Chapter Four

Gordon Tranwell

Gordon Tranwell flinched when the pebble cracked against his windowpane.

He resisted the urge to jump up from the edge of his bed and run to the window; it only ever made things worse if he showed his face. If they knew they were getting a rise out of him, it just made them more insistent. Instead he remained sitting there, with his eyes screwed shut; hunched over his guitar, the last incomplete chord still hanging in the air as the music from the CD system he had been playing along with kept on going. From somewhere in the street below he heard the sounds of jeering. He clenched his teeth, leaning over to switch off the music, and then regretted that he’d been goaded into even doing that. When the laughter came again, it was because they knew they’d gotten a reaction out of him after all. He should just have let the music keep on playing, and to hell with them.

Below, one of the girls began to sing the old Beatles song: “Nowhere Man”. The lyrics were meant for him. He gritted his teeth again when another pebble skittered across the window, leaving a scratch. More laughter, fading away. And again, Gordon could feel the bitterness inside. He was close to tears. He screwed his eyes shut, then leaned over to rewind the tape. Pressing “Play”, he carefully placed both hands in position for the opening chord. He had played this piece of music so often, had memorised its chord sequences so well, that he even knew by heart the pop and crackle on the tape, taken from an old LP years ago. It didn’t bother him. There were only a few recordings available by the maestro, and he treasured every one of them.

The music began again. That first melancholy phrase that he now knew to be a minor chord. Gordon had never studied music, could not read it. But he could play by ear now, his love for this particular music style filling all the heartbreaking gaps in the rest of his life. There were no disappointments with his music. This track, for example. It had everything of loss and regret and loneliness…it seemed to mirror his life. But then the music changed…it surged ahead into a major chord sequence, changing the sorrow and the melancholy into something else. It had a yearning quality that he strove to emulate in his own playing. Sometimes he managed to get it, at other times it seemed that his fingers’ awkwardness in finding the chord brought it out too “flat”. Now the resolution, as the emerging melody cast off all the bad memories, finally bursting into that last wonderfully melodic phrasing. It was like finding light in dark cloud cover, soaring for it, bursting through the rain-clouds and finding the sun. It was ecstatic then, and it made Gordon ecstatic, too. At his best, copying the maestro, he could finally express things inside himself that he’d struggled all his life to express.

Gordon was eighteen, but could barely speak. His stammering had been treated in the early stages, when his mother and father had taken him to the consultant. But six months into the programme, when Gordon was eight years old and progress was being made, his mother and father had been killed in a car accident. It seemed to him now that he could remember very little of those days. There was a darkness; a chasm inside that seemed to blot it all out. But one thing had come out of it. It had cured his stammering, in a manner of speaking. Quite literally.

Cured it in the sense that he just didn’t talk any more. It was so easy, really. Don’t try to talk and you won’t stammer. His aunt and uncle, the ones who had taken on responsibility for him with an attitude approaching resentment, could not afford to continue with his special treatment, and there had been no insurance cover for the death of Gordon’s parents to enable the treatment to continue. So he had been transferred back to the “normal” education system; a school where he knew no one, where teachers were given the barest of instructions about his problems with communication, and children who felt that someone who didn’t talk was only behaving that way because he didn’t want to talk to them. As a result, Gordon was ostracised from the beginning. In desperation and fury and grief, Gordon had learned another thing. He had learned that he could speak, after all. If he tried hard enough—and was angry enough. When something happened that really hurt, or when he was really angry at his inability to speak—he could muster up the anger inside and spit out one word.

One word. Maybe two. Sometimes three.

Always spoken with anger.

Just confirming what the other kids thought: that he didn’t like them, that he didn’t want to talk to them. That he considered himself different.

The jeering continued in the school yard. The beatings continued. His uncle died, and his aunt became more withdrawn.

And the overworked, overburdened teachers in a stressed-out system somehow managed to avoid the problem.

At fourteen, he had discovered an old guitar at the back of a cupboard. It had been bought by his cousin, now grown up and moved to another country. Knowing his uncle as he did, he wasn’t surprised that his own son had put a sea between them. His aunt had forgotten that the guitar was there, didn’t notice when he took it. She never questioned him when she heard him trying to tune it, plucking absently at the strings. Over the months, and then the years, Gordon had got used to the feel of the instrument. He had learned where the notes were, the chord combinations. He’d heard a story once; about how if you put a monkey at a typewriter and left it there for eternity, with the animal just pounding at the keys, eventually it would turn out the works of Shakespeare. Ruefully, he wondered if he was like that. Instead of a typewriter, he had a guitar.

And then one day, on the radio, he heard an instrumental piece of music. Something that sounded foreign; maybe Italian, or Spanish. He wasn’t into that kind of thing at all, but something about it made him turn up the volume. That first time he missed who had composed and performed it. But there was a special quality that haunted him, made him keep on tuning into the same station in case they played it again. They did. A week later. It was called “Come un uragano”—“Like a Hurricane”. An instrumental theme composed by a Spanish guitarist called Nicola Spagnole, who’d had some success on the Continent with a small orchestral group. Someone on the radio termed it “rock flamenco”, with something that sounded like a smirk. It was a minor hit, staying in the charts for three or four weeks, never reaching the top twenty. But something about that music had lit a fuse in Gordon. For weeks, months, after the music had vanished from the airwaves, he continued to practise on his battered old guitar.

The Monkey and the Typewriter.

Eventually, he had discovered how to play the lead guitar part. That understanding gave him his first knowledge of the musical scale, gave him an understanding of the basics. From there, he had sought out other music by the same man, discovering with real disappointment that Spagnole had died shortly after “Come un uragano” had been released on the Continent. He had been young—thirty-six—dying of a congenital heart condition; leaving behind a mere three CDs and a handful of singles.

Unable to communicate, unable to make friends and with the normal avenues of expression denied to him, Gordon found in Spagnole’s music and his cousin’s battered guitar a way to bring out the feelings inside. Even if he couldn’t share them, even if his loneliness continued, he could still make that beautiful music himself, could practise and practise until he had learned each track, each chord combination. Sadness, joy, melancholy and anger. All of them coming from his fingertips, purging the frustration inside. Soon he was also learning to play the harmonica and had moved to keyboards.

But to the kids at school, the kids who threw rocks at his windows as they passed (because only a fucking weirdo would listen to that crap over and over again, and never come out of there to show his face), Gordon remained as distant and strange a lunatic as he always had.

The window rattled again, and Gordon missed a chord. The discordance made the anger flare inside again. Now the track was fading, and he’d cocked up the beautiful final phrasing. Once more, the window rattled. But this time it sounded different. Not like a pebble or a rock being thrown; more like a heavy goods vehicle passing by outside, making the foundations of the house shudder, making the windowpanes tremble. Except that couldn’t happen here. There were weight restrictions on this road, with a major water main running down the centre. Again, the shuddering. Angrily, Gordon turned from the window, rolled over the mattress and grabbed his headphones from the bedside table. Jamming them over his head, he rolled again and plugged the lead into his CD player. Stabbing at “Track I”, he rolled for a third time and swept up his guitar. Refusing to look at the windowpanes, refusing to give in to the goading from the street below, he prepared for the first chord yet again. When it came, he was on cue, and the music had distanced him from what was happening beyond the windows on the street below.

When the track finished, with its final flourish, Gordon felt that he’d never played better; knew that even though he couldn’t hear how he was performing because of the headphones, he hadn’t made a single mistake. Defiantly, he looked back at the windowpanes.

To see that something was happening there. Something strange.

They were…blurring.

Each pane still reflected the light from his bedside lamp, but the light was somehow shifting and flashing. The second track began, but Gordon leaned over to switch the CD player off and, as he did so, two things happened simultaneously.

First, he felt the bed shift, as if one of the legs had broken. And then he heard the noise. As if a piece of fluff had caught somewhere on the CD, causing it to make a ragged, roaring sound. Gordon snatched the headphones from his head, but the noise was even louder now. A grinding and roaring that seemed to be coming from outside. Now anger was overcoming his fear. He tore the headphones from around his neck and flung them across the bed, kicking himself clear of the mattress to stand in the middle of the room.

And instantly became aware that the noise was both outside and inside his bedroom. In fact, it was filling the room; had been filling the room for some minutes but, until now, he had not been able to hear because of the headphones.

It was the sound of thunder.

Not outside, not in the sky. But here, right now, in this room. It was shaking the walls, making the bed rattle.

When he looked back in alarm at the scratched windowpanes he could see them trembling and reflecting light from the bedroom lamp in even wilder patterns. The thunder was in the floor now, juddering into his feet and legs. In fear, he stooped and grabbed both thighs, trying to steady himself. Was he somehow imagining all this? Above him, there was a rending crack. Suddenly the air was filled with talcum powder; a great drifting cloud of it from above, falling like thin snow all over his bedroom. Instinctively, he dropped to his knees and sheltered his head with his hands, watching the talcum powder float and drift in the air. When he looked up he could see that the plaster in the ceiling had cracked. Even as he watched, there was another shifting, grinding sound—and then the crack spread on both sides, racing to the corner beside the window and right across the room to the door frame. Gordon lunged back to his feet and felt the floor tilt. The movement shifted his balance and he reeled across the carpet to clutch at the windowsill. He looked outside into the day.

Someone was running down the alley on the other side of the street. Now there were three, four…and a young girl. Were they the kids who had been jeering and throwing stones up at his window? He didn’t recognise the silhouettes as they ran, but there was something…something wrong…about the way they were running. Something wrong about the way they were holding their arms. They were lurching from side to side, their arms thrown out as if they couldn’t keep their balance. They looked like sailors in a ship’s corridor, when there was a high sea and the vessel was pitching from side to side. Gordon felt a great shuddering in the windowsill, and the next moment the entire facing wall of the building opposite cracked, split and burst apart in a chaos of bricks and mortar and an erupting cloud of dust. Gordon flinched away from the window in shock as the running figures disappeared from sight in the dust cloud. An avalanche of masonry crashed across the street towards Gordon’s home. It stopped halfway, the sound of thunder now intensified and the erupting dust cloud billowing up across the windows to obscure everything from sight. Suddenly Gordon was across his bedroom and yanking at the door. There was no lock, no way to jam it shut. But somehow the door was jammed shut.

Gordon panicked.

His world was falling apart, and he couldn’t understand what was happening.

Overhead the ceiling cracked again, and a chunk of plaster was dislodged. It exploded into a white spray of debris on the floor behind him. And now he had torn the door open, the hinges screeching. Did something want to keep him in the room when the ceiling collapsed? On the landing he steadied himself against the wall as another tremor shook the house. Was that someone in the distance, screaming?

Gordon tried to call for his aunt.

He opened his mouth. But nothing would come out. In anger and fear, he screwed his eyes shut, tried to form the words Aunt Sheila.

But he could only gag.

Gordon threw himself down the stairs, clutching at the handrail when something exploded somewhere—something that sounded like another house collapsing, shaking the foundations of his own home. He almost fell at the bottom step, but clung to the rail and twisted down the hallway. From his bedroom came the sound of another screeching roar, and another great shuddering convulsion shunted the staircase supports out of the wall in a rattling spray of plaster. Had the bedroom ceiling finally caved in? Still yelling his aunt’s name, he flung himself down the passage to the kitchen door. Would that too be somehow locked or jammed? This was a dream…it must be a dream. How else could he be moving so slowly when everything around him was shaking itself to pieces and his world was falling apart? He could see his hand, impossibly large, reaching for the door handle as the very ground beneath him vibrated and juddered. With his aunt’s name still locked between his teeth, he forced his hand onward. His grip on the handle felt unreal, hardly solid.

And then the kitchen door was open.

Aunt Sheila was there, standing beside the gas cooker and looking at him as if she could hardly understand his rude entrance. She was holding a pan of boiling milk in one hand, and even from here Gordon could see the blue glow of the gas ring on the cooker. Overhead, the ceiling shuddered and another cloud of plaster dust cascaded around her in a talcum-powder shroud. She brushed at it with a ridiculously calm gesture, as if there were a bothersome fly somewhere around her head, and now he knew for sure that this must all be a dream. Why else did she seem so unconcerned? When the ceiling gave another crack, just like the sound in Gordon’s room, he suddenly remembered that his own bedroom was directly above the kitchen. If the ceiling had come down, then it must mean that the kitchen ceiling was also in danger of collapsing. The roaring sound was suddenly louder and nearer, and with a brittle snap the kitchen window suddenly crazed into a jagged glass cobweb. The sound of it seemed to bring the dream into focus a little more clearly, make the danger more real than it ever had been until this moment. Gordon braced himself in the doorway and tried to yell at his aunt that they should get out of the house straight away, that something very bad was happening.

“Gordon?” admonished his aunt, putting the pan carefully back on to the gas ring even though the entire kitchen was now shaking so much that she had to brace one hand on the wall beside her. Gordon struggled to yell her name, but still could find no words. In a moment he would emerge from this bad dream and everything would be okay.

And then the ceiling came down on top of his aunt with a deafening roar.

Something slammed into him at the same moment, throwing him backwards through the door frame and into the passage. Instinctively he covered his head and face with his forearms as he hit the carpeted floor. The impact jerked the breath out of his lungs and whiplashed his neck. Somehow the violent blow had loosened his jaws.

“Aunt SHEILA!”

The two words were ejected with his breath; a cry of terror. Gasping for air, moaning in pain, Gordon scrabbled away from the doorway as rubble began to fall towards him. On his feet again, pain and fear seemed to be one enveloping spasm as he clutched at the splintered stair rail and tried to wave the gushing clouds of plaster and concrete dust from his vision.

“Aunt…”

The dust choked him. Coughing and gagging, he became aware that the thunderous roar was now somehow muted. Could it be that the rattling vibrations he could feel beneath his feet and in his grip on the staircase were fading? Yes, even now, the shattering roar had become the distant rumbling of a passing thunderstorm, the vibrations now no more than might be caused by a vehicle passing on the street outside. But the passage was still filled with the whirling dust storm as Gordon began to stumble back over the littered carpet to the kitchen doorway.

“Aunt…Sheila! Are you…”

Gordon refused to recognise the last moment, the look of bemusement on his aunt’s face as her figure was suddenly obliterated by a tumbling mass of plaster and concrete. He stumbled on the debris underfoot, called her name again…and this time fell forward, clawing at the rubble that now filled the passage. The dust cloud swept past him and began to subside. Gordon could hardly believe what he was looking at, less than three feet from his nose.

The kitchen doorway was filled with compacted, shattered rubble; from floor to ceiling, in a great wedge of devastated masonry. It had spilled out perhaps six feet into the passage, and he realised now that if he had not been thrown clear he would most certainly have been buried; crushed to death beneath the accumulated devastation that had been the roof, his bedroom floor and the kitchen ceiling.

Gordon clawed at the unyielding wall before him. He tried to call his aunt’s name once more, but his voice had locked. There was a wild fluttering feeling in his throat, as if every last moment of his daily grief and anger and fear had suddenly come down upon him with this avalanche of masonry. Gordon clawed again, breaking his nails, bloodying his fingers. She was still alive in there, trapped on the other side perhaps. But he was never going to reach her from here. Pushing himself away from the rubble, he twisted back along the corridor to the front door. He tried to yell: “I’m coming. Hold on, I’m coming!” But nothing would come out of his mouth. When he tore open the door and hurtled out into the front garden, he was aware that something wasn’t right out there. There were changes. Frightening changes. Somehow the garden had been ploughed; great chunks of soil and grass had been churned up in the centre of his aunt’s treasured lawn. The garden wall wasn’t there any more. Burglar alarms were sounding from all over the council estate. A great cloud of dust was billowing on his left. But Gordon refused to look at these things, barely took them in as he hurtled around the side of the house towards the back garden. His aunt would probably be out there by now, staggering around to meet him. Gordon grabbed at the brickwork in his flight, swung around…

…and fell over the pile of rubble that had once been the back wall of the house. He sobbed as pain stabbed in his knees, scrambled back to his feet and swayed there, looking at the devastation.

Rooted in shock, he couldn’t take in what he was looking at.

It was as if some giant knife had cut through the middle of the house. He could see a cross-section of the property, open to the air. He could see the loft, and below that his own bedroom, from which he had fled not a minute ago. There was his bed, the headphones still lying on the quilt. It rested on the last remaining section of floor, somehow looking like a bed in a doll’s house. Below the flooring, the upper wall of the kitchen, and then…only rubble. The entire upper half of the house had come down in a sloping avalanche on top of the kitchen, the rubble spilling out across the back garden. The kitchen simply didn’t exist any more. And no one could be alive under that devastation.

Gordon made no conscious decision. The next moment he was scrambling forward over the rubble; clawing at the bricks, throwing handfuls of debris over his head and behind him.

“Aunt Sheila!”

He had no idea how long he had been clawing at the debris, was uncaring about the blood that streamed from his ragged fingertips, before he realised that he must be standing on top of his aunt’s body. Still sobbing, Gordon staggered back from the heap of masonry and collapsed to his knees on the one bare patch of grass in the back garden that hadn’t been covered with masonry. Now, as well as the banshee wailing of all the burglar alarms, Gordon became aware of the other sounds; sounds that until now had been drowned out by his own sobbing.

The sounds of other people somewhere out there. Wailing and crying.

Climbing to his feet, dazed, Gordon stumbled over the rubble and around the side of the house to the street. Smoke was billowing from around a corner, and the dust cloud seemed to fill the sky all around him. But he could see no sign of those others who were also giving vent to their grief. When he reached the front of the house, he became aware of the rain on his face and arms. He looked up, but the dust cloud blotted out the sky. As he moved on down the fractured garden path, he could see where the rain was coming from. A gaping fissure had appeared in the main road. Somewhere below, the water main had burst and a geyser of water was rising in a fountain from the crevasse. Pavements on either side of the road had been uprooted and shattered, now glistening in the falling rain.

Gordon leaned against the garden gate and let the water fall on him.

Someone would come.

The devastated street remained empty. There were only the swirling dust clouds, the smoke and the hissing of the fractured water main. And somewhere out there the sounds of multiple, distant voices; weeping and calling out the names of the dead and dying.

Someone would come and make things right.

Someone…