The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

her throat.

      He stared at her bewildered, then doubled over the wheel in a convulsion of silent laughter, slapping his thigh and thumping the dashboard. He pointed to the sonovac, then reached down and turned up the volume.

      ‘… aaauuuoooh,’ Madame Gioconda heard herself groan. She grasped her hat and secured it. ‘Mangon, what a dirty trick, you should have warned me.’

      Mangon grinned. The discordant sounds coming from the stockades began to fill the cabin again, and he turned down the volume. Gleefully, he scribbled on his wrist-pad:

       Now you know what it is like!

      Madame Gioconda opened her mouth to reply, then stopped in time, hiccuped and took his arm affectionately.

      FOUR

      Mangon slowed down as they approached a side road. Two hundred yards away on their left a small pink-washed cabin stood on a dune overlooking one of the stockades. They drove up to it, turned into a circular concrete apron below the cabin and backed up against one of the unloading bays, a battery of red-painted hydrants equipped with manifold gauges and release pipes running off into the stockade. This was only twenty feet away at its nearest point, a forest of door-shaped baffles facing each other in winding corridors, like a set from a surrealist film.

      As she climbed down from the truck Madame Gioconda expected the same massive wave of depression and overload that she had felt from the stockade of aircraft noises, but instead the air seemed brittle and frenetic, darting with sudden flashes of tension and exhilaration.

      As they walked up to the cabin Mangon explained:

       Party noises – company for me.

      The twenty or thirty baffles nearest the cabin he reserved for those screening him from the miscellaneous chatter that filled the rest of the stockade. When he woke in the mornings he would listen to the laughter and small talk, enjoy the gossip and wisecracks as much as if he had been at the parties himself.

      The cabin was a single room with a large window overlooking the stockade, well insulated from the hubbub below. Madame Gioconda showed only a cursory interest in Mangon’s meagre belongings, and after a few general remarks came to the point and went over to the window. She opened it slightly, listened experimentally to the stream of atmospheric shifts that crowded past her.

      She pointed to the cabin on the far side of the stockade. ‘Mangon, whose is that?’

       Gallagher’s. My partner. He sweeps City Hall, University, V.C., big mansions on 5th and A. Working now.

      Madame Gioconda nodded and surveyed the stockade with interest. ‘How fascinating. It’s like a zoo. All that talk, talk, talk. And you can hear it all.’ She snapped back her bracelets with swift decisive flicks of the wrist.

      Mangon sat down on the bed. The cabin seemed small and dingy, and he was saddened by Madame Gioconda’s disinterest. Having brought her all the way out to the dumps he wondered how he was going to keep her amused. Fortunately the stockade intrigued her. When she suggested a stroll through it he was only too glad to oblige.

      

      Down at the unloading bay he demonstrated how he emptied the tanker, clipping the exhaust leads to the hydrant, regulating the pressure through the manifold and then pumping the sound away into the stockade.

      Most of the stockade was in a continuous state of uproar, sounding something like a crowd in a football stadium, and as he led her out among the baffles he picked their way carefully through the quieter aisles. Around them voices chattered and whined fretfully, fragments of conversation drifted aimlessly over the air. Somewhere a woman pleaded in thin nervous tones, a man grumbled to himself, another swore angrily, a baby bellowed. Behind it all was the steady background murmur of countless TV programmes, the easy patter of announcers, the endless monotones of race-track commentators, the shrieking audiences of quiz shows, all pitched an octave up the scale so that they sounded an eerie parody of themselves.

      A shot rang out in the next aisle, followed by screams and shouting. Although she heard nothing, the pressure pulse made Madame Gioconda stop.

      ‘Mangon, wait. Don’t be in so much of a hurry. Tell me what they’re saying.’

      Mangon selected a baffle and listened carefully. The sounds appeared to come from an apartment over a launderette. A battery of washing machines chuntered to themselves, a cash register slammed interminably, there was a dim almost subthreshold echo of 60-cycle hum from an SP record-player.

      He shook his head, waved Madame Gioconda on.

      ‘Mangon, what did they say?’ she pestered him. He stopped again, sharpened his ears and waited. This time he was more lucky, an over-emotional female voice was gasping ‘… but if he finds you here he’ll kill you, he’ll kill us both, what shall we do …’ He started to scribble down this outpouring, Madame Gioconda craning breathlessly over his shoulder, then recognized its source and screwed up the note.

      ‘Mangon, for heaven’s sake, what was it? Don’t throw it away! Tell me!’ She tried to climb under the wooden superstructure of the baffle to recover the note, but Mangon restrained her and quickly scribbled another message.

       Adam and Eve. Sorry.

      ‘What, the film? Oh, how ridiculous! Well, come on, try again.’

      Eager to make amends, Mangon picked the next baffle, one of a group serving the staff married quarters of the University. Always a difficult job to keep clean, he struck paydirt almost at once.

      ‘… my God, there’s Bartok all over the place, that damned Steiner woman, I’ll swear she’s sleeping with her …’

      Mangon took it all down, passing the sheets to Madame Gioconda as soon as he covered them. Squinting hard at his crabbed handwriting, she gobbled them eagerly, disappointed when, after half a dozen, he lost the thread and stopped.

      ‘Go on, Mangon, what’s the matter?’ She let the notes fall to the ground. ‘Difficult, isn’t it. We’ll have to teach you shorthand.’

      They reached the baffles Mangon had just filled from the previous day’s rounds. Listening carefully he heard Paul Merrill’s voice: ‘… month’s Transonics claims that … the entire city will come down like Jericho.’

      He wondered if he could persuade Madame Gioconda to wait for fifteen minutes, when he would be able to repeat a few carefully edited fragments from Alto’s promise to arrange her guest appearance, but she seemed eager to move deeper into the stockade.

      ‘You said your friend Gallagher sweeps out Video City, Mangon. Where would that be?’

      Hector LeGrande. Of course, Mangon realized, why had he been so obtuse. This was the chance to pay the man back.

      He pointed to an area a few aisles away. They climbed between the baffles, Mangon helping Madame Gioconda over the beams and props, steering her full skirt and wide hat brim away from splinters and rusted metalwork.

      

      The task of finding LeGrande was simple. Even before the baffles were in sight Mangon could hear the hard, unyielding bite of the tycoon’s voice, dominating every other sound from the Video City area. Gallagher in fact swept only the senior dozen or so executive suites at V.C., chiefly to relieve their occupants of the distasteful echoes of LeGrande’s voice.

      Mangon steered their way among these, searching for LeGrande’s master suite, where anything of a really confidential nature took place.

      There were about twenty baffles, throwing off an unending chorus of ‘Yes, H.L.’, ‘Thanks, H.L.’, ‘Brilliant, H.L.’ Two or three seemed strangely quiet, and he drew Madame Gioconda over to them.

      This was LeGrande with his personal secretary and PA. He took out his pencil and focused carefully.

      ‘…