If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Softcover

Jon McGregor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747590079 ISBN 13: 9780747590071

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2007

Synopsis

Unusual book

About this title

About the Author:

Jon McGregor is twenty-five and lives in Nottingham.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the
roof of a house.
It"s clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of
things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It"s a wordless song, for the most, but it"s a song all the same, and nobody
hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when
you pick out each
note.

The low soothing hum of air-conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells
of shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down,
long breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets.
The rush of traffic still cutting across flyovers, even in the dark hours a
constant crush of sound, tyres rolling across tarmac and engines rumbling,
loose drains and manhole covers clack-clacking like cast-iron castanets.
Road-menders mending, choosing the hours of least interruption, rupturing
the cold night air with drills and jack-hammers and pneumatic pumps, hard-
sweating beneath the fizzing hiss of floodlights, shouting to each other like
drummers in rock bands calling out rhythms, pasting new skin on the veins of
the city.
Restless machines in workshops and factories with endless shifts, turning
and pumping and steaming and sparking, pressing and rolling and weaving
and printing, the hard crash and ring and clatter lifting out of echo-high
buildings and sifting into the night, an unaudited product beside the paper
and cloth and steel and bread, the packed and the bound and the made.
Lorries reversing, right round the arc of industrial parks, it seems every lorry
in town is reversing, backing through gateways, easing up ramps, shrill-
calling their presence while forklift trucks gas and prang around them,
heaping and stacking and loading.
And all the alarms, calling for help, each district and quarter, each street and
estate, each every way you turn has alarms going off, coming on, going off,
coming on, a hammered ring like a lightning drum-roll, like a mesmeric bell-
toll, the false and the real as loud as each other, crying their needs to the
night like an understaffed orphanage, babies waawaa-ing in darkened wards.
Sung sirens, sliding through the streets, streaking blue light from distress to
distress, the slow wail weaving urgency through the darkest of the dark
hours, a lament lifted high, held above the rooftops and fading away, lifted
high, flashing past, fading away.

And all these things sing constant, the machines and the sirens, the cars
blurting hey and rumbling all headlong, the hoots and the shouts and the
hums and the crackles, all come together and rouse like a choir, sinking and
rising with the turn of the wind, the counter and solo, the harmony humming
expecting more voices.

So listen.
Listen, and there is more to hear.
The rattle of a dustbin lid knocked to the floor.
The scrawl and scratch of two hackle-raised cats.
The sudden thundercrash of bottles emptied into crates. The slam-slam of
car doors, the changing of gears, the hobbled clip-clop of a slow walk home.
The rippled roll of shutters pulled down on late-night cafes, a crackled voice
crying street names for taxis, a loud scream that lingers and cracks into
laughter, a bang that might just be an old car backfiring, a callbox calling out
for an answer, a treeful of birds tricked into morning, a whistle and a shout
and a broken glass, a blare of soft music and a blam of hard beats, a barking
and yelling and singing and crying and it all swells up all the rumbles and
crashes and bangings and slams, all the noise and the rush and the non-stop
wonder of the song of the city you can hear if you listen the song

and it stops

in some rare and sacred dead time, sandwiched between the late sleepers
and the early risers, there is a miracle of silence.

Everything has stopped.

And silence drops down from out of the night, into this city, the briefest of
silences, like a falter between heartbeats, like a darkness between blinks.
Secretly, there is always this moment, an unexpected pause, a hesitation as
one day is left behind and a new one begins.
A catch of breath as gasometer lungs begin slow exhalations.
A ring of tinnitus as thermostats interrupt air-conditioning fans.
These moments are there, always, but they are rarely noticed and they rarely
last longer than a flicker of thought.
We are in that moment now, there is silence and the whole city is still.

The old tall-windowed mills, staggered across the skyline, they are silent,
they are keeping their ghosts and their thoughts to themselves.
The smoked-glass offices, slung low to the ground, they are still, they are
blankly reflecting the haze and shine of the night. Soon, they will resume
their business, their coy whispers of ones and zeroes across networks of
threaded glass, but now, for a moment, they are hushed.
The buses in the depot, waiting for a new day, they are quiet, their metalwork
easing and shrinking into place, settling and cooling after eighteen hours of
heat and noise, eighteen hours of criss-crossing the city like wool on a loom.
And the clubs in the centre, they are empty, the dance-floors sticky and sore
from a night"s pounding, the lights still turning and blinking, lost shoes and
wallets and keys gathered in heaps.
And the night-fishers strung out along the canal, feeling the sing of their lines
in the water, although they are within yards of each other they are saying
nothing, watching luminous floats hang in the night like bottled fireflies,
waiting for the dip and strike which will bring a centre to their time here,
waiting for the quietness and calm they have come here to find.
Even the traffic scattered through these streets: the taxis and the cleaners,
the shift-workers and the delivery drivers, even they are held still in this
moment, trapped by traffic lights which synchronise red as the system
cycles from old day to new, hundreds of feet resting on accelerators,
hundreds of pairs of eyes hanging on the lights, all waiting for the amber, all
waiting for the green.

The whole city has stopped.

And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be
complicated again.

It"s the briefest of pauses, with not time enough to even turn full circle and
look at all the lights this city throws out to the sky, and it"s a pause which is
easily broken. A slamming door, a car alarm, a thin drift of music from half a
mile away, and already the city is moving on, already tomorrow is here.

The music is coming from a curryhouse near the football ground, careering
out of speakers placed outside to attract extra custom. The restaurant is
almost empty, a bhindi masala in one corner, a special korma in the other,
and the carpark is deserted except for a young couple standing with their
arms around each other"s waists. They"ve not been a couple long, a few days
perhaps, or a week, and they are both still excited and nervous with desire
and possibility. They"ve come here to dance, drawn sideways from their route
home by the music and by bravado, and now they are hesitating, unsure of
how to begin, unfamiliar with the steps, embarrassed.

But they do begin, and as the first smudges of light seep into the sky from
the east, from the far side of the city and in towards these streets, they hold
their heads high and their backs straight and step together in time to the
slide and wheel of the music. They dance with a style more suited to the
ballroom than to the bollywood movies the music comes from, but they
dance all the same, hips swinging, waists touching, eyes fixed on eyes. The
waiters have come across to the window, they are laughing, they are calling
uncle uncle to the man in the kitchen who is finally beginning to clean up
after a long night. They dance, and he steps out of the door to watch, wiping
his hands on his apron, licking the weary tips of his fingers, pulling at his
long beard. They dance, and he smiles and nods and thinks of his wife
sleeping at home, and thinks of when they were young and might still have
done something like this.

Elsewhere, across the city, the day is beginning with a rush and a shout, the
fast whine of office hoovers, the locked slam of lorry doors, the hurried
clocking on of the early shifts.

But here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man
with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his
restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading
starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter, and a slow walk home.

Copyright © 2002 by Jon McGregor. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0747590079
• ISBN 13: 9780747590071
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304