Exchange Place (13 page)

Doctor Who

The doorbell rang. I went to the front door. It was the postman. He gave me an armful of post. Three days’ backlog addressed to John Kilfeather, 41 Elsinore Gardens, Belfast
BT
15
3
FB
, whether Northern Ireland or
UK
: letters, junk mail, packages. It was the morning after the day of my return to my dwelling place. Some show, said the postman, gesturing with a nod of his head to the street behind him. Three figures in white coveralls were shuffling at a snail’s pace down the pavement on this side of the road, three others on the other, holding long white wands in front of them like blind men, one or other of them stooping from time to time to examine the ground in greater detail, sometimes picking up something invisible to me and either discarding it, or depositing it in a plastic bag; and I supposed they must be blind indeed to anything beyond their immediate field of vision, a matter of a square yard or so at a time, so concentrated did they seem on their task. I nodded back at the postman. In the time it took me to sign for some packages, bid the postman good-day, and turn to go back into the house, the figures in white coveralls had barely moved from where they had been. I took the post into the front room and took a Stanley knife to the three packages. I knew they were books. One bore the sender’s name, Tgl Harmattan 2, Paris. This would be the Cocteau,
Tour du monde en 80 jours
. I couldn’t remember what the others might be; I order many books online. As it turned out, one was
Three British Screenplays
, edited by Roger Manvell and published by Methuen of London in 1950. The screenplays were of
Brief Encounter
,
Odd Man Out
, and
Scott of the Antarctic
. I had ordered it for
Odd Man Out
, but the other titles were not without interest. I opened the book and found the first page of
Odd Man Out
. I rolled a cigarette.

This is what I read:

1. Passenger ’plane. A scene from a passenger ’plane which is above cloudbanks. The clouds drift past, and as the ’plane banks and then dives, the scene is momentarily obscured, until we catch a glimpse of a large city in a gap between the wisping clouds. Sunlight shines through the clouds which thin and finally disappear, revealing the great scene below, with mountains surrounding the city. We dive swiftly down and approach towers, smoke stacks, tall steeples and see everything in sharper definition. Then into view there comes a busy main street with traffic and pedestrians moving below, gazing into shop-windows. Dissolve to

I lit the cigarette, as I thought of it. As I smoked, the fog of memory cleared and I remembered the flying dreams of my childhood, when I would soar and swoop over Belfast, diving swiftly down and gliding along Royal Avenue at rooftop height, then just above head height. It is 1950-something, and I float above a bobbing sea of hats and caps. I am invisible to the crowds that throng the street, walking purposefully or aimlessly or gazing into shop windows and I do not know whether I am remembering a dream or daydreaming in the here and now, making it up as I go along. I take another draw of the roll-up and pause to hover at the window of Burton’s the Tailor, admiring the three-piece navy herringbone suit displayed on a headless mannequin. Three buttons, narrow lapels, narrow trouser cuffs, it must be the late 1960s now. Gone for a Burton, as in dead, the suit you are laid out in when your time comes. I know that Burton’s, where I got my first proper suit, is long since gone. So is the suit, into what oubliette I do not know. I’m daydreaming now, remembering. I’m coming on eighteen. This will be a birthday suit, so to speak. My father is standing outside the cubicle where I am being measured behind the drawn curtain: chest, shoulders, arms, waist, leg, the tailor deploying his tape with practised ease, jotting down my details in a notebook. I am in his book now, the suit already beginning to take shape in his mind’s eye.

I feel slightly stoned. I lay the book on the desk and see a rolled cigarette beside it. I realize I am stoned. Only now do I get the scent of the Black Rose. Now I remember I’d rolled a joint just before my forced evacuation, and left it lying on the desk in my distraction. I am smoking a joint not the cigarette I’ve just rolled. I put it down to a happy accident. I’m beginning to see everything in sharper definition. I flick through the screenplay at random. Facing page 96 is a black and white still, captioned ‘SCENE 156: Shell realizes that Johnny is hidden in the Bar of the Four Winds’. Of course. The Four Winds. I remember that John Buchan, author of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, also wrote
The House of the Four Winds
, a book I’ve never read, and I wonder if Carol Reed had it in mind when he renamed the Crown Bar. I think of the four points of the compass, and then of the Morning Star, whose sign is a compass rose or star, and again I remember that October afternoon which seems a life ago, the thunderstorm, and rain spattering the pages of the missing notebook.

I look at the still. The character known as Shell, attired in shabby overcoat, scarf and bowler hat, is in the immediate foreground, glancing suspiciously to his right at something or someone out of shot. There are some twenty other men in the bar, many of them wearing hats or flat caps. Four of them, wearing white mackintoshes, look like detectives but are most likely not. It’s just what men wore back then, in 1947. Behind the bar is the chief barman, played by William Hartnell, who later went on to play the first Doctor Who. What was his name? Fencie, that was it. Implication of illicit dealings. The fence who sells on stolen goods, which are under defence of secrecy. As I write I hear the menacing bass throb of the
Dr Who
theme reverberating in my memory. I’m writing this directly on to the computer now, having strayed somewhat from the notebook entry I’d made previously, what I had in mind to write. So I look up the theme tune on the net.

The tune was composed by Ron Grainer and realized by Delia Derbyshire at the
BBC
Radiophonic Workshop in 1963. Grainer’s score, written on a single
A
4
sheet of paper, was basic: essentially, just the famous bass line and the swooping melody, with simple indications for timbre and orchestration: ‘wind bubble’, ‘cloud’, and so on. Derbyshire’s job was to put electronic flesh on the bare bones. No synthesizers existed then: the music was pieced together by hand-splicing tape loops of an individually struck piano string –
duh-duh-de-dum
,
duh-duh-de-dum
– and sounds from an array of oscillators and filters used to test electronic equipment. A white noise generator provided the hissing sounds as well as the ‘bubbles’ and ‘clouds’. I click on Grainer’s name and discover he also wrote the theme to the 1960s
Maigret
TV
series. French accordion music evoking bistros, cafés, cobbled streets glistening under lamplight. In my mind’s eye I saw the opening titles, the black Citroën police car driving through the rainy darkness, windscreen wipers ticking metronomically; and I entered a fictional Paris.

Les Structures Sonores

The intercom gave off a noise as if of short-wave radio. The words that emerged from it were unintelligible to Kilpatrick. Gordon said some words in reply. There was a click, and Gordon opened the postern gate. They walked through a vaulted entrance into a courtyard. The fog had gone. A full moon hung in the sky and a fountain played in the moonlight. They walked through the courtyard into a stone-flagged arcade lined with statuary, mythological figures whose blank eyes seemed to follow Kilpatrick as he passed them, or else he felt them boring into the back of his head. You know the way you know someone’s looking at you, he thought, you can feel the gaze, and you turn to look at them, but by this time their eyes have turned away. Gordon and Kilpatrick walked to the end of the arcade, shoes clacking on the stone flags. They came to a door and another intercom. Again the same procedure. The door opened. They entered. They found themselves in a dark vestibule. Watch your step, said Gordon. They descended a steep stone staircase into a cellar space. Strange, ethereal music was playing. Under a series of arches along one wall were alcoves lit by art deco scallop-shell wall lamps. Interlocutors leaned towards each other over the tables, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Kilpatrick could make nothing of their murmuring. He recalled how often he had sat in other bars, overhearing snippets of talk drifting in and out of the buzz, trying to guess or make up whatever story lay behind this stray phrase or that, disembodied from whatever context, words like enigmatic messages emanating from a badly-tuned short-wave radio awash with static. Sometimes he would scrawl what he had heard in a notebook. Sometimes when he looked at it again in the light of day he would find his own writing indecipherable, or else he could not think of the significance of the words and why he had written them.

At other times he liked it when he was the only customer in the bar, alone with his own thoughts as they came to him over a martini or a Manhattan. He remembered the Blue Room of the Adelphi Hotel in Belfast, where at a certain hour of the early evening he would find himself the only audient to the jazz piano in the corner, not counting the barman, who had no doubt heard it all before as a matter of routine. Kilpatrick liked to think that this time it was different, for when he had seated himself, the piano player – a gentleman of a certain age, brilliantined hair, white tuxedo, cigarette smouldering in an ashtray – would give him a nod of acknowledgement or recognition and seem to launch into another mode, fingers lingering over the keyboard in a reverie of contemplation, exploring the contours of a song that was no doubt long familiar to him, but never realized in this manner until now, the melody haunting itself in its ever-changing repetitions, variations intertwining, unfolding, recapitulating till they dwindled to a conclusion by no means foregone. After the second or third song Kilpatrick would nod to the barman and the barman would set up whatever the piano player was drinking. They never spoke.

Absinthe, said Gordon. Two bubble-stemmed glasses and a carafe of iced water had been set before them. An elaborately perforated spoon holding a sugar cube rested on the rim of each glass. Louche, said Gordon. He gently poured water over the sugar cube and as the sugar dissolved the emerald liquid in the bubble slowly turned a paler opalescent. Kilpatrick, never having done this before, did likewise. Louche? said Kilpatrick. French for that effect, they call it
la louche
, said Gordon, where it goes milky. Opaque that is, and of course shady as in dodgy, not above board, shifty, sinister, whatever you’re having yourself. He turned his eyes up as if quoting from an invisible text. The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see what you want to see, wonderful, curious things. Oscar Wilde. The element of water, said Gordon, liberates the essential oils from the spirit and releases the power of the
la Fée Verte
. Transformation has always been her fundamental essence. The Green Muse. The Green Fairy. Rimbaud’s Poison.
Le bateau ivre
.
Le dérèglement des sens
. How would you translate that, the deregulation, the derangement of the senses? Whatever.
Santé
. He lifted the glass to his lips and Kilpatrick did likewise and he felt the absinthe cool and liquid on the tongue, burning as it went down. He thought of depths of opalescent green, emerald and eau de nil.

Kilpatrick looked around him. The other customers were all drinking absinthe too. They were talking more volubly now, as if they had turned their conversation down a notch when Gordon and he entered the room. They were elegantly dressed. He noted a lady in what looked like a Chanel jacket and a Hermès scarf opposite a gentleman in an impeccably cut navy-blue suit and a tie in black shantung silk with orange and emerald green splotches, colourful as an Oriental fish against the sea-blue herringbone ground of his shirt. The man fingered the knot in his tie and Kilpatrick found himself doing the same, fingering the Charvet tie that had been so mysteriously bestowed on him it seemed an age ago. He caught Gordon looking at him with a quizzical expression. You’re wondering what these people are doing here, he said. Perhaps, said Kilpatrick, or wondering what we’re doing here, if it comes to that. Oh, we’re doing what they’re doing, said Gordon, chasing the Green Fairy, being themselves, or rather one of their selves. Like us. Look around you, Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick looked around him and saw that every booth was occupied by a single couple not necessarily paired by sex. It’s not what you think, said Gordon. Les Caves des Changes is about change, and to change one must become another self; so these people offer each other counterparts. The interlocutors play off each other as it were, reciprocating and elaborating each other’s phrases, syncopating them as they would the musical score that is the sum of their parts, for they have rehearsed these words often in their memory, and they go back a long way, ever-changing as they move into the future or as time elapses. They are conducted by the mirror neuron, which reflects the words before they are framed by the conscious mind, the neuron firing a good few blinks of the eye before the phrase is even at the back of the mind or on the tip of the tongue; so they speak trippingly, pausing every now and then to consider what has been said, letting silence speak. They do not pretend to know each other, but go with the flow. The absinthe helps. So does the music. Listen. Kilpatrick listened to the ambient music he had first heard when he entered the room. He thought of tubular bells of wood and crystal swaying and chinking in the breeze through a wood as it blew through them, and the wavering of a wind-harp. He heard the birds in the trees. And he imagined John Bourne listening to that eerie music as Bourne walked through the forest of John Kilpatrick’s memory, following him into the dark.