Russell Hoban - Come Dance With Me

When I qualified I decided to put the past behind me and I hoped the future was in front of me. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to be but I thought elsewhere might be good. About that time I had a postcard from London from a school friend I rarely saw. The picture was a 14 bus and the message was: ‘This is a great place to feel strange.’ So I went to have a look at London. I came for two weeks, decided to live here for a time, registered as an alien, and showed the Home Office that I would not be a burden on the state.

When I decided to stay my qualifications were accepted. This was thirty years ago, so I was not required to sit any examinations. It was a time when England needed specialists and I had an offer from St Eustace. Now at sixty-two I’m a well-established consultant. I do four to five specialist clinics a week and two in-patient ward rounds. The rest of my time is taken up with teaching, research, admin sessions, and my regular stint as specialist in charge of incoming emergency medicine.

‘You’ve done all right with what to be and where to be,’ said Christabel. ‘Have you worked out how to be?’

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘Let me know when you do.’ She said this without cynicism, as if she thought I might come up with an answer that had escaped her. The band was ready for her again and she went back to work.

22 January 2003. You work with somebody for years, you go on tour together, you eat and sleep and go to the toilet in the same bus day after day, mile after mile, you get to know each other’s smells but you don’t know fuck all. She talks to me about the music, we work on songs together. Does she think there’s anything else in my head besides a fuzz box and a wah-wah pedal? She’d probably be surprised to know that I have pictures in my mind apart from what I see with my eyes. Pictures of her sometimes. Strange ones. Naked in a high place. Or looking at me through trees. Like dream pictures with sounds and smells. Sometimes the sea.

How did I get to be what I am, where I am? Nothing unusual about the start of it. Back in the sixties if you wanted to pull the birds you learned how to play a guitar, just like now. And if you couldn’t join a band you formed one, so that’s what Sid Horstmann and I did. We found two other guys for bass and drums and we put together a kind of skiffle band, The Winkle-Pickers. Learned ‘Cumberland Gap’ and after a while we got hold of a bloke with a Vox Continental and we were on our way. Did our first gig at The Cave in Bethnal Green and from then on we went up and down and sideways with changes until Buck Travis came in on keyboards in 1972 and Bert and Shorty joined us shortly after. We called ourselves Ouija Board for the first three years, then we changed our act and became Mobile Mortuary. Christabel didn’t come into the band until 1980, and that’s when we had our first chart record: ‘Haunt Me’ at No. 3. Thirty-one years this band’s been together! A lot of marriages don’t last that long.

Sid always had to be the alpha male. He didn’t look like James Dean but he tried for a James Dean look. Live fast, die young, and get as much pussy as you can. He wasn’t in love with Christabel but he didn’t like it when she went out with that weirdo from Sayings of Confucius. She didn’t love Sid but she was the one who started this Anubis huddle shit after he was in a body drawer he couldn’t climb out of. By now she’s so used to feeling guilty she’d be miserable without it. She’s fifty-four and I’m sixty. This new boyfriend looks at least as old as I am. I’ve never made a move yet, each time I thought I might the time didn’t seem right. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I think of how I took up the guitar to pull the birds. Tracy was one of the first I pulled and no sooner had I played a few riffs than she got pregnant. With two big brothers and a father with a very short fuse. Hello, Mrs Jimmy.

After Tracy took the kids and left me I thought I’d come out and tell Christabel how I felt. I didn’t, though. She still looks pretty good. I don’t know, if I’m careful maybe I can outlive the competition. Time will tell, they say. It’s been telling me for years but I try not to listen.

22 January 2003. When I got back from Vienna after Sid’s death, Victor, one of my cat-minding neighbours, gave me a recording of ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’. He hadn’t yet heard about Sid, he just gave it to me because he thought I might like it. ‘It’s deep,’ he said. When I played it, it was as if the whales and the sea were singing my thoughts and singing the dead. Sometimes Death himself would sing in a very low-frequency whale voice, grunting and growling, and the whale voice of me would plead with him, weeping and wailing in higher frequencies. And all the time the watery deep-sea voices were burbling and plashing all around. After that first hearing I didn’t want to listen to it again for a long time but every once in a while it was the only thing I listened to. Now after all these years I hear it in my head without playing the CD.

I didn’t want this dinner date to be too serious and I had a craving for fish and chips so Elias suggested The White Horse in Parson’s Green. ‘They do cod in beer batter,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll like it.’ By the time the rehearsal was over it was almost eight so we took a taxi straight there. On the way we talked a little about music. Classical is what he listens to mostly, he said Haydn quartets would be his Desert Island Discs. He remembered people headbanging to Hawkwind and Status Quo and he liked The Rolling Stones, also Portishead and Garbage but that was about it for rock and pop, he’d never heard of Joe Strummer. He likes blues and Thelonious Monk, he likes country and western and he knows a lot of standards but I wasn’t sure how we were going to get through the evening until we started talking about painters. He’s a big Redon user and he has a thing for Caspar David Friedrich. I have a tattoo of a Friedrich owl, wings outspread, perched on a grave marker just above my bottom cleavage. Not many people know that.

The White Horse seemed to be popular with Hooray Henrys and Henriettas. Even on this cold January evening they were stood three deep outside the pub and clogging the entrance, none of them over thirty and all of them loud. ‘There’s a dining room at the back,’ said Elias. ‘It’s fairly quiet there.’ We struggled through the braying and the cigarette smoke, reached the dining room and sat down at a table for two. The other tables were braying less loudly than the people in the bar. There were some crap abstractions on the walls doing some visual braying but they went quiet when I looked away. We ordered the beer-battered cod and pints of Bass and there we were then, at the point where one of the two people says, ‘So … This time I said it, ‘So … Here we are. What now?’

‘Why do you sound so negative, as if nothing good can happen?’ said Elias.

Tell me about negative, I thought. My son Django was four when I took him to Maui with me. It was January, the band had nothing scheduled for a couple of weeks and I wanted to see those humpback whales that come there every year. I’d been having dreams in which I was drowning in the sea while the whales sang all around me but I wanted to see them anyhow. Then I dreamt that Django was in the sea, sinking down, down, down into the darkness. When I woke up I thought, he could fall over the side of a boat. So when we got to Maui we didn’t go out on a whale-watching boat; instead we watched from a cliff and Django fell off the cliff and was killed. He’d be fourteen now and a good-looking boy. ‘Negative?’ I said to Elias. ‘I guess I’m just that kind of person. Tomorrow you can try someone else.’