Part Two. The New City
Chapter Five
Fabian was trying to call Natasha but he could not reach her. She had taken her phone off the hook. The news about Saul’s father was spreading among his friends like a virus, but Natasha had immunized herself for a little while longer.
It was just after midday. The sun was bright but as cold as snow. The sounds of Ladbroke Grove filtered along the backstreets to the first floor of a flat on Bassett Road. They slid through the windows and rilled the front room, a susurrus of dogs and paper sellers and cars. The sounds were faint; they were what passed for silence in the city.
In the flat a woman stood motionless in front of a keyboard. She was short and her face was severe, with dark eyebrows that met above a scimitar nose. Her long hair was dark, her skin sallow. Her name was Natasha Karadjian.
Natasha stood with her eyes closed and listened to the streets outside. She reached out and pressed the power button on her sampler. There was a static thud as her speakers clicked into life.
She ran her hands over the keys and the cursor. She had stood motionless for a minute or two now. Even alone she felt self-conscious. Natasha rarely let people watch when she created her music. She was afraid they would think her precious, with her silent preparations and her closed eyes.
She tapped out a message on a clutch of small buttons, twisted her cursor, displayed her musical spoils on the LCD display. She scrolled through the selection and plucked a favourite bassline from her digital killing jar. She had snatched it from a forgotten Reggae track, sampled it, preserved it, and now she pulled it out and looped it and gave it another life. The zombie sound travelled the innards of the machine and out through wires, through the vast black stereo against her wall, and burst out of those great speakers.
The sound filled her room.
The bass was trapped. The sample ended just as the bass-player had been about to reach a crescendo, and expectation was audible in the thudding strings as they reached out for something, for a flourish… then a break, and the cycle started again.
This bassline was in purgatory. It burst into existence with a recurring surge of excitement, waiting for a release that never came.
Natasha nodded her head slowly. This was the breakbeat, the rhythm of tortured music. She loved it.
Again her hands moved. A pounding beat joined the bass, cymbals clattering like insects. And the sound looped.
Natasha moved her shoulders to the rhythm. Her eyes were wide as she scanned her kills, her pickled sounds, and she found what she wanted: a snatch of trumpet from Linton Kwesi Johnson, a wail from Tony Rebel, a cry of invitation from Al Green. She dropped them into her tune. They segued smoothly into the rolling bass, the slamming drums.
This was Jungle.
The child of House, the child of Raggamuffin, the child of Dancehall, the apotheosis of black music, the Drum and Bass soundtrack for a London of council estates and dirty walls, black youth and white youth, Armenian girls.
The music was uncompromising. The rhythm was stolen from Hip Hop, born of Funk. The beats were fast, too fast to dance to unless you were wired. It was the bassline you followed with your feet, the bassline that gave Jungle its soul.
And above the bassline was the high end of Jungle: the treble. Stolen chords and shouts that rode the waves of bass like surfers. They were fleeting and teasing, snatches of sound winking into existence and sliding over the beat, tracing it, then winking away.
Natasha nodded her satisfaction.
She could feel the bass. She knew it intimately. She searched instead for the sounds at the top, she wanted something perfect, a leitmotif to weave in and out of the drums.
She knew the people who ran the clubs, and they would always play her music. People liked her tracks a lot, gave her respect and bookings. But she felt a vague dissatisfaction with everything she wrote, even when the sensation was shot through with pride. When she finished a track she did not feel any purgation of relief, only a slight unease. Natasha would cast around, ransacking her friends’ record collections in an attempt to find the sounds she wanted to steal, or would make her own on her keyboard, but they never touched her like the bass. The bass never evaded her; she needed only to reach out for it, and it would drop out of her speakers complete and perfect.
The track was nearing a crescendo now: Gwan, exhorted a sampled voice, Gwan gyal. Natasha broke the beat, teasing the rhythm out, paring it down. She stripped flesh from the tune’s bones and the samples echoed in the cavernous ribcage, in the belly of the beat. Come now… we rollin’ this way, mdebwoy… She pulled her sounds our one by one, until only the bass was left. It had ushered the song in; it ushered it out again.
The room was silent.
Natasha waited a while until the city silence of children and cars crept into her ears again. She looked around at her room. Her flat contained a tiny kitchen, a tiny bathroom and the beautiful big bedroom she was in now. She had put her meagre collection of prints and posters in the other rooms and the hall; the walls here were quite bare. The room itself was empty except for a mattress on the floor, the hulking black stand which housed her stereo, and her keyboard. The wooden floor was criss-crossed with black leads.
She reached down and put the receiver back on the phone. She was about to wander into the kitchen, when the doorbell sounded. Natasha crossed the room to the open window and leaned out.
A man was standing in front of her door, looking straight up at her eyes. She had a brief impression of a thin face, bright eyes and long blond hair, before she ducked back into the room and headed down the stairs. He had not looked like a Jehovah’s witness or a troublemaker.
She walked through the dingy communal hall. Through the rippled glass of the front door she could see that the man was very tall. She pulled the door open, admitting voices from the next house and the daylight that was flooding the street.
Natasha looked up into his narrow face. The man was about six feet four, dwarfing her by nearly a foot, but he was so slim he looked as if he might snap in half at the waist any moment. He was probably in his early thirties, but he was so pale it was difficult to tell. His hair was a sickly yellow. The pallor of his face was exaggerated by his black leather jacket. He would have looked quite ill were it not for his bright blue eyes and his air of fidgety animation. He started to grin even before the door was fully open.
Natasha and her visitor stared at each other, he smiling, she with a guarded, quizzical expression.
‘Brilliant,’ he said suddenly.
Natasha stared at him.
‘Your music,’ he said. ‘Brilliant.’
The man’s voice was deeper and richer than she would have thought possible from such a slender frame. It was slightly breathless, as if he were rushing to get his words out. She stared up at him and her eyes narrowed. This was much too weird a way of starting a conversation. She was not having it.
‘What do you mean?’ she said levelly.
He smiled apologetically. His words slowed down a little.
‘I’ve been listening to your music,’ he said. ‘I came past here last week and I heard you playing up there. I tell you, I was just standing there with my mouth open.’
Natasha was embarrassed and amazed. She opened her mouth to interrupt but he continued.
‘I came back and I heard it again. It made me want to stand dancing in the street!’ He laughed. ‘The next time I heard you stop halfway through, and I realized someone was actually playing while I listened. I’d thought it was a record. It was such an exciting thought that you were actually up there making it.’