The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

was sitting up when he returned, propped back on an enormous gold lamé cushion, the single lamp at the foot of the couch throwing a semicircle of light on to the great flats which divided the sound stage from the auditorium. These were all from her last operatic role – The Medium – and represented a complete interior of the old spiritualist’s seance chamber, the one coherent feature in Madame Gioconda’s present existence. Surrounded by fragments from a dozen roles, even Madame Gioconda herself, Mangon reflected, seemed compounded of several separate identities. A tall regal figure, with full shapely shoulders and massive rib-cage, she had a large handsome face topped by a magnificent coiffure of rich blue-black hair – the exact prototype of the classical diva. She must have been almost fifty, yet her soft creamy complexion and small features were those of a child. The eyes, however, belied her. Large and watchful, slashed with mascara, they regarded the world around her balefully, narrowing even as Mangon approached. Her teeth too were bad, stained by tobacco and cheap cocaine. When she was roused, and her full violet lips curled with rage, revealing the blackened hulks of her dentures and the acid flickering tongue, her mouth looked like a very vent of hell. Altogether she was a formidable woman.

      As Mangon brought her tea she heaved herself up and made room for him by her feet among the debris of beads, loose diary pages, horoscopes and jewelled address books that littered the couch. Mangon sat down, surreptitiously noting the time (his first calls were at 9.30 the next morning and loss of sleep deadened his acute hearing), and prepared himself to listen to her for half an hour.

      Suddenly she flinched, shrank back into the cushion and gestured agitatedly in the direction of the darkened bandstand.

      ‘They’re still clapping!’ she shrieked. ‘For God’s sake sweep them away, they’re driving me insane. Oooohh …’ she rasped theatrically, ‘over there, quickly …!’

      Mangon leapt to his feet. He hurried over to the bandstand and carefully focused his ears on the tiers of seats and plywood music stands. They were all immaculately clean, well below the threshold at which embedded sounds began to radiate detectable echoes. He turned to the corner walls and ceiling. Listening very carefully he could just hear seven muted pads, the dull echoes of his footsteps across the floor. They faded and vanished, followed by a low threshing noise like blurred radio static – in fact Madame Gioconda’s present tantrum. Mangon could almost distinguish the individual words, but repetition muffled them.

      Madame Gioconda was still writhing about on the couch, evidently not to be easily placated, so Mangon climbed down off the stage and made his way through the auditorium to where he had left his sonovac by the door. The power lead was outside in the truck but he was sure Madame Gioconda would fail to notice.

      For five minutes he worked away industriously, pretending to sweep the bandstand again, then put down the sonovac and returned to the couch.

      Madame Gioconda emerged from the cushion, sounded the air carefully with two or three slow turns of the head, and smiled at him.

      ‘Thank you, Mangon,’ she said silkily, her eyes watching him thoughtfully. ‘You’ve saved me again from my assassins. They’ve become so cunning recently, they can even hide from you.’

      Mangon smiled ruefully to himself at this last remark. So he had been a little too perfunctory earlier on; Madame Gioconda was keeping him up to the mark.

      However, she seemed genuinely grateful. ‘Mangon, my dear,’ she reflected as she remade her face in the mirror of an enormous compact, painting on magnificent green eyes like a cobra’s, ‘what would I do without you? How can I ever repay you for looking after me?’

      The questions, whatever their sinister undertones (had he detected them, Mangon would have been deeply shocked) were purely rhetorical, and all their conversations for that matter entirely one-sided. For Mangon was a mute. From the age of three, when his mother had savagely punched him in the throat to stop him crying, he had been stone dumb, his vocal cords irreparably damaged. In all their endless exchanges of midnight confidences, Mangon had contributed not a single spoken word.

      His muteness, naturally, was part of the attraction he felt for Madame Gioconda. Both of them in a sense had lost their voices, he to a cruel mother, she to a fickle and unfaithful public. This bound them together, gave them a shared sense of life’s injustice, though Mangon, like all innocents, viewed his misfortune without rancour. Both, too, were social outcasts. Rescued from his degenerate parents when he was four, Mangon had been brought up in a succession of state institutions, a solitary wounded child. His one talent had been his remarkable auditory powers, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to the Metropolitan Sonic Disposal Service. Regarded as little better than garbage collectors, the sound-sweeps were an outcast group of illiterates, mutes (the city authorities preferred these – their discretion could be relied upon) and social cripples who lived in a chain of isolated shacks on the edge of an old explosives plant in the sand dunes to the north of the city which served as the sonic dump.

      Mangon had made no friends among the sound-sweeps, and Madame Gioconda was the first person in his life with whom he had been intimately involved. Apart from the pleasure of being able to help her, a considerable factor in Mangon’s devotion was that until her decline she had represented (as to all mutes) the most painful possible reminder of his own voiceless condition, and that now he could at last come to terms with years of unconscious resentment.

      This soon done, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to serving Madame Gioconda.

      Inhaling moodily on a black cigarette clamped into a long jade holder, she was outlining her plans for a comeback. These had been maturing for several months and involved nothing less than persuading Hector LeGrande, chairman-in-chief of Video City, the huge corporation that transmitted a dozen TV and radio channels, into providing her with a complete series of television spectaculars. Built around Madame Gioconda and lavishly dressed and orchestrated, they would spearhead the international revival of classical opera that was her unfading dream.

      ‘La Scala, Covent Garden, the Met – what are they now?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Bowling alleys! Can you believe, Mangon, that in those immortal theatres where I created my Tosca, my Butterfly, my Brünnhilde, they now have –’ she spat out a gust of smoke ‘– beer and skittles!’

      Mangon shook his head sympathetically. He pulled a pencil from his breast-pocket and on the wrist-pad stitched to his left sleeve wrote:

       Mr LeGrande?

      Madame Gioconda read the note, let it fall to the floor.

      ‘Hector? Those lawyers poison him. He’s surrounded by them, I think they steal all my telegrams to him. Of course Hector had a complete breakdown on the spectaculars. Imagine, Mangon, what a scoop for him, a sensation! ‘The great Gioconda will appear on television!’ Not just some moronic bubblegum girl, but the Gioconda in person.’

      Exhausted by this vision Madame Gioconda sank back into her cushion, blowing smoke limply through the holder.

      Mangon wrote:

       Contract?

      Madame Gioconda frowned at the note, then pierced it with the glowing end of her cigarette.

      ‘I am having a new contract drawn up. Not for the mere 300,000 I was prepared to take at first, not even 500,000. For each show I shall now demand precisely one million dollars. Nothing less! Hector will have to pay for ignoring me. Anyway, think of the publicity value of such a figure. Only a star could think of such vulgar extravagance. If he’s short of cash he can sack all those lawyers. Or devalue the dollar, I don’t mind.’

      Madame Gioconda hooted with pleasure at the prospect. Mangon nodded, then scribbled another message.

       Be practical.

      Madame Gioconda ground out her cigarette. ‘You think I’m raving, don’t you, Mangon? “Fantastic dreams, million-dollar contracts, poor old fool.” But let me assure you that Hector will be only too eager to sign the contract. And I don’t intend to rely solely on his good judgement as an impresario.’ She smirked archly to herself.