Okay, he said.
He arrived in Morningside Heights dehydrated and exhausted. Outside Denny’s building he noticed a small skip – or dumpster, as they were known in these parts. In the skip was a lot of smashed-up plaster. On closer inspection there appeared to be, in the rubble, pieces of broken pottery and crockery. Even closer study revealed complete items of brassware, including a couple of spear-bearing monkeys, and the head of a cherub, flaking and freshly chipped, with a cork for a neck.
The old man’s living room was clear of most of the clutter it had held previously. All that remained were the books, the chairs and wake table, and a few unobtrusive items on the mantelpiece. Bit sniffed sorrowfully along the skirting board where the reredos figures once stood.
‘I prefer the word dumpster myself,’ said Denny. ‘Skip seems too light for the item that it describes. And to me that item looks like a giant turtle dumped by a giant bird.’
Seated was Clive, as expected, but also Jeremiah, who lived and worked in the building. He had in front of him an electric piano on a stand, set low so that the keys could be comfortably played while he sat. A plate with a large mound of fruit balanced on the arm of the chair. He was so big – not remarkably tall, but broad – that he seemed to be wedged into the upholstery.
‘Rickard, you’ve met Jeremiah from the basement rooms. His brothers have been very kind to me. They have placed my more valuable items in storage in a pantechnicon. They have promised to earn me some money in these flea shops that are “all the rage”. And Jeremiah will be a great help too. A great help to all of us.’
‘You’ll be playing with us, Jeremiah?’ said Rickard.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Denny, before the younger man, who in any case was engrossed in his machine, could respond.
Beside Jeremiah, Clive nodded emphatically along, as if he had already been informed of a plan and was convinced again of the wisdom of it.
‘We have some good news anyhow,’ said Denny. ‘Jeremiah, showing a barefaced disregard for ethics, but an admirable dynamism, has been recording our singing. He has sent the recording to a radio station. The radio station has sent it into space. It has travelled in a perfectly straight line. Is that all correct, Jeremiah?’ (Jeremiah, delighting in his fruit, murmured an affirmative.) ‘A lady has heard our singing. And now we’ll be playing our first concert on March the sixth.’
‘Ah,’ said Rickard. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘this is good news,’ though the news was like bright light to his dry eyes, and he felt dazed, dazzled, a-muddle, and he was not sure, come to it, it being real now, if he wanted any of it any more.
‘Which is why,’ said Denny, ‘we’ve enlisted Jeremiah, who has a terrific ear.’
‘You’ll be able to pick up all the tunes, Jeremiah?’
‘Jeremiah won’t be picking up any tunes,’ said Denny. ‘He’ll have a more localised job on the night and, here’s to be hoped, on many others too.’
Clive nodded with especial fury now. Jeremiah remained a million miles away.
‘You’ll have noticed,’ continued Denny, ‘that I’ve got rid of that awkward upright piano. Jeremiah and I have been shopping for a replacement since. We have acquired a sleek new device. What’s it called, Jeremiah?’
‘It’s called the Reformer,’ said Jeremiah.
‘Is she “booted up”?’
‘It’s on, yes, but just having a bit of a snooze at the minute.’
Jeremiah ran his finger from side to side on the shiny white cladding of the keyboard. Within the cladding the ubiquitous Puffball orb burned upwards until it was all the one intense brightness and its edge was sharp. Quickly it settled down to a gently pulsing ember and the edge became hazy. From inside the machine the juice of it, or a spinning part, made a faint and steady hiss.
Rickard stepped forward to examine the machine. It was barely a keyboard at all; the keys were not objects but markings on the cladding. The corners were rounded; there were no bumps or attachments or holes or dials or switches. It encouraged touching, though he resisted touching it.
Denny took a rectangular box from his wake table, about the size of a big man’s fist and wrist and the same white colour and gloss as the keyboard. The box opened with a click. It contained what resembled a small flat horseshoe with two curled fronds attached to the ends.
‘The machine only works with this device, and this device works by means of laryngeal violation. I place the main part under my tongue. The tendrils unfurl and find their own way to my vocal cords. The device takes all the sound from my voice box and transmits it to the main unit. This is where Jeremiah does his job. He plays not the musical backing to our songs but the vocal parts. That is … my vocal part. He takes the substance of my voice and bends it to the song. His machine then communicates with any amplifier within reasonable distance.’
‘Where will the accompaniment come in?’ said Rickard.
‘There won’t be any. Jeremiah’s job will be to serve my voice. The machine can produce various effects too. It can make me sound like McCormack, or Merli. Or Dame Nelly Melba, if I so desire it.’
‘We will be in effect an a cappella group, then?’
Denny’s face soured.
‘And what about it? We’ve operated as such so far in practice.’
‘In practice, yes, but always on the understanding that when it came to singing a concert we’d be accompanied on piano.’
‘On whose understanding, now? It was never my intention to have musical backing.’
Rickard knew this to be untrue. He looked for a doubting expression in Clive, but Clive showed only the most earnest and patient attention to Denny.
Denny continued: ‘There are too many tenor groups about now, all the same, all ruined by schmaltzy accompaniment. I don’t want schmaltz in my group. It belongs to a different culture. I want to capture a spirit of an earlier, more traditional Irish music culture. One that came from material poverty, is simple, minimal.’
Rickard said, ‘We’ve chosen the wrong songs if that is so.’
Denny did not rise to him.
‘We must be honest in our interpretation of these songs,’ he said, ‘as we should be in how we live our lives. I am a man in the modern world. There – I’ve said it! Look at Clive – Clive is a former woman and is not afraid to tell people.’
Rickard thought of a flaw in the plan:
‘And this concert on the sixth … This lady who heard our singing … Surely she has put us on the bill on the basis of the sound she heard. Your voice unchanged is fundamental to that sound, Denny.’
‘I am not the fundament of this group! I am the sinew, the ganglions! Damn this … You and Clive concentrate on your voices, and let me and Jeremiah concentrate on my voice!’
Denny put the oral device back in its box. Took it out again immediately. Rickard was frightened and filled with remorse.
‘This programmer, the Rosenberg woman,’ said Denny, ‘she is of the old way of doing things. She has fixed ideas. The range of her interests is as narrow as her ambition. I am not interested in death and preservation but in the continuum. I believe in giving life to the past and in bringing forward the bright future. Now – let me demonstrate to you how this technology can be used to our great advantage. Jeremiah!’
Denny eased himself to his knees, and then on to his back. Jeremiah placed a draught excluder under his neck, a positioning that encouraged Denny’s mouth to open to as full an extent as the lips and cheeks permitted. Then Jeremiah took the oral device.
‘I’m putting it in now, Mister Kennedy-Logan. Are you ready?’
‘Ah-ah.’
‘They say think of sipping water through a straw. It stops the gag reflex.’
‘Wait!’ said Denny, putting his hand on Jeremiah’s wrist. ‘Before you do that …’
He sat up, turning to Rickard and Clive, and announced:
‘I meant to tell you. The name of the trio has changed. We are no longer the Free ’n’ Easy Tones. We are now the
White-Headed Boys.’
‘The White-Headed Boys?’ said Rickard.
‘The White-Headed Boys,’ said Clive, a half-beat behind.
‘The White-Headed Boys,’ said Denny, lying down again on the floor. ‘It means the propitious, the chosen, the favoured. Re-enter me, Jeremiah.’
The device in place, Jeremiah helped Denny back to his feet. The old man faced Rickard. He was almost unintelligible as he said, jabbing Rickard’s chest:
‘Now – the Emergency ditty “Eat Your Goodie”. A young pup like you wouldn’t understand what it’s like to live with the thunderclap of war just over the horizon. Listen to how well I sing this one, the feeling we produce.’
Jeremiah switched on the amplifier he had hauled upstairs from his basement bedroom. He sat at the keyboard and rubbed at the cladding again. Denny turned to him for the nod – and was away, moving his jaws as Jeremiah fingered in time. From Denny’s mouth came only silence. From the amplifier, a voice that sounded, to Rickard’s ears, unlike anything Denny had produced before in singing or speech. It rocketed and plummeted and quarked in mid-air, making queer shifts in pitch and glancing off the diphthongs and sending Bit scampering away to the kitchen:
‘bREAD aND bUTTER – bUILD iT uP!
bUILD tHAT bREAD uP tO tHE bRIM!
lAYERING sUGAR aLL tHE wAY,
aND pOURING mILK fROM pAIL oR tIN!’
(Here Denny did a twirl on the spot, flapping his hands like a little clucky hen.)
‘eAT yOUR gOODIE! mASH iT uP!
lAP iT uP, oH gOODIE-oH!
tHE wHITE tHAT’S tHERE iS wHITE fOR bONES,
iT’S wHITE tO hELP yOU tHRIVE aND gROW!’
At the end of the song Denny, with all the urgency of a naval surgeon, plunged his fingers into his mouth, tore out the device, and ran to the bathroom. Retching noises and a splashing of vomit were heard.
He emerged again into the living room, dabbing his chin with toilet paper.
‘Where would we be without our suffering artists?’ he said.
8
Now they had not much time and their rehearsals took on an added intensity. Now, with Jeremiah’s help, they practised daily, and into the nights, counting down and losing count of the days. In the heat of concentrated activity they did not feel time pass. They forgot at times the closeness of the air but it seemed that it was a good medium for the thick bars of music that powered from Jeremiah’s speaker. In the quiet periods they imagined the buzzing and groaning electrical and heating services were listening, and made jokes about the critics blowing hot air. Poor little Bit was having to listen; it had no choice. The creature could not bear the strangeness and danced amusingly like a naughty girl to catch their attention. The globe at the end of the projecting brass arm cut out with a ping but on they went. They forgot feeding times but some nights a good old Texan eatery delivered ‘South in [their] Mouth[s]’: cornbread and meatloaf and root beer; and cakes – cherries instead of carrots for Denny. Now and then they sprawled on chairs, feeling like real artists. Denny said he wished for a cigar. His curtains remained closed all these days and nights. When they felt they could do no more practice they wished the concert was tomorrow.
When this happened they sat about the room and looked to the clock, but the clock had been sold and the calendar had not been changed. For a time no one was certain what day it was or whether the concert had indeed passed them by.
Rickard came and went but his copy of Airs of Erin remained all the time. They plundered it for songs. Jeremiah came and went too and indeed went missing for most of the later time.
For a time in the earlier time Denny felt he had been singing like his older self, his younger self. When this time passed he became aware of himself again as simply a collection of spaces and resonators. This feeling that he had associated with the singing from the speaker, a warming fuzz around the heart, had been tricking his brain.
He opined that ‘the fronds on my oral device touch certain membranes, softer palates, the same that these Irish nose and throat singers use to send vibrations out into the body, like a sonar to find the soul, or the omphalos. Do you know about these nose and throat singers, Clive? You are probably out of the country too long, but then so am I.’
Clive said, ‘I am thinking of going back one day. Been thinking heavily of this.’
Denny said, ‘You will not be thinking of that while you have a job to do over here. You are thinking too much about death. Or is it that it is following you around? You never need to go back, you know. It follows me around, old son of the sod. One thing that consoles me is that the loam and the silica over here preserve you better.’
Clive said, ‘Being here as we are preserves us well enough.’
Then Denny said, apropos of an earlier thought, ‘Bloody English, Velily.’
Clive was walking around the living room, divining, clacking his shoes one in front of the other, led by the position of the chairs and by a pattern on the carpet, biscuit coloured, apparent to him now, and embossed, like the back of a biscuit. He had been thinking of the powers unleashed by furniture arrangements, and of other older -ologies, dynamat-this-and-that, with their whirlings and their circles of progression.
Denny said, ‘If we are to be honest singers then we should be honest, as I have been trying so hard to tell you. Let us play a game among ourselves. It’s a game like dare, or omphalos gazing. Tell us again about your being a woman at one time, Clive. “What gives?” as they say. No, I want to know what Rickard has been up to. Anything you’d like to tell us, Mister Piltdown Man?’
Rickard, who was in the room again, said, ‘I once threw a roof tile at a cousin who kept putting “-tastic” at the ends of words, for example, “sandwich-tastic”, “gas-meter-tastic”, etcetera.’
Denny laughed loudly and harshly.
He said, ‘Do you know how my dear wife Aisling died? I’ll tell you – she walked out on me. There was a real game of dare. I said I was a modern man, a man of the modern world. There were others around me were doing far worse and I asked her to give me the freedoms that these men enjoyed at that time in history as artists. And when she would not stand for it, I took them anyway. And she said she would prove this was a time in the world for women too. And she went after her freedoms too.’
Clive said, ‘I am curious to know exactly how this machine brings out the noise in you, Denny. I want to be assured that there is firm science behind it.’
A grinding sounded in the corner: a light came up, the light from the brass arm – Jeremiah was back in the room.
‘Twenty-four-hour hardware,’ he said.
‘Of course there is firm science behind it,’ said Denny. ‘Biology and sound waves. It resonates with my mitochondria.’
‘I cannot help feel that a deal has been done.’
‘No cash changed hands.’
‘I can sense in its outgoings something above and beyond you and it and Jeremiah.’
‘There’ll be a certain amount of leakage that will have all of our mitochondria moving, that is only natural.’
‘There is a well-established link between music and the otherworld.’
‘But anyhow I held out for Aisling, and holding out requires a certain amount of holding in. I wonder if that did all the damage.’
***
One Saturday afternoon when Jean Dotsy was a young child an American aeroplane came from over the border and scudded into the bog where her older brother Patrick did casual work on weekends. The pilot, a brown-haired man with a face that suggested he would go on to achieve great things, climbed out of the plane uninjured. On landing, it had ploughed up a huge curl of turf which now, collapsed into divots, largely buried the nose. Patrick observed the pilot, wild still with panic, scoop further bundles of turf in his arms and try to pile a rick on the wreckage. Sensing that he was being watched, the pilot turned around to see Patrick observing him.
‘Help me with this, kid – quickly. Take your spade.’
Patrick was a
big strong lad but the plane was a job to cover because, as well as being massive, it had a fin that stuck up in the air.
‘What about the wing?’ said Patrick – one of the wings had broken away and was lying on the ground fifty yards behind.
‘Goddamn,’ said the pilot, and the two ran to bury the wing as well.
The light was dim by the time the job was as good as could be done and the pilot asked Patrick if there was somewhere he could shelter the night. Patrick brought him the couple of miles to the family home. The pilot explained to Patrick and Jean’s mother and father that as an American and an ally he was no threat to them.
‘Technically, you are not an ally,’ said Mister Dotsy. ‘Make up scones and some of that serviceman coffee,’ he said to Missus Dotsy, and then to the pilot again he said, ‘Young man, have yourself a wash,’ before disappearing for half an hour.
Later, over stout with Mister Dotsy, the pilot, whose name was Joe, played between his knees with little Jean, who remembered his tanned face and sharp nose and not-disfiguring wrinkles, and his white teeth, and the way those teeth and his mouth were set in his face in a way that she would later have described as ‘goofy’.
‘I am fighting the war for people like your little girl,’ he said to Mister Dotsy.
He sat unembarrassed in long johns and in a yellow gansey of Patrick’s that was only a little too small for him. The two men faced the fire, drowsy from the stout. Behind them sat Patrick, in Joe’s pilot’s jacket and not much else.
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