Sound

by Catherine Fearns

  ‘I fuckin’ knew it. They should never have built on top of the rubbish dump. What are we supposed to do? What about the kids?’ There was clamour throughout the room. The man from the newsagent was standing up again, gesticulating wildly to speak.

  ‘Sir, if you’d just let me finish—’ attempted Vanessa Scott.

  ‘No, you let me start. This meeting is for us, not you. This is a scandal. These homes were mis-sold, and you tell us now, now that the ten-year warranties are up. We can’t sell! We’re trapped here, and people are sick! There was a suicide last week, d’you realise that?’

  ‘We understand your frustrations. But we are here with a solution. If you would all just bear with me for a few minutes, I’d like to read you something. We have been approached by an anonymous donor with a very generous and attractive offer.’ The clamour subsided a little, and she held up one hand for more quiet as she read out a statement.

  ‘“To the Residents of the Napier Estate. A northwest-based company has become aware of the dangerous living conditions on the Napier Estate, and the urgent need for all residents to be re-housed. In support of Liverpool City Council, who acknowledge their responsibility for the crisis, this company offers to buy all the properties on this estate, and re-house all residents in accommodation they will find more than satisfactory.”’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ someone shouted. ‘What company is this?’

  ‘If you’ll just let me finish, sir,’ continued Vanessa Scott. ‘There is more to tell you. I have here…’ she patted a freshly-printed pile of documents which her colleague had placed on the table. ‘Contracts to re-house every resident on this estate, all five hundred-odd of you, in luxury accommodation within Liverpool. This company has the space, you need the space, and this company is willing to provide it for two years. Home-owners will then receive the purchase values of their homes, while council tenants will be re-housed in suitable accommodation.’

  The young man began handing out papers, gesturing for people to pass them down rows, as she continued:

  ‘This company will buy the Napier Estate land at a discounted price, and hold it, at significant loss to itself, until the methane gas is cleared. The company will then redevelop the land for non-residential use.’

  There was quiet now as people began to read the contracts.

  ‘I’ll ask again,’ someone shouted. ‘What company is this?’

  ‘Ah, well as you’ll see when you read,’ said Vanessa. ‘The company wishes to remain anonymous at this stage.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This is an incredibly generous move, motivated by a love for the city and a wish to demonstrate corporate social responsibility. But the company will sustain high short-term losses, and it does not want to risk a drop in its share price as a result. As far as I understand, anyway. Lots of charity benefactors prefer to remain anonymous.’

  ‘Why does this sound too good to be true?’ asked the newsagent.

  ‘You’re right, it is very generous. But don’t forget that for this company it’s a long-term investment opportunity. Because they will eventually redevelop the land. And as you’ll see in the contract, all homeowners will be given shares in any eventual commercial or industrial development. It could even make you rich. See it as a community enterprise.’

  By now Darren had been handed a contract and, as he skimmed through it, he spotted the drawback. The newsagent stood up and took the words right out of his mouth, shouting, ‘Oh here it is. Here’s the catch!’ He read out loud: “Signatories will agree to refrain from taking any legal action against Liverpool City Council with regard to methane contamination of the Napier Estate. Signatories will also agree to refrain from discussing methane contamination with the press.” This clause is a gagging order!’

  Vanessa Scott smiled ‘I wouldn’t quite call it that. It’s in all our interests to keep this under the radar. People will be jealous. Wait until you see where you’ll be living!’

  ‘But what if we don’t want to move? This is our home. This is a community.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid you have to move. Unfortunately, this land has been deemed unsafe. It would be very dangerous to stay. Health and safety aside, I know I personally couldn’t live with that on my conscience. Communities can be rebuilt. They are about people, not locations, and I can feel there’s a strong community here. Plus, you will all be living in close proximity to each other.’

  The rest of the meeting was a formality. As the council representatives tried to explain scientific measurements, toxicity levels, legal requirements and so on, people were engrossed in reading the contracts, chatting between rows about what it all meant. There was a new buzz of something approaching excitement.

  When the meeting was called to an end, people filed out, still studying the contracts, whispering. Two young mothers with prams giggled to each other about where they might end up living. ‘WAGS eat your heart out!’

  Darren waited until there were enough people standing up and milling about for him to slip out unnoticed.

  Nine

  Back from the Napier community meeting, Darren sat at the kitchen table in the house that he now hated, yet couldn’t imagine ever leaving. The emptiness and the sense of loss hung in the air, both draining and nourishing him. It had been three months, three months to the day. Last week, Matt’s Mum had come over to help him clear out Matt’s clothes, but there were some things he was not ready to let go. The firefighter uniforms still hung in the downstairs cupboard, and on the kitchen worktop lay the fire investigator’s application form that Darren hadn’t managed to persuade him to send off.

  After the first weeks of living in squalor, drinking himself into lonely oblivion every night, Darren had cleaned himself up, started exercising again, and the house was now spotless. But it was not empty. On the edge of the kitchen table, leaning against the wall, was a large corkboard that teemed with information relating to Shawn Forrest. The former organised crime boss who now, having turned over a new leaf, was one of the richest businessmen in the northwest. The man whom, Darren was convinced, was responsible for the death of his fiancé, along with all the other horrific deaths of that blazing summer.

  Newspaper clippings, financial information, photos, police reports. It wasn’t difficult to keep abreast of Forrest’s movements because he loved to court the press. He was constantly being photographed at events, both locally and in London. His handsome face with its gleaming white teeth tortured Darren almost every time he opened a newspaper. Forrest’s affair with Justine Kuper, although not explicitly mentioned in the press, was all but common knowledge in Liverpool. Meanwhile his construction company, Forrest Group Plc, had survived the Lumina II fire with a hefty insurance payout, and its subsidiaries were busy churning up Liverpool under a series of council contracts.

  Darren pored over the personal incident board he had created. He knew Forrest was an obsession, that madness lay not far away from this corkboard; but he needed it. It was perhaps the only thing keeping him going. He was determined to bring Forrest to justice one day, if not for Matt’s death, then for another crime. He knew it was dangerous to set himself up to be Forrest’s nemesis – the man’s enemies didn’t tend to survive – but it was better than letting him get away with it. And maybe he didn’t want to survive.

  After the strange events of this week, he had a sudden urge to talk to Helen Hope. She was the only one who understood him now. Sitting at the kitchen table, he picked up the telephone. It wasn’t orthodox; in fact it was positively against the rules, but he had felt for a long time now that he was operating on the edge of the rules, and that he preferred it this way. He was on course towards something, and he was fairly sure it wasn’t the successful career in the police force he had always dreamt of before. When Helen answered he heard the sounds of rock music and male voices in the background. Of course, Mikko was back. Her voice sounded happy, and Darren was momentarily lifted out of his misery as he pictured her with Mikko.

  ‘Darren. It’s so
nice to hear from you, how are you doing? I’m in Formby. Total Depravity are here and they’ve rented a house in the pinewoods. It’s not far from the convent, actually. Not that I’ll be paying the Sisters a visit. I’m persona non grata there now. Why don’t you come over tonight? I… well, I think I’m going to be staying here for a while, actually.’

  ‘Thanks, but it’s late. Maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s only 8.30pm, that’s positively lunchtime for a death metal band! Come and join us, please. It will do you good.’

  Darren had barely left the house in three months, and he really needed not to be alone tonight. He couldn’t help connecting Shawn Forrest with the strange happenings at the Napier Estate, even though there was no evidence whatsoever other than his own hatred. He feared being taken over by the apophenia that Marcel Rees suspected had afflicted his professor; that tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meanings between unrelated things. It was a signifier of madness, and Darren sometimes felt he was going mad. He needed to be with Helen, the only person who had shared his half-knowledge of another world beyond his own.

  ‘Ok, I’m coming. Thanks.’ He grabbed his keys and headed out into the twilight, before he could change his mind.

  A few minutes later his tyres were rolling down a track off one of the residential streets that dotted the Freshfield pine forests. Mikko had managed to rent a house that was almost a miniature replica of the Sisters of Grace convent. A detached Edwardian red-brick with delusions of grandeur; ornate bay windows, mock Tudor gabling and a corner turret. Helen was waiting on the doorstep and she enveloped Darren in a warm hug that made him tearful. Her whole manner was so much freer than she had been when he had met her a year ago. She wore one of those black heavy metal T-shirts printed with unintelligible spiky writing; tight jeans and oversized boots. Her long black hair hung loose around her face.

  ‘I can’t get used to you like this.’

  ‘Like what? Oh.’ She looked down at herself. ‘Oh yes. I suppose I swapped one uniform for another. In fact, I’ve worn uniforms all my life; first at school, then my nun’s habit, now this. I rather like how it makes me feel that I belong. I do have to be careful about some of the more blasphemous images on the t-shirts, though.’

  ‘I miss my police uniform, actually. Since I made detective,’ said Darren.

  ‘But you customise your suit so well with those fluorescent trainers.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, bobbing back and forth on his feet. ‘I used to treat meself to a new pair every pay day. I haven’t for a while now, though.’ They both looked at the ground, and he tried to raise the mood again.

  ‘You’ll be getting a tattoo next,’ he joked. Helen pursed her lips sheepishly, and lifted her t-shirt slightly to reveal a tiny pair of angel wings on the side of her abdomen, just above the line of her jeans. The black outlines of the wings were still red, raw and bruised, indicating that it was freshly done. Darren laughed for the first time in months.

  ‘I couldn’t decide what to get.’

  ‘As long as you didn’t get an inverted axe.’

  ‘Indeed not. Come on.’

  She led him through a dim corridor, and Darren mused that the owners of this house would not be too pleased if they knew what Total Depravity had done with the place. The stairs were strewn with laundry, tattered black banners had been pinned to the walls, and there was a heady scent of bacon, beer and marijuana. The air was slightly hazy, as if everything had a sepia tint. Reading Darren’s mind, Helen said, ‘I’m sorry about the mess. They had a housewarming party last week, and a couple of the female guests were still here this morning. Actually, I don’t know why I’m apologising, it’s not my house! But I’m going to have a good tidy-up for them tomorrow. You know, they haven’t had anyone to take care of them before. And I haven’t really had anyone to take care of before.’

  As they entered the kitchen Darren saw an enormous long-haired man, whom he recognized as their bassist Anders. He almost fell over in his desperation to hide the joint he was smoking, but Darren held up his hands. ‘It’s all right, mate. Let’s say I didn’t see anything.’

  The kitchen sink was piled with dishes, the worktop with used pizza boxes. It was incongruous to see the band in such a domestic setting; even for Darren who had no interest whatsoever in their music. It was almost a disappointment to see them playing house, a shattered myth – although they certainly weren’t doing it very well. Helen took a beer bottle out of the fridge and inexpertly opened it before handing it to Darren. He fingered a magazine that was on the kitchen counter, open at a page displaying an interview with Total Depravity. The band were pictured in a snowy forest, Mikko gnashing his teeth at the camera, hands clawed, while the other band members stood impassive. The headline read ‘Nothing Is True – Everything Is Permitted.’

  ’So,’ he said, as they leaned against opposite counters. ‘Mikko.’

  Helen looked down, a little sheepish again.

  ‘Yes. It’s nice to have him back.’

  ‘It’s brilliant. I’m happy for you.’ As they both took a swig of beer Helen’s eyes smiled at him over the top of her bottle, embarrassed but happy too. At that moment Mikko came in, and enveloped Darren in another one of those hugs. Darren felt the delicate bones of his ribs.

  ‘Dude, I am so, so sorry. I had no idea when I saw you yesterday. Helen told me, about your fiancé. Man, that is just fucking terrible.’

  ‘Thanks. Yeah.’

  There was an awkward silence and, eager to lighten the mood, Mikko beckoned him over to a staircase leading down to the basement. ‘Come on, I’ll give you the tour. I guess. Last time we were in a basement together, it was under pretty different circumstances, huh?’

  Mikko was referring to the Sisters Of Grace convent’s retreat, a cottage off the M6 where Helen had been imprisoned and rescued just in time.

  ‘It’s ok, there is no torture equipment down here,’ he said, as they clumped down the stairs. ‘Although there is some satanic shit, and… I don’t know, whatever.’

  The band had converted this basement into a makeshift recording studio. Darren recognized some of the equipment as similar to that which had been crammed into Professor Neilson’s office: amplifiers, microphones, mixing desks. Although there was none of the foam-shard cladding of Neilson’s cupboard, the old carpeting that hung the walls and lay on the floor gave the room a similarly claustrophobic feel. An open black crate, battered from a decade of travel, covered with stickers and with TOTAL DEPRAVITY painted on it in white, contained a rack of different-coloured guitars.

  ‘So this is where the magic happens. I guess,’ said Mikko, tapping a cymbal modestly. Behind the huge drumkit, the band had hung their black Total Depravity banner, with its inverted axe symbol. The symbol that had been co-opted by killers. Darren motioned to it.

  ‘Did you ever think about changing your logo? I mean, after the murders?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? Those murders were the best fucking publicity we’ve ever had. Sorry.’

  ‘Mikko, you don’t mean that,’ said Helen, attaching herself to his arm with as little self-consciousness as she could muster. ‘Mikko is writing an album called Chaos Magick.’

  ‘Nice title,’ nodded Darren, wondering if he should show more enthusiasm. He couldn’t help liking the diminutive Norwegian, and recognized that within Mikko’s field he was regarded as something of a god, but Darren had less than zero interest in the music. He couldn’t understand what anyone saw in it.

  ‘Oh yes, but it’s more than a title, it’s actually a fascinating subject,’ continued Helen. ‘Chaos Magick. Look at all the research he’s doing.’ Helen motioned to a low table on which lay piles of books, many of them weighty tomes open at pages that showed strange symbols and verses of poetry, and loose pages of scribbled notes and drawings.

  ‘What are all the drawings?’ asked Darren, looking at the variations on an inverted axe that Mikko or one of his bandmates had scrawled multiple times. ‘Don’t tell me –
you’re designing Helen’s next tattoo?’

  ‘These are sigils, man. It’s like your own personal magical symbol. You design it, internalise it, then use it as a sort of psychic weapon. Or whatever. I guess it’s like an internal tattoo.’

  Helen explained, ‘Chaos Magick is a new type of magical practice, a sort of postmodern magic. It was developed in the 1970s out of the theories of occultist Austin Osman Spare, and there’s no religion in it whatsoever. The idea was to strip magic back to its simplest element, which is belief. When you practice the magic you achieve success, you get results, by using belief as a tool. Most of the details are rubbish, I have to say, but it’s a very simple, powerful concept. Because we all know the power of belief.’

  ‘It has so much fucking cool stuff. You can basically pray to whoever you want, even if it’s fucking Star Wars or Madonna. There are so many crazy words.’ Mikko picked up a notepad on which he had scribbled some lyrics. ‘Synchromysticism, antispell, astral sphincter, gnosis, servitor – I’m having so much fun writing this shit.’

  ‘I like my explanation better, Mikko. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. That’s the motto of chaos magick.’

  ‘Fucking cool way to live, right?’

  ‘Belief as a tool, right,’ said Darren, feigning as much interest as he could. After all, it was endearing to see Mikko attempting to adopt Helen’s academic research techniques, while Helen herself was dressing more and more like him and listening to his music.

  ‘I suppose everyone needs a bit of magic.’

  ‘Exactly, dude. Humankind still needs magic. Humans still need gods. Every age of man has its own magic, and its own gods. Even if our current gods, unfortunately, seem to be millionaires and celebrities.’