The Fahrenheit Twins (25 page)

Morpheus tended to excuse himself when Cerb got started in this vein; at twenty-two, he was a bit young for dewy-eyed reminiscence. Besides, it wasn’t quite true that Corpse Grinder were a stadium act; they only toured stadiums when they landed a support slot to a bigger group, like Pantera or Metallica. That’s what this tour of Eastern Europe was all about, despite the exclusive billing on the Corpse Grinder T-shirt: they were one of several warm-up acts for that hoary old heavy metal warhorse, Slayer. Thousands and thousands of Eastern European adolescents were primed to crawl out of the woodwork to see Slayer, and with any luck they would spare a cheer for Corpse Grinder too, and buy a CD or a T-shirt (‘Hand-wash only!’).

‘Maybe your neck is stiff, Morph,’ suggested Ildiko. ‘Maybe you slept in a bad position.’

‘Yeah, next to
you
,’ he grimaced, rubbing his temples experimentally.

‘Stop grouching,’ she said, fully dressed and efficient by now. ‘I’ve brought you a coffee.’

‘Not that Portuguese garbage in the blue and yellow packet?’

‘No, it’s Dutch. Top brand. Inferno Expresso.’ She stared down at him, poker-faced until he twigged she was joking.

‘Ha ha ha,’ he said.

A little while later, she convinced him to go for a walk in the fresh air. His ‘bad head’, as she diplomatically called it, might respond to oxygen and exercise. So, the pair of them dressed up in their anoraks and gloves and fur-lined Polish boots, and took to the streets outside Ildiko’s apartment. Morpheus wore dark sunglasses, a mainstream rock star affectation he usually avoided, but the sun on the snow was still fearsomely bright.

‘Fantastic day, Ildiko!’ called Hajnalka, the florist.

‘Sure is!’ she called back.

‘That’s all people talk about in Scotland, too,’ muttered Morpheus, keeping his eyes on the footpath, where the footprints of pedestrians had scuffed the snow into a more tolerable mud-grey. ‘The weather.’

‘Must be a human trait, then, I’d reckon,’ she said, leading him under the tarpaulin canopies of a street market.

The traders were out in force today. As well as the usual stalls of mobile phones, outmoded Italian leather jackets, counterfeit Gap and Adidas gear, bootleg Hollywood videos, blue-and-yellow packets of Portuguese coffee, Britney Spears calendars and discount confectionery, there were more traditional wares on offer: home-made strawberry jam, fat headless chickens, stamp albums from the Communist era, reams of stolen office paper, gigantic mouldy salamis.

‘Would you like a Bounty bar?’ said Ildiko, casting her eye over a trestle table loaded with chocolates from America via the Arab Emirates.

‘I feel … there’s a strange feeling in my stomach,’ said Morpheus.

‘You feel sick, in other words?’ said Ildiko, buying a Mars for herself.

‘I’m never sick,’ insisted Morpeus, shoving his sunglasses up under his hood as he rummaged through some pirated CDs. There was a Slayer greatest hits compilation, called
The
Biggest Hist of Slayer
, as well as the most recent album by (of all people) Cradle of Filth. No Corpse Grinder, of course.

‘You wouldn’t want there to be, would you?’ said Ildiko, noting his disappointment. ‘You don’t get any money from illegal copies.’

‘We’ve never seen any money from the official releases, either,’ he grumbled. ‘At least the pirates pay their own costs.’

Ildiko zipped her unopened chocolate bar into a jacket pocket. ‘I want something nourishing first,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to Café Kalvin and have a Halaszle.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You’ll need something inside you for tonight.’

It was the first time she’d alluded to the fact that tonight was showtime: the first gig of twenty-two, the firing-on-all-cylinders start to Corpse Grinder’s highest-profile tour ever.

‘Plenty of time, plenty of time,’ said Morpheus, his eye caught by a glossy magazine that looked as though it might be about thrash metal. It proved to be pornography for leather fetishists.

‘Have some of my soup, Morph,’ Ildiko urged him, stirring some cream into her Halaszle.

‘It’s too early in the day for anything fishy,’ he said. The lights inside the Café Kalvin were nice and subdued, though the sight of the pale cream revolving in the dark soup around Ildiko’s twirling spoon was making him slightly dizzy.

‘It’s one o’clock,’ she reminded him. The gig at the castle was due to kick off at seven thirty, with Corpse Grinder following Ferfiak (the homegrown pretenders) at eight fifteen. Morpheus, still helplessly staring at the swirling cream in the Halaszle, had a sudden pre-vision of his band’s ideal light show – flickering red strobes and sweeping white lariats of dervish luminescence.

‘Gonna blow everyone away tonight,’ he declared, picking up a fork and teaspoon, and drumming a high-speed fanfare on the edge of the table. Even through the tablecloth, his power and skill were unmistakable.

‘Are you ready to order or what?’ called the waitress.

Morph walked through the door under the sign that said GYOGYSZERTAR. It could have been the name of an Eastern European thrash metal or Goth group, but it meant ‘pharmacy’.

‘I have a headache,’ he told the old uniformed lady behind the counter.

‘Speak up,’ she said, cupping one gnarled hand behind her ear.

‘Headache,’ he repeated, shame-faced.

‘What have you tried?’

‘Nothing. What have you got?’

She gestured behind her, at a wall bristling with little cardboard boxes. Analgesia for every man, woman and child in Budapest, by the looks. Was there really enough pain inside a sufficient number of skulls to justify the existence of all these pills?

‘I’ve heard aspirin’s pretty good,’ said Morpheus, wishing the old woman would take charge.

‘In that case, you don’t need to pay through the nose for a fancy brand name.’ She seemed to be warming to him, showing a motherly side. ‘We have mounds of no-name aspirin out the back. You can get a hundred of them for the same price as twenty Bayer.’

‘I only need a couple,’ pleaded Morph, wondering what he’d done to deserve a run-in with Hungary’s only surviving pre-capitalist.

‘I’ll get you fifty,’ she smiled, already moving towards the store-room, as if he were a cheeky little boy at the baker’s and she was about to sneak him a bag of yesterday’s donuts.

A minute later she stood in front of him with a plastic bottle and a glass of water.

‘What, here?’ said Morpheus, alarmed.

‘Certainly. No time like the present.’

He shook two pills out of the bottle and threw them into his mouth, quickly chasing them with a swallow of water.

‘You’ve never done this before?’ she said, as he half-choked and grimaced and drank more water.

‘Arghhh,’ he replied, shaking his head.

‘Are you working in Budapest?’ She could tell he was a foreigner, of course.

‘I’m a musician.’

‘Really? What’s your name?’

‘Uh … Nicky.’

‘English?’

‘Scottish.’

‘Beautiful place. What brings you to this den of thieves?’

Not enough demand for Corpse Grinder in Scotland
, he thought. ‘My girlfriend lives here,’ he said.

‘That’s nice,’ she said, the corners of her eyes wrinkling benignly. ‘That’ll be a hundred forint.’

‘How’s the head?’ said Ildiko as they walked back towards the flat. Drizzle was eating into the snow like a mist of acid. The parked cars were emerging from their white canopies like giant metal mushrooms.

‘Worse,’ said Morph. ‘I shouldn’t have taken those pills. Power of the mind, that’s what’s needed.’

Indoors once more, he allowed Ildiko to massage his neck and shoulders while he watched TV. With the remote control he turned the brightness down so far that the faces went negroid.

‘Maybe you should let the other guys know,’ said Ildiko.

‘Know what?’

‘That you may not be well enough to play.’

‘Of course I’ll be well enough. Mind over matter.’

She kissed his head. Her fingers were tired from kneading his tense musculature.

‘Hey, look!’ he said. ‘It’s the lead singer of Ferfiak!’ On the TV, a heavily tattooed young man was telling a journalist that his band was going to blow Slayer off the stage all the way across Europe. Then the bass player pushed forward, middle fingers raised in defiance, and shouted in English: ‘We’re gonna kick some asses!’

Morph and Ildiko cackled gleefully.

At six, Morpheus was on his way to the castle, to rendezvous with his fellow Corpse Grinders. It was a twenty-minute drive, with Ildiko at the wheel of her pirated Volvo. Morph was in the back, as the front passenger seat was taken up by a carefully balanced, quivering, transparent plastic bag filled with water and tropical fish. The exotic creatures swam backwards and forwards in their fragile polythene home, the water vibrating in the thrum of the engine.

Morpheus was drumming against the back of the seat with real drumsticks, getting himself psyched up.

‘Meetchooo in Gomorraaaahhhh!’ he sang tunelessly, beating the hell out of the leather head-rest.

‘Maybe that’s not so good for the fish,’ called Ildiko over her shoulder. Her father had been waiting for these little beauties to arrive for months, and wouldn’t be too happy if his decision to let his daughter pick them up for him from the city resulted in their being dead on arrival.

‘Survi-i-ival of the fiiitte-e-e-est!’ sang Morpheus, quoting the title track of Corpse Grinder’s first album. He drummed less aggressively, though.

To be honest, he was feeling like hell, and even the exertion of hitting his drumsticks on the back of a car seat made the blood in his head pound. He squeezed the sticks hard in his fists, breathed deep, pressed his knuckles into his leather-clad knees. The biker trousers, usually like a second skin to him, were cold and clammy. His bare arms were pale and goose-pimpled, yet his anorak was on the front seat, a nest for the wobbling fish bubble, and the bother of extracting it seemed too great. Always in the past he had driven to gigs wearing only his stage T-shirt; sheer adrenalin had kept him warm, even if the car had no heating and the temperature outside was below freezing. Today he was shivering.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ called Ildiko, when a sharp bend in the road provoked a heavy sigh from him.

‘Aspirin poisoning,’ he groaned. His stomach and intestines had turned to hard rubber inside his abdomen, a solid mass of anatomical sculpture with no fluid function. A dark mass of pain pulsed behind his left eye and brow. He pressed his forefingers against the bridge of his nose, harder and harder, until it seemed they were in danger of bursting through the bone of his skull (a very ‘heavy metal album cover’ scenario, he had to admit).

‘Stop the car.’ His own voice was alien to him, a weedy, nasal sound, indistinct above the noise of the engine and the rushing in his head.

‘It’s only another couple of minutes,’ said Ildiko, ‘to my parents’ place.’ She checked the rear view mirror. There was a car jam-packed with post-adolescent Hungarians right behind them, a Peugeot crammed to the roof with excited young men ready to raaahk.

‘I’m going to be …’

Morph lurched sideways, wound the window down at desperate speed, and heaved a hot gush of vomit into the air. It spurted out of his mouth and nose like beer from an agitated can, and splattered the side of Ildiko’s car, wind-blown, in a long yellow stream. Smoothly, Ildiko slowed down and pulled off the road, allowing the traffic behind to roar past.

Morpheus fumbled the door open and fell out onto his hands and knees in wet frosty grass. He vomited more: convulsive gouts of it that made his head almost explode with agony. Ildiko’s arm around his back triggered a fit of shivering.

‘H-how are we doing for time?’ he panted.

Morpheus woke up in a dark room surrounded by ceramic milkmaids and carved statuettes of reindeer. He was in bed – not Ildiko’s aromatic little nest, but a strange king-size rococo layer cake of quilts and embroidered coverlets and ironed cotton sheets and fur-lined pillows. He might have been an ancient warrior on a funeral bier, floating onto a dark lake just before being set on fire.

A crack in the bedroom door admitted a pale antique glow from the hallway. Ildiko’s parents had always been wealthy, even before Hungary’s threadbare Iron Curtain was impatiently swept aside. Their house was a Viennese-style monstrosity, a nineteenth-century hunting lodge hidden inside a three bedroom bungalow, a Black Forest gateau cunningly concealed in a crispbread wrapper.

It was deathly quiet. Usually when Morph visited, Pavarotti or Carreras were warbling from the superannuated sound system. Ildiko’s father was the sort of man who believed that CDs could never compete with the lustrous, organic tones of old fashioned vinyl, especially when channelled through Russian-made speakers the size of shipping crates. Being rather deaf, Ildiko’s father liked to play his imported tenors quite loud, but right now, there wasn’t a whisper of an aria to be heard.

Morph sat up in bed. He was dressed only in his T-shirt and underpants, lightheaded and weak as a kitten.

‘Ildiko!’ he called softly.

She appeared in the doorway almost at once, holding a coffee mug shaped like a squirrel.

‘A doctor came,’ she explained. ‘You’ve had a shot of painkiller, and something for the vomiting. Migraine, she said.’

‘The concert …’

‘It’s long over. Zoltan from Ferfiak filled in for you.’

‘Zoltan? He belongs in a post office, stamping the Christ out of letters …’

‘Maybe so. But he filled in for you. They’re on their way to Bratislava now.’

‘Bratislava? What?’ He swung his legs out of the bed and tried to stand, but felt as if two feet were unfeasibly few for this challenge.

‘It’s next day already,’ Ildiko said, opening the bedroom curtains a bit. Undeniable daylight shone in. The dyed sheepskin rugs on the floor lit up caramel and gold. Morpheus noted that he could cope with these things now, that the sunshine was well within the range of his endurance. He was thirsty and a little peckish; his innards were empty as a bass drum.

‘I’ve got to get to Bratislava,’ he said. There was a crust of dried blood on his thigh, where the needle had gone in. He didn’t remember the doctor at all, though he vaguely recalled his own arrival at Ildiko’s parents’ place: the ecstatic barking of the dog, the embarrassment of being half-carried across the threshold, his limp arms slung round the shoulders of a midget middle-aged couple, the surreal passage past bookshelves crowded with Goethe and knick-knacks, stuffed antelope heads, crocheted farmyard scenes in teak frames, the door of the ‘guest’ bedroom with the smiling graduation photo on it, the spare plastic goldfish-bowl they’d given him to vomit in, the divine relief of being stationary and warm and in the dark.