He inspected his hands, held them up in front of the camera, moved them closer to the lens.
Ah, here it comes. It’s happening again. I can’t control it any more. I am too weak
.
He was short of breath.
I’ll show you. I’ll show you
.
Alex came up into a crouch, leaning toward the screen.
Can you see it?
Can you see me beginning to fade out?
His voice shook slightly, dropped to a whisper.
He extended his arms, his hands filling the screen, held out in front of him, obscuring his face.
Can you see it? Paula? Can you see it? Soon enough I won’t be here at all
.
Crane’s voice was even quieter now, edged with dissonance, and Alex was unsure for a second whether it was still in the headphones or had detached itself somehow, bypassed them and was mixed in with his own thoughts.
Crane’s hands were filling the screen. Were they slowly losing colour and density, thinning out, or were his eyes playing tricks on him? He inched closer still, and then the image was gone, the screen suddenly black, the tape rewinding with a loud accelerating whirr.
Alex stood up and went into the kitchen, his mind racing, strangely exhilarated, picking a bottle of Atrium Double Stout from the fridge. So, he had video documentation, footage, of someone cracking up. Possibly there were other videos too. He began to imagine an exhibition, multi-media, text and images, sounds, footage, documents, testimonies, ideas in a torrent, swirl- ing through him. Yes, yes, a book, perhaps a dramatisation of Crane’s life, lightly fictionalised, something blending reality and invention, a dialogue between Alex Hargreaves and the missing Vernon Crane reconstructing his last days, rescuing his lost work.
Ideally he needed to talk to Paula Adonor again to see if he could get his hands on the rest of Crane’s belongings. Then he needed to find out where the other parts were, get those records off Graeme Ferris and whoever else might be looking for stuff, which could be, potentially, who knew, hundreds of people.
He considered texting Paula Adonor. It was late, he might disturb her sleep, piss her off, but he was twitchy and impatient, imagining that every second he prevaricated was a gift to Ferris, the crowding thousand others all plugged into the same circuits, attuned to the same frequencies. Yes, yes, nothing stays secret for very long, once it’s out there, it’s like wildfire, quicksilver.
It seemed he was ahead of the curve, or at least looking in the right places. Other people would be going for the vinyl maybe, maybe even officially released cassettes, but he wanted the uncatalogued, unofficial, undocumented, that was where the power and interests lay, in marshalling that.
He sent a message.
Paula, have free time tomorrow morn. Could I possibly look at
Crane’s stuff again if convenient?
While he was at it he sent her a reminder that he wanted to friend her on
noodl.com
A minute later she texted back.
No problem key with Penny best P.
A few seconds after that he saw his noodl request had been accepted.
This time he remembered his guest pass.
Jaqui had been kind enough to get him one, though it had required any number of checks, a stringent application procedure and a lot of waiving away of privacy and data protection rights on entering the Soft Rail’s smart grid. There was a grey-market in the passes of course, some changing hands for up to £10,000, and increasingly sophisticated attempts to clamp down on non-designated individuals gaining access to the complexes and the grid. Facial recognition software, biometric chips.
But still, what a pleasure it was to be gliding smoothly above the cattle trucks creeping out of Clapham Junction, lounging in his inflatable chair, marvelling at the monorail’s frictionless speed, watching the train extend, as it pulled into each station, to accommodate the extra passengers who had swiped in, each carriage sliding smoothly out from the housing of the ones behind, the chairs, the attached worktops and drinks holders bursting silently up from the floor, commuters directed by their phones to the nearest empty seat.
He gazed through the tinted plastic window, sun out, sipping a green tea latte and enjoyed, glancing around at his fellow passengers, their success stories of one kind or another, experiencing a surge of quiet and sustained satisfaction.
He swallowed a Deveretol and sat back. It was hard to imagine now the trough he’d been in around November, Christmas, how bleak and crushing January had seemed.
His reverie was punctured by a message from Paula Adonor.
Sorry forgot to leave box out, on top of cupboard in hall.
In the flat he found the box immediately on the top of a cheap pine wardrobe with a missing door that took up a lot of space in the corridor. The flat was tiny, really. He poked his head round the door of Paula’s room, saw a neatly made bed with a cream and brown quilt, shelves full of books and trinkets, photos of kids.
He went back to the living room, replaced the video he had borrowed and pulled a walkman out of his pocket, slotted
Field Recording 1
in and snapped it shut, turning the volume down low, anticipating the loud scream he had heard before.
There was nothing at first, just silence, then a sound slowly growing louder, closer. It was a sound unlike any he had ever heard and an image immediately formed in his mind, something plant-like but crystalline, bright green, sharp angled, a mineral of some kind, somehow blooming and flowering as other sounds and forms slowly came into view. He could hear ragged breathing which for a second he thought was perhaps his own, and the sound of rapid footsteps. Alex stood up and began, with his eyes closed, to walk slowly around the room. Noises loomed as others passed and faded, long pollen-yellow strips of plasma, clusters of bright white berries, bubbling pools of chalk that solidified, shattered, and drifted away. The breath, the sounds of footsteps growing more alien, harsher, calcifying and slowing to a stop before again there was a tremendous scream that seemed to shatter everything and left nothing now but the gentle hiss and click of the blank tape sliding slowly forward.
Alex took off the headphones and sat there in that quiet room on the fourth floor of a condemned council block in Deptford, at a loss.
As part of the research for
Gilligan’s Century
he had thoroughly explored the history of modern composition, Gilligan briefly having had an affair with Beriano’s lover. Some of the compositional principles were perhaps the same, these swarms of sound and textures, but with an extraordinary sense of almost limitless depth. He should get this, later, to some of his musicologist friends.
He opened one of the books and flicked through it. Sketches and diagrams, scribbled notes. These were the shapes and forms that he himself had seen in response to the music, the colours written in around them, arrows showing the angles of rotation.
Crane’s blueprints for the music he wanted to make. But how had he managed to convey, to conjure so exactly in Alex’s mind, those shapes and forms that he had hoped to create?
He hunched over the book. Page after page, divided into sec- tions: field recording one, recording twenty, recording thirty-two.
Now, suddenly, something of the immensity of what Crane had been doing overwhelmed him.
This is a goldmine. He had to have this box and its contents for himself, to give him time to look over it all in a more conducive environment. It was ridiculous to expect him to come all the way over to Deptford every time, to a flat with no real facilities. This was of no value to Paula Adonor, she had just stowed it away. Wasn’t it the case that the work belonged to those who would value it most, to those who would make something of it? Wasn’t that what the artist himself would have wanted, that his art was revered and cherished rather than left ignored in a box on top of a cupboard in a fucking Deptford council estate of all places?
He couldn’t remember exactly who had advanced this same argument in reference, wasn’t it, to ownership of land in the USA, that the land belonged to those who would make use of it, who would cultivate it, add something to the world, increase the fund of human understanding, endeavour.
It was a question of the work as much as anything, of doing justice to the work, and in that sense he was liberating it. He, well, he felt there was an analogy there with the very block he was sitting in himself, the argument that some things are wasted on certain people, that yes, things belong by right to those who will most value them, who will make most use of them. He left the flat and went down onto Deptford High Street, asked around and found a place where he could get a key cut. He did all this automatically, his mind elsewhere, completely preoccupied with speculating about where and how this chain of events might play out. He’d felt it from the start, had some inkling of it, some sense of momentum, of being drawn forward, and now Alex was sure that Vernon Crane was what mattered. And he was pleased, more than pleased, elated, to find a clear road ahead, a sense of purpose, a definite direction. Back at the flat he tried the newly cut key on the door and found it worked fine.
He considered just taking the contents immediately and putting the empty box back on top of the wardrobe but then it would be obvious, if she ever checked it, that he was the culprit. So he needed to come back at some point while she was at work and take the whole thing, which might well be missed and again would make Alex a suspect. A break in, clothes strewn everywhere, the place ransacked, but why would a thief take the box?
Well, he would have to think about it more carefully. Certainly for the moment it was best to keep Paula Adonor on side. He went out again, bought flowers and a bottle of champagne from the local off-license, popped it in the fridge and put the flowers on the table, wrote a thank you note on a piece of paper he tore from his notebook saying: Paula, thanks so much for making this stuff available to me, really appreciate the time you’ve given. Have a drink on me. Bottle in the fridge. Best. Alex.
All day at home as he waited for a response. Halfway through dinner he got a message:
Thanks really not necessary but thanks. Am just happy someone is showing interest in Vernon.
Sitting up in the bed, almost the moment he had opened his eyes he found he was sending a message from his iPhone to Nick Skilling. It was important that he get moving on this.
Hi Nick. Just a couple of quick questions. Is Graeme Ferris still interested in that stuff of Vernon Cranes. If not i would love to have a look at all of it.
Message back:
Graeme down to pick it up next week sometime.
Alex:
Are you free before then?
There was what seemed to Alex Hargreaves an interminably long delay in which he made himself a Vortex coffee: organic, triple- filtered, blended with locally sourced grass-fed butter, coconut oil, crushed cacao nibs and liquorice.
Sure, if you want to come out to Margate. Weekday evening after seven should be fine.
How about tonight? Where?
A much shorter pause this time.
Sure. Let’s say the Wetherspoon’s pub on the front at seven thirty. V busy in work so may be a little late but will be there.
Great. See you at seven thirty. Here’s a photo.
He went into noodl to start trying to track down more information on Crane, shifting his node and network settings around in order to get a thick description of all of Paula Adonor’s contacts and potential links, finding out how many degrees of separation there were between him and potentially useful contacts, and figuring out which route and accumulation of mutual friends might best get him access to the next node.
Paula’s noodl map was relatively small, unlike his own, which was rather vast, although he imagined that compared to some people’s, Dominic’s for instance, it was quite insignificant. This scope that a few months ago he had found overwhelming now satisfied and even thrilled him; the links to friends and associates were filled in with thick Udon-style lines, the friends-of-friends with whom he was yet to connect, thinner, Ramen-style white squiggles. He selected a hundred of them and set the app to processing all the information on their online activity, matching it with his own recent web searches and prioritising the following terms: #VernonCrane, #90s, #experimental, #literature, #music, #Manchester, #NickSkilling, #HulmeCassetteFactory, #NarwhalRecords, #DreamscAPE, #Graeme Ferris. Noodl was essential really for a writer; a combination of a three dimensional map of everyone’s networked life, the unforged but potential connections, and a mini data-mining programme.
It would be useful if Nick Skilling accepted his node request too. Some people were reluctant to sign up, perhaps because it was a Chinese app and they distrusted the cutesy noodle graphics, the cover for a lot of sinister monitoring and collating. The impersonality of it offended others, the lack of even the pretence of friendship. He was deep inside noodl for a while sending out contact requests to anyone who looked promising, flipping the map this way and that, extending the field to take in more and more potential links, and searching, re-searching, swinging the net wider and wider. Mid-afternoon he sent Karen a text explaining that he was going to Margate, and set off early to avoid the rush hour out of London and see those sands on which T. S. Eliot could connect nothing with nothing. Whereas he, Alex Hargreaves, a mere hundred years later, smartphone in hand, would be busy connecting everything with everything.
The drive down to Margate was relatively rapid despite some delays at checkpoints on the way, due to problems last night in New Cross and Lewisham, Stratford, and Croydon. The
getthere
app on the GPS was constantly toggling and recalibrating his route, shaving every surplus second off his journey time. Even though he had no need to get there as quickly as possible, he felt he ought to. It was the principle of the thing.
He parked by the Ramada Inn and set off along the front, surprised that there really was so little to see. The Turner Gallery, some faded arcades, a lot of shabby facades, some quite marginal looking people milling about, an attempt at a hipsterish lane that ultimately led to a rundown pub and a courtyard full of feral looking families in cheap sportswear. Its Victorian heyday was long gone and no other heyday looked to be on the horizon. The sands were nothing spectacular.