The Dog by Joseph O’Neill

Author:Joseph O’Neill [O’Neill, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-07-24T22:00:00+00:00

‘Bryan Adams sucks,’ he tells me.

‘He does?’ I say. I’m startled by this declaration out of the blue, which may be the first entirely voluntary utterance he’s made to me in the weeks he’s been my intern. Nor is there a previous instance of his leaving his desk and standing at the entranceway of my part of the room. I beckon him in. ‘How come?’

‘His songs are so bad.’

That doesn’t accord with my assessment of Bryan Adams, but hey. And I’m biased. Bryan Adams took on the Batros gig on a week’s notice and at a considerable discount on his advertised minimum fee of one million USD. (Bryan Ferry’s people were unhappy, understandably, but that was mediated by Fabulosity to everyone’s relative satisfaction.) I wasn’t at the Adams concert (not invited), but Sandro and Mireille are very pleased about how it went, I’ve heard (not from them).

Hi Sandro – You’re welcome. De rien. No trouble. Nichts zu danken. Any time.

‘What’s so bad about them?’ In an ideal world, Alain would have more complex critical skills.

‘I don’t know. Everything.’

(His don’t know comes out as døn’t knøw. For all his devotion to mumbling and drawling, the kid has this fancy English-Norwegian accent that must be, I guess, a payoff of his expensive schooling in England. (I like it just fine. (That said, I have a real soft spot for the habitual accent of Arab speakers of good English, in whose mouths the language, imbued with grave trills, can seem weighted with the sagacity of the East. (See Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia.))))

I tilt my head respectfully. ‘So who’s good? Who should I be listening to?’

He shrugs. ‘Slayer. Or maybe Dying Humanity.’

I decide against saying something that I would find funny but Alain wouldn’t. ‘Maybe I’ll check them out,’ I say. The kid’s still hanging around, and I feel the touch of opportunity and duty. This outburst of musical opinion is the first sign of any knowledge on the boy’s part. I know he’s only just turned fifteen, but in the course of my minimal involvement in his summer assignments (as per Sandro’s instructions), I’ve been astonished and re-astonished by just what a know-nothing he is. He can’t point to Rome on the map. Somehow he has never heard of St Paul. He thinks ‘the present tense’ may have something to do with ‘feeling worried’. I am giddily reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labour of pedagogy, everything would go to hell.

I ask the kid to tell me more about Dying Humanity. He tells me they’re from Germany.

‘Where in Germany?’ I say. He doesn’t know. ‘Let’s look it up,’ I say. ‘Pull up a chair.’ I figure this is without the ambit of the prohibition against the kid using a computer in the office.

Unfortunately, only German Wikipedia offers details of the band. Fortunately, I still have my childhood German. ‘See this? It says they’re from Annaberg-Buchholz.’ He doesn’t seem to care very much.

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