NA/578934
The first time, I didn’t hear all of it. I’d turned on the radio just to fill up the silence, the way I did in those days when Jamie was at work and the jobs were all done. I meandered up and down the dial until I heard something that wasn’t too loud, and I poured myself a long drink. The window seat was my favourite place, with its view of the hills and the loch beyond our garden wall. I drew up my knees and sipped the fruit juice, and the music just seemed to slip under my guard. Cold, it was, cool and smooth as the ice cubes clinking in the tumbler. It made me think of the sea—not the grey sea of my English childhood with its piers and pleasure gardens, but a clear blue northern sea where light stuttered and sparkled and icebergs moved past each other like rudderless ships in the night.
I couldn’t have told you what kind of music it was. I didn’t even know which station I was tuned to. Two presenters were handing over between programmes, and their voices babbled and rolled over the smooth surface of the music until there was one of those annoying segues into an ad break. Somehow after that I didn’t want to listen anymore, and I turned the radio off and went out to see if the washing was dry. Jamie would be home soon.
I didn’t hear it again for weeks. I’d almost forgotten about it when it came on under a link on TV, a trailer for some new show or other. It was only a brief extract, but I knew it at once.
“Jamie, listen, that music….what is it? Have you heard it before?”
“What music?” I picked up my phone and opened Shazam, but the notes had already faded.
“That snatch of tune under the trailer, didn’t you hear?”
“Sorry, Ruth, I wasn’t listening…”
Like a stubborn sliver of food stuck between my teeth, I couldn’t leave it alone. Feeling ridiculous, I phoned the BBC and asked for the name of the music. The girl wasn’t sure. She didn’t get many calls like this. But in the end she found the schedule or cue sheet or whatever she had, and told me what I needed to know.
It was called Winter, she said. A piece of what she called “library music,” bought by the yard, copyright-cleared and used all over the place wherever a mood needed to be created or a space filled up. It had come from an agency, she said. “You might hear it anywhere. Television, radio, on the net…advertisers use a lot of this kind of stuff.” I asked for the name of the agency; a few Google clicks later, I was reading their blurb.
“We provide music for a whole range of corporate and educational multimedia projects,” it said. “We can supply sample clips to suit your needs and budget…”
I was careful about how I worded the e-mail, inventing a new business start-up and asking about music clips for our multimedia pack. “Our company designs and manufactures water-coolers for the modern corporate environment,” I typed. “We’re looking for music which expresses the clear impact of pure iced water—something which conveys the pristine feel of a frozen winter.” I had a pretty good idea that whoever processed the request would put some combination of ice, water, frozen and winter into their search engine and come up with what I was looking for. I knew the drill. I’d had a pretty good job in marketing before we’d moved out of London so Jamie could come home, take up his first job as a GP in this quiet crofting township near his family.
That night he brought up the subject of kids again. “Ruth, are you sure you don’t want me to run some tests? Just to be sure nothing’s wrong?”
“There’s no need yet, is there? We’ve not been trying long…”
“Yeah, I know. It’s just that I’d rather have some idea so we can get onto a fertility programme as early as possible. There’s no point in leaving these things any later than we have to.”
I fought down my irritation. “Look, Jamie, the one thing that’ll stop it happening is you going on and on about it.”
He shrugged defensively and switched on the TV. “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m away to run a bath and read for a bit before bed.” I picked up a couple of glossy magazines as he switched channels.
He didn’t respond, and by the time my bath was cold he was already asleep.
The next morning I checked my e-mail every hour until a response arrived. They’d sent me links to half a dozen clips, too low-fi to be used for real, but quick to download and good enough to make a choice. Northern Lights, Ice Floes, Pole to Pole, Snowblind, Alaska. Then two just called Winter, but with different catalogue codes. I clicked the mouse, saved them both to my hard disk and ran the virus checker, just to be sure—or perhaps to delay the moment. Then I opened the first of them.
It was nonsense, worthless, a riot of sleigh bells for a special Christmas offer. The second was a bigger file. I closed my eyes.
The music rose from the speakers, haughty and pitiless, sharp as frostbite. I hadn’t heard this part before; it was beautiful but reeked of pain, an ice-palace pulling itself into shape and form as I listened. The sounds were muffled, distant, but I could hear enough to know its utter cold, its complete and splendid inertia. I listened, motionless, spellbound. And then I heard him.
It was a cry, or something like a cry; the sound of someone lost inside the abstract architecture of the ice palace, his breath misting the transparent walls and balustrades as he wandered through its endless rooms. He was lost, and as the music went on I heard his mounting panic as his search grew more desperate. My hand flew to my mouth. He was crying, sobbing now, and the frozen walls were closing around him, confusing him, the corridors twisting, the doors and windows changing places as he moved.
It was a child. Somewhere inside the music there was a child, calling for help, trying to find his way out. I was sure of it. I accessed the website again, supplied my credit card details and requested an uncompressed FLAC file of Clip: Winter, Catalogue number NA/578934.
I wanted to tell Jamie what was going on. I tried to, that very evening, but the words wouldn’t come. I’d made a playlist on my laptop, slipped it in alongside a collection of instrumental stuff—bits of film soundtracks, mostly. It was track 4, sandwiched between something from American Beauty and the bit near the end of The Return of the King when Frodo sees Gandalf again. I clicked play and spooned vegetables onto my plate.
And as we sat and ate the music came and went, its spell filling the room with its frozen magnificence as its four minutes and 27 seconds held sway, the plates of ice sliding past each other over the mirrored floors, the child running this way and that, his eyes wide, his hands pink and flat against the transparent walls. I chewed my cutlet and watched my husband for any sign of emotion or recognition. He had the evening paper folded and propped against the water jug, and his eyes darted from left to right over and over again as he read.
“Oh, by the way….” he said suddenly, his smile full of pleasure at the sudden recollection. “I’ve invited some people round to supper next Saturday, that’s OK, isn’t it? Just two couples.”
“Mmmmm,” I said. I was tired of pushing the rest of my food round my plate. I laid down my fork. “Who are they? Anyone I know?”
“Jude from the practice,” he said. She was one of the female GPs, a likeable woman with thick dark hair and no-nonsense shoes. “And her bloke, Iain. He works in Inverness, I think he’s a solicitor or something. You met him at the Christmas ceilidh. The other two you don’t know, Philip’s a patient actually—he and his wife run a shop, antiques I think.”
“He’s not one of these dreadful Volvo types, is he?” I said. Jamie grinned back, pleased to see me taking an interest. I’d been a bit quiet lately, he’d often said. He’d been wondering if I was depressed. Whether I needed…
“No, no,” he laughed. “He’s OK. Came in with an irregular heartbeat, ran all the tests, turned out to be nothing. Too much coffee, I told him. But he’s a good lad; you’ll like him. Haven’t met the wife yet.”
Over the week that followed I couldn’t leave the music alone. It became necessary to me, not merely a backdrop but part of the very fabric of my daily life. I dumped the file into my phone so I could listen when I was in the car or out walking. And the boy was still there; only it didn’t seem so distressing now, didn’t tear at my heart with the wild urgency of those first few times. He was still wandering, still crying, but he sounded calmer, somehow, like he knew someone was listening, someone was following.
And I was following; as I cleaned the house, loaded the washing machine, walked to the shop or wandered over the hill, I was following him. My mind was moving deeper into the ice palace, seeking him out. The notes and chords were cold blades, cutting out new ice, creating new passages and rooms, new windows and doors each time I entered; a flurry of descending notes could fashion a staircase out of the air, an icicle blast of a cadence could open up a new aspect, a new window on the impossible. At the centre was a high, cathedral ceiling revealing layered galleries spiralling up towards the crazy, turreted roof, and I chased my quarry through all of them.
I had no idea why I never seemed to find him. Sometimes it seemed as though his sobs were only feet away, and then I’d turn a corner and there’d be no-one within sight. Sometimes I had the eerie feeling that we were in the same space—but inhabiting different times, as though I’d entered a room where he’d been yesterday, the week before, or tomorrow, or next year—and the sound, the feel of him was already there, or was still lingering. My tears fell and froze into diamonds on the mirrored floor.
I don’t much like dinner parties, but I didn’t want to upset Jamie, so I cooked fresh venison and his favourite pommes dauphinoises. It was good to see Jude again, and the antique dealer Philip and his wife Marie chatted amicably. We ate the deer, drank the wine and started on Jamie’s favourite single malt. And perhaps it was being slightly drunk that made me play the music when strangers were there.
The effect was almost immediate. I’d been preparing to drift off, close my eyes. It was late, and the buzz of conversation was making me sleepy; maybe they’d take the hint and go. But within a few seconds the atmosphere had changed; the air seemed to be vibrating, as if something momentous had happened. Something irreversible. I opened my eyes, and saw that Philip was standing stiffly, his back to the others, pretending to look out of the window towards the veil of frost which had started to form on the cars parked outside. From where I was I could see his face, see his eyes staring, glittering with longing, his hands clenched into fists at his side. His whole body was tense, straining towards something that wasn’t on the twilit hillside. In the music, now, I could feel another presence, another pain. His. He turned half towards me, and the raw look that passed between us murdered speech.
I got up to clear the glasses, empty the ashtray, anything to cover the lightning flash of emotion I thought everyone in the room must be feeling. But Jamie, Jude, Iain and Marie were still laughing, talking, smoking and drinking. They weren’t even looking at us. I rose and went to the window, and for some reason I put my hand on Philip’s arm. And I recoiled; a shock like plugging into the mains, a moment’s contact with something inexplicable. And a name: Luke. Did he speak it? Or did we both hear it? Was it—
The music ended, flowed into Howard Shore’s evocation of a peaceful Middle Earth. The moment passed, and we both turned, almost guiltily, and moved back towards the others. Philip refused Jamie’s offer of coffee.
“No, we’d better be getting off,” he said, his voice flat. I thought his wife registered the strangeness in his tone, but if she did she kept silent, merely flicking up a quick glance at his guarded face. “We have to open up early tomorrow,” she added cheerfully, bridging the pause in the hubbub of goodbyes. “Saturday’s always our busiest day.”
I stood vacantly smiling, not meeting his eyes, while Jamie fetched the coats from the porch and turned on the house lights so that everyone could see their way to their car. As we loaded the dishwasher, I let Jamie talk. I was afraid; too afraid to say anything. I let Jamie turn off the lights and followed him meekly up the stairs to bed. “Tired?” he smiled. I nodded, and when he tried to take me in his arms under the warmth of the covers I turned away, faking exhaustion.
It wasn’t until Monday that the phone calls started. First time the ringing cut off before I got there, and the click of the voicemail was met by the usual strident tone as the caller hung up. Second time I answered, and there was a long pause until a man’s voice spoke. “Ruth?” It wasn’t Jamie, and no-one else ever called unless they were someone from the practice. And Jamie was already at work.
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Philip. From the other night. Look…”
He paused, and I said it for him. “You want to talk about the boy.”
Silence.
“Luke…” I sounded terrified.
“Oh, my God. Ruth…I don’t know what’s happening. I’m not sure I ought to know. I don’t know you, I only know your husband slightly, I’ve no idea what all this means. But I know you heard him too. In that music. Luke, crying. My god, I don’t even know who Luke is, but I do know that he’s six years old and I lost him and he’s here and I have to find him again. We have to find him again. Ruth? Talk to me….”
But I wanted to hang up. “Yes.”
“What do we do?” Philip sounded six years old himself. I tried to pull my mind back into one piece, make it face the impossible.
“He’s…ours, isn’t he?” I said at last. “Yours, and mine. I don’t know how, or when…but he wants to come back, he wants to get out of that place…”
“I know, I know.” Philip’s voice sounded calmer now. “Those transparent walls…all that glass…!”
“It’s not glass,” I said. “It’s ice. And he’s so cold.”
His sudden sigh was desperate, angry. “So, what do we…”
Suddenly I could hear the car outside. “I have to go. Jamie’s home. We’re supposed to be going out.”
“At least let’s meet up…”
I dropped the call.
I should have been braver. I should have met Philip that week, driven into Inverness and had lunch with him in some anonymous place. I should have helped, we should have gone after Luke together. Found him again, whoever, wherever he was. I should have told Jamie what was happening, enlisted his love, let him protect us all.
But I didn’t. I pretended I’d never heard from Philip, never shared what I’d heard and seen in that other icebound place. I deleted my playlist, wiped the file from my phone and my hard drive, kept away from the radio and TV as much as I could in case I heard those cold, dreadful, hopeless sounds again. It was no use. I might have gotten rid of the recordings, but the music still played in my head, every note, every chord, every cadence.
The phone kept ringing too, usually when Jamie was out. I gave up answering. I cowered at the back of the house, terrified he’d come round, make me know things I didn’t want to. I stopped following. Instead, I fought to drive the boy away, and the man who was his father. I abandoned both of them.
And then, one evening, I heard. “Ruth, you’ll not guess…the most dreadful thing. Jude got a call from Marie, she went straight round there first thing. That poor man Philip…he’s dead. Heart attack.”
He didn’t have to tell me. I already knew, because ever since that morning the music that still played constantly in my head had changed. The sobbing had stopped, the terrible crying silenced. The ice palace was quiet under a steady, cold winter sun that gave no warmth, safe and still and silent. And inside, somewhere I couldn’t find them, were a father and child who’d never be separated again, whether by time, or space, or name.
I pressed my face to the ice, but there was no way in. I turned to my childless husband, his kind face full of concern at the look on mine, and wept.
Originally a Londoner, Clare O’Brien has worked in teaching, journalism and PR and now lives with her husband, her wolfhound and her cat on the rugged north-west coast of Scotland. Her recent fiction and poetry credits include Mslexia, Northwords Now, The London Reader, Lunate, The Mechanics’ Institute Review and Spelk, and anthologies from The Emma Press, Hedgehog Poetry and Unimpatient.one. She’s working on a first novel, called ‘Light Switch’.
