Nowhere Near Milkwood (4 page)

I stood there and flexed my thumb.

To my astonishment, Goodbut called out a request: “That obscure Bavarian number, if you please.”

“Which one do you mean?” I muttered.

He said, “‘I Feel Like Hound Dressed Up As Swine Tonight’,” and I realised he was trying to assist me, trying to make the pigdog soul of my banjo seem deliberate and right.

I loved him for that. Music reviewers don’t earn enough money in my opinion. He was able to keep his car on the road, true, yet I still think he deserved a small wage increase.

But I retorted, “Don’t know that one.”

He shuddered just a little, and I added, “No, my set for tonight is sure to be remembered in myth long after the destruction of Bavaria, however and whenever that happens.”

“Because,” I continued, “it’s the best...”

And then I roared, “Listen!”

And I plucked the G sharp. And it flew out of my banjo and filled the pub to its most hidden corner.

I knew something had gone amiss before the ripple of sound struck the nearest tables to the stage. I wanted to run forward, pull off my coats and gather it up, this ripple, whose circumference was already growing bigger than any item of clothing. Yes, gather it up and push it back into my instrument! But I stayed where I was and let the damage make itself known. It did. I leaned over and blew out the crimson candles which had been left flickering to themselves since Bridget arranged them there, for I craved darkness for the payback.

What had I done? What was my mistake?

Playing a sharp on a flattened instrument! The note just wasn’t right. It was shifted a semitone backward, which wouldn’t have mattered usually, it’d just be a major tone, but not in this case, because I had suggested the context with the note, as I indicated earlier. A bum note. It was
infinitely
bum. That stinks. So I flushed. My embarrassment was severe enough to calcify hedgehogs. That’s warm.

The glow of my shame returned sunset to the interior. The UPLANDS TAVERN boiled itself alive. The people ran out. Somebody was plucking at my sleeve. It was Goodbut.

He said, “You imbecile! You’re finished.”

We ran away somewhere. Turned out we were headed toward the only late night drinking venue in this part of Swansea, a bohemian place called MOZART’S. It was just down the road. I don’t believe Goodbut wanted to go there with me, but the momentum of acquaintance carried me through the doors in his wake. It was cramped inside. Most of my audience were already there, together with my support acts. They tolerated me without a flicker of compassion. This was good enough for me. I didn’t expect any sort of forgiveness. No quarter, not by half. I moved into the back room, which was slightly less full.

I recognised one person there, Brian, who I’d last met at Darren’s party a few weeks before. He sat with his friends, Chris, Pete, Reshmi, Louise, and his hairstyle, Ginger. He guessed something was up, so he treated me like an unwanted bill, which is the overused pun I truly was. He deferred me indefinitely, like the climax of my song. It still hasn’t been performed in its entirety, so I’ve heard.

Somebody had left a newspaper at the bar, so I perched awkwardly on a stool and sat reading it. Anything to appear unobtrusive. The front page was bursting with news about trouble in distant lands. Lots of revolutions had broken out at the same time. The nations of Africa, the Americas and Asia had overthrown their governments. There were angry mobs in every street demanding globalisation and a single world state. As they marched to victory they sang anthems. I recognised these. I’d written them with the Cussmothers. The songs from our first (unsuccessful) album. It was clear what had happened. The secret societies had finally made their move. My former colleagues ruled much of the planet now. I felt like the fifth Beatle or the sixth sense, left out of things but still there, cheated, frustrated and helpless, an orphan of cuss.

I folded the newspaper and returned to my immediate surroundings. I needed to confront my own mess.

Some of my support acts began strumming guitars for their personal pleasure, while Goodbut kept repeating to himself and anyone else who would listen: “Infinitely bum! Infinitely bum!” And the beers and glasses of wine slipped down all other throats smoothly, but not down mine, and parts of me wept for the rest.

The very bald singer from Satori came up next to me. “That gig wasn’t big enough for the all of you.”

I nodded every one of my heads.

The atmosphere in the room became strained. The songs which came out of those guitars were painful. Every time a G sharp was sounded, the walls sparked red. There was shame and heat. The people winced. Even though these G sharps should have been different to the one I’d extracted from ‘And Dug The Pigdog A Tomb’, the horror was there. My fault for welding it to one specific context! The note was alloyed with that context forever now, tainted and ugly.

A mirror for my existence.

I felt a strong grip on my biggest shoulder. Bridget Wells was standing behind me. Then she growled:

“You’ve destroyed G sharp! You’ve ruined an entire note. Never again will anyone be able to play that semitone. There were only twelve in a full scale and now there are just eleven. All musicians must regard you as an enemy from this instant. You’ll never get a gig anywhere. You should go home now. Leave us forever.”

“I have no home,” I replied miserably.

“Just get out of Swansea,” Goodbut added. “I’m sure the miasma will part itself especially for you.”

“I’ll finish my drink first,” I said, and I raised my pint to my lips, but I didn’t taste it. I suddenly found myself surrounded by grinning people. So many happy faces! I felt light and immersed in compassion, warm and at peace. This is the way it should always be! I laughed my typical laugh but the sound was a fraction softer.

Then I realised that I was lying on my back parallel to the bar with my feet still resting on the stool. I was upside down and the grins were sneers and pouts. The warmth was gore. There was a gouting neck where one of my heads had been. I felt a fraction more stupid. But I rapidly worked out what had happened. Fed up with my delaying tactic, Bridget had punched me. Don’t mess with that girl!

I crawled away, out of the room, out of the door, onto the street. It had started to rain. The sky washed me. Cars helped by splashing puddles. All the moonless gutters were damp and crooked. I didn’t enter any of them. I crossed the road and found a patch of soggy greenery, Cwmdonkin Park, it was. There was no real shelter here, but I lay flat on my back again and thrust my legs up into the air.

All songs are now played without G sharp. Strings have been removed from pianos across the globe. Banning this note may even become law in the utopia of the new world order.

I sang a tune to myself while I was in the park, an obscure Atlantean number called, ‘I Feel Like Urchin Dressed Up As Octopus Tonight’. It was appropriate. The membrane which connects all my thighs acted as an umbrella. There are no notes in Atlantean music, just bubbles. It is sure to surface in popularity again.

In the morning I’d begin the journey back to Cardiff. In the meantime I’d linger in a world where every twisted leer was a grin. A planet of grins discovered and colonised and exploited by me, but liberated by standing up for nothing in particular.

I needed a manager, that’s what, because without one I was going nowhere. And nowhere is probably an unpleasant place. Already I’d been to Swansea, so I had an inkling, though I’m disinclined to judge the two places exactly alike, for the simple reason you can return from Swansea. Plus there’s a difference between going nowhere and
going to
it. Yes, a manager was called for, and I called for one, wrote actually. I placed an advertisement in a local magazine.

I should have chosen a publication devoted to the music business, I appreciate that now, but they were too expensive. I picked one I could more easily afford. I wrote out my advertisement, keeping it short and enigmatic. Then I waited in my rented room for a reply. I was living in Beresford Road at the time and the flow of traffic outside my window resembled the excited murmuring of the audience I’d never known. In the evenings, the glare of the headlamps pierced the curtains, illuminating the peeling wallpaper that was all I had to look at.

To say I saw patterns there would be interesting, but I didn’t. I tried. The swirls of faded colour, possibly never bright, flickered with the intensity of a dull headache, but they never congealed into the forms of living things. I slept in the chair which was the only item of furniture in the room. There was movement above me, other lodgers, feasibly happier than I, going about their own penurious affairs. I never saw them, though we dwelled in close proximity, nor had I any vast desires in that direction. Anonymity seemed right for this place and time.

One morning there was a knock on my window. I stood and parted the curtains and peered out. A moonface was pressed to the glass on the other side. By this, I don’t mean a round face, jolly and pockmarked, but a thin curved one in profile, fused to a crescent head. He was listening, whoever he was, for sounds of activity within. I obliged by rapping a selection of
my
knuckles back, and he sprang away from the pane in pain, but then he turned to regard me directly, winked his cold blue eyes and mouthed the words, “May I come in?” and grinned when I nodded.

I went into the grimy hallway and opened the heavy ugly door and invited him into my humble, very bare, abode. He stood uneasily in the dust, wringing his hands and forgetting to blink, and I shivered, but the temperature in my room was always a few degrees lower than it ought to be, whatever the season, so I dismissed this. I would have offered him tea, coffee, fruit juice, weak and salty beer, but I had none, so I reached into a pocket and drew out a small piece of bread, which I was saving for my dinner, but he declined this gift. I replaced it gratefully and we stared at each other helplessly.

After a while, he said, “I’m here.”

“I agree,” I replied, “but who are you exactly?”

“The answer to your advert.”

“Of course!” I exclaimed.

The tension, which had been unbearably abstruse, was broken. We shook hands, a ritual which lasts an hour with me and is best avoided. But I was overjoyed, for I believed the answer to my problems had materialised, a manager, my ticket to delayed success, the balm for my soul, worn out by years of hope deferred. He was my guide on the path to fame, a man with an astronomical head, and a mind for such figures too, for those would be my profits when I hit the big time, if there was any justice in the world, whether the world of elements or the insubstantial one of business. I didn’t care! A mentor, seemingly congealed from the early traffic fumes, here with me at last!

“When can we begin?” I asked.

“Right away,” he said.

“Let’s go!” I enthused.

“Fine,” he replied. “I’ll give you a lift to my factory.”

I was so excited I neglected to question this suggestion until it was too late. I merely followed him out of my room, not even bothering to lock the door behind me because I knew I’d never return, and climbed into the sidecar of his motorcycle, whose chrome side was emblazoned with the image of a speeding glacier, ice crystals vaporising from its surface and flaring off behind like a rocket’s exhaust trail. The engine didn’t start. He turned the key in the ignition again and again and finally it clattered and groaned into some sort of life, undoubtedly alien and doomed. We roared off at walking pace and joined the more competent traffic. This should have told me something.

But it didn’t.

We passed under a railway bridge, where the road was in a dip and flooded with dirty rainwater, and almost failed to make it out safely, but our destination wasn’t far. We went down Tweedsmuir Road until we left the domestic streets behind. Now we were in the district of Tremorfa, where an industrial zone lurked like a temple complex dedicated to boiled eggs. It was depressing and therefore familiar, though I’d never been here before. We spluttered to a halt outside a grey building, a perfect cube, set on its own among black earth and patches of dead grass.

There were no windows in its walls and the main door was metal and chill to the touch. We entered. A freezing mist enveloped us. It was at this point that the first doubt assailed me. Frost cracked on my eyebrows as I knitted them, knitted them not warmly enough, not like cardigans, to display a mild confusion. No, it was severe, my frown, by necessity of temperature. Then I asked him plainly:

“What sort of manager are you?”

“I run a cold storage company. This is it.”

“I wanted a music manager.”

“Yes, but you advertised in the REFRIGERATION GAZETTE, so you have nobody to blame but yourself, unless you deem multiple heads too many to hold just one responsibility.”

“I don’t,” I confessed sadly.

“Well, I’m your manager now. I answered your advert.”

“I need gigs,” I said.

He pondered this and blew on his hands. “I’ll do my best to provide. Have you considered looking for them in the future?”

“The one place I haven’t.”

He gripped my shoulder. “Let’s try there!”

He led me to a chamber at the core of the factory and shut me within. A dim light filtered through an observation slit in the hatch. The interior was bare, almost the same as my room in Beresford Road, but without wallpaper. The sides were ceramic and hard. I squatted and waited, glancing uneasily at the intake pipes in the ceiling. I heard my manager turning valves outside. Then I was sprayed with a very cold fluid, perhaps liquid nitrogen. It lapped around my ankles, my calves, my thighs. My mind began to shut down, suspend its duties, cancel its appointments with ideas. I was being sealed in ice! It didn’t worry me too much, no more than anything else in my life, which was already infinitely bothered. It’s better to be a cube than a square.

A cube which eventually melted. I was free again, but my manager had gone. So had the factory and its machinery, including the chamber which was my prison. So had the industrial zone of Tremorfa and its bordering streets. So had the rest of Cardiff. I crouched in a region of lagoons and a grim wind made sluggish ripples on the metallic waters, which reflected the light of an overcast sky. There was no vegetation, just a crude and sloppy mud tower at the limits of my vision. I reached for my pocket and my piece of bread but it had gone, crumbled to atoms. For that matter so had my pocket and clothes.

Nude, I started limping down the paths between the gelid pools. I had terrible cramp. I wondered how my garments could decay while I was trapped in ice. I guessed I must have been thawing for a long time and the bitter coldness of my present environment had delayed the return of my consciousness. That was it. By the time I reached the tower, circulation had returned to forty of my legs. A figure sat on a stool in the doorway and squinted at me. He was doing nothing, but I’d obviously interrupted him. I didn’t feel sorry.

“Whet du yua went?” he sneered.

“Information, breakfast, celebrity,” I replied.

“Qaeont eccint,” he snorted. “Uat uf wurk ectur, eri yua? Git ewey, lievi mi eluni. O’m basy, cen’t yua till? Baggir uff!”

“Just as soon as I get what I need. But you don’t look busy to me. You’re just sitting, twiddling, scowling.”

“Nu, O’m pritindong nuni uf thos ixosts et ell.”

He gestured at the entire landscape.

I sympathised. “Keep trying. Don’t give up. But I need a gig.”

“Will, yua wun’t fond uni hiri!”

“I suppose not,” I conceded.

He seemed to soften. “Yua mast gu tu thi Osli uf Chrumi. Ot’s thi unly pleci whiri masocoens mey fond wurk.”

I frowned. “The Isle of Chrome? What’s that?”

“Thi cepotel uf thi lewfal plenit. Fulluw thos peth antol ot bicumis e prupir rued, thin kiip guong elung ot woth nu dovirsouns end yua woll onivotebly git thiri. Guud lack!”

He gave me a fruit for my hunger, but no celebrity for my reputation. The fruit was bruised and ugly. Before I left, I asked him: “Who are you?”

And he snapped, “Thi furmir Prisodint uf thi Wurld...”

I believed him, His bitterness was proof.

“Goodbye,” I said, and he replied:

“Nuw O cen’t ivin jaggli! Ivirythong guis et lung lest!”

And I peeled the fuit and bit into it, because I felt it was expected of me. It was sweeter than its appearance promised, and I hoped this was a metaphor for myself. It hadn’t been so far. But I’m an optimist, always looking to the future. I was living there now, so it had to deliver or I’d be left with nothing. I walked. I left the lagoons behind and reached a very smooth plain, bland and unremarkable, the path dividing it in two, and I wondered if I had wandered into limbo, a future where erosion had flattened every protuberance, each crinkle and crease on the planet’s surface. Not sexy, that. An infinite Belgium of the mind. And cryogenic freezing is a one-way ticket. I was stuck.

The clouds began to break and I glimpsed a pale pink sky beyond. The sun, wherever it was, had started to set. It was going to get even colder. I needed clothes or shelter, but neither were available. There was nothing left to do but run to generate heat. I hate running on empty stomachs, but my options were limited. So I accelerated over the plain and soon the friction warmed my cheeks. I kept under the one hundred miles per hour mark, because of the speed wobble. A sprained ankle at that rate and the ground becomes a big bruise just waiting to pass it onto you when you land. But the terrain was perfectly level, without holes.

As the ambient light dimmed into a muddy dusk, the silhouettes of low hills appeared on the horizon. I gasped in relief and slowed my velocity. The clouds had thinned out even more and stars were visible. I knew I was heading the correct way, though the path hadn’t become the promised road. Behind the lower hills were higher ones, and beyond those true mountains. I was too weary to be inspired, but I saved the memory for later, when I’d have my feet up on a constellation of couches, if that astrological-comfy conjunction ever occurred. I couldn’t feel confident at present it would. I was ravenous and my eye alighted on the first plants I’d encountered, but they weren’t edible. Not yet. A few bluish mosses. Later I encountered ferns and tumbleweed too lazy to roll. No, not lazy. Square. The dice of desolation...

I ran up a slope into a forest of thin trees. They wore their branches bare and I wondered where the man in the tower had got his fruit from. Not from here. The trees were so thin I could almost pinch the thickest between finger and thumb, like the neck of a distant banjo which forgets to grow bigger when you approach it. There were mushrooms in the next forest, wide enough to curl up on, but not quite warm enough for a nude sleeper. Then I was racing between boulders, bandit friendly terrain, if old novels and romantic lithographs are to be believed. They probably aren’t. So don’t! Go on then, have it your way. Reckless. My elevation had increased considerably. I was passing between the hills and catching up with the mountains. They glistened with no colours in the unanimous night, no purples and silver. I slowed my pace again, for I was weak now. I cantered rather than galloped.

Dawn found me weaving through one of the high passes in the range of mountains. On the other side, I paused to look down. Astonishment sent my tiredness to bed. I was fully alert now and aghast at the scene below. Two armies clashed on a field. Bent shields and snapped pikes soon littered the ground. Each side carried lanceolate flags, by which I mean rounded at their ends, but these displayed no symbols of creed or nationality. They were different colours, but blank. As I watched, men died in sordid ways. Within the hour, there were only a few dozen left and I deemed it safe to begin my descent. By the time I reached the field, the battle was down to just two fellows, who took it in turns to hit each other with axes. Both were bearded and dressed in similar attire, though one wore a blue scarf around his neck and the other a red. They stopped when I appeared.