‘I have a headache,’ he told the old uniformed lady behind the counter.
‘Speak up,’ she said, cupping one gnarled hand behind her ear.
‘Headache,’ he repeated, shame-faced.
‘What have you tried?’
‘Nothing. What have you got?’
She gestured behind her, at a wall bristling with little cardboard boxes. Analgesia for every man, woman and child in Budapest, by the looks. Was there really enough pain inside a sufficient number of skulls to justify the existence of all these pills?
‘I’ve heard aspirin’s pretty good,’ said Morpheus, wishing the old woman would take charge.
‘In that case, you don’t need to pay through the nose for a fancy brand name.’ She seemed to be warming to him, showing a motherly side. ‘We have mounds of no-name aspirin out the back. You can get a hundred of them for the same price as twenty Bayer.’
‘I only need a couple,’ pleaded Morph, wondering what he’d done to deserve a run-in with Hungary’s only surviving pre-capitalist.
‘I’ll get you fifty,’ she smiled, already moving towards the store-room, as if he were a cheeky little boy at the baker’s and she was about to sneak him a bag of yesterday’s donuts.
A minute later she stood in front of him with a plastic bottle and a glass of water.
‘What, here?’ said Morpheus, alarmed.
‘Certainly. No time like the present.’
He shook two pills out of the bottle and threw them into his mouth, quickly chasing them with a swallow of water.
‘You’ve never done this before?’ she said, as he half-choked and grimaced and drank more water.
‘Arghhh,’ he replied, shaking his head.
‘Are you working in Budapest?’ She could tell he was a foreigner, of course.
‘I’m a musician.’
‘Really? What’s your name?’
‘Uh … Nicky.’
‘English?’
‘Scottish.’
‘Beautiful place. What brings you to this den of thieves?’
Not enough demand for Corpse Grinder in Scotland, he thought. ‘My girlfriend lives here,’ he said.
‘That’s nice,’ she said, the corners of her eyes wrinkling benignly. ‘That’ll be a hundred forint.’
‘How’s the head?’ said Ildiko as they walked back towards the flat. Drizzle was eating into the snow like a mist of acid. The parked cars were emerging from their white canopies like giant metal mushrooms.
‘Worse,’ said Morph. ‘I shouldn’t have taken those pills. Power of the mind, that’s what’s needed.’
Indoors once more, he allowed Ildiko to massage his neck and shoulders while he watched TV. With the remote control he turned the brightness down so far that the faces went negroid.
‘Maybe you should let the other guys know,’ said Ildiko.
‘Know what?’
‘That you may not be well enough to play.’
‘Of course I’ll be well enough. Mind over matter.’
She kissed his head. Her fingers were tired from kneading his tense musculature.
‘Hey, look!’ he said. ‘It’s the lead singer of Ferfiak!’ On the TV, a heavily tattooed young man was telling a journalist that his band was going to blow Slayer off the stage all the way across Europe. Then the bass player pushed forward, middle fingers raised in defiance, and shouted in English: ‘We’re gonna kick some asses!’
Morph and Ildiko cackled gleefully.
At six, Morpheus was on his way to the castle, to rendezvous with his fellow Corpse Grinders. It was a twenty-minute drive, with Ildiko at the wheel of her pirated Volvo. Morph was in the back, as the front passenger seat was taken up by a carefully balanced, quivering, transparent plastic bag filled with water and tropical fish. The exotic creatures swam backwards and forwards in their fragile polythene home, the water vibrating in the thrum of the engine.
Morpheus was drumming against the back of the seat with real drumsticks, getting himself psyched up.
‘Meetchooo in Gomorraaaahhhh!’ he sang tunelessly, beating the hell out of the leather head-rest.
‘Maybe that’s not so good for the fish,’ called Ildiko over her shoulder. Her father had been waiting for these little beauties to arrive for months, and wouldn’t be too happy if his decision to let his daughter pick them up for him from the city resulted in their being dead on arrival.
‘Survi-i-ival of the fiiitte-e-e-est!’ sang Morpheus, quoting the title track of Corpse Grinder’s first album. He drummed less aggressively, though.
To be honest, he was feeling like hell, and even the exertion of hitting his drumsticks on the back of a car seat made the blood in his head pound. He squeezed the sticks hard in his fists, breathed deep, pressed his knuckles into his leather-clad knees. The biker trousers, usually like a second skin to him, were cold and clammy. His bare arms were pale and goose-pimpled, yet his anorak was on the front seat, a nest for the wobbling fish bubble, and the bother of extracting it seemed too great. Always in the past he had driven to gigs wearing only his stage T-shirt; sheer adrenalin had kept him warm, even if the car had no heating and the temperature outside was below freezing. Today he was shivering.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ called Ildiko, when a sharp bend in the road provoked a heavy sigh from him.
‘Aspirin poisoning,’ he groaned. His stomach and intestines had turned to hard rubber inside his abdomen, a solid mass of anatomical sculpture with no fluid function. A dark mass of pain pulsed behind his left eye and brow. He pressed his forefingers against the bridge of his nose, harder and harder, until it seemed they were in danger of bursting through the bone of his skull (a very ‘heavy metal album cover’ scenario, he had to admit).
‘Stop the car.’ His own voice was alien to him, a weedy, nasal sound, indistinct above the noise of the engine and the rushing in his head.
‘It’s only another couple of minutes,’ said Ildiko,‘to my parents’ place.’ She checked the rear view mirror. There was a car jam-packed with post-adolescent Hungarians right behind them, a Peugeot crammed to the roof with excited young men ready to raaahk.
‘I’m going to be … ‘
Morph lurched sideways, wound the window down at desperate speed, and heaved a hot gush of vomit into the air. It spurted out of his mouth and nose like beer from an agitated can, and splattered the side of Ildiko’s car, wind-blown, in a long yellow stream. Smoothly, Ildiko slowed down and pulled off the road, allowing the traffic behind to roar past.
Morpheus fumbled the door open and fell out onto his hands and knees in wet frosty grass. He vomited more: convulsive gouts of it that made his head almost explode with agony. Ildiko’s arm around his back triggered a fit of shivering.
‘H-how are we doing for time?’ he panted.
Morpheus woke up in a dark room surrounded by ceramic milkmaids and carved statuettes of reindeer. He was in bed –not Ildiko’s aromatic little nest, but a strange king-size rococo layer cake of quilts and embroidered coverlets and ironed cotton sheets and fur – ined pillows. He might have been an ancient warrior on a funeral bier, floating onto a dark lake just before being set on fire.
A crack in the bedroom door admitted a pale antique glow from the hallway. Ildiko’s parents had always been wealthy, even before Hungary’s threadbare Iron Curtain was impatiently swept aside. Their house was a Viennese-style monstrosity, a nineteenth-century hunting lodge hidden inside a three bedroom bungalow, a Black Forest gateau cunningly concealed in a crispbread wrapper.
It was deathly quiet. Usually when Morph visited, Pavarotti or Carreras were warbling from the superannuated sound system. Ildiko’s father was the sort of man who believed that CDs could never compete with the lustrous, organic tones of old fashioned vinyl, especially when channelled through Russian-made speakers the size of shipping crates. Being rather deaf, Ildiko’s father liked to play his imported tenors quite loud, but right now, there wasn’t a whisper of an aria to be heard.
Mor
ph sat up in bed. He was dressed only in his T-shirt and underpants, lightheaded and weak as a kitten.
‘Ildiko!’ he called softly.
She appeared in the doorway almost at once, holding a coffee mug shaped like a squirrel.
‘A doctor came,’ she explained. ‘You’ve had a shot of painkiller, and something for the vomiting. Migraine, she said.’
‘The concert …’
‘It’s long over. Zoltan from Ferfiak filled in for you.’
‘Zoltan? He belongs in a post office, stamping the Christ out of letters …’
‘Maybe so. But he filled in for you. They’re on their way to Bratislava now.’
‘Bratislava? What?’ He swung his legs out of the bed and tried to stand, but felt as if two feet were unfeasibly few for this challenge.
‘It’s next day already,’ Ildiko said, opening the bedroom curtains a bit. Undeniable daylight shone in. The dyed sheepskin rugs on the floor lit up caramel and gold. Morpheus noted that he could cope with these things now, that the sunshine was well within the range of his endurance. He was thirsty and a little peckish; his innards were empty as a bass drum.
‘I’ve got to get to Bratislava,’ he said. There was a crust of dried blood on his thigh, where the needle had gone in. He didn’t remember the doctor at all, though he vaguely recalled his own arrival at Ildiko’s parents’ place: the ecstatic barking of the dog, the embarrassment of being half-carried across the threshold, his limp arms slung round the shoulders of a midget middle-aged couple, the surreal passage past bookshelves crowded with Goethe and knick-knacks, stuffed antelope heads, crocheted farmyard scenes in teak frames, the door of the ‘guest’ bedroom with the smiling graduation photo on it, the spare plastic goldfish-bowl they’d given him to vomit in, the divine relief of being stationary and warm and in the dark.
‘See if you can make it to the toilet first,’ suggested Ildiko. Standing there cradling her squirrel mug, she looked calm and happy. She always enjoyed seeing her old room again, to remind herself why she now led a life of rumpled minimalism.
‘I puked on your parents’ hallway carpet,’ said Morpheus, remembering suddenly.
‘Don’t worry, it fits right in,’ said Ildiko. ‘Besides, they’re over the moon about their new cichlids.’
Morph pictured Mr and Mrs Fleps sitting in their front room, Pavarotti forgotten as they stared in a trance – ike state of devotion at their latest imported fish. He chortled and allowed himself to slump back onto the quilt.
‘You look cute on this big bed,’ said Ildiko, tugging the covers out from under him, tucking him back in.
‘I feel like … like death warmed up,’ he groaned, but this evidently wasn’t a Hungarian turn of phrase, because she replied,
‘I don’t think that’s something my parents have in the house. How about a bowl of chicken soup?’ ‘Just … coffee, thanks.’
‘How about a cup of tea, in a squirrel mug? Expensive English tea, bought by my daredevil dad on the black market in 1977. Maturing in the tin ever since, just waiting for you to come along.’
He closed his eyes wearily. ‘My band has left me,’ he said, in a voice from the Hadean depths.
By evening, Morpheus was up and about, if a little shaky. In the same room with the benignly attentive Mr and Mrs Fleps, the over-friendly German shepherd and the successfully integrated tropical fish, he spoke on the telephone with Cerberus.
‘Slayer have had it,’ enthused Cerb in his strong Ayrshire accent. ‘They’re old men. We’re gonna murder them all across Europe.’
‘What about me?’ said Morph.
‘We’ll save the death blow for you. Catch up with us when you can. Meet you in Gomorrah!’ Cerb was raving, high on adrenaline. He was about to go onstage in Bratislava, and sounded as though he was surfing on a huge tidal wave of adulation – or as if he’d succumbed to a cocaine pusher.
‘How are they coping?’ asked Ildiko when Morph hung up.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘OK, I think.’
Morph was hungry by now, but reluctant to endure a three-course meal under the watchful gaze of Ildiko’s parents, the dog, two of El Greco’s saints, and the stuffed head of a fox.
‘I’ll take you out for a snack,’ whispered Ildiko, reassuring her parents that ‘Miklós’ needed some fresh air.
They left the house, blinded by the porch lights and stumbling hesitantly until they found their footing on the moonlit main street. Morph’s legs functioned like newly purchased equipment, not yet broken in. He looked up at the sky, clearer here than in the city. The patterns of the stars were unrecognisable, nothing like the ones above his own parents’ house in Ayrshire.
At the end of the street was a grocery store, closed, and a tavern called the Blaha. They went in and seated themselves at a table, thereby doubling the number of serious diners instantly, although there were half a dozen folk drinking beer and wine. A trio of local musicians – guitar, accordion and drums – were playing restrained renditions of pop standards. Observing Morph and Ildiko’s arrival, they judged that the demographics of the Taverna Blaha had changed sufficiently to justify a switch from Abba to U2. A cat-eyed girl Ildiko had gone to school with wandered over to take the order.
‘Somloi Galuska,’ said Ildiko, without looking at the menu.
‘Bacskai Rostelyos,’ said Morph, after some deliberation.
‘Are you sure?’ Ildiko whispered to him. ‘So soon after chucking up?’
‘Mind over matter,’ he smirked.
The band played U2 until the food arrived, then slimmed down to a duo for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. Morpheus watched Ildiko spoon her vanilla cream cake into her perfect mouth; Ildiko watched Morpheus devour his roast beef in tomato sauce. The clientele of the Taverna Blaha kept a casual eye on Ildiko Fleps and her long-haired boyfriend from Scotland, England.
‘Does it bother your parents,’ he said in between mouth-fuls, ‘that we’re not married?’
‘Of course it bothers them, you idiot,’ she said, and licked the icing sugar off her fingers.
‘Then let’s get married,’ he said.
A cheer went up from among the middle-aged folk at the bar. There was a scattering of applause. Morpheus figured they must be showing their appreciation for the musicians.
‘Idiot, idiot, idiot,’ smiled Ildiko, shaking her head. ‘Come on, let’s dance.’ And she pulled him to his feet.
‘I’m still woozy from the drugs,’ he hissed in her ear as she pulled him close to her. The accordionist played a tremulous fanfare.
‘I’ll hold you up till the roast beef takes effect,’ she whispered back.
The band, complemented to the full trio once more, launched into a slow waltz version of ‘Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’.
‘I can’t dance to this sort of thing,’ Morph murmured anxiously into her hair.
‘Just hold me tight,’ she said, directly into the ear that was the less deafened of the two. ‘Close your eyes, and pretend we’re in bed together.’
They shuffled around on the polished floor of the Taverna Blaha for a while. An elderly man tapped an aluminium ashtray gently on the bar, one-two-three, one-two-three, to help the drummer keep time. The accordionist carried the tune, allowing the bald, moustachioed guitarist to attempt a few power chords of Dire Straits intensity.
Meanwhile in a Slovakian city far, far away, a death metal band was blistering its way through its demonic repertoire. Hordes of demented fans were synchronising their movements with every leap and lunge on stage. A drummer who might be mistaken for Morpheus was flailing away behind his fearsome armoury, putting the boot into the bass drum, bashing the Christ out of the cymbals. Close to the speakers, the noise would be titanic. Outside the venue, it would be a muffled din. Half a mile down the road, no trace.
In the Taverna Blaha, the noise levels were rising slightly. The waitress was clearing plates from the tables. Sleet clattered against the windows. The band played on, and Morph and Ildiko were still dancing. M
orph kept his eyes focused on the oscillations of Ildiko’s feet, willing himself not to kick his fiancee’s toes. He was doing pretty well for a beginner.
The strain of playing ‘Loch Lomond’ in waltz tempo was beginning to show on the musicians, though. The accordionist leaned over to the guitarist and whispered something in his ear. Two sets of grey moustache nodded in unison, and the music metamorphosed smoothly into an old pop hit by Fonograf Ensemble. Ildiko leaned into Morph’s chest and muffled her giggles in his shirt. He squeezed her tight, flexing the muscles of his powerful forearms against her warm back. He stopped looking down at his feet, rested his cheek on her shoulder instead, and kept moving.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s it, you’ve got it.’
TABITHA WARREN
Dear Sir,
Further to your obituary of Tabitha Warren on the 3rd of November, I believe I was the last journalist to interview her before her death. On the basis of our meeting, I wrote a feature article for the Independent which, thanks to some heavy pleading by Jack Warren, was never published. If it had been published, the inaccurate picture of Tabitha’s last years, as reproduced in your obituary, would never have gained currency.
The ‘authorised version’ of events is that Tabitha’s last book was Cat’s Paw, and that she saw no need to add to her body of work, having achieved everything she’d ever hoped for – including, it must be said, extravagant wealth You yourself repeated the oft-quoted story of how she once burned a twenty-pound note over a restaurant candle, sighing that in the time it took the money to burn, twice that amount would have accrued in royalties.
In all honesty I wasn’t a fan of hers when I was assigned to the interview. My taste in fiction was more ‘literary’ and, despite Tabitha Warren’s supposed cross-over appeal, I personally found her oeuvre lightweight. Her endless series of novels featuring angst-ridden animals as narrators struck me as entertaining but gimmicky –Watership Down with Kafka pretensions, as I would put it in the article. But my editor thought she was the bee’s knees and, besides, there was a rumour that another book was about to emerge from what was affectionately known in the trade as ‘the warren’. (‘Affectionately’, not because Tabitha and her husband were well-liked, but because of the amount of revenue and media hype a new addition to the Tabitha Warren franchise was sure to generate.)