by Hughes, Rhys
I have mentioned my late wife and her mandolin. Also her underwear. However, I have neglected to offer an account of how her plucking drove me to distraction. From our wedding-night, when the young man first turned up, right through all the early years of our marriage, she kept me awake between midnight and dawn with the infernal silences of her melodies. Truly, she was the quietest mandolin player on the globe, and as I have already intimated, it is the barest sounds that I cannot bear.
In the middle of a dull and fitful slumber in the autumn of one year, I was roused by an even more excessive silence than usual. I opened my single central eye and beheld her sitting on the edge of the bed. Either from deliberation or impulse, she had neglected to string her mandolin. Consequently, the airs she sounded were no more than that — the rustle of fingers on the stale vapours of the chamber. I rose in a passion and wrested the instrument from her grasp. How many blows were sufficient is unknown. Perhaps it required a dozen — who shall tell?
I cut her up into very tiny pieces and flushed her down the toilet. Doubtless the young man observed me from some hidden recess. He was fond of lurking in corners; I dare say the genesis of his crime was in this scene. As the cistern refilled, I presumed the matter was at an end. But now, so many years later, I was forced to reconsider the matter. Not all the municipal sewers flowed to the sea; a few older ones, twisted by a geological upheaval, deposited their effluvia in the fetid lagoons that ringed the city. Why had I forgotten this?
It was more than possible that her remains were channelled into the lagoons, partly preserved by the formaldehyde discharged by the chemical works and mortuary establishments on those clammy shores. For more than a decade, her viscera might have risen and fallen with the secret sluggish currents, drawn not by the moon but the mass of the city, to lap the crumbling jetties and rotting boardwalks where the oddest fishers sat, rods in hand, hooks catching on the corrugated surface of the infinitesimal wavelets and straining up, to lift the lid of scum from the deeps, the toxic fathoms.
Yes, this was it! And what if I had caught her pieces on my last expedition? No use berating myself for not noticing the coincidence at the time; I never actually look at the results of my catches. Oh no! The dark lantern I carry through the hollow streets and beyond the deserted suburbs is merely for the sake of appearance. I wish to fit in with my nameless colleagues on the quays. I do not open the device, for the reason I have already elucidated — the hinges, the excruciatingly quiet hinges.
Now I discerned the sounds of a brief scuffle. The officers were grappling with the young man. The rattle of handcuffs, the echo of a truncheon. It occurred to me that I was still safe. In those days, forensic medicine was a primitive art; the officers would never know that the recovered heart, kidneys, lights and tongue were not mine! Who was clever enough to open the handkerchief where they nestled and tell the gender of their owner? Nobody, not then! So all I had to do was remain hidden a few more minutes, while they left the house. The young man would be locked away, as I originally hoped, but for a different reason.
They came down the stairs and passed the ebony clock in the hallway. A little longer and I would be free! But now I felt a twitch in the nostrils and a momentous pressure building up within my lungs. My head ached, and I fancied a rushing in my ears; but still they lingered at the door. Why would they not be gone? I pinched my nose between callused thumb and finger, but the pressure increased. Was it possible they felt my presence inside the clock? No, it was the partial vacuum occasioned by my voluminous intake of breath that kept them here, tugging them toward my place of concealment. They fought this force, they strained against it.
At last, I could stifle the eruption no longer. I must let it loose or die! Then it came, a miniature hurricane! — Atchoo! — With the release of pressure, the clock shattered. The door blew open, a backward slam, and the orange rained juicy segments on my head. I stood exposed, my twisted frame shivering before the three officers. I saw that they carried one enormous handkerchief between them and that they had faces sewn up the wise way — one without eyes, another without ears, the third without a mouth. So here was the end of my chances for peace. I would be carried off with the young man, possibly to occupy the same cell, while the old house was locked up and auctioned off for its construction materials. But something had to be said.
“Germs!” I shrieked, “spread no more! I admit the deed! — tear up the handkerchief! — snot, snot! — it is the sneezing of my hideous nose!”
The Macroscopic Teapot
I live on the roof of the hotel. I don’t have many provisions and the nights are very cold. I’ll never come to Birmingham again, if I’m ever allowed to leave. They lie when they say perpetual motion is impossible. I’ve seen it in action here: the sheets of rain are endless, swishing constantly from one horizon to another. I still have my bass guitar, a 1964 Rickenbacker, and I thumb the occasional riff to keep in practice. It’s not connected to an amplifier and sounds rather thin as a result, but I would rather endure that than be electrocuted. Voltage and water don’t care for each other’s company. I won’t play a note near moisture when I’m plugged in. I still remember our keyboards player, frazzled in a swimming pool in Barcelona.
It was his own fault and my sympathies are muted. He was trying to impress a couple of girls by composing a catchy tune on his portable synthesiser. They ignored him and he climbed the ladder, still playing, to the high diving board. I thought he was going to abandon the work, which was funky but uninspired, and come down again, but for some reason he plunged over the edge. Maybe he lost his footing. The somersault was conventional stuff, but the sparks when he hit the water were original. The girls were won over and stripped off, but to no avail. His charred corpse drifted toward them, knocking against the side of the pool a dozen times before sinking to the blue-tiled bottom.
That was a long time ago, when our band was almost less unpopular than now. We managed to make enough money to keep our one and only European tour going, mainly by selling off our equipment on the way. We started our first gig as an impressive art-rock band with many banks of unnecessary keyboards and an enormous drum-kit complete with tubular bells and gamelan pots and Chinese gongs. We ended our last gig as a choral group singing a cappella folk songs. But I was too sentimental to trade my Rickenbacker. I pretended to lose it before it could be sold, hiding it at the bottom of the communal laundry basket, which was fitted with wheels and towed behind the bus on a long rope. The abominable socks and underpants kept it safe.
But the essences rubbed off and when I retrieved the instrument my practice sessions became more hurried. Now when I wake in the middle of the night I often believe my comrades are still with me, but it’s only the mingled odour of what they once exuded, throbbing on the strings. Even endless rain can’t purify that complex, ghostly stench. I guess I’m another of their rejects, worn out, reputation soiled. After visiting every sovereign state on the continent, a manager’s gross of gigs in total, similar to a baker’s dozen squared, but without the metaphorical bread, though plenty of crusts, mostly on the aforementioned laundry, we finally returned to Britain, sold the bus and bought new equipment with the money received in exchange.
I was sly. I had already rescued my bass from the basket, which was cast over the side of the ferry on the Channel crossing, but claimed it was a replacement, found slung around the shoulders of the ship’s figurehead. The fact it looked identical to my old instrument didn’t alert any suspicions. Nor that our hull was devoid of statuary. Before the other band members raised this second point, I answered the first by inviting them to apply nose to strings. They agreed there was an obvious difference. That’s the sort of gullible fool I travelled with. But I wasn’t greedy. I spent my share of the cash on a crate of whisky for us all: a reward for my ingenuity and also to keep them too sozzled to want to ask any difficult questions.
We decided to make a last monolithic bid for glory. We wrote a lot of new material, fused it together into a suite with inac
curate literary and philosophical references, changed the name of our hitherto anonymous band to a single blank space, arguably an equally unmarketable label, though apparently it worked for lone gunmen in Old Mexico and tentacled monsters in New England, and booked a night in a Birmingham hotel, the same one I squat atop. We had to hitchhike to the city in separate vehicles and our new keyboards player hopped a freight train that plummeted off a bridge outside Swindon. We picked up a substitute on the way: a fellow locked in the boot of the car our vocalist was travelling in. He heard the thumping at the same time as his driver opened the glove compartment to reveal a collection of used knives. Fortunately our vocalist is also a madman, and a bigger one.
At least that’s what I heard when I rang the hotel from Coventry to say I was going to be late. My luck wasn’t great that day and I’d caught scores of little rides by slow drivers. There was interference on the telephone line, background giggles and grunts. It sounded like a party in half-swing. It boded well for a successful evening if people were already gathering. I hung up and returned to the road, thumb extended. I used my left hand for this gesture because I couldn’t risk losing my playing digit if a vehicle sped by too close. I completed the final stage of my journey on the back of a motorbike. We spluttered into the walls of rain that defend Birmingham from external thoughts of joy. The oily droplets slicked my soul as well as my face and I somehow knew I would never be dry again.
I was deposited near the hotel and ran down the few remaining streets until I reached it. A tall, thin building with crumbling plaster. Although the day was drawing to a close and the sky was getting dim, no lights shone from the grimy windows. The front door was open and I entered the lobby. It was deserted and the dust lay thick on the dead potted plants and mouldy carpet. But there was a key waiting for me on the counter at Reception, at least I assumed it was for me, and I took it and went in search of my room. I needed to relax for a moment before joining my comrades for the concert. I climbed the stairs to the second floor, groping in the murk and listening for sounds. There were none.
I fumbled with the key in the lock and opened the door to reveal a spacious but oppressive chamber. I threw the light switch and lingered on the threshold of sinister vacancy. There was a mystifying delay before the electric bulb hanging from the ceiling began to glow, almost as if it had forgotten how to work. The yellowing wallpaper and rotting furniture raised the suspicion that this room hadn’t been used for many decades. The skeleton of a cat reclined on the bed. I shook it off by yanking the quilt, and kicked the individual bones under the bed’s iron frame. Then I hurled myself on the mattress and stared at the dead eye of the antique television standing on its own legs in the corner. It had a perfectly round screen set in a massive wooden case. There were all sorts of extra attachments fitted to that frame, hooks and drawers and hollow cylinders, as if the unwieldy piece of equipment doubled up as a gentleman’s valet.
I grew bored resting. I twiddled my best thumb against the sinews of my bass. The ceiling provided no outstanding attractions. Abruptly I stood and went in search of my colleagues and our audience. Back in the lobby I found the telephone that I had earlier rung, but the dust over it was hardly disturbed. Where was everyone? When I attempted to step onto the street to survey the hotel again from outside, I received a shock. The front door was closed and locked. I shrugged, trying to feel relief that at least somebody else was about. I turned and passed through a succession of identical chambers, bearing different names and functions, restaurant, sauna, storeroom, eventually coming to the dancehall, supposedly our venue.
It was empty and utterly silent. The dust was inches thick and the imprints of the shoes of forgotten dancers resembled a choreography schematic. Here was a tango, an ephemeral wild evening, feasibly from the 1920’s, preserved as an intaglio design in a desert of skin flakes. I wandered to the stage, paying my respects to history by slotting my own feet into the prints. There was absolutely no sign of any recent activity, no equipment or wires. It was completely bare. I left through the wings, drifted among the backstage cells, found another staircase and followed it up to the second floor. I roamed the corridors, listening for sounds. Then I returned to my room.
I stretched out on the bed next to my bass and fell into a light sleep. The rain against my window in no way resembled applause. Maybe I dreamed of adulation, but for scarcely longer than I expected to receive it in reality. I opened my eyes and checked my watch. Less than an hour until midnight. Our gig should be drawing to a climax now, the separate instruments, after playing solos that tugged against each other, coming together in time and key as the suite took its final crystalline form. And yet the hotel was dead. Had I come to the wrong place? If so, there was nothing I could do about it, especially as I was now trapped inside. I decided that the error, if there really was one, could be blamed on my attitude. Clearly I needed to get deeper into the swing of the occasion. A desperate, absurd measure but the only option which presented itself to my somewhat troubled mind.
That feeling of having just missed out on a chance is the one I fear and despise most. Acting like a rock star seemed the only positive option left, however little it currently appealed to my nerves. My limbs were stiff, my whole metabolism sluggish. But I roused myself to perform a traditional gesture of professional defiance. I resolved to throw the television set out of the window. The management, if they existed, would expect it and so would my fellow musicians, elusive as they were, not to mention our hypothetical audience. I grasped the sides of the frame but found it too heavy to move. Then a peculiar notion entered my head: that it might prove to be lighter if I switched it on. The electromagnetic field set up by the ancient circuits would push against the Earth’s own magnetic field, allowing me to glide it along the floor to the window and the moist oblivion of a bottomless puddle.
I flipped the brass switch. The tubes warmed up very slowly. A tiny bright dot appeared at the centre of the screen, and even before it expanded it seemed full of the energy and potential of a new or parallel universe. I felt I was watching the birth of a different reality, a cosmos that wanted nothing more to do with me, its creator. There’s a word for this phenomenon: deism. I learned it when we plundered philosophical dictionaries for references for our musical suite. I peered more closely at the screen. Now the sound came through from the primitive speakers, a hiss of ambient radiation that gradually settled down into something more audible, the chaotic mutterings of an excited crowd. As the spot of light grew, I heard music, familiar because I knew it well, but odd because I had never listened to it from the outside. Previously I had helped play it.
The dot expanded to fill the circular screen. Perhaps it continued beyond the limits of this circumference, but there was no way of telling. Slotted between the static specks were pixels of meaning. A group scene, profoundly human and yet disturbingly alien: a conventional cameo distorted by immense distance and depth, as if the signal had circumnavigated the universe before returning to this point of origin. Naturally, in such an ambitious transmission there was bound to be a lag, but not just of time: also of inclusion and roles. My mind slowly interpreted the soup of angry colour before me. It was the climax of a concert, my gig, taking place now in this hotel, and there was a large audience, but I was missing. The new keyboards player, whom I had never seen, was compensating for my absence by pounding out the bass lines on an electric organ with his left hand.
There was wild clapping and cheering. The pompous suite hadn’t turned sour after all. The band dismounted the stage and struggled through the audience, pushing something before them. The crowd parted reluctantly. I recognised the sweat on the faces of the vocalist, lead guitarist and drummer, and beneath the pungent moisture a communal flush of determined excitement. The gig was barely cool and already they were forcing pleasure from the aftermath. When they were halfway across the dancefloor I saw what they were pushing. It was a model of the hotel, mounted on castors as our laundry basket had been. Possibly it was the laundry basket,
rescued from the sea, washed up the mouth of a river and through a series of locks into the canal system which watered Birmingham in cruel alliance with the rain, and now converted into this replica, impressive and abominable, complete with crumbling plaster and grimy unlit windows.
What did they intend to do with it? Larger it grew as it approached the surface of the screen from the other side. Soon the band members were obscured by its apparent magnitude, its bogus bulk. It suddenly accelerated, as if on the lip of a cliff, and tipped forward out of the screen. There was no sharp crack of breaking glass. It passed effortlessly through the flickering bubble, tumbled down and shattered on the floor of my room. Pieces of chimney and roof broke underfoot, a jagged edge of rusty guttering gashed my ankle. I drew back in alarm. I had seen many television sets hurled out of sundry hotels, but this was the first time I had witnessed a hotel ejected from a television set. I glanced at the screen for an explanation, but already the picture was returning to a dot. Somewhere a fuse had blown.
Refusing to accept the treachery in this experience, I scooped up a fragment of the model and took it to show my colleagues, who I knew I would never find. I foolishly imagined I could return for the other pieces. I also took my bass, slung over a shoulder. When I left my room, the door slammed inevitably behind me. I explored each corridor of the building, knocking on every door, calling the names of my former friends. Whenever I passed through a chamber, it locked itself behind me in a nonexistent wind. The darkness seemed thicker, the world lonelier. Had everybody evacuated to another universe without informing me? Slowly I was denied access to the majority of the hotel’s internal space. As I entered the kitchens for the first and last time, I made sure of pocketing the few ancient cans of soup I discovered in the mainly bare cupboards.
