Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

He wept, leaned forward to the shiny black box. His cheek pressed the panel in front, his hand the panel at the side. Wood and metal rumbled inside with the disturbed air. He was no longer hearing Merli soaring now. He was hearing Paolo Silveri. In Dublin, 1959, dying.

Dying.

(He told anyone who asked that she had died. And dead she probably was now. They had been the same age and he was all of eighty-three and half of Western humanity did not make it as far as eighty-three.)

Aisling.

She had come off her bicycle. It was a terrible tragedy.

The next day he decided to get rid of his piano. He put an ad in the newspaper:

UPRIGHT PIANO. BLACK, GOLD LEAF AND BRASS. GERMAN. MID-CENTURY.

HAS STAYED TRULY IN TUNE FOR 45 YEARS.

$750 o.n.o.

Two days later three men came to carry it away. A woman in mustard angora, the mother of the new owner, stood back, directing their movements, little Bit jigging like a jumping bean among these strangers’ ankles.

‘You must show these beasts who’s boss,’ he said to the woman, stooping to smack the dog’s bottom.

‘Yes, they are making it awkward for themselves,’ the woman said, ‘though I can see why you thought it was too big for the room.’

The men carried the piano out the door, down the corridor, down in the service elevator. In the lobby, doorman Emmet helped them the rest of the way.

‘Mind it,’ Denny couldn’t help calling out, though it was no longer his to care about. ‘Good riddance,’ he said, ‘and bye to that.’

Emmet came back into the lobby shaking his arms from the shoulders down.

‘Ee-yaye, yaye, yaye,’ he said.

‘Heavy?’ said Denny.

‘Painful,’ said Emmet.

‘Emmet,’ said Denny, ‘I want to talk to Jeremiah about his electric piano. I’ll need a replacement for my own now.’

‘Excellent for tight spaces, Mister Kennedy-Logan.’

‘Is he down below?’

‘Just follow the noise.’

The basement was in fact quiet when Denny entered, except for the hum of a tumble dryer or two coming from a side passage. Past the passage, on the left, was a door to a vestibule, then two of the three goblin brothers’ living quarters. Past Jeremiah and Breffny’s living quarters was, somewhere, a set of workshops.

‘Come in,’ said Jeremiah.

On one side of the vestibule plastic trays filled with oiled nuts, dirty rags and various cranking and turning tools were stacked to the ceiling. On the opposite side, sitting on a stool, was the middle though largest and yet youngest looking of the goblin brothers. He was eating a sandwich, and wearing shorts and an upside-down US Mail bag with holes for head and arms. To the left of him was his electric piano on a serifed-X-shaped stand. To the right was a wooden lectern desk.

Jeremiah was a quiet and private lad, but the residents often remarked on his talent. He played in the day or in the evening when he was not on door duty, which was most of the time. Whenever Denny came down to wash or collect laundry it seemed that a vamp or fugue or riverine tinkle was coming from Jeremiah’s cubbyhole.

(The lectern desk, Jeremiah had explained to Denny before, was for the business of producing manuscripts. All the goblin people and varieties of that kind in the world worked flat out to make history and artefacts to give a delusion of past beyond human beings’ living memory.)

‘What can I do for you, Denny?’

‘I have always liked the sound of your electric piano. Are they expensive?’

‘Are you in the market?’

‘Can you demonstrate for me please what your machine can do? I believe the keys on these things are not satisfactorily weighted.’

Jeremiah slowly savoured the last bites of his sandwich, then dragged his stool to the piano. He quickly ran through a scale.

‘They’re fine. Your fingers get used to it.’ Lifting his head and crossing his arms now he said, ‘The brother tells me you were wanting to get rid of your old lovely upright.’

‘Just been rid of it,’ said Denny, loudly exhaling through his nose.

‘And why would you have done something like that? The tone off of that instrument was easily the finest in the building.’

‘A woman, of course.’

‘Sit down there now,’ said Jeremiah, offering his stool. He went into his room and fetched a fold-up chair for himself. ‘Same woman?’ he said, settling down again.

‘The same one.’

They listened to a fit of croup from the boiler for some moments. (The goblin brothers had illegally redirected steam from public services into the building’s heating system.)

Finally Jeremiah said, ‘I wouldn’t be in any position to give advice on that.’

Denny considered this point. ‘It’s true that I have never seen a goblin woman, or even assumed that such a variant existed. How do the goblin people generate themselves?’

Jeremiah angrily slapped his hands on his knees. ‘Why do you persist in calling us “goblins”? We are fairies or shee. Is that such a hard idea to grasp? Do you not believe I’m a shee?’

Denny was sorry he had said anything to hurt Jeremiah, having thought the words ‘goblin’ and ‘fairy’ and ‘shee’ were interchangeable (though the words ‘fairy’ and ‘shee’ clearly now were, and this was noted).

‘I have no difficulty at all believing that you are a shee,’ he said.

The Mac An Fincashel brothers belonged to a clan of lowland fairies, isolated by bogs and cuts, who were famed for their jam-making but equally for spoiling jam. After a blackcurrant blight they came to the new world as stowaways in the hull of a steamship, or at least a ship that was powered a great length of the way by steam and partly by electrics. It was in the clanging compact chambers of this vessel that they had learnt all that they knew about plumbing and electrics. In America where there are no blackcurrants they turned to blueberries, and because of the tremendous nutritional value of blueberries the brothers grew to an abnormally large size. Denny had no difficulty believing that the Mac An Fincashels were shee because two of them (Emmet and Breffny) had tenacious beard shadow despite shaving every day, and one of them (Breffny, the youngest) had dark wrinkled skin like a defecated husk. Also, he had no difficulty believing that they were shee because he, Denny, belonged to the city of Dublin, the most magical city in Ireland, which sat in a saddle between the Hill of Howth, where the queen Aideen was buried, and the Hill of Kilmashogue, which was a known haunt of the god Aonghus Óg.

‘Although,’ said Jeremiah, caressing his forehead, ‘I’ve observed this about women: they don’t have the power to overpower men and yet they walk about carefree as you like, so delicate’ — his caressing became a forceful strumming — ‘around the hollows of their ankles and in the glides of their necks and at the houghs of their knees, as if they are never in danger. I’m not sure if that’s of any use to you.’

Denny, studying him with an ambivalence of pity and awe, said, ‘No, Jeremiah, it is not. Is there anything more useful you can tell me about women from your vantage of bemusement and dispassion?’

Jeremiah looked back at him with rubbed-red bright smiling eyes.

‘Is there anything you can tell me from your vantage of great experience and knowledge?’ the shee said.

Denny, stroking his chin, said, ‘You are blessed by your nature, Jeremiah the Shee, and you’re as well away from them.’

‘I think I would like to know more about women.’

Denny, thinking for a moment, said, ‘Some information you might like to know about women can be found in this song.’

He noticed something slosh across the muscles of Jeremiah’s face, like a wave in a tray of water. A smirk broke from the shee’s lips. Denny closed his eyes tightly and gave it as well as he had it within him, singing ‘Two Sisters of Outstanding Charms’: