Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  During happy times, Mum and Dad used to sing together at home. Their favourite song was a duet called ‘The Keys of Heaven’. Mum’s voice was sweet, high and effortless, but I remember my father singing as if he was pulling his voice out from somewhere deep inside his body.

  Will you give me the keys of heaven?

  Will you give me the keys to your heart?

  Madam, will you walk?

  Madam, will you talk?

  Madam, will you walk and talk with me?

  Dad had what Mum called a fine mid-range baritone and he loved to play the part of Mum’s lover when they sang duets. This involved him clasping her hands close to his heart and looking soulfully into her eyes as he sang, something that used to embarrass me deeply. Perhaps their love of singing together, the pleasure of harmonising their emotions through music, made their marriage endure despite their difficulties. When Mum sang back to him it was perhaps the best way she knew how to answer his call of love.

  I will give you the keys of heaven,

  I will give you the keys to my heart,

  Yes sir, I will walk,

  Yes sir, I will talk,

  Yes sir, I will walk and talk with you.

  Joan: They were difficult years. Sometimes I didn’t know how I would get through them. But that’s what marriage was in those days. You endured things, even after they became terrible and difficult. Oh, I know it’s not fashionable now, but I have to tell you that after years of praying, one day I felt released and I forgave your father. I opened my heart to him and gradually we became – first friends, and then husband and wife again. And it was softer, more precious than when we first loved each other. We’d come through something dark and horrible and afterwards there was … just a lot of light.

  ‘Your cards and letter tell me that you are in a happier mood,’ Dad wrote to Cathie in a letter at the end of that time. ‘I am also better all the time. I guessed that you were passing through emotional trauma, but now the trauma is, to some extent at least, over. Stay that way. Keep travelling. Keep being happy, we all send our love.’

  FIDDLING IN THE UNDERWORLD

  In one of her articles for the Music Teachers’ Association, Mum advised her readers to ‘encourage your students to take any and every opportunity to take the music out of the practice rooms and into the real world’.

  I joke with her later that I followed her advice, right down to the gritty details, when I took my music out of the practice rooms, the concert and recital halls, and onto the streets of Sydney. It was really her fault, I tell her, that I went crazy for a while, that I went wild as I took any and every opportunity to make my dreams of music real.

  For instance, busking. The hardest thing about busking is choosing the spot, marking your territory, my friend Busker Joe used to call it, except we’re too civilised to cock a leg and piss on the footpath. Still, there were always a few moments of terror between putting your violin case down and opening it up, when you didn’t really want to do it, except you’d set yourself goals – yes, Prime Minister, even buskers have goals – well a goal anyway, of at least an hour a day, clocking in and clocking out, usually during peak hours, as if there was some unseen boss checking out your work ethic.

  Back in Mum’s house, it seems like a dream now, this wild musical life I’d had in Sydney when I’d played with famous people and heard my violin on the radio. Though I rarely refer to it, I am neither proud nor ashamed of it. It was something I did then, just as looking after Mum is something I am doing now.

  Since I’ve been, in Mum’s words, ‘back in the fold’, playing violin for Mum’s friends at weddings and funerals, it is even the source of funny stories. Oh yes, Linda played on the streets for a while, Mum might offer a visitor, as if she is passing unusually shaped biscuits around the table. Oh really, they might reply, reaching out in curiosity like they might really take a nibble out of me. How interesting! I tell stories as they sip their tea. My stories encourage their stories: about nephews and nieces, friends of cousins, relatives of accountants who also busked ‘for pocket money’ to pay for overseas trips, to pay off bills, to pay for rent. My Irish roots explain a lot, I sometimes think, as I observe this secret admiration for private enterprise, this bypassing of the system, this playing of music for the people and not for the elite. Many professional classical musicians refer to busking as begging, but for me it was a kind of badge of honour. I knew that it taught me courage and restored to me the faith in the wild, spontaneous and real that my years of discipline and study had suppressed in me. I also knew that my training and discipline were always at the back of my creative adventures in Sydney. It was the synthesis of these things – the highbrow, the lowbrow, the no-brows-at-all – that gave me work habits even in the middle of the chaos around me.

  Mum and Dad raised me to be a nice girl, but I don’t think I would have qualified as a nice girl when I played my violin on the footpaths of Sydney. I suppose they thought I’d gone mad when I took to playing music on the streets and in bands, especially since they had been relieved that after dropping out of law I had finished a music degree at university. They probably expected me to settle into a life of teaching and professional music-making in an establishment that had seemingly opened its door to me. But the professors I needed now were somewhere different – they were playing on footpaths and in bars, on street corners and in arcades. I wanted to learn to play the violin differently and to find a new way of life to go along with it. I wanted something raw to enter the sound I’d learned to refine in the temples of music and a new energy in my body and mind as well.

  I couldn’t articulate these things at the time, but my passion to explore overrode all the fears that, as a daughter of good parents, I naturally had. The nicest thing I did for Mum and Dad, though, was that I was living in another city when I leapt into the unknown over barriers of classical music and went down into the wild and the dark where I would hear for the first time the sound of my own music.

  I picked the grungiest part of the city to begin my musical journey. Kings Cross. I made a lot of money at the Cross, but no one wanted to hear anything original. If I played my own music I always ended the day penniless, so I stuck to Vivaldi and Mozart if I wanted to rake in the money from the yuppies in Elizabeth Bay and Potts Point walking to their high rise apartments from the train station. Classical music – paying for classical music – made them feel separate from the prostitutes and desperados who sold junk and banged on tin cans with old spoons, like an old guy called Gilbert who always played six doors up from me, right outside The Pink Pussycat.

  Eventually the Cross just got too hard on my own. It was great for a while gathering an audience around me as I made my way through the greatest hits of the classical repertoire. I even enjoyed the added bonus sometimes of getting fifty bucks chucked in my case for having ‘the best legs in the Cross’. But things turned weird one day when a man called Mario, who said he was a record producer, lured me to his hotel room to talk about ‘a deal’ and then tried to take all my clothes off. I fled down the fire escape and the next day moved my operation to the Central Station tunnel at peak hour, where the clientele was anonymous, regular and cashed up, and the acoustics were absolute heaven.

  Moving from the street to the tunnel felt sometimes as if I was burrowing down further into a musical underworld, as if the heart I was trying to discover was truly filled with darkness. Some days it felt like things couldn’t get any worse, that I really had gone mad, that I really was crazy for music: when I’d been playing for hours and all I had in my case was twenty cents. When my face would be red from shame and hunger because I couldn’t afford anything to eat. When I’d feel like smashing the violin, giving up and going home, back to where I came from, where I would do what was expected of me, where I would play other people’s music, and teach other people to do the same thing. Times when I thought I couldn’t stand to play another note of Mozart or Vitelli or Cor
elli or Locatelli. Times when in sheer bloody frustration I’d rip into some big, fat, juicy sound just to keep myself warm, because a musician knows that music can hang there in the high space of the tunnel and warm you like the sun. There’d be nothing like those times. I could never be lonely enough, cold enough, hungry enough to give up those moments when all the resonance harmonises and even the mosaics on the wall seem to shimmer with the vibrations of the violin. When I could feel – not just hear – the sound I was making. When the sound of the music seemed to heat me up from the inside.

  This was when my dream of making music began to feel real, bit by bit, those moments when I was enveloped in sound, as if I was standing in a womb of music waiting to be reborn.

  I wish I’d been able to find the words to tell this story to Dad, but we didn’t really communicate often during that time, although Mum still sent me regular letters and cards on which Dad would add a few dutiful lines at the end. I didn’t tell Mum much either. I know she fretted about me, but thought I was smart enough to turn things around if I wanted to. I think Dad took my situation personally, though, and I resented his disappointment in me. When I visited then, I was ashamed and defiant, unable to articulate to him, or even to myself, why I was doing what I was doing, when he had educated me to live in other ways. I was stubborn too. I began to look, in my mother’s words, ‘blowsy’. It probably broke Dad’s heart to see me go wild. I knew that my underground life was only part of a longer journey for me and that I would have to find my way back to some middle ground. But I couldn’t turn back. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t know how. Perhaps I really was – as Grandma once accused me of being – ‘as stubborn as sin’ and ‘headed straight for hell’.

  But if I’d known then the right words, if I’d understood the use of a good metaphor, Dad might have understood exactly what I was doing – if I’d been able to tell him that I wasn’t wasting myself or whatever gift I had for life or music. That I was only fiddling in the underworld and I had to keep going until I found the light.

  They came with plates of pikelets and sandwiches, fairy cakes and lamingtons, clutching sheet music of songs from operettas and musical comedy. They carried handbags stuffed with accoutrements to enhance their performances that day: false eyelashes, black plastic compacts rimmed in gold and filled with powder for the face, rouge for the cheeks and false curls for a performance of ‘Three Little Maids from School’ from The Mikado, white pancake makeup for a rendition of ‘One Fine Day’ from Madam Butterfly, a black lace fan used as a prop while singing a flirtatious aria from The Merry Widow. There were pearls for The Pearl Fishers. There was a red plastic rose to be thrown dramatically onto the floor while a big-boned mezzo soprano sang the ‘Habanera’ from Carmen. There was a black babushka worn by my mother as she sang ‘Mother You Know the Story’ from Cavalleria Rusticana. There were saucers of cream for the ‘Cat Duet’ and later, without props, four-handed versions of ‘Granada’ and ‘The Can Can’ from Orpheus in the Underworld. Before lunch, my sister Cathie would play such a bustling version of Mozart’s ‘Alla Turka’ that the piano keys clicked and rattled as if we were not really crowded into a tiny lounge room in a Brisbane suburb, but stuffed together, sweating and breathless, in an old cart careering along a road to Istanbul. Then, after food, there were tentative performances of old violin light classics like ‘Melody in F’ by Arthur Rubenstein and ‘Intermezzo’ from Cavalleria Rusticana, which I played reluctantly with bowed shoulders and drooping head while Mum yelled at me to Play up! Play louder!

  I might have forgotten now other specific sounds from Mum’s annual Musical Day, but I can still remember an invisible sound, or, more accurately, I remember the sound of invisible energy: of these women coming to life, moment by moment, as they sang, listened, clapped and laughed along in delight at their sharing of this music and song.

  Men rarely, if ever, made an appearance; it was a day of secret women’s business before we ever knew what that phrase meant. Husbands were seen dropping off their wives in our driveway, or occasionally helping them carry the trays of cakes and sandwiches and the piles of sheet music that would make up the day’s performance repertoire. Sometimes, late in the day, one would venture as far as our back door and peer in through the flyscreen looking for his wife, hardly daring to enter what must have seemed from the outside to be an overwhelming world of laughing, singing women.

  As well as the muscles in her throat, the muscles in Mum’s eyes now begin to cause her trouble. She responds to this with alarm. Apart from the fear of losing her voice, she is now terrified of going blind. Unable to reach her doctors to voice her concerns in person, Mum begins the habit of writing little notes and letters on scraps of paper which she then might hand to the doctor when she arrives. Many of them are forgotten, though, between the time when they are written and the time the doctor arrives. She writes politely and goes into detail like a supplicant in a legal case.

  Dear Doctor,

  Regarding my eyes during the night: after I wake and can’t get to sleep again owing to the flickering of my eyes, the same thing happened last night. I continually flickered my light [sic] for the night nurse (a tall gentleman) and told him what was happening and that I couldn’t sleep because of my eyes. He first gave me Xanax, then camomile tea and we were talking about how often this had happened. After several calls I suggested he give me a Madopar early (at about 4.30 I think) then he went and within about eight minutes or so I must have gone to sleep till about a quarter to seven. I’m sure he will verify this.

  I’m hoping something can be looked into about my eyes and hopefully something can be done as it is becoming a real problem for me.

  Yours sincerely

  Joan Neil

  Pricilla Leighton, an old vocal student of Mum’s, wasn’t around for her musical days, but she is a regular visitor during the first years of Mum’s illness. Your mother was my rock, Pricilla tells me. She got me through my bad times. She was always someone you could rely on. To drop in for a cup of tea. To tell your problems to. And I don’t just mean musical ones. I thought she would have handled this better. The way she expected me to handle my problems.

  There sometimes seems nothing to say to comments like these so I adopt the habit of getting the violin out when Pricilla visits. Music diverts Mum – and Pricilla as well – from feeling embarrassed by her worsening condition. Sometimes I have the same feeling I used to as a child: a performing seal trundled out for Mum’s friends at concerts and recitals. But music is a gift I feel increasingly grateful for and I now play happily for Mum and whoever visits her. I even take requests.

  Play that gypsy piece for us, will you, Linda? Pricilla calls out to me during one of her last visits to the house. The one you used to play on the street. You with your wild, wild heart.

  There is a beautiful symmetry, a sense of return, when I relive my busking days in Mum’s house, the place where I first heard and learnt to play these gypsy tunes. Now we are not one, but three women going feral in the suburbs, the way I went feral on the streets. I prowl around the corridors with my fiddle the way I used to prowl the footpaths of the Cross, scraping my violin strings as if they are made of raw metal. Pricilla, an occupational therapist who dreams in her time off of one day escaping the confines of her million-dollar house up the road and singing in the great opera houses of the world, is delighted.

  It feels good to bring delight back into my mother’s house; delight can wipe out the shadows of the past. It shimmies like a glittering sequinned woman through the denseness of depression. It is, like the music of buskers, full of gesture and affect. It is a showgirl, a peach. It does no damage. And it gives a point to my fall away from my mother. It gives meaning to my days on the streets. Sometimes now when I am playing my crazy fiddle and Pricilla is clapping wildly I feel as if the present is linked all the way back to some distant past, before words, before language, when people danced and screamed to express their stories, when sorr
ow could be told through sound, and passion relayed through rhythm and dance. Sometimes it seems as if this delight and laughter is the final transformation of all my mad adventures, the looping back of my own fall, to find upon my return among the cracked cups and dusty linoleum of my mother’s kitchen, the real grace of music.

  THE ASYLUM SEEKERS

  In Santuzza’s aria ‘Voi lo Sapete’ from the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, which Mum often sang around the house when I was a child, a young peasant girl confesses to her mother her despair at her faithless lover.

  Mother you know the story,

  That evil one,

  for all my rightful pleasure,

  burns now with jealousy.

  Me she has outraged!

  Despoiled of my honour

  I live on –

  Mum never had the build, the voice or the passion for Wagner and was never meant to be a Valkyrie or a Gotterdamerung. Grand opera didn’t suit her style either. Though she admired Dame Joan Sutherland, she never attempted the coloratura roles for which Sutherland was famous, the Normas and the Lucia d’ Lammermoors. She preferred the energy and emotion of a Puccini opera, as well as the refinement of a beautiful Mozart aria to the madness and drama of a Lucia. Being the younger wife of an older man, she was always, in his eyes anyway, young, beautiful and girlish, and so she was physically well suited to sing Santuzza’s lament.

  Before I was old enough to properly understand the difference between make-believe and reality, I could have sworn that real despair was tearing my mother’s heart as she clutched at her breast. What did she draw on, I wondered, to find such wretchedness with which to sing? She tells me later: