by Will Wiles
My ticket came with a strip of paper, blue-lined and possibly torn from an exercise book, wrapped around it. I unfolded this slip with a feeling of weary familiarity, but the handwriting that greeted me was not Oskar’s: it looped and slipped its leash like an over-friendly dog.
Meet me in bar afterwards!
Michael. (friend of Oskar!)
OK then.
How was the concert? I have been asked this before by people, on the rare occasions that I have attended concerts, and I have never known what to say. Normally, I would just reply: ‘Oh, very good.’ By this I mean: ‘There were no obvious mistakes. No notes were missed in such a clunkingly apparent fashion that I was able to detect the error. No one forgot how to play their instrument halfway through. No one ran amok in the audience. Nothing caught fire. Music played and I was so bored that my hair was bored.’
How was the concert? Not intolerable. I surprised myself by recognising the music. All classical music is recognisable in an oh-isn’t-this-the-tune-from-the-Kenco-advert way, but I knew that I had heard ‘Death and the Maiden’ before – possibly from the Sigourney Weaver film – and ‘The Trout’ turned out to be the theme tune to a BBC sitcom from the 1990s that I had only the faintest traces of a memory of. Thus culturally anchored – and reassured that I wasn’t about to be exposed to some two-hour experimental piece consisting of a crying baby and the sound of a shovel being dragged along a pavement – I was free to enjoy myself. Still, it was hard not to consider the nature of the psychological characteristic that others present possessed and I did not, the characteristic that meant their enjoyment was immersive and rapt, and mine was partial at best. When listening to classical music, I want to be able to read the paper at the same time, or potter about. If forced to devote my attention wholly to the music, I wonder what I am missing out on, what secret channel of sublimity I am not receiving, what tiny disposition of cartilage in the inner ear means that classical music is little more than nice background noise to me, high-quality aural wallpaper. Obliged to gaze upon this wallpaper for a couple of hours, my mind will always turn to other things.
With soaring heights of aesthetic joy apparently denied to me, my thoughts strayed to the corporeal. I started to think about my legs, and whether they were comfortable or not; I wondered if cavemen had sat like this at all, or whether it was a more recent thing. My legs were like sullen guests whom I had dragged along to this concert and was eager to please; my concern for them only intensified their grumbles. The focus on them grew sharper, soon pinpointing problems at microscopic level; a rogue fear that half a dozen blood cells had died and fused together, a newborn clot roaming the legs’ circulation, searching blindly for some vital system to lodge in. All of a sudden, I was aware that I was a pulsing sack of blood, relying completely on the cooperation of millions upon millions of individual cells; these teeming workers had had little opportunity to make any grievances known to the controlling mind as their feedback and petitions were reduced to nonsense twinges and discomforts that I ascribed to either hypochondria or a hangover or dismissed entirely. But even now an enraged delegation of blood cells might be marching up a major artery, bearing at their processional fore an encrusted mass of their deceased brethren, intending to cram this clotted protest deep in the cerebrum and bring about a permanent industrial stoppage. Strike, meet stroke.
But the music did not stop suddenly, as I feared it might, an abrupt silence brought on by the cessation of my life. (‘Rebellious legs,’ the coroner would remark, gravely. ‘It was the sitting down. They wouldn’t stand for it.’) The performance came to its natural end after little more than an hour. The musicians stood for applause, and I scanned them for potential Michaels. They looked very pleased with themselves. I remembered how Oskar looked after performances I had seen him give – a tightening in the cheeks at either extremity of a perfectly horizontal mouth, a feline narrowing of the eyes; a mask, a self-imposed rictus of satisfaction that looked as if it might snap into an expression of anger, or loss, or humour, the instant it relaxed in private. But it never relaxed, in private or otherwise, it just switched seamlessly back to his normal face, the pine doors of a cabinet closing on a dead TV set.
The bar was not decorated in the same thrombosis red as the rest of the building, but hung with dark green embossed wallpaper. A green room. Green rooms in theatres were green because that colour was most restful on the actors’ eyes after an evening spent gazing into the limelight – burning lime was once used as stage lighting, with blinding effect. This was a generous, high-ceilinged room made strangely claustrophobic by the fact that the wallpaper continued above the top of the walls and covered the ceiling, in the process apparently smothering what I imagined were plaster cornices and mouldings, which now appeared as vaguely malignant lumps and ridges. A communist-era chandelier dangled from a particularly prominent tumulus of wallpaper in the centre of the ceiling, distributing a kind of restless surgical light. It was an obvious triumph of proletarian aesthetics and wiring over bourgeois conventions of beauty and safety; a cuboid entanglement of metal struts and sheets of yellowing fabric, it strongly resembled a box kite hitting an electricity pylon, and would have been far more comfortable in the brutalist megastructure across the street. With the wallpaper, it was like an abstract ice cube floating in a glass of congealed crème de menthe.
The bar was original, though, an ornate teak longboat in dry dock, staffed by the best-dressed people in the room and backed by huge mirrors in gilt frames. But a long portion of it was topped by an ageing sneezeguard, the plastic of which was beginning to fog and craze in places. I ordered a gin and tonic, in English, a language that the barman clearly understood. A mobile phone trilled behind me; the till that my money disappeared into was new. The West, home, at once felt closer than it had done at any time during my stay here, and very far away. I felt as if Oskar’s flat was a bathysphere submerged in alien depths, and I had just briefly surfaced, an isolated bubble of humanity bursting into the atmosphere of others. An awful sloshing wave of homesickness caught me, trailing misery. How much longer would I be expected to stay? Oskar had said at least a week, almost certainly two, possibly more. At this moment, even the end of the first week seemed an impossible age away. The beginning of the week also felt distant; time telescoped away in both directions. I found a place to sit and sipped my G&T. Was I still hungover, perhaps? The gin, I thought, would revive me. Maybe it was the hair of the dog that I needed. Yes, the hair, the hairiest hair of the hairiest dog. Let the hangover be deferred, thin out that clotting blood with a dash of spirit, get things moving.
The crowd was also unclotting. A few concert patrons had bought drinks and settled at tables, small groups, husbands and wives, and a line of men had taken up positions along the bar, in pairs and threes, adopting the slight deviation from the vertical that indicates that they were there to stay, not simply to purchase refreshments. The mood was intelligent and self-satisfied, two things that I did not feel. I felt self-conscious, a lone drinker. Not a rare sight in this country, perhaps, a state of alone-ness. It was a state of alone-ness. It was the kind of place that started shooting political prisoners because it suspected that they would enjoy solitary confinement and internal exile too much. The zinc surface of the table at which I sat was covered in little dents, as if it had been used for target practice by a Lilliputian firing squad. These little dents in the pinkish metal pulled my reflected face this way and that, obscuring my eyes, pulling my jaw into a John Merrick parody, making it look as if a whole second head was swelling up behind mine...
My name was spoken. Clearly, very close behind me. I didn’t even hear it as a word – I simply started at the sudden knowledge that I had been identified.
I turned. There was a tall man standing behind my chair, the owner of the second head I had seen swelling from my reflection. It was a long head, and prematurely balding, with wisps of incredibly pale blond hair arranged over an inescapable pink dome. An intelligent forehead presided over an assor
tment of young, pink features, animated with a liberal smile. Underneath this affable face was a black dinner jacket and a white dress shirt, open at the collar. Sweat gleamed on an equine neck.
‘Ha ha!’ said the dome. ‘I made you jump!’
‘Uh, yes, miles away,’ I said, twisting out of my seat and standing with the easy grace of a newborn giraffe.
‘I am Michael,’ said dome in German-accented English. His smile did the impossible and broadened, revealing a parade of white teeth of American splendour. He extended his hand, and I shook it.
‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked, gesturing towards my glass in case he was unfamiliar with the concept.
‘Yes, yes!’ Michael enthused, before his features darkened: ‘But not here.’ He scowled in the direction of the bar.
‘OK,’ I said, feeling a little dazed. I had been moving in the direction of sitting back down, and I straightened instead.
Michael stared intently at me for a moment, as if fascinated. Then he pointed at my glass on the zinc. ‘Finish, finish.’
I picked up the drink and drained it. The ice hurt my teeth.
‘How much money do you have with you?’ Michael asked.
‘About a hundred euros,’ I said.
‘OK. We can get more.’
‘OK,’ I said, pulling on my coat. ‘Uh, what?’
Out, out through the ventricles of the lobby, out into the rain-soaked street.
‘He owes me money,’ Michael was saying, ‘and he is being fuck about it. How is it said? He is being a fuck about it. Or he is being a fucking thing, a something, about it? A fucking something. Noun and verb and adjective – very useful, the English fucking; fucking useful.’
This monologue had been kept up since we left the bar, but as Michael had charged ahead of me, I had not been able to follow much of it.
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Who? Victor!’ Michael said. We were passing the cathedral, crossing the great square. ‘He owes me money, and is being a fuck about it. So I will not drink there. I do not want to look at him. No more money for him!’
‘The barman,’ I said, filling in the blank for myself.
Michael stopped at the avenue’s edge, to my relief – I had been worried that he was going to march straight into the hurtling chasm of traffic, such was the momentum of his trajectory from the concert hall.
‘Yes, the barman,’ he said, looking at me as if I were a cretin. ‘The bar, man. CHANGE!’
This exclamation startled me, but it was not directed at me. Instead, Michael was apparently addressing the torrent of cars. It was past nine, and rush hour was long over, so that the city’s motorists were now able to pick up speed along its triumphal axes. This increased velocity added to my sensation that the pace of the evening was, if anything, picking up. I wanted to relax, not pick up the pace. It was an anxious experience, meeting a stranger in a foreign city – by now we should be making awkward chit-chat over a modest supper, but instead I was being startled by this frankly startling individual, Michael.
‘CHANGE!’ Michael bellowed. The city did not listen. The traffic continued to race past, tyres hissing on the drenched asphalt, beating up mist. Across the avenue, water was gouting from several points on the concrete monster where its gutters and drains had failed. I wondered that it hadn’t dissolved entirely, like a grey sugar cube. The lights of the pedestrian crossing changed and the traffic grudgingly halted. I now realised what Michael had been yelling at.
‘Interesting building,’ I said as we drew nearer the brutalist lump.
‘Horrible,’ Michael said, jerking out his left arm in the direction of the structure as if he sought to waft it away. ‘A gift from the Soviet allies. They built it on the graveyard of the church. On the bodies of the dead! But the bodies, they had their revenge. It is too heavy. It is sinking.’ He stopped abruptly, and I almost ran into him. ‘Big cracks in the floors,’ he said with a grisly grin. ‘You can smell death.’
Unaccountably, I felt drawn towards Michael. I was starting to like him. He had flicked off the safety catches of the evening.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, joining his smile.
‘Near,’ he replied.
The bar was a brick vault below ground level, unexpectedly dry and not too stifling. It was filled with cacophonous jazz from a CD player with a stutter, noisy chatter, and cigarette smoke. The lighting was jaundiced and inadequate; with the smoke, it killed depth. Back in the bathysphere, sinking. We sat at a table in a vaulted booth, and a waiter brought us a bottle of red wine on the basis of a raised index finger from my host. No money changed hands, no price was indicated. The thought that Michael might consider a hundred euros inadequate funding for this evening nagged at me. Did he want me to pay for him, as well? Was this my treat? I detested my meanness.
‘Now, Oskar’s friend,’ Michael said, pouring the wine. It irritated me that he didn’t use my name. ‘Tell me about you.’
‘Well, I’m a writer,’ I said.
‘Aha! You write books?’ Michael said, eagerly.
‘Um, no,’ I said. I hated conversations that progressed in this pattern. ‘I write leaflets, press releases, that sort of thing.’
Michael’s brow knotted up. He had an expressive forehead. It would be an impressive feature even if he still had all his hair. ‘What are “leaflets”?’
‘It’s...like little books,’ I said.
‘Short stories?’
‘No! no...like...information sheets, eight, twelve pages...for local councils.’
A blaze of light issued from that articulate face. ‘A-ha-ha! Pamphlets! Political, yes? Jonathan Swift, Tom Paine...’
‘No, no,’ I said, exasperated, ‘leaflets...about recycling, and environmental health, and noise nuisance, and how to pay your council tax in instalments by direct debit, how to vote...all the things a council does.’
‘This is writing?’
‘It’s called copywriting,’ I said, emphasising the -writing.
‘You are copying it?’
‘No, the writing is called copy. But it’s very samey stuff. It might as well have been copied. You notice that the leaflets from one council read much the same as leaflets from another council. It’s all the same bollocks. Online is worse. But online it’s not called “copywriting”. It’s called “content provision”.’
‘“Content provision”,’ Michael echoed. A smile spread across his face. ‘This is writing. “Content provision.” You provide “content”, yes? This is fantastic. Then I am not a musician. I am no longer a musician. I am a “noise organiser”, yes?’
I laughed, and raised my glass. ‘To noise organisation!’
Michael returned the toast, and we drank, and he topped up our glasses. ‘The concert was good,’ I said.
‘Uff,’ Michael said, wrinkling his nose. ‘Some of it...I drink to forget.’ He drained his glass with amazing speed, refilled it again, and poured more wine into my alreadyfull glass, bringing it to the brim.
‘Well, I liked it.’
‘When we play, we are imitating the dead,’ Michael said. He had darkened with astonishing speed. The rapidity of these emotional oscillations reminded me strongly of Oskar. ‘Noise organisation after the fashion of the dead.’
I decided to disregard this. The English model of conversation – in which death either did not exist, or was a very limited phenomenon happening only to absent third parties – seemed far preferable to me. ‘What’s it like working with Oskar?’ I asked, with what I hoped was a devilish expression. I gulped at my wine, eager to keep pace and nervous of being seen as a lily-livered Westerner.
‘What is it like working with Oskar!’ Michael replied, with what seemed to be delight. ‘Ha ha! What is it like being friends with Oskar? I like Oskar, Oskar is a very good man, he...in music...he is a genius. He is fantastic, superb. It is good that he goes to Los Angeles. It is the correct horizon for him. He will be famous there.’
‘He’s only there for a couple of week
s,’ I said. ‘For the divorce.’
‘Yes, divorce...’ Michael said. ‘Did you meet her?’
‘Laura? Yes.’
Michael wrinkled his nose, again. ‘And what did you think of her?’
His expression made it clear that I was safe to tell the truth. ‘I didn’t like her.’
‘Yes! Yes...’ Michael beamed. ‘My God...She is a bitch, yes?’
Such was the savage, savouring joy that Michael put into this word, he forced a laugh out of me. ‘Ah, ha, yes, well, I didn’t like her.’
‘She came here and she was rude about everything, the food, the wine’ – he tapped the bottle – ‘We have Italian wine here, we have French wine! This isn’t Communism now! We have Australian wine and the’ – the vitriol reached a corrosive crest – ‘Californian fruit juice. Chateau Minute Maid, Cuvée 7-Up! She was rude about everything. I think she thought the city was very dirty, and she did not like the people here.’
I was beginning to feel guilty about my own private musings on Oskar’s home, but at least I had kept them to myself. And Laura had clearly considered Britain to be an unwashed, anarchic backwater, sliding backwards into dereliction and despair, so what she made of this place, well, the mind boggled.
‘I did not like her,’ Michael continued. ‘But Oskar, I like Oskar. But I work with Oskar. You are friends with Oskar? Because I think perhaps we all work with Oskar. We are all his co-workers. He lives his life like a job. He does this job very well, he is very efficient and successful. You are his colleague, too. He does not go home from this job. He is working when he is sleeping. You see?’
‘I think.’ I noticed, with a degree of horror, that my glass was already halfway empty again; it wasn’t this fact that horrified me so much as the fact that Michael had also seen the approaching dearth, and was reaching for the already heavily depleted bottle. But then all the horror dissipated suddenly and totally, so totally that I was left wondering if I had felt it at all; instead I felt...good. I felt warm and relaxed. The atmosphere in the bar appealed to me, it included and enveloped me. The smoke and hubbub cushioned me. Some music was playing, appropriately Weimar-decadent, all accordions and clarinets and a sense of civilisation sliding towards catastrophe and the fact not being too important. I felt as if I could be a poet or an intellectual here, sharing a drink with a musician friend.