Metronome

by Oliver Langmead

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  The Best of Unsung Shorts

  Metronome

  Oliver Langmead

  Published by Unsung Stories, an imprint of Red Squirrel Publishing

  "Red Squirrel" is a registered trademark of Shoreditch Media Limited

  Red Squirrel Publishing Suite 235, 15 Ingestre Place, London W1F 0JH, United Kingdom

  www.unsungstories.co.uk

  First edition published in 2017

  © 2017 Oliver Langmead

  Oliver Langmead has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work

  This book is a work of fiction. All the events and characters portrayed in this book are fictional and any similarities to persons, alive or deceased, is coincidental.

  Cover Artwork © 2017 Alex Andreyev

  Interior Illustrations © 2017 Darren Kerrigan

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-907389-39-9

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-907389-40-5

  Editors: George Sandison and Gary Budden

  Copy Editor: Rob Clark

  Proofreader: Katherine Stephen

  Designer: Martin Cox

  Publisher: Henry Dillon

  For Dad

  Part One

  The Doors Between Dreams

  Awake

  There is a painting of a fishing boat at sea on the common room wall, and if I stand close enough, I can just about make out the sailors. The artist put a lot of effort into things like the froth of the waves, and the billowing sails, and even the texture of the clouds, all so vividly captured that sometimes I imagine I can smell the salt coming off the canvas. But the sailors bother me. They are lazy matchstick lines, with black blobs for heads, and no sailor I ever knew was so two-dimensional. It is as if the artist has missed the entire point of the piece.

  ‘Dreaming again, Manderlay?’

  Valentine is proud of his new slippers. They let him sneak up on people.

  I turn to see him. ‘One day, you’re going to give me a heart attack.’

  Though bent-backed to the point of being crooked, and made squinting by the fact of his glass eye, Valentine is still a proud military man. Something in the curl of his bushy grey moustache, perhaps, and the way I know he insists on wearing green. I am aware that, on more than one occasion, he has been made to remove medals from the front of his dressing gown. Valentine grins a grin made simultaneously ugly and silly by his false teeth. ‘Missing the waves, eh?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  He draws in closer beside me, as if he is admiring the painting as well.

  ‘Meet you out back,’ he mutters, out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Got some contraband.’

  The two of us shuffle towards the back door.

  Right now, the common room is full of broken folk like us, who have been deemed by higher powers – our families, mostly – of being incapable of living without carers. There is an almost funereal air to the place, as if mortality is something tangible here. There is the clatter of Connect 4 pieces, and the shuffle of cards, and the murmur of idle recollection as a dozen pensioners slowly fade from the world.

  However… Once a week, on Fridays, this room takes on a different atmosphere. At precisely half past eleven at night, a small group of us sneak down from our rooms and gamble in the light of a lamp stolen from the storage room. We play poker, and bet whatever it is that we have to bet: coins, and stationery, and all manner of marbles and trinkets. I once saw Valentine try to bet his glass eye.

  The game is run by one of our fellow pensioners, lovingly dubbed Island Pete because he insists that he once owned an island. He also insists that he lost it to a wealthy baron playing blackjack on a steamboat docked in Glasgow.

  ‘So… where is this island of yours?’ I ask, sometimes.

  Island Pete will waft his hand of cards vaguely around. ‘Tropical,’ he replies, as if that is an answer.

  Valentine and I have a side bet going about whether or not he is telling the truth about his island. And being the sentimental old fool that I am, I have wagered that one day Island Pete will arrive at our weekly poker game waving some kind of deed, or an ancient photograph of him on his island, and prove all the sceptics wrong.

  Today is Wednesday and the home is already suffering from its weekly paper-clip drought, as we few gamblers seek out tokens with which to place bets. I am looking forward to Friday. Of course, because of my hands I am unable to hold my cards steady when we play, so Valentine lifts them up for me, and I know that the crafty old fool uses this opportunity to cheat whenever he is able, but this does nothing to deter me from playing. Indeed, I rather think that without Valentine, and Island Pete, and all the rest, I would have run away from this place by now.

  There is a nurse on duty at the back door, absorbed in a well-thumbed novel, and Valentine loudly proclaims that he wishes to stretch his legs outside as we pass her by. ‘Oh, how they ache!’ he moans, theatrically.

  There are quite a few folk in the garden, enjoying the late summer. Some sit nattering and knitting in that way which makes them look like caricatures of the elderly – balls of wool at their feet – and others kneel at the edge of the grass, digging with trowels and planting bulbs. Valentine navigates us a route around all this outdoor industry to the very back of the place, where there is a hidden veranda half in shadow. There, he quickly patrols the perimeter to make certain that we are alone.

  I settle down on a bench. ‘What have you done?’ I ask him.

  Valentine raises his storm-cloud eyebrows mischievously, before drawing a pair of lollipops out from beneath his robe. ‘Strictly between you and me,’ he says. ‘Nearly half an hour of reconnaissance for these. That chap at the front desk is a stickler, and I was running out of excuses to be there.’ Licking his lips, he unwraps the first. ‘A dashing shame to waste these on the kids, eh?’

  I raise my hand to accept the contraband, but my fingers refuse to grip.

  Seeing my struggle, Valentine is kind enough to simply pop the sweet straight into my mouth. Then, he lowers his bones onto the bench beside me, sucking industriously at his own lollipop and eyeing me up. ‘What’s that, then?’ He jabs his lollipop in the direction of the letter sticking out of my shirt pocket. I am quite certain that Valentine has the sharpest eye in our home – as if, when he lost one, the other became twice as powerful.

  I lift my aching hand to pat the folded paper there. ‘A cheque,’ I tell him.

  The letter from my old record label genuinely surprised me when it arrived this morning. I am quite used to mail from my daughter, and the occasional bit of mail from the bank, as well as news of another death among those I used to sail with. But mail from my record label is quite unheard of. After all, I have not released anything new in nearly a decade now.

  ‘Won the lottery, have you?’ asks Valentine.

  ‘Not quite,’ I tell him, rolling the lollipop around in my mouth. In fact, the cheque is for 40 pence, and by my calculations, this means that over the past six months I have sold a grand total of one album. Still, the cheque is cause for celebration, because someone out there is actually still listening to my music. I do not think that I will ever cash the cheque. Instead, I will save it, and place it upon the mantelpiece in my small apartment upstairs, beside the picture of my dau
ghter, Samantha, and my grandson, George, from the last time they came to visit.

  ‘I sold a CD,’ I tell Valentine.

  ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ says the old soldier, chuckling, ‘that’s bloody marvellous. Well done, Manderlay, you old codger.’ He raises his lollipop into the air. ‘A toast! To whichever fool out there stumbled across your album and actually bothered to pick it up. May their ears survive the onslaught of your terrible songs!’ He laughs loud, but so do I, and we two share a long moment of peaceful reflection at the bottom of the garden, sucking on our illicit sweets and watching the trails of planes as they fly through the blue sky.

  Eventually, there is a change in the direction of the wind, and a chill in the air. I pull my old threadbare dressing gown closer around my shoulders. And perhaps it is the chatter I can hear from the garden beyond, or perhaps some wisp of smoke from somewhere outside the garden, which reminds me. But it is then that I remember my dream.

  I turn to Valentine, rolling the lollipop around in my mouth.

  ‘I had the most peculiar dream last night,’ I tell him. * I dreamed of the time I wandered the shipyards of Gothenburg.

  It was midway through a voyage I remember well, because we were under the command of Captain Radley, who was a good man when he was drunk and a tyrant when he was sober. That whole journey through Europe, delivering cargo from port to distant port, was an unforgettable experience. Thankfully, as we pulled into Gothenburg, Radley was as drunk as a lord, and gave everyone on deck a day’s shore leave.

  I had taken it upon myself to leave the rest of the crew to their drinking and explore the port-side. I remember that afternoon clearly, because of the peculiar taste of the tobacco I was smoking: a fresh blend from Indonesia with a sharp kick to it, which I have never been able to find again.

  It felt good, being so young. It felt great. I could flex my hands as easily as a man without swollen joints, and the tattoos on my arms looked close to fresh. There was the serpent and rope coiled around my shoulder, still clear, and the dozen white sails of the galleon over my heart, still seaworthy, and the small heart on my wrist for Lily, the clearest of all.

  With the sun about to drop behind the hills of Gothenburg, everyone at the docks was working harder than ever. I walked through the ribbed shells of gigantic housings, dappled with lowlight, beneath which floundered the hollowed-out structures of huge vessels being taken apart and put back together again. The ships were all lit up in patches around me, aglow in the light of dusk and scattered with the burning ends of engineers’ cigarettes. There were great gouts of black smoke rising into the orange sky above, where stars were starting to show themselves.

  Halting, I recharged my pipe, admiring the view. And in that moment, my dream diverged from my memory. I did not continue along to join my fellows at the bar just as I did that day more than fifty years ago, because something caught my eye. Something out of place.

  I am not sure what to call them. Nightmares, maybe. I saw the first standing beside the bright light of an open coal burner, and I could see that his feet were blackened from standing there. He looked as if he was damaged, on account of the bandages wrapped all around him. Except, I realised that they were not bandages: they were strips of soiled sheeting. Where his skin was visible, it was scarred with illness, and I thought: That man is a leper.

  I moved swiftly along – feeling my heart quicken – well aware that the eyes of the man were upon me, until I rounded a corner beside the hollow hull of a tanker.

  I noticed a second leper striding with a peculiar gait past the steps of a distant cruise-liner, and I could see that his limbs were too thin, to the point of emaciation. And further along, I could see another still – hairless, with a broad chest, standing among the sparse crowds along the street like a rock among the tide of people.

  Then he caught sight of me, and started to move.

  They were coming for me.

  I emptied my pipe, pocketed it, and started to jog towards the nearest pier, where I thought I might be able to lose them.

  Coming close to the pier, where a freighter was unloading its cargo, I emerged into the last orange light of dusk. Turning, I saw the first leper as he reached the edge of that glowing, and stepped beyond it, reaching out with heavily wrapped hands towards me.

  Skirting the rusted remains of an anchor, I dashed quickly up the nearest gangplank and onto the freighter, pulling myself through the low doorway. I thought I might lose my devilish pursuers by leading them into the maze of the place.

  My feet clanging off the metal corridor, I rushed past glowing lights until I came to the cargo deck. There, I could see the crates that would be my labyrinth. I rushed down, among the heavy boxes, which formed corrugated metal corridors for me to hide among.

  At the place where three crates formed a crude arch, I turned again, to see two lepers in the doorway. It looked as if they were in conversation; I could hear a scratchy whispering beneath all the dockside noise.

  They surveyed the deck with their hollow, watery eyes.

  ‘Manderlay!’ I heard one cry.

  They knew my name.

  I made a left, and a right, and another left, hoping that by getting myself lost, they would not be able to find me. I continued on, glancing up at the last ebbing rays of the sun, and the stars gathering in the dark behind them, and I knew that if I spent much longer running through the maze of cargo, I would not be able to see. So, instead, I started to make my way towards the stern, hoping that there were some officers on board, and that they would be armed.

  Vaulting from the top of a tower of crates, I grabbed hold of a railing and pulled myself up. The upper decks were dark, and empty, and when I turned back to the maze of cargo, I could see the shadowy figures of maybe six or seven nightmarish lepers as they hunted for me.

  I pulled myself up two steps at a time to the freighter’s bridge, and was glad to find the door there unlocked. I knew that by turning on the power to that section of the ship, it would be a beacon to my pursuers, but I also knew that I had no other choice. By turning on the power, I would be able to use the radio to call for help.

  The floodlights burst on at the flick of a switch, and I grabbed the handset.

  ‘Mayday, Mayday!’ I called, but there was no answer, only the crackle of static.

  Still, I stood, crying out for help, until I could hear the rattle of the steps below the bridge, as nightmarish figures clambered up after me. I am not sure if I was frightened, then. I had the fearless immortality of my youth on my side, or enough foolish confidence to consider my options instead of giving in to fright. And it was in that manner that I decided to take my chances with the river Gothia.

  Abandoning the bridge, I rushed out to where there was a balcony overlooking the freighter. I leaned over the edge, just to see, and saw the mismatched silhouettes of a dozen lepers following me. Their bony fingers reached out as they paused at the sight of me, foul and toothless maws opening up in a hideous serenade of wordless noise.

  I climbed the ladder up to the highest part of the ship.

  And when I reached the apex, where there was a flashing red light, I could see all of the shipyards, and all of Gothenburg, spread out before me. The sky was encrusted with so many stars that they seemed to outnumber the black. And even though I was being pursued, and even though I was scared, I knew that my dream was wonderful, and remarkable.

  Then, as the first of my dark pursuers found the ladder below, I dived into the river.

  I remember the way the warm air flowed across me, as if for a moment I might be flying instead of diving. And I remember the way the waters rushed up to meet me, and the way the stars reflected from the river’s surface, as if I was diving into the sky. I remember the impact of the waters as I parted them, hands together, smashing that sky. And then I remember nothing more.

  I woke.

  *

  Remembering my dream casts a gloom over the rest of my day. I follow Valentine around restlessly, considering the in
tensity of it..

  ‘What do you think?’ I ask him, in the queue for dinner.

  He turns, and squints at me. ‘What do I think about what?’

  What I lack in dexterity, Valentine makes up for, as he takes both his plate of food and mine. I follow him through the dining room to our usual table, near the back. Outside, Edinburgh has darkened, and there is even a small smattering of rain rolling down the windows.

  Twice a week, this room is used for bingo. I tried it once, and absolutely loathed the experience: the clatter of the balls, the monotone drone of the announcer, and the collective groans of the elderly. It was definitely not my kind of gambling. Unfortunately for most of the home’s occupants, bingo afternoons are also mandatory, in some feeble attempt at getting the home’s more reclusive pensioners out of their flats and doing something social.

  Thankfully for me and Valentine, there is a sympathetic receptionist, who signs us onto the bingo register as attendees, and lets us slip out through reception. As such, not only do the two of us manage to avoid mandatory bingo, but we also head to the local cinema twice a week, where we have become regulars. Indeed, I have become rather attached to modern cinema in all its peculiar flashy glory. And Valentine makes for a wonderful companion, in that he is happy to hold the popcorn, will inevitably fall asleep halfway through most films, and is superb comic relief when he insists on seeing 3D films despite only having one eye.

  ‘A bit blurry, wasn’t it?’ he will grumble, afterwards.

  Sitting at our table in the dining area – and occasional bingo hall – is a lovely woman by the name of Aggie, who I know for a fact used to be a boxer. She does not talk much about her boxing days, or about anything, because her lungs are on the way out, and she wheezes even when she breathes. But even though she often struggles with her breathing, all the hallmarks still remain: the nose broken too many times to count, and her huge hands, knuckles scarred.