H(A)PPY Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicola Barker

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s note

  Epigraph

  1 The New Path.

  2 Help!

  3 The Farm.

  4 A New Song.

  5 The Cathedral.

  6 The Kora.

  7 The Bag of Stones.

  8 The Forked Tongue.

  9 Tuesday.

  10 The Unknown.

  11 The Gaps.

  12 The Light.

  13 The Flood.

  14 Terrible Discipline.

  15 Silence.

  16 Savannah.

  17 Awake.

  18 A brief study of Mira A.

  19 The Sacrifice.

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

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  About the Book

  Imagine a perfect world where everything is known, where everything is open, where there can be no doubt, no hatred, no poverty, no greed. Imagine a System which both nurtures and protects. A Community which nourishes and sustains. An infinite world. A world without sickness, without death. A world without God. A world without fear.

  Could you … might you be happy there?

  H(A)PPY is a post-post-apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland, a story which tells itself and then consumes itself. It’s a place where language glows, where words buzz and sparkle and finally implode. It’s a novel which twists and writhes with all the terrifying precision of a tiny fish in an Escher lithograph – a book where the mere telling of a story is the end of certainty.

  It is another imaginative tour de force from one of our most audacious and ambitious novelists; a writer the Guardian declares ‘a genius’.

  About the Author

  Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of eleven previous novels, including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and The Cauliflower®, and two short story collections. She has twice been longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003. She lives and works in East London.

  Also by Nicola Barker

  NOVELS

  Reversed Forecast

  Small Holdings

  Wide Open

  Five Miles from Outer Hope

  Behindlings

  Clear

  Darkmans

  Burley Cross Postbox Theft

  The Yips

  In the Approaches

  The Cauliflower ®

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Love Your Enemies

  Heading Inland

  For Stefan Towler – who painted his way into one book, then wrote his way into another

  Author’s note

  Although by no means essential, this novel is best enjoyed in conjunction with Agustín Barrios: The Complete Historical Guitar Recordings 1913–1942.

  In front, a corral of bamboo and two house palms. Mangoré presents himself with feathers. An anachronism. Something for children. His costume goes with the bamboo, but not with the guitar.

  The reception by the public is cold and silent, with ironic comments: ‘horrendous’, ‘shocking’, ‘he’s on marijuana’ etc.

  The Indian sits, strokes his instrument in a strangely smooth manner and begins. The program does not seem to be in agreement with the situation – it indicates the Indian feels he is a musician, and that he wants to give the best he can, but my God! That savage wants to play Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin on the guitar! It seems a sacrilege. We expect a disaster, a fatal musical calamity.

  He plays a Serenata Morisca of his own composition. On the mark. Another of his compositions, andante and allegretto. Notable. A Chilean dance . . .

  The guitar becomes a piano, violin, flute, mandolin, drum. There is nothing that this man can’t do on the guitar. At times it seems the guitar plays itself . . .

  The applause grows, and increases with each piece until at the end of the performance the public is shouting ‘encore’ to which he replies ‘thank you’, simply ‘thank you’.

  —UNKNOWN CRITIC WRITING ABOUT THE GUITARIST AND COMPOSER AGUSTíN BARRIOS, AKA CHIEF NITSUGA MANGORE, IN THE Nuestro Diario, GUATEMALA, 1933

  Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.

  SAINT AUGUSTINE, City of God (AD 476)

  Happiness is brief.

  It will not stay.

  God batters at its sails.

  EURIPIDES, Orestes (408 BC)

  After they banded together and saved us from the Floods and the Fires and the Plagues and the Death Cults, the Altruistic Powers actively discouraged The Young from thinking about God. We walked a new path. They called it The New Path. They called it A Path of Light. And The Young were taught various, simple techniques that allowed them to feel at peace. We moved Beyond God. We were taught to celebrate This Moment. And our chemicals were balanced.

  We were perfected. We were given just enough choices to make us feel as though we were free, but not so many that our minds (our still-fragile intellects) became overloaded. Doubt ended. The Information Stream was purified. Before, there was filth and it corrupted us. After, there was freshness. There was the smell of newly cut grass. Everything shone. They made us feel innocent again. No – no. They made us Innocent again.

  We are Innocent. We are Clean and Unencumbered. Every new day, every new dawn, every new hour, every new minute, we are released once more from the tight bonds of History (the Manacles of The Past). We are constantly starting over and over from scratch. Right here! Right now! A new beginning. A New World. Everything is possible. We are reborn.

  I am told that at one time (when there was recorded time – which is apparently a flawed religious concept) everything worked until a certain number was reached and then everything stopped working because nothing could cope with the magnitude of The Number. It was a finite number. All numbers were finite then. Vital resources kept running out and people suffered. Because of numbers. Just numbers. But now numbers are infinite and everything has been mapped and nothing is unknown. Nothing can run out – even life. We are eternal. And we always have enough. Just enough. We do not crave more than enough. We are content. We are In Balance. And we work hard – but never too hard – to stay In Balance. This goal is what fires us, what drives us. We are not encouraged to question how or why – although we are not discouraged from questioning, either. We just accept that the past was The Past. We live Now. We live In Light. And when darkness threatens (darkness? Can there ever truly be darkness again?) they simply adjust the chemicals. They just . . . know.

  The chemicals enter us in a multitude of ways. Our environments are sensitive. Our environments are cooperative. Everything is Whole. We are total, universal, all-integrated. We are In Balance. We work (but never struggle) to stay In Balance. And everything functions perfectly. So we no longer have to worry.

  Sometimes – while we sleep, as we gently dream – they remind us of how it used to be so that we appreciate how good things are now. Now that we are Free From Desire. And we are H(A)PPY to be reminded of this because it reinforces our sense of peacefulness, of calm, of conformity, of equilibrium. They tell us about the lies of The Past. Of how The Young were told that they needed to rebel against the norm in order to feel Whole. That creativity is dependent on struggle and suffering. Of how true happiness could only be felt if we complete
ly abandoned the self to God, or, at the other extreme (The Past was full of such contradictions), of how true happiness was always contingent upon another person or creature’s suffering and pain. That it was somehow ‘comparative’ or ‘competitive’.

  Lies. All lies.

  When I say ‘they tell us’ I actually mean ‘we tell us’. Because nothing is above us. Nothing is below us. We are In Balance. That is how The System was tooled. We work to stay In Balance. Each of us contributes in our own special way to this goal. I am principally a musician. This is my talent. But I do not focus exclusively on music. Nothing is ever exclusive here. To be exclusive is to exclude. And nothing is excluded. I give my time and my attention and my energy to many causes, to many occupations. I am open. I am humble. I am appreciative. I am grounded.

  We have a graph – we call it The Graph – and it shows us how In Balance we are: as a person (our physical and mental health), as a small community (a community of skills, a community of friends, a community of consumers, a community of thought) and as a broader society – as a race, as a planet, as a galaxy. Many graphs, one Graph.

  There is a satisfaction – a deep satisfaction – in remaining neatly within the parameters of our various graphs. In keeping things even. And we all strive (but not too hard) for that. Because it makes us H(A)PPY: just to contribute, to be utterly aware, utterly informed, utterly sensitive. Utterly open to everything.

  It makes us H(A)PPY . . .

  H(A)PPY

  H(A)PPY

  But why is that happening?

  H(A)PPY

  Why? Why does the A persist on disambiguating? On parenthesising?

  And why am I talking? What am I doing? Why am I rehearsing this?

  Where is the need?

  H(A)PPY

  H(A)PPY

  How curious . . .

  How perplexing.

  A malfunction?

  A blip?

  A kink?

  But where . . . ?

  Ah. That jangling, sweet melody. Remember?

  And the child.

  If it started – although I cannot describe ‘it’, I cannot comprehend ‘it’, just sense ‘it’, just suspect ‘it’ (imagine a mist of condensation on your skin which you are unaware of until a light breeze lightly gusts against your cheek), yes, if it started – this odd disambiguation, this slight discombobulation, this blip – then it started with the child – a little girl – there was, yes – when I think back – if I recall correctly – and I can’t seem to get her . . . she keeps stealing into my mind. And she is accompanied by a strange melody. A sweet, jangling waltz. Performed on the guitar. But it’s being played on metal strings. It reverberates most curiously. She is small and dark, with burning eyes and a wary smile; and my Sensor tells me that she is nine years of age and that she lived – many years ago, when there was still age – in what was once the Southern Americas. I discovered her on The Information Stream in the margins of an article about a Paraguayan luthier who specialised in acoustic cutaways (I have been pondering the virtues of the cutaway of late). This luthier also happened to own a precious guitar – although not a cutaway. I idly followed the link.

  It was strange (yes, strange) that I should be looking at an article about a precious guitar (although I am a guitarist and I play and tool guitars), because – to all intents and purposes – guitars are all precious now (and all valueless, and all the same, and all perfected, and all readily available to anyone who might feel in need of one). So it was strange that I should find myself searching The Past for information about any other kind of guitar than the kind I have which is a perfectly wonderful kind of guitar, a guitar that I am truly and completely and utterly con . . . con . . . H(A)PPY with.

  H(A)PPY

  And this precious guitar was anything but perfect. It was imperfect! It was a traditional, wooden guitar; pear-shaped. I focused in on the picture so intensely that the image became grainy (this was still a time when images became grainy, a time of discord, of mischief, of fracture and of pixellation. A time without True Clarity. A time of blurred edges).

  This guitar – ah, this guitar – was precious not because of any inherently good qualities, but because it once belonged to a famous guitarist. It had metal strings – not gut strings. And it had tiny beads made from a kind of vulcanised rubber through which each of the treble strings had been painstakingly threaded and then positioned so as to remain flush with the bridge. These were dampers. Yes, dampers. To reduce the metallic rumble. The vibration. A compromise of sorts. A creative compromise, a curious compromise. The guitar – this patently compromised instrument – made no real sense to me. As a luthier. As a player. An acoustic guitar but with ugly metal strings at a point in History – yes, my Sensor promptly confirmed this for me – when gut strings were the only truly acceptable devices for play. This was before the electric guitar. This was before the Age of Blare, of Wah-Wah, of Rock. The ‘precious’ guitar was a curious anomaly. A puzzle. It sat unsteadily (1920? 1925?) – it teetered – at the end of the Past and the start of the Future (which was also a kind of past). It existed at a tipping point. At the birth of Dissonance. At the death of Harmony. It was an imperfect instrument. An anachronism. A curiosity. A puzzle. Yes, I’ll say it again: a puzzle. And because I am a luthier I habitually engage with these puzzles, I struggle with them (although I do not war with them or battle with them, and I do not embrace them, either, I do not search them out, because where is the need when the solutions are ever-present, when every riddle has been finally and definitively solved?). But I found myself staring at this guitar’s imperfections and wondering. I am not sure what I was wondering. There was simply a space, a wordlessness, an itch.

  Yes, an itch.

  I suppose I may’ve wondered who could have owned this imperfect object which – even in the history of guitars, of guitar-making – made no real sense. Who might’ve owned this chaotic instrument? This clumsy, silly, senseless instrument?

  And then I suddenly saw the girl, the brown-eyed child, standing there, in the margins. On the edge of a badly torn clipping. She was holding a doll, swaddled in a blanket. There she was. Just a girl.

  But why should I care? We – The Young – utterly reject (my language is too harsh here, imagine a calmer version of this phrase, a more dispassionate version, if you will), we disavow the idea of fame and all that this titular ‘garland’ of The Past implies. Even the word. We even reject the word fame – a hot word. A steaming word. A word that condenses and then rots. A dangerous word. We abhor ‘personality’. We eschew difference. And The Sensor – because we ask it to, because it needs to – actively refuses to acknowledge (and thereby credit) prominent individuals – ‘famous’ individuals – from the Cruel Rack of History. From the chaotic Then. From that dark and damp and foggy time before the serene purity of Now.

  Because Now all creatures are equal. That is our Philosophy. No one may be raised above. So The Sensor – because we want it to, because we need it to, because we ask it to – helpfully breaks these once-lauded individuals down into their component parts. It deconstructs them. They are accorded mere numbers. They are not credited with names, because names generate a kind of tiny, psychological implosion, a connection, a dangerous synergy that bounces between the letters and the information and the image and the meaning.

  This guitarist was Paraguayan and his number is 91.51.9.81. 81.1.2.

  Sorry.

  But . . . yes . . . then there she suddenly was, the child, this haunting girl, and because she was on the margins of the page – the page about the precious guitar – I could not access the full story (I could not ably guide my Sensor – where might I direct it? How? When there were no other clues?), even though I tried. I tried hard. I tried several times. I almost became . . . I don’t know . . . I almost became frustrated.

  Breathe. Breathe.

  Push it away, Mira A. This moment. This feeling. This frustration. Frustration is nothing more than an unhealthy burgeoning of the rampant Ego
. Frustration is entitlement. Frustration is arrogance. Check The Graph. Is it pinkening? Is it?

  Oh just let it pass, Mira A. Inhale. Exhale.

  Forgive yourself. Forget yourself.

  That’s right. Yes. That’s better . . .

  Well done.

  Good.

  Phew!

  But still, still, there was something so . . . so old, so . . . so intriguing about that small child’s dark eyes. They haunted me. Of course I tried to receive the information – as little as I had – and then let it go. The way we have been taught to. But I found it hard to let go. I don’t understand why. Perhaps there was a blip, a kink. Yes. I think my chemicals must have become unbalanced. It’s very strange. I will ask for help. Oh. Somebody has already noticed. On The Graph. How lovely. There is help. Help is already here.

  He was a Full Neuter and his name was Kite. His Identifier has a little logo of a cheerful green kite with a long, dancing tail weighted down by a series of pretty, red bows. But for some reason I thought of the hunting bird. I secretly wished that his logo was of a hunting bird.

  ‘Too masculine.’ He smiled, noting that my Sensor had called up information about the hunting bird.

  ‘Of course.’ I smiled. Of course.

  Kite checked my chemicals. He made a couple of tiny adjustments. He asked about my given name, Mira A, which I am told is the name of a star – a giant, red star – and also means ‘boundless’ in one of the many old languages from The Past. Then he asked about my guitar (my logo is a simplified version of 41.51.91.21.51.8.3.9.41–41.5.2’s Musical Instruments; an abstract image in greys and blues and browns of two, stringed instruments, somehow conjoined, facing each other, one – the most dominant – a guitar, the other possibly a cello or a violin, each separate but somehow a part of the other).