The Collected Short Fiction

Never To Be Heard (1998)

As the coach swung into the drive that led to the Church of the Blessed Trinity, Fergal jumped up. He would have reached Brother Cox before the coach gasped to a halt except for tripping over lanky Kilfoyle's ankles in the aisle. Boys of all sizes crowded to the doors ahead of him, waving their hands in exaggerated disgust and denying they'd farted and blaming red-faced O'Hagan as usual, so that by the time Fergal struggled down onto the gravel Brother Cox was playing doorman outside the arched stone porch, ushering in each of his favourite choirboys with a pat in the small of the back. 'Sir?' Fergal said.

The choirmaster gave him a dignified frown, rather spoiled by an April wind that, having ruffled the trees around the church, disordered the wreath of red hair that encircled his bald freckled scalp. 'Shea, is it, now? O'Shea?'

'Shaw, sir. Sir, is it true Harry's mum and dad won't let him sing at the concert?'

'I believe that may turn out to be the truth of it, Shaw, yes.'

Fergal found his eyes wanting to roll up, away from the choirmaster's inability to talk to him straight that was bad even by the standards of most adults, even of most teachers. If he looked above him he would see the pointed arch that reminded him uncomfortably of the naked women in the magazines making the rounds of the dormitory. 'Sir, so if they're stopping him—'

'I'm not about to discuss the rights or otherwise of their decision with a choirboy, Shaw.'

Fergal didn't care about their decision, let alone their objections to the music. 'No, sir, what I meant was we'll be a tenor short, won't we? Sir, can I be him? My voice keeps—'

'Don't be so eager to lose your purity.' Brother Cox was no longer speaking just to Fergal, who felt as though he'd been made to stand up in front of the whole of the choir. 'You'll grow up soon enough,' said the choirmaster with a blink of disapproval at the single hair Fergal's chin was boasting. 'Sing high and sweet while you can.'

'But sir, I keep not being—'

'March yourself along now. You're holding up half my flock.'

Fergal bent sideways in case the choirmaster found his back worth patting, and dodged into the church. More than one window was a picture of Christ in his nightie, a notion Fergal wouldn't have dared admit to his mind until recently for fear of dying on the spot. Not only was the building full of pointed arches to inflame Fergal's thoughts, the broad stone aisle was an avenue of fat cylindrical pillars altogether too reminiscent of the part of himself that seemed determined to play tricks on him whenever and wherever it felt inclined. Choirboys were streaming down the aisle as their echoes searched for a way out through the roof. In front of the choirstalls on either side of the altar, a conductor was pointing his wand at members of an orchestra to conjure a note from them. Between him and the orchestra a woman was typing on a computer keyboard, and Fergal's interest nearly roused itself until he remembered why she was there - the stupidest aspect of the entire boring exercise. The computer was going to produce sounds nobody could hear.

When the Reverend Simon Clay had written the music there had been no computers: no way of creating the baser than base line he wanted for the final movement. The score had been lost for almost a century and rediscovered just over a year ago, not by any means to Fergal's delight. Even its title -

The Balance of the Spheres: A Symphony for Chorus and Large Orchestra - was, like the music, too long to endure. Last year, when the choir had won a choral competition, some of the boys had sneaked away afterwards for a night in Soho, but now that Fergal felt old enough to join them, everyone was confined to quarters overnight and too far out of London to risk disobeying. He'd given up on that - he only wished he were anywhere else, listening to Unlikely Orifices or some other favourite band - but all he could do was take his place among the choirboys with hairless baby chins and wait for the orchestra to be ready. At last, though not to his relief, it was time to rehearse.

Brother Cox insisted on announcing the title of each movement, no matter how high the conductor raised his eyebrows. 'The Voice of the Face That Speaks,' said the choirmaster, all but miming the capital letters, as the stout radiators along the walls hissed and gurgled to themselves, and the choir had to sing a whole page of the Bible while the orchestra did its best to sound like chaos and very gradually decided that it knew some music after all. 'The Voice of the Face That Dreams,' Brother Cox declared at last, after he and the conductor had made the choir and orchestra repeat various bits that had only sounded worse to Fergal. Now the choir was required to compete with the orchestra by yelling about seals - not the sort that ate fish, but some kind only an angel was supposed to be able to open. The row calmed down as the number of seals increased, and once the seventh had been sung about the brass section had the music to itself. The trumpeting faded away into a silence that didn't feel quite like silence, and Fergal realized the computer had been switched on. 'We shall carry on,' the conductor said in an Eastern European accent almost as hard to grasp as his name.

'Best take it in stages, Mr . . .' said Brother Cox, and left addressing him at that. 'This is the hardest movement for my boys. Quite a challenge, singing in tongues.'

Fergal had already had enough. Even if he'd wanted to sing, his voice kept letting him down an octave, and singing in the language the Revolting Clay had apparently made up struck him as yet another of the stupid unjustifiable things adults expected him to do. Brother Cox had acknowledged how unreasonable it was by giving each choirboy a page with the words of the Voice of the Face That Will Awaken to use at the rehearsal. Whenever Fergal's voice had threatened to subside during the first two movements he'd resorted to mouthing, and he was tempted to treat all of the Reverend's babble that way rather than feel even stupider.

It looked as though that was how he was going to feel whatever he did. Keeping a straight face at the sight of Brother Cox as he opened and closed his mouth like a fish gobbling the gibberish was hard enough. The choir commenced singing what appeared to have been every kind of church music the Reverend could think of, the orchestra performed a search of its own, and Fergal was unable to concentrate for straining to hear a sound he couldn't quite hear.

He felt as though it was trying to invade everything around him. Whenever the choir and orchestra commenced another round, more than their echoes seemed to gather above them -perhaps the wind that flapped around the church and fumbled at the trees. Shadows of branches laden with foliage trailed across the windows, dragging at the stained-glass outlines, blurring them with gloom. Once Fergal thought the figure of Christ above the choirstalls opposite had turned its head to gaze at him, but of course it was already facing him. His momentary inattention earned him a scowl from Brother Cox. Then the choir climbed a series of notes so tiny it felt like forever before they arrived at the highest they could reach, while the orchestra contented itself with a single sustained chord and the computer carried on with whatever it was doing. Well before the top note Fergal did nothing but keep his mouth open. The conductor trembled his stick and his free hand at them all, and when at last there came a silence that appeared to quell the trees outside, he let the baton sink and wiped his eyes. 'I believe we have done it, Brother,' he murmured.

'If you say so.'

Either the choirmaster objected to being addressed like a comrade or resented not having had his wellnigh incomparably straightforward name pronounced. His dissatisfaction was plain as he gestured boys out of the stalls row by row. Fergal was among the last to be marched past the amused orchestra, who were within earshot when Brother Cox caught up with him. 'O'Shea,' the choirmaster demanded, and even louder 'Shea.'

'It's Shaw, sir.'

'Never mind that now. You've little enough reason to want anyone knowing who you are when you can't keep your eyes where you're told. Maybe you were dreaming you'll be singing low tomorrow, so let me tell you a boy from this very church will be taking Harty's place. A prize soloist, so don't you go thinking you're the equal of him.'

On the coach he renewed his disapproval. 'I want every boy's eye on me tomorrow from the instant he opens his_ mouth. There'll be no sheets for you to be consulting. After your dinners we'll spend all the time that's needed till every single one of you is letter perfect.'

The choir groaned as much as they dared, and some of the boys who'd heard Fergal being told off glared at him as if he'd brought this further burden on them. The coach wound its way through the narrow Surrey lanes to the school where the choir was suffering a second night. The boys who ordinarily put up with it had gone home for Easter, but the monks they'd got away from had remained, prowling the stony corridors with their hands muffled in their black sleeves while they spied out sinful boys or boys about to sin or capable of thinking of it. The choir had hardly taken refuge in the dormitories when they were summoned to dinner, a plateful each of lumps of stringy mutton that several mounds of almost indistinguishable vegetables applied themselves to hiding. The lucky vegetarians were served the same without the lumps but with the gravy. Some of the resident monks waved loaded forks to encourage their guests to eat, and the oldest monk emitted sounds of what must have passed in his case for pleasure. After the meal, even the prospect of rehearsal came as almost a relief.

Brother Cox made the choir sit on benches in the draughty bare school hall and repeat the stream of nonsense Simon Clay deserved to be cursed for, and then he collected the pages with the words on and mimed trying to lift an invisible object with the palms of his hands to urge the choir to chant the whole thing again, and yet again. He mustn't have believed they could have learned it so perfectly, because he tried requiring each boy to speak it by himself. When it came to Fergal's turn the boy felt as though all the echoes of the repetitions were swooping about inside his head, describing the patterns of the absent music, and he only had to let them become audible through his mouth. 'Nac rofup taif gnicam tuss snid...' He didn't even realize he'd finished until Brother Cox gave him a curt nod.

By the time Brother Cox dismissed the choir they were so exhausted that hardly anyone could be bothered with horseplay in the communal bathroom. As Fergal crawled under the blankets of the hard narrow bed halfway down the dormitory, a long room with dark green glossy walls as naked as its light bulbs, he wondered if anyone else was continuing to hear the echoes of the last rehearsal.

There was only one kind of dream he wanted to have in the intimate warmth of the blankets, but the echoes wouldn't let it begin to take shape. They seemed to gather themselves as he sank into sleep - seemed to focus into just three voices, one to either side of him and one ahead. That in front of him began to lead him forwards while the others were left behind. Soon he was outside time and deep in a dream.

He was trudging towards a mountain range across a white desert that felt more like salt than sand. He'd been in the wilderness, his instincts told him, for three times thirteen days. He was bound for the highest mountain, a peak so lofty that the river which rushed down its glittering sheer slopes appeared to be streaming out of the bright clouds that crowned it. He thought he might never reach the water that would quench his thirst and lead him to the mystery veiled by the shining clouds, but in a breath the dream brought him to the river. It darkened as he drank from it and bathed in it, because he was following it downwards through a cavern he knew was the mountain turned inside out and upside down. Surely it was only in a dream that a river could run to the centre of the world, which would show him the centre of the universe, the revelation he'd journeyed so far and fasted so long to reach. Now, at the end of a descent too prolonged and frightful to remember, he was there, and the blackness was glowing with an illumination only his eyes could see. Around him the walls of the cavern were fretted like jaws piled on jaws, ridged as if the rock might be the skeleton of the world. Ahead was a pool so deep and dark he knew it was no longer water - knew the river was feeding a hole so black it could swallow the universe. A figure was rising from it, robed in rock that flowed like water. Was the universe creating it just as it had created the universe? Its eyes glinted at him, more than twice too many of them, and he struggled to awaken, to avoid seeing more. But he could hear its voices too, and didn't know whether his mind was translating them or trying to fend them off. In its image, he found himself repeating, in its image—

Brother Cox wakened him. 'Get up now. Sluggards, every one of you. Rising bright and early is a praise to God.'

He sounded so enraged that at first, bewildered by appar-endy having dreamed all night, Fergal thought the choirmaster was berating him for the dream. At breakfast, chunks of porridge drowning in salt water, it became clearer why he was infuriated, as the head monk flourished a newspaper at him while trying to placate him. 'I just wanted to be certain you're aware what you and your charges will be involved with, Brother Cox.'

'I'm aware right enough, aware as God can make me.

Aware of how the godless media love to stain the reputations of the saints and anybody with a bit of holiness about them.' Brother Cox said no more until he'd gulped every chunk of his porridge, and then he sprang off the bench. 'If you'll excuse me now, I've a coach driver needs phoning to be sure he presents himself on time.'

After a few moments of staring at the abandoned newspaper Kilfoyle ventured to say 'Sir, can I read it?'

The head monk pursed his thin pale lips. 'Perhaps you should.'

Since Kilfoyle was by no means a speedy reader, when he didn't take long over it Fergal knew he'd given up. The newspaper was passed along the table, making increasingly brief stops, until it arrived in front of Fergal. Of course the article was about Simon Clay - all the stuff Harty's parents had objected to. Fergal was making to pass the paper to O'Hagan when the headline stopped him. Clay's First Symphony: What Kind of Pilgrimage? The question reminded him of his dream, and he read on.

It was mostly information he couldn't have cared less about. Simon Clay had revived the classical church symphony, starting with his Second . . . He'd composed nothing but religious music ... During his lifetime he'd maintained that his first symphony was lost . .. Before he was ordained a priest he'd been a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and the original score had recently been discovered among the papers of a fellow occultist, Peter Grace ... It hadn't previously been identified as Clay's work because he had signed it with his occult name, Indigator Fontis, Seeker of the Source . .. Grace had scrawled a comment on the first page: 'fruit of the secret pilgrimage' . . . One wonders (wrote the critic) whether Clay's subsequent output was a prolonged attempt to repudiate this score and its implications. Yet the issues are less simple than has been stridently suggested by some members of the press. Underlying Clay's determination to outdo his contemporary Scriabin in terms of passion and ecstasy writ large and loud (Fergal no longer knew why he was bothering to read) is a radical attempt, so harmonically daring as almost to engage with atonality, to create a musical structure expressive of the cosmic balance to which the title alludes, a structure to which the sub-audible line of the third movement is crucial. Given that Clay wrote above this line the comment 'Never to be heard'—

The newspaper was snatched away from Fergal. 'Heavy reading, is it?' roared Brother Cox. 'Let's try the weight of it.' When he eventually finished slapping Fergal about the head with the paper truncheon he turned on the rest of the choir. 'Eat up your breakfasts, all of you, that our hosts were so kind they provided us. And just you keep your minds on what you have to sing today instead of filling them with nonsense.'

Fergal might have retorted, if only to himself, that nonsense was the word for what they'd learned, except that he was no longer sure it was. The ache Brother Cox had beaten into, his head prevented him from thinking as he trudged away from breakfast and eventually to the coach, which threw his head about as it rewound yesterday's journey. Amid the chatter of his schoolmates he kept thinking somebody was practising the words of the last movement on either side of him. His mind was trying to retrieve the sentences he'd glimpsed as Brother Cox had snatched the newspaper. Had Simon Clay meant that the symphony never would be heard, or that it never should be? A more insistent question was why Fergal should care, especially when attempting to think sharpened his headache.

Cars were parked along the quarter-mile of lane nearest the church. Members of the audience for the world premiere that would be broadcast live at noon that Saturday were strolling up the drive while a small group of protesters flourished placards at them over the heads of several policemen who would clearly have preferred to be elsewhere. GIVE EASTER BACK TO GOD ... KEEP THE DEVIL'S MUSIC OUT OF GOD'S HOUSE ... RAISE YOUR VOICE TO GOD, DON'T LOWER IT TO SATAN ... As the coach drew up beside the porch a man stalked out, pulling at his hair to show that he worked for the BBC. He wasn't happy with the cawing of rooks in the trees, nor the noises the doves made that put Fergal in mind of old women around a pram. He was especially distressed by the chorus of 'Onward Christian Soldiers' outside the gates, and flounced off to speak to the police.

Fergal was trapped in the choirstalls when he heard the protesters being moved on. As a verse of 'Nearer My God to Thee' trailed into the distance, his urge to giggle faltered, and he realized he'd been assuming the protesters would ensure that the premiere didn't take place. There was plenty to be nervous of: the audience and the conductor and Brother Cox, all of whom were expecting too much of him; the BBC producer darting about in search of dissatisfaction; the microphones standing guard in front of the performers; his sense that the church and himself were liable to change, perhaps not in ways to which he'd begun to grow used; the imminence of an occasion he was being made to feel the world was waiting for ... As the conductor and Brother Cox took up their positions, Fergal gave the stained-glass window opposite him a look not far short of pleading. What might his old beliefs have been protecting him from? 'It doesn't look like a nightie really,' he almost mouthed, and then he heard a bell start to toll.

It was noon, even if the sky beyond the stained glass appeared to be getting ready for the night. The twelfth peal dwindled into silence not even broken by the hissing of the radiators, which had been turned off, and then the echoes of the footsteps of an announcer dressed like a waiter in an old film accompanied him to a microphone. 'We are proud to present the world premiere of Simon Clay's The Balance of the Spheres. Despite the controversy it has engendered, we believe it is a profoundly religious and ultimately optimistic work ...' All too soon the conductor raised his baton and Brother Cox, as though gesturing in prayer or outrage, his hands, to let the music loose.

Fergal managed to sing about the creation without dropping any notes, and could hear Harty's replacement was equal to the task. If Fergal started to be less than that he could .ilways mouth - except the notion of leaving the choir short of a voice made him unexpectedly nervous, and he sang with such enthusiasm that Brother Cox didn't glare at him once during the first movement. He felt pleased with himself until he wondered if he was using up too much of his voice too soon.

Why should it be crucial to preserve it for the final movement - above all, for the last and highest note? He set about appearing to sing with all his vigour while employing only half. The display seemed to fool Brother Cox, but was it the choirmaster he had to deceive, and if not, wasn't his attempt to play a trick worse than ill-advised? As the last seal was opened he sang as hard as he could, and was able to rest his voice while the trumpets blared. They fell silent one by one, and as the seventh prolonged its top note he saw the woman at the computer reach for the keyboard. The incongruity made him want to giggle: how could they broadcast a sound nobody could hear? Then the fragile brass note gave way to that sound, which crept beneath him.

He might have thought he was imagining the sensation - it made him feel he was standing on a thin surface over a void -if all the birds hadn't flown out of the trees with a clatter that was audible throughout the church. The conductor held his baton high and stared hard at the windows as the computer sustained its note. Was he waiting for the branches to stop toying with the stained-glass outlines? Freeing himself from a paralysis that suggested the sound under everything had caught him like quicksand, he waved his wand at the forces he controlled.

The words of the last movement filled Fergal's head and started to burst from his mouth. Even if he didn't understand them, they were part of him, and he felt close to comprehending them or at least to dreaming what they meant. He had to sing them all or he might never be free of them. He had to reach the highest note, and then everything would be over.

He had to sing to overcome the sound that was never to be heard.

Or could the choir be singing in some obscure harmony with it? He was beginning to feel as if each note he uttered drew the secret sound a little further into him. He tried not even to blink as he watched Brother Cox, whose scowl of concentration or of less than total contentment was in its predictability the nearest to a reassurance he could see. His breaths kept appearing before him like the unknown words attempting to take shape, and he told himself the church was growing colder only because the heating was off. He tried to ignore the windows, at which the darkening foliage had still not ceased groping minutes after the birds had flown, unless the trees had stilled themselves and the glass was on the move. The thought made the robed figure at the edge of his vision seem to turn a second face to him, and then another. He almost sang too loud in case that could blot out the impression, and felt his voice tremble on the edge of giving way, dropping towards the cold dark hollow sound that underlay everything, that was perhaps not being performed so much as revealed at last, giving voice to a revelation Simon Clay had spent his life trying to deny he'd ever glimpsed. Fergal didn't know where these thoughts were coming from unless they were somehow in the music. The choir and the orchestra had begun to converge, but they had minutes to go before they reached the final note that was surely meant to overcome the other sound. If he was failing to understand, he didn't want to - didn't want to see the stealthy movements in the window opposite. The choir had arrived at the foot of the ladder of microscopic notes, and he had only to sing and watch Brother Cox for encouragement - not even encouragement, just somewhere to look while he sang and drew breaths that felt as if he was sucking them out of a deep stony place, precisely enough breath each time not to interrupt his voice, which wasn't going to falter, wasn't going to let him down, wasn't going to join the sound that was invading every inch of him—

When Brother Cox's face twisted with rage and disbelief Tergal thought the problem was some fault of his until he saw movement beyond the choirmaster. A man had darted out of the audience. With a shout of 'Grant us peace' he seized two power cables that lay near the broadcasting console and lieaved at them. The next moment he tried to fling them ;iway while, it seemed to Fergal, he set about executing a grotesque ritual dance. Then the computer toppled over and smashed on the stone floor, and every light in the church was extinguished.

The orchestra trailed into silence before the choir did. Fergal was continuing to sing, desperate to gain the final note, when a cello or a double bass fell over with a resonant thud. He was singing not to fend off the darkness that filled the church but the sight it had isolated opposite him. That was no longer an image in stained glass. The window had become a lens exhibiting the figure that was approaching while yet staying utterly still, its three faces grim as the infinity it had lived and had yet to live, its eyes indifferent as outer space, the locks of its multiple scalp twisted like black ice on the brink of a lake so deep no light could touch it. The figure hadn't moved in any sense he could grasp when it entered the church.

In the instant before the last glimmer of light through the windows went out, Fergal saw the three faces turn to one another, sharing an expression he almost understood. It was more than triumph. Then he was alone in the blind dark with the presence, and he struggled to hold every inch of himself immobile so as not to be noticed. But the presence was already far more than aware of him. For a moment that was like dying and being reborn he experienced how he was composed of the stuff of stars and the void that had produced them, and of something else that was the opposite of both -experienced how he might be capable of partaking of their vastness. He hadn't begun to comprehend that when his mind shrank and renewed its attempt to hide, because the presence had unfinished business in the church. Even if it had taken the man's dance of death as a tribute, that wasn't enough. Fergal felt it draw a breath much larger than the building so as to use every mouth within the walls to give itself a voice.

'I want to praise the choir for their self-control and their presence of mind at the concert on Easter Saturday. As the rest of you boys may be aware, a gentleman under the mistaken impression that the music was sacrilegious interrupted the performance but was unfortunately electrocuted. Some of the orchestra and some members of the public were injured in the panic, but our school can be proud that its choir kept their seats and their heads. It is regrettable that the building was apparently damaged by the effects of the technology used at the concert. I believe that is all that requires to be said on the matter, and I shall deal harshly with anyone who is caught circulating the superstitious rumours that have been invented by some of the gutter press. Let your minds remain unpolluted by such rubbish as we start the summer term.'

As the headmaster's complexion began to fade from purple to its customary red, Fergal glanced at the choirboys seated near him. None of them seemed inclined to disagree with the headmaster's pronouncements. Perhaps they were cowed, or perhaps they preferred to forget the events at the church; perhaps, like all the members of the audience Fergal had seen interviewed on television, they actually believed that nothing more had taken place than the headmaster had said. For the moment Fergal was content to pretend he agreed. As the row of boys including him filed out of the school hall under the frowns of the staff, his fingertips traced like a secret sign the oudine of the folded page hidden in the pocket against his heart.

It was from the newspaper the headmaster had condemned. Fergal didn't care what it said, only what it showed: the lopsided church in the process of twisting itself into a shape that seemed designed to squirm into the earth; the distorted stained-glass figure of Christ, an expression hiding in its eyes, a broken oval gaping above each shoulder. Fergal shuffled after the rest of the procession into the classroom and cramped himself onto the seat behind his desk, and put on his face that looked eager to learn. Of course he was, but not at school. The weeks to the next holiday seemed less than a breath he'd already expelled, because then he would return to the church to discover what was waiting, not just there but within himself. If Simon Clay had been unable to cope with it, he must have been too old - but Fergal had been through the fear, and he vowed to devote the rest of his life to finding out what lay beyond it. As the first teacher of the day stalked into the room, Fergal was on his feet a moment before the rest of the class. Pretending only promised a future reward. 'Good morning, sir,' he said, and sensed his other voices holding their tongues until he was alone with them in the dark.