The Whispering Swarm

by Michael Moorcock

  ‘He doesn’t have my number. What would it matter if he did?’

  ‘He’s very good looking. An old boyfriend?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, not even that.’ She offered her daughter a passing frown as if asking why I was so inquisitive.

  I apologised, explaining myself with a joke. ‘I’m a novelist, you know. We always ask too many questions.’

  I already knew her first name, though I still called her Mrs Melody. ‘Wasn’t Freni one of the three Zoroastrian muses?’ I lit her cigarette for her. I was genuinely curious. Zoroastrianism seemed such an exotic, romantic and actually rather attractive religion. Had her parents followed the old Persian faith? Many still did in some parts of India and the Middle East. ‘I suppose your own mother and father—?’

  She showed a hint of irritation and made an evasive remark. ‘Michael, could you order another bottle of that delicious claret?’ She ate and drank with great relish, having at least one bottle of the ’57 St Emilion to herself and treating us to another.

  I tried to catch the waiter’s eye. ‘Which one?’ I asked. ‘Painting? Sculpture? Or oratory?’

  She knew what I meant and laughed in spite of herself. ‘Astronomy,’ she said.

  Molly broke in, an odd look in her eyes. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mum’s a famous astronomer.’

  That was a rather big bit of one’s mother’s CV to leave out. I flashed a question at Moll.

  ‘In Iran,’ said Mrs Melody. ‘I know the shah isn’t popular with young people, but it’s my native country. And my job does give me certain visiting privileges at Cambridge.’ She looked up at me from under long lashes, her expression mildly sardonic.

  If she expected me to challenge her, I couldn’t. What I knew about astronomy filled a page and a half or so in The New Scientist. Try as I might, I had developed no interest in the heavens. I fell asleep during a press showing of 2001 and Arthur Clarke, with whom I saw it, wasn’t a bit offended. He told me how much money it had earned in Chicago in its first week. Ever since then, any giant spaceship which takes forever to cross the screen during the credits for whatever protracted space opera it is has sent me off to the Land of Nod in an instant. I really didn’t like space. Space bored me. Space was a distraction. Cute robots left me cold and they’d never dueled with light sabres better than in Planet Stories, the greatest of all the 1950s science fiction pulps. Time, however, was an entirely different mess of fish. Past, present and future in any order related closely to human affairs. Life is short but it needn’t be dull. And then you die. Maybe a few times. Space just confirmed how insignificant you were. Or not. I don’t care if I’m a specimen and some superior intelligence is observing this solar system through a microscope. But Freni Melody made it interesting. ‘We are rare in having the power to observe our environment as well as living in it.’

  I laughed. ‘If I knew I had a cosmic audience, I’d clown it up a bit. I love the stage.’

  ‘You do? So do I. I started going to plays early, when matinees were dirt cheap.’ Mrs Melody was returning to a safe enthusiasm.

  ‘I would have been an actor if I hadn’t been a writer and a musician. At least an actor can see the type of audience they’re working for. Writers have no real idea of their readers. The book just goes out there and whether anyone else is interested is frequently a matter of speculation.’

  ‘You poor thing.’ She was mocking. ‘We astronomers know nothing of such problems.’

  While I was trying to put that together, she changed the subject again, giving as an example yet another wonderful anecdote of her girlhood in Iran.

  Soon I was in no doubt about who was the superior storyteller. Freni Melody was a genius at laying out a narrative. And what amazing stories they were! It was obvious that Molly laughed at her mum’s tales in spite of herself. She had obviously heard many of them before. I saw her then as a little girl, begging her mother to tell one of her stories, and I fell in love with her again.

  In that state I was impervious to Mrs Melody’s charm. At any other time I had to make a huge moral effort not to embrace her. An effort flattering to nobody, I suspect, but some lunatic Puritan. I was discovering how that mysterious and attractive woman could confuse me very easily.

  By now we were choosing dessert and Mrs Melody asked suddenly, thinking of an invitation she’d gotten for when she would be in New York, why Thanksgiving wasn’t celebrated in the UK. Because it best illustrated the subject in a nutshell and offered a fairly good joke, I told her how some years earlier my friend Polly Zee, who was a guest at the big Thanksgiving dinner Helena and I regularly gave our American friends in England, asked why we British were celebrating Thanksgiving, since, after all, it was to commemorate the first harvest and the Puritans’ safe arrival on American soil. ‘Well,’ I said, quick as a flash, ‘you’re thanking God for the Puritans’ arriving—and we’re thanking God they left.’

  Mrs Melody loved that. Her laughter was heartfelt. She had always thought, she said, that it was no surprise that after the Indians had offered them squash, the Puritans persecuted them. I hated squash, too. Had she ever been persecuted?, I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘They tried to make me a Catholic for years, my dear. That’s the dark side of the Emerald Isle, eh? At that damned convent. I followed my father’s advice. I ignored what didn’t interest me and took from them what did interest me. By my second year at St Bridie’s the nuns believed me some kind of reincarnated pagan, possibly even a demon. They tried to beat the devil out of me. Because my parents said they were not Moslems, the nuns always thought they were Persian Christians who had somehow been used by Satan to give birth to me. I was sympathetic to their delusions. What decent person could not be? And they hated that, too. Their guilt and their superstitions didn’t interest me.’ Her crimson mouth yawned with laughter.

  ‘When did you first discover the Sanctuary?’ I asked, bold enough in my cups and hoping she was drunk enough to answer.

  ‘Oh, I think I’ve always known about it. Haven’t you?’

  Somehow this wrong-footed me. ‘Well, not always.’

  ‘Oh, I think so.’ She smiled into my eyes. ‘I think you know a great deal, Michael. The mind is a kind of maze, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s possible to get lost in it. That’s what’s tricky about memory. Am I right?’

  And that was how she blocked my line of enquiry. Moll didn’t try to rescue me. Was this a familiar tactic of her mother’s? If so, it worked to enforce my silence on the subject of the Sanctuary.

  Although her plane did not leave until the afternoon, Freni Melody left in the morning. She had to make some phone calls to Iran, she said, and of course that wasn’t possible from the Alsacia. The shah would not be deposed until 1979. His secret police watched her and were more or less of the same stripe as secret police worldwide, that is, highly suspicious and not very bright. She was on first-name terms with some of them. When she returned from the Holy Land, Freni went off to have an open affair with Billy Alford, her opposite number in Cambridge. Molly had been told all the details and some of the most sensational stories had been passed on to me as pillow talk. Freni told her daughter, for instance, how Alford had ‘taken her’ astride the casing of his gigantic optics. She judged an astronomer, she boasted, by the size of his telescope. In formal astrophysics, they would co-write a couple of papers in Nature, early steps towards modern string theory. She had supplied the abbot with a good deal of the detail for his Cosmolabe.

  Years later I had the chance to ask Alford what he thought of string theory. Some still believed it a pseudoscience along with climate change indicators and such. Only in the twenty-first century did people start to take it seriously. The SF magazines had been warning about climate change since the ’50s. Alford had laughed. Most of his ideas, he said, had come from Mrs Melody. ‘She had a brilliant, if somewhat erratic, mind. But she was the only astrophysicist I ever knew who believed in what I can only call magic!’r />
  I wonder if he had meant her interest in the tarot. She had read both of us our cards the night she left and then, frowning and smiling, had refused to tell us what they told her. She was not so much troubled as puzzled by what she read. Every time I tried to find out what she had seen in the tarot deck she laughed. But she did leave a beautiful new pack for me as a parting gift.

  Before the green Lagonda arrived to take her to the airport, Freni give me a quiet hint of what to expect of her daughter. ‘Every woman dreams of a life which never came and never could have come,’ she said as Molly prepared breakfast. ‘Old flame dreams. We all had “what might have been” locked into our brain patterns. Men dream of possible futures, women of impossible pasts. When we grow older we realise what a disgusting weakness it is to harbour such infantile desires and what damage it does. You must expect at some point a period of turmoil. You, surely, have read her tarot? But if you really desire her, you will be at her service in a moment. If not, let her fly free. She can be as capricious as she is steady, as romantic as she is practical. And for all she seems mature, she is not skilled at bedroom diplomacy. She was born under Virgo and her moral conscience is developed in spite of herself. She struggles against her own nature. If she wants to move, she will find an excuse to make you the villain, be sure of that. “Beware the Crisis Maker!” as the tarot tells us. But who’s to say that day will ever come? You have your own fate to follow, of course. You have three children?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Believe me, I mean to make no threats. I wish only to help you. I’ll do a close reading for you, if you like, before I go.’

  She never did find time to give me that last tarot reading. Astonished by her speech, I had frankly avoided the opportunity. I could read the cards, of course, as I had learned from my Aunt Ethel and my gypsy babysitters. They said I had a talent, but I was convinced my own tarot stuff would seem amateurish to Mrs M. I didn’t question her further. Some of what she said completely mystified me. I didn’t take it very seriously. Not seriously enough in some ways. I thought I could resist Mrs Melody’s mind games. But I came to realise, not without a good deal of admiration, that she had me completely outplayed. This woman was an expert at backgammon and chess. She played them to the highest mark and entirely for pleasure. I learned that lesson more than once.

  I should have preferred to remain friends with Mrs Melody. I was never her enemy and I did not think she was mine. Yet somehow I felt she was not on my side. She was on no one’s side except her own. She was good-humoured, kind-hearted and exceptionally gifted, but self-sacrifice was not one of her most obvious characteristics.

  To me, Molly hardly resembled her mother at all, except she sometimes seemed a bit judgmental. She told me that Freni Melody was also a September birthday, a Virgo, like Helena, Sally and Kitty. They all had quite a lot to say about what was wrong with the world, though Molly rarely let herself express such judgments in public. This made Mrs Melody all the more intriguing to me.

  The night after she left for New York, I asked so many questions about her that Molly became impatient with me. ‘You sound as if you’re in love with my mother rather than me. Well, she isn’t having you. And if you ever…’

  But threats of that kind were not really in her nature and she never did say what she’d do to me. In the end, I suppose it was just as well I didn’t know what was coming. That made it an infinitely more painful revenge than any I could have anticipated.

  I became anxious to return to Ladbroke Grove. Something Mrs Melody had said had made me uncomfortable. I reminded myself that the Sanctuary offered me a kind of holiday, a release from those constantly whispering voices. I was really growing weary of mysteries and I suspected Freni Melody had tried to warn me about her daughter. I wasn’t sure what. I was in love with Molly, but I loved Helena in that deeper way that comes from sharing children and domestic life. I longed to see Sally and Kitty. After I finished my latest fantasy novel, I told Molly I needed a break to see the kids. She accepted this, even seemed solicitous. She told me to take my time. I was a little uncertain of this, wondering if she was hiding her emotions, but she reassured me. ‘I want you to go on loving me,’ she said, ‘not come to resent me. Freedom means a lot to both of us.’ She seemed so ready to accept my leaving that I wondered if for some reason she was actually glad to see the back of me.

  The Swarm seemed worse than the last time I had been home. Of course it was impossible to ignore, though I really had forgotten how beautiful Helena could look. She seemed pleased to see me and her lovemaking was wonderful. As before, she said that my ‘retreat’ had done me good and that I was my old self again. But the Whispering Swarm was almost unbearable. I could barely ignore it for seconds at a time. I was glad I had met many of my most pressing deadlines. I had a lot of them. I was writing about six books a year then, and also editing, writing short stories and doing the odd local gig on stage with the Deep Fix, just to keep my hand in.

  An old friend, the actor Jon Finch, looked me up. We had met at a poker school we both belonged to when he was in the SAS and I worked for Fleetway. Jon would later play Jerry Cornelius in The Final Programme movie. He had a job in the West End revival of Richard II. After a bit of soul-searching I told him what was happening to me. I’m not sure if he believed me, but he suggested trying something which had helped him get rid of migraines. Together we visited the more upscale of Notting Dale’s two opium dens, run not by sinister Fu Manchu types plotting to take over the Western world but by a couple of gay guys who were similar in looks and both called Charles. Strictly speaking they were This Charles and That Charles. A third, known as The Other Charles, had disappeared years ago, back to Kingston with a schoolmaster. Helped by two assistants, the remaining Charleses ran a very decent premises up behind Porchester Road Baths. Nothing nasty and sinister. A long way from the Limehouse of Thomas Burke and Broken Blossoms. The premises had been a hairdresser’s and was still disguised using the old fittings in each cubicle where you lay down on fresh white linen and your pipes were prepared by two extremely pleasant Korean girls, dressed vaguely as geishas.

  Within moments, just as in one of Burke’s stories, May, my girl for the evening, came into the cubicle and began to cook for me. On a small table she spread the layout; lit the lamp, dug out the treacly hop from the toey and held it against the flame. It bubbled merrily, and the air slowly filled with sweetness. Holding the bamboo pipe in one hand, she scraped the bowl with a yen-shi-gow and kneaded the brown clot with the yen-hok. Slowly it changed colour as the gases escaped. Then she broke a piece in her finger, and dropped it into the bowl. She handed the stem to me. I took deep puffs and relaxed as the Swarm slipped a little further into the background. Could I hear words suddenly?

  I think Jon left early. He was a drinker rather than a drugger and this was just something he was doing to help me. I needed more than one pipe to send me into the land of dreams. I felt an almost unbearable need to escape back into my old life when my simple enthusiasms had been Edgar Rice Burroughs, Planet Stories and P.G. Wodehouse, before I had met Friar Isidore what seemed centuries later. I yearned to be transplanted to a red planet where the world was forever in an English summer and giant green men rode over endless ochre deserts searching for a stolen cow creamer. And that was the tenor of my early dreams as I directed myself back to childhood, an engrossing book, an apple and perhaps some pop. Staying with my dad’s relatives in the country. The scent of pines and roses, of rich red earth fallen away from the deep roots of oaks, elms and pines. The faint, pleasant smell of my dog Brandy as I cycled with him in the basket on my handlebars along the quiet streets of Brookgate on an early closing day when not even a delivery van disturbed that peace.

  Before I knew it, I was dropping deeper and deeper into an appalling depression as I fell from the bike and we turned and I was back in the street, near a patch of waste ground, a bomb site, and I had lost Brandy. I remembered the moment well. I had lost him forever. I never found him. Almost th
e worst moment of my childhood. This dream wasn’t going too well.

  Like the opium eater himself, the resident genius of Hookem House, I seemed to roam a deserted Brookgate for ten thousand years before I understood that Brandy had been swallowed by a sewer linking to Alsacia. When I got into the sewer I heard the echoes of the Swarm, far away. But, distant as it was, it didn’t offer much relief. I could hear the rush of my own blood. Was that the only escape? To return to the Alsacia?

  Hearing Brandy’s distant, hopeful bark, I awoke long enough to take another pipe and do all I could to get my dog out of that sewer, which turned into a tunnel, which opened into a wide, tall cavern where high brass boats sailed beneath blazing, roaring copper skies on bright indigo water which merged with the haze of the heavens and sped to spill over the edge of the world. Soon the boats were transformed into gigantic peacocks whose metal wings and enamelled fans clashed in time to a distant waltz-tune and I recognised it as one of my own from the Deep Fix gigs. Began to swim in thick smoke tasting of chocolate from which glorious strawberry-coloured cities loomed and the Swarm was reduced to no more than the sound of a distant ocean. Lavender and lemon and the little chocolatier on the corner of Brook Lane and Fox Alley playing a tune on a tin whistle, doing a jig outside his shop while Claude Duval looked on and applauded. And over the fast-rushing Fleet was the great bridge of red iron, with its muses of the arts and sciences which had been a fermenting image in my mind as I danced one by one with those Graecian ladies, those lovely, wise ladies in their chitons and scarves and then I dreamed of fire and learning to inhale the smoke so that the pain should go as soon as it could.

  Or so I hoped.

  So I hoped.

  Jolie dansez, Mike, mon mari, she said. Kiss me sweetheart. Laissez les bon temps roulez.

  Where was I now? What did she want?

  My memories were locked in a sturdy box with straps. I smelled the box and began trying to open it. My licences were there. All my licences! Without them, I was nameless. I had no position.