with me. It was January, the band had nothing scheduled for a couple of weeks and I wanted to see those humpback whales that come there every year. I’d been having dreams in which I was drowning in the sea while the whales sang all around me but I wanted to see them anyhow. Then I dreamt that Django was in the sea, sinking down, down, down into the darkness. When I woke up I thought, he could fall over the side of a boat. So when we got to Maui we didn’t go out on a whale-watching boat; instead we watched from a cliff and Django fell off the cliff and was killed. He’d be fourteen now and a good-looking boy. ‘Negative?’ I said to Elias. ‘I guess I’m just that kind of person. Tomorrow you can try someone else.’

  ‘I don’t want to try someone else,’ he said.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked him.

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Don’t answer a question by repeating it. What are you looking for with me?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought it out, Christabel. You started it with that line from “Herr Oluf”; I’m just going from one moment to the next with you and I’ll go as far as it goes.’

  ‘Brave words. Have you got a video of Vertigo?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Good. After we get out of here let’s go to your place and watch it.’

  ‘OK, we’ll do that. Any reason for that particular film?’

  ‘Not really, I just feel like watching it with you.’ We talked some more about Friedrich and Böcklin and Bresdin, had two more pints and coffee, then we left The White Horse and walked to Elias’s place on the other side of Eelbrook Common. Here I was in another January ten years after the one when I lost Django. January weather suits my January mood. I like it when the days are cold and grey and rainy and the nights are early and dark and huddly. The lights on the New King’s Road and on both sides of the common made it seem darker where we were and now it started to rain. Again there was an invisible helicopter near and far, near and far. Behind us the District Line trains rumbled and clacked as shadowy people passed us coming and going on the shining paved paths. Sometimes, I was thinking, everywhere is nowhere and nowhere isn’t a bad place to be.