Sphinx (26 page)

It was as if my brother had been transformed into someone whom I’d had no idea existed under that indolent façade. There was an old-world Celtic quality to his lyrics despite the punching brutality of the chorus. The next three songs had the same lurching romanticism as the first - seductive ballads splintered by violent refrains. At the edge of the stage near Gareth’s feet, a small group of girls had gathered, their faces illuminated as the spotlight swung into the crowd like a beam from a lurching lighthouse. Each girl appeared to be undergoing a private dialogue with the sinewy figure, as if he were singing for her alone. They reminded me of worshippers at an altar, transfixed, transported. It was hypnotic to witness and, suddenly envious, I found myself imagining what it must be like to hold such power.

Just then a boy who looked about fifteen, a Union Jack safety-pinned to his vest, pushed past, spilling his beer down the front of my trousers. I reeled around but he carried on regardless, stumbling into the swaying audience. The three vodkas I’d consumed collided with my exhaustion in a sudden dizziness. I made my way through the crowd and leaned against the wall, looking on as my brother sang his way through a kaleidoscope of emotion.

 

Gareth’s dressing room was far less glamorous than I had imagined it would be. Painted white, it had a chipped mirror glued to one wall, a battered Formica table covered in sticks of stage make-up, empty beer cans and ashtrays spilling over with cigarette butts. In one corner stood a steel clothes rack on wheels with various performing outfits hanging off it.

Wearing sunglasses, Gareth leaned against the edge of the table. He was surrounded by a small crowd of groupies, fans and band members, with a beer can in one hand and Zoë nestled adoringly under his other arm. Under the fluorescent light I could see that sweat had run rivulets through his make-up. He appeared jittery, still high from his performance, but I also recognised the influence of amphetamines in his manic gestures.

He caught sight of me. ‘Oliver! Oliver! I can’t believe you’re here! I almost didn’t recognise you with that beard.’ He addressed his entourage. ‘Everyone, meet my brother - fresh from the land of the Pharaohs!’

The small crowd stared at me, then, seemingly disappointed at my ordinariness, turned back to their drinking and chattering. Pushing his way through them, Gareth took off his sunglasses and pulled me into a hug. The shock of the embrace made me freeze.

‘Did you like the dedication?’ he asked. He smelled of cigarettes and Old Spice aftershave.

‘It was really moving.’

‘I’m so sorry about Isabella.’

Hating myself for the inherent awkwardness of the men in my family, I pulled away. ‘It’s been terrible.’ My voice broke despite my reserve.

‘You’re home now. It’s good to see you.’

I changed the subject. I couldn’t bear to talk about Isabella, not now, not with Gareth. ‘You were brilliant out there. I couldn’t believe you were my brother.’

‘Did you all hear that? Oliver here thought we were bloody brilliant!’ he shouted to the room. ‘And he’s a bloody Tory!’

His entourage grinned inanely and nodded in dumb approval.

‘I’m not a bloody Tory,’ I muttered, embarrassed.

‘Yeah, but you’re a capitalist - same bloody thing.’ He suddenly swung back to the others. ‘Fuck off! The lot of you!’

They paused, murmuring amongst themselves, wondering if he meant it.

‘Now!’ he yelled, spittle flying.

The room emptied in minutes.

Gareth turned back to me, grinning. ‘Oh, the sheer power of celebrity. They’re sheep, the whole bloody lot of them.’ He extracted a crushed cigarette packet from the back pocket of his tight leather trousers and lit up a crooked cigarette, inhaling deeply. ‘Fuck, it feels so wrong - without Isabella you’re nowt. She was your inspirational self, your evolved feminine side, she made those exploitative mud scramblings of yours poetic.’

Gareth’s speech tended to oscillate wildly between an ornate Oscar Wilde-style patter and contemporary slang, as if his personality was some grand work in progress whose foundation hadn’t quite settled yet.

‘The word is “geophysicist” and it’s not mud, it’s oil.’ I looked into his eyes, trying to gauge the size of his pupils. ‘You’re speeding, aren’t you? Do you know we’re all worried sick about you?’ My voice reverted to the northern accent of my childhood as I spoke - the tongue of my family.

Gareth pushed me away and put his sunglasses back on. ‘Give me a break. You’ve been gone for months, and Da’s been on my back every bloody week.’

‘When did you start using again? I thought we talked about that—’

‘Isabella talked about that. You were never bloody interested until now. Did you bring her back?’ he demanded abruptly.

‘What?’

‘I thought maybe you’d bring the ashes back or something. ’

I stared at him - the amphetamines were making him manic. ‘Isabella had a Catholic funeral, it was what her family wanted.’

‘I just thought we could have our own service - you know, scatter her ashes on the Heath or something. I could have sung. Isabella liked my singing.’

‘Christ, you’re unbelievable.’

I turned to walk away, but Gareth reached out and put his hand on my shoulder.

‘Listen, I’m sorry, all right? It must be hell for you. I know I wouldn’t have survived it. You two were symbiotic: silence and song.’

For a second a window opened onto the man he might become; rarely had I heard Gareth sound so sincere. I decided to take a risk.

‘Gareth, you made a drawing for Isabella, a drawing of the astrarium . . .’

His whole demeanour changed; it was as if he sobered up instantly. He went to the door and, after checking that no one was loitering in the passage outside, closed it. ‘Come back with me tonight, Oliver, back to the squat. We need to talk.’

 

Gareth’s bedroom, on the top floor of the terrace, had black walls and a dark blue ceiling onto which he’d stuck fluorescent decals of planets and stars - a fictional galaxy that in no way resembled the Milky Way or any other known astral body. He lay on a mattress on the floor, while Zoë and several others of his entourage - Philippe, the drummer, a couple of drunk bouncers - lounged around the room. I sat awkwardly beside my brother, my back hard against the cold wall, the discovery that he was virtually never alone a growing source of irritation.

Gareth had just turned off the light to display his celestial artwork and the others were staring reverently at its greenish glow.

‘I’m telling you, on this hash it’s better than the Sistine Chapel,’ Philippe murmured, curled up on a beanbag.

‘You should see what it’s like on acid.’ The drummer rolled over onto his back, high as a kite.

‘Yeah,’ Zoë affirmed in a reed-thin voice.

‘Gareth,’ I hissed, ‘I thought you wanted to talk to me alone.’

‘We are alone.’

‘No, we’re fucking not.’

‘I meant existentially.’

‘That’s it - I’m out of here.’

I struggled to my feet but Gareth grabbed my arm.

‘I’m sorry. Listen, don’t go, we’ll talk in a minute, I promise. ’ He pulled me towards him. His breath stank of Guinness. ‘How did she die really? Did she find the astrarium? Is that how it happened?’

I paused, my mind reeling in the dark. I hadn’t realised he’d known Isabella had been diving for the astrarium in Alexandria.

‘She drowned searching for it,’ I whispered.

I wasn’t going to tell him we’d found it. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him; simply that I wanted to protect him. I couldn’t bear the idea of putting him in the same danger I’d unwittingly put Barry. Perhaps I’d already endangered Gareth’s life simply by coming to his house. I couldn’t shake the overwhelming sense of being shadowed, and if, God forbid, someone did corner him and question him at some point it was safer that he knew nothing.

‘Come with me.’ Gareth pulled me to my feet.

We stumbled our way to the door, tripping across outstretched legs and splayed arms, and provoking a chorus of expletives. The tiny room he took me to was lined with cardboard egg cartons and illuminated with a single naked electric bulb. A battered desk with a sound-mixing board on it ran along one wall, while opposite stood a small bookcase holding titles such as Rimbaud’s
A Season in Hell
, John Fowles’s
The Magus
,
Ways of Seeing
by John Berger - all the usual reading for a twenty-two-year-old art student.

‘This is my workshop,’ he said. ‘It doubles as a recording studio and drawing space. Only a privileged few are allowed in. There are fans out there who would give their virginity just to get through that door.’

‘You’re safe then. I lost my virginity years ago,’ I joked.

‘Thank fucking Christ for that.’ Gareth reached for the copy of
A Season in Hell
. ‘This is what I think you’re after.’ Between the pages was what looked like a slightly rougher draft of his drawing. ‘She showed you this?’

‘Yes, the night before she . . .’ I faltered, unable to say the words. Hands shaking, I pulled out the drawing he’d done for Isabella.

Gareth put his hand on my shoulder, a brief reassurance.

‘Did she explain the symbols at the bottom?’ he asked, keeping his hand on my shoulder for another brief moment. I sighed and shook my head, scrutinising the drawing.

‘She said she was going to tell me when she had the actual astrarium in her hands. But I know you’d worked on the cipher together.’

Gareth’s demeanour changed instantly. He pulled himself upright, sweeping his hair back over his forehead, then grinned. ‘I was always good at puzzles, remember?’

He paused, seemingly to collect all his energy. Then, like some kind of alchemist, he held his hands above the page before running his finger over the letters as if they were Braille. I’d never seen him so concentrated before: eyes shut, his features twitching slightly as if the paper itself was talking directly to him alone. He opened his eyes suddenly, then folded the paper carefully so that the symbols lined up against each other. ‘I’d been staring at it for hours. There was something about the symmetry or lack of it that kept annoying me.’

He held up the paper. The way he’d folded it made it apparent that the symbols were actually halves of whole symbols or hieroglyphs; and once each symbol sat against its opposite, eight letters became four. He pointed to the four new hieroglyphs.

‘They’re basic Egyptian hieroglyphs you can look up in any library: Singing/Song, Stick/Reed, Put in/Placed, Hathor/Lion, Mouth. The translation is: “When the singing reed is placed in the lion’s mouth the sands will echo.” We spent hours before you guys left for Alexandria trying to understand the context - what such a phrase might be doing on an astrolabe, a time calculator. Then, weeks later, it came to me. I was on a bender - I’d been up for days. Anyway, in the middle of the night I had this epiphany - it was just a couple of weeks before Isabella drowned. I booked a call through to her immediately and asked her, “What if the reed was a key and the lion’s mouth a keyhole? What if the astrarium required a key?” There was a long silence and then she said quietly, “My God, Gareth, you’ve solved it. Ten years of searching and you’ve solved it.” I’ll never forget her voice.’

‘Isabella was always a little dramatic,’ I said, my own voice hoarse. Grief mingled with guilt, and a strange jealousy that she’d taken Gareth into her confidence and not me.

‘Look, it’s an ancient riddle,’ he said impatiently, ‘some kind of metaphoric instruction. But now we’ll never know, will we?’ He looked at me questioningly.

I avoided his gaze, anxious that he’d guess the astrarium had been found, even that I had it in my possession. He wasn’t fooled.

‘Oliver, you haven’t . . .’

‘Listen, the less you know the safer you are, understand?’ I snapped back, more aggressively than I’d intended.

‘You’re in danger, aren’t you?’

Dropping my gaze, I didn’t reply. I don’t think Gareth had ever seen me more vulnerable and I could see him struggling as he tried to square this new persona with the fearless entrepreneur he knew me to be. After a moment he turned back to the photocopy.

‘Okay, I know nothing. But there’s something else you should know about this inscription. I think the way the cipher’s constructed is symbolic in itself. Two halves that mean nothing until they’re put together. It re-emphasises the key idea. I reckon that the astrarium, if Isabella had ever found it, would have been incomplete. It needs something else - its other half, most likely the key - to be activated. Two halves making a whole - it’s almost like a love story. There you are, that’s Gareth the drug-fucked Romantic’s version.’

I looked back at the hieroglyphs, trying to keep my face blank to cover my amazement. Intuitively Gareth had understood the need for the Was, the key to the device.

A noise outside the door startled me and I shuffled the papers together quickly. I could see that Gareth was unnerved by my fear. Reaching out, I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re to tell no one about the hieroglyphs or their meaning, understand? This is important - important for me, important for Isabella. You’re to destroy the drawing and forget about the whole thing. Promise?’

He nodded solemnly.

‘And I want you to come and stay with me,’ I continued, determined to persuade him while he was vulnerable. ‘I’m only here for a couple of weeks, but it’ll give you a chance to get clean. And, frankly, I could do with the company.’

Gareth’s body stiffened at the mention of his addiction. Immediately he began to slip back into the nonchalance of the junkie. ‘I can’t do that - I have art school, gigs, it’s impossible . . .’

‘Please?’

‘No, Oliver.’ His voice had dipped into a tone of sullen aggression and I knew there was no point in arguing.

‘Then at least ring me every day to let me know you’re okay?’