Part Five. Spirits

Chapter Twenty

Fabian shook his head, scrunched up his dreadlocks into vicious little bunches. His head ached terribly. He lay on his bed and pulled faces at the mirror just visible on his desk.

Lying some way off was his ‘work in progress’, as his tutor insisted on calling it. The left two-thirds of the huge canvas were a garish panoply of metallic spray-paints and bright, flat acrylic; the right third was covered in ghost letters, faint pencil lines and charcoal. He had lost motivation for the project, though he still felt a certain pride in it as he stared at it again.

It was an illuminated manuscript for the 1990s, the letters a careful synthesis of mediaeval calligraphy and graffiti lettering. The whole screen, six feet by eight, consisted of just three lines: Sometimes I want to lose myself in faith and Jungle is the only thing I can turn to, because in Drum an’ Bass I know my place…

He had thought of a phrase which started with an ‘S’ because it was such a pleasing letter to illuminate.

It was very large, contained in a box, and surrounded by ganja leaves and sound-system speakers and modern serfs, rudebwoys and gyals, an intricate parody, the expressionless zombies of monastic art executed by Keith Haring or one of the New York Subway Artists. The rest of the writing was mostly dark, but not matt-black, shot through with neon strips and encased in gaudy integuments. In the corner below the writing lurked the police, like devils: The Man. But these days the sloganeering had to be ironic. Fabian knew the rules and couldn’t be bothered to disobey them, so the devils coming up from the pit were ridiculous, the worst nightmares of St Anthony and Sweet Sweetback combined.

And up in the top right, though not yet drawn, would be the dancers, the worshippers who’ve found their way out of the slough of urban despond, a drab maze of greys in the centre of the piece, to Drum and Bass heaven. The dancing was fierce, but he had been careful to make these faces more than ever like those in the old pictures he was mimicking: placid, stupid, expressionless. Because individualism, he remembered explaining earnestly to his lecturer, had no more place in a Jungle club than in a thirteenth-century church. That was why he loved it and why it frustrated him and sometimes frightened him. That was why the ambiguous text as well.

He was always on at Natasha to cut a really political track, and she demurred, claiming not to be interested, which irritated him. So until someone would do it, he would keep on with his loving chiding. Hence the Middle Ages, he had explained. The necessary displays of opulence and style at the clubs were as grandiose and vapid as any display of courtly etiquette, and the awe in which DJs were held was positively feudal.

At first, his tutor had hummed and hawed, and sounded unconvinced at the project, until Fabian had hinted that he did not appreciate the importance of Jungle in modern pop culture, and that had given it the seal of approval. All the lecturers at his art college would rather have died than admit that there were any gaps in their knowledge of youth.

But he was unable to concentrate on ‘Jungle Liturgy’, even though he was quite proud of it.

He was unable to concentrate on anything except his disappearing friends. First Saul, in a blur of shocking violence and mystery, then Kay in circumstances far less dramatic but no less mysterious. Fabian could still not bring himself really to worry about Kay, although it had been at least a couple of weeks now since he had seen him, maybe more. He was concerned, but Kay was so vague, so aimless and genial, that any notion that he was in trouble was impossible to take seriously. It was, nonetheless, frustrating and perplexing. No one seemed to know where he had gone, including his flatmates, who were beginning to get agitated about his share of the rent.

And now it seemed as if he might be losings Natasha. Fabian scowled at the thought and turned over on his bed, sulking. He was angry with Natasha. She was obsessive about her music at the best of times, but when she was on a roll it was compounded. She was excited about the music she was making with Pete, a man Fabian considered too weird to be liked. Natasha was working on tracks to take to Junglist Terror, the event coming up fast in the Elephant and Castle. She had not called Fabian for several days.

It was Saul’s departure, he thought, which had precipitated all this. Saul was hardly the leader of a social phalanx but, since his extraordinary escape from custody, something that held Fabian’s friendships together had dissipated. Fabian was lonely.

He missed Saul deeply, and he was angry with him. He was angry with all his friends. He was angry with Natasha for failing to realize that he needed her, for not putting away her fucking sequencer and talking to him about Saul. He was quite sure she must be missing Saul, but she was such a control freak she was unlikely to discuss the matter. She would only allude to it obliquely and suddenly, and then refuse to say more about it. She would listen to him, though, patiently. She always broke that social contract, the exchange of insecurities and neuroses with one another. With Natasha the offering was always one-way. She either did not know, or did not care, how that disempowered him.

And Saul — Fabian was angry with Saul. He found it amazing his friend had not contacted him. He understood that something unbelievable must be going on in Saul’s life, that it would take a lot to cut Fabian off so completely, but it still hurt him. And he was desperate to know what was happening! He was sometimes afraid now that Saul was dead, that the police had killed him and had concocted a bizarre story to allay suspicion, or that he was caught up in something huge — vague images of Triads flashed through Fabian’s mind, and the London chapter of the Mafia, and God-knew-what — and that he had been routinely eliminated.

Often that seemed the likeliest explanation, the only thing that could explain the deaths of the police and Saul’s escape, but Fabian could not believe he would have known nothing about his friend’s involvement. It seemed unbelievable. And then he was forced to consider the possibility that Saul had killed those men — and his father, which he did not believe, definitely — but then… what was happening?

Fabian stared around him at his room, a tip of paint and record covers and clothes and CDs and posters and cups and wrappers and dirt and paper and books and pads and pens and canvas and bits of glass for sculptures and plates and postcards and peeling wallpaper. He was lonely and pissed off.

The view was so familiar Natasha did not see it. It was a tabula rasa to her, a white space on which she could impose her tunes. She had gazed out at it for so many hours and days, especially since Saul disappeared and Pete appeared, that she had achieved a Zen-like transcendence of it. She transcribed its features into her mind as nothingness.

First the net curtains, a tawdry throwback to the previous occupant that she had never bothered to get rid of. They moved slightly, a constant whiteness with flickering edges. Through this veil the trees, just at the level where the boughs thrust outward from the body. Stripped by winter, black branches clutching. So a film of curtain, then the twisted knots of wood, dark and intricate, a random lattice of twigs and thick limbs. Beyond that a street lamp.

After dark when it had rained, she would sit at her window and poke her head out from under the net curtains and stare at that lamp through the tree outside. Its rays would pass through the thicket, lighting up the inside of each branch, surrounding the streetlight with thin circles of illuminated wood, composites of a thousand tiny wet sections reflecting the light. As Natasha moved her head, the streetlight’s halo moved with it behind the tree. The lamp sat like a fat spider in the centre of a wooden web.