Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett

But I don’t hear …’

      He checked himself.

      ‘The voice?’ said Clive.

      ‘I don’t mean to be so plain but it’s quite …’

      ‘Monotonous,’ they said together.

      ‘Yes,’ said Clive, looking at his feet. ‘It is sadly limited.’

      ‘So what happened to that voice in the meantime?’

      Clive leaned back against the glass of the bus shelter, then stood forward again.

      ‘I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he had accidentally or purposely disturbed in some way a fairy mound. Bad consequences are known to result from such an action.’

      ***

      Within a few weeks of rehearsals Denny, Clive and Rickard had a core of fifteen songs for their set and a repertoire that extended to three dozen more. They were satisfied at last that their voices achieved harmony: Denny steadfastly held the middle; Rickard cleaved to and weaved around him; Clive skirted the top. They had a name for their trio too: the Free ’n’ Easy Tones. It was of course Denny’s name. It was not a traditional-sounding name, he conceded, but it had a spunk and a jizz about it that might catch the eye of modern audiences.

      Rickard was excited about the idea of performing and making money out of it, but he couldn’t help wondering if Denny’s expectations of how their music would be received in the modern city were unrealistic. Did this residual affection that Denny insisted New Yorkers had for Irish tenor singing carry to the young people? It was hard to imagine, and New York was a young city. The young people seemed always busy and sometimes angry and interested only in young music and fashions. The boys were feminised yet somehow thrusting, like wicked regime-favoured women of mercy-free places of the East. The girls were not people Rickard could imagine in the nursing profession (apart from the girls he saw on the streets in medical scrubs, and there were many of these girls). All the young people were in thrall to the great technology cult, Puffball Computers. In every coffee shop they were bent behind the orbs of the hoods of their Puffball machines; if they were to lift their heads at all it was only for an incoming young acquaintance who they would acknowledge by dislodging then quickly reinstating a single white earplug. He recalled Denny’s enquiry weeks earlier about whether he was the sort who would ‘twist an implement inside an elderly man and rob his things’. He wondered about how easily these words had come from the old man and whether this was so because he had been violated in a natural or surgeon-made opening of his body by angry young people. Many muscles contracted in him at the thought of several gruesome scenarios and he felt these contractions as empathy. He pondered the cruelness of this city with its dry-eyed young people who would cull their living forebears. It was a city, he would later see confirmed, where even the young and the avant-garde spoke very well the language of money; a city that called on you to keep a hard ferocious focus. But he appreciated too that the young people were angry because they were afraid, for he understood that America was dying. Another old man, an Indian-Ugandan in a coffee shop, said that India was taking over and that perhaps Uganda would too if its ‘this’ levelled out to ‘this’ and ‘this’, and he appreciated that the new generation of young people must have felt great pressure to earn money in order to continue to enjoy the luxuries they were used to.

      Their efforts in the early weeks to secure concert bookings were frustrated. Denny rang some likely venues – supper clubs and cabaret rooms – but all responded by requesting a sample of music on an internet website. This was something none of the men were either capable of providing or inclined to provide. Besides, as Denny asserted, an Irish tenor concert was about more than just the sound of voices; it was the experience of the live performance: seeing the joy and melancholy of song in the faces of three men; borne in their deportment, the plight of an injured linnet as a symbol of the plight of a nation.

      Denny also contacted an Italian entertainment agent he had known many years before but had not been in touch with for a long time. The agent, Denny said, had promised to enlist a theatrical-set designer of his acquaintance who could create cycloramic backdrops for them. There was talk too of elaborate three-dimensional stage props, round towers and passage tombs and such, from which one or all of them might emerge as part of their act. The agent said that he knew opera-house managers in Campania and Sicily, including that of the San Carlo in Naples, and that if all went well the Free ’n’ Easy Tones would soon be touring the south of Italy and that they would be millionaires. It all sounded too wonderful to be true, and of course it was. Some days later, after another phone call to the agent, Denny was told that the trio would have to audition for a place on his roster.

      The old man fumed.

      ‘I have offered him a private concert in these rooms yet still he demands we line up outside his decrepit offices with the sword swallowers and the cowgirl troupes. Well schist and frack to that! He can stick his auditions in his cameo locket and stuff it in his cannoli! And curse his dead mama! We’re better than this, boys!’

      Then one Sunday evening Denny told Clive and Rickard that he had had a dream during a nap that afternoon. He described it with the solemnness and detachment of a religious mystic, looking away and into himself in recollection of the vision.

      ‘I saw loudspeakers attached to telegraph poles in a bocage-like landscape playing the music of liberation.’

      ‘Were they playing our music?’ said Clive.

      ‘They were playing Al Jolson. They were playing Al Jolson. Listen now – we must find a mosque. I believe hundreds have sprung up around the city in recent times. We’ll get a willing muezzin – bribe him if necessary – to play our music over his loudspeakers and have it echo down the avenues.’

      ‘We’ll need to make a record first, to play it on his stereo,’ said Rickard.

      ‘We’ll look in the Yellow Pages!’ said Clive.

      ‘Yes!’

      Denny bounded humpbacked from his chair like an excited monkey. They were all excited – at the way they seemed to harmonise and relay on this gathering idea. They ripped leaves and sheaves from the directory – the hand of one beating away the hand of another – until they reached the R listings. They found a number – one of several under ‘RECORD COMPANIES’. Aabacus Records. Denny straightened his back and went to his phone. Rickard took a deep breath, went to the window, tore back the Turkish curtains. To the south, a huge glowing nebula that changed through phases of intensity and colour hung between the great entertainments of Midtown and the proscenium of cloud above. All seemed poised and possible.

      ‘Fellows!’ called Denny in a loud rasp with his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. He beckoned the others near. ‘“The Caul That Jack Was Born With”, all right? When I slide my hand away. On three …’

      Some twenty-five minutes and ten songs (‘The Caul That Jack …’ / ‘Cogitations of My Fancy’ / ‘’Tis Very Cold For June’ / ‘The Malefactors’ Register’ / ‘Empress of the Americas’ / ‘Evidence of the Glimmie Glide’ / ‘The “Celebrated” Windy Song’ / ‘Letters from France’ / ‘A Pike in the Eye’ / ‘What I Shall Have Been For What I Am in the Process of Becoming’) later they took a pause, took a step back, and Denny signalled that that was enough. They had given the best possible account of themselves. They would change the world.

      With the return of the wail of far-off sirens, and as the light in the room seemed to pulse and pitch as on a boat adrift, Rickard realised that it was ten past eight on a weekend evening and that no record company would be open for business. Also, he noticed that the year on the front of the directory was ‘1961’.

      There came then the sound of laughter – cackling laughter, as troubled as it was troublesome – from up the hallway and out in the landing. Denny swung open his front door. A big man, broad as a sandwich board, was creased over on himself.

      ‘Jeremiah! What are you doing?!’

      The man stretched to full height, rising to six and a quarter feet. He had flaccid dangling arms like