‘I didn’t hear anything, although it’s hard to be sure, there was so much noise from the aeroplane.’
There was a boy’s face at the window. His hand appeared, pointing at the head of Orpheus on my desk. I went to the front door and found two boys on the steps. ‘Can we have our football back?’ said the first one. ‘We didn’t mean to kick it at your door.’
‘I haven’t got your football.’
‘Yes you have. You picked it up and took it inside and it’s on your desk now. We’ve been ringing your bell for a long time.’
‘The bell’s disconnected.’
‘We’ve been knocking as well,’ said the second boy.
‘I never heard it.’
‘Well, anyhow, give us back our ball,’ said the first boy.
‘What did your ball cost you?’
The first boy looked at the second boy. ‘Ten quid.’
‘There’s a sports shop in the Broadway near the bus stop; you can buy another ball there, OK?’ I gave him ten pounds and both boys disappeared.
‘Where were we?’ I said to the head.
‘I’ve sung for you twice,’ it said, ‘and both times you’ve said you haven’t heard me.’
‘This time the microphone was listening too; let’s see whether it heard anything.’ I rewound the tape, put on headphones, and played it back. It was surprising at first to hear the head speaking in my voice but there was of course nothing extraordinary in it; if it could use a football for manifesting itself there was no reason why it shouldn’t use my voice to speak with. When it said on the tape that it was going to sing I turned up the volume and watched the level meters. There went the aeroplane. The cooling fan of the Apple II was audible, and above it there was a faint high-pitched humming that went up and down in a halting and uncertain tune that was just loud enough to move the luminous bars on the level meters a stroke or two past the –20 decibel mark. Faint and distant it struggled to reach me like some broken melody coming round the ionosphere through the storms and surges of the shortwave night to my lost outpost in Fulham. It was of course my own voice but I hadn’t remembered humming at the time; it sounded as if I might have been trying to follow something that I was straining to hear.
‘Well?’ said the head. ‘Can you hear yourself hearing me?’
‘Yes, but why can’t I hear your voice, the voice of Orpheus singing?’
‘Let’s be realistic; I’m a hallucination.’
‘Right, that’s why the tape recorder hears only my voice. But if I hallucinate an Orpheus voice when you talk to me why can’t I do it when you sing?’
‘Maybe I’m not real enough to you.’
‘Maybe nothing is. Maybe the third novel isn’t real enough to me, maybe Luise wasn’t real enough to me.’
‘Maybe you yourself aren’t real enough to you.’
‘How does the world-child do it? How does the world-child hold the world together and keep it real?’
‘The world-child has been told that this is a world,’ said the head, ‘and it believes it; it is the energy of this belief that binds the world together. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of every single thing: root and stone, tree and mountain, river and ocean and every living thing. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of woman and man, the idea of love.’
‘Who told the world-child all this that it now believes?’
‘Each thing told itself to the world-child: the tree; the mountain; the ocean; the woman; the man. You and I, we have told ourselves to it.’
‘And the idea of love? Who told that to the world-child?’
‘It didn’t have to be told,’ said the head. ‘This idea arises of itself from that energy of belief that keeps the mountains from exploding and the seas from going up in steam. It’s only a kind of cohesion that binds together possibilities that have spun together out of the blackness.’
‘Like you and Eurydice.’
‘It didn’t hold us together long.’
‘Why not?’
‘Even the beginning wasn’t very auspicious, was it,’ said the head. ‘The first I ever heard of Eurydice was the sound of her weeping.’
‘That was because she dreamed she was the world-child and she was afraid; that was nothing to do with you.’
‘Yes, it was,’ said the head. ‘She was weeping because she knew that the world-child is always betrayed.’
‘And that was in your song?’
‘Of course it was; it was in the strange and many colours of the death of love.’
‘Her weeping came before your singing,’ I said. ‘Maybe those strange and many colours in your song came from the weeping that started you singing.’
‘Obviously.’
‘What’s so obvious about it?’
‘Don’t you understand?’ said the head. ‘There’s only one.’
‘Only one what?’
‘Only one femaleness, whether it’s called Eurydice or Medusa or Persephone or Luise. As Eurydice/Persephone she opened underworld for me, the world under the world, the moment under the moment. And from underworld came my song of love’s beginning and the betraying of the world-child and the death of love that made her weep.’
‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘it just keeps going round in a circle.’
‘She never liked my singing,’ said the head, ‘I’ve told you that. Once she took the lyre out of my hands and said, “Love is its own music.” But that doesn’t really mean anything, does it? I mean, if music is what you do then that’s what you’ll do, isn’t it. Then she said to me, “You emptied the tortoise-shell for your music and now you’re emptying us.’”
‘Maybe it wasn’t only the music that was bothering her.’
‘You’re thinking of other women.’
‘Yes.’
‘I remember how their eyes shone in the firelight,’ said the head, ‘and beyond the firelight the wild beasts crouched and black trees nodded in the night. I remember the dawns when I found myself in strange places encircled by trees and stones and sleeping figures wet with dew. I remember the tops of the trees swaying in the dawn wind, how the night was still in them like a cat biting the neck of its mate.’
‘Groupies.’
‘I never said I was any better than anyone else,’ said the head.
‘And yet,’ I said, ‘I suppose the world-child is greedy for sweets as all children are.’
‘No, it isn’t. The world-child perceives the lover as the whole world, the world-child is greedy for the sea and the mountains and the death that live in that one person who is loved.’
‘I told you the first time we spoke’, I said, ‘that your morality might be too much for me.’
‘It’s too much for me as well,’ said the head. ‘My perceptions have always been beyond my capabilities.’
‘Then you accept that this world-child is some kind of an impossible ideal.’
‘Whatever it is,’ said the head, ‘it’s an idea that won’t let go of me.’
‘But you weren’t able to go on being the world-child,’ I said. ‘You lost it, and now you roam the world rotting and eyeless, telling your story to strangers like a drunk in a bar. Is this your punishment?’
‘Being Orpheus was my punishment.’
‘For what?’ I said.
‘For killing the tortoise.’
‘Can that one killing matter so much?’
‘Nothing matters more than anything else. Things arrange themselves in certain ways and it is left to us to make the connections.’
‘And what’s the connection between you and me? I know you’re the first of my line and all that but why are you telling me your story?’