Читать книгу Green Glowing Skull - Gavin Corbett - Страница 8

The corners of the piece of notepaper were decorated with feathers and swirls; taking a cue – Rickard fancied, as he made his way from the subway station – from the built character of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Leafy friezes and arabesques on building facades spoke of high ambitions, but the impression of the area now was of neglect and decay. Bread husks dissolved to pap and fish heads putrefied in neon-pink pools; discarded plumbing technology cluttered pavements and front lots; in the air distant sirens mingled with a nearer synthesised racket; on the avenue cars hurtled south to brighter lights. Rickard hurried down a side street, found the door he was looking for, and pushed its heavy iron grille.

Upstairs he followed a corridor that turned three corners to Denny Kennedy-Logan’s door. Immediately it opened the guilt crashed over him again: Denny Kennedy-Logan was very old; Rickard’s very old parents remained abandoned in Ireland. Denny was wearing a bulky dressing gown, tightly tied, which suggested to Rickard age-related illness, and he became a little angry, thinking of how he’d been manipulated. The old man would have him, before he knew it, wiping his bottom.

But he had a surprising bounce, Denny, to his walk; a combative bustle and energy, as he led the way into his apartment. He was forward-angled rather than forward-leaning or forward-stooped. Rickard could picture him in leathers, in a garage, at three in the morning, failing to kick-start a Triumph motorcycle; on his way to a confrontation or to playing a mean prank on someone; unwittingly and unknowingly kneeing a child in the skull in the course of a purposeful stroll.

A darkened passageway brought them to an inner room, softly lit and warm in colour. A brass or bronze arm projected from a wall and held a barely luminous globe. Rickard perched on the edge of the seat he was offered, under the arm. An upright piano created an obstruction in the middle of the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanked a chimney breast and the space on the shelves in front of the books was cluttered with trinkets and ornaments, as was a mantelpiece, a wake table, a whatnot and a small chest of drawers. Larger ornaments – slim glazed pots and a couple of wooden figures such as might have been prised off the front of a medieval guildhall or from the alcoves of a reredos – sat on the floor against the wall behind him. The place smelt either of dog or popcorn, Rickard could not decide which. As if in answer, a ginger-and-white dog with a squidgy pink-and-black face came skittering into the room and rolled on its back by its owner’s feet. The old man pulled up a chair so that he could sit down and tickle the dog’s belly. After a minute he turned the animal over and toggled the flesh on its head until its eyes watered. ‘My little poopy frootkin, my little poopy frootkin,’ he said, and continued to jerk the dog’s head.

‘You found me all right,’ he said, still looking at the dog.

It took Rickard a moment to realise that the old man was talking to him. ‘Your directions were very good,’ he said.

He sat back into the seat, warily, expecting broken springs and plumes of dust, but discovered a plump and yielding easy chair that smelt most definitely of dog; for split seconds he remembered the two dogs of his childhood, Jumpy and Kenneth. This was a comfortable, lived-in sort of place, he admitted to himself. Something about the randomness of the clutter and the softness of the light reminded him of the living room of a wealthy Irish country home or townhouse. It would be nice to live in this way in this city, he soon found himself imagining; in a dim few rooms near the service core of an old apartment building surrounded by the stuff of a lifetime. He spotted high on the bookshelves a cherrywood radio set like the one in his father’s clubhouse in Dublin. He remembered seeing it on Spring Open Day. A man called Wally had said, ‘That is just like the one in my grandfather’s country kitchen. My grandfather was a great man for the ideas and one day he had the idea that there was a little man inside that radio and he smashed it up with a hammer.’ He chuckled gently at the memory, forgetting himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Denny, ‘would you like some shaved ice?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Rickard. ‘I haven’t long finished my dinner.’

‘I have a machine inside for it.’

‘I’m fine, really.’

‘I don’t drink alcohol any more, so I’ve nothing to offer you in the way of that. We said nine o’clock?’

‘Nine o’clock was the time I thought we agreed in the club last night.’

‘I must have meant four o’clock. I’m usually thinking about bed by nine. But all right so – nine o’clock.’

The old man made playful faces and noises at his dog, then spun it around and sent it racing away with a loud smack on the backside.

‘Here for the night we are, then. Oh well, I’ll enjoy the challenge.’

He stood up and, with his shins, shuffled an ottoman towards Rickard.

‘At least have the footrest,’ he insisted, manoeuvring the item under Rickard’s feet. ‘You should come and see the outside of my building in the daytime. It’s been said that it looks like the Treasury in Petra, so grand and serious does it look in this street, and so suddenly does it come upon you.’

‘It’s not an area lacking in grandeur.’

‘No it is not.’

The old man sat down again, on top of his yelping dog, which had already skittered back into the room and settled itself up on the chair.

‘But the pity then it has all gone to rot. The cross-streets are not so bad but they funnel you, with no by and by about it, to the main drags. If I take a stroll anywhere these days it’s on West End Avenue.’

‘I have been on West End Avenue,’ said Rickard, indulging him. ‘It’s a very beautiful thoroughfare.’

‘What do you like about it?’

He thought about it seriously and could not come up with anything better than, ‘I like that it doesn’t have any shops.’

The old man sat perfectly still for a moment, then added, ‘It brings to mind, for me, the old world, or at least old New York, with its old associations. And something of the world of the tango, and of depressed beef barons. But mostly, yes, it recalls a great European boulevard. In its scale, in its idiom and, when I think about it now, its shape. Not so much because it curves, which it doesn’t, but because it undulates. Like keys rippling. Under a virtuoso’s hand. Spelgelman used to live there, as did Rosburanoff.’

These revelations delighted Rickard, although he had no clue who the old man was talking about.

‘Tell me now, Rickard Velily’ – he said his name mockingly, Rickard sensed, throwing in an extra ‘-il-’ syllable, and became distracted with the taste of it on his tongue – ‘Velily, Velily, Velily. Is it an Irish name?’

‘It is. It’s also a village in White Russia.’

‘They are Bialy this and Bialy that in New York. Many people originate from places that were once part of Antique Poland or Lithuania, or Greater Austria or Russia. Velily is one of those names that is Irish but might not be. Like Costello, which could be Italian, or Egan, which could be Turkish, or Maher, which could be Berber.’

‘Or Walsh,’ offered Rickard, ‘which could be German.’

The old man looked at him testily.

‘You mustn’t make any jokes around these parts about the war, you’ll learn that smartly enough.’

Rickard protested, ‘I –’

‘You’re a recent immigrant, we’ve established that?’

‘I’ve been here just a few months.’

‘Ah, you’ll fit in well enough. We always do. There are American people today called Penhaligon and Thrispterton and the like who say that they’re Irish. And they probably are. Anyhow, she’s doing well, I believe, Ireland?’

‘She has been doing well, it’s true,’ Rickard confirmed, hoping that the matter would be left at that as he did not want to be drawn into a discussion on economics, of which he knew nothing.

‘I hear that now we’re a force on the world stage, that everyone seeks to imitate us. I have read that there are companies that will kit out your pub in Moscow or Peking in the Irish style, with advertisements for Whitehaven coal for the wall and Nottingham-made bicycles to hang from the beams.’

Rickard’s eyes wandered about the room, to the left and right of Denny, through the ornaments and vases, and settled on a small mottled wall mirror.

‘Perhaps,’ said the old man, evidently noting the pattern of Rickard’s scope, ‘if someone from one of these companies, someone less forgiving than myself, stood on the threshold there and said, “How much for the job lot?” I might agree a price. We have trouble moving these days for the bric-a-brac, isn’t that right, Aisling?’

Rickard glanced back at Denny and saw with some alarm that he was not addressing his dog but the ceiling or a point beyond. He guessed that this ‘Aisling’ was a dead wife, and he had no wish to hear about her, or about the old man’s being made a widower, or to be involved in his affairs by this knowledge and have it implied to him that he should care.

‘It’s not, though, as if I bought it all in one go. Although I have had to move a quarter of it twice, and half of it once, and arrange it in new ways, in different places. Though the last time it was a different place only to the one before it, and not the place it is now.’

Rickard was tiring already of these spiralling formulations. ‘Do you mean this present apartment?’

‘Yes. A fitting home for my belongings, I think it is. Did you notice the tracery in the hall?’

‘I did,’ said Rickard, lying.

‘It reminds me of Stapleton’s work, and the work of those great Italian stuccodores that came to Dublin in the eighteenth century.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Oh. Twenty-one years. Twenty-one from last September.’

The old man tapped the dog’s head, nestled in his groin, evenly and gently now.

‘I have done more living in this building, in these rooms, than in any other building since I came to New York; many moons ago now. If living is taken to mean man-hours, and in this building, in these rooms, is taken to mean just that.’

Rickard detected self-pity creeping in. ‘It’s not such a bad space to spend time. A fitting venue, as you say, for a man of refined tastes.’

‘It is that. But, well … refined tastes. I must tell you, all this’ – the old man gestured magisterially with his hand – ‘this, ornamentation, all these pretty-looking things, you probably wonder if I’m a bit of a funny sort. Well I am not this way inclined, I would like you to know.’

‘I would never make judgements of that nature about a person.’

‘But these pretty things … What you see about you are monetary investments.’

He leaned forward in a manner that suggested he was about to say something very important, though the lower part of his face wrestled with a smile.

‘You’re not a – hoo hoo hoo – thief, are you? You’re not one of these drag-racing hooligan bucks who would twist an implement inside an elderly man and rob his things?’

‘No, Mister Kennedy-Logan. I have come here to be taught how to sing.’

‘Shall I tell you what is the most valuable of all the items in this room? It’s those curtains.’

He pointed to dark red drapes, drawn across, on the end wall.

‘You wouldn’t think to look at them, would you? They’re from Turkey, from the early nineteenth century. They look better tied back in the wings, I feel about it, where the gilt threading picks up the light, but they add an element of drama to the nightly act of blocking out the evening.’

He remained leaning forward, with a slump, as his dog trilled enquiringly and tried to catch his eye.

‘But I do not sleep in this room, so it’s an act best described as a ritual, then.’

At this moment Rickard felt that he could have risen from his chair and walked out of the room and apartment undetected, such was the completeness of the trance that the old man appeared to be in. Instead, in a life-changing intervention, he said, ‘Mister Kennedy-Logan, I am booked in for a singing lesson tonight, yes?’

‘Booked …’

The old man grasped, peevishly, thin air, as if he might have found an appointment book there.

‘Singing lesson … Yes. Do you have a song that you could sing so that I can gauge the quality of your voice as it is?’

‘I do,’ said Rickard. ‘I usually like to warm up with “Come Off It, Eileen”.’

‘Good choice. Not too challenging. Away you go.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unaccompanied?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right. Here you have it, so. Ahem.’

Rickard stood up, cracked back his shoulders, and began:

‘With a nerve to match her rosy cheeks

And a cheek to pique my nerves,

My brazen Eileen, mo cushla …’

‘Stop there, stop there.’

The old man lifted a hand, his forefinger extended; and he was chewing, seeming to be assessing Rickard’s efforts with more than one sense.

‘You have very good vibrato.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rickard, still frozen mid-pose, his arms stretched around an invisible keg at his chest.

‘And more. And more.’

Rickard laughed, in astonished gratitude.

‘Yes. You have quite a range of gifts.’

‘I’ve been told that I have excellent control in the middle to upper register, if only you would give me the chance to show you.’

‘Oh yes … control … middle to upper register … I can tell that, I can tell. No, you’re ready.’

‘When you say “ready” …?’

‘I could do with a young man like yourself, and a voice like yours, pure and not so fraught with the years.’

‘I’m not as young as you think,’ said Rickard, with a suddenness and even a venom that surprised him, his arms dropping by his side. For some reason the use of the word ‘young’ felt like an attack on his very sense of himself. His reaction seemed to jolt the old man.

‘Do you not consider yourself young?’

‘I have not considered myself young for many years, even when I was young. Even the pop vocalists I admired when I was young were people who sounded old, like Kaarst Karst of Kaarst Karst and the Iron-filers.’

‘When did you technically cease to be young?’

‘I could last credibly claim to be young five years ago when I was in the middle of my thirties.’

‘You’re young in my book. It’s unusual for someone of your age to be interested in the old-style tenor singing. Your soul may creak but, I tell you, it’s exciting for my ears to hear a virgin voice like yours. You should revel in the light voice that you have, your spry and tinkling tone; do not be after some character that you do not possess. You would be ideal for a project I have in mind. I and the man you met in the club last night, Clive, wish to form an Irish tenor trio and we are on the lookout for a third person. We will play the front parlours and concert venues of this city, whose people’s appetite for Irish ballads and art songs and the singing styles of John McCormack and Joseph “The Silver Tenor” White I believe is dormant but has not disappeared.’

Rickard was still brooding over the ‘young’ comment.

‘Mind you,’ the old man went on, looking Rickard up and down, ‘young though you are, it’s not as if you’ll be attracting the attention of the ladies. Your thighs are swollen like upturned bowling skittles and you have hips like a hula hoop and your face looks like it’s been split with a hatchet and has gradually fused back together after many setbacks in a humid region of the world.’

It was an easy decision to make in the end. If Denny Kennedy-Logan could continue to offend him, Rickard would not feel so bad about spending time with the old man and not his parents. The next evening, finding him in the drawing room at the clubhouse again, Rickard said he would join his trio.