Virgil Dainty played a dangerous game with his lyrics, but he understood the magic of music. You could say just about anything in a song. The words were immaterial; what mattered was how they made you feel.
—
The recommended dose of Joy did not last through the night. That was why Uncle Jack came on first thing in the morning with his show, Wakey Wakey. His cheerful bombast cut through all thought and made it impossible to focus on the vague feelings of memory lurking under the dissipating fog of one’s last dose. Uncle Jack also reminded everyone to take their morning dose, so Wakey Wakey was a tidy solution to the problem of morning Joy lag for most people.
Virgil didn’t watch Wakey Wakey. When Virgil woke up in the morning, he rode that thinning haze out to the very edge his memory and used what he found there. As long as one didn’t linger too long, one could look at it all with some detachment, as if the memories belonged to someone else.
There were two sisters. His sisters, presumably. Pauline and Gillian. Gillian was only a year younger than him; Pauline was… seven or eight? They had matching dresses. The three of them would go to Coakley’s Confectionery Counter. His mother would send them to pick up tea and tobacco and she’d let them buy themselves penny candy with the money left over. Sometimes there was a boy too. A spoiled little shit. His mum made Virgil take him along because he was their… neighbor? Cousin? He was their cousin. Virgil had revisited this memory a number of times and it always took him a minute to remember who that boy was. He never got so close to the edge as to remember his name though.
There was a girl there too. Not one of his sisters. Her name was Wendy. Was she a girlfriend? No, that didn’t make any sense. He was Vermin Virgil, the Rat-Faced Boy. No way any girl would deign to let herself be called his girlfriend. It’d be social suicide. Wendy was happy to let him buy her candy though. As an adult, looking on this scene, he’d start to feel the first tinges of resentment about this, but as the boy in it, he only saw the opportunity. Every butterscotch button he gave her was a chance for her to see past his pointy features and bucked teeth.
This was about the time he’d start to wonder whatever happened to her. Then he’d remember her face in the train window and the whistle blaring. And that awful refrain of “London Bridge” in children’s voices. He hated the sound of children singing, even as a child himself.
That song was his cue to come back to the present before the scene turned real sour.
—
Nick was out there crooning about children in candy shops and the world they all wished they still had and… it was fine. It was great! The crowd was swaying along, the girls were screaming in ecstasy. When the lyrics had the music to recontextualize them and the Joy to prevent people from thinking too hard about them, you were left with the saccharin nostalgia of The Time Before with none of the bitterness of what came after. It was alchemy.
Virgil stood just off stage, arm crossed and surveying his handiwork, feeling like a goddamn wizard.
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