Nova Swing (32 page)
Authors: M John Harrison
“What are those things?” she whispered to herself.
“The quarantine orbit,” Liv Hula told her, “gets bigger every day.”
Straint Street: Edith Bonaventure knocked out Liv Hula’s old zinc bar and had a small stage built where it used to be. The floor was ripped up and replaced with black and white tiles. A contractor fixed her some wall panels of faux mahogany in a warm burnt-orange shade. Edith dispensed with the ceiling fans and fitted chandeliers in their place. She had a new bar manufactured from one long block of artfully melted glass, backlit glass shelves behind.
With the change of theme she wanted light. The theme was Edith. It was all of Edith’s memorabilia, with which she could now experience a different, much more certain, much more creative relationship. Light was everywhere, gilding the keyboard ivory of fifty or sixty accordions in their deluxe presentation cases lined with every shade of pink from salmon to neotony; glittering as off shallow water from clear resins over maroon and ginger metalflake finishes; spiking the corner of your eye with reflections and interference patterns of otherworldly weirdness. There were silver buckles on every strap to catch it, and brass-plate rocket ships craftsman-tacked to silky alien wood finishes: but chrome shooting star emblems predominated.
“Because,” Edith would explain, “that’s what I was, in my day.”
Twice a week she got up on stage and played tango standards to a packed house, adding curios and marginal items for variety and to demonstrate the strength in depth of her technique. Some of these—
Lindie’s Alcine Rein,
for instance, which was really a polka written for a five-million-year-old instrument no one was sure how to play—grew popular in their own right. Despite the fading ads recovered from venues all over the Halo, which she set to fluttering round the room with news of gigs she had played twenty years before, no one remembered her. Instead, they received her act as something novel and surprising. This hardly mattered to Edith, to whom it seemed enough that she should rediscover herself. She stood dazzled in the spotlight in her straps and taps, her pipeclayed face, her too-tight little costume, perhaps with a cowboy theme that night, and she could hardly tell herself from the thirteen-year-old Accordion Kid in the hologram. She had begun to feel awkward again without the burden of the instrument, as if perpetually released to lean backwards from the waist. She practised new tunes in the afternoon.
Edith was always on the premises, but she didn’t keep bar. For that, she had hired Liv’s ex–beach bunny, who, it turned out, called himself Nicky Rivera because he liked that upscale brand of luggage. Nicky was a successful choice. He lived quietly above the business. He fixed the sink. His people skills proved pivotal in attracting trade. He helped out with new acts too: Edith was picking up musicians from all over the city. Within months they were crammed every night.
The crowd was new to the tango, pleased with itself because it learned so quickly when to cheer and when to be rapt. Its signature was high-end cocktails, honey-coloured fur; its underwear, Nicky could confirm, was from Uoest. It was a slumming crowd, and if she hoped to gentrify the street by her efforts, Edith could only be disappointed. But as a result of her investment in herself, the reputation of her venture grew out beyond Straint, and even Saudade itself, out into the Beach stars and across the Halo, and she had to be content with that. Not many people get two chances to be new. She stopped playing the gates of the corporate port. Instead, she placed her own ads with the rickshaw companies, and later with the tourist lines themselves.
Sometimes the applause at the end of the evening caused her some tears. Then she would whisper, “This encore I would like to dedicate to the one who meant most to me in this life, Emil, my father:
Le Tango du Chat,
which he particularly enjoyed,” which was how Liv Hula’s bar came by its new name.
One afternoon near Christmas, Liv herself could be found sitting at a table with the Accordion Kid, drinking vodka and Brilliantine, no ice. Out on Straint the chopshops were closed early. Little hard gusts of wind ran up and down the street, driving the flurries of snow before them; while inside, on the dusty unlit stage, three teen sisters in sequinned one-pieces cast sidelong glances at Nicky the barkeep, who sat on the edge of the stage in conversation with their manager. “Sun and shade sometimes seem like equal things,” Liv heard him say. “Both, in a way, kind of illuminating?”
At this the Accordion Kid, her sensibilities honed by thirty years in bars, smiled and closely watched Liv Hula’s face.
“So now how do you like what I did?” she said.
Liv wasn’t sure. It was Christmas. It was coming dark. Next day she would be out on the cusp of a new life, a rocket jockey delivering unwaybilled cargoes to ports she didn’t know on planets she was the last to hear of; some of those cargoes would be more clandestine than others. The first time Liv came back to the Tango of the Cat, some weeks before, she had been ready for change, but also nervous what she would find. When she went inside, ten years of her life tucked themselves away in an instant, like the theoretical dimensions of long-ago cosmology. This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren’t the person you were before you got trapped; you weren’t the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren’t someone entirely different either. Pondering these notions, she heard herself say:
“It seems very successful.”
“I promised you I wouldn’t be sentimental,” Edith said, and fetched Liv another drink.
They were joined by Irene and Fat Antoyne, whose first time it was at Le Tango. Anyone would have mixed feelings, was Irene’s belief, about returning to a previous stamping ground. She had forgotten, she had to own, what Black Cat White Cat looked like in those past days; though it would always stay mixed up in a part of her life she could not find it in her heart to reject. The fat man, meanwhile, rubbernecked around, then fell into a game of Three Dick Hughie with Nicky the barkeep, so no one knew what he thought. Night drew on. After a few more drinks they left for Carver as a threesome. It was a pity, Edith said as she walked Liv Hula to the door, that it had been too early in the day to get an idea of what a good trade she did.
“Though I never knew it so slow, even at this time.”
When they had gone, calling to one another, “Hey, this snow!” in receding voices down the street, she picked up her instrument of choice at that time—a worn old three-row diatonic in pearlescent mint-blue, with a contrasting bellows which revealed in its open phase the ace of hearts, or perhaps a welcoming vulva—and played a few notes. That didn’t seem to suit her. She refused another drink. She picked up one of Emil’s notebooks she always kept by her, and leafed through it. Five o’ clock, a tall woman entered the bar and sat down at a table by the door.
This woman had blonde hair cropped down to nothing much, and a fuck-off way of moving only the heavily tailored can achieve. Some kind of datableed ran oriental-looking ideograms down her arm. She parked a pink 1952 Cadillac roadster at the kerb outside. Known to everyone as a police detective operating out of what used to be called Site Crime, she was a frequent visitor at Le Tango. You also saw her at the fights. She knew the talent, she knew their chops. She knew Straint. She would come by early and stay late. Her order: double Black Heart rocks. She would stare around at the clientele as if they puzzled and amused her in equal parts. This evening she sent Nicky the barkeep away with a smile which said she would probably see him again soon; then nodded over at Edith Bonaventure.
“Good book?” she said. “You’re always reading it.”
It was a busy night in the end. They had a guest two-piece over from some surf bar down on the Corniche, an old man who’d had himself Zipped to look like Samuel Beckett, a young man in a suit a size too big, keyboards and saxophone, bebop jazz, complicit, clever deconstructions of simple popular tunes, stuff Edith didn’t get, but a clear winner with the corporate clientele who came in once a week to hold shouted conversations and spill Giraffe beer. Three a.m. it was all over. The two-piece packed itself away, took its money, melted into the night. Dry snow continued to blow up and down the street outside. It didn’t settle. After the barkeep said goodnight and went upstairs, only Edith and the police detective remained. It worked out like that most nights. They sat at their separate tables. Every so often one of them might look up and smile at the other, or go to the door and stare along Straint Street towards the event site. A rocket from the noncorporate port cut the sky like scissors.
A version of Chapter One was published at Amazon.com under the title “Tourism” a few paragraphs of Chapter Ten appeared in
Locus
as part of an essay. I’m indebted to Luis Rodrigues, who made me think about
saudade
; Jukka Halme for the Finnish tango; Zali Krishna, not just a webmaster, but an eye across the manuscript; and Philippa McEwan, who loaned me her house to write in. The Phillips family proved as kind and supportive as ever.
M. JOHN HARRISON
is the award-winning author of eight previous novels and four collections of short stories.
Viriconium
was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize and
Climbers
won the Boardman Tasker Award. His most recent novel,
Light,
was awarded the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was short-listed for the 2002 Arthur Clarke Award.
LIGHT
VIRICONIUM
THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPEN
TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS
SIGNS OF LIFE
THE COURSE OF THE HEART
THE LUCK IN THE HEAD
CLIMBERS
THE ICE MONKEY
THE MACHINE IN SHAFT TEN
THE CENTAURI DEVICE
THE COMMITTED MEN
NOVA SWING
A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Gollancz edition published in Great Britain in 2006
Bantam trade paperback edition / October 2007
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2007 by M. John Harrison
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harrison, M. John (Michael John), 1945–Nova swing / M. John Harrison.
p. cm.
“A Bantam Spectra book”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90429-1
I. Title.
PR6058.A6942N68 2007
823'.914—dc22
2007008288
