Tom McCarthy - C

“You like them?” she asks, slipping the shoes on and straightening her feet against the driver’s partition as the cab pulls off again.

“Dr. Arbus buy them for you?” Becky half-sings. Audrey nods.

“Who’s Dr. Arbus?” Serge asks.

“Her mentor,” says Becky in a mock-stern voice.

“Protector,” adds Audrey, equally faux-solemnly.

“Instructor,” Becky elaborates, nodding slowly.

The two girls start laughing. Serge laughs too, although he doesn’t get the joke, and looks out of the window. Streets are growing leafier, houses bigger and smarter. They chug uphill for a while, then stop beside a house whose entrance is held up by light-blue columns (Ionic, Serge deduces as they wait between them for admission). A servant opens the door; Becky enters into an exchange with him whose phrases don’t make sense to either Serge or Audrey but result, like combination lock-dials rotating to their designated slots, one after the other, in a second door being opened and the three of them being led up a finely carpeted staircase into a living room with sensual curtains and hangings, low-shaded purple lights and an uncanny atmosphere of lassitude. People-some in dinner jackets, some in suits, and some in what look like elegant pyjamas-are strewn around this room like clothes at Audrey’s: draped across divans, curled up on rugs, slumped in lush armchairs.

“This is like the Mogul’s opium dream in Sunshine of the World,” whispers Audrey. “You know, Niziam-Ul-Gulah, or whatever he’s called, in the first act.”

“Niziam’s the Vizier,” Becky whispers back. “The Mogul’s called something else.”

“Isn’t that the lord who’s chasing Mabel?” Audrey says, nudging Becky. “You know, the political man. Lying on the sofa, with that girl you always see in the lounge of the Denmark Street Hotel.”

“I think maybe it-” Becky begins, before catching her breath and gasping: “Oh, look! It’s the chap who’s in that film we saw last week!”

She clasps both Serge and Audrey with excitement. Audrey squints piercingly towards the man in question, but is unable to confirm or deny Becky’s claim, as her view’s blocked by the approach of an ageing lady who floats towards them with an indolent, cat-like gait.

“My angel,” the lady, whom Serge presumes to be their hostess, this Zarovia or Ferrovia, purrs as she gathers Becky’s hand between her own, smiling at her with a languid and matronly look. “So glad to see you.”

Her voice is husky, foreign: maybe Greek or Russian. Becky introduces Serge and Audrey to her; she takes their hands too. Her hands are limp and clammy; she reeks of perfume. Her eyes move from one of them to the other with a dull and heavy motion as she asks:

“What will my angels have? Pipe or syringe?”

The two girls turn to Serge, who answers:

“Syringe, definitely.”

Their hostess leads them to an enclave in which poufs lie in a circle round a Persian rug, sits them down, then floats away, returning shortly afterwards with three loaded syringes. Serge injects himself, then watches Zoroastria inject first Becky and then Audrey. By the time she’s got to Audrey he’s already under the drug’s spell; watching an air bubble rise through the liquid in the barrel as the madame taps it with her clammy finger, he feels himself rising too, shedding gravity like clothes, like curtains, hangings, tapestries…

Serge, Audrey and Becky visit the salon several times over the next few weeks. After a while Becky teaches them the password sequence so that they can go without her: it consists of the visitor enquiring whether there’ll be a piano recital today, and the servant (since Madame Z’s seems to be open round the clock, these keep rotating) asking whether they’ve come to hear the Chopin or the Liszt, to which the visitor must answer “Liszt.” There is a piano in the main room, as it happens; from time to time, one of the guests will play it for a while, but their recitals never get completed, any more than the intermittent conversations rippling about the place, which fade away almost as soon as they get going. Serge learns other passwords too: there’s one that works at Wooldridge and Co. chemist’s shop in Lisle Street, and another in a taxidermist’s store in Holborn; at a confectioner’s in Bond Street, by announcing himself favourable to liquorice, then purchasing either a flask of perfume or a box of sweetmeats, Serge is able to procure much more than he ostensibly requests; at an antique dealer’s out in Kensington, the code works the other way, one or other (sometimes both) of two Oriental objets d’art, calligraphic watercolours bearing (originally, at least, quite accidentally, Serge imagines) the likenesses of the Western letters C and H, appearing in the window to indicate the availability of various stock. He starts seeing all of London’s surfaces and happenings as potentially encrypted: street signage, chalk-marks scrawled on walls, phrases on newspaper vendors’ stalls and sandwich boards, snatches of conversations heard in passing, the arrangements of flowers on window-sills or clothes on washing lines. He also comes to realise just how many of his fellow citizens are subject to the same vices as him. He picks up the telltale signals all over town: the sniffs, the slightly jaundiced skin, the hands jerky and limp by turns, eyes dull yet somehow restless too. Sometimes a look passes between him and a chance companion on the bus, or in a queue, or someone brushed past in a doorway, a look of mutual recognition of the type that members of a secret sect might give each other: Ah, you’re one of us…

The 52’s maître d’, Billie Lee, has that look in spades. He’s half-Chinese, and has a liquid, silken voice that lingers like Madame Z’s clammy hands do when she greets her guests. He has a lisp as well, which Serge always associates in his mind with the word “Liszt” in the salon’s entry-dialogue. His gait also strikes Serge as cat-like, although Serge knows he’s probably only thinking this because of all the cat-masks leering at him from the stage. The more drugs he takes, the more associatively his mind seems to work: the circulation of dancers over the long floorboards, interlocking bodies moving on collision courses towards other conjoined bodies, pausing to let them pass then advancing again, suggests for him the way that London’s cabs and busses pulse and flow, negotiating space; then aeroplanes circling and passing one another; gnats above a bed; orbiting planets. The bold, confident women sitting around tables, painted in stylised geometries of black, white and scarlet, the stark angles of their bare spines, stockinged legs and forearms that extend and retract triangular cocktail glasses or long, straight cigarette holders, summon up the image of new, shining engines, the sleek machinery of luxurious, expensive cars, their brazen pistons, rods and cylinders. Men-both in the 52 and Madame Z’s salon, and for that matter in most other places-seem diminished by comparison: retracted, meek, effeminate.

“Dear Szerge,” Lee susurrates at him one night, “you’re minusz your lovely Audrey this evening.”

“She’s meeting her guardian,” Serge tells him.

“Ah! The doctor.” A soft chuckle emanates from Lee’s mouth. “A fine man. Devoted to her.”

Serge shrugs. He still hasn’t worked out the nature of Audrey’s relationship with this Dr. Arbus. Lee half-gasps as he remembers something.

“Szerge!” he says. “You must bring all your Folies-Bergèrsz to the party that I’m organising down in Limehousze next week. It’s a zsecret party. Exclusive, but huge. It’ll be a blaszt…”

“Consider them brought,” Serge answers.

Audrey arrives soon afterwards, flush to the gills with money. She buys them both Champagne and smothers his cheek and neck in apologetic kisses. He turns from her wordlessly and watches the jazz band play. They look like machine parts too, extensions of their instruments, the stoppers, valves and tubes. Their bodies twitch and quiver with electric agitation. So do the bodies of the dancers. One girl, gyrating with another, lets a shriek out: it’s a shriek of joy that manages to carry on its underside a note of anxiety, a distress signal. The music carries signals too: Serge’s eyes glaze over as he tunes into them. There are several, gathering within the noise only to lose their shape again and slip away. Dispersed, they rise up silently towards the winking moon and bounce off this to Mars and Saturn before travelling along the cat-masks’ whiskers and being granted structure and form once more by the trellis and the plants, which they cause to slightly tremble. When Serge closes his eyes, the signals become images: words and shapes being written out in light against a black void, then erased, then written out again, worlds being made and unmade…