Bad Dreams (20 page)

He drove his family out of his head, and let the music flood back. As a boy, he had been certain that he was adopted, or that his mother had taken a lover. Once, well after her marriage to his father was over, he had even asked her, but she just laughed at him. He remembered the red-cheeked embarrassment, and his subsequent determination never to let it show again. For a while, he had even resisted his name, scratching out the Jr on any documents with his full name on them, and signing himself C. Eugene Nielson. Now, that seemed cowardly. He simply had to stake his claim and fight for it, making sure by his works that everybody knew who Cameron Nielson
really
was. The brilliant young composer, not the burned-out playwright.

‘Not long now.’

‘No.’

‘Nervous?’

Alexia did not know him well, he realized. ‘Of course not. It’s too late for that.’

Performing this piece was as complicated as launching a space shuttle, involving synchronized computer systems, traditional orchestral instruments, African drums and as many technicians as trained musicians. Cameron was not merely the composer and conductor, but a theremin soloist and the director of operations. There were human elements involved, and that would give the piece an immediacy, but so much of it was pre-programmed, with tapes played and sounds conjured by infallible computers, that most of the work was already done. The performance itself was important, but it was almost of academic interest.
Telemachus
was already a thoroughly achieved work. Presenting it to the public was like unveiling a finished sculpture.

‘Then why are you whistling?’

He realized he had been, and clamped his lips. It was a habit he had had as a child. A bad habit. His nanny had scolded him over and over, but he had never been able to stop. She conjured up a bogeyman, Mr Whistle, who pulled out the voices of little boys who whistled, leaving them only with their whistles. That had been before Dr Spock. He had been terrified, but still unable to stop. He had dreamed about Mr Whistle, picturing him as a child-sized man in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, with floppy velvet bows and knickerbockers, his head a white eggshape, featureless but for a shark’s gash of a mouth. He knew that he still whistled sometimes, but the bogeyman could not scare him any more.

‘It’s an old thing with me, Alexia, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ she said, smiling. ‘I think it’s cute.’

‘Cute? That’s not an English expression.’

The girl stepped back, away from him. ‘Obviously I’m being polluted by an American.’

There were good luck cards on the dressing room table, from tutors, colleagues, a few friends. There was nothing from Dad, of course, nor Anne. He could not expect their interest. But there was a note, heart-stoppingly cheerful in its brevity, from Judi. It must have been mailed a few days ago, with a second class stamp. It had stopped him dead, for a moment.

‘Here’s another one,’ Alexia said, producing a square envelope, ‘delivered by hand. Sorry it’s a bit bent.’

He slit it open with his finger, and glanced at it.

‘Best wishes for your career,’ it read, ‘from…’ Mr Scribble?

‘Mr… I can’t make this out, Lex. What do you think?’

‘Begins with a W,’ she laughed. ‘Looks like Whistle.’

Before he could stop himself, a piercing howl was forced through his teeth.

‘Sounds like Whistle too.’

He suffered a flashback, an out-of-place reel from an old dark house horror movie, or maybe a nightmare being offered for psychoanalysis to Ingrid Bergman. The young composer wanders through a haunted mansion, trying to exorcise the spirits of his tyrannical father and castrating sisters. Molten watches tumble out of wardrobes, cellos sprout spider-legs and scuttle musically in the shadows, faceless conductors lash out with scorpion-tailed batons. All very symbolic, with theremins on the soundtrack. And also in the house is the Monster, Mr Whistle, obscene drool leaking onto his embroidered vest.

He dispelled the images, and hugged the girl, almost desperately.

‘That was a surprise,’ she said. ‘I knew you weren’t the composing machine they say you are.’

They? Who were they? Who had been talking?

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, embarrassed.

‘It’s all right. This is a big night. You have a right to be nervous. What with your father, and your sister. No one could blame you.’

Was she already making excuses? Did she know something about the performance he did not?

He let her go, and walked to the mirror. As always he wore the traditional evening clothes. He liked the reference to the classical tradition. His white tie was perfectly tied, his shirt-front stiff with starch and studded properly.

Alexia whistled this time, off-key. A wolf whistle. Cameron forced a smile.

The digital clock was counting down towards the performance. On the closed-circuit monitors, he saw the technicians taking their places at the instrument banks. The stage was dominated by a cracked mask with blank, blind eyes. Telemachus, himself. Cameron thought the face looked like his father. The instrument monitors were reading normal as the equipment started up. Alexia brought him his headset, which he slipped on like a minimalist space helmet. He was becoming part of the machinery of the piece. He checked his watch against the clock, and mentally ticked off the functions as they were performed.

7:31.

‘It’s nearly time,’ Alexia said, needlessly.

The orchestral musicians were filing out, also formally dressed. Minerva Beaton, the cellist, had resisted
Telemachus
at first, refusing to become part of the machinery of the piece, but those arguments, hateful to Cameron’s memory, were over now. She had had to be converted, but now she was a true believer. She would serve the symphony.

‘Who’s that?’

Alexia pointed to a shape moving on one of the monitors, just behind Minerva. It was shadowed, and small.

‘There shouldn’t be any children backstage.’

There was a gleam in the dark, as if reflected off a large eggshell. Then the shape was gone.

‘There’s no one there,’ Cameron said quietly. ‘No one at all.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘There was…’

‘It was just a glitch,’ he said, too forcefully. Alexia held his glance for a few moments, a furrow between her eyebrows, and dropped the subject.

7:33.

Light was flooding the monitors as the curtains rose. There was polite applause as the mask came into view, and the performers settled.

‘Ready?’

He nodded, and left the room, Alexia a few steps behind. The door was held open for him, and he threaded his way through all the backstage equipment. Alexia took her canvas chair in the wings, her bug in her ear so she could relay if necessary his almost subaudial commands to the technical people.

7:34.

Cameron Nielson Jr stepped out on the stage just as the initial applause was dying, and climbed the dais with leisurely ease, settling down behind the theremin stand. He nodded to each of the performers. There was a flicker of applause for his appearance, but it faded away on schedule, leaving him three seconds of silence by the clock on the theremin before the first tonalities sounded out.

Then at precisely 7:35, the nightmare began.

I
n his nightmare, the device with the beeping alarms misfired because, by 7:59, the audience was laughing too loud for their watches to be heard. The tittering started during the first five minutes of the piece, and grew.

The music was his, and emerged as written from the apparatus he had designed for it, but it was changed. The effects he had carefully measured were misjudged, comical, obscene, absurd. Minerva Beaton could hardly keep her long face straight as she sawed her cello. The eerie, longing notes of his Telemachus theme sounded like whoopee cushions.

Beyond the lights, Cameron got the impression of audience members thronging the exits, trying to get out of the concert hall. He tried to keep going, his hands wringing sounds from the theremin. Painful feedback boomed from the amplifiers, and he realized he was whistling again, the sound dreadfully enlarged by his headset and hurled out into the auditorium.

Telemachus looked down blindly on his humiliation. And the childsized intruder shifted in the shadows around the stage, mocking him from the darkness.

He started coughing, and blood spatted across the note-dotted creaminess of his score.

Somehow, he made it through to the end.

There was no crescendo of applause, just a lone volley of claps. Alexia was trying to make him feel better.

He wrenched off his headset and fled the spotlit stage, pushing past the girl, hiding his red face in the dark.

When the last resonances of the symphony had died, all that was left was an electronic whine. It sounded like an idiot child whistling. Somebody turned it off.

The film sped up as Cameron ran out of the building, still in his tailcoat, and tried to lose himself in the streets around the Barbican. His shiny shoes pounded the sidewalks, and neon signs flashed the names of increasingly seedy nightclubs at him. It started raining in sparkling sheets, the technicians pouring water down from above his eyeline onto him. Rich, orchestral music, a kitschy concerto in the style of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, thundered on the soundtrack, vibrating his teeth.

Mr Whistle was still dogging him, not pursuing but just keeping up. The bogeyman did not need to do anything more to him. His fate was complete. In the space of a few cuts, he had a thick growth of stubble, his shirtfront was soiled with liquor, his hair was wild and his tails were tattered. He had a bottle of cheap booze in his hand, and was swigging from it.

He was in a flophouse, his coatsleeve wrinkled up above his left elbow and his shirtsleeve ripped away. The vein pulsed in his arm as the makeshift tourniquet drew tighter. Judi, her face white with Gothic make-up, handed him the glowing syringe. As the needle slid into him, he whistled sharply, hurting his ears. Rain washed Judi’s face away.

Then, the sun came up and the nightmare shifted gears. He was in a gutter, cold clean water running around him, washing the grime and sleep from his face. A figure loomed over him, haloed by the sunlight, and picked him up, her arms slipping tight around his chest. Her blonde hair shone gold.

‘Lex?’

She did not try to soothe him, but she took him away from Skid Row, pulling him into a kingsize bed with freshly-laundered sheets. He was naked and clean again, his pains salved. The music came back. Things were not as bad as they seemed…

In the long run, they were much worse.

The night before the wedding, Cameron Nielson Jr burned his manuscripts, one by one. Alexia stood by and watched him do it. Acting as his agent, she had got him a commission to score a 15-minute TV documentary about autumn leaves. He thought he could do it. A sub-Elgar theme was whistling in his mind. In the burning pages, he imagined his electro-acoustic instruments sparking and self-destructing like a spaceship set at the end of a low-budget science fiction film. He reached for a more conventional musical palette, strings and woodwinds.

They were married in church, in the West Country village where Alexia had grown up. Her parents were delighted. Anne was there, representing his family, and his Dad, his spirits lifted by his recent turn for the better, sent a cable of congratulations to the groom and a mash note to the bride. Turning from the altar, Cameron could not see Mr Whistle among the congregation, but did think he glimpsed Judi, loitering embarrassed near the back.

After the ceremony, Alexia kissed him and loved him. He was enfolded by warm feelings. There was gentle applause, and flashbulbs popped. The orchestra played only harmonic music. Everything was easy.

After the honeymoon, Alexia was pregnant and he was progressing well on the film score. His work proved acceptable, and further commissions resulted. No one knew his name, but people hummed his tunes. He wrote the theme music for a British television serial adapted from a Barbara Cartland novel. He wrote a thirty-second piece for a shampoo commercial that enabled him to buy a house in the country. With his wife and Cameron Nielson III, he had a comfortable life, cocooned by money and anonymity. He never thought of performing again, or of serious music. If there was something lacking in his life, he did not know what it was.

Meanwhile, thanks to a series of startling medical breakthroughs, his father was recovering from his debilitating strokes. He almost literally returned from the dead, and his personal memoir,
Facing Death
, was the strongest thing he had written since the ’50s. A seventy-five-page essay, it climbed the
New York Tunes
bestseller list and was
the
talking-point book of the year. Following that, there was a revival of interest in Cameron Nielson Sr, and most of his theatrical works were staged in New York and London.
The Rat Jacket
broke box office records on Broadway with Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino,
The Crunch
was directed by Peter Hall on Shaftesbury Avenue, and
On the Graveyard Shift at Sam’s Bar-B-Q and Grill
was remade by Steven Spielberg with Marlon Brando as Sam, Robert DeNiro in Brando’s old role and Meryl Streep as Angela. Cameron’s father began writing plays again, and managements competed for the rights to stage each new mature masterpiece. He was pleased for his Dad, and things were better between them. When Martin Scorsese filmed
The Rat Jacket
, Cameron Nielson Sr tried to get his son the job of writing the score, but the deal fell through. Cameron did not mind about that, even when Harvey Broadribb, who had been at Juilliard with him, won the Academy Award for his work on the movie.

Anne sent him a signed copy of her first book,
Remembering Judi.
A non-fiction account of their sister’s last years,
Remembering Judi
won the Pulitzer Prize and was a hardback bestseller. It was turned into the highest-rated Made-for-TV movie ever produced, catapulting Nina Kenyon, the young unknown cast in the lead, to multiple awards and international stardom. After that, Anne became a novelist, won the Booker and the Whitbread in the same year with different books, and was given her own television show. He wrote the opening and closing signature tunes for the programme, but they were dumped after the first season and replaced with ‘something a little more distinctive’. He wrote more shampoo, hairspray, deodorant and sliced bread commercials.