by Kim Newman
Alexia whistled this time, off-key. A wolf whistle. Cameron forced a smile.
The digital dock was counting down towards the performance. On the closed-circuit monitors, he saw the technicians taking their places at the instrument banks. The stage was dominated by a cracked mask with blank, blind eyes. Telemachus, himself. Cameron thought the face looked like his father. The instrument monitors were reading normal as the equipment started up. Alexia brought him his headset, which he slipped on like a minimalist space helmet. He was becoming part of the machinery of the piece. He checked his watch against the dock, and mentally ticked off the functions as they were performed.
7:31.
'It's nearly time,' Alexia said, needlessly.
The orchestral musicians were filing out, also formally dressed. Minerva Beaton, the cellist, had resisted Telemachus at first, refusing to become part of the machinery of the piece, but those arguments, hateful to Cameron's memory, were over now. She had had to be converted, but now she was a true believer. She would serve the symphony.
'Who's that?'
Alexia pointed to a shape moving on one of the monitors, just behind Minerva. It was shadowed, and small.
'There shouldn't be any children backstage.'
There was a gleam in the dark, as if reflected off a large eggshell. Then the shape was gone.
'There's no one there,' Cameron said quietly. 'No one at all.'
'No,' she said. 'There was…'
'It was just a glitch,' he said, too forcefully. Alexia held his glance for a few moments, a furrow between her eyebrows, and dropped the subject.
7:33.
Light was flooding the monitors as the curtains rose. There was polite applause as the mask came into view, and the performers settled.
'Ready?'
He nodded, and left the room, Alexia a few steps behind. The door was held open for him, and he threaded his way through all the backstage equipment. Alexia took her canvas chair in the wings, her bug in her ear so she could relay if necessary his almost subaudial commands to the technical people.
7:34.
Cameron Nielson Jr stepped out on the stage just as the initial applause was dying, and climbed the dais with leisurely ease, settling down behind the theremin stand. He nodded to each of the performers. There was a flicker of applause for his appearance, but it faded away on schedule, leaving him three seconds of silence by the clock on the theremin before the first tonalities sounded out.
Then at precisely 7:35, the nightmare began.
TWO
IN HIS NIGHTMARE, the device with the beeping alarms misfired because, by 7:59, the audience was laughing too loud for their watches to be heard. The tittering started during the first five minutes of the piece, and grew.
The music was his, and emerged as written from the apparatus he had designed for it, but it was changed. The effects he had carefully measured were misjudged, comical, obscene, absurd. Minerva Beaton could hardly keep her long face straight as she sawed her cello. The eerie, longing notes of his Telemachus theme sounded like whoopee cushions.
Beyond the lights, Cameron got the impression of audience members thronging the exits, trying to get out of the concert hall. He tried to keep going, his hands wringing sounds from the theremin. Painful feedback boomed from the amplifiers, and he realised he was whistling again, the sound dreadfully enlarged by his headset and hurled out into the auditorium.
Telemachus looked down blindly on his humiliation. And the childsized intruder shifted in the shadows around the stage, mocking him from the darkness.
He started coughing, and blood spatted across the note-dotted creaminess of his score.
Somehow, he made it through to the end.
There was no crescendo of applause, just a lone volley of claps. Alexia was trying to make him feel better.
He wrenched off his headset and fled the spotlit stage, pushing past the girl, hiding his red face in the dark.
When the last resonances of the symphony had died, all that was left was an electronic whine. It sounded like an idiot child whistling. Somebody turned it off.
The film sped up as Cameron ran out of the building, still in his tailcoat, and tried to lose himself in the streets around the Barbican. His shiny shoes pounded the sidewalks, and neon signs flashed the names of increasingly seedy nightclubs at him. It started raining in sparkling sheets, the technicians pouring water down from above his eyeline onto him. Rich, orchestral music, a kitschy concerto in the style of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, thundered on the soundtrack, vibrating his teeth.
Mr Whistle was still dogging him, not pursuing but just keeping up. The bogeyman did not need to do anything more to him. His fate was complete. In the space of a few cuts, he had a thick growth of stubble, his shirtfront was soiled with liquor, his hair was wild and his tails were tattered. He had a bottle of cheap booze in his hand, and was swigging from it.
He was in a flophouse, his coatsleeve wrinkled up above his left elbow and his shirtsleeve ripped away. The vein pulsed in his arm as the makeshift tourniquet drew tighter. Judi, her face white with Gothic make-up, handed him the glowing syringe. As the needle slid into him, he whistled sharply, hurting his ears. Rain washed Judi's face away.
Then, the sun came up and the nightmare shifted gears. He was in a gutter, cold clean water running around him, washing the grime and sleep from his face. A figure loomed over him, haloed by the sunlight, and picked him up, her arms slipping tight around his chest. Her blonde hair shone gold.
'Lex?'
She did not try to soothe him, but she took him away from Skid Row, pulling him into a kingsize bed with freshly-laundered sheets. He was naked and clean again, his pains salved. The music came back. Things were not as bad as they seemed…
In the long run, they were much worse.
The night before the wedding, Cameron Nielson Jr burned his manuscripts, one by one. Alexia stood by and watched him do it. Acting as his agent, she had got him a commission to score a 15-minute TV documentary about autumn leaves.
He thought he could do it. A sub-Elgar theme was whistling in his mind. In the burning pages, he imagined his electro-acoustic instruments sparking and self-destructing like a spaceship set at the end of a low-budget science fiction film. He reached for a more conventional musical palette, strings and woodwinds.
They were married in church, in the West Country village where Alexia had grown up. Her parents were delighted. Anne was there, representing his family, and his Dad, his spirits lifted by his recent turn for the better, sent a cable of congratulations to the groom and a mash note to the bride. Turning from the altar, Cameron could not see Mr Whistle among the congregation, but did think he glimpsed Judi, loitering embarrassed near the back.
After the ceremony, Alexia kissed him and loved him. He was enfolded by warm feelings. There was gentle applause, and flashbulbs popped. The orchestra played only harmonic music. Everything was easy.
After the honeymoon, Alexia was pregnant and he was progressing well on the film score. His work proved acceptable, and further commissions resulted. No one knew his name, but people hummed his tunes. He wrote the theme music for a British television serial adapted from a Barbara Cartland novel. He wrote a 30-second piece for a shampoo commercial that enabled him to buy a house in the country. With his wife and Cameron Nielson III, he had a comfortable life, cocooned by money and anonymity. He never thought of performing again, or of serious music. If there was something lacking in his life, he did not know what it was.
Meanwhile, thanks to a series of startling medical breakthroughs, his father was recovering from his debilitating strokes. He almost literally returned from the dead, and his personal memoir, Facing Death, was the strongest thing he had written since the '50s. A 75-page essay, it climbed the New York Times bestseller list and was the talking-point book of the year. Following that, there was a revival of interest in Cameron Nielson Sr, and most of his theatrical works were staged in New York and London. The Rat Jacket broke box office rec
ords on Broadway with Dustin Hoffman and A1 Pacino, The Crunch was directed by Peter Hall on Shaftesbury Avenue, and On the Graveyard Shift at Sam's Bar-B-Q and Grill was remade by Steven Spielberg with Marlon Brando as Sam, Robert DeNiro in Brando's old role and Meryl Streep as Angela. Cameron's father began writing plays again, and managements competed for the rights to stage each new mature masterpiece. He was pleased for his Dad, and things were better between them. When Martin Scorsese filmed The Rat Jacket, Cameron Nielson Sr tried to get his son the job of writing the score, but the deal fell through. Cameron did not mind about that, even when Harvey Broadribb, who had been at Juillard with him, won the Academy Award for his work on the movie.
Anne sent him a signed copy of her first book, Remembering Judi. A non-fiction account of their sister's last years, Remembering Judi won the Pulitzer Prize and was a hardback bestseller. It was turned into the highest-rated Made-for-TV movie ever produced, catapaulting Nina Kenyon, the young unknown cast in the lead, to multiple awards and international stardom. After that, Anne became a novelist, won the Booker and the Whitbread in the same year with different books, and was given her own television show. He wrote the opening and closing signature tunes for the program, but they were dumped after the first season and replaced with 'something a little more distinctive'. He wrote more shampoo, hairspray, deodorant and sliced bread commercials.
On a visit to England, Cameron's Dad met Minerva Beaton at a dinner party arranged by Alexia and wound up marrying the cellist. She reminded him of someone he had known as a young man. At the age of forty, Cameron was presented with a baby brother, Todd Nielson, upon whom everybody doted. When his own son was old enough to go to school, Alexia took up painting, working her way away from representational landscapes into suggestive abstracts based on the British countryside. Her work was too unconventional for immediate popular acceptance, but Cameron could tell how good she was, and was supportive even when she was discouraged. Anne and Dad both bought her paintings and displayed them prominently, and Cameron used his fee from a sanitary napkin commercial to finance an exhibition in London. Alexia was critically acclaimed, and several major galleries purchased her, but she did not become immediately collectible. She joked that she would only make money fifty years after she was dead, and he told her that money did not matter.
Cameron went to a lot of receptions, private views, book launches, first night parties, movie premieres and testimonials. His father, sister, wife and stepmother - Minerva became a much-in-demand soloist and had a big-selling jazz-classical crossover album - were always being honoured, and he always tried to turn out to support them. He got used to people asking him 'and what do you do?' He needed less and less to work, his commercial and film scores earning him a steady residual income. He did not miss his music, and could barely remember his performing days. Alexia and Cameron III gently chided him for his whistling habit, and he developed an aversion to his own work. Even when Alexia, who remained a young woman even as her hair silvered, tried to point out the strengths of his pieces he mentally tuned out. He had spent his life designing inoffensive wallpaper, he realised, and he was not really ashamed of that.
Cameron III asked for a guitar for his 13th birthday. Cameron wanted to give him a computer, but Alexia prevailed and soon the house was full of twangs and scales again. His son was obsessive about music, mastering classical, folk and rock modes with alarming rapidity. At sixteen, he put together his first group and, with a cash present from his grandfather, put out a record of his own songs. It got a lot of airplay from John Peel, and was written up extensively by the music press. A major company signed him up, and he had a series of top ten hits while building a serious reputation. Elvis Costello called him a genius, and Jonathan Demme made an in-concert film of his appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. Cameron III was embarrassed by the Smash Hits following and tried not to be a teen idol, whereupon he was celebrated all the more. Cameron knew how good his son really was, and encouraged him to break free of the pop straitjacket. Cameron III recorded duets with Stevie Wonder, David Byrne, Frank Sinatra and Kiri Te Kanawa. Then, he wrote a West End musical based on his aunt's Remembering Judi and it transferred to Broadway, with Nina Kenyon making an impressive singing debut in her original role, finally outgrossing everything written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. On The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson did a whole monologue on the theme of, 'yes, but who is Cameron Nielson the Second?'
Todd Nielson became a medical researcher, and finally did something about the ageing process. Their father was one of the first beneficiaries, and the whole family was able to gather at his 100th birthday party. Cameron talked with Minerva, who was being magnanimously tolerant of her husband's much-publicised affair with Nina Kenyon, and with Anne, who was well into the tertiary stage of her fourth marriage (to Didier Bishopric, a society restauranteur) and just back from the Betty Ford clinic after a spell of amphetamine dependency. The family had asked him to compose a tune for the party, but he had declined. He did not do that any more. Finally, his son stepped in and wrote a song, 'Not Out', that would become an anthem for the new generation of active centenarians. However, thanks to a nervous disorder, Cameron Nielson III was unable to play at the party and, at the last minute, Cameron agreed to step in. After his son's band, joined for the occasion by Minerva, played 'Not Out', with Nina handling the vocal, Cameron sat at the piano. Everybody sang 'Happy Birthday to You', drowning him out. It was a great occasion.
Cameron Ill's condition got worse, and his uncle Todd recommended specialists. Alexia was tormented, and poured her feelings out on canvas, producing some of her best work. Cameron spent a lot of time sitting at his piano with the lid down, his fingers resting on the wood, whistling unconsciously. The specialists tried increasingly radical treatments, but his son did not recover. In the nursing home, Cameron III wrote an album's worth of his very best material, railing against the darkness that was crowding in on him. At the funeral, Cameron's stepmother played the cello while he stood with his arm around Alexia, feeling drained and empty.
Anne overdosed alone in her penthouse, describing herself in her last note as just another dead junkie.' Their father wrote a tragic play about his daughters, and Nina, grown old enough, played 'Amy', the character based on Anne. There were characters equivalent to Victoria Page, Judi and Todd, but no one in An American Family resembled Cameron. There were new arts by now, shared dreams that could be shaped by the skilled. Susan, Anne's daughter by Didier, became one of the first geniuses of the form, moulding her night fantasies into unforgettably affecting tapestries of emotion and narrative.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a major retrospective of Alexia Nielson's paintings, but his wife did not live to see it. She succumbed to an unexpected cerebral haemorrhage at the easel two weeks before the opening. Her last, unfinished work was uncharacteristic: a portrait of her husband, prepared as a birthday surprise. He insisted it be exhibited, although it lacked a face. Several journalists who covered the event assumed that Alexia was Cameron Nielson's daughter and that he, despite his name, had married into the family.
Hugh Farnham was discovered in a retirement home in Florida, living under an assumed identity, obsessively chewing on his rusks. He agreed to a televised debate, hosted by Dan Rather, with Cameron Nielson Sr. Farnham was still feisty on the show, but Cameron Nielson, looking younger now than his son, was as skilled as a great matador, and finally evened the score with his former tormentor, driving him to tearful contrition. Waving a fist at the camera, Cameron Nielson recited the names of those blacklist casualties he had avenged at last. At the reception after the show, Todd, learning for the first time of the ancient history of his family, spat in Hugh Farnham's face. The old inquisitor slunk into the night, spittle still dripping from his cheek.
Cameron, needing nothing, sat around the house, surrounded by other peoples' books and music and art. A journalist interviewed him for a book about his family, and when The Nielsons appeared, it made no mention at all of his professional l
ife. He did not mind.
He whistled, tunelessly. Alone, with no worries, he whistled. The whistling became louder, more piercing, more painful.
Sitting at his piano, he howled. He looked down and saw he had battered his fingers bloody against the wooden lid.
He was coughing.
The whistling sounded like feedback, and his hammering on the piano became a dying round of applause. He was in the light, but there was darkness all around.
One of the perils of dreaming too much was that you got flashbacks afterwards. He tried to clear the phantoms from his head and grasp reality.
He looked up and saw Minerva at her cello, and Alexia, young and alive again, in the wings.
He was not sitting at a piano. It was a theremin.
The whistling stopped, and the music began.
THREE
HIS HANDS hovered above the instrument, refusing to move, but the opening notes of the symphony came from the theremin.
Nobody noticed that he was not contributing. Tapes cut in and overlaid the unearthly siren-call of the electro-acoustic instrument, and Minerva's cello answered the melodic tonality with a delicately offhand echo.
Cameron was sweating. His hands were stuck in space, a foot away from the theremin. He felt as if he were pressing against a strong, polarised magnetic force.
But the theremin played its part by itself, as if it were programmed to.
The Telemachus Symphony swelled. The audience were hypnotised by the piece, each member, even those cynical about 'so-called "modern" music', knew they were present at a historic event. This was a premiere that would be remembered forever.
It was for Judi, Cameron decided. He must make that clear to the press. And for Dad.
