by Simon Avery
The girl came out onto the balcony where Krisztina was shivering, watching the snow flake out of the pale sky. She hadn’t brought a cardigan with her. It was cold. The girl joined her at the railings. Once she’d closed the door, Krisztina’s voice over the PA system was muted enough to mollify her. It was no more than a narcotic whisper out here.
“What do you want?” Krisztina asked without looking at the girl. She wanted only to leave, not to talk to another stranger.
The girl didn’t respond immediately. Instead she leaned against the railings and Krisztina noted that she was a pretty blonde. Her dress was trying too hard to be expensive but her shoes were pink Manolo Blahnik pumps. They were scuffed though; she’d had them a while but she was determined to get her money’s worth. “They’re taking bets inside,” she said finally, and Krisztina realised she was English. “Half of them are expecting you to shin down a drain pipe and the other half are betting you just jump.”
Krisztina smiled, despite herself. She’d managed half an hour of fawning record company executives while they piped her debut record around a room filled with journalists, radio people, and other assorted faces that seemed to simply want to stare at the fresh meat. Greasing the wheels. After that she’d tired of them all, tired of her own voice, and retreated to the balcony of the hotel. And even now, with her hair glittering with snow and shaking in her boots, she realised that she would rather be out here. “What’s your name?” Krisztina asked.
“Alice.”
“And what were you betting on?” Something about the girl’s very presence was calming. She realised that all the tension had suddenly gone out of her. How had that happened?
“I’m betting we use these to parachute to freedom.” She produced two tiny napkins. Krisztina laughed. She barely recognised the sound.
They slipped away and into the cold embrace of Krisztina’s city. She showed Alice the sights: the Danube as they crossed the Elizabeth Bridge; the onion domes of the synagogues; the little coffee houses on Váci utca, where Slavic pimps and gangsters would assemble to sip at Turkish coffee and wait for their boss – a florid fat man who constantly dabbed at his bald head with an immaculate red silk handkerchief. Krisztina became an over-eager tour guide, sharing everything with equal zeal. She showed Alice the couture shops and the ‘consumption girls’; the floodlit triumphal arches straddling the Danube and the strip joints; the Turkish baths and the drunks in the doorways. Everything was equal; everything was beautiful.
Sometime around midnight they settled on a restaurant that was filled with circus folk from a travelling show, and Krisztina introduced Alice to Szarvastokány erdei gombával, a venison stew with wild mushrooms, and a variety of sweet Hungarian wines. They talked and laughed with a sibling trapeze act and a contortionist, and then later talked about Alice, and England. The record company executives were pushing Krisztina to tour the album, she told Alice; in England and the rest of Europe, but she wouldn’t; not then, not now. She had always been cripplingly afraid of the stage, of performing her fragile little compositions live. She felt sure they would crumble like a tower of cards as the assembled musicians attempted to reproduce the studio recordings.
It was still snowing when they left the restaurant: a drowsy, almost luminous snow that seemed to light the ancient buildings up from inside. Commuters were moving cautiously out of Pest, across the Margaret Bridge. Krisztina led Alice away from the traffic grinding through the city. The ancient cold drifted up off the river, and they embraced, gazing down at the pink and gold light on the Danube like the lovers they weren’t yet aware they had become. No one took any notice of two women holding each other fast – faster than the river was flowing. Krisztina could feel it surging beneath her feet and it felt like blood coursing through her veins. They ended up back at her hotel rooms, tipsy yet full of an urgent need to touch and be touched. By the time the doors were closed, they were kissing in the dark and the world was falling away. There had been a hole made of darkness in these rooms for too long that suddenly seemed to be filled with light; it was burning the cold from the bed sheets, melting the snow from the balcony, purging the loneliness from the city, the bridges and the beautiful buildings of worship with something incandescent and holy, stopping the river from surging…
Fate gave them five years. Almost to the day: five years. A line that led from kissing in the dark to the night Alice died while Krisztina played the song that was in some way a vestige of the life that had been denied her. All the roads that led from those first sweet stolen moments had fallen away to nothing; returning her to the woman she had been before. It was simple mathematics: add and subtract, and what are you left with? The equation of love that would take a million years or more to understand.
They were the same five years shared by any young lovers who assume their time is almost infinite: holidays and travel; dinners with friends and family; evenings in bars and restaurants, sex on Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, and all times in between; gifts on Christmas morning; walking in the sun and snow; days and nights in Krisztina’s hotel as the Danube surged on below them… It was nothing more or less than any other couple in the world shared.
Except after almost exactly five years, Alice, loaded down with Christmas gifts for Krisztina, would leave the pavement and take three steps across Batthyány Square, and be hit by a car that had lost control in the ice. The car swerved to avoid a tram, fishtailed and hit Alice so hard she was flung into the air. She impacted with another tram going in the opposite direction. From her hospital bed later, she told Krisztina that she watched as the world was reduced to intermittent still photographs in black and white: the broken window of the tram she had collided with, and the glass shimmering around her body; the Audi skewed into the side of a building, and a man weeping at the kerbside with blood and glass in his hair; the sea of faces blotting out the pale sky; the brightly coloured gifts arrayed across the square; the warm pillow of blood pooling beneath her hair, melting the snow…
At the hospital the first person Krisztina saw was a record company executive who, after five years of suffering her musical inactivity, had finally told her she was ‘pissing all of her promise away’. But there were no songs in her. Not one since that first night she’d met Alice. There was a patina of dust on the Apple Mac and the desk and all of the instruments in her studio. The phone calls from the record company had become less and less frequent; there were fewer emails, fewer requests for interviews, almost no royalties. The songs for This is Krisztina had been a way out of the pain of life. There had been no pain so there had been no songs. It was quite simple. But this man wouldn’t understand. She ignored him as he rose to greet her outside Alice’s room, and he slunk away finally a while later.
After that the days diminished to time spent in grey corridors and sitting in quiet rooms while Alice drifted in and out of consciousness; or alone in dreary cafeterias, smoking endlessly. It was in the hospital café that Krisztina heard the song first. She barely noticed it then; imagined it was only a radio playing something, somewhere. But then she heard a woman in a headscarf say to the woman at the till:
I am your lonely days
The bills, the debts, the dinners for one
The tears and regrets when the day is done
When Krisztina turned around the woman in the scarf was rooting in her purse for loose change to pay for her coffee and sandwich. She handed over the coins and left the café.
It happened again the following day while she sat in Alice’s hospital room. She had been reading a paperback, but her head had begun to droop forward as the winter light cascaded into the room, turning Alice’s hair gold. Krisztina heard the melody then. It woke her and it was so pretty that she placed the paperback onto the bedside cabinet and opened the door and peered into the corridor. She couldn’t hear it anymore. She felt obscurely disappointed. She sat back down and studied Alice’s face while she tried to recall the melody: it had been no more than five or six notes, played on a piano. S
he ran her fingers along the arm of the chair, played a scale from memory and then attempted the notes that were drifting away from her like a dream. But then they came again. It was like being on the first floor of a huge empty house while someone played a grand piano downstairs. Krisztina rose then sat down again. She heard the first crackle of an electric guitar as it followed the piano motif. She heard a cello, violins. She stood, walked around the room, opened a window and peered out at the car park, listening hard. When she closed it she realised that she could hear the song best in the sick room. She stood over Alice and pressed the back of her hand to her cold cheek, then ran her fingers through her hair until there were tears in her eyes, rolling down her face.
She had caught the train home that night and she saw the words appearing on billboards and advertisements in the subway.
I am your lonely days
The bills, the debts, the dinners for one
The tears and regrets when the day is done
And then on the street she followed the melody again until she realised she had circled Vigadó Square three times in pursuit of the fugitive melody. The drunks on the benches had noticed her presence and begun to call out to her. Once she’d worn wigs to disguise herself. After the first album had been released, she had become a minor celebrity around Budapest, and around Europe. She’d hated being recognised; she had no idea how to respond to fans of her music. They seemed to expect something she could not give them. A scrawled autograph seemed like a poor substitute sometimes. But these drunks didn’t know her. She hurried away from them and heard one of them cry out:
You want to be someone else
You want to forget yourself
But the world made you cruel
And the pain made you hate
But out of the chaos comes a calm
A light that the dark cannot touch
She wrote the words across her studio wall when she got back to the hotel and studied them. She sat at the piano and her fingers hovered over the keys. She was afraid to begin. She couldn’t recall the tune anymore. Any attempt she made to replicate it would be a poor substitute. Within an evening it would be diverted away from the original melody until it was nothing more than a stranger to the original idea. She waited for hours with her hands suspended above the piano but the melody resisted her. She was afraid of one false note.
Krisztina heard it again the next day in the hospital. Alice had drifted up from the depths of wherever the accident had left her. It wouldn’t last. Once the nurses had dispersed, she asked Krisztina, “What is it? You look so sad.”
“I’m scared,” Krisztina said in a small voice. She stared at her feet, at her hands, anywhere but Alice. “I’m scared of losing you.”
Alice reached out her hand and closed it around Krisztina’s. “Don’t be scared.” But she didn’t seem to know how to quell her fear, how to hide the uncertainty from her face. She knew she’d never again rise from this unfamiliar bed they’d placed her in, with its pale, stiff sheets and limp pillows. She would never leave this room in her old clothes and her expensive scuffed shoes and walk away down the corridor and into the world with Krisztina. Never again.
“I can hear a song,” Krisztina said. “For days I’ve been hearing it, but I think it’s in my head. It won’t leave me alone.”
Alice squeezed her hand. “That’s good, baby. That’s what you do. What you used to do. It’s coming back to you.”
“I don’t want it,” Krisztina said, her voice cold and firm. She was aware that she sounded like a petulant child, but she didn’t care. “I want you.” She looked away, out of the window, at the empty sky. “I just want you.”
Alice tightened her grip. “Sing it to me,” she said.
Krisztina shook her head. “I can’t hear it, not all of the time.” But even as she said it, she realised it was there, close by but almost impossibly distant. That sweet piano, the crackle of the guitar, the sudden sweep of the strings… She realised then that it was Alice. She leaned down, close enough that their faces were touching. Alice’s cheek was cold. There were wires coming out of her nose, out of her arm. Krisztina ignored them, listened to the song.
“What is it?” Alice asked.
“It’s you. It’s your song that I’ve been hearing.”
“I can’t hear it,” Alice said. “Play it to me.”
Krisztina had to go home to the hotel to collect a keyboard. She was reluctant. It seemed an absurd thing to do, to be wasting precious time like this. A cold hand of fear was tugging at her all the way there and back again. She heard its voice: she’ll be gone before you get back. You wasted your last moments with her… All around, she could see the words of the song appearing, the notes tempting her along the suddenly lonely streets. She wished hard that when she returned, it wouldn’t be all she had left of her.
But Alice was still awake, awash in the wintry sun as Krisztina bustled in with the keyboard and a bag of equipment: a power supply, a notepad, a small digital recorder. She laid them out on the bedside cabinet, placed the keyboard across the arms of the chair. A couple of nurses were hovering in the corridor, glancing in through the window, curious.
“Look at you,” Alice said with forced levity in her voice. “Writing your songs again. That’s my girl.”
“I thought I’d forgotten how,” Krisztina said, pushing the tears from her eyes.
Alice pulled her close and cradled her face in her cold hands. “Is it the teardrop method?” she asked, smiling.
“I can’t play it all,” Krisztina said. “I don’t hear the whole song.” She paused, stumbling on the next words. They were too hard to say, to admit to. “I think I have to wait until you’re gone.”
Alice nodded and relinquished Krisztina’s hand. “Don’t cry,” she said in a small voice. “Please don’t cry anymore.”
Krisztina nodded and pushed the tears from her face, concentrated instead on the keyboard and trying to recall what she could of the tune. She was suddenly very aware of the quiet around them both. Beyond the bleeping machines and Alice’s shallow breaths, beyond the hum of the hospital and the ever-present sound of nurses’ footsteps was that silence. It was waiting to reclaim the room, the way it always had. Soon, the bed would be stripped of its fever-wet sheets and pillow cases; soon, the window would be opened to let fresh air and birdsong in; soon, Alice would be gone from the world.
Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice’s mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes.
Afterwards, Krisztina held her cold hand while the nurses and then the doctor came. They prised them apart then and Krisztina stood in the corner of the room as they went about their final routine. She wept silently, stared at Alice’s suddenly vacant eyes.
Time stopped.
There were things to sign later. Krisztina waited for Alice’s mother in the hospital café and stared at the Formica table. She walked home some hours later, feeling adrift, as if she’d come untethered in space. In the emptiness of her hotel rooms she avoided the smell of Alice’s clothes in the wardrobe and on her pillow, the indentation of her body still in the bed, her lipstick on t
he wine glasses, and locked herself instead in the studio and recorded the song. It took her three days as she layered it with sounds and instrumentation, recorded and re-recorded it until she was satisfied. She called it ‘The Teardrop Method’, and then she left it alone, closed the door on the studio. The days drifted away from her. She attended the funeral, she got drunk at the wake, and she avoided everyone. Someone took her picture and it appeared in a popular Hungarian magazine. Then six weeks later, she heard the next song. She repeated the process, not recognising it for what it was. But then she followed the song to a ballet dancer on the other side of the city and she realised that events were out of her control.
4
She thought she was done. It had been a year since Alice had died. Since then there had been seven more songs amid a cacophony of them in Budapest; and seven consequent deaths to somehow crystallise them. Until then, they were fragments, the half remembered memories of songs that would forever go unrecorded. As time went on, she heard them all; every single soul that was about to meet its maker. Krisztina had learned to listen for the songs that meant something to her, whose melodies appealed the most; the rest she sifted away from her attention. Each song necessitated a death, required her presence at the end to hear the song that their life had made. Each demise had been different, each situation hard to predict, but somehow whatever it was that was providing her with the ability to hear these secret songs was also looking out for her, keeping her path free of harm. Krisztina kept a close watch on the newspapers after each song was recorded to be certain that the Budapest police had nothing to link her to the deaths.
