A Night in Tunisia Page 3

  “There’s a book here, by the telephone. I think a British paperback. The 12th Orbit Book of Ghost Stories. He had an album called that once, Ghost Stories, but I didn’t think he read this stuff.”

  I heard her flip the cover open. “Hey, it’s signed. This you?”

  I can’t remember, either, how our conversation finished up. I wanted to sit down now, since my legs had become very weak.

  Lauren was away that whole week, off at a big international conference in Montreal or some such place. When she called me that evening, I did not tell her the news. Wait till she gets home, I’d already decided. Not over the phone

  I poured myself a scotch though, and I did put on an old tape of A Night in Tunisia, a tune thumping and insistent as a steam train. It was a live recording from some ballroom in Southern California in the Fifties. Walter Bishop. Walter Yost. Roy Haines. Cran Candido. Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet. Charlie Parker – ‘Bird’ – on alto sax.

  You could hear the crowd in the background, simply murmuring at first. But, after the first few minutes, they were applauding and yelling with approval.

  I poured myself a second and then a third scotch, remembering those evenings with Robert, those terrific gigs he’d played. How could anyone just go to sleep like that and not get up again? I was starting to get slightly angry. How could he just go like that, when I had only just caught up with him again? I’d wanted him to pick up the phone. I’d wanted to say “Hey, man! What’s happening?” and hear his big, infectious grin break on the transatlantic line.

  I kept on pacing back and forth and getting more worked up and drinking more, until I’d finished up the bottle.

  I don’t remember how I actually got to bed. But, once there, I had the strangest dream.

  I had become Ivan, that aging Russian hippy back in Bern. The Viet Cong had captured me, and buried me alive. Worms and grubs brushed up against me, and the soil was damp and warm. I tried to move, but couldn’t shift a muscle. The earth pressed against my eyeballs, tried to push its way right up my nose. But the worst thing was that I didn’t dare open my mouth, which was unbearable, because I needed so badly to scream.

  But the next second, I wasn’t Ivan any more. Instead, I was Robert, buried and yet still conscious. Simply lying there.

  I woke up very sharply, thinking to myself, before my head had even lifted from the pillow, He’s still here!

  Call me crazy if you will, but the feeling hung around me the entire next day. The same kind of instinct I had had at the apartment block and when I’d yesterday been listening to that ringing phone. Perhaps it was because we’d been so much on the same wavelength, but I seemed to have developed this sixth sense. Knew if Robert was around or not.

  And that sixth sense was telling me, right now, that he was still present somehow. That he had somehow not departed, as he should have done.

  It was foolish, nonsense, the worst possible case of wishful thinking. But it just wouldn’t let go of me, clung to me like an angry crab, bothering me so terribly I couldn’t do a thing all day.

  And when I dreamt again that night, it was a similar bad dream. I was Robert again, but I wasn’t lying placidly this time. I wanted to get out and move around. I was struggling to scream beneath the earth.

  Only half-awake, I rolled out of my bed, lurched to my feet. And then I stood there, shivering and sweating, with my eyes clamped fiercely shut.

  Somehow – I just knew it – he’d remained behind. And was, right now, trapped underneath the ground out in New York somewhere.

  The knowledge was like a ball of concrete in me by this time, paining me terribly, wholly impossible to ignore.

  And so … what was I going to do?

  This was the most bizarre thing that I’d ever done in my entire life – I knew it. But I also understood that I had little choice. I simply had to get out there.

  Heading down the motorway – the night air close and smoggy – I phoned ahead on my mobile. Yes, there were some free seats on the next United flight to JFK, and I could make it in good time. I pulled onto the hard shoulder and read out the details of my credit card.

  Impatient hours later, I was stepping out onto the tarmacked soil of Queens. The time was round one thirty in the morning here. There were a few cabs waiting. I approached the first one in the line.

  In any other city, the driver might have looked surprised when I told him where I wanted to go at this late hour of the night. But this was New York – a fare was a fare. He simply pursed his lips and shrugged, then took me.

  It was one of those enormous cemeteries that sprawl across the borough like some macabre golf course. Was set mostly on a slope, so that the headstones ascended in pale tiers above me. It was hotter and even muggier here than it had been in London, such a thick haze on the night air that the distant outline of Manhattan could barely be made out.

  There were no railings, just a brick-built wall some five feet high which I climbed over easily. I’d brought a flight bag with me, with a few odd items in it.

  A small torch, for instance. When I switched it on, I felt slightly dismayed. Not only were there literally thousands of headstones, but a fine mist was gathering about them. Tendrils of it swarmed about my ankles when I looked down. And I hadn’t even thought to ask Kisha which section he was buried in, so finding him was going to be a good long job.

  I set off all the same, casting my gaze everywhere for fresh flowers and newly turned earth.

  It must have been more than an hour before I finally stumbled across his stone. His family hadn’t used the name he had been born with, I was pleased to see. They’d had engraved the name that he had chosen for himself, and paraded on spotlit stages half across the world.

  In loving memory of ROBERT BIKO composer, musician, and father

  1942-2004

  “Hey, man,” I said, relieved, and sat down.

  I could almost hear him breathing underneath the earth. What exactly was he doing down there? Lingering, because the mood had taken him to do so and he had no other plans?

  What should I do? He couldn’t stay here. He was probably okay at the moment, but what about later, when the box rotted and the soil came tumbling in? Then, he’d be like Ivan, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I was his friend. He was relying on me, even if he didn’t know it. I had to find a way to persuade him to go.

  Maybe some music would stir him into action. It always had done in the past. I’d bought that same tape with me, the Parker/Gillespie session, along with an old, beat-up portable cassette player. And so I laid it in front of the headstone, switched it on.

  A Night in Tunisia came flooding out again, for the last time.

  I closed my eyes at that point, and then began talking gently to him. Ploughing through the past and reliving old memories. That first night in Gamarth, all the evenings since. That time that I’d turned up (un)expected at the Jazz Café, and the way that Ouchy looked in the late afternoon sunlight.

  Perhaps, if I ran through it one final time, then he would recognise that the hour had come, at last, to let it go.

  It took me a several minutes to realise that something had changed. The music … was no longer as it had been. It was still A Night in Tunisia playing, but when I listened properly, I could hear there was only a saxophone now. No Dizzy and no backing band, no congas by Cran.

  My eyes snapped back open. And I almost scrambled backwards at that point. Because the little spoked wheels in the cassette player were no longer turning. The tape had fouled, I could now see, big tangled loops of it protruding from the lid.

  The music was coming from underneath the ground. They might have buried his sax with him, but I don’t think it was that. Rather, it was coming directly out of him, directly from his soul.

  I took in what was happening with a drained, bloodless amazement, and then got up to my feet, angry again.

  “You can’t do this Robert!”

  His playing just got louder.

  “You just can’t –“
I turned around on the spot, trying to think how to say this.

  “You remember what you said to me the day that Dexter Gordon died? I can still recall your exact words. ‘You can’t stay here, man. They won’t let you.’ So, you think the rules have changed? What the hell are you trying to do?”

  The music stopped for a few seconds, as if he were thinking. Then resumed more fiercely than ever, filled up with a savage intensity by this time. Fired, ablaze with impertinent life.

  I understood now. He wasn’t simply hanging around, not loitering like flotsam the way he usually did. He was remaining here because this whole business was so unfair. To go to sleep like that and, without warning, simply not wake up again? Where was the justice in that? He had so much music to compose and play still, and so many places left to go. And all of that potential had been casually snatched away from him.

  Whose justice was that? Who were the ‘they’ who won’t let you stay here?

  I was shaking now, my own thoughts feverish and verging on the crazy … when something new caught my attention. There was something moving at the corner of my vision, and I’d thought I was alone out here.

  The mist, which had grown slightly thicker, was starting to coalesce in places. Starting to form expanding, pallid blotches.

  Within seconds, I realised there were dozens of them. Growing ever larger now, and gradually taking shape.

  I did stagger back a little, my heart hammering, my breath turned solid in my throat.

  There were several ranks of them, their features becoming apparent. Was there the faintest glow about them? I couldn’t really tell you. I was too astonished now to take that kind of detail in.

  Human faces were now being formed out of the massed condensation. Limbs, and even fingers and toes, all melded into view.

  And, once they were whole, these beings began to move towards me.

  There was nothing threatening in the way they moved. Rather, they approached respectfully, making not a sound.

  The first rank seemed to be babies, with massive heads and tiny digits. But they walked entirely steadily on their hind legs. There was a quality about them that was unlike any normal infant. Their large eyes shone with intelligence. Their brows were creased with thought. Their lips kept pursing and their fingers flexing, as though they wanted to …

  Wanted to do what, exactly? Play an instrument, the way that Robert had once done?

  The second rank were six or seven years of age. Boys and girls, of all races and colours. Clutching in their hands recorders, triangles, and penny whistles. All of them just starting out, I understood numbly, on the same road Robert had travelled along.

  And the third and last rank? They were all in their pre-teens. And they were holding proper instruments this time, clarinets and oboes, violins and trumpets …

  And yes, saxophones.

  I had thought at first they might be ghosts. But now, I recognised the truth of this.

  They were not the lost souls of the dead, quite the opposite, in fact. They were the spirits of those still to come. Of all the talents waiting in the future.

  They were not even looking at me, I saw.

  I went back a few more paces, staying very quiet myself. And watched, as they gathered by the side of Robert’s grave.

  ‘You can’t stay here, man – they won’t let you.’

  These were ‘they’, I now took in.

  And why did they require him to go? Because they needed their own spot. Their time. Their debut. Their career. Their turn. No one could just remain here and deny a place to one of them.

  Robert’s saxophone, still playing beneath the soil, had become uncertain, muted.

  The mist-children just stared down silently and waited.

  After another short while, the tune faltered to a stop.

  I don’t think I was breathing at all by this time. But I was still shaking. What exactly would he do? Which direction would he choose to take?

  I got my answer finally when a last extended lick came blasting out from underneath that gravestone. The most beautiful short flurry of chords I’d heard in an entire life of listening to jazz. All the spirit, the soul and humanity Robert had ever mustered were contained in there, and a dozen other things as well.

  It was fireworks at New Year’s Eve. It was dawn’s rise on the ocean. It was a sudden flight of birds against a sky of azure, and the crackle of a log fire on a freezing night. It was making love for an entire weekend in Paris, stepping out into Manhattan your very first time. It was being drunk and very happy, and being at some fiesta in Spain so wild that you were simply drunk on that.

  It coruscated, seemed to burn my eardrums, and it scorched the very air.

  And … as it finally echoed away into silence … then that instinct I’d developed kicked in once again.

  He was gone. I knew it just as well as I’d known that he’d remained here.

  The mist-children remained in place another moment. And then …?

  They smiled simultaneously, a thankful if faintly apologetic smile.

  Then they swiftly faded, until there was only mist again.

  And I know what you’re all thinking. The death of a close friend is hard to take under any circumstance. But when that friend dies out of the blue, entirely without warning, there are always things you wish you’d done earlier, thought of earlier, said to him while you still had the chance. A yawning, guilt-edged void is left. And, the mind being what it is, half-formed dreams and imagination soon rush in to fill the void.

  There is – in fact – another way of looking at it though. There are certain religions in the world, certain philosophies which hold that our genuine existence lies elsewhere entirely. That this place we call the world is no such thing in truth, and this thing we call life upon it is merely a passing dream, of little consequence.

  And if that’s true then, in spite of my claim at the beginning, none of this is in the slightest bit real.

  Including my setting it down on paper.

  And you reading it.

  By the time I’d climbed back over the wall my face was wet with tears. They were stinging my cheeks, and my eyes were burning.

  It had to be four in the morning by now, still dark if it wasn’t for the streetlights. A car hummed by in the distance and was gone.

  You couldn’t see even the faintest outline of Manhattan any longer, the mist had spread everywhere. But it only rose to chest height.

  I set down my bag, tipped back my head. Above me, the sky was a clear, deep, purplish black, entirely filled with stars.

  I could have been anywhere right then. New York? Tunisia? Lausanne? What did it matter? There are a hundred thousand places in the world with humid, star-drenched nights like this one.

  The kind of night during which anything might happen, and occasionally does.

  In loving memory of

  ROBIN KENYATTA

  composer, musician, and friend

  More of Tony’s short fiction is available, both in Kindle and in print, from Dark Regions Press -- www.darkregions.com

  Other self-publications by Tony Richards on Kindle include:

  THE BLACK LAKE: 13 CLASSIC TALES OF TERROR

  SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

  MORE SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

  THE 3rd SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

  HOT BLOOD #1 -- THE SEDUCTRESS -- vampire novel.

  HOT BLOOD #2 -- CAPTIVE OF THE NIGHT -- vampire novel.

  UNDER THE ICE -- supernatural novella.

  DARK FUTURES: HORROR MEETS SF

  TO STEAL AN ANGEL: SF STORIES

  TOUCHED BY MAGIC: HUMAN DRAMAS IN THE PARANORMAL WORLD

  ALSISO -- suspense.

  TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE -- horror.

 

 

 
with friends