It was raining. Of course it was raining. It always rained in Britain, and back then it always had. And he’d felt like it was appropriate. He was entitled to sun and had surrounded himself with it when he’d gathered all the wealth he required. But no matter how much grand weather he’d surrounded himself with, inside; everything was now and forever, grey as the gathered skies.

The people milled around in a cluster of black, there was a big turnout, there always was for the death of a child. People felt drawn to it, exhilarated by the tragedy, it shouldn’t happen, it was against the order of things, and left helpless by the callousness of the world they inhabited they milled around like confused sheep around a rent carcass.

She was there. Susan. She didn’t remember. He’d been told and he’d been warned to keep his distance, keep his disguise, look and not touch. Not that he could touch their grief anyway, it was alien to him, an emotion that he sought but could not grasp. A hundred, maybe a thousand songs on the theme, dirges, requiems, funeral plainsong, anything he could find and he was still no closer. He’d found similarities in the music, slow, singular melodies, specific chords repeated often. But there was no comparative thread of similarity in emotion, he had no tools with which to address it, he was a deaf man trying to understand music that played all around him always. He could ape the machinations, learn to read the music, learn to play it back, learn to make them dance, but he’d never hear it.

He was aware he should feel something looking at the tiny coffin. Melody had been part of him, composed of the same matter as he, potentially alike. And now she was gone, a waste that was set into the ground, whatever potential she may have harboured unrealised forever. He felt around in the hollow shell that was his heart and sought a response he could compare to the idea of grief and found nothing but emptiness. He did not regret. Death simply was. She had ceased because she was inadequate, not what he hoped. Anything that failed him was redundant and worthless.

Later, much later he would sit by Jerry’s borrowed keyboard and he would compose long into the night. Feverishly committing notes to paper only to erase them and begin again. What would result would be a single thread of melody, no chords or harmonies, bare polished and stripped down. It would be unpleasant to the ear, no casual dinner music. Raw, discordant and fractured it would be littered with flats and sharps, running up and down the scale without heed of regulation or musical rules. It would not be sad because he could not begin to comprehend what sad was. But it was painful and it lamented. Whether it lamented the void of emotions clustered around the hole where a child had once been or lamented something rawer and deeper, even he couldn’t say.
He would title it simply Melody. And he would say nothing further about it.

Standing there with the rain soaking him to the bone, a husk watching a husk, he found himself absorbed by the sheer rampant futility of the world, tuneless and without rhyme or reason, a billion individual players clamoring to be heard. One day he would conduct them and it would be sweet. He could lead them, control those individual nuisance emotions Or he could compose them, pare them down to their purest form and pin them to paper, freed from their earthly shackles.

He was gifted, more than them in so many ways, perfection incarnate, an angel walking alongside apes.

And yet, part of him, despite these great gifts sometimes wearied. He had guiltily hoped that here in the depths of the human concept of misery, surrounded by grief, rain and mourning that he might awaken from his deified existence. He hoped that he might inhale and take in the very concept of the churchyard that morning, come alive with emotion and regret , weep openly with the others and take up his neglected place amongst the human race as an equal.

But there was nothing. Nothing at all.

The last words were said by the priest and he closed his eyes and turned his face up towards the rain.

People gave him his space as they meandered back to their cars and lives, erroneously allocating emotions to him he did not possess.

He did not cry, nor on a more dramatic slant, did he laugh.

He did nothing but stand there, a statue amongst statues, an angel amongst angels.

And the only sound in his thoughts was the sobbing whine of the Grudge apparition that resided there as the canine realised that the oppressive, all-consuming silence it found itself immersed in- vast and as lethal as the silence of space - was the true sound of his master’s thoughts.