AT AROUND MIDDAY on Saturday morning Abe left his room and careered down the front stairs two at a time, causing the hall light bulb to sway. His steps on the bare wood made echoes and the traffic hummed, but within itself the house was quiet. The two bicycles had gone, revealing scuff marks on the wall and drifts of dust that collected between the skirting board and the wheels. Luka had left – and Kirsty too, it seemed, on Declan’s bike. There was a white envelope and a couple of flyers on the mat. Abe picked up the envelope, saw the giveaway window and dropped it on top of the other letters from the bank that were heaped in a pile. The pile was tall, heading for a tower. He gave it a kick and the letters scattered over the floor.
Abe went back upstairs. He finished the mug of tea he had made earlier and picked up the A4 notebook that was lying next to the swivel chair. Page one was torn out, but on the next page he had drawn a circle with lines radiating from it, beside which he had written ‘sun disc’. Another page was full of scarabs. They were neat drawings with the divisions of the beetle form in the right places. Some of the creatures appeared to be smiling. Some had big eyes. On Thursday afternoon, after calling Richard’s office, he had filled half the book. He had started to make notes on incorporating fitness into the Egyptian religion. Exercising for Osiris. Spin-offs had kept occurring to him. Government grants for combating the obesity epidemic. Backhanders from health clubs. He had fleetingly considered reintroducing the old religion to the Middle East and winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but had shied away from the trouble that that would involve. He hadn’t planned to have Gloria as a partner in the enterprise, though he was sure that with more focus she could develop the business potential of her musical/spiritual interests. She was tough as a person, but not commercial and rarely left south London. Abe had broken into a cold sweat as he jotted down headings, worried that the competition had already got hold of his ideas and was at that very moment infiltrating the market. Yet, even as he had despaired of leading the field, the ideas had gone flat and he had remembered that no part of them was real.
His mania hadn’t returned. He had called in sick on Friday. For the whole of the day he had sat around in his room, setting fire to small bits of paper in the ashtray. For the duration of the flame’s flicker he felt alive but inevitably it died and then he was bored. He was also agitated. With him the two went together. Mood was stickiness, or rather, particles of stickiness that adhered to everything he thought and did, and which he tried to shake off. He envied people for whom trouble was a cloud or a blanket. Kirsty used mood as a hiding place. She made it cosy for herself, pretending she was perfect, martyring herself to borrowed goldfish. No, that wasn’t fair. For a sister she was pretty faultless.
Abe dropped the notebook and crossed the room to put on some music. He needed to hear something new. He picked up a CD and put it in the player. ‘Gesualdo RESPONSORIES’ it said on the box. It was one that Declan had left behind before Christmas. The stack was still piled up in a corner. The music’s edginess caught in his throat like the fumes from the traffic. Abe turned up the volume so that the sound went up through the roof and down to the basement. In Iverdale Road no one complained. Abe sat down in the swivel chair with the sleeve notes on his knee. Spiritus quidem promptus est, caro autem infirma. The spirit indeed is ready but the flesh is weak. The words seemed slick – on the one hand, on the other – but the music blew in a different direction, wanting to escape, still on the lookout. Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, had discovered his wife having sex with another man and had organised her murder – and her lover’s murder. A bit extreme, Abe thought. Luckily, Carlo had carried on with the composing.
Abe tilted the chair back, letting the sleeve notes slide to the floor. Church music had once been the business. Everyone had been in on it: family men like Bach, excitable types like Gesualdo. The band of sky that appeared above the opposite roofs was cloudless but Abe thought of a corporate golfing umbrella, rolled up, propped in the corner of a room. ‘Are you all right?’ was what he had wanted to say to Richard. On balance, the secretary’s dependable voice had reassured him – the talk of a client meeting.
A woman on the top deck of a number 52 bus heard beautiful singing. She closed her eyes and listened. The traffic was stationary, waiting at the lights. Pull yourself together, she thought. There aren’t angels on the bus. Tamsin Spira opened her eyes and lifted a strand of hair from her face with the self-conscious gesture of someone who used to be noticed. She glanced round to see if there was anyone behind with a leaking iPod. A man was asleep on the back seat. He had a grey hood pulled over his head but no trailing wires. A black kid across the aisle, half hidden behind a large sports bag, had ears empty as a baby’s. There were no other passengers. Tamsin looked out of the window straight into a room. A young man was sitting in a huge mauve chair. The house was scruffy on the outside. All the houses along Iverdale Road were scruffy. Behind the mauve chair was a mirror that filled the wall. As the bus started to move, Tamsin caught sight of her reflection, framed by the bus window, staring out. Then, when she could no longer see herself, the singing stopped.