Adam Thirlwell - The Complete Short Stories - Volume 1

I had never heard the Arachnid sing before. I was listening to it open-eared when I felt a glow of heat burn against my arm. I turned and saw the woman staring intently at the plant, her skin aflame, the insects in her eyes writhing insanely. The Arachnid stretched out towards her, calyx erect, leaves like blood-red sabres.

I stepped round her quickly and switched off the argon feed. The Arachnid sank to a whimper, and around us there was a nightmarish babel of broken notes and voices toppling from high C’s and L’s into discord. A faint whispering of leaves moved over the silence.

The woman gripped the edge of the tank and gathered herself. Her skin dimmed and the insects in her eyes slowed to a delicate wavering.

‘Why did you turn it off?’ she asked heavily.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock here and that sort of twelve-tone emotional storm can blow a lot of valves. Most of these plants aren’t equipped for grand opera.’

She watched the Arachnid as the gas drained out of its calyx. One by one its leaves buckled and lost their colour.

‘How much is it?’ she asked me, opening her bag.

‘It’s not for sale,’ I said. ‘Frankly I’ve no idea how it picked up those bars –’

‘Will a thousand dollars be enough?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on me steadily.

‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘I’d never be able to tune the others without it. Anyway,’ I added, trying to smile, ‘that Arachnid would be dead in ten minutes if you took it out of its vivarium. All these cylinders and leads would look a little odd inside your lounge.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she agreed, suddenly smiling back at me. ‘I was stupid.’ She gave the orchid a last backward glance and strolled away across the floor to the long Tchaikovsky section popular with the tourists.

‘ Pathétique ,’ she read off a label at random. ‘I’ll take this.’

I wrapped up the scabia and slipped the instructional booklet into the crate, keeping my eye on her all the time.

‘Don’t look so alarmed,’ she said with amusement. ‘I’ve never heard anything like that before.’

I wasn’t alarmed. It was that thirty years at Vermilion Sands had narrowed my horizons.

‘How long are you staying at Vermilion Sands?’ I asked her.

‘I open at the Casino tonight,’ she said. She told me her name was Jane Ciracylides and that she was a speciality singer.

‘Why don’t you look in?’ she asked, her eyes fluttering mischievously. ‘I come on at eleven. You may find it interesting.’

I did. The next morning Vermilion Sands hummed. Jane created a sensation. After her performance three hundred people swore they’d seen everything from a choir of angels taking the vocal in the music of the spheres to Alexander’s Ragtime Band. As for myself, perhaps I’d listened to too many flowers, but at least I knew where the scorpion on the balcony had come from.

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 performances 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.