The Music of the Spheres

by Allister Thompson

  “What’s his problem?”

  Hastings grinned. “Addiction. Not everyone’s as perfect as you claim to be, my dear.”

  “I know. It’s a curse.” She took his arm and walked close to him as they descended the escalator to the platform. They received plenty of stares, not many of them friendly. Watford, an extremely conservative suburb, did not possess anything like a bohemian community. One group of loutish teenage boys dressed in Watford football jerseys who got off at Harrow made a point of delivering a few insults in their direction, something about the “hippie poof” and his “tart,” but one vicious glare from Teresa abruptly shut them up.

  During the long ride, she filled him in on the latest news from New York. There had been no further developments in the case of Guy’s death. The mayor, who had hinted at a possible pending investigation the day after the incident, had been relieved of his duties in the fallout from a sex scandal involving several city politicians, a movie star or two, three clergymen, and the star player for the New York Tobacconists rounders team. The police had issued an official statement that the final verdict in the case was one of accidental death by misadventure from the intake of toxic chemicals, probably imported illegally from Colombia. The Colombian Cartels, Virginia Office, had also issued a statement, reassuring the public that despite widespread rumors that chemicals from their country were to blame, Colombian Cartels products were guaranteed to be nontoxic and safe when used appropriately. There had been little public opposition to either statement, except perhaps in the downtown core, where someone had organized a tiny, pathetic march.

  Marty had apparently disappeared the day after Hastings left and was said to have told someone he was going back to England to live with his mum in Coventry. Billy Prestwick, after a couple of days of making vitriolic attacks on the police in the press, had also made the sudden announcement just hours before Teresa’s departure for London that he would be moving to Portland in the Central North Autonomous Territory, where his sister resided, as far away from the corruption of New York as possible. The Hammer had joined the Muttonchop Killers.

  Hastings was amazed. “All this in only a matter of days?”

  Teresa sadly shook her head and leaned on his shoulder. “Yup. It’s almost as though without Guy’s leadership, the rest of you just immediately fell apart.”

  He was more than a little annoyed at this. “What do you mean? I haven’t fallen apart.”

  “Sorry, I guess not. Although you have to admit running off to Colombia was … impulsive.”

  “Perhaps. But at least I had a purpose. And what’s this about The Hammer? Did the Muttonchops kick out Bludgeon Nightstick to make room?”

  “No. They claim they’re going to pioneer a two-drummer sound. As if they’re not obnoxious enough already.”

  He laughed. “You can say that again. Well, good riddance to that alcoholic bastard.”

  They were silent after that, and after transferring to the Central Line at Paddington, they reached the fragrant, welcoming confines of Ladbroke Grove without further incident.

  “I always love coming to London,” Teresa said gaily as a few strands of sunlight unexpectedly imbued the street with an idyllic glow. “We should stay here, at least for a while.”

  Hastings shot her a quick glance. She always had a way of echoing his thoughts. Was it love? It did seem strange, since he had spent so much of his time in a community where the word “love” was bandied about in an endless mantra by stoned hippies, and there seemed to be so much brotherly love to go around that anyone should feel such a selfish, possessive variant, but there it was for the first time in his life.

  Once again, he was welcomed by several old acquaintances as they walked arm in arm down the street. He decided to risk lighting up a smoke, despite the chance of ruining Teresa’s gay mood and bringing her ire down upon him; the weather was so beautiful, it seemed ridiculous not to indulge on such a fine day. There was a slight autumnal nip in the air, the kind that makes a person feel just that little bit more alive. Teresa was so wrapped up in the sights and sounds of the busy neighborhood that she didn’t even seem to notice.

  After a few minutes, they reached the Mountain Grill on Hastings’ favorite street, Portobello Road, where Daevid Mallorn could often be found at this time of day enjoying a tea, some macrobiotic delicacies, and holding forth on his beloved Eastern philosophy and the politics of absurdist resistance. Mallorn was basically a more genial, expressive version of Baba Frank of the Asparagus Stalks and had been good friends with Hastings for many years. He had spent his youth traveling the world, and he had picked up a number of unconventional ideas and culinary tastes.

  Sure enough, they found Mallorn seated comfortably at the prized window table of the café, conversing in between mouthfuls with Steve Brock, London’s preeminent street busker. Both were rail-thin, with unkempt blond hair parted in the middle, but Mallorn had the pointier nose and a narrow goatee jutting off his chin. Also present was Mort Moorhen, the noted new wave science fiction writer. Mallorn and Brock greeted their friends with excitement, and the always well-mannered but quiet and intense Moorhen nodded gravely from behind his bushy beard.

  “Have you come for oolong tea and couscous, friends?” Mallorn said, bringing over two extra chairs. His slightly lined face shone with a pixyish energy as he jabbed his fork into some kind of raw potato and radish dish. He and Brock could have been brothers, with their similar features and taste in colorful, mad-looking clothing.

  “Well, we might have a bite while we’re here, Daeve,” Hastings said, “but we’re actually here for rather a more pressing reason. Some bad news, in case you haven’t heard yet, and a warning. I know the world sometimes passes you by around here.”

  Moorhen’s ears pricked up at this. He had a taste for a dark tale (and still does, as anyone who’s read his latest, The Grey Passage to the Vacant Beyond, will agree).

  “Well, do tell, then,” Mallorn said, wiping some fragments of parsley from his tiny blond goatee, the eyes in his gaunt face gleaming with interest and charm.

  Hastings, surprised that his friends hadn’t heard the news yet, sighed, drew in a breath, then thought better of it. “Teresa, you know the whole story. I’m tired of the telling. Could you please fill the chaps in?”

  While she enthusiastically launched into the story of her heroic Simon’s half-week in Hell, he went to order a coffee, which he carried to the doorway to soak up some of the day’s fading rays.

  “You shouldn’t drink that stuff, it’ll kill you,” Mallorn called out, interrupting the tale.

  Hastings ignored him. A light, refreshingly cool breeze was wafting in to complement the carefree atmosphere. This street always had a few pleasing sights to display. Few people in the area owned vehicles, so, aside from a few parked delivery vans, pedestrians walked unrestricted and freely on the road. Today, a Caribbean man with dreads so heavy that his face was totally hidden under his drooping ebony fronds was covering the pavement with chalk pictures in bright pastels, mainly of idealized country scenes and exotic animals. He was very good. The sparse rays added a surrealistic glow to the man’s work. Hastings wished he could step right into one of these otherworldly illustrations and forget the problems of life in our troubled dimension, where visions of beauty and potential always seem to come up sadly short of realization.

  Groups strolled the pavements, laughing and talking, the older, more conservative inhabitants who had never left the neighborhood mixing easily and without tension with young, colorfully dressed bohemians, many of whom carried instrument cases slung over their shoulders. It often seemed like everyone under forty in Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill was in a band, but there was no sense of competition, and all styles of music were welcome, from all of the traditional musics of the world to ska and reggae, to psychedelic rock and roll. It was an oasis of culture in a country where the life had been sucked away for years from the arts. Afterward, the neighborhood was to become a bit more gentrified, which was
a great source of disappointment for people like Hastings and his friends, but to this day there is still a special atmosphere in this small corner of London.

  “Simon! C’mon back in,” Teresa called. He turned back to the café, finding the party much more subdued than it had been when they arrived.

  “This is terrible…” Brock, who had a couple of tears running down his own prominent nose, was interrupted by the muffled sound of an explosion not far in the distance. It was accompanied by a dull roar that Hastings couldn’t place.

  Mallorn shook his head sadly, wiping away his own tears, and sighed. “Not again.”

  “Fucking bastards!” Brock exclaimed, jumping up and striding over to the doorway, along with several other patrons, who were also muttering and cursing. His lanky limbs were quivering with suppressed violence. Hastings and Teresa joined them, curious. Moorhen remained at the table with Mallorn, his face inscrutable under its layer of fur as he sipped his tea.

  “It’s those goddamned thugs again,” Brock said. “They come in from the suburbs in gangs — usually football hooligans boozed up after the games, and they try to do damage to the neighborhood. They police won’t stop them.” He spat forcefully out onto the pavement. “They do more than break windows and shit like that. They even beat up a poor old gran the other week, just minding her own business. There’s more of them every time.”

  “Half of them come from Tory party meetings, not football matches,” growled another man with bushy black sideburns. “That bastard Powell whips ’em up into a frenzy at special meetings.” Due to a gerrymandered electoral system in which the boroughs of central London were joined into huge super-boroughs with the suburbs, the MP for that part of London had always been a Tory, despite receiving votes from almost none of Ladbroke Grove or North Kensington’s inhabitants.

  “Well, they won’t have the chance to do any more damage today!” Brock roared. “I’ll kick all their bleedin’ heads in first!” An angry mutter of approval and agreement went up from the predominantly male crowd that had assembled outside, and Hastings felt his own repressed rage and frustration responding. Let them come, he thought. It may not solve things, but I may get a little symbolic revenge for Guy by knocking a few teeth out today.

  “Simon … be careful, please. You’re no fighter,” he heard Teresa say from behind him, but it barely registered. He could feel his body shaking slightly in primal anticipation. He felt nauseous and lightheaded with the fear that always accompanies impending violence.

  The sounds of smashing glass and sharp explosions were joined by the uncontrolled roar of a large group of approaching men. The sounds came nearer for about a minute. Then, suddenly, a crowd came bursting around the corner of Westbourne Park Road. There must have been a hundred men of different age groups, Hastings estimated, at least half of them wearing sinister red gas masks. So that rubbish had finally arrived in Britain from Virginia — or did it originate here? It was only a matter of time before the new populist political situation and migration policies boiled over into open conflict.

  The mob was escorted by several cars, which drove behind, wildly sounding their horns. The hooligans were smashing windows as they came and throwing what looked like homemade bombs made of bottles. Plumes of smoke billowed in the distance, indicating they had already started several fires. Men and women, mostly elderly and many people of color, stumbled choking out of the fires, while younger people frantically tried to put the fire out with blankets and tea towels.

  “Bloody hell!” Brock said. “There’s never been this many before.” Nevertheless, he turned to the multicultural crowd surrounding him, which now almost matched the group of hooligans in size. “Well, it’s time we fought back, isn’t it?”

  His followers bellowed.

  As one, the crowd of longhairs, East Indians, and Rastas marched toward the mob. The closer they got, the more frenetic the vandalism of the hooligans became. The weak rays of sunlight that had imparted a sense of peace to the street were now buried beneath a flotilla of thick, gray clouds that hovered menacingly over the impending battle. Hastings could now hear the vandals jeering: “’Ey, ’ere come the hippie boys for a stompin’!”

  “’Ere come the immigrant-lovin’ hippies! Oh, ’oim so froitened! Where’s me mum?”

  “We’re gonna kill the lot of them commies and take their women! Bloody welfare cases.”

  There were now only a few meters separating the groups. The Ladbroke Grove defenders grimly ignored these jibes. They had armed themselves with whatever they could find in the alleys, broken bits of pipe, wood, glass. They marched under Brock’s direction in a surprisingly united line. Hastings walked directly behind Brock, unarmed, his fists clenched tightly in a bizarre mixture of terror and anticipation. He could feel the veins in his neck and forehead pumping.

  Then the hooligans charged with a deafening holler. The lines quickly dissolved into a flurry of hand-to-hand combat. Hastings felt himself confronted by a massive, gorilla-like bald man. He carried a cricket bat in his right hand.

  “All right, lovey. It’s lights-out!” the monster hissed, then jumped ferociously at Hastings, who leapt desperately into his enemy’s body to grapple with his arm before he could bring the bat to bear. It was his only hope to avoid being knocked senseless. He was borne down by the weight of his opponent but managed to roll away, realizing that the man had lost his bat in the fall. Hastings nimbly scrambled to where it lay, jumped up, and swung it wildly with a yell. When he looked down, the gargantuan man lay prostrate, blood oozing from a large, serious-looking gash on his temple. The bat was splintered. Hastings felt sick and guilty, but he had no time to reflect on what he had done as another hooligan, this time a small, blonde, ratty-looking type with a crew cut and dressed in a bomber jacket, had finished knocking down the other speaker from the café and was brandishing a knife at Hastings with an evil grin.

  The time Hastings took the offensive, leaping forward and aiming a blow with the bat’s remains at the man’s knife hand. His aim was true, and the man dropped the knife with a curse, holding his forearm. Without a second thought, Hastings brought the bat down with full force on the crew cut. The man went down without a sound and lay on his back, twitching grotesquely. The bat was almost down to the handle.

  This time, no one immediately confronted him, so he took the opportunity to look around him. The air was filled with smoke from the homemade bombs, and one of the cars was on fire. Steve Brock was taking harsh knocks by the second, but they seemed to have little effect on him in his berserker state. He swung his wiry arms like windmills, bowling over any hooligan who wandered into his path. Then Hastings saw with a shock that Teresa had joined the fray on the other side of the crowd and was applying a choke hold to a man twice her size. Hastings vaguely remembered her saying she’d taken some rare form of Chinese martial arts training during her teens. It was impressive to behold.

  She wasted no time but went on the attack against an even bigger man, downing him with what looked like a classic karate chop. Aside from those two, the locals, who were not much used to fighting, were getting the worst of the battle and taking a serious beating. He had no more time to admire Teresa’s combat skills, because he was set upon by a third opponent, a skinhead with brawny tattooed arms wearing a gas mask and bearing yet another cricket bat. Just as Hastings ducked to avoid the first swing, the sound of rapidly approaching sirens drifted into the smoke. Everyone stopped dead in an awkward moment of silence.

  “All right, boys, we’ve had our fun,” yelled one of the invaders, the only one wearing a smart suit. “Let’s clear off, on the double.” The mob swiftly dispersed, leaving their unconscious and wounded on the pavement. The locals stood around in shock and confusion.

  Four police cars pulled up, screeching their brakes, their headlights switched on against the unusual murk caused by the fires. Momentarily distracted, Hastings shielded his eyes and stopped paying attention. Hearing a rustle behind him, he turned around too late to see his pr
evious opponent’s fist coming at his head.

  Oh, no … not again. A crunching sound, a blinding light, and then he fell.

  Thirteen

  Again, Hastings didn’t pass out entirely but instead lay in a daze for several minutes, oblivious to everything that was going on around him except the intense pain, experiencing hallucinations of himself committing horrible murders in a waist-deep pool of blood. He did feel a pair of strong arms lift his head, which was placed into someone’s lap. When his mind cleared a little, he saw Teresa’s concerned face peering down at him.

  “Oh, brave little Simie! Are you all right?”

  He struggled to sit upright, feeling nauseous. A fine drizzle brushed his face. The police and most of the wounded were gone; so were the hooligans and most of their smoke. The usual token visit to break up the fight, then the bobbies had gone their way. The wrecked car was giving off an acrid stench. Most of the local heroes had scattered at the arrival of the police. Brock, Mallorn, and Moorhen, the latter two of which had watched the fight from the safety of the Mountain Grill, stood beside Teresa. Brock was covered in scratches and cuts but looked very pleased with himself.

  “Got knocked on my bloody head again … where’d the fuzz go?”

  Brock shook his head angrily, his eyes still blazing. “They just dispersed the crowd, laughed a bit at us, and took off. People can come and try to set fire to our fucking neighborhood, and they won’t do a thing!”

  “Simie here took down a couple of men, didn’t you?” Teresa looked a little proud as she helped him to his feet. One of the sleeves of her dress was torn, and her face was smudged with dirt. “My little fighter.”

  “That’s about a third of your tally,” Moorhen observed dryly.

  Hastings said nothing; the memory of the animalistic pleasure he had felt in taking his enemies down was still disturbing him deeply, but he checked his pocket for his special gun, which he had forgotten about again. It was still there, awaiting its one moment of dreadful glory. He was glad that he had not remembered it in the heat of battle, or a man might now lie dead by his hand.