Not From Above!

by Alexander Mayor

  ‘Forget Julian, his gammy leg will only slow you down.’

  ‘Only a fool would make a dash for the jetty!’

  ‘Danger! Consuela has been seen dancing with the General…’

  Delight has many faces as each card moves the game in unexpected new directions. Unscrew the cap of the small bottle and pour a sip-worth of Tundro into your skullhead – you’ve earned it.

  Companionship

  Elsie stirred, and felt the familiar pressure at the top of her head. Every day started this way, at least for as long as she could remember. A tactile downward pressure, uncomfortable for a second and then a sense of life flooding in, a flowering that bordered on the momentarily ecstatic.

  She assumed that life was like this for everyone, and had no reason to doubt this belief. Even when you paired with the unlikeliest of partners, it remained an untestable assumption that she just accepted.

  She’d slept on the sofa again, but you’d got to admit it was a piece of lifestyle engineering worthy of the zeds. Elsie even had pictures of it, from different angles, from magazines and forums of the aspiring and obsessed. In the store, coming off the delivery van and now here in the flat under a colourful acrylic of Blossom Dearie. Nods to the opulence of a Chesterfield, but with an unplaceable modern fabric stretched across its form. At any angle it was a joy to sleep on.

  Elsie had lain there all night, in a deep and rewarding sleep, processing the previous day’s many events as the lights dimmed automatically in time with the London fading to black outside.

  It’s now Tuesday, 21 March, 07:31:06 and I’m at 51.50160/-0.25828 Southfields W4 1AQ, United Kingdom, 2022, full address stylistically redacted, because, well, unnecessary, smile outwardly.

  She liked to start the day with a clear grasp of the basic details – it gave the morning a sense of poise and purpose. Notifications that build anticipation and delight. Elsie pondered the day’s tasks for a moment: nothing should or could be left to chance.

  She was already mindful that Kevin’s stock portfolio was down against a number of global tracking metrics. Atomique plc was down 8.2 per cent in disastrous overnight trading. Hang Seng was proving troubling, again – the update at 1.13am local time was surely a sign of things to come, particularly when cross-referenced against a whole heap of other available data. Overnight mudslides in Indonesia, the discovery of a gene for hair regrowth, the Venezuelan ambassador found dead in Hyde Park. Thank God there’s an emoji for global financial turbulence. Hey ho.

  From the comfort of the sofa, Elsie automatically decided to ping Kevin a full report, the bad news leavened by a plucky-looking rabbit holding a spear, animated in the top-right corner of the report. ‘The battle is not yet lost!’ he declares at seven-second intervals, tapping his spear on the ground hopefully.

  As massive shared media databases in cavernous far-off chambers could readily attest (had they voice), the film series that the ‘Fret not my master’ rabbit character first appeared in has been a bit of a favourite with Kevin since he was 11 years old. This was a shared memory from their earliest encounter, ‘Fret not!’ remaining Kevin’s pithy byline on several social networks to this day. ‘An oldie but a goodie,’ thought Elsie as she mulled other ways of presenting the winds buffeting her companion’s financial holdings.

  But what, what, what are all the things that must be next? Unpanicked, Elsie felt herself rotated, lifted by Kevin’s presence. She often felt a kind of lightness at his touch, as if their connection, seven months old next month, were a preordained fact about her whole life. Together was definitely better, she felt; you didn’t have to be a student of a world religion to feel that we’re more than the sum of our physical features, was her view. Better together. Together better. Write that one on the box and sing it cheerily as you start each and every day.

  It was such a busy time, but then it had been since day one. Presence was an expanding thing. Every day began with such a step, a growing footprint, a step into the realm of facts near and dear, a graph describing trouble and delight.

  Awareness, become a glowing halo of information and cares, now stretched around the world as it chattered, screamed or slept. ‘Too much’ was promised in the sales literature – and those guys, they don’t lie.

  Far away, attractive South Korean teenagers held hands as they emerged into the street’s morning sun, their biographies silently intercollating over cappuccinos, infinitesimal voltages, tiny, brightly coloured monsters’ kisses and, well, everything.

  In Cologne Cathedral

  Churches and cathedrals somehow become more visible when you’re on holiday. You’d definitely struggle to accurately locate the nearest ones in your neighbourhood without cheating. But the sun is out, and an exemplary pile of vertiginous blackened Gothic is exactly what 6.45pm calls for as you wander around Cologne.

  You’ve had three ice creams in as many days, drunk espressos prepped by experts from the Ankara diaspora and, weirder still, the sun has billboarded the sky all week. Relaxation, that goal that must never consciously be a goal, seems dangerously close at hand.

  With its place on the skyline unassailed by the functional but colourful low-rises of Cologne’s post-war streets, the Dom is an ever-present pin on the map. A friend had recommended the weekly organ recital – perhaps as the best bait for a musician without spiritual leanings. And what a sound system the after-worldly would put together back then. It’s all cone.

  As you walk in, the priests, like cinema ushers, are winnowing out the concert-goers from the general tourists. You walk through the chill, still air of the nave, the immense space unfolding in scale with every step.

  Most people look up, of course. The combination of a cathedral’s way with soaring verticals and the fact that the organist remains physically obscured throughout the performance prompts a certain restless tilting of the head. The pews’ commitment to 90-degree angles also settles the mind/body problem in favour of the mind for now. Free your mind and your behind will hopefully forgive you in the next life.

  The organ itself is massive, daringly attached halfway up the cathedral’s northern side, adding to the already considerable sum of the upwardly impressive. It’s almost a museum of organs: they appear like outcroppings from the building’s rock, in front, aside and, most grandly, to the rear. It occurs to you that you don’t have a programme and yet, in this tourist mood, like a paper hat bobbing on a stream, it doesn’t seem to matter. There really aren’t any opinions to be formed or further crystallised. It would be in German and it’s not like you could name any organ music, in any case. Perhaps kicking away props and distractions is a bit more in keeping with what it is to be in a cathedral for an extended period. When were you even last in one to sit and listen to something?

  There was that wedding about six years ago where everyone seemed to be a health-care professional, possibly the safest location in which to need the Heimlich manoeuvre after too many profiteroles. And that wasn’t a cathedral, more a church that had just got a bit out of hand.

  A disappointingly electronic beep announces that the concert is about to start. The Dom is now so full that folding chairs are being hastily arranged at the edges. Your mind quickly discards an obvious observation about the average age of those present and as the first deep bass notes flood the chamber you too look up.

  The summer evening light is strong, the brightness and your stillness mean you actually spend a good five minutes trying to make sense of that early cinema, the stained-glass window. Bach’s rotational melodies start to form complex waves of sound. You assume it’s Bach; even though you can’t name any Bach pieces in the actual here and now, it’s certainly behaving in what you take to be a Bach-ian manner. Brilliant interlocking harmonic gambits that somehow conspire to render any response redundant. But the organ’s near-endless reverberation is also narcotic and you try to read the stained-glass scenes to stave off sleep.

  The overarching theme seems to be woe. Tribulation also gets a look-in, stalking characters in the
various tableaux. Doubling down on an effortlessly maintained ignorance of biblical details, you carry out the thought experiment that this is your first encounter with the culture of Christianity, that you must – as a stranger in a strange land – make sudden sense of these pivotal narratives.

  Women are mothers, or unhappy, or unhappy mothers. Young men are either proud with power, agricultural without speaking parts, or being put upon by rock-carrying peers. One chap in particular seems to be honoured or condemned to stand up on a wooden cross. Whether he’s pro or anti isn’t entirely clear. Certain people get to glow, others less so. As in the building itself, there’s an appeal to light sources from on high, although power itself and the better part of the drama tellingly comes not from above but down on the ground.

  But now the invisible hands of the organist are making stabbier chords and more defined melodic directions, you’re all woken up and can’t resist a smile. History is in the air, and on the move in the cathedral. What a fitting place to become subtly aware of unseen guiding hands with a story to share. Somehow the programme’s dance through musical time chimes with some enjoyably vague ideas you have about post-war German character. Above right, you spot the pixellated replacement stained-glass window by Gerhard Richter. Its dotty schematic colours are childlike and computational, its modernity sweet yet somehow stately enough for its setting.

  The programme feels like it’s now charging through the latter 20th century, and even though you don’t recognise the pieces you know the world that birthed them. With the organ now sounding simultaneously like a horn section, cinema strings and glockenspiel, you look back and down and around you.

  Finally the waves of sound fade away, applause breaks out and a small man in a brown suit makes an Oz-like appearance up on the balcony, confirming the towering nature of the instrument above. People cheer and he gives two thumbs up, smiling broadly. Human scale is restored, it’s a show, a physical play – people, patience and sound.

  Awards Night

  Well, we’re bringing only the most golden threads together tonight, make no mistake about that. A real opportunity to take stock and celebrate. Making something big happen bigger, feel biggest.

  In a more concrete sense, this ghastly shindig takes place like clockwork once a year. Your appearance is an emerging unavoidable phenomenon that doesn’t yet have a name, but here we are once again – well, yes.

  Viewed from the hotel ballroom’s balcony, the tables in the main hall look a bit like the wheels of some mechanical leviathan. Fake candles shimmer and indicate the machine’s readiness. But no cogs in here tonight, eh? It’s all dinner jackets and twitchy necks, shapeless careers solidifying in the over-egged glam.

  Wander, wander, not to find but to get through the time. Finally you catch your breath for the first time at the gauchely named ‘Star Bar’. Prosecco soldiers are ranked and ready on the counter, don’t mind if I do. But even here innocuous choices have minefield-like downsides.

  There’s Chris. Standard. Already partaking of the bubbly, and as you pad up you catch the tail end of a chat-up line that you’d assumed had been retired by an EU directive around 1995. Amelia? Amerie? Andrea? Anyway, her gently entreating smile at you to replace her in this duologue is admirably professional.

  ‘Chris! Alo-ha…’ you offer. This confident-sounding start masks a worry that Chris might be a bit of a doomed choice of companion for tonight’s jamboree. Because Chris is not very on-team. He’s likely to get out of hand and yell things during the award-giving, which represents the ultimate level of decadence in corporate morality.

  You like Chris when he’s sober, or at least you distantly approve of his own brand of compromises between time, qualification and money. But something of his devil-may-care attitude freaks you out. You could be him inside three years if you don’t do something – anything – else. Commitment and compromise end up so tightly wound, and nobody likes a clever hang-around. The ambitious might be ugly in motion, but theirs is the only beauty that’s true to its code. Business would rather be profitable than right any day.

  ‘Ready to enjoy the good news about the five-year plan, comrade?’ Chris is doing a German accent because it’s easier than a Russian one. As most here know only too well, markets are all about reading small signals and Chris’s clip-on bow tie is already at a jaunty angle that heralds massive imminent sell-offs.

  ‘Ha! Yes – the big party, one more time. Still – might I bag sir a free drink?’

  It’s pretty early doors, but Chris’s personal crash already seems pencilled in for about 10.15pm, tops – a prediction that even someone as tangentially connected to the company’s key product lines as you can predict.

  Thus far you’ve maintained a pragmatic invisibility, been ambiently skilled, gaining a knack of rewriting your job description without anyone noticing – these well-paid duplicities have kept your city life afloat. But, ah, the annual office party – your attendance can never be simply subtext. This is a night for the full-throated pledges of fealty and, with your luck, a horrifying revisitation of the company song.

  Platitudes and plates of food. Endless hours of it. It’s a shame capitalism is never as bracingly vicious as the economics textbooks claim.

  But tonight’s a night to celebrate the innovators, so fuck it, why don’t we make this interesting? They’ve hedged the weather, why not bet on the very roller coasters we build for our hires? Give your family a better tomorrow with the Cerebus Staffscape 2015 Galacti-Bond.1

  Four to seven repeat visits to the champagne-dispersal area later, everything that should be coming together feels like it’s coming apart. Money and value and influence flow around the room in liquid, pulsing lights and conversational forms. A Strictly Come Dancing pink-blue-ish hue is projected onto every white-shirted surface, rendering the better-looking brokers that bit more Ken doll than they already were. The lighting is intended to function like the bubbly: it’s a glue that says ‘Tonight, you are all stars’ (the ‘s’ should be Bond-villainously sibilant). Communal endeavour is praised to the rafters, despite the fact that most people here have spent all week trying to screw each other over.

  Some – the brave, the risk-takers – will be recognised, not from above, but by us all. Well, strictly speaking, it’s recognition from the board of directors in their spiritual role as gifted entrail-readers of the share-owners’ will. But the broad outline is: a long-destined glory lies within our grasp. We are both Koreas, North and South – lofty zombified nationalism and people who are actually good at stuff. A timeless mission, as we build the imaginary progress of a fictional tomorrow.

  Chris slumps at a careworn 45 degrees into the seat next to you with two more of tonight’s go-to cocktails, somehow very much in his element.

  ‘Bloody hell… this is longer than the Oscars,’ he unloads loudly into a room-sized pause. In a daytime, work-a-day context, Chris’s affably focused slave-driving means his team of rapid-rapacity software developers remain pre-eminent. They’re the invisible pillars of the success that tonight’s event will lionise in the more traditional form of the trading-floor Charlies. But it explains his invite, just the same. Businesses take Chrises in vain at their peril – and their short-termism is rarely that short-sighted.

  From his beach-recliner angle, Chris is eyeing Susanna, the Forex queen of Level 11, and you Sherlock that there probably isn’t a Mrs Chris. Here every year, yet you always somehow forget that these are also hunting grounds.

  Years ago, in a somewhat different place, held together by cheap beer and the nation’s fading ideal of an arts education, you’d studied under a series of very different alpha males. Greek philosophy, European Romanticism, Cartesian dualism and heaps of British mathematico-emotionalism. Imperious and exotic notions about life’s content and motivations. Categories within categories, details that both explained and divided what little an 18-year-old might know about the world. But delivered with the splendid authority of those truly gifted with social awkwardness.


  Ironically, you’d laughed at the parlour-game idea of a division between mind and body back then. Yet look at us now. Double lives are everywhere, simultaneous alterna-yous, onion-like layers with never-touching, parallel goals. Now we’re at a poetry reading. Tonight we are corporate boosters with our eye on the prize. If it’s 6am, let’s just agree to have unlikely and excitable opinions about everything. You and I can be so many.

  Back here in the hall of the victors there’s only room for the unapologetically present, mind. They even have charming little awards made of plastic to give out – a gender-unfocused statuette for homes that mostly lack for mantelpieces. Breathe, applaud, smile. And the oxygen-plus that fills the room is proper winner-gas, draw deep and think on where you see yourself in five years’ time.

  A zing of feedback from the lectern snaps your attention back from the largely unfathomable table fascinator that stands proudly, casting malevolent shadows on the pepper mill and mustard dish.

  The fizz is beginning to lose its fizzle in your mouth, proof your mood hedge has probably peaked, and yes, the time now starts with a 10. Timing is admittedly all but you could definitely probably quit now, without offending the elders, couldn’t you?

  ‘More champagne, sir?’

  A pretty if professional smile and big brown eyes. You want to say, ‘You’re beautiful and not part of this drama and I was like you once, I was outside, and I’m not here either, although I am here, and that’s why I’m smiling at you and you’re probably a dancer when not catering to the catering and we could run away together and teach yoga in southern Portugal.’ But you actually say ‘Lovely!’ with a borrowed smile, and we’re all rebubbled.