Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

Denny continued: ‘There are too many tenor groups about now, all the same, all ruined by schmaltzy accompaniment. I don’t want schmaltz in my group. It belongs to a different culture. I want to capture a spirit of an earlier, more traditional Irish music culture. One that came from material poverty, is simple, minimal.’

Rickard said, ‘We’ve chosen the wrong songs if that is so.’

Denny did not rise to him.

‘We must be honest in our interpretation of these songs,’ he said, ‘as we should be in how we live our lives. I am a man in the modern world. There — I’ve said it! Look at Clive — Clive is a former woman and is not afraid to tell people.’

Rickard thought of a flaw in the plan:

‘And this concert on the sixth … This lady who heard our singing … Surely she has put us on the bill on the basis of the sound she heard. Your voice unchanged is fundamental to that sound, Denny.’

‘I am not the fundament of this group! I am the sinew, the ganglions! Damn this … You and Clive concentrate on your voices, and let me and Jeremiah concentrate on my voice!’

Denny put the oral device back in its box. Took it out again immediately. Rickard was frightened and filled with remorse.

‘This programmer, the Rosenberg woman,’ said Denny, ‘she is of the old way of doing things. She has fixed ideas. The range of her interests is as narrow as her ambition. I am not interested in death and preservation but in the continuum. I believe in giving life to the past and in bringing forward the bright future. Now — let me demonstrate to you how this technology can be used to our great advantage. Jeremiah!’

Denny eased himself to his knees, and then on to his back. Jeremiah placed a draught excluder under his neck, a positioning that encouraged Denny’s mouth to open to as full an extent as the lips and cheeks permitted. Then Jeremiah took the oral device.

‘I’m putting it in now, Mister Kennedy-Logan. Are you ready?’

‘Ah-ah.’

‘They say think of sipping water through a straw. It stops the gag reflex.’

‘Wait!’ said Denny, putting his hand on Jeremiah’s wrist. ‘Before you do that …’

He sat up, turning to Rickard and Clive, and announced:

‘I meant to tell you. The name of the trio has changed. We are no longer the Free ’n’ Easy Tones. We are now the White-Headed Boys.’

‘The White-Headed Boys?’ said Rickard.

‘The White-Headed Boys,’ said Clive, a half-beat behind.

‘The White-Headed Boys,’ said Denny, lying down again on the floor. ‘It means the propitious, the chosen, the favoured. Re-enter me, Jeremiah.’

The device in place, Jeremiah helped Denny back to his feet. The old man faced Rickard. He was almost unintelligible as he said, jabbing Rickard’s chest:

‘Now — the Emergency ditty “Eat Your Goodie”. A young pup like you wouldn’t understand what it’s like to live with the thunderclap of war just over the horizon. Listen to how well I sing this one, the feeling we produce.’

Jeremiah switched on the amplifier he had hauled upstairs from his basement bedroom. He sat at the keyboard and rubbed at the cladding again. Denny turned to him for the nod — and was away, moving his jaws as Jeremiah fingered in time. From Denny’s mouth came only silence. From the amplifier, a voice that sounded, to Rickard’s ears, unlike anything Denny had produced before in singing or speech. It rocketed and plummeted and quarked in mid-air, making queer shifts in pitch and glancing off the diphthongs and sending Bit scampering away to the kitchen:

‘bREAD aND bUTTER — bUILD iT uP!

bUILD tHAT bREAD uP tO tHE bRIM!

lAYERING sUGAR aLL tHE wAY,

aND pOURING mILK fROM pAIL oR tIN!’

(Here Denny did a twirl on the spot, flapping his hands like a little clucky hen.)

‘eAT yOUR gOODIE! mASH iT uP!

lAP iT uP, oH gOODIE-oH!

tHE wHITE tHAT’S tHERE iS wHITE fOR bONES,

iT’S wHITE tO hELP yOU tHRIVE aND gROW!’

At the end of the song Denny, with all the urgency of a naval surgeon, plunged his fingers into his mouth, tore out the device, and ran to the bathroom. Retching noises and a splashing of vomit were heard.

He emerged again into the living room, dabbing his chin with toilet paper.

‘Where would we be without our suffering artists?’ he said.

Now they had not much time and their rehearsals took on an added intensity. Now, with Jeremiah’s help, they practised daily, and into the nights, counting down and losing count of the days. In the heat of concentrated activity they did not feel time pass. They forgot at times the closeness of the air but it seemed that it was a good medium for the thick bars of music that powered from Jeremiah’s speaker. In the quiet periods they imagined the buzzing and groaning electrical and heating services were listening, and made jokes about the critics blowing hot air. Poor little Bit was having to listen; it had no choice. The creature could not bear the strangeness and danced amusingly like a naughty girl to catch their attention. The globe at the end of the projecting brass arm cut out with a ping but on they went. They forgot feeding times but some nights a good old Texan eatery delivered ‘South in [their] Mouth[s]’: cornbread and meatloaf and root beer; and cakes — cherries instead of carrots for Denny. Now and then they sprawled on chairs, feeling like real artists. Denny said he wished for a cigar. His curtains remained closed all these days and nights. When they felt they could do no more practice they wished the concert was tomorrow.

When this happened they sat about the room and looked to the clock, but the clock had been sold and the calendar had not been changed. For a time no one was certain what day it was or whether the concert had indeed passed them by.

Rickard came and went but his copy of Airs of Erin remained all the time. They plundered it for songs. Jeremiah came and went too and indeed went missing for most of the later time.

For a time in the earlier time Denny felt he had been singing like his older self, his younger self. When this time passed he became aware of himself again as simply a collection of spaces and resonators. This feeling that he had associated with the singing from the speaker, a warming fuzz around the heart, had been tricking his brain.

He opined that ‘the fronds on my oral device touch certain membranes, softer palates, the same that these Irish nose and throat singers use to send vibrations out into the body, like a sonar to find the soul, or the omphalos. Do you know about these nose and throat singers, Clive? You are probably out of the country too long, but then so am I.’

Clive said, ‘I am thinking of going back one day. Been thinking heavily of this.’

Denny said, ‘You will not be thinking of that while you have a job to do over here. You are thinking too much about death. Or is it that it is following you around? You never need to go back, you know. It follows me around, old son of the sod. One thing that consoles me is that the loam and the silica over here preserve you better.’

Clive said, ‘Being here as we are preserves us well enough.’

Then Denny said, apropos of an earlier thought, ‘Bloody English, Velily.’

Clive was walking around the living room, divining, clacking his shoes one in front of the other, led by the position of the chairs and by a pattern on the carpet, biscuit coloured, apparent to him now, and embossed, like the back of a biscuit. He had been thinking of the powers unleashed by furniture arrangements, and of other older — ologies, dynamat-this-and-that, with their whirlings and their circles of progression.