To Indigo Read online

  There was only one thing I could cite – even if that too involved my trade. It was the sole manuscript I had never even submitted to an agent or editor. The untitled, unfinished book had begun life in paper form, but had currently lain in the files of my computer for six years. Untitled was not a work of suspense or detective fiction. It was a strange thing, perhaps even a sort of fantasy, set in an (also untitled) European country during the eighteenth century. The literary style of the book was also fairly unlike the normally carefully-clipped and controlled prose of everything else I typed in there. And it had a structure that was, perhaps, experimental. It involved no plotting whatsoever, dissimilar to every other novel I’d penned, typed, or ultimately tapped out on the keyboard. And of course, like anything never planned, unplotted, unresolved, meandering and ‘free’, it frequently stuck. I had begun Untitled in 1975, when I was in my twenties. Thereafter, section by section it flowed and stuck, and unglued and went on, until the next inevitable block. Printed up so far, it ran to 318 close pages, but aside from the revisions I sometimes visited on it, it had by now been stalled fairly conclusively since the turn of the century.

  Now it came floating up as it were out of the beer glass. Untitled was, for all its failings and inertia, the one interesting book I had ever attempted. In fact the only book that flew in the face of everything else of any kind I had had to do and done.

  Did I say what it was about? If only loosely, it concerned a crazed and murderous young poet, son of a once-wealthy mercantile family, a drug-taker and visionary with black curling hair and wide wild eyes. Aside from his genius, he took anything he wanted, but generally it was given him, and the silver salver his far from mundane treats were served on, was often also awash with blood.

  Just as I glanced up from the beer, the pub door opened in a sudden sun flash. Two silhouetted figures walked in, two men. One was a suited business type with expensive shoes. The other was the black-haired poet from Untitled.

  Obviously he wasn’t anything of the sort, the young man now leaning against the bar. Actual characters do not, as in one or two peculiar romances they may, leap from the page to take on sentient life.

  The resemblance, however, especially as I had just then been thinking of it, was remarkable.

  Realistically I’ve sometimes wondered since, if I hadn’t been thinking of Untitled, would I even have noticed him particularly? Maybe on the train going back I might have thought of it: Oh, that fellow in the pub. He was rather like Vilmos… wasn’t he.

  Under these circumstances I was inevitably intrigued.

  I stared a moment, checked myself, and started to scrutinise him more cautiously.

  He was definitely quite a handsome specimen. As, naturally, was Untitled’s Vilmos. Lynda, with her prissy taste, wouldn’t have liked him, I don’t think she would. After all she made do with me and my little way for two whole years. Maureen though, I’m fairly sure, would have appreciated the man in the pub. She too spent time with me, but I had been a lot younger then, and her husband was also very good-looking in his youth.

  This young man was himself about thirty-six or seven. Not so young really. And Vilmos – about thirty-five where I’d left him last, wallowing in a brothel on some shadowy cobbled side street of an arched and aching city. Here then, Vilmos abruptly aged by the next unwritten chapter.

  He took no notice of anything around him that I could see. He spoke to the Suit-and-Shoes in a muted angry monologue, pausing only to listen to the Suit’s own brief comments, here and there inserted, during which Vilmos – I might as well call him that for the moment – seemed both strung-up and contemptuous. The Suit drank a glass of red wine. It was a nice colour, like the bottle Harris had got with the steak. Vilmos drank a double vodka or gin without mixer, knocked it back and stood waiting for a refill. Which was duly purchased.

  Already this, his demeanour, seemed aptly reminiscent of what Vilmos’s might have been in some comparable situation. But what situation was it? Suit-and-Shoes looked composed, almost non-committal. There were a lot of early evening drinkers already in the pub, and more streaming in. I couldn’t make out even a single word. Probably twenty years ago I would have. Then other barflies grouped between me and the two men and I couldn’t see them well either. Vilmos wore a black shirt and black jeans. They were neither expensive nor tat. He was wearing brown boots that looked as if they had helped him scale the sides of rough chalky buildings.

  I took a few more gulps of beer.

  It was nearly five-thirty, the middle of what we used to call the Rush Hour. As a rule I avoided travelling this late, or caught the seven-thirty train, which missed the worst of it. I’d dawdled. As if – I was meant to see this man, to be inspired, Untitled rejuvenated.

  I’d use this scene in the next chapter. Find a good if bizarre explanation for it, the Suit man a creditor or lover, even a sibling. To work on the book tonight could ease the dull feeling of threat that had somehow fastened on me with Harris’s words Dad’s dead.

  All at once the crowd round the bar was parting, like clothes in a big wardrobe, as some Narnian-like beast came shouldering forth. It wasn’t Aslan.

  “Yes?” he said, standing over my table.

  My scrutiny, as I’ve noted here, had been intended to be discreet. Besides he and his companion had been hemmed in. How had he seen the slight low glances I shot at him?

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked mildly.

  “Well maybe you should.”

  I kept a blank face. I don’t like confrontations, and don’t often either invite or get snared in one.

  “Well,” he said, “you could buy me a drink, then.”

  His voice was not as I had imagined Vilmos voice to be. I suppose I heard Vilmos, in my inner ear, speaking a sort of cod Franco-Russian-Hungarian. Something like that.

  I thought, Christ, he thinks I’m after him. Want to shag him. Now what do I do, for God’s sake?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t quite…”

  He sat down across from me. There was an empty chair there somehow left unfilled. He sprawled out his long legs. “I know you, don’t I?” he asked me.

  For a queasy second I did think perhaps, despite all common sense, he truly was Vilmos. But I seized the one apparent saving chance.

  “I thought I knew you a minute too. You’re very like my sister’s son.” I have no sister, and this non-existent She has no son. But would that sweep the problem up?

  He said, “Oh really?”

  He levelled his black brows. He had good teeth, and a slightly crooked nose. Vilmos? Why not. Perhaps in some fight… I tried to keep my wits.

  “I haven’t seen him for a year,” I elaborated. A writer, or my kind of writer, can do such things extempore. “They’re in India, he and his girlfriend. So I was a bit surprised…”

  “To see me here. Only I’m not, or he’s not.”

  “No. I’m sorry if I stared. That was why.”

  “It isn’t usually,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “have a good evening.” I rose. Thank Christ he stayed in the seat. From the bar, I noticed, his former associate had melted away.

  “Cheers,” said Vilmos.

  He had an actor’s accent. His voice seemed trained, expressive, but more lazy now.

  He still didn’t get up and I wove through the pub crowd and got out on the scorched pavement. I was sweating. God, that had been – never mind. Forward march – my father again. Rise and shine, forward march, the touch of the Grim Reaper, easy come, easy go…

  I was walking quickly towards Charing Cross. The best course however would be to go by and on to the Hay Market. I could look at the theatres, I could simply…

  “I just thought,” said his unmistakable voice behind me. It came from higher in the air. I’m five ten, you may remember, and Vilmos about six three, “you might like to take this.”

  Trepidatious to the point of agony I turned. He held before me a business card. The very last item I would guess my nerve
s expected.

  I gazed at it. Joseph Traskul said the card in plain black Roman on plain dull white. Then an email address and telephone number.

  “Er – why would I…?”

  “Be a sport,” he answered with a menacing old-fashioned playfulness.

  “Look, I’m really sorry…”

  “I’ll bet you are, now.”

  All around the crowd eddied. I knew that if he drew a knife and sliced off my ear, or kicked me in the groin, everybody else would merely fastidiously move round us, not to interrupt.

  “All right. Thank you.”

  “You think,” he said, “I’m a gay whore. Or maybe a bifunctional one. Look on the back of the card.”

  I did so. Piano Tuner to the Bars it said.

  He laughed then, now not like Vilmos, more gentle, and almost shy. “Had you going there. I thought you looked the type of guy might have a piano, or know someone. Work is scarce this spring. I’ll travel, just minimum expenses. The main rates are printed there, too. See you.” And he swung himself about, the mane of hair springing up and flopping down on his collar. He strode carelessly away through the splintered westering sun.

  TWO

  My father used to keep a piano, (I put the word “keep” advisedly) in the sitting-room. He could play quite well, if rather stiffly, a little Chopin or Schubert, and sometimes Victorian songs. I had piano lessons at the grammar school, which was one of the few still surviving locally in the ’60’s. Then I too could play a little, if like him without much magic and with less ability. I remember hot summer, cold dark winter evenings, practicing, and my mother putting her head round the door. “That’s nice, Roy.”

  Maureen had a piano too, and she could play very well. She played the kind of thing I liked, unless I only really started to like it because she played it. Rachmaninov and Debussy were a couple of her choices, and Scott Joplin. She’d found him long before his return to the public ear.

  Now of course my home premises were pianoless. I had sold it four years after I inherited the house.

  It was nothing like Harris’s ‘place’, No 74, Old Church Lane. A long, sloping, winding street with some occasional careering oak trees, and semi-detached villas planted behind short front lawns. I’d grown up there, and later gone away, although only about an hour by train, to a succession of not very salubrious rooms. Gradually the street and the villas changed over the years, the former getting less cloistered and the pavement more worn, the trees being cut down or regularly pruned to stumps. The houses though perked up. They acquired bright red or blue front doors and new roofs, garages where side access had been, and ponds with water-lilies. “People value a house now,” my father had remarked. “Because it costs more, it means more.” I never really followed that. Houses had often cost a lot more than was affordable. I was more inclined to put the renovations down to the increasing frequency with which everyone else seemed to move out or in, tarting everything up for a quick sale or to please a mortgage company.

  I assayed little improvement when I went back. My father had died, having a heart attack at the local, where he’d gone for an unusual drink with some friends. My mother had been dead for years. Breast cancer. There wasn’t much they could do for it then. But the house was useful. It was paid for, and once all the legal business was solved I was installed, only half an hour out of London’s Charing Cross. I managed to find a gardener too. He was young, quite efficient. He scalped the lawn and hauled the worst of the weeds from the flowerbeds, where a scatter of flowers then bloomed by themselves for several seasons before, finally, untended and never watered except by God, they gave up. In the end the gardener too simply vanished without a word. Perhaps someone had killed him, as happened to gardeners and many others in quite a lot of my books. I got the back and front lawns paved over then, and left the rest to itself. I sold the piano about the same time. I had never been tempted to play it.

  That evening I got home around eight. I had just missed a train, then travelled standing on another, amid herds of commuters in the same case, reading papers, chatting on their mobiles, swaying there like bats the wrong way up.

  Indoors I made some tea and took a biscuit from the jar, my mother’s biscuit barrel that had a fat bear on it. As a child I had loved it, the bear.

  I really had altered the house very little. Only neglected it. The agency cleaning girl came once a fortnight.

  She was currently a German student, who seemingly spoke only five words of English: Hello. Yes. No. Done. And Ifbee. (Perhaps six words?) That last meant If I can against all odds, i.e.: Could you clean the cooker? Ifbee.

  The sun was at last going down in the fir tree at the end of the garden, not mine, but that of an adjoining plot. Beyond my back fence ran the alleyway, but the fir tree mostly hid it from me. I’d used this tree in swift descriptions here and there, a handy example of nature, its needles against this sky or that. Now a fractured golden sunset sky that had been prefigured in London’s radiance.

  Mug in hand, I stared into the last light.

  Sunset and dusk have a mystic significance in the East, I forget quite what. In France of course, with dusk comes l’heure bleu, when phantoms and hallucinations are seen.

  The sun went. The fir grew darker and the sky like bronze. Then the twilight blueness. A bright star stood out over the roof of the Catholic church.

  Vaguely heard around me the ordinary noise of a radio, some male clearing nasal passages careless of open window or listening ears, a Hoover; a night flight starting off for Europe.

  And then, the phantom.

  It emerged palely from the umbra of the fir tree and the gathering dark, and gazed in over the fence. Bisected by the fence at the approximate level of his jaw, Joseph Traskul’s disembodied head. Vilmos would have liked that.

  I didn’t drop the mug. Maybe I clutched it far too tightly.

  And he? He watched me. He was smiling.

  We said nothing, either of us.

  And then the owl – there was an owl, it sometimes flew across the gardens in the spring and summer, although where it came from I’d never been sure – the owl sailed by overhead.

  And both he and I looked up.

  Both he and I – Vilmos – Joseph – and I, looked up at the passing of the owl.

  When I looked down again, the phantom was gone.

  2

  On the third flight I met one of the neighbours. He came out of a door above and clattered down the stair towards me.

  I got ready to show him the forged packet, with its address of Saracen Road and the apparently franked postage. But, thickset and indifferent, he shouldered past me, brushing me over with a leather jacket very unsuitable for the summer weather, not saying a word.

  No doubt few of them took any notice of each other in this block. Inner London is like that, even more so than the suburbs where I exist.

  I went up the further three flights and reached flat No 6. His flat.

  It was as he had described it. A door painted a dull white like all the others I had already seen, but this one with a panel of crinkled glass. The door had only one Yale lock. Yet it did not have a number on it, unlike those below. Nevertheless it had to be 6. The stair ended here. There was nowhere else to go.

  One flight down, flat 5 was still crashing out its horrible music, tuneless, with only the deadly beat and mostly indecipherable Neanderthal lyrics, to class it as any kind of ‘song’. When I had walked by on my way up, not only was I deafened, I felt the racket through the soles of my feet, base of my spine, and punching me in the gut.

  Up here, no one else was about. Through a narrow, unwashed window I could see the rear of the other buildings, and not a flicker of life. Beyond those, the London skyline.

  I was scarcely furtive. I took the heavy-duty gardening glove out of my back pocket, put it on and made a fist. I smashed the glass with one smack, as if I’d been doing things of this sort all my life. Watching TV I suppose teaches one the worst skills; the morality brigade are right.
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  Most of the panel fell in. It must have been very inferior stuff.

  I reached through and undid the door.

  As it swung inward, I thought he would spring at me, out of nowhere, out of thin air.

  But he didn’t. The narrow hallway was empty. In fact very empty, no carpet down, the paper even scoured from the unpainted walls. There were two internal doors, each closed.

  THREE

  I went back into the house, through the kitchen door, which I shut, locked and bolted behind me. Then I switched on the external light. Its beam cut hard into the gathering dark, revealing nothing beyond what was normally present, the paved lawn and dead flowerbeds, the fir tree over the fence, the top of the Catholic church. The light dimmed the diamond star that had appeared there.

  What had happened? Had I imagined him, Joseph Traskul the piano tuner, his floating head swimming by the fence and smiling at me, before the owl somehow diverted both our attentions to the sky?

  I didn’t think it had been imagination.

  Well then, was I going mad?

  Putting down the mug I went through into the front room and poured myself a finger of whisky.

  Standing motionless, I peered out at the street. The curtains were still undrawn. My mother used to have ‘nets’ up, to stop anyone looking in at our nondescript activities. But I had taken them down in the end. I had nothing fascinating to hide, did nothing in that room, nor in any of the living-rooms, to merit such strict concealment.

  Out in the street a couple of surviving oaks caught the ugly glare of the street lamps. The fifteen-year-old from three doors up was bicycling by, and the man who always walked his Alsatian dog was doing just that. Nor was anyone on the garden path that ran beside the house. The side gate was securely shut.