"We don't know what we're making. We don't know what it's for. If it's destined for a hospital or'll end up in a war. We only know we're working. From dawn til end of day. An honest day's effort for an honest day's pay."
The song carries them through their shift. When their arms tire it lends them strength. When their muscles ache, it soothes them. It moves the hands of the clock around in stealthy intervals so that the morning passes almost without notice. The song thickens with harmonies, complicates with counterpoints. The hall resounds with impromptu calls and responses, but the basic song remains the same. The beat remains constant. The work gets done.
"Did you?" Sandra's eyes are fixed on her work, but this contrapuntal aside is pitched to carry to Steve and no further. "Did you see? Last night on the TV?" She risks a second of eye contact to make sure that Steve has heard her. When she sees that she has his attention, those red lips breathe: "Arrhythmia..."
Steve almost misses a bulb.
Sandra smiles.
The break bell sounds, the conveyors grind to a standstill and the worksong dwindles out, leaving only the boom of the deep engines resounding in the air, vibrating through their feet.
Sandra retrieves her handbag and her pretty beige macintosh. A nod of the head, a promise in her eyes. Steve stumbles after her. He follows her beyond the line for the water cooler, past the queue for the toilets. There is door, and a corridor, and then another door. And then stairs, stairs and more stairs. The astonishing silver-tipped heels of her ankle boots rimshot on the risers. Below the hem of her workdress, the pale flash of skin in the outrageously ripped stocking sizzles like a cymbal. The blue tail of a tattoo catches him off beat, makes him breathless by the time they reach the door at the top.
"We only have," Steve begins, but his voice comes out flat, atonal, in search of melody and scansion. "Fifteen minutes..." His words drift away over the flat roof, over the pipes and ducts and chimneys, up into the grey, silent air. Because here, by some quirk of architecture, some acoustic accident, there is silence. Or at least as close to it as Steve has ever experienced outside of his dreams. He can still feel the thud of the engines. It vibrates the tarmac beneath his feet, jumps through his fingers when he touches the brick chimney breast. But in his ears, there is nothing.
"Hey!"
"What?"
Sandra's red lips are a snarl. "You're the one," she accuses, her words spilling fast and angry. "You're the one! You're the one who's worried about time. Take this home." She's holding out a package. It's square, wrapped in a white polythene bag decorated with a poorly rendered skull and the words Anarchy Records. "Take it home. Take it home and listen to it tonight." Her eyes are blazing with something entirely alien to Steve. "And play it fuck-ing loud, all right?"
Steve takes the bag. Then Sandra smiles, stretches up on the toes of her wicked little boots and kisses him. The kiss is short and brutal, and Sandra's lipstick is smeared when it is over. Without another word she re-enters the Factory and disappears down the stairs.
Part of Steve already knows what is in the bag, and part of him doesn't want to confirm his suspicion. He just wants to stand here in the silence a little longer, but there, faintly, is the warning bell that signals the imminent resumption of the shift.
Steve sighs. He flaps open the bag, acknowledges the mini-skirted harridan, the bilious spatter of her name. He closes the bag quickly, slips it inside his coat and reluctantly goes back to the beat.
~
"Are you sure, son, that you don't want to come?" Mum fastens the top button of her coat, pats her hair into place. It's the second Tuesday of the month and that means drinks with the Hendersons. Steve stares at his pork chop and colourless, diced vegetables, shakes his head.
Dad enters from the hall. "Come on lad, it'll be fun." He winks and pats Mum's bottom, yolking the word fun with lurid potential.
"You can talk to..." Mum hefts a gift-wrapped box of Matchmakers.
"You can talk to..." Dad grabs the bottle of plonk.
"Jennifer."
"Veronica."
Steve's parents share a look of consternation. Of the Hendersons' two daughters, Jennifer is a year older than Steve and timid as a rabbit, while Veronica is a year younger and a precocious tease.
"No, thanks." Steve snaps his reply, forestalling his parents from saying any more.
When the front door snicks shut, Steve breathes out. One long, slow stream of air. He keeps on blowing out until he is empty, until his lungs ache, but he can still feel his heart. The music, reduced to its lowest volume. Beat, beat, beat.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Steve clears his dinner into the bin, rinses off the plate and cutlery, puts the things away. Then he goes into the living room and lifts the lid on the record player. To one side of the machine are Dad's records. Cheesy covers depicting men in dinner suits and bowties or women in lamé gowns and towering hair. Burt Goodman, Sylvia Hammond, and Dad's favourite, Charlie Montgomery. On the other side of the turntable, his mother's, much smaller collection of heartthrob charttoppers. All hair oil, leather jackets with the collars turned up and 'dangerous' winks. To watch his parents listen to them you'd think this music was capable of transporting you, but how can it? There are four measured beats to every one of those bars. No matter how chirpy and bright, how croony and swoony. Four beats. Work, Eat, Play, Sleep. Transportation? You'd be as well putting your ear to the factory wall.
Steve slips Sandra's record from the polythene. Holds the garish cardboard square by the corners, by his fingertips. He stares at the sleeve, drinks in the clashing colours, the jagged lettering, the snarling girl frozen in the act of smashing her fist through a pane of glass, teeth bared and red lips parted in a yell. He flips it over, devours the other side too. The track listings: A/ Smash Your Way Out, B/ Tear It Up. The writing credits, the copyright notice, the logo and business address of the record company. Behind the text, a close-up photograph of a bluebottle sandwiched between two plates of glass.
Steve's fingers are shaking as he slides the vinyl out of the sleeve. He tilts it, and the light swims around its glossy grooves. He rotates the knurled switch with a satisfying clunk. The turntable begins to move, and the speaker issues that expectant noise that is part hum and part hiss. Steve turns the volume knob from 2 to 3. The expectation rises. He feels sick, but he doesn't know why. It's just a record. It can't possibly give him what he dreams of. This will be anything but silence.
He drops the record onto the machine. It shrugs reluctantly, rebelliously down the spindle. He watches it for one, five, ten revolutions before plucking up the courage to place the stylus onto the leader.
He realises he is holding his breath.
There's a percussive chunk, followed by a wire-thin whistle of feedback that sounds taut, like a restraint. Then, off microphone: "onetwothreefour", and then a crazed, enraged musical beast is released. Growls of guitar, slashing steel claws of cymbals, raging, inchoate screams, barely comprehensible. "Kick 'em down. Beat 'em up. To a pulp. Scream and shout. Smash it. Smash it. Smash it. Smash your way out. Out. Out. Out!"
Steve recognises the hook. On Top Of The Pops that two seconds had been two seconds too long, but now he can't get enough of it. "Smash it. Smash it. Smash it." The song goes on forever. The song lasts two minutes and nine seconds precisely. It finishes with a final foundering thrash, and that is followed by silence.
Steve starts the record again. Nudges the volume up one more notch.
Some time later he is lying on the floor, and shouting: "Smash it. Smash it. Smash it. Out. Out. Out." He's lost track of the number of times he has played the song. The record player's volume is at ten now, and even though the ducks are jouncing against the wallpaper and the crystal ornaments jumping on the mantelpiece, it still isn't loud enough.
Then the music cuts in with a soap-opera melodrama that easily drowns the record out. The room fills with a sickening swell of impending familial discord and framed in the doorway are his parents faces: Dad's re
d, Mum's ashen.
~
"Your old man? He actually broke it, man? Snapped the plastic. Like elastic?"
On the Factory roof the next day, Sandra's face is impossible to read. She's done something with her hair, it looks weirdly asymmetrical at the front, ragged at the back.
"I'm so sorry." Steve sings low and earnest, and is perplexed by the huge grin he receives.
"That's so...so...fuckin' cool! Your 'rents are cardboard cut-out cruel. What a pair of waa-aaa-aaankers."
Steve thinks that's going a bit far, but he's not about to admit that right now, so he imitates her melody. "Waa-aaa-aaankers!"
"Too right." She looks up at him through her lopsided fringe. "You know, you're all right. What you doing Friday night?"
"Nothing." Which is true. If Steve had friends that he regularly went out with, or had ever shown any interest in attending the weekend socials at the Factory, no doubt his parents would have added restriction of his movements to the punishment that banned his use of the television and the record player for the rest of the month. But since all Steve ever did was go to work then come home, it had clearly never occurred to them.
For the rest of the week Steve does what is expected of him. He goes to work at eight, he eats at six, he puts his light out and sleeps at eleven. His mother tries to interest him in conciliatory after-dinner board games, but the living room is radiant with Dad's constant glare, so he opts to retire early with a book whose pages he turns but doesn't remember. He doesn't see Sandra again that week, but that doesn't matter. She's written the details down for him on a scrap of paper that is pressed between the pages of his book. On Friday it is a simple matter to repeat the pattern of the previous evenings, then lie awake until the rest of the house has retired before stealing downstairs and slipping out.
The Makers Mark is located at the lower rent end of the Parade. It's a cold night, needles of rain prickling Steve's face and a ragged wind plucking at the tails of his workshirt. He's familiar with the Parade from helping Mum with the Saturday shopping, but that's during the day. These night time shuttered frontages are alien to him, like turned cheeks. The warmly lit windows above, blind eyes.
The segs of his workboots beat their ingrained, infuriating four on the pavement. Steve forces himself to break the rhythm, interspersing lopes and shuffles into his gait. Nothing calamitous happens, but the novelty quickly wears off. It's simply easier to go with the music.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Steve's breath mists the air, becomes a song he hadn't known was there. "I feel." His melody is low, threaded with minor intervals. "Outside of everything. Outside of living and dying, and laughing and crying. And anything real." Near the grocer's there are some broken food crates. Steve scoops up a piece of wood, drags it along the wall as he continues to sing. "I feel...unreal. Brittle and paper thin. Fragile as butterfly wings, the most delicate things. Touch me..." As Steve rounds a corner he belts the stave satisfyingly against a lamppost. "...and I'll shatter." The upper third of the wood snaps and dangles by jagged splinters. He swings it around in circles as he advances down a side street. "I feel my own rhythm but I'm ruled by the beat. I'm light as a feather, yet chained by my feet."
Ahead he sees a pub. It must be the one he's looking for because there's nothing else out here.
"I know where I'm going from the first step to the last," he murmurs, "but the bus that I'm riding is going too fast." He comes to a halt, throws the broken stick away. He wishes he hadn't come, wants to go home. He wants to be anywhere but home. "I just want to make it stop. I just want to breathe. Jam the hands upon the clock. Hide between the beats." He hasn't a clue where he wants to be.
"I just want to be me," Steve whispers, and finds that he is moving again, closing step by step on the beery lights, the well of muted noise. "I just want to be me. Me. Me..."
Steve breaks off when he realises that there is someone leaning against the wall beneath the swinging pub sign. The corpulent man is wrapped in a woollen coat. He takes a puff of a chubby cigar and blows out exotic smoke. If he heard Steve's song, he gives no indication, but when Steve falters at the door, he glances at last his way. "And if you can't stop moving?" The melody apes Steve's down to the last note, but the clear tenor voice, unmistakeable from the television, is what is amazing. "If there's no such thing as silence? Why not indulge in a little noise and violence?"
"You're the – " Steve begins, but the Governor raises a fat finger to his lips. Then with a tap of glowing ash, he straightens up and saunters off down the Parade, apparently oblivious to the muffled blare that has been issuing from the building all this time.
There is perhaps a measure less of anticipation in Steve's heart as he eases open the pub door and walks into the buffeting cacophony, but it is quickly forgotten when he finds Sandra's hand and manages to lose himself completely in the all consuming noise that, in the end, is almost as good as silence.
~
It is only many years later, when he and Sandra are married, that he will look back and feel cheated. Sandra and the others will remember a genuine moment of rebellion. Even if the only thing that gets torn up and smashed out are the walls of the old Factory, making way for a shinier, sleeker, more productive replacement. Even if people still spend their lives doing the same meaningless, incomprehensible jobs. Even if the changes to come that will feel so fundamental at the time are acknowledged in the end as merely superficial. They will remember Arrhythmia and claim a small part in what they'll call a revolution.
A revolution that began: onetwothreefour.
But Steve won't have that. Instead he'll remember the Governor's words. The way they lingered in the air like the cigar smoke, staining everything to come. The way they fell in perfect time with both the music and the pub's muffled chaos, equally bound by those four simple, inescapable, beats.
One, two, three, four.
Work, eat, play, sleep.
Live, marry, fuck, die.
It is only all those years later that he will acknowledge the truth that it seems he has always known. Sometimes, the music might change its tune, but it will never end.
Dr Vanchovy's Final Case
Stephen Palmer
Good evening. My name is Barakystys, and I work the evening shift behind the bar at the Spired Inn. I work every day, come storm, rain or drizzle. It is bearable work.
The tale I am about to relate is one of murder and detection in this final year of humanity on Earth, when all is madness and chaos – bladder blade plants kill the unwary, youngsters are surprised by falling cushions of fungus, cats with silicon implants in their claws prowl the streets for prey. And there are gang wars, street battles, and feuds settled by high energy rifles. For we are told by the demagogues, by the priestesses of the Goddess, in fact by everybody, that the long despoliation of the planet is over and the Earth is fighting back.
We who live and work in the northern half of the city of Kray are perhaps more used to death than soft southerners. Most of us do not consider the question of whether the killing of a human being still counts as murder. So what if somebody gets murdered? Should we still care?
The tale I am about to tell may help you decide that question.
It was about Eostre time when the deed was done. Early awakening trees were soft with orange and yellow blossom. From rusting cablecars long strings of deadly moss hung; they looked like sticky ropes, dotted with the bodies of entangled insects. There was an eerie beauty in the world, and many was the time I wandered the main streets of the Carmine Quarter, more for melancholy pleasure than any other purpose. I walked alone. All my family died last winter.
On the evening of the murder the Spired Inn was quiet. There had been a furious battle between reveller tribes and laser-toting teenagers from the Temple of Youth, and so the streets around the Inn, so close to the Cemetery, were empty. Several people sat drinking smart dooch in the common room. I remember the aamlon twins Praes-lin and Daes-lin playing chess. Also there was Dr. Vanchovy, the famous detective
and noted dandy, and Aqa the belly-dancer and her percussionist friend Jizhaqar. I suppose I should mention here the victim of this tale, Yasque, a drifter formerly employed as doorwoman to the Temple of the Goddess. Who was she? It is difficult to say. She did odd jobs for odd people. She was a loner, a tart.
On the night of the murder all these people were drinking at the Spired Inn. I was behind the bar with Dhow-lin, the owner. Because it was quiet I spent a lot of time chatting with the clientele, especially Dr. Vanchovy, who only popped in occasionally, and Aqa, who I was trying to bed. Dr. Vanchovy was in an expansive mood, and he bought me a drink, and one for Aqa, and Yasque too. As usual his dress was clean and perfect, excepting the eye patch that he had recently taken to wearing over his artificial eye. It must have been uncomfortable because he kept adjusting it. He talked with Yasque early in the evening. I remember she wore tattered clothes and a tribal necklace of small globes. With me he discussed the healing properties of oils derived from the organs of genetically engineered fish.
The other main character in this drama was Baylockell, a dour man recently expelled from the Temple of Pure Justice. At the time he was living in a house off the alley behind the inn, with his sister. He came in a few times a week.
Early in the evening Yasque went to the room on the first floor that she was renting. Nobody ever spoke to her again.
~
It was Dhow-lin who discovered her body, one hour before midnight. Crying and making a fuss she ran down to the common room and shouted, "There's been a killing! Here! Curse all Krayans. A killing, in my inn!"
Of course, everybody took notice. Immediately Dr. Vanchovy stood up and said, "Leave this to me. I shall use my detective skills to elicit the circumstances of the case. Dhow-lin, you must see to it that nobody leaves." He was like that, Dr. Vanchovy, a bit formal when it came to public speaking. I tried not to laugh as he examined himself in a handy mirror and brushed down his beige jacket.
Infinity Plus: Quintet Page 6