“Wait! One last thing?”
“Yeah?”
“Now they’re all working—I mean, now College says he’ll give everyone a pair… does that mean I’m not special anymore?”
Anika stops in her tracks, turns back. Not knowing what to say.
“I mean, I’m not a freak anymore? Am I?”
“No.” Anika smiles. “No. You’re not a freak. You never were.”
Mary smiles back, puts her head down, picks up the chalk again. “Good. Thanks.”
Tyrone unlocks the door to let her out, holds it open as she leaves. Stone-faced attitude. She pauses in the doorway, looks back at him.
“Hey, look, man. It’s all right. Don’t beat yourself up. You did okay trying to stop me yesterday. Main thing was you made sure the girl didn’t get hurt.”
“Whatever.” Ah, the delicacy of the bruised male ego.
She smiles and steps out, but as she does, he surprises her by speaking. Sheepishly.
“So. These things, yeah?” He’s holding a pair of spex that College must have given him. “There any way of making music with them?”
“Yeah. Yeah, should be. Look under ‘creativity.’ Might be what you’re looking for. You want me to show you?”
“Nah. Nah. It’s all right. I’ll work it out.”
She smiles back at him. “Yeah. You will.”
17. AFTER
The black monoliths of the Shaka sound system tower into the dull sky, ancient hardboard cases bound together with tape and fraying elasticated rope. The old Rastas busy themselves with checking cables and connections, as some unidentified Trinidadian dub pulses through the stack. It’s just a warm-up, a system test for tomorrow. Tyrone watches them, knowing they’ll spend an hour or two tweaking and perfecting, messing with balances and levels, before they throw a tarp over the top of the whole thing and pay a couple of kids in ganja to stand watch all night. He knows this because just a couple of years ago he was one of those kids, standing out here with Bags on the corner of Ashley and the Croft, bullshitting to try to keep each other awake, to try not to nod off.
He wasn’t in it for the free weed, even back then, though it was a bonus. It was part of his education, an apprenticeship. What he learned about sound and acoustics from running chores for Shaka and his crew—standing guard, carrying boxes and records, climbing up the stack to reconnect loose cables—you couldn’t find it in any books down at St. Paul’s library. Tyrone doubted you’d even find it on the Internet, if that was still an option. It was an unending, unrecordable mishmash of technical knowledge and folklore, engineering skills and oral history, acoustic science and superstition.
The system sounds fierce tonight, the sub-bass going straight through Tyrone, effortlessly penetrating bones and flesh to reverberate in his stomach and bowels, to shake the contents of his rib cage, to move the air in his lungs. He blinks into his periphery and pulls down menus from the spex, still feeling his way through the unfamiliar software, and records a two-bar loop of slow-motion bass. He makes sure to capture it all—not just the pure, unfettered low-frequency sine waves, but everything they touch and move, the buzzing of loose connections, the distortion of speaker cones pushed too far, the groaning of cabinet cases. By the end of the night Shaka and his technicians will have ironed out most of these bugs, but Tyrone wants it all, every glitch and imperfection.
He takes the loop, the waveform floating in a translucent window in front of his face, and slices it into individual notes. More blinks and hand swipes—he feels self-conscious waving his hands around in the street, but he’ll get over it—and he drops them into a step sequencer, each note becoming a vertical bar representing pitch and velocity, pulsing as they play. With a few more blinks he’s shuffled them around, changed their order, tweaked their levels. Made something new, something his own.
After a few minutes walking up the Croft he pauses again, to watch a couple of graffiti writers working on a new mural on the permanently shuttered front of some long-abandoned shop. Berry paint stains the sleeves of their threadbare Adidas as they work aging airbrushes retrofitted to run off solar, their faces so close to their intricate lines that their foreheads nearly scrape against the colorful metal and brickwork. The hissing of compressed air punctures the near silence and he captures it, slicing it up again, carving high hat and snare patterns from the distorted white noise, bathing it in reverb to fill out the high end above his thunderous bass.
Back at the shop, he lets Mary out, smiles at her as she leaves. He glances around, wondering what will become of it now, the dead faces staring back at him. Supposedly they’re all up for grabs now, to anyone with a pair of College’s special glasses, anyone that wants to come venture down the Croft to wake the dead. He wonders what that means for Mary. Girl’s had a busy couple of days. She seems happier now, though, lighter. Like she’s had a load taken off her shoulders.
If she’s not looking for dead people anymore, then the shop closes, and he’s out of a job. No worries. Grids will find him something else. Maybe running spices, maybe helping him out with security. Maybe he’ll let him do the radio station full-time like he’d always wanted, maybe even pay him for it. Tyrone knows Grids thinks it’s important; he once told him that after the spices and the weed it’s the most important thing the Croft produces. A sense of community, a sense of purpose, a statement to the rest of the city. Well, at least it was, right up until today. He thinks of the spex on his face. Maybe that’s all about to change.
As he closes the door behind Mary the bell chimes again, that pathetic sound he’s heard a dozen times a day for the last year. Somehow, tonight, in the empty shop it sounds different, the high-frequency metallic sound waves splashing back from bare walls, creating instant rhythms and subliminal harmonics. He opens and closes it again, captures the bell’s double ring, and drops it into the sequencer, this time triggering the sound across nine sixteenth notes, so the pattern goes in and out of sync with the rest of the track. A light touch of reverb and compression, a heavy dose of urgency and discord.
He flicks off the lights, closes the door, and leaves, shutting the faces of the dead away in the dark.
Up on the roof of the tower he checks the transmitter. One hour until broadcast, and for once everything seems in order. It’s a big one, the pre-carnival warm-up show. He’s got a bunch of guests in tonight—a couple of MCs from Barton Hill and Easton, some DJs from Bedminster and Brislington. Even some posh kid from up in Clifton is coming down to drop some tunes. Well out of his safe zone. All crew, all ends. Can’t have any transmitter fuckups tonight, no dropouts, no dead air, no static.
He steps back from the bird-shit-stained cluster of aerials, wondering again how this all changes, wondering if College will be up here soon, breathing life back into the dead infrastructure. Behind him there’s a familiar yet disconnected squawk, and he turns to see the gull again, sheltering under the solar panels, hiding its young from him while bawling him out, watching him with one wide, terrified eye. Still here, still surviving, still dodging jerk spices and oil-drum smokers.
He crouches, moves crablike toward it. Slowly. The bird reacts, squawking increasing, one wing unfurling toward him as if to hold him back. Tyrone freezes, not wanting to distress the gull more. Instead he just captures everything, the gull’s cries mixed into the static rush of the circling winds. Again he cuts it up, shifting it into a three-note pattern of almost acidic stabs, drenching them in dub-siren levels of echo before layering them over the rest of the track.