COPYRIGHT © 1989 BY FIZZY DREAMS, INC.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Originally published in Canada in hardcover in 1989 by Doubleday Canada Limited, Toronto, and in a mass market edition in 1990 by Seal Books. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Lyrics from “Rock Around the Clock” © 1954 by Bill Hailey. Reproduced by permission of Golden Rule Music, Astoria, New York.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Quarrington, Paul
Whale music
eISBN: 978-0-307-36410-4
I. Title.
PS8583.U334W48 1997 C813’.54 C96-932612-2
PR9199.3.Q37W42 1997
Except for the recognizable names of public figures appearing in these pages, all other characters in this novel are purely fictitious and are not intended to bear any resemblance to persons living or dead. The events described in this novel should not be considered to be actual or real.
v3.1
To Dorothy and Carson
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice, “because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”
“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee.
—Lewis Carroll
There is a toe sticking out from underneath a green blanket on my living-room sofa. A lovely toe, a pale and dainty toe. A toe that has never tested dirty bathwater. I am fond of pretty toes like this, because my own are so ugly. My big toes are huge and flat like ping-pong paddles. The rest are deformed midget toes, little squirmy grub toes. The nails are hard and horny and for some reason have turned bright yellow.
Apparently I’ve received a visitor. This strikes me as highly unlikely. Oh, certainly, people come to see me from time to time—executives from Galaxy Records, reporters from magazines, my mother on a weekly raid-and-pillage—but this is some form of house guest, because the owner of this toe has decided to spend the night! I don’t know how I feel about this.
Into the backyard then, for a refreshing dip in the pool.
Let me see how large a splash I can make. Immense, a monster. This is not just my weight—that helps, but size alone does not ensure a fine splash—it is a matter of maximizing surface contact, making sure every available square inch of naked pale flesh slaps the water simultaneously. Danny was great at this, which proves that size is nothing, because Danny never achieved my proportions, although towards the end my brother was quite corpulent and bloated.
We were all of us born too late, that’s a sad fact. This age is a strange new neighbourhood, cheaply constructed and stuck out in the middle of nowhere. None of us belongs. Daniel should have been a medieval warlord. Dan-Dan should have wandered throughout the barren earthworks, a butt of malmsey in his paw, tweaking the bosoms of handmaids, shooting the boots to the snivelling turnspits. When he passed out in the shadowed hallway, there would be minions aplenty to haul his carcass off to bed.
My brain is a little leguminous, I make no bones about it. Indeed, I worked hard for this brain, put in the years and squandered millions. So, let me just ask, what’s this about a toe? A pale, dainty one poking out from beneath a green blanket? I see. This is impossible, people do not come to visit me. Sometimes record executives (even President and Chairman of the Board Kenny Sexstone himself, the bizarre, puppetlike creature), magazine people or fraudulent psychiatrists knock on the door, but I pretend I’m not home. I hide behind something and wait for them to go away. My mother doesn’t fall for this, she unlocks the door (as many keys as I come up with, she comes up with more) and barges in. My mother makes vague inquiries as to my health, she sticks her hand between the cushions on the sofa and ferrets out uncashed cheques. Ergo, this alleged toe on the sofa couldn’t belong to a visitor, because I would not have opened the door. It could not be my mother’s, because my mother’s nail is always painted a garish red. I probably imagined this toe on the sofa, it is too unlikely a thing. But, if you insist, I will go back to the living room and take one more gander.
Ah, here we are in the music room.
Look at all this equipment! I have synthesizers and recording modules, mixing boards and otherworldly musical machines, everything interfaced with a Macintosh computer. I’m pretty sure that I could get the house to lift off if I tried hard enough. The world is going down in flames, it is a flushing conflagration, but technology has kept pace. Do you see that over in the corner? That hulking assemblage of wires, circuit boards, plastic and wood? That is the Yamaha 666, the most advanced keyboard system ever invented. Tread softly, we don’t want to wake it.
I love Science. Look at the astounding toys it’s produced, consider the wonders of pharmaceuticals. The future has arrived, as promised in those little films they showed us in grade school. You remember those, don’t you? The film would slip off the take-up reel, before long celluloid would be roiling about the floor, your teacher would panic and start screaming for the A.V. man.
I must work on the Whale Music. The Whale Music is very important to me. It’s the only thing that’s important to me. Don’t try to stop me from working on it like Mom and Fay and Kenny Sexstone and countless record executives have tried to do. The record execs say the Whale Music isn’t commercial. I say it’s not my fault if whales don’t have any money.
A low note on the pianoforte machine. Don’t you love low notes? Don’t they tingle in your privates and send electrical juice spurting to your brain? Of course they do. And now rhythms, layered as the sea, slow and powerful near the bottom, clear and sparkly on top, whitecaps catching the sun. I need, I need—I need a saxophone! Do you play the sax? I need, it is absolutely imperative that I have, a sax—a soprano sax—to do the dolphins. I never learned how to play the sax, a costly oversight. What I must do is hire Mooky Saunders, unless he’s dead.
Into the living room, then, to use a telephone, although I have a nagging suspicion that I don’t own this instrument of torture. Still, there’s no harm in checking.
Do you see what I see? Toes, five of them, attached to a foot, a pale ankle, a calf, a slender calf, a calf that has romped through clover in Switzerland. This is a very strange thing to be poking out from underneath a green blanket on my living room sofa. This is some form of intruder. What could they be after? Despite popular belief and overwhelming evidence, I am not paranoid. At least, I don’t believe that anyone is trying to kill me. My friend John Lennon was assassinated, but I cannot imagine someone doing that to me. What would
be the point, other than a bravura display of mental imbalance one-upmanship?
Wait a moment. I suppose there’s some chance, a slim one but a chance all the same, that I’ve killed someone. Oh my goodness, I hope not. I may have killed a record executive or magazine reporter, one of the main reasons I don’t let them through the front door. I may have strangled them, or smothered them within the foul-smelling folds of my body, then covered the corpse with this green blanket.
All is well, because the form underneath the green blanket just moved. Now it’s rolling, and the green blanket is falling away to reveal … nakedness.
Into the backyard, into the pool. Look how big a splash I can make! Colossal, improbable.
It was Danny who taught me the technique. He was seven, I was eight, when the father had a pool put into the backyard on Whitman Avenue. The father had made a bit of money from a song called “Vivian in Velvet”, which you might remember if you’re quite old and have ridiculously bad taste in music. My mother had wanted the pool, apparently as a backdrop to her tanning activities. The first thing Danny did, as soon as the pool was full of water, was announce that he was going to produce the most humungous of splashes. He spent quite a few minutes telling me the technique involved. “You don’t gotta run,” he pointed out. “Running is for shits. Two, three steps maximum, and then you got to lay your body over the water and drop. Think down. Try to get as much of your body to hit as you can. Now, I’m gonna go first. Watch me.” Danny took two determined steps towards the deep end and stretched into the air. As he hit the water he produced a beautiful thing, liquid pyrotechnics. Then it occurred to me that Danny didn’t know how to swim. I managed to fish him out with the handle of the skimming net.
My house is high on a cliff, and from the edge of my property, pressed against the fence (barbed wire running along the top, eight feet in the air), I can see the ocean. From time to time I will spy a pod of whales. They swim around the world, you know, whales circle the globe purposefully. They lunch off the Isles of Scilly, stop for idle chatter near Monrovia. I feel very fortunate to see a pod—a family—sail by in the water beneath me. I love to see that. What I don’t love to see is a naked body on my living room couch. It is a female body, by the way. What am I to do?
Into the music room. I rewind the tape on the console, blast the song into the world octaphonically. Yes, yes! This is lovely and I must dance to the Whale Music. I throw off my bathrobe into one of the dark corners. I sing the “Song of Flight.” The dolphins leap through waves, they swim through sunlight, and now I remember, what this needs is a saxophone. I’m going to phone Mooky Saunders, unless (a) Mooky is dead or (b) I don’t own a telephone. So it’s into the living room for a look-see.
Oh. Er. Um. There is a naked girl sleeping on my couch. She appears to be no older than fifteen—extremely bad legal news—and she is snoring lightly. Her hair is a golden colour, and it spills around her, it cascades onto the floor. I will cover her with the green blanket, which has likewise tumbled onto the living-room rug.
The girl suddenly sputters and twists her arms into the air. She makes an odd sound—eeaagh!—and her legs begin to kick in a petulant way. Then she opens her eyes—one of them, at any rate, the right—and sees me with the blanket held out in front. She is in the middle of another odd sound—oooopphh—but she breaks it off in order to smile at me. How lovely of her. She smiles at me, digs her tiny fists into eye sockets. She says, “Good morning.”
“Attire,” say I, “is one of the hallmarks of civilization.”
She is yawning. “You should talk,” she mentions in the middle of her yawn.
I am without bathrobe. I wonder where it might be. It is no doubt in the last room I was in, a conclusion that should (you’d think) simplify matters. No such luck. The short-term memory is not all it might be. I cast a glance down upon my nakedness and, judging from the spectacular belly, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that I’ve just been in the kitchen. Doughnuts. Follow me, we’ll have some doughnuts and milk.
You see the hallway with all the gold records on the wall? Platinum records as well, which means sales of multi mega-units. Platinum means shipping crates to the Dogons. There used to be more of these gold and platinum records, but one night Danny got especially drunk and frisbeed many of them into the ocean. Anyway, if we follow this hallway, we get to the kitchen. I think. Sometimes I voyage throughout the manse equipped with chart and sextant, but I’m pretty sure that this passage leads kitchenward. And here we are! You get the milk, I’ll get the doughnuts. I hope you like jelly-filled. I hope you like rock-hard jelly-filled with one or two bites taken out of them.
“Hey, man, is this any better?”
The formerly sleeping girl has put on a pair of panties. They are almost invisible, I can see little curls of hair pressed like flowers in a high-school yearbook. Her small breasts are bouncing, because this formerly sleeping girl has become very animated.
“So,” she asks, “do you have any coffee or what?”
Do I have coffee. I support the country of Colombia almost single-handedly. “Look in that cupboard,” I say through a mouthful of doughnut.
She opens it, whistles through her teeth and announces, “Coffee.” The girl sets about preparing it.
“Make lots,” I tell her. “I’m not supposed to have any.”
“Okee-dokee.”
Do you think she might be some sort of housekeeper? I’ve had them before, although they have tended to be much older and stouter creatures, Teutonic, more given to the wearing of clothing. The girl has freckles all over her body, little bits of sunlight.
“Where do you come from?” I ask.
“Toronto,” is her curious response. “I told you that before.”
“Toronto.” I believe it’s a planet in the Alpha Centauri galaxy. This makes sense, this seems to me the most logical explanation for her presence. She is not a house guest, she is a scientist from beyond the sun, conducting some sort of interplanetary survey. “Pretty cold up there,” I add conversationally.
“You speak truth.”
“Care for a doughnut, a staple of the Earth diet?”
“Ugh.”
What terrible manners they have up on Toronto. All the more for me.
She has managed to get a percolator merrily bubbling on top of the stove. It is producing lovely polyrhythms. I never noticed that household appliances were so funky. I rush to the music room to grab a little tape recorder. While there, I decide to have a quick listen to the Whale Music. Listen, in the background, do you know what that is? It’s the anguished bellow of a bull whose mate has been harpooned. The cow has been chopped up and stuffed into little perfume bottles. I wipe tears from my fat face. It is some time before I get back. The brewing machine has stopped, the girl is peacefully sipping coffee from a large mug.
“Do you know Mooky Saunders?” I demand.
She shrugs. “Sure. He plays on a lot of albums.”
“Is he dead?”
“Why would he be dead?”
“It seems to me,” I tell her, “that if you don’t keep track of people, they die.”
“He’s not dead.”
“I’m going to call him on the telephone. He must play the dolphins.”
The girl nods, shrugs. “Coffee?”
“Yes, certainly, please. Sometimes, though, coffee makes me behave a tad oddly.”
She fills up another mug. Her golden hair hangs down all the way to her tiny waist. “I just want to say, it was wonderful last night.”
“Well, this is certainly good news,” I tell her. “For the longest time I’ve been unable to …” Various phrases fill my mind, all of them spoken in Danny’s voice (actually, the voice of his alter ego, Stud E. Baker, High Prince of the Greasy Geeks), things like charm the one-eyed snake. They all sound too strange, and I am at a loss for words until I remember a phrase from the divorce proceedings. “For the longest time,” I begin again, “I’ve been unable to have intimate relations.”
&nb
sp; “Oh.” The girl seems embarrassed, her entire body reddens slightly. “That’s not what I meant. We … we didn’t. I meant, it was wonderful when you played me the Whale Music.”
“You liked the Whale Music?”
“It was fantastic. It was the best thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Do you have whales on Toronto?”
“Er, no. I saw whales before, though, when I used to live on Galiano.”
She gives me a cup of coffee. It is hot and sweet and I drain the mug in a few short moments. “May I please have more?”
“For sure.”
“I’m glad you liked the music, because you are the farthest thing from a whale I could imagine. I was a little worried that it would appeal only to whales.”
She giggles and has to sweep golden hair out of her face. “You say some pretty strange stuff.”
The coffee has gotten me all jumpy, it has attached itself to some residual pharmaceutical mother lode. I leap about, I must do something. I must work on the Whale Music, which this strange creature from Toronto thinks is wonderful. “Do me a favour,” I tell her. “See if I have a telephone. If I do, find Mooky Saunders. See if he does dolphins. Tell him he gets quadruple scale. I’m going to the music room. Can you do that for me—Um, what’s your name?”
“Claire.”
Ouch. I’m forced to drive my forefingers into my ears. I suffer from tinnitus, to put it mildly. Some clown with crash cymbals is stuck inside my head. I wait for the noise to go away, and remove my fingers with an audible pop. “Claire,” I add conversationally, “is my mother’s name.”
“So you mentioned.”
“Claire” was also the name of a song the father, Henry Howell, wrote. There’s a recording of this, the artist a man named Beany Poacher. To call this tune bouncy would be like calling me fat, or my brother Danny dead.
Claire, the way the moonlight sparkles in your hair,
The way my mind goes blank when you are there.
What do I care that the world is not exactly fair?
When you are there, fair’s fair, my lovely Claire.
Whale Music Page 1