by Adam Thorpe
‘Think about it, Jack. Let me know. I’m sure you’re amazingly busy.’
Jack’s fractiousness, after his disappointment, suddenly burst into view. Despite the commission, Gary Soames was annoying him: ‘OK, but please, a silence afterwards,’ he found himself saying, his hand waving about. ‘No ditzy comments cutting in from the presenter. I’m sure you’ll agree that was … And all that. In fact, I’ll write it in. The silence. At least five bars.’
Gary Soames was already turning to George Benjamin.
Later, Jack heard him explaining the commission at much greater length to Abigail Staunton. ‘We’ve a spot every day for that week, miraculously. Early evening, peak time. Brilliant. And for God’s sake make it challenging. Don’t be afraid to shake ’em up, Abigail. Lean-forward radio, we are. They’ll have plenty of the usual tuneful suspects on the actual day. Purcell, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Finzi, all that. Birtwistle’s got a slot, too, so it’s not all cowpats and cornfields.’
Abigail laughed.
‘The real drag,’ Gary went on, encouraged, ‘is having to avoid sounding like the culture arm of the BNP. You on the pop, my love?’
Abigail held her glass out, flashing a smile that got the producer’s lazy eye watering. Jack left the South Bank deeply disgruntled. The secret to success was not to speak, and to look permanently hot for it.
He’d no idea when St George’s Day was, but hadn’t dared to ask. He googled it, afterwards. April 23rd. England’s national day, this. The day of Shakespeare’s birth – and death! How embarrassing. Like, so obviously arranged by a Tory, Home Counties God. Amazing, to think it had all been appropriated by football louts and fascists. Made into the equivalent of exposing your genitals.
He had a few months in hand. He would take it extremely seriously. It would be very pagan and green and dark and all about losing your mother, losing Mother Earth. Losing Moyna and losing Milly. Losing his eyrie with its view of the Heath. Losing Wadhampton Hall. Slipped through his fingers, just like that. The rooks, the soft thuds of the croquet mallet, the hidden ancient bones beneath. It would keep him occupied.
Donald was not in a good state, of course. He wandered about the house in Hayes as if searching for something, with a dulled look in his eyes. Jack had to do more for him than anticipated, including the cooking and the cleaning. In fact, Donald kept calling him Moyna by mistake. They even laughed about it.
Moyna was behind every door, about to appear. When Jack took very long baths, her voice was always about to wonder if he had drowned. When he watched rubbish on late telly, long after Donald had gone to bed after fussing about in the bathroom for ages, Moyna was always about to yawn noisily in her easy chair (now occupied by unread copies of the Daily Mail) and deny that she had nodded off. She was the Moyna of his childhood and youth, this phantom. She was his mum. At one point, cooking at the stove, he felt she had slipped inside him. He almost ticked Donald off for sniffing.
He was all but wearing her slacks; pulling down the sleeves of her cardy. When Donald fished out the housekeeping envelopes at the back of the cupboard, fumbling for coins for the gas, he almost put his hand out.
The weather turned properly cold and the last leaves were a mush among the dogs’ doings in the meagre slips of green that Hayes offered up, these days. Jack took Donald out on trips in the car, getting stuck for ages in fume-laden traffic as they battled their way out to some form of reasonable countryside pocked by pylons, to some stately or interesting sight like Chenies or Cliveden or Stoke Poges, to some recommended country pub that usually turned out chilly in the corners and served up indifferent, overpriced nosh. But Donald wasn’t interested, anyway. It wasn’t his thing. He preferred airfields, plane-spotting, model-glider meetings in windswept fields full of cowpats beside car dumps or vast storage sheds. But when Jack heroically suggested driving him out to one of these, Donald never felt like it.
The England piece was stuck at the twenty-second bar. So far, it sounded like Britten bludgeoned into Pärt, and strained through a morris dance. All wrong. He drove out to Watership Down, not so far from Wadhampton, and stood on the grassy bumps of the ancient fort on Ladle Hill and felt barren and grief-stricken in the biting wind. Most of the downland seemed to have been nibbled away by arid-looking wintry fields, and there was some kind of ginormous antenna; walking through a bleak farmyard, he noticed a battered van in the distance turn a wide circle and head back towards him menacingly. It stopped and he stopped and a man with a nicely wind-pickled face leaned out of it and snarled at him about private property.
He got rid of all but the last bar, then tore that up as well.
There was a succession of days before Christmas, dragging into weeks, which stayed resolutely ashen. The sky was a sheet of impenetrable lead, not really a sky at all: no clouds were discernible. It was something exhaled by the colourless land, by the air itself, hardening into a depression and bolted to Jack’s own heart – which actually seemed not so much to ache as to turn gaseous with grief. It hardly rained, and yet it was always about to. It was always about to spit, rather than rain, and one was convinced it was actually spitting, except that it wasn’t. The light was so feeble that no hour of the day was differentiated from another: Jack felt it as a purgatorial, equinoctial stage that might usher in some kind of redemptive blaze, but the blaze never came, nor did the night. It probably never would. The days were down a well, a bunker. And through all this the traffic moved steadily and with a sinuous heaped motion onwards to no discernible place and for no discernible reason. Jack saw this through the spittled windscreen, or from the squeezed pavements of Hayes, and heard a harp. He had never heard a harp play what he was hearing it playing. It was playing the greyness of England. It was playing this weather. It was playing this English reality of ashen, utterly leaden futility. Of spoliation. Of flag-fluttering retail parks and commercial estates spread in a cancerous ring around every town. Of people with too much money and the people they’d taken it from, who no one cared a hoot about. Of the zillions that went into scuttling the green land and the clear air that must have existed once, not all that long a time ago.
He was on his way to Currys, situated in a retail park outside Harlington, to buy Donald a digital radio. It was Sunday. The estate’s car park was almost full. It was, in fact, spitting steadily and people were hurrying with their wares from sliding glass door to vehicle – or vice versa with empty, needy hands. Jack looked at them from his father’s rattly old Ford and thought: we are the damned. And the harp continued into another phrase, squeezing out the greyness onto the scored page in his mind. This is our England, he thought. This is our world. It is giving up. There is no sky. There are no white clouds. There is only loss, and Currys, and cars nudging their way towards nothing, and the end of polar bears. And no one cares.
You were so good once.
But this harp was crazy. It wasn’t ancient or pagan or green or plangent. It was grey, that’s all. It was the leadenness of this. It was the futility of this. It was this piss in the ocean. It was a harp playing grey and this scurrying into Currys. It was nonsense. It was it.
Donald would nap in the afternoon, in the easy chair, an unread newspaper or Model Glider sliding off his knees. He looked much older. He was considering moving to Australia, to live with Julie and Mike. Julie and Mike were keen, because they felt lonely without family. Jack thought this was their lookout. But Donald couldn’t be unhappier in Australia than he was in Middlesex. In Australia, the only arvo was the afternoon.
‘I’m thinking on it,’ he’d say, on the phone to Julie. ‘I know it’s nice and warm, pet. I’ve got a head on my shoulders. Just about.’
Christmas had been just the two of them; Donald had wanted to skate over it, do the minimum, but Jack had cooked a turkey and overdone the Brussels sprouts and his father had all but choked on a walnut and his siblings had phoned. It was miserable and painful, but it fed Jack’s piece for St George’s Day. In fact, the piece was growing into several pieces: the
Radio 3 broadcast would be an extract, just part of the middle section for solo harp in A minor. In A for April; and in B for Birth and D for Death, either side. B, A, D. Major and minor.
Jack knew, with a thrill in his bones like something stirring in the black sediment, that it was very good. He would call it: Grey Days. Everyone would know what it meant. The silences between the plucked notes were thrusting forward in a way he’d never achieved before. It was music for the blind. All music is for the blind – that we might see. At intervals, between the grey notes of the harp, hewn from the granite silence, he introduced a tranny in bursts of one or two seconds, distorted trash, agonised over the fence. Oh, it was very good. And everything, everything fed in. Even the humming of a revolving washing line turning in its socket.
Radio 3 hated it. They didn’t say they did, but he knew they did. He sent them the whole score, marking where the extract began and ended in the middle section, and after a fortnight came a lukewarm thank you by email. They had found it ‘very interesting and surprising, but we aren’t sure it fits with the others in the series. Maybe it would suit a late-night slot, for our more serious, committed listeners.’ Unusually for Jack, he sent back a furious defence of it, quoting the producer’s overheard request to be ‘challenging’. They crumbled immediately. This is how it’s going to be from now on, he thought. No compromise.
He would dodge the silly questions in the pre-recorded interview and say what he thought. He had to say what he thought.
The complete work was over an hour long.
He sent it to Howard, not all that nervously because he knew it was good. A week later, Howard wrote a proper letter on proper paper, three pages long in nice violet ink, proclaiming Grey Days to be a work of genius. He meant it, too.
‘Thank you, Mum,’ said Jack, lying with his hands behind his head on the bed, Howard’s letter on his chest. ‘Oh, and thank you, too, Roger. You bastard.’
ELEVEN
A group of men are waiting to board their return flight as I emerge into arrivals at Tallinn airport. Their identical yellow sweatshirts are emblazoned with big purple letters: Bridegroom, Best Man, Usher, Chauffeur, Groom’s Best Mate and, in one case, Poor Jilted Bastard. They look like released prisoners still adapting to daylight and they all appear to be called Chris. They have very loud, if hoarse, voices. One of them wears a felt top hat marked with a St George’s flag.
I’m staying just the one night in Tallinn. My hotel’s the cheapest I could find, a grey lump smelling of BO and hair grease next to the railway in the ex-Soviet zone, but I can walk into the Old Town in a few minutes.
It’s cooler here than in London – about the same as it was six years ago, although it’s April now rather than October. There are a lot more tourists, and most of the houses have been stripped and painted, teetering on the edge of Disneyfication. I feel like a trespasser on my own memories. The café where I met Kaja, where this long phrase started cooking, has been entirely revamped into something very red inside with night lights on the tables, called St Petersburg. The façade’s painted a subtle blue, with a gas light on an elaborate hook. Cardiac-challenging trance pumps out through the open door. No Stag Parties Please Respecful Behaviour Only is stuck on the window in elaborate computer-Gothic.
Not one trace of the Café Majolica is left, in fact.
I wander up to the pub, still O’Looney’s, with a hand-painted wooden sign saying Since 1994. As before, music and shouting are in chromatic conflict through the open door. It’s the very same tweedling Irish folk tape (I picture it as a cassette) as in ’99, but the shouting is English, not Finnish. It sounds like blood-up-the-walls fisticuffs, and I’m turning to go when about ten of my compatriots spill out, yelling and guffawing. Despite the cool spring weather, they’re dressed for summer.
I back off, to the other side of the street, not wanting to be started on. I am also fairly curious. Is their behaviour the same as it might have been in Hayes or Harlow or wherever they come from? One lifts up his T-shirt at his reflection in the window, waggling his mammoth behind; another lies belly down, pretending to have sex with the cobbles. Just like home.
The others gob and guffaw some more, then spot me loitering. I pretend to be checking text messages on an invisible mobile in my palm. My lifeline looks interestingly short. One of them approaches, fat and ginger-haired rather than hard, with huge fuzzy nostrils he seems to be looking through, and he yells, a few yards off: ‘Oi, what’s the big issue, piss-face?’
OK, I’m cross. As if I’m watching a foreign army rampage through my own land. It isn’t courage that makes me answer back, it’s blind and spontaneous anger. They’re bombed stupid on cheap beer and Tallinn vodka, I should let it go – but I can’t let it go. They’re jeering at me, thinking I’m Estonian, or thinking I’m at least not English and therefore of an inferior race. And, at the same time, they’re revelling in their ugliness, their brutish-ness – there’s something self-consciously comic in it, something theatrical. It makes you think they wouldn’t harm you, in the end.
But that is a big mistake. I make that mistake. I’m not exactly naive – I was brought up in the fag end of Middlesex, after all, and saw a man’s face pulped against a pub’s floorboards when I was eighteen – but I have lost my animal edge, my instinct.
So I answer back instead of hurrying away.
And it is, in fact, like everything I’ve wanted to say to myself for years, rolled up into a tiny black ball and ejected at the speed of sound.
‘Grow up,’ I scream, jabbing my finger at him and bouncing on the balls of my feet; ‘Why don’t you just grow up? Fat chance, eh? You’re pathetic! Got that? Pathetic!’
I fray my throat in a voice I recognise as lacking lumpen cred. I’ve been away from it all too long, in the likes of Richmond and Hampstead and Wadhampton Hall. I sound like a teacher. It echoes down the street with all the menace of a ping-pong ball.
A kind of swaying roar goes up, not so much a battle cry as this drunken inability to believe that anyone would dare to say what I have just said. And then there is a pause. There is even a silence. The kind of silence that occurs just before major battle is joined. The crack of banners. The odd distant whinnying of a single horse among the thousands lined up opposite.
They start moving towards me as one. I make to run off, but too late. Edward would like this story, I am thinking. Piss-up.com. We’re taking over. Fear hasn’t yet hit me.
They are drunk, but not that drunk. They can still shift: it’s as if someone has cheated and placed them all around me. I put my hands out in front, like someone blind.
I wake up in a white room, seeing a girl in a white dress on a white shore, playing a viola. Then I realise I am in a hammam, filled with steam, like the one Mill and I went to once in Turkey a long time back. My nose is stinging, and something is digging a metal point into my lower chest. If I could only move, I’d be free of the man with the knife, sticking it in me through the steam.
The girl is a nurse, smiling through the fog.
The metal point is a broken rib. My nose has been reset. My upper lip is cut, swollen to twice its normal size. My ear is broccoli rather than a cabbage. My head feels like hot ice and hammers. I staggered about with blood on my face, apparently, then curled myself into a ball on the ground while the boots kept on coming. Then the police arrived and beat the drunken English oafs over their heads with Estonian truncheons. The police were appointed to deal with just this imported problem. The oafs are in the cells, bleeding and moaning, and I can bring charges. Yes?
I shake my head. That would ruin all my plans. It would be England entangling me deeper in her briars.
‘And your family? You have a wife?’
The doctor is young and friendly, with gold-rimmed specs. I say I don’t want to upset my family, I’ll be fine. I apologise for my fellow Englishmen. The doctor shrugs, tolerantly.
‘Not polite and gentlemen these days,’ he smiles. ‘The world has change.’
‘Tell
ing me,’ I say, indistinctly what with my swollen lip. ‘Things haven’t worked out as perfectly as some of us would have wished. Actually, this is the second time I’ve been hit in Tallinn. Maybe I ask for it.’
‘Oh,’ says the doctor, slapping his own bared lower arm, ‘what is this in English?’
‘Smack? Slap?’
‘Smack, yes. You must not smack your nation too strong or you might be hurting yourself again.’
I leave the hospital after a couple of days. The various checks on my head have found nothing amiss. I give a brief statement to the police. A headache, nausea – but that’s shock. My face will settle down to what it was, I’m told – even the ear. My rib will mend itself. The bruises are already less tender, turning purple and green as they should.
Milly would’ve told me how I wanted to be punished, I think, as I stare at myself in the hotel’s cracked mirror. A psychophysical urge to be thumped in Tallinn. Twice over. Oh, Mill.
I stay on in Tallinn a few more days, as medically advised, allowing my body and my mind to settle down before setting off for Haaremaa. I’m nervous in the streets, to be honest, my legs jellifying without warning, and I keep mostly to the upper town or to the massive library – where I finish Anna Karenina in between loafing about in the music section. Plasters over my nose and my forehead, hiding the stitches, provide something to stare at for passers-by. I avoid wherever I can hear shouting.
I walk past a quiet group of pale, menacing-looking blokes sitting outside a restaurant. They meet my eyes point-blank, but not out of friendliness. I assume they’re mafiosi, well entrenched these days, here and everywhere else: porn, drugs, arms. Then I hear English, London English. Off I go, at a brisk pace.
All this has spoilt Tallinn for me. A mistake to come back. I’m upset, I have to fight self-pity and depression. I am forty-three, and washed up. It’s an ugly age: too old not to know your dreams are an illusion, but not old enough to dismiss them. That’s Dostoevsky, as far as I can recall. But my dreams aren’t an illusion, like Dostoevsky’s were. They can’t be. Without them, I might as well be dead.