‘Listen, Dick: about “Tam Lin”. I’ve got the perfect instrument for the sound of the forbidden wood — a dulcimer.’
‘You can play a dulcimer?’
‘I can play anything.’ Gleeful sniggering came down the phone, in which I joined, amused at his swaggering egotism — elated by his enormous confidence that we would enchant the public.
Now that Rod had given me the go-ahead for the pilot, and would let me produce it in September, my interest in the radio productions I was doing became almost perfunctory; I thought of the Rymers constantly, and Martin Gadsby had taken to making reproachful remarks, accusing me of deserting radio.
Rationally, I still knew that the likelihood that Programmes would be convinced by the pilot was slender; there was small hope that they’d launch a whole series for an unknown folk group. But emotionally, I was fixated on our succeeding; I couldn’t accept that we would fail. Few men are placed in the position of giving their fantasies flesh, and this was what had happened to Darcy Burr and to me.
But an odd development characterised our planning sessions, concerning which I would have felt embarrassed had anyone else but Darcy and I been aware of it. Much of the time, although we discussed the practical and artistic means of realising the fairy and supernatural themes, we were going beyond these particulars and into the general; we were discussing the mythology and anthropology of Faery, as we’d once done in Varley’s basement.
Theory nurtured practice, we said; it gave us ideas. This was true, but I began to admit to myself that we often theorised for the sake of it; that we both had some sort of need of it. And in each session, it seemed to me, Burr took the lead in this theorising, as though guiding me along a path.
The night before we were due to record the pilot, when his nerves and mine were strung to a high pitch, the path came to a gateway. He had wanted to bring me there all the time, I suppose. In some ways, he was very patient.
Our sessions occasionally took place in my office, but mostly they were held in Burr’s room in the Victoria Street flat, when Brian was out. We’d be out of Katrin’s way, he said; she didn’t want to listen to our talk.
It was true; she didn’t, any more than Brian did. And although she admired Darcy as a musician, he’d made her uneasy, on the few occasions when he’d come to the flat to visit. ‘He makes a funny atmosphere,’ she said. ‘I feel it for an hour after he goes.’
Darcy had developed a habit. When he wanted to see me in the evenings after dinner, he would walk down Victoria Street to the corner of Challis Avenue and stand outside our gate and whistle, two fingers in his mouth: the sort of whistle once prized by members of street gangs. I would look out from the sliding verandah window and see him grinning below on the path.
It had been like that this evening. He’d whistled me out at about eight; now we sat in his room. The pilot was entirely planned for tomorrow evening’s recording: the set designer, the technical producer and the lighting people were all happy; everything was ready to go. Burr and I said that we needed to meet now for a last look through the camera script, but this was just an excuse; our talks had become an addiction, and what we were discussing was the Faery Process again.
‘Fairyland’s double,’ Darcy said.
He was lying back in an armchair beside his desk, perfectly still, legs extended in front of him in their habitual way, crossed at the ankles. As always, the room was half-lit by the tall standard lamp. I knew now what the sweetish smell in the flat was; he’d taken to the occasional smoking of marijuana — a practice that was fairly dangerous at this time, since the police were raiding apartments and houses in the Cross in a hunt for suspected users. I sometimes worried about his getting caught, but he laughed at this.
He held out the damp joint to me now, and I leaned and took it.
He grinned. I’d never smoked pot before, refusing because of a secret dread of losing control. But tonight I drew the smoke in, coughing as its sickly sweetness stung my chest.
‘It’s double,’ Burr insisted, still watching me, his voice croaking a little as he held in his smoke. And a remark of Clive Broderick’s came back to me; something about the universe itself being double. It had always lurked in my mind, as the guitar teacher himself had. I was trying to gauge the effects of the pot, but so far, nothing seemed to be any different. Was there an odd clarity about the furniture?
Meanwhile, Darcy was enlarging on his theme, the smoke seeming to affect him very little.
The Faery Otherworld had two aspects: dark and light; Hades and Elfland. It was impossible to know which zone one might find oneself in: the Barrow World of eternal night, or that country whose very air was the bright ether of dream. But Elfland itself was located under hills; under barrows; under ground: and that was where the dead were, wasn’t it?
As to the elfin people themselves, who were they? On what level did they have their being, and why did they tease our minds? They kidnapped earthly mothers to nurse their children; they craved our vitality, as malicious spirits did, we knew that: they might well be entities between Heaven and Hell. Lost wives, lost sweethearts who had gone to Elfland were sometimes seen again by those who loved them — but usually only once. And he recalled for me the story of the young Scots farmer whose dearly loved wife was lost in Fairydom. She appeared to him suddenly among their children, and told him he could win her back by waylaying the fairy cavalcade at night. But when he waited for it on the heath, he lost his courage; the troop rode by, his wife wailing among them, and he watched it paralysed, and did nothing. Then it was gone; she was lost to him forever. He heard the harness bells and the triumphant laughter recede, and I found his pain unbearable; because how would he ever be free of it?
A double world: enchanted and endlessly sweet, its savours never failing; or else dim wastes without hope, where shades went drifting in endless loss. Was this why Broderick’s ideas had been so disturbing? Was this why my mind had rung with shock when he told me the universe was double?
There was a fatal moment when people succumbed to the wish for that region, I said; when they reached out for the Otherworld. And then everything was changed. It happened in dream, or else in sickness — at times when the will or the life-force were weak. It had happened to me in the Red Room. Paralysis had put its mark on me, and then spared me; I was one of those who had looked into the grave early, and had then drawn back.
‘Brod knew all that,’ Burr said softly. ‘He knew that you were special, Dick: he told me, once. And he knew that some day you and I would work together.’ He stubbed out the joint.
‘I didn’t trust him.’ My own voice was loud and rude in my head; stoned, one spoke only the truth, it seemed.
Darcy’s eyes gleamed quick at me behind their glasses, and I had a stirring of caution; I remembered his capacity for violence. But this thought was silly, and his voice when he spoke confirmed it; he wasn’t angry, he sounded gentle and almost cultivated.
‘That was a pity. Brod was your ally, and we don’t find many. He wanted to teach you all he taught me. Brian was never up with it, because Brian’s pretty simple. But you were different. Brod offered you knowledge, and you blew it. You weren’t receptive enough.’
‘Maybe I didn’t want it.’ My tongue was slow; it almost hadn’t finished this sentence. The hash had unseated the room’s perspective. It now seemed as long as a corridor, and Burr was down at its end. I tried not to be alarmed, while he went on talking, watching me insistently. And now, with a logic I found exquisite, making me laugh aloud, he put everything into place.
Of course the universe was double; how could anyone but a fool believe otherwise? Had Christianity ever really justified or explained a merciful and omnipotent God’s toleration of evil and pain? Could it even give a reason for one child’s death in agony? For villagers being bombed and maimed in Vietnam, even as we spoke? For frightful, undeserved catastrophes, or tormenting disease? For the long chain of suffering — preying and being preyed upon — which was the destiny of all a
nimals on earth?
‘That’s the natural order,’ I said.
Darcy laughed. ‘There’s nothing natural about it, mate. You don’t even believe that yourself. It’s totally unnatural. It’s disastrous. And it began from a disaster.’
I laughed again, but he ignored my laughter; he went on to explain in detail the pre-cosmic calamity through which the material world had been created: not, it seemed, by what we called God at all, but by an inferior and malevolent force — the Demiurge, one of whose identities was the God of the Old Testament.
‘So Jews and Christians have both been fooled,’ Darcy said. ‘The Demiurge thinks he’s God, but he’s wrong. There was a split, do you see that, Dick?’
Leaning closer, he elaborated. The true First Cause of things was quite detached from the Demiurge, and from the misery of matter and false Time; it was pure spirit, and its name was the Abyss. As for us, we were all trapped in matter, where we didn’t belong. This was what gave our spirits pain; this was why we longed for something nameless, all our lives.
‘You really believe that, Darcy?’ I remained impressed, but the room’s perspectives had certainly gone wrong. The green walls were furry as vegetation; the coloured, comic-strip Tarot figures in Darcy’s pictures were threatening and comically alive (the Fool, the Magus, the Empress), and the shaded lamp was bright as a sun. I found I was very thirsty; I wanted to stand up and get a drink, but I couldn’t summon the will to do so.
‘It’s truer than you think,’ Burr said. He thrust his head even nearer and frowned, and I half feared this frown; I wanted to placate it. To get free of our prison wasn’t easy, he told me — but invisible beings existed whose powers could be invoked; entities of power, who reflected the different levels of consciousness. And always the most potent power that could be turned to was that of love.
‘Love,’ Darcy repeated, and now he smiled, with what I saw was intended as tenderness. (Was it tenderness? I wasn’t sure.) Through love, and through the magic of sex — through direct contact with the divine female force — we could liberate ourselves; we could achieve communion with the Abyss. And we could then rediscover the older Mysteries: the secret knowledge of Eleusis; the rites of Koré, raped and stolen by Hades, like that Scottish farmer’s wife lost in Elfland. It all linked up, didn’t it?
The dual Otherworld waited — where either we were lost, or renewed. He looked at me fixedly, an adult with a wayward child whose attention might stray. I wanted to laugh again, but his face had the shine of fanaticism, which can only be laughed at in the abstract.
‘We have to get free of the world,’ he said. ‘We have to pierce the skin.’
How? Through magical bliss, he said. The way of Faery; the way of Dionysus. And didn’t Dionysus preside over all magic? No wonder Christianity saw him as the horned god: the Enemy!
‘Look, people still want bliss; they still want the invisible,’ he said. ‘But Christianity can’t give it to them any more, right? Once that door shuts, it’s hard to open again. And what in the world could be more important?’
He waited; I said nothing; his glasses flashed. ‘Maybe it’s especially important here,’ he said. ‘In Australia, I mean. Because we don’t have much to take our minds off it, do we? People are killing because of that; nasty murders that we can’t see the sense of — have you noticed? Hitch-hikers get tortured; girls get cut to pieces, out in the bush. And yet the desert’s waiting all the time with the answers. I was out there once, near Darwin, and I felt it. The Aborigines found the power-places there; but we don’t want to know, do we?’
I wanted to go, but couldn’t summon the will to get up.
‘Brod knew all about that,’ Darcy said. ‘He showed me the paths of power.’
There was a long silence. I looked at a blue coffee-cup on the small table beside me, which grew and filled my vision, calm and still. Then I heard Darcy speaking again.
‘He made me see that there were two people inside me: one who was weak and sentimental; the other somebody who could be strong enough to make himself free. I made myself free of my bloody parents, to begin with. That was the first hurdle. I didn’t have to think about them any more, I could be totally indifferent. I could have watched them killed if I had to, and not given a bugger.’
‘Do you remember much about them?’
‘Remember them? Oh yes mate, I remember them.’
His mouth grew abnormally thin, his face was constricted by a frozen, inverted passion; he clenched his fists on the arms of his chair, and I was sorry I’d asked. ‘I remember them fighting in bed,’ he said, ‘and fighting up and down the kitchen when they were both drunk.’ He was looking back into echoing lanes near the Gasworks, and had suddenly become a small, far-off figure, down the long hall the room had become. His voice was far off, too. ‘But my old man had sense. He got out and took to the road, and I never saw him again. So he didn’t have to see my mother dead drunk in the kitchen every night, passed out and pissing herself on the floor. Neither did I, after I moved to Sandy’s.’
I couldn’t look at his distant figure; I waited. There was no time, here in his room; and Harrigan Street ran on for ever, in the soft rain of the island. I had somehow assumed that Darcy had no hurts; that he felt no normal sadness. Why had I assumed that?
And I knew now why it was so important that the Rymers should lift him free. I smiled at him, and he smiled back with severe calm, still as a storybook king, in his chair.
10
‘Take two,’ I say. ‘Close-up on Katrin and Brian.’
I hunch in my chair in the control-room’s semi-darkness as though at the wheel of a truck with ten gears: chain-smoking cigarettes; muttering to the script girl next to me; calling the shots to the vision-mixer; peering at the script under its little lamp. With elated fury I focus on my whole technical orchestra, unable to slacken attention for a second, lifted high on concentration as though on Darcy’s hash, willing it all to work.
And there are tensions within tensions in this long, nigrescent saloon with its red and green lights, jigging meters and blue-grey video screens. Although I’m in charge here, my authority is silently in question. I haven’t had the production experience to justify doing a show like this, and despite the comparative success of our rehearsals, scepticism floats in the darkness. Rod Ferguson’s influence put me in the chair, and the techs know it. On either side, at the control desk, sardonic shadows wait for a mistake to be made: a wrong cue, a bungled sequence of shots. I’ve ridden some of them hard to get what I want, and they resent it.
Only the sound crew, who have come to admire the group, are probably with us. It’s taken us weeks to find the right balance; to get exact, restrained levels with the electric guitars that match with the voices, and blend with Darcy’s delicate pipes and acoustic instruments without drowning them. Nothing like it has been done on ABS before, and even as I worry about camera angles, I must listen all the time to be sure that the balance stays right. I know I should trust the sound crew; but I trust no one.
‘Take one. Medium close-up. Keep Darcy in shot.’
I have the three in view all the time through the control-room window; the black cameras stalk them out there, and my headphoned envoy, the floor manager, dodges and crouches in front of them like an attendant spirit, pointing dramatically, leaping nimbly over cables. But it’s the black-and-white screens above my head I attend to most: second-hand images more vital than the real one through the window. Brian is working on electric guitar; Katrin is singing, head back, straight as a sentry beside him; Darcy is a little apart, crouched cunningly over the table where his electric dulcimer has been set, working away with his little hammers, mop of black hair swinging. All are in outfits designed to my specifications: the two men in tight knee-breeches, full-sleeved white shirts and leather jerkins; Katrin in a full-length skirt, long-sleeved blouse and a jerkin that complements those of the men. We’re using key lights on the studio floor to create an eerie dimness; although we’re in black and white, w
e have coloured gels over these to create studio atmosphere, and they dramatise the modelling of Katrin’s face, striking upwards to put shadows under her Estonian cheekbones; she gazes yearningly at Brian as she sings.
It’s all working, except for one thing: Brady is drunk.
This has kept me in a state of anguished concern. When they first got into the studio he was grinning loosely, his eyes bloodshot and his speech slurred. Darcy Burr took me aside, his fingers digging into my arm, his face drained of colour, his frown dangerous, his voice hissing in my ear.
‘The bastard’s pissed! He’s been gone for two days: it’s because of that little slut Rita. Get some black coffee. Get the bugger sober.’
During the dry run, Brady played some jarringly bad notes, and his attack was less sure than usual when he sang. He ridiculed his costume, which he apparently regarded as effeminate; he made homosexual gestures, and flapped his sleeves like a bird. I took him aside and reproved him, and his face showed a blurred look of shame; he swayed.
‘Sorry mate, sorry. Rita’s gone, see? Can’t find her anywhere. She ought to be here tonight, oughtn’t she?’
‘Do you want to wreck it for Katrin — for all of us?’ I was angry now.
‘No Dick, no. It’ll be right when we cut. You’ll see.’
And it’s proved to be true. Now that we’re taping, he’s performing as well as he’s ever done, and I begin to relax. There’ll be no second chance. If the Programmes people are convinced by this pilot, it will go to air as the first of a series; if not, it will never be seen.
But it’s all coming together, and we’ve only had to stop the cut once. My fingers are trembling as I yank at the script; fulfilment is unfolding inside me leaf by leaf. We’re doing ‘Tam Lin’, our last ballad but one, and sporadic murmurs of admiration have started in the control room’s darkness; the still air tingles with pleasure.
The Doubleman Page 26