The Courage Consort

by Michel Faber

  'Bose,' he replied.

  Though Wim's English vocabulary was good, his accent was so thick that he seemed to have been schooled by a different process from that used by all the other Dutch people they'd met—interactive CD-ROMs, maybe, or those little translator gadgets you saw in brochures that fell out of the Radio Times.

  More worrying than his accent was the way he blushed and stammered when introduced to Dagmar: evidently he had a weakness for big-breasted young German women with muscular limbs, even if they did not look overly friendly. Perhaps he mistook Dagmar's glower for the mock-dangerous pout of an MTV babe.

  'Hi. I'm Wim,' he told her.

  'Great. Let's see the video,' said Dagmar.

  Small talk having reached its apex, they all got promptly down to business. Wim had brought with him a video of his images for Partitum Mutante. On the spine of the cassette, in silver felt-tip, he had scrawled 'PArTiTEm M!' This, more even than Mr. Waafels's appearance, caused alarm bells to toll inside the overheated skulls of the Courage Consort.

  There was a slight delay as the television proved not to be connected to the video player. To Wim, this was an eyebrow-raising oddity, something that could only be explained in terms of the Courage Consort having fiddled with the leads and plugs while using digital samplers, MIDI keyboards, or other sophisticated technologies. He could not have guessed that the Courage Consort simply did not watch television.

  Wim Waafels connected the machines with a practised, casual motion, the closest he came to physical grace. He then asked for the curtains to be drawn so the daylight wouldn't interfere with the clarity of his images. Roger obliged, or attempted to.

  'Ken it not be moor dark den dis?' Waafels enquired uneasily, as the room glowed amber in the muffled sunlight.

  Roger fiddled with the curtains, trying out one thing and another.

  'That's as dark as we're going to get it,' he said.

  They all kneeled around the television, except for Ben, whose massive body did not permit him to kneel; he sat on the divan, insisting he could see perfectly well from a little farther back.

  'OK,' announced Wim. 'De oddience is here, you are on de staitch, de lights go out—blekness!'

  The tape started to whirr through the machine, and the screen, at first snowy, went perfectly black. It remained perfectly black for what felt like a very long time, though it was probably only thirty seconds—a minute, at most.

  'You heff to imegine you are singing, of coorse,' Wim Waafels counselled them.

  'Of course,' said Julian, moving a little closer to the television so that he couldn't see Dagmar's face.

  The blackness of the screen was finally softening at its core, to a reddish-purple—or maybe it was an optical illusion brought on by eyestrain. But no: there was definitely something taking shape there.

  'In de beginning, de ooniverse woss widout form, yes?' explained Waafels. 'Darkness moofs on de face of de deep.' The videotape as it passed along the machine's play heads made a faint squeaking noise which set Catherine's teeth on edge; she wished Ben could be making his sonorous Tibetan moans to give this gloomy void a human soundtrack.

  After an eternity, the inky amorphous swirls finally coalesced into … into what? Some sort of glistening mauve orifice.

  'Now, do you know what iss it?' challenged Waafels.

  There was an awkward pause, then Ben spoke up.

  'I believe I do,' he said, his voice calm and gently resonant. 'It's a close-up of a larynx, as seen by a laryngoscope.'

  'Ferry goot, ferry goot!' said Waafels, happy to have found a soul on his wavelength. 'In de beginning woss de word, yes? De word dat coms from widdin de focal cords of Got.'

  Another eternity passed as the larynx trembled open and shut, open and shut, twinkling in its own juices. Catherine felt queasiness accumulate in her stomach as the picture became lighter and pinker, and she glanced sideways at her companions, to see if they were feeling it too. Roger's face was rigid with concentration, loath to miss any crucial details if and when they should come. Julian and Dagmar, though they would probably have hated to be told so, looked strikingly similar: incredulous, openmouthed, beautiful in their disdain. Catherine longed to turn and look at Ben, but she didn't want to embarrass him, so she reapplied her attention to the yawning aperture of flesh on the screen. Some sort of digital magic was being employed now to morph the larynx; the labia-like plica vocalis and vallecula were evolving, cell by cell, into the vulva of a heavily pregnant woman. Then, with agonising slowness, silent minute upon silent minute, the vagina dilated to reveal the slick grey head of a baby.

  The Courage Consort spoke not a word as the largo-speed birth took its vivid and glistening course on the screen before them. They were all intimately aware, though, that the duration of Partitum Mutante was a shade over half an hour, and the timer on the video player kept track of every second.

  When, at long last, the newborn Adam or Planet Earth or whatever he was supposed to be was squirming out into existence, his slow-motion slither almost unbearably eventful after what had gone before, the Courage Consort began to breathe again. Soon, they knew, the lights would go on.

  'Of coorse,' said Wim Waafels by way of qualification, 'it's a total different effect like dis, on only a smol screen.'

  'I'm sure it is,' said Roger.

  'In de life performance, de immitch will be ferry ferry bik, and you will be ferry smol. It will … enfelope you.'

  'Mmm,' said Roger, as he might have done if a Bedouin chieftain was watching him eat sheep's eyes at a politically delicate banquet.

  'Mmm,' agreed Catherine, suddenly glad to have her husband around to suggest le mot juste.

  Then, with heavenly timing, little Axel started crying upstairs, and Dagmar's ascension from the room was a fait accompli before Wim Waafels had a chance to ask her what she thought. He looked a little crestfallen to have lost the only member of his generation so abruptly, but he turned to the older, less gorgeous members of the Consort without ill feeling.

  'Dis giffs you an idea, I hope?' he said to Julian, plainly the next-closest to him in age.

  'It does, it does,' said Julian archly. 'I'm sure no one who sees this extraordinary work of yours will ever be able to forget it. My only regret is that I shall be onstage rather than in the audience.'

  Waafels hastened to reassure him that this base was covered.

  'I will make a video,' he said, 'off de performance.'

  'Splendid! Splendid!' crowed Julian, turning away from Roger Courage so as not to be inhibited by the older man's warning stare. 'A video within a video. How very postmodern!'

  Waafels smiled shyly as the grinning Julian slapped him on the back.

  Later, when Wim Waafels had gone home and Julian had excused himself, the Courages turned to Ben, who was pensively examining the first couple of printed pages of Partitum Mutante's score.

  'Well, what do you think, Ben?' sighed Roger.

  'I'm too old to claim to know anything about video art,' Ben conceded graciously. 'There is one little thing that worries me, though.'

  Still a bit pale and peakish from the slow-motion gush of afterbirth, Catherine waited in silence for him to give voice to his concern.

  'While it's utterly dark, in the blackness before the world is born,' mused Ben, 'how are we to see the music?'

  ***

  THE FOLLOWING DAY was the Consort's second-last in the Château de Luth, and they spent most of it arguing.

  Things started off civilly enough, in the short-lived morning hours of freshness before the heat set in. Catherine made Ben his havermout breakfast as usual, serene with pleasure at this wordless routine of nurture. He ate, she watched, as the sun flowed in on both of them, making them glow like light-bulbs. When it got too bright for comfort, Catherine squinted but did not stop looking, and Ben kept his eyes lowered, smiling into the steam of his porridge.

  Julian was holed up in his room, no doubt to avoid a reprise of last night's unpleasantness with Roger over the
Waafels affair. Roger had disapproved of Julian's sarcasm on the grounds that Waafels, if he'd taken it to heart, would have regarded Julian as speaking for the Courage Consort as a whole; Julian retorted that he damn well hoped he was speaking for the Courage Consort as a whole and that if Roger had any deep-seated enthusiasm for singing inside a pair of labia the size of a barn door he'd better come clean with it immediately.

  In the wake of this altercation, there'd been a curious change to the château's atmosphere, sonically speaking. Julian had removed the television from the public domain and carried it upstairs in his arms, claiming that if he was going to endure another sleepless night he needed something to keep him from going gaga. And, indeed, by midnight Catherine was hearing, from her own bed, the muted sounds of argument and tender Dutch reconciliation coming through the wall. It was a change from the uncanny silence, but not necessarily a welcome one.

  This morning, although she couldn't hear any identifiable television sounds filtering down into the kitchen, Catherine had a feeling it was probably still chattering away to Julian in his room, because the purity seemed to have been taken out of the silence somehow. There was an inaudible fuzz, like the sonic equivalent of haze from burning toast, obscuring Catherine's access to the acoustic immensity of the forest. She would have to go out there soon, and leave that haze behind.

  Inconveniently, Dagmar didn't want to go for a cycle. Looking fed up and underslept, she came into the kitchen with no discernible purpose except to check that Julian hadn't touched the eggs in the fridge.

  'My nipples are cracking up,' she grouched, causing Ben to blush crimson over his havermout behind her. 'First, one was still OK, now it's both of them. Today, it must rain—must, must, must. And I don't understand why you people let that asshole Wim Waafels go without hurting him.'

  Having run out of non sequiturs, she slammed the door of the refrigerator and tramped out of the kitchen.

  Catherine and Ben sat in silence as they heard Dagmar ambush Roger in the next room and start an argument with him. The German girl's voice came through loud and clear, an angry contralto of penetrating musicality. Roger's baritone was more muted, his words of pained defence losing some of their clarity as they passed through the walls.

  'There was never any suggestion,' he was saying, 'that we had any choice…'

  'I'm a singer,' Dagmar reminded him. 'Not a doll for nutcases to play with.'

  Roger's voice droned reasonably: '…multimedia event … we are only one of those media … problem with all collaborations … compromise … I'm not a Catholic, but I sing settings of the Latin Mass…'

  'This is the Dresden Staatsoper all over again!'

  On and on they went, until the listeners ceased to take in the words. Instead, Catherine and Ben let the sound of the arguers' voices wallow in the background, an avant-garde farrago of Sprechstimme.

  By and by, Julian came downstairs and, smelling blood, gave mere coffee and toast a miss and joined the fray instead.

  This was too much for Roger: fearing unfair odds, he called a meeting of the Consort as a whole, and the five of them sat in the front room where they had sung Partitum Mutante so endlessly, and bickered.

  'The way to stop this sort of fiasco ever happening again,' declared Julian, 'is to price ourselves right out of the loony market.'

  'What on earth do you mean by that, Julian?' sighed Roger.

  'Sing much more popular repertoire and command higher ticket prices. Do more recordings, get our pretty faces known far and wide. Then, whenever we're offered a commission, we pick and choose. And keep some sort of right of veto. No Italian arms dealers, no gynaecology buffs.'

  'But,' Roger winced, 'hasn't our strength always lain in our courage?—that is, our … um … willingness to be open to new things?'

  Catherine started giggling, thinking of the yawning vulva that was waiting to 'enfelope' them all.

  'Perhaps Kate is, in her own way, reminding us of the need for a sense of humour,' Roger suggested rather desperately.

  'No, no, I was just … never mind,' said Catherine, still chortling into the back of her hand. Roger was staring at her mistrustfully, imploringly: she knew very well he was trying to decide how crazy she was at this moment, how badly she might let him down. He needed her to be on his side, mentally frail or not; he needed her to see things his way, however impishly her inner demons might prevent her articulating it sensibly. She didn't have the heart to tell him that there weren't any inner demons making her laugh anymore; she just had more important things on her mind right now than the Courage Consort.

  'The King's Singers went across a bomb at the Proms,' persisted Julian.

  Roger bridled at this; it was a sore point with him. 'Look, I didn't cast my boat out on the dangerous sea of a cappella music,' he remarked testily, 'to sing "Obla-di, Obla-da" to a crowd of philistines in funny hats.'

  'A very large crowd,' Julian reminded him. 'How many people are going to be hearing us at the Benelux Contemporary Music Festival?'

  'For God's sake, Julian, are you suggesting we sing Andrew Lloyd Webber and "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in motet style?'

  'Oh bravo, Mr. Courage: reductio ad absurdum!' Julian was rearing up alarmingly, balletic with pique. 'I'm merely hummmmmbly suggesting you give a thought to what might put some reasonably intelligent bums on seats. The Beatles, it may astound you to know, inspire greater love than Pino Fugazza and Mr. Waffle put together—if such a pairing can be imagined without an ejaculation'—he gasped for breath—'of vomit.'

  'Yes, but…'

  'You know what would make a great encore for us?' raged Julian, quite crazed by now. 'Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" arranged for five voices.'

  Dagmar snorted loudly.

  'You think I'm joking?' exclaimed Julian, fizzing with mischief. 'Listen!' And he burst into song, a snatch of "Bohemian Rhapsody" showing off his own range from horrible faux-bass to fiercely accurate falsetto: 'Bis-mil-lah! No-o-o-o! We will not let you go—Let him go-o-o-o! Will not let you go—Let him go-o-o-o! No, no, no, no, no, no, no—Mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go…'

  Mercifully, Julian's fury dissipated before he reached the 'Beelzebub has a devil put aside' section so familiar from his answering machine, and he slumped back onto his knees.

  'You are insane,' pronounced Dagmar, awed, as silence settled again on the sweltering room.

  'What do you think, Ben?' pleaded Roger.

  Ben breathed deeply, blinking as bad vibes continued to float through the thick air.

  'I think one thing is not in question,' he said. 'We've been contracted to sing Partitum Mutante at the Benelux Contemporary Music Festival. If we do it, some people may question our judgment. If we refuse to do it, many more people will question our professionalism.'

  Dagmar shook a heavy lock of hair off her face in a paroxysm of annoyance.

  'You are all so British,' she complained. 'You would kill yourself so the funeral company wouldn't be disappointed. Why can't we tell the Benelux Music Festival to shove their Fugazzas and Waafels up their ass?'

  'Aahh … Perhaps we should approach this from the other end, so to speak,' said Roger, with grim optimism. 'We all seem to be assuming that the fallout from this event is going to be bad for our reputation—but who's to say it won't be the best thing that ever happened to us? If Partitum Mutante outrages everybody and gets the press steamed up, that'll generate a lot of word of mouth about the Consort. In that sense, whatever we may feel in our heart of hearts, the whole affair may push us up to another level of recognition.'

  'Oh, you slut, Roger,' said Julian.

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'I meant it good-naturedly.'

  Plainly, the discussion was doomed to be all downhill from here, but unfortunately there were still many hours of the day to get through. On and on, inexorable as a body function, the argument spasmed blindly along. Catherine, though she was kneeling in the midst of the battle, watched it as if from a distance. She knew Roger wouldn't
ask her opinion, not after she'd giggled; he'd be too afraid she'd disgrace him by chattering about underpants. Or he might be worried she'd just stare back at him in a soulless daze, as though he'd tried to summon her from the bottom of a deep, deep well. He didn't realise she was elsewhere now.

  It didn't impress her, actually, all this bluster about Partitum Mutante and the Consort's future, and she took pleasure in the fact that it didn't impress Ben, either. As often as she could get away with it, short of embarrassing them both, she turned to look at him and smiled. He smiled back, pale with tiredness, while between him and Catherine the stinging voices ricocheted.

  She thought: Dare I do something that might lead to the end of two marriages?

  In the end, it was Axel who came to the rescue again. Strange how this unmusical little creature, this uninvited marsupial whom they'd all imagined would meddle constantly with the serious business of singing, had left them to commune with Partitum Mutante uninterrupted for two solid weeks, only making himself heard when he could exercise his preferred role as peace broker.

  Today, he'd allowed the Consort to argue the morning and afternoon away, content at first to impose no more ambitious restrictions than to remind them, every few hours, to take a short break for food and drink. However, when nighttime came and they were still hard at it, Axel decided that drastic intervention was needed. Screaming at the top of his lungs, his mission was to lure his mother to his feverish little body, which he'd marinated in sufficient puke and ordure to earn himself a bath. Dagmar, interrupted just as she was about to announce her defection from the Anglo-German alliance, swallowed her words, stomped upstairs—and did not return.

  With her departure, some'séance-like bond of hostility was broken, and the Courage Consort dispersed, exhausted. They had resolved nothing, and the rain still hadn't come. Julian slunk off to be comforted by the murmurings of Dutch television; Roger said he was going to bed, though the expression of wounded stoicism on his face suggested he might be going to the Mount of Olives to pray.