‘Oh my God,’ Jeekers whimpers to himself. But it’s too late – Titch is already introducing them; and now they are walking out onto the stage. The lights are so bright, and so hot! Yet even through them it seems he can feel the icy gaze of his parents, the avid gleam of their eyes as they wait to grade him out of ten in this new field of endeavour; and although he cannot see them, and in spite of what he is about to do, he works up a watery smile and directs it into the great darkness.
Two days ago, Jeekers was eating lunch in the yard on his own, just as he does every day, when Ruprecht sat down beside him and told him he wanted to get the Quartet back together. Jeekers was surprised to hear this, after everything that had happened. But then Ruprecht explained why. He wanted to use the Quartet to get a message to Skippy. I know it sounds unorthodox, he said, but the fact is that there’s a sound scientific principle behind it – here he reeled off a list of nineteenth-century names who had apparently tried a similar thing. Where they went wrong, he said, was in thinking of us, our four-dimensional spacetime, as here, and the other dimensions as there, which meant they needed some kind of magical substance to bridge the gap in between. But in fact, you don’t need any such substance – or rather, according to M-theory, ordinary matter is also itself the magical substance! He paused here, looking at Jeekers with eyes that blazed like Catherine wheels.
Strings, he said. If they ripple one way they make stuff, and if they ripple another way they make light, or nuclear energy, or gravity. But in each case they perform these ripples in eleven dimensions. Each string is like a chorus line with a stage curtain falling down the middle of it, so that one part is in our world, and the other is in the higher dimensions. The same string that makes up one quark of one atom of the handle of your tennis racket could at the same moment be revolving in an entirely other universe. So if every string goes beyond the veil, might it not be possible to somehow pass a message along the string from our side so it reaches the other side?
Like two tin cans tied together? Jeekers said.
Exactly! Ruprecht said. Once you see it, the concept is quite simple. It merely becomes a question of how. That’s where the Quartet comes in.
In Lodge’s book, he explained, the soldiers in Summerland, which was what they called the Otherworld, reported that they could hear certain musical performances from the Albert Hall. What they were hearing were radio broadcasts. Evidently certain combinations of sonic architecture and radio frequency have this ‘amphibious’ quality that enables them to travel over to the higher dimensions. My theory is that some kind of sympathetic resonance must be involved. The tricky thing then is to find these amphibious frequencies. In the past they used human mediums, who sniffed them out by a process of intuition. However, with a simple recalibration of the Van Doren Wave Oscillator, we can alleviate all need for a medium by translating our sonic ‘message’ into every possible frequency – one of which has, of necessity, to be the one audible to the dead…
Listening to him elaborate on his plan, Jeekers recognized that Ruprecht had finally lost the plot. His experiments had always been a little zany for Jeekers’s taste; still, in the past he could appreciate that they did have some exhilarating, if fleeting, points of correspondence with reality. This, though – this was delusion, nothing more.
So why – why, why, why! – had he said yes? It’s not that he hasn’t felt sorry for Ruprecht over these last few weeks, and of course he feels terrible about what happened to Skippy. But when he thinks of how much trouble they’re going to get into – and right in front of their parents! It’s all right for Dennis and Geoff, they don’t have academic records to protect. But Jeekers is putting his whole future in jeopardy! Why?
Yet even as he asks it he knows the reasons why. He is doing it precisely because it is pointless and foolish and out of character. He is doing it because it is the kind of thing he would never, ever do, because the kind of thing he does do – following the rules, working hard, being Good like a boy ordered from a catalogue – has lately come to seem quite empty. It might have something to do too with Dad getting Mr Fallon fired, even when Jeekers begged him not to; or maybe the creeping realization that it was the Best Boy that Dad loved, not Jeekers, and that if he was kidnapped, and the Best Boy left in his place, Dad would not be sad.
Anyway, here he is. And as he looks across the stage – at the other three primed over their instruments, Geoff’s triangle lilting ever so slightly back and forth, like a leaf in anticipation of a breeze; Dennis’s smirk just visible at the mouthpiece to his bassoon; Ruprecht breathing very slowly, focus fixed on the back of the auditorium, on his lap the mangled horn that Jeekers still can’t look at without setting off an interior pandemonium of alarm; and then at Father Laughton, poor unsuspecting Father Laughton, as he raises his baton – the weird thing is, even though he knows Ruprecht is wrong and there is no chance of this working, still, at this precise moment in time – beneath the bright lights, shaking with nerves, surrounded by parents and priests in the Sports Hall on a Saturday night – reality does feel distinctly unreal, and what seemed unreal, conversely, feels a lot closer than before…
And the music, when it begins, sounds so beautiful. Pachelbel’s familiar melody, worn threadbare by endless TV commercials for cars, life assurance, luxury soap, by street-performers in black-tie, mugging for tourists in high summer, by any number of attempts to invoke Old-World Elegance, accompanied by haughty waiters bearing trayfuls of tiny cubes of cheese – tonight it seems to its audience entirely new, to the point of an almost painful fragility. What is it that makes it so imploring and so sweet, so disconcertingly (for the older members of the audience who have come tonight expecting merely to be pleasantly bored and now find themselves with lumps in their throats) personal? Something to do with the horn that large boy in the silver suit is playing, perhaps, a new-fangled instrument that looks like it must have been run over by a truck, but produces a sound that’s like nothing you’ve ever heard – a hoarse, forlorn sound that just makes you want to…
And then the voice comes in, and you can actually see a shiver run through the decorous crowd. Because there is no singer on the stage, and given that Pachelbel’s Canon does not have a vocal part, listeners could be forgiven for mistaking it for a ghost’s, some spirit of the hall roused by the music’s beauty and unable to resist joining in, especially as the voice – a girl’s – has an irresistibly haunting quality, spare, spectral, carved down to its bare bones… But then one by one the audience members spot beneath the mike stand over to the right, ah, an ordinary mobile phone. But who is she? And what’s she singing?
You fizz me up like Diet PepsiYou make me shake like epilepsyYou held my hand all summer longBut summer’s over and you’re gone
Holy smokes – it’s BETHani! A new murmur of excitement, as younger spectators crane their necks to hiss in the ears of parents, aunts, uncles – it’s ‘3Wishes’, the song she wrote after she broke up with Nick from Four to the Floor, when there were all those pictures of her at her mum’s wearing skanky clothes and actually looking quite fat – some people said that was all just part of the publicity, but how could you think that if you listened to the words?
I miss the bus and the walk’s so longI got split ends and my homework’s wrongThere’s a hole in my sneaker and gum on my seatAnd the world don’t turn and my heart don’t beat