Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

‘Maybe I can live with it. I need the money.’

‘Are you sure it’s his mind that’s bothering you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean him and Luise.’

‘He’s told you about that, has he.’

‘Yes, he has. It seems to have a mystical significance for him, as if it’s created a metaphysical bond between you and him and Istvan.’

‘Feels more like bondage.’

‘Maybe bondage is what you really like. You seem to enjoy harnessing yourself with regrets and chaining yourself to the past.’

‘I’m not even sure there is a past,’ I said. ‘My life is littered with old action like empty beer cans but it’s all in the present.’

‘Let’s get some full beer cans and some fish and chips,’ she said.

We went to a place near her flat in the North End Road. The fluorescent lighting and the white tiling amplified the roads and voices in my mind while asseverating the particularity of this only, this distinct and unmerged moment. I noticed again Melanie’s eyes as they had looked the first time I saw her, open wide, with white showing all round the pupils. Clip-clop, her little black boots had gone in the shady grove of her sudden woodland. She had just said something.

‘What did you say?’ I said.

‘I said that fish and chip shops are metaphysical.’

‘Everything is.’

We took the fish and chips and beer up to her flat near the West Kensington underground station. The room that overlooked the street was large and uncluttered; the walls and ceiling were white, the overhead light was an orange paper globe; there were blue drapes on the wide window; there were a drawing table with a typewriter and an Anglepoise lamp on it, a blue wooden chair, two red filing cabinets, and some unpainted bookshelves in which among the books and typescripts were a tape deck, amplifier, tuner, turntable and speakers. There was a large print of Rousseau’s Sleeping Gipsy. Under the desert moon the gipsy woman slept, the lion watched, the stillness waited. In the background a green river and a range of mountains.

I wondered what was moving at this moment in Gerard David’s mystic wood at the Johan de Witthuis, I wondered what was rising from the pinky dawn water between the beach and the Island Tamaraca. I’d told Melanie about everything but Medusa.

Looking at the Sleeping Gipsy, I said, ‘What do you think is going to happen in that picture?’

‘First tell me what you think.’

‘I think the gipsy is in a dream. The lion isn’t in the dream so the gipsy is safe for the moment. But if the gipsy wakes up or the lion falls asleep there could be big trouble.’

‘You’ll notice’, said Melanie, ‘that the gipsy’s got a lute or a mandolin.’

‘Yes, I notice that.’

‘Well, this gipsy’s been busking around for a while and she’s tired of doing it alone. Her birth sign is Leo so she’s put an ad in Time Out: “MUSICAL LEO SEEKS PARTNER.” The lion answered and they’ve arranged to meet by the river but he’s late and she’s fallen asleep waiting for him.’

‘The question is’, I said, ‘has he got any talent?’

‘If not he can always get by on his looks,’ she said.

We ate our fish and chips and drank our beer contentedly; our windows were golden in the night. From the front window I looked down on the Saturday night North End Road and saw Gom Yawncher go unsteadily past with a bottle in his hand. He was singing:

Yessir, I can boogie

but I need that certain song –

I can boogie, boogie-woogie

all night long.

Yes, I thought, maybe I’ve got that certain song now. She was so beautiful, there was in the air such bright promise of nights following nights. I walked around the room taking in the herness of it, looking at book titles, picking up small objects. On the drawing table next to the typewriter was an A4 folder. Eurydice and Orpheus, it said.

‘Eurydice and Orpheus!’ I said.

‘Yes. I’d rather you didn’t look at it.’

‘You’re writing something.’

‘Yes.’

‘For yourself? Off your own bat?’

‘For Classique. It’s the one Sol wanted you to do and you turned down.’

‘He didn’t waste any time, did he,’ I said.

‘There’s no mandatory waiting period before someone else has a go, is there? Especially as you’d already wasted whatever time there was to waste.’

‘Sol told me to give it my best upmarket thinking. Are you thinking upmarket?’

‘For four thousand quid I’ll think however he likes. It’s a commercial proposition.’

‘And you’re a commercial person?’ As I said that I told myself there was no reason why Sol shouldn’t offer her the same money he’d offered me; looking at it with strict objectivity and grinding my teeth a little I accepted that all those years of speech-ballooning hadn’t made me worth any more than the rankest beginner. And the novels, after all, counted for nothing.

‘I’m no more commercial than you are,’ she said. ‘I’m just doing what you’ve been doing with your comic-writing all these years — I’m buying time.’

‘You’re working on a novel.’

‘Don’t worry, it isn’t catching.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, you recoiled so violently that I thought I’d better reassure you.’

‘Reassure me that there’s no danger of my writing a novel.’

‘That isn’t what I meant but if that’s how you choose to take it then all right.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m being stupid.’

‘You said it, I didn’t,’ she said.

‘I wonder if we could possibly wind back the evening to where we were just before I saw that Eurydice and Orpheus folder?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Now the gipsy’s wondering whether the lion really is a lion or maybe just two very small blokes in a lion suit.’

‘Two very small blokes,’ I said to my face in the mirror as I brushed my teeth alone at home, ‘and no boogie-woogie for either of them.’

‘Veuve Clicquot,’ said Hilary Forthryte to the waiter. She was a vivid-looking woman with long dark hair and she was wearing a Ralph Lauren safari outfit with very expensive boots. Sitting next to her was a small gimlet-eyed bearded man in a leather jacket. ‘My partner Ivor Dreft,’ she said. ‘We thought it might be a good idea for him to be in at the beginning of this.’

The skylight in the top-floor dining-room of L’Escargot let in a better class of daylight than was available in the street; the people in the room all looked as if they were in full colour in a Sunday supplement. Youth and beauty, talent and fame were all around me.

‘Hilary!’ said an immense bearded man, also in safari clothes. He kissed Forthryte on the mouth and during the kiss they both said, ‘Umm-mmhh!’ When they’d done that he made signs of professional recognition to Kraken, Fallok, and Dreft and nodded pleasantly to me. You may be nobody, said his look, but you might have money or influence and what does it cost me to nod pleasantly. ‘Are we going to see you on Sunday?’ he said to Forthryte.

‘I wouldn’t miss it,’ she said, and immediately I imagined a great coruscation of youth and beauty, talent and fame. ‘Ferdy Phyvemill,’ she said, ‘Herman Orff.’

‘Hi,’ said Phyvemill, getting the better grip and crunching my hand.

‘I’ve got your Lost Incas of the City on tape,’ I said. ‘I’ve watched it four times so far.’

‘Piracy,’ said Phyvemill. ‘Send me money. Are you in the business?’

‘Herman’s working on a Channel 4 film with us,’ said Forthryte while I manifested humility.