* * *
I should make it clear that when I say things weren’t going to plan that I didn’t actually have a plan but even if I had had one, well, things weren’t going to plan. For a start, now there were two books. The book I didn’t have but wanted, and the book I didn’t want but turned out I might need after all. I was none the wiser, the way you sometimes are when at least the tiny amount of information you have kind of balances things out. Before, I knew where I was. I was looking for a book and, if I found it, maybe I could help Carrie, or whatever this girl’s name might be. Instead I had found a notebook which, to be honest, only made things more complicated. I hadn’t planned on tracking down a singer, in fact I hadn’t planned on tracking anyone down at all. I didn’t want to approach the girl until I had some good news for her. I suppose it was a kind of a fantasy, me as the knight in a white suit of armour saving the fair damsel from a mysterious I didn’t know what, and winning, if not her heart or her praise, then at least her forgiveness for going through her stuff. OK, so the last part wasn’t very medieval but you get the idea. I was embarrassed that I’d acted out of character and I wanted to make amends.
But here I was now with no way of making amends and a lead I didn’t necessarily want. I could track her down now but what would I say? ‘Hi, I know you didn’t want me to get in contact with you again, but I did. And I’m no nearer to solving your problem than before.’ I could present her with the notebook, sure, but it was just a notebook full of rock articles. And whichever way I looked at it, her parting words had been very clear.
The whole situation was in every way the polar opposite of what I actually wanted to achieve. On the other hand I had no alternative plan, so I might as well just look for Carrie and the Legions and maybe along the way something might turn up.
This was as it turned out the nearest to what I could call a plan, anyway. It wasn’t very good when it started and three hours later, as I ploughed my way through Google and the websites of five or six rock magazines, it seemed that it had got even worse. There was nothing on the internet about Carrie and the Legions. Once again, I’d hit a dead end. This struck me as bizarre. My girlfriend and her pals at college were constantly marvelling at the fact that the internet was always throwing up more and more obscure rock groups, and they even used to vie with one another to find bands or singers that nobody had heard of. It was almost as if they valued the obscurity of the artist more than their actual music. Well, they would have been shocked and stunned to learn that of all their acquaintances, I would be the one to find an act that didn’t appear anywhere on the internet. In terms of obscurity points, I was the clear winner. Not that this was any consolation. There was no way I could go back in time and impress these students with my find. And, more pertinently, I was yet again stymied.
Even the individual words in the name ‘Carrie and the Legions’ were so common that it wasn’t so much like looking for a needle in a haystack, as it was like finding a needle that scattered into its various component atoms as soon as you picked it up. Clearly Carrie and the Legions – with or without the records they had made – were not a successful or popular act. I stood up and got a glass of water, and I thought hard. Why was this more difficult than looking for la furcheuxne and the other words? They were made-up fragments of nonsense from a fantasy world, whereas Carrie and the Legions were surely as mundane and real as any other wannabe rock band.
And then it dawned on me. With the whole la furcheuxne conundrum, I at least had an inkling that I was dealing with a fantasy language. And why? Because language is my business. I’m a translator! I speak several major European languages. I know the beat, as it were. But with groups and bands (and I don’t even know the difference between a ‘group’ and a ‘band’), I’m completely at a loss. I haven’t a clue, you might say. I don’t go to concerts, I don’t buy T-shirts with the names of bands (or groups) on. I’m just not in that world.
But I did know someone who was.
* * *
It had been a long time since I left college, but not so long that I’d seen fit to throw away my old student address book. We students, of course, all lived in temporary accommodation in those days, but most people had mobile phones and even if those numbers had changed, well, I had their parents’ details from those long vacations when we would visit each other at ‘home’. I’m sure they had mine, too, but years had passed and people make new friendships or fall in love or just die, so I wasn’t too upset that none of my old college acquaintances had been in touch. Besides, if I wanted to contact any of them, or just see how they were doing, there was always my trusty old friend the internet. A lot of people had posted photographs from their university days on various social network sites and I could often see myself in those photographs, crowding in to get nearer to the centre, or caught unawares in the background of some group shot.
I don’t want to give the impression that I was not one of the gang as a student. I’d say it was one of the happiest times of my life. I joined various societies, ones whose activities didn’t clash with my courses, and it was there that I met my girlfriend. We went out for a couple of years until she met the guy she married, who was on one of my courses. In fact, I sort of introduced them to each other, which goes to show that sometimes when you think you’re being the main actor in your own life, you’re in fact a supporting character in someone else’s. But they got married, so at least I can take some credit for bringing happiness to two people there. Also, the fact that they stayed together makes her dropping me less bad, somehow. It wasn’t as though I had planned to marry her, after all.
All these thoughts and some more besides were in my head when I tried the first number I had for my old girlfriend in my address book. The phone rang and rang but didn’t go to answerphone. I was just about to put the receiver back in the cradle when a man said, ‘Hello?’
‘This is Jacky,’ I said, recognising the voice at once. He was the guy who I had introduced to my girlfriend. Once again I was pleased they were still together. It validated me introducing them even more.
There was silence at the other end of the phone.
‘From college,’ I said, adding the names of the courses we had taken.
‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Jacky, of course. How are you?’ And before I could reply, he shouted something muffled. I was confused until I realised he was probably calling out to my ex-girlfriend. I couldn’t catch what he said, though, but it must have done the trick because seconds later her voice was in my ear.
‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is that you … Jacky?’
I could hear her saying my name like it was rusty, or like something in a drawer she was unwrapping cautiously for the first time in years. She sounded wary, which I suppose is reasonable when somebody calls up the way I was doing, with no introduction. For one crazy moment I wished I had written to her first, warning her that I was going to telephone, but that would have been a worse plan, now I come to think about it.
‘Hi,’ I said, ‘I’m very sorry to call out of the blue like this.’
‘Not at all,’ she said, and her voice seemed more relaxed now. ‘You were never one for the social niceties, after all.’
I set this comment aside, because it patently wasn’t true, and went on in fact to disprove it by saying, ‘So how are you?’ Then I added, ‘How are you both?’ because that would disprove her claim regarding me and social niceties.
‘We’re well,’ she said. ‘We have a baby now, a boy. In fact I think I can hear him crying.’
I couldn’t hear a thing, and I wondered why her husband didn’t go and attend to the baby. Perhaps she was breast-feeding and didn’t want him to use a bottle. Nevertheless to be polite – and also because it was possible she was using the baby as an excuse to keep the call short – I decided to take the hint, if hint it was, and get straight to the point.
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘But I won’t keep you. I just wanted to ask you something.’
‘Oh?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You know about rock music and pop and that kind of thing, don’t you?’
She had to ask me to repeat the question, so I guess it must have thrown her slightly.
‘Rock music,’ I said again. ‘I remember at college you were always reading music papers and going to concerts.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course, it was a long time ago. You certainly have a good memory.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied politely. ‘So I’m calling to ask you if you’ve ever heard of a group or a band called Carrie and the Legions.’
There was quite a long pause on the line. I listened for the sound of a baby crying, but could hear nothing.
After a while she spoke again. ‘That’s it? That’s what you want to know?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I realise it’s an unusual request but I couldn’t think of anybody else to ask. And before you say anything, I have tried the internet.’
‘I see,’ she said, slightly heavily. ‘It’s been, what, ten years? Since we last spoke.’
‘Maybe more,’ I agreed. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have called like this.’
‘No, it’s fine. Really. I think I’d just forgotten what you were like. Um, let me think.’
But instead of thinking, I heard her shout to her husband. It sounded like ‘Lemuel wants to know …’ and then the rest was muffled, because now I actually could hear a baby crying. Then the husband was shouting, and there was really a lot of noise at the other end of the line. In fact, I could hear something drop and smash. After some time the noise quietened down again, but, to be sure, I said, ‘Hello?’ into the telephone.
‘No,’ she said tersely. ‘I don’t know of any band called Carrie and the Legions and neither does he. Sorry.’
I could tell she was about to hang up but I had another question, this one motivated purely by personal curiosity.
‘Before you go,’ I said quickly, ‘what did you say to your husband then? It sounded like you called me “Lemuel” or “Emu” or something like that.’
‘No,’ she said, amusement surfacing for a moment. ‘It was our nickname for you at college.’
I was surprised, and almost a little flattered. I hadn’t known I’d had a nickname. This made me see some of my old college acquaintances in a different light, I must say.
‘And it wasn’t Lemuel or Emu,’ she said. ‘It was “the Mule”.’
I could hear the baby crying again.
‘Why did you call me the Mule?’ I said.
‘Why do you think?’ she said and put the phone down.
CHAPTER THREE
Of all the meals of the day, I think lunch has to be the least interesting. With breakfast, no matter how simple it is, even if it’s just an apple and a cup of tea, there’s the anticipation of the first meal of the day. You’re hungry and you crave instant satisfaction and there it is. Dinner is in many ways the opposite. It can crown the day, as a big celebration or just a well-deserved blow-out. It says, well done for working so hard, here are the fruits of your labours. With dinner you can perhaps have a glass of wine and indulge yourself.
But lunch, in my experience, is neither of these things. Lunch is a necessity, a mid-point in your working day when you have to take a break and refuel yourself. Unless you’re a rich aristocrat or a fat-cat businessman, for whom lunch is just one more pig-out in your gluttonous day, of course, but I’m not. Lunch for me is at best a bowl of soup and a toasted bagel, and at worst, something stale from a cafeteria.
Today’s lunch was no exception, except that it was particularly poor. I had somehow forgotten to go to the shops and buy any provisions, so my midday meal was a rye cracker with margarine and half a banana that I’d found in the fridge, carelessly wrapped in its own blackening skin. I had no milk either, something that made the cup of instant decaf coffee I prepared myself even less pleasant. All in all, I would say it was one of the worst lunches I had ever had.
I could have gone out and bought myself some lunch, but to be honest I didn’t feel like it. I suppose the telephone call to my old girlfriend had upset me a little, as had the information that I had apparently been known to all and sundry at college as the Mule. However you look at it, the Mule isn’t a flattering nickname. Nobody’s face ever brightened up at a shout of, ‘Hey, Mule, get over here!’ or ‘Great! Here comes the Mule!’ Nobody ever heard of a cool Mule, that’s for sure.
I abandoned my lunch and went over to the mirror. I studied my face for several minutes. Maybe the large eyes were like those of a mule? I couldn’t see it myself. I certainly didn’t have long ears or a prominent jaw. Admittedly, my expression could sometimes tend towards the mournful (as it certainly was doing at the present moment) but all in all, I could see nothing in my physical appearance to justify someone calling me the Mule.
I took down my Children’s Encyclopaedia, which contained several facts about mules concerning their use as beasts of burden and their unusual parentage. None of this seemed to apply to me. I am, as far as I know, the product of normal breeding and while it’s possible I cannot reproduce, there’s no cause to suppose that this would be the reason for my nickname. Mules in fiction are few and far between; there’s a character of that name in a science fiction novel but as he travels the galaxies having thrilling adventures, I saw no connection there either.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and some of the evening researching the word ‘mule’ and its possible applications to myself before I noticed that it was dark outside and therefore time for dinner, a much more exciting meal.
*
I don’t know if you’ve ever woken up at three or four in the morning, plagued by doubts. Apparently it’s by no means uncommon. A man can hit the hay in the best of moods yet suddenly sit bolt upright in bed as if bombarded by every awful thought possible. I’ve read that it’s caused by a lack of endorphins or the like, which are the natural drugs the body produces to keep us feeling OK during the day as we go about our formerly primitive tasks, so we would feel happy about being hunted down by mastodons or not having invented fire and so forth. And it seems that at about three o’clock in the morning these endorphins shut down, the body being asleep and therefore able to cope with its natural, untranquillised state. That’s what I heard, anyway.
Unfortunately, if like me you’re prone to waking up during this unendorphinated time, all bets are off, mentally speaking. Every bad thing you can think of just walks into your mind without so much as a by your leave and blows away any plans for the future you might have, pleasant notions or optimism. And that’s exactly how I was feeling at this moment, depressed and doubtful and worried, with the most terrible ideas running through my mind.
For a start, there was the issue of my nickname and the nagging feeling that perhaps all those years ago the people I had thought were my friends might have been mocking me. But that was something I could cope with. After all, it had been a long time ago, even if it was fresh to me. No, what was worrying me now was the business with Carrie, as I had now started calling her. The more I thought about it, the more disturbing her situation seemed to me. The mysterious book, which so intrigued me as a text to be translated, was surely more upsetting for her because of the photographs it contained, rather than any peculiar quirks of linguistics. How had she come by this book? I realised with a shock that I had no idea if she had picked the book up randomly in a shop or been sent it. Either way the effect on her must have been distressing. And I had been of no help at all. Quite the opposite: just when she wanted some kind of comfort, I had instead decided to go through her stuff. I’m aware that I was driven by curiosity rather than malice, but the result was the same: I had made a girl who was already quite upset even more upset. It was no wonder she had no desire to see me again. And my efforts to help her since she had gone were no better. I had no idea what the book was or what it might mean, and my visit to the bar where we had met was almost as fruitless; in fact it raised more questions than it answered.
The more I la
y there, the more my mind was disturbed by these thoughts. Sleep was clearly not going to be easy to recover. I opened my eyes and decided, reluctantly, that I might as well get up and make myself a cup of tea. The room was still dark, so there were clearly some hours to go before dawn. The darkness was illuminated by a green blinking light, which might well have been what woke me up. I’m a light sleeper and any small thing can bring me out of my slumber. I got up and went over to the source of the illumination. It was the scanner on my printer, which I had obviously left on since shamefully attempting to copy some of the book. It hadn’t woken me last night, but then I had been exhausted.
I was about to turn it off when I noticed an edge of paper peeping out from the printer tray. I removed it. Partly smeared but largely legible were two pages scanned and printed from the book. Somehow the machine must have been copying when the girl snatched it from the scanner. I took the paper from the scanner, scarcely believing it. There was a big smudge across the top of the paper, but it only took up about as much room as perhaps a lid on a jar of sauce takes up on the jar. And while the type on the page was small, it was still entirely legible – three cheers for digital imaging – and anyway I could blow up the scan for clarity. But best of all there were two drawings on the page – drawings with captions. This may not seem like particularly exciting news to you but believe me as a translator thrown into the position of becoming a comparative linguist, this was a real bonus.
Most translation work is based on the simple assumption that the person doing the translation is fluent in both or all of the languages required. They speak and write the language the document is written in and also the language the document is required to be rendered into. That’s surely a given. You would find it pretty odd if a book claimed to be translated from French by a person who admitted they didn’t speak a word of French. Almost certainly, they’d have to make it up. You may laugh, but this used to happen all the time: English translators who didn’t speak, say, Spanish, would get a copy of the book that had already been translated into German, for example, and translate from the German into English. The results would be, as you can imagine, pretty mangled.
The Mule Page 5