by Rhys Hughes
I was sly. I had already rescued my bass from the basket, which was cast over the side of the ferry on the Channel crossing, but claimed it was a replacement, found slung around the shoulders of the ship’s figurehead. The fact it looked identical to my old instrument didn’t alert any suspicions. Nor that our hull was devoid of statuary. Before the other band members raised this second point, I answered the first by inviting them to apply nose to strings. They agreed there was an obvious difference. That’s the sort of gullible fool I travelled with. But I wasn’t greedy. I spent my share of the cash on a crate of whisky for us all: a reward for my ingenuity and also to keep them too sozzled to want to ask any difficult questions.
We decided to make a last monolithic bid for glory. We wrote a lot of new material, fused it together into a suite with inaccurate literary and philosophical references, changed the name of our hitherto anonymous band to a single blank space, arguably an equally unmarketable label, though apparently it worked for lone gunmen in Old Mexico and tentacled monsters in New England, and booked a night in a Birmingham hotel, the same one I squat atop. We had to hitch-hike to the city in separate vehicles and our new keyboards player hopped a freight train which plummeted off a bridge outside Swindon. We picked up a substitute on the way: a fellow locked in the boot of the car our vocalist was travelling in. He heard the thumping at the same time as his driver opened the glove-compartment to reveal a collection of used knives. Fortunately our vocalist is also a madman, and a bigger one.
At least that’s what I heard when I rang the hotel from Coventry to say I was going to be late. My luck wasn’t great that day and I’d caught scores of little rides with slow drivers. There was interference on the telephone line, background giggles and grunts. It sounded like a party in half-swing. It boded well for a successful evening if people were already gathering. I hung up and returned to the road, thumb extended. I used my left hand for this gesture because I couldn’t risk losing my playing digit if a vehicle sped by too close. I completed the final stage of my journey on the back of a motorbike. We spluttered into the walls of rain which defend Birmingham from external thoughts of joy. The oily droplets slicked my soul as well as my face and I somehow knew I would never be dry again.
I was deposited near the hotel and ran down the few remaining streets until I reached it. A tall, thin building with crumbling plaster. Although the day was drawing to a close and the sky was getting dim, no lights shone from the grimy windows. The front door was open and I entered the lobby. It was deserted and the dust lay thick on the dead potted plants and mouldy carpet. But there was a key waiting for me on the counter at Reception, at least I assumed it was for me, and I took it and went in search of my room. I needed to relax for a moment before joining my comrades for the concert. I climbed the stairs to the second floor, groping in the murk and listening for sounds. There were none.
I fumbled with the key in the lock and opened the door to reveal a spacious but oppressive chamber. I threw the light switch and lingered on the threshold of sinister vacancy. There was a mystifying delay before the electric bulb hanging from the ceiling began to glow, almost as if it had forgotten how to work. The yellowing wallpaper and rotting furniture raised the suspicion that this room hadn’t been used for many decades. The skeleton of a cat reclined on the bed. I shook it off by yanking the quilt, and kicked the individual bones under the bed’s iron frame. Then I hurled myself on the mattress and stared at the dead eye of the antique television standing on its own legs in the corner. It had a perfectly round screen set in a massive wooden case. There were all sorts of extra attachments fitted to that frame, hooks and drawers and hollow cylinders, as if the unwieldy piece of equipment doubled up as a gentleman’s valet.
I grew bored resting. I twiddled my best thumb against the sinews of my bass. The ceiling provided no outstanding attractions. Abruptly I stood and went in search of my colleagues and our audience. Back in the lobby I found the telephone which I had earlier rung, but the dust over it was hardly disturbed. Where was everyone? When I attempted to step onto the street to survey the hotel again from outside, I received a shock. The front door was closed and locked. I shrugged, trying to feel relief that at least somebody else was about. I turned and passed through a succession of identical chambers, bearing different names and functions, restaurant, sauna, storeroom, eventually coming to the dancehall, supposedly our venue.
It was empty and utterly silent. The dust was inches thick and the imprints of the shoes of forgotten dancers resembled a choreography schematic. Here was a tango, an ephemeral wild evening, feasibly from the 1920s, preserved as an intaglio design in a desert of skin flakes. I wandered to the stage, paying my respects to history by slotting my own feet into the prints. There was absolutely no sign of any recent activity, no equipment or wires. It was completely bare. I left through the wings, drifted among the backstage cells, found another staircase and followed it up to the second floor. I roamed the corridors, listening for sounds. Then I returned to my room.
I stretched out on the bed next to my bass and fell into a light sleep. The rain against my window in no way resembled applause. Maybe I dreamed of adulation, but for scarcely longer than I expected to receive it in reality. I opened my eyes and checked my watch. Less than an hour until midnight. Our gig should be drawing to a climax now, the separate instruments, after playing solos which tugged against each other, coming together in time and key as the suite took its final crystalline form. And yet the hotel was dead. Had I come to the wrong place? If so, there was nothing I could do about it, especially as I was now trapped inside. I decided that the error, if there really was one, could be blamed on my attitude. Clearly I needed to get deeper into the swing of the occasion. A desperate, absurd measure but the only option which presented itself to my somewhat troubled mind.
That feeling of having just missed out on a chance is the one I fear and despise most. Acting like a rock star seemed the only positive option left, however little it currently appealed to my nerves. My limbs were stiff, my whole metabolism sluggish. But I roused myself to perform a traditional gesture of professional defiance. I resolved to throw the television set out of the window. The management, if they existed, would expect it and so would my fellow musicians, elusive as they were, not to mention our hypothetical audience. I grasped the sides of the frame but found it too heavy to move. Then a peculiar notion entered my head: that it might prove to be lighter if I switched it on. The electromagnetic field set up by the ancient circuits would push against the Earth’s own magnetic field, allowing me to glide it along the floor to the window and the moist oblivion of a bottomless puddle.
I flipped the brass switch. The tubes warmed up very slowly. A tiny bright dot appeared at the centre of the screen, and even before it expanded it seemed full of the energy and potential of a new or parallel universe. I felt I was watching the birth of a different reality, a cosmos which wanted nothing more to do with me, its creator. There’s a word for this phenomenon: Deism. I learned it when we plundered philosophical dictionaries for references for our musical suite. I peered more closely at the screen. Now the sound came through from the primitive speakers, a hiss of ambient radiation which gradually settled down into something more audible, the chaotic mutterings of an excited crowd. As the spot of light grew, I heard music, familiar because I knew it well, but odd because I had never listened to it from the outside. Previously I had helped play it.
The dot expanded to fill the circular screen. Perhaps it continued beyond the limits of this circumference, but there was no way of telling. Slotted between the static specks were pixels of meaning. A group scene, profoundly human and yet disturbingly alien: a conventional cameo distorted by immense distance and depth, as if the signal had circumnavigated the universe before returning to this point of origin. Naturally, in such an ambitious transmission there was bound to be a lag, but not just of time: also of inclusion and rôles. My mind slowly interpreted the soup of angry colour before me. It was the climax of a co
ncert, my gig, taking place now in this hotel, and there was a large audience, but I was missing. The new keyboards player, whom I had never seen, was compensating for my absence by pounding out the bass lines on an electric organ with his left hand.
There was wild clapping and cheering. The pompous suite hadn’t turned sour after all. The band dismounted the stage and struggled through the audience, pushing something before them. The crowd parted reluctantly. I recognised the sweat on the faces of the vocalist, lead guitarist and drummer, and beneath the pungent moisture a communal flush of determined excitement. The gig was barely cool and already they were forcing pleasure from the aftermath. When they were halfway across the dancefloor I saw what they were pushing. It was a model of the hotel, mounted on castors as our laundry basket had been. Possibly it was the laundry basket, rescued from the sea, washed up the mouth of a river and through a series of locks into the canal system which watered Birmingham in cruel alliance with the rain, and now converted into this replica, impressive and abominable, complete with crumbling plaster and grimy unlit windows.
What did they intend to do with it? Larger it grew as it approached the surface of the screen from the other side. Soon the band members were obscured by its apparent magnitude, its bogus bulk. It suddenly accelerated, as if on the lip of a cliff, and tipped forward out of the screen. There was no sharp crack of breaking glass. It passed effortlessly through the flickering bubble, tumbled down and shattered on the floor of my room. Pieces of chimney and roof broke underfoot, a jagged edge of rusty guttering gashed my ankle. I drew back in alarm. I had seen many television sets hurled out of sundry hotels, but this was the first time I had witnessed a hotel ejected from a television set. I glanced at the screen for an explanation, but already the picture was returning to a dot. Somewhere a fuse had blown.
Refusing to accept the treachery in this experience, I scooped up a fragment of the model and took it to show my colleagues, who I knew I would never find. I foolishly imagined I could return for the other pieces. I also took my bass, slung over a shoulder. When I left my room, the door slammed inevitably behind me. I explored each corridor of the building, knocking on every door, calling the names of my former friends. Whenever I passed through a chamber, it locked itself behind me in a nonexistent wind. The darkness seemed thicker, the world lonelier. Had everybody evacuated to another universe without informing me? Slowly I was denied access to the majority of the hotel’s internal space. As I entered the kitchens for the first and last time, I made sure of pocketing the few ancient cans of soup I discovered in the mainly bare cupboards.
The band had obviously forsaken me, and now the hotel was following its example. My options were narrowing as I probed the passages and stairways. I was being herded by the slamming doors, the thickening gloom, to a destination unknown, but one I still invested my remaining hope in. Was the building guiding me within itself to a reunion with my comrades? My rational mind doubted it, but my emotions were desperate to believe that, yes, they were waiting for me in some obscure attic room, huddled together with their triumph, a surprise party for me, primed and coiled, requiring only my belated appearance to discharge itself and put my life back to rights.
No such luck. And that’s not too surprising, bearing in mind the fact that my life was never good enough to warrant a return to itself. When I reached the top floor of the hotel, I indeed found a trapdoor set into the ceiling, and a ladder reaching up to it, but when I climbed the rungs and pushed my head through the hinged square, my face emerged not in an attic, warm and itchy with rough insulating fabric, but out onto the roof, slates gleaming in the remorseless rain. I would have tried to climb back down, but I felt the ladder tipping, and was forced to haul myself up and out onto the slippery slope. The trapdoor shut like an apprehended yawn, and my fingers were too wide to fit in the gap around it and hook it back open. I was trapped outside with my sense of failure, high enough in normal circumstances for a decent view over the city, but there was no normality here: this was Birmingham and nothing at all was decent. The sky wept for me.
I went through the expected motions of a stranded adventurer, searching for a way down, peering over the gables and gutters, looking for a drainpipe to slide me to the ground. There were none. I considered jumping to the roofs of adjacent buildings, but the distances were too great, the street too far and hard below. Not being an adventurer but a musician, I gave up at the base of the solitary chimney, too narrow to climb down, too squat to provide any shelter from the rain, and sat with my bass across my knees. I thumbed a few notes, the opening bars of my new cage. I was marooned on the elevated grey of a temperate eyesore: a Crusoe without a canoe, pink or otherwise, a Friday without a tomorrow. A man without sympathetic critics. But I did not die immediately, despite my mood. I lingered and linger still.
Lately, however, I have noticed a change in the geography of the roof. The two sloping sides are getting steeper. This is no illusion, for in the early hours I can hear the hotel narrowing, drawing in its walls, compressing itself like the concertina we planned to use in the next incarnation of our band as a Celtic-roots outfit. And as the hotel grows thinner, the sides of the roof, hinged at the ridge along the top, must obey the rules of shapes and increase their angles. There are no doors to slam here: the edifice has found another way of rejecting me. The process is exasperating, for the hotel dares not draw attention to itself and must move so gradually that nobody will notice what is happening. Not that this precaution is necessary. There are no pedestrians below, nor have I ever glimpsed an inhabitant of the city in any of the surrounding buildings.
Soon I must slip and fall to my doom. Into how many pieces shall I break? It dimly occurs to me, a thought as slick as any to be expected under the onslaught of such oily rain, that the hotel is not vindictive or even amoral, but that it is trying to help my reputation. Fame is not an elusive thing, as is often stated, but is everywhere. And maybe that’s the real reason for my lack of success. So much fame has been used up on so many other people that there’s none left for me. Or is my customary view of young hopefuls as empty vessels waiting to be filled with liquid fame wrong? What if fame is the vessel and we the potential contents? That vessel, the proverbial hall, is crammed to the brim and there’s no more room left, unless, and here I lick my lips as I contemplate the long drop, the additional contents are first smashed into tiny shards, ground into powder.
Yes, that seems likely, and explains why so many artists of my calibre only achieve posthumous fame. Death is essential for reasons of space. We are being pounded to fit. Because I was late arriving at the hotel, I missed out on its first promotion, the granulating of an entire universe, and nameless band, into light and static to fill a television screen. In a similar way, the pillar of a temple from a lost city buried under the dunes of a forgotten desert can just occupy an hourglass by being pulverised. A better example emerges from my childhood. I remember the only birthday present I ever received: from an eccentric aunt. I opened the parcel in breathless excitement to find the fragments of a broken teapot. I assumed it had shattered in transit, at the rough hands of the postal service. I carefully glued the pieces back together. The teapot was a magnificent reconstruction of dismay, ready to brew my bitter frustration. For when it was finished, I realised it was larger than the box it had arrived in. Make of that, and the other digressions in my life, what you will.
Fallow
“I once tried to saw a ghost in half,” said the first traveller. “It was a highwayman, all rusty flintlocks and tricorne hat. I was cutting wood in a forest when he appeared from nowhere. He offered me a menacing look and raised one of his pistols. The saw was the only weapon I had, so I snatched it up and set to work. I was nearly through his neck when he disappeared.”
The second traveller blinked wide eyes. Alone in the cornfield, they rested in the elongated shade of a battered scarecrow. The sun was already setting over the rolling hills and a light breeze had sprung up. They had cast their blankets in preparation
for the night ahead and now there was just enough time for a few tall tales before the fading light prompted sleep and callow dreams of a more comfortable life.
“I don’t believe that.” The second traveller shook his head and began cleaning his fingernails with a little stick. “Ghosts are supposed to be insubstantial. I don’t see how you could even begin to saw one in half.”
The first traveller pouted. “It’s true, I tell you!” He reached into the pocket of his threadbare jacket for tobacco and filled his clay pipe. “He vanished in a cloud of sulphurous smoke. When I looked at the blade afterwards there was a single speck of blood on one of the teeth. Nothing more.”
The second traveller remained unconvinced. “Ghosts are not solid,” he replied. “They are like clouds. They are like childhood memories or friends who no longer write letters. They are no more tangible than stars in the daytime or hours lost on a sea voyage.” He considered these observations and judged them worthy of repeating. Eventually he grew tired and turned on his companion. “Whoever heard tell of a solid ghost?”
“I have,” I announced suddenly. In truth I had tried to restrain myself from speaking. But the subject was so dear to my own heart that I found it impossible not to add my own comments. “Wait! Don’t go! I won’t hurt you. This is private land, sure enough, but I won’t report you. Have no fear.”
The two travellers, who had jumped up at the sound of my voice, eyed each other warily and then turned to face me. I knew that I would have to assuage their doubts further. I adopted a gentle, musical tone and did my best to smile.
