Adam Thirlwell - The Complete Short Stories - Volume 1

‘That should hold it,’ I said to Carol. I walked round and lopped off a few of the noisier spars. ‘Tomorrow I’ll finish it off altogether.’

I wasn’t in the least surprised when Raymond called and said that there was no trace anywhere of Lorraine Drexel.

At two o’clock that night I woke as a window burst across the floor of my bedroom. A huge metal helix hovered like a claw through the fractured pane, its sonic core screaming down at me.

A half-moon was up, throwing a thin grey light over the garden. The statue had sprung back and was twice as large as it had been at its peak the previous morning. It lay all over the garden in a tangled mesh, like the skeleton of a crushed building. Already the advance tendrils had reached the bedroom windows, while others had climbed over the garage and were sprouting downwards through the roof, tearing away the galvanized metal sheets.

All over the statue thousands of sonic cores gleamed in the light thrown down from the window. At last in unison, they hymned out the finale of Bruckner’s Apocalyptic Symphony.

I went into Carol’s bedroom, fortunately on the other side of the house, and made her promise to stay in bed. Then I telephoned Raymond Mayo. He came around within an hour, an oxyacetylene torch and cylinders he had begged from a local contractor in the back seat of his car.

The statue was growing almost as fast as we could cut it back, but by the time the first light came up at a quarter to six we had beaten it.

Dr Blackett watched us slice through the last fragments of the statue. ‘There’s a section down in the rockery that might just be audible. I think it would be worth saving.’

I wiped the rust-stained sweat from my face and shook my head. ‘No. I’m sorry, but believe me, once is enough.’

Blackett nodded in sympathy, and stared gloomily across the heaps of scrap iron which were all that remained of the statue.

Carol, looking a little stunned by everything, was pouring coffee and brandy. As we slumped back in two of the deck chairs, arms and faces black with rust and metal filings, I reflected wryly that no one could accuse the Fine Arts Committee of not devoting itself wholeheartedly to its projects.

I went off on a final tour of the garden, collecting the section Blackett had mentioned, then guided in the local contractor who had arrived with his truck. It took him and his two men an hour to load the scrap – an estimated ton and a half – into the vehicle.

‘What do I do with it?’ he asked as he climbed into the cab. ‘Take it to the museum?’

‘No!’ I almost screamed. ‘Get rid of it. Bury it somewhere, or better still, have it melted down. As soon as possible.’

When they had gone Blackett and I walked around the garden together. It looked as if a shrapnel shell had exploded over it. Huge divots were strewn all over the place, and what grass had not been ripped up by the statue had been trampled away by us. Iron filings lay on the lawn like dust, a faint ripple of lost notes carried away on the steepening sunlight.

Blackett bent down and scooped up a handful of grains. ‘Dragon’s teeth. You’ll look out of the window tomorrow and see the B Minor Mass coming up.’ He let it run out between his fingers. ‘However, I suppose that’s the end of it.’

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Lorraine Drexel sued us. She must have come across the newspaper reports and realized her opportunity. I don’t know where she had been hiding, but her lawyers materialized quickly enough, waving the original contract and pointing to the clause in which we guaranteed to protect the statue from any damage that might be done to it by vandals, livestock or other public nuisance. Her main accusation concerned the damage we had done to her reputation – if we had decided not to exhibit the statue we should have supervised its removal to some place of safekeeping, not openly dismembered it and then sold off the fragments to a scrap dealer. This deliberate affront had, her lawyers insisted, cost her commissions to a total of at least fifty thousand dollars.

At the preliminary hearings we soon realized that, absurdly, our one big difficulty was going to be proving to anyone who had not been there that the statue had actually started growing. With luck we managed to get several postponements, and Raymond and I tried to trace what we could of the statue. All we found were three small struts, now completely inert, rusting in the sand on the edge of one of the junkyards in Red Beach. Apparently taking me at my word, the contractor had shipped the rest of the statue to a steel mill to be melted down.

Our only case now rested on what amounted to a plea of self-defence. Raymond and myself testified that the statue had started to grow, and then Blackett delivered a long homily to the judge on what he believed to be the musical shortcomings of the statue. The judge, a crusty and short-tempered old man of the hanging school, immediately decided that we were trying to pull his leg. We were finished from the start.

The final judgment was not delivered until ten months after we had first unveiled the statue in the centre of Vermilion Sands, and the verdict, when it came, was no surprise.

Lorraine Drexel was awarded thirty thousand dollars.

‘It looks as if we should have taken the pylon after, all,’ I said to Carol as we left the courtroom. ‘Even the step-pyramid would have been less trouble.’

Raymond joined us and we went out on to the balcony at the end of the corridor for some air.

‘Never mind,’ Carol said bravely. ‘At least it’s all over with.’

I looked out over the rooftops of Vermilion Sands, thinking about the thirty thousand dollars and wondering whether we would have to pay it ourselves.

The court building was a new one and by an unpleasant irony ours had been the first case to be heard there. Much of the floor and plasterwork had still to be completed, and the balcony was untiled. I was standing on an exposed steel crossbeam; one or two floors down someone must have been driving a rivet into one of the girders, and the beam under my feet vibrated soothingly.

Then I noticed that there were no sounds of riveting going on anywhere, and that the movement under my feet was not so much a vibration as a low rhythmic pulse.

I bent down and pressed my hands against the beam. Raymond and Carol watched me curiously. ‘Mr Hamilton, what is it?’ Carol asked when I stood up.

‘Raymond,’ I said. ‘How long ago did they first start on this building? The steel framework, anyway.’

‘Four months, I think. Why?’

‘Four.’ I nodded slowly. ‘Tell me, how long would you say it took any random piece of scrap iron to be reprocessed through a steel mill and get back into circulation?’

‘Years, if it lay around in the wrong junkyards.’

‘But if it had actually arrived at the steel mill?’

‘A month or so. Less.’

I started to laugh, pointing to the girder. ‘Feel that! Go on, feel it!’

Frowning at me, they knelt down and pressed their hands to the girder. Then Raymond looked up at me sharply.

I stopped laughing. ‘Did you feel it?’

‘Feel it?’ Raymond repeated. ‘I can hear it. Lorraine Drexel – the statue. It’s here!’

Carol was patting the girder and listening to it. ‘I think it’s humming,’ she said, puzzled. ‘It sounds like the statue.’

When I started to laugh again Raymond held my arm. ‘Snap out of it, the whole building will be singing soon!’

‘I know,’ I said weakly. ‘And it won’t be just this building either.’ I took Carol by the arm. ‘Come on, let’s see if it’s started.’

We went up to the top floor. The plasterers were about to move in and there were trestles and laths all over the place. The walls were still bare brick, girders at fifteen-foot intervals between them.