HEAR THAT SONG
Round and round again; the Piper felt his tired old muscles twitch. One more job to winch him back from the edge of endless sleep. And this job, they promised, would be easy, and he was grateful, but right now his fingers clicked on the steering wheel and he frowned at the dusty windscreen. He was lost, and roundabouts frustrated him. He circled slowly, roads and lights and indecipherable signposts peeling steadily away into the night. Rain began to fall; the windscreen smeared and the road dissolved before him in a glassy wet mess. Horns blared. The map gaped stupidly at him from the passenger seat. The Piper swore and swung the car out onto the next exit. One more job, and it was already giving him a headache.
In the hotel at last, exhausted and sweaty, he sat on the edge of his narrow bed and watched the steam from the kettle unwind. The television babbled to itself, and the window was sealed shut so that the moisture hung in a fug above his head. The Piper cracked his bony knuckles. His fingers, crooked and aching, were swollen with age and disuse. He peered at his reflection in the fogged-up chrome of the kettle. His skull pushed outwards, shedding hair, flaking skin, and his eyes and ears no longer worked well as he expected. He squinted. His eyes were sunken, veined, dilated. His nose hooked over his mouth like a claw, and his teeth had grown long, chipped, ruined, furred like ill-tended gravestones. His body tricked him into errors and stumbles. He was tired; so tired. He soaked his bones in the bathtub. The job, again, would remake him, wake him, untwist his creaking limbs and clear his clouded vision. He held the contract up to the flickering light and frowned at the tiny print until he fell asleep in the swell of lukewarm water, and the papers dropped from his limp fingers and fell into the bath, where the tight black words unwound and dissolved in the grey suds. His hollow and pale chest rose and fell to the uneven beat of his dreams.
Ten; that was the agreement. Ten was manageable, and the first, at least, was easy. He stood on the steps outside the hotel and polished his old pipe as he watched the traffic pass. The hard caress of his threadbare cloak unveiled the old sheen; the ebony shone with a soft glow in the morning light, born again in his calloused hand, and he smiled. He followed the slow line of yellow buses crawling and jerking their way through the bumpy streets, and waited outside a school, whistling softly to himself, coughing, touching dry lips with a dry tongue, nervous as a debutante. He thought, this is ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. He almost left. But when the first bus disgorged its wriggling cargo, he was ready: he played his song, the old chorus, trickier now, his lungs stretching and wrenching to reach the melody, the notes that trickled first and then poured out in the haunting refrain of the hunt, the ballad of a bird of prey, circling, tempting, baiting – and sweet – so sweet – though not as sweet, he thought, as it once had been. A single child, a little girl, detached herself unnoticed from the twisting mess of her classmates. She came to stand by his side, staring up at him, her eyes already wide and glazed, her mouth slack and slightly drooling. He mopped her up with a corner of his cloak and took her by the hand. They walked away, her short skips beating out a counterpoint to his slow, creaking stride.
The girl sat on the edge of the mattress and watched the television as he made up a bed for himself on the floor. Her expression didn’t change as he carefully swung her dangling legs up onto the bed and laid her back onto the pillows. He pulled the covers over her and tucked them in tight. When he bent his head low to murmur an awkward good-night, he could hear her humming his song, her voice almost imperceptible and completely off-key. Later, awake and uncomfortable on the floor, he listened to her breathe. She was too close, too near; it unsettled him. He pictured her future: bundled into a van, a stifling factory line, begging on a street-corner, strapped to a bed in a strange place, humming to herself as the men lined up. Feeling suddenly sick, he clenched his fists and forced himself to breathe deeply. It never used to be like this, he thought; it used to be easy, it used to be fast. The children were disposable, like the rats; he handed them on, he grew stronger, he sidestepped death and laughed. There was never space for imagination. What was this? These pictures – he would almost prefer the darkness. The night dragged on, and still unable to sleep, he traced out oceans and lost continents on the water-stained ceiling.
The second, third, and fourth came together as he bent his mind to the task – three siblings, twin boys, redheads, and their older, blonder, sister, skipping out the sliding doors of the supermarket to follow the Piper across the vast car park, while their mother queued up for breakfast cereals and orange squash. A bored lollipop lady waved them across the street. The fifth was a stray, collected from a cardboard encampment in an underpass, stinking of neglect and sticky with dirt and stale urine. The sixth was an infant, mewling, lifted from an unattended pram outside a shoe-store in a shopping mall. It smelt fresh, the way milk used to, creamy and frothy in the early-morning farmyard, and the Piper inhaled hungrily before tucking the child away in the folds of his cloak. But that was lazy, he chided himself, half-hearted; he hadn’t even used his song. He felt himself slipping, uncaring, and his head ached as he ticked the numbers off his list. One more job, he muttered, four to go.
The seventh and eighth ran out of church on a Sunday morning, giddy with rebellion, howling freedom at the empty skies, and were caught up by the Piper’s tune before their feet hit the pavement at the bottom of the church steps. The ninth was the flautist in a youth orchestra. The Piper listened to her practice, her narrow face concentrating on her instrument as she waited in an empty car park for her parents to come and get her. He wondered if he looked like that when he played, the passion and the focus, the beauty of the song expressed as a light in the eyes. He doubted it. He felt a deadened heaviness in his playing; a falling and a longing that wished only to put an end to the whole adventure. He thought about this child chained to the first, silent, bruised and bleeding, and he pushed the thought away. He brought the girl home and sat her with the others, placed the baby in her arms, lined them up on the side of the bed. The children’s shoulders slouched forward as they all stared at him, even the baby, its depthless eyes floating back and forth, following him as he moved about the room. The twins, in particular, he found disturbing, one deadened face echoing the other.
The room seemed to shrink to fit its occupants; the air grew stale; it smelled. The children sat wedged against one another and lay head to toe at night, pinned to the narrow bed with taut sheets. The Piper recoiled from bathing them, although they could do with a wash; when he accidentally touched their skin, it was tacky. He shuffled past them awkwardly to reach the door. Nine pairs of eyes tracked him constantly. Three times a day he fed them tinned food with a teaspoon, unable to escort this unconventional family to the hotel restaurant or a public diner. The television gabbled hysteria and panic; parents begged for answers in the newspapers; the flautist’s face peered down at him from flyers taped to lampposts and shop windows. His car radio recited lists of the missing children in a tinny voice until he switched it off. He didn’t need the names; at night he heard echoes of old screaming mobs, mothers baying for revenge, torches crackling in the darkness. His own ancient laughter. He lay there, breathless, and waited for his pounding heart to slow or stop. Outdoors, he wore his hat pulled low over his ruined face; in the hotel, he began to eat his meals sitting on the toilet. The children brushed against his legs if he stood in the bedroom.
The tenth one, the final one, he found at a playground. This was two weeks into the job, and he had barely slept. The balding grass and rusty swings filled him with a melancholy that made his bones ache harder than before. The children playing here were raucous; a smaller boy edged towards the swings and the others swarmed around him. The Piper, his song snatched away by the wind, stepped closer. The children pushed the boy and knocked him to the ground. The Piper felt their blows like wallops of freezing water slamming into his chest. He breathed hard as they punched and kicked the child, ripped his clothes, spat on him. He felt weak with the aftermath of a ferocious excitement as they retreated, leaving the boy bleeding and still in the slanted shadow of the swings. His body screamed for release; his mind, his resolve, wavered and faded. He blasted hard on his pipe and one of the attackers stopped, turned and walked slowly, deliberately, towards him. The boy’s face didn’t change, he didn’t go limp; the music died and he moved closer, frowning, his fists clenched. The Piper almost stepped backwards in sudden fear, but held his ground and waited. He saw the row of mindless ghosts on his rented bed, waiting to be bought and used and tossed away. He saw the girl’s flute, dirty and abandoned in the car park, the baby’s empty pram, the frantic mother of the twins and their sister, as sleepless now at night as the Piper himself, and he saw a faint, endless queue of children stretching across time, feeding some vast hunger in the sewers of the world, and feeding his own awful existence, again and again and again. He stared past the advancing youth to the limp boy on the ground, red blood staining his blonde hair, and as the older boy reached him, the Piper dropped his pipe and waited for the blow, offering himself up, exhausted, finished, ready. But the blow didn’t come. He opened his eyes and saw the boy standing there, less than a foot away, limp as the others, a vacant smile painting his lips, and the Piper howled, a desperate, miserable scream of frustration.
And now, while the children’s pleading images stared out from the muted television, he lined them up and smoothed them down. He combed their hair and tied their shoelaces. They raised their feet for him, lifelessly, like huge marionettes. He stood before them and played them one last tune; their cheeks flushed to sudden colour and some of them hummed along. The flautist whistled softly. The baby raised its arms and gurgled. The Piper felt lighter, almost buoyant, and the steady ache that thumped through his old body hovered on the edge of lifting. He could leave this moment – walk away, fade into quiet nothingness, let it end, leave these children behind. But when he lowered the pipe, and they sank back into blank lethargy, their eyes distant and empty, he sighed.
He herded them outside and down the street, moving quickly, afraid of attracting attention, hustling them around the corner into the alleyway where the buyers waited. His contact, ancient as the Piper himself, tall and lean and dark-eyed, watched as the hired men, smoking and grumbling, loaded the children into a truck. The baby was swaddled in a pillowcase and wedged for convenience into a drawer the Piper had taken from the hotel-room dresser. The children sat cross-legged in the windowless lorry and didn’t react when he climbed in and crouched before them and told them goodbye. He hovered for a moment, reluctant to touch them, but longing all the same to press them to his chest and to receive, somehow, a sense of grace, a transference of innocence, a blankness that would pass from them to him, a deep white fathomless release. The children didn’t respond, and he felt foolish, a stupid old fool, out of place and out of time. The buyers yelled at him to hurry the hell up, and he climbed out. The men slammed the door shut. His contact held out the final contract, his eyes narrowing on the slight tremble in the Piper’s fingers as he paused before signing. The Piper’s heart shuddered in his chest, and as the truck’s engine throbbed, he swayed and the world swam into brief darkness as pain sang through his chest. Sign, somebody said in a cold voice, sign, and gasping for breath, and with numb fingers, he scrawled his mark on the paper.
As the truck rumbled away, he leaned against a wall and rubbed his eyes. His body felt better already. Blood pounded through his loosening limbs and his skin tingled. An alley-cat twined itself against his legs, and he reached down to pet it, but it hissed and spat and darted away. He wiped his hands on his cloak, and withdrew his pipe. He fondled it for a moment, and then held it with both hands over his knee as if to snap it. He stood like that for a long moment, barely breathing, not blinking, and then he straightened, licked his lips and pocketed the pipe. Knotting his cloak tightly around him, he walked away, tall and smooth-skinned, his long fingers flexing in the breeze, the cold air running through them like fresh clear water.
