The Children's Bach

by Helen Garner

  ‘This is reduced,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy it.’

  They stood by the register, but the boy serving would not come. Minutes passed. Poppy lounged and read on. Elizabeth observed that the diary was invisible in her arms among their already wrapped purchases. The adrenalin squirted and twinkled in her veins. Oh! did I forget to pay for this one? Sorry! You kept us waiting for so long! How much is it again? ‘Come on,’ she said to Poppy in an ordinary voice, and walked quickly towards the door.

  ‘Elizabeth!’ said Poppy.

  ‘Shutup!’ she hissed. She barged out on to the bright street. Poppy trotted after her, keeping her finger in the book to mark her place, and caught up with her half a block away. Elizabeth was panting. She sat down on the deep window ledge of a furniture shop and pulled the furious girl to face her. ‘Now don’t you ever do what I just did,’ she said.

  ‘Me?’ said Poppy. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me!’

  ‘You’re such a puritan!’ said Elizabeth. ‘You make me feel like a criminal.’

  ‘You are a criminal. Taking other people’s stuff is wrong.’

  ‘You should talk! What about that camera.’

  Poppy held her book to her chest. ‘That was different. Finding things is not the same as stealing them.’

  ‘You could’ve reported it.’

  ‘I will, then,’ said Poppy. ‘I’ll take it back.’

  ‘Don’t be pathetic. It was years ago – you don’t even remember which motel it was.’

  ‘It was one of them. On that highway.’

  ‘It’s too late now.’

  They were both red and breathing hard. They stared away from each other, their arms folded round their possessions. Cars passed. The asphalt was spongy.

  ‘We’ll both burn in hell,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘I don’t believe in hell.’

  ‘We’ll burn somewhere else, then.’

  ‘Are you going to keep the diary?’

  ‘Are you going to keep the camera?’

  ‘I might. Or I might not. I might . . . donate it to charity.’

  ‘They’d know it was hot. People don’t give away good stuff that works.’

  Elizabeth waited. Poppy stood up and brushed off the seat of her pants. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to Allans. I feel like playing the pianos.’

  The house of music was lumbered with grands, a noble line of them, each fluttering a many-digited price tag. Their lids were propped open as if to catch a breath of air. Their perfect teeth, their glossy flanks, their sumptuous smell caused customers to tiptoe past them on their way to the secondhand uprights at the back; but Poppy fronted up to a big black Bösendorfer and settled herself on the bench. She handed her book to Elizabeth, wiped her palms on her thighs and launched into something that used all her fingers.

  ‘That’s a lovely piece of music, that is!’ sang out a young salesman who was sitting at a Steinway, five juggernauts down the line.

  She stumbled, she paused to listen to him. He picked it up and played the next two bars. He waited for her, poising his hands above the keys and raising his eyebrows. She hesitated, with a glance and a smile at Elizabeth, and then she skated away into the elements. Their game was clever: the man teased, the girl echoed him, they were flirting with each other, laughing; they played three slow chords in unison. People stopped and listened, pretending not to, because it was so intimate. Elizabeth wandered away to the head of the stairs. From the lower regions the grim thumping of an electric bass rolled up and throbbed in the metal banisters.

  *

  Vicki spent an hour getting herself ready. She tied a diaphanous scarf round her head, stuck a yellow rose in it, and put a lot of makeup on her flat, smooth, pale face. She looked striking, and flustered because of the lipstick she had rubbed into her cheekbones.

  ‘One thing you can be sure of,’ said Dexter in the car. ‘No-one else in the place will be dressed like you.’

  How would you know, thought Vicki; you never go to any places. ‘Why don’t you ever wear makeup, Thena?’ she said.

  ‘Athena doesn’t believe in makeup,’ said Dexter. ‘Do you dear. She’s got beautiful skin.’

  ‘I don’t know how to put it on,’ said Athena.

  ‘You don’t need it, dear,’ said Dexter.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of feminine mystique, once in a while,’ said Athena.

  ‘You don’t want that rubbish,’ said Dexter.

  Athena sat beside him in the front seat with straight spine and folded hands. It alarmed Vicki to see her shoulders tremble with holding back. ‘Elizabeth used to be against makeup,’ she chattered. ‘But now she even puts polish on her toenails. She says, ‘‘I’ve made my reputation as a strong woman. I reckon I’ve earned the right to a couple of red blobs on my extremities.”’

  Athena laughed. ‘She’s clever, isn’t she.’

  ‘A bit too clever, sometimes,’ said Dexter. He waltzed the car from lane to lane with big flourishes of the steering wheel. ‘I can’t even remember the last time we went dancing. Will you have a dance with me, Vicki?’

  ‘Dexter!’ she said. ‘Nobody dances with anybody any more!’

  ‘Have they started already?’ said Athena at the door.

  ‘No,’ said Vicki. ‘It’s just a tape.’

  ‘Can’t they turn it down a bit?’ said Dexter.

  Elizabeth saw them from the bar where she and Philip were leaning while the other band packed up. ‘She’s brought her mum and dad,’ she said.

  Philip turned round. ‘Looks embarrassed, doesn’t she.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you? Get the look on his face.’

  ‘I like him,’ said Philip. ‘He’s like a character out of a Russian novel, or a Wagner opera. A noble soul.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘He’s the coolest person here. He’s not even trying.’

  ‘You’re not kidding. That shirt. It’s like a pyjama top.’

  Vicki skidded up to the bar beside them.

  ‘Cute scarf,’ said Philip.

  ‘Reckon?’ said Vicki with a triumphant glance at Elizabeth. She ordered a Kahlua and milk.

  ‘What’s that stuff?’ said Dexter. ‘I’ll get us a jug. Anyone want to share a jug?’

  ‘I’m drinking whisky,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘I’ll have one too,’ said Athena.

  ‘This whole place is painted black,’ said Dexter. ‘It’s like a vision of hell.’

  ‘Shutup, Dexter,’ said Vicki. ‘Don’t be so loud.’

  ‘This isn’t a proper glass,’ said Dexter. ‘Here, mate – you’ve given me a plastic glass.’

  The barman, who had two false plaits twined into his hair at the back, shrugged and served the next person.

  ‘For safety,’ said Philip. He nodded at Dexter and turned his mouth down at the corners. What if I told him about the headbangers, he thought; he wouldn’t believe me. Philip downed his drink and walked away: the crowd parted for him.

  Safety! Dexter stood holding the plastic glass of beer and stared around him. These kids didn’t look as if they would smash glass. They had cold, passionless faces. He knew the phrase for it: ‘l’ inébranlable résolution de ne pas être ému.’ They were like refugees, war orphans, thronging in their drab clothes. It was too late to get out. The big room was packed solid and he was backed up against the bar. He looked for Athena, to mention the Baudelaire to her. She was emptying her glass in one swig, and her face was already turned towards the stage which at that moment went black.

  Vicki kept her eyes on the dark patch, and saw the pale blur of Philip’s shirt, the faint shapes of the musicians creeping out, stepping over leads, fumbling with their instruments. Light and sound burst as one and she saw the shock wave hit Dexter: his eyes became slits and he turned his head this way and that like a baby with earache. Vicki charged down the front to dance beside girls she did not know but who meet her eye and smile at her as they leap and bob and twirl about in their cheap and cheerful dresses, in the br
ief camaraderie of moving to music. They are happy! They are laughing! They are young and silly and here to have fun!

  Athena worked her way forward as far as the front row of non-dancers. She was blasted by noise but fired with curiosity. She could not tell which instrument was producing which sound, but she heard a guitar playing something that started as casually as water spilling over the lip of a basin and wondered if it was proceeding from Philip’s fingers; she heard a boy behind her roar to his friend, ‘They’re a bit guitary, aren’t they?’; she saw the fat-hipped keyboard player raise his wrists up high and move his lips like a slow reader; and with a piercing envy she saw Philip’s sociable demeanour, his raised head, his skipping turns, and the glances, the smiles of a tender complicity that passed between him and the others as they drowned themselves in sound.

  At the first break Dexter forced his way through the shoulders to Athena and seized her elbow at the very moment her other arm was taken by Vicki fighting towards the bar. Vicki was glassy and smiling, Dexter frowning and wild-eyed. In their linked, three-way posture they might have been performing a country dance.

  ‘Let’s get out of here!’ shouted Dexter. ‘Those aren’t instruments! They’re machines!’

  A passing boy sneered. Vicki’s face closed. ‘I’ll get a lift home,’ she said.

  ‘I think I’d like to stay too, Dex,’ said Athena.

  Betrayed, Dexter did not argue. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car,’ he said, and ploughed away to the door.

  Dexter stumbled out past the posters into the hotel carpark. It was a mild summer night. A warm wind puffed now and then, a wind that had passed across the river and through miles of suburban gardens, across the roofs of houses in which lived people’s aunties, and doctors, and university professors, and adults and children whose families had put them into institutions. He had not drunk enough. The music was nothing to him now but a dulled thudding, though his head was ringing. How did the neighbours put up with it? He unlocked the car door and got in. His wide, short trouser leg snagged on the door handle. The inside of the car comforted him. He could smell his children in it, their grubbiness, their chip packets; and something else, something more than a smell, a faint fleshiness which was evidence that his wife had been there. Even Vicki’s strident perfume could not swamp it. He picked it up as surely as a nesting bird recognises its mate’s cry in the dense cacophony of an Antarctic island. Sometimes if he went to the lavatory after her he smelled it so strongly that it almost revolted him: it was his mother’s smell, sickeningly rich and warm, an emanation from internal membranes.

  What was that noise? He wound the window right down and stuck his head out. Someone was sobbing in the carpark, a woman, a girl. She was wailing, choking, trying to talk. He pulled his head in and went for the door handle but the moronic thumping of the music stopped dead and a man’s voice spoke, light, reasoning, impatient.

  ‘Look, Donna,’ it said, ‘why can’t you just accept it? And make the best of it?’

  ‘But you don’t – you never – I can’t –’ She was weeping without shame. They were standing in the dark behind Dexter’s car. He heard the man click his tongue and sigh, then the sobbing became muffled. He’s put his arms around her, thought Dexter, but he doesn’t love her any more. He rolled up the window as quietly as he could, although his urge to go on listening was almost sexual. His heart was beating. The music began again, stamp, stamp, stamp. The girl’s grief passed through metal and glass and became part of Dexter. His cells were sodden with it. He would carry it forever, long after she had recovered from it and gone on to love someone else.

  *

  Beside one of the speaker boxes crouched an androgynous creature in a raincoat. Its neck was bent, its hair was slicked back like a schoolboy’s off its sweating, waxen face, it nodded its head in time and kept its eyes turned up sideways and fixed on the lit, jerking figures above it. Something damned in its posture and its crooked stare made Athena shiver. She followed it to the lavatory – so it was a girl – and heard it vomiting.

  She found Elizabeth standing watching the band from the side. The music stopped.

  ‘Did you see that girl? Is she all right?’

  ‘I saw a thing in a raincoat,’ said Elizabeth, ‘with no features on its face.’

  ‘She was vomiting. Do you think I ought to do something?’

  ‘What – clean up? They hire people to do that.’

  ‘But she looked like a child.’

  ‘They all do,’ said Elizabeth. ‘They are.’

  The girl emerged, paler than before, and slithered back to her crouching position of worship, or supplication. Athena noticed that from where Elizabeth was standing, Philip looked . . . famous. From below the stage, where Athena had spent most of the evening, he had looked like a bloke with a guitar doing a job of work.

  When Athena opened the passenger door at midnight she found Dexter asleep with his head on his arms, and his arms on the steering wheel. He did not move, though people were shouting and laughing and starting up cars all around. She stood bent over, half in and out of the car, and looked at his face from the side. She found it pretty. It wasn’t, but that was how she saw it. She thought, ‘You will never be anything to me but beautiful.’ She slid in beside him and he woke.

  ‘Hullo, dearest!’ he said. ‘All over, is it?’ He stretched his arms backwards and arched his spine.

  ‘It was fun,’ said Athena. ‘We’ve been dancing and dancing.’

  ‘I had a wonderful stroke of luck,’ said Dexter. ‘I turned on the wireless and they were playing that Mozart clarinet quintet, you know, the one I like so much?’ He pursed his lips and whistled a rising run of notes, one forefinger lifted like a prophet. ‘It’s sublime. Beyond praise! Where’s Vicki?’

  ‘She said she’d be home later,’ said Athena.

  *

  They lay wide awake, smelling the summer night, restless, involved in their separate travellings, longing to slip off the edge into real sleep.

  ‘Are you still awake?’ said Athena.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stop thinking. How can I drop off next to a head full of thoughts?’

  Dexter got up with a sigh. She heard his bare feet brush on the hall lino, and stretched out into the cool corners of the bed. What time could it be? Her feet felt dry-skinned and feverish. Her hair stank of other people’s cigarette smoke. She turned the pillow over and over. A door creaked, someone laughed up high, there was a scuffling somewhere in the house, Dexter was up, he would see to it. Her muscles let go and she was away.

  Someone was whispering above her head, through the window, tap tap tap on glass, calling her name. Her feet hit the floor and her finger the lamp switch before her eyes were open. ‘What? What?’

  ‘Come and open the front door, Thena! It’s me!’

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Dexter was standing on the front verandah in his pyjamas with both hands clapped over his mouth and his eyes rolling. He scampered past her and dived on to the bed.

  ‘He had her up against the fridge!’ he snorted. He giggled and thrashed his legs like a naughty boy in a dormitory. ‘I was on my way to the lavatory. I turned on the kitchen light and they were –’

  ‘Who?’ She pushed the bedroom door to and flicked off the light.

  ‘Him! The one with the tattoo! He had his trousers off, in the kitchen!’

  ‘What? Is Elizabeth here!’

  ‘No! It was Vicki! I had to come back round the outside of the house. They must have thought I was perving on them.’ He took a big quivering breath. ‘Is there going to be a scandal?’

  ‘Isn’t she a little monkey,’ said Athena. ‘I hope she’s on the pill.’ She lay down, smiling to herself. The curtain moved on the air, settled, moved again. It was like waiting for a play to continue.

  An engine slowed down outside, a taxi radio quacked, a door slammed, heels clacked to the verandah as smartly as if it were broad day.

  ‘Here’s your scandal,’ said Athen
a.

  They lay flinching on the bed. Her knocking shook the house. The neighbour’s dog began to bark.

  ‘Open the door,’ said Athena. ‘She’ll wake the kids.’

  He scrambled into the hall. Elizabeth pushed past him and charged down the hall towards Vicki’s room.

  ‘The back door wasn’t locked, Morty,’ Dexter sang out after her. ‘She’ll think it’s our fault,’ he hissed to Athena.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Let them sort it out for themselves.’ She turned her back to him and he flung his arm around her.

  ‘This is awful!’ he said.

  ‘This must be what people do,’ said Athena. ‘Go to sleep.’

  Dexter lay rigid as a board, braced for more sobbing, but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden, on a large, flat, well-kept lawn, where yellow leaves off poplars lay about in drifts. As she watched they began to rise off the grass and play in the air in orderly streams as if being squirted from a hose: they rose and fell and rose again, in a variety of patterns, and everything was beautiful and enchanting and as it should be.

  *

  They stood in the shade on the cool tiles of an arcade and looked into a shop window where an automatic photo printing machine was on display. Before their eyes it disgorged into the chute a single colour snap: a baby in a humidicrib. As one they turned away.

  ‘I used to play my guitar all day at home,’ said Philip. ‘I used to think that if people could hear these certain notes played at this certain rhythm, then they’d understand everything and everything would change.’

  ‘Do you feel horrible,’ said Athena, ‘when you’ve played less well than you ought to have? And exposed yourself?’

  ‘I used to,’ said Philip. ‘I used to go looking for heroin or dope or a lot of whisky so I could get oblivious as fast as I could. Because of shame. And wanting to wipe out this person and be nothing. Not just after I’ve played badly either. When I’ve behaved like an animal. Hurting people. These last few mornings I’ve been shaving and I’ve looked in the mirror and thought, I could pull the razor across here like this’ – he drew a line from ear to ear – ‘except that it would hurt so much.’