Folded in the pigeonhole, bearing a diminutive, I found the note as I came home in the unbecoming dawn. I opened it out as I set off up the stairs. My cousin’s name and the address of a hotel had been printed in the concierge’s caps-locked hand. At the bottom it read: DINNER TOMORROW?? As simple as the message was, I could hear the demand to spell every word in the tremor of her lettering. I wondered where he’d called from, and imagined him dictating every consonant and vowel, his provincial accent, no less than that he’d asked for me, met with her incredulity. Rehearsing the sounds as I once would’ve made them, the letters, numbers, the interrogative, I hummed them through the rhythm of each step up to my room.
Once inside, I let the paper drop. It fell amongst the sheet music covering the floor. A note from my cousin; a note from Lorcan. I call him my cousin, but only use the term expediently, to avoid the entanglements of a tortured family tree. Once or twice removed, half, step; what difference did any of that make? Related enough. The invite was appreciated. It was nice to know some remnants of relative had survived. I stretched on my bed and turned out the lamp. How long had it been since I’d last seen him? Almost impossible to say.
For as long as I can remember, it’s been winter and I’ve lived nights. That began as a necessity, became a habit, then a mire. Whether it was like that when I first arrived, I couldn’t tell you anymore. I presume there were summers; I must’ve seen the sun. I came here to attend the Royal Conservatory, after all. Sent up from the sticks, making mother proud, having won my spot from pure preternatural virtuosity. It’s been years since my training there ended, though, and almost as long as since I last auditioned for an ensemble of any kind. I did try, once upon a time, bearing my apprenticeship as a prelude to my name, but despite that, never got beyond a handful of unsuccessful trials. Either that, or I’ve consolidated a bad experience or two and have thought about them so many times, playing them back and forth as I’d once perfected scales and arpeggios, that the sequence is now inveterate, and accessible in every tone and mode, depending on the day’s neuroses. That is sometimes how things go.
I tried to picture Lorcan in the dark, and saw him over a boozy meal, fair-haired and rosy, cheek-boneless, wet lips widening but never to a smile, slit eyes sliding off his nose: a face all sliver, glisten and subside. When would that have been? My recall’s getting worse. Once I’d had whole repertoires memorized. Now I couldn’t even tell you when I last picked up my instrument.
It lies there in its box in a corner of the room, my viola, unfussily interred like a childhood pet. In the dark, I listened to my room, waiting out some vibration. With the windows shut and shutters closed, not a particle moved. I held my breath. The letters of my cousin’s name echoed across the staves of the paper strewn floor. I was under no obligation to go to the dinner. I turned into the quiet and curled towards the wall.
For all that music had sloughed from me, I didn’t miss it. On the contrary, I sought out silence. Lining the floor had dampered my steps and I’d stuffed my bedframe with enough newspaper that its springs no longer creaked. Whenever I stepped out, I plugged my ears. Sometimes I bunged them up for sleeping too. And, when knocking around my flat, if some noise became too much, passing sirens, say, or a distant alarm, rolling stock being moved in dormant metro lines, the rumbling of which, in the early hours, sends shudders all the way up through the building, I block them for a bit of peace. Days will sometimes pass in which I forget my ears have been plugged, only noticing when a mouth moves mutely, in the all-night corner shop, for example. But even that seemed to be happening less and less: the items I buy are always the same, they know I’ll need a bag, my change is always precisely counted out. Everything is modulated by repetition. Perhaps, soon enough, like the light has dwindled, I’ll find myself living in a world without sound.
With the lamp back on, I sat on the floor and reread my cousin’s message. There was no number to reach him on, nor anything suggesting either how long he would be in the city or whether seeing him another time might be an option. The name of his hotel was unfamiliar, it’s address in a neighbourhood I’d not been to for a while. At the very least, I told myself, it might be fun to explore that neck of the woods. That was how I spent my waking hours, after all, wandering all night through the better-heeled quarters, looking in on the warmly-lit luxe of their interiors. I’d stay out walking loops until the cold got in my bones, but more often than not I frequented the same areas. The thought of a free meal and the pleasures of some lesser-trodden pavement was just enough to tip me towards venturing out. Mind made, I was able to sleep. I could always, I told myself, back out on waking up.
*
Lorcan was passing through the city for a conference, though of what kind he didn’t say. He spoke to me as if I knew. He’d had no idea, he told me, whether or not I was still in the city or whether the number he had was mine. I told him I hadn’t moved since I’d arrived, and he looked into the distance, as though listening for the passing time. He scratched his head, and told me he was happy to have reached me. I believed him. He was looking old, too old and too tired to bother telling me a lie. There are ten years between us, though I imagine that when he got home he told his family the same thing about me. I must look old and tired too. We reminisced about the last time we’d seen each other. It had been under similar circumstances, it turned out, some number of years before. He winked as he told me how much he’d missed coming to the city. I asked him if he was meeting up with anyone else during his stay and he shrugged away the question. I understood him well enough. We never get too old for a little dissimulating.
When he asked if I was still playing the violin, I nodded along without correcting him, so as not to interrupt some rhythmic chewing. “Must be tough,” he said, “times like this.” He gestured and ran his fingers through his hair. I nodded again.
Lorcan waggled the back of his fork in a puddle of blanquette sauce, raised it to his mouth and lapped the tines. I watched his tongue as he licked his pink lips clean. “To be honest,” I began, “I’ve been thinking about stopping. I seem to have lost my feeling for it.” Lorcan looked up, concern in his eyes, though whether for me or the spot I’d put him in I couldn’t say. “It’ll come back, I’m sure. Probably like riding a bike or something, no? I’m sure it’ll come back, and the feeling too.” He nodded conclusively and scratched his head again.
A third bottle of wine was brought to the table. Nights away from home were a freedom, he announced portentously, employing the noun. It was a chance to let off steam, get loose. He winked again. He told me he relished his time away. “Relish it,” he insisted. Put off by conspiratorial looks which assumed sympathies that I didn’t share, I sank in my seat. Under the table my hands searched pockets for the waxy nubs of cotton which I use to plug my ears.
*
Walking home, I took a moment to dally on the quays. I could smell the mud of the low flowing river, the silt and bilge of its exposed flats. On he had gone, Lorcan, speaking, increasingly puckered and increasingly slurring, in dribs and nonsequitous drabs. We’d ended up the only diners there. I’d started to relax. The more Borgogne that pooled in his belly, the more prolonged the silences that filled our time. As he’d slumped, I noticed scabs on his crown, crusting through the flaxen where his hair was getting thin.
I shuffled a little danse macabre along the banks; glad to be a shadow, happy to be drunk.
*
The scent of the river had become a smell of drains, and I found myself in a part of the city I’d not been through before. It was not a well-heeled neighbourhood. The further along the quays I’d gone, the fewer cosy lounges there had been to look in on. Either that or I had reached the stage of the night where everyone but the most interior, flickering and sallow had long since gone to bed. I took a breath and filled my lungs. In those hours I stand taller; my bones stretch, lengthening my step. I can cross boulevards in a single stride, straddle blocks, and would seem, to the last quivering insomniac squinting from their drapes, to stalk with such a graceful glide, gangling limbs in drift, coat flapping out behind me, that they would think I was spectre, a phantom of their restiveness, or else that they had slipped into an unforthcoming sleep and hadn’t yet twigged that they were in a dream.
I turned away from the river, up the road running perpendicular to the water. Not a living soul around. On I went. There was no way of knowing for how long I’d been walking, my metronomic feet counting beats not time, but I was soon well clear of the riverside’s industry. I made my way through a network of semi-urban streets: terrace after terrace of narrow, leaning, tenements, four or five storeys tall, woeful eyes downcast as they loomed to watch the road. The further I walked, the narrower the streets became. Clusters of shuttered shops and cafés huddled at the crossroads, but none of the places I came across seemed to bare a sign or even a name.
By then, as I stepped, footfall no longer echoed. Beyond a heavy douse of cloud, the night dragged out unchanged.
*
On I went, until, cold through the marrow, I’d had enough and decided to turn back. I had no plan but to retrace my steps until I reached familiar surroundings. From the river I’d be able to find my way home. Thinking I was doubling back, I soon found myself on a tree-lined street on which all the streetlamps had gone out. I moved back and forth over the border of the lights, fancying that I might seem to disappear as I passed from the jaundiced municipal world into the by-ways of the obscure. I’d not been on this street before, and slowed my pace to enjoy its darkness, it’s depths something like the silence I’d been craving. Barely inching along the pavement, I let my outline disperse within its black. I breathed more deeply, taking it up; the silence, the night, and the winter air combining in a tincture of antenatal blank.
Though I thought I’d closed my eyes, I caught a glisten runnel from the shadows of the arbour. My state of mind being what it often was on night-time walks, the emergence of forms and creatures from peripheries was not all that unusual. As ever, I ignored it, expecting whatever half-seen thing it was to melt into the murk with a knuckle to my lids. I shuffled on.
This time, however, the thing did not disappear and instead was soon rubbing up against my leg. I stopped. The cat was too clean looking and friendly to be a stray. Perfectly, even beautifully white, it was clearly somebody’s well-kept pet. I looked around. There was nobody about. The curtains of every window were closed; every light in every building was out. I fought the urge to pick it up, and it mewed as I shunted it off my leg. No sooner was my foot planted again, however, it continued to press against my calf.
I bent to scratch its head, its persistence paying off, and brushed its hair from my trouser leg. I picked off a strand and rolled it between my forefinger and thumb. I tucked the hair away in an inside pocket.
When I crouched to pet its head again, I scrabbled for a collar. It didn’t have one. “There’s not much I can do, I’m afraid,” I addressed it unthinkingly, as though it understood. As it crested and receded on the shoreline of my shin, I waited. “I can’t exactly take you home,” I held my palmsopen. The gesture did nothing to assuage my guilt.
Finally, giving in, I wrapped both hands around the creature’s stomach. I lifted it to my nose and breathed in. It smelt of nothing; it smelt of stone. It smelt like the skin of an old woman’s palm, from which the fine lines of the future have been planed by years of distracted caresses. I sniffed and sniffed again. I inhaled until the cat began to squirm. I dropped it, and looked at my open hands. I turned them over. My fingers tapered to a chip of bone, the fingernails having grown since I’d stopped playing my viola. One scored the life line of my left hand. It splinters at the start and again at the end.
In the time I was transfixed by my fortune, the cat had disappeared. I considered the evening’s diversions over. Three trunks on, however, it re-emerged, back at my trouser leg, shouldering and purring. I walked on assuming that, denied my attention, it was likely to get bored and go off on its own.
The tree lined street was coming to an end. A streetlamp was visible ahead at a crossroad. I slowed, the cat seing this as an invitation. Lifting it away with the side of my foot, I tried another gentle kick. I was sure it wouldn’t follow me beyond the crossing, but no matter what I did, shoving, stopping, hissing, spitting, the thing would not leave me alone. I toyed with giving it a name. Ghost, perhaps, or Spirit, something appropriate to its colour and the way it had haunted me all down the pavement. In the end, however, I plumped for Clavicle, from how it had protruded and finally beguiled.
Back in the urban night, Clavicle increasingly led the way. When I paused, it waited. It ran ahead, then returned to me if I fell too far behind. I’d been walking for far longer than I normally would but still the sky showed no sign of brightening. For comfort, I spoke to the cat. “I thought as much,” I told it, “I wasn’t sure, but I suspected.”
We were soon in another area I’d not been to before. Or perhaps the circumstances of my arrival made a known quarter strange. Just as earlier, we passed terrace after terrace of tall apartments. This time, however, the streets were wider, the architecture grander, more elaborate, but stolid and imposing: clamped with the imperiousness of the city’s richest, old-money neighbourhoods. It was exactly the kind of place that I most liked to linger through, where the mealtimes are regular and the meals themselves robust, and evenings peter with lustred warmth, in surrounds of rich and familial comfort.
We continued to wander as though through a mausoleum, Clavicle picking its way between monuments, me on its tail. Every road and corner looked the same. Each time we approached a crossing, I vowed to check for a street sign. I needed some idea of where we were, as much so I could come back as find my way home. But every time I did, without fail, the cat would play up, dashing between my feet to trip me or else tearing off with my attention. By the time it would casually saunter back, or once I’d recovered my gait, we’d gone beyond anywhere the avenue might show a name.
Finally, however, the cat did stop. It climbed the steps of a building which looked to have once been a hotel. The scars of long-hung signage marked the area above the remains of an awning, and the entrance way had picture frames embedded in the walls.
The cat muzzled the unlocked door, the waited on the threshold, holding it ajar, until I stepped up and opened it. Whether from fatigue or the evening’s excess strangeness this neither surprised nor troubled me. In Clavicle went. It occurred to me that I could let the door swing shut and that would be the end of it. I could walk for as long as it took to find somewhere I recognised or else see if the sun would actually come up. But why? I thought, having come so far.
Inside, the reception was in a rough state of abandon, but not in disarray. Though it had clearly been empty for a while, there was no graffiti and nothing had been broken. It hadn’t been taken over by squatters or the homeless, and seemed not even to have attracted the attention of the neighbourhood’s bored and nihilistic teens, should such an area house the likes. It seemed more likely, however, that there were no children. The air was stale but there was no smell of damp or rot; nor of the shit and piss one might expect in a place left empty for as long as this. The streets outside had been so quiet. Perhaps the hotel had simply been forgotten. I imagined it written off by some bankrupt, its deeds lost amongst the mouldering papers of a dour impresario who’d died without an heir, or else in the files of a canny magnate who’d held onto it in the hopes that things would turn around once there was a vaccine and the borders opened up, but then got bored with the wait and moved on to more promising investments. I took the cotton stoppers from my ears.
Clavicle was waiting on the stairs, licking a paw. I assumed the hotel was its home. Certainly it was no longer showing the imperative which had led us there. I wandered idly through the ground floor rooms. The hotel appeared to have the same layout as where I’d eaten with Lorcan some time before. I went behind the desk, curious to see what had been left, but all the drawers and shelves had been cleared out. A piece of headed notepaper, scrunched on the floor, told me the place had been called ‘The Beauportail’.
I approached the stairs intending to sit and stroke the cat, the thought of my cousin having brought to mind for just how long we’d been out walking, but as I got closer, he turned and took off. Back to the old dart and pursuit. I followed him. The hotel’s corridors were endless and identical. For all that its façade was narrow, it ran deep off the street. Its hallways wound and rose. Almost without noticing, we climbed several floors. I put my head around every open door. The silence, manifest, as tangible as mist, filled me confidence. I stalked about the place. Had there been another person in the building, I would, from some distance, have heard their heart beat.
In every room I looked inside, everything was intact. The beds were all made up and undisturbed. It was as though the entire staff and guests had disappeared in the catching of a breath. I vaguely remembered having read that during one or other wave of the epidemic, with the hospitals running out of beds, hotels had been sequestered for the care of the virus-stricken. But I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it, or how long ago that might have been. Either way there was no trace of medical equipment or supplies, and the only smell was dust, old linens, carpets and curtains; no hint of ammonia, peroxide or bleach.
Clavicle waited patiently as I nosed around the rooms. The building seemed made to meet my needs, and I felt that the cat knew as much, and wanted me to see. I considered what it might be like to move in. I could take a different bed every night. If I wanted, I could nestle in a suite in the middle of a floor, in the middle of the building, and cocoon myself completely. I wouldn’t need to plug my ears, or worry about any of the other complications involved in keeping up my lease. I wouldn’t even need to transport my things. I had all the sheets and bedding I could use. The plumbing was still working, and although there was only cold water, I knew I could soon get used to that, as I’d got used to many things.
What else did I have at home? Some clothes, easily replaced; some books, the same. Nothing I wouldn’t miss. I’ve never been especially sentimental and with the speed my memory was failing me – My viola. To move in would mean leaving it behind once and for all. I thought about it tucked away in its box, feeling something but unable to say quite what. I sat on the edge of the room’s single bed. All the year’s I’d spent refining the placement of my fingers.
Having leapt up beside me, Clavicle nestled in my lap. I stroked its head and felt its purr vibrate up through my femur to knot like balled wire in my gut. I heard an echo of things that Lorcan had said.
“When I was at the conservatoire, Clavicle,” my voice cracked from unuse, “what began as some background research on liturgical arrangements developed in a vaguely esoteric vein, in which I studied campanology. One insight that’s stayed with me regarded peeling bells. I read that the practice of change ringing, tolling bells in mathematical variations, had gone unchanged in some five hundred years. That would mean, if you were stood in the vicinity of a steeple which housed long-maintained, historic bells and heard a peel ring, you would be hearing the exact same thing as any citizen throughout the ages: a shared audio lineage that nothing in the realms of recording technology could even come close to replicating. That’s something, don’t you think?”
Clavicle groomed an ear. As it continued to purr, I thought of other sounds that one might hear that wouldn’t have changed at all in years. I sat and listened to the room until the cat got up.
When it left , I made to stand too, but found my knees had seized. Sinking back onto the bed, I picked at the weft of the coverlet as I straightened out and stretched my legs. I poked the tips of my fingers through moth eaten holes. A floorboard creaked in the corridor.
I heard a heartbeat and an intake of breath. Someone knocked.
