by Tim Richards
Adding to Tori’s woes, Graham had become morose. Losing his appetite for salmon, the Dog Bear shed an alarming amount of weight. Tori attributed this crisis to tensions surrounding his readiness to mate.
Much later, Carl would blame himself for the embarrassments that accompanied the program’s collapse, but he’d meant well when suggesting that Graham – for all the deftness of Tori’s touch – might be under-stimulated. She should brighten the atmosphere in the lab.
After blindfolded painters gave the lab a vivid make-over, the Dog Bear’s spirits picked up, and he once again attacked his salmon with zeal. Curiously, wet paint seemed to neutralise Graham’s odour, giving those investigating the matter some hint of where they should next proceed.
The trouble started when music was added to the mix. Neither Mozart nor Beethoven excited the beast, but Scott Joplin’s ‘Entertainer’ drove DB1 crazy. First, he nuzzled the CD tray with his nose, then jumped onto the bench to slap the speakers with his paws, bellowing as he never had before.
When Tori arrived to deal with the commotion, she guessed that ragtime piano offended Graham’s aural sensibility. But as she tried to remove the disc, DB1 stood on his hind legs to block her path. Tori asked Graham if there was something else he would prefer to listen to. Eyes growing moist, the Dog Bear made an utterance that was, quite unmistakeably, ‘No’.
Carl was shocked by these developments, but Tori had long suspected something like this might happen. By asking the Dog Bear questions that could be answered with silence for ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ for ‘No’, she established that Graham believed he’d been a pioneering jazz pianist in a previous life. If she looked closely at his DNA, she’d find material that was neither dog nor Peruvian Sun Bear.
With the lab bugged, Tori knew it was only a matter of hours before federal police arrived to halt a project that could supply an escape route to poor black musicians from another time.
Just before sunset, Carl arrived at a parkland rendezvous to find Tori’s Cruiser waiting in the shadow of a huge tree. As he made to leave his car, she motioned for him to wait. When Tori left her vehicle, Carl could just make out Graham’s silhouette sitting upright in the front seat.
Explaining everything just recounted, Tori said that no government could risk the perception they were funding a scheme that would make refugees seem cute and desirable. Both she and Graham were in danger.
‘We’ll head west,’ she said.
Carl thought there was nowhere a glamorous, foul-smelling American could take a stinking prototype without drawing attention to herself. What’s more, DB1 needed access to huge amounts of top-quality salmon.
There was no time to tell Tori what she meant to him. Even if there had been, Graham was nearby, monitoring every word. Canny as the pair was, Carl didn’t believe them smart enough to slip away unnoticed. Maybe they did escape to start a new life. Maybe they didn’t.
Inevitably, Carl finds himself reflecting on what might have been if he hadn’t advised Tori to stimulate Graham with music. Still missing her immensely, he prefers to concentrate on the joy she brought him, and to recall the dynamic qualities that drove better men than him to distraction.
Some nights, when using the glove, he can almost believe that it’s Tori answering his need, filling him with a strength that enables Carl to imagine himself the prototype for a transcendent species.
THE FUTURES MARKET
Mind Games
Maybe Simone shouldn’t have called Lennon a twisted arsehole, but Andrew forced her to take extreme positions, and she began to enjoy firing these shots through his heart. Liverpool. No one in their right mind needed Liverpool. Hamburg and Abbey Road were enough. If Andy wanted to cream himself over George’s first Strat, let him go to Liverpool. Simone was done with time-travel. She needed to witness some natural beauty.
The Beatles were never the issue. She couldn’t have cared less whether Lennon was the genius of his century or a snide misanthrope. For her, it was about coping with an otherwise intelligent man cursed with his mother’s high-school obsessions. How could you possibly start a family with someone who’d want to discuss ‘Revolution Number 9’ in his retirement?
After months living in each other’s pockets, the break would do them good. Or so she argued. For Andrew, knocking back Liverpool was like a Muslim giving the bird to Mecca.
And no sooner had her train crossed the Welsh border than the guilts set in. She’d denied a pilgrim the chance to have his devotion validated. The poor bastard would have to beg strangers to take his photo in Penny Lane. Much as Simone adored The Beatles, she’d never accede to the currency of all things Fab. But as the landscapes she flashed through grew more spectacular, a desolation took hold.
Andrew was always map-man, and now she’d have to pretend she wasn’t at a loss, desperately hoping that the wetness slapping her window wasn’t the first sign of an unrelenting wet. Would nature quash her new freedom? Rain is never just rain. This rain was punishment for disloyalty, her craven refusal to offer the hand that a Beatle-boy wanted to hold. Now it was certain to rain flatchat for days.
The Switch
Other than the old song about having a lovely day there, Simone only knew Bangor via The Beatles. The newly psychedelic ones were meditating in North Wales when their manager overdosed. They were shocked and stunned. Brian Epstein’s death would leave them to drift rudderless on the sea of unimaginable success. But none of this Bangor trivia was any help when a furious wind gust destroyed Simone’s umbrella.
The lone traveller found a cheap bed and breakfast five minutes from the station. Although the Welsh were slightly easier to understand than the French, Simone had no idea why she was there beyond her desire not to hear again how Paul consoled young Jude with a song. Maybe when the rain stopped she could take a trip on the mountain railway. Mrs Evans soon put paid to those hopes. The railway was closed for winter. And this mist was nothing compared to how bad it would get in the next few days. So the traitor spent an evening alone in her room, writing letters home telling friends and family what a fantastic time she and Andrew were having.
At breakfast next morning, Simone pulled back the curtain to find the water-world Mrs Evans had promised. She knew that she was to blame. The sun wouldn’t reappear until she’d fully undone her cruelties. She was searching timetables for the next train to Liverpool when she was joined at the table by another guest, a stupendously large, middle-aged man who offered a nod and a shy smile before introducing himself as Ken.
Ken had the magician’s gift for making food vanish. Several plates of sausages, eggs and bacon disappeared without Simone seeing the man place food in his mouth. Her breakfast companion had refined the process of food consumption to such a level of elegance that he could cut, insert, chew and swallow during the natural pause between sentences, never once losing eye-contact. Ken was a Shrewsbury man, but he spoke with the plummy, educated accent of someone who produced radio arts documentaries. Although he’d never travelled to Australia, he knew one of Simone’s English lecturers, Liz Williams, describing her as ‘related by marriage’ without detailing the exact nature of the relationship. No wedding ring. Simone saw Ken stacking on the charm, and she was sufficiently flattered by his interest to be curious how far that interest would extend. In the meantime, Mrs Evans delivered another plate of crisp bacon.
Questions. Simone was between degrees, unsure which direction to take. She’d spent three months visiting art galleries on the continent. Now she would spend a few days here before reuniting with her friend in London. Her friend? An Australian she’d teamed up with when she arrived in London. A friend of a friend.
A kind of tease, not using Andrew’s name, studiously failing to mention that this friend was a lover. Simone enjoyed Ken’s melodic voice, and his quietly insistent gaze. The big man was smart enough to make his own surmises.
As she spoke of career hopes, Simone recalled how little time she’d had to consider her future when travelling with Andrew. He took up the space she o
rdinarily gave to reflection and thought. Simone would tell her huge dining companion that she had no sense of her future life, and needed to become more focused. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to be an academic, a writer, or a film-maker, and wasn’t sure that she’d ever have the ability to do any of those things. Maybe she’d be corralled by her inability to decide.
According to Ken, the important thing was not to let anxiety rule the show, or to make decisions for the sake of appearing decisive. Trust your passions and follow them wholeheartedly. The future crushed imperfectly formed hopes, so you had to let your resolve build gradually.
Ken managed to pass on this advice while three sausages and a fried tomato vanished from his plate.
Ken’s tone was fatherly, and devoid of obvious sleaze, but his gaze was unremitting. What would she think if she saw her father giving such close attention to a young woman?
Not that her father had ever travelled to Paris to interview Beckett, Buñuel or her great hero, Eugène Ionesco. Ken had seen everything, read everything, and he’d met almost everyone who mattered to Simone.
The giant neglected his plate only when detailing literary and cinematic enthusiasms, and these almost exactly coincided with hers. His big jowls shook when Simone mentioned Robert Musil. The young scholar’s declaration that Love in the Time of Cholera was her favourite among all favourites brought a tear to the man’s eye. Ken had once flown to New York to interview Márquez, but illness had forced a cancellation.
‘Anyone who loves Márquez and Cortázar must read Worthless Lives by Manuel Primm. He does that great thing Márquez does. He tosses out as casual asides brilliant ideas that most writers would base three-hundred-page novels on.’
Mrs Evans brought fresh toast while Simone found a pen to record a title and author she’d never encountered.
‘And Marginal Behaviour by Michael Fouks. You must know him, he’s an Australian.’
When Simone admitted that she’d never heard of her countryman Fouks, the man took her pen and paper and scrawled a list of a dozen authors and titles. None of the names was familiar. All, according to Ken, were crucial to any well-formed understanding of where literature was headed as it steered away from post-modernism. Simone heard her pen singing as Ken wrote.
‘Oh, and Helen Bain, a new writer from Wick in the north of Scotland. Unbelievable. Like Alice Munro. Not quite so elegant, but playful in surprising ways.’
Ken’s list of must-reads would keep Simone busy for years. He made each of these books sound irresistible. Although she knew that Ken’s enthusiasm was in large part delight at meeting a pretty girl who shared his interests, she wasn’t sure that this was a tactic of seduction.
Simone couldn’t read Englishmen. Men of any nationality for that matter. Andrew was relatively simple. Always happy to be enthusiastic about her, provided she was enthusiastic about him. Otherwise, bets were off. Now Simone found herself with mixed feelings. Big Ken would disappoint her if he made a pass, yet she would be equally disappointed if his obvious attraction to her mattered less than his hunger for breakfast.
As Ken shifted his attention from plate to teapot, Simone took the opportunity to draw him out. He didn’t strike her as the kind of person who came to North Wales for the walking or mountaineering.
She’d summed him up correctly. He wasn’t that kind of man. Ken’s ex-wife lived in Bangor. He came up every second weekend to visit his twin sons. The boys, young men of Simone’s age, were in palliative care. Their lives had been cursed by a rare genetic disorder.
Rain lashed the windows, and Mrs Evans was heard rattling plates in the kitchen.
Simone was speechless. How could a man with two sons near death eat several hearty breakfasts? How could a father in his situation enthuse about the unrivalled qualities of obscure novelists? Ken continued to pour his tea as if his remark had been a banal comment on the weather.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Ken told her, ‘but we’ve had twenty years to come to terms with the hand we were dealt. In the long run, you have to make a choice; to despise life, or to relish it.’
Even this struck her as glib, untouched by real feeling. Maybe the big man needed to see others feel in order to connect with the emotional world. Or maybe it was something more complicated than Simone would ever understand.
Finally, she told Ken that she couldn’t imagine anything worse. The thing to be feared most was the possibility of outliving a child. It was as if time was arse-about, running in the wrong direction.
The big man smiled gently and said that’s exactly how it was. Life was arse-about. Someone given too much responsibility had hit the wrong switch.
Simone didn’t mention Ken to Andrew. After failing to make sense of Ken herself, she could hardly expect the boy stranded in timeless melody to get a handle on him.
Although still angry, Andrew was keen to relate the intensity of his Merseyside experiences, but Simone found she had lost interest in provoking him. The couple seemed to know that their relationship would end somewhere between San Francisco and Melbourne Airport. Accepting this allowed them to be more forgiving than they had been before their Liverpool dispute.
‘You realise The Beatles were staying in Bangor when Brian Epstein died?’
‘No, I didn’t know that,’ Simone told him.
At Foyles in London, she sought out the books Ken had recommended. The assistant took the list to a female superior who pressed her horn-rimmed glasses hard against the bridge of her nose. Mrs Delaney knew none of the books or authors. Simone asked the assistant to check the computer, but the young man politely declined. If the books were on the computer, Mrs Delaney would certainly know about them.
Several days later, during a stop-over in New York, Simone made the same enquiry, first at Barnes & Noble, then at several specialised bookshops. The same result. Computer records found no reference to any of the authors, let alone exotic titles like The Abattoir at the Far End of the Futures Market.
When the helpful assistant at City Lights in San Francisco returned waving empty hands, Simone had to concede that Ken’s list looked dodgy. Amateur chimney sweeps had more internet presence than Manuel Primm, the genius Ken placed alongside Márquez and Cortázar.
Perhaps the big man had been more desperate to hold Simone’s attention than she had realised. She couldn’t pretend to understand Ken’s behaviour. Maybe the dying twins were no more real than his mystery authors. Maybe honey-voiced Ken was one of those giants who took pleasure in devouring gullible young women for breakfast.
Left-Field Investment Strategies
Simone had never imagined marrying someone so opinionated as Mick. Those who didn’t understand Mick saw him as a deadshit whose self-confidence was ill-founded. She knew that many of her friends considered her husband to be a bad investment.
For lawyer Mick, The Beatles were cordial passing itself off as Coke. Overrated. A bunch of sharp-witted pretty boys who should have gone to Hollywood. According to Mick, punk and new wave failed music in one respect only: not arriving fifteen years sooner.
Simone now felt guilty defending the Fab Four against critiques she’d once made herself. Particularly when she thought of Andrew, who’d moved back in with his mum after his father’s death. (The equivalent of making camp in Strawberry Fields forever.) Yet Simone managed to see in Mick’s assertiveness all the textbook signs of denial. Her man was a frightened puppy. His whole persona was a confidence trick.
Having cottoned on to the rules of the game, she took pleasure stringing Mick along, the puppeteer who allowed her charge the illusion of autonomy. Mick could be made to do absolutely anything if Simone convinced him that he called the shots, that all her ideas were his.
Where did his strange idea to call their unborn child Rose come from? Mick didn’t know. He’d never known any Roses, but the name struck him as a good idea and now he couldn’t think of calling his daughter anything else. Simone would get used to it, eventually.
Yes, Mick was fragility
itself, but Simone found his papered-over vulnerabilities endearing.
Terrified of his wife’s pre-history, Mick refused to look at old travel photographs, not wishing to encounter ‘that lanky dickhead’. Mick couldn’t cope with the idea that Simone had known romance before meeting him, that she’d found other men to love, and that she might have lived an equally happy life with someone else.
Unpacking after the shift from Elwood to Hampton, Simone found a box of papers she hadn’t seen since posting it home from Europe seven years earlier. Maps and guides to obscure museums. Tickets. Postcards. Programs. The front-door key to a bed and breakfast in Canterbury. Notes written on the back of beer coasters. Even a forgotten Polaroid of herself and an equally pissed Danish girl sitting topless in a Heidelberg Youth Hostel. (How Andy must have searched for that photo!) Among a pile of letters she’d received from friends, Simone found the list of brilliant authors and books big Ken had composed over breakfast in Bangor.
She would have thought no more about this list if her eye hadn’t caught the name Manuel Primm. What was it Ken had said about the South American’s unusual sensibility? She couldn’t remember. But Simone knew that Primm had just won a major literary prize. And two other authors on the list, Helen Bain and Miranda Murray, had attained sufficient fame for their names to be known to her. Of course, Simone read nothing these days except books and articles pertaining to her thesis, an inspired attempt to relate the myth of Sisyphus to the American film Groundhog Day.
So Ken hadn’t pulled her leg after all. The big man’s judgement was astute. She then recalled Ken’s oddness about his dying twins, and figured the boys must have passed on by now. Ken might have too. His gusto at breakfast was unsustainable.
As Simone re-packed boxes that wouldn’t be re-opened for another ten years, she placed Ken’s reading list on a coffee table. Mick’s birthday was coming up, and maybe she’d give him a book. Jaded from sending threatening legal letters to DJs and samplers, her man needed a new outlet for his vast reserves of disdain.