Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett

this – moving back to Dublin – paralysed slightly in movement, and partly in thought itself, for the rest of the day. Late in the night he tried to sing. He willed his diaphragm to flatten like a weakling pushing a plunger, and he intoned. His plans to be a singer now seemed altogether pathetic. He knew no way of going about being a singer – and how juvenile and risible of him to have even dreamt of it. He took Lyons tea and felt that perhaps it would be nice to return to Dublin and embrace the kind of love that was sympathy. But it was painfully easy too to imagine the great stigma of being delivered, pitied, in a squeaking cage like some kind of King Puck, brass crown askew, with divergent eyes. No; no. It was true; he could not return to Dublin so soon.

      There was of course another option, another way that an observer of his situation might have told him would improve that situation; but it was one that Rickard had never been, nor was now, prepared to entertain. He had felt, from the moment his father had introduced the idea, that to go to the Cha Bum Kun clubhouse would be to walk into a trap. His father knew that Rickard would only have approached the lodge in the most miserable condition. Down at heel, pining for home, and sitting across a room from old men, he would be squarely in front of the cause of his flight from his parents.

      No, no, he decided. He would attack his problems with great conviction. Encouragement came from an unsought source. One of the books in a book shop that he was left face to face with that he was not in the first place looking for was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Lessons emanated. He would strain at his balls and sockets from the down-suck and make money. This was America, this was New York, the beating and – importantly – not geographical and not rutted heart of America. Men here had made art deco facades to provide footholds and handholds to the clouds. Later in the 1980s men had made the same things in polished granite that was the colour of both the inside and outside of salmon. Now new walkways were emerging on elevated platforms, and gleaming silver tubes on skyscraper roofs pumped beautiful pure clouds into clear blue skies. Young people, no longer afraid to revel in youth and money, were running with the spirit. Many wore ironic pilot goggles in a nod to the spirit of early aviation. A new dawn, or a new young spirit, was rising, or abroad.

      In the meantime, in a time, some time, in the middle of that, on a day when no ATM in the city would accept his PIN, a woman in the bank persuaded him that – yes – he should get a job because his funds were rapidly depleting, and assured him that the problem with his card would be resolved by the next morning.

      ‘But if you don’t mind me saying,’ this banking woman with beautiful Greek almond eyes decorated with platinum eye shadow said, ‘it’s all fine declaring that you’re a professional singer, but when you’ve got no income from it, it isn’t worth the name that you give it. New York is an expensive place at the best of times.’

      This was true, Rickard knew, but he had said ‘professional singer’ without any belief that that’s what he actually was and only to make it seem that he was not a layabout.

      ‘But then I realise the kind of person you are,’ continued the woman with the Greek eyes, ‘and it’s the kind who will be satisfied only with following some “art and craft” pursuit.’

      ‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ said Rickard, taking in the woman’s stern high-waisted navy skirt and then looking at his hands on his knees.

      ‘There are plenty of creative opportunities in this city if you look around you. New York is full of reminders that you may not be wasting your time if that’s the life you feel you must live. There are signs in the smallest gesture on the street and in the grandest building on the block.’

      Perhaps this woman was not Greek after all: Rickard had only thought so because his thinking had become contaminated when he noticed the Greek-style columns in the hall. And then there was the question of him taking advice from a person who was obviously under the spell of these trashy fashionable novels that dealt in symbology and conspiracies: a copy of The Gordion Quorum by Cole Tyler lay on her desk.

      ‘New York,’ said the woman, ‘is a city built by cults who begat cults who know very expertly the art of making cults. And this is my suggestion to you: that you find a cult of your own. There is a very large one in the city right now that you would do well to be a part of. Lots of people young and old are part of it and it worries those of us who are not! I’m talking of course about Puffball Computers. You won’t have failed to notice its adherents. They carry Puffball products with them wherever they go, and they look in ways unconventional, yet every element of their appearance is discrete from the other elements around it. They are so clean and ready for this world that they’ve shaped for themselves. We in the bank are always happy to help a person who looks like this.’

      ***

      Breaking point came one evening when he fought a hopeless battle against a translucent close relative of the cockroach, the water bug. Long after the creature had scuttled to safety he was still rattling his tongue scraper back and forth through the crack behind his water cabinet.

      ‘Die! Die! Die!’ multiplied ten thousand times he screamed.

      Afterwards he went to his bedroom, sat at the end of the bed, and began to do the one thing he’d been doing a lot of recently to comfort himself. Most often he would select a song to lift his mood, but occasionally he let the mood dictate the selection of song. That evening the most morbid ballad in the Challoner canon, a song about expulsion to the penal colonies, poured from him:

      ‘Diemen, smother my face

      And have what you will,

      For the bread I have taken

      Is making me ill.’

      As he sang, he looked from his window to the night sky and the full moon above. He saw it as a spot at the end of a beam of light moving across clouds that were not, on this coldly clear night, there. A call for help, or to arms, in other words. Then he looked at his Challoner book on his bedside stand and considered again his home, his father, his mother’s porous brain, his genetics, Toni, and his funds. He saw from the corner of his eye a movement on the wall – a plain cockroach. He leapt to his wardrobe where his Cha Bum Kun tie hung on a hook on the inside of the door, made a loop with it, and went to crack it against the bug. But he pulled back at the last moment; and then began the complex and arduous process of putting on the tie.

      New York City’s Cha Bum Kun clubhouse was a townhouse-height Venetian box of white and smoky-blue stone, in Murray Hill, Manhattan. Tall windows tapered to sharp points and the impression of verticality continued through many twisting chimneys and flues. Inside, the air smelt of brass polish and coconut hair. A flying-buttress-style walkway vaulted the width of the grand stair hall. The walls to second-floor level were crusted with dozens of skulls of mystery beasts.

      ‘Rabbits, hares and cows,’ said a receptionist, a Pole, or Russian. ‘All killed by Kunians, or their Pak Doo Ik forerunners, in the New York area when it was mainly forest and silica.’

      He beckoned Rickard to bend his head towards him. Pulling Rickard’s tie across the desk between finger and thumb, he worked slowly towards the knot, appearing to examine the threading. When he got to the knot, he pinched into it with his nails, then produced a thumb tack and tried and failed to puncture it – testing it presumably for hardness and layering.

      ‘What is your name?’

      ‘Rickard Velily.’

      Now he looked into a diary, scanning down through a series of paragraphs in tiny squarish handwriting. He turned over two pages until he found the entry he was looking for.

      ‘Rickard Velily. Yes, yes. Velily. Yes. Okay, just give me a moment. Yes. Velily. Your father rang ahead some weeks ago and told us, uh … to expect you?’

      ‘He did?’

      ‘Yes, he did. Can you wait here for a little while until the President arrives?’

      Clicking feet descended the stone grand stairway, and a ‘Hello’ sounded from two flights up. The President embraced Rickard with overbearing warmth. He looked every centimetre the reluctantly retired company executive with his figure-hugging silver suit, his Latin tan, and his side-parted