C

by Mccarthy, Tom

  The Pageant’s almost over now. Ascalaphus’s transformation heralds that of most of the other characters as Ceres goes on a bird-producing rampage. Harvesters, undulators, shadows are all rendered avian, disappearing like Serge beneath beaks and feathers. Some, robbed of speech, are condemned to be “sluggish, screeching”; others are allowed to retain human voices and ordered to take to the skies above the oceans,

  of purpose that your thought

  Might also to the seas be known …

  Even the chorus who pronounce these lines are transformed into birds. Since there’s no one left to put their masks on, they transform each other, the last remaining one pulling the feathered head onto his own shoulders with the resigned look of the final participant in some mass suicide. The stage now full of birds, the same recording that started the whole Pageant off is now replayed from behind the screen, growing louder and louder until birdsong fills the whole lawn. Sophie’s meant to repeat her smoke-trick at this point, to produce clouds for all these newly generated birds to soar through, but she’s nowhere to be seen.

  “Where is that blasted girl?” Carrefax barks. He scours the lawn eagle-eyed for a few moments, then booms out: “No matter: curtain call, everyone!”

  The masked children can’t really see him, and continue soaring around, bumping into one another. A couple of them fall over. Carrefax steps out onto the stage to haul them into line. He pokes his head behind the sheet and the music stops abruptly. There’s silence for a moment; then the audience break into loud applause.

  “Thank you, thank you!” shouts Carrefax above it. “Tea, coffee, light refreshments on the lawn. And if …”

  But his sentence is lost amidst the bustle of people rising from seats, stretching limbs, straightening skirts and waistcoats. Parents make their way towards the sheet for reunions with their children. The volume of general chatter rises as people vie to outdo each other in their praise for the production, for Mrs. Carrefax’s costumes, for Miss Hubbard, Serge, the chorus, Maureen and Frieda’s sandwiches, the gramophone for providing such ambience, the skies for holding off. Carrefax works the crowd:

  “The coronation scene? I thought that this year, of all years … What? The crown was meant for my head … No, quite funny really: honoured guest and all that … Perfectly safe: water and glycerine combination; she was going to make clouds, but I don’t think we could have withstood any more brimstone …”

  Shadows grow longer. Children grow tired. They tug at parents’ sleeves, or sit beneath the trestle table unpicking cucumber slices from sandwiches’ entrails and mining seams of chocolate from the ruins of layered cakes. Cupid/Hermes dozes in a chair. Sophie remains as absent as Persephone. Eventually people slink off, their footsteps dwindling up the path’s gravel. Urns, tables and chairs are brought back in; the props are returned to the schoolrooms. Only flattened grass, the odd discarded feather or crushed flower, Sophie’s box of chemicals and the tautly strung-up sheet still bear witness to the fact that something has happened on the lawn when Serge comes out after dark to fetch his bird mask.

  The wind’s died down by now; clouds hug the ground more closely, warming the night air. It’s quiet: the only sounds Serge hears are the slow oozing of the stream and a kind of rustling that he thinks at first must be a badger or hedgehog in the undergrowth beside it. It’s a rhythmic scratching, a rubbing chafe that carries on its back a higher sound, a squeak like the noise of an unoiled gate being opened and closed repeatedly. As Serge moves across the lawn he realises that the sound’s coming not from the undergrowth but from somewhere much closer. He looks around; although there’s no moon to light up the lawn a small glow is spilling from a lantern someone’s left behind the sheet. When he comes face-on to the sheet he sees what’s making the noise—or, rather, sees its shadow, cast on the sheet’s far side by the lantern so as to be visible from this side, like a film made up of only silhouettes. It’s some kind of moving thing made of articulated parts. One of the parts is horizontal, propped up on four stick legs like a low table; the other is vertical, slotted into the underside of the table’s rear end but rising above it, its spine wobbling as the whole contraption rocks back and forth. The thing pulses like a insect’s thorax, and with each pulse comes the rustle, scratch and chafe; with each pulse the horizontal, low part squeaks, and the vertical part now starts emitting a deep grunt, a gruff, hog-like snort. The grunts grow more intense as Serge comes closer to the sheet; the squeaks grow louder. The front part has a head; the back part too—Serge can make this out now, rising from broad shoulders. The thing’s rocking and wobbling faster and faster, squeaking and grunting more with every pulse.

  Serge has started moving round to the sheet’s side so he can find out what the source of this strange shadow display is when a scream comes from some way behind him. He turns round. A second scream follows the first: the voice is Maureen’s, and it’s coming from the house. He runs back across the lawn towards it. The door’s open; in the hall, Maureen’s crouching down in front of Spitalfield, who’s lying immobile on the floorboards. Spitalfield is stiff: his legs are sticking straight out at an odd angle to the ground; his mouth is frozen in a gaping rictus; foam sits hard-set on its lips.

  “The little bitch!” shrieks Maureen. “Where’s your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” replies Serge. “Is he dead?”

  He’s dead alright. Sophie, when she eventually emerges, denies having fed the poison to him deliberately.

  “He must have sneaked into my lab,” she whines. “It’s not my fault.”

  Maureen thinks otherwise. She tries to get her employer to punish his daughter, but Carrefax takes Sophie’s word on this one.

  “We’re British, not Napoleonic. Innocent till proven guilty.”

  Sophie assuages whatever guilt she might feel by deciding to accord Spitalfield proper funeral rites. To Maureen’s further horror she persuades her father to allow her to stuff the cat. This takes her two days of uninterrupted labour: Serge, perched on a chair in her lab’s corner, watches her empty out his stomach of its organs, guts and juices, then peel the skin back from the skull towards the spine and ribs. The innards, gathered in a bucket, exude a rancid, sour smell; Serge moves closer to Sophie to block it out by breathing in the odour of her hair.

  “Now you’re distracting me,” she says. “Clear off.”

  She calls him back, though, some hours later, to show him a trick of which she seems extremely proud. Sticking two electric wires into the cat’s left hind leg, she throws a switch on to complete the circuit—and the leg, galvanised by the current, twitches and then flexes, as though Spitalfield were trying to walk. She switches the current off, and the leg reverts to its rigid, straight position. She throws the switch again; again the leg twitches and flexes. As she animates the leg over and over again, she shakes with a laughter that’s sparked up afresh with each new quickening—as though she were also animated by the current, which was somehow running through her body too. Serge, watching the leg move with the angular stiffness of a clockwork mechanism, thinks of semaphore machines, their angles and positions, then of the strange, moving shapes he saw played out across the sheet. After a while, he starts to wonder if perhaps the morbid and hypnotic sequences being executed by the dead cat’s limb contain some kind of information—“contain” in the sense of enclosing, locking in, repeating in a code for which no key’s available, at least not to him …

  On the third day after Spitalfield’s demise, Sophie emerges with the reconstituted cat mounted on a board and, gathering a small crowd in the Crypt Park, has them squeeze into the Crypt itself, whose door her father opens with a large, rusty key. Here, among cobwebs undisturbed for who knows how long and dust-residues whose origins must lie in the last century if not the one before that, she installs her trophy on top of a tomb whose upper surface is so strewn with dead insects that she has to clear a swathe for it with her sleeve.

  “He’s the wrong shape,” says Serge.

  He’s right:
Spitalfield’s surface has gone corrugated, with stiff ripples running down his fur; his neck juts out aggressively, like a tiger’s or leopard’s; his face is dented and irregular, with unmatching marble eyes.

  “Gives him more character,” their father says. “Good job! Any words?”

  There’s a pause while they all wait for her to say something: Serge, their father, Bodner, Miss Hubbard and Mr. Clair. Widsun’s not with them anymore: he left the day after the Pageant. After a few seconds Sophie brushes her hands and replies:

  “No. Let’s go.”

  But after they’ve stepped out and locked the door behind them she seems to change her mind. She stops, turns to her father and, pointing to the Crypt, smiles as she asks:

  “You know what this is now?”

  “No,” he answers. “What?”

  “A catacomb.”

  “A cat a—what? ‘Catacomb’? Ah, yes,” says Carrefax, “a catacomb: that’s good. Very good.”

  i

  The static’s like the sound of thinking. Not of any single person thinking, nor even a group thinking, collectively. It’s bigger than that, wider—and more direct. It’s like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush. Each night, when Serge drops in on it, it recoils with a wail, then rolls back in crackling waves that carry him away, all rudderless, until his finger, nudging at the dial, can get some traction on it all, some sort of leeway. The first stretches are angry, plaintive, sad—and always mute. It’s not until, hunched over the potentiometer among fraying cords and soldered wires, his controlled breathing an extension of the frequency of air he’s riding on, he gets the first quiet clicks that words start forming: first he jots down the signals as straight graphite lines, long ones and short ones, then, below these, he begins to transcribe curling letters, dim and grainy in the arc light of his desktop …

  He’s got two masts set up. There’s a twenty-two-foot pine one topped with fifteen more feet of bamboo, all bolted to an oak-stump base half-buried in the Mosaic Garden. Tent pegs circle the stump round; steel guy wires, double-insulated, climb from these to tether the mast down. On the chimney of the main house, a pole three feet long reaches the same height as the bamboo. Between the masts are strung four eighteen-gage manganese copper wires threaded through oak-lath crosses. In Serge’s bedroom, there’s a boxed tuning coil containing twenty feet of silk-covered platinoid, shellacked and scraped. Two dials are mounted on the box’s lid: a large, clock-handed one dead in the centre and, to its right, a smaller disc made from ash-wood recessed at the back and dotted at the front by twenty little screws with turned-down heads set in a circle to form switch-studs. The detector’s brass with an adjusting knob of ebonite; the condenser’s Murdock; the crystal, Chilean gelina quartz, a Mighty Atom mail-ordered from Gamage of Holborn. For the telephone, he tried a normal household one but found it wasn’t any use unless he replaced the diaphragms, and moved on to a watch-receiver-pattern headset wound to a resistance of eight and a half thousand ohms. The transmitter itself is made of standard brass, a four-inch tapper arm keeping Serge’s finger a safe distance from the spark gap. The spark gap flashes blue each time he taps; it makes a spitting noise, so loud he’s had to build a silence box around the desk to isolate his little RX station from the sleeping household—or, as it becomes more obvious to him with every session, to maintain the little household’s fantasy of isolation from the vast sea of transmission roaring all around it.

  Tonight, as on most nights, he starts out local, sweeping from two hundred and fifty to four hundred metres. It’s the usual traffic: CQ signals from experimental wireless stations in Masedown and Eliry, tapping out their call signs and then slipping into Q-code once another bug’s responded. They exchange signal quality reports, compare equipment, enquire about variations in the weather and degrees of atmospheric interference. The sequence QTC, which Serge, like any other Wireless World subscriber, knows means “Have you anything to transmit?”, is usually met with a short, negative burst before both questioner and responder move on to fish for other signals. Serge used to answer all CQs, noting each station’s details in his call-book; lately, though, he’s become more selective in the signals he’ll acknowledge, preferring to let the small-fry click away as background chatter, only picking up the pencil to transcribe the dots and dashes when their basic QRNs and QRAs unfold into longer sequences. This is happening right now: an RXer in Lydium who calls himself “Wireworm” is tapping out his thoughts about the Postmaster General’s plans to charge one guinea per station for all amateurs.

  “… tht bedsteads n gas pipes cn b used as rcving aerials is well-kn0n I mslf hv dn this,” Wireworm’s boasting, “als0 I cn trn pian0 wire in2 tuning coil fashion dtctrs from wshing s0da n a needle mst I obtain lcnses 4 ths wll we gt inspctrs chcking r pots n pans 2 C tht they cnfrm 2 rgulatns I sgst cmpaign cvl ds0bdns agnst such impsitions …”

  Transcribing his clicks, Serge senses that Wireworm’s not so young: no operator under twenty would bother to tap out the whole word “fashion.” The spacing’s a little awkward also: too studied, too self-conscious. Besides, most bugs can improvise equipment: he once made Bodner’s spade conduct a signal and the house’s pipes vibrate and resonate, sending Frieda running in panic from her bath …

  Serge moves up to five hundred metres. Here are stronger, more decisive signals: coastal stations’ call signs, flung from towering masts. Poldhu’s transmitting its weather report; a few nudges away, Malin, Cleethorpes, Nordeich send out theirs. Liverpool’s exchanging messages with tugboats in the Mersey: Serge transcribes a rota of towing duties for tomorrow. Further out, the lightship Tongue’s reporting a derelict’s position: the coordinates click their way in to the Seaforth station, then flash out again, to be acknowledged by Marconi operators of commercial liners, one after the other. The ships’ names reel off in litany: Falaba, British Sun, Scania, Morea, Carmania, each name appendaged by its church: Cunard Line, Allen, Aberdeen Direct, Canadian Pacific Railway, Holland-America. The clicks peter out, and Serge glances at the clock: it’s half a minute before one. A few seconds later, Paris’s call-sign comes on: FL for Eiffel. Serge taps his finger on the desktop to the rhythm of the huge tower’s stand-by clicks, then holds it still and erect for the silent lull that always comes just before the time-code. All the operators have gone silent: boats, coastal stations, bugs—all waiting, like him, for the quarter-second dots to set the air, the world, time itself back in motion as they chime the hour.

  They sound, and then the headphones really come to life. The press digest goes out from Niton, Poldhu, Malin, Cadiz: Diario del Atlántico, Journal de l’Atlantique, Atlantic Daily News … “Madero and Suárez Shot in Mexico While Trying to Escape” … “Trade Pact Between” … “Entretien de” … “Shocking Domestic Tragedy in Bow” … “Il Fundatore” … “Husband Unable to Prevent” … The stories blur together: Serge sees a man clutching a kitchen knife chasing a politician across parched earth, past cacti and armadillos, while ambassadors wave papers around fugitive and pursuer, negotiating terms. “Grain Up Five, Lloyds Down Two” … “Australia All Out for Four Hundred and Twenty-one, England Sixty-two for Three in Reply” … Malin’s got ten private messages for Lusitania, seven for Campania, two for Olympic: request instructions how to proceed with … the honour of your company on the occasion of … weighing seven and a half pounds, a girl … The operators stay on after the Marconigrams have gone through, chatting to one another: Carrigan’s moved to President Lincoln, Borstable to Malwa; the Company Football Team drew two-all against the Evening Standard Eleven; old Allsop, wireless instructor at Marconi House, is getting married on the twenty-second … His tapper-finger firing up her spark gap … Short, then long … Olympic and Campania are playing a game of chess: K4 to Q7… K4 to K5 … They always start K4… Serge transcribes for a while, then lays his pencil down and lets the sequences run through the space between his ears, sounding his skull: there’s a fluency to them, a rhythm that’s spontaneous, as though the clicks were somehow sp
eaking on their own and didn’t need the detectors, keys or finger-twitching men who cling to them like afterthoughts …

  He climbs to six hundred, and picks up ice reports sent out from whalers: FLOEBERG/GROWLER 51N 10′ 45.63″ lat 36W 12′ 39.37 long … FIELD ICE 59N 42′ 43.54″ lat 14W 45′ 56.25″ long … Compagnie de Télégraphie sans Fil reports occasional light snow off Friesland. Paris comes on again; again the cycle pauses and restarts. Then Bergen, Crookhaven, Tarifa, Malaga, Gibraltar. Serge pictures gardenias tucked behind girls’ ears, red dresses and the blood of bulls. He hears news forwarded, via Port Said and Rome, from Abyssinia, and sees an African girl strumming on some kind of mandolin, jet-black breasts glowing darkly through light silk. Suez is issuing warnings of Somali raiders further down the coast. More names process by: Isle of Perim, Zanzibar, Isle of Socotra, Persian Gulf. Parades of tents line themselves up for him: inside them, dancers serving sherbet; outside, camels saddled with rich carpets, deserts opening up beneath red skies. The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of year. He lets a fart slip from his buttocks, and waits for its vapour to reach his nostrils: it, too, carries signals, odour-messages from distant, unseen bowels. When it arrives, he slips the headphones off, opens the silence cabin’s door to let some air in and hears a goods train passing half a mile away. The pulsing of its carriage-joins above the steel rails carries to him cleanly. He looks down at his desk: the half-worn pencil, the light’s edge across the paper sheet, the tuning box, the tapper. These things—here, solid, tangible—are somehow made more present by the tinny sound still spilling from the headphones lying beside them. The sound’s present too, material: Serge sees its ripples snaking through the sky, pleats in its fabric, joins pulsing as they make their way down corridors of air and moisture, rock and metal, oak, pine and bamboo …