Russell Hoban - Come Dance With Me

It lasted almost a year and by that time Dick had knocked me about a few times too many with his big strong hands. He went off to work one rainy day when I was wishing he’d fall off a roof. He did and it killed him. My judgement has never been good but neither was his.

I wonder what Elias would think if I stopped being a mystery and told him just how risky it is to get too close to me. Stevo’s been OK so far but maybe he has nine lives. When I got back to my house after Django’s death I found this tiger-striped kitten in a basket on my doorstep. He looked up at me as if Django’s spirit had gone into him. I couldn’t give a cat his name so I named him after Stephane Grappelli.

If Elias were smart he’d find somebody safer to get mixed up with.

24 January 2003. I don’t think of my daughters very often. Wherever they are, they have done all right, that I know. Sometimes I think of Elias because there are things I want to tell him. These things he knows maybe, maybe not.

Everything is twice itself, this I often think. Things are what they are every day, but then sometimes they are not. Sometimes I see people talking, crossing the road, running to catch a bus. Suddenly it is like TV with the sound turned off and I see that this is really Death dressing himself up as these people talking, crossing the road, running to catch a bus. So that is what is really happening, no?

But who am I that I should say this? My mind is like a top that spins crazily just before it falls over.

24 January 2003. Sometimes I wonder if I am the sort of person who’s really suited to a career in medicine. My mind is subject to fits of strangeness; this morning coming to work I looked out of the bus window at people talking, crossing the road, running to catch the bus and I thought, all this is really only Death dressing himself up as people talking, crossing the road, running to catch the bus. Ought a doctor to see things in that way? But it’s not surprising that Death comes into my mind; I know quite a few people my age who are dead, even some younger than I. I do what I do and I advance in my profession but it could well be too late for any personal development, any future with a woman. I’m sure there are people who get all the way to the end of their lives and die without ever having been in love. Still, I do feel that connection with Christabel that was there even before we met. Did it will be?

24 January 2003. The cyclops turned up in a dream last night. Staring at me through a clump of trees. Birches, thin scraggley ones. The ground was boggy, squelching under my feet and there was that hideous face gawking at me with its one staring eye and its disgusting little mouth saying something but I couldn’t hear what it was. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you the Erlking now?’ But it just kept moving its mouth and my own voice woke me up.

Adam Freund was Django’s father. Although I was sharing a bed with Sid Horstmann we hadn’t had sex since my last period and I was ovulating when I was with Adam. The band was back in London two days later and I never saw him again. When I found that I was pregnant I wondered how he’d feel about it if he knew. When we were together in that borrowed room, before he told me he was married, I knew that he was the right man for me. If he’d asked me to drop everything and go away with him I’d have done it. But as it was, even if I’d known where to reach him, what would have been the point? I used to lie in bed and grind my teeth thinking about it. If only he weren’t married!

Sid Horstmann was wrong for me but I was with him long enough for him to kill himself. Why did I take up with him? Working together and travelling together made it easier of course and he had had a sort of doomed air that attracted me. Did I think I could save him from whatever he was heading for? I know now that you can’t save anybody. He had a lot of talent and he wrote some good songs but he had black moods and fits of depression that weren’t helped by his drinking. Maybe I helped him over that balcony railing by getting bored with his need for special treatment. It would have been better for both of us if I’d said no the first time he wanted to get a leg over.

My night with Adam was in 1988. In 1990 Mobile Mortuary were back in Vienna and Sayings of Confucius were our support band again. Adam wasn’t with them. ‘He’s dead,’ they told me. ‘We were in Hamburg setting up for a gig at Onkel Po’s Carnegie Hall and the light rig fell on him.’ So he wasn’t married any more but he wasn’t available. When Django was three I told him about it and some time after that he showed me a drawing of a man. It was done the way little kids draw people, a big head with arms and legs growing out of it. Big smile on the man’s face and he was holding a guitar.

‘Who’s that?’ I said.

Django said, ‘Dad. He played me a song.’

‘In a dream?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember how it went?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you hum it?’

So he hummed ‘Nuages’. He’d heard me play it often and he had a good ear. Django’s coffin was made on Maui by Rudy Ka’uhane, a local craftsman. On the lid he lettered:

O winds, winds of Waipio,

In the calabash of Kaleiioku,

Come from the ipu-makani!

O wind, the wind of Hilo,

Come quickly, come with power!

‘This is the kite-flying song of the demigod Maui,’ said Rudy. ‘Now the soul of your son flies like a kite and the string is in your hand.’

When I got to Honolulu my flight home wasn’t due to leave until next morning. In the airport the part of my brain that makes sense of what the eyes see didn’t seem to be working, all the colours weren’t any colour and the shapes wouldn’t stay the same. Hello darkness, I thought, but there wasn’t any proper darkness either. I breathed in the ghosts of long-gone burgers and fries and when I went to the ladies’ the air freshener smelled like Juicy Fruit. I wasn’t hungry but I felt like eating so I had a couple of spring rolls at the Fresh Express cafeteria. There were neon signs in English and Japanese and the spring rolls probably had some flavour but I didn’t know what it was.

I spent the night at the Mini Hotel Sleep/Shower in the airport. It was like a cell for a monk, very quiet and away from everything. The bedsteads were iron, the blankets were thin and grey like prison blankets, the towels were only a little thicker than the toilet paper, but that monk’s cell of a room kept all the bits of me from flying apart. It held me together until the coffin and I were on the plane. Lying in that narrow iron bed I kept thinking that Django would always be a child, he’d never know what it was to have a woman. Because I had to see humpback whales.

I did the necessary paperwork to get the coffin on the plane and eventually Django and I took off for home. I had an aisle seat next to a young German couple. She was about six months’ pregnant, a big sturdy girl like the one in the Schiele painting. He was also large, and both of them had blue eyes and fair hair. He put his hand on her belly and they smiled at each other, then at me. I smiled back and said, ‘Viel Gluck’

‘Sprechen sie Deutsche said the man.

‘No,’ I said, ‘just the odd word.’ I put on my headset and went from one channel to another until I found a male voice with female backing singing:

I’ll be waiting on the far side bank of Jordan,

I’ll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand,

And when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout,

And come running through the shallow waters, reaching for your hand.