Green Glowing Skull

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 grey hair held in place by a perfumed product.

He introduced himself as Paulus.

‘Rickard, the first thing to say to you is that we’ll ask no questions. You’re among friends here. We’ll ask nothing other than that you don’t play loud music in your room, that you smoke only tobacco, and that you eat only in your room and not in the dining hall, and only off your plate and not off your lap or bed sheets. Of course if you choose to become a member and pay your subscriptions you can eat with us in the dining hall.’

Rickard was taken to the other side of the building, and an elevator. The elevator was of a corporate 1980s design – Nefertiti’s breast cups blinkered bulbs in its corners. It took them to an attic floor where Rickard’s bedroom was. The bedroom was plain – bare dark floorboards; yellow walls on which was hung a framed picture of ‘the 18th at Valhalla Golf Club’ – and partly dirty. The bed, a double sleigh, at least looked comfortable. A bedside locker, a desk, a tall walnut wardrobe and some chipboard bookshelves completed the furnishings. The shelves were scattered with books on business: ‘how-to’s and biographies and annual reports. A porthole in the slanted ceiling was filled with distorting glass.

President Paulus leaned against the door jamb with crossed arms, looking as if he had not seen the room in a long time. Embarrassment, disdain and contrition expressed themselves in a cluster of dimples on his chin.

‘Home for however long you require. But with any luck you’ll be self-sufficient again soon. Until then you’ll receive our stipend. You’ll need to leave your bank details with Jon our treasurer. And while you’re under our roof, please enjoy our amenities. We have a library, a billiards and card room, and a racquet court which I’m afraid these days is used only for storage. We also have a small pro golf shop.’

Rickard settled for now on the drawing room. The room was hot as he entered, and he felt his face flush. A fire blazed in the grate. Set as it was into a gigantic tableau carved from green-grey soapstone, the fireplace resembled the centrepiece of a tall satanic grotto. At first glance the tableau seemed to be an oppressive mass of ribs, roots and boils, as if made of continually melting and solidifying wax. As Rickard’s eyes adjusted he picked out the details: foliage, weaponry, fauns, sheep-people, Korean farmhands, men from Europe. It was an attempt to represent the legend of Cha Bum Kun. Here were the gryphons and dragons of his childhood; there was the Moon Baby that brought him dairy produce from the West. It was a random and confused scene, and therefore a good representation of the story. Nobody was sure of the details of the story of Cha Bum Kun or in which order the details came. Nobody knew, either, what Cha Bum Kun’s message was, or even if he had had a message, or what lessons could be drawn from his life, or even if he had ever lived. In truth, Cha Bum Kun was not a figure that was taken very seriously. It meant that the Cha Bum Kun Club had no rituals – the tie business aside, and despite the vocabulary around its workings – and no ethos. It was, and always had been, just a club where men from all over the world could meet each other in its lodges, make useful connections, relax and play games. Usually these men were of such a disposition – meek, or odd – that they found it hard to get on in the world despite significant financial means. (And, usually, they were of significant financial means.)

There was just a single free chair in the room. It was so positioned that Rickard could not help but face two men. One of these men was bald on top, perfectly round-headed, and had an underbite. A pad of spittle had collected at a corner of his mouth. The other man had a full head of greasy white hair, long and pinned back behind the ears, and a face that tapered to the nose and lips like the blade of a Stone Age hatchet. They were snoozing, and easy to imagine dead.

Recently Rickard had been given to imagining that any elderly person he saw looked dead. Perhaps this was because the elderly were the easiest of all people to imagine dead: their corpses, in the main, would not look so different to the living versions of themselves. Something of the fear of death would disappear with this visualisation, although when he thought of his parents at home he saw them face down on the floor beside each other and hollowed out and grey like hot-counter chickens. But this bald old man would not be quickly corruptible. He would remain apple-cheeked and full in the mouth – no collapse in support behind the lips. Rickard imagined him too in a giant glass tube, in a bubbling rose-coloured liquid.

The other man – the flint-hatchet one, rigid in his chair, one hand loosely holding the other – would find the transition to corpsehood traumatic. His face was whittled, Rickard decided; had an eaten quality, been blasted, from having seen too much. He had uncanny foresight. Or, rather, uncanny experience: he knew, somehow, the advancing horrors. In the first moments of death the microbes would swiftly – and not for the first time – get to work; the tissue in the face would subside ply on ply and the hard edges above would harden further.

But even haunted by death there was something elevating about this man. He would be long and limber and heroic and become one with the relief carving in his likeness on the lid of his tomb. The tomb would be made of alabaster and in the dark it would glow. And in death the other man too – there would be something grand and glorious. This man as a crusader at rest, and that man at peace in his bubbling tube: and now the tableau behind glistened and quivered. Rickard saw in its details other creation stories; he thought of Romulus and Remus, Europa, and of the Milesians. He saw in it too evolution: the squirming tissue oozing more of itself, regulated by an electronic pulsar; but in the embers something seasoning – a glimpse of another world, arcane and outlasting, beyond bosses or bailiffs.

The heat of the fire had lulled him to sleep – a thump of the heart brought him back to life. He saw the bald man taking him in with querulous rousing eyes. The other man fully awake. The fire roaring again with fresh fuel.

‘New blood?’ said the bald man, with a discernibly Irish accent.

Rickard was afraid to open his mouth. It would give him away and then they would be off on that predictable old track talking about the same old bull.

The other man looked him gently up and down, and said, also with an Irish accent, but Americanised, and slightly lispy and high, ‘Sure leave him be, Denny. He’s only settling in. You’re very welcome anyhow. I’m Clive Sullis. Your friend here is Denny Kennedy-Logan.’

‘He’s not normally so forward and confident,’ said the first man, Denny, leaning now with ladsy familiarity towards Rickard. ‘The club makes him feel very secure. In the street he’s a lamb.’

Well, he would have to be out with it. He told the men his name – established that Denny was from Dublin, Clive from south Donegal (‘though I went off to Dublin as soon as I could escape’). Both had been in New York a long time.

‘And so they’ve given you that attic room, aye?’ said Denny. ‘They gave me that room when I first came here. But they boot you out once you find your way again. I wonder if they’ll ever give it back to me. What do you think you’ll do with yourself here in this city?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Rickard. ‘Perhaps I’ll stay with the newspapers.’

‘You look like a print-room boy, all right. Do you know about the hierarchy of aprons? You won’t get anywhere in that game unless you have the right length of apron.’

‘But,’ Rickard cut back in, ‘I’ve a bit of an old hankering to become a singer, that’s what I’ve set my sights on.’

‘Nothing in that game either. I knew a “rock and roller” in Dublin called Pádraigín O’Clock. You’ve never heard of him because he never amounted to anything.’

‘I don’t want to be a rock-and-roll singer, sir. I want to be a tenor.’

‘A tenor!’ Denny guffawed, clapping his hands together as a log exploded in the grate and hissed in its half-life. ‘Clive, would you listen to this! And how is your voice?’

‘Untested. Untrained,’ said Rickard. ‘But it’s all there, I think.’

‘You must try and coax it out so. Have you thought about getting lessons?’

‘Yes, this eventually would have been the plan.’

Denny sat back into his seat and turned to his companion. ‘Well, Clive, what do you think?’

Clive, to Rickard, said, ‘Denny here is a tenor of note.’

‘And better known than Pádraigín O’Clock I was in my day, too!’

‘He was,’ nodded Clive, ‘I can vouch. Sure Pádraigín never made it to acetate, and you made it to America.’

‘True enough! True enough! Did you know that Pádraigín’s real name was Pádraigín Cruise? They always give themselves these jazzy names, these “rock and rollers”.’ When Denny had finished laughing, he said to Rickard, ‘If it’s lessons you want, come to me, and we’ll see what you’re about.’

He took a notepad – personalised with his initials – from the pocket of his cardigan, and scribbled his home address.

‘We’ll say this time tomorrow, at my apartment. What do you think?’

Before Rickard had time to answer, Denny, to Clive, said, ‘New blood, what did I tell you?’

2

The corners of the piece of notepaper were decorated with feathers and swirls; taking a cue – Rickard fancied, as he made his way from the subway station – from the built character of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Leafy friezes and arabesques on building facades spoke of high ambitions, but the impression of the area now was of neglect and decay. Bread husks dissolved to pap and fish heads putrefied in neon-pink pools; discarded plumbing technology cluttered pavements and front lots; in the air distant sirens mingled with a nearer synthesised racket; on the avenue cars hurtled south to brighter lights. Rickard hurried down a side street, found the door he was looking for, and pushed its heavy iron grille.

Upstairs he followed a corridor that turned three corners to Denny Kennedy-Logan’s door. Immediately it opened the guilt crashed over him again: Denny Kennedy-Logan was very old; Rickard’s very old parents remained abandoned in Ireland. Denny was wearing a bulky dressing gown, tightly tied, which suggested to Rickard age-related illness, and he became a little angry, thinking of how he’d been manipulated. The old man would have him, before he knew it, wiping his bottom.

But he had a surprising bounce, Denny, to his walk; a combative bustle and energy, as he led the way into his apartment. He was forward-angled rather than forward-leaning or forward-stooped. Rickard could picture him in leathers, in a garage, at three in the morning, failing to kick-start a Triumph motorcycle; on his way to a confrontation or to playing a mean prank on someone; unwittingly and unknowingly kneeing a child in the skull in the course of a purposeful stroll.

A darkened passageway brought them to an inner room, softly lit and warm in colour. A brass or bronze arm projected from a wall and held a barely luminous globe. Rickard perched on the edge of the seat he was offered, under the arm. An upright piano created an obstruction in the middle of the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanked a chimney breast and the space on the shelves in front of the books was cluttered with trinkets and ornaments, as was a mantelpiece, a wake table, a whatnot and a small chest of drawers. Larger ornaments – slim glazed pots and a couple of wooden figures such as might have been prised off the front of a medieval guildhall or from the alcoves of a reredos – sat on the floor against the wall behind him. The place smelt either of dog or popcorn, Rickard could not decide which. As if in answer, a ginger-and-white dog with a squidgy pink-and-black face came skittering into the room and rolled on its back by its owner’s feet. The old man pulled up a chair so that he could sit down and tickle the dog’s belly. After a minute he turned the animal over and toggled the flesh on its head until its eyes watered. ‘My little poopy frootkin, my little poopy frootkin,’ he said, and continued to jerk the dog’s head.

‘You found me all right,’ he said, still looking at the dog.

It took Rickard a moment to realise that the old man was talking to him. ‘Your directions were very good,’ he said.

He sat back into the seat, warily, expecting broken springs and plumes of dust, but discovered a plump and yielding easy chair that smelt most definitely of dog; for split seconds he remembered the two dogs of his childhood, Jumpy and Kenneth. This was a comfortable, lived-in sort of place, he admitted to himself. Something about the randomness of the clutter and the softness of the light reminded him of the living room of a wealthy Irish country home or townhouse. It would be nice to live in this way in this city, he soon found himself imagining; in a dim few rooms near the service core of an old apartment building surrounded by the stuff of a lifetime. He spotted high on the bookshelves a cherrywood radio set like the one in his father’s clubhouse in Dublin. He remembered seeing it on Spring Open Day. A man called Wally had said, ‘That is just like the one in my grandfather’s country kitchen. My grandfather was a great man for the ideas and one day he had the idea that there was a little man inside that radio and he smashed it up with a hammer.’ He chuckled gently at the memory, forgetting himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Denny, ‘would you like some shaved ice?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Rickard. ‘I haven’t long finished my dinner.’

‘I have a machine inside for it.’

‘I’m fine, really.’

‘I don’t drink alcohol any more, so I’ve nothing to offer you in the way of that. We said nine o’clock?’

‘Nine o’clock was the time I thought we agreed in the club last night.’

‘I must have meant four o’clock. I’m usually thinking about bed by nine. But all right so – nine o’clock.’

The old man made playful faces and noises at his dog, then spun it around and sent it racing away with a loud smack on the backside.

‘Here for the night we are, then. Oh well, I’ll enjoy the challenge.’

He stood up and, with his shins, shuffled an ottoman towards Rickard.

‘At least have the footrest,’ he insisted, manoeuvring the item under Rickard’s feet. ‘You should come and see the outside of my building in the daytime. It’s been said that it looks like the Treasury in Petra, so grand and serious does it look in this street, and so suddenly does it come upon you.’

‘It’s not an area lacking in grandeur.’

‘No it is not.’

The old man sat down again, on top of his yelping dog, which had already skittered back into the room and settled itself up on the chair.

‘But the pity then it has all gone to rot. The cross-streets are not so bad but they funnel you, with no by and by about it, to the main drags. If I take a stroll anywhere these days it’s on West End Avenue.’

‘I have been on West End Avenue,’ said Rickard, indulging him. ‘It’s a very beautiful thoroughfare.’

‘What do you like about it?’

He thought about it seriously and could not come up with anything better than, ‘I like that it doesn’t have any shops.’

The old man sat perfectly still for a moment, then added, ‘It brings to mind, for me, the old world, or at least old New York, with its old associations. And something of the world of the tango, and of depressed beef barons. But mostly, yes, it recalls a great European boulevard. In its scale, in its idiom and, when I think about it now, its shape. Not so much because it curves, which it doesn’t, but because it undulates. Like keys rippling. Under a virtuoso’s hand. Spelgelman used to live there, as did Rosburanoff.’

These revelations delighted Rickard, although he had no clue who the old man was talking about.

‘Tell me now, Rickard Velily’ – he said his name mockingly, Rickard sensed, throwing in an extra ‘-il-’ syllable, and became distracted with the taste of it on his tongue – ‘Velily, Velily, Velily. Is it an Irish name?’

‘It is. It’s also a village in White Russia.’

‘They are Bialy this and Bialy that in New York. Many people originate from places that were once part of Antique Poland or Lithuania, or Greater Austria or Russia. Velily is one of those names that is Irish but might not be. Like Costello, which could be Italian, or Egan, which could be Turkish, or Maher, which could be Berber.’