Don’t look for me.
Danny said nothing. The red light went green, and the car moved forward. Steve licked his lips, knowing full well he was skidding on a razorblade and about to use his balls for brakes, but duty compelled him to continue.
“Apparently,” he went on, “she’d been chatting to this twat for six months. Decided to go and buck him instead of her husband. Mental. Cunt musta used a nice font or something.”
Danny did turn now, and glared across. “Am I talkin’ to my fuckin’ self here?” he said.
Steve shrugged in a don’t shoot the messenger way. “I dunno…women…I‘m just sayin’…”
“It’s Ellie, Steve. Not women. Ellie.” The car seemed claustrophobic suddenly and he cursed himself for being so stupid as to think Steve had done this for any other reason than to have The Talk with him. And he probably could have left it there and Steve would have - maybe - caught the warning tone in his voice and stopped and let it be. But he didn’t. He was angry and pissed off and he didn’t.
“That’s your fuckin’ problem, you know somethin’? You got fucked about and you can’t tell the difference between women and a woman anymore. Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe you backed the wrong horse? Or that maybe you can be a bit of a fuckin’ big eejit yourself, lad? Don’t start talkin’ about me and Ellie just because you fucked things up with Maggie, alright?”
The silence was thunderous. For a while as the car glided through the streets, Danny simply stared out the window, his heart thud-thud-thudding in his chest, somewhat stunned the car was still moving forward and that he hadn’t been fucked out on his ear.
“I’d hate to hear what you said to your Da,” Steve said quietly.
Danny closed his eyes and allowed the stab of guilt to poke home. He turned again and Steve glanced over and a look born of many years of friendship was passed between the two, a look that pretty much said only because it’s you.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said, but then his face hardened a little, “that was outta line. But lad, I did warn ya not to talk that balls to me. Think about it for one minute would ye – I’d fucking love to believe you. Right now finding out Ellie and the wee fella are in Antarctica shacked up with the New Zealand rugby team would be far better than the sort of alternatives that are running through my mind. But I know, I know, that she didn’t leave me. How do you think that makes me feel?”
Steve frowned. “The wee fella?” he echoed. Danny wasn’t paying attention, though; a thought had come to him, unbidden, out of left field but intriguing. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his mobile. Even without the synaesthesia there was no way he was likely to forget Ellie’s number.
“Cover your ears,” he told Steve.
“Aw, fuck, no…” Steve said, realising what was about to happen. The electronic squeal blasted forth a moment later and sustained until Danny pressed the end call button.
“Thanks for that, lad,” Steve said, his voice strained. “I know you don’t drive and all that, but one thing you’ll notice about people who do is that they have to keep their hands on the fuckin’ wheel. So covering ears can be quite fuckin’ difficult.”
Danny was staring down at the phone. “It’s not as loud,” he said. He knew he was right. He’d listened to that squeal enough times, like picking at some sort of aural scab, that he’d grown to know every nuance of it. The synaesthesia helped with that too; sometimes sounds could form a sort of map in his mind, and the pattern of that squeal was different now than it had been before. He was fucked if he knew how it was different though.
“If you say so,” Steve said, shaking his head as if to restart his brain. “There’s definitely something weird about it lad. You said to the police about it like, didn‘t ye?”
Danny rolled his eyes. “For all the fuckin’ good it did, aye. I don’t think they’re gonna do anything about it. I think they’re much more interested in me.”
“In you?”
He couldn’t help but be touched by the level of Steve’s naïveté. “Jesus you’ve seen enough of this on TV. It’s always someone close to the family. Didn’t you see the way they looked at each other when I told them I’d got the sack yesterday?”
Steve drove on, not replying immediately. “What are you gonna do about that,” he asked eventually. “I mean,” and he forced lightness into his tone, “obviously this oul ballix will all clear itself up sooner rather than later and Ellie will turn up safe and sound. But you’ll still be unemployed, man.”
“I can’t think about that right now,” Danny lied, forcing down annoyance that Steve too had decided to talk as if it were only Ellie who was unaccounted for. Biting his friend’s head off for the second time in as many minutes, stressful time or not, might be pushing it.
“I could maybe see about getting you somethin’…”
Danny shifted in his seat. More pity. He knew Steve meant no harm by it. The only things Steve could ‘get him’ would be clerical stuff in the IT company he worked for. At least Lircom had been semi-skilled. Bad as it had been, to take a step back into secretarial work would be just about more than he could bear.
“We’ll see,” was all he said. “Like I said, it’s not really my priority now, alright?”
“Course, lad. Course…”
After that they lapsed into silence. Danny’s mind went back to the phone signal oddity, and somewhere, finally, something sparked into life in his mind. Could he…? Yes. Yes, why not? They were doing fuck all good circling the estates here, and now that they’d had ‘The Talk’, he could see Steve’s interest in this exercise had waned. Another ten minutes and he’d start throwing hints about dropping by the nearest KFC.
“Get onto the main road,” he said, pointing needlessly to the correct turnoff.
Steve complied. “Where we going, boss?” he asked. “I was thinkin’ we might grab a-”
“Queens,” Danny said firmly, doing a drive-by on the drive-thru suggestion. “I’m gonna visit an oul mate of mine…”
***
The place smelled of new paint, very old books and carpet that hadn’t seen a hoovering since the Ming Dynasty. He’d been blown away by the Lanyon Building when he’d signed up to attend, as everyone was, and then about six minutes into his first registration day they’d cheerfully told him he’d be attending the majority of his lectures and tutorials in 1-3 University Square, the nondescript looking terraced street across the road.
The disappointment hadn’t lasted long though. There was something right about going into that wee row of houses, all antiquated as fuck, with big white banisters and wee mazy winding hallways and landings. It felt like you were hanging out at your uncle’s big house in the country. All memories of secondary schools with their sterile corridors and row after row of wee desks and chairs were banished. This was grown up shit you were into now. This was raw learning being pumped directly into you.
It all washed over him as he stepped inside. This was the only time the synaesthesia felt like a disability, and even now, it wasn’t its fault; it was simply doing what it did best, connecting dots in his head that stretched across the five senses. Coming back to a place he hadn’t been in over a year, a place he’d seen some good times in, a place he missed, he was almost staggered by the onslaught of the smells and tastes and memories that flooded him. Nostalgia wasn’t just an abstract concept to Danny.
He and Steve made their way up to the third floor. Steve was looking around nervously, as if he might be ambushed at any moment by a paramilitary metaphor. He wasn’t comfortable around big words. Medium words made him think twice. Put him in front of a computer spitting out gibberish and he could have it singing sweetly in an eye blink, but ask him what the difference between a colon and a semi-colon was and you stood a good chance of seeing a grown man cry.
They heard the lab before it hoved into view around the top corner of the third floor; in fact they felt it before they heard it - a faint rumbling in the floorboards grew in intensity as they approa
ched.
“It’s the subwoofer powering up,” Danny explained to Steve’s questioning, nervous expression.
“Powering up? You mean that‘s what it does before it‘s even on?”
Danny shrugged. “It’s a big one,“ he offered. He knocked on the door. “Doc?”
“Big speaker? Doc?” Steve snorted. “What’s next? A DeLorean?”
Danny ignored him. He was already planning what he would do if someone else opened the door, some assistant or other that might have been employed recently and not know him. Bluff, seduce, or failing that, surgical blow to the back of the head were all valid options.
As it turned out though he needn’t have worried. The door opened and the bearded middle-aged avuncular little man who stood there went from a slightly irritated look at being disturbed to a broad beaming grin almost instantaneously when he saw who stood at his threshold. Although to call Doc Hammond bearded would be doing him a kindness – since Danny had known him and kindled an instant kinship with him in first year Linguistics, he had been trying his best to grow what he probably thought was a beard with suitable academic gravitas, but which looked perpetually scruffy and ragged, the face-fuzz of a man not supposed to have anything more than a five, (maybe six, tops) o’clock shadow.
“Danny! Come in, come in!” he proclaimed, sweeping his hand grandly to indicate his domain. Danny inclined his head in thanks and walked in, flinching inwardly at yet another involuntary assault of memories sparking in his mind as he did so.
He’d taken a girl he’d been going out with, pre-Ellie, here one afternoon to show her the equipment. She’d been a bit dubious about the fun factor of it, but he’d finally managed to sway her into coming along. He didn’t tell her that Doc Hammond had taken delivery of the big subwoofer only the day before and had, along with Danny and a few of his other favourite students, arranged to test out the new baby by hooking in a Playstation and a copy of Guitar Hero. Five minutes after arriving, the shredding had begun in earnest, and nary an eardrum was safe.
Danny’s rendition of All Along The Watchtower had been heard as far away as Cookstown. Seismologists’ needles had trembled in the face of his plastic guitar’s fury. And he’d successfully nailed a blowjob for his troubles later that evening. Star Power indeed…
“Can you analyse something for me?” he asked.
Doc put a hand on his shoulder. “Danny, I heard,” he said gravely. “You must be out of your mind with worry. I’m surprised to see you here, to be honest, welcome though you are.”
“You heard?” Danny said. “Who told you?”
Doc held up his phone. “Maggie sent a text yesterday evening. I don‘t have your number so I couldn‘t-”
Danny goggled. “Maggie? Maggie texted you? Who told her?”
Steve raised a hand. “That’d be me,” he said. Off Danny’s look, he shrugged. “What? I told ye I was gonna send texts to everyone askin them had they seen anything or heard anything, didn’t I?”
“Aye, but…” Danny started to reply, and then sighed. Steve was right, after all; everyone was everyone, although the odds that Ellie would have chosen Maggie of all people to confide in about her plan to abscond the country were so miniscule as to be laughable. The few times both girls had been within spitting distance of each other Danny had honestly thought they were about to put that phrase to its literal use. Not surprising given the history between the two, and Danny himself, but that didn’t make it any easier.
And for Steve to text her…he couldn’t help but be touched. He might not have known much about the legendary break-up between the two, but he did know that since it had happened they’d had nothing above accidental contact.
“Forget it,” he said. He proceeded to fill Doc in on the events of the day before, highlighting in particular the weird phone interference and the police’s disinterest in it and concluding with indicating the machinery in the lab. He rang Ellie’s number at Doc’s request - Steve this time was able to put his fingers safely in his ears - and allowed the signal to blast out.
As he’d hoped, Doc was intrigued. “Let’s give it a go,“ he assented, and began to make it happen.
“Cheers, Doc,“ Danny said while he buzzed about the machines.
“Least I can do. Least I can do. As you say, relying on the police for progress would be like relying on Famous Seamus’ translation of Beowulf for searing textual insight.”
He and Danny chuckled knowingly at this. Steve rolled his eyes, but he seemed captivated by the technology before him enough not to mind the book geek talk too much.
“Doc, this is Steve, a friend of mine,” Danny said, realising dimly his friend hadn’t been introduced to his old mentor.
“Delighted to meet you, Stephen. I’m-”
“Dr Hammond,” Steve said dryly. “Yeah, I know. I think I’ve listened to Danny here recount every single lecture you ever did.”
Doc beamed in his direction as he finished hooking the landline into the computer. “And yet our Heaney reference was lost on you? Surely you must know something about the finer points of literary tradition, my boy!”
Steve shrugged. “Think so, wouldn’t ye?” he said. He seemed impressed despite this gruffness. “You’re pretty good with the computers,” he said, grudgingly. “I didn’t think…”
“…anyone over fifty knew their USB from their ASCII?” Doc finished for him. He winked. “Life’s full of surprises. I discovered that the day your friend here enrolled in my tutorials.”
Danny coloured as Steve looked at him sceptically. “Why, what’d he do? Fart in the middle of the lecture? He did that in one of my Computers ones. The dirty bastard. Jesus. I felt like Wilfred fuckin’ Owen in the trenches choking on mustard gas. See?” he said triumphantly. “A literary reference!”
Doc looked affronted. “Studying Danny’s synaesthesia brought our understanding of how linguistics can interact with human senses forward in leaps and bounds,” he elaborated. “Danny has an incredible gift. If we could bottle it, replicate it, people would be queuing up to receive it, believe me.”
“What, to smell colours and hear tastes?” Steve snorted. “Aye, sounds like a right fuckin’ laugh. Fuck only knows why there’s isn’t Synaesthesia Man in the X-Men. Missin a trick there aren’t they?” and he struck a dramatic pose and sniffed. “What’s this?! I can smell the Bat Signal! Ho! Away to the Tastes of Wednesday Cave!”
“Synaesthesia is not a superpower, young man!” Doc thundered, twisting superpower in his mouth in the way only someone over fifty could have. “And it is more than simply a rewiring of the brain! Research has proven that the sense of smell, for example, does not even need to go through the brain in the same way as the other senses to be perceived – so how can our friend Danny smell colours? Clearly, more is going on-”
Seeing Doc was about to launch into an impassioned defence of the fascinating mysteries of his brain, Danny decided to intervene. He had other things on his mind.
“Doc…are we ready to go?” he said, pointing to the equipment.
“Yes…“ Doc tore himself away from the juicy argument looming before him like a dog letting go of a steak. “All hooked in. We can dial the number…and record…” and the sound of a touch tone keypad rattling out a long string of numbers was amplified through the lab. Steve’s eyes widened as he saw Doc adjust a volume control upward. He slammed his hands over his ears. Danny did the same-
He was never quite sure what happened next. If his eardrums had been personified, it would have been as if someone had picked them up by the throat, shaken them violently, and slammed them to the ground. The room rrrrrrrrummmmmmmbled with the bass reverb even as the eeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeee squealed at the higher pitch.
He felt the strength go from his legs, and saw through fading periphery vision that Steve and Doc had likewise stumbled, their equilibriums shot to fuck by the sound waves crashing through their heads. His cheeks were wet with tears brought on by the pain. He wanted to reach inside his brain and rip o
ut the hearing part…even if it meant being deaf, it was better than this, Jesus Christ anything was better than this-
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