The Museum at the End of the World Page 4

  He checked himself and returned.

  And nothing I cared, at my blue sky trades, that time allows

  In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

  Before the children green and golden

  Follow him out of grace.

  The night

  starless and bible black

  giving way to the false dawn at the edges of the blind and the hum of the milkman’s electric cart, the milk bottles rattling in their metal crates, he reluctantly closed Sir Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and its Remains and set it on the upended box that served as a night table. Knuckled the soreness in his eyes. Still on the carpet where he’d dropped it in irritation, The White Goddess, Robert Graves’ dotty, stillborn vapourings.

  Deaths

  he dared to think

  and Entrances.

  *

  After enquiring of passers-by, Rob found the sequestered street, one of the few that had escaped the German bombing of the docks and city centre. It was a short street of ancient higgledy-piggledy houses, the ground floors converted, obviously many years earlier, to cubbyhole shops, Shoe Repair and KEYS CUT, Modelling Supplies, Costume Rentals, CONSULTATIONS, a chemist’s with a window of sun-faded packets, dead bluebottles on their backs, and a KODAK advertisement, a life-size cut-out of woman in an unalluring bathing suit, smiling and holding out a camera, behind her, palm fronds, beach, sea, all leached out to a dull purple.

  CLOSED read the sign on the door but Rob could see the barber sitting in the barber chair peering into a tabloid. In answer to the rapping, he levered himself up and unlocked the door, turning CLOSED to OPEN. His white jacket was grubby and the cuffs greasy.

  “Good morning,” said Rob. “I was told—”

  The barber nodded and stood back to allow him in, but was suddenly bent into a bout of red-faced, mucous, phlegm-pulpy hawking. Rob politely looked away. At the hair on the floor. The strop hanging from the chairback. Combs standing in a jar of green disinfectant. An industrial-size bottle of Bay Rum. Beside the scissors, a tin-lid heaped with ash and dog-ends.

  A purple plastic sign:

  DUREX

  …and will there be anything for the weekend, Sir?

  When it had all subsided, the barber, glasses off and mopping, Rob said, “I was told you could direct me to an office called The Second Line.” The barber pointed to an ordinary wooden door at the end of the room and said, “He’s at the top of the stairs. There’s a light switch as you go in there. And mind your step. The lino’s lifting.”

  The stairs and landing groaned.

  The door to the The Second Line opened.

  “Good morning,” said Rob, “I have some records—”

  “Indeed?” said the man.

  “And I was told—”

  “Told what and by whom?”

  “Charlie Denton. And he said—”

  “Ah! The redoubtable Mr. Denton! A veritable confrère. You are most welcome, I am Christopher Mawson and you are Mr.…?”

  He held out his hand saying “God, I do find myself boring!” He was tall, long floppy hair, a drooping moustache. Wearing a peculiar sort of coat, a frock coat made of suede and a white shirt open at the neck, a blue silk scarf with a huge knot askew at his throat. The coat was what Americans called, Rob thought, a tailcoat, and it had reminded him instantly of a treasured Wild West picture book he’d owned as a child, a book he’d won at a ring-throwing fairground booth, glossy boards, wonderfully garish colours, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, and Wyatt Earp on the front board and a Colt Peacemaker on the rear.

  “Edge your way in, Rob. And let us not stand upon the order of our going, as it were. Do call me Chris. As you can see, I’m rather cramped. Not,” he said “that I expect the rozzers to burst in brandishing truncheons and shouting ‘ello, ‘ello, what ‘ave we ‘ere then? But legally speaking, as, perhaps, Charlie intimated…”

  Rob had got talking to Charlie Denton at The Bristol Nails, a dingy bar, home to the Avon City Jazz Band. Charlie was in his thirties and lived with his mother and an extensive record collection.

  “ …so if you wouldn’t mind parking yourself on this crate.”

  Rob handed across the five records Charlie had lent him.

  “And Charlie lent you these? You’ve listened to them?”

  “Well, only at his place. He said my record player would destroy them.”

  “But still! You must be favoured!”

  Rob smiled and shrugged.

  “Let’s have a dekko, then.”

  There was a workbench under the window and a sink, pegboard hung with tools, two or three record players, wires everywhere, a shelf above with glass and plastic spray bottles, other electrical-looking things. He wondered how old Christopher was. Forty, he guessed. His fingers were yellow with nicotine. The rather mournful moustache a little yellow-stained too. He kept tucking his hair back behind his ears.

  “So. Charlie Patton, Kokomo Arnold, yes, ah! Sleepy John. Two of the 1929 sides. Now where did friend Denton get that. Son House, yes. And Sonny Boy Williamson. The very first side he cut was “Good Morning Schoolgirl.” Know it? Sold like hotcakes. He was murdered, you know. Like Trotsky. An ice pick.”

  He paused.

  “You know… I’ve never seen an ice pick. Of course, on the other hand, we don’t have ice.”

  He paused again.

  “Charlie Patton. You’ve read about that? It was in Jazz Journal, I think.”

  Rob shook his head.

  “Well, he first recorded in 1929 and then again in 1934, and one of those tiresome, spotty, World Authorities on The Blues—they live typically in frowzy bedsits in Slough or Swindon—he wrote quite seriously that Patton’s delivery of the 1934 sides was weaker ‘probably because his throat had been cut in 1933 in a juke-joint brawl.’ I did treasure ‘probably’”

  Rob grinned at him.

  “Swindon!” said Chris.

  Shaking his head.

  “And you do understand I can only cut 78s. Not 45s or anything sophisticated. They’re pressed, you see, from a machine like, oh, a die, stamped, whereas I cut acetate blanks employing a…”

  He had stood while talking, staring down out of the window.

  He scuffed aside sheets of the Western Daily News on the workbench, and his hand reappeared holding a small revolver.

  “Even the words ‘cottage industry’…”

  Opened a drawer beneath the bench and took out a box of cartridges.

  “…would dignify my level of production…”

  Pushed the revolver’s chamber out and loaded.

  “…and the sophistication of what I —”

  Rob released his breath as he saw the cartridges were crimped .22 blanks.

  Catching Rob’s expression, Chris said, “What? It’s just a starting pistol. Ease up the window on your side and I’ll get…”

  The sway-backed roof some three or four feet below seethed with pigeons.

  Crack! Crack!

  “Die, you fuckers, die!”

  Crack!

  The pigeons clattered up, wheeled into a flock over the chimney pots, beat strongly into the sky.

  “Sorry,” said Chris, “sorry. I loathe pigeons. Those raw pink feet. I have a horror of them. One got in here once. Banging off the walls, smashing against the window. I killed it with a tennis racket. We were both hysterical. And those eyes—they have a, what is it, a membrane or something, it drops down over the eye and they suddenly look opaque, deformed, they remind me of my ex-wife. And those pink feet. I associate them with psoriasis.”

  He paused.

  “Now where were we?”

  “You were saying,” said Rob, “something about employing equipment…”

  “‘Employing’ did I say…? Ah! And then, of course, there’s avian psittacos
is. But, yes. Gotcha! Employing a pair of Pye Black Boxes. Or, as we in the trade say, Les Boîtes Noires. Do you want more technical…?”

  Rob smiled, shaking his head.

  “So,” said Chris, turning on a swan-neck lamp on the bench and tilting the discs, scanning the playing surfaces, “Twenty-five bob a piece, OK?”

  “Yes. OK.”

  “That’s both sides, of course.”

  “Fine. Good.”

  Chris performed his mysteries, an orange Ilford Antistaticum cloth, one of the spray bottles, knobs, wires, what he called ‘the cutting carriage,’ and started the Charlie Patton record.

  “I can turn the sound on if you…”

  Rob shook his head.

  “Quite right,” said Chris. “Better to listen in silence and alone.”

  The room was filling with the pungent smell of acetate, sharp in the throat. After each face was finished, Chris brushed detritus from the grooves with a bushy paintbrush and sprayed the surface with another pump bottle. Put on headphones and listened to a snatch. Nodded to Rob that all was well. The acetate smell was strange, something like, Rob thought, a mixture of hot vinegar and the rotten sweetness of diarrhea.

  “When you think about it,” said Chris, his tan half-boots up on the bench, “it’s not unlike human congress.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “He’s puffing himself up, neck feathers iridescent mauve, green, ruffing himself up. He parades about her in circles, strutting and bobbing. She, meanwhile, ignores this technicolour production, obvious resigned irritation, pitpats away to escape his amorous intent, resumes a desultory peck here, peck there, seed, husk, crust. Ridiculous in his desire, swollen, puffed up with self-importance like Malvolio, he corners her. Covers her. The briefest of flutters. The deed is done. Without pause, she’s back to a flick of the head, peck, orange peel, peck, dog-end, flick.

  “And there he is, solitary, subsiding.

  “Just like women, when you think about it. They lie there staring indifferently the while, staring up at the pelmet, costing new curtains, tracing the crack in the ceiling she’s always thought looks like the top edge of Australia.”

  He got up to turn the Kokomo Arnold record.

  As he brushed out the curlicue wisps of acetate, he said, “What you’ve brought in interests me. It’s a pleasing change, young Robert, from the mainstay of my business—cutting disc after disc of the Yerba Buena Jazz Band and such. A little jolliness goes a long way. Or the George Formby or Vera Lynn fanatics.”

  Hands clasped loosely against bosom, he intoned:

  We’ll meet again

  Don’t know where

  Don’t know when

  But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day…

  He made a snorty noise and turned back to bend over the turntable.

  “Six months,” he said, “that’s what I’d give it. Had she met him again some sunny day, I’d have given it six months before she’d have been staring at the pelmet.”

  “Sir!” said Rob. “You sully the name of ‘The Forces’ Sweetheart’!”

  “And who shall blame him?” said Chris.

  “Who’s ‘him’?”

  “Me,” said Chris. “But enough of this Pat and Mike stuff. How would you describe,” pointing to the records on the bench, “what it is you’re after?”

  “After?” said Rob.

  “Yes. ‘After.’ Don’t prevaricate.”

  “I want…”

  “Mmmm?”

  “I want the passion of it, that’s what I want to get at.”

  Saying it, he felt hot embarrassment, felt self-conscious, exposed.

  “Good,” said Chris, tucking his hair behind his ears, “good.”

  “When it’s raw,” said Rob. “When the words aren’t important, it’s the voice, the timbre, the sound. When the voice is singing to the guitar, when it’s all, you know, one instrument.”

  Chris was nodding.

  “I have to come at this,” he said, “in a roundabout way, ‘circuitously’ as we say in the trade.”

  “Come at what?”

  “Plantations.”

  Rob regarded him.

  “I expect you think of plantations as a big house, white columns, Spanish moss, all the trimmings and a few big cotton fields—that sort of picture. But they weren’t like that at all. They were huge. Dozens of little farms, smallholdings, sharecroppers… they all rendered up tribute, of course, but the plantations were communities. It was the feudal system, more or less. They were like manor houses or great houses here. The big houses supported by surrounding tenant farms. In some places, entire villages or even more than one—thousands of acres.

  “You should read up on these plantations—Stovall’s, say, or the Dockery Plantation.

  “Why should you?

  “Because these plantations were more or less self-sufficient worlds. They were—how would you say?—time capsules. They preserved the slave life in a modified form. And—our interest—they preserved the music from an earlier period. And what gave rise to the music wasn’t that much modified. Slavery was over but the social structure hadn’t changed at all.

  “Most of these plantations had jukes, bars, little dance halls—safety valves for the estate—and blues singers travelled widely. Charlie Patton, for example, travelled with Son House from plantation to small town to plantation. Son House was a big influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Big Bill Broonzy learned guitar from Lonnie Johnson and Blind Blake.

  “They were expressing that community. We’re talking about a time when there actually was ‘a folk.’ Most of these men recorded in the late twenties or early thirties—that was a matter of race, of course, and of technology—but they’d been singing for many years before that so we can hear music that has strong links back towards slavery. Prisons did the same thing. The work songs in there, the blues, locked away decade after decade, untouched by change. Listen to Lomax. It’ll open your ears. More African than you’d believe possible. Parchman Farm was the Harvard of the blues.

  “Did I just say that?

  “How brilliant!

  “What you want, Rob, is what they,” he made an encompassing gesture, “them, that lot, call ‘primitive.’

  “You can feel it in the music of other communities too, in flamenco, cante jondo, fado, even the cantor at my mother-in-law’s funeral. Raises the small hairs.

  “There’s a word for this feeling, this effect, a Spanish word, duende, and Lorca… have you read Lorca? Lorca said that duende was beyond the limits of intelligence. He said, ‘All that has black sound has duende.’ Duende means emotional darkness, blood, suffering, death, sorrow. It speaks beyond the rational. Those who had duende weren’t so much exercising a skill, Lorca said, as expressing a power. Duende possessed them. The audience fed them, became part of the playing and singing. Lorca saw it, the night in the juke, in the bar, as a rite—secular, but a rite. Something very far from a ‘show.’ Hemingway presented the corrida more or less the same way, as ritual, as duende. Death in the Afternoon. You’ve read that? and Lorca? No?

  “Ah! His poem for Ignacio Mejias. A las cinco de la tarde. Killed in the ring. A close friend of Lorca’s.

  A boy brought the white sheet

  at five in the afternoon.

  A frail of lime already prepared

  at five in the afternoon.

  The rest was death and death alone

  at five in the afternoon.”

  Chris suddenly stopped talking.

  He was silent for a few moments then said, “It is the tolling of bells.”

  Then, making an exaggerated mime of consulting his watch, he said, “Fancy a drop of Mother’s Ruin?”

  “Lovely,” said Rob.

  Chris took out a large bottle of gin. Set the kettle on the tiny gas stove.


  “Away with tonic, lemon, and other pollutants,” he said. “Take a tip from the dears you see every night in the snug listening to The Archers. A drop of hot water releases the botanicals.”

  He gestured at the stove.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I eat baked beans.”

  He opened a cupboard underneath the sink and, taking out two glasses, held them up to the light.

  Tut-tutted.

  “I really must speak severely,” he said, “to my housekeeper.”

  Catching Rob’s eye, he said, “Oh, she’s not a real one. Unfortunately. I made her up to comfort myself—and who shall blame him? I call her Fiona Macpherson. But always ‘Mrs.,’ of course. She’s widowed. Very Scottish and reserved and severe. Wears tweed skirts below the knee and high-necked blouses. Breakfast is either porridge with salt on it or Arbroath Smokies, though where she gets them in Bristol I have no idea. She refers to me as Master Christopher and cuts the crusts off my sandwiches.”

  “Sounds very satisfactory,” said Rob.

  Gin fumes mingled up his nose with acetate.

  “And when you follow up that plantation idea, look up a character called Lester Melrose. He was a talent scout for Victor, other labels too. He found much of the talent in the plantations. Follow who he turned up. Get Charlie Denton to play you Ishman Bracey. And Skip James. You’ve never heard Delta picking till you’ve heard Skip James. Get Charlie to play you ‘I’m So Glad.’ Sings falsetto. Ungodly. And see if he’s got the other two sides Sleepy John Estes cut in Memphis in 1929. They’re on Victor. I’ll cut them for you. You’ll thank me. Twenty-five bob a time.”

  “Where would I find out about Melrose, Chris?”

  Chris paused.

  “Mmm. I can’t remember where. I read rather a lot. It might have been a book about record companies… Well, I’ll just have to tell you when you come back. I’ll get Fiona to make us a packed lunch. Sandwiches. Oh, what a way she has with sandwiches! What would you say to cold scrambled egg and smoked salmon, one of her yummier…”

  The second gin warm inside him, Rob put the records into the carrier bag, walked along the gloomy landing.

  “The greatest of them all,” called Chris from the lighted doorway, “the very apotheosis of what you seek, Bukka White. Released from Parchman in 1940—shot someone—he recorded just twelve sides for Victor. The apogee. All we have is just six 78-rpm records.”