Song Of Time (33 page)

By now, I’d begun to understand what Christos was describing. Not that I’d ever believed the stories of illicit clinics which kidnapped the dispossessed and used them as unwilling donors for black market organs, but it explained a lot—not least, Christos’ own white vans…

“Then I went out into Paris. The masked figures took me with them in their dark vans as they went in search of what they sometimes called
new donors
, and sometimes simply
fresh meat
and I saw all the lost and the helpless souls who lived on these streets. Ha—and imagine what could be made of
this
—I even helped capture and subdue them…”

Christos was growing more and more agitated now, sometimes talking of visions which even his terrible clinic would have failed to contain: of dead souls swimming the sewers, and of the sky above Notre Dame teeming with angels. But whether he wandered the clinic corri-dors or prowled the Parisian streets in search of fresh donors, all he saw was a fallen world. The unreachable skies teemed with promises of different flesh, intricate metals and plastics—new skins, new clothes, new perfumes, which cost more than the supposed worth of many people’s lives. So he knew that this world was fallen and ending long before he understood the scriptures, for the word of the scriptures was already all around him. But the masked figures still merely laughed. And they complemented him on how well his skin had taken, and how well he had healed, and asked if perhaps he might care to help out again tonight in the operating theatre…?

Lightning rattled. The dark afternoon was passing. Sometimes, Christos hunched or crawled. Sometimes, he squatted and whimpered as if he could no longer bear to speak. Yes, yes, look at me. He ripped his smock and stabbed at his pasty chest. You see this heart? You hear this voice?
You think you understand…
His words veered into English, or were smeared with a scatter of other languages which might have been German, Dutch, Gujarati, Swahili…

Once, he told me, he was taken to a place where it was so cold that you couldn’t touch anything without ripping your flesh. There, lined on shelves within shrivelled plastic, lay frosty lumps of meat. No, no, the masked figures told him, these weren’t for
eating
—but look…Gloved hands picked up a frozen lump which Christos, who now knew about these things, recognised as a human heart. Then, peering up at him like a swimmer drowned under ice or a flower inside glass, lay the whole face of a beautiful woman, preserved until it was required by some rich crone…

“But here’s the problem,” he growled at me as he knelt amid his chains. “You can only keep people alive with a certain number of organs. After that, they die. It’s how we’re made, and freezing’s a poor alternative to using fresh, live donor flesh—or perhaps you didn’t know that? But what if…What if…? What if…What if…”The dead eyes of his VR helmet fixed me with their insect gaze. “Let me tell you what I am. I was more of a joke than a serious suggestion…That was what the masked figures told me, anyway. But what if…” Christos nodded to himself, as if the truth had only just struck him. Then he let out a hacking laugh, and nodded again. “But what if a few spare parts—organs and, yes, limbs and flesh as well—could be reassembled into something resembling a living whole? Might that not be a way of keeping the valu-able meat fresh for longer?”

“You’re saying that’s what you were?”

Up in that high room, Christos rattled his chains. “That’s what I
am
. I’m the fragments of dozens of helpless donors stretched over with a covering of borrowed skin. I’m the scattered tribes of Babylon made real…”

“What happened to you? How did you get—”

“These places—the place I thought of as my home—they don’t last. There are competitors. There are market forces. There’s even the gendarmerie, it they haven’t been paid enough to look the other way. One day, I awoke and found that the masked figures had vanished. No rattle of trolleys. No humming generators. No slamming doors. All I could hear were the moans and screams of the imprisoned ones. I wandered the corridors. I helped some of the donors left behind,—loosening their bonds, giving them the crutches or medicines which might allow them to survive. Others, those past hope, I led into the next world. That was easy work to me—I knew what to do. Then, as I left, I noticed several cases of bottled water lying in a corridor. Remembering the sweetness and ease which water had brought me in my darkest time of pain when I first awoke, I decided to carry them out as my gift to the world…”

Christos smiled beatifically. “So here I am.
This
is who I am. Look at me. What do you see? One man or many…?”

Thunder moved the air—I felt of the wash of its power—but it was getting late, and I needed to prepare for tonight’s performance. Stumbling amid the sensors and tripods, I backed away. Christos’ bare chest, his half-masked face, shone out through the hot darkness, seeming to twist and change as lightning stuttered and something new and dark and titanic unfurled beneath. I was genuinely afraid, but Tiger-Stripe Jill was laughing. “He’s Michael fucking Jackson—he’s falling apart!” She clapped her hands in delight as I ran down the metal stairs.

The shower still wasn’t working back in our atelier, so I stripped and took the last bottles of Christos water from the fridge and tipped them over myself. For a few precious moments, I felt cool and clean. I wandered about, looking at the things Claude and I had bought together in Paris. Gazing at our watercolour of Venice, the frozen face of a woman rose up towards me from inside the glass. When I struck the keys of the piano, it gave off a dissonant clang.

The polling stations had closed, the traffic had faded, and Paris seemed oddly empty as my taxi bore me to the Opéra on that deepening evening. Only the water sellers were about. Looking up at the skies, I saw the perennial adverts still playing amid the continued flicker of lightning. Buy this or that. Everything was
Changed, Enhanced, Improved, Boosted, Redesigned
or
Classic
for the new era which was supposedly about to come, but I no longer believed a word…

My part of the performance wasn’t due until after the interval, and I was able to make my arrival with the concert already in progress. I was beginning to relish the idea of simply turning up, playing, departing, just as Kreisler had done. Claude came in just as I’d finished changing into the crimson dress which Lujah Vaudin had helped me choose in Washington. Elegant as ever in his black silk tuxedo, he kissed me lightly on the lips, then propped himself on the edge of my dressing table.

“You look beautiful, Roushana.”

“It’s going well. So I hear.”

“Great, but not brilliant. Have to keep them waiting, wanting—that little bit in reserve. Haven’t seen Karl around, have you? After all, it’s his premiere.”

I shook my head.

“You should see who
is
out there, Roushana!”

“Mathilde, I suppose?”

“Of course.” He smiled at me. “And that guy who’s Boullard’s so-called arts minister.”

“We’re alright both ways, then, aren’t we?”

“Hardly that, but…” A short, frigid silence, different in character to anything I’d experienced with Claude, fell between us.

“Why are you—”

“You’re—”

We both stopped.

“Tell me,” Claude said, “is everything okay with Christos at the warehouse? Not that I don’t trust Jill, but…”

“I stayed with him most of this afternoon. He seems…” There was no word for it. “He doesn’t think and act as normal people would, Claude. He keeps saying he’s going to die and the world’s going to end. I’m not quite sure which it is, really…And he told me the strangest story. He says he’s made up from the bits of other bodies taken by some illegal organ-snatching clinic.”

“Hey, you mean like Baron Frankenstein’s monster…!” Claude laughed almost as much as Tiger-Stripe Jill had done. “You didn’t
believe
him, did you?”

“No. But I think he believes it himself.”

“I suppose it fits.” Claude nodded. “I am legion and all that.”

“What?”

“It’s just a phrase. From, I think, the Book of Revelation. You probably wouldn’t have heard it, Roushana, seeing as it’s from the Bible instead of one of those…” He waved a hand “…those Indian holy books. Anyway, I can’t think that there’s any reason not to let him out once we get the results after Harad’s precious unveiling, can you?”

“We can hardly keep him forever.”

“No, no.” Claude picked a piece of fluff from his silk lapel. “Of course not. It’s all just the sort of weird thing which happens at the time of elections—you should hear the stories Dad tells!—and Mathilde says—”

“I thought you said she couldn’t possibly know about this?”

“Well, she
doesn’t
.”

My head swam. I was tired. I’d never felt less right in the moments before a big performance. “By the way, Claude, did you ever work out what it was that Christos said to you on
Rapport
?”

Claude shrugged a less than Gallic shrug. “I think it was something about destruction. You’re going to be destroyed—something like that, anyway. Pathetic, I know.”

Thinking for a moment that Claude meant that his own reaction was pathetic, I nodded.

“But it would suit him, wouldn’t it?” Claude muttered. “To be let out after disappearing for a while, and then with that damaged arm. No matter what you do with these people, it plays into their hands. It would all just add another layer to his ridiculous aura of mystery. He doesn’t deserve—”

Then a knock at the door signified we had five minutes to performance.

Sitting at the edge of the proscenium as I awaited my entrance, I was able to watch Claude ascend the podium. Dry lightning sheeted through the glass dome overhead, catching on shirt fronts and cosmetically enhanced bosoms. There was a palpable sense of expectation amid the audience. Claude didn’t need to win them over; they were yearning for this to be good. Still, he took the unusual step of turning to them. He explained how what they were about to hear was essentially a snapshot of Nordinger’s new symphony, and that the piece would be different every time it was performed. There was scattered applause and much neck-craning up and down the aisles for a glimpse of Nordinger himself, but he still seemed to be absent. Silence fell. Lightning flickered again at the perfect moment, illuminating Claude’s silhouette as he turned towards the orchestra. Like everyone else, I was urging him on.

There had even been enough leaks for the audience to have an idea of what to expect. They certainly wanted fine tunes, giddy pyrotechnics, wild peaks and troughs of sadness and exultation. And, as the symphony unfolded, all these elements were there—but, from the very first notes, they were filtered through a distraction of mistakes and fluffed entrances. Where Karl Nordinger’s
Fourth Symphony
should have danced, it stumbled. Where it should have been steely, it was limp. By the end of the cacophonous first movement, there was already a changed mood in the Opéra de Paris Bastille. Of course, Claude had been here before, and I fully expected him to turn things around, but, by the end of the second movement, there were shuffles, and a few loud departures. When I made my entrance, I heard sympathetic cheers. We’d decided that my contribution would be more dramatic like this, but now it looked as if I was disassociating myself from the performance, and my sharp, angry tone as I played the
Song of Time
probably didn’t help. When, as happened with the beginning of the fourth movement, an orchestra and a conductor fluff an introduction and have to start again, there’s usually encouraging applause, for audiences love to think that even great orchestras can lapse from their usual high standards. This time, there were angry gestures and catcalls.

So it turned out that Nordinger’s
Fourth Symphony
was an addition to that distinguished canon of works mangled at their first performance, but the applause after the ragged finale was surprisingly loud. Paris had come to witness the unveiling of a masterpiece, but was just happy to be given another tale of hubris to tell.

The reviews were being posted even before we reached the Marais for the unveiling of Harad Le Pape’s 6th floor.

What can any critic say about a new work, when they haven’t had a proper chance to hear it…

Claude Vaudin stepped up onto the podium. The only good thing that can be said of his and the orchestra’s performance was that, eventually, he stepped down again…

The one shining light in an evening of missed opportunities was Roushana Maitland, whose intervention in the third movement was, as the English might say, a breath of fresh air…

We wondered at the start why Karl Nordinger wasn’t attending his own premiere. Soon, we found out…

I knew about bad press, but this was gloatingly malicious. Claude, though, was kissing cheeks with the very people who’d said the worst things about him as they emerged into the hot night outside Harad’s apartment. Still in a sleek suit and ruffed shirt, he cut the fine figure he always did. No, no, he insisted to everyone who asked—
of course
it hadn’t been the symphony itself. That was undeniably a masterpiece. Nor was it the orchestra—less still was it the responsibility of Roushana for—yes— that brilliant cameo. Claude wanted everyone to understand that he bore every ounce of the blame. What he was doing, I realised as I watched him clap shoulders and laugh and ruefully shake his head, was to make the whole thing out to be a failure of such epic proportions that it could only be regarded as a success.

Word was spreading about the elections. Boullard, no, Irissou, was ahead. The computers were up—or they were down and there would be no announcement at all at midnight. Better, some said, weary as I’d grown of the whole thing, to have a theocracy, despotism, anarchy, civil war. But it was the computer glitch thing which rode the strongest in the waves of gossip which flooded Harad’s foyer as the elite of Paris waited for the lift.

Here they all were, in their bright feathers, in their subtle furs, wilting a little, yes, but happy and bitchy and undaunted as they were borne up towards the canapés and champagne. Bracelets chimed. Hands evaded, or chose to settle like butterflies, on buttocks and breasts. There was so
much
to talk about. The water was a nightmare—at least for those poor souls who hadn’t got a private supply. But anyway…And by the way…And did you see…? And haven’t you heard…? It was amazing, really, to hear these people talk of arrogance and hubris. But
you
, my darling Roushana. What you did was stunning. Even more so in the circum-stances. It was a breath of heaven amid those clouds of sulphur and shit…