And she realized, in a way that she could not articulate properly, that there were other constants at her disposal. There was the air, high, cold, and capricious. There was the water, filling the emptiness with its gentle relentlessness. And the earth too, a limitless realm of rich chord-filled depths. The possibilities of the instrument opened up in front of her like a yawning pit, and she balked with a momentary vertigo but, with her uncle’s wordless encouragement, she launched herself into it, taking control of the music from him and guiding the melody into new territory.
“The auloi were invented by Marsyus, the wisest of the satyrs,” said Kantzaros.
He had stopped playing but Nell carried on. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to stop if she had wanted to. She had given the music free rein and it rode her with a certain inevitability.
“Some say that the auloi were invented by Athena who tossed them aside when the puffing of her cheeks ruined her pretty little face,” said Kantzaros. “Whatever, Marsyus was the master of the pipes and there was no greater musician in all the world. He knew this too and challenged Apollo to a contest: Marsyus versus Apollo, the auloi versus the lyre, freedom versus reason. Apollo was the god of light and truth. Marsyus was the emissary of the great Dionysus; Dionysus the giver of unmixed wine; Dionysus the hidden ruler, the false man; Dionysus the wild, the liberator, he of the loud shout; Dionysus the big-balled, the black goat, the goat killer, the winnower; Dionysus who brings release from care and worry.”
As Kantzaros recited the litany of names, Nell felt, as she had in previous evenings, the shadows gather in the corner of the rooms and the corners of her eyes, and through Kantzaros’s invocation, something more beautiful and more terrible than she could bear to look at took form in the room with them.
“In such a contest, only Dionysus could win,” said Kantzaros, “but Apollo can never admit defeat and Marsyus was forced to pay for his hubris for daring to challenge a god. Apollo took him to a dark and windowless cavern and flayed the skin from his back and left him there for dead. I still carry the scars,” he said, wincing.
She played on but her eyes twitched questioningly.
“But Marsyus and the auloi survived, down among the roots of the world tree. And he rises still to lead the Bacchanalia, the cult of drunken frenzy.”
And she saw without seeing, could not see but knew, that there was not one figure in the room with them but several, a host of them emerging from the moonlit copse behind her, moving in time to her music.
“And the dance will go wherever it will,” said Kantzaros, smiling at the forms in the shadows. “The ladies of the dance offer their gifts, their wine, their bodies to whomever they meet, and kill those who refuse them.”
There were other instruments accompanying hers now, cymbals and drums and things she could not imagine, and Nell felt the power she held ripple through her, a caress and a shiver. Kantzaros raised his hands high in welcome, a wine bottle held in one of them.
“We shall share our Bacchanalian mysteries with those willing to learn, the mysteries of fig and ivy and pine, mysteries of bull and goat. The bull whose horns we drink from. The goat whose hide makes our wine sacks.”
He grinned at those assembled. “For what is an old goat for, if not for storing wine?”
He drank deeply and his smile broadened and his voice grew larger and more resonant than humanly possible.
“We lead the dance,” he said, “and everyone must follow us or perish.”
She stopped blowing. The shades who accompanied her did not vanish instantly but faded back into the gloom, their music disappearing like a balloon slipping from a child’s hand.
Kantzaros looked at her, waiting for a response.
“I like that,” she said.
“Of course you do,” he replied and pointed at the clock on top of the television. “It’s midnight.”
“My birthday.”
“My last day in the world above.”
“Let’s make it one to remember.”
***
People might find it hard to imagine how the minions at the Blame ‘n’ Claim call center could possibly fail to see the radical change that was worked upon them that day, but those people, just like the rest of us, perfectly aware of the invisible progress of the hour hand, are still capable of looking up at the clock and declaring, “Is that the time?”
Each person in that office found a way into that other world. Some entered the building humming tunes they imagined they heard on the radio. Some had heard the echoes of birdsong in the trees in the sculpted lawns by the car park. Some, driving in, had been fortunate enough to glimpse the cavorting figures emerge from the Harvester pub, their faces raised in exultation to the sky. Those witnesses carried their experiences with them into work, like seeds in their pockets.
During the morning, several callers made mention of the unusual voices they heard whilst on hold, strange and sibilant, enticing them with offers, though of what they couldn’t be certain. Then there was the old woman who sat in one of the toilet cubicles (a toilet cubicle that was now a dark and mossy bower and yet quite clearly still a toilet cubicle). The crone uttered prophecies to every woman who would stop and listen and read the fortunes of those few who dared ask. Then there was the music that began to bleed in through the office PA system, a constant rolling tune that was sometimes pipes and sometimes drums and sometimes voices. The music was utterly natural. They all knew the tune. They had always known the tune.
And when the call handlers and paper shufflers heard and saw that the music wasn’t coming from the overhead speakers but from the instruments and mouths of the party makers who were now among them, this too seemed obvious. New Year’s may have been nearly a week gone, but it was still the season for parties.
The parade of drunkards wound its way through the aisles of tiny cubicles, encouraging folk from their chairs with offers of wine and food (a banquet of food was set out by one wall, trestle tables laden with platters brought in by a catering company that no one had booked). Few of the minions questioned any of what was going on about them. Even fewer questioned it once they had a cup of wine in their hand or, better still, in their belly. Kantzaros’s wine was heady stuff, and many of Nell’s coworkers were soon stumbling about drunkenly.
Nell watched Kantzaros hopping from hoof to hoof in the midst of a circle of women, making loud, lewd, and ecstatically received boasts about his “horn of plenty.” Turning with a smile, she saw Robert refilling his cup at the drink machine (which had spontaneously decided to produce golden frothy wine), and as she saw him, he lifted his head and saw her too. He gave her a little wave. Another Nell would have returned the wave but it was a tiny gesture that indicated too little to signify anything. Now, for today at least, she was not a woman of tiny gestures. She glared at him, not unkindly, and blew on her pipes, raising the volume and tempo of the music that she controlled.
A ragged cheer and drunken laughter rippled around the room, spinning the party onward into dance. Drummers and singers, bare-breasted call handlers and wine-addled desk jockeys, locked arms and seized waists and kicked their legs to the music.
“You want to dance?”
She stopped playing, leaving the music to its own whims.
Kantzaros stood beside her, leaning on the banquet table and nibbling on something red and papery.
“I don’t dance,” she said.
“Everyone dances.”
“I don’t. I do many things but I don’t dance.”
He humphed at her but said nothing.
“You do know you’re eating a napkin,” she said.
He spat gently and inspected the chewed thing he held. “I was wondering what it was. Well, you know, as a great man once said, try everything once except . . . um . . .”
“Folk dancing and incest,” she prompted.
He frowned deeply at her. “No. Tin cans and cardboard.” He shook his head. “Folk dancing and incest? Where did you hear such rot? I bet you’ve never
tried it.”
“Which?” said Nell.
“Watch,” said Kantzaros. “And play.”
He turned on one hoof and sharply raised one knee, a sharp motion, like a whip-crack, cutting through conversations and demanding that every eye be on him. He turned and switched feet, cocked an elbow in one direction and thrust his face in another. It should have looked ridiculous, Kantzaros stepping out with jerky sudden movements like a spastic chicken, but it transcended absurdity and became something profound and compelling.
“Play!” he commanded, snapping into a fresh pose.
Nell put her pipes to her lips, picked up the tune and moulded it to Kantzaros’s movements, transforming the people’s dance into theirs—hers and Kantzaros’s. She stepped in behind him, and not to her own surprise—because surprise would indicate that she was something other than in perfect control of the situation—but to her glowing pleasure, she lifted her naked legs in time with his, shifted, pivoted, and kicked. The men and women of Blame ‘n’ Claim, ecstatically drunk, unkempt and at peace, fell in behind. In addition to the bells and drums, some took up improvised instruments and joined the music with stapler castanets, filing-tray tambours, and paperclip shakers.
Nell spun and flung her head back and, seeing Robert pulled toward the dance but clearly hovering at its edges, cast a trilling countermelody over him, dragging him to her side, his cheeks flushed and his eyes glistening.
“Eu-oi!” sang Kantzaros, and the crowd sang it back to him.
“Eu-oi! Eu-oi! Eu-oi!”
They progressed through the room until everyone had joined the procession, willing subjects of the Bacchanalia. With heads thrown back and eyes glazed, feeling the drumbeats guide their limbs and the melody tug at something more elusive, they abandoned themselves to dancing and capering and felt themselves filled with a spirit that was not their own.
They danced out into the reception area. Josephine came running up from the ranks and threw herself in front of the double doors, her arms spread wide to bar their exit. The dancing did not stop but Kantzaros drew to a halt in front of her.
“You’re not going anywhere!” said Josephine hotly, glaring at Nell.
There was laughter and booing.
“Come on!” yelled someone.
“Have a drink!” yelled another.
“This is wrong!” shouted Josephine.
For a moment, just for a moment, Nell was struck with an unpleasant thought, a peculiar connection made. She remembered the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, piping away the children of the town, luring them into a cave, never to be seen again. But the fear vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Kantzaros was not leading these people into the darkness. He was leading them out, into the air and freedom.
“The dance will go wherever it will,” he said to Josephine.
Julie from Accounts tried to press a cup of wine into Josephine’s hand.
“The ladies of the dance offer their gifts, their wine, to whomever they meet,” said Kantzaros.
“Just look at yourselves!” shrieked Josephine, gesticulating at their dishevelled, half-naked bodies.
This did not have the desired effect. The merry folk of Blame ‘n’ Claim looked at themselves and one another, decided they liked what they saw, and cheered.
Kantzaros dipped his head forward and danced onward, sweeping Josephine aside like a garden gate, and out into the winter’s afternoon. As their breath misted in the air and the cold pricked their eyes, they fought back with loud voices and enthusiastic leaps and turns on the icy path leading down to the road.
“You can’t do this!” yelled Josephine, chasing after them. “There are calls going unanswered in there, claims waiting to be made.”
“We lead the dance,” said Kantzaros, “and everyone must follow us or perish.”
Nell did not see, yet perfectly comprehended, what happened next: Josephine, running, stepping on a patch of ice, slipping. Nell heard the dull thump and the scream and incorporated that high pure note into the tune.
They led the tipsy, pissed, and near-catatonic across the ring road, past the retail park, and on toward the town center.
The wild procession collected all in its path, and the throng, both real and imaginary, grew and grew. And though Kantzaros and Nell led it, it eventually reached such enormous proportions that it became impossible to distinguish what was the Bacchanalia and what wasn’t, and as the alcohol flowed and the music spread and the short day ended, it wrapped itself around the world, and with the kind of logic that only the truly drunk are capable of, the dance of Dionysus simultaneously became the world and vanished from it.
***
Nell and Kantzaros, alone once more, danced up the stairs to her flat and spun in each other’s arms on the landing until nausea and laughter made them stop. As Nell fumbled for her keys, Kantzaros stumbled and slammed against the door.
“Ow,” he declared slowly. “S’very hard door.”
“I should put up a sign,” said Nell with difficultyand let them in.
Kantzaros rebounded off the sofa and then the wall before slipping, by chance more than design, straight through the kitchen door. There was the sound of many pieces of crockery almost breaking.
“Time for one last drink,” he said.
“No!” shouted Nell.
His head poked round the doorframe, the bottle of nectar in his hand.
“No?”
Nell placed her auloi on the table and patted them as one would a sleeping child. “Never say it’s the last drink,” she said.
Kantzaros jiggled the dark bottle in the general direction of the clock.
“Less than an hour to midnight,” he said with a rueful smile. “The world tree’s healed. I have work to do. Those tree roots won’t saw through themselves.”
Nell wilted. “You mean this is it?”
“Yup.”
He popped back into the kitchen and returned with two glasses. He pressed one into her hand.
“A toast!” he said.
She looked into her drink’s yellow-green depths. “Why?”
“What?”
“What have we achieved?”
“What were you expecting?”
She swept her arm down to indicate her hideous goat legs and then up and round to the unlovely flat she had somehow acquired and then, lacking the sufficient appendages, grimaced to indicate the formless unchosen life she had similarly acquired. He looked at her blankly.
“Oh, what’s the use?” she said and turned away and went into the bedroom.
She stood at the foot of the bed and knew that he stood behind her.
“I expected things to change,” she said. “But all we did was drink far more alcohol than was good for us. We’ve spent more time drunk than sober. We’ve pressured everyone else into joining in just because we wanted them to and only did what we’ve done because it seemed a good idea at the time.”
“Dear girl!” said Kantzaros softly. He took her by the elbow and turned her to face him. “You have it entirely wrong.”
“Really?”
“What we did was drink far more alcohol than is good for us. We spent more time drunk than sober. We pressured everyone else into joining in just because we wanted them to and only did what we did because it seemed a good idea at the time!”
He grinned widely and there was definitely a twinkle in his eye. “If that’s not an achievement, I don’t know what is.” He raised his glass. “A toast, my love. An end to care and worry.”
She raised her glass and clinked it against his. “An end to care and worry,” she said and drank and then leaned down to plant a kiss on the corner of the small satyr’s beard-wisped mouth.
“You are, without a doubt, my favorite uncle.”
“Or brother.”
“Or father or king. It doesn’t matter. It’s all good.”
She drained the glass and felt the intoxication flood her cheeks, her body, and head.
“Definitely my last drink,”
she giggled and then, the back of her knee connecting with the bed, toppled backward. She grabbed at Kantzaros for support, dug her fingers into his shoulder, and pulled him down with her. Something bounced off the mattress and smashed against the wall but they were laughing and barely heard it.
***
Nell woke to the sound of her phone ringing. Something felt different, felt odd. She stretched. She was alone in her bed. Kantzaros had gone although his not unpleasantly earthy smell still clung to the bed sheets. That wasn’t the odd thing. It was something else.
The phone continued to ring.
She reached out for it blindly, not ready to open her eyes to a new day.
“Hello?” she croaked.
“Oh no, you don’t sound well.”
“Robert?”
Something in the freshness of his voice, or perhaps the faint noises in the background, made her suddenly wonder what time it was and she came awake more fully.
“I was just checking that you were all right,” he said.
“I’m fine.” She rubbed her sleepy eye with her knuckle.
“There’s obviously a virus going round,” he said. “Either that or a lot of people throwing sickies today.”
“Hangovers will make people do that,” she said.
“Hangovers?”
“Yeah. You know because of . . .”
She didn’t continue. She just knew the conversation that would ensue if she tried to talk to him about what had happened the day before. She didn’t know if it was Kantzaros’s magic or not.
“Virus,” she agreed. “Yeah, that’ll be it.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No,” she said, scrunching her toes. “No, wait.”
“What?”
“I want you to come out with me on Friday night.”
“Special occasion?”
“Our first date.”
“What about our first date?”
“We’ll have it on Friday night.”
“But . . .” He stopped. “Okay.”
She flung back the bed sheets and covered her grinning mouth to stop herself laughing into the phone.
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