J. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories

Tony Miles had heard Sophie Tucker singing the ‘St Louis Blues’, and Harry, the elder Bach conducting the B Minor Mass.

They came round to the shop and argued over their respective perfor mances while I wrestled with the flowers.

‘Amazing,’ Tony exclaimed. ‘How does she do it? Tell me.’

‘The Heidelberg score,’ Harry ecstased. ‘Sublime, absolute.’ He looked irritably at the flowers. ‘Can’t you keep these things quiet? They’re making one hell of a row.’

They were, and I had a shrewd idea why. The Arachnid was completely out of control, and by the time I’d clamped it down in a weak saline it had blown out over three hundred dollars’ worth of shrubs.

‘The performance at the Casino last night was nothing on the one she gave here yesterday,’ I told them. ‘The Ring of the Niebelungs played by Stan Kenton. That Arachnid went insane. I’m sure it wanted to kill her.’ Harry watched the plant convulsing its leaves in rigid spasmic movements.

‘If you ask me it’s in an advanced state of rut. Why should it want to kill her?’

‘Her voice must have overtones that irritate its calyx. None of the other plants minded. They cooed like turtle doves when she touched them.’ Tony shivered happily.

Light dazzled in the street outside.

I handed Tony the broom. ‘Here, lover, brace yourself on that. Miss Ciracylides is dying to meet you.’

Jane came into the shop, wearing a flame yellow cocktail skirt and another of her hats.

I introduced her to Harry and Tony.

‘The flowers seem very quiet this morning,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with them?’

‘I’m cleaning out the tanks,’ I told her. ‘By the way, we all want to congratulate you on last night. How does it feel to be able to name your fiftieth city?’

She smiled shyly and sauntered away round the shop. As I knew she would, she stopped by the Arachnid and levelled her eyes at it. I wanted to see what she’d say, but Harry and Tony were all around her, and soon got her up to my apartment, where they had a hilarious morning playing the fool and raiding my scotch.

‘What about coming out with us after the show tonight?’ Tony asked her. ‘We can go dancing at the Flamingo.’

‘But you’re both married,’ Jane protested. ‘Aren’t you worried about your reputations?’

‘Oh, we’ll bring the girls,’ Harry said airily. ‘And Steve here can come along and hold your coat.’

We played i-Go together. Jane said she’d never played the game before, but she had no difficulty picking up the rules, and when she started sweeping the board with us I knew she was cheating. Admittedly it isn’t every day that you get a chance to play i-Go with a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes, but never the less I was annoyed. Harry and Tony, of course, didn’t mind.

‘She’s charming,’ Harry said, after she’d left. ‘Who cares? It’s a stupid game anyway.’

‘I care,’ I said. ‘She cheats.’

The next three or four days at the shop were an audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear.

Unfortunately I couldn’t starve the plants below their thresholds. They needed exercise and they had to have the Arachnid to lead them. But instead of running through its harmonic scales the orchid only screeched and whined. It wasn’t the noise, which only a couple of dozen people complained about, but the damage being done to their vibratory chords that worried me.

Those in the seventeenth century catalogues stood up well to the strain, and the moderns were immune, but the Romantics burst their calyxes by the score. By the third day after Jane’s arrival I’d lost two hundred dollars’ worth of Beethoven and more Mendelssohn and Schubert than I could bear to think about.

Jane seemed oblivious to the trouble she was causing me.

‘What’s wrong with them all?’ she asked, surveying the chaos of gas cylinders and drip feeds spread across the floor.

‘I don’t think they like you,’ I told her. ‘At least the Arachnid doesn’t. Your voice may move men to strange and wonderful visions, but it throws that orchid into acute melancholia.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, laughing at me. ‘Give it to me and I’ll show you how to look after it.’

‘Are Tony and Harry keeping you happy?’ I asked her. I was annoyed that I couldn’t go down to the beach with them and instead had to spend my time draining tanks and titrating up norm solutions, none of which ever worked.

‘They’re very amusing,’ she said. ‘We play i-Go and I sing for them. But I wish you could come out more often.’

After another two weeks I had to give up. I decided to close the plants down until Jane had left Vermilion Sands. I knew it would take me three months to rescore the stock, but I had no alternative. The next day I received a large order for mixed coloratura herbaceous from the Santiago Garden Choir.

They wanted delivery in three weeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, when she heard I wouldn’t be able to fill the order. ‘You must wish that I’d never come to Vermilion Sands.’

She stared thoughtfully into one of the darkened tanks.

‘Couldn’t I score them for you?’ she suggested.

‘No thanks,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve had enough of that already.’

‘Don’t be silly, of course I could.’

I shook my head.

Tony and Harry told me I was crazy.

‘Her voice has a wide enough range,’ Tony said. ‘You admit it yourself.’

‘What have you got against her?’ Harry asked. ‘That she cheats at i-Go?’

‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ I said. ‘And her voice has a wider range than you think.’

We played i-Go at Jane’s apartment. Jane won ten dollars from each of us.

‘I am lucky,’ she said, very pleased with herself. ‘I never seem to lose.’ She counted up the bills and put them away carefully in her bag, her golden skin glowing.

Then Santiago sent me a repeat query.

I found Jane down among the cafιs, holding off a siege of admirers. ‘Have you given in yet?’ she asked me, smiling at the young men. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me,’ I said, ‘but anything is worth trying.’

Back at the shop I raised a bank of perennials past their thresholds. Jane helped me attach the gas and fluid lines.

‘We’ll try these first,’ I said. ‘Frequencies 543-785. Here’s the score.’

Jane took off her hat and began to ascend the scale, her voice clear and pure. At first the Columbine hesitated and Jane went down again and drew them along with her. They went up a couple of octaves together and then the plants stumbled and went off at a tangent of stepped chords. ‘Try K sharp,’ I said. I fed a little chlorous acid into the tank and the Columbine followed her up eagerly, the infra-calyxes warbling delicate variations on the treble clef.

‘Perfect,’ I said.

It took us only four hours to fill the order.

‘You’re better than the Arachnid,’ I congratulated her. ‘How would you like a job? I’ll fit you out with a large cool tank and all the chlorine you can breathe.’

‘Careful,’ she told me. ‘I may say yes. Why don’t we rescore a few more of them while we’re about it?’

‘You’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

‘Let me try the Arachnid,’ she suggested. ‘That would be more of a challenge.’

Her eyes never left the flower. I wondered what they’d do if I left them together. Try to sing each other to death?

‘No,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow perhaps.’

We sat on the balcony together, glasses at our elbows, and talked the afternoon away. She told me little about herself, but I gathered that her father had been a mining engineer in Peru and her mother a dancer at a Lima vu-tavern. They’d wandered from deposit to deposit, the father digging his concessions, the mother signing on at the nearest bordello to pay the rent.