Song Of Time (6 page)

“Yes.”

“You know, I’ve gone off dope. I rather hoped that it might help with the cramps I get. Or just…But it doesn’t. Some other WRFI sufferers say it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Not that they can
have
sliced bread. But for me, I think it might be like the taste of something you have just before you get ill. Some part of your brain you can’t persuade otherwise somehow thinks it’s to blame. Perhaps it’s that. Anyway, I’ve got my stash of resin left in my tin, and you can have it if you like. If it’s any use. I can’t see anyone else wanting it. Unless you include Mum and Dad.”

We laughed at the resurrection of that old joke, and then we lay back for a while, and I closed my eyes. I never wanted this moment to end, but, sensing the fall of his shadow, I looked up as he leaned over me.

“What?” I murmured.

Leo’s hand rested on my shoulder, traced my chin, picked the sweat-stranded hair back from my forehead. “So,” he asked. “What do you know about Venice?”

I was happy to prolong the moment by confessing the truth, which was that I knew barely anything. I cared even less. Venice was paintings, culture and history, and all the other stuff on which I easily grew glutted and bored. Venice was having to share Leo with Mum and Dad and Blythe. Venice was endless sightseeing. I also had a sneaking feeling, I finally said, as Leo’s hands left me and the sky swirled, that it would be very busy and incredibly hot at this time of year.

The garden had fallen quiet. Even the murmur of city traffic seemed to have stilled.

“You’re right, Sis. When I said to Mum and Dad I wanted to go to Venice, I didn’t mean go in the way that they took it. I meant someday, somehow…But then the whole thing was already out, and they and even Blythe were conspiring to make it into this big treat, so it would have seemed ungrateful not to act surprised when it was presented to me, already wrapped up and booked and done.”

“What about all the problems?”

“Mum
wanted
those. Battles with customs and consuls to get me there which she could fight on my behalf. How do you think she’d have reacted if I’d said, well actually, thanks, but I’m not that bothered…?”

I smiled up at the sun.

“Not that I don’t love the idea of Venice. Not that I didn’t mean exactly what I said when I told Mum that it was probably the place I most wanted to visit on earth. But now she’s turned it into a summer holiday, a trip with the family, and Blythe as well.”

“I thought…” But I had no idea what I thought.

“It’s costing a fortune, and you can imagine where a lot of the money’s come from, with Blythe’s parents being the way they are. Did you know, Sis, the hotel we’re staying at, the Danieli, it’s where Wagner used to stay, for God’s sake, and probably Proust as well!”

Not that I knew who Proust was, and Wagner was low on my list of likeable composers as he would always remain, but Leo was soon talking in this same half-complaining, half-wondering, tone of Georges Sand, and I knew exactly who
she
was, and then of Stravinsky with his cats, and Henry James, and Hemingway drinking in Harry’s Bar, and of Vivaldi, and how DH Lawrence had hated Venice so much he had Lady Chatterley heading there as if it was the opposite of full-blooded romance when in truth it was the beating heart of the stuff…

I saw a different Venice as Leo talked and I lay in the drugged heat of our back garden, and it was a far darker and brighter place than the touristic theme park I’d previously imagined. Rats swarmed in alleys beneath palaces plated with gold. Happy couples wandered between the limbless beggars in Saint Mark’s Square on their way to inspect the instruments of torture in the Doges’ Palace whilst paintings by Turner transformed the stones of the city into shivering water. There were the swirling saints and gods of Titian, and the romps of Veronese, and all those many films. I don’t know quite how Leo managed it as he rambled and laughed and digressed, but I saw the gardenia floating away on the scummed water from Katherine Hepburn’s hand, and Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte arm in arm in a gondola, and Mahler’s face flaking as he pursued a beautiful boy down the stinking alleys until he stumbled up the steps of a deserted palazzo as a red-caped figure, which was death itself, scurried ahead…

The afternoon receded and the air filled with gasoline flutters of barbecue smoke from other gardens. Then Mum returned in a foul mood from her final expedition to the shops and shouted at me to get on and finish my packing. I grumbled my way upstairs. I was half-excited now at the prospect of a quite different trip to the one I’d previously imagined, but the rest of me still felt glum and sweaty and ignored. My violin sat unplayed on a chair as I sorted through tee shirts and crop trousers, stuffing them into my zip-up bag’s plastic mouth. Blythe’s parents would be picking us all up at five next morning to take us to the airport in their tank-sized silver runaround, and we were all supposed to be finished and ready tonight, but I became distracted as I rummaged under my bed for lost sunglasses, last year’s flip-flops and a decent swimming costume. Instead, I discovered the same Barbies whose lost shoes now litter my desk drawer, and schoolbooks written by a child who already was no longer me. Even then, I was good at keeping things, and poor at getting rid of even the most trivial of my possessions. But at least I had that Seashell, which was more mine now than it was Leo’s, although it was probably too late to download any Monteverdi. Outside, the evening sky gloomed. I suppose at some time I must have gone and eaten something downstairs, but all I remember is the small chaos of my room, the sour heat, hot, falling dark and old memories…

Already, the shower pipes were clunking. Already, goodnights were being called. Looking in on me, her hair turbaned in a towel, Mum attempted an apology for having shouted at me earlier and I got my revenge by being monosyllabic, just as I did when Dad came in not long after. Soon, the house fell silent, but it was still early—I could hear the boom of next door’s television through the wall—and sleep seemed impossible as I headed across the landing to use the toilet. I could hear the rise and rattle of Dad’s snoring. Seeing as Mum hadn’t jabbed her elbow to stop him, I knew that she was asleep as well. Leo’s light wasn’t on either, although I guessed that he’d still be awake, and there was that Smith Kendon tin he’d promised me. Still, and I hesitated outside his door, debating whether to knock, to whisper his name, whether to simply go away…

“Might as well come in, Sis,” a soft voice growled.

Leo was sitting in the throw of streetlight beside the window. His face was striped by glints of sweat, and I got the impression he’d been there for some time, hunched by his desk in this uncharacteristic pose of underactivity. He was always so critical of people who stared into space on trains, in cars, in queues—anywhere. After all, there was always some-thing which needed doing. Notes to be made on whatever piece you were currently learning. New data on your handheld. Some book which demanded to be read. Otherwise, life could pass you by and where would you be, then?

“That tin. You said you’d give it to me.”

“Did, didn’t I…?” He swivelled a little on his chair, but kept his face angled sideways. “Not planning to take it with you to Venice or anything stupid like that are you, Sis? Don’t want to get you arrested.”

There was an additional smell in this breathless air. Not that Leo’s room, it has to be said, was ever particularly fragrant—after all, it was hot that summer, and he was a teenage male, and he hadn’t been well— but this smell was harsh and coolly chemical, yet also reminiscent of sweetshops, and, somehow, of travel. Then I notice the litre bottle of Pernod which Mum and Dad had brought back to England from last year’s holiday in a fit of Frenchness, and which neither of them had been able to bring themselves to drink, shining on his desk.

Although there was no sign of a glass, the level was a third of the way down.

“What are you up to?”

He waved the question away. “It’ll be a damn sight hotter than this in Venice. Can you imagine it—getting heatstroke outside Julienne’s?”

I just stood there.

“And I wasn’t kidding about the beggars, either, Sis.” He gave another wave, this one so emphatic his chair creaked. “And the bloody shops all full of the same old crap. Cheap glass and pornographic ties and ridiculous, unwearable carnival masks. And the jabbering French school parties. And the fucking huge Americans and the tiny bloody Japanese and the plastic coated menus and the sodding gypsies trying to nick your bag. Fuck Venice, eh?”

“No one’s forcing you to go, Leo.”

“No.” His fingers traced the Pernod bottle. “I suppose they’re not.”

For once, I had no desire to get myself deeper into whatever part of his life my brother was now living. Giving what I imagined was a prim
harrumph
, I turned to go.

“You said you wanted that tin.”

I shrugged an okay. There’d be trouble if Mum and Dad ever found out, and I had no plans to smoke the stuff, but I was reluctant to refuse any gift from Leo, especially one as charged with significance as this.

Carefully, unbending his back and limbs—he’d never been much of a drinker, and despised those of his age who were—Leo stood up. The chair slid away from him and his hand gripped my arm as if for balance as he moved forward, although I thought that he was playing it up a little.

“It’s under here. Hardly original, I know…” He chuckled, sounding briefly more like himself as he began to work open the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet. “There used to be a faint possibility that Mum might check. Not that she’d have ever said anything—and I’m sure she doesn’t look now. That’s the magic of white plague. Distorts everything…” He lifted the drawer fully out.

Leo’s room was sodium-bright. The tree which had once blocked the streetlamp had died this parched summer, and I could see quite clearly over his thin shoulders into the space beneath the drawer. As well as the tin, there was a nearly folded plastic bag amid the pellets of dust, a scrunch of rubber bands and about a dozen pill bottles.

“There you go.”

The tin felt slippery and hot from his hands. Slowly, clumsily, he re-inserted the drawer, then belched and slumped back on the bed, angling his elbows as if to shade his eyes from the glare of the streetlamp. “Will you bring that bottle over for me?”

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

Don’t want you to hurt yourself.
He mouthed my words in silent parody. “That’s the whole fucking point, Sis. Although, funnily enough, Pernod is one of the few spirits I
can
still safely drink. I had a test sip a few days ago to see if there was any reaction, then I checked it out again tonight on a WRFI webpage. So there’s no worries there. It won’t wreck more of my gut, and neat alcohol’s absorbed mostly in the stomach, if
that’s
what’s bothering you. Herbs and wormwood. I’d almost recommend the stuff, if it didn’t taste so bloody dreadful.”

Leo was wearing the same hoop-shouldered vest and shorts he’d worn all day. With his thin limbs sprawled in this saffron light, he looked like some ancient wooden Christ.

“You could at least drink it in a glass, with water,” I said.

“Then there’d just be more of it to get down, wouldn’t there?”

I walked over, picked up the bottle, handed it to him.

“Thanks, Sis.” He propped it on his chest.

“You told me you loved Venice.”

“Oh, I
do
. But the Venice I love isn’t the place we’d have been going to.

I thought I explained all of that to you this afternoon, Sis—I thought you of all people were better than that at paying attention? The whole place is sinking, and the seas are rising—don’t you ever listen to the news? The sooner it’s gone, the better. Can you imagine it! Seabirds nesting in the Basilica, the campaniles tilting, bridges rising from the mud…?”

“They’ll never let that happen.”

“It
is
happening! This is the
future
.” He lifted the bottle in mock salute and took a long, dribbling slug. Yellow as the light, aromatic Pernod shone on his chin and pooled in his neck. “You know, it would almost be worth the trouble of staying around to watch it happen, if everything wasn’t so much of a bloody effort.”

How late was it, now? I had no idea, although the usual sounds of the diminishing evening—dogs yapping, revellers swaying home drunk from the pubs, car doors slamming, a slow dulling of the endless susurration of distant traffic—seemed fallen into silence. We’d passed beyond into some nameless portion of the night.

“Sis, you’ve got no idea how much hard work it is. No one has. I thought—I thought, you know, that I was one of those special people. I thought that I could go through life without it touching or hurting me. I thought I could take the brickbats and the applause and the good and bad reviews and the disappointments. But I feel so bloody
tired
every morning. It’s like I’ve been up for six hours performing some wearying and pointless task before I can even get out of this bed. And the bloody stomach cramps, and the shits and the little emergencies, and the endless rows of fucking tablets. I’ve more bruises than a junkie from being prodded by syringe after syringe. And the
food!
Did I ever mention the food, Sis? You try living on diet of banana and tofu. You try going into a shop because you’re peckish and finding there’s not one single sodding thing on all the shelves you can safely eat. And then there’s the sheer joy of relenting. You can’t imagine just how sweet a Mars Bar can taste, Sis, when you’re eating it in the certain knowledge that it’ll bring you down for two days of fevers and vomiting, and irredeemably strip out more of your gut. My tolerance is decreasing. Who knows what it’ll be next? Water, maybe. Now
that
would be fun. Or bananas, perhaps, and that would be such a fucking relief. I tell, you, Sis, whoever designed this virus knew exactly what they were doing. It couldn’t be more clever. Imagine, for an infidel like me to slowly starve amid all the bounteous food we’ve dragged in on cheap labour across the skies from every corner of the earth just so we don’t have to worry about being bored by what we eat!”