Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett
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Clive, ‘I can vouch. Sure Pádraigín never made it to acetate, and you made it to America.’
‘True enough! True enough! Did you know that Pádraigín’s real name was Pádraigín Cruise? They always give themselves these jazzy names, these “rock and rollers”.’ When Denny had finished laughing, he said to Rickard, ‘If it’s lessons you want, come to me, and we’ll see what you’re about.’
He took a notepad – personalised with his initials – from the pocket of his cardigan, and scribbled his home address.
‘We’ll say this time tomorrow, at my apartment. What do you think?’
Before Rickard had time to answer, Denny, to Clive, said, ‘New blood, what did I tell you?’
The corners of the piece of notepaper were decorated with feathers and swirls; taking a cue – Rickard fancied, as he made his way from the subway station – from the built character of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Leafy friezes and arabesques on building facades spoke of high ambitions, but the impression of the area now was of neglect and decay. Bread husks dissolved to pap and fish heads putrefied in neon-pink pools; discarded plumbing technology cluttered pavements and front lots; in the air distant sirens mingled with a nearer synthesised racket; on the avenue cars hurtled south to brighter lights. Rickard hurried down a side street, found the door he was looking for, and pushed its heavy iron grille.
Upstairs he followed a corridor that turned three corners to Denny Kennedy-Logan’s door. Immediately it opened the guilt crashed over him again: Denny Kennedy-Logan was very old; Rickard’s very old parents remained abandoned in Ireland. Denny was wearing a bulky dressing gown, tightly tied, which suggested to Rickard age-related illness, and he became a little angry, thinking of how he’d been manipulated. The old man would have him, before he knew it, wiping his bottom.
But he had a surprising bounce, Denny, to his walk; a combative bustle and energy, as he led the way into his apartment. He was forward-angled rather than forward-leaning or forward-stooped. Rickard could picture him in leathers, in a garage, at three in the morning, failing to kick-start a Triumph motorcycle; on his way to a confrontation or to playing a mean prank on someone; unwittingly and unknowingly kneeing a child in the skull in the course of a purposeful stroll.
A darkened passageway brought them to an inner room, softly lit and warm in colour. A brass or bronze arm projected from a wall and held a barely luminous globe. Rickard perched on the edge of the seat he was offered, under the arm. An upright piano created an obstruction in the middle of the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanked a chimney breast and the space on the shelves in front of the books was cluttered with trinkets and ornaments, as was a mantelpiece, a wake table, a whatnot and a small chest of drawers. Larger ornaments – slim glazed pots and a couple of wooden figures such as might have been prised off the front of a medieval guildhall or from the alcoves of a reredos – sat on the floor against the wall behind him. The place smelt either of dog or popcorn, Rickard could not decide which. As if in answer, a ginger-and-white dog with a squidgy pink-and-black face came skittering into the room and rolled on its back by its owner’s feet. The old man pulled up a chair so that he could sit down and tickle the dog’s belly. After a minute he turned the animal over and toggled the flesh on its head until its eyes watered. ‘My little poopy frootkin, my little poopy frootkin,’ he said, and continued to jerk the dog’s head.
‘You found me all right,’ he said, still looking at the dog.
It took Rickard a moment to realise that the old man was talking to him. ‘Your directions were very good,’ he said.
He sat back into the seat, warily, expecting broken springs and plumes of dust, but discovered a plump and yielding easy chair that smelt most definitely of dog; for split seconds he remembered the two dogs of his childhood, Jumpy and Kenneth. This was a comfortable, lived-in sort of place, he admitted to himself. Something about the randomness of the clutter and the softness of the light reminded him of the living room of a wealthy Irish country home or townhouse. It would be nice to live in this way in this city, he soon found himself imagining; in a dim few rooms near the service core of an old apartment building surrounded by the stuff of a lifetime. He spotted high on the bookshelves a cherrywood radio set like the one in his father’s clubhouse in Dublin. He remembered seeing it on Spring Open Day. A man called Wally had said, ‘That is just like the one in my grandfather’s country kitchen. My grandfather was a great man for the ideas and one day he had the idea that there was a little man inside that radio and he smashed it up with a hammer.’ He chuckled gently at the memory, forgetting himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Denny, ‘would you like some shaved ice?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Rickard. ‘I haven’t long finished my dinner.’
‘I have a machine inside for it.’
‘I’m fine, really.’
‘I don’t drink alcohol any more, so I’ve nothing to offer you in the way of that. We said nine o’clock?’
‘Nine o’clock was the time I thought we agreed in the club last night.’
‘I must have meant four o’clock. I’m usually thinking about bed by nine. But all right so – nine o’clock.’
The old man made playful faces and noises at his dog, then spun it around and sent it racing away with a loud smack on the backside.
‘Here for the night we are, then. Oh well, I’ll enjoy the challenge.’
He stood up and, with his shins, shuffled an ottoman towards Rickard.
‘At least have the footrest,’ he insisted, manoeuvring the item under Rickard’s feet. ‘You should come and see the outside of my building in the daytime. It’s been said that it looks like the Treasury in Petra, so grand and serious does it look in this street, and so suddenly does it come upon you.’
‘It’s not an area lacking in grandeur.’
‘No it is not.’
The old man sat down again, on top of his yelping dog, which had already skittered back into the room and settled itself up on the chair.
‘But the pity then it has all gone to rot. The cross-streets are not so bad but they funnel you, with no by and by about it, to the main drags. If I take a stroll anywhere these days it’s on West End Avenue.’
‘I have been on West End Avenue,’ said Rickard, indulging him. ‘It’s a very beautiful thoroughfare.’
‘What do you like about it?’
He thought about it seriously and could not come up with anything better than, ‘I like that it doesn’t have any shops.’
The old man sat perfectly still for a moment, then added, ‘It brings to mind, for me, the old world, or at least old New York, with its old associations. And something of the world of the tango, and of depressed beef barons. But mostly, yes, it recalls a great European boulevard. In its scale, in its idiom and, when I think about it now, its shape. Not so much because it curves, which it doesn’t, but because it undulates. Like keys rippling. Under a virtuoso’s hand. Spelgelman used to live there, as did Rosburanoff.’
These revelations delighted Rickard, although he had no clue who the old man was talking about.
‘Tell me now, Rickard Velily’ – he said his name mockingly, Rickard sensed, throwing in an extra ‘-il-’ syllable, and became distracted with the taste of it on his tongue – ‘Velily, Velily, Velily. Is it an Irish name?’
‘It is. It’s also a village in White Russia.’
‘They are Bialy this and Bialy that in New York. Many people originate from places that were once part of Antique Poland or Lithuania, or Greater Austria or Russia. Velily is one of those names that is Irish but might not be. Like Costello, which could be Italian, or Egan, which