Each midnight, Trumpet Forsyth leans out of his sixth floor
bedroom window and blows out his horn. The first notes are avant-garde and
complicated, angry, like his guernica is inhabited by limbless limbo dancers
and drowning hands. The next series of notes are big-nosed-Sonny-Rollins-sax,
then tall and meditative, and after that a little fruitless like a man growing
wings to turn into a penguin that will never fly. A horse bray and neigh, a
dog’s head in a light bulb tree and a dancing man falling flat on his face make
up the final third, and then trumpet Forsyth puts away his horn and lets the
dogs, cats and manacled maniacs take up his clarion call to wake up the night.
