The Condition of Muzak (6 page)

He had stashed the car at the side entrance of his fortress and had walked round the tall white walls and up the steps to the black front door before he saw a movement behind one of the pillars on his right. His hand swam for his needler but dropped. He smiled instead. “Afternoon, Mo.”

“’Ullo, Mr C.” By way of apology Shakey Mo Collier shrugged in his filthy denim suit. His bright, kitten’s eyes, greedy for violence, shifted, and his scrubby moustache and beard twitched like the whiskers of a rogue beast. “Can I come in?”

Jerry put his hand against the print-plate and the door opened. He led the way into a wide, mosaic hall, turning off strobes and substituting limelight. Mo panted behind him muttering to himself. “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.” He scuttled for a side door and entered Jerry’s back parlour, a tangle of electronics and dirty, expensive upholstery. The room was dark, only a little light coming through the thickly curtained French windows. Mo crawled into the comfort of a huge mohair sofa, feeling down its sides for something to sustain him, slipping pills and capsules at random into his mouth. “What’s it all about, I ask myself.” Quickly he achieved a philosophical equilibrium. “Eh, Mr C?”

Jerry pulled the curtains back a fraction. “You don’t mind?” Light sidled into the room.

Mo nodded. “I came with a message, actually. Shades is on the dole and wondered if you had any ideas.”

“I thought he was in the States.”

“Things have dried up there, as well. You know how fashions change. Last year it was all assassinations, this year it’s all sex scandals and religion. Could we have a little music?”

Jerry fiddled with an already glowing console. Faintly Zoot Money’s band gave them ‘Big Time Operator’.

“That’ll do,” said Mo. “It doesn’t need to be loud. Just there. Anyway, Shades thought you might be looking around.”

Jerry smiled. “You have to, don’t you, with Shades. Tell him I’ll probably be in touch.”

Mo nodded. “He says all he needs is a pair of kings.”

“It’s good news for everyone else.” Absently Jerry toyed with a decaying packet of Chocolate Olivers. “Though his interpretations are all his own.”

“And I saw Mr Smiles. He says to get in touch sometime. It’s about what Simons and Harvey are after, he says.”

Jerry shrugged. “All that’s in the past.” He glanced through an electron microscope. “Or maybe the future.”

Mo had lost interest in the conversation. He began to move slowly about the room, experimentally fingering any loose wires he discovered. “Oh, and I saw your mum in the pub. When was it? Tuesday?”

“Did you tell her I was back?”

“What do you think? But she’d heard you was living around here. She was more interested in knowing where Cathy was.”

Jerry smiled at this. “They always were close.”

“She said Frank was doing very well for himself but was looking a bit tired. What is he doing with himself, these days, anyway?”

“Services,” said Jerry. “Power and communications.”

“Only I heard he was dealing.”

“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“Everything is…” Mo returned to the sofa and curled up. He went to sleep. Jerry pulled a huge silver metallic sheet over him to retain what heat was left in his body and headed for the kitchen. He searched amongst the collection of Coronation biscuit barrels and jugs and cottage-shaped teapots until he found the half-full bottle of Prioderm. He climbed the stained white carpet of the curving staircase and went into the bathroom, glad to find that the hot water was working in the shower. He stripped naked and, bottle in hand, stepped into the stall.

Soon his head was engulfed in hellfire.

Jerry rarely visited his father’s fake Le Corbusier château and this was probably the first time he had used the front entrance, but he was in unusually high spirits as he eased his Phantom V up the weed-grown drive and depressed the horn button to let his father’s faithful retainer know he had arrived. Beyond the broken outline of the house was the grey Normandy sea. Rain was coming in from England and with it waves of inspirational music interspersed with the babbling voices of that crazed brotherhood of the coast, the pirate deejays. Jerry stepped out of the car and took a deep breath of the cold, moody air. His father—or the man who had claimed to be his father—had died without leaving a will, so Frank (who was convinced that he was both the only legitimate and the true spiritual successor to the old man) had claimed the house and its contents as his inheritance; but John Gnatbeelson swore the dying scientist had bequeathed his roof and its secrets to his namesake Jeremiah (there was even a rumour that old Cornelius had changed his name to Jeremiah soon after his son’s birth). The matter had been settled, in Jerry’s view, by his letting Frank use the place whenever he wanted to. In spite of the complications, Jerry had been glad that his father had died. It removed an uncomfortable ambiguity. Jerry hated keeping things from his mother.

Before he could put his palm against the print-plate the grey steel door moved upwards and John Gnatbeelson, in tattered Norfolk jacket, grey moleskin britches and scarlet carpet slippers, greeted him awkwardly. He was thin, his cancerous skin given a semblance of life by the many broken blood vessels spreading purple and red beneath it. His chin sprouted a few long, grey wisps of hair, perhaps the remains of a beard, and his cheekbones were set so low as to give his head an oddly unbalanced look. A stooping six foot four, he looked fondly down on his young master who strode into the dark interior. Originally the house had possessed enormous windows, but these were now shielded with steel-plate. As old Cornelius’s suspicion of the outside world had increased he had introduced more and more modifications of this sort.

“Have you come to stay, sir?” Gnatbeelson whispered habitually. His former employer had hated the sound of the human voice and had communicated almost entirely by a variety of mechanical means, never leaving his heavily guarded laboratories. Neither Jerry, Catherine or Frank had ever met their father personally, though they had all lived here from time to time. The house trembled with profound and unusual memories; it stank of the experiences of a hundred lifetimes, centuries of technomania tinged with the desperate eroticism of those who cast desperately about for their lost humanity and found only flesh.

“Just a flying visit,” Jerry said. “I’d have phoned, but you’ve been cut off.”

“The bill seemed unreasonable, sir. It was all Mr Frank’s reverse-charge calls. I did write to you…”

“As long as the generators are working.”

“I tested them last week. They’re just fine.”

“I want you to activate the defences as soon as possible,” Jerry told him. He walked rapidly through haunted galleries, Gnatbeelson, his limbs moving irregularly, lolloping in his wake. “Particularly those towers.”

“The hypnomats, sir?”

“Set every one at go.”

“Are you expecting trouble, Mr Cornelius?”

“From Mr Frank. He’s on his way. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I know it involves this place. He mustn’t get in.”

“I thought you didn’t mind, sir.”

“I don’t normally.”

“Is anything up, sir? Some sort of situation?”

“It’s all instinctive. I couldn’t really pin it down.”

“I’ve been reading about it in the book, sir. The millennium and so on.”

Jerry stopped as the corridor opened onto another gallery. He looked down through filthy light at the scattered shells of computers, their innards spread at random over the large black and white tiles of the floor. “That wasn’t here last time.” He put his hand on the balustrade, close to a fragment of canvas on which had been painted a patchwork of red, yellow and blue diamond shapes, faintly bloodstained. His foot struck a gilt frame on the floor. “The sod’s eaten it!” He was shocked. “Watteau!”

“What ho, sir…” Gnatbeelson’s face sagged a little lower. “Mr Frank was looking for something, I think. He kept sucking at those vacuum tubes in the corner. He said the marrow was good for his piles. He’s not himself, sir.”

“Then who is?” Jerry put the scrap of canvas into his pocket and continued his inspection of the house.

“I’m glad you’ve decided on a firm line at last, sir.” Gnatbeelson’s legs bent and straightened, bent and straightened. “I took the liberty of saving one of those books you gave me to put in the furnace.
The Million Spears and the Coming Corruption
. Do you think—?”

“It’s lies. It’s your moral duty to burn it.”

“Then of course I shall, sir. But are you sure this isn’t to do with that?”

“It’s all a question of how you look at it. What about the reactor?” Jerry peered over the rail of another gallery. Below was a swimming pool, the water stagnant, filled with every kind of rubbish. Something living seemed to move just below the surface. “I’ve changed my mind. Things are settling down. They’ve never been better.”

“Then why are you so anxious?” The whisper came from miles away but when Jerry turned Gnatbeelson was at his shoulder.

“Because I want to maintain the balance. I’ve a right to take a few precautions.” Jerry was defensive. “What’s wrong with that?” He peered down at the far wall. Written in a substance resembling, in colour, the ichor of spent batteries, were the words:

Encore un de mes pierrots mort;
Mode d’un chronique orphelinisme;
C’était un coeur plein de dandyisme
Lunaire, en un drôle de corps.

Jerry became sentimental. “How we loved to luxuriate in terror.” There had been good times here, when the three of them had spent their holidays, at play amongst their father’s discarded inventions, stretched upon heaps of confused circuits, with a bag of apples and a Wodehouse or a Sade. Simpler, if not sunnier, days.

“I’m in full agreement with you, sir.” The old retainer’s voice seemed closer now, almost normal. “But why have you rejected all those books out of hand?”

Desperately Jerry rounded on Gnatbeelson, displaying glowing eyes. “Can’t you see? It’s my last bloody chance to achieve a linear mode!”

It might be 196–, thought Jerry, but the countryside beyond Dover had returned with incredible speed to its medieval state. Kent was wild and beautiful again; so lush that few would have guessed it had sustained and recovered from a major nuclear bombardment during the ‘Proof of Good Faith’ contests between the major powers. There were disadvantages: poor roads and slow progress; but his car wasn’t badly affected, even when it was forced to inch through bramble thickets or cross small patches of ploughed land where angry peasants occasionally appeared, to pelt him with pieces of rock or crude spears. The people of Kent, happy at last in their proper primitive state, were much more at one with themselves.

A fairly unspoiled stretch of road took him close to the remains of Canterbury where skin-clad monks had erected a timber reproduction of the Cathedral, almost the same size as the original. The unseasoned scaffolding still surrounded it and more monks were at work with what was probably liquified chalk, painting the exterior in an effort to make it resemble stone. Elsewhere a project to restore the shopping precinct was in hand; soon Canterbury in facsimile would flourish again: triumph of Man’s optimism, of his faith in the future. Jerry hooted his horn and waved, turning up the stereo, to give them a friendly blast of ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, pursing his lips regretfully as one of the monks lost his footing on the scaffold and fell fifty feet to the ground.

Soon he was nearing London. In the evening light the city was phosphorescent, like a neon wound; it glowed beneath a great scarlet sun turning the clouds orange and purple. And Jerry was filled with a sudden deep love for his noble birthplace, the City of the Apocalypse, this Earthly Paradise, the oldest and greatest city of its Age, virgin and whore, mother, sister, mistress, sustainer of life, creator of nightmare, destroyer of dreams, harbourer of twenty million chosen souls. Abruptly he left the Middle Ages and entered the future, the great grey road, a mile wide at this point, gradually narrowing to its apex at Piccadilly Circus. Now, as night drenched the tall buildings and their lights burst into shivering life, he could again relax in his natural environment.

Against all the available evidence he was betting everything on simple cyclic time, on cause and effect, on karma. He passed through the first toll-check; now the road was covered; its perspex roof reflected the myriad colours of the headlamps below. He took the first exit up to the fast tier and joined the hundred-and-seventy mph stream; within a minute or two he was leaving it again, spiralling down the Notting Hill exit and making for home through the crowded park. The booths and tents of the nightly fair were only, he noticed, doing moderate business. At his favourite roadside fish-and-chip bar he stopped and paid four pounds for a piece of warm carp and some fried reconstituted mashed potato. It had been days since he’d had any real food. He wasn’t looking after himself properly. There were too many fresh shadows. He enjoyed the meal, eating it off the passenger seat as he drove, but felt sick afterwards and had to munch a couple of Milky Way bars to make himself better. He was already improving by the time he drove through the back gates of his house and garaged the Phantom beside the Duesenberg.

He went into the house and found his old black car coat, his black flared trousers, his high-heeled boots, his white linen and, as he dressed, he became depressed. It was probably association, he thought. Dark clothes often brought him down. He turned away from the wardrobe, seeking a stereo, and at last found a deck and amplifier where he must have shoved them under an old-fashioned bentwood and china washstand. He switched the kit on. From the ceiling came the miserable, neurotic drone of the Everly Brothers. He let it play, deepening his mood. If a mood was worth having, he thought, it was worth having profoundly.

He went downstairs and turned up some mail which must have come with one of the last runners to get through. There was a letter from Mr Harvey, one of Frank’s wholesalers, saying that he had some information which might be useful to Jerry and Mr Smiles, Jerry’s sometime business partner. Although he had made at least a million in the last job he was disinclined to work with Mr Smiles again. Smiles usually claimed to have a ‘purpose’ to his ventures and thus tended to confuse Jerry. He crumpled the letter, wondering why Harvey should wish to double-cross Frank, an excellent customer for any new chemical to come in.