The Way We Heard: Total Eclipse of the Heart

The song followed them out of the pub on Dean Street and stood in the doorway like a third man.

"You know this song is about vampires, right?" Derek said.

Norman worked his gloves on, one finger at a time. "It's about a woman shouting."

"It's about vampires. He wrote it for a stage Nosferatu that never went up. A vampire love song. Then the musical died and he sold it to a Welsh girl with a big voice, and the whole world decided it was about a divorce." Derek tipped his head at the doorway, where the drums were landing like doors slammed in an empty house. "Listen to it. Nobody writes that for a divorce."

"You've heard it, then."

"It's been number one a fortnight. It put Jackson out. There's nowhere in this city you can stand and not hear it. You've been walking us round it for two weeks."

Norman looked back at the doorway until the record changed to something with trumpets. "The voice is the interesting part," he said. "She had growths on the cords. A surgeon cut them off and told her to keep silent for six weeks, and she didn't, and the voice that grew back wasn't the one that went under." He flexed his gloved hand once, watching it. "Different animal entirely."

They walked. At Shaftesbury Avenue the theatre crowds were thinning into taxis, and the two of them took the south side, out of the lamplight, and let the crowds keep the bright pavement.

"So," Derek said. "Grant the premise. The song's fellow. Suppose he's real and suppose he's sensible. August the eleventh, ninety-nine. The shadow crosses Cornwall a few minutes after eleven in the morning. Two minutes and a bit on the centre line. Sixteen years from now."

"You've been at the almanacs."

"Somebody has to be. Two minutes of dark in the middle of the day. The only two minutes of day he'll ever be given. Question." Derek's stride lengthened; Norman let him get half a pace ahead and then didn't close it. "What does he do with them?"

"He stays home."

"He does not stay home. Sixteen years of notice. It's the one appointment in his diary. What does he do with the two minutes?"

"Tell me what you'd have him do."

"See the corona. The one light he's never once been allowed to look at, sitting up there with its crown off. Astronomers cross oceans for it."

"He'd spend both minutes squinting at a smudge through cloud and go home with a headache he keeps for a decade." Norman stopped at the lights on Cambridge Circus although nothing was coming, and waited for them anyway. "Next."

"The people, then. Thousands of them out of doors in daylight, all stood still and looking up. When does he ever see people in the light? Through curtains. In the evening editions. Two minutes in the middle of them. A congregation he's allowed to attend."

"With cameras," Norman said. "Every second man with a camera round his neck, and the light coming back at speed." He crossed. Derek came after him.

"Fine. He eats."

"Now you're being vulgar."

"I'm being thorough."

"You're being cheap. A man plans sixteen years and spends the result on his dinner." Norman's pace had shortened. "Cross that one out and don't put it back."

Down Charing Cross Road the record shops were shuttered, posters of the Welsh girl in the windows, hair like weather. A pub was emptying by St Martin's Court; the door swung and held, and a slab of yellow light lay across the pavement with the song's chorus riding out on it, and Norman stood quite still, remarking on nothing, until the door shut and took the light back in. Then he stepped over where it had been.

"Here's the real question," Derek said. "The one the almanacs can't answer. Does the rule go by the light, or by where the sun stands?"

"Ah," Norman said.

"Because if it goes by the light, then the shadow is night. Two honest minutes of it, and the door's open. But if it goes by where the sun stands, then the shadow is scenery. The sky goes black and the birds shut up and he lies in the box with the lid down, wide awake, listening to his two minutes happen to other people."

"Yes."

"Which is it?"

"Nobody's written back with the answer," Norman said. "It isn't the sort of test that returns its results."

Derek took that in for most of a block. "Then the box," he said. "Practicalities. The latch works from inside, that's first. And he travels heavy, your sensible fellow. Boxes and soil. It's been shipped before, that arrangement, by sea, and it wanted a crew that didn't look inside and mostly got one."

Norman stepped off the kerb and back again, letting a cab take the corner wide. "You've costed this."

"Someone has to. Second contact at eleven eleven, give or take the county. The lid comes up on the second, and not the second before. The whole expedition is a man and a watch. The watch is the entire religion."

"And the sky?"

"One clear August in three, down there. If that."

"And afterwards?"

"Afterwards it's a quarter past eleven on a summer morning, and he's in a crate in a field of ten thousand day-trippers with their radios and their sandwiches, and sunset is nine hours off. The plan was never two minutes. The plan is two minutes and then the longest day anyone has ever spent."

"And you can't rehearse it," Norman said.

"You can drill the latch. Stopwatch in a cellar."

"You can rehearse the latch. You can't rehearse the thing itself. Nobody has done it to tell you what it does. Every drill in the cellar is a rehearsal for the wrong event." They had come onto the Strand, where the crowds gave out and the wind found them, and their pace fell to something slower without either of them proposing it.

"There's still the exit," Derek said, quieter. "Third contact. He could just stand there and let the morning finish it. Sixteen years of planning and the sun does the last of the work. Some would call that a use."

"A use is a thing you walk away from afterwards."

"Some would call it tidy."

"Some would." Norman said nothing else about it, and after a moment Derek left it where it lay.

They passed under the railway bridge at Charing Cross, and in the dark of it Derek said, "You've thought about all this before tonight."

"I went to the one in twenty-seven."

Derek stopped walking. Norman did not, and so Derek caught him up.

"June the twenty-ninth, nineteen twenty-seven," Norman said. "Totality crossed the north of England a shade after twenty past six in the morning. They ran special trains all night out of King's Cross. Three million people went and stood in fields. I had a field north of a village whose name I won't bother you with, wet to the knee, and a sky like a saucepan lid. The dark came in over the hills, and the birds stopped, all of them, together, like a wire cut. Twenty-three seconds. Then the morning carried on as if it had been interrupted by nothing much, which I suppose it had."

"Twenty-three seconds," Derek said. "Under cloud."

"Under cloud."

"What did you do with them?"

"Nothing," Norman said. "I stood in them."

"You stood in them."

"That's what I did."

"But what was it for?" Derek had turned to face him, walking half sideways, his hand still against his coat but no longer counting. "Twenty-three seconds, a night on a train, a wet field, the whole performance. It has to have bought something. What was it for?"

"It wasn't for anything."

"That can't be the answer."

"It's the only answer there is. For is your arithmetic, not mine." Norman's voice had not risen at all. "Twenty-three seconds doesn't owe you a reason. It doesn't owe anybody anything. You stand in it. There's no second half to that sentence."

Derek opened his mouth, and shut it, and the sums against his coat stopped for good. They walked on past Charing Cross without speaking, down onto the Embankment, where the sodium lamps ran off toward the bridges in both directions and the river below the wall was working at its stones.

At the cab rank a driver had his window down against the cold, radio on, and the song came across the pavement one more time, thin at that distance, mostly the drums and the ruin of a voice underneath them, the one that went under the knife and came back as something else. Neither of them remarked on it. It went with them a little way along the wall and then the distance took it.

"The eleventh of August, ninety-nine," Derek said at last. He said it the way a man reads a date off a stone. "Eleven eleven in the morning. Give or take the county."

Norman watched him say it, and let it stand. Then he took out his watch, opened it, and read it a long moment against nothing that was visible anywhere in the sky.

The tide was going out, and the water ran black and specific under the lamps, and a last cab pulled away upstream. Derek set his elbows on the stone parapet, close enough that their coats touched.

Neither of them looked east.

 

~End~