A Read online




  For Fay

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  a: voice of the crane

  b: the pilot

  c: the sky about to rain

  d: boiling point

  e: something in the attic

  f: katharine d’aragó

  g: having a dream, i will go up in the sky

  h: another lunatic plan

  i: would that i had seven lives to give for my country!

  j: belle, or the burning

  k: steve

  l: o darlin’

  m: open sesame

  n: version

  o: sheep in heaven

  p: long, thin strips of woodland

  q: what makes a gander meander in search of a goose?

  r: ejection

  s: faith, or fated to die

  t: a man in a maestro

  u: topiary

  v: you damned

  w: under the moon

  x: the moth acts first…

  y: listen to the voice of doom. open your eyes, blind fools!

  z: …shining.

  Also by Tom Bullough

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Tom Bullough and Sort Of Books gratefully acknowledge the following copyright permissions:

  I’LL BE SEEING YOU Words by Irving Kahal © 1938 Williamson Music Inc – Redwood Music Ltd (Carlin), London NW1 8BD, for the Commonwealth of Nations, Eire, South Africa and Spain – All Rights Reserved – Used by Permission.

  THE THRILL IS GONE by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson © 1931 De Sylva, Brown & Henderson Inc – Redwood Music Ltd (Carlin), London NW1 8BD, for the Commonwealth of Nations, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Africa and Spain – All Rights Reserved – Used by Permission.

  STREET OF DREAMS Words and Music by Sam Lewis and Victor Young © 1932 EMI Catalogue Partnership, EMI Feist Catalog Inc and EMI United Partnership Ltd, USA. Worldwide print rights controlled by Warner Bros. Publications Inc/IMP Ltd. Reproduced by kind permission of International Music Publications Ltd – All Rights Reserved.

  AMBULANCE BLUES by Neil Young © Neil Young – Wixen Music Publishing – Warner Bros Publications – All Rights Reserved – Used by Permission.

  Sugasugashii

  Refreshing

  Bofuu no ato ni

  After the gale

  Tsuki kyo shi

  The moon rises, shining

  Admiral Takijiro Onishi, 15 August 1945

  a haiku written for his suicide

  a: voice of the crane

  The music was funky, with a hip-hop beat and a vocoder over the top of it. The two vehicles were flying round the M25, the heat building banks of distortion behind and in front of them, blotting out everything beyond. With wooded verges to either side, their piece of space might almost have been all there was; except, of course, for the endless blue of the sky – a rare buzzard floating on the updraughts, twitching its wings with lazy, occasional movements.

  Pete’s ambulance had hung beside Tim’s car for miles, or Tim’s car had hung beside it. It was the nine of them being together at last – that and the sense of occasion – it seemed to require a gesture. So they occupied parallel lanes, and there was nothing anyone else could do about it.

  Pete had his shirt off, the sun on his stomach. He had wraparound sunglasses and his dreadlocks loose down his back, one hand on the steering-wheel, the other drumming on the panelling beneath the window. Fay and Katy were lounging beside him. Katy was laughing, moving her hands in sinuous patterns. Wedged against the window, Fay was sunning herself, catlike. From time to time Nick stuck his head in from the back, releasing bong-sized clouds of smoke or sticking up a finger in the others’ direction. Sunlight traced the dents across the blank white Transit walls.

  In the Nissan, a new tune was evolving on the stereo. This one was faster, a 303 mounting in the background. When the beat kicked in Paolo shouted from the back seat, gesturing for more volume, his bulbous Afro shaking on the offbeat. He had REGGAE in big square letters across his chest and a heap of seafood in Tupperware boxes on his lap: mussels and prawns, salmon, tuna and cuttlefish.

  > Kingston said a sign and Tim led the way down the banked arc of a sliproad, leaning into the curve like a biker. He came vertical as the road went straight, eyes glued to the car in front, changing mechanically down through the gears.

  Next to Paolo, a pair of bodies were untangling themselves.

  – Hello, Belle whispered to Angus. She smiled, brushing a few strands of blonde hair out of her eyes.

  – Hello, Angus whispered back.

  Belle shuffled closer on the cracked brown seat-cover, putting an arm around his neck, closing her eyes, smiling again as he kissed her.

  The house in Kingston was a great old wreck of a place: a 1950s dreamhouse, crumbling and swamped in creepers. It stood out against the rest of Burnell Road like a tramp at a convention of estate agents. Over the past twenty years or so the shrubberies bordering the pavement had turned into ashes, sycamores and rhododendrons so enormous they didn’t seem entirely natural. They groped at the air above the yard, splattering shadows across chippings, weeds and wandering herbaceous borders.

  The house itself was brilliant in the midday sunshine. At some point during the past week the hydrangea had come into flower. It smothered the wall in front of them with gleaming white petals, closing round the windows and clambering across the roof.

  – Look! It’s gift-wrapped! said Fay delightedly, jumping from the passenger door of the ambulance and sniffing at the heavy smell of blossom.

  – It’s ours! hissed Paolo. He poked Angus in the ribs, grinning idiotically. I mean, get in! It’s fucking ours!

  But there remained an air of solemnity as the others extracted themselves and converged around the front door. Paolo, Tim, Katy, Fay, Belle, Nick, Pete and Angus. They were in a tidy kind of semicircle when Rob produced the key from his pocket: tall, Indian, with little round sunglasses and floppy black hair. For a moment he let it hover, then he floated it towards the lock – slowly, like he was introducing food to a baby – and pushed wide the door.

  – The HQ! he announced, stepping to one side.

  Although they had all viewed the house, a week or so earlier, it seemed somehow changed as they looked across the dusty carpet – the sofa, the bookshelves, a table, a couple of old chairs – through the French windows and out across the overgrown lawn towards the listing iron fence, the towpath, the river twinkling in the background.

  – Da paura! observed Paolo finally, breaking the stupefaction. Wicked! He strode into the living-room, a family of whole prawns peering from halfway up his chest. Then Belle and Katy rushed in after him, vanishing up the stairs; and the rest of them followed.

  Inside the house was cool, musty from years of isolation. They spread themselves up stairs and around rooms, breathing like even the air was on the inventory. They found slides in the attic: the perfect 1950s couple posed before the wonders of the world. They found a collection of broken washing machines at the bottom of the back stairs; a set of British Empire magazines in gold-embossed maroon binders in one of the bedrooms; a barbecue set sitting ready on the patio.

  Everywhere there were bursts of laughter, the sounds of people jumping down the stairs. To have found somewhere so cheap, and so large, was incredible enough, but the real excitement was in escaping the university: the students’ union, with its ’70s nights and alcopop promotions, the halls of residence, their concrete corridors and endless daytime television. If there was one thing that had brought them all together, it was a loathing of the place. And now they were suddenly emancipated. The feeling was euphoric, almost as if they were floating.

  The other
thing, of course, being that they all took a lot of drugs. Not that there was anything very unusual about this, but it was how most of them had met up in the first place: looking for somewhere to score and picking out the most likely-looking people to ask.

  – Radioactives, Tim was droning in his usual monotone, pointing out the symbols on the little white tablets to the two or three people watching. They’re really great. Ninety-five percent MDMA and the other five caffeine. A friend of mine in the Chemistry department – you know, Dave? Three-eyed Dave? – he tested one so, like, it’s official…

  Tim was bending over a three-legged coffee table in the living-room – greasy-haired, in jeans and a sweatshirt – collecting the pills into piles. Rob rubbed his hands on his loose, stripy trousers.

  – E-ecstasy! he shouted at the stairwell.

  A kind of ripple passed outwards through the house. Someone stopped bouncing on a bed. Someone else whooped in the attic. The garden door clacked open. Then the banisters started rattling: Belle and Katy stampeded down the stairs. Paolo and Nick trotted in from the kitchen. The queue began coming together.

  It was part of Tim’s approach to these things that each person’s chemicals be dispensed individually. This allowed him both to tick off who owed what in his notebook and to perform a sort of reverend role as the dispenser. He sat behind the coffee table, jotting down debits, credits and quantities, and occasionally looking up with an expression like a bank manager’s.

  – Ketamine? he asked Angus, as he handed him his pill. 2CB? Acid?

  Angus was looking healthy at this point in time: sun-browned, long-haired, with thin, defined arms and a sleeveless black T-shirt. Around him the living-room was crowded – people were milling about, accepting joints and washing down pills – and it took him a moment to locate Belle beside the window, talking to Rob, presumably about India. It was never a conversation he could add very much to. It seemed better to go and take the pill, and retrieve her when he was feeling a bit more empowered.

  The kitchen had a chequered blue linoleum floor and a series of light-blue sideboards. Angus scraped his hair back from his face, pulling himself onto one of them and weighing the pill in his left hand as he ran the tap till it came through cold. He filled a glass and drank some water, but when it came to actually putting the pill in his mouth he found – inexplicably – that he couldn’t.

  His arms had become lifeless.

  Above the house a plane was falling – howling – towards Heathrow. Sitting on the sideboard, Angus was starting to sweat; a droplet appeared on his palm, sucking off a corner of the pill. It was like having forgotten the name of someone incredibly famous: Elvis, for instance. Angus knew that he could operate his arms, but whenever he attempted to grasp the knowledge it just slipped further away.

  Others had started to appear in the kitchen now, heading for the garden – Pete, Tim, Paolo – a pill or two under their belts, laughing expectantly. They glanced at Angus as they passed, nodded; but it was only when Nick shuffled in a minute later that he found himself able to speak.

  Nick stopped in the middle of the floor, his hands in his pockets, a sunburnt bald patch in the crown of his sandy hair.

  – Not had your pills? he said.

  – No… said Angus weakly.

  – Why’s that then? You’ve gone all white, do you know that?

  – I don’t know, said Angus. I don’t fucking know! My arms are stuck!

  – You look freaked, said Katy, arriving beside Nick. She gestured towards the garden. You should get outside, you know? Get some air in.

  Angus dropped the dissolving pill on the sideboard, and followed her through the washing-room, past the bottom of the back stairs.

  Out on the patio, Katy peeled off her shirt, tugging down her vest to conceal her fleshy waist. Paolo was already reclining in a deckchair he appeared to have found in the shrubbery. He had assumed a look of authority, one eye on Tim, to whom he’d delegated control of the barbecue.

  – Alright, Ang? he said.

  – Alright, said Angus weakly, looking round the garden for a place to collapse.

  All he really wanted now was Belle, to come and put her arms round him and make him feel whole again. But she was still there in the living-room; he could see her through the French windows, listening to Rob.

  The garden was long and thin, wildly overgrown, with the former hedges craning in from either side of it: hollies, beeches and flowering laburnums. Pete was spreadeagled on the grass about halfway to the river, far enough from the shadows not to have to move for some time. His eyes were closed behind his sunglasses, the sun on his stomach stared upwards, a ragged book of Japanese prints lay open beside him that Angus had found that week in a second-hand bookshop.

  Angus sat unsteadily, pulling a packet of cigarettes from his combats and lighting one, picking up the book and flicking through a few pages.

  – Give us one, said Pete, his eyes still closed. What are they, Marlboro?

  – Lights, said Angus, dropping one into his hand.

  – Cheers, said Pete.

  For a moment he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, then he opened his left eye and put it in his mouth, taking a Zippo from a pocket of his jeans and flicking the wheel till it caught.

  – Wicked book, he said, coughing smoke and pulling himself upright. A bit kind of disciplined, but the colours are amazing… What’s going on?

  – Weird shit, said Angus. Some very weird shit. Pete. I… I couldn’t take that pill.

  – How do you mean?

  – I tried to but I couldn’t move my arms. I was just sitting on the sideboard, staring at the fucking thing, and I couldn’t move them! It was like… like they were fucking paralysed or something!

  Pete inspected him over his sunglasses, squint-eyed.

  – But, they’re okay now?

  – Yeah. Angus sucked nervously on his cigarette.

  – And you feel alright?

  – No, I don’t feel fucking alright!

  – Okay, okay, said Pete. Look, let’s get a handle on this, yeah? It’s a new one on me. You wanted to take a pill, but you were not able to… Are you sure you actually wanted to take it?

  – Of course I am, said Angus.

  Pete put the cigarette in his mouth and tied his dreadlocks back.

  – Why, then?

  – Why?! Angus echoed. Well, why did you? Why would anyone? To enjoy myself. To make the most of the moment. To feel… alive!

  He petered out.

  A few yards away Belle and Rob had emerged on the patio. Belle had removed her shirt and was wearing a croptop, her chest at its most spectacular.

  – You know, Rob was peering at her through his sunglasses. Altamont was really the Fall. Do you know what I mean? When the dream was revealed for itself? It was like, an epiphany of man’s humanity; and woman’s too, of course… He smiled inclusively. So, as I see it, our task with this group is to rebuild that dream, but to work from an enlightened standpoint. To reattain Eden, if you like.

  – Wow! said Belle, smiling enlightenedly.

  She was obviously coming up, starting to chew.

  – What did you say again? said Pete, following Angus’s eyes.

  – So, Belle, I suppose what I’m really asking you is: Are you ready to see God?

  The sound of Rob’s voice – his guru posturing – was making Angus’s blood go strange. He knew perfectly well now why he’d wanted to take the pill: Belle. It was that simple. If the pills were even half as good as Tim had made out, she’d have been all over him, and he’d have been all over her, and it would have been just like it had been when they first got together – even if it was only for a few hours.

  – Well? said Pete.

  The clamour of a train was floating upstream from the bridge. An eight was rowing hard by the end of the garden, the cox squealing instructions.

  – Let’s go down to the river, said Angus.

  A couple of willows leant out across the water a little way upstr
eam of the end of the garden, and just between them a small white cabin cruiser of a similar vintage to the house was moored against the bank. Pete and Angus sat down on the grass beside it, smoking fat roll-ups and watching a flotilla of swans slip round a bush, necks like unconvincing glove puppets. Pete was beginning to rock with pleasure.

  – What do you get for eight magpies? asked Fay, appearing and sitting down beside them.

  – What? said Angus.

  – Well, there’s eight magpies over there. She pointed at the lawn of the rowing club across the river: a cluster of magpies around something dead. It’s seven for a story never to be told. What happens next?

  Angus looked at her: thin, cheekbones, a pair of loose blue trousers. She was the only other person around not coming up on anything. If only for that it was nice to see her.

  – A set of cut-glass tumblers? she suggested.

  Angus chuckled.

  – A Black & Decker workbench, he said. There’s always a Black & Decker workbench.

  For a second it was like a path had opened beside him – the dread evaporating – but even as he realised, it was already too late. The opening had passed, and he’d been no more able to turn towards it than he’d been to move his arms.

  – How are the pills? said Fay.

  – They set my soul on fire, Pete muttered, rocking back and forth, his eyes on the swans.

  – Oh, no pills for me, said Angus. I mean… Look at this! He waved a hand at the river, trying to muster conviction. It’s such a beautiful day. I didn’t really see the need…

  Fay narrowed her eyes. They were green already but greener in sunlight; they made Angus feel like she was seeing right through him. He held the look for three or four seconds, then he turned towards the swans.

  Angus had only actually spoken to Fay a half-dozen times or so before but every occasion had been very much the same. She was Katy’s best friend, a fellow Psychology student, and the obvious person to ask when the house proved larger than the group was. She fitted in well, considering – sharing the others’ views on the university – but somehow she was on a different wavelength, a bit of a loner. You had to be to stay straight with everyone else in that condition.