Song Of Time (39 page)

“That’s where it ends?”

“I’m not saying Claude’s death ended my life. I travelled. The kids grew. I performed. Life went on. Things changed…I could tell you about the year I spent in Bolivia, helping musically gifted kids who’d never otherwise have had a chance to play. All so very altruistic, I suppose it sounds, but what I was really doing was filling in the shadow of all the things done by Mum and by Claude. That, and trying to revive my enthusiasm for my instrument which five years of touring had exhausted. You see, that’s how it always is with us artists, musicians. We’re not even
self
-obsessed—we’re simply obsessed with doing the thing that we do. Or I could tell you about the speech I gave—a rare thing for me by then, and I couldn’t believe how nervous I felt—at one of the first conventions of the Reformed League of Nations. Not that it made the slightest bit of difference to the fate of the world, and I realised as I stood there and looked down at all those faces that the reason I was here wasn’t because I was Roushana Maitland, but because I was the widow of the famous Claude Vaudin. And the reason
Claude
was famous—it wasn’t his musical triumphs, it wasn’t even the fiasco of Nordinger’s
Fourth Symphony
any longer, it was because of all the speeches he’d given in places like this.
That
was how people remembered Claude, as a celebrity promoter of lost causes. It was the biggest, saddest irony of all…”

He looms over me. “What happened to his body?”

“You sound like some detective now. Does it really matter?” I feel so tired. I really do want to go to bed, and I wish he’d leave me alone. I’d love to sleep, if sleep were possible. But he’s right to ask—this thing, this need to resurrect the past, won’t let go of me now until it’s done. “There were so many places Claude told me he wanted to be buried, scattered, cremated or commemorated over the years. You wouldn’t believe…It just one of those things he had—something he’d say if he was happy, which usually meant he’d just presided over a particularly successful performance.
I want it to be here.
Partly a joke, although Claude’s jokes were always in earnest. So it could have been Paris, or here in Morryn, or Bayreuth, or Sydney or any of a dozen places—including several not on this earth. But I didn’t have to think hard to decide. I took his ashes over to Washington. The place reminded me of the way New Delhi had been, right after the war, and it reminded me of the time we visited Luxor. There were the same sights, the same flies and smells, the same toothless guides…The Washington Monument’s still standing—did you know? Or at least it was back then. And still surrounded by rusty fences and huge walls of concrete, dykes to keep back the maniacal messiahs the Americans thought were trying to destroy their country. Of course, they were wrong. It was the very land itself which turned on them. The top of that monument’s a windy spot now. All the old plate glass had been taken out—looted, I suppose. Claude’s ashes just blew away, high across the ruins and swamps of the lost capital of a lost country where my husband once dreamed of changing the world…”

“You make it sound very poetic.”

“That’s the trouble with memory, Adam. The fact was, I was shattered by the enormous climb, and worried about being knifed by the seedy little guy who’d led me there, not to mention the prospect of the long climb down. The place stank of pee as well, just like the pyramids and New Delhi. Funny how people always seem to want to piss against the monuments of old empires, which is something Shelley forgot to mention when he was writing that poem. But that’s not what I’m saying. You see, it’s all gone. Not just Washington, but anything that matters. What I am is what I was. It all goes back to the people I loved, and to those times…The rest is just…Words.”

“You mean you’ve finished?” he asks after a long pause.

I nod. After all, didn’t Liang Ho tell me that the day would simply come, and that it could be there and then, just as I wanted, without preamble or fuss? So this is it—and it feels like nothing. It’s like the end of the final concert, the last day of the tour. Packing up in your hotel room, or walking across an empty auditorium. All that struggle, all that planning. All the night-sweats and the nerves and the bleeding fingers. A huge mountain of effort which lies before you and bulks out the rest of your life, and which you dread and hate and long to finish. And then it
is
gone, and you’re left with this empty feeling. I suppose I could go on. I could talk some more about Bolivia and those kids sitting around me under the jacaranda trees, nervy with talent and expectation. Sometimes, I just wanted to tell them to stop. Say—
Forget music; it isn’t too late. Just go out and live instead…

I look over at Adam. He’s standing so quiet now, framed by the wings of the storm, when before he was so passionate…

“Stay here,” I tell him. “Stay here when I’m gone. Not that I
will
be gone—we can still talk, sort things out. My kids, they don’t want this house—they’ve told me as much. They don’t need the money. I can leave it to you. Keep it, sell it, do whatever you want. If you have some kind of property, it won’t matter who you are or aren’t.”

“You’d really leave me this house?”

“Why not? It’s not as if the dead can’t re-make their wills.”

What
is
that expression I can barely see on his face? Is he sad, or amused? It’s almost as if he’s not taking it in, but it would solve every-thing, and it would rescue us both. It would save Morryn as well, before Edward starts treating it like another investment, or Maria uses it to work some more of her architectural angst.

“This isn’t just some passing whim, Adam. I really will give you the rights to this house.”

“To some stranger from nowhere who’s befriended a dying, elderly woman?”

“We both know it isn’t like that.”

“I’m sorry, Roushana. This is your moment, not mine. Perhaps we really should just go to bed now…?”

The music room sinks back into the littered and homely place I’ve long known, but nothing much else happens when I tell my limbs to move. The old Leo’s Smith Kendon tin gleams over on the desk. Maybe Adam and I should open it up—fill this room with antique smoke and push back the years just as Claude once tried to do. But whatever’s there would be dried-up, worn out, drained of all its potency and power. The past is gone. So is the future. All that remains is me.

“Could you help me?” I ask.

Adam bends to slide the strength of his arms between me and the divan. It’s not even like I’m being lifted; I’m that light, he’s that strong. All the plans I had for these last living hours—the music I’d listen to, the food I’d taste, the things I’d touch, the messages I’d leave—seem worth-less now. I’m just a husk, I’m driftwood, I’m nothing, and to give up like this is far better. The hall ceiling floats above me, but I’m safe here in Adam’s arms, far away from the fists of the storm. My body is redefined. Bits of me are floating above the water, but most lies beneath. And Claude was right—or was it Leo?—dying isn’t hard. It’s easy, a mere act of will. All I need to do is let go…

I let out a small mew of disappointment as Adam flops me down on the wide, cold space of my bed.

“You want me to stay?” he asks.

I smile a yes, too tired to talk. Once again, his hands slide under me, and I’m rolled and pushed. I’m feeling giddy now as well. Adam’s hands and the seasick roll of the bed won’t leave me alone. I laugh a little, then give out small sobs of pain.

“Who do you want?” I hear him ask. “What?”

“Open your eyes, Roushana. Look at me.
Concentrate
. Tell me—who do you want me to become?”

Strange, strange question. Am I dreaming? Am I dead? But I open my eyes, and a storm-shadow which might still be Adam floats above me amid the grainy light.

“Just tell me!” it shouts. “I can be anyone!”

I cringe. The storm rises. I’m swept up by impossible arms. The shape above me is stretched, contorted—it could be Claude, dancing naked to Miles Davis in that big Parisian atelier. It could be Leo. It could even be the distant ghost of the child I never had. It’s like all humanity, and everything Christos ever claimed, driven here and tossed together by this storm. Then everything retreats, Morryn regains substance as the sea beneath us beats its irregular heart, and I can make out Adam sitting hunched in the darkness at the far end of my bed.

“What
was
that…?” I breathe. “What
are
you…?”

He gives a dry chuckle. “I’m everyone and no-one—haven’t I told you that before?”

I shrink back from him.

“
Why
are you so afraid now, Roushana? Nothing’s changed between us. It’s always been the same truth. I’m an empty vessel, I’m legion, I’m flesh unmade. But perhaps you
don’t
understand—perhaps you really don’t…”

He gets up. The storms quickens as he begins to pace the dark room.

“So look at it this way, Roushana. You think the dead really want to
stay
dead? You think they don’t hate and lust and envy the way the living shit and sleep and fuck and breathe? Who the hell wants endless potentiality? What could be better, eh, than a live body—someone fresh and new and cheaply young? You could breed them specially, perhaps grow them in vats or simply kidnap them from the sink cities. Life’s cheap, so who knows, who cares? Then you can wipe the mind, cleanse the body of its petty identity, fill it instead with a crystal field which will absorb all that you ever were. You’ve just got that thing growing in your
head
, Roushana. But look, look at this stuff—it’s invaded me. It’s all that I am…”

Adam’s scattering drawers, strewing glass, searching for something long and sharp, which gleams a white arc as he lifts the hem of Claude’s old sweatshirt and drives it into the wound in his belly and then, breathing in hard, angry snorts, begins to widen and deepen it.

“…look…”

His fingers scrabble at the lips.

“…look…”

There’s flesh and tissue deep inside him—in this flickering light, I can even see the gleam of organs—but it all shines within a dense webbing of crystal through which the blood wells thickly as if through a layer of dense frost. Down there, deep within him, he’s barely human at all.

“You were
made
like this?”

“It’s what I’m for! Somehow, I suppose I must have escaped. I realised that long ago when I first looked at those marks on my legs and wrists— but why did the sea take me here, to you, and to Morryn?
That’s
what I’ve been wondering, asking, all these days. It’s taken me this long to understand…”

Despite everything, what he’s saying makes a kind of sense. You don’t have to keep up with the newscasts to understand what a good, young body stripped of all personality and identity might be worth. And perhaps the dead do envy the living. Perhaps they do seek to re-enter life through stolen flesh. Adam’s certainly an empty vessel, just as he says. It all makes sense—all the things he knew—all the things he can do—the way he’s
everything
but a single mind, a single collection of memories…Hunched on sheets which are now scrawled with his blood, watching him prowl this room, I believe.

Adams nods and smiles. He laughs. He spreads his dripping hands. “I’m nothing. I’ve looked into my heart, Roushana, and it’s empty. But it doesn’t
have
to be like this—can’t you see why the sea brought me here?”

“What are you saying?”

“You don’t have to go to that clinic tomorrow. You don’t have to shed your flesh and take nothing in exchange. Or you can—but you can do it here, you can do it now with me, and you can have
everything
instead. Look at me, Roushana. I’m all you could ever want. You can take me, you can enter me. You can become all that I’m not. These days in Morryn, all I’ve ever had from you is an endless torrent of faces and places and memories. And the music, the music as well, lest we forget…You don’t have to let go of any of it. Look at these hands…”he holds them out, still darkly bloodied “…
feel
them. Feel their strength. Imagine holding the Guarneri with
these
, Roushana, imagine listening with these ears, feeling with this heart, and fucking, yes, with this cock…Imagine all of that. Imagine what you could become…”

The spread hands are offered but he jerks them away just as I reach hungrily. It seems for a terrible moment that he’s withdrawing, but instead he reaches to drag Claude’s old sweatshirt off his shoulders, then the tee-shirt beneath, and he scrambles towards me across the bed, his chest covered with runnels of sweat, his whole body shining and shuddering.

“…here…”

His fingers make dark scrawls as they cross his belly to seek that wound on his left side. There’s a shuddering gasp, a wet tearing, but there’s no flesh, nor blood, nor even crystal, inside the rent he’s made in himself. What I see instead is a vortex of gathering dark.

“…you see…”

A widening space of potentiality spreads towards me from within his spread arms. Everything he is lies within it—his sweet flesh, his new breath, his finely beating heart—and I could have it all. I could have everything. I could
become
him. Adam’s right—he’s merely a vessel, a swirl of disconnected information. He has nothing to lose, and I long to escape this stupid, failing, body and live on. All it takes is an effort of will. Already, withered hag reaching forward to grasp life with these useless hands, I see myself through his eyes. I feel his breathing. I can taste his tongue. I could leap. I could do it. I could live on. But something breaks and the moment dissolves in a clamorous rush.

“I can’t do it!” A voice which could be Roushana’s tries to howl, although it comes out as a dying whisper.

“You must—”

“—You don’t understand. All the things I’ve told you. It isn’t
me
. What I said about the truth being more than one thing, Adam…It’s far simpler than that—I lied.”

ROUSHANA MAITLAND’S CROUCHING ON HER BED IN HER RUINED BODY, looking out at the blur of Adam through her fading eyes. I’m her, and she’s me. But it isn’t that simple any longer—everything’s much too clear. I can see Adam as well, sprawled beside me with that wound gaping and the blood drying on his hands. I can hear the husky hurt in his disbelieving voice.
What is the truth, Roushana? What are you, really?
Questions, questions, and the frail old creature hunched beside him which is still partly me mutters something about Morryn knowing, how Morryn has always known and kept its secrets, down in its cellar heart, down in its crystal granite bones…And she’s right—I can feel it as well. But I can also feel the pull of the wind drawing me away towards drowned cities, gilded spires, crystal domes. From here, it would be so easy to let go. But I’m Adam as well. I could leave here, I could be him—I could be
everything
. But I, too, have to know…