Medusa Frequency (16 page)

‘That
grapefruit! Oh my God, I’ve eaten it.’

‘You artists. Look, Herman, we’ve got to have a little think session soon to get this Eurydice-Orpheus thing off the ground. How’s next Wednesday for you? Can I pencil you in?’

‘GNGG, NDZNX, MMPH,’ I said as what felt like an iron fist pushed heavily against my sternum.

‘Friday any better?’

‘Can I phone you back later?’ I was already sitting so I thought I’d lie down. There were too many papers, books, cassettes and floppy disks on the couch so I tried the floor and was amazed at the amount of dust, fuzz, and crumbs. There was a coffee about three weeks old under the couch, my favourite mug, I’d wondered where it had got to.

‘Try to make it soon,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s busy and I’m stuck with organizing the whole thing.’

My left arm was very leaden; the iron fist had gone but now I seemed to have swallowed an iron box which was stuck in my chest. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll make it soon.’

The local surgery was close by so I stood up, walked there very slowly, told the receptionist about the leaden arm and the iron box, and took my place in the waiting-room with five people being patient and seven National-Health-looking fish
being aerated by a stream of bubbles. That’s how it is, I thought: a little stream of bubbles till the pump shuts down. I picked up a two-year-old copy of
Harpers & Queen
which fell open to a photo of Gösta Kraken and the headline FROM THE DEEPS: KRAKEN RISING. The corners of the iron box sharpened up a little.

Dr Carnevale looked into the room and called my name and I followed him into his office. ‘Pains in your chest and left arm?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘At first it was like an iron fist but now it’s as if I’ve swallowed an iron box. And my left arm feels leaden.’

‘Let’s have your shirt off.’ He unlimbered his stethoscope. ‘I guess by now you’ve finished the novel you were working on when I saw you last year. Breathe in.’

‘No, actually I haven’t.’

‘Breathe in again. Very stressful occupation, novel-writing, so I’m told. Do you happen to know Rupert Gripwell? Lean forward.’

‘No. Is he a novelist?’

‘Undertaker. He says they don’t last as long as journalists.’

‘Undertakers?’

‘Novelists.’

‘Why is that?’ I said, as he took my blood pressure.

‘Says they drink alone too much. People drink faster when they drink alone. You drink alone much?’

‘Well, I can’t be bothered to go looking for people every time I want a drink, can I.’

‘I suppose not. I spend a lot of time in the garden. You’ve got to have some way of unwinding or everything gets to be too much. How’s the pain?’

‘It’s gone.’

‘I don’t think it’s anything more than angina but I’ll book you into St Stephen’s so they can have a look at you.’

Watchful in her space of light the night sister sits at the edge of the dark ward. At three o’clock in the morning the moments patter like rain on the roof of night; the silence is a road to anywhere.

At the far end of the ward someone cries out, ‘Luise!’ There is a rush of nurses, a trundling of apparatus; the fluorescent lights flicker on; the curtains around the bed are drawn; the curtains are opened, a man is wheeled away.

The name he cried out must have been
Louisa,
not Luise. Yes, it must have been Louisa. The bed remains empty, the man hasn’t come back. What did he look like? I hadn’t noticed the occupant of that bed earlier, he must have been in the day room or asleep or hidden behind a newspaper.

He never did come back. Later they cleared away his things, stripped the bed, and put on fresh sheets and pillowcases. I asked the night sister whether he’d had a snake-and-dagger tattoo and the name
Louisa
on his left arm.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Did you know him?’

‘We chatted sometimes but I never knew his name. Who was he?’

‘Gombert Yawncher.’

‘Do you know what he did for a living?’

‘He was an actor but I don’t think he’d been in work for quite a long time. He told me he used to do the voice for the old Pluto Drain Magic ads on TV, the cartoon ones where Pluto hurled himself down the drain like Superman.’

I remembered those ads, they were done before the account came to Slithe & Tovey. Back then their slogan was ‘PLUTO GETS THE DIRT UNDER THE DIRT’.

‘His heart gave out, didn’t it?’ I said.

‘Yes, it was a coronary thrombosis. He said to me this morning, “It’ll be tonight,” and I said, “What’ll be tonight?” and he just looked at me and said, “I can’t remember my lines any more.’”

‘It could happen to anybody,’ I said.

I went to the day room and stood there in the dark at the sliding glass door that opened on to the balcony. From where I was on the fourth floor I could see, beyond the roofs and dormers of the old part of the hospital, the upper parts of houses on the far side of the Fulham Road. The road itself was not to be seen.

Looking towards the unseen road in that three o’clock in the morning of the November night I imagined Orpheus running, running, saying to the night, ‘I have no name but the one you give me, no face but the one you see.’ Orpheus as athlete, his limbs and motion graceful in the darkness; Orpheus seen from a distance on the dim Fulham Road under cold November lamps, on the dim Thracian road wending into darkness, the dim white of the road that runs behind the eyes to otherwhere. Orpheus running, running night into day, day into the long road, night into the long world’s music. I’d never thought of his body before, only the head.

It’s still three o’clock in the morning, the night sister still in her space of light at the edge of the dark ward, at the edge of underworld. Her face is in shadow, her white cap flickers, becomes a writhing and a hissing silence. She looks up, her shadowy gaze is on me. The silence crackles with its brilliance, her mouth is moving as it moved above the pinky dawn water between the beach and the Island Tamaraca.

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

‘We haven’t had a ten o’clock urine specimen from you,’ she said.

Melanie came to visit me with a bunch of grapes. ‘What brought on the angina?’ she said.

‘The head of Orpheus turned up as half a grapefruit and in an absent-minded moment I ate it.’

‘Perhaps that was your way of recognizing that you don’t need it any more.’

‘It’s the other way round: it doesn’t need me any more now that we’ve finished the story.’

‘Well, there you are then; you took it on yourself to finish the story and now you’ve done it and it’s off you. That’s more of a reason for
not
getting angina.’

‘Yes, but it’ll take some getting used to.’

‘Do you remember in
The Tempest,’
she said, ‘Prospero says, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘That’s what I think you’ve been doing; and now that you’ve acknowledged it you can move on to something else.’

‘This thing of darkness is where my writing comes from.’

‘You mean your comics?’

‘No, I don’t mean my comics.
Slope of Hell
and
World of Shadows
weren’t comics, were they.’

‘No, but they were quite a few years back, weren’t they. What’s this thing of darkness done for you lately?’

‘Today is William Blake’s birthday,’ I said.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Nothing. He just came into my mind, that’s all. He said that what men and women require of each other are the lineaments of Gratified Desire.’

‘There’s more than one kind of desire that wants gratification,’ she said.

‘What kind were you thinking of?’

‘The desire to stop mucking about and get on with it. Have you started work on the film?’

‘No.’

‘Are you going to?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Right. I can see what’s coming: after a while you’ll leave the phone off the hook and stop answering the door and keep the blinds pulled down and newspapers and letters and bills will pile up in the hall and finally one day they’ll break down the door and there won’t be anybody there but the thing of darkness.’

‘Maybe that’s who’s been there all along. Gom Yawncher’s gone.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He was here in this ward and now he’s gone, handed in his dinner pail, picked up his cards, hopped the twig, slung his hook, pissed off out of this world.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and began to cry.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to burden you with it.’

‘Yes, you did.’

After a while the grapes were still there but she was gone. Pale wintry Sunday-afternoon sunlight on the grapes.

The hospital, having brought me a cup of tea at six o’clock every morning, electrocardiogrammed me, X-rayed me, tested my blood and urine, confirmed Dr Carnevale’s diagnosis of angina, advised me to avoid fats and cholesterol and take moderate exercise and lose weight, gave me a little bottle of glyceryl trinitrate tablets, and put me out on the street again. And there I was as before with Hilary Forthryte waiting for my call and the current account dead on the floor.

Quickly I went to the word machine, booted the system master and the word-processing programme, and typed:

Hello, hello. Is anybody there?

WHOM DID YOU WANT?

Well, I thought maybe Medusa.

THIS IS MEDUSA SPEAKING.

Do you remember what you said to me?

WE HAVEN’T HAD A TEN O’CLOCK URINE SPECIMEN FROM YOU.

No, before that, when you spoke above the pinky dawn water between the beach and the Island Tamaraca.

THAT WAS A MYSTERY.

I know, but couldn’t we talk about it a little?

NOT NOW.

OK, I said. Sorry I bothered you. I blew some of the dustballs off my desk, emptied the wastebasket, put on a Greek tape, shook some dandruff over the keyboard, stared at the screen, and began to fall asleep. ‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s not the way to do it.’ I got a videotape from the shelf, it was a BBC documentary about a wedding in Calabria and I was remembering the father of the bride. I ran it fast forward to the part I wanted: there it was just before the end, there was the father, a thin man in shirtsleeves. Setting up his daughter in married life had cost twenty thousand pounds, each of the two families bearing half the cost. This man had used up his savings and borrowed from the bank and he had two more unmarried daughters.

There is music and suddenly he is dancing. His feet move
him in a circle and with his arms and his head he abandons himself; his arms make rhythmic motions of swimming or scattering, his face is rapt, urgent with the marriage of his daughter as his dance carries him around his circle.

I rang up Hilary Forthryte and told her I couldn’t do the film, I had too many other things to wind up and I really wasn’t going to be free for a new project for a long time. Then I sat down at the keyboard again and looked intently at the screen.

ARE YOU THERE? said the Kraken.

Here I am. What now?

PAY ATTENTION,

I am paying attention.

FAR, FAR DOWN IN THE DEEPEST DEPTHS OF THE HURGO MURMUS LIVES NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH.

Yes, that sounds good. Tell me about Nnvsnu the Tsrungh.

NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH, ALONE IN THE BLACKNESS, THINKING, THINKING IN THE BLACKNESS OF THE ULTIMATE DEEP.

Carry on, I’m with you.

THAT’S AS FAR AS I’VE GOT.

You’re making up a story.

I THOUGHT I’D GIVE IT A TRY.

This Nnvsnu the Tsrungh - there’s a lot of you in him, isn’t there?

WELL, YOU KNOW HOW IT IS - THIS IS MY FIRST TIME.

That’s all right, you’re doing very well. There’s nothing wrong with using yourself but you have to dress it up a bit, put in a little sex and violence, a little excitement. Not too much thinking in the ultimate deep.

NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH IS THINKING VIOLENTLY.

Of what?

OF GOING AFTER WHOEVER PULLED THE GREAT SNYUKH.

What was the Great Snyukh?

IT WAS THE BLUG OF NEXO VOLLMA.

The Blug of Nexo Vollma. I like that. I should think it was about forty feet high with a thousand tentacles and it left a slimy track.

NEXO VOLLMA IS THE BLUGHOLE OF THE UNIVERSE.

You mean plughole. Nexo Vollma is the plughole of the universe and the Great Snyukh was the plug. In that case the Great Snyukh must have been a good deal bigger than I thought.

IT WAS A WHOLE LOT BIGGER THAN ANY PLUG YOU CAN THINK OF, AND IT GOT PULLED. BUT IN THAT UNIMAGINABLE MOMENT BEFORE THE BIG WHOOSH, SNYUKH! INTO THE BLUGHOLE WENT NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH.

He saved us all.

HE DID WHAT HAD TO BE DONE BUT NOW HE THINKS VIOLENT THOUGHTS. FROM THE BLUGHOLE IN THE BLACKNESS OF THE HURGO MURMUS, FROM THE UTTERMOST DEPTHS OF THE ULTIMATE DEEP HE SENDS HIS MIND AFTER THOSE WHO PULLED THE GREAT SNYUKH, THE BLUG OF NEXO VOLLMA.

Who did it? Who pulled the Great Snyukh?

THE DEEPLY BAD ONES DID IT.

Why did they do it?

THEY WANTED TO HEAR THE BIG WHOOSH.

The bastards.

DEEPLY BAD.

But Nnvsnu the Tsrungh is sending his mind after them. How does he send his mind?

HE SENDS HIS MIND AS MEGAHERTZ, AS QUESTING SIGNAL FROM THE DISTANT DEEPS. AS THE SEEKER FROM NEXO VOLLMA IT SWEEPS ALL FREQUENCIES BUT HE CAN’T FIND THE DEEPLY BAD ONES.

He puts out a call on the emergency band, I said: DEEP MIND IN PURSUIT OF DEEPLY BAD ONES, REQUIRES ASSISTANCE.

BACK COMES THE MESSAGE, said the Kraken: ROGER,DEEP MIND, WILL ASSIST.

IDENTIFY YOURSELF, says Nnvsnu, I said.

I AM NABILCA, THING OF DARKNESS, IS THE RESPONSE, said the Kraken.

Nabilca, Thing of Darkness, I said, is really Wendy Nelson, a marine biologist. She was scuba diving when she lost consciousness and woke up in the secret undersea headquarters of the Nexo Foundation.

SWORN ENEMIES OF THE DEEPLY BAD ONES. THE NEXO FOUNDATION FIGHTS THE FORCES OF EVIL AND HAS DEDICATED ITSELF TO AVENGING THE EMBLUGMENT OF NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH. THEY IMPLANTED A RADIO IN WENDY NELSON’S HEAD SO SHE CAN COMMUNICATE WITH NNVSNU THE TSRUNGH.