Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

‘Then one day I knew what it was —

My poor benighted mind!

This charm was but an illusion of sight

And was I ever but blind?

One sister was the half of her head

Where feel and instinct wrought.

The other close sister was the half

Of soundness, nerve and thought.

Wasn’t I the fool to ever believe

The marriage was her and me?

The union true was prestidigitator

And the woman that I could see.’

A distressing fact of Denny’s singing, and one that he wondered about others detecting, was that he could not meet anybody in the eye when he was in the act.

He placed his knees neatly together and his hands on his lap.

Instead of articulating a response Jeremiah said, after a moment, ‘The sounds you hear now are of tunnelling and underground exploding. All sorts of groupings are in on it. New York City is being undermined.’

Denny believed he could feel the vibrations of this activity through the legs of his stool.

‘Tell me this now,’ he said. ‘If I called a tune, any tune, like the one I have just sung, would you be able to play it?’

‘I’d be able enough to have a crack at it. If that doesn’t sound too proud.’

‘I don’t doubt that you would be able. I have heard you play, and you have a rare ability.’

‘Have you a specific task in mind, Mister Kennedy-Logan?’

‘I do. I have a concert upcoming on March the sixth and need someone to play the piano for me.’

‘That doesn’t leave a lot of time.’

‘No it does not, I suppose.’

‘I mean this with the greatest of respect.’

‘I hadn’t considered it a slight until now.’

Denny inclined on the arc of his arm, racked with a surge of internal insubstantial misfirings.

‘And tell me this now,’ he continued. ‘Was it you or your brothers behind this radio-station business?’

Jeremiah gave a big open smile and tilted his head.

‘You’ve got me in a corner and I cannot tell a lie. It was me the cause of it all right.’

‘A shee’s machinations. I thought so.’

‘Only machinery. And benign espionage. Mister Kennedy-Logan, I must admit that the last time wasn’t the first time I stood outside your door listening to your singing. And not the final time either.’

‘How did you know to come? Did the neighbours complain?’

‘No, no. You’ve been perfectly discreet. But to be in charge of plumbing in a building such as this is to have an ear in every room, you’ll understand. The pipes led me to you. And most Thursdays and Sundays now I’ve liked to stand outside your door enjoying the nice sound. All these songs of home make me feel sick for Ireland, but in a good sort of way that brings me right the way up before they sluice out of me again as a purgative and leave me feeling tired and wanting more. And you sing them very well, all of you. But do you know, the first time I heard you through the plumbing it was all warmth and not so much clarity. Outside your door I get less warmth but better clarity. I think the latter is the better of the two compromises. But a compromise is a compromise and I can’t encounter a problem within my jurisdiction without wanting to try to fix it.’

‘And how was that accomplished?’

‘Well, the door, I felt, was a boon, acting like a resonator, or a tympanic membrane, as it were, and I knew that I would keep the door, and so I didn’t bother to knock on your door to ask your permission to stand the other side of it with my recording equipment. A bit of that then, but also the software I have on my computer there behind. It took a bit of fiddling, but after a time I felt I had a file showing the Free ’n’ Easy Tones’ singing to its best advantage. It was a very beautiful piece of sound production, if I may compliment you. And compliment you I will, as the beauty did not originate with me — I was merely the usher of the beauty.’

‘Thank you, Jeremiah.’

‘You’re welcome. Yes. No. For a time I found myself wondering if it was vanity had come over me, listening over and over again to the music in the file; was it that I felt proud admiring my own part in its effect? And then, after I would turn off the computer to rush upstairs to listen outside your door of a Thursday or Sunday evening, I realised that a more honest admission was that it was a weakness for beauty caused this obsession.’

‘Thank you again.’

‘You’re welcome. And when you finished singing and I rushed back down below I became very sorry that by having to switch on my computer again the beauty was locked away de-constituted at all. And when I did reopen the file it made me terrified with a thought: the perilousness of it. How easy the zero negates the one; how greedy is the interstice for that which bounds it, for it is tropic to the void, which is all beyond the bounds, which is the rigid simplicity of nothing, which is the opposite of beauty. It is no wonder we are all so afraid of the dark, for the dark itself equals nothing, it is the encroachment of nothing, it is the overlap of space. Turning on the lights or making the most of the hours that the sun graces our yardages of earth is just about all we can do in the midst of it. But there is another thing we can do: we can try and give back to that infinitely large and sublime space the immaterial beauty fully constituted it begs for. Which is why to my mind came the idea that I would send the file of music, on a disc, to a radio station, where it might be decoded and the beauty transmitted in the straightest of lines that would cut away from the curvature of the earth and continue for ever and ever into the darkness.’

Denny had been squirming about on his seat as if he had worms in his bottom.

‘That’s all well and good, Jeremiah. But the upshot is that I now have a concert date and I don’t have a piano. Nor have I had time to organise an accompanist.’

At that moment young Spanish-coloured Breffny emerged from the door to his room. He had a little hammer and some rattly bits of blue metal in one hand and was wiping orange axle grease on his trousers with the other.

‘Good evening, Denny,’ he said, and again: ‘I said: Good evening, Denny.’

‘Good evening, Breffny. And what are you making for the benefit of the world?’

‘Some braces for the brother above.’

‘To hold up his trousers?’

‘To straighten his teeth.’ He showed Denny the pieces of metal flat in his hand and shook them. He went on: ‘Denny, I hope you don’t mind but I couldn’t help hear you say that you needed an accompanist for a music concert. And what, with the greatest respect, were you all this time thinking by not having an accompanist? Why don’t you ask the brother here?’

‘Jeremiah?’

‘You know of his talents. Call any tune and he’ll play it. Sing something now, Denny.’

‘We’ve done that bit,’ said Jeremiah.

‘And I have no doubt he would have accompanied me perfectly,’ said Denny.

‘What about it, Jeremiah?’ said Breffny to his brother.

Denny said: ‘As a result of your machinations, Jeremiah, the Free ’n’ Easy Tones have been offered a concert on the sixth of March. I came down here to ask your advice in buying a portable electric piano. Now I feel that you owe us your assistance in playing the piano.’

‘I think you are very kind,’ said Breffny. ‘Jeremiah spends too little time outside of his basement making himself better and fresh for the work he has to do. Some day we fear he will place his head under the clock weight of the elevator in despair and then he will be no use to us at all.’

‘You are not the master of me,’ said Jeremiah with a snap.