Thimio's House

By John Kefala Kerr

Fish is an idealistic young composer whose life is in meltdown. Gabrielle is an archaeologist who has uncovered something frightening and needs to get away. The couple escape to economically decimated Greece where they take up residence at the abandoned house of Fish's late father. The arrival of a rebellious lifeguard, a love-struck schoolteacher and an Albanian puppeteer, prompts Fish to follow his utopian dream of creating a new society. But as the heat of the Greek summer rises and tensions in the fledgling 'republic' increase, the unspoilt Aegean shoreline plays host to a series of unexplained events that threatens the future of the community. With the sounds of Fish's imaginary orchestra playing throughout, Thimio's House builds towards an emotional crescendo and a shocking revelation. Lyrical and satirical, funny and sad, sensuous and intellectual, gentle and traumatic, John Kefala Kerr's remarkable debut novel is about the raw unhappiness of modern society and an ancient vision of utopia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Dec 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781782790525

Book preview

Barks)

1st Movement

FURIOSO

1

Near Death Experience

It’s a lovely sunny day and it’s time for you to get ready to go to town. Your mother has woken you and drawn back the covers to stop you from falling asleep again. Your mother gives you a kiss on the cheek, snuggling her face into your neck before picking up the soft toys that have fallen on the floor. Eeyore and Tigger always fall on the floor. After putting the toys on the chair, your mother goes to the bathroom to do her lovely hair.

In town you hold your mother’s hand. Town’s a busy place. You stay where you’ve been told to stay—by the lamppost. The dummies in the shop window have no clothes on. Suddenly they’re lying in the road with no clothes on, and a jet of water’s sprouted up out of the ground, and a very hot wind’s made the litter stick to everything, including you.

You remember the heat, the smoke, the rubble, the blood, the shouting and screaming.

In hospital, everything’s a murmur. The murmur feeds on you, taking whatever it needs and discarding the rest—extracting the pink. You lie dead for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, combing and being combed, crying out for mother, your hair and body in tatters, your skin forming an inhibiting bracken that you struggle to get out of.

Emerging elsewhere, in a dazzling place, you suddenly feel a friendly feeling and see a glow and a shimmer. The glow and the shimmer brighten to become a person—not your mother, but a person so bright that it’s impossible to make out their features. The person is holding a shiny object in their hand. They put the shiny object up to their mouth and blow into it, playing high notes—tee-teeee, tee-tee-teeee, tee-teeee—which makes the person’s hair billow out in response as though the breath is escaping out of the top of the person’s head.

Enveloped in the trumpet call’s chilling burn, you know your vision has something to do with the way you’ve been made and unmade, and that the vision means you’ve been made again for a second time within the blissful noise of the trumpet, which is everywhere except in the room where you’ve been resuscitated and told you’ll have to lie on your front for weeks.

That was when you were nine years old, before you’d understood that the trumpet was a summons, calling you back to life.

2

Warmonger!

The rain was torrential, bouncing off roads and pavements, making rapid lie-detector lines. The lies being detected were those of the reckless bankers, the phone-hacking journalists and the corrupt politicians.

Fish had been wandering the city since midday, listening to sounds. City sounds he found inspiring, but today they seemed reproachful, bombarding him like sonic projectiles. The sounds all cried warmonger! their myriad hisses and rumbles and clangs all going off like acoustic ammo. He was the victim of these munitions, especially the incoming shots of the goldsmith’s clock (which said one hour to go) and the armour-piercing voice telling him his phone credit was zero.

Today his wandering had purpose: a last-ditch meeting with the solicitor at three. Skirting the Coffee Democracy queue, he headed for Toney’s Café, taking the route past the Occupy tents. As he walked through the encampment he saw the djembe guy talking to some of the other protestors, a sodden banner behind him listing the movement’s core grievances: bank bail-outs, spending cuts, tuition fees, arms trading, banking crisis, heating costs, exploiting nature. The bearded drummer waved to him and pointed to the Monument—a reminder to him of his busking promise. Fish acknowledged the djembe guy with a thumbs up and entered the mall (capitalist cathedral), his mindchoir now on a rant (ooooaaaaeeee!) and his orchestra on a bombing raid (brrrrrrrrrmmmmm).

He was starting to doubt the wisdom of his symphonic project. Symphonies were an ineffective protest. He’d been told this twice in the past week: first by his composition professor and then by the djembe guy. The poncho-wearing drummer had said that symphonies were a part of the problem, the province of the one per cent. ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s really cool what you’re doing and that,’ he’d said, stroking his goatee, ‘but who’s gonna hear it? Moneyed dudes that’s who.’ The djembe guy had then issued him a challenge. ‘Come and join us here, man. Get your hands dirty. Come busking.’

Fish liked the djembe guy, he seemed sincere. He had a point too about the slowness of his symphonic resistance, but it had been shortsighted of him to dismiss the tactic so readily.

Crossing the replica public square where the giant teddies sing fun, fun, fun, Fish felt suddenly vulnerable. Apart from the piano taking up most of his room and the symphony taking up most of his head, he was alone in the world. The whole point of writing a symphony was to rectify this, create social magic. Otherwise there was nothing to live for.

In Toney’s Café he tore off the end of a sugar sachet and stared at the posy of fake ice-cream cones arranged in the window. He hadn’t enjoyed having his commitment questioned, his methods attacked, and now the seminar incident was replaying in his head like an earworm—‘You don’t have to be a genius to work out whose debts Britney’s referring to, but it’s obvious to me that she’s playing the entire financial system off against itself, giving every fat cat in the world a taste of that green slime stuff she puts in the guy’s mouth in the video.’

His comments caused hilarity.

The back story to the scenario was the megastar’s classic hit, Toxic. The track had been pounding the woodchip every night in the communal house and the song’s prophetic message had grooved its way into his thoughts, so he’d decided to conscript the diva because she said pertinent things like: ‘Oh baby you’re so toxic’.

—Have you really quoted Toxic in your symphony?

—Are you seriously suggesting that Britney Spears predicted the global financial crisis?

—Well, who’s to say Britney hadn’t seen it coming? She had her finger on the pulse back then, you know.

Bowing to sub-prime applause, he’d opened the lid of the classroom piano and laid into it, pounding the keys in unstructured bursts, unleashing an executive bonus of notes and chords.

With the cheers of the class adrenalising him, he’d gone to reclaim his score from the professor’s clutches, but the musical snob had held onto it, giving it a curt sniff first before holding it aloft like a dirty pair of underpants. He’d responded by snatching back the thick wad of paper, rolling it up and whacking the professor in the face with it.

The sharp edge of his score created social magic—conjuring blood first and then a designated first-aider.

Ejected from the seminar, he’d retreated to the Union bar to find news of his clash gobbling bandwidth. Facebook had gone mental and the leader of the University Wind Band—always quick off the mark with anything publicity-worthy—had sent him an email begging him to bring the score and parts of his ‘amazing militant music’ to Friday’s rehearsal.

Fish didn’t think he’d be able to oblige the bandleader. He was too confused, too messed up in the head, too concerned over how on earth he could legitimately join the Occupy protest now without appearing hypocritical. In mounting his offensive he’d committed the cardinal sin of peaceful resistance. Whacking might sound innocuous in a Tweet, but it still amounted to violence.

Gulping on his lager, he’d tried to ignore the music playing on the in-house sound system, its connotations lending inappropriate grandeur to the war being shown on SKY. But when the giant screen showed hundreds of Thimio lookalikes rampaging through the streets of Athens, and the music suddenly achieved a perfect fit, he realised then that it was time for him to get serious.

* * *

The solicitor’s office was up a steep flight of stairs, which made Fish feel like he was going to the gallows. He reckoned he could always whack the solicitor if things didn’t go his way, seeing as he was now a warmonger. But the solicitor turned out to be lacking in whackability. In fact he was friendly and badly dressed, which reduced his whack value. The groove under the solicitor’s nose held firm when his mouth and lips explained to him how inheritance issues could often be perverse and that no amount of legal action would change the fact that his adoptive mother had left the piano to him and the house to the church.

Numbed by the news, Fish stood outside in the street and gazed up at the Mediterranean-style frontage of the Stand ‘n’ Tan that the solicitor’s was above. Along with every TV report and newspaper headline it reminded him of Thimio.

Ever since the Euro crisis had hit, old memories had bobbed up to the surface: his adoptive father’s tanned face, his droopy moustache, his oregano-and-Swarfega smell, his pumice-rough hands, the way he used to mangle the names of department stores (‘Woolwuthers,’ ‘Littlywoods,’ ‘Markaspencer’), his delicate tutorial on how to crack open the pumpkin seeds called pasatébo.

Psaráki was what Thimio used to call him. It was Greek for little fish. His father’s death had seemed unreal. On the telly there’d been a platform on stilts and footage of a downed helicopter. Search and Rescue never found Thimio.

3

Trick

Frightened, you flee.

Pack your bags and flee.

Stalked all the way.

The baritone sax too big for the boot, lying on Bruno’s back seat.

Signs of life rising up all around.

A roar of living life.

A tsunami.

A curling, living willow pattern of life.

I’m loving angels…

On the outskirts of Belfast you skin up, constantly checking over your shoulder, drained of energy but loving the open road, the security of it. You want to keep going forever. The world is big enough. Moving, you revive things—rouse fields, restore towns, awaken skies, stir rivers. The speedometer keeps you on the right side of sixty. After sixty all hell breaks loose.

Spread your golden wings…

You inhale deeply. The cool smokestream settles you…makes you feel unmade and made again…helps you feel joy at the undoing of the done…at the gathering of parts from as far as a bomb blast can send them…lets you feel proud of your trick for re-gluing the beautiful mother torn asunder (wait here, Sweetie, while I pop in for some ham), for replacing the hairs caught in the hairbrush (sudden ears of cloth), for fixing the forever-wrecked breasts (hot cloth!), the confetti freckles lost on the breeze (sticking!), the fluttery eyelashes (singed!), the keepsake lip (scorched!), the laugh damaged beyond repair (burning!).

After you’ve lost your pursuer you’ll resume the task of reassembling your mother. This is your goal. You have the skills.

4

Seizmós

In his symphony, violins make curved Vs the shape of wings.

His tan was a disaster! His life was a disaster! The objects on the windowsill agreed. Gel Spray—its label facing the wall—was spurning him. Shaving Mirror, all steamed up like a huffy mother, was reminding him of how stupid he looked. Only Toothbrush showed empathy, standing there alone in the cup like an orphan.

Fish had been soaking himself in the bathtub for over an hour, trying to decaffeinate himself. What had induced him to go in and get a tan he had no idea. Maybe he’d thought it would improve his fortunes, make him look more like Thimio, or perhaps give him the edge at the police station when he went to get cautioned. He hadn’t bargained on spray. He’d expected bright lamps, not spray!

Giving his arms and legs another scrub, he felt an arpeggio of anger ripple through him, which had nothing to do with the professor’s jibes and a lot to do with coming a poor second to the church. Greta had done him out of hundreds of thousands of pounds and had rendered him virtually homeless.

He couldn’t give a toss. He was on his way down. The seminar incident had merely sealed his fate. A letter requiring him to withdraw from his course was on its way. Greta would have huffed big time. Thimio would have told him not to worry and to go see the world.

He could have done with some of his father’s wisdom right now. Thimio had known a thing or two about disasters: ‘Get a clear word from someone who knows’ was his maxim.

On the oil-company helicopter there hadn’t been anyone who knew. But at the Pelion house Thimio’s clear word had come from his grandmother—Yiayia Maria. An earthquake had awakened the teenage Thimio and he’d made his way around to the other side of the wobbling hardboard partition to where Yiayia Maria kept her bed.

‘It’s nothing, go back to sleep,’ the old lady had said, and Thimio had jumped to it, because Yiayia Maria knew. She’d escaped a house fire in Athens once by jumping from a third-storey window. Yiayia Maria was a sklirí yeinaíka—a hard woman who’d lived alone for thirty years in a remote house by the sea.

Both Thimio and Yiayia Maria had survived the ’54 quake, and to celebrate, the octogenarian had smoked a cigar, and her obedient grandson had received a haircut from an alcoholic farmer. The inebriated neighbour had staggered along the recently devastated path with his scissors and his comb in his hand, and Yiayia Maria had brought out a chair and placed it defiantly over one of the newly formed cracks in the ground. Kátse káto meant sit down, which was what Thimio had done, allowing the amateur barber free-rein, the object of the haircut being twofold: to ensure the young man’s mother would recognise him when he went home to Volos and to prevent him from resembling a priest.

Later that same day, an old man called Yiorgo had climbed up onto Yiayia Maria’s roof to realign the loose slates. A newly cropped Thimio had been indoors giving himself his first ever shave. The shaving mirror had rotated. Flecks of soft beard had vibrated in the soapy scum. The mirror had danced. Pots and pans had clattered. The suspended cheese larder had swung violently—peradóthe-peradóthe. Yiorgos’s anxious face had flashed past the window. ‘Seizmós! Seizmós!’ the old timer had cried.

That second tremor had been brief but violent, as off-the-scale as the peals of laughter emanating from the Petrino Bar that evening when the men of the village had resumed their tsípouro- drinking and games of távli. A vast plane tree outside the Petrino hadn’t budged in the quake, despite the ground around it having snapped like a biscuit. Feeling himself lucky to be alive, Thimio had etched his name into the bark of that tree.

Thimio had been Fish’s someone. His father’s absence was why his life was now a disaster.

With a brown-streaked body there wasn’t much he could do except stick to his work regime and maybe have a few more baths before Friday’s rehearsal. His imminent departure from the university wouldn’t stop him from making the most of his final band practise, though. He would go out with a bang. Music was all he had now. It was the only good thing Greta had given him. Everything else had been skatá—shit.

5

Digit

Cooking a nice plate of champ is how you’re reconstructing her today. You mash up the boiled potatoes (like so), chop the scallions, mix in a dollop of butter and some milk (well done, Sweetie) then pile the lot onto a plate. The volcano shape comes easily…but not a volcano now that you look at it, more like a landfill slope. You add a veggie sausage in sick commemoration, recalling with the help of your notepad the way your fringe had been irritating you that day at the dump, and how you’d had to keep brushing your hair away from your eyes with your sleeve because your hands, or rather your Kevlar gloves, had been too filthy to be touching your face with. The rest of the team had gone to the pub. One last delve, you’d insisted, knowing it broke the rules.

The song playing on your Walkman at the time was My Special Angel. The machine—a wee totie piece of retro you’d bought yourself after winning the scholarship at Northern—you’d likened to the getting of a new purse, hence the mixtape.

…from paradise…

The landfill’s north foreshore was where you’d been based those three weeks, the preceding three months having been spent getting the Environment Agency clearances, the polio, tetanus and hepatitis jabs, and negotiating access to that area away from the active dumping: a place you’d dubbed the valley, located between the hillock and the dune, a place where the stench was unspeakable. Your descriptions of the various pongs had been uninventive. More like curses. But after half an hour in the noxious perfumery words became redundant, because the smells vanished, or rather the capacity to detect them did.

From afar, the landfill was a rowdy splatter of colour. Close up, it was a repository, an archive, in which every object told a story. How many stories had you disturbed that day? How many had you unwittingly trampled on? How many more were still waiting to be uncovered in the municipal marshland of waste paper and buckled plastic?

You’d kneaded the top layer of mustardy sludge, picking out a drinks bottle, a half brick, splinters of wood, a condom, bits of eggshell, a shitty nappy, a hot dog (some were known to last 15 years), several newspapers (every three-foot bucket of trash produced 10 to 30 readable ones), a syringe, a human finger…

…I feel your touch…

Lowering your mask, you’d removed a glove and held the surprise object up, giving it a shake. After inspecting it, you’d slipped the meaty banger into the pocket of your Hazmat suit; somewhere within the three-foot tower of matter extracted by the giant pastry cutter there’d be a hand. You’d proceeded to hoake about, but your bravado had been short-lived, the dense springiness of something well-bagged coming up against your spade, and with it, a sick mulching feeling in the pit of your stomach. With the useless tool failing to free the bulky object from the sliding puzzle of rubbish, you’d cast it aside and used your hands instead to push and pull at the intransigent mass.

…angel, whoa-oh-oh…

Till then, you’d only taken brief glances at the body, being more concerned about what to do now that everything had suddenly become a very different kind of evidence. A revenge killing, you’d supposed, sectarian possibly, though less likely now.

Whatever the facts, a body wasn’t something to be tampering with, so you’d retrieved the severed digit and replaced it, making the end of it dock into the stubby gap where index fingers belong, noticing as you’d done so how the bare arm of the dead man looked stuffed, like upholstery, and how the signet ring on his fourth finger looked tight on.

The man’s naked torso had been bouncin’. You almost boked at the sight of it. It was the handiwork of demented tattooists: a hotch-potch of scrolls, flags and slogans, all overlain with a slapdash body art of dried mud. Standing out amid these hieroglyphs, like a detectorist’s find, were the twin coins of the victim’s nipples. You’d seen others like him before, only they’d had flash burns instead of tattoos.

Through a timid squint you’d taken in the dead man’s face—papier-mâché-stiff—and his bald head, a single black hole in the forehead, just off-centre. Freaked, you’d hurried down the midden slope to get your bag, realising before even reaching it that your phone wouldn’t be there…surprise, surprise, you’d forgotten it…another rule broken.

Tramping back up the incline, you’d looked up towards the crumpled summit and seen a movement come from within the mangled hill of rubbish: a miniscule spasm, a twitch, an inwardinchward collapsing into debris, followed by a much larger shift—like the one your mother had made at the beach that time when, half-buried in sand, she’d wanted to end the funny game.

You’d stared at the disturbance, awaiting confirmation before running in your steel-toecap boots over the irregular terrain, your heart in your mouth, energy on the wane, knowing this was no overreaction on your part, no mere garbage settling.

Insects and birds were one thing, but you’d never thought a human being possible.

6

Plip-Plop

In his symphony, the form of the notes is the form of the moment, and the form of the moment is strings (lustre), horn (sheen), oboe (edge), harp (light) and glockenspiel (a touch of the rinky-dink).

Snow arrived with the flamboyance of a Victorian conjurer. A dark cape of cloud covered the sky, releasing a cascade of magic flakes. The wheelie bins in the back yard wore white caps, the telegraph poles white stripes down their windward sides, and the cars in the street slept under heavy white duvets, the recently departed ones having left behind grave-like gaps.

Fish had been working all night on his score, dropping off at the keyboard countless times yet always waking up with the same thought in his head—that he was back in his room at home. This room, the one fate had suddenly dealt him, had no pictures of indie bands or great composers stuck to the walls, and no music certificates crowding the mantelpiece. It was considerably larger than any of the rooms at home—though that hadn’t helped the removers. They’d struggled like hell to get the piano in. The legs had had to be taken off and the instrument tipped on its side and then kind of rolled. All the furniture had had to go too, to make room for it, including the bed, so when Fish wasn’t dropping off at the keyboard, he was dozing on a mattress on the floor with his body halfway under the instrument.

The Bechstein needed tuning, which took money. If Greta hadn’t messed things up he might have been able to afford it. He pressed the keys, listening intently to the sound. Taken seriously, the out-of-tune instrument had unsettling depth. That depth voiced his protest against war, inequality and corporate greed. It also censured Greta for getting ill and dying and disinheriting him.

He played random patterns, using eight fingers and two thumbs, like the Greats had done. He’d read all about them, learned about their lives and their foibles: Beethoven (deaf); Mozart (scatological); Schubert (unemployable); Wagner (bigoted); Sibelius (spendthrift); Debussy (unfaithful).

He knew that the Greats had only become great because they’d dedicated themselves, ignored petty interruptions and the suffocating demands of their mothers. These things he’d done too, finding private time at five in the morning with the practise pedal down, thinking up foibles for himself.

Leaning in towards the instrument, he built up the sound, making the music surge. There were twelve more band parts to finish off before Friday’s rehearsal. He would need to slog all day if he was to meet the deadline. He didn’t want to disappoint the bandleader; despite having ulterior motives, the bandleader had been supportive following the prof incident.

Opening his manuscript pad, Fish tuned into the sound of dripping water and the noise of the heating system traipsing around the house like a charivari. Sounds were his loyal companions, they’d helped him through, not least the ones that had flown bird-scared the other morning from the felled dockyard cranes. Watching the demolition from the car-park roof, he’d loved the way the bfthoom and xeecgchhhrzzzz sounds had arrived long after the metal structures’ flamingo legs had buckled and twisted.

Freedom sounds these had been, full of promise and optimism. The dripping sounds were different; these were confining. Water was an uninventive drummer, its beats more interesting for their regularity than their ingenuity. The dripping was from the snow thawing and landing on the upturned bucket in the back yard. Sometimes a plip coincided with the movement of the second hand of his alarm clock and a plop synchronised with the beat of his heart.

Plop following plip also alerted the orchestra seated in permanent readiness in his imagination. No lying on mattresses for them! His virtual strings held their bows in a perpetual hover, his make-believe woodwind inhaled continually and his pretend harpists sat like Grecian goddesses, their fingers poised above the strings. The brass and percussion were not so dutiful. Being always just back from the pub, they needed a good fortissimo to keep them interested.

Feeling inspired, he set about notating the scene, arresting each plip-plop with the trickle of a temple block and the splash of a brush upon snare, his two devoted harpists rendering the spillage with an atomizing spray of arpeggios. The result was insecurity, disorientation, confusion: unstable conditions, which he underscored with a bass drum and a suspended cymbal, as if it were some neatly executed circus trick—bakoomphsh!

The splatter he tried to ignore, because it didn’t fit in with the plip-plop, the splatter of envelopes hitting the floor. Stowing his pencil behind his ear, he went to the front door and found the offending letter lying on top of a pile of pizza leaflets. He ripped open the envelope, tore up the letter inside without reading it and rushed back to the piano where he walloped the keys with his forearms. Keeping the notes held down, he listened to the rancorous harmony—the sound of Northern University dumping on him!

The clamour brought forth a vow—not to wallow in self-pity but to rise above. This was what Thimio would have wanted. He was in urgent need of a plan for his life. He needed a new start— like the angry Athenians were demanding, like the freed crane sounds had achieved, like Thimio got when he left Greece.

* * *

Fish thought about his parents as he lay beneath the coffin-like panelling of his mingy inheritance. The instrument’s underside looked a lot newer than the rest of it. It smelled new too. He felt like he’d entered some kind of Benjamin Button enclosure and was being regressed back to childhood. He wondered if the reason Greta had stayed so young-looking was because of all the years she’d spent sitting with her legs parked under here. He remembered the way the vicars from St George’s used to gawp at his blonde-bombshell mother, and how it used to churn his stomach when they called at the house to discuss the next week’s hymns. The vicars never visited when Thimio was home, though. The vicars were terrified of Thimio.

Staring at the instrument’s unblemished underside, Fish recalled how Greta used to supervise his piano practice from the hallway—musical surveillance—and how he’d often resort to Bartok then because he knew Greta hated Bartok. Together him and Bartok could get Greta so worked up on the other side of that door!

It was in the tiny back room of the house that Greta Fisher (LRAM, ARCM) had given her piano lessons. A concert hall made for two. She’d taught him well enough, but she’d played him too, like a set of variations: inverted him, changed his signature, altered his tempo, so that whoever he was never quite made it to the fingers. With his own music it had been different. But his mother had been indifferent. She’d messed him up more than he’d deserved.

He preferred to think about Thimio. His father’s legacy had been less fraught than his mother’s, its outgoing themes more in tune with a new start.

But conjuring Thimio involved conjuring absence: the fact of his father being away for so long that he’d almost forget he existed, till a sudden return in the night, like a burglar in reverse, reinstated him. Thimio’s nocturnal arrivals always began with the subdued sounds of a heavy bag settling on lino, and the rumble of discarded boots, the shuffling of feet on stair carpet, and the groaning of his bedroom door when his father entered his room with a clutch of books concertinaed between his big hands. The collected wisdom of twenty years in the Greek Merchant Navy those books had been, plus another ten on North Sea rigs. Fish wished that Greta hadn’t given them all away. There’d been titles on astronomy, human behaviour, Classical art, internal combustion engines and European history. Most of them had been in English, though the few Greek ones among them had still been accepted by the charity shop.

One particular book—a coffee-table glossy—had hung around his bedroom for most of his childhood. It had been a guidebook to Thimio’s hometown of Volos. Volos was a port on the Aegean coast, the celebrated point of departure for Jason, famed leader of the Argonauts. Many of Volos’s streets bore the names of heroes, and Fish could remember seeing a picture of Jason Avenue in the glossy book, and another of a street called 28th October. Naming a street after a date had seemed peculiar to him, till he’d learned that 28th October was very a special date in Greek history; known as the Day of No,