Duende
[2]
–from behind an unseen door. The metallic scraping punctuated the scene; even as his countdown still hovered in the air. The new sound was that of a doorknob turning. He guessed that much.
Take your time. And when you’re ready, you can count to five. Aloud. She’ll hear. He recalled again the bar owner’s last words to him as they stepped across the untidy cobbles of the courtyard. Following their exchange, the tired musician had entered the red-brick building alone.
First, a dusky orange-lit reception area. Empty. Then into a hallway. Finally, the room where he now sat cushioned by aged leather.
The warring perfumes of the cocktail dregs and the cigar smoke persisted on his tongue; wilting willow blossoms hanging from the roof of his mouth. Choking. A discordant note–a dry click–as the invisible door knob completed its sober gyration. The hairs on his forearms stood as the atmosphere expanded and enlivened, a vague alteration of state marking the momentary conjoining of spaces.
There was something else, too: an almost, but not quite, insignificant whiff of summer-fruit perfume.
He had removed his jacket in the bar. Beneath the open cuffs of his white shirt, goosebumps emerged–
§
–on her upper arms as she moved from kneeling to standing. A brief, rippling sense of vertigo, seldom experienced in the years since she had entered the employ of Mr Damascus. She theorised it was the combination of the smoke smell, and her own perfume, and the otherworldly resonance of the counting voice, all existing concurrently in deviant serendipity to upset her usual poise. She thought again of the waves. The shift in realities. Atop her skin, the goosebumps multiplied into an expanse of crushed pearl crumbs.
She rose.
“Are you there?” the voice said.
An emphasis–possibly imagined–on the ‘you’.
She said nothing. Her role was not to speak except to introduce her performance. She breathed in the atmosphere. It was cleaner and less dense now; the opening of the door had stimulated the air and increased its rate of circulation. A bubble of inhaled oxygen nestled in her chest, pressing into her heart and lungs. The goosebumps embedded atop her flesh were diamonds. Uncut. Her pulse had surged to a bounding rhythm. She breathed out. She took–
§
–three steps. Their severity suggested high heels. With each, the goosebumps patterning his arms calcified. He wanted to speak, to greet her perhaps, as if the act might tear through the sudden tension in the air–but conversation was, according to the bar owner, not part of the show.
He listened. Oscillating breaths. His. Deep and long, and drawn from lungs wearied by a lifetime sculpting sound for the devoted masses. So many years, and so many songs, that he often exhaled to an orchestrated beat. Respiration as an echo of a life unceasingly lived.
Modern History’s Raging Conscience: one magazine had run with that headline. He’d been barely out of his twenties then.
He sighed. As he did so, his breath evolved into a fresh form of music. Collaboration. A blending of shared air. Exhaust from separate lips. For as he exhaled, he heard her breathing as well. In duet with him. For a moment, and only a moment, their combined acts of respiration–a cocktail far richer than the one he had earlier imbibed–intoxicated him more than the alcohol and the smoke ever could. His head swam.
Two more steps. Two stiletto gunshots. Then still.
“Please enjoy this adaptation through dance of the nineteenth century hymn: Crown Him with Many Crowns.”
A female voice. As expected.
The tired musician grasped his shirt collar with fingers calloused by decades of steel guitar strings. He unfastened the top button and noted the casual pop as it came free. It was a habit he had: when feeling flustered, he would loosen his collar. If there was no collar, he would caress the area immediately below his Adam’s apple until the skin was salmon pink.
Her voice had made him feel something.
There was a faint wooden scraping; he assumed it was evidence of her altering position. Heels on floor. Still unseen. Light remained a memory as the darkness pervaded. The remnants of the alcohol secreted away between teeth and tongue took on a more insistent bitterness. The lingering whisper of smoke solidified to muttering ash.
Her choice of song–he hadn’t expected a hymn. Had his fabled taste for the solemnity of long-buried days preceded him? It was a possibility. But that wasn’t what discomfited him. Not entirely.
It was the mechanics of her voice; or rather, the accent welded to it. There was an island off the north-west coast where the populace took pride in their nautical heritage. So proud were they, in fact, said people seldom left for pastures new. Wind and rain, and vengeful storms–it was not a welcoming place. Yet it had that most potent of abstract constructs: it had soul. And not the accepted portrait of the concept preached and promised by overfed men in satin robes whose hands hung heavy from the weight of their gold-ringed fingers. No. Soul in its purest form; the type that permeates not just man, but the very ground, and sea, and sky above. Life distilled to purest essence.
The musician had dallied there once. A season-long break from life’s trials. It was a pursual of temporary anonymity, away from the dirty neon lights of the concert halls, and the dumb glare of a thousand winking screens held aloft in sweaty palms. From his invisible pulpit on stage, where he watched them sing every one of his words with perfect timing, he queried the need to croon into the microphone at all. It had become tiresome. On the island, there were only stone houses; hills of rolling green brushstrokes unmoved by the wind; the salted ocean aroma of the morning’s catch being unloaded at the pier, and the accompanying ensemble of wet tails slapping scaled flesh; wood smoke; and singing.
Each settlement along the granite coast had an alehouse: institutions handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. The incumbent families bore a propensity to set down deep roots, and even the kids they sent away to study would inevitably return when they were of age. The young were welcomed home by song.
The musician, on his self-imposed hiatus from fame, had passed time lodging in one such establishment. The family there, and the regulars, had entertained him–and he them. They sang together. Memories of log fires and bitter smoke; spilled beer; roasted meat and steamed shellfish; shared and stolen moments under rough-wool blankets; candlelight reflected in a girl’s eye; rolling thunder. Liquid communion.
Yet he most remembered their voices. Their speech and dialect. Each syllable of each word was salt-sprayed fire–an unpoliced soirée of the tongue.
The girl. The one whose high heels he could hear but not see. The dancer Mr Damascus had chosen to perform for him. In their shared darkness, her voice was a reflection of the rocks and the sea. Memory’s echo.
“And now,” she said, “I shall–”
§
–begin by stepping to the left. Toes turned at a twenty-degree angle toward centre. Extend spine fully, lengthening the gaps between each vertebra. Arms outstretched, perpendicular to the body. Fingers splayed. No smile. No expression on the face at all. You’re a doll. A mannequin clothed by the song. And the song moves you. A further step to the left. Feet hip-distance apart. Another.
She spoke the words in her head. Recitation. She practised every morning and afternoon. The teacher was older than the rest of the girls, and she did not live in their shared dormitory. A bony yet elegant woman who none of them had ever seen smile.
No expression on the face at all.
She increased the frequency of her steps. The wooden stage was a circle, and she skirted its circumference with faultless accuracy. In absence of light, her feet were led by the memory of countless recitals. She coasted, and as she did so she wrote the lyrics of the song through the indiscernible ink of her movements. A step forward. Back. Heels clicking deliberate staccato on the stage. A hymn, at least originally, but accelerated to double speed, then triple, and she spread her arms wide like wings. Her left eye watered where the cascading tips of her hair grazed her face. Breaths mirrored the pumping of her thighs. Heels, and breathing, and the swish of her hair. Music of the body rather than the tongue.
And unavoidable discomfort. The greedy pinch where denim shorts a size too small cut into the tops of her thighs with each step. The hollow click of bone on bone as she overextended her right arm. Feeling. But no thought. She knew each move, and each–
–word of the hymn, he realised, was being sung in the darkness by her educated feet. He knew the piece by heart: school choir, so many years ago. He’d come a long way since then. Travelled down unnavigable roads, and taken unplanned detours his idealistic younger self could never have dreamed of. But what were dreams? The tired musician recited the lines of the hymn under his breath, though the tempo of the song was much increased compared to that in his memory. The words vibrated in his chest. His dry mouth preached old truths, even as her feet sang–
§
–in perfect tune: “Crown him with many crowns.”
A spark of surprise. No audience had ever sung along to her dance before. Her toes missed their mark, and the next sole-led beat was a quarter-second off rhythm. She was sure the singer would notice her–
§
