11.

AVA KAPOOR

I used to busk in what I think of as Newcastle’s town centre, Old Eldon Square. I’d get there early in the morning, set up my instrument, and start playing as the sun came up. I played facing the east, with St. George slaying his dragon behind me. Though really it is less of a killing happening atop that pedestal and more a depiction of some fascination—a courtship, possibly—between the saint and the serpent. George courteously offers the dragon a metal spike, the dragon just as gallantly ingests it, and both seem gratified that it’s going down so well. I played theremin-adapted reveilles until the shops opened, and when you do that, passersby really give you whatever they have to give. Sniggers and stares. Comments about noise pollution. Phone numbers. Doughnuts. Song requests. Applause. Impromptu dance routines. Spare change. A five-pound note “’cause I’m not sure exactly what you’re up to but it’s a ballsy move; girls like you remind me I wouldn’t want to live in any other city” . . .

I played for an hour and a half regardless. Then I’d go to work: online customer service for a few different companies, just me and my laptop logged into a few different company e-mail accounts, with a number of databases open so I could check the typical things customers enquire and complain about or contact somebody who could find out what was what. Phone calls were rare during the day, and I liked that because it meant I’d be able to answer immediately if there was anything about my dad.

In short: it was the standard life of a music scholar who’d love to play vocationally but can’t. Time, money, talent, and grit—I think I’d have been able to do more with my theremin if I’d been lacking only two of those four essentials. But I lacked all four. And what did I have instead? Realism. What a gift! Most of the time it’s as if my life is hiding from me, but as I play, note by note, I echolocate it.

One morning in Eldon Square, the most beautiful emergency I’d ever seen walked by, dressed in red from head to toe and chugging a can of Red Bull. She had her earphones in, but she pulled them out and listened to my playing. She didn’t stop walking, and I had to choose between looking at her and following the notation on the sheets in front of me, so I lost her. But she came by again the next day, and the next—each time dressed as if she was going somewhere special, or as if that day was a very important day. But when we spoke, she’d tell me she’d just come from picking up or dropping off packages and dry cleaning and things like that. And her name was Allegra Yu.

One morning she asked if I was OK with her recording my busking. I said I was, but that I didn’t want her to put it online or anything. She told me she needed the recording so that she could compose for me. Compose for me!

I didn’t see her for a couple of weeks; then she came and gave me what she’d written: an untitled, spinning-top sort of sonata that slowed down into an arch, darting, aching minuet. I was a bit scared to play it in public and wondered if that was how Prince had felt about performing sometimes. It felt like people might get pregnant just from listening to this. Men, women, everybody . . .

The “raunchy spaceship” song went down well, and over the following weeks Allegra Yu wrote me two more songs. The second song was a boozy, bluesy piece that made my theremin sound as if it was looking back on a long life of crime, and the third song was a dance tune that had all these charming little trips and falls in it, just like a row of dizzy ducklings. After the third song, realising that we’d already danced together and slept together and aided and abetted each other, I asked her out. She said I’d had her kicking her blankets at night, wondering if she was no longer a genius. “Usually it only takes one song . . .”

I brought her aboard my train, “The Lucky Day,” for a picnic dinner; I’d prepared all the food myself so we ended up sticking with wine. We lit candles, and even though I’d dusted that particular carriage just hours before, I saw that the dust helixes were back, in enhanced definition, as if determined to stop us from romanticising this evening on a broken-down train that hadn’t gone anywhere for over forty years. She announced that a smugglers’ train is never what it seems to be, blew the candles out again, and lay her head on my lap.

“OK . . . where are we going? Announce the stations,” she said.

That was my moment to sound well-travelled, or an imaginative match for her, but I had a lapful of runway model and couldn’t think, couldn’t think . . . yet I had to say something . . . and at that moment the spirit of Agatha Christie took over and made me name stations from “the 4:50 from Paddington,” all haphazardly: “Waverton. Haling Broadway. Barwell Heath. Change here for Roxeter and Chadmouth . . .”

She stopped me there, at Barwell Heath. We dallied at that station for quite some time, and left with love bites as souvenirs.

Empty room gig or no empty room gig, Allegra Yu is the one I play for. I’ve come to know her better than anyone, I think, and she me.

But there’s one matter that divides us—that divides me and everybody else who’s contributed to this file: Allegra has seen and interacted with Přemysl Stojaspal—several times this has occurred in my presence—while I look where she is looking, and listen to the silence before and after the remarks she makes, and I see and hear nothing. This is not good for my relationship with Allegra, or with anybody, really . . . when Přem enters our conversation as a subject . . . or not even as a subject, if we talk about anything even vaguely linked to Přem, we begin to lie to each other. We tell ourselves we’re being tactful, but it is more desperate than that. We’re trying not to lose each other.

There must actually be a Přemysl Stojaspal. Everybody—and I mean everybody—behaves as if there is . . . so to me Přem exists in that sense, and sometimes also in a vaguer sense of a listener, some reaction that forms when certain notes are mixed into air. I have no personal knowledge of him otherwise.

I can state that it was Allegra who introduced me to him, or at least, to his father. Allegra was Karel’s personal assistant and was supposed to be organizing the logistics of life so he had more time for his own projects. But he was all, “Oh, Allegra, if I was thirty years younger,” and she was all, “Mate . . . if you were thirty years younger I’d still be gay.” I’m the one Karel’s (conditionally) made sole beneficiary of his will, but Allegra’s the one who’d get phone calls from him at all hours of the day. “Hang up and don’t answer: I want to leave you voicemail,” he’d say, and fill her voicemail inbox with musings only she could decipher and the occasional blast of music so she’d “see what he meant.”

Karel’s son was somewhere in his thirties and lived with his dad. I’m not flagging that up as unusual—I’d be one to talk, since I was still living with mine. I had love reasons and health reasons as well as economic reasons for that, but I did pick up some subtext that Karel’s son was living with him mainly for health reasons. The son’s, not Karel’s.

My understanding of Přem’s condition was that he couldn’t be alone at night. That’s what Karel told me, without going into what was meant by “couldn’t.” From a very early age Přemysl got bad at night. Agitated, wouldn’t sleep, would get violent, other things. Karel did once tell me that Přemysl took especial issue with him, Karel, sleeping. He simply wouldn’t stand for it. Karel Stojaspal told me that as a boy Přemysl conceived a notion that he’d disappear unless somebody kept thinking about him, and that Karel and his wife had indulged that fancy until it had grown to unmanageable proportions. Medication didn’t work, therapy had worked for a while, but he tended to run through therapists like a swarm of termites through floorboards . . . (Karel’s terms underlined. He was very tired when he made that termite comparison, but it sticks with me as I’ve never heard anyone talk about their own child like that.)

A few months into our acquaintance, Karel stopped discussing Přemysl with me, and only reluctantly mentioned him. That was partly my fault. I just didn’t know how to look at him while he talked about his invisible son. We went through the stage where I’d laugh or smile; then the stage where I tried to treat it all as a sort of philosophical riddle; the phase where I got angry with Karel; the fearful phase, which still comes and goes. I almost had a panic attack when Karel gave me the paintings, quite publicly, at a restaurant lunch he held for my twenty-second birthday, with an empty seat at the table beside me. A seat our friends addressed as Přem, though from time to time they’d joke and laugh with different fissures in the space all around me, and those fissures were also Přem Stojaspal. How they all admired the self-portrait . . . though he’d lost all that weight, so it wasn’t quite as accurate now, hahaha! I honestly couldn’t breathe at all. I couldn’t really look at the paintings for a few days, and when I did, I studied that face that our friends apparently recognized, and I considered moving to a different city, breaking up with Allegra, and getting new friends who’d never heard of the Stojaspals. But . . . abandoning Allegra and our people, the loveliest loves of both our lives, just because of some guy? As if.

It was OK when I was with Karel or the others and Přem didn’t join us—increasingly he didn’t bother, I’m told. “He loves you but has received your message of hate,” is how one friend put it. Of course I didn’t hate Přem (how could I?), but I made things worse when I tried to play along. One of the only times I’ve seen Karel look as sick as I felt at that birthday lunch was when I tried greeting him and Přemysl simultaneously one evening. Přemysl hadn’t yet arrived. Karel laughed, though he could tell I hadn’t been joking. Then he threw me out of his house and told me never to come back. He repented after what I’m guessing was one of the “bad” nights with Přem; Allegra played go between . . .

It was fine when I played at night, and it was, supposedly, just the two of us. Me and Přem. Don’t think I didn’t try to catch sight of him in mirrors and in glass—I was ready to believe he was a spirit, anything. But it was an empty room.

However, some things I remember Karel telling me before Přem became a taboo topic between us: When Přem had been younger there’d been games that used to amuse him through the night. But once he reached the age of putting away childish things, the nights were the worst ever. But he’d have good nights if Karel played for him all night. That worked for a while, but between theremin playing all night and sleeping all day, Karel was in a bad way and not really able to take part in his own existence. Concerned friends volunteered to play for Přem at night, and even drew up a roster, but Karel only wanted them to know the personable, multitalented daytime Přem who did his father so much credit. He also didn’t think they’d take the task seriously enough; they’d fall asleep, and then doom would befall. Or something.

Allegra played for Přem herself—for seven nights, by her count. She stayed wide awake, but so did he. Bitching about her playing until dawn, she told me. Přem kept saying she should stick to composing, even though he could hardly say her compositions had more substance. Allegra asked me if I agreed with him . . . if I thought Karel agreed with him, etc. . . . Přemysl being mean to her throughout the night got a ruminative wheel turning, and I hoped and hoped Karel would get someone else to play for this Přemysl before Allegra broke herself on that groundless wheel. I remember she was on antidepressants at the time, but I’ve noticed that the cushion those pills can provide isn’t that thick.

Then I needed money even more than ever, and Allegra handed her nighttime theremin playing position over to me. The first night I went, I meant to have it out with this Přemysl, but Karel showed me into an empty bedroom. He didn’t speak to the room . . . Sometimes I hold on to that as evidence of something, I don’t know what, but that first night Karel didn’t speak to the room . . . just told me to play as discussed, and left me to it. If the setup was exactly the same with me as it was with Allegra, that would mean Přem Stojaspal would’ve been there in the bed the whole night, talking shit about my theremin playing while I played my heart out without letting a word pass my lips. If . . . if that’s what happened, did that . . . make him happy somehow? Help him sleep? Karel seemed amazed when he looked in at us just before dawn. He said I was a miracle worker. I thought he was just an effusive man.

Two more things:

One night, the very first night I didn’t bother to check the room before I began playing, there was someone in Přem Stojaspal’s bed. She sat up among the pillows, all “hand me a glow stick and let’s rave!” as soon as I started playing one of Allegra’s songs—the giddy duckling dance, as it happens. It was Chela. Chela Kapoor, a mongoose who deserves all the finer things in life, and often gets them, I’m sure. I played Allegra’s song twice more for her, and then she gave what must be the mongoose equivalent of a sigh and left the room. I actually stopped playing for about half an hour when she left. I thought about going to look for her, I thought maybe the mongoose was Přem, that what Karel hadn’t wanted to mention was that Přem turned into a mongoose at night . . . I thought all sorts of things, but I was unable to reconcile any of it with the previous nights. She was a very friendly manifestation I mustn’t allow to distract me from what I was there to do. So I resumed the usual program. Hoping all the while that she’d come back. She didn’t return to the bedroom, but when I was leaving the house, she gave Karel’s flower beds a good trampling as she pursued me to the garden gate. I phoned Karel to ask if it was OK for the mongoose to come home with me, and Karel, sounding very surprised, said that was up to Přem. “She’s his mongoose. Her name is Chela.”

To me this was like saying, “That’s Tinkerbell’s mongoose . . . look out . . . Tink might get angry with you!” I took Chela home without further ado. Dad was at first inclined to treat her as a hallucination brought on by his pain medication but very soon warmed to her, and we’ve been the best of friends ever since.

The second thing: this is my ruminative wheel, like the one Allegra might have broken herself on if she’d spent many more nights playing for Přem. Is there anything I could have done that would have made it so that Karel Stojaspal could be alive and well today?

Karel had cysts on his kidneys. He knew something was wrong for quite a long time—we’ll never know how long—but he didn’t seek treatment until he collapsed at a meeting, was taken to hospital, and a scan revealed the extent of the damage. Karel had to have a transplant. He had to, and naturally, his son, Přemysl, was the donor.

Naturally. Tests had been run, compatibility was assured, Karel didn’t want to die, he still had a project he wanted—needed—to complete, and he would. Přem, he told me, was more than willing, was all but ready to rip the kidney out and hand it over himself. The date of the operation was arranged.

I was dazed, couldn’t believe he meant to go ahead with this thing. Karel wanted to try to live with Přem’s kidney in his body? Přem’s? A non-corporeal kidney? I wrote the date of the operation down, and I took it as many holy places as I could reach with my railcard over the course of five days. Temples, a synagogue, a church, a woodland glade, a shrine by the sea. I believe in some greater power, but not formally. I don’t know how to pray; maybe I’m as blind and deaf to the greater power as I was to Přem’s presence. In the holy places I asked what would happen on the date I’d written down; I asked if there was any way Karel was going to survive. I asked the power to move that ludicrously stubborn man, to make him seek another donor, try something, anything, else. Answers came, but that thing you read and hear about, that thing that happens to people when they try to access some exterior truth and sink so deep that they don’t recognize the voice they hear . . . it wasn’t like that for me. I always heard the answers in my own voice. Shallow consciousness problems.

I went back to Karel, and we had one more fight, one more terrible fight about Přem. And everything I said was wrong. I tried to force Karel to say he didn’t have a son; Karel tried to force me to admit that I am playing some minx-like game of influence, trying to drive his son to lunacy just because. Apparently Přem was there, shouting that I should be ashamed. But Allegra says she was with Přem that afternoon, so the bit about Přem shouting was probably Karel fighting me.

The operation went ahead the following week. Five months passed, and Karel was alive. I didn’t visit him, he didn’t want to see me, but I went back to all the holy places and kissed the earth, kissed the stones, kissed whatever I could kiss for the gladness of being wrong. In the sixth month, Karel got really sick. His body had rejected Přem’s kidney. The medication he was taking was supposed to safeguard against that, but I don’t think anyone can imagine what kind of charge Karel’s medication was trying to take on. It failed. Then there was the funeral, and then there was the reading of the will, and the wheel of thought as I turn words over. The words I said to Karel Stojaspal about his son. I said it all wrong. But the right words—what are they?