The Dying Fall

Chapter 6: Familiar Face

Song for this chapter:

Chapter 6: Familiar Face

A depleted burnt-red and rusty-amber canopy rustled above Carrie as she perched on a moss-covered log and scuffed the damp woodland floor with the heel of her boot. She hummed quietly to herself as she cast a wary gaze around her. It had occurred to her, as she climbed the hill and clambered over the fence into the woods, that it might not be a good idea to meet a bud-dealer alone in a secluded spot only a few hours before sunset. But then she’d realised that it was a worse idea to steal scraps from work and buy illegal buds under the bridge at the market, so this new risk was barely a risk at all in the pattern of life choices she had made so far.

Apart from the occasional movement of a bird in the branches above her, the scuff of her boots on dead leaves, the rhythm of her fingers tapping on the log, and the tune that softly vibrated from her lips, the woodland was quiet and still around her. This stillness emboldened Carrie to mould the melody she was humming around words, trying phrases in one order and then another as she felt out the right cadence, searching for the right expression.

Her experimentation was abruptly cut off by the appearance of a figure through the trees ahead of her. She recognised Nano’s casual stride immediately and instinctively  dug her hands into her pockets to clutch the green cloth bag. Nano’s mouth lifted in a leer as he saw her and stopped a little distance away.

“I wasn’t sure for a moment if that was you or some faerie singing,” he said.

“I don’t sing,” Carrie replied.

Nano took a couple of steps forward and held out his hand. “Come on, let’s see what you’ve got.”

Carrie got up from the log and took the cloth bag from her pocket. She came forward a little way and took out the scraps she had collected since Monday. Nano took them one by one from her, looking each item over and weighing it in his hand.

“Not bad,” he said, pocketing the items and taking out his little book. “What did you take these out of?”

“The transformer, motor and electromagnets came out of a large stereo,” Carrie replied. “The wire came out of various other appliances. The stereo was the biggest thing I’ve had on the line so far this week.”

“Funny to think those things were once used to listen to tunes—like the one you were singing just now.” He gave her a sly look as he tore out a receipt from the pocketbook and handed it to her.  “What was it anyway?” he asked.

“What was what?”

“The song.”

Carrie shrugged, slipped the receipt into the green bag and balled it back into her jacket. “I can’t remember.”

“Which bud is it from?”

“I don’t know.”

Nano scoffed. “It’s pretty pointless lying to me, Carrie. I have sold you every bud you’ve ever consumed and I know that song isn’t on any of them.”

“Then I heard it somewhere else.”

“Right—some stranger was singing it in the street?”

Carrie scowled at Nano’s smug look. “Don’t worry, Nano,” she said, “I haven’t found myself another dealer to rip me off—it’s just something that came out of my head.”

“You made it up?” Nano said, his smugness replaced instantly by something that was almost eager.

Despite his change of tone, Carrie couldn’t dismiss the wry barb from her own voice. “Just the melody—the words aren’t mine.”

Nano pressed his lips together and glanced down at the ground as he shuffled forward. Carrie watched him intently, waiting for his response—a sneer, crude laugh or some obnoxious comment. When he looked up however, he merely raised an eyebrow and said, rather bluntly: “You should come to an undersound.”

Carrie snorted a rude ‘Huh!’ and wrinkled her nose.

“What? You don’t want to?” Nano asked, his teasing air returning. “You’re not curious?”

“I’m not an idiot,” Carrie retorted.

“Right, because this is really smart…” Nano gestured as if to encompass not just their presence in the woods, but all the clandestine meetings they’d ever had under the railway bridge.

“This is a calculated risk,” Carrie said. “There’s a pay-off for it. Attending an undersound would be…” She struggled to find a word that wouldn’t lead her into an outright lie. “…absurd! I’d have to break curfew. If the Patrol didn’t catch me, my mother probably would—and she’d actually kill me.”

“Fine,” Nano said, sounding indifferent. “I’ll see you here on Saturday.” He began walking away, but then paused and faced her again. “You know, if you ever want new stuff—I mean stuff made in the last five years—I have contacts.”

“What do you mean?” Carrie asked, her suspicion and her curiosity piqued.

“Brand new tracks, created here and now, in a secret studio,” Nano replied, grinning as he began to step backwards. “A bit like the song you were singing,” he added, before turning his back to her and sauntering into the trees.

Carrie stared after him, her heart beat thumping in her stomach and making bile rise a little into her throat. She wanted to believe Nano was winding her up about the brand new buds with their freshly conceived highs. It was hard enough getting hold of the old stuff: the latest of that had been produced nearly a hundred years ago. Did someone, somewhere, really have a secret studio where they were actually making music? Not just playing with tunes in their head, but laying them down with harmonies, beats, and voices. That would require equipment that was incredibly difficult to get hold of these days. And surely a new track couldn’t possibly be the same quality as an old one—it couldn’t possibly achieve the same high.

Carrie tried to shake off the idea and the restlessness in her gut. She began walking through the woodland, retracing her steps back to the public path. Nano had to be winding her up about the new music, though he had been perfectly serious about the undersound. She was annoyed at him for mentioning it. She had discovered from Savannah’s journal that her sister had attended the occasional undersound: an incredibly risky venture—not just because it meant breaking the curfew. Knowing the hold the tiny black discs she bought off Nano had on her, Carrie could easily imagine the impact a collective high like an undersound would have. To be completely surrounded by sound, pumping out of speakers, wrapping itself around her whole body, flowing through her blood stream and rushing her neurons at a volume that drowned out all her other senses, would be a dangerous overloading of her system. She had lied, of course, when she’d declared she wasn’t idiotic enough to take the risk. She was idiotic enough; she just didn’t want Nano to know it. It was her instinct to rebuff any assumptions Nano had about her. She didn’t trust him. He was a dealer and it was in his interest to push her addiction to its limits, to make money from her just as he had Savannah.

Carrie didn’t blame Nano for what had happened to Savannah: there had been no stopping Savannah when she had set her mind on something. But she doubted he had discouraged her habit, and he had almost certainly got her involved with the undersounds. Something between a shiver of horror and delight travelled up Carrie’s spine and set her head tingling. Despite the obvious danger, the very thought of an undersound made her sick with longing, and she had to admit that she probably wasn’t strong enough to resist the lure for long.

When she got home, there was a note from her mother on the kitchen table next to a small pile of clothes. The note asked her to take the clothes across the road to Mrs Giles for repair, and give her the IOU note that was attached with a safety pin to the top garment. Carrie checked the IOU, went upstairs to her bedroom and took out the cash Nano had given her for her used buds from her side table.

After counting the money for Mrs Giles out on the kitchen table, Carrie unpinned the IOU and put the rest of the cash in the money tin. Then she scooped up the clothes into her arms and headed to Mrs Giles’s house.

Mrs Giles was someone who had always been a familiar yet somewhat ghost-like figure in Carrie’s life. She was in her late seventies and had spent half her life without sound. Carrie had been very young when she’d learnt that Mrs Giles had been given corrosive sensorineural treatment for breaking the Degenerative Recreational Drug Laws. The procedure appeared to have left her selectively mute as well. The other kids on the street used to whisper that the authorities had invocalised her for lullabying to her children but Carrie had definitely heard the old lady stutter a few words to the postman. For a long time, Carrie had been afraid of Mrs Giles. Her mother had made her take parcels of food across the road and she would always ring the doorbell with trepidation. Mrs Giles relied on a flashing light system to alert her to the doorbell ringing, so it always took her some time to come to the door. Sometimes, the wait had been so terrible, Carrie was tempted to leave the food on the step and run away.

And then, one day, when she was about nine and had been waiting a good six minutes, after ringing the bell twice, Carrie plucked up the courage to peek through a hole in the net curtains at the front window. Peering through the musty glass, she’d seen the bird-like woman, in her moth-chewed cardigan and patched slippers, swaying around her living room with her eyes closed, head slightly back and a smile on her thin lips as a pretty pink flushed the paper-thin flesh of her high-boned cheeks. Suddenly, in that moment, Mrs Giles hadn’t seemed so terrifying.

Years later, when she found herself in her bedroom with the curtains closed, door shut and a bud in her right ear, spontaneously swaying to the melody in her ear, Carrie remembered Mrs Giles and realised the significance of what she had witnessed as a child.

As she stood on the doorstep now, waiting for the old lady to come to the door, Carrie wondered how much time Mrs Giles spent dancing to the memory of a tune that had been impressed on her brain decades before. Was it possible to hit a high without a bud? Was it possible to be satisfied with hearing songs in your head, even if your ears were deaf to them? The fearful urge to throw herself into the underworld of illegal sound-clubs and immerse her nervous system in musical rhapsody until it became absorbed into every molecule of her being suddenly grabbed her.

A creak and shuffle sounded the other side of the door and a moment later Mrs Giles opened it and peered up at Carrie. She had a soft face and expressive grey eyes, but Carrie had never seen her smile.

“Good evening, Mrs Giles,” Carrie said, aware of the elderly lady watching her lips as she spoke. “Mum asked me to bring these over…” She hesitated and then found herself saying, “Would you like me to bring them in?”

Mrs Giles twitched her head to one side and signalled Carrie to follow her as she turned back into the house. Carrie stepped into the hall and closed the door behind her. Although her mother regularly visited their neighbour, Carrie had never been inside the house before and she wasn’t sure why she had invited herself in. The house was similar in layout to her own, except the lounge and kitchen were on opposite sides of the hall. The carpet that ran through to the lounge was threadbare and layered with a couple of mismatched rugs. There was the mottling of damp around the windows and along the skirting boards, and, in the dim light of a single standing lamp positioned behind an armchair that was pulled up to the wood burner, Carrie noticed much larger patches on the ceiling. She remembered her mother angrily telling her that Mrs Giles had been on the waiting list for Sate-Assisted Re-insulation for nearly a year and a half.

The wood burner wasn’t yet lit, and, apart from the lamp, the only other light came from the television, which flickered silently in one corner. It was tuned to a News channel and the subtitles were on, scrolling up from the bottom of the screen in a large, bold font. Mrs Giles took a pair of glasses from her pocket, put them on and took the pile of clothes from Carrie, motioning for Carrie to take a seat as she placed the clothes on the sofa. Carrie didn’t like to sit in the armchair so she seated herself on a low stool next to it whilst Mrs Giles examined each garment in the pile. Having peered closely at each one, Mrs Giles lay them on the back of the sofa and went to a little open bureau.

Whilst the elderly lady rummaged around in a drawer, Carrie ran her eyes over the room, taking in the two dressmaker’s mannequins against one wall, the embroidered cover on the back of the armchair and the throws that spilled from a large basket by the wood burner. As her gaze travelled the room, her attention was caught by the news item on the television. She skimmed the subtitles and gathered that the Patrol had raided an insurgent base in a neighbouring town, recovered a stash of weapons, chemicals and unregistered equipment, and arrested three agitators who had tried to escape the property.

Carrie watched a little scornfully as footage of the raid and its aftermath was shown. The government liked to make a show of successfully quashing insurgents but everyone knew, from the increase in rumours, Patrol presence on the streets and pockets of protest graffiti that kept popping up all over the place, that they were actually losing control over growing dissent in a large part of the population. As the news presenter interviewed the local Patrol chief, a live feed of a small crowd of curious locals, standing behind the security tape outside the raided base, played on one half of the screen. As the camera scanned the crowd, Carrie felt a prickling of heat along the back of her neck when the face of one of the onlookers shocked her memory with a bolt of recognition. A hard gasp caught in her throat and she automatically glanced over her shoulder to see if Mrs Giles had heard her, before the irrationality of this fear hit her.

Mrs Giles was standing by the bureau, an invoice book in her hand and her eyes fixed intently on the television screen with an expression not far off Carrie’s original scorn. When she noticed Carrie looking at her, she came forward and held out the slip from the invoice book. Carrie took the slip, nodded as she read the amount and took the money from her pocket. She handed it to Mrs Giles, who counted it, put it in her pocket and signed that she’d have the repairs done by tomorrow evening. Carrie signed a ‘Thank you’—one of the few phrases her mother had taught her—and stood up, her gaze slipping back to the television. The news item had ended and the presenter had rolled on to the next story.

Mrs Giles accompanied Carrie to the front door and Carrie paused on the step to wish her good evening. Before she turned away, the old lady placed a hand on Carrie’s upper arm and rubbed it gently in a gesture that was motherly and a little wistful. Then she stepped back and shut the door.

For a moment, Carrie felt as if she had been reassured, though she couldn’t identify in what way or why. As she hurried across the road to her own house, the face on the television pressed for her attention and ignited a riot of emotions that sent her heart beating erratically. Trying to ignore her feelings, Carrie went straight to the living room, turned on the television and found the news broadcast, where it had automatically recorded into the programme library. She found the report on the raid, fast-forwarded to the footage of the crowd and paused it. Then she ran upstairs to her bedroom, took Savannah’s journal from under her mattress and thundered downstairs again.

Kneeling on the floor in front of the television, she plucked the photograph of her father from the journal and held it up to the screen and the face that had caught her attention. Her heart stopped still. The face in the crowd was a little rounder and rougher, and the beard greyer, but there was an unmistakable resemblance—an older doppelganger. Carrie flipped the photograph over and looked at the date and the  symbol drawn on the back. The emotions that had been tussling inside her now stilled and she felt nothing but numb. This was a picture of a father and his daughters: a picture a father might take with him if he had to leave in a hurry and thought he might never see his girls again.

Carrie stared hard at the date. But he had seen one of them again—two years ago. Carrie knew the writing on the back of the photo wasn’t Savannah’s; somehow, Savannah and her father had met and he’d given her this photograph, perhaps as proof of his identity. That meant he’d been alive two years ago, and, if the face on the screen was also his, he was alive now: alive and free, not thirty miles from her.

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Next weekend: Chapter 7—Confrontations

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Author’s Notes:

I love Mrs Giles.

Maria Mena’s You Broke Me is a huge favourite of mine and I listened to it obsessively whilst writing this novel, so do check it out if you can.

Chapter 7: Confrontations, coming next weekend.

PJ