The Cairo Pulse

by B. B. Kindred

  Five

  There’d been no word from Cairo Shore. I had two theories:

  1. She was worried I might contact the hospital about her ‘under the radar’ activities. A fortnight had gone by, so she’d calculated I probably wasn’t going to and didn’t want to do anything to aggravate me.

  2. She knew that curiosity and desperation would get the better of me and that I’d contact her sooner or later.

  She was right on both counts. We had a refectory re-run the next day. Purple velvet this time, with a matching beret. She took her shoes off. Neither of us mentioned the previous encounter.

  “How did you get that name then, Gabriel? Was your mother religious?”

  Was. She knew that my mother was dead. When I was six, I told my mum that I’d seen God sitting on a branch in a tree, just thinking and watching and that he was a big monkey with very long hair. My mum said that was very interesting, but I should probably keep it to myself because not everyone would understand. She was the business, my mum. She died when I was ten.

  “A big fan of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” I said. “My mum was a hippy chick. I think all the Pre-Raphaelite romance appealed to her. I’m guessing you’ve checked me out.”

  “Okay, you say what you know and I’ll say what I know.”

  I’d heard rumours that straightforward women existed, but never expected to meet one.

  “You first.” I said.

  “You’re well respected, always popping up in architectural and technical journals. There isn’t any personal stuff about you, really, just that piece in North Life.”

  Relief. I’d never Googled myself, too worried about what I might read. The North Life piece had infuriated me, but at the time I hoped Stenkesson had read it. Roland Stenkesson headhunted Arlo and me at our final year show. We worked like dogs for three years of peanuts before he asked us if we wanted to invest in the business and become directors. Two months later, the firm went belly up. I smacked him one with Arlo’s blessing. It took us five years to pay back the money we’d borrowed. Despite taking another three practices down, he’d won every award known to the profession. No comment.

  “Have you seen my medical records?” I said.

  ‘Yes.”

  “Were you supposed to see them?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you ever lie?”

  “Only to myself.”

  “I know you’re a big shot in the neurological world. I saw the Subversive Scientist piece. Stitched up. Once bitten, etcetera, I understand.”

  She smiled, but it didn’t reach the shrewd grey eyes. The eyes are part of the brain, which means it’s possible to literally read another person’s mind, although I hoped she wasn’t reading mine.

  “I’m not ashamed of where I came from.” She said.

  “Never crossed my mind.”

  “He had it in for me. Science goes tabloid, who’d have thought it?”

  A moment passed between us; the two class mongrels.

  “Was it Bentley? Who blabbed to them, I mean?” I said.

  “How did you fathom that?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “I’ve never worked out how he knew. I certainly didn’t tell him.”

  “Just one more thing.” I said. “I’ve explained my name…”

  “Oh, most people think I was conceived on an exotic honeymoon in Egypt, but I was actually conceived on the back steps of the Cairo mill in Oldham. My parents were robbing the warehouse. As I understand it, they were high on cocaine and adrenalin at the time. They told me that story with pride when I was eight. Anyway, are you ready now?”

  Perhaps there’d been a decision to break me in more gently this time.

  “Yes, I’m ready.”

  She had a tentative theory about the songs in my head and reiterated that although she didn’t have the faintest idea what created the marine parasite effect, she’d like to find out. Would I be willing to come to her place in the hills, it was more private and we could discuss things in more detail? Would next Wednesday afternoon be convenient?

  I said yes.

  Six

  I’d been at the Medlock site for a good half hour, languishing in the car sipping lukewarm coffee. A cautionary tale of sixties’ social engineering, the estate probably seemed impressive on the original drawings with bikini-clad girls throwing beach balls to happy children. Alas, like so many others, it had slipped into decay with eighty irredeemable maisonettes earmarked for demolition. The land had been offered to Better Homes Housing Association for redevelopment and they, in turn, offered the project to me. There are things that never change in places like Medlock, like the engine carcass strewn across a front garden and the strangely regular sight of people carrying sofas up the street. Medlock was well known to me because we moved there soon after my mum died to be nearer to my grandparents. When I won the scholarship to Manchester City Grammar I was a bully’s wet dream tick-list. No siblings for the rough and tumble of rivalry, grieving for my mother, high on ambition, low on self-esteem. Puppy fat and cheap shoes probably didn’t help. In the morning, I’d go to school and be picked on for being poor and in the afternoon, I’d come home and be picked on for being posh. Bullying, I discovered, is a pastime enjoyed by all sections of society. When the frequency of bruises led my dad to finally discover the truth, he whisked me off to the nearest boxing club. Subsequently, a good few showstopper punches relieved me of both bullies and victim mentality, which in turn allowed me to release my inner smartarse.

  I found myself revisiting the mutual cracks of fist on bone instead of creating a vision for the future. Could there be brain damage from said punches, damage that had only recently begun to manifest? Would the mystery of Meredith’s grey matter ever be solved?

  I closed my eyes and visualised the development I’d visited in Stockholm a few weeks before. A circle of dwellings, ground-floor apartments with sizeable houses above, both entered at street level. The houses had private balconies that looked onto tree lined outer streets, while the inner circle had play and seating areas protected from the outside world and easily visible from windows. Could I make that work here? Or would it become a battleground over who didn’t clear up the litter and communal areas, or who vandalised the equipment, whose child was shrieking too much, or who was hanging around the picnic tables smoking dope at three in the morning. It was giving me a headache. Eyes closed, I drifted to the return flight from Sweden instead, the landscape of cloud unrolled to infinity; grandma’s plaits and heads of dirty cauliflower, lakes of cushion wadding and spray on snow. As the sun fell deep below the horizon, the black, jewel-encrusted land was revealed to me, but when the plane began its descent into Manchester I didn’t fall with it, instead I was yanked out like a toy by a fairground claw.

  A knock on the car window jerked me, gasping back to the moment. It was a pasty teenage boy pushing a baby in a dilapidated pram.

  “Mister, could you give us some money to get milk for the little un?”

  It was a well-known trick, one that usually made its nomadic purveyors a fortune in Freshers’ Week before the innocent and earnest got wise to it. I fished in my pocket for an obliging stray fiver and opened the window a crack to push it through. “All right, lad, be on your way now.”

  After grasping the fiver, he pressed his face up to the window. I could have sworn he said hear my song.

  My next port of call was the appointment with Cairo Shore. About ten miles from central Manchester I sprang out of the tree line and on to the moors. I turned the air con off and opened the window, drinking in the keen air, my attention drawn to a host of little white tufts sticking up from the peat like vanilla lollipops. Cotton grass, I recalled. It’s funny what sticks. I had that feeling again, that what if I just keep going just put my foot down and keep going just burn rubber to infinity until it all falls away. The mist was unobserved until it
shrouded me. The car whacked into something and I whacked into the air bag. I tried to rally, but was woozy and disorientated. Having enough wit to get out of the car, I fumbled across the warm bonnet, tripping over a soft and substantial bundle. I squinted at it. Thank God it was a sheep, not a human. If my eyes hadn’t told me, it wouldn’t have been long before my nose did. The sheep shot me a disgusted glance before getting up and shaking itself, after which it baaed its way into the mist. I moved to the roadside, slipping into a ditch. A sharp pain zapped up my left arm as it tried to break my fall. Disquiet rolled over me; the road was remote, but there was a fair chance another driver might run into my car. I reluctantly made my way back to the driver’s seat, trying to push down the slippery fabric of the airbag with sausage fingers. There was a moment of triumph as the car rumbled into life and I turned it into the roadside, flicking on the emergency lights. I checked my phone as the dank ditch water seeped through my shoes. No signal. ‘For Those in Peril on The Sea’ was playing in my head and it filled me with foreboding. I returned to the outer world hoping to find a signal, but no. I’d glanced at the satnav just before the incident, which had suggested my destination was near. I didn’t fancy chancing the car, but didn’t much fancy walking, either. I flopped down on the peat and closed my eyes as dwindling adrenalin pulled the energy plug. On opening them, the mocking face of a horned demon filtered through the mist, drawing closer to my own. This time the words that haunted me came as a whisper.

  “Hear my song, Gabriel.”

  I jumped to my feet, screaming and sprinted away.

  The demon was a curious ram of course, but that’s the wisdom of retrospect. I must have looked a fright when I knocked on Cairo’s door, which turned out to be a matter of yards away. It was only later that the bathroom mirror revealed a scratched, muddy me. When she opened the door, I blurted out, “I don’t care what it is, I’ll do anything, I just want this sorted once and for all.”

  The substantial, sixteenth century weaver’s cottage displayed an attitude of Bohemian rustic. The low ceilings and stone-framed mullion windows were deeply comforting, wise and certain like the perfect grandparent. It was a refreshing alternative to the modernist minimalism of most architects’ dwelling places. Any woman who successfully combined a Tiffany lamp with a Popeye figurine got the thumbs up from me. She made me hot tea in a William Morris mug, sitting next to me in silence as I calmed into coherence and told her the bones of my story. I didn’t mention any of the ‘hear my song’ stuff, believing I’d imagined most, if not all of it, like my head was making fun of me. She reminded me of one of my namesake’s paintings, always in a vision of stained glass and vivid raw silk, or in a garden bursting with roses and lilies. Bits of dead brain and statistical programming were probably nearer the mark.

  She made no comment other than suggesting I took a shower, at which point all the mud I’d trailed through the house became apparent to me. My apologies were profuse. I always had a change of clothes in the car in case of having to get down and dirty on a site, so Cairo offered to get Gizmo to retrieve it or them, depending on the state of things. After guiding me to the bathroom she left me to it, saying she’d leave my clothes outside the door. It smelt of sandalwood and contained a substantial, claw-footed enamel bath with soft, clean white towels hung over it. I ran the taps. Cairo Shore wouldn’t mind.

  Wandering back downstairs, I heard voices, one of them Cairo’s. Creeping towards the sound, I peered through a crack in the door leading to a study that wafted beeswax. A shadow I presumed was Gizmo sat at a desk by the window. The voices were coming from a laptop.

  Click.

  “Could you tell me what you experienced during the session?”

  A young male voice, rasping with sentiment.

  “I’ll try, but it’s beyond words, in fact I’m having trouble talking just now.”

  “Can you try to tell me what it was like?”

  “I don’t know. It was like, like somebody loves you with all their heart and it pierces you, enters you; fills you up with unconditional joy. Like a sort of spiritual orgasm.”

  Click.

  “Could you tell me what you experienced during the session?”

  Another young male, joyous and excited.

  “It was a bit like floating, like I’d been freed from my body, or from gravity. I had memories from childhood, one from a Christmas where I got a bike and rode around on it all day, another when me and the other kids went roaming down the valley on one of those summer days that seem to last forever.”

  “What was that like?”

  What was it like? The only way I can describe it is to say ‘transcendental’.”

  Click.

  “Could you tell me what you experienced during the session?”

  A young woman, obviously displeased.

  “What I experienced? Being pissed off, that’s what I experienced. Just annoyed, annoyed with knobs on, that’s what.”

  Click.

  “Could you tell me what you experienced during the session?”

  A deep and croaky older male voice, compelling in its emotion.

  “I know now, that’s probably the best way I can put it. I’ve been in the spiritual wilderness for so long, couldn’t make my mind up, but now I know.”

  “What is it you know?”

  “I’m graced with vision and understanding; it’s as if I was in chains and I’ve been set free. I haven’t been this calm since I don’t know when.”

  Click.

  “Could you tell me what you experienced during the session?”

  A high-pitched, manic female voice.

  “Nothing, zilch, nada, jack shit, absolutely, bloody nothing. Nothing. Can I go for a cigarette, now?”

  Another voice, this time from behind me. “Feeling better, Gabriel?”

  “Yes, sorry, you must think I’m a complete idiot, or lunatic, or both.”

  “Neither, I think you had a shock, that’s all. It could happen to any of us.”

  I followed her into a farmhouse-sized kitchen while she made coffee, perusing the oak and porcelain offset by a sturdy table formed from railway sleepers. After that, we returned to the living room, facing each other on matching terracotta sofas with a limed-teak coffee table between us, like we’d had a refectory upgrade. The sun had burned the mist away to reveal its passage towards the horizon, suffusing the room with an amber glow.

  “I’m sorry.” I said. “I’ve wasted your afternoon. Do you have to be anywhere?”

  “No, it’s okay, really, but I think you need to tell me everything, Gabriel.”

  “What do you mean by everything?”

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  “I think you need to tell me everything, actually. What is it you do here?”

  “It’ll take a while.”

  “A while is available.”

  She told me about a guy who’d been experimenting with weak electro-magnetic pulses and the brain. If they’re applied to a spot just above the left temporal lobe, it can fill the subject with intense feelings of calm and happiness that linger for a while. They can even feel like there’s a divine presence in the room. She’d got curious about it, believing it might have applications for people with brain disease or injury, even conditions like depression or dementia. It would be simple, cheap and potentially remove the need for mind-altering drugs, which she called ‘a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.’ The trouble was, the procedure wasn’t reliable and as it was common knowledge that nothing happens in just one part of the brain, they decided to see if it could be improved. They’d started off by recreating the original experiments and after extensive research combined with Gizmo’s apparent technical genius, had recently produced a headset capable of stimulating different parts of the brain and mapping changes moment by moment.

  “So, that’s what I heard �
� when I came downstairs, I mean. Recordings of the experiments?”

  “Yep, Gizmo keeps going over them to see if there’s anything we’ve missed. I don’t know why she bothers; we could both probably recite them verbatim by now. Anyway, I think your exact words were ‘I don’t care what it is, I’ll do anything, I just want this sorted once and for all.’ So maybe you’d better tell me everything.”

  I’d assumed Gizmo was a bloke.

  I was drawn to a pattern of shadows painting the wall. Did they consider such things in the sixteenth century or was it a happy accident? Difficult to imagine them putting form before function anywhere in a weaver’s cottage, but there was no reason why, on occasion, one had to exclude the other. I decided to confess the ‘hear my song’ and the zig-zag lines, presuming she knew everything else. As the subdued contents spilled forth, I found there were other things I wanted to confess, like the sensation of pervasive aloneness where everything seemed alien and surreal and my heart never sang. But I didn’t.

  “Ophthalmic migraine.” She said.

  “What?”

  “The zig-zags; that’s what they probably are, migraines don’t always come with a headache. Are you under stress when you get them?”

  “Yes.”

  “They go after about ten minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d put money on it, then. The phrase you keep hearing people say, well, that’s a bit more complicated. It might be another symptom – neurological or stress-related, or they’re saying it.”

  Audible gasp. Months of dealing with medics had generated caution; I’d observed that anything hard to explain was promptly dismissed, including me.