Song Of Time (23 page)

“No, I didn’t have children, Roushana…” she said, and I was pleased to see how her face had become flushed, how her eyes were shining. “Like a lot of people who lived through that last century, I decided not to. And as for lovers—”

“What do you really want from me, Blythe?”

She took a step towards me. I could hear the silky whisper of her limbs. “You’re almost ready. You don’t know it—people never do—but you
are
. The jewel in your head is far more than just some clever device now. It’s become part of what you are. It mirrors, anticipates. It
exists
. When you look at me like that, it does the same. When you laugh, it laughs. Oh, I know how difficult this is, but you’re got to give way. This—what I’m now experiencing—it’s everything…”

“Can you show me?” Even though I still wished this was someone other than Blythe, it was a question I knew I had to ask.

“You can show
yourself
.” She moved closer still. I could feel, I was sure of it, her breath against my face. “Take my hand.”

I did, and her grip was warm, smooth, supple, secure. She felt alive— it was no use my telling myself that it was all a matter of energies and suggestions, for the effect was uncanny, although it’s harder for me to recall exactly what happened next. It was all so quick, so bright, so real. Suddenly, we were in a huge square lined with long, elegant buildings. Some kind of domed cathedral lay at its far side, with a glimpse beyond of glittering water. Bells were ringing. Pigeons swirled. I
knew
this place, these buildings…

“I thought,” her voice murmured, “that Venice would be as good a place to show you as any.”

I had to laugh, and felt as I did so the thrills of lightness and youth re-entering my body. There were wafts of a choir from the open doors of the basilica, which seemed to be made of nothing but gold. This was too, too beautiful. The sky was Bellini blue, there were Canaletto buildings, Veronese clouds, and people were eating, people were laughing. Sconces burned along the Arsenal walls, and people, up in the high windows of the exquisite buildings, were making extravagant love. I noticed a small child, neither boy nor girl, and he or she came over to me, smiling, and then we were together on a gondola, and songs echoed from the palaces along the dank walls.

“I know,” said this child in a voice high and sharp and sexless. “I look nothing like Harad, not even when he or she was young…But you of all people understand how difficult things were after Paris. Being both a critic and an artist only teaches you how essentially worthless both pursuits are. Oh, I won’t bore you with the circumstances, Roushana, but I realised as soon as I passed that there’s another way.” Beside us, people were swimming naked in the golden waters of the canal. They were all beautiful and they were all laughing. “The most ridiculous thing is that it’s called simply living! Can you believe, Roushana—that I had to die to find that out?”

Hands clamoured around our boat, and were rocking us back and forth. It swung over, and I fell through necklaces of golden arms into sewer-darkness, and winter-cold. I was looking down on the drowned and fallen edifices of a different Venice. The basilica’s dome was a sludge-filled crater. Eels darted amid the fallen pillars of Florien’s bar.

“Ha, and you think
this
is what it’s really like—it’s far worse…”

My old agent, Adur Foster, more bull-walrus than mermaid with the scaled tail he now affected, swam up to me out of the gloom. Although he couldn’t possibly be talking to me underwater, silver bubbles skittered up from his lips.

“Don’t tell me, Adur—you now represent promising dead artists?”

“The fact is, Roushana, that I still represent quite a few living ones as well.It was just…”He gave his hairy shoulders a shrug.”…I think we’d gone as far as we could with our relationship. And, let’s face it, the music of the forever dead was getting a harder and harder act to sell.”

Adur swam off with a brisk kick of his tail, drowned Venice swarmed, settled, and I become conscious once again of Blythe’s presence. We seemed to fall back until the darkness became blue-lit, and I realised that we were hovering far above the earth. From up here, it looked beautiful and unspoiled—a snowstorm bauble swirled by our own invisible hands.

“The future isn’t the earth, Roushana. Coastlines change, continents drift and the sea soon rises to engulf every mountain. There’s no escaping chaos and change. The living will die endlessly, but even the passed can’t be safe down there. Ah, but that is just the beginning! You and I, we can become the breath of the sun—we can ride the signal to the furthest probe. And not just the planets. The solar system is merely our doorstep. We can escape all matter, we can reach the stars…”

Morryn.

This bed.

This body.

This night.

My mind sinks back to the present. I can’t possibly sleep—not when my head is filled with these impossible dreams. But they were far more than dreams, and I haven’t been able to sleep for days, anyway. And Blythe…Blythe Munro was everything I might have expected. Brisk as ever, and just as prim. Not really that youthful, for all the way she looked, but then she was never someone who was ever really
young
. More than anyone I’ve ever known, she was born to become what she is now, although it’s disappointing that Daisy Kornbluth didn’t choose to come to me instead, after all the promises we made. But perhaps she was busy, and I never did thank her properly for all those flowers. Adur, though, seems to have taken to it all well enough, and to have kept his sense of humour, even if he has decided to quietly dump me from his client list. But that’s agents for you, either living or dead. And Harad Le Pape…!

I noticed again the view through the window when Blythe and I returned to the charming virtual room she had first greeted me in. Not just that it wasn’t Bodmin which lay beyond, nor that it was some predictably pleasant glade, but that it looked oddly familiar. Then I realised that what I was seeing was that far corner of the Munros’ garden where Blythe had once sat me down and shared her concerns about Leo.

“Well…” Blythe said, and I almost cringed as she took my hand again, but this time it was only in farewell, “…I wish you good luck in your passing.”

A moment later, and she was gone, leaving me with what felt like a thousand questions unanswered, and an odd sense of warmth in my groin. I felt another peculiar tug in my head as I left the room myself, and turned just as the door was closing, and saw how the place had emp-tied to a windowless square stripped of all warmth and furniture, with its bare plaster walls embroidered only with glittering snails’ trails of crystal.

The sky had changed as I stepped outside the old Public Hall. The wind was trying to turn to the north, and the warmth I’d felt initially in my groin had already begun to chill. Legs chafing, thighs wet, longing to get back to Adam and Morryn, to change and shower, I stood shivering and waiting for my car in the market square as the chalked menu on the board outside the Tudor tearoom began to streak with rain.

You’re almost ready.

Of course, the crystal is co-operating.

I’m still shivering now under these blankets. Crystal jellyfish, listening inside my head, you can’t wait to take hold.

This is the future, Sis.

Summer is fading, and these modern autumns never last. Great hissing curtains of auroras fill the skies in winter, even this far south. The world is changing, the dead are rising, and it really is time that I left. But I’m leaving anyway—that’s not for me to decide. The virus which has long nurtured itself in my system will soon destroy these very thoughts.
Everything
will go. It’s going already. My incontinence will no longer be an embarrassment kept mostly under control by a careful regulation of what and when I eat and drink. My vision will fade. My hand, my limbs, my tongue, will become unruly until they lose function entirely and start to atrophy. I will become a bag of driftwood bones, withered skin, soulless pain.

There’s no point in waiting, no point in beating about the bush.
Just get on with it Roushana.
Mum, who feared death far less than she feared anything, would have had a field day. Leo as well—he made this step seem almost easy. If they were waiting for me, and if Claude were there, and if Dad had passed over, too, instead of the people who seemingly have, all those useless friends and acquaintances, this process would be much easier…

I lever myself up from the pillow, then inch my legs over the edge of the bed. Silence resounds around Morryn as I move towards the door, then out along the landing, and down the stairs. Adam will be sleeping, just as all the truly living do, but Morryn watches, waits, and everything remains unlit as I shuffle towards the music room and slump down at the automatic piano which the wash of the stirring sea gives an inky gleam. Slowly, quietly, I begin to pick out the notes of
Les Escaliers de Mont-martre.

A ONE-LEGGED BUSKER, CARDBOARD-PROCLAIMED VICTIM of the Algerian wars, was playing our song when Claude and I went to take the weekly flight to Washington. The melody, that mid-beat uplift caught almost perfectly, gasped from his accordion to echo through Charles de Gaulle airport’s mostly empty space. There were smiles and good-natured applause as Claude tried his hand at playing the man’s instrument, made a mess of the same tune, then humbly handed it back to him. Even in this half-abandoned monument, a crowd of fellow travellers, vendors and pickpockets had gathered to watch. Lenses flickered. The tableau, totally unplanned, and thus all the more valuable, would be certain to make the major virtuals this evening. We were cheered and waved on our way.

After all the probes and scans, and a predictable two hours’ wait on the runway, the elderly Eurobus finally juddered from the ground and headed towards the Atlantic. I gripped Claude’s hand as I looked out of the window. Even the thought that we might not make it to the USA was exciting, and it felt like years since I had seen sunlight and blue skies.

We talked about our families as we got softly drunk on tiny plastic bottles of wine and fiddled with the broken controls for this or that form of entertainment: Claude’s, but also my own. I’d rarely looked back at anything, but Claude could trace his own name to the Carolina slave plantations, and to a woman from Senegal, with whom he shared mitochondrial DNA. He believed that to recognise one’s innate sources of joy and pain was a key part of being a performer.

“How much did you love Leo?” he asked as we lumbered through the skies towards the city he called his hometown. He’d already listened gravely to the few recordings of my brother’s playing which I’d been able to access, making comments about the interpretation as if Leo might still hear them, and had watched a solitary video of us both performing in some school hall (me sawing terribly on that first cheap violin) which Dad had once posted online. He quizzed me about aspects of my supposedly Irish heritage—Roman Catholicism, the Potato Famine, the ongoing conflict between North and South—about which I hadn’t the faintest idea. And he’d already spoken by videolink to Mum, who was only too happy to tell him about this and that cousin and second uncle. All this stuff about family seemed so unconventionally conventional for the person I’d imagined Claude to be.We dipped into sleep as the plane chased the sun across the endless afternoon.

Claude’s mother Lujah was waiting in the evening smog outside Dulles airport. A broad, busy, imperturbably happy woman who shared Claude’s golden-brown eyes, she hugged us both and took our bags and squeezed our hands and breezily insisted on how tired we must be as we crossed the tarmac and climbed into the leather expanse of a massive vehicle which she hand-drove herself through the sunset back towards the city.

This was my first experience of America as well as Washington, yet many of those blurred and lush first impressions stayed with me, and come to mind now even when so much has been lost. There was some-thing sepia-toned about the clouds, something showy and unhurried about the way the big sun was hovering for so long on that space on the horizon, gleaming across the Potomac and flashing through the rising buildings of the city as if we were still racing the dateline, or as if time and the rest of the world could wait whilst the sunset lingered here purely for the sake of the marvellous show it made.

After a confusion of busy roads and bridges and security cordons, we arrived at the Vaudins’ house in Georgetown. I stepped out into purple twilight amid smells of blossom and wet earth beneath the benevolent glow of redbrick sash windows. Claude’s father Tony was an academic of the sort for whom grand-sounding posts are specially made. His grey hair and lined smile suited him, and Lujah was hardly a lesser talent, an amateur singer good enough to have been professional who worked as a lobbyist for various blue chip charities on what she called
The Scene
. Their house was a marvel of big rooms, dramatic stairways and fireplaces, and the Vaudins filled it with the comings and goings of acolytes and message-bearers, the subtle scurryings of servants.

“I know what you’re going to say,”Tony Vaudin beamed from the far end of a candlelit dinner-table whilst I, pleasantly drugged by more wine and jet lag, dazedly tried to take it all in. “It’s what you British always say about us Democrats in our big houses. You think we think we’re social-ists, and in a way we are, but it’s never a word that you’ll ever hear anyone say over here.”

“And you can’t say we’re liberal either,” Lujah chimed from the far end. “That’s the death knell of all political influence as we know it.”

“I hadn’t thought…”

“
Of course
you hadn’t, dear.” Tony Vaudin leaned across the expanse of linen and silverware which separated us to squeeze my hand. The squeeze lingered. So did the grin, which was a tribute to the capital city’s dentistry. “And you can say what you like in that charming British accent. No-one will mind if
you
use the S or the L word.”

“So—what do you say?”