Читать книгу The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician - Tendai Huchu - Страница 13

The Maestro

The Maestro took out a pack of fags from his back pocket. He flipped it round so he wouldn’t see the pair of black, rotting lungs pictured at the back. Instead the big font, SMOKING KILLS, printed at the front, assailed him. There was something perverse about taking a product that promised death; then again, salt might kill you, crossing the street might kill you, life itself was a set of small, incremental steps leading towards a certain end. He remembered an advert from way back that said: It’s not the destination, it’s how you get there, or something like that. There were a lot of adverts to remember, all saying different things. It was hard to keep up with the barrage at every corner that told you what to buy, what to eat, what to wear, what to think. He lit the cigarette and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs, savouring the harsh taste tempered by menthol. He exhaled, watching the blue smoke dissipate in the air. Grey clouds hung heavy in the sky. If he looked closely, he could see they were a patchwork of dark and light, a small bright region indicating where the sun might be. This was his routine, one last fag in the car park before work. All around were cars, new, old, shiny, dirty, the SUVs and people carriers, bright colours, a dozen shades of green, more of blue, then the whites, the reds, and the stunning pink of a Fiat Panda. Shoppers went by with their trolleys, prams and brood, swallowed up by the large glass jaws of the doors. It looked Dr Whoey, for every three that went in, only one came out. Like, where do the rest go? Shit, I’m stoned. Hey, Maestro! A woman waved from across the road. It was Tina from the deli. He smiled, waved and pushed his hair back in a nonchalant gesture. The Maestro stood just shy of six feet, had emerald green eyes and freckles that ran across the bridge of his nose. Aren’t you coming in yet, or you’re waiting till the last minute? Can’t blame you, I hate this place, Tina said as she walked past. He watched her, a round blob, self-conscious under his gaze, going until the glass doors swallowed her up. Everyone moaned about the place, but they kept coming back. Every little helps. This place, his work, was the greatest show on earth. Twenty-four hours of reality TV with a cast and an audience that didn’t even know they were taking part in an act in the ultimate playhouse, a performance replicated in every city and town. He looked at the spandrels and the steel girders that supported the glass front of the building, open and inviting, free entry, bring a friend. The sheer size of it, the huge, bold letters spelling T.E.S.C.O. high in the air, a beacon for all to see, making this place a cathedral, an awesome sight. I feel high, he thought, really shouldn’t have had that last joint this morning. Next I’ll be talking to myself, Tim Marlow at Tesco. He finished his fag, threw it on the ground and crushed it under the heel of his boot. The last cloud of smoke hung in the air just above him. He walked down to the shop, past the cash machines, the railing with shopping trolleys stacked one behind the other, and through the glass doors. Hey, Maestro, turn that smile upside down, you’re here to work. That was Peter Aaron, the security guard, standing behind a construct that looked like a pulpit with screens that allowed him to watch what was happening in every corner of the store from the CCTV cameras dangling from the ceiling, feeding in from every aisle. The Maestro saluted him and went by. He felt like Superman as he removed his jacket, revealing a chequered blue shirt with his name-tag in clear lettering. The symphony of the checkouts bleeping filled the air. It was mechanical, hypnotic, a ceaseless intonation; the soundtrack of commerce so familiar to him after four years working in the store. Had it been that long? Time was warped in this place, bent, buckled, packaged into little packets called clocking in and clocking out. Everything had a price tag, a value assigned to it by some unseen authority. An old woman stopped him. Can you tell me where I can find the antipasto? He didn’t miss a beat. Aisle twenty to the left of the cooking oil, you’ll find it on the third shelf from the top beside the artichokes. She thanked him and tottered along with her basket. He had to clock in. There was nothing worse than being deemed late when you’d actually come in on time. He made his way through the familiar aisles. Above him were the steel struts of the roof, crisscrossing one another, the fluorescent lights suspended there made the building feel like a spaceship. Everything about it felt as though it could just take off at any moment, nothing was permanent, nothing was fixed; it was just a space, a form that could be taken apart and reassembled anywhere else – transient, with no pretence of an eye on eternity. He went back stage, staff only, gloomy and functional without the polish of the shop floor. I see you finally made it, said Tina’s disembodied voice from somewhere. I always make it, he replied. They’ve stuck you back on frozen foods, I’m afraid. She emerged in her coat, with silly netting round her hair. The look suited her. That’s the way aha, aha I like it. He serenaded her and grabbed a trolley. Barry came up behind him and slapped him on the back of the head. That’s for being too damn cheerful, he said, and went on his way. Aye, grandpa, I’ll have a bullying lawsuit on ya. You wait and see. Laughter erupted from unseen corners of the warehouse. He pushed his trolley out. It was time for work. He got to the freezers, feeling the chill within. A man and a woman walked past. The woman, his partner perhaps, was in the lead. The man followed dull-eyed and dazed, his primitive brain forged in the hot, sparse savannah was overwhelmed by the bright lights, bright colours, the incredible range of choice on display, so that an elementary defence mechanism kicked in, a fuse breaking the circuit, shutting it down. He was zombified, mute, out of his depth. His partner led confidently, navigating the aisles by instinct, using her superior evolutionary gifts to sniff out the frozen parsnips, somehow knowing to choose Aunt Bessie’s, because somehow, just somehow, maybe x-ray vision piercing through the multi-coloured plastic packaging, perhaps genetic memory passed down through the matrilineal DNA, she knew they were better than the rest. The poor man was relegated to the role of trolley pusher. The Maestro arranged the merchandise, first checking the chicken thighs in the fridge were not past their sell-by date and loading the latest batch underneath. His fingers were frozen and numb. A pair of gloves was stashed in his back pocket, unused. A nasal voice came on the tannoy asking the in-store cleaner to report to Beers, Wines and Spirits. He checked his watch, the hands barely moved. That’s what this place did to the fourth dimension; outside of it time rushed by too quickly, but inside it was dilated by some sort of Tardis effect, which also made the store feel bigger on the inside. I have to stop smoking pot, he told himself. He met Carrie at the dairy section, offloading some Yakult. Hey, Carrie, he said. She handed him a pack. Have you tried this stuff? she asked. He shook his head. It’s got Lactobacillus casei, it will improve your digestive system. Do you know you’ve got good and bad bacteria in your gut? Of course not. Well, Lactobacillus casei is good bacteria. Each small bottle of Yakult contains over six billion bacteria in it. Impressive, hey? He shook his head; he didn’t want six billion more bacteria in his gut, he was happy with what he already had. John came by, looking all-serious, face pockmarked with acne. You guys should be working, said John, who was one of those supervisors drunk on an ounce of power. Carrie replied, I was just informing Maestro about the benefits of having a probiotic drink once a day to boost your immune system. John frowned, the Maestro backed off, worried that he might burst a whitehead. It’s true, he said, I have to know stuff like that in case a customer comes by and asks, you know, like, how many bacteria are in a bottle, that kind of thing. John looked him in the eye, De Niro style, and told him to go outside and stack trolleys in the car park. How come he gets to go out and I stay in the freezers? asked Carrie as he walked away. The Maestro turned round and winked. He always found himself shunted between one department and the other, ping ponged round when there was heavy grafting to be done. It was better like this when there was stuff to do outdoors, he’d have hated doing personal shopping for online orders. He took his jacket from the warehouse. It was nippy outside, but he knew, after a couple of minutes running about, he’d have to take it off again. Peter stopped him at the door. I know you’ve got a piece of frozen chicken in your left pocket, it’s all here on CCTV, pal. The Maestro shook his head; Peter was going on loud enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear. The ladies at the cigarette kiosk laughed. Betty called out, Leave him be, Peter, he’s only skinny, he needs the nutrition. He felt himself turn crimson, couldn’t find a comeback line. The brain’s too slow after a stint in frozen foods. The ladies at the kiosk were little oldies with honest faces, the kind that made you think it was a good idea to buy a lottery ticket. He walked out into the open, surveyed the car park all the way up to the green building, Corstorphine Police Station, sweeping round to the lane between PC World and McDonald’s. Empty trolleys lay between the parked cars, used and discarded. No one thought about the poor sod who had to clear up after them. He watched a toff push a trolley into the middle of the road and leave it there before he drove off in his brand new Prius. Wanker, he thought. The cold made him crave a fag. He pushed those trolleys. For each one he parked in the rack, two more popped up. Hercules’ Hydra. The Maestro felt the sweat drip from his armpits. Should have pinched a puff of Sure from Health and Beauty. He loved it outdoors, watching the cars negotiate the roundabout by the McDonald’s, the American Golf store beside the police station, the pet shop, daily life, commerce, people going by, the senseless muddle of it all. He stacked up more trolleys, creating a metallic millipede, bent his back and pushed them, straining the muscles in his arms to keep them on course. The last thing he needed was for them to crash into someone’s car, ruining the bodywork, like Gary had done a few weeks back. It wasn’t worth the hassle of the disciplinary: the inquiry, the formal letters, the health and safety training. Though Gary had come out of it all alright and got redeployed to the checkouts where the only risk that remained was of him dropping a can of baked beans on a customer’s toe. He tried to drive his stack into the other trolleys by the railings, but he hit into the side of the last one. The impact jolted his shoulder making him wince. He pulled them back and tried his approach again, a complicated manoeuvre like a Harrier landing on a carrier. A cab pulled up. The cabbie got out and helped a mum with two tots load her shopping. He watched them drive away, out of the car park and then get caught at the traffic lights. You’re daydreaming, Maestro, we don’t pay you for that. It was Colin, coming to relieve him. Time for the Maestro’s break. He went round the back, to the bins and the loading bays where the deliveries came through. A lorry was backing up. He smoked, watching it reverse, a robotic voice announcing: Attention, this vehicle is reversing. Attention, this vehicle is reversing. It bored through his skull and he could still hear it long after the lorry had stopped, its engine switched off. He watched piles of expired food being tipped into the skips outside, perfectly good food going to waste just because a label said otherwise. He was thinking. He had to stop himself from thinking. There were processes and procedures, a rule for everything, thought out and planned by head office. Once you started thinking for yourself, you were lost. At least that’s what he thought about his job, and so far the idea of putting his brain in neutral at work had served him well. He’d seen blokes come in, get tired of the BS and leave in a matter of days – blokes who thought too much. He finished his fag, watched the lads offloading the lorry for a bit, and then went back to work. There was nothing else for the Maestro to do but to push and pull the trolleys back and forth across the car park like a robot, until the lights dimmed, the sun set and then it was time to go home. When he left, the lights in the store were still on, customers dribbled in and out. It was a twenty-four hour store, tills always ringing, never resting. He took the 12 on Meadow Place Road and watched cherry blossom swaying in the wind, carpeting the pavements with rich pink petals. It took him on to Bankhead Drive, where he dropped off just opposite Powerleague. He walked through Sighthill, with the towering block of Stevenson College to his left. It was empty, the lights left on. He went past the Lloyds offices and the sprawling buildings of HMRC, where he imagined goblins totting up cash destined for secret vaults. I’ve been watching too much Harry Potter, he thought. There was a spring in his step, the post-work endorphin surge working its way through his body. A few minutes later he was in the lift in Medwin South, one of the three high rises that brutalised the skyline in this part of the city. The doors opened and he walked through the screen door, which was broken, unlocked his front door, got in and closed it. The chirpy expression on his face dropped off like a mask falling from an actor’s face. His shoulders slumped. He was offstage now. The strain of the heavy work caught up with him inside with a ferocious vengeance. He took off his shoes and stretched out his toes to sooth his aching feet. The Maestro moved to the bathroom and ran himself a warm bath, sprinkling Radox in it, churning it until it had a layer of bubbles. The foam clinging on to his arm crackled and popped. He stripped off and lowered himself, sinking down until the water touched his chin. It smelled divine, of sage and other herbs. Immersed in the water, there was nothing else for it but to close his eyes and relax, feeling like he was floating in the sea, somewhere warm, beyond the confines of his cramped flat. The day dissolved into the water, sinking away until nothing was left except the sound of his breath. He let more hot water in, not wanting to get out, lost in the wonderful, fragrant feeling in which he was cocooned. From outside he could hear two dogs barking, the sound travelling eight floors up to his flat. He let himself sink lower, raising his knees to create more space in the bath for his head to slip below the waterline, holding his breath as he drowned, the water entering his nostrils and ears. Everything was silent down below except the subtle noise of shifting water whenever he moved. He held on for as long as he could, emerged and took a deep breath of air. Afterwards, the Maestro dried himself and wrapped the towel round his waist. A few minutes later he was in the kitchen where he made himself a ham and cheese sandwich for tea. There seemed to be no incentive to bring out his pots and pans to cook just for one. The labour required, for today at least, was something he could not muster. Outside his window, he could see Dunsyre and Cobbinshaw, the two other twelve-storey blocks identical to his own, the only difference being the red and blue strips at the top of the respective buildings. Medwin had a yellow strip. He ate standing up, looking out into the night, his reflection in the double glazed window mirroring him. It was his lonely companion. A crescent moon hung somewhere in the sky, above the airport, in the distant west. The clouds had lifted and he could see it, an orange C sat above the horizon. There were no stars in the sky. He seldom saw them, blocked out as they were by the brilliance of the street lights. The city never knew night. He missed seeing the Milky Way stretching out, millions of stars, the vastness of creation. He finished his sandwich and washed it down with tap water. There was a brown envelope on the mantelpiece above an electric heater fashioned into something like a fireplace, a cheap imitation that was broken and which he had not bothered to replace. He took the envelope, ran his finger along the edge and replaced it. Books lay piled on the floor, against all four walls of the room, rising up to window level. The walls were white, bumpy where old bits of wallpaper had been painted over. Two unopened Amazon packages sat at the bottom of the fireplace, more books to add to the collection. He reached out for the Consolation of Philosophy, which he was reading, and had been, slowly, contemplatively for a week. This book, Boethius’ masterpiece written when he was in prison, was one of those favourite texts he returned to time and again, hoping with each reading to unlearn the last and discover it anew. Each time he read the poetry of the words, he felt a kinship, as though he too was in bondage, searching for a higher meaning to life through reason. The pages were dog-eared from when he’d lent the book to Tatyana. While he was careful and used a bookmark, she folded the pages as though forcing her presence onto them. He opened the window, swinging it wide, placed the book on the ledge, pulled himself up and twisted round so he sat on it, looking into his flat, his back to the world. He could read easily with all the light coming from the streetlights below. Pg 38: Love governs lands and seas alike/ Love orders too the heavens above. Boethius thoughts captured, sealed in this vessel, the book, transmitted over the centuries to him. That was a mystical thing, he thought, as he read on. He arched his back, slowly controlling his movements like a ballerina until he found the exact point where his lower body and upper body were balanced, with the ledge acting as a pivot. He relaxed his muscles, feeling the cool breeze rush by. It was a precarious position; one that he found improved his concentration. After midnight there was stillness in the air, as if the city sighed and held its breath. There was no sound to be heard anywhere. It was the briefest of moments; so fleeting, so fragile that if you breathed you missed it. The Maestro had discovered this magical moment while reading a book by Jon McGregor. McGregor, that chronicler of ordinary life, finding little snapshots of beauty in the mundane and capturing them in amber, poetic prose. Every night, especially on nights he couldn’t sleep, the Maestro looked for this one moment, and took pleasure in finding it, in the thought that he might be the only one experiencing it in the entire city. He flicked to the next page; the sound of the paper turning shattered the moment and the city started up again. In the distance he could hear a big lorry going along the bypass, the sound of a loud television coming from one of the flats, his own breath, the whole world turning in that familiar way, a confluence of old and new events, organisms that lived for a few minutes died next to those that lived for hundreds of years, instants piled upon moments becoming the fletching in the unidirectional arrow of time. He felt the familiar craving for a fag. He could hear the cranking of the cogs in his mind, a thought forming. Let there be light! Did this moment exist before he’d read McGregor, or had it always been there? And if it had, then why hadn’t he noticed it before? Perhaps, he thought, it did not exist and only came to be after I read the book. If that was the case then he had to accept the terrifying notion that fiction had created a real moment in the real world from nothing but word. He recalled a trick by a writer who embedded the word – yawn – in his text and the readers who read this word found themselves yawning automatically once they had passed over it. A cheap trick or a small indication of the power of the word? Pg41: Mortal creatures have one overall concern. This they work at by toiling over a whole range of pursuits, advancing on different paths, but striving to attain the one goal of happiness. The Maestro felt lightheaded, the effect of blood rushing to his brain. In that moment he pondered if he were to let go, to cast himself down from this ledge (it was another of those intrusive thoughts, one so familiarly woven into the fabric of his mind that not a day went by without him thinking it), if he let go, would He send one of His angels so that not a hair on his body would be harmed. It was an appealing concept, the idea that once every so often the Divine intervenes in the workings of the cosmos, Joshua stops the Sun, Moses parts the Red Sea, so as to make His presence known, yet, in all likelihood, and the Maestro always came to the same conclusion, he would hurtle into the void, accelerating at nine point eight metres per second squared, simple physics, the predictable effects of gravity on an eleven stone, twenty-seven year old male body falling through the atmosphere, leaving only the hope that through the panicking, firing neurons there would be a moment of clarity in which everything is illuminated, a split second in which life itself was explained, the meaning of it all, past, present and future laid out, all making sense so that when, when he hit the ground, then at least it would have been worth something more than the aching emptiness he felt every day with each sunrise and sunset. The image of the falling man from 9/11 flashed into his mind. What had the man thought on the way down, was he just thinking, oh fuck, oh fuck, or was there some fundamental insight on the journey, plummeting to earth, the concrete-scarred ground rising to meet him? The scary thing, the Maestro realised, was not the falling, but what happened after the fall, Nothing, not even the nothing of the darkness of night or the nothing of emptiness; those were something at least, those were nothings that could be measured by the absence of a particular thing, and so they had an essence to them, a core beyond the event horizon. Not this, this was an incomprehensible Nothing, the nothingness of non-existence, beyond consciousness, a Nothingness that was not something, and so far beyond intellect that entire religions had to be formed to cover it up, to speculate its very being, a function of the causality-seeking neurons in the brain. So religion said the end was not The End, there was something larger, another chance, the weighing of scales so that there was a final justice, immortality, punishment, God, anything at all except the Nothing beyond proof that was waiting for the Maestro if he fell. This for the Maestro was the reason he read these books, to try to make sense of life, the side of the equation that was at least known. And so he hopped and hoped from one to the next, searching, trying to unlock the secrets of Kafka, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, hoping that one of them had peered behind the veil, into the unknown, so that a sliver of the unknowable was captured and contained in the words on a page. His mobile rang, startling him, and he let go of the book. It fell, hitting him on the chin, tumbling, flapping in the air like an owl trying to gain flight as it continued on its death spiral, round, round, round it went until it landed on the pavement with a clap. He hauled himself up and leapt off the windowsill into the flat. He answered his phone. Hello, he said, and it came out sounding more of a challenge than a greeting. The person at the other end was silent. In his haste he’d not checked the number, but he knew who it was. Maestro, why you are breathing so loud? Is this a bad time? It was Tatyana, the only person who would call him at this time, the only person who would call him at all. She mostly worked nights and, once she knew he was an insomniac, took it as a licence to call at any odd hour. I was just reading, he said. You’re always reading, every time I telephone. Go out, boogie, it’s Friday night, she replied. He waited for her to say something else; there was a silence that had to be filled. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he asked, How’s work? She thought about her answer. Tatyana was the kind of woman who could stare you down and win. It’s busy as usual; nightshift is always busy, so many shelves to stack. You want to come and see me some time? He mumbled a reply about how he was busy and had a lot of reading to catch up on. She coaxed him and made him promise that they’d meet soon. Then she hung up. He closed the window. It was only now he noticed the chill in the night air. He ignored his familiar craving, telling himself he wasn’t going to have another fag until morning. Almost without thinking, he ran his finger along the cold spine of a book. Of late, he found himself preferring the company of his books to the companionship of people. Tatyana was virtually his only friend, if he could call her that. Everyone else had forgotten him or given up on him once he’d withdrawn, almost as though he’d quietly sunk into quicksand that no one else could see. At work he was friendly, exuding something resembling warmth, but outside of work he kept to himself. There was something safe in the white pages of a book. A book could be opened and set aside. It could be read and reread, each time a new, deeper meaning deciphered. People, well, people were harder to read. So much was hidden in the twitch of the brow, a sweaty palm, the tenor of the voice, subtle gestures, and things left unsaid. People were moving, dynamic, inconsistent in a million ways. He imagined Tatyana at her shift, wiping shelves, replenishing them. He counted sheep, got to a hundred and stopped. He switched the TV on, flicking through many channels, and failing to find anything worth watching. There was an overwhelming choice, even avoiding the temptation of Playboy, Babestation and the late night adult entertainment channels. On National Geographic, a crocodile waited patiently in a river for a herd of kudu taking tentative steps to the banks. The narrator spoke in a cool, soothing voice, explaining how it had been a long dry season and that this was the only source of water for hundreds of miles. The kudu walked along the muddy banks, reached the river and began to drink. The Maestro watched as the crocodile drifted nearer and nearer, a floating log in the muck, and then in a flash it was all over for a baby kudu. Its mother watched helplessly from the banks as it was dragged into the murky brown waters. He remembered Boethius. He dressed, left his flat, took the lift and walked out of the security doors into the night, where he found the book on the pavement, unscathed.