The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [235]
“Hey, Rob?” There was the clatter of his keyboard. “With you in a sec.” Raymond and his computer lived together in intense codependency, as if they shared a brain, his arcane undiscriminating memory backed up on the machine and perpetually enlarged by it. Raymond himself was vast, in a cheerfully challenging way. What his life was like beyond the confines of the shop Rob had no idea. “Just uploaded a new thing for you.”
“Oh yeah …?”
“You’re going to like this one.”
“Mm, I wonder.”
At the side of the shop, a chaotic cubicle made a kind of office. Rob grinned in over the heaped papers and coiling dusty cables at Raymond’s round face gleaming in the light from the screen; he bounced slightly on his office chair as he nodded. His reddish beard, grown long and wild like a martyr’s, spread out over his T-shirt, half-covering the slogan for his website, “Poets Alive! Houndvoice.com,” above an implausibly cheerful picture of W. B. Yeats. He looked up and nodded. “I’ve just done Tennyson—want to see?”
On Houndvoice Raymond posted eerie little videos of long-dead poets reading, authentic sound recordings emerging from the mouths of digitally animated photographs. It was clear from the Comments that some viewers thought they were really seeing Alfred Noyes read “The Highwayman,” while even those who weren’t taken in were apparently impressed by the fish-like gaping of the poet’s lips and the rhythmical flicker of his eyebrows.
“Yeah, I guess …,” said Rob, coming round as Raymond pushed back his chair. “They’re a bit spooky, aren’t they.”
“Yeah?” said Raymond, clearly pleased. “Yeah, I suppose people might be a bit spooked by them.”
Rob didn’t think the films were remotely convincing, but in a way this made them more disturbing. The dummy-like dropping of the jaw, the cheesy melting and setting of the features, were like the evidence of other impostures—the doctored photos of early séances, more creepy and depressing to Rob than the thought of real communication with the dead. Rob met up with his dead friends in witty and poignant dreams, where they didn’t look at all like these bundles of mouthing matter. “Here we go,” said Raymond, maximizing the player and whacking up the volume. Lord Tennyson’s notable head and shoulders filled the screen—hollow-cheeked, high-domed, hair tangled and greasy, the straggly dark beard with a lot of grey in it. The beard, at least, was a blessing, as it completely covered the poet’s mouth, preventing any ghoulish working of the lips. Raymond clicked the Play button and against a rainstorm of hissing and the galloping thump of the cylinder the determined quavering voice of the great poet began its familiar rush through “Come Into the Garden, Maud.” Rob had always thought the recording uncanny in itself—the effect whenever he’d heard it before was comic and touching and awe-inspiring by turns. He saw Raymond was watching him watch the video, and he smiled thinly, as if only just reserving judgement. The bard’s beard quivered like a beast in a hedge, as the famous face made repetitive mincing and chewing movements. Rob felt the peculiar look in the older Tennyson’s eyes, the air of almost belligerent anxiety, appealing to him critically and directly through the shame that was being inflicted on his lower features. Then it came to its abrupt end, and Raymond’s copyright line—not in the recording or the image, but in the puppet-show he’d made with them—appeared across Tennyson’s frozen face.
“Almost incredible,” Rob said, “listening to a man read a poem he wrote a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Ah—yes,” said Raymond, seeing this rather skirted the issue.
Rob stood back. “I suppose that’s the earliest you can go, isn’t it,” with a quick grasp for reassurance. “That