Thin Air
Storm Constantine
Stafford England
Thin Air
© Storm Constantine 1999, 2010
Smashwords edition 2011
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people, or events, is purely coincidental.
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The Sea
On the day he disappeared, the sky was silver. He stood beside the sea, looking down at the beach from a car park, gripping a black metal hand-rail, gazing out at infinity.
It had begun already.
People walked across the damp tarmac behind him, wreathed in an almost invisible steam. They paid him no attention. Children shrieked and sea-gulls scattered. The sands were pearl below. He felt so insubstantial. Perhaps it would not be necessary to carry out the plans. Perhaps, if he concentrated hard enough, he could be absorbed by the silvery ether.
Summer time. He thought of childhood, of those snap-shot days in sunlight. He did not mourn them, but examined the memories with a distant nostalgia. The film of his life. Where had it changed? When?
For a moment, he turned round and looked up at the hills behind him, where sea-side residences perched pink and white among the sycamores. This town held so many memories, but none of them were his. There was something odd about resorts, he realised. They were ephemeral. They had a virtual life. Full of ghosts. Like he was.
Back to the sea. It heaved in the distance, listlessly; a goddess in repose. Now that he had made the decision, it was difficult to proceed. He might be wrong.
The sky was clear of rain now. All tears were shed. He was surrounded by the smell of the tarmac, by the rank aroma of the beach, mixed with a synthetic vanilla reek from a nearby dough-nut stand. It was unremittingly ordinary, the most concrete of illusions.
Would his disappearance be as simple as making a decision? He had believed it so, sitting alone in a hotel room, able to see through the illusion. Reality does not exist. You can step out of it. So easy. Two hundred and fifty thousand people disappeared every year. Where did they go? How could such a vast number be so invisible? How many of them felt as he did now?
He imagined it would be like pushing through a membrane, slight resistance at first. He looked down at the beach, at the buzzing masses of energy: human beings, beach towels, sand. I do not believe in it, he thought. Not any longer. And the sky continued to burn above him. A hundred tiny hands reached from the top of his head towards it. He felt weightless.
The sea, the gulls, the sand. It was all empty. Elemental. He fell.
Chapter One
If he was dead, she was sure he’d make his presence felt to her somehow. She wasn’t a great believer in the paranormal, but surely, if he was no longer part of the world, there’d be some subtle indication in her heart? She didn’t feel it, but perhaps that was because she didn’t want to believe he was dead. If she imagined it hard enough, would he come walking in through the door like nothing had happened?
The flat was quiet in the afternoon, almost too quiet, but its stillness didn’t seem watchful, just empty. Dex wasn’t there. In a sense, he’d never been there.
The phone lay in two pieces on the floor, its wire and cord trailing like entrails. She’d savaged it the night before, unable even to bear the click of the answering machine as it fielded all the calls.
Jay padded barefoot out into the kitchen where the refrigerator hummed reassuringly. The sun didn’t reach here in the afternoon; all was in shadow, but warm. Inside the fridge were three bottles of rum, one white, one spiced, one dark. Today, it was white rum, for clarity. Jay took down a clean glass from the cupboard overhead, filled it with ice from the freezer. Then she poured the white fire over it, cracking the ice, releasing its potency. Sometimes, Jay would put flower petals in the glass, or leaves from her house-plants, or threads of her own hair. All of these rituals were meaningless, because she had lost the focus of her life, and no omens existed to herald its return. Everything had changed. Forever.
As she sat drinking, with the curtains drawn across the windows, filtering the light to the colour of cinnamon, Jay realised that in her shock and sorrow, she was somehow cleansed. All that existed was a raw form of herself, perhaps without identity, but primal.
For five days, she had shut out the world, because it was trying so desperately to get in. Even with the curtains pulled close together like stubborn lips, she still crawled across the floor when she had to pass the windows. Not even her shadow would fall upon the world outside. Perhaps they had all gone; the fans, the reporters, the photographers, and those other people, who were drawn to sites of human drama like carrion-eaters. Jay hadn’t checked since early yesterday morning. She had been acquiescent at first, warmed by the attention. It felt like everyone shared her bewilderment. Images of herself, pale-faced and disguised by sun-glasses, were strewn about the room; on the newspapers she’d trampled over, rolled in, wept onto. Her skin was dappled with smeared print. Now, she felt like a spectacle, something to be gloated over. Who cared, really?
There was no way forward from here. This was the end, and it was endless.
Jay had met Dex at a party for someone’s new CD release, a band who were on Sakrilege, the same label as he was. She was covering the event for her column in ‘This’ magazine, accompanied by a friend, another writer named Grant Fenton. Both Jay and Fenton were regarded with awe and fear by the bands whose fate they could decide in print. Jay never pulled her punches: most of what she heard and saw in the music business irritated her. But, despite this, it had become her natural habitat. Dex’s presence had inevitably touched Jay’s world already on a number of occasions, but with little impact. She saw him as nothing more than a product, embarrassing in his bravado. He was also very famous, and would undoubtedly treat her with little respect, so she’d avoided any confrontation. Jay was careful to mix only with people who appreciated who and what she was. But that one night in the summer of 1988, coincidences had aligned, bodies had been strategically placed upon the board of the social gathering and by ten to midnight, Jay and Dex were enclosed in the same group of people, who were all gabbling rubbish inspired by too much champagne. At just the right moment, when Jay in her private world had been wondering what she was doing there, Dex had caught her eye and a knowing smile had been exchanged. Somewhere, a light turned on. Jay saw a kindred spirit in this unlikely figure before her. For a fleeting second, she knew they had both been aware of the travesty of the party, the superficiality of its participants, the silly, delusional egotism of the whole scene. It was not love at first sight by any means, simply a feeling of relief. They went outside together.
The balcony hung high above the river and the lights of Lond
on vibrated through the warm air.
Jay put down her champagne glass on the balcony rail, and brushed her fingers through her hair. ‘God, those people are just awful.’
‘Twats,’ Dex agreed succinctly.
‘I don’t know why I come.’
‘Free booze.’
‘It’s not worth it.’
‘No.’
She inspected him for a moment, eye to eye, without the media screen. He was shabby, rather goofy in appearance, but with interesting eyes. She suspected his hair could do with a wash, because she could smell it, but the smell wasn’t unattractive. His hands were sensitive, with oddly-aligned thumbs. This was the man whose image was enshrined upon the pages of every teen magazine in the country. Thousands of little girls wanted to touch him, and here she was, on a balcony above the Thames, close enough to smell his hair. The thought made her smile, and he just smiled back, didn’t ask why. She liked that.
‘So what are you here for, then?’ he asked her. ‘You work for Sakrilege?’
Ten minutes before, Jay would have been offended that he didn’t know who she was, but now the feeling was liberating. She shrugged. ‘No. I’m supposed to write up the edifying experience for a magazine. People want to read bitchy things about their friends.’
‘You’re a writer.’
‘I write, yes.’ She pulled a face. ‘Pays the bills.’ She waited for him to ask if she’d ever written about him, already formulating a suitable reply.
‘Words are the most powerful thing in the world,’ Dex said. ‘People who work with them are warriors.’
She glanced at him sidelong, resisting the urge to laugh at these earnest words. ‘In that case, I have a veritable arsenal about tonight.’ She paused. ‘I’m Jay. Jay Samuels.’
His smiled widened with private amusement. He’d heard of her all right, and from the look on his face had read what she’d written about him. ‘I’ve seen your weaponry draw blood on occasion.’
‘Nothing too fatal, I hope.’
He shook his head. ‘No, it’s funny. Makes me laugh. That’s why you do it, isn’t it - to make people laugh at other people’s expense?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Are we arguing about this?’
He shrugged, stuck out his lower lip. ‘Don’t think so. Are we?’
No, they weren’t arguing.
‘So, come on, then, tell me about yourself,’ he said. ‘Where are you coming from, Ms Samuels?’
She told him. Dex did not listen with the ingratiating air she had become used to from musicians, those who were afraid she would destroy them with words. Dex did not care about such things. He just wanted to know her.
She described how she’d hung around the music scene since she’d been a precocious fourteen year-old in the late seventies. ‘They were the times though, weren’t they,’ she said, then frowned a little, ‘or are you too young to have been around then?’
‘I wasn’t around your scene,’ Dex said, ‘I’m a foreigner.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Up north. Foreign. Cloth cap and whippet. You know.’
She smiled. ‘Not everyone thinks that civilisation ends at Watford.’
‘But you do - perhaps until now, anyway. I know what you London people are like.’
‘I wasn’t born in London. I come from Hampshire actually.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I was just a kid in your time, but not much younger than you. So how did you get into it all? Bet you were in a band.’
‘No. I was never musical myself. I got into it through my art.’
‘Not writing?’
‘No, that came later.’
As an eighteen year old, Jay had gleaned enough skill from a brief art school experience to create record covers that aptly reflected the time. Startling pinks and scratched black mutated slowly into the abstract art of textures; mottled backgrounds and carefully placed artefacts; a rose against degraded rock; the skull of a bird upon a collage of grainy hieroglyphs. She’d never spent that much time on her work, being too fond of parties and bored by sleep. Jobs had been rushed, but eerily competent. She’d taken her environment so much for granted, unaware that things inevitably change, and so they did.
‘One afternoon, I woke up with a hangover. I was lying in the bath, throbbing with various pains from head to foot, and then I realised. The life I’d led had disappeared. The people were gone, the young had changed, and I couldn’t really call myself young anymore.’
‘That must have pissed you off.’
Jay twisted her mouth to the side, thought about it. ‘I suppose the demise of my world grieved me, but I’ve always been adaptable. I just cut off the spiked black hair, changed my wardrobe, and became someone else. There was a new mood in the air. Music had fragmented, had somehow condensed. It was less about hedonism and release and more about money. It was the world that created you, Dex.’
He turned away from her, leaned against the balcony rail. ‘I existed before that, sweetheart.’
‘I didn’t mean to sound insulting. You know what I mean, though, you must do. The music business has always delighted in creating people. It’s a sort of Pygmalion thing. Let’s face it; you were certainly the right raw material.’
He glanced at her and she was no longer sure what he was thinking. Had he taken offence? But she was quite sure he understood her. His background had been suitably impoverished, his manner pertinently abusive and self-assured. He’d had no education to speak of, yet possessed the ability to work magic with words and music. Read separately, his lyrics seemed almost banal, which was why they’d never been printed on the CD covers, but once they were given life by his voice, and set to the haunting yet powerful cadences of his music, they became filled with meaning.
‘I’m not what you think,’ he said. ‘You don’t know everything.’
‘I didn’t mean to imply that. God, Dex, I know your success is just as much to do with your work, as any favours from the suits. You sing about the details of existence with a clarity that touches people. It’s like you can see around the corners in people’s lives and illuminate the dark spots.’ She was amazed at her own eloquence, given the amount of champagne she had consumed.
He laughed, but she could tell he was flattered. ‘Sounds like you’re working now! Funny. I never saw you write anything like that about me.’
‘You haven’t read everything, you know you haven’t. I don’t think you read my work very much at all. You don’t like it.’
‘Maybe. In that case, what do you think of mine?’
She paused. ‘To be honest, it’s a bit too commercial for me. Remember, I was reared in the grimy alleys of the alternative nation.’ She smiled. ‘As you know, I’m renowned for scorning anything that gleams with popularity, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate its qualities.’
‘Privately.’
She stared at him a moment. ‘Yes, privately.’
‘So what happened next, then? How’d you get to be a hack?’
She let that ride. ‘Let’s just say I graduated from doing artwork for independent labels - most of them were gulped down whole by larger companies. I work for ‘This’ magazine mainly, with the odd other job here and there.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘’This’ is a bit self-conscious, I know, but it has a good pedigree.’
Dex nodded. ‘I can remember when it was still a fanzine. Black and white smudged photo-copying.’
‘Yeah. But it’s survived, perhaps through luck more than judgement. It’s respectable now.’
Dex laughed. ‘Well, let’s face it, your safety-pinned punk anarchists have all got electronic filo-faxes now, talking about ‘windows’ in their diary.’ He pantomimed an affected voice. ‘Oh, we’re radio DJs and TV presenters. We have our little shops, restaurants and recording studios.’ He uttered a sound of derision. ‘They’ve become fat and complacent, but still think they’re trend-setters.’
Jay grimaced. ‘Harsh, but accurate.’ She didn’t want to say more, because she fitted
comfortably into that world, writing a scathing column in ‘This’ once a month that attacked anything that promised controversy. Still, she was aware that the youth of the country burned with different fires now, and perhaps her writing spoke only to her contemporaries, who lived in a time bubble of when anything had seemed possible.
She took a breath. ‘So, what about you, then?’
He laughed bitterly. ‘You know about me.’
‘I’m not stupid, Dex.’
He studied her. ‘No, I can see that.’
Later, Jay went back inside alone. Dex had uttered a friendly good-bye and left. She was slightly disappointed he hadn’t suggested they go on somewhere else together, but was amused by the quaint way he’d formally asked her for a date. They would meet tomorrow. She smiled to herself as she moved through the twittering crowd of the party, mentally replaying details of their conversation. His ego hadn’t been painful, he’d really listened to her, he’d been interested in what she had to say. How long had it been since she’d talked to someone like that?
Eventually, Jay came across Grant Fenton in a corner, draped drunkenly over a scantily-clad giggling girl.
‘Hey, Jay!’ Grant drawled. ‘Where’ve you been?’
She sat down next to him, aware she felt light-headed, excited. She hadn’t felt like that for a long time. ‘Grant,’ she said. ‘I’ve just met the most amazing man.’
Perhaps if Jay had met Dex five years before, they wouldn’t have been that different, but now they seemed like opposites; she articulate, groomed and sharp; he mouthy, scruffy and often insulting. He never insulted her, though. She wondered what they saw in each other, and whether other people thought they made an odd couple. Because they did become a couple.
He treated her from the start with a puzzling familiarity as if he couldn’t see the exterior she’d constructed for herself. There was something about her he liked or needed. She wasn’t a career girlfriend, like so many other women who fluttered desperately about the music scene. She didn’t measure her own worth in terms of who she could persuade to sleep with her. When she met Dex she hadn’t really wanted a regular partner. Romance was great, lust exhilarating, but after the gloss had dimmed, men, in Jay’s experience, tended to become unfaithful, demanding or cruel. Dex became none of these things. She often hated him for the things he said and did to other people, and detested the public persona he’d created, but at home he was her soul companion. They’d infiltrated the scene and had found each other. They knew the truth of the music industry, but milked it for all they could. It was their secret. They could laugh about it.