First published in ‘The Coelacanth Journal: No. 3: The Moderns’ – Summer 2009
I
I woke to banging, banging, banging and a dog’s whimpering half-howl.
Emerging from a dream set in a cellar lokal called the Alexander Casino in Christopher Isherwood’s 1930s Berlin, I was – for a while – in my bed in Croydon. I looked up to where the window and the orange glow of the streetlamp should be and there was a patch of half darkness in its place. Sitting up, the distant bangs floated around, stopped for a moment, and then picked up, double time, like a machine-gun rat-a-tat. A second dog echoed a whimpering response.
Looking to the right, I saw a long window where a window shouldn’t be in the grey-blue morning twilight. To the right of the window, and a little lower, in the corner of the room, a small shrine to Jesus and Ganesh twinkled and flickered in the reddish haze of a single incense stick, almost burnt to its end. They seemed happy neighbours, Jesus and Ganesh; Christ with his gruesome sacred heart glowing and beating, and Ganesh with small eyes concentrating and large ears listening to the floating bangs.
His trunk twisted and contorted in time to the drums as they continued their distant rhythmic pounding and my suburban bedroom warped and weirdly wobbled.
On the yellowy pine desk to my left, a big, ugly, dusty, LG Flatron PC monitor – purchased in 2001 from PC World on the Purley Way – melted into the greyness of a simple plastered wall; its flat dark screen turning in to a frameless mirror. The monitor’s tangle of cream-coloured cables strung themselves out and transformed themselves in to a thin metal chain. The chain, fixed to the back of the mirror, hung tight over a small black nail that had been crudely hammered in to the wall.
In front of me, beyond the foothills of my sheet-covered knees and feet, my blonde and white laminate Ikea wardrobe pulsed in time to the drums outside and became a series of heavy vertical shadows belonging to a full-length curtain, spanning the early morning gloom of the room.
High up to my left, on a disappearing shelving system, a 1/43 scale Burago Fiat Cinquecento – in a red, silver and yellow cardboard box – stretched and extruded itself in to a wooden, white-painted doorframe. To its right, a box set of three dark blue WH Smith photograph albums labelled ‘Crystal Palace Park Dinosaurs’, ‘Florence’ and ‘Slyboots’ became a plastic light switch. On and around the switch there were slight shimmers of bluish light reflecting off of small fingerprint traces of grease.
Behind my head, the metal frame of my hospital-style bed-head combined and flattened in to a cold stone window ledge. Awkwardly twisting my head around, I looked at the series of objects on the window ledge. A green plastic comb, a can of Jungle Formula insect repellent, a hair clip, a yellow pencil with a red rubber at the end, two small coins and a copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The book had been soaked in Kingfisher and Gin the day before, and smelt yeasty – like a papery bread. Inside the book, Miss Brodie’s gentle pedagogic havoc was damp with alcohol and Maharastran night air. The pages had distorted in to waves of buckled yellow. Tiny insects flitted about the choux pastry edges of the Penguin Modern Classic and skipped across the ruddy cheeks of the two 1930s schoolgirls on the book’s rippled cover. The miniature midges’ syncopated movements mimicked the rhythms floating in through the window from outside. Their tiny, delicate, flecky legs danced.
I wasn’t at home, I sleepily realized. My suburban flat had faded in to a Maharastran guesthouse just as seamlessly as the Alexander Casino had faded in to Croydon.
The drumming continued. Just behind it I could just make out something that sounded like a flute or recorder playing jazzy flurries of notes. The flurries faded in and out, carried by cold morning breezes and drowned out by the spasmodic percussion and the sound of a cock crowing.
Somewhere outside, below the window, footsteps crunched towards the front yard. A pause, followed by the rhythmic squeak, squeak, squeak of a pump being pulled and flushes of water ringing into a metal bucket. I could hear the bracelets on the woman’s arm chink and jangle as she pumped. The tone of the rings went higher with each flush, and I could almost gauge the size of the bucket and guess when it was full. Then a pause, before the same footsteps crunched back past my window and up the lane behind the guesthouse.
Now, a long, low honk sounded across the valley, like the cry of a gigantic whale pushed through an alpine horn. I imagined the ancient beast stranded at the top of one of the mountains surrounding the village, covered in barnacles of jungle vegetation; jabbering monkeys picking at its thick skin. The whale’s deep long call sounded again, shaking the surrounding trees and launching flocks of squarking birds in to the dark early morning sky. The whale honk also seemed to have shaken the drummers too, and they started to attack their skins with an extra burst of furious energy. I wondered whether they were at the top of the mountain too, standing in a big circle around the whale.
The drums and flute-flurries were now accompanied by the single bong of a bell, followed by muffled bursts of strings playing exotic arpeggios and a high female voice singing quietly but piercingly, distorted through crackling electric amplification. The strings and singing lasted a few moments and then stopped, repeating again every half a minute or so.
I ran my hand over the warm range of ripples in the sheets beside me and looked at the slight indentation in the pillow next to mine. At the end of the bed, a dark blue towel was heaped in a gentle mountain. Down to the left, a small puddle and a series of feet-shape pools led across the tiled floor, beyond the curtain, to the wet room. The showerhead dripped into a plastic bucket. I touched the towel with my big toe and felt that it was damp.
Somewhere beyond the floating percussion, flute flurries, squawks, pips and dog whines, I could hear the distant hum and rush of a jet plane flying overhead, maybe on the last leg of a long flight from London to Mumbai. Up there, a passenger sank back in to his economy class chair, head in a limp pillow, blindfold and headphones on, blanket pulled up to his neck, mind fuzzy and mouth sweet from a recent Bloody Mary. Senses dulled, his puffy pink fingers fidgeted and fumbled around in a little silver bag of honey-roasted peanuts as he listened to ‘Perfect Symmetry’ by Keane for the second time in a row.
Down below, the drums and dogs had stopped and had been replaced with a Spem in alium of avian chips and chirps and twitters. These gradually rose from the trees around the village, acquiring layer upon layer of delicate new sound as the sky grew warmer and lighter.
I imagined the morning chorus following the sun around the world like a ripple of sound as I began to drift back to sleep. A sonic Mexican wave of musical cheeps and chatters and twits accompanied me back to the 1930s and the Alexander Casino.
‘I am a Miner Bird,’ I whispered to the bar man.
