‘What exactly does all this do, Ed?’
‘Makes music, man.’
‘I thought you just played the stuff.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m branching out, inn-I?’
‘You mean you’re actually going to start composing?’ I picked up a dark red A4-sized manual for something called a Virus and flicked through it, squinting in the low ambient light.
‘Yeah. I fot it’d be a laugh. An anyway; just look at this stuff.’
I looked at it again. ‘You know, you’re absolutely right, Ed. It doesn’t have to produce a fucking note to justify its total, glorious gorgeousness-hood-icity. Please don’t tell me all you’re going to produce on it will be N-chih N-chih music.’
‘N-chih N-chih music?’
‘Yeah, you know; the sort of music you hear from some brother’s blacked-out Astra passing you in the street. It always goes N-chih N-chih N-chih.’
‘Na, mate. Well, yeah, some, maybe. But, na; one day I’m gonna write a bleedin symphony.’
‘A symphony?’
‘Yeah. Why not?’
I looked him up and down again. ‘You don’t lack for ambition, do you, Edward?’
‘Certainly fucking not; life’s too short, mate.’
I leafed through the manual for the Virus thing. ‘I mean, do you actually understand all this?’
‘Course not. You don’t need to to get good sounds out of it. But the deep stuff’s there if you need it.’
‘“Extended Panic functionality”!’ I quoted. ‘Ha! How can you not love something with Extended Panic functionality?’
‘Uvverwise known as the All Notes Off command.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said, putting the manual back on its bookshelf with the others. My phone vibrated on my hip. I glanced at the screen. ‘Jo,’ I told Ed. ‘Better answer it; she’s in, I don’t know, Berlin or Budapest or somewhere.’
‘I’ll fire up the software, let you hear some N-chih N-chih tunes.’
‘Hello?’ I said.
And, distantly, I heard, ‘Yes, yes, yes, come on, fuck me, fuck me, do it, do it, there, yes there there there, fuck me, fuck me harder. Fuck me really hard. Right there, right there, yes, yes, yes!’ This was accompanied by what sounded like clothing rubbing on clothing, a series of slaps, and then a man’s voice saying, ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah…’
It didn’t stop, either. Went on for some time.
I stood there and listened for long enough to entirely convince myself that this was not a joke, not any sort of an attempt at humour at all, and also not in any way meant. This was about the time when Ed turned round from the bewilderingly complicated displays on his two giant monitors and looked at me; just a glance at first, then back again, frowning, eyebrows rising. I handed him the phone.
He listened for a while as well. The frown was replaced by a smile, even a leer for a moment or two, but then he must have read something from my face because the smile disappeared and he handed the phone back to me and looked down, clearing his throat and turning back to the screens. ‘Sorry, bruv,’ I heard him say.
I listened a little while longer, then Jo’s phone must have fallen, because there was a loud but soft-sounding thump, and the noises became very muffled, incoherent. I folded the phone off. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think the choice phrases involve sauces for ganders and geese; and petards, whatever the hell one of those is.’ Ed knew well enough I wasn’t faithful to Jo; blimey, we’d been able to watch each other at it with those two Argentinian girls that night on the beach at Brighton during early May.
Ed looked round, chewing his bottom lip. ‘Fink that was a wind-up?’
‘No.’
‘Deliberate?’
I shook my head. ‘I doubt it; I’ve had Jo’s accidental calls jam my phone for hours at a time before. Usually her and her girlfriends in a bar or a club.’ I released a deep breath. ‘Plus, ah, that is the way she expresses herself, during the act. I don’t think she’s a good enough actress to fake that.’
‘Woh. Right then. So. You two have one of them open relationships then, do ya?’
‘Looks like it,’ I said. ‘Just neither of us ever bothered to tell the other.’
Ed looked concerned. ‘You still want to hear some tunes, man, or would you ravver ave a drink or a smoke or sumfing?’
‘Na, play some tunes, Ed. Bangin tunes, in fact; play some bangin tunes.’ I gave a small, not funny laugh.
Jo said: ‘Listen.’
And I said: ‘Oh-oh.’
‘What?’
‘These days, people our age – okay, my age and also your age – don’t say “listen” like that without it meaning something pretty fucking serious.’
Jo looked down. ‘Yeah, well…’
Here we go, I thought.
We were in the London Aquarium, housed in the old GLC building on the South Bank of the Thames, beside the London Eye. Mouth Corp Records were having a bash and I’d been invited. So had Jo. She’d pretty much just arrived, coming straight from Heathrow off the flight from Budapest.
The aquarium was a slightly spooky place for a party, I thought. Especially a music industry party. Sharks in abundance; as above, so below. The light was kind of freaky too; apparently the fish wouldn’t take kindly to lots of flashing disco-stylee lights, strobes and shit, so all you had was this bluey-green wash of underwater luminescence, making everybody look slightly sick. The light slid off Jo’s facial metalwork, visual echoes of the green and blue diodes on Ed’s music gear the night before.
I’d asked her how she was and been told, Okay. I’d thought the better of asking her if she’d made any accidental phone calls twenty-four hours earlier, but now, with virtually no preamble, I was getting a ‘listen’.
‘Look,’ Jo said. People passed on either side, somebody said, Hi, and great, sleek, grey bodies moved sinuously behind and above her.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Now it’s “look”? We’re covering the senses one by one, are we? What’ll your next exhortation be? “Sniff”?’
Jo sucked her lips in and looked at me. ‘You don’t want to make this easy on either of us, do you?’
‘Make what easy, Jo? Why don’t you tell me?’
‘Ken, I think we should, ah, you know; split up.’ She said this and drew herself straight, putting her shoulders back and her head up, as though defiant. I thought of the night we met, and the way her stance had shown off her nipples through her T-shirt. Now she wore a big, ribbed yellow jumper with a roll neck. Black jeans. Only the DMs were the same.
I stared at her. Of course I’d known that this was the most likely thing she was going to say after ‘listen’, but somehow it still came as a shock, and I was left temporarily speechless for the second time in two days, and this time not in a good way. I’d thought that maybe she was going to say she knew what had happened with the phone and she was sorry, or that she was pregnant (always a good stand-by, that one, if unlikely as we always, but always, used a condom) or maybe something else entirely, like she was taking a job in LA or Kuala Lumpur or had decided to become a nun or something, but I’d known, at least since last night, in Ed’s studio, that maybe whatever it was we had had going was near the end.
Still, I found myself feeling kind of crushed, and surprised. I opened my mouth. She was still sucking in her lips, making her nose look longer. She had taken a sort of half-step away from me, almost bumping into people standing talking behind her, in front of the thick, distorting glass of the aquarium windows. I wondered if she thought I was going to hit her. I never had. I’d never hit any woman; never would. Oh, well, apart from ‘Raine’, of course, but I reckoned I could claim massively extenuating circumstances there.
‘Oh, well,’ I said. I looked down at my bottle of Pils. I supposed I could throw that in her face, like Jude had thrown her G &T in my face at Craig’s during the first hour of the New Year, but then Jude had had the forethought to arm herself with a nice wide tumbler; I had a narrow-necked bottle. To achieve a satisfactory soaking of my intended victim I’d have to ask Jo to wait a second or two while I jammed my thumb in the bottle and shook it up before emptying it in her face. That would be inelegant, somehow. Anyway, I didn’t really want to do it.