An Absence of Natural Light Read Free Page B

in London, he’d concluded you drove in the centre of the city only if there was absolutely no alternative.
    He got in tired. He felt excited – no, elated – about what had happened with Rebecca. He could still smell her perfume on his fingertips. In Colorado he’d been about as convinced that there was life after football as he thought a committed atheist might be about life after death. He’d wanted something new and different. He’d just doubted he was really equipped for it. It had seemed daunting, unimaginable, really. Then this had gone and happened.
    The music droned, almost imperceptibly, on the edge of his hearing, but he thought it had got fractionally louder and more solid than the first time he’d become aware of it. Then it might almost have been imagined; now it was undeniably there. He thought he recognized it, probably from a car or coffee commercial using the soundtrack to give what it was selling an aura of sophistication. It was naggingly familiar. Maybe he had heard it in a posh boutique with Melody on one of those endless weekday afternoons as she’d tried on a series of expensive outfits in what he was thinking of increasingly as his old life.
    He just didn’t know. Jazz was unexplored territory. He’d been hurt by Rebecca’s earlier autodidact line because he had actually done a bit of that recently. The problem was that there weren’t just gaps to fill in his knowledge and experience of the wider world. There were chasms to try to bridge securely and then attempt to cross.
    It was definitely louder. His beatnik neighbour must have cranked up the volume on his stereo. It had to be one of those proper, old-fashioned stereo systems too. The wattage on the speakers you plugged an iPhone into was too feeble to fire the sound through walls like these. Except that it sounded, actually, as though it was coming not from next door on either side of him, but from his own basement. The tune was leaking through the doorframe at the top of the basement staircase. He looked across to where that hung. The sound was brassy and mournful and insistent. With a surprised swallow of trepidation, Tom knew that he was going to have a look.
    The stairs on the other side of the door were stone and led straight down. The door had to be pulled rather than pushed open, he supposed as a safety precaution. You were forced to take a step back to make room for it so the stairs on the other side couldn’t come as a nasty surprise. He naturally expected the music to become louder and gain in clarity when he opened the door and shifted the obstruction, but it didn’t. It actually seemed to fade, in a way that seemed calculated and therefore slightly menacing.
    It’s late, he thought, I’m tired. And the tune had become barely audible again. He switched on the stairway lights, industrial in character, ovals of frosted glass bracketed with loops of blue painted metal. They looked the business, those lights, when he switched them on; fit for a power station or a submarine, except that they didn’t actually do their principal job of providing much light.
    He hadn’t known what an autodidact was. He hadn’t known what somnambulism was either. But there was another word on the tip of his tongue he thought would describe the music he could no longer hear but had heard recently enough to have a clear memory of. He began to descend the steps. The word was syncopation. It described the way jazz instruments blended to improvise a tune. The music he had heard had been syncopated. He thought it was probably an old recording, something taped from a live session done in a studio, dingy with cigarette smoke, a lifetime ago.
    He had no sense there was anyone at all in the basement. It was dark beyond the stairs but he couldn’t hear a sound down there now. He’d had the upper rooms furnished, but had done nothing yet with this substantial, stone-flagged space. The