THIMIO'S HOUSE

SCHIZOPHONIA

1. SORRY

In the beginning the eyes were closed, the ears were plugged and the imagination was blank. All was dark and silent and thoughtless. Not a plucked harp nor a struck triangle could be heard in the vacant vastness of the pre-symphonic nothingness.

Soon after, there were magnificent displays—sonic eruptions, contrapuntal fireworks, melodious dins—followed by the opening of the eyes (harp) and the listening of the ears (glockenspiel) and the rousing of the mind (piano) and the shouting of the mouth (woodwind) and then a person—a winnow of a boy—being born (brass) but getting disowned (strings).

Sounds the disowned boy lived by. They were his religion. The disowned boy practiced his religion at the piano, using eight fingers and two thumbs, plus the occasional elbow and forearm. All The Greats had done it that way (minus the elbows and forearms). The disowned boy started his magnum opus with an impromptu assault on the keys, generating showers of notes, like sparks from an oxyacetylene torch.

Then came a mournful sound (drumming): of earth, handfuls of it, landing on the coffin lid.

In the boy’s disowned world there could be no quietening of the din or resting of the ears. Not until he’d received his “reply” would the boy be able to forsake his constant, effortful listening, which was producing in him the meanderings of an orchestra (eeeoooaaaaah) and the hummings of a mindchoir (mmmmmmmmm).

(This was his version, not Greta’s.)

In Greta’s version they’ve been abandoned together, him and it. It—the grander of the two babies—is stationed at the far end of the church hall for the tea dance season, lid open like a mouth. But the lesser baby inside has a mouth too, and the mouth opens, and cries bombard the strings, causing them to sing like eerie harmonic ghosts. ‘Oh Dear Lord,’ are the words that spring to Greta’s lips when she peers inside. And, ‘What greater wonder for a childless piano teacher than to deliver herself a babe from out of her very own Bechstein?’

Very funny! If it were really true that he’d been abandoned and that she’d found him inside her piano then how come “things” hadn’t happened? How come the police didn’t get involved? But Greta always maintained she hadn’t reported it, hadn’t say a thing to anyone on the afternoon she allegedly picked up a certain screaming child and carried it home to her three-bedroom semi and then did thereafter what she'd claimed had been “simple”: looked after it, without telling a soul, not even Thimio.

To Fish it all sounded implausible. Made him seem implausible. No less so when the story was later changed to the one where Greta had waited with her name on the register for the chance of a newborn. That story was probably true, mostly.

*

When he was four Greta taught him to pray. She said that prayer was a bedside lamp he could switch on anytime. When Fish prayed he didn’t see any light. He heard things—sounds, noises, music. When he got older he wrote them down. Compositions! A pile grew like a hedge. Greta did the trimming. All his creative efforts she cut down to size, saying how unsurpassable were The Greats.

Fish knew all about The Greats. He’d read about them and their foibles: Beethoven (obsessive), Mozart (scatological), Schubert (unemployable), Wagner (extravagant), Debussy (unfaithful). He knew The Greats were only great because they’d dedicated themselves, ignored petty interruptions and the suffocating demands of their mothers. These things Fish did too, finding private time at five in the morning with the practise pedal down, thinking up foibles for himself.

It was in the tiny back room of the house that Greta Fisher (LRAM, ARCM) gave piano lessons. A concert hall made for two. He’d been her star pupil. Her Little Sonata. Sometimes Greta would be the audience, listening from the passage, checking on him. Then Fish would play Bartok because he knew Greta hated Bartok. Together him and Bartok could get Greta so worked up on the other side of that door!

She'd taught him well. But she’d played him too, like a set of variations: inverted him, changed his signature, altered his tempo, so that whoever he was never quite made it to the fingers. With his own music it was different. But Greta had been indifferent. She messed him up more than she need have.

One afternoon she'd shown him a note. Handwritten. It was the afternoon she said she would tell him a true story about himself. Fish wondered how many other true stories there might be. She said that the note from his real mother was real:

sorry can’t keep it sorry

2. WARMONGER

Fish got off the bus and covered his head with his Karrimor. The rain was torrential, bouncing off roads and pavements, making rapid lie-detector lines. The truth was he hated his new situation and he hated this new place. Mornings and nights he stayed indoors, composing, but in the afternoon he went out, whatever the weather, and took the bus to the city centre for some aimless wandering.

The sounds of the city soothed him, kept him in the moment. City sounds travelled in waves—soothing, 3-D shock waves, which if visible would look like shells were exploding at every point where one occurred. Wandering in the city involved being surrounded by such munitions, some of which were mere bullet-sized affairs and others like ICBMs. Anyone new to the experience would be ducking and diving to avoid these projectiles, especially the incoming shots from the goldsmith's clock or the missile voice that says your phone credit is zero.

Today his wandering had purpose—a meeting with the solicitor at three. He stood in the Coffee Democracy queue, languishing in the blast of the cappuccino machine, but the irony of the place made him want to start a dictatorship so he headed for Jimmy’s Café instead, taking the route through the mall past the hair loss misery posters.

All morning his mindchoir had been ranting (aaaahawaiiii!). He blotted it out as he crossed the replica public square where the giant teddies sing “fun, fun, fun”.

In Jimmy’s he tore off the end of a sugar sachet and gazed at the posy of fake ice cream cones arranged in the window like synchronised swimmers.

His symphony had been hailing him too (tumteetumteetum!). He didn’t know why he was bothering with it, because symphony writing was the least fashionable thing on the entire planet and the chances of a new one ever getting played were practically zero. He was probably bothering with the symphony because he needed it—apart from the Bechstein taking up his room and the masterpiece taking up his head, he was alone in the world.

The composition professor had exposed both of these nerves with his clever-arse analysis, saying that his music was banal and violent, and adding a load of academentia bollocks about the bequest being symbolic of his problematic relationship with his recently deceased guardian—pianos being coffin-like, and so on. The prof had held his score up between his thumb and forefinger like a dirty pair of underpants, while Fish told the class about Britney being his inspiration: Toxic had been pounding at the woodchip every night in the house and the song’s chemical overtones had grooved their way into his thoughts, making WMD of them.

‘Remind me,’ said Fish, super-polite, ‘Why isn’t it symphonic to have my music grooved in a Britney-anti-chemical-warfare kind of way?’

‘Infantile,’ said the prof.

‘Warmonger!’ countered Fish. (They’d never clicked.)

‘Well, well, a proverbial angry young man!’

That comment riled him.

‘YOU MEAN LIKE “A FIST FROM A LOUT IS WORTH TEN FROM A PRAT?”’ yelled Fish, dishing out a half-hearted exemplar on the academic’s chin, which got the designated first-aider there in seconds and some meathead from security soon after.

He'd retreated to the Union bar and watched SKY News being projected onto the wall above the spirit bottles. He'd listened to the music on the sound system making inappropriate juxtapositions, such as war accompanied by reggae, and cringed at the two world leaders standing above the vodka smooching politics at one another and smiling for the cameras.

*

In his symphony the drums race for control of the security forces, trampling pacifist violas underfoot. The top brass celebrate prematurely the return of order and the woodwind make huge profits via big business. The peaceful ones—a piano, a xylophone and a dissident trumpet—hold out for citizenship values. They mount protests but get locked up as mass destruction gains momentum, the centripetal music drawing everything to its centre—its big, businesslike centre.

Fish had been in the bath over an hour, trying to decaffeinate himself, regretting venting his anger. Now he was a warmonger too. His outburst had little to do with the professor’s jibes and a lot to do with coming a poor second to the church—Greta had left the house to St George’s and the piano to him. It should have been the other way around. At least it confirmed she was mad. Either way, the seminar incident had sealed his fate. Things would be no beatbox now that academentia had it in for him.

His life was a disaster. The objects on the window sill agreed: Gel Spray, its label facing the wall, was spurning him; Shaving Mirror, all steamed up like a huffy mother, was reminding him of how stupid he looked. Only Toothbrush showed any sympathy, standing alone in the cup like an orphan.

He’d listened stoically to the solicitor. Apparently, everything was in order with Greta's will and there were no grounds for contesting it. After the meeting, he'd stood outside in the street, gazing up at the Meditteranean-style frontage of the stand ‘n’ tan that the solicitor's was above, because it was comforting and made him think of Thimio. What had possessed him to go in and get a tan he had no idea. Maybe he’d thought it would improve his fortunes or make him look less like a thug or help him project a better image when he went to the police station to get cautioned. Whichever, he hadn’t bargained on spray. He’d expected bright lamps not spray.

The spray had smelled of Greek coffee, which had conjured Thimio. Thimio had been a great coffee lover, though not a snob, because he used to add Nou Nou to it: a brand of evaporated milk that came in tiny cans. Thimio kept the Nou Nou in titanic quantities in the kitchen cupboard—not stacked neatly, but piled like rubble. Fish remembered how sometimes the nocturnal aroma of Thimio’s coffee would wake him up.

With a brown-streaked body there wasn’t much he could do except stay out of sight and have as many baths as possible before the rehearsal. He gave his face one last scrub and got out. Sitting on the edge of the tub, he trimmed his softened toenails, picking at them with his fingers as if they were tricky adhesive labels. The house was quiet now, apart from the distant aerosol of traffic spraying past. He’d received the email notification and the official letter was on its way. Greta would have huffed big time. Thimio would have told him not to worry and to go see the world.

He pulled the plug and the the hole guzzling water—a glossolalia he’d have had to drag trombones over marimbas to replicate.

3. “BLIP-BLOP”

Snow arrived with the flamboyance of a Victorian conjurer. A dark cape of cloud covered the sky, releasing cascades of magic flakes. The wheelie bins in the yard were wearing white caps, the telegraph poles white stripes down their windward sides and the cars out the front had thick white coats, the recently departed ones having left grave-like gaps.

He’d worked all night on his score, dropping off at the piano countless times. He was yet to wake up here without first thinking he was in his room back home. This room was bigger than any of the rooms back home, though the removers had had the same struggle getting the piano in here as they’d had getting it out the old place. The legs had had to be taken off and then the instrument tipped on its side and kind of rolled. Most of the furniture had gone make room for it, so when he wasn’t dropping off at the keyboard he was sleeping on a mattress on the floor with his body partly under it.

He gazed out the window. Gazing out the window was displacement activity because he had twenty-five band parts to finish off by tomorrow evening. He didn't want to let the bandleader down. The bandleader had been supportive. After the prof incident, he didn’t bow to pressure. He said he would be happy to give Fish rehearsal time if he wanted to bring in an extract of his “militant music”. The bandleader was a self-publicist, not an anarchist, as he liked to claim. He was using him but Fish didn’t care. It wasn’t courting notoriety to want to hear your music played, militancy or no.

Still gazing, Fish listened to the sound of the water dripping and the noise of the heating system, traipsing around the house like a charivari. Sounds were his loyal companions, they helped him through. The water drips were from the snow melting and landing on the upturned bucket in the back yard. Water was an uninventive drummer, its beats more interesting for their regularity than their ingenuity. Occasionally a “blip” coincided with the movement of the second hand of his alarm clock and sometimes a “blop” would synchronise with the beat of his heart.

“Blop” following “blip” also alerted the orchestra sitting in perpetual readiness in his imagination. No lying on mattresses for them! The ever-ready strings had their bows in a perpetual hover, the geared-up woodwind inhaled continually and the faithful harpists, looking like Grecian goddesses at their oversized lyres, kept their well-prepared fingers near the strings. Only the percussion and the brass were less dutiful, being always just back from the pub. They needed a regular fortissimo to keep them interested, something that Fish, being inclined to loyalty, often granted them.

Taking up his manuscript pad, he set about capturing the moment, arresting each “blip-blop” with a trickle of a temple block, a splash of a brush upon a snare and a syncopated dribble of roto-toms; his two devoted harpists embellishing the spillage with an atomizing spray. The sounds of the moment—his moment—were disorientated sounds, confused sounds, disowned sounds; sounds such as the sibilant rush of snow slipping from the roof, which he captured with a bass drum and a suspended cymbal, like it were some neatly executed circus trick. Bakoomphsh!

The “splatter” he tried to ignore because it didn’t belong with the “blip-blop”, the splatter of envelopes hitting the floor. Stowing his pencil behind his ear, he went to the door, finding the offending letter in amongst the usual letterbox junk. He ripped open the envelope but didn’t look inside. Instead he raced back to the piano and walloped the keys with both forearms. Keeping them held down, he listened to the rancorous harmony . . . the sound of Northern University dumping on him. The clamorous discord produced in him a vow: to not wallow in self-pity, to rise above, like Thimio would have done. He wanted a future. A plan for his life. He wanted a New Start, like Thimio got when he left Greece.

*

After the accident, Fish had gone through Thimio's books, remembering how his adoptive father would arrive in the early hours and make unpacking noises downstairs before tiptoeing into his bedroom with the books concertinaed between his big hands. Sometimes Fish would peek and see Thimio put the books on the floor in the corner and then close his eyes again when Thimio turned to kiss him.

The collected wisdom of twenty years in the Greek merchant navy those books were. Plus another ten on North Sea rigs. Fish wished he'd not given them away. There’d been titles on astronomy, stellar navigation, jet propulsion, European history and Classical Philosophy. Half the books were in English, the others in Greek, which the charity shop still accepted.

One book was of particular interest. It was about Thimio’s home town—an Aegean port called Volos. In Volos the streets were named after heroes, such as Jason, who’d sailed from there with the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. Fish realised what an inordinate amount he knew about Volos for someone who’d never been there. Jason Avenue, he knew, was next to the street that commemorated the “Day of No”, which was when the Greeks snubbed Mussolini. "Yes" and "No" were big words for Greeks. ‘Ask anyone who’s seen a junta run an election,’ Thimio had said.

Thimio could have written a book. Several, in fact. He had no shortage of subjects. English Orderliness would have been the title of his first, with chapters on “queuing”, “politeness” and “the Highway Code” and how these things murdered freedom. The fact that Greeks parked their cars wherever they liked was for Thimio the sign of a superior brand of liberty. ‘In Greece the road markings are only a guide,’ he'd say.

Once, after travelling all the way from Aberdeen by taxi, having enduring the most expensive traffic jam of his life, Thimio had unburdened himself of a drama of a complaint about the English cab driver, whom he’d likened to the ill-fated protagonist of a Classical play; the malevolent forces of which weren't the satyrs and phantasms of antiquity, but the cultural ghosts of deference and subjection, which had rendered the cabbie incapable of committing even minor transgressions, such as ignoring road signs, taking illicit short cuts, or violating one-way streets. ‘It would have been perfectly safe to do so,’ Thimio had pronounced, like a censuring Greek chorus, ‘But the stupid man was a slave to the rules!’

Thimio had a subversive take on most things. Not least the monarchy, even the nice English one. On Christmas Day when Greta watched the Queen, Thimio would exit and Fish would stay with Greta to watch and listen for what the little woman in the two-piece suit did that got Thimio so worked up. Thimio also mistrusted the Orthodox Church. ‘Their hands are not clean over the junta,’ he once said. Thimio even had radical views on earthquakes, saying that working on an oilrig had made him homesick for the precarious Balkan plate.

Fish treasured this knowledge. It was his antidote to Greta, who used to get angry with Thimio when he complained about Great Cloud, which was what he used to call Great Britain. More than once Greta had said to Thimio that if he hated Britain so much why didn't he leave. Greta could be harsh. Unlike Thimio, who had no complex counterpoints. Thimio was as straight as a zeïbekiko—the showy handkerchief dance he used to do for them on the mini-stage of the bay window. The zeïbekiko’s intermittent rhythm summed Thimio up: there even when not, present despite the pauses.