Medusa Frequency

12 In the Morning

In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff. Melanie stirred, clinging to the sleep that was casting her off. I looked at the long line of her back, the sweet Velasquez curve of her hip, then I got up and parted the curtains to see under a dark sky the distant red and green lights of the District Line and the long grey curve of iron sweeping towards Fulham Broadway. It was Saturday; an idle train stood empty while from behind it a Tower Hill train slid majestically round the long and shining curve.

I went to the larder under the stairs and found the head weeping quietly. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What are you crying about?’

No answer except a quiet snuffling.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to carry on like that at least tell me what’s on your mind.’

Still no answer. I heard Melanie in the kitchen. ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ I said to the head.

Melanie was naked under my anorak again, smooth and sleepwarm as we kissed good morning. I was looking forward to a slow and easy weekend together but in a few minutes she was dressed, had toast and coffee, and gathered herself for departure. ‘Sol’s going to drop off a typescript at my place,’ she said. ‘I’ll phone you later.’

When she’d gone I went to the larder to talk to the head but found only an exhausted-looking cabbage. ‘Once begun, the story must be finished,’ I said, ‘remember?’

Nothing. I put it in a carrier bag, took it to the river, dropped it in, came home and sat down at my desk and typed:

IN THE MORNING

In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff. Millicent stirred …

No, Millicent wasn’t right.

trapped in a car going over a cliff. Monica stirred …

Definitely not Monica, women named Monica have never fancied me.

In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff. Melissa stirred, clinging to the sleep that was casting her off.

Page one? I didn’t think so. Suddenly the idea of turning one’s experience into a story seemed not only bizarre but perverted; the idea of such a thing as page one seemed at the very least a monstrous vanity. Where was the beginning of anything, how could I draw a line through endless cause and effect and say, ‘Here is page one’? Well of course either one was a storyteller or one wasn’t, and it looked as if I wasn’t — all I could do was describe phenomena as I experienced them. I looked at the two sentences on my page one attempt until the telephone rang and it was Melanie.

‘There went today and tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Sol’s given me a twelve-hundred-page first novel by the ex-mistress of General Sphincter to read and I’ve got to give him my report on Monday.’

‘Twelve hundred pages! What size?’

‘A4.’

‘Good job they’re not foolscap. Why don’t you do it here? It’ll be really cosy.’

‘No, I’ve got to be in my own place with my own space-time. I’ll ring you Monday.’

Well, I thought as I hung up, there you have it: you need her more than she needs you.

The telephone rang again and Sol Mazzaroth jumped out of it and grabbed me. ‘How’s it going?’ he said.

‘GNGGX. NNZVNGGGG. NNVLL.’

‘Terrific. When can I see it?’

‘FNURRN.’

‘Great. Any time after three.’ He shook my hand and climbed back into the telephone as the dusk wrapped itself around me like a python.

Evening shadows make me blue, I thought in the voice of Connie Francis, when each weary day is through. How I long to be with you, my happiness. The dusk continued both as python and ambience as it filled the room with what the dusk brings, roads and faces long gone, action not to be revoked, the past that is always now and

THE LITTLE TRIBUNAL OF THE DUSK

Shadows, shadows, voices from otherwhen, faces from time lost, said the dusk. Do you remember the maze near Bicester and whom you walked it with? Do you remember the Cairn o’Mount Road over the Grampians, the tawny owl in the grey afternoon? And Portknockie? Do you remember the boat in the rain? Do you remember St-Paul-de-Vence and Kensington Square? Do you remember the olive tree? Do you remember, do you remember?

Yes, I said, I remember everything because this is

THE DUSK VS ME

How do you find? said the dusk.

Guilty, I said.

The universe, hissed the dusk as python, as ambience, as tribunal, is a continually fluctuating event that configures itself to whatever is perceived as centre.

I turned to the Vermeer girl, I looked at the colour plates in the books and the big print over the fireplace. She wasn’t there, the virtue had gone out of my poor copies, they were empty of her. The room filled up with a desolation that drained the virtue out of everything. All of the colour and accumulated detail of books and pictures, posters, puppets and art objects, charts and maps and Chinese kites, all the comradely clutter of shortwave radio and tape recorders, computer and printer, all the things on my desk, the stones from places of power, shrivelled oak leaves and dry acorns from favouring trees, shells from memory’s store of sunlit ocean (some of them broken and revealing mystical helices), the little china cat that played with a golden ball, the pensive bisque mermaid from a forgotten aquarium (Luise had given me both of those), the sombre broken-nosed painted lion (relic of some cast-iron peaceable kingdom) — everything in the room, the colour and pattern of Oriental carpets and cushions and furniture until now harmoniously sharing territories of light and shadow — all of it stopped looking right and began to look wrong.

It was after closing time. From the footpath along the common came shouts and drunken singing where jackals and hyenas prowled the wastes and the satyr cried to his fellows. This was only Saturday night; there was still Sunday to get through.

In the morning as always the Sunday Times and the Observer slid through the letterbox and flopped grunting to the floor, their review sections and supplements heavy with news of Juan de Fulmé, Boumboume Letunga, Jarvis Bendable, Charmian Rox, and every other writer who was not Herman Orff. I got through the day by answering letters and paying bills, my regular Sunday refuge.

In the evening I looked for the Vermeer girl again in the print over the fireplace and in the books and again she wasn’t there. ‘Why aren’t you there?’ I said to her. ‘What have I done to make you go away? Where have you gone?’

No answer.

‘You’ve always been here,’ I said. ‘How am I supposed to get along without you?’

Still no answer.

‘Listen,’ I said to the radio, ‘give me her voice at least.’ It was tuned to 7320 kHz, in the twittering and tweetling of the vast hollow aerial miles a soprano was singing Tales from the Vienna Woods in Russian. Desolate, those woods. Radio Moscow began to fade, and scarcely had I touched the tuning dial when a new voice came in, a girlish voice as fresh and clear as the run of spring water over clean stones. It was a presenter I hadn’t heard before, reading the news on Radio Tirana’s German transmission on 7310 kHz. I was caught by her brilliant simplicity; her speech was wholly unmannered, wholly uncovered, it came out of her with her breath and there was in it a fragrance as of her breath and an incandescent eroticism. She read the news like a schoolgirl standing up straight with her feet together, her voice dancing a little with the enjoyment of its own physicality.

She spoke of Amerikanischer Imperialismus enchantingly and unmaliciously, and she finished each news item with a rising inflection in which one could hear her tidy small pleasure. Her voice made in the crackling and whispering of the evening airwaves a quiet place of its own. Knowing hardly any German I was able to let go of all comprehension so that she came to my ear naked, giving me, unvitiated by any surface meaning, the sound that signified only herself. Whenever she paused for breath I was shocked by the intimacy of it. It was just such a voice as the Vermeer girl might have spoken with.

Still listening to her I put on a videotape of a Channel 4 film of a tidal mangrove forest in Borneo and the crabs with bodies like human faces. I ran it with the sound off. The moon rose over the sea and the voice of the girl from Tirana moved with the spring tide that flooded the mangroves as the great female crab silently exploded her fertility into the sea, clouds of infant ancient faces rising around her. The German faded out, the sweet voice was itself only, beckoning wordlessly in the moving waters under the moon.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What are you saying?’

Come and find me, said the Vermeer girl.