Now it was day and the lamp was nothing, just another washed-out shape beyond the curtain, a shape Natasha was not seeing as she stared at it. Beyond it the houses on the other side of the street. The child’s bedroom, the little study. The kitchen. The roofs, the slate anaemic, its rough red invisible inside the room. Behind the roofs the jutting landmarks, the estates that stretched up over West London, squat and huge and awe-inspiring. Behind them a sky that was all cloud, a shifting scudding mass whose details twisted and turned and decayed leaving the totality unchanged.
Natasha knew every part of this diorama. Had anything been missing or different, she would have seen it immediately. Instead she saw that it was as it should be, and therefore she did not see it at all. In her careful itemization of its qualities, it became invisible.
She felt as if she would float into the clouds, sometimes.
She did not feel tethered at all.
She thought about Saul but she thought about basslines as well, and she wondered where he was, and she heard a stunning track suggest itself in her mind. She wondered where Pete was. She wanted to hear his flute. It was time to put some layers down on to Wind City. She realized that she could not really think straight. She had not felt secure and engaged for some days now. But she was eager to lay down some more flute.
Pared down as it was, Natasha wanted to strip the room of all its extraneous objects, the bed, the telephone, the cups she saw by her pillow. She wanted to close the door and ignore the rest of her flat and just stare at that window, at that view, through the dilute milk interference of the curtain. She wanted no sounds except the tiny murmurings of the street and her own sequencer, weaving her tune, making Wind City what she wanted.
A couple of weeks ago she had mentioned the track to Fabian when he had called her, and he had made a joke about the title: about eating too many beans, or something cretinous like that. She had brought the call to an abrupt close, and when she had put the receiver down she had cursed him, sworn at him, told him how fucking stupid and crass he was. A part of her had tried to evaluate his comment dispassionately, tried to see it as he saw it, but even as she understood she saw how wrong he was. Her opinion of Fabian was shaken. Maybe he had to hear the track, she concluded charitably.
He could not hear the word Wind without remembering his little idiot jokes in playgrounds, the puerile scatology she could not empathize with. It was a boy thing. How could she make him see what she saw when she named that track, when she played it and tweaked it and made it work so well it made her chest hollow?
To start, a tiny piano run from some histrionic Swingbeat rubbish. She had stripped it down so severely that she had dehumanized it. This was something different from her usual approach. The piano, the instrument that so often ruined Jungle, making her think of Happy House and idiotic Ibiza clubs, here turned into an instrument that signalled the destruction of anything human in this world. Deeply plaintive and melancholy, but ghostly. The piano tried to remember melancholia, and presented it as if for approval. Is this it? Is this sadness? it asked. I can’t recall. And under the piano she faded in, for a fraction of a second, subliminal, she laid down a sample of radio static.
She had sought it for a long time, recording great swathes of sound from all the bands on her radio, rejecting them all, until she found and seized and created exactly what she wanted. And here she hinted at it.
The beat kicked in after the piano went around and came around several times, each time separated by a severe gap, a rupture in the music. And the beat was all snares at first, fast and dreamy, and a sound like a choir welled up and then resolved itself into electronic orchestration, fabricated emotion, a failed search for feeling.
And then the bassline.
A minimal program, a single thud, pause, another thud, pause, another, longer pause… double thud and back to the beginning. And underneath it all she began to make those snatches of radio static a little longer, and longer still, and looping them more and more randomly, until it was a constant, shifting refrain under the beat. A chunk of interference that sounded like someone trying to break out of white noise. She was proud of that static, had created it by finding a station on shortwave and then just missing it, so that the peaks and troughs of the crackling could have been voices, eager to make contact, and failing… or they could have just been static.
The radio existed to communicate. But here it was failing, it had gone rogue, it had forgotten its purpose like the piano, and the people could not reclaim the city.
Because it was a city Natasha saw as she listened. She sped through the air at huge speed between vast crumbling buildings, everything grey, towering and enormous and flattened, variegated and empty, unclaimed. And Natasha painted this picture carefully, took a long time creating it, dropping a hundred hints of humanity into the track, hints that could not deliver, dead ends, disappointments.
And when she had sucked her listener in to the city, all alone, Natasha brought on the Wind.
A sudden burst of flute mimicking the almost speaking of the static, a trick she had pilfered from a Steve Reich album — God knew where she had heard that — where he made violins mimic human voices. The static rolled on and the beat rolled on and the soulless piano rolled on and as the static rose and fell the flute would shudder into existence behind it for a moment, a shrill echo, and then it would disappear. Gusts of Wind sweeping rubbish off the streets. Then again. More and more often, until two gusts of flute would appear, overlaying each other. Another and another would join in, a cacophony of simultaneous forces of nature, half-musical, half-feral, artificial, commentary, an intruder in the city that shaped it contemptuously, sculpted it. A long low wail of flute piped up from behind, gusting through everything, the only constant, dwarfing the effect of the other sounds, intimidating, humbling. The peaks and troughs in the static go, they are blown flat by the flute. The piano goes, each trill of notes reducing by one until it is just a single note like a slow metronome passing time. Then that, too, disappears. The intricacies of flute are superseded and only the great single wind remains. Flute, white noise, snares and bassline, stretching off for a long time, an unbroken architecture of deserted beats.
This was Wind City, a huge metropolis, deserted and broken, alone, entropic, until a tsunami of air breaks over it, a tornado of flute clears its streets, mocks the pathetic remnants of humanity in its path and blows them away like tumbleweed, and the city stands alone and cleared of all its rubbish. Even the ghost of the radio proclaims the passing of the people, a flat expanse of empty sound. The boulevards and parks and suburbs and centre of the city were taken, expropriated, possessed by the Wind. The property of the Wind.
This was Wind City, the title that made Fabian laugh.
She could not talk to him after he had made his joke.
Pete really understood. In fact, when he heard pieces of the track, he told her that it was she who understood, that she really understood him.
Pete loved the track with an extraordinary passion. She supposed it appealed to him, the notion of the whole world possessed by the Wind.
The little flat in Willesden had become the setting for Crowley’s dreams. He was no longer fooled by its nondescript architecture. This flat was a dynamo. It had been turned into a generator of horrors.
He was on his haunches, looking down at another ruined face.
The little flat was becoming steeped in violence. It contained some vast attractive force luring people in to violent and bloody mayhem. Crowley felt trapped in some ghastly time-slip. Here we are again, he thought, gazing at the destroyed and bloody mask beneath him.