It Knows Where You Live (11 page)

I threw everything away except the MP3 player. I’d never had the money to afford to own one, and the idea of walking around with my own personal soundtrack held a certain egotistic appeal.

Opening the box, I inspected the contents and found them intact. There was, of course, the player itself, along with a set of small black ear buds and two USB leads meant for connecting to a computer.

Ah. A computer.
 

This was where my plan of constant musical accompaniment fell down. I didn’t have a computer...but I knew a woman who did. Unless she’d sold it to buy drugs. I was due to meet my friend Tina the following afternoon, and she owned a compact laptop someone had given her in exchange for a blowjob. The hardware was stolen—of course it was—but Tina was that kind of girl.

I took a closer look at the sleek black piece of kit in my hand, admiring the overall design. It was a sexy item; a piece of aspirational tat. I almost wished I had the money to buy stuff like this.

My thumb played across the power button, and with the minimum of pressure the machine lit up, a small screen with a blank display. The controls were quite instinctive; I found myself accessing the hard drive as if I had experience of such things. The song list was yet another blank screen, yet the memory screen showed there was information being stored on the device—a large slot of memory was filled.

Intrigued, I plugged the earphones into the player and slipped the buds into my ears. They were rather comfortable, I had to admit.

Pressing play, I sat down on the bed, kicked off my shoes, and waited to hear what the previous tenant had enjoyed listening to, perhaps late at night when he was unable to sleep.

Only static sounded in my ears, but there was a depth to the hissing that unnerved me. It sounded less like electrical interference than it did a distant ocean...and I found myself straining to hear something else behind the endless noise.

Closing my eyes, I opened my senses and reached out. The static seemed to part, allowing me to access whatever it was screening, and for the briefest of moments I thought I heard what sounded like discordant music. Then my body twitched—startling me awake in the way that happens when you feel as if you’ve fallen from a great height—and I realised I’d been poised at the edge of sleep.

Static hissed in my ears. The device was clenched in my hand.

I switched it off, placed it on the small cabinet near the bed, and lay down. Suddenly, without warning, I was very sleepy. Without further preamble, I slept, and did not dream.

The next day I attended a job interview arranged for me by a friend. Well, not really a friend: more of an occasional drinking companion.

“Why would you like to work here?” asked the interviewer, chewing on the end of a pencil. He was a short man, and his hair was the same tough texture as wire. His eyes were small, positioned low down on his face, and I’d already decided I did not like the look of him.

“It’s a good company with a strong ethic. I also want to try to build a career rather than just sit in a dead-end job.” In truth I’d forgotten what the job description was—something to do with admin, or perhaps payroll. Whatever it was, I did recall it was office based and paid more than my last temporary employment.

“Thank you, Mr Jules. We’ll be in touch by the end of the week.”

I smiled, stood, shook the man’s hand, and then left the room.

Outside in the corridor I had the oddest feeling I was lost inside the building; it was as if the entire internal layout had shifted while I was being interviewed, and the way out was different to the route I’d used to get inside.

I waited for the lift doors to open and stepped inside. By the time the lift reached the ground floor that queer sensation had left me, but its echoes remained, filling me with an intense and vivid paranoia.

I headed towards the pub where I was meeting Tina, dodging lunchtime shoppers and truanting school kids who stared malevolently at everyone they passed. The pub was located off Boar Lane, down near the canals, and as I headed in that direction the crowds thinned out until the only people sharing the footpaths were the ragged and poor-looking denizens of rooms like the one I rented.

Tina had always liked to drink in the bad parts of town.

She was waiting at the bar when I entered the building, sucking on a pint of lager with a lemonade top. She smiled at me, waved, and ordered me a Guinness.

“How you doing, love?” Tina threw her arms around me. She smelled of old sweat and fresh booze. Her eyes shone far too much and when she kissed my cheek her lips left a trail of saliva in their wake.

“Not too shabby. Got a new place, and maybe a new job. Be back on my feet in no time.”

Tina was nodding but I wasn’t quite sure why.

“You still using?”

Her cheeks reddened. She nodded, and then glanced down at the floor.

“What am I going to do with you?”

Tina laughed. Our friendship had always been honest and open. We never walked on eggshells and always punctured through the awkward moments with a jab of the truth.
 

“I know,” she said. “I was clean for two weeks, then I found myself climbing the walls and restless. It was only a matter of time before I buckled.”

“What about the streets? You still a working girl?” I already knew the answer yet felt compelled to ask.

“Now and then. Just enough to fund the habit.”

We drank in silence for a while until I remembered the MP3 player. I fished it out of my pocket and placed it on the bar top, pushing it towards her. “You know much about these things?”

Tina picked it up and glanced at it. “Yeah. I have about three or four back at the flat. This looks like a nice one. Where’d you get it?”

“Found it in the new place—the previous tenant left it in a drawer. Thought you might stick it on your laptop and see what’s on there. It’s weird, but I can’t seem to access the song list—well, I can, but it’s telling me there’s nothing on there when I know for a fact there is.”

Tina switched on the device, scrolled through a few screens, and then slid it back towards me. “Sure. Let’s drink up and go back to mine.”

Half an hour later we were lying sweating, our bodies bruised and our faces shining in the dull light of her room. We always ended up having sex when we met these days; it was almost a prerequisite. I’m not quite sure when that particular ritual began, but it seemed like a long time ago.

Tina’s left hand was resting on my right thigh. Her ring was cutting into my flesh but I didn’t have the heart to shrug her off. So I waited until she moved of her own accord and then shifted slightly on the worn mattress, wondering not for the first time how many men had been here before me.

“Let’s take a look at that player,” said Tina, sliding off the bed. I caught a glimpse of her Betty Boop tattoo as she moved across the room and threw on a bath robe. Then she sat down at a small desk and hit a button to rouse her laptop from its sleep mode.

By the time I joined her, standing at her side and staring at the screen, the device was connected and a file manager was open. The track listing offered up no clues; the screen was blank apart from the readout from the software.

“Weird,” said Tina, pressing buttons and moving her mouse across the desk top. “There’s clearly something held in the memory, but the listings say there’s nothing on here. Either the player itself is knackered or there’s something wrong with my software.”

“Maybe there are photos or some other kind of files on there?” I impressed myself with such technological insight.

“Already thought of that...not a sausage. Just empty space reading as saved data.”

“Ah, well. How about sticking some sounds on there for me to listen to in bed? I lost all my CDs when I was burgled last year and haven’t been bothered enough to get hold of any more.”

Tina laughed, and it was a nice sound: the laugh of a woman who knew the score and didn’t mess about when it came to getting what she wanted.

The cursor moved across the screen as Tina dragged and dropped some downloaded music files onto the device. One by one, the files vanished.

“Weird,” she said, her voice low.

She tried again, and we witnessed the same effect. For some reason, the player would not allow any new information to be copied onto the hard drive.

“Just forget about it. I’ll sell the damn thing down the pub.”

Tina shrugged her narrow shoulders, pulled the bath robe around her too-thin body, and turned to face me. She pushed the MP3 player into my waiting hand, stood, and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m going to have to ask you to go now, Jules. I have...an appointment.”

“What time’s he coming?”

She looked at the clock on the wall above the bathroom door, smiled, and then turned back to me. “Ten minutes.”

“I’ll make myself scarce.”

“Thanks, love. I know you hate to see me high, but I need something today. Something to take the edges off.”

Five minutes later I was out on the street, wondering if the tall Asian man who passed by me was Tina’s dealer. He stared at me from under the brim of his baseball cap, his lips curled into a sneer. He had all the moves, so was either the Man or a poseur trying to pretend he was the Man.

Later that evening, after a cheap dinner of fried chicken and greasy fries from the fast food joint on the corner, I went to bed and slipped the buds into my ears. The sound was the same, a deep hissing masking something more. This time I made out the music quicker, as if by hearing it once I’d made it easier to access again.

I closed my eyes and felt the room shift, as if the walls were shuffling slightly towards me. I tried to pick out a tune, but the music did not seem to have one. It was discordant, as I’d noted already, but there was something more than that. I began to think it wasn’t music at all; it was the voice of some strange being, an alien or creature from another dimension.

The world moved beyond my closed eyelids; despite being unable to see, I was acutely aware of subtle changes taking shape. The experience was one I’d had before, listening to music in the dark, eyes tightly closed, and feeling the entire world alter around me...an illusion, and one usually brought on by drugs or alcohol. But not this time: tonight I was sober, and the feeling was more intense.

I opened my eyes, but the room looked the same. I did, however, get the sense that I’d just missed something...some kind of furtive motion.

Again, I slept without dreaming, the sound of a distant sea on an unknown shore filling my head with strange promises.

Next day I decided to go for a walk. I went to a local park and sat on a wooden bench, surrounded by broken bottles, crushed beer cans and tin foil baggies rolled up into tiny silver balls. Two children played on a set of swings, their faces sombre and unimpressed. Soon they climbed off the swings, walked over to the slide, and began to kick the steps.

I watched the little vandals until they became bored and moved away. One of them stuck up his fingers at me; the other spat on the ground and ran a finger across his throat in the universal manner of a death threat. They must have been no more than seven years old.

“Wanker!”

I smiled at them, immune to it all.

Then I took the MP3 player from my pocket and applied the headphones. I had a craving for that other world, the one inside the player. The realisation hit me hard, but it made sense: someone had managed to record evidence of another place on the hard drive, perhaps by going there, or maybe it had been downloaded from some arcane website.

I laughed silently, amused by my own wild theories.

The hissing in my ears soothed me, filling me up as if I were a pit in the earth.

Eyes closed, I rocked to the arrhythmic music I could just about hear through the static. Lacking in musical training, I have always considered myself tone deaf, yet even I knew this was not normal music. There was something distinctly otherworldly about the sound, but for all I knew it could have been created by an experimental deejay or put together by an
avant-garde
artist to accompany an installation in some obscure gallery.

But it felt good to pretend, to act like this was an aural glimpse into another realm, a place where humans did not exist and the indigenous wild life was exotic and wonderful. It might be the place where all the myths originated: perhaps the Loch Ness monster drifted through the depths of that constant ocean, yetis ran in the snow-tipped hills, and dragons soared above them all.

Here, in this place, there were no junkies, no whores, no dead-end jobs and discarded futures.
 

I only realised I was crying when I lifted a hand to my face to scratch my cheek; my fingers came away moist, and when I opened my eyes I saw something—something like an afterimage. For an instant the park and the swings were no longer there, the road beyond had never existed, and the derelict flats across the way did not block the view. I saw vast open fields of cyan grass, a rippling stream of smoking water, the outline of what could only be some kind of animal—but with more legs and heads than was surely possible—as it loped behind a tree with small yellow birds instead of leaves.

Then the real world—or at least the world I had always been told was real—invaded the scene, covering it all up like a sheet being pulled across a screen.

I sat there for a long time, until the sky grew dark and groups of teenagers roamed the area. Then, my shoulders heavy with something that felt like a combination of grief and happiness, I walked the long journey to Tina’s place.

I rang her bell and banged on the street door, needing company, needing her.

The upper window jerked open above me. “What the hell’s going on?”

“It’s me, Tina. Please, can I come in?”

She threw down her keys and I let myself in, walking slowly along the cramped hallways and up the filthy stairs to her door.

I stood there until the door opened. Tina stood before me, her eyes dull, her skin pale and hanging loose on her bones. “You shouldn’t have come. You hate seeing me like this.” She staggered backwards, spinning into the room, falling onto the floor and giggling.