Song Of Time (2 page)

The company I chose to cheat death with, although they would never have used that term, has centres in most of the world’s major capitals, as well as a conveniently local—but not too local—office in Bodmin. I was basically anonymous—music only gives you a certain kind of fame—and I submitted to old-fashioned interviews with real people, and rigorous mental and medical assessments, and to group sessions with others of the soon-to-pass. We sat awkwardly in our circles of soft-backed chairs beneath marble heads and goldlists of dignitaries long gone. Death, we were assured, is no longer a final barrier. Life can continue.
You
can continue. It doesn’t require faith, and it certainly doesn’t need God. Effort yes, and a little self discipline, and then some money. But what is there which doesn’t need those things? Some of us penitents were far older than I was; shuffling landcrabs in their protective wires and carapaces. Some were younger. Some were plainly seriously ill. There was even one child.

I booked myself in for the necessary procedure in mid-August, almost exactly three weeks after my last performance in Sydney, and I wished it were sooner, and worried that I’d left it too late. I almost ran towards the granite pillars of Bodmin’s old public hall on the allotted morning, and I was so relieved when the arms of the couch finally closed around me that I scarcely felt afraid. Then I breathed the smell of burnt bone as the crystal seed of my immortality whined its way into my skull.

I kept saying to myself—it was my mantra—that none of this was particularly strange. After all, the dead have long been with us. For centuries, their faces have stared down at us from paintings, and then those paintings became photographs, and the photographs became strips of image, and those images began to move. Soon, the dead were speaking to us from the horns of gramophones; they hovered in the dark of cinemas until they migrated into the glass screens we kept within our homes, and those screens grew cleverer and more reactive until the glass which separated us from their far side began to dissolve. The crystal fields expanded and we, the living, stepped in—or the dead, the passed, have drifted out.

Memories, I’ve been told, are crucial. Memories are what you are. Forget your worries about what you will become—that will take place anyway—surround yourself instead with things which are important to you, even if they are painful. Submerge yourself in time. Swim in it. Drown. Well, I’m doing that now, sitting at this desk.

My elbows slide. My fingers tremble through brittle hair. Already, the sun is surprisingly high, pushing through the clouds, catching in lazy flashes across the edges of the waves. I can’t just sit here. I can’t just wait. I have to do something. I can’t simply die. I used to know a composer— I used to know many composers, but this was Karl Nordinger—who once told me that the answer to any problem is always there, right in front of you. But what does that mean now, sitting at this desk, in this room, with this man I’ve rescued—how can any of this ever make any kind of sense?

Shoving things aside, I notice something silvery lying beneath a balled-up Chanel scarf. The stuff we leave behind. A Sony Seashell, a long-defunct kind of personal music player, regards me with its shattered eye. When did I last listen to you? When did you last work? I work open a drawer, shoving the object down beneath reams of staved paper in a kind of burial, but something else blocks the way as I strain to slide the drawer back in. Reaching in and around, I find the culprit and haul it out. An old Smith Kendon barley sugar sweet tin—the sort they used to sell in petrol stations and motorway service areas for those endless journeys people once took in their hand-driven cars. Somehow, tossed aside but never quite thrown away, it’s made it across all these years as far as Morryn. The round, bronzy lid resists the scrabble of my feeble fingers, then gives. Flashing with fragile light, it exhales a salty, herby smell.

EVERYBODY DOES IT, SIS. You know that smell you sometimes get in the front room on Sunday mornings after Mum and Dad have had people round? It’s because they’ve been smoking dope…”

Leo and I were sprawled on a rug beneath the withered cherry tree in our back garden one hot summer afternoon. I’d been mimicking my brother’s lazy monosyllabism, his arms behind-the-head pose, as we gazed up at the splintered sky. Now, I had to turn. He chuckled.

“You
knew
that, didn’t you? Don’t you remember that time you came downstairs and Mum couldn’t stop laughing when she carried you back up?”

Not that I did remember, but I didn’t particularly doubt what he was saying either. It fitted some of the evidence. Windows open when it was raining. A dim memory of candlelit adult faces beaming at me through an odd dinner party haze. And yes, that smell, which I’d always thought of as pleasantly homely; like our old Hessian doormat, or bonfire smoke.

“There’s no harm in it, you know. Some doctors prescribe it to help with neural diseases.”

Calmly, I stroked the dry grass beside the rug. “It’s a bit deceitful, isn’t it? To do something without admitting…?”

“That’s what parents are for.” Leo chuckled again. “Dad even gave me his
be careful about drugs
talk a few years back—you’re probably due the same one soon. He admitted to what he called
experimenting himself
back in his student days, but that was about as far as it went. You know the top of the unit in the kitchen by the fondue set?

That’s where they used to keep their stash. I even nicked some for myself a couple of times, but then it got moved, and Mum said something about people having rights to privacy although she didn’t have the nerve to say what she really meant. So Leo’s a good boy now. Leo always gets his own.”

This was less of a surprise—my brother was, after all, seventeen— although I felt the same sense of privilege I always did when he shared something of his world with me. Despite the times we spent together, I felt that he existed at some indefinable distance from me, living a life which was bigger and more interesting. He often had a look of a deep but secret amusement in his eyes. He had it now.

“Tell you what. It’s about time you tried…”

Already, he was standing up, and I gazed at the redbrick walls which surrounded our garden as he ambled towards the house. We were entirely alone. By nature, I was a conformist, but, like all conformists, I secretly wanted to break my own rules. And I was, after all, a child of the twenty first century. And Leo was my brother. And it was only dope.

He re-emerged with a tinkling jug of orange juice, along with a tin which had once held Smith Kendon boiled sweets. I wiped off condensation and poured out juice, pretending an absorbed disinterest as Leo unfurled a leaf of cigarette paper and snapped a steel lighter and crumbled some brown stuff. He ran his tongue along the edge of the paper and twisted it at the tip. He sneezed.

“This isn’t one of my finer efforts.”

Shrugging as if I’d seen better, I gulped the juice.

“Sis, do you know what this’ll do to you?”

“It’ll make me feel a bit happy…a little giddy.”

“Glad they’re teaching you something at school. Move over…” Shuffling back onto the rug, he snapped the lighter a few more times. It gave off pleasantly petroly tang. “You know you don’t have to do this? I’ll get into all sorts of trouble if you tell anyone—especially Mum and Dad. But some friend of yours is going to offer you this soon enough now, and you’ll know what to expect, and whether to say yes or no. Have you heard of Bill Clinton, Roushana? Never mind; the trick is to inhale…”

The paper glowed and cracked. Warm, sweet smoke rolled from his lips. “It’s not like sucking lemonade through a straw. Pretend you’re simply breathing. Pretend this is air…”

I leaned forward, mouth agape, and I felt the papery nudge of the joint against my lips. As if it was air, as if I was diving, I sucked it in with a great inwards sweep, and something exploded within me. I rocked back, gasping, and clamped a glass of orange to my lips. Juice shot out from my nose and ran across my brother’s arm.

“Hey!” Leo was laughing, and I was laughing as well, as he wiped himself on a corner of the rug, and took another drag. This time the smoke vanished within him for so long that I thought it would never emerge, and I longed to do better when he finally offered it back to me. I tried to let the smoke fall into my mouth, but most of it still erupted, and by then the joint, the roach (for these terms seemed to arrive inside my head along with the smoke) was so ruined that Leo had to unpick what was left and start again. But I was already lying back, letting the cherry tree spin about me. Thinking—this is what this feels like; whatever this is.

I don’t know how much marijuana smoke I actually inhaled that summer afternoon. The day was so still, the air so pooled within the walled heat of our garden, that breathing and being there with Leo was probably enough. Someone had started up a mower a few houses off and a tiny plane was making its way from bough to bough across the solid blue. I thought of the people up there in that long silver tube. When the mower paused, I expected them to fall.

Then, and with a dope-croak to his voice, Leo began to talk about the future. How Mars would cease to hang red in the sky and turn verdant green, and Venus would shift from white to oceanic blue. Soon, long steel ships will dart from existence to existence, probability to probability, world to wondrous world. It’s there for us, Sis, waiting ahead in this century in which we’re so lucky to have been born. Leo certainly knew that such visions were already outdated, but that didn’t matter: what mattered on that afternoon was the dream, and the way he said
you and I, Sis
. What mattered was lying beside my brother on that frayed rug, and I think that Leo, for all his drawling know-it-allness, really did imagine then that the world was a place of endless possibility, a ripe fruit which he would soon reach out to possess.

The afternoon unfurled. My face felt stiff from dried-up orange juice and too much smiling. Every blade of grass grew a shadow like the tiny flecks of stubble I could see on my brother’s chin, and I was studying our hands, the smallness and Indian-brownness of my own against Leo’s knuckly shades of Anglo-Saxon pale, when I heard the boom of the front door, and someone calling his name. Unmistakably, it was his girl-friend Blythe Munro’s voice, and was that not a small sigh of irritation which escaped from Leo’s bitten underlip as he cleared the wreckage of our spent joint and squeezed down the lid of his Smith Kendon tin?

“Out here!” he shouted, but Blythe was already unshouldering her cello case at the French windows, then saying
Hi Roushana
as if she was surprised to find me here.

“Been busy, eh?” Her mouth made an effort to smile as her eyes took in the litter of paper and ash. “You
did
say I should look in…?”

“Sure.” I watched the way Leo stood up, how he kissed Blythe’s cheek, and the motherly way she ruffled his hair. She was already a maturely beautiful young woman—in fact, it was hard to imagine that she’d ever been truly young. She smiled at me, looking as cool in a fresh white tee-shirt, billowy peasant dress and crisp new espadrilles as the day was hot. She jingled her keys as she weighed them in the cup of her hand. Blythe already had a car of her own, and not some battered banger, but little jelly-mould-shaped bit of the future in its own right, with seats which remembered who you were, and which, even then, virtually drove itself.

Unpeeling myself from my shadow, I crossed the lawn to join them as they set up music stands and opened the piano in the dining room. Even in the middle of a summer holiday, music was something I took for granted; it was simply what we did. Leo was on a music scholarship to King Edward’s, whilst Blythe was studying at the private girl’s school next door. They both played in the joint Music Society, and were also involved in the Birmingham Conservatoire and many of the other bands, projects, weekends, summer schools, recitals and contests into which the young and musically talented were then drawn. They were currently working on a performance of the Brahms
First Cello Sonata
for a concert at the Barber Institute and I, as was often the case, was page-turner. Of course, and as Leo quickly pointed out, Blythe should have memorised the piece by now, but it was plain as she hesitated over the first slow counterpoint when he began the languorous melody on the piano that she wasn’t there yet. Despite my vague hostility towards her, I think Blythe welcomed my presence at these rehearsals. Leo’s brilliance in music was brittle. He’d leap up in mid-bar to demonstrate how she should be accomplishing a tricky sequence of fingering. Not that Blythe wasn’t a good cellist, but you could tell from the brisk way Leo approached her instrument that he knew he could have bettered her with no more than a few months of study. At least, that was how we felt.

And that was how Leo was: competent at most things, with brilliance never that far away in any of them. But that in itself was a frustration to him. Yes, he could play the Brahms and probably a hundred other main-repertoire piano pieces to near-performance standard. Yes, he’d won awards and had a scholarship to one of Birmingham’s most expensive schools and had once performed in front of Ashkenazy, but he remained far from sure whether he even wanted to be a professional musician, and what road he might take if he did, or if the piano was his main instrument. He loved jazz. He doodled with popular tunes. He’d switch in one practice session from Bach to Chopin to Bill Evans, and never quite finish any of the pieces, and then plug the midi into the computer and work on something of his own.

This was the world which you entered when you got involved with my brother and music, and I sometimes wondered in my pre-teenage way whether Blythe only pushed herself this hard with the cello in an attempt to please him. And here I was—sitting with them: a small but slightly stoned gooseberry, and self-nominated page-turner. The French windows were open, but the air inside refused to move, and even Blythe lost something of her fresh-picked coolness as the same tricksy upwards phrase on bar thirty eight was endlessly repeated. After an hour or so of this, I was more than happy to scurry into the kitchen to make up some of Leo’s special sandwiches—thick white bread mattressing layers of corn chips glued in mayonnaise.