Noise (2 page)

Michael Chambers liked empty restaurants. He was a solitary person who'd grown up with an overprotective mother and no dad and as a child he'd had emotional problems. His mother had paid for him to see a counsellor who told him that while it wasn't a good idea to isolate himself, there was no shame in going to a gig or film or party on his own. He'd taken this to heart: in his teenage years it had given him a mystique that had ironically led to more
people being interested in him than if he'd tried to get popular in a conventional way, but now he was in his mid-thirties it meant he was mostly alone. He had a nocturnal job, where he worked solo, seven days a week, transferring old videos on to DVD for a rich eighties comedian who kept his identity secret. There was another guy who did the same job during the day but they only saw each other for five minutes at midnight and noon. Sleeping all day made it hard for Michael to make arrangements to see friends and, as he lived alone in London, very few people bothered to keep in contact. He liked to make the most of the five hours he had each day and an important part of this was choosing where to eat. Almost every gig he went to now was in an isolated area–he didn't understand why American noise-acts had colonised carpet shops in Dalston or lock-ups round the back of the Elephant and Castle tube station–but at least it gave him plenty of restaurants in the surrounding area to choose from. Tonight he'd found a Vietnamese restaurant that clearly suffered from being just too far from the popular strip of similar establishments and at 7.30 on a Monday evening was completely empty.

This excited Michael. An empty restaurant wasn't as novel as an empty cinema–no matter how poorly reviewed or obscure a film there were always at least a couple of other audience members at every screening he attended–but it was a desirable prospect nonetheless. Because he had to spend all night every night in front of a screen, Michael tried not to watch television at home, but on the rare occasions he did there always seemed to be teaser ads for programmes about restaurants. He'd always believed celebrity chefs had an easy ride–if you were any good your talent would soon be recognised. He knew that some believed the same was true
of music or literature, but Michael didn't agree. There were plenty of bands and authors he admired who failed to find much of an audience. He liked to believe that the cooks in empty restaurants were like obscure bands or authors, giving their best irrespective of whether they'd ever achieve the acclaim they deserved. Of course, cooks were performing under firmer restrictions, but he wanted to believe that a lonely man in the kitchen of an empty restaurant cared as much about the consistency of his sweet-and-sour sauce as Peter Gordon did about his signature dish.

He entered tonight's restaurant. He didn't yet know what kind of unpopular restaurant this would be. Some unpopular restaurants had unpleasant waiters and it was hard to tell whether they were angry because no one came there or whether no one came there because the waiters were angry. Other unpopular restaurants employed waiters who fell upon any customers in an off-putting way, ensuring anyone who entered would be so embarrassed they'd never return. As Michael rarely went back to the same restaurant he didn't mind whether the waiters were rude or over-attentive and found it bore no relation to the quality of the food.

Tonight's waitress was of the over-attentive breed, and she even committed the shocking intimacy of placing her hand on the small of Michael's back as she guided him to his table. He was surprised by this, but didn't say anything. Instead of giving him a chance to look over the menu, she hovered beside him, waiting for his order. Michael wasn't a gourmet, but he often chose the most expensive dish on the menu for the sheer hell of it–and as the anonymous comedian paid him well for working antisocial hours and he had few expenses, he could easily afford it. Lobster was his favourite food, but he often found in these sorts of restaurants that you had
to order it a day in advance. As this didn't seem to be the case here, he asked for it.

The waitress winced. ‘I'm really sorry, sir, we don't do lobster any more. It should've been taken off the menu.'

‘That's OK,' he said, ‘I'll have…'

‘Perhaps you would like the crab,' she suggested.

Michael considered this. He rarely ate crab, considering it poor man's lobster rather than a dish in its own right. But now that the waitress had suggested it he found himself feeling an overwhelming desire to fill his mouth with the meat of this inferior crustacean, and he told the waitress that he would indeed like the crab. She smiled and, seemingly emboldened by his acceptance of her suggestion, asked him whether he would like a beer with his food.

He didn't often drink alcohol with his dinner when he was out alone. Sometimes it was ages before the band came onstage at these smaller clubs and, if he had too many drinks beforehand, he got tired and bored and even the surge of excitement he always felt when a band walked out onstage and picked up their instruments wasn't enough to perk him up and he'd leave after a couple of songs. But there were four bands on the bill tonight, which meant there wouldn't be too much waiting around, and he wasn't likely to stay until the end anyway, so he told the waitress he would like a beer.

‘Tiger, Asahi or Tsing Tao?'

Her pen hovered above her pad as she waited for Michael's reply. When he did drink beer in these sorts of restaurants and it was on the menu, he'd usually have a Tiger, but he thought that as he was having crab instead of lobster, he should have a beer he normally wouldn't drink as well.

‘Tsing Tao, please.'

The waitress nodded and asked him whether he wanted plain or egg-fried rice. Then she returned to the kitchen. Michael never brought anything with him to read when he went to restaurants alone. He enjoyed the experience of waiting for food. Lacking experiences in his daily life when he was engaged in normal social interactions, the five or ten or fifteen minutes he spent most days between ordering his dinner and waiting for it to arrive was an important time for him. The waitress came back with his Tsing Tao and the metal cracker and thin forks he would need to eat his crab.

He picked up the cracker, examining the design. The handles were in the shape of lobster claws. The waitress noticed him doing this and smiled at him. He had the strange sense she was flirting. He rarely received attention from women and, when he did, they failed to stay around for long, unable to understand what they saw as his fatal lack of ambition. The possibility that this elegantly dressed Vietnamese woman–who, he was beginning to suspect, wasn't just a waitress, but was the owner of the restaurant–would be interested in a disaffected thirty-something in a Viking Moses T-shirt was hard for him to believe, but when she returned with his crab and the egg-fried rice, she leaned over him and carefully demonstrated the best way to use the cracker in a way that made him feel uncomfortably aroused.

He had never been in a situation like this before. The closest he'd come to having sex with a stranger was picking up a woman he didn't know at a party thrown by a college friend. He wasn't psychologically equipped to deal with what he saw as the woman's advances and as she kept returning to his table to fill his beer glass or ask whether he was enjoying the crab he tried to imagine what
might happen if he did kiss her. He wondered whether it was the emptiness of the restaurant that was exciting her; her knowledge that if he did make a move she could turn the sign over from open to closed and no one would disturb them.

He ate his food quickly and, although she tried to entice him into having another beer or dessert, he ignored her and asked for the bill. He checked his wallet, wanting to pay with cash so he could speed up his exit, but he'd forgotten to get any money from the hole-in-the-wall. He took out his debit card and put it inside the black leather folder she'd placed in front of him.

Instead of taking the folder away, she opened it and squinted at the name on his card.

‘I don't believe it,' she said.

‘What?' he asked, worried.

‘Your name is Michael Chambers?'

‘Yes.'

‘We have Michael Chambers upstairs.'

‘What?'

‘Another Michael Chambers.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘I own this whole building. Downstairs, as you can see, there is this restaurant. Upstairs there are three flats.'

‘OK.'

‘And in one of these flats, I have a tenant and his name is Michael Chambers.'

‘Ah,' said Michael, relieved.

‘You must meet him,' she said, grabbing his hand.

‘No,' he replied, pulling his hand away. ‘I'm sorry, I'm late for a concert.'

She looked puzzled. ‘But you must meet him. How often does something like this happen?' She considered for a moment. ‘If you come upstairs and meet him, your meal will be on the house.'

Michael didn't care about money: he had more than enough for his purposes. The prospect of meeting his doppelgänger frightened him, but the woman was so insistent he worried there was no way of escaping the restaurant without doing so. He tried one last protest. ‘I'll come back another night.'

‘No,' she said, ‘it has to be tonight.'

He sighed and got up from the table. She led him to a doorway at the back of the restaurant. They pushed through the string curtain door-divider that separated the kitchen from the restaurant. He almost tripped over a white box of Asahi beer. A Vietnamese man in a white apron smiled at Michael from the other side of a plastic-topped table where he was carefully picking noodles from an orange colander. Michael didn't like seeing the kitchen and, although there was no sign that the preparation of food here was anything but hygienic, he knew he could never come to this restaurant again.

The waitress unlocked a door in the corner of the kitchen that led to a flight of stairs. It occurred to Michael that maybe this whole doppelgänger thing was just a ruse to get him upstairs to an empty bedroom so she could make love to him, and he thought that, although this was an extremely weird seduction technique, if it did turn out to be the case, he wouldn't be angry. Maybe she'd done it before: that could be why the cook had smiled at him.

They went up the stairs and on to the landing. As they approached the door to the other Michael Chambers' bedroom, Michael thought he could hear scratching sounds coming from within. He turned to the waitress.

‘Is he OK in there?' he asked.

‘What?' she said.

‘Those noises…'

‘I can't hear anything.'

The noises grew louder. Michael turned round. The waitress was behind him, blocking the landing. She shrugged. ‘He drinks a lot, that's all. But he'll be very pleased to see you.'

She crowded right up behind Michael and unlocked the door. As it swung open, he felt her hand on the small of his back again. She gave him a sudden shove and, as he passed over the room's threshold, Michael Chambers ceased to exist.

It's been a month now since the severed human hand was found in the public park on my street. There may be city parks where a mere disembodied hand, loose on the grass, would have little impact. But this park has noble old trees, lush lawns around elegant flower beds, benches, paved paths and a children's play area. It is a shared pride for the apartment dwellers in this tony and peaceful old neighbourhood. Litter is rare and frowned upon. In fine weather, sunbathers and band concerts crowd the grass. Children and chess players and sedate dog-walkers commune there from dawn to dusk all year long.

After dark, it's true, other uses and other users occupy the park.
But usually they are gone by daybreak when the park takes on its graceful form. To the taxpaying residents, the hand appearing in this place was a brutal invasion from a world belonging to headlines about the poor sections across the river.

I learned about the hand the day after its discovery from the woman who is captain of the Neighbourhood Crime Patrol. Her two large, limping dogs are always with her when she stomps around the streets at night in her orange vest with her police-issue cell phone, and a big flashlight. But on this sunny autumn afternoon the dogs were stretched snoozing on the sidewalk, the bees were crooning their death songs in the shrubbery and the vivacious Crime Patrol captain was telling the tale to another neighbour when I happened by.

The captain sees the hand as evidence of the satanic covens conducting abuse rituals in two apartment buildings on my street. I know both addresses well and it's clear that she has misinterpreted appearances so I didn't respond to her story until I could talk to John, who lives just around the corner, and who reportedly found the hand.

He's a kind man but nervous and he works in public relations. He is horrified by any kind of unpleasantness. He shares his immaculate apartment with a small dog named Daisy.

I saw him passing my building that same afternoon and rushed out to the sidewalk to demand his version. He was reluctant and would have hurried away but I crouched down to scratch Daisy's chest. John would never be so rude as to yank his dog away from the attention she craves, so he was forced to answer my questions. He winced but confirmed the story.

He and Daisy were out for their pre-breakfast stroll through the
park when he came upon three fellow dog-walkers, milling near the abstract metal sculpture on the east lawn. (In the captain's version it was near the public restroom at the opposite end of the park.) They were holding their excited dogs on tight leashes. Thinking there was a bird or some other wild animal on the grass, John kept Daisy near his knee and peered over someone's shoulder.

There on the grass was a human hand severed by a straight, clean cut just above the wrist. There was a trail of ‘very bloody blood', as he called it, leading away on the concrete walk.

Surely, I interrupted, it was a rubber hand from a novelty shop–a joke hand with the bone and shreds of torn muscle painted on. John's face lifted for a moment as he considered the possibility, but then sank back into anxious gloom. No. He was familiar with the rubber hands. He'd seen mine hanging on my front door every Halloween. But no. This was different. And one of the other dog-walkers had touched it and turned it over as he watched.

John thought it was probably a man's hand but he couldn't be certain. It was fairly large and bloated, with an unhealthy bluish tinge that made him think of gangrene. But he didn't touch it or sniff it. He didn't let Daisy nose it. He simply looked. One of the others used a cell phone to call the police. They stood waiting for a patrol car. John felt ill and went home.

John is a delightful neighbour, usually cheerful and always gracious. But he is a singularly unsatisfactory witness. He knew the names of the dogs at the scene–Ralph, a schnauzer, Jiggs, an ageing brindle boxer, and Toko, a mop-haired mutt wearing a harness. But he didn't know their owners.

If I had seen the hand I would have registered the condition of its fingernails–dirty? chewed? manicured? painted or polished?–and
whether there were visible hairs on the fingers and back, whether any calluses, tattoos, scars or wounds were visible. Certainly I would have checked for the reek of chemical preservatives or other telltale scents. I would have a clear sense of whether the hand was male or female, fresh or rotting, raw or preserved.

And that trail of blood. Was it thick enough to represent a living arm still pumping towards its lost extremity? Or was it just drips, such as might fall in the process of carrying an already long-amputated paw to this place in the grass? And what colour was this ‘bloody blood'? Bright or dark would suggest how long the hand had lain there.

But I didn't ask John these questions. Pressing him to dwell on details would have been cruel and useless. He didn't notice such things. As it was, he gave me an injured look and said he'd nearly forgotten the whole thing until I'd brought it up. He hurried away, pulling Daisy after him.

I am still looking for the other witnesses. I ask every dog-walker with an appropriate breed the name of their pooch. Surely one of those three at the scene would have noticed more than John did. But there are many dogs in the neighbourhood and I have yet to find Ralph, Jiggs or Toko.

The crime watch captain was furious at her usual allies, the police. They would not discuss the affair beyond confirming that a hand was, in fact, found in the stated place at the given time. They offered no information about their investigation or their suspicions. No mention of the hand has yet appeared in the news.

This lack of information naturally fuelled a festival of speculation. There was, for the moment, neither war nor election, scandal nor disaster, to engage us. The mystery of the hand was refreshingly small
and localised. The captain spread the word. The grocery checkers, pharmacy clerks and coffee servers collected comments from customers and passed them on. Every clot of two or three strollers stalled on the sidewalk was gossiping about the hand. The park benches were prime venues where the debaters could jump up and demonstrate elements of their imagined scenario at the very scene of the crime. The outdoor cafés on the avenue were swept by talk of the hand. The topic gradually enveloped table after table, evicting the usual discussions of politics and business, parking problems and looming divorces through warm afternoons and evenings.

While some clung to an injured or indignant air, many of us passed quickly to enjoyment and a surprising energy. It was a sudden fad, a kind of parlour game, to advance theories regarding the hand's source and saga. Each theory attracted its own fans and boosters. My own thinking took two routes involving either murder or the medical school.

Considering the innocuous option first:

The medical school on the hill is several miles away, but this is a mobile culture of cars and drivers. Our neighbourhood apartment buildings, so close to the hospital and the nursing school, are desirable locations for medical students, interns and nurses. Say, for example, that the anatomy class party goes late. A scalpel-wielding prankster takes off with a memento from the study corpse. Discards it drunkenly. This sequence strikes me as petty but possible.

And then there is murder. The vulgar crime rate is low in this part of town. We are not some trailer park by the racetrack, swamped by used-car lots and deep-fry joints. Not for us the midnight stick-up of convenience stores, the hysterical clubbing of robbery victims or the drive-by shootings and barroom stabbing of crasser
neighbourhoods. Our few treasured murders are crimes of passion. And the most common murder victims in the neighbourhood are our brilliant and beautiful gay men. Some are adventurers bringing volatile found objects home from the clubs. In other cases, some true lovers' quarrel escalates to fatal heat. Usually the victims are found in their apartments. If they live alone, it may take time for the tenants next door to complain about a smell.

But a room-mate murderer might try to hide the crime and keep the apartment. The perpetrator could dismember the body in the tub. Lug the pieces out in black plastic garbage bags late at night. The park has big ornamental garbage bins, emptied daily into the city's trucks. Or say the park is a discreet short cut to where our murderer's car is parked. He means to sling the bag into the trunk and drive down to the river. But a plastic bag could rip–a hand could fall out. At night, in the dark beneath the trees, it would be easy to overlook one chunk, to drag the torn bag away, leaving a blood trail, not noticing what had been left behind.

Granted, murder is far from common here, even with tens of thousands of us packed into this well-upholstered section of the city. Still, it has been a good four years since the last and I figure we are due.

For reasons that are not clear to me, these perfectly simple and reasonable possibilities were impatiently dismissed by my neighbours. This snub occurred several days after the discovery when I offered my ideas to those assembled at the five outdoor tables at the corner café. Their immediate and unanimous view was that my scenarios were more sensational than likely. Worse, they were viewed as trite. There were ill-disguised hints to the effect that such notions were somehow typical of me and less than likeable.

Uneasy at having my ideas so abruptly and rudely discounted, I subsided to listen as others presented their theories. Apparently the game had developed rules that I was not aware of. It was soon obvious that the theorists' temperament and politics affected their choice of explanatory tales. But on one factor the radicals and moderates, the timid, the imaginative and the bony-nosed pragmatics seemed to agree. They all presumed that the hand was severed in some blameless fashion, and that the rest of the body was either still alive or previously and innocently dead.

Most of their notions revolved around some combination of three significant elements in the neighbourhood. First, the huge and sprawling Good Samaritan Hospital is just six blocks north of the park. Next, the small but potent Hennessey, Gooch & McGee funeral parlour is even closer to the park, a mere three blocks to the south-east. And finally, our neighbourhood, although renovated to an expensive polish, has become a haven for a homeless spectrum of wino panhandlers and shopping-cart people driven out of the nearby river district by police purges.

In one set of theories, the hand came from the hospital. It was amputated to save a diabetic or an accident victim. Or: it was the useless refuse of an industrial accident, a mill worker who fell into the saw (these explanations acknowledge John's description of the cut as being straight and clean). Say the foreman tossed the hand into an ice bucket and slid it into the ambulance beside the victim, but by the time he arrived at the hospital it was useless. It couldn't be reattached. Or he was dead.

Whatever its origin, surgical or accidental, it was dropped into a waste basin in the hospital operating room, transported to a disposal bag, then tossed by mistake into a dumpster rather than
into the big incinerator which disposes of medical waste materials. In times past, we have collected or concocted horror stories about that incinerator and the narrow red-brick chimney that towers over the hospital. It spews the faint high smoke, we suppose, of aborted fetuses, cast-off spleens and tumours, bags of bloody bandages and the endless toxic detritus of illness.

So, the hospital theorists say, this hand lands in a dumpster by mistake and one of the local dumpster-browsers finds it wrapped in plastic and carries it off. These thinkers apparently ran dry before fully developing the dumpster-to-park process.

Anywhere else in town we might speculate that a prowling dog could have accomplished the same thing, snatching the hand out of hospital trash, carrying it to the park. But, in this quarter, the dogs do not prowl. They are as well bred, pampered and meticulously groomed as the local children. Actually dogs far outnumber children among the young and ambitious who live here. Dogs are always leashed. Roaming free is not an option. Even the homeless keep their mongrels tied close because a loose dog would quickly be hauled off to the pound and the vulnerable owner jailed or at least fined.

Besides, a dog would gnaw, would chew. Unless it were one of the soft-mouthed retrievers, a Labrador or golden, and they are not as popular now as in times past. They have been replaced by terriers suitable to apartments and by heavy Rottweilers and wolfhounds, which have supplanted the old-fashioned Dobermans and shepherds as bodyguards. Besides, John, the meek master of the dainty terrier Daisy, would surely have noticed any obvious bite marks or chewed areas on the hand.

A rival but similar scenario traced the hand back to the pristine
courtyard of the funeral parlour. Say, for example, a corpse arrives in pieces–a traffic victim whose separated bits are tossed into the body bag at the scene and delivered on a gurney.

One sophisticated version combined the hospital with the funeral premises and the street denizens. A man whose hand is being amputated dies on the operating table and the hand is included for symmetry's sake when the remains are carted off to the mortuary. Careless morticians transfer the body to the work table or cold storage, but the hand remains in the zipper bag, and the bag lies by the loading door to be sanitised later.

Then a prying wanderer–one of our panhandlers, for example–peeks in a door left open for the last summer air, and finds the prize, carries it off, swinging it merrily by one finger…The intent would be entertainment. A prop for ghost tales. A memento for gloomy pondering over a jug of Mad Night beneath the bough. Or a gleeful prank to slip into some crony's ragged blanket, to prop by his face as a surprise for when he wakes. And when he does wake he hurls the thing away on to the grass and chases after the joker, furious, to thrash him. Exeunt clowns down dawn streets, gibbering.

We do not know which hand it was, right or left, because we are all afraid to ask John, who considers us ghouls.

But suppose, said someone else, that it was an accident victim found in the mountains days after a fatal fall, or perhaps it was a drowning. The body decaying out of doors or in the river would account for the bloated flesh. Then suppose this was the left hand and there was jewellery–not a watch because that could be unbuckled or slipped off easily, but say a bracelet, a heavy gold chain too tight to slip off over the swollen, disfigured extremity. The swelling may have extended up the arm, burying the bracelet in the wrist.