A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  But that’s not a crime. I don’t hold anything against them. I’ve mellowed. I know now that I was asking too much, asking them to become something they never had it in themselves to pull off. I know they are essentially just a facsimile of the groups they looked up to; really just a more sophisticated version of the covers band that my student colleagues were happy to settle for being. But they are playing what they always wanted to play, it’s their taste, their chosen style – and they do bring to it a love, a passion. I can respect that.

  Nick Foster, however, never brought any love or passion to the music he produced, and nor did the Ritalin-deficient limelight-junkies he employed. Under Foster’s instruction, they never put any heart into it, never mind soul. He ensured there was never any real expression in their vocals, no unleashing of turbulent emotion. Too much expression, too much emotion in the vocal and you can frighten the horses. It can have an adverse effect on your chances of securing high rotation on the pop stations. Can’t have something like that playing in the office of an afternoon, or you might disengage the drones from their allocated tasks, and, God help us, you might accidentally revive their anaesthetised imaginations.

  Never any passion, any expression, any genuine, unfettered emotion on a Nick Foster record. And never any Nick Foster either: not so much as a backing track. Couldn’t sing a note, apparently. (Perhaps that was why he was so dedicated in suppressing the expression of those who could.) But both of those things are about to change. I’m going to release – digitally, of course – my new version of ‘Hurts So Good’, as debuted at tonight’s party. And on it, as you heard, is guest vocalist Nick Foster, giving vent to more expression than he’s ever loosed in his life; unleashing more emotion than all the singers he’s ever produced have cumulatively committed to tape.

  I know we shouldn’t but it

  Hurts so good

  Please don’t stop, you know it

  Hurts so hurts so gooooood.

  Oh, wait, you must see this, it’s one of my favourite bits.

  You really ought to download the whole thing if you haven’t already. I know they keep taking the links down, but this is the web, for fuck’s sake, who are they kidding. The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. There’s new links going up all the time. If you can’t find them because the cops or the record companies have nobbled Google, then look for the news groups. The files are on alt.blackspirit.binaries and the chat is on alt.blackspirit.discussion. If any particular files aren’t visible, just request a pea-roast. (You won’t find the ‘Hurts So Good’ mp3 there, though, as it ain’t free. I won’t see any of the money, so don’t worry your hypocritical little conscience about that, but it only counts towards the chart if it’s a paid-for commercial download, so I had to rig something.)

  I love the choreography here, the way they’re all spaced out and in position in the classic Four Play video line-up: black boy, white girl, black girl, white boy. The giant Marshall amp in the background adds a kind of synergy too, like when the same iconography appears on all the videos and artwork on multiple singles from the same album. The synths are new; well, new for any video Four Play have ever lined up in. The headset mikes are just precious too – they strike precisely the right late-Nineties note.

  I’m really proud of this: absurdly, gigglingly so. I’m not normally impressed by the supposed merits of improvisation. Never understood why anyone ever thought it was a worthwhile form of comedy. Just because you think up some shit gag on the spur of the moment doesn’t transform that same remark into something funny. My sense of humour doesn’t work that way – am I supposed to set my laugh sensitivity somehow lower, recalibrated to make allowances that I don’t need to make for witticisms that somebody actually took some time and care to construct? But this, even if I say so myself, is something of a triumph of on-the-hoof thinking, proof that necessity really can be the mother of invention and all that.

  I already had plans for Vogue 2.2, and reckoned I could incorporate the extra passengers into the same scheme, but as I drove my cargo of somnolent stars beneath the darkness, I was struck by inspiration. I can’t claim I pulled it entirely out of nowhere, though: there was a traceable genus to this idea. Young Daz gave me it, having reminded me of Four Play’s biggest number-one hit.

  The headset mikes are non-removable: they’re attached to steel collars around their necks and padlocked at the back. I attached one to a crash-test dummy before we started recording, to ensure they gave me a more committed vocal performance than Foster ever coaxed out of them. There’s a small plastic-explosive charge attached to the crosspiece supporting the microphone’s pick-up head, the device radio-controlled by me. The charge isn’t going to demolish any buildings, but as I demonstrated to them, was quite enough to obliterate a dummy’s head. Producers sometimes have to do extreme things to get the sound or the feel they’re looking for.

  They stand at the keyboards, in formation, singing their greatest hit and thus adding a new vocal track to my evolving Nick Foster tribute song. It wasn’t much of a challenge to mix the Four Play number into ‘Hurts So Good’ – after all, you could run most of Foster’s output together and never notice an edit. Same time signature, same production, same horrible sampled snare. With these latter two encumbrances removed, however, it’s starting to sound pretty interesting.

  Secrets of the successful pop producer and video director: they’ve been told that if they don’t sing when they’re supposed to, they die. If they move away from the keyboards, they die. But as with the Daddy, I’ve given them an out. No point in punishment without the chance of redemption.

  There’s a synth-brass break before the final chorus, a structural staple of every Nick Foster hit. It just reprises the opening run-through of the melody before the vocals join in for the final chorus, usually repeated to fade. Outside of that fucking four-note Intel signature, it’s probably by some distance the single piece of music these four have heard the most in their entire lives, so we’re not talking Geoffrey Rush in the movie Shine here. When that part of the song comes around, if any of them can play it on their keyboards – not note-perfect, just recognisably and in key – their collar comes off. If they can actually play one little bit of one song, the song that made them stars, then I’ll sedate them again, drive them away from this place and leave them somewhere they’ll be found, unharmed. Only Daz has seen my face, and I assure him he hasn’t seen what he thinks he’s seen.

  There is, as promised, real feeling to the vocal. The girls are actually crying as they sing. Sweet emotion, as Aerosmith put it. They’re still not very good, but at least they’re putting their hearts into it at long last, and that’s all you can ask. I always knew they had it in them.

  We go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, then into that final verse before the crucial synth break. Can they play it? That one little melody? To save their lives? Can they?

  The ensuing synth-mashing cacophony says no. That part will not make the final audio mix, though it stays in the video for obvious reasons.

  They’re all in tears now, but what troopers, what pros: they do as they’re told and keep singing on into that final – oh so final – chorus.

  You’re dynamite

  You’re outta sight

  Love missile with a

  Max! I! Mum! Payload!

  You’re dynamite

  You’re outta sight

  Feels like you’re gonna

  Make! My! Head! Explode!

  II

  This Insubstantial Pageant Faded

  This rough magic

  The magician delicately places a piece of coal on a brass cradle atop a waist-high wooden stand just in front of the crushed – and, Zal can’t help but notice, frayed and fading – purple velvet curtains at the rear of the stage. There’s a pillar either side of the drapes, creating an ad-hoc proscenium arch, though their purpose is purely to support the deck above.

  ‘As you can see, merely an ordinary piece of coal,’ the magician says. L
ike his drapes, his affected aristocratic accent shows the effects of wear, small gaps occasionally revealing the less refined material immediately beneath. ‘But given enough time, and pressure, it will turn into a diamond. I have to confess I’ve been waiting a while, and up on this stage here I can certainly feel the pressure, but there’s still no sign of progress. We live in hope, nonetheless.’

  His patter is greeted with a few laughs out of politeness and sympathy, bordering upon embarrassment. Zal doesn’t offer any fig-leaf chuckles of his own; it would just be too patronising, and the guy deserves more dignity than that. Any old stager does, even – maybe especially – when their gifts are long since faded and the final curtain is unavoidably beckoning. Under the stage lights, The Great Mysto, as the sign in the lobby advertises him, looks well into his sixties despite the make-up. He’s a slightly built man who must have been dartingly nimble once upon a time, a quickness on his feet matching a quickness of eye and mind. Now, though, he seems tired, his motions too deliberate, his stagecraft clunky and functionary, no spark to what he’s about. He looks defeated. His assistant knows it, too. She’s far younger than him, maybe early thirties, slim, petite and lithe as the position dictates, and wearing less make-up than he is. She keeps smiling as she faces the audience, but she looks tense half the time, afraid something’s going to go wrong at any second. With saws and swords lined up as part of the repertoire, Zal muses, this is an understandable anxiety.

  The venue is barely a third full, and it’s not a big room: half the size of the suite next door where a stand-up comic is billed to appear later, and a quarter the size of the ship’s ballroom. The audience comprises mostly families, but half the kids aren’t even paying attention. It being term-time for school-age children, it’s mostly toddlers, who are just wandering around in the aisles. There are a few older ones, uniformly playing with their Gameboys. The adults are just as fidgety and inattentive, impatient for the show to finish so they can pack the kids off to bed and finally hit the bar, maybe even come back here to see a ‘proper’ show later. This is the early bill, scheduled partly to suit a family audience, and partly so that the room is free for the jazz/blues act billed to play the late-evening session.

  ‘Pressure,’ he says, as if trying to reboard his own train of thought before it chugs off without him. ‘Pressure: that’s the applied principle behind the sword.’ As he says this, he pulls a long blade from a rack, while his assistant slides a wicker basket from the side towards the centre of the stage. ‘The sharpness of the steel is essentially a means of concentrating pressure on the smallest possible area, allowing even a frail little man like me to defend myself with the minimum effort.’ At this, the assistant reaches into the basket and produces an armful of fruit, which she throws at him with impressive rapidity. The Great Mysto merely holds the sword vertically in front of him, the hilt gripped at waist-height, and the missiles are bisected: two limes, two lemons, two oranges, two grapefruit. This does raise a few chuckles, the fruit getting larger and the assistant’s apparent ire greater as she escalates her unilateral arms race. This culminates in her producing two weighty-looking water melons from the basket while the magician, apparently oblivious, turns face-on and gives a little bow as though the trick is finished. The assistant then lobs them, one from each hand, in a one-two movement so that both are in the air simultaneously, in response to which the Great Mysto nonchalantly flicks his wrist and angles the sword so that both melons are impaled upon it.

  The assistant looks a little sheepish and the magician gestures to her to climb inside the erstwhile fruit receptacle. She complies with an exaggeratedly huffy pout, whereupon the Great Mysto commences the standard swords-through-the-basket routine.

  Mysto’s not without his moments, but there’s something wrong, and Zal has worked out what it is. It took a while to occur to him, but then only a little more observation to confirm. There were no coins, no cards. The guy isn’t doing any intimate stuff, no close-up work, which to Zal seems an even more conspicuous omission given the inescapable modesty of the venue. A little room like this, a small audience, and the guy hasn’t so much as fanned a deck. Even the magicians playing theatres in Vegas would start off with something simple to set the scene, help to pace the ascent to grander illusions. Why wouldn’t a veteran conjuror playing under these reduced circumstances not get the little kiddies onside with some coin work, a few vanishes and transpositions before paying off the little bastards with a few miraculously appearing bribes?

  As soon as Zal asks himself the question, he realises his query already contains the answer – veteran conjuror – and a little scrutiny verifies his hypothesis. It’s his hands: the poor sonofabitch has rheumatoid arthritis, and has constructed an act out of what illusions his stiff and irreversibly deforming fingers can still execute, with an inevitable weighting towards machinery: self-working tricks and automated gizmos that ought really to be used more sparingly to augment a wider repertoire.

  Zal feels it right in the heart, pictures the slow deterioration, the moment the guy tried a particular palm or sleight and realised he could no longer manage it. What moves him all the more is that the guy is still clinging on to flotsam long after his ship has been wrecked. He’s been unable to give it up and is still performing his failing act before dwindling and disinterested audiences aboard a cruise liner. Zal can’t decide what would be the sadder: if he is doing it because he still needs the dough, or doing it simply because it is all he knows. Probably a combination of both.

  It sure helps create a breathless tension to Mysto’s execution of the old basket routine, but unfortunately only for Zal, who can’t take his eyes off the old man’s hands as he thrusts each sword through tiny slits in the wickerwork. If he had played up an image of bumbling clumsiness, it would perhaps have engaged the audience more, but the overture to the trick had been about precision, emphasising not only the sharpness of the blade but the control with which Mysto wielded it. Thus the audience were more taken with the overture than the trick itself, the former having the novelty value of an element of the unexpected and unpredictable. The latter is something they’ve seen a hundred times on TV, and even seeing it live makes no difference, because Mysto just doesn’t have the stagecraft to get them excited about it. Zal’s witnessed comics perform classic gags the audience have already heard over and over on TV, but they know how to play the material so that they still get the laugh: they know how to sell it. Mysto must have known once, but now he’s just going through the motions, his audiences’ indifference having created a kind of positive-feedback loop so that he cares just a little less with each performance. Thus the paltry crowd today has little interest in the outcome, and even less appreciation of the skill and ingenuity being practised by the two performers. They know the girl is going to climb out of the basket unharmed, so every sword he drives in is one more he’ll have to pull out again before the trick is concluded: meaning each blade is not one sword more than could explicably go through that basket without injuring the girl, it’s one sword more between them and that drink once the kids have been safely tucked up in their cabins.

  Zal, the Great Mysto and the weary parents are all aboard the cruise ship Spirit of Athene, three days out of Palma and currently en route to the Canary Islands via Casablanca and Agadir. It had put in at Palma for forty-eight hours and, as it turned out, was due to depart at exactly the same time as Zal’s flight to Paris. He didn’t believe in fate or providence, but sometimes you just took your cues from the signs life randomly threw up. What else was he going to do: throw a dart at a map? Head for the airport and play departure-board roulette? A cruise liner was not exactly his scene, but it seemed an effective way of dropping off the screen at zero notice. It was also a concentrated version of the lifestyle he’d adopted for much of the past year: the ultimate in travelling hopefully but never arriving.

  Bitch of a place for anyone to abduct him from, too. Bearing that consideration in mind, he’d booked his berth online at an internet caf�
�, using Albert Fleet’s credit card details to pay for it. He’d got all he needed from the wallet, including the guy’s mailing address from his driver’s licence. That was partly why he’d made play of taking the hard cash and dropping the wallet itself: make him think he’d no interest in the other goodies. Fleet wouldn’t know anything was wrong until he got his next bill – not unless they flagged it up for authorisation, but Zal figured spontaneous travel fares weren’t exactly a conspicuous rarity on this guy’s monthly statement. The other way he might find out sooner would be if Zal went crazy and maxed out his credit limit, but there was no call for that. He didn’t need the guy’s money, just needed him to pay for his passage. It was appropriate, after all: Fleet had been planning to set up Zal with a cosy cabin aboard a boat leaving Palma that morning anyway, hadn’t he?

  He signed himself up for a month, due to finish up at Marbella on the return leg. Time enough to reflect and consider what he was going to do with a future that he had now resolved would not, could not contain Angelique.

  The second day out, at noon, he marked the moment when he was scheduled to meet Angelique at the Musée d’Orsay by leaning against a guardrail and firing cards into the water with practised flicks of his wrist. He tried not to wonder whether she’d even be there, tried not to picture the scene. When he got to the last card, he turned it over to reveal it as the eight of diamonds: the card she’d chosen (or rather the card he’d forced on her) once upon a time at the Louvre. This was no fateful coincidence, however, as he had earlier flicked through the deck, selected it and slipped it to the bottom in a sequence of moves now so natural and automatic as to be almost subconscious. He looked at it for a second, thought of keeping it as a symbol, but a symbol of what? Some token he’d sometimes lie awake and fantasise about giving her should they ever meet again? No, here was a symbol: let her go.