Tom McCarthy - C

“For once, we’re underdressed,” Audrey shouts at the other girls.

It’s true: most of the women here are wearing chiffon dresses trimmed with lace and crêpe-de-chine tea gowns; the men, like some of those he saw in Madame Z’s salon, seem got up for a pyjama party too. Waiters wearing laurel wreaths are gliding around with trays of Champagne. Serge, Audrey and the Amazons down a few glasses; then the girls skip off to join the crowd of dancers on the floor beneath the stage.

“Dr. Arbus is here,” he hears one of them say to Audrey as they slink away.

Serge looks around, wondering which reveller he might be. The dancers are mostly women. He can make out Amazonian segments interspersed among the limbs and faces: bare shoulders turning and vibrating, hands pulling vanity cases from purses (they’re so adept at sniffing cocaine that they don’t need to stop moving in order to do it). Serge has his own medicine, procured from the objet d’art-displaying antique dealer this afternoon, an H day. He retires into what seems to be a small electricity cabin and doses himself up. When he emerges, all the dancers are moving like the actors in a film that he and Audrey saw played at the wrong speed by a novice projectionist a week or so ago: slowly, their frenetic twists and shudders broken down to gestures that ooze into one another at a pace so languorous it’s almost static. Skirts draw together and apart like clouds merging and separating over the course of a whole afternoon; eye contact between partners takes as long to establish as trunk-call connections, and is taken leave of lingeringly, sadly; wisps of smoke turn solid as they extend from cigarettes to coil like lace round limbs and clothing. Viewed like this, the scene looks more melancholic than celebratory or jubilant. Even two women who are kissing each other passionately seem caught up in the grip of a slow desperation: their mouths suck at one another, as though struggling to draw oxygen out of the lungs beyond them; one of their hands is grappling at the other’s breast as though clutching at a fixed object to prevent a fall. As the breast breaks free of its clothing, the hand slips and its owner emits a shriek that takes an age to reach him and stays with him for even longer, drowning out the music: a slow, drawn-out version of a shriek he’s heard before…

Serge finds himself, much later, standing on a fire escape that overlooks the Thames. Audrey is nowhere to be seen. There’s someone with him, though: another male reveller who’s expounding to Serge his theory that jazz and morphine compliment each other: something to do with frequency and synchronising, how the waves of the brain need to be brought into step with those of the music, Africa and America, ancient and modern, something, something…

“Words on the cross…” Serge tries to murmur, but discovers that his own words won’t emerge from him. In any case, his interlocutor seems to have vanished, if he was ever there at all. A dull metallic pressure on his knee causes Serge to realise that he’s lying, not standing, on the fire escape. He looks down at the river. The tide’s out; the exposed mud is deep and black. “Maybe it’ll be like this, when it comes,” he finds himself saying to nobody, not knowing what he means.

In mid-November, Audrey repeats her offer to take Serge to one of her Hoxton Hall spiritualist meetings. Serge accepts. They set out from his flat, and take a bus along Clerkenwell Road and Old Street.

“What’s that?” she asks, feeling an object in his jacket pocket prod her as they press together: it’s rush hour and the bus is crowded.

“Leveller,” he says. “A surveying instrument. I was meant to drop it off at home.”

He shifts his position so it doesn’t prod her anymore. As he does the object digs into his ribs in reproach for the lie: it’s not a leveller but an ammeter, his father’s one, smuggled along to take a surreptitious reading, gauge the “spirit level” as it were…

“Last week we had the relatives of two people in the room pop up,” Audrey tells him as they walk up Hoxton Street together.

“What, jump out of a box and stroll around?” Serge asks.

“No, of course not,” she scoffs at him. “They get channelled through the medium: their voices. Through her, and the control too. You’ll see.”

There are people milling around outside the hall, watched over by two sentinel lamps that protrude from the building’s white façade. As Serge and Audrey make their half-shilling contributions at a table in the vestibule, they’re each handed a couple of leaflets. They pass into the main room, a homely little place with rather shabby chairs scattered around, all facing a small stage fringed with plush red curtains. In the middle of the stage a table sits. It’s a round table with a single, thick stem-leg holding its top up: a dining table, of the type you generally get in middle-class homes. A single chair is drawn up at the table, facing the audience from behind it. Several yards to the table and chair’s left, at what Audrey would call “stage right,” a second chair sits facing the same way. Between the two chairs, mounted on an easel, is a blackboard. To the table’s right (stage left), a second, smaller desk has a chair placed in front of it, facing back inwards towards the big round table. This chair alone is occupied, by a thin, mousey woman who sits, pencil poised, above a notepad resting on the surface of the desk.

“Is that the medium?” Serge asks.

“No,” Audrey tells him. “She’s a secretary or something like that. She takes notes throughout the session, for a scientific organisation who research this kind of thing.”

They head towards two seats near the hall’s rear, drape their coats over the back of these and sit down. Other people drift in slowly. Some of them are clearly ingénues like Serge: on entering the room, they pause and stare around, wondering what they’re meant to do, before falteringly making their way to vacant seats. Others are habitués: they stride in confidently, looking left and right to see which of the other regulars are here. Serge glances at the topmost leaflet of the little handout sheaf he’s holding. It contains a short biography of Miss Ann Flannery Dobai, their hostess medium. Born of humble immigrant stock in Baltimore, this account informs him, she and her five siblings spent their childhood following their father, a railway worker, from city to city. It was in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that her gift was discovered, quite by chance, in 1884:

On meeting with a group of music hall performers, the adolescent Ann entered a trance and listed, quite accurately, the names of each of their maternal grandfathers. Shortly thereafter, she began performing apports and materialisations throughout the American Midwest. As news of her psychic powers crossed the Atlantic, she was invited to the capitals of Europe, and granted private audiences to the Austrian Emperor, the Italian King, and numerous heads of state. Finding herself persecuted by malicious sceptics on her homecoming, she resolved to once more offer her gift to the more open-minded peoples of the Old World…

The two sheets beneath this one have hymns printed on them.

“What are these for?” Serge asks Audrey.

“To vibrate the air,” she says. She nods hello to a gentleman in a fedora seated a few yards in front of them. “He’s always here,” she tells Serge.

A door at the room’s far end opens and a man strides through it and onto the stage, pausing beside the stage-right chair. A hush descends on the audience as he addresses them.

“Ladies and gentlemen-and, above all, friends,” he announces, “Miss Dobai will commence her sitting in a moment.” His accent is English, not American. Sweeping the hall with his gaze, he continues: “I see a number of familiar faces among us-but for those of you here for the first time, I shall briefly outline the extraordinary procedure we are about to undergo together. Miss Dobai will initially, with your help, attempt to make contact with a control and to channel the ensuing communication by means of her vocal cords. Once contact has been established, you are welcome to put questions to the control: it is to you, after all, that he or she may wish to speak.”