The Voices

by F. R. Tallis

  ‘I think I can hear something,’ said Kaminsky. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Jesus, Roger,’ said Christopher. ‘What do you mean, you think you can hear something?’

  ‘Well, there’s definitely some stuff going on in the background. I just can’t tell what. Got any cans, Chris?’ Christopher handed the engineer a pair of headphones and pushed the jack plug into a socket on the tape machine.

  Rewind. Stop. Play.

  Kaminsky closed his eyes and after a few moments he said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I see what you mean.’

  ‘Do you?’ Christopher could still detect uncertainty in Kaminsky’s voice.

  The engineer dislodged the headphones. They fell to his shoulders and the metal arch closed around his neck. ‘Cool piece. What is it?’

  ‘The soundtrack for a film called Android Insurrection.’

  ‘A bit like Tangerine Dream.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Christopher. He didn’t like the comparison.

  Kaminsky opened his toolbox and said, ‘I’ll give you a shout when I’m done.’

  In the kitchen, Faye was crawling on the floor playing with her dolls. She looked up when Christopher entered and produced a squeal of pleasure. Laura was seated at the kitchen table reading a book that Christopher had vaguely heard of: The Feminine Mystique. He didn’t know what it was about and didn’t care to ask, but he quite liked the title. He crouched beside Faye and with the aid of two dolls, one small and the other large, enacted a conversation in correspondingly high and low voices. Faye was, for a few seconds, a little alarmed by their sudden animation. When Christopher laughed at her surprise, she laughed too. He handed her the dolls and she clutched them to her chest.

  ‘This is so annoying,’ Christopher said. ‘I’d had a good morning too. It was coming along nicely.’

  Laura looked over the top of her book. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘There’s this knocking sound. I’m sure Roger will get to the bottom of it, but it might take him a while. I was hoping to get the whole sequence done by the end of the week.’

  Laura put her book down, leaving the pages open to keep her place.

  ‘Chris, would you mind if I went out tonight?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘A bookshop in Islington. There’s a young writer I’m interested in. She’s giving a talk about her new novel.’

  ‘OK.’ He was expecting Laura to elaborate, but instead she picked up her mug and blew across the surface of her tea. Ripples appeared very briefly and then vanished.

  The conversation that followed was fragmented and it was only when they talked about mundane necessities that they seemed to find a common purpose. Laura took to removing the dead leaves from a spider plant and Christopher reached for The Times. He found nothing pleasantly diverting in its pages. Only the usual depressing copy: the threat of terrorism, industrial action, the failing economy. It was the same every day. Politicians seemed completely unable to stop the nation’s decline, a problem compounded by an apathetic silent majority addicted to light entertainment, gassy beer and greasy food.

  An hour elapsed and Christopher sank into a state of despondency, after which he heard Kaminsky calling. Christopher made his way into the hallway and shouted, ‘All right. I’m coming up.’

  When he entered the studio he found the engineer looking out of the window across Hampstead Heath.

  ‘Well?’ Christopher asked.

  Kaminsky turned to address him: ‘There’s nothing wrong with your machine.’

  ‘But there must be.’

  ‘Everything’s fine. I checked.’

  ‘Then what caused that noise?’

  The engineer raised his hands, offering his ignorance to the heavens as well as his employer. ‘I have no idea.’

  Although Christopher went to bed early he didn’t fall asleep. The heat of the day seemed to be trapped in the house and he could not make himself comfortable. Timbers creaked and the baby monitor hissed in the darkness. Very occasionally Faye would snuffle or cough, but she didn’t wake. When Christopher heard the sound of an approaching vehicle he hoped that it was Laura returning from the talk she’d attended in Islington. The engine fell silent and a car door slammed shut. Good, Christopher thought. It’s her. The wideness of the bed had unsettled him. Other sounds preceded her arrival: her key in the lock, the latch chain being secured, her footsteps on the stairs; a toilet flushing and then water flowing through the pipes. The door opened and Laura crept in.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Christopher said. ‘I’m still awake.’ Laura slipped beneath the quilt and Christopher embraced her naked body. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Interesting,’ she replied. She spoke a little about a couple of the women she had met. One of them was a psychotherapist, the other a garden designer.

  ‘Did you get the designer’s number?’ Christopher asked. ‘We’ve got to do something about the garden soon. It’s getting like a wilderness.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Laura, ‘I got her number.’ And then, after a lengthy pause, she added, ‘I might join a readers’ group. The shop has one that meets every fortnight.’

  ‘OK,’ Christopher replied, laying his palm on her stomach. She had put on a little more weight recently. Not much, but enough to cause a revision of the contents of her wardrobe. She used to wear tight jumpers and T-shirts, garments that emphasized her slender form, but she was now much more likely to throw on a smock. Christopher supposed that she had become self-conscious, which was ridiculous, he thought, because it would take more than a few additional pounds to ruin her figure. Her graceful transit across a room never failed to stop conversations and attract interest.

  Laura’s body seemed to be giving up its scents to the night: the lavender of her soap, the lacquer in her hair, the musk of her perfume, all of the sweet-smelling lotions and creams that she assiduously rubbed into her skin. Christopher’s hand moved over the fleshy contours of Laura’s abdomen and it came to rest between her thighs. His index finger curled into her and he began a gentle oscillation that eventually elicited a moan of pleasure.

  Their lovemaking was slow, not merely because of the heat, but because slowness (a slowness close to lethargy) had become almost second nature. A miscarriage following Laura’s first pregnancy had made them overly cautious when making love and the habit had stuck. Although Laura responded to Christopher’s initial caresses, she quickly lost interest. She became inert, detached. There was no mutuality or reciprocation. It made Christopher feel as if he were pursuing his pleasure alone. When it was over, Christopher extricated himself, somewhat inelegantly, and rolled over onto his back.

  A police siren sounded in the distance.

  Christopher felt disappointed. It hadn’t always been like this. Sex used to be meaningful, imaginative and fulfilling. Since Faye’s birth, however, Laura’s desire for intimacy had dwindled. Where there had once been a great torrent of libidinous energy, there was now only a thin, miserly trickle. She never showed any enthusiasm. Their infrequent couplings were rarely protracted and Laura’s forbearance was clearly dutiful, a spousal obligation that could be discharged along with the childcare, cooking and cleaning. Laura’s sexual disengagement was only one part of a general torpor that made her seem distant. When Christopher spoke to her, he was never quite sure that she was listening.

  It was all so ironic, because Laura had built her modelling career on a sexually confident persona. Around the house there were cupboards filled with old editions of magazines with Laura posing on the covers: auburn hair disproportionately thick and styled; her eyes, a pale, delicate brown – so pale, in fact, that they turned gold in a certain light. Lips parted, glossed, glistening.

  Christopher missed her – that woman. The woman he had married.

  They had met six years earlier at a party, a glitzy affair attended mostly by people in film. Laura was there because, at that point in her life, she was getting bored with modelling and wanted to become an actress. Christopher couldn’t remember their conversation, but he coul
d remember Laura’s eyes, the way that her irises changed colour, from brown, through amber, to gold.

  Two weeks later she was sitting, cross-legged, on the floor of his little mews house in Maida Vale and looking through his LP collection. She was curious about his musical tastes. Remarkably, she had heard of Stock-hausen and appeared to be impressed when Christopher mentioned that he and Stockhausen had once been acquaintances. They made love for the first time that afternoon. There was no shyness or anxiety, no awkward fumbling. It felt entirely natural – the removal of clothes, the stroking and the kissing, everything flowing inexorably towards a rapturous climax and the mute tranquillity of post-coital exhaustion. Christopher had wondered if their physical compatibility wasn’t, in some abstruse way, significant? He asked himself if it wasn’t just chance that had brought them together, but a loftier intercessional power – destiny, fate? He had been forty-two and she had been twenty-four. The neat symmetry of this numerical reversal, with its suggestion of arcane influence, had played on his mind. The idea that their union might be preordained was one that, until very recently, had occupied a central position in his personal mythology: the story he told himself, about himself.

  Laura went to the bathroom. When she returned, she climbed back into bed and lay on her side, facing away from Christopher. He edged across the mattress and wrapped an arm around her waist.

  Before long, he was thinking about Android Insurrection, a particular scene in which an army of humanoid robots goose-stepped down an enormous ramp. Christopher knew what was required: an accompaniment made from percussive tape loops. He possessed a very vivid, auditory imagination, and his tired brain, without much effort, invented effects that he hoped to reproduce in the studio the following day.

  Christopher slipped in and out of consciousness. Just as he was about to make what felt like a final descent into oblivion, he heard a knocking sound coming from the baby monitor: a distant rat-a-tat-tat through the hiss. It delivered him back again to wakefulness.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he said.

  ‘Hear what?’ Laura replied.

  ‘The monitor. I thought I heard something.’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Her voice hardened. ‘You were dropping off – I could tell from your breathing.’

  ‘OK.’ Christopher rested his cheek against his wife’s shoulder blade. He had intended to go back to sleep but he was soon agitated by a growing sense of unease. Faye. He should check on Faye, just in case. A question arose in his mind: in case of what, exactly? His unease was not connected with any readily identifiable threat but he found himself motivated to get out of bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Laura asked.

  ‘I’ll be back in a second,’ he answered, unwilling to justify his behaviour. He pressed the light switch on the landing wall and entered the nursery. Leaning over the cot, he studied his daughter. She seemed to coalesce out of the darkness, gradually acquiring shape and substance. Her face was the last thing to clarify. Christopher listened for the reassuring rhythm of her respiration and relaxed. He felt somewhat self-conscious, even a little embarrassed.

  When he got back into bed, Laura turned over and said, ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Yes. She’s fine.’

  ‘Why did you get up? Did you hear something else?’

  ‘No,’ Christopher yawned. ‘I just thought I’d check, that’s all.’ He shifted position so that his wife could lay her head on his chest. ‘Goodnight,’ he whispered.

  Early May 1976

  ‘I won’t be long, love,’ said Christopher. ‘A couple of hours, maybe.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Laura asked. She was perched on a high stool by the kettle.

  ‘Only the village. Le Cellier du Midi – lunch with Henry. I did say . . .’

  ‘Has he got you some work?’

  ‘I don’t know. He mentioned a new Peter Cushing film on the phone. We’ll see.’

  Christopher lifted a pale linen jacket off a coat hook and rifled through the contents of a drawer. His movements were abrupt and hurried.

  ‘Next one down,’ said Laura.

  ‘Right.’ Christopher followed his wife’s advice and there were the car keys he had been looking for. He picked them up and went over to his wife, loose change jangling in his trouser pockets. ‘Thanks.’ He gave her a perfunctory kiss on the forehead, pulled on his jacket, and said, ‘See you later.’

  Laura listened to his footsteps receding down the hallway, the loud crash of the slammed front door. The house shook and when the reverberation faded the ensuing silence filled her with cold dread. Suddenly, she felt entombed. Her heart thumped in her chest and she struggled to draw air into her lungs. She gripped the edge of the worktop and waited. ‘It’s OK,’ she said out loud. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ Gradually, the panic subsided and she began to feel normal again.

  Laura made herself a camomile tea. Good for the nerves. She took a tin of biscuits down from a shelf and prised the lid off with a butter knife. The chocolate digestives and bourbons were gone. She had eaten them the day before. It wasn’t that she had been hungry, but rather that she had found the sweetness of the chocolate comforting. She grabbed a handful of shortbread cookies and pushed the tin away.

  What was happening to her?

  She had consulted her doctor – a jolly, avuncular type with half-moon spectacles and a suspiciously florid complexion – earlier in the year, and he had said that it was common for women to get emotional after childbirth. Even as he was saying these words, she was thinking, but that was fourteen months ago now. He mumbled something about chemical imbalances and appeared uncomfortable when she tried to articulate her feelings. He interrupted her tentative disclosures with bland reassurances. His heedless manner made her feel stupid, as though she was making a fuss about nothing. She felt like a child, sitting with her knees pressed together and her feet wide apart. He surprised her at the end of the consultation by scribbling out a prescription. ‘To be taken three times a day,’ he said, without looking up. ‘You may feel a little drowsy, so be careful when you’re driving.’

  The pills made her feel less tense and agitated, but when she was alone, she still felt panicky for no good reason, and she still cried without knowing why. She was unable to talk to her husband about what she was going through. Christopher was a sympathetic man; she knew that he would be concerned and try his best to help her, but she doubted that he could. Indeed, she doubted that anyone possessed the means of restoring her former happiness and self-confidence – except perhaps herself. She was hoping for an epiphany, after which everything would click back into place.

  Sometimes, she felt as though she was no longer one person, but two. There was the Laura who looked after Faye and went about her daily routine, and then there was another Laura who critically observed the first. She was familiar with the term schizophrenia and knew that the condition had something to do with split personalities, but she was sure that she wasn’t going mad. At least, not like that. She felt like she was watching herself in a film. A woman, just turned thirty, with uncombed hair and a blank expression, sitting by the kettle eating chocolate biscuits, or staring out of the window into the garden, or lying on the bed waiting for Faye to wake up – and she didn’t know who that woman was. She had become a stranger to herself, and when she was alone, this self-estrangement became frightening.

  Laura drank her tea. She tidied the kitchen, painted her nails, and then wandered into the drawing room, where she sat in an armchair and began reading a novel: The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble. The psychotherapist she’d met in the bookshop in Islington had recommended it. There wasn’t much of a story and the tone was bleak, but occasionally the heroine described feelings that Laura recognized. Although Laura wasn’t really enjoying the novel, she persevered, because it was short, and because she thought that it might contain answers. She had only managed to read ten more pages before she was disturbed by the sound of Faye
crying. Laura placed the book on the chair arm and went upstairs.

  Faye was standing up in her cot, gripping the rail, red-faced and angry. She was trying to get out, hopelessly attempting to get some traction on the bars with her feet. Clearly, she was finding the absence of progress extremely frustrating. ‘Hush now,’ said Laura. She picked up her daughter, comforted her and then changed her nappy, after which she carried the child down to the kitchen and fed her some tomato pasta out of a jar. When Faye had had enough, Laura took her to the drawing room and placed her at the centre of a circle of toys. Laura wanted to read some more of her novel, but Faye kept on distracting her, so she had to lay it aside once again.

  The days were so long.

  Faye ran around the room on short, fat legs. Her balance was precarious and every step seemed to flirt with disaster. Eventually, she ran into the side of the sofa, banged her head, and more comforting was required.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ said Laura, wiping away Faye’s tears. ‘You can help Mummy sort her things out.’ She took Faye’s pudgy hand in her own and they ascended the stairs.

  On the top floor was a room full of cardboard boxes and packing cases. They contained old clothes, shoes and miscellaneous items of no great value. Laura hadn’t had enough time to go through all of her possessions before moving. It had seemed too much, too effortful, having to care for a newborn baby and make decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. But things had changed. Laura wasn’t feeling quite so tired and she couldn’t justify putting the task off any longer. She bolted the stair gate, an original fixture decorated with carved roundels, and set to work. Three piles: Keep. Not sure. Oxfam. She tried to engage Faye and pretended that emptying the boxes was a kind of game. Despite her efforts the child soon lost interest and wandered onto the landing.

  As she sorted her clothes, Laura was reminded of particular photo shoots, parties and people. She should have felt nostalgic remembering those times, when London seemed like the centre of the universe and she was young enough to enjoy it. But not all of her memories were good. There had been significant lapses of judgement. The see-through blouse that she threw onto the Oxfam pile had once been too easily removed, with her full consent, by an Italian couturier she had not known very well, or liked very much, but who had made plain his willingness to advance her career if they became better acquainted. Laura fought to dispel an image of an expensive hotel interior: black leather furniture, modern art, champagne on ice, and the slow, hypnotic movement of luminous forms in a lava lamp. She persevered with her task, detaching memories from garments like price tags.