They Do the Same Things Different There (45 page)

One day a bar pianist in Portugal hit the news. Afonso Guttierez had been playing his own songs to customers as they ate their tapas, and had been persuaded by concerned friends to take a selection of his work for registration; it would have taken only one disgruntled diner unhappy with the calamari to stop him. He offered fourteen songs. Eight were rejected, but that still left an unprecedented
six
that were accepted automatically by the Lisbon computer. The pianist was thirty-four years old, but in spite of that still hailed as a new wunderkind, a new Mozart. All six of the songs ranked higher than our composer’s effort, which now came to rest at a precarious nine hundred and ninety-seven. The composer decided that he needed to get a song accepted into the canon immediately before he lost his placing altogether, and for the next few nights worked hard on his latest masterpiece—he pushed and prodded at all of his feelings, dredging his heart for something that might sound beautiful. But it was too late. By the time he took his new work into the city everything had changed. Fired up by his success, Guttierez had returned to his bar, and written up for submission a further fifty-eight of the songs he’d squirreled away over the years. All fifty-eight were accepted. When our composer reached the office, he found he now had to queue like everybody else. He had to take a ticket and wait his turn. And when he at last reached a cubicle, tired and angry, it was to find only that his childhood success had been erased, deleted from the computer, wiped from the world’s iPods. The clerk apologized. He fed the new song into the computer. It was rejected.

“What if I wrote a song that wasn’t about love at all?”

The clerk said, very slowly, “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“It has to be possible.”

“Every song expresses love for
something
,” said the clerk. “A few hundred years ago, love of God was all the rage. Now it’s all about love of sex. Give it another hundred, it’ll be love of silicon chips, who knows? But in any good song, there’s always a love you can’t get around. And that’s love for the music itself. That’ll always be there. You can’t beat it.”

“A man can try,” said the man who had once been a composer.

For two long months the man worked hard. Fortified by broccoli and lukewarm beer, he cut out anything from his diet that might excite his taste buds, anything that might get translated accidentally as passion in melody form. The stipend had been withdrawn, so he was obliged to go out to work during the day, concentrating on his music only once his shifts were over. He wasn’t trained for anything, so took on a series of menial temp jobs, stacking shelves, stuffing envelopes. But even that helped, he was able to channel the numbness of the day into the numbness of his music. He composed through the night, every night, his desk turned so he was facing a blank wall, and every time he came up with a note that even reached for emotion he’d quash it. The music wasn’t bad; he couldn’t simply afford to be bad, anyone could write
bad
music. It took a very certain sort of genius to write something instead that was so good and so fully formed, and yet stillborn.

He went to register his song. He took the day off work. They’d just have to find someone else to hold a placard advertising golf sales. He took his ticket. He waited. There was a child across the aisle sitting with his father, no doubt thinking this whole process of assessment and rejection was some fun day out. He glared at him and made him cry. He went to the toilet. His face looked haggard with lack of sleep, his hair had greyed.

The song was fed into the computer. It whirred for a bit, and then whirred some more. The screen froze. The clerk had to get out the manual, turn the computer off and then back on again. “Well,” he said, at last, “it’s not a love song. We don’t know what it is, but it’s not a love song. And so it’s outside our jurisdiction. It doesn’t need to be destroyed.” He took the sheet music from the feeder, and instead of shredding it, handed it back to the composer.

“You’ll buy it?” said the composer.

“God, no.”

On his way home, for want of something to do, the composer read over his song. He didn’t finish it. He left it on the bus behind him.

He vowed he’d never write music again. He needed a career, something permanent, something he could commit to. He applied for a job at the local McDonald’s; McDonald’s was a fast food chain specializing in burgers, and the six hundred and sixth best in the world. He was much older than any of his fellow workers, they all thought that was impressive. And he worked hard there, he began the week as a mere team member but by Thursday he was team leader, he had five gold stars on his name badge and he was on a roll. His managers were in awe, they’d never seen anyone scale the ladder of convenience food industry so quickly, he was astonishing, a wunderkind. He loved his job. He flipped the burgers and wiped the tables and gave service with a smile, this was something he was good at. The restaurant played an endless stream of Muzak, simplified versions of the love songs he’d once admired and competed with. And sometimes they played Guttierez.

One day the televisions all reported breaking news. The world had a new best love song. Nothing composed in the last fifty years had even made it near the top ten, there was something so established about those classics that was just hard to beat. But the latest from Afonso Guttierez had taken the number one spot, knocking down into second place some ditty by Verdi. Always one to shy away from publicity, Guttierez had only reluctantly agreed to a
TV
interview, in which he mumbled in broken English that he was pleased people a-liked his song. People more than liked it; it was adored. Everyone played it for their loved ones, and although doing that was immediately a cliché, it somehow wasn’t, because the song seemed to speak personally to whoever heard it, it was universal but was also specifically about
them.
The former child prodigy, former composer, gave the song a listen. He didn’t much care for it.

He couldn’t have explained why he caught that flight to Lisbon. Why from there he took a seven-hour coach trip into the Portuguese hinterland. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he found Guttierez. Only that by now Guttierez had three hundred and four songs in the top thousand, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, the other composers of the world had cottoned on, they were writing their songs in the
style
of Guttierez; they weren’t quite as good as Guttierez, of course, but they were perfectly suited for adaptation as background music, for elevators, for supermarkets—there was suddenly a strange sticky homogeneity to the music of the world, and there was a new name already coined for it, it was used freely and without shame by all the critics and all the disc jockeys, and that name was Guttierezesque. He’d been working so hard at his Big Macs to make a bit of money. Now he’d blown all his savings. Some of it had gone on the fare to Lisbon, the rest had gone on the gun.

They said that the genius of Guttierez was that he didn’t appear to compose his songs at all, he’d just play at the piano and somehow they’d pour out. It was why he was so extraordinarily prolific. He said he needed the audience, that before his success he’d tinkered before customers in a bar, and that he couldn’t change the way he worked now. That was why, shy as he was, he still performed. He’d sold up the small bar, of course, and now owned a large restaurant. The food was only adequate, and was served on paper plates and with plastic cutlery to minimize the clatter of knife and fork. But no one came to Restaurante Guttierez to eat.

The maître d’ asked if he had a reservation. “No, I’m sorry. Can you squeeze me in?” “I’m sorry, senhor, tonight we’re fully booked.” “I see. Can I reserve a table for tomorrow?” “Senhor, we are fully booked for the next five months. Senhor Guttierez, he is very popular.” “Please. I need to see him. I’ve flown all the way from England.” “We have many visitors from England, senhor. From Japan, from Australia, from the Americas, from all over the world.” “I’m begging you. I’m a composer too. I compose love songs. I used to compose love songs. We’re the same, him and I. We’re the same. Please. Please.” The maître d’ let him in.

He was given a little table at the back, with two chairs. He looked at the menu. The wine cost a fortune. He couldn’t afford it. He ordered a carafe.

At last the lights dimmed, and Guttierez appeared. He shuffled toward the piano. He was just a little man, a little man. He was wearing shirt and tails, like a concert pianist, but they didn’t really fit him, he looked scruffy. He darted a glance at the audience, but didn’t look at them directly, didn’t want them there. There was a smattering of applause, but Guttierez ignored it. He sat down at the piano.

The team manager from McDonald’s carefully took the gun from his coat pocket.

Guttierez frowned at the piano. As if it were something he was trying to remember, trying to place. He raised a finger. He hesitated. He dropped it onto a key. Plonk. It was a C. He thought about this, then raised the finger once more, thought a bit further, then dropped it onto the F. Then back onto the C. Then back onto the F. He gave this some consideration. He took his hand away from the piano altogether, stared at it once more. Then raised his hand, raised his finger. Held it in the air—then let it fall, at last. Back onto the C. Then faster, another C, another F, another C. Then the single finger exploring further, excited, picking out other notes, at random, a mess.

Our hero wanted to laugh. Guttierez wasn’t worth killing. He wasn’t worth the price of a wine carafe. He got up to leave.

“No,” said the woman beside him.

He hadn’t realized there
was
a woman beside him. That someone had taken that second chair. He couldn’t make her out in the dim light. She said something to him in a whisper.

“What?”

“
Escute
. Listen.”

So he listened. And there wasn’t much to be impressed by. Not for a while. But then Guttierez visibly relaxed. The notes began to smooth. They still seemed random, at least at first—not so discordant now, even pleasing to the ear, nothing special of course, nothing of any worth—but then that was all stripped away, it was as if it had been a game all along, those notes weren’t random, they’d been building up to something, building up a rhythm, you could hear those simple Cs, those Fs, every now and again being picked out, as if winking at an audience who took them so much for granted before, we’re building up to something, they said, we’re building up to . . . and here on the top of them there was. . . .

He gasped. And was flooded by the music.

Guttierez opened his mouth. For a while nothing came out. The fingers continued to dance upon the piano, the music hadn’t reached his head yet, the mouth hung open, waiting for it to do so. And then words tumbled out. Guttierez was not a great singer. He didn’t have to be.

He didn’t know what Guttierez was singing about. He didn’t have to.

He didn’t have to know anything.

He wasn’t a composer anymore, or a man who had once been a composer and had given up, or a man who had once been a composer and who could never give up, not really, no matter how much he failed. He was a little boy. He was a little boy who listened to love songs. He was a little boy in love with love.

He turned to the woman, and he could barely see her. It dawned on him that this was because he was crying.

She put what she was holding onto the table, and with her hand now freed, reached for his. He looked at her closely. And he knew that he loved her. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, it wasn’t that. But she was there. She was there, amongst the music.

“Listen,” she mouthed, and he nodded happily. She held his hand tightly. It was smaller than his, but strong, stronger. He saw that she was crying too. He saw what she’d put upon the table. He saw that she too had come with a gun.

He didn’t know what he could ever say to her, whether he could ever find the right words. But for that moment he was in love, and it was the fullest and richest love he’d ever felt. He gazed at her, and she gazed at him, and they listened. They listened. And hoped that the love song would never end.

“Luxembourg.” First published in
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
, Issue 39, edited by Andrew Finch, and subsequently collected in
Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical
.

“Restoration.” First published in
Everyone’s Just So So Special
, and subsequently collected in
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six
, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

“A Joke in Four Panels.” First published in
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven
, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

“That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love.” First published in
Psycho Mania
, edited by Stephen Jones, and subsequently collected in
The Best Horror of the Year Volume Six
, edited by Ellen Datlow, and in
Best British Horror 2014
, edited by Johnny Mains.

“Taboo.” First published in
Everyone’s Just So So Special
.

“Peckish.” First published in
Fearie Tales
, edited by Stephen Jones.

“Dumb Lucy.” First published in
Magic
, edited by Jonathan Oliver.

“Static.” First collected in
Tiny Deaths
, and subsequently adapted into a short film directed by Tanya Lemke.

“The Constantinople Archives.” First published in
The Cutting Room
, edited by Ellen Datlow.

“Your Long, Loving Arms.” First published in
Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical
.

“Brand New Shiny Shiny.” First published in
Flotsam Fantastique
, edited by Stephen Jones.

“Patches.” First published in
Wild Stacks 1
, edited by Peter Coleborn, and subsequently collected in
Everyone’s Just So So Special
.

“The Sixteenth Step.” First published in
The Burning Circus
, edited by Johnny Mains, and subsequently collected in
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 25
, edited by Stephen Jones.

“It Flows From the Mouth.” First published in
Shadows and Tall Trees
, Issue 6, edited by Michael Kelly.

“History Becomes You.” First published by the
Sunday Times
when it was nominated for the Sunday Times EPB Private Banking Award, and subsequently collected in
Everyone’s Just So So Special
.

“One Last Love Song.” First published in
Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical
.