FAIRFOUL

I stood in the bathroom after my shower and made faces at the mirror. I scared myself sometimes, though that was probably the point of it: it was a bit of a thrill not recognising my face. Then I also made my face as straight as possible and tried to capture that “I can't believe this is me!” feeling. I'm always amusing myself by finding silly games to play with the objects around me, but it isn't as enjoyable as it used to be.


I finished drying myself with Howard then went and got dressed. I put on Crispin, my boxers; Carol, my shirt; Eva, a cotton jumper; Rodney, jeans; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, socks. It was strangely quiet in my apartment; I went and looked out the window. It had been raining heavily during the night and the people on the street below walked along hunched against an icy southerly. I went into the hallway and did up Edgar and Edmund, my boots, then slipped into Urban, my jacket. I grabbed the manuscript from the telephone table and put it in Sophie, my satchel. Then I left the apartment.


“Be honest, Guy, am I still fashionable?” said Urban as soon as I closed the door. “You never were fashionable, Urban,” I replied and immediately regretted it. They all started to panic, thinking I would soon get rid of them. Eva pleaded with me, saying she was still warm and as long as it was winter people didn't have to see her. Edgar and Edmund shouted that they weren't very worn and that Rodney almost covered them completely so it didn't really matter what they looked like. I tried to calm them all down by saying that I didn't really care much about fashion; I was satisfied as long as they were warm and comfortable. Eventually they relaxed and Rodney and Urban fell into giving the rest of them a running commentary about what was happening on the street.


“There's an old lady with a thick fur coat on in front of us,” said Urban, “it's so thick you can hardly see her, she could be an animal herself.”


“Then how do you know it's an old lady?” asked Carol.


“You can see her shoes and stockings,” said Rodney, “and her hat. Urban's exaggerating as usual.”


“It's called being descriptive, Rodney,” retorted Urban, “you bore everyone to death with your tedious monologues.”


“It looks as though she hasn't got long to go,” said Rodney sombrely, ignoring Urban, “she's almost staggering along.”


I was feeling a bit tired and short of breath, so I caught the bus across town to see my patron instead of walking as I usually did. Miss Williamson, my patron, lived in a palatial sort of house in Remuera. It was huge and affluent; everything about it said that the owner was very rich. I mean literally, there were few parts of the house that remained silent when I visited.


“We are made of solid marble and are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said the pillars.


“I get at least a dozen charity appeals every day,” said the letterbox.


“Hardly any heat escapes from this house thanks to us,” said the windows, “we're triple glazed.”


It's probably unusual to have a patron these days, but Miss Williamson was pretty unusual herself. She had inherited shares in a logging company and had spent her life immersed in the arts and collecting rare books. She was short-tempered and very irritable with her staff but very polite towards any guests she entertained. There was an impressive library in the house and she would spend hours just sitting there and reading. The room was very cosy with a large brick fireplace in the corner and she assured me that in the winter it didn't get cold at all.


I climbed the stairs to the front door and her maid let me in. She led me to the library where Miss Williamson sat drinking tea.


“Ah, Guy, come in, come in,” she gushed. I sat down across from her and she ranted for a while about politics, complained about her staff, praised the version of Otello that was playing, and finally got around to our business.


“Now, Guy. You've been very quiet, but I'm sure you have something exiting to tell me?” she said. I handed over the manuscript, and her face lit up like a child's. I would have liked to explain it to her, and I thought that if I'd been in her position I would have liked to hear some explanation about it's structure or something, but she just flicked through silently while I sat and waited. I was sure that at one of our previous meetings she'd told me she couldn't read music.


Eventually she said: “That's wonderful Guy, I look forward to hearing it. And remember, keep 'em coming!” Then she wrote me my cheque.


“What a boring old cow,” said Crispin as we left. I told him not to be so negative, but I knew why he might have been a bit nervous. The next person I had to visit was Lester, who I hated and feared. Lester was an international playboy who liked life in the fast lane; this quickly became clear to everyone who met him. He was good-looking and could be charming when it suited him, but with people he didn't think worthy of his affections he was rather snobbish. So it was kind of infuriating that he was also a brilliant violinist, and extremely well connected. A piece of mine had been given two good reviews because he was involved. One had praised his “masterful interpretation” even though it was the first time it had been performed. Instead of taking this as clear evidence that the reviewer didn't know what he was talking about, Lester had seen it as confirmation of his innate superiority and had lauded it over me the last couple of times I'd seen him.


I knocked on the door to his apartment and heard him shout, “It's open.” I walked into the living room and he said “Guy,” flatly, so that it wasn't clear whether he was greeting me or just confirming that I was someone he knew. He was sitting watching TV and didn't get up or offer me a seat. I sat down anyway and handed over the manuscript. He also flipped thorough it, but looked completely disinterested. Eventually he tossed it on the coffee table, sighed and turned to me.


“You know, Guy, I think you get more and more boring each time I see you,” he said.


“Um. Oh, really?” I replied. My clothes and the coffee table got pissed and started shouting at me: “You can do better than that!” “Come on, say something smart,” “The prick! Don't let him get away with it!”


“I sometimes think your pieces are getting that way too. The last one was just on the border between adequate and dull or flat,” continued Lester, spitting out the last few words theatrically. “And it's not as if you're important. I know plenty of other composers, there are dozens coming out of the woodwork at the moment. But I suppose… we'll see, we'll see.”


My next stop was the bank. As I was standing in the queue I noticed that for some reason one of the tellers reminded me of my wife. I looked closely at her trying to figure out what it was, but Urban interrupted me by asking about the security cameras.


“Is there someone watching them all the time or are they just recording, Guy?”


“Urban's getting self-conscious again, he's feeling old and worn,” said Rodney.


“I am not,” replied Urban indignantly, “I'm just interested in how things work.”


My clothes were always getting into petty arguments like this these days; they used to be cheerful and genial towards each other. I answered Urban in a whisper because there were other people nearby. I'm not stupid, I know that it's not considered normal to have conversations with inanimate objects. But I'm definitely glad that I can, they tell me some interesting things.


I spent the little money I had on what I hoped would be enough food to last me until the cheque cleared, then returned to my apartment. There I stripped down to my underwear and sat down to work. I have to strip, it's less complicated that way; I also made sure the study only contains my keyboard and the desk I work on. What normally happens is that all the objects around me suggest melodies. It's my big secret: I have very little to do with writing my pieces, I just edit or arrange them really. But when there are too many objects around they start to pull a piece in different directions: my socks will want to go for a big dramatic climax while Mortimer, my pen, always wants to finish in a subtle or ambiguous way.


It's an unlimited supply of inspiration. The difference between lifeless matter and us is that they have none of our inhibitions. While humans have to be very reasonable and alert and need to censor most unproductive or irrational impulses in order to exist, the objects around us face no such constraints. They never have to file for tax refunds or draw up budgets. So they're always coming up with nice tunes or odd phrases, which is very useful for me, though they can also be childish and annoying at times.

My latest piece has been giving me a few problems though. I've decided to write something for my wife, she died in a car crash about 10 years ago. It's been in the back of my mind since not long after the accident, though for one reason or another I never got around to writing it. And now, when I've finally started, I'm getting no help: my clothes, pen and desk are either silent or come up with inappropriately cheerful melodies. Mortimer has even started to complain about what seem to me to be trivial things, and has said he is going on strike. I've tried to piece together snatches of tunes from memory, but what I've come up with so far has been pretty lacklustre. My possessions are also getting more antagonistic when I sat down to write, but when I stop they're their usual selves.


A week has now passed since I started to write this piece and Mortimer and Crispin are getting angrier and angrier each time I sit down to work. But I'm determined to finish this; I think it's important although I couldn't really say why. I may be approaching some sort of crisis; stresses are starting to pile up. Lester called yesterday and took delight in telling me that the piece I had given him was absolute rubbish and that he wouldn't be performing it. I don't know how Miss Williamson will react to that, she seems to think that I need to be constantly churning out top quality compositions in order to justify her patronage. I couldn't handle doing menial jobs again, or moving into a cheaper apartment. It all makes finishing this piece more urgent.

*****

The lecturer moved towards the lectern and the students slowly began to quieten down. He handed out some notes, arranged his papers and briefly went through a few administrative matters before beginning the lecture.


“Right. Today we'll cover Karlheinz Stockhausen and Guy Fairfoull,” he said, putting up the first overhead, “I'll spend about half the lecture on each, starting with Fairfoull. They're often grouped together in the literature, but really they were very different and both quite unique, Fairfoull especially. Although he became famous mainly because of the bizarre circumstances surrounding his death, he composed what are in my opinion some of the most sad and beautiful sonatas ever written.


“As you can see I've given you a timeline of his life, the most significant event probably being the death of his wife in 1996, when he was 24 years old. He appears to have changed a lot after it happened, and a lot of people who knew him lost contact with him. He's a pretty ambiguous character in general, we don't really know that much about him. Some have claimed that he showed symptoms of schizophrenia: he was socially withdrawn and the few people who did see him said he sometimes appeared to be hearing voices. He was certainly a loner and probably a bit eccentric, but he was always able to look after himself and never spent time in any institution. My guess is that the death of his wife affected him very badly, she was also his childhood sweetheart. But… make up your own minds. In the decade after her death he was extraordinarily prolific and produced a huge body of work, most of which was never performed during his lifetime. He did get some recognition because a popular violinist named Lester Trevers performed a few of his pieces, but he had to rely on the patronage of an heiress, he couldn't live off his work.


“So, is there anyone who doesn't know how he died?” he said with a laugh, “Okay, a few of you. Well, it was in the winter of 2008… and he just seemed to disappear. He wouldn't answer the phone or the door and eventually his patron called the police. They entered his apartment and found it completely empty, no furniture, nothing. Even the blinds had been removed. Then they entered his study and found everything there, the suite, clothes, kitchen utensils, all his belongings in a pile that filled the whole room. They cleared it out and found Fairfoull at the bottom where he had suffocated. How he managed to do it, no one knows. He may have levered it up somehow, that was their best guess, because try as they might, the police found no evidence that anyone else was involved. But it was a good story and the media ran with it for a long time. Then his music got more and more attention too.


From a biographical point of view it's hard to know what to make of it, and musically as well… But anyway, I'll go into his pieces in a bit more detail…”

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