Exchange Place

Les Structures Sonores

The intercom gave off a noise as if of short-wave radio. The words that emerged from it were unintelligible to Kilpatrick. Gordon said some words in reply. There was a click, and Gordon opened the postern gate. They walked through a vaulted entrance into a courtyard. The fog had gone. A full moon hung in the sky and a fountain played in the moonlight. They walked through the courtyard into a stone-flagged arcade lined with statuary, mythological figures whose blank eyes seemed to follow Kilpatrick as he passed them, or else he felt them boring into the back of his head. You know the way you know someone’s looking at you, he thought, you can feel the gaze, and you turn to look at them, but by this time their eyes have turned away. Gordon and Kilpatrick walked to the end of the arcade, shoes clacking on the stone flags. They came to a door and another intercom. Again the same procedure. The door opened. They entered. They found themselves in a dark vestibule. Watch your step, said Gordon. They descended a steep stone staircase into a cellar space. Strange, ethereal music was playing. Under a series of arches along one wall were alcoves lit by art deco scallop-shell wall lamps. Interlocutors leaned towards each other over the tables, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Kilpatrick could make nothing of their murmuring. He recalled how often he had sat in other bars, overhearing snippets of talk drifting in and out of the buzz, trying to guess or make up whatever story lay behind this stray phrase or that, disembodied from whatever context, words like enigmatic messages emanating from a badly-tuned short-wave radio awash with static. Sometimes he would scrawl what he had heard in a notebook. Sometimes when he looked at it again in the light of day he would find his own writing indecipherable, or else he could not think of the significance of the words and why he had written them.

At other times he liked it when he was the only customer in the bar, alone with his own thoughts as they came to him over a martini or a Manhattan. He remembered the Blue Room of the Adelphi Hotel in Belfast, where at a certain hour of the early evening he would find himself the only audient to the jazz piano in the corner, not counting the barman, who had no doubt heard it all before as a matter of routine. Kilpatrick liked to think that this time it was different, for when he had seated himself, the piano player — a gentleman of a certain age, brilliantined hair, white tuxedo, cigarette smouldering in an ashtray — would give him a nod of acknowledgement or recognition and seem to launch into another mode, fingers lingering over the keyboard in a reverie of contemplation, exploring the contours of a song that was no doubt long familiar to him, but never realized in this manner until now, the melody haunting itself in its ever-changing repetitions, variations intertwining, unfolding, recapitulating till they dwindled to a conclusion by no means foregone. After the second or third song Kilpatrick would nod to the barman and the barman would set up whatever the piano player was drinking. They never spoke.

Absinthe, said Gordon. Two bubble-stemmed glasses and a carafe of iced water had been set before them. An elaborately perforated spoon holding a sugar cube rested on the rim of each glass. Louche, said Gordon. He gently poured water over the sugar cube and as the sugar dissolved the emerald liquid in the bubble slowly turned a paler opalescent. Kilpatrick, never having done this before, did likewise. Louche? said Kilpatrick. French for that effect, they call it la louche, said Gordon, where it goes milky. Opaque that is, and of course shady as in dodgy, not above board, shifty, sinister, whatever you’re having yourself. He turned his eyes up as if quoting from an invisible text. The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see what you want to see, wonderful, curious things. Oscar Wilde. The element of water, said Gordon, liberates the essential oils from the spirit and releases the power of the la Fée Verte. Transformation has always been her fundamental essence. The Green Muse. The Green Fairy. Rimbaud’s Poison. Le bateau ivre. Le dérèglement des sens. How would you translate that, the deregulation, the derangement of the senses? Whatever. Santé. He lifted the glass to his lips and Kilpatrick did likewise and he felt the absinthe cool and liquid on the tongue, burning as it went down. He thought of depths of opalescent green, emerald and eau de nil.

Kilpatrick looked around him. The other customers were all drinking absinthe too. They were talking more volubly now, as if they had turned their conversation down a notch when Gordon and he entered the room. They were elegantly dressed. He noted a lady in what looked like a Chanel jacket and a Hermès scarf opposite a gentleman in an impeccably cut navy-blue suit and a tie in black shantung silk with orange and emerald green splotches, colourful as an Oriental fish against the sea-blue herringbone ground of his shirt. The man fingered the knot in his tie and Kilpatrick found himself doing the same, fingering the Charvet tie that had been so mysteriously bestowed on him it seemed an age ago. He caught Gordon looking at him with a quizzical expression. You’re wondering what these people are doing here, he said. Perhaps, said Kilpatrick, or wondering what we’re doing here, if it comes to that. Oh, we’re doing what they’re doing, said Gordon, chasing the Green Fairy, being themselves, or rather one of their selves. Like us. Look around you, Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick looked around him and saw that every booth was occupied by a single couple not necessarily paired by sex. It’s not what you think, said Gordon. Les Caves des Changes is about change, and to change one must become another self; so these people offer each other counterparts. The interlocutors play off each other as it were, reciprocating and elaborating each other’s phrases, syncopating them as they would the musical score that is the sum of their parts, for they have rehearsed these words often in their memory, and they go back a long way, ever-changing as they move into the future or as time elapses. They are conducted by the mirror neuron, which reflects the words before they are framed by the conscious mind, the neuron firing a good few blinks of the eye before the phrase is even at the back of the mind or on the tip of the tongue; so they speak trippingly, pausing every now and then to consider what has been said, letting silence speak. They do not pretend to know each other, but go with the flow. The absinthe helps. So does the music. Listen. Kilpatrick listened to the ambient music he had first heard when he entered the room. He thought of tubular bells of wood and crystal swaying and chinking in the breeze through a wood as it blew through them, and the wavering of a wind-harp. He heard the birds in the trees. And he imagined John Bourne listening to that eerie music as Bourne walked through the forest of John Kilpatrick’s memory, following him into the dark.