The Voices Read online

  In due course the doctor appeared and invited Laura to enter his surgery. Over the flat expanse of his desk, she addressed a bald patch that had started to show on the doctor’s crown. He remained hunched over his notes, occasionally emitting a protracted humming noise, while she described Faye’s trance. When she had finished the doctor still didn’t look up. ‘You were here in May,’ he said.

  She wasn’t sure whether this was a statement or a question. Judging that it would be rude to remain silent, she replied, ‘Yes. I was.’

  Finally, the doctor looked up and made eye contact. ‘You know, children are not so very different from us adults. They get tired, their minds go blank, they nod off to sleep. It’s been two months since you were here last. I suspect that if these absences were indicative of a significant underlying problem, then they would have become more frequent in the intervening weeks. And look at your daughter, Mrs Norton. Really.’ It was remarkable how this one small word – really – pronounced with particular emphasis – questioning, sceptical, accusatory – completely undermined Laura’s sense of being an intelligent adult. ‘Isn’t Faye a picture of health?’ His forced smile begged Laura to reflect on her folly.

  ‘I’ve never seen children do this before,’ she responded.

  ‘Do you have a great deal of experience with children?’ It was a question with one purpose only – to expose her lack of authority, to embarrass and belittle her.

  ‘No,’ she mumbled. ‘No. Not really, but. . .’

  The doctor talked over her unfinished sentence. ‘As I said to you before, I could refer your daughter to a neurologist. . .’

  ‘But you’re not going to.’

  The doctor raised one of his eyebrows before adopting a tone of casual familiarity. ‘My son used to go to sleep while he was eating. And – if I’m not mistaken – it started happening when he was about Faye’s age now.’

  ‘She wasn’t asleep. Her eyes were open.’

  The doctor ignored this objection and leaned forward. His gaze became penetrating. So much so that Laura detected a hint of stagecraft in his melodramatic attitude. ‘And you, Mrs Norton. Tell me, how have you been recently?’

  ‘All . . . all right, I suppose.’ Dishonesty made her stumble over her words.

  ‘You see,’ the doctor intoned gravely, ‘I can’t help wondering whether the problem – as you describe it – is only a problem in so far as it reflects your own anxieties.’

  She surprised herself by snapping. ‘No! That’s not it. That’s not it at all.’ The doctor withdrew. ‘I’m worried about my daughter!’

  ‘Are you taking your medication?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ . . .’ Laura shook her head. She wanted to scream. She had feared this would happen.

  The doctor spoke firmly. ‘Mrs Norton, I can’t help you if—’

  ‘Forget it. Just forget it.’

  She got up and placed Faye in the pushchair.

  ‘Perhaps you should come back tomorrow. You’re obviously quite distraught today’ He pushed his chair back and stood, demonstrating that he had not forgotten his manners. When Laura reached the door she turned and sighed. She considered apologizing, but then dismissed the thought. ‘I can fit you in first thing tomorrow morning,’ the doctor persevered.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, opening the door and manoeuvring the pushchair through the gap and out into the waiting room. The man with the cough was wheezing into a handkerchief held over his mouth. A few ominous red stains were visible on the white material.

  As she rushed away from the practice she began to cry. She was furious and her head filled with the militant language that she often heard at the bookshop in Islington. Chauvinist! Male chauvinist pig! He had no right to treat her like that – no right at all. She carried on walking for some time, not paying very much attention to where she was going. Eventually, her pace slowed and she became more aware of her surroundings. She was walking down a wide, leafy road with large red-brick houses on either side. Her temper cooled and she sat down on a bench. Faye had gone to sleep.

  She remembered the argument with her husband over the magazines. He had stood beside her, bemused, perhaps even horrified, and said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ It was obvious that he didn’t like what she was becoming. The memory came to her in a peculiar form, like a black-and-white photograph taken from a third perspective. She saw herself sitting at the kitchen table and Christopher, his expressive hands arrested in the air like a shop-window dummy. It was a desperately sad image.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ She repeated his words out loud and suddenly she was besieged by doubt. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I really don’t know.’

  Christopher waited until he was alone in the house before he telephoned Amanda Ogilvy. There was always a chance that Simon would answer, but there was nothing he could do about that. As he listened to the ringing tone, he was conscious of a fluttering sensation in his stomach. He was relieved when Amanda’s voice sounded in the receiver. Their conversation was light in tone and he fancied that her frequent laughter was uncharacteristically girlish and, perhaps, somewhat nervous. ‘Your book,’ he said. ‘When shall I bring it over?’

  ‘Just a minute.’ She put the phone down and went to consult her diary. Christopher could hear an aggressively discordant toccata being played on a piano. He thought of his friend seated at the keyboard, engrossed in his music, oblivious. Amanda returned and said, ‘How about tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Yes,’ Christopher replied. ‘That would be fine.’

  ‘Ten thirty?’

  ‘Yes. Ten thirty.’

  The following day he scraped the bristles off his chin with a razor and applied a little too much aftershave. Subsequently, he drove to Muswell Hill, where he parked his car – not outside the Ogilvy residence, but in an adjacent side street. Fortunately, there were no twitching curtains.

  Christopher pressed the doorbell and some chimes sounded inside the house. He listened for a piano, but couldn’t hear anything apart from the birds and the constant low rumble of London traffic. Amanda had decorated the bay window with coloured transfers, just like those he had seen at The Earth Exchange – two mandalas and a CND peace symbol. She opened the door and invited him in, but it was only when the door was closed that she offered him her cheek to kiss. He handed her the book. She took it, thanked him for taking the trouble, and put it on a shelf.

  ‘Do you fancy a coffee?’ Amanda chirped.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ he replied.

  On entering the kitchen, she said, ‘Simon’s got a rehearsal today. He won’t be back until this evening.’

  ‘Right,’ said Christopher.

  An hour later they were in bed together.

  When they had finished making love they rolled apart, hot and needing to cool down. A fan, placed on a chair by the window, was rattling loudly but having no effect on the temperature. Christopher turned to look at Amanda. She was lying on her back with her eyes closed, her arms thrown above her head and her legs spread. Her dusky skin was coated in a film of perspiration that gave it an appealing, smooth sheen. He found the ampleness of her body satisfying. He liked the slight bulge above her waist, the generous girth of her upper thighs, and her breasts which, even when deflated by the redistributive force of gravity, still retained a residual curvature. Her pubic hair was thick, fleecy and remarkably black – a black so intense that it fascinated him.

  The room was hazy and humid.

  Amanda lit a cigarette and let clouds of smoke rise up from her mouth in silky, braided columns. Even though the curtains were drawn, the light was strong enough to penetrate the material. Everything was bathed in a decadent, reddish luminosity.

  A conversation of sorts began: a rather superficial conversation about what they were both going to do later that afternoon. They were not ready to discuss implications, consequences. It was far too early. Christopher asked for a cigarette and when he drew on the filter the nicotine rush made him shiver with plea
sure.

  After a lengthy silence Amanda said, ‘I suppose that counts as unfinished business.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know – the beach.’

  ‘How do you mean, unfinished?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t get very far last time, did we?’

  ‘What?’

  She repositioned herself so she could see him more clearly. ‘We didn’t get very far,’ she repeated.

  ‘Far enough. Isn’t all the way far enough?’

  She smiled. ‘God, you must have been stoned.’ She rolled off the bed and stood up; the sight of her hair tumbling down her back and the loveliness of her buttocks stopped him from responding. Amanda slipped her arms through the sleeves of a kimono and left the room.

  Later, in the car driving home, Christopher wondered what she had meant. They had gone all the way. He could remember, albeit dimly now, the warmth of her moist interior, made inordinately exciting because the sea that they had been standing in was cold. The contrast had produced an extraordinary amplification of sensitivity. He could remember the moonlight on her wet shoulders, her husky groans close to his ear. Amanda was flattering herself. Perhaps she wasn’t as robust as she thought. It wasn’t he who had been heinously stoned, but her. Yes, that was the explanation. It must be. Nevertheless, as Christopher pressed his foot to the floor and accelerated down Hampstead Lane, the idea that they both possessed conflicting memories of the same event made him feel strangely uncomfortable.

  Christopher felt nervous in the presence of his wife. Her powers of intuition worried him. When, all those years ago, they had driven down to the villa near Cannes, Christopher had been amazed by Laura’s map-reading skills. Her directions were faultless. In due course he had noticed that she wasn’t really looking at the map at all, but making consistently correct guesses nevertheless. It had amused him at the time, although now, he supposed, he would find such behaviour rather irritating – in the same way that he now found her ability to guess what he was searching for rather irritating. He avoided Laura for the rest of the day and informed her over a hurried supper that he intended to work late. In fact, he spent the remainder of the evening listening to French piano music and thinking about Amanda.

  It was past midnight before his mawkish reverie came to an end. Still disinclined to go anywhere near Laura, Christopher considered how he might busy himself, and, judging the pin-drop hush of the house to be propitious, he decided to record more spirit voices. Making the usual appeal to ‘unseen friends’, he let a tape run for ten minutes before playing it back. There was nothing, not even a distant whisper. A second attempt was equally disappointing; yet he persevered, doggedly inviting the ‘unseen friends’ to communicate. On the third attempt he allowed the tape to run for twenty minutes before pressing ‘rewind’ and ‘play’.

  The voice that he subsequently heard was perfectly clear; so clear, in fact, that he started and looked over his shoulder. It seemed inconceivable that such clarity could be achieved in the absence of a living body, vibrating vocal cords, a tongue and teeth. Moreover, his bewilderment was compounded by the tonal quality of a voice that was entirely different to anything he had heard before. The treble register was so unexpected that several seconds had elapsed before Christopher realized he was listening to a child, a girl of about seven years of age – or so he estimated. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’ The recording was also unusually long. ‘If I shall die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ A pause was followed by a solemn ‘Amen.’ Christopher continued listening, alert, until the rev counter showed that the tape had been running for twenty minutes. The prayer was the only communication.

  He played it back several times, noticing additional details with each repetition. The child spoke in a pronounced cockney accent and had difficulty articulating the letter R. Between the first and second couplets she inhaled, causing some phlegm to rattle in her lungs. Her final ‘Amen’ was oddly despairing. It wouldn’t be necessary to clean up the recording as every syllable was distinct. Even something of a background acoustic had survived transmission from the spirit realm – a slight echo.

  As Christopher listened to the prayer he became increasingly excited. He had been struggling with the problem of how ‘The Speech of Shadows’ was going to reach its climax, but now he could see what needed to be done. All of the other voices would fall away, leaving only one voice. The girl’s delivery was so affecting and the words of the prayer so apt, he couldn’t help thinking that the spirits approved of his project and were helping him to realize his creative vision. Heady with inspiration, Christopher imagined that he might have been, in a sense, chosen, and that his art might ultimately fulfil some higher purpose. His skull became crowded with possibilities: vast soundscapes, rolling waves of harmony, fundamentals produced by the motion of stars; expanding nebulae, nurseries of light, cosmic orchestration. He couldn’t operate the controls fast enough. He introduced the voice of the girl into the mix and the effect was thrilling.

  The sky was beginning to brighten but he wasn’t tired. Indeed, he hadn’t felt quite so good since the early days of his career when he often worked through the night. He felt invigorated, confident, invincible. Even when the sky had turned fully blue he was still refining harmonies and repositioning the faders. It wasn’t until he heard Laura getting up that he looked at his watch and conceded that the heaviness in his limbs must be fatigue. He closed his eyes and when he looked at his watch again two hours had passed.

  After breakfast he tried to resume where he had left off, but something had changed. Fleeting images of Amanda’s body kept distracting him. They flashed into his mind like a pornographic slideshow. Arousal made him restless, agitated, and he couldn’t settle. Every time he tried to develop a new idea, he was distracted by ghostly recollections of caresses and kisses, and he was returned to the ruby half-light of Amanda’s bedroom. He wanted her to hear his new composition.

  Abandoning the pretence of industry, he left his studio and descended the stairs.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he shouted.

  From somewhere in the house – he wasn’t quite sure where – Laura called back, ‘What about lunch?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  Outside, the warm air smelt faintly of burning wood – the subtle fragrance of a log placed on dying embers. He crossed the soft, yielding tarmac and followed a winding pathway through the trees. A carpet of dry leaves crunched underfoot. Even the leaves on the bushes crumbled like wafers as he brushed past. Christopher pressed on until he joined a wider path that led to a Victorian viaduct. Tiny flying creatures clouded the air and it became necessary to bat them away with his hands. When he leaned over the iron railing to look down, he saw that the water level of the lake below had dropped, exposing steep banks of cracked mud. The still surface was covered with algae and resembled a sheet of emerald.

  He thought about the music he had composed in the night and felt a frisson of pleasure. Once again, he began to fantasize about concerts and interviews and appearances on radio arts programmes. He remembered Loxley talking about Maybury – a bitter, rather conceited man, who believed that he had never been given the recognition he deserved. It was a terrible thing, to be overlooked.

  Christopher entered another area of woodland and continued until he emerged at the foot of Parliament Hill. His climb to the top was arduous and on the way he noticed something very unusual. The English were keen sun worshippers and rarely missed an opportunity to soak up its rays. Yet the slopes of the hill were empty, a wasteland of bleached dead grass. The sun was so strong it felt sickening, like an aggressive medical treatment that would make one’s hair fall out.

  When Christopher reached the summit he stopped to catch his breath. He was panting and his shirt was sticky with sweat. Beyond the heath and its hinterland of high-rise housing, the whole of central London was submerged beneath a layer of pollution, a horizontal brown strip that shadowed the horizon. St Paul’s Cathedra
l was the only significant landmark distinguishable in the haze. He couldn’t find the slim cylinder of the Post Office Tower because it was hidden behind a bush. A low-flying passenger jet flew overhead, the roar of its engines creating an awful din. It banked and glinted before veering off to the west.

  Looking south once again, he saw a figure ascending the hill. Even at two hundred yards the mop of bright orange hair was conspicuous and vivid. An irregular, limping gait was also apparent. Christopher watched and felt an increasing sense of unease as the figure got closer. It was a man, a young man, whose limbs were extremely thin and wiry. There was something about his step suggestive of a manikin made from pipe cleaners and animated by stop-motion photography. His labouring ascent continued and the gap between them diminished. The youth was dressed so bizarrely, Christopher assumed that he must be a psychiatric patient: a ripped T-shirt held together with safety pins, long chains hanging down from beneath the hem, tight, tapered jeans and big military boots. A razor dangled from his left ear in lieu of an earring and around his wrist he wore a thick leather band festooned with sharp metal studs. The youth paused a few feet in front of Christopher and took a swig from a can. His mean, slit eyes were full of menace.

  It seemed fitting that this young man had dragged himself up the hill from the direction of the city, the great, murky sprawl sweltering beneath its blanket of bad chemicals. He was like a new life form, an urban monster that had spontaneously arisen out of the primordial soup of London’s broiling atmosphere. Christopher realized it was extremely unwise to stare, but he was fascinated. How old was this juvenile horror? Seventeen, possibly sixteen; certainly still young enough to be plagued by a disfiguring outbreak of suppurating acne. His ugly expression promised violence and Christopher tensed up. The backdrop of high-rise housing in the middle distance reminded Christopher that this part of the heath abutted several districts where squalor and casual aggression were commonplace.