Chink.
18
Departure Lounge
THE CLAUSTROPHOBIA IN the Departure Lounge was so intense that Jane had to go into the kitchen for a glass of water. Didn’t like this at all any more.
Dipping into the Internet was sometimes like lowering yourself into hidden catacombs or potholing. Going down… click, click, click… one site dropping into a deeper site, crawling through narrow tunnels, until you found you’d sunk so far that, when you looked up, the patch of light over your head had totally vanished, and the air was too filthy to breathe.
Of course, she knew what this was: too many bad experiences with confined underground places linked with death – the cellar at Chapel House, the crypt of Hereford Cathedral. It was close to phobic, and she resented that but it still didn’t mean she could handle it.
She filled a tumbler with sparkling water. All she needed now was a bottle of old-fashioned aspirin to wash down. Twenty should do it, right?
Naw, twenty is nowhere near enough, Karone the Boatman, from Nevada, had written for the benefit of Dolores, from Wisconsin. Ya don’t just wanna be sick…
Jane had started with the new teen-oriented search-engine I Wanna, which dealt mostly with shopping wannas. Shopping to topping yourself was quite a long and tortuous trip and meant circumnavigating all the agony-aunt sites that wanted to talk you out of it.
But she was getting better at this, nearly as good as Eirion now at knowing what to look for. Which was how she’d wound up with the disgusting Karone the Boatman in the Departure Lounge.
Welcome to the Departure Lounge. Take a seat. You are among the best friends you have ever had, perhaps your last good friends. Help yourself to a drink (see our wine list, left). Listen to some music (see our selection, right).
As you can see, the Departure Lounge has two doors. You may leave at any time, through the door on the right. Or you may choose, if invited, to enter, through the left-hand door, into the Inner Lounge.
If invited? It was confusing. The walls of the Departure Lounge kept shrinking and expanding, and the doors on both right and left would alternate from black to white, and sometimes they were both grey. This was technically quite a sophisticated site. More sophisticated, at least, than some of the sickos who hung around in the virtual lounge like virtual pimps.
Karone the Boatman, from Nevada? Jane guessed he’d taken his name from Charon, the boatman who ferried the dead across the Styx in Greek myths… only he’d never read any Greek myths; someone had probably just told him the name, mispronouncing it, and he’d never even bothered to check it out. She pictured some earnest, humourless, semi-literate, burger-munching git in a sweaty baseball cap, who was arrogant enough to imagine it was his mission in life to help other people end theirs.
Karone kept printing up a link to his personal website, on which Jane had tentatively clicked, thus learning how to make a foolproof noose. Shutting down the site at this point, before slime could start oozing through the monitor.
She went back and perused the music selection: some classical stuff and a few names Jane hadn’t heard of. Plus Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag’, which it said Cohen had banned himself from singing – was this a joke? – and a song called ‘Gloomy Sunday’, which definitely was not a joke.
God.
‘Gloomy Sunday’ – also known as ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’ – had been written and recorded in 1933 by Rezso Seress after breaking up with his girlfriend.
In the song she dies and he decides to follow her. The actual girlfriend later killed herself, leaving a note saying only ‘Gloomy Sunday’. Rezso Seress himself jumped to his death from his apartment in 1968.
‘Jumped to his death.’ Jane found that she’d whispered it.
She was starting not to like this. She learned that the song had been banned by the BBC and other broadcasters because it had been linked to so many suicides, some within the music business – one of the more recent had been one by the Scottish duo, The Associates, who’d recorded it in 1980.
But the most sinister version remained the original, which had recently been cleaned up. It was said to promote nightmares, depression and irrational fear in listeners, but was not available for downloading on this particular site.
However…
The cleaned-up version was not available in 1999, when ‘Gloomy Sunday’ was covered by Belladonna, and the singer insisted that the crackles and scratches on the 1933 recording be scrupulously duplicated on her own version. Record company executives refused to include the Belladonna version on the album The Pervading Dark – for which it had been recorded – after a spate of suicides, including an assistant engineer, a secretary and the singer’s former lover, the session musician Eric Bryers, who threw himself from high up in a block of flats in south London.
Jane drank some water. Christ, another one. Did Mum know about this? Somehow she suspected not.
One theory was that the music was part of an occult ritual devised by Seress for purposes unknown, in which his girlfriend was expected to take part. But the implications of it terrified her, and this might have been linked to her suicide.
The words ‘Gloomy Sunday’ were blinking at Jane from the monitor.
Uh-huh. She drew back and clicked away the panel.
Belladonna. There were some artists who’d been big in the 1980s that it was still cool to kind of like: Elvis Costello, Julian Cope and XTC, of course, who would have been totally celestial if they hadn’t stopped touring and been forced to compete against dreary synth bands. But Belladonna…
Belladonna had embraced synthesizers. Her voice even sounded like it had been produced electronically, thin and screechy with occasional pulses – part of the machine. Belladonna was distant, lacked any kind of intimacy. But in its dismal-as-January way, the music did, Jane was forced to concede, sometimes carry you away. Just not to anywhere she could imagine ever wanting to be carried.
Actually, she was being particularly wimpish tonight. Could be something to do with being alone in the vicarage. She really should download Belladonna’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’. It was almost certainly a scam – that whole story sounded phoney.
On the other hand, she was pretty sure The Associates had existed. The trouble with the Net was that it was always very good at half-truth and conjecture.
Jane clicked back to the music panel. Immediately, ‘Gloomy Sunday’ began to flash. Her hand hovered over the mouse.
Mumford calmly put his glasses in their case, tucked it down the inside pocket of his jacket. He stood there, turning his head slowly from face to shadowed face, as if he was matching each one to a mugshot. Then he straightened up, hands by his sides, cleared his throat.
‘Help you boys?’
And Merrily realized that they were boys. Mainly young teenagers, plus the kid of eleven or so who’d been here earlier.
The tallest and presumably the oldest of the teenagers peeled himself away from the others. ‘So what’s happening, dad?’ He was about a head taller than Mumford.
‘Heard you was having a garage sale.’ The beefy kid with the chain grinned from inside his hood, like some kind of malevolent gnome. He pulled the chain tight. Chink.
‘Con,’ the tall kid said, ‘will you put that fuckin’ thing away?’ He looked mixed-race, had prominent teeth, a stud in the cleft of his chin. His silky black jacket had zips everywhere, like ridged operation scars. ‘Sorry about my mate, dad, he’s seen too many old videos.’