Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [62]
“You didn’t mean to be nosy?!”
“Hey, sweetie, look! This is it! We’ve found it!”
She was pointing the beam at a table a short distance away. It had a white tablecloth on it, and two silver domes side by side.
I went up to the first dome and carefully raised it. Sure enough, there was a fat roast turkey sitting there. I searched out its cavity and inserted a finger.
“Nothing here,” I said.
“You have to get right in there. I pushed it right up. These birds are bigger than you think.”
“I’m telling you there’s nothing in there. Hold the flashlight over here. We’ll try this other one.” I carefully took the lid off the second turkey.
“You know, Steve, I think it’s a mistake. You shouldn’t be embarrassed to talk about it.”
“Talk about what?”
“About you and your wife being separated.”
“Did I say we were separated? Did I say that?”
“I thought …”
“I said we weren’t exactly together. That’s not the same thing.”
“It sounds the same thing …”
“Well, it isn’t. It’s just a temporary thing, something we’re trying out. Hey, I’ve got something. There’s something in here. This is it.”
“Then why don’t you pull it out, sweetie?”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?! Jesus! Did you have to push it in so far?”
“Sssh! There’s someone out there!”
At first it was hard to say how many of them there were. Then the voice came closer and I realised it was just the one guy, talking continuously into a cellphone. I also realised exactly where we were. I’d been thinking we’d wandered into some vague backstage area, but in fact we were up on the stage itself, and the curtain facing me was the only thing now dividing us from the ballroom. The man on the cellphone, then, was walking across the floor of the ballroom towards the stage.
I whispered to Lindy to turn off the flashlight and it went dark. She said into my ear: “Let’s get out of here,” and I could hear her creeping away. I tried again to pull the statuette out of the turkey, but now I was afraid of making noise, and besides, my fingers just couldn’t get any purchase.
The voice kept coming closer until it felt like the guy was right there in front of me.
“… It’s not my problem, Larry. We need the logos to be on these menu cards. I don’t care how you do it. Okay, then you do it yourself. That’s right, you do it yourself, bring them over yourself, I don’t care how you do it. Just get them here this morning, seven-thirty latest. We need those things here. The tables look fine. There are plenty of tables, trust me. Okay. I’ll check that out. Okay, okay. Yeah. I’m gonna check that out right now.”
For the last part of this, his voice had been moving over to one side of the room. He must now have flicked a switch on some wall panel, because a strong beam came on directly above me, and also a whirring noise like the air-conditioning had come on. Only I realised the noise wasn’t the air-conditioning, but the curtains opening in front of me.
Twice in my career I’ve had it happen when I’ve been on stage, I’ve had a solo to play, and suddenly it hits me I don’t know how to start, which key I’m in, how the chords change. On both occasions this happened, I just froze up, like I was in a still from a movie, until one of the other boys stepped in to the rescue. It’s only happened twice in over twenty years of playing professionally. Anyway, this is how I reacted to the spotlight coming on above me and the curtains starting to move. I just froze. And I felt oddly detached. I felt a kind of mild curiosity concerning what I’d see once the curtain was gone.
What I saw was the ballroom, and from the vantage point of the stage, I could appreciate better the way the tables were laid out in two parallel lines all the way to the back. The spot above me was putting the room in shade a little, but I could make out the chandelier and the fancy ceiling.
The cellphone man was an overweight bald guy in a pale suit and open-neck shirt. He must have walked away from the wall as soon as he’d flicked the switch, because now he was more or less level with me. He had his phone pressed to his ear, and