Gavin Corbett: Green Glowing Skull

This was true, Rickard knew, but he had said ‘professional singer’ without any belief that that’s what he actually was and only to make it seem that he was not a layabout.

‘But then I realise the kind of person you are,’ continued the woman with the Greek eyes, ‘and it’s the kind who will be satisfied only with following some “art and craft” pursuit.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ said Rickard, taking in the woman’s stern high-waisted navy skirt and then looking at his hands on his knees.

‘There are plenty of creative opportunities in this city if you look around you. New York is full of reminders that you may not be wasting your time if that’s the life you feel you must live. There are signs in the smallest gesture on the street and in the grandest building on the block.’

Perhaps this woman was not Greek after all: Rickard had only thought so because his thinking had become contaminated when he noticed the Greek-style columns in the hall. And then there was the question of him taking advice from a person who was obviously under the spell of these trashy fashionable novels that dealt in symbology and conspiracies: a copy of The Gordion Quorum by Cole Tyler lay on her desk.

‘New York,’ said the woman, ‘is a city built by cults who begat cults who know very expertly the art of making cults. And this is my suggestion to you: that you find a cult of your own. There is a very large one in the city right now that you would do well to be a part of. Lots of people young and old are part of it and it worries those of us who are not! I’m talking of course about Puffball Computers. You won’t have failed to notice its adherents. They carry Puffball products with them wherever they go, and they look in ways unconventional, yet every element of their appearance is discrete from the other elements around it. They are so clean and ready for this world that they’ve shaped for themselves. We in the bank are always happy to help a person who looks like this.’

***

Breaking point came one evening when he fought a hopeless battle against a translucent close relative of the cockroach, the water bug. Long after the creature had scuttled to safety he was still rattling his tongue scraper back and forth through the crack behind his water cabinet.

‘Die! Die! Die!’ multiplied ten thousand times he screamed.

Afterwards he went to his bedroom, sat at the end of the bed, and began to do the one thing he’d been doing a lot of recently to comfort himself. Most often he would select a song to lift his mood, but occasionally he let the mood dictate the selection of song. That evening the most morbid ballad in the Challoner canon, a song about expulsion to the penal colonies, poured from him:

‘Diemen, smother my face

And have what you will,

For the bread I have taken

Is making me ill.’

As he sang, he looked from his window to the night sky and the full moon above. He saw it as a spot at the end of a beam of light moving across clouds that were not, on this coldly clear night, there. A call for help, or to arms, in other words. Then he looked at his Challoner book on his bedside stand and considered again his home, his father, his mother’s porous brain, his genetics, Toni, and his funds. He saw from the corner of his eye a movement on the wall — a plain cockroach. He leapt to his wardrobe where his Cha Bum Kun tie hung on a hook on the inside of the door, made a loop with it, and went to crack it against the bug. But he pulled back at the last moment; and then began the complex and arduous process of putting on the tie.

New York City’s Cha Bum Kun clubhouse was a townhouse-height Venetian box of white and smoky-blue stone, in Murray Hill, Manhattan. Tall windows tapered to sharp points and the impression of verticality continued through many twisting chimneys and flues. Inside, the air smelt of brass polish and coconut hair. A flying-buttress-style walkway vaulted the width of the grand stair hall. The walls to second-floor level were crusted with dozens of skulls of mystery beasts.

‘Rabbits, hares and cows,’ said a receptionist, a Pole, or Russian. ‘All killed by Kunians, or their Pak Doo Ik forerunners, in the New York area when it was mainly forest and silica.’

He beckoned Rickard to bend his head towards him. Pulling Rickard’s tie across the desk between finger and thumb, he worked slowly towards the knot, appearing to examine the threading. When he got to the knot, he pinched into it with his nails, then produced a thumb tack and tried and failed to puncture it — testing it presumably for hardness and layering.

‘What is your name?’

‘Rickard Velily.’

Now he looked into a diary, scanning down through a series of paragraphs in tiny squarish handwriting. He turned over two pages until he found the entry he was looking for.

‘Rickard Velily. Yes, yes. Velily. Yes. Okay, just give me a moment. Yes. Velily. Your father rang ahead some weeks ago and told us, uh … to expect you?’

‘He did?’

‘Yes, he did. Can you wait here for a little while until the President arrives?’

Clicking feet descended the stone grand stairway, and a ‘Hello’ sounded from two flights up. The President embraced Rickard with overbearing warmth. He looked every centimetre the reluctantly retired company executive with his figure-hugging silver suit, his Latin tan, and his side-parted grey hair held in place by a perfumed product.

He introduced himself as Paulus.

‘Rickard, the first thing to say to you is that we’ll ask no questions. You’re among friends here. We’ll ask nothing other than that you don’t play loud music in your room, that you smoke only tobacco, and that you eat only in your room and not in the dining hall, and only off your plate and not off your lap or bed sheets. Of course if you choose to become a member and pay your subscriptions you can eat with us in the dining hall.’

Rickard was taken to the other side of the building, and an elevator. The elevator was of a corporate 1980s design — Nefertiti’s breast cups blinkered bulbs in its corners. It took them to an attic floor where Rickard’s bedroom was. The bedroom was plain — bare dark floorboards; yellow walls on which was hung a framed picture of ‘the 18th at Valhalla Golf Club’ — and partly dirty. The bed, a double sleigh, at least looked comfortable. A bedside locker, a desk, a tall walnut wardrobe and some chipboard bookshelves completed the furnishings. The shelves were scattered with books on business: ‘how-to’s and biographies and annual reports. A porthole in the slanted ceiling was filled with distorting glass.

President Paulus leaned against the door jamb with crossed arms, looking as if he had not seen the room in a long time. Embarrassment, disdain and contrition expressed themselves in a cluster of dimples on his chin.

‘Home for however long you require. But with any luck you’ll be self-sufficient again soon. Until then you’ll receive our stipend. You’ll need to leave your bank details with Jon our treasurer. And while you’re under our roof, please enjoy our amenities. We have a library, a billiards and card room, and a racquet court which I’m afraid these days is used only for storage. We also have a small pro golf shop.’

Rickard settled for now on the drawing room. The room was hot as he entered, and he felt his face flush. A fire blazed in the grate. Set as it was into a gigantic tableau carved from green-grey soapstone, the fireplace resembled the centrepiece of a tall satanic grotto. At first glance the tableau seemed to be an oppressive mass of ribs, roots and boils, as if made of continually melting and solidifying wax. As Rickard’s eyes adjusted he picked out the details: foliage, weaponry, fauns, sheep-people, Korean farmhands, men from Europe. It was an attempt to represent the legend of Cha Bum Kun. Here were the gryphons and dragons of his childhood; there was the Moon Baby that brought him dairy produce from the West. It was a random and confused scene, and therefore a good representation of the story. Nobody was sure of the details of the story of Cha Bum Kun or in which order the details came. Nobody knew, either, what Cha Bum Kun’s message was, or even if he had had a message, or what lessons could be drawn from his life, or even if he had ever lived. In truth, Cha Bum Kun was not a figure that was taken very seriously. It meant that the Cha Bum Kun Club had no rituals — the tie business aside, and despite the vocabulary around its workings — and no ethos. It was, and always had been, just a club where men from all over the world could meet each other in its lodges, make useful connections, relax and play games. Usually these men were of such a disposition — meek, or odd — that they found it hard to get on in the world despite significant financial means. (And, usually, they were of significant financial means.)