That Kirkism about dice had started out about trivial stuff. An E string snapping, mic feedback, flight cancelled. It escalated from there. The time Hassan had mono. Legal problems with our record label. Then, The Five. It was a typical Kirkism, flip and light-hearted, yet with an undercurrent of something darker, deeper.
Stumble, walk, fall, all fours now you crawl
It’s just the rhythm of the dice
CHAPTER 18
There are many types of London pub. Large gin palaces with a range of superfluous upstairs rooms; corner locals, with either TV screens and electronic arcade games or slate, zinc and muted tones. And another type of inner London local, the terraced pub, slotted between houses, narrow-fronted, bottle-glassed, discreetly-signed—such was The Wrestlers, my rendezvous with my physics siren.
I arrived early. I had undergone serious difficulty rescheduling my flight back home, now via Washington, DC. So the cause, this meeting, had better be worth it. To find that out I couldn’t risk blowing it by arriving late, finding her gone.
I bought a single Jack at the bar then sat in easy view of the entrance. To pass the time I had my notebook out, reading through pages of ideas for songs—themes and phrases—wild theories and fantasies, street impressions. I went through the song scraps, wondering how close I was to starting again. Wondering, too, whether there were any flecks of gold in this pan. I was in a reverie of planes and phrases, clouds and whiskey when I became aware of two people standing next to me.
My eyes first fell to an expensive watch on a male wrist, followed the arm up to a thirty-something man, a bit on the short side, handsome with dark, polished looks, in a well-cut charcoal suit, dark hair lightly greased back. The other was the physics student, dark slacks, a subtle, light pink sweater, and a well-cut black blazer. Where had they arrived from?
I stood up. I topped her companion by a good half-foot. He gave me the slow look of a competitor, that physical assessment, before easing off with a smile. He introduced himself as George, let it be known he was the owner of the pub, then excused himself.
We sat down. I was still trying to figure out where she had arrived from. All I knew was not the front entrance. I looked into her face. Her eyes were on my notebook, intent. Interested.
“You write one of your songs?”
“No. More mundane stuff than that.”
“What is mundane?” It took me a second to understand she was asking for the meaning.
“You know how poetry has many adjectives; lofty, noble, one the highest forms of art? Mundane is the opposite.”
There was no rhythm to our talk. I took a sip of my whiskey, then realized she didn’t have a drink. There was a throng at the bar. I didn’t want to leave her for the ten minutes it would take to restore alcoholic equity to our table. George arrived with an orange juice.
“What’s powering that?” I asked.
She didn’t understand me. Instead she smiled, showing her white, implacable teeth, the foreign curl of lip, teasing eyes that didn’t back away. “So you write songs but not now?”
She must have heard about my background from Professor Howell or the Internet. Both.
“I’d rather talk about you. You seem to know about me already.”
“I have a feeling you are different person to that.”
“Probably not.” I wasn’t certain who I was. This sober, clean, play-going, book-reading, sometime tourist had to be a temporary role. The question was, what was I going back to after that?
Now a smartly dressed hostess was before us. She escorted us up a narrow stairway to a room full of tables set for dinner.
Our table was in a corner. A bottle of champagne was resting in an ice bucket.
“You know about me. I don’t even know your name,” I started.
She laughed here. “I am Sula.”
“Exotic.”
“If Greek is exotic.” She flashed her all-conquering smile. “Complete name is Anastasoula Lamzaki.”
“So, like Anastasia?”
“Other way. Greeks were first.”
Here a quick freeze, as if for a second she was off somewhere else, unaware of me. Then back in our world.
“Her biography is very sad, no? When she is my age she has been dead for many years.” A conversation stopper. I didn’t know what to say.
We talked haltingly about Greece. She wasn’t all that interested, hit the highlights out of a sense of decorum. A new waiter brought glasses, opened and poured the champagne.
“To what?” she asked, as I raised my glass to her.
“To your beauty.”
“And what about my brains?” She laughed in mock disappointment.
“You don’t normally toast another’s intelligence; that toasts you.”
“This means?”
“Well, among other things, it means I’m intimidated by intelligent women.”
There was a brief interruption while I had to explain what intimidated meant. She had a trick of doing this, I was to learn.
“If this was true you wouldn’t admit it. You are trying to show lack of hubris. You do this to prove to me you are intelligent.” Said teasingly, yet still it brought me up short.
“Hubris?”
“It is Greek word. I can’t think of the right word in English.”
“It’s okay, we’ve taken it from you.” I took a sip of the melted ice in my drink. “So, what do you do in London when you’re not working on your calculations?”
She gave me a small, defensive smile. “Even my professor says I work too much. What I do, it has to be like this. It is not like a job in a bank.” She looked down now. Okay, I had hit a sensitive topic. “It seems we are having a contest, neither wants to talk about himself. You because you are happy to hide behind your—what is the word?—what public knows about you? Me because my story is very boring.”
I got her on to physics. I’d had a lot of science in high school. After that, I’d read on the road to keep up with Kirk. I took in the phrase “quantum gravity,” but not her tentative, arcane explanation of it. I watched her mouth form words, the lips and teeth working in teasing harmony. Her voice soft and low and husky and foreign. Foreign, yet somehow the same pitch and timbre as my mother reading to me as I fell asleep. It had that night confessional tone to it, low and intimate, for me only.
“I am in trouble though—with the professor. I want to, to forget string theory. I am being like heretic in church. Don’t believe myths about scientists who can change their minds.” She gave me a smile, confident, warm, a touch of loneliness too.
She kept on explaining. I tried to think of a question that would keep her going, show I was following. This was important. My eyes kept returning to her face, her intent manner, eyebrows active below the tiny furrows of her brow.
There were too any distractions to keep up with her explanations. The combination of the subject’s complexity and Sula’s shaky English might have defeated me anywhere.
“Schrödinger’s cat and all that, eh?” I finally said, just to show some sign of science from my side.
Again that micro-freeze, a blank mask for just a split-second.
“Yes, his cat. All that crazy stuff. We ignore such things. We stay with the mathematics.”
“What does the math tell you?”
“I focus on probabilities. You know, wave function?” She gave me a light version of her frown—she had many variations, I would learn—eyes tightened, brows lightly knit, arched, serious, her career face.
I strained to remember what I’d read. The phrase “smear of probabilities” came to me.
Instinctively she grasped my forearm. “Yes! Exactly!” Then she looked down, embarrassed. “I forget the English don’t like to touch. I have committed a sin.”
The upstairs room was full now, a steady, roaring buzz. Our conversation had these lurches to a stop. It was like practice tennis with one ball: she waited while I trotted to the net for it.
“I too am hoi polloi; not a subject of the Queen, more like an indirect object.” I explained my background.
“American? You are the enemy!” Said with a smile.
“We have taken your democracy and given it to the polloi.”
“You Americans are like our former gods. You come down from your mountaintop, make chaos, make fornications, many problems, then you return to your mountain.” Her brows were knit tightly here.
“That’s us all right.” I found it endearing the way she said “moun-tane.”
She asked me how long I planned to be in London. I found myself equivocating. “At least until I see the sun, which could be a couple of years.”
She looked at me sharply with a dismissive sigh, disappointed. Okay, I had dodged her question. I told her a little about my solo album project, not exactly untrue. I looked away from her. I was beginning to understand how difficult it would be to lie to her. I proceeded to sell her on my extended stay in London, of being around and available.
I told her of my plan to use London as a base for weeklong jaunts to Italy, Spain—Greece would be good too. That plan was from back in November, before I got here. We talked about Greece. I had heard Athens was not a great city to hang out in. She didn’t dispute that.
“Do you really like retsina?” I asked.
“Normally I do not drink. I shall be falling down quite easily.” She nodded at her glass of champagne, barely sipped. “I shall have to hope that you are a man of honor.”
I held back on any wisecracks. I didn’t know what to think of Sula. She was intelligent, attractive, honest, defensive, and intermittently friendly. I was used to operating on a two-adjective level, one of which was hot. This was something else completely. “I’d like to see you again.”
She gave me a yes-I-know nod. Mentioned she would be back on the fourth of January. I left it there. A maybe was good enough for now. Finally we got around to Professor Howell.
“He has been ill. His heart. Poor man.” Her eyes shied away from mine.
“Serious?”
“The heart is always serious.”
CHAPTER 19
The Internet showed Francine McLain as a successful writer specializing in the former Soviet Union. She had written three books on the fall of the Soviet system and the rise of what she termed “gangster capitalism.” All three books were published by Iken Press.
The number Moira had given me didn’t work. I had called her the next morning to reconfirm it. She was out sick. I was flying home the following morning. The McLain project would have to wait until January.
I arrived at Sunnydown Hills on foot from the train station—suddenly in no hurry to take in the smells and mild despair. Mr. Hardcastle was upright in his recliner, an easy chair on wheels, on the other side of the double glass doors. His thin, shaky arm came up, pointing vaguely at me, like an antenna searching for signs of life out in the world.
I entered the foyer. The Polish nurse, Anja, was minding him. We exchanged smiles, an amiable current of humanity, a mutual sigh, a comment on this sad play. “He waits for you.” I had called so they could get him ready.
Anja bore a slight resemblance to Kirk’s one (known to me) girlfriend, a Polish graduate student called Jolanta, who was at UC Berkeley studying some impossible portmanteau subject like biopsychology. They looked good together, but more like political running mates than anything romantic. I met Jolanta a handful of times—she wanted Kirk to herself once we were back from our latest tour—but I don’t think I ever saw them touch. Jolanta was undoubtedly good for Kirk. He ate better, lost the hint of dark under his eyes. She could get him to do stuff; go to the doctor, get his eyes checked, read what she suggested. Kirk kept that side away from me—or it was me avoiding it so as not to intrude? You didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know there’d be a collision up the road—I’d been through my share—because it always came down to the band or the girl. The only time Kirk hinted at such a tacit ultimatum was when he told me, “I can’t see the point in hanging out with someone who gets mad at you for not changing.” I wondered if Kirk had run into Anja.
I was carrying my new guitar, an off-the-shelf Gibson J45 standard, a what-the-hell purchase made to avoid any Big Decision involving prime periods of guitar construction, or optimum sound. Buying a replacement guitar was sure to tempt the gods into returning Estelle to me. I had a hopeful theory that I just needed the right sequence of notes to unlock Mr. Hardcastle’s mind—something to do with singing using both brain halves, thereby amplifying the chance of effective connection. Of course you can’t bring a guitar into a place like Sunnydown Hills without sharing. The sound caromed around the linoleum-floored dining room. I only knew two songs from their era (not knowing that old American songs were fair game). One was “We’ll Meet Again” and the other, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” I played them plus a few other folksy ballads like “Leaving on a Jet Plane”; then a few jazz instrumentals, “So Far Away” and “Light My Fire.” I couldn’t come up with any song that didn’t cruelly mock their plight.
I had been working on a blues number, a song for my fast-fading Care Home king, a song about life from his perspective. Songs come in different ways, but it was only ever with the blues that sometimes the right title could blossom out into more and more words, a full song. Maybe because melody is secondary. Hardcastle’s song was like this: “Cain’t Pull the Trigger Blues.” I had thought I might work on it in front of him, but, no, that would be too harsh.
It was impossible to know what, if anything, was going on inside that noble, quizzical head. There were hints—a well-timed reaction, a wince, a sudden clarity in his eyes—when I was convinced Hardcastle’s main challenge was an uncooperative tongue. He didn’t talk much, when he did it was incomprehensible mush.
I was determined to avoid the usual over-bright, dumbed-down prattle. Oh, look, here comes the tea! Would you like the nice lady to give you a cup of tea? Instead, I started talking to him about my case; why I was here, Kirk. “I think you’ve met him, Mr. H.” I mentioned Claudia, then Francine. I went through the story all over again, every detail, even those he was unlikely to be connected to. I watched for any reaction, especially to names, to Kirk. If anything my talking calmed him down (or put him to sleep). Or maybe he had his eyes closed in concentration.
I had wheeled Mr. Hardcastle into the communal room. The other Polish nurse, Ivanka, was administering tea to the more incapacitated residents.
“You take him for walk. It is good for him to try.”
I hadn’t done that the second visit: he’d fallen asleep. A male nurse helped me get Hardcastle on his feet. His forward motion had deteriorated since last time. Now it was step and stop, step, stop longer, like swimming out to sea then looking back to shore.
Eventually, we succeeded in leaving the communal room, entering a wide hall with glass giving on to an inner courtyard. A few steps into this new area Hardcastle stopped for a long minute. His face went dark, a storm cloud over his brow, like a parody of thought. He moved his eyes to me. I had a distinct feeling that there was intelligence screaming to be let out. He pursed his lips, another parody. Then he said something with considerable effort. It was garbled, mushy. I heard it as “Ulyanov,” but that was Lenin. Now, more parody, he fought my arm off, tried to, stamped his foot in frustration.
It had been an effort. Now he was done, sunk into himself, spent. I waited, holding him up. Ivanka, who had her eye on us, came to help and brought another attendant. The easy-chair-on-wheels was fetched. Mr. Hardcastle was hoisted into it.
I wanted time alone with Hardcastle’s utterance, chew on it like a dog on a bone. No doubt my first take in the immediacy of hearing it would be the most accurate. I decided I was fairly sure about the “ahnov” part. The syllable that preceded that was more grunt than syllable, which was how I got to “uh.” Was I simply projecting from my new knowledge of the man as an old Russia hand? That mumbled mush could have bee
n anything. It was clear, however, that this was some kind of warning, something that warranted all of Hardcastle’s energy. Yes, a warning. Those brows. That effort. To stand all by himself, to try to. Even more, that right hand on my forearm, pulling me towards him as if to whisper. Then that stamp, frustration or emphasis. I needed to stop thinking about it and go with my gestalt take before memory corrupted it for good.
Now I was summoned by the manager, Bette, via her assistant, a Nigerian lady with a wide smile that spoke of everlasting sunshine. She escorted me back through the locked doors, down a short hall to Bette’s office. Small desk, large woman. Lots of papers, files stacked everywhere. She sat behind her desk, her labored breaths a shared event between us.
“Mr. Hardcastle is deteriorating at such a pace. I fear, I really do fear, that we may not have him much longer.” She paused. “A few months. Perhaps less. These things are never predictable, but…” She trailed off, contemplating this unsavory part of her job, how all her guests were there for the short term, then the Big Checkout.
What could I say? My eyes were on a dusty bowl of plastic flowers on her windowsill.
“The poor man does not seem to have any next of kin.”
“Didn’t he have any visitors? Someone must have arranged for him to be put here.”
She nodded, wearily.
“What about money? Mr. Hardcastle looks like the type who would have a lot. Doesn’t that usually attract any and all flies to that honeypot?”
She didn’t know anything about that apart from an absence of said files. I waited for her to get to the point. “Come to the service. You’re quite popular here with your guitar. Play a few songs at the reception afterwards. Cheer us up. We’ll need that. All the cake you can eat.”
I nodded absently. Maybe I’d write a new song, assuming my erratic muse cooperated. I wanted it to be rock and roll. I heard a high, sharp stab of notes. Rock for me has a generosity of spirit, giving of yourself, a pouring out, a laying bare, all connected to anger. Somewhere between that and “Guantanamera” I’d find a way.
Little God Blues Page 8