Song Of Time (25 page)

My throat contracted. I wanted to sing, or dance, or do something. The Burger King, he remembered the old days when the doors into the infinities of virtuality had scarcely been open. He remembered crack and chew and all the rest. He’d tattooed his skin with implants. He’d tried the best and the worst available. Yes, he sighed, it had been a long journey. Then his hands guided my sight back towards the place where I had been longing to look…

“You know about this?”

His fingers massaged my scalp and the billowing carpets of this palace of virtuality all seemed to slide downwards towards that warm, welcoming pit. Towards re-birth or death—in the presence of the Burger King, it already seemed that the distinction didn’t matter.

Soon, the long mornings, the golden evenings and endless afternoons, of our stay in Washington were drawing to an end. It was time for our last big concert, and then for us to head back to Paris, to our real careers and lives, the coming elections, and Claude’s Project.

After seeing what I was planning to wear onstage at the JFK, Lujah Vaudin took me over to an exclusive shop in Chevy Chase in her tank of a car and found me an evening gown in blue and crimson.

“You’ll find,” she said as she appraised me beside a cascade of mirrors, “that you can say and do far more radical things in life if you dress according to conservative expectations.”

“Radical—isn’t that another word you can’t say?”

She chuckled and smoothed my hips. “
You
can say and do anything you want, my girl, if you look like this…”

In those days, I never saw concerts as obligations, nor noticed people yawning or gazing absently at the exit signs, and I was excitedly happy as, on the last, long afternoon before the big event, I returned to George-town after a final full run-through, and sang phrases of Mendelssohn to myself as I wandered the house turbaned in towels in preparation for the hairdressers, manicurists and masseurs who would all be arriving later.

“Ah, Roushana!”

It was unusual to see Tony Vaudin at home at this time of day and he scarcely looked himself as, dressed in a tee shirt and jeans, he bore down on me from the direction of his and Lujah’s suite of bedrooms. But this was a big occasion for them, too. Claude had conducted and performed before at the JFK, but never with this much media attention.

“You look a lot readier than Lujah!”

I laughed: we both knew his wife was never, ever, late.

“The house’ll seem so quiet without you both.” He stood in a self-consciously boyish pose I almost recognised from Claude, his big hands stuffed into his pockets.

“I’ll come again.”

“You will?” He seemed pleased and surprised. “And we
must
come to Paris. I know, I know…” He extracted a hand to give a deprecatory wave. “It’s nothing like the way people say it is.”

“Washington isn’t either.”

“Well, there you go. Two old cities facing each other across the dead Atlantic. But at least Paris is old enough to start to think about being young again. Claude was right to go there.” He gave a sideways smile. “My son doesn’t get much wrong, does he?”

“I suppose…”

He pointed towards the door we were standing beside. “Has he shown you in here?”

I realised as he opened it that this was Claude’s old bedroom. Rather than explain the circumstance in which I had seen it, I shrugged my ignorance.

“Come, come…” He beckoned me. “You might learn something.” He clicked shut the door. “I don’t know why, he’s never had anything to hide, but Claude can sometimes be a little secretive.”

Claude’s old bedroom seemed less small in daylight. In many ways, with its football and baseball rosettes, cups and trophies (Claude having been as near-professionally good at sport as his mother was at singing), and with its long alcoves of shelves filled with toys, games and gadgets, it looked like an idealised version of the room where an American boy might once have slept. Claude hadn’t needed Ludwig and Stockhausen glowering down from the walls to remind himself of his seriousness as a musician, so instead there were merely discreetly sexy posters of the last decade’s pin-up females. And it was all so
tidy
, as if he’d left knowing people would visit it as some kind of shrine. The stones and shells he’d collected from some beach holiday which lined the ledges of the tall casement windows looked like something from a museum. I picked one up. It was some kind of polished fossil, and there was still a faded price tag underneath.

“Well…”Tony patted the space beside where he sat on his son’s bed. “What do you think?”

“Of what?” I moved by him. “This? Washington? America?”

“You can start anywhere you want.”

“I’m not sure I can. It’s been marvellous. But…Maybe back in Paris…”

Tony nodded as if I’d said something profound and coherent, and we were pushed a little closer together by the sag of the springs. “Just keep an eye on him for us, will you, eh? The thing about Claude is…” He shook his head. “Well, we always knew he was so special, so unique, that there was never any thought of our having another kid. But I suppose that’s a huge weight of expectation. He’s so good at everything. But it’s a tightrope act and we worry sometimes that he’ll fall, but he never has. But now he’s got you as well as us. You won’t let him down, will you?”

The question raised uneasy memories, but I nodded gravely. Tony Vaudin had the sort of tone and approach which could make you accept most things. In other decades, he’d have easily made senator. In other centuries, and if he hadn’t been black, he might even have got to be president.

“I hear that that guy—what’s his name, Northanger?—has got a new symphony that you’ll be playing?”

“That’s the plan. Although I’ll only be performing a few phrases.”

“And he’s using AI to write it!” he chuckled. “That’s just what half my students do with their dissertations. But to be honest, I much prefer the ones which are written using someone’s poor old brain. Computers are still useless at making mistakes. You know, we had to put a ban on A plus markings, because all of them were written by machine. So now we’ve got a ban on excellence—and there’s
another
word you can’t use in Washington these days.”

I chuckled, too. Tony and Lujah never seemed to lose their good humour at the way the world was going.

“These things, these intelligences…I guess we really are getting closer now to a time when they really will be able to mimic human emotions and feelings. Then where will we all be, eh?”

I looked around again at the many shelves of Claude’s childhood possessions. “I suppose,” I said, “we’ll have to leave perfection to them, and try to be as human and fallible as we can be.”

Once again, Tony nodded gravely and encouragingly. I supposed that this was his tutorial mode, but our legs were pressed against each other’s now, and the dressing gown I was wearing had ridden up and parted midway above my knees. As I gazed down at my thighs, wondering vaguely how I might cover myself without it seeming prim, I realised that Tony was staring as well.

“You’re right,” he said with soft, surprising passion. “We have to be human. We have to be prepared to be fallible.” As if by accident, his fingers brushed against my flesh as he reached beside me to pick at a stain which lay on the cover of Claude’s bed.”We can’t all be like Claude, Roushana,” he murmured. “We must all find things out in our own way—make our own mistakes…”

I don’t know what I then said, but I managed to stand up and leave Tony Vaudin in his son’s bedroom to get on with my preparations. Next day, and after a well-reviewed performance, Claude and I flew out from Washington and returned to Paris, and to our real lives.

KIPPERS FOR BREAKFAST; THE SMELL OF THEM FILLS THE HOUSE. Yesterday’s rain was an illusion, and summer is holding, and I wander the rockeries afterwards in brisk morning sunlight, picking at the weeds—or perhaps they’re proper plants, and as if it matters. And perhaps I don’t need to sleep, dream, any longer, either, for even after these long, turbulent nights of memory, I still don’t feel particularly tired. Adam sits in the new kitchen which he now possesses far more than I have ever done, or even those redundant machines, looking out at the world from the screen. Then he brings out orange juice for us both on a tray—he’s long picked up on the fact that I don’t like to have too much coffee—and the tinkle of the glasses takes me to the back garden in Moseley, and to Leo. Not
back
any longer. The past is here even as we sit, we talk, and Adam says that perhaps he’ll do a bit of gardening himself, and I watch him as he moves with easy youth and purpose amongst the fading hydrangeas, still dressed in bits of Claude’s old clothing. Then I go inside, and the sun moves across Morryn’s furniture and warms the rugs. Thus, in our close but separate orbits, do Adam and I now exist.

I find him later in the music room with the Sony Seashell dangling from his hand.

“This doesn’t work.”

“It’s old—of course it doesn’t,” I snap.

“But isn’t this the thing that you said Blythe gave to Leo? The one with all the recordings…?”

I take it from him and put it down.

“It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“Well, from everything you’ve told me, I understand how important Leo was to you. And all those photographs, recordings, awards you said there were. But there’s so little of him here in Morryn.”

“Memories aren’t about objects,” I tell him. That’s how it is with Adam. For half the time, the questions he asks, the way he looks at the things, the ways he picks them up, feel like an intrusion, but for the rest it’s an unburdening, a blessed relief. Here, I show him, pushing aside some of my old childhood drawings—that flat sun and squashed people with their square-roofed house which surely must exist somewhere other than inside every child’s head—is the programme for that benefit performance I gave when I went with Claude to Washington. Copper-plate paper, now yellowed, cornered with pink flecks of wine…

We talk, we share—or I do anyway—for that’s what living’s about, isn’t it? We’re not islands. We’d die, drown, if we were.

“So,” I try asking him, “what do you remember now?”

“Many things. But none of it’s personal. None of it’s me. It’s as if—” An expression of something close to pain seems to cross his face.

“Not even in your dreams?”

He gives another of those almost Indian sideways shakes of the head.

“But you’ve heard of the symphonies of Nordinger? You know what happened to Venice? You can picture the dome of Saint Paul’s?”

“All of those things, yes—I can recognise them even before I call up on the screens. But they don’t seem
real
, exactly. It’s just
information
. It’s as if I’ve just read about them.”

“Nobody reads these days.”

“Well…Looked them up.”

“I suppose we’ll just have to stick with calling you Adam, then.”

“Yes. Abaddon.”

He still says it in that odd way. Then he leans from the chair he’s sitting in and he gives a gasp. His hands flutter towards his right side.

“It’s that cut, isn’t it? The bigger one? You’d better come upstairs and let me look at it again.”

He nods, then submits. Upstairs, he sits on the same stool in the bath-room he sat down on—how many days ago was it? The other cuts, abrasions—those I can see anyway on his wrists and neck now he’s not naked—have faded. Crouching down, I lift up Claude’s old tee shirt to take a peek. Adam’s skin is golden, and his belly really does look like some medieval painting, but wasn’t the spear cut on Christ’s other side? For the life of me, I can’t remember. But, unlike the other Adam, at least he has a navel.

The waterproof coating I sprayed on peels back easily. So does most of the dressing beneath. This is all going to be fine, I tell myself. Easy-peasy. Nothing but flesh and adhesive. Then he gasps again, this time more loudly, as the last of the strip clinging to the wound resists my fingers.

“Another moment. Just hold still.”

He submits, although his belly is now sucking in and out. But I need to look—what alternative is there?—and my hands, these hands which have shaped the innermost feelings of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, are suddenly cool and firm and steady and authoritative. Adam groans as I give the dangling white tape a firm tug. I try again. His belly has stopped moving now, his whole body is arched, the muscles have turned rigid. One last pull against a momentarily stronger resistance. There’s a slight sound of something parting, then something large and sodden drops with the dressing f rom my fingers. The wound is wide open, glistening. The plug of artificial skin I inserted has failed to meld. But there’s no odour, which is something, isn’t it?

“How does it look?” Adam finally hisses.

My sight blurs, although the sunlight which washes up from the sea is clinically bright. Defined within this prism, the mouth of the wound looks far wider than I remember it. The flesh seems re-shaped, peeled back as if by curious fingers, and inside…

“Is it infected?”

“Hard to tell…it’s as if…” Not a wound, but some new orifice, thinning and gaping as Adam begins breathing again.

“Is it serious? What can you see?”

It’s a tunnel, glinting but oddly bloodless. Doubting Thomas, I might almost put my fingers into it, but I refrain. My breath, with my face still close, pulses against Adam’s belly. Yes, yes, of course it
could
almost be a vagina. It isn’t, but it isn’t a wound, either. And inside, glittering in strange encrustation, are the pillars and grottos of a crystal cave.

“I don’t know,” I tell him, standing up. “Give it time. No, I don’t think it’s infected.” I lay a hand on his shoulder. “But we’d better put some-thing over it.”

His breathing is easy now, and his smile, his endless sense of gratitude, has almost returned. He’s withdrawn again into the pretence of being whatever he imagines he is, and I’m just a schoolgirl playing nurse. Leo, I can’t help remembering as I unravel new padding, never was a good patient long before he got struck down by WRFI.
Come on, Roushana, I’d be dead already
, even when it was only ketchup sauce and old bandages. The world had to revolve around him, especially when he wasn’t feeling one hundred percent. No wonder Mum became a
sadhu
, a saint…