Conditie van muzak Read online

  Luckily Sebastian Auchinek’s sense of humour functioned only in direct relation to his own sense of despair. He puzzled over the music. He removed his little hat. He sucked at his huge lower lip. He rubbed his monstrous nose. “But will it catch on with the general public? That’s what we have to think about—Jerry? You don’t mind?”

  “No, no. ’Course not.” Jerry looked anxiously into the liquid eyes of the handsome promoter. “You’ve heard of the Pink Floyd, haven’t you? They’re getting quite popular.”

  “Oh, yes. I don’t doubt it. But you know what public taste’s like. Twinkle one week, Mojos the next. Whether this sort of music’s got any future—I honestly don’t know. I can see you’re serious. But are you commercial? I’m sorry.” Sebastian Auchinek held up a shapely hand as if to ward off a light blow. He put his cap down. “It’s what we have to think about, if we’re going to back you. It still boils down to investments. You’re a talented boy, I don’t doubt it. I mean, what we have to say to ourselves is—How do we promote this kind of music? All right, we can get a minor record company to do one LP—but it’s the singles market that’s important. I can’t see any of this as single material, quite frankly. Miss Persson led me to understand that you were more of an R&B group. Like Graham Bond and Brian Auger. We’re considering them at the moment.”

  “We don’t do that sort of thing any more,” said Jerry with a certain disdain. “Una said you were into progressive stuff.”

  “We are. We are. But we have to see it. In context. We have to be able to feel we can do something positive for a group. It wouldn’t be fair to you, would it, if we just took you on and then did nothing?”

  “Yes, I can see that…”

  “Maybe if I came along and heard you at your next gig?”

  “That’s why I’m talking to you. We can’t get any gigs.”

  “Not even locally?”

  “There aren’t any local venues, are there?”

  “It’s difficult, isn’t it?”

  Jerry turned the recorder off. The hissing had begun to irritate him. “Some people think we’re ahead of our time.”

  “Could be. When’s your next rehearsal?” Auchinek was eager to prove to Jerry that his mind was still open.

  “I’m not sure. We have trouble finding places.”

  “Well, look, get in touch with me when you know what your plans are. Maybe I can fix up a rehearsal room for you.”

  “It’d be something, anyway. Thanks.”

  Sebastian Auchinek removed a leather-bound notebook from his inside pocket. He clicked a ballpoint with his thumb. “What’s the name of the group?”

  “The Deep Fix.”

  “You might have to change that a bit. It’s not really—you know… The BBC’s still a power in the land, eh? They don’t like drugs. Have you thought of any other names?”

  “Yes,” said Jerry. “The Cocksuckers.”

  Sebastian Auchinek managed a small smile. “Well, we’ll talk about that when the time comes.” He tore a page from the book. “Here’s my office number. Keep in touch. Leave a message with my secretary if I’m not there. Don’t think I’m being negative. And remember—I’m not the only promoter on the beach.”

  He looked around for his corduroy Dylan cap. He had put it on top of his cocoa.

  MRS C. AND COLONEL P.

  “Of course,” said Colonel Pyat as he poured Mrs Cornelius another gin, “we lost everything in the war, including our titles. My uncle had a very big estate not far from Lublin. And his father, you know, had an even bigger one in the Ukraine. He was shot by Makhno who in turn was shot by Trotsky who was killed by Stalin.” He shrugged and his smile was crooked. “So it goes.” He fell back into Mrs C.’s best armchair, the white plastic one, his eyes fixing on the silent television screen. The warped monochrome picture displayed a nurse, a nun and a black man in a hospital bed.

  “We’re surpposed ter be related ter ’im,” said Mrs Cornelius, brushing crisp crumbs from her pink cotton lap. “Shouldn’t eat crisps. They make yer sweat.”

  “My uncle?”

  “Nar! The ovver one. Trotsky, innit? Though I ’eard ’e corled ’isself somefink else. Brahn or somefink.”

  “Bronstein. His real name was Bronstein. Jewish, you see.”

  “Nar! It woz nuffink forin’.” She raised her glass. “Darn the ’atch then.”

  Bemused, the drunken colonel imitated her action.

  “It’s more comfy ’ere, innit, than ther pub?” said Mrs Cornelius. She could see that Colonel P. was a gent (even though currently in need of a spot of luck) by the cut of his greasy tweed jacket, his shiny flannels; but his breeding was revealed by his bearing rather than his clothes, she supposed. And he hadn’t hesitated to fork out for a half-bottle of gin when she’d taken a fancy to him and suggested coming back here. Tonight wasn’t the first time she had seen him in The Blenheim, of course, but it was the first time she’d had a chance to have a decent chat.

  “Definitely Brahn,” she said. Her expression softened. She moved closer to Colonel Pyat. He looked at her through wary, red-rimmed eyes. He stroked the stubble of his chin. “Is Pyat yore real name, then?”

  “Well, it’s my official name, you know. In the last war…”

  From the next room, Jerry’s, there suddenly came the ear-splitting squawk of a feeding-back amplifier. She was shocked. It hadn’t occurred to her to check if her son was in. Automatically she lifted her great red head and raised her voice:

  “I thort yer said you woz garn art ternight! Turn that fuckin’ thing darn!”

  “Pardon?” thickly said Colonel Pyat.

  “Not you, Kernewl. Sorry. Turn it darn, carn’t ya!”

  “I meant to go back after the war.” Colonel Pyat raised a sorrowful glass to his lips. “I was in intelligence, you know. Liaison officer for your chaps. Stuck here when the war ended. But, naturally…” He shrugged.

  She was vaguely sympathetic. “The Russians, eh?”

  “Worse than the Germans.”

  “But I thort you said you woz Russian.”

  “No, no—I was with the Russians.”

  “Oh really? Where woz that?”

  A high-pitched shriek filled the flat.

  “My God!” Colonel P. covered his ears. His eyes hunted about the room. He stared through the window as if he expected the sky to fill with planes.

  “’Ang on a sec.” Carefully Mrs Cornelius got to her broad feet. “Ooo.” She coughed. “It’s me kid,” she said.

  Before she could reach Jerry’s door the sound from behind it had changed again, rising and falling, so that now it resembled the distant wailing of some demented creature of the sea.

  EARLY REPORTS

  Scotland Yard will keep up its drive to recruit black policemen despite the failure of the campaign so far. Revealing this yesterday Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Robert Mark said: “We won’t take No for an answer. We shall keep at it.”

  Daily Mirror, 31 March, 1976

  The chances of our moderate climate changing soon to a prolonged cold spell, but not glacial, are high, Dr E.J. Mason, FRS, director general of the Meteorological Office, suggested last night. With the caution of a man carrying ultimate responsibility for the precision of the official day-to-day weather forecasting methods, he added: “There is no real basis for the alarmist predictions of an imminent ice age, which have largely been based on extrapolation of the 30-year trend of falling temperatures in the northern hemisphere between 1940 and 1965. Apart from the strong dubiety of making a forecast from such a short-period trend, there is now evidence that the trend has been arrested.”

  Guardian, 18 March, 1976

  The annual meeting of the National Front voted in London at the weekend to expel all members who are of mixed race, non-European ancestry or coloured. About 20-25 members are affected. But yesterday, Mr Eugene Pierce, an Anglo-Indian accountant who has been a member of the National Front and walked out of the meeting in protest at the vote said: “I was imme
diately assured by members of the directorate that the vote was only a recommendation…” Mr Pierce, 65, whose British grandfather married an Indian, earlier told the meeting: “I was a member of the British army, along with thousands of other Anglo-Indians.” But the meeting became increasingly noisy and his words were drowned in the uproar. “We have to be 100 per cent racialist in the National Front,” said the mover of the resolution, Mr Bert Wilton, of Southwark, London, to loud applause: “If people who are half or quarter coloured are allowed in, it will kill everything.”

  Guardian, 6 January, 1975

  Police frogmen were hunting for more bodies yesterday after the cut-up remains of two teenage sisters were found in a lake in the Catskill Mountains, 110 miles north of New York. The self-styled “Bishop of Brooklyn”, 51-year-old Vernon Legrand, leader of a bizarre religious cult, has been charged with the murders.

  Daily Mirror, 15 March, 1976

  Two members of a British-based religious sect are believed to have been the victims of ritual killings. Police think that they were hypnotised—and then vital organs in their bodies were crushed. The probe began after the body of artist Michel Piersotte was found at the foot of the 250 ft Citadel in Namur, Belgium. Michel was a member of the Children of God sect, whose international headquarters is at Bromley in Kent. A post-mortem revealed that his liver and kidneys were crushed, as though in a vice. Police decided to reopen an inquiry into the death of another member of the sect. This was 20-year-old Jean Maurice, who was found dead at the foot of the Citadel in Dinant, Belgium, in December. Again police established that vital organs had been crushed. The men were close friends. They were believed to be trying to break away from the sect. A Belgian police spokesman said last night: “We’re studying a Scotland Yard report about the sect”. The report says that hypnotism is used at indoctrination ceremonies. Youngsters are encouraged to break off all ties with their parents.

  Daily Mirror, 15 March, 1976

  TUNING UP (2)

  Jerry hauled on the reins to bring the lead dog to a sudden stop. At once the other dogs lay down in their traces, the breath from their pink panting mouths melting the surrounding snow. The small red sun overhead was the only bright colour in the dark grey sky, the only light, yet it was possible to see for miles over the twilight landscape to a range of mountains in the north-west, to the black line of the horizon elsewhere. It had taken him months to reach Lapland, travelling mostly by sled. He hauled a sack from the wicker rack behind him and began to walk along the line, throwing the dogs chunks of skinned half-frozen wolf. As he reached the lead dog and produced a larger than average lump of meat from the sack he heard in the distance a bass drone, coming from the direction of the mountains. He recognised the motor of an old Westland Whirlwind and automatically looked for cover. There was none, save the sled. He pulled his bow and his quiver of arrows from beneath the furs and bric-à-brac on the main section and prepared for the worst. Things were waking up a little sooner than he had anticipated. He supposed that, in spite of the immediate problems, he was relieved. At least the birth (or re-birth, depending how you look at it) had been relatively easy this time.

  The big chopper appeared in the sky, black and glimmering, and the dogs looked up from their flesh, eyes bright, ears pointing. One of them snarled; Jerry was sure that they had not responded to any specific stimulus. They were a strange breed of husky, with red eyes, white coats and red-tipped ears.

  Snow began to fly. Clouds seemed to form just above the surface. The helicopter came down heavily, still only partially powered, bumping and groaning. The motor was switched off. In the stillness the rotors clacked slowly to a halt. Jerry saw muffled figures moving inside the breath-clouded canopy. He fitted an arrow to his bow as a door in the Whirlwind’s body opened and a woman descended. She had a large 7.63mm Borchardt automatic pistol in her gloved right hand. Her face was hidden in the hood of an ankle-length pandaskin parka. Her breath coiled from shrouded lips as she peered towards the sled. She walked with a kind of Sarah Bernhardt limp.

  “Mr Cornelius?” The voice was sharp, demanding.

  “Which Mr Cornelius would that be?” Jerry recognised her at once.

  Miss Brunner was her usual petulant self. “Oh, don’t be silly. What have you got in your hands?”

  “A bow and arrow.”

  She buried her pistol in her clothing. “I understand. Put it away.” She held up her heavy arms.

  “Oh sure.” Jerry indicated the swivelling gun-turret in the chopper.

  She shrugged. “Merely a gesture. You know there’s little chance of a gun working in the current moral climate. What are you doing in Lapland? Looking for someone?”

  “Just trying to recapture the past.”

  “That’s not like the old Jerry.”

  “I can’t say the same for you. But then I always admired your consistency.”

  “There’s a bit more mass than there used to be.” It was obvious that she had taken his remark for a compliment. “You look like a Mountie. Well, what do you want from us?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t even know you were out, did I?”

  She became suspicious. “Aha.” The snow crunched. She moved tentatively forward. The dog snarled again, pricking its peculiar ears. She stopped, glaring at it in considerable dislike. “You won’t be able to get to the laboratory. Not for a while. It’ll be frozen up. Is that where you were thinking of going?”

  “I haven’t been thinking much at all. You don’t in these conditions. I suppose I was making for the lab. Instinct.”

  “Instinct!” She cackled. “You!”

  She had hurt his feelings. “It’s the only explanation I can think of. You were heading south. Does that mean you’ve been to the lab already?”

  “That’s how I know about it. We came via Russia. And before that Canada. We’ve been flying for ages.”

  Luxuriously Jerry inspected the vast sky, half expecting to see a formation of geese, but it was still empty. “It’s probably the spring,” he said.

  INTRODUCTION

  On New Year’s Night, 1091, a certain priest called Gauchelin was terrified by a procession of women, warriors, monks, etc. who swept past him, dressed in black, half-hidden by flames, and wailing aloud. Astonished and dismayed, the priest said to himself: “Doubtless this is the Cornelius family. I have heard that it has formerly been seen by many people, but I have mocked at such tales. Now, indeed, I myself have truly seen the ghosts of the dead.” Gauchelin was, indeed, neither the first nor the last to see the notorious “maisnie Cornelius” (Harlequin-troupe), which appeared so frequently both in mediaeval France and England. For Harlequin (Harlechin, Hellequin, etc., are all variations of the same word) appears first in history or legend as an aerial spectre or demon, leading that ghostly nocturnal cortège known as the Wild Hunt.

  —Enid Welsford,

  The Fool: His Social and Literary History,

  London, 1934

  PRINCE PHILIP OPENS DREAM FLATS IN W.10

  Trains roared behind a VIP canopy, the sun popped out suddenly and children whistled from the rooftops when the Duke of Edinburgh arrived in dreary North Kensington on Tuesday afternoon [to open] Pepler House, the biggest project to date by the Kensington Housing Trust.

  Kensington Post, 12 November, 1965

  1. THE DOG-FIGHT MISSILE DESIGNED TO DOMINATE ITS DECADE

  Jerry struggled into his pink tweed Cardin suit. The waistcoat was a little tight and he had to undo the shoulder holster by a notch but otherwise he looked as sharp as he had always done. He pulled his needler free and checked that the magazine was full, each hollow dart containing a neat 50ccs of Librium: a perfect hunting charge. He smoothed his long, fine hair about his face as he stood in front of the looking-glass, well satisfied, in the circumstances, with his appearance. He checked his watches. Both waited at zero. He crossed his wrists and started the watches. The hands moved at a steady rate.

  “Pretty,” he said. He smirked. He faced the room, squin
ting in the glare from the white, plastic furniture, the neon, the ivory walls. He took mirror shades from his top pocket and slid them over his eyes. He sighed. “Nifty.”

  He sailed out into the currents of the day, high on painkillers and a sense of his own immortality, swinging his hips to the sound of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ from the receiver built into his unfashionably rigid collar, down Holland Park Avenue beneath the tall spring trees, stepping wide on two-inch cuban heels. The bravest dandy of them all: he had a smile for everybody. Under his breath he sang along with John, George, Paul and Ringo and turned right into Campden Hill Square where his great big Duesenberg, chocolate and cream, waited for him alone. He unlocked the door, slid behind the wheel, started the perfect supercharged straight-8, let go the brakes and was on the move. A masterpiece to equal any one of its European contemporaries, the 1930 SJ Torpedo Phaeton was the most elegant car America had ever produced. Euphorically, both mind and body in ecstatic unity, he cruised between the labouring corpse-wagons which parted so that he could pass through them, as if by divine command. He offered a friendly wave to all he overtook, then he reached the top of Ladbroke Grove’s hill and began the descent into the mythical netherworld of Notting Dale. The road was suddenly almost deserted; sounds were muffled; the sun was hotter.

  Turning right into Westbourne Park Road he stopped outside the main gate of the Convent of the Poor Clares. He did not bother to lock the car. He knew he could rely on its aura to protect it.

  Sister Eugenia, the Mother Superior, herself greeted Jerry as she opened the grilled steel door which led directly into the shadowy Visitors’ Chapel with its hideous green, yellow and pink Crucifixion above the green marble tiles, the brass, the tasselled purple of the altar. She spoke in carefully modulated tones like a consultant psychiatrist and when she smiled it was sweet and good. Jerry admired her smile in particular, as he admired professionalism wherever he found it.