Later she stands and tells me she will make a stir-fry.
I lean back across the bed, play the guitar and sing. It sounds like the golden bells that hang in the smiling trees of paradise.
I know I love her, because they told me so.
“See you tonight, Martin. Chops all right?”
“Perfect, love.” I kissed Elizabeth, then Lee, then Grace, sitting so warmly wrapped up in her pushchair that only her eyes peeped over the blanket.
They waved me good-bye in a line as I drove away from the house. I watched the figures grow small in my mirror, still waving like a family from the Waltons.
My hand groped across the back seat among the toys and my plastic sandwich box, then closed over the small, sharp cornered box of the cassette. I snapped the tape into the car’s stereo.
For a second nothing much happened, just the hiss of the old tape. Then emerging from the hiss, almost growing from it rather than a recording came a voice.
“Yes.” A male voice; in his twenties perhaps. No accent. You could imagine the man nodding as he spoke, as if acknowledging he was ready.
More tape hiss then in a flat voice. “This is it.”
I was ready to eject the tape in favor of the radio. My surprise find was turning out to be a nonevent. Then the music started.
A guitar, slightly out of tune, as if the strings lacked the proper tension. I’d played electric guitar in the youth club band as a teenager, but I wasn’t even sure if I was listening to an electric or an acoustic.
The strumming chords were fumbling, hesitant. A pause. Then the guitar started again. This time vigorous, with a newfound sense of assurance.
When the man began to sing I nearly switched off. The voice sounded flat and very nearly tuneless.
A wannabe pop star, I decided, with all the talent of a no-hoper in a tailspin, had simply been filling a Sunday afternoon. But my hand paused on the switch. The dirge had almost been laughable, yet as I listened to the lyric a quirky kind of charisma began to shine through.
The first song sounded faintly psychedelic with repeated reference to “the black bear that sleeps by my head,” and “I may be tall but I feel so small.”
I became so engrossed in the songs, their stark beauty so unearthly, that I drove on a kind of autopilot, not noticing the queues of traffic over the bridge into town.
The strange lyrics and hypnotic guitar filled the car. I upped the volume. There was a trembling tenderness and sincerity in the voice; the words wound their way around my brain like spiderwebs. They stuck. The songs made me think of a child who had seen or experienced something profound; something they did not understand, yet which they desperately, desperately tried to describe using the only imagery they had available to them. The effect was of an attempt at communicating a transforming experience but failing. Yet even in failure some essence of the message filtered through—and its power winded me.
SMILE? THIS MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOU
My name is Joseph Lawton. This happens:
“There’s one! And there’s another!” cries Sophie excitedly.
“How many’s that?” I ask. “Have you kept count?”
“Have you, silly?” she laughs. We are both giggling. The cat watches us; it jumps from the sofa to the drawers then back again. She knows.
“What do you think they are?” She holds my bare arm under the table lamp. “Can you feel them? Do they itch?”
At first I’m not sure. “No… Not itch. No, but I felt a tingling.”
“Hold still, silly.” She looks at my arm so closely her hair washes over my skin like cool silk. “They are on both arms. Look. There must be… four, five… Six. That’s just on this forearm… Here. Oh! I think they really are, you know.”
“What?”
“Ancient writing. Yes! Sumerian cuneiform.” She looks up at me, her eyes shining. She is beautiful.
Then I gaze at my arms. They are covered with white marks under the skin, like tattoos without color. It started yesterday as I lay on the bed playing my guitar. This morning my arms are covered with ancient cuneiform symbols—stars, squares, spiky pennants, snowflakes, crooked crosses, tactile swastikas: ghosts’ tattoos. Something marvelous is happening to me.
“I recognize this one,” says Sophie. “This is Ishtar. A Sumerian goddess.”
“Ishtar,” I whisper. She looks quickly up at me with her eyes shining like diamonds. “She is sending you a message. We have to copy these down and take them to someone who can read them.”
On the little table in the corner of the room the television shows a film in black and white. A ghost with sparking eyes and graveyard teeth plays a violin as the gates to a thundering hole in the earth open. There is movement behind the gate. The ghost plays faster. I recognize the music. Because it is mine.
“I’m going out on site,” I told Brian. “I’ll be about an hour.”
Brian, his mouth crammed with a sausage sandwich, could only manage a nod.
I didn’t switch on the stereo until I parked my car at a rural paddock surrounded by trees without leaves. In eighteen months it would be buried beneath executive homes. Now it looked bleak.
I listened to the tape from end to end. It had its hooks deep inside of me.
More songs, some spangled with bizarre surrealist imagery. Some very plain. These plain ones were perhaps the most effective. They were sparse descriptions of what the singer might have been seeing from his window at that very moment. But all the songs carried this potent charge that was electrifying. And always the plod, plod, plod of the guitar. Often the songs did not end in the conventional way. They simply fell apart as if some joker had stolen the last sheet of music; then the singer faltered to a halt. Sometimes you thought the songs would continue as a change of key seemed to herald a new verse. Then the song would abruptly end. As I listened, gazing at the bare winter fields, I thought of God at the egg-crack of creation, rehearsing making Man and Woman only to break off in failure to toss away a part-formed torso, a fragment of head.
The collection of songs ended in a scrabble of fretwork sounds followed by the ringing thump of the microphone falling on the floor. The singer spoke for the last time; the voice weary, defeated: “That’s it. There is no more.”
I listened to the tape one more time before driving back to work.
When I walked through the door I thought I’d walked into the wrong office. I saw my name plate, MARTIN PRICE, on my desk, I knew the names of the dozen people sitting at their desks, but just for an instant they looked like strangers.
Brian, peeling the wrapper from a Mars Bar, looked out of the window.
“It’s starting to snow,” he said.
CONCRETE HANDS CLAP THE FUNERAL CLOWNS
My name is Joseph Lawton. This happens:
I know there are people who are suffering and who are unhappy now, while I, happy, warm and at peace, sit and play my guitar. Sophie stands at the kitchen table, buttering bread, slicing red cheese. She looks up and smiles at me. Sad people thoughts push roughly into my brain.
I try to forget. I cannot.
All over this world people are suffering pain. Someone must be to blame. My thoughts spill into the song. Maybe with the stars on my arms I can help.
“A sad song,” says Sophie, licking butter from her ring with the green stone as big as a man’s eye. “Oh, look. Don’t cry. Don’t be sad.” She walks to me, her bare legs look pale beneath her tassled skirt. Her hands that touch my face are cool and buttery.
The sorrowing voices of all the people that suffer fill my head. I imagine them crying out to me. Only I can save them. Only I can save them. They cry and they cry.
And that’s when I know Sophie must die.
I think you’ll find this interesting. I found the tape in a box of books in a charity shop. God knows who the singer is, but there’s a weird kind of charisma there, almost hypnotic. When you hear it, you’ll know. I thought you might consider it for one of your special limited edition albums. Anyway, have a listen, Bob, and let me know what you think. In the meantime I’m going to try and find the guy. I’ve got a couple of leads. Christ! Now I know what it feels like to be a detective!