chapter thirty-one

The Cavern

Oscar Kørner clattered his instrument case onto the stone floor inside the kitchen door and sloughed his massive overcoat, depositing a dense cloud of ice particles upon the same surface. Mother and son turned their attentions from their respective activities; Sylvia to be gathered into a huge embrace and Frank to be summoned to the congress in front of the stove.

“I have made a discovery; an important discovery, I think,” announced Kørner, kissing his wife generously and ruffling his son’s already thinning hair. He plucked the ladle from Sylvia’s hand, dipped into the pot and sucked up a rich mouthful of herring broth, steam and oxygen. “I will expound further over this splendid meal. Come, Frank, prepare the table for us.” Frank, excited by the promised revelations, quickly gathered his sketch book and the mathematical devices he had been using to construct a chart of the heavens. He laid three hide mats and the antique silver and mother-of-pearl cutlery whilst his father opened a bottle of Paulliac and poured it into two heavy crystal goblets with which he had been presented in the days when he still enjoyed the esteem of the Royal Norwegian Academy of Science.

Frank watched his reflection disappear in the concave soup-spoon as it reached the distance of its focal length from his eyes, the age-spotted silver then fogging with condensation before cutting into the oleaginous orange liquid. Oscar, noticing his son’s downcast gaze, lifted the eight year old chin in his warm hand. “Here, you should not be deprived of this glorious French sunshine,” Paulliac swirled into Frank’s simple tumbler of water. “We share this wine, and we share this great discovery. I have chanced upon a cavern; possibly a system of vast caverns, not far to the South-West. Following a necessarily brief inspection of the exposed strata and the very many fossils, I believe it to be extraordinarily old, and uniquely unaffected by millions of years of changing terrestrial conditions.” He stood and poked one of his hand drawn maps of the island with a dripping shard of unleavened bread “Here is our Garden of Eden, and tomorrow, at first light, we go to examine God’s earliest handiwork!”

Frank was puzzled: his father was a vociferous atheist; this talk of God astonished him. Oscar divined his son’s confusion and nudged the pagan Sylvia, who ignored most of the Norwegian spoken in the house as a matter of course. “I jest, of course; God, his garden and his shaming of women are all nonsense. Tomorrow we will begin to use scientific instruments and method to reveal the reality of our Genesis.” He laughed loudly at his joke and Frank picked up a kerchief to stifle his nasal response. The wine had compromised both the taste and temperature of his water. He soon retired and made highly detailed drawings of imagined prehistoric creatures by candlelight as his parents finished the wine and then vigorously copulated before snoring and silence stilled the cabin.

It was not even first light when Frank found himself woken, fed with porridge and strong coffee and smothered with a malodorous hide robe. Oscar pulled a light sled into the confusing darkness, allowing Frank to ride on it when his eyes, unable to discern a reliable path, caused him to stumble and twist his ankle. Reluctant dawn revealed a vast incline, jagged with the snow carrying the same grey iridescence as the antique nacre of last night’s cutlery. As Oscar dragged the sled towards the rise the sun defined his long shadow, pointing towards a dark heart in the land that refused to surrender to the day. This turned out to be the entrance to the cavern.

The dynamite that had opened the cavern had thrown large, piano shaped chunks of rock into the inner space, and these formed convenient irregular steps that led them into the profound, almost eternal waiting within. Frank’s father set torches around the chamber, revealing in jagged excerpts the enormous dimensions of the place, and the clear strata which articulated the walls and the mineral millennia there recorded. While Oscar used his hard metal tubes and hammer to extract samples of rock, Frank wandered with his own hand-held torch to an area where the roof swept down, almost, but not quite, fusing with the floor. He got down on his hands and knees and felt a cool breath in the narrow aperture. He pushed the torch through and then, wriggling on his stomach, ripping the robe and a fair portion of his back and buttocks, followed it into the mysterious ancient lung.

His torch revealed a sandy ledge, a thin crescent that he was unable to reliably attribute to instantaneous light or lugubrious geology. Before and slightly below him was a motionless body of liquid. He held the torch over it and perceived no depth, merely his and the light’s reflections in an implacable black mirror. He remembered his eight years, all of those he retained being in the cabin. Now he sensed the future, and it was interesting, and it was long, and this black fluid space was his true home; a home to which he would return for more than a century.

chapter thirty

The Hit Men

The café was closed to the public. This pleased Frank, firstly because Tuesday was normally very slow, and secondly because tonight a record company had hired the venue to celebrate the completion of an important project. Unfortunately most of those attending were vegetarians or even vegans; and Frank had gone to great lengths to impress upon his staff, Wibz particularly, that their dietary requirements were to be fully met. Only a few of the guests would be dining on human flesh this evening.

There was something else that excited Frank about this booking: he had made his reputation on providing a decadent dining experience for the so-called ‘Yuppies’ of the financial sector of the city, but he felt nothing for their trite materialism. Musicians offered an opportunity for him to let his few hairs down, and these were reputed to be some fairly exotic musicians indeed. He retired to his apartment to consider the fashion in which he would greet his guests.

After showering he stood before the mirrored wall and lifted his ponytail above his head. He teased the strands as he dried them and knotted several together. As they fell back to his scalp he was taken by the twisting forms and decided to fix them; defying gravity. He mixed a paste of lacquer and sand, scented it with Hermes, and began to sculpt. Seven was a good number, a prime number, and coincidentally the number of men he had killed at Los Cardales. It was also the sum of the complementary dots on his die; the one that contained the bone gas, so he gathered his few hairs into seven wiry clumps and arranged them into snaking lines over, and then falling around his head. He considered his image in the glass: he possessed, as ever, the body of a thirty six year old, his torso hairless, all extremities slightly elongated, including the part that was, as it were, redundant. The asymmetry of the tresses crowned it well, but he needed to strengthen the statement. He opened a tray and surveyed his father’s specimens: fragments of minerals, shells, bones belonging to various undiscovered species of sea creatures. He threaded some of these onto the hair, pausing to tint some with food colouring. This was much better, he was reminded of, and probably inspired by, the paintings made by Helen and Morris in New York in 1960.

He was experiencing nostalgia, but it was a strong, invigorating nostalgia. He selected a 12 inch record and placed it on the Linn turntable. ‘The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra’ suited the occasion perfectly, and the opening track was choreographed by his dressing in dark blue suede shoes, tight black slacks and a perfect white linen shirt. To create the appropriate atonality he chose a heavy ring given to him by the princess in 1896. He injected 10 ml of nutriment and drank a small glass of Janneau. When the girl knocked at the door to announce the arrival of the first guests he was more than ready for the night ahead.

The record company representative was a disappointment: too young and obviously nervous about his charges. His eyes shifted rapidly over the historic details of the restaurant as he spoke.

“The artists are arriving now; there are twenty; musicians, some partners and technical people. There may be some friends dropping by later, but it’s a buffet scenario I believe, so will that be OK?”

“I think you will find the cafe can accommodate whatever you require. Anything else?” Frank wanted to get the formalities over as quickly as possible, but was delighted by what came next.

“Some of the musicians like to smoke. Is that OK?”

“This is not a no-smoking restaurant, Mr...” Frank looked for a name tag and found one pinned upside-down to the cheap T shirt “Foxton.”

“Call me Andy. No I don’t mean smoke; I mean smoke. They are musicians after all.”

Frank put his arm around the young man’s shoulders. “Of course they can smoke, and drop acid or whatever else musicians do. They can even sing if they want to.” He gently spun the young man around so he could survey the whole of the establishment. “ Mi casa, tu casa, as they say. If you pay for my café you pay for anything you like.”

“That’s great, just great, Mr Corner” Foxton stepped back to the door and opened it slightly. “They just wanted me to clear that up, so let me introduce Daevid, Gilli and Mark; the album is called Hit Men....”

“But we’re not hit men, either in the criminal or musical sense. Thanks for letting us use your place, Frank” Daevid was nearing sixty years of age, with long hair and dressed in the manner of the early 70s. There was an other-worldly aura around him, and Frank sensed a long history of, if not exactly decadence, then perhaps exploration.

“That’s an unusual accent,” he replied. “I hear some French, some English, some Australian.”

“That’s about right. Australian once; it was a long time ago. But eternally coming from the planet...”

“Gong!” the others all joined in for this word and burst into satisfied laughter. Frank was amused by a joke he didn’t understand and accompanied them to the buffet. Gilli took in the huge variety of vegetarian dishes and the adjacent sumptuous bar.

“I think we’re going to enjoy this,” she said, picking up a golden samosa.

Much later the air was heavy with cannabis smoke and the tables heavy with wine bottles. Frank found himself dancing, erratically propped between Daevid and Gilli as their friend Kevin sang his anthem dedicated to Frank’s footwear. “I walked into this bar and the man refused,He said ‘We don’t serve strangers in blue suede shoes....”. Frank was happier than he had been for at least twenty years. The song ended and they all chorused “Thank you very much,” each one meaning it in their own way, but none more totally than Frank.