Malcolm Orange Disappears

by Jan Carson

  The People’s Committee for Remembering Songs existed solely for the purpose of remembering songs. Six months previously the Director had been unduly influenced by a state-sponsored research paper highlighting the negative implications of over-excitement in the elderly. Within a week he’d taken it upon himself to ban outdoor sports, organized dancing and the annual trip to Knott’s Berry Farm. Four months later the Director had also banned music. In an unprecedented fit of generosity he’d given the residents a two-month amnesty period in which to willingly dispose of their music and music playing devices. Though horrified, none of the residents had been overly surprised by the music cull. The previous week the Director had banned clocks, electric toothbrushes and satin pajamas; the week before, good-looking visitors. Later things would get worse and worse until the cul-de-sac residents couldn’t so much as fart for fear of having too much fun.

  The Director was not a nice man. Having failed in the face-fixing industry, he was loath to embrace the world of elderly care. The Director did not like old people and struggled to see why they could not be stacked end to end on bunk beds like overgrown library books. He kept a black tie in his blazer pocket so he could slip into funeral mode at a moment’s notice. The Director enjoyed a good funeral almost as much as his daily bourbon.

  At first the residents assumed the music ban was a joke. ‘Ooops,’ they’d said, clamping an exaggerated hand over mouth every time they caught themselves humming along to the Dallas theme tune, ‘better not get caught singing. I might be thrown out on my ear.’

  Then the pastel pink fliers had appeared under their doors.

  ‘We, the management, regret to inform you that all residents are banned from listening to or creating music. This ban comes into effect on the first of the month at 9am. All questions and/or complaints should be addressed to the Director ASAP.’ The fliers had been hastily illustrated with a picture of a smiling transistor radio, peeking over the rim of a trash can to wave a cheery goodbye. You could barely make out the radio resemblance. From a distance it could easily have been a microwave oven.

  Miss Richardson, as leader of the in-house jazz ensemble, was most visibly upset. Upon discovering a flier, folded twice and stuffed under her front door, she’d locked herself in the bathroom with a box set of Carpenters records, refusing to come out for an entire afternoon.

  ‘What about hymns?’ asked Mrs Huxley and, by proxy, Mrs Kellerman, her non-speaking friend, who had in their previous lives spent a sum total of one hundred and two years married to Baptist pastors. ‘How can we still be Christians and have meetings in the back yard if we aren’t allowed to sing hymns, or at the very least modern choruses?’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Nate Grubbs had said and taken it upon himself to run all the fliers through the washing machine. ‘You can’t ban music. It’s an infringement on our civil liberties. We will write to the White House and complain about this.’

  It was a good plan, but no one had an envelope and the plan was quickly forgotten. Without organized leadership other attempts at mutiny soon met a similarly lackluster fate. Worn out from inventing workable solutions to a ridiculous problem, all twenty-three residents had congregated en masse outside the Director’s residence. Holding aloft a ragtag collection of walking sticks, rolled-up copies of the National Enquirer, and, in one case, an unopened banana, they’d barged through the door and demanded answers.

  ‘Answers!’ the Director had yelled, standing on his desk to give himself that extra two feet over the residents, ‘I’ll give you friggin’ answers. Look at these statistics.’ Fishing around in his pocket, he’d produced a dog-eared sheaf of papers and begun to read aloud. ‘“Recent Government research suggests that music incites people to deviant behavior. A localized study into music deprivation has conclusively proven that people are less excitable, less prone to outbursts of violence, unplanned pregnancies, aggression and graffiti when they aren’t exposed to music.”’

  Thereafter he’d unfolded the paper to reveal a supporting bar chart. ‘To be specific, folks. Since my appointment here less than two years ago, I have noted, with great disappointment, the ongoing deterioration of basic moral values in this institution. There have been three unplanned pregnancies in the last month alone, one all-night drug-fuelled dance party and, of course, the incident with the inflammatory graffiti on the Center wall. I blame music. It makes all of you too excitable. Therefore we – the management – have made the difficult decision to ban all music forthwith. As you can imagine this was not an easy conclusion to reach. I myself am a big fan of music and have seen Sting live in concert on at least three separate occasions. It pains me greatly to ban music, but when you abuse a privilege you have to suffer the consequences.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Bill had cried and pitched a stapler at the Director’s head. Unfortunately it did not kill him but left staple marks, like pygmy vampire bites, on the mahogany desktop. (Two weeks later, with the matter all but melted into amnesia, Bill would receive a wildly exaggerated invoice for the cost of recovering the Director’s desk.)

  As a direct consequence of the uprising, Bill had been banned from the weekly potluck get-together for three Wednesdays in a row and spent four hours forcibly Scotch-taped inside the enormous cardboard box which had previously housed the Center’s new fridge. It was during this extended period of solitary confinement that God had spoken directly to Bill, instructing him to form the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs. Bill had emerged from the cardboard box a new and freshly determined man, having heard the voice of the Almighty and lived to tell the tale. ‘You should be dead if you heard God’s real voice,’ reasoned Clary O’Hare. ‘You’re only alive because it got filtered through a cardboard box.’

  That evening at 11:30 when the Director retired to his own quarters, Bill summoned all the residents to the front room of Chalet 11. Malcolm Orange, catching the whiff of mutiny mumbling over the backyard fence, had showed up with a plastic mug of deep-fried fish sticks leftover from dinner. (Snacks had not yet been banned at the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs.)

  ‘Listen here, ladies and gents,’ said Bill, rising to address the entire group. ‘This is a dire situation. The Director is the Devil incarnate and it looks like he’s going to take our record players and radios. It’s a nightmare but there’s not much we can do about it. Of course we’ll fight back, hit them with every stick we’ve got … and Roger if you could see fit to doing that thing where you pretend to have a stroke again? That seems like a mighty fine way to shake the buggers up a bit, but at the end of the day they’re still going to take our record players. There’s nothing we can do about it.’

  The group visibly deflated, wheezing slightly like a cluster of elderly balloons left too long in the sun. Miss Richardson, terrified by the thought of losing a record player, began to slip her easy-listening LPs up the inside of her dress, one record at a time.

  ‘What if we pray a bit more?’ asked Mrs Huxley, and, by proxy, Mrs Kellerman, who had arrived at the meeting armed with the Believer’s Hymnbook. ‘We’ve already had three prayer meetings about the record players today but we could get up early and do five tomorrow if you think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘And I could use Morse code,’ offered Clary O’Hare.

  ‘Thanks ladies. Prayer is always a good back up, and yes Clary, you should definitely use Morse code as much as you can, but I think I have a slightly more practical solution. This afternoon at three thirty whilst confined inside an enormous cardboard box, God spoke to me directly and told me we should all get together and form a group to remember songs. That way, no matter how many radios and record players the Director confiscates, we can always remind each other of every song in the entire world. It’s vitally important that every group has a good name, especially if they wish to be taken seriously. I think you’ll agree with me when I propose that this group should be called the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs.’

  Everyone agreed, aside from Clary O’Hare who sugge
sted the group should be called the Beatles. When it was explained to him that this name had already been taken, he too had to agree that the People’s Committee was a more than apt name for a group such as this.

  And so the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs had formed and immediately broken for fish sticks and instant coffee. After the interval they made a list of every song in the entire world and split these songs up twenty-three ways. It was strange. Malcolm Orange had been sure a comprehensive list of all the songs in the entire world would be extremely long but it turned out he was wrong. There were only two thousand, five hundred and twenty-three songs in the entire world, five hundred of which were Bob Dylan songs, seven hundred and fifty of which were hymns and the majority of the rest traditional Irish folk songs involving peasant girls falling in love and/or dying young.

  Bill put all the songs into a spare bedpan and Malcolm Orange drew Elton John. Other people were not so fortunate and ended up with the Bee Gees or the soundtrack from Riverdance. All things considered, Malcolm was pretty happy with Elton John.

  ‘Off you go,’ Bill had said, pronouncing a quick benediction to bring this first meeting to a close. ‘We only have eight and a bit weeks to remember every song in the entire world. You folks better get practicing.’

  And practice they did: in their garden sheds with the lights turned out, under the bedcovers late at night, in the kitchen with their blenders set to liquidize. With headphones on and headphones off, in small groups and solitary confinement, the residents of the cul-de-sac listened and remembered and forgot and listened a little more. Music and lyrics. Lyrics and music. Music came hard to those who couldn’t hold a tune but they never, for one minute, gave up. All summer long the elderly residents of the Baptist Retirement Village kept right on remembering every song in the entire world.

  Every Monday and Thursday afternoon they reconvened in Chalet 11 to monitor their progress. It quickly became apparent that some members of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs were better suited to remembering songs than others.

  Within one week Nate Grubbs had memorized almost four hundred and fifty Bob Dylan songs and could, at a moment’s notice, perform note-perfect renditions of any one of these with all the proper Dylan drawls and affectations. It was inspiring stuff. Overawed and intimidated by the surefire possibility of his shotgun closet, ninety-five percent of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs mutinied and voted Nate Grubbs their new Captain. Confused by a multiplicity of choice Irene (of Bill and Irene fame) had voted against her own husband, mistaking Nate Grubbs for a particularly handsome young man she had once dated in high school.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Huxley and by proxy Mrs Kellerman, despite drawing the collected works of Elvis, Frank Sinatra and the Pet Shop Boys, had taken it upon themselves to disregard direction and memorize the Anglican church hymnary, the Psalter and Mission Praise, Volumes One and Two, in their entirety. Called before the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs, they seemed unable to offer so much as a coherent word in their own defense and instead chose to perform a rousing rendition of ‘And Can It Be That I Should Gain’, with Mrs Huxley taking the female lead and Mrs Kellerman, by proxy, the male.

  Clary O’Hare, a long-term victim of God’s humor, had drawn Aerosmith, and spent two weeks translating ‘Love in an Elevator’ into a series of neat tips and staccato taps which, while impressive, was of no earthly use to anyone who didn’t speak Morse.

  Miss Richardson, terrified of losing her own record collection, had yet to remove the box set of Carpenters LPs from the inside liner of her dress and instead of remembering songs had spent the previous fortnight seeking out increasingly obscure hiding places and depositing records as she saw fit. Abandoned Lionel Ritchie records were now beginning to turn up in the oddest places: in the closet with the bed sheets, shredded and slipped between the pages of the Holy Bible and just last week, forming the cardboardy crust of the ham and tomato quiche which she’d presented at the residents’ weekly potluck dinner.

  Only Bill, belligerent and sharp as a bag full of brass-backed drawing pins, seemed to be making any significant headway. Having drawn the Rolling Stones, he could soon sing his way through ‘Exile on Main Street’, ‘Goats Head Soup’ and most all of ‘Sticky Fingers’ in correct order with complementary dance moves. Despite widespread mockery he had taken to borrowing Irene’s make-up and fixing his face in the style of Keith Richards. ‘It helps me get in character,’ he explained to his daughter-in-law during the Retirement Village’s bi-annual visiting hour. ‘When I’ve got my lines on I feel just like Keef. I can do all the high parts.’ And, to illustrate his point, launched into a hand-jangling, caterwauling clip through ‘Street Fighting Man’.

  As the deadline loomed ever closer it became increasingly clear that many of the residents were incapable of remembering anything more complex than their own ankles. Despite drawing the soundtrack from Cats – a collection which ran to fifteen songs at most – Rose Roper struggled to recall anything aside from the Diet Coke jingle. ‘Rosie,’ said Nate Grubbs, addressing her directly just ten days before the deadline, ‘you’ve got to work harder at your remembering. No more Diet Coke jingles. Alzheimer’s is no excuse for laziness. Keep practicing.’

  With less than a week left before the music ban came into effect, Nate Grubbs had stepped up rehearsals, calling a series of emergency meetings of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs. Seemingly things were not going well. There was talk of an ill-defined Plan B, of hunger strikes and police intervention. The residents were deeply skeptical.

  Malcolm Orange had been present at every one of these emergency meetings, reeling with adolescent zeal through his Elton John numbers whilst the other residents grew more elderly, more wizened and shortsighted, forgetful. At eleven years old, almost twelve, Malcolm struggled to shoulder their panic. His mind was sharp as a colored pencil and growing sharper by the day. Ten years of trundling had left him with a fine nose for detail. He could remember incredibly small things – buttons and perfumes and throwaway comments – which might or might not have taken place in the blurry space before his own birth. Malcolm Orange was magic in his memorizing. Scientific Investigative Research was a mere vehicle for curating his genius. Though the retirement village was the closest thing to concrete he’d ever known, Malcolm was old enough to understand there would be other homes; times and troubles beyond the entry gates; a whole lifetime of songs yet to sing and forget. It was different for his friends. Malcolm was a bucket. They were sieves. With nothing new to sing or remember they would soon leak clean.

  Malcolm Orange had taken great pains to remain enthusiastic about the project.

  Noticing Sorry’s puzzled expression he scooched across the living room carpet and attempted to explain – in melodramatic under-breaths – what was happening.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Sorry mouthed, her words barely audible above the stench of Double Fruit.

  ‘Your dad’s banned music from next Friday on,’ whispered Malcolm. ‘All their radios and record players will be confiscated. They’re trying to remember every song in the world before that happens.’

  ‘Lord Almighty,’ Sorry laughed out loud. ‘They’re all crazy. There must be six million songs in the world.’

  ‘Well, two months ago there were two thousand, five hundred and twenty-three. There are only about eight hundred left now. It’s harder than you’d think trying to remember the tunes and the words at the same time.’

  At Sorry’s feet Mr Fluff shifted suddenly, hacking a medium-sized fur ball onto the carpet behind the sofa. Rose-pink and cream-flecked, it blended perfectly with Irene’s shag pile carpet. Malcolm Orange thought it best to let the cat puke go unmentioned.

  ‘Ladies and gents,’ Nate Grubbs began, bringing the meeting to attention (sensing the gravity of the situation he had practiced this speech in his bathroom mirror, and imagined himself charismatic on a par with JFK or John the Baptist). Pausing for effect, he swiveled to look direc
tly at his audience. Two dozen pairs of prescription bifocals glared back at him, his image reflected lazily in each lens.

  ‘We have less than a week left. Let’s get musical … from the top now!’ he cried and his voice had all the last-ditch exuberance of a sinking ship. ‘Let’s hear you sing every song in the entire world!’

  In the corner, by the spider plants, Roger Heinz rose arthritically and began to shuffle towards the middle of the room. Standing centre square, butt blocking the electric fire which Irene (who’d been raised, red hot, in the armpit of Texas) kept sweltering all through high summer, he cleared his mouth and prepared to begin his now famous rendition of ‘King of the Road’. Legs spread, cowboy style, Mr Heinz dropped his Slavic intonation in favor of a dark drawl and angled in the direction of the three ladies resident on Irene’s heavily patterned sofa.

  ‘Trailers for sale or rent …’

  From the void behind the sofa, a guffaw like a pitch-pinched earthquake began to gain momentum. Roger Heinz, deaf as he was, bore on regardless. Five seconds later, a half-empty pack of Lucky Strikes came flying from behind the sofa, striking him solidly in the forehead. Though purely coincidental – the perpetrator being a lousy aim, even with a target in full view – the crumpled cardboard made contact in perfect tempo with the final syllable of the stanza. The ladies of the sofa, sensing a cold front, shuffled nervously. Well used to the threat of attack, Mr Heinz quickly abandoned Roger Millar and reached for the half dozen butter knives buckled individually, with elastic bands, about his midriff.

  ‘Right, you little bitch,’ he yelled, scrabbling to locate a knife for each hand. ‘Reveal yourself. Stand up and take what’s coming to you. I’ll not have you mocking these good folks in their own home.’