But he was unable to concentrate on ‘Jungle Liturgy’, even though he was quite proud of it.
He was unable to concentrate on anything except his disappearing friends. First Saul, in a blur of shocking violence and mystery, then Kay in circumstances far less dramatic but no less mysterious. Fabian could still not bring himself really to worry about Kay, although it had been at least a couple of weeks now since he had seen him, maybe more. He was concerned, but Kay was so vague, so aimless and genial, that any notion that he was in trouble was impossible to take seriously. It was, nonetheless, frustrating and perplexing. No one seemed to know where he had gone, including his flatmates, who were beginning to get agitated about his share of the rent.
And now it seemed as if he might be losings Natasha. Fabian scowled at the thought and turned over on his bed, sulking. He was angry with Natasha. She was obsessive about her music at the best of times, but when she was on a roll it was compounded. She was excited about the music she was making with Pete, a man Fabian considered too weird to be liked. Natasha was working on tracks to take to Junglist Terror, the event coming up fast in the Elephant and Castle. She had not called Fabian for several days.
It was Saul’s departure, he thought, which had precipitated all this. Saul was hardly the leader of a social phalanx but, since his extraordinary escape from custody, something that held Fabian’s friendships together had dissipated. Fabian was lonely.
He missed Saul deeply, and he was angry with him. He was angry with all his friends. He was angry with Natasha for failing to realize that he needed her, for not putting away her fucking sequencer and talking to him about Saul. He was quite sure she must be missing Saul, but she was such a control freak she was unlikely to discuss the matter. She would only allude to it obliquely and suddenly, and then refuse to say more about it. She would listen to him, though, patiently. She always broke that social contract, the exchange of insecurities and neuroses with one another. With Natasha the offering was always one-way. She either did not know, or did not care, how that disempowered him.
And Saul — Fabian was angry with Saul. He found it amazing his friend had not contacted him. He understood that something unbelievable must be going on in Saul’s life, that it would take a lot to cut Fabian off so completely, but it still hurt him. And he was desperate to know what was happening! He was sometimes afraid now that Saul was dead, that the police had killed him and had concocted a bizarre story to allay suspicion, or that he was caught up in something huge — vague images of Triads flashed through Fabian’s mind, and the London chapter of the Mafia, and God-knew-what — and that he had been routinely eliminated.
Often that seemed the likeliest explanation, the only thing that could explain the deaths of the police and Saul’s escape, but Fabian could not believe he would have known nothing about his friend’s involvement. It seemed unbelievable. And then he was forced to consider the possibility that Saul had killed those men — and his father, which he did not believe, definitely — but then… what was happening?
Fabian stared around him at his room, a tip of paint and record covers and clothes and CDs and posters and cups and wrappers and dirt and paper and books and pads and pens and canvas and bits of glass for sculptures and plates and postcards and peeling wallpaper. He was lonely and pissed off.
The view was so familiar Natasha did not see it. It was a tabula rasa to her, a white space on which she could impose her tunes. She had gazed out at it for so many hours and days, especially since Saul disappeared and Pete appeared, that she had achieved a Zen-like transcendence of it. She transcribed its features into her mind as nothingness.
First the net curtains, a tawdry throwback to the previous occupant that she had never bothered to get rid of. They moved slightly, a constant whiteness with flickering edges. Through this veil the trees, just at the level where the boughs thrust outward from the body. Stripped by winter, black branches clutching. So a film of curtain, then the twisted knots of wood, dark and intricate, a random lattice of twigs and thick limbs. Beyond that a street lamp.
After dark when it had rained, she would sit at her window and poke her head out from under the net curtains and stare at that lamp through the tree outside. Its rays would pass through the thicket, lighting up the inside of each branch, surrounding the streetlight with thin circles of illuminated wood, composites of a thousand tiny wet sections reflecting the light. As Natasha moved her head, the streetlight’s halo moved with it behind the tree. The lamp sat like a fat spider in the centre of a wooden web.
Now it was day and the lamp was nothing, just another washed-out shape beyond the curtain, a shape Natasha was not seeing as she stared at it. Beyond it the houses on the other side of the street. The child’s bedroom, the little study. The kitchen. The roofs, the slate anaemic, its rough red invisible inside the room. Behind the roofs the jutting landmarks, the estates that stretched up over West London, squat and huge and awe-inspiring. Behind them a sky that was all cloud, a shifting scudding mass whose details twisted and turned and decayed leaving the totality unchanged.
Natasha knew every part of this diorama. Had anything been missing or different, she would have seen it immediately. Instead she saw that it was as it should be, and therefore she did not see it at all. In her careful itemization of its qualities, it became invisible.
She felt as if she would float into the clouds, sometimes.
She did not feel tethered at all.
She thought about Saul but she thought about basslines as well, and she wondered where he was, and she heard a stunning track suggest itself in her mind. She wondered where Pete was. She wanted to hear his flute. It was time to put some layers down on to Wind City. She realized that she could not really think straight. She had not felt secure and engaged for some days now. But she was eager to lay down some more flute.
Pared down as it was, Natasha wanted to strip the room of all its extraneous objects, the bed, the telephone, the cups she saw by her pillow. She wanted to close the door and ignore the rest of her flat and just stare at that window, at that view, through the dilute milk interference of the curtain. She wanted no sounds except the tiny murmurings of the street and her own sequencer, weaving her tune, making Wind City what she wanted.
A couple of weeks ago she had mentioned the track to Fabian when he had called her, and he had made a joke about the title: about eating too many beans, or something cretinous like that. She had brought the call to an abrupt close, and when she had put the receiver down she had cursed him, sworn at him, told him how fucking stupid and crass he was. A part of her had tried to evaluate his comment dispassionately, tried to see it as he saw it, but even as she understood she saw how wrong he was. Her opinion of Fabian was shaken. Maybe he had to hear the track, she concluded charitably.
He could not hear the word Wind without remembering his little idiot jokes in playgrounds, the puerile scatology she could not empathize with. It was a boy thing. How could she make him see what she saw when she named that track, when she played it and tweaked it and made it work so well it made her chest hollow?
To start, a tiny piano run from some histrionic Swingbeat rubbish. She had stripped it down so severely that she had dehumanized it. This was something different from her usual approach. The piano, the instrument that so often ruined Jungle, making her think of Happy House and idiotic Ibiza clubs, here turned into an instrument that signalled the destruction of anything human in this world. Deeply plaintive and melancholy, but ghostly. The piano tried to remember melancholia, and presented it as if for approval. Is this it? Is this sadness? it asked. I can’t recall. And under the piano she faded in, for a fraction of a second, subliminal, she laid down a sample of radio static.