Things Behind The Sun

By David Martin

David Martin’s dark contemporary fictions have appeared in the likes of Black Static, The Dark, Litro and The Mechanics’ Institute Review. This collection brings together previously published short stories from 2015-2019, including the title novelette, which was described by Nick Cato of The Horror Fiction Review as “One of the finest short horror stories dealing with music I’ve ever read... it left me in a genuine state of wonder” as well as The Park, which was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.

“This is a story of guilt and power and the horrors humans are capable of inflicting on each other and the world and then rationalize away. Martin skillfully and deliberately twists the story until all illusion and self-deception falls away and harrowing reality stands bared.” Maria Haskins, for Barnes & Noble, on In A Dry Season.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Martin
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463360446

David Martin

David Martin is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Honorary Professor of the Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University.

Book preview

Things Behind The Sun

Short stories by David Martin

Distributed by Smashwords

© David Martin 2019.

For Al and Evie

Cover image by David Martin

© David Martin 2019.

All rights reserved.

Contents

Things Behind The Sun

Graduation

Wolves

Spiders

In A Dry Season

The Speed Of Light

The Park

Acknowledgements

Things Behind The Sun

Lisa is in the passenger seat and we are somehow, inevitably, on our way to Leyford. She stabs the stop button on the tape deck, grinds her cigarette into my pristine ashtray and lets rip as the London streets become motorway. What is it about music by dead guys? Why do we obsess about people who left a good-looking corpse? Ending up as a poster on some bloody student’s wall. Is it because they’re never going to get fat and bald, never sell out? You don’t see kids putting pictures on their wall of Hendrix with a mouthful of puke, or Kurt with half his face shot off.

Well, isn’t rock’n’roll all about sex and death though? Some kind of primal ritual kind of thing?

She’s not impressed. She writes this stuff for a living. And why is it that the poor sods who make the things that make us feel less alone are expected to be miserable, broke and suffering? It’s some fucked-up Christian thing isn’t it? We’re all ghouls and we all want to neck a shot of the blood of Christ.

That’s pretty good. Maybe you should think about being a music journalist?

Cheeky fucker.

That’s how I remember her, on the day both our lives ended in different ways, and it’s as good a place as any to begin. All this was last century, a different age, back when things could still get lost and leave no trace. Even that music, in the car’s tape player. Music like a negative image of something else, something that lives beyond things, where the guitar chords fade out beyond hearing and even the mathematics that describes the sounds spirals into uncertainty. It’s not just that their music was haunted. All music is haunted.

My name is Simon Ash. I’m writing this on a brand new laptop, while my other, illegal, recent purchase is lying on the bed looking at me. If I listen closely, I can hear the sea murmuring on the shingle beach a few hundred yards down a track from this cottage where I’ve been living for the last year or so, the latest in a long string of rented addresses.

As for you, you’re reading this because you’ve heard that music, or even just heard about it, and it’s switched something on inside you that means you have to know more. Though if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s not to look too closely at why you might be drawn to do things, what really might be yanking your strings beneath all that fairytale stuff about free will and rational choices.

And you’re hoping that this nutjob whose blogged ramblings have just turned up in your search results can satisfy that hunger. After all, rock ‘n’ roll saved your soul, a DJ saved your life and no-one’s ever understood you like those voices on your headphones in the wee small hours. So you’ll understand how I first got into all this. I bet you’re young though. Christ, listen to me, the Ancient bloody Mariner. But what I mean is, you’ll have grown up being able to find every scrape and groan in the history of recorded sound with a couple of clicks. But imagine what it was like not having that, every record on the radio a question mark, a mystery. That not knowing, that hunger, seeps into those few precious bars, there’s a void behind it. We’re human beings, we hunger to know stuff, and we create the stuff we don’t know in our heads. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Lisa again, glaring at the road signs counting down the miles: You know when you hear a song that changes the whole shape of the world? It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before but suddenly it’s where you want to live, or maybe it’s where you’ve always lived but you just didn’t realise until now. That’s why we’re here, that’s why we’re doing this.

This record (and it was a record, in the end, a chunk of black vinyl, archaic when I got hold of it); it’s hard to say what made it so strange but so familiar. Nothing out of the ordinary instrument-wise. Two guitars. Bass. Drums. Sparse, restrained, but as though every piece counts, resonating together to become something more, something vast. The first time I heard it, I saw a small town, miles of silent farmland all around, the sky getting dark, a summer storm brewing out of sight. You can feel the tension behind those notes, something waiting to break out. Breathless, hot, electricity in the air. You think of all the hidden places in that town, all the dark corners.

It’s not a slick recording, it’s murky, not much more than a demo. It sounds like they’re playing scales they’ve just invented, a slight left turn from how everyone else in a band has always played, but up an overgrown little track no-one else had noticed. It draws you in, makes you inhabit it, makes you complicit.

I didn’t even know what they were called for years. It all started with a mix tape a girlfriend made me. And ok, not just a girlfriend, the first girl who finally broke my heart. In fact, as we’re being honest, the girl who first taught me I had a heart and then broke it for good measure.

I remember near the end of side B of that tape there was a clunk, the hiss got worse and I was about to switch off when another track started up. Drums slow, unhurried, then a clean single guitar line, another guitar entwining with it, and low in the mix a voice, intoning lyrics whose force you could feel even though the words themselves couldn’t be distinguished, tantalising fragments on the edge of meaning. It was hissy as hell but I wound it back and listened to it over and over. Anna didn’t have a clue what it was, turned out she’d taped over a mix tape some other feller had made for her and it was a ghost from that.

We lasted about a year and it turned me inside out when she left. I kept that tape. Pretty much wore it out, and it was that one song half drowned in static that I kept coming back to, it made things hurt, but hurt good, you know? One night I was driving what seemed like the whole length of the country in a rainstorm. Hours of motorway night and red brake lights, jolts of black coffee in service stations with only the cleaners moving around. Somewhere in the Midlands I randomly sweep the dial along the waveband and there it is. Different song, but I know straight away who it is. I nearly crash into the back of a truck. And the DJ actually mutters the name of the band and that he doesn’t know anything much about them. Then I lose the station.

It was that song on Anna’s tape that first got me to obsess about music, the first time it really connected to me, right under the skin. You see, I’m not the kind of guy you probably think I am. I never wrote terrible lyrics in the back of my exercise books or thrashed away in some miserable goth band. Music to me up till then was just another shiny product you had to buy to show that you weren’t weird. I was a bit of a lad really. No, again let’s keep it honest. I was one of those guys you remember from school, backing up the hard kid who’s about to ruin your day, sniggering and holding his coat. And no, I don’t expect you to like me for it.

But maybe it was that music that kind of opened me up to things a bit more, maybe it was growing up a bit, maybe it was having had my heart broken for the first time, or maybe it was just that I had money to indulge an obsession. I’d been a sales rep, hence the epic motorway drives, but then I’d blagged my way into the City soon after that, just in time to catch a bit of the good times. By the time I heard that second track, I was hooked, soon I was devouring the inky music papers every week, hanging around in record shops and scummy gig venues full of the kind of people who part of me still scorned. I hid my new obsession from the blokes I worked with in case they ripped the piss out of me. But I never saw that band’s name