The Mule

by David Quantick

  Frant finished locking the cases, patted his pockets a few times to reassure himself that he had his passport, his front door keys and his gold-rimmed bifocals, and then suggested that I call a taxi. I wondered briefly if he thought he might get an electric shock if he picked up his own phone, and turned to dial a cab number on the wall behind his desk. As I did so, I heard the rattle of a belt buckle being loosened. I looked at Frant’s reflection in the mirror above the desk and saw that he was undoing his trousers. He began to wrap something long around his middle, and I realised that, for the first time in my life, I was witnessing someone strap on a money belt. I wondered what dangerous brigands and murderous footpads Frant thought we might encounter on the streets of Paris. Then again, he might just be extremely cautious with his money. On reflection, this seemed the more likely of the two options.

  Frant closed up his trousers and I was able to turn around.

  ‘The taxi’s on its way,’ I said.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Frant. ‘The game’s afoot.’

  In all my time with Euros Frant, I never came closer to braining him than when he said that. Which, given what happened later, seems slightly ironic now.

  * * *

  The train charged across the sunny landscape, and I tried to look at the scenery.

  ‘You might also have been tempted to make merry of the similarity between my surname and the name of the country in which we now find ourselves,’ said Frant. ‘Again I must commend you on your restraint.’

  I had never ‘made merry’ in my life or met anyone who had, but I guessed that in Frant’s world people were making merry all the time, when they weren’t ringing the wassail or singing ho for the life of a woodsman fair. I wanted very much for this journey to end.

  My mobile phone made an unfamiliar pinging noise which turned out to be a notification that it was now operating via a French phone network. A second ping indicated that I had received a voicemail message. As Frant prattled on, I asked him to excuse me while I worked out how to play the message. Finally I succeeded.

  ‘Quigley here,’ said the man about to smash his way into my apartment. ‘We’re very concerned that you haven’t been to see us. Please do make the effort to contact myself or my colleague. In fact, if you’re smart, make the effort right now.’

  ‘Important call?’ said Frant, clearly miffed that I wasn’t hanging on his every word.

  ‘Not in the least,’ I said, and turned off the phone. I was out on a limb now, and there was very little I could do about it. Frant made a vague noise in his throat, leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. The silence was by no means unpleasant. The countryside became less and less rural, and was now dotted with all manner of prefabricated sheds, power lines and the odd clump of houses. We would be in Paris within the hour.

  Frant was now riffling through his man-bag in search of peppermints or similar so I took the opportunity to remove the notebook from my pocket. I hadn’t had a chance to look at it since I’d called my ex-girlfriend and learned that I was known to her and all her friends as the Mule. Perhaps that was why. Maybe I was associating the two things – the notebook and the nickname. Maybe not. I’m no psychologist. I shook my head to empty it of irrelevant thoughts and opened the notebook at the first page. This I had read before, it being the review of Carrie and the Legions’ first record ‘The Future’ (backed with ‘Night Life’). The anonymous reviewer was extremely enthusiastic and appeared to predict great things for the band or singer (I’m not, as I said, an expert on this sort of thing).

  The second page of the notebook was written in the same hand, though, which suggested to me that Carrie – if she was the owner of the notebook as well as its subject – had decided to copy all these reviews out longhand rather than go through the process of cutting them out of magazines. It seemed to me a laborious process, but people have their own quirks. For example, when I’m translating a book, no matter what the author or the compositor has done, I always put the first three words of the first paragraph of a new section into capital letters. I believe it makes the text look more elegant and, as nobody has complained so far, it makes me feel more part of the process of writing the book. I’m aware, obviously, that I’m not the author, and don’t have the creative talents of the writer or writers, but I like to think of those three capitalised words as my own personal signature.

  So I could understand why she had gone to all this trouble. Copying something can make it more yours, as well, as the words turn from the harshness of machine print into the rounded figures of your own personal hand. And Carrie, or whoever, had excellent handwriting. It was very easy to read and even its more idiosyncratic features – a squiggly initial ‘C’, for example, or a slight similarity between initial ‘Q’ and the ampersand – were perfectly legible in context. And it made ploughing through the rather shrill rock-writer prose in the reviews a lot more pleasant.

  I began to read the second piece in the notebook. It was, as I said, a lot longer, and while it was in the same handwriting, it was clearly the work of a different writer, a journalist who to my surprise was much less enamoured of Carrie and the Legions’ work. It also, somewhat confusingly, seemed to be a retrospective piece, suggesting that the writer wasn’t commenting on something new, but looking back in time, and, to my surprise, treating what was clearly a pop record with all the seriousness and consideration of an important historical artefact:

  CARRIE AND THE LEGIONS

  Showtime? **

  MAYOR KIM FORWARD RECORDS

  On this, her first album, Carrie Legion showed but little of the promise of her early singles, shows and – if we’re going to alliterate – sessions. The pros are, there was everything to play for for the sophomore singer, a sense of real possibility and the idea that anything could happen in the next 47 minutes and 32 seconds, and throughout Legion’s voice reverberates with that sense of freedom – almost literally at times, as it ranges from the Gothy tremor of a slightly nervous Nico to the confident girlie trill of a Kate Bush or a Tori Amos. It’s a lot to unpack, to be sure.

  And that’s almost it for the pros. There are a few echoes of what made people love the Legions – the unusual use of retro synthesisers, the reluctance to utilise any form of percussion other than BIG WEIRD DRUMS, and right from the off, that oh so Carrie Legion habit (it used to be an oh so New Order habit) of never putting the title of the damn song in the chorus. The first clue that something was amiss was in the album’s writing credits. Where once all tracks were band-credited with lyrics all by Carrie, here was a new voice – producer and ‘sound guru’ (whatever that may be) Henry J. The enigmatic but heavy-handed J is all over these songs like a cheap suit, adding unnecessary keyboards, guitars, backing vocals and everything bar the fabled kitchen sink. And where once Legions’ songs were both original and immediate, like hits you’d never heard before but wanted to hear again and again, now everything sounded – to quote one reviewer – ‘awfully familiar and at times familiarly awful’.

  That was, admittedly, a harsher view than most. Showtime? is and was a serious disappointment. Fans rarely discuss it on the forums and it’s never found on even the crummiest budget reissues. Its only redeeming track is, perhaps significantly, a reworking of early Legions’ B-side ‘Night Life’, which not only remains free of the drab bombast of Henry J’s other work on this record, but contains a significant new lyric: ‘The night is nearly over now / But still the dark is growing / I don’t like where I’ve been somehow / And I’m scared of where I’m going.’

  It’s almost like she knew what was coming.

  The review puzzled me, to say the least. Here was a writer saying that Carrie was possessed of a great talent – even I had heard of some of the big names she was being compared to – and yet somehow she had apparently lost her way before she had even begun, as it were. I also assumed that the two stars at the top of the review were not two stars out of three, but some larger number. Clearly Carrie and the Legions had incurred some important crit
ical disapproval. To be frank, I wasn’t at all sure what it was Carrie had done wrong. Surely the variety of sounds would be exciting to a listener, while the ability to create catchy songs that sound instantly ‘familiar’ is the hallmark of a professional songwriter, not an amateur?

  Then I remembered the conversations my ex-girlfriend would have with our friends. They liked to sit up late in our apartment, drinking coffee and playing the newest CDs over and over again and discussing them as if they were important works of art or missives from the front line of culture (which to them I suppose they were). I have to admit I found these conversations a bit hard to follow, as I’ve never really been what you might call a rock’n’roller. In fact, I once said those exact words to my ex-girlfriend – ‘I’ve never really been what you might call a rock’n’roller’ – and she had to leave the room to go and laugh behind a door. I can see, or rather hear, the appeal of, for example, the Beatles or Beethoven, but not much else.

  And that’s at the quality end of the spectrum. Some of the music that my student acquaintances enjoyed seemed to me to be almost deliberately unpleasant or designed to be annoying. Men who sang ridiculous disjointed lists of words in the voice of an angry dog were particularly popular, as were women who keened abominably over acoustic guitars about their awful boyfriends, who often turned out, according to my ex-girlfriend, a fan of the music press and its gossipy pieces dressed up as serious analysis, to be the self-same dog-voiced men, who all seemed to possess the enormous beards of lumberjacks but were only nineteen years old. I didn’t enjoy any of this music and so, when the latest CD by some hairy fellow had been taken out of the player and flung unceremoniously into a corner of the room (respect for the artist did not seem to extend to their actual product) I’d usually just say goodnight and slip away unnoticed as the debate got more heated and people began to raise their voices to one another.

  Despite this unwillingness to engage with the world of pop, I still managed to pick up a basic knowledge of the central ideas and prejudices of our group. They had a very hard and fast set of rules about what was and what wasn’t acceptable. There were some variants – the feminist students, obviously, disliked lyrics and imagery that were offensive to women (although they were always prepared to make an exception for any song that, no matter how spectacularly unpleasant its content, was ‘just brilliant’) but as a rule there were certain simple criteria for acceptability in music. Being ‘real’ was very important and while it seemed to me that every act was as real as the next one, I was told that some people were ‘fake’ and others weren’t. Again, having a beard was a good indicator of being a real person, while wearing bright clothes and smiling was a sign of moral fraud.

  ‘Not doing it for the money’ was very important, too. In most jobs, doing it for the money is all there is. Very few of us are lucky enough to work for fun or as a vocation. Even as a translator, working in a medium I love, I often wish that I was able to read for fun, and not have to worry about rendering every sentence I read into a form acceptable to others. In music, it seems that the best artists are not doing it for money, but instead embarked upon an artistic quest whose fruits were more likely to be spiritual than financial. It was often hard to tell who was doing it for the money and who wasn’t, as several of those not doing it for the money seemed to spend their time travelling around the world and enjoying a lifestyle far beyond most people’s dreams, while those who were doing it for the money spent most of their time on unpleasant and gruelling television shows where they were shoved around like performing chimps.

  The worse offence of all, worse than murdering someone or being an obvious heroin addict in the eyes of my ex-girlfriend and her friends, was ‘selling out’. Selling out was a foggy concept that could mean anything from taking corporate sponsorship to – in some people’s eyes – just signing a record contract. One of my ex-girlfriend’s circle once organised a charity disco or rave to raise money for some worthy cause or other, and was immediately rounded on for selling out by other members of the circle when he charged a slightly higher than usual amount of money on the door, and so the event was a failure as many people refused to attend it. (I remember this particularly clearly as it was the occasion of another unsuccessful joke on my part. I said that, as nobody was going to the event, there wouldn’t be any worries about it ‘selling out’. It wasn’t a great joke, or a popular one.)

  And it seemed to me now, reading the review of Showtime? by Carrie and the Legions and remembering those earnest student chats, that the anonymous writer was accusing Carrie precisely of selling out. Clearly, the implication of the piece was, her decision to opt for a more commercial sound – and, specifically, to achieve this sound by working with this producer, Henry J – was a cynical move, a false step which, instead of propelling her towards her true artistic goal, had had the opposite effect and alienated Carrie from her true fans, who were presumably discerning people like my ex-girlfriend and her friends. Carrie, in short, was not only selling out, but also doing it for the money, and this was what had so vexed the writer.

  There was another implication. I may or may not have been reading too much into the piece, but it sounded like Carrie herself was unhappy with the way things had been going. The lyrics of the song quoted in the text were, to say the least, full of doubt, worry and, unless I was very much mistaken, fear. The final line of the review, too – ‘It’s almost like she knew what was coming’ – made me uncomfortable. What exactly was coming? And did she know it was coming? I realised, of course, that there was a simple way to answer these questions. All I had to do was to keep reading the notebook, which was clearly laid out in chronological order, and the story of Carrie and the Legions would unfold in front of my eyes.

  I decided not to do this right now. For one, I wanted to mentally digest the things I’d seen so far, and if possible see if it somehow linked up in my mind with all the other, equally confusing, information that had come my way recently. Thoughts of the Alice text, the terrifying photographs, and the fact that the girl – who might in fact not be Carrie at all, just a devoted fan – had disappeared (along, of course, with my own inadvertent role as an innocent suspect) were all rolling around in my head, refusing to align themselves and spell out answers to which I didn’t even know the questions. Part of me also wanted, perhaps oddly, to indulge in what the psychologists call ‘delayed gratification’. It might sound a bit perverse, but I found I was looking forward to reading the next instalment of Carrie and the Legions’ career.

  And part of me was aware that the train was now approaching the outer suburbs of Paris. Meanwhile, Frant stirred beneath his fedora and made little snuffling noises in his sleep. Perhaps he was dreaming he was chasing unicorns and other imaginary beasts. I didn’t know, but I suspected that these noises were a prelude to him waking up, and I didn’t want him to see me reading the notebook. I was keen for any interest in my business on Frant’s part to be kept to a minimum, and so I put the notebook back in my pocket and waited for Frant to surface from the grumbling land of Nod.

  * * *

  I’m not particularly well travelled, which might strike some people as odd given what I do for a living, but the fact is my income doesn’t often enable me to visit the places mentioned in the books I translate. And when I do, frequently they’re not as exciting or interesting as the way they’re depicted by my writers, which I guess is a testimony to the skill of these authors. I once made the mistake of travelling to Düsseldorf on the strength of a particularly exciting passage in a book called They Struggle at Night by a briefly popular German crime writer named Wolf Stern, who had made that city look like downtown Los Angeles in the 1940s. In fact, Düsseldorf turned out to be very much like every other large German city, full of clean concrete buildings with a city centre that emptied at six o’clock every night, and I soon regretted my decision to book a fortnight’s holiday there.

  But Paris did not disappoint me. Just getting off the train at Gare du Nord your senses are struck by a
brilliant metallic tang in the air, a mixture of water and iron that seems to come off the trains even on the sunniest days. Stepping off a train into an unfamiliar location always fills me with optimism anyway, because there is no better place to feel a sense of possibility than a railway station, where people are always beginning new journeys and everywhere is full of the reality of fresh starts. That’s what I felt anyway. Euros Frant clearly had a different point of view, as he pulled his trousers tighter round his waist, the better to prevent his money belt being visible to thieves, and tugged a valise with a retractable handle along on little wheels. I’d never seen a man less at ease with the process of travel. He looked suspiciously around him at every passing tourist, visibly flinched when asked to produce his passport, and repeatedly urged me to be careful as I loaded the rest of our luggage onto a trolley and pushed it towards the cab rank.

  Once in the taxi, Frant became more relaxed. ‘La belle France,’ he said, accurately, as the taxi pulled out into traffic. ‘How I love Paris!’

  ‘Have you been before?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Frant. ‘My work is respected here, and I am often invited to speak at conferences and literary conventions. In fact, I have recently heard from a very reliable source indeed that my name is in the hat for a little red ribbon.’

  I must have looked confused, because Frant shook his jowls at me irritably and said, ‘A Légion d’Honneur!’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, wondering what derangement of French culture could possibly result in an idiot like Euros Frant receiving any kind of honour from the government.

  ‘Is this our hotel?’ said Frant, peering out of the window. ‘Arrêtez ici, s’il vous plaît.’

  The driver pulled over outside the hotel and Frant all but leapt out of the cab, leaving me to pay and to bring the luggage.