Medusa Frequency

27 To Borrow the World

I’d no plans to go anywhere but home but when OXFORD CIRCUS appeared in the train windows I got out and walked over to Hermes Soundways.

Fallok was sitting in his electronic twilight holding a small terrestrial globe, a cheap tin one, badly dented, with no base. Through the closed door I could hear the Hermes music.

‘I never should have let him do it,’ he said as I came in.

‘Let whom do what?’

‘I never should have let Kraken get his head zapped.’

‘Kraken! Do you mean to tell me that Mr Deep Mind himself came to you with art trouble?’

‘How can you joke about it with the poor bastard dead?’

‘Dead! Of what?’

‘Heart attack. I think he may have had some trouble with the head of Orpheus.’

‘What happened?’

‘After our lunch at L’Escargot I was walking slowly back here when I heard a voice speaking to me from a dustbin in Wardour Street and it was the head. I didn’t want to stand there in the street talking to it so I wrapped it up in the Guardian and brought it here. I was surprised to see it on the loose and I rang you up but there was no answer.’

‘I must’ve been in hospital by then.’

‘Anything bad?’

‘Bit of angina. What happened with the head?’

‘I asked it what it wanted and it wouldn’t answer but it began to sing. I was recording the singing when Kraken dropped in and asked me why I had a microphone in front of a perfectly silent tin globe. So I told him about it and then he wanted to get his head done so he could see the head of Orpheus too. We had a session but he didn’t see the head and he asked if he could borrow the globe; I gave it to him and he left. He’d said he’d ring me up to let me know how he was getting on but after three or four days I heard from Hilary Forthryte that he was dead. He was found sitting in a chair with the globe in his lap.

‘Poor Kraken. I doubt that he and the head would have got on very well.’

‘Actually he was a pretty boring guy,’ said Fallok, ‘but I liked his films.’