Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘… incredible,’ the woman said explosively after a few beats of silence. ‘I can’t believe him acting as if he hadn’t gone off with his lover for almost a year! If anything he’s worse to Mumma than before.’

  ‘Why did she take him back?’

  ‘Who knows. Habit. Fear of being old and alone. I can’t believe she loves him. You see how he is to her? And how can she bear him, knowing that he had an affair with someone my age? And that he made her pregnant before he left her.’ The boy felt that there was more to his mother’s anger than fury at his grandfather for leaving his grandmother. He felt a sort of dark secret fear stir inside his mother and knew that this was the centre of her sick rage.

  ‘What is he going to do about it?’ his father asked.

  ‘He told Mumma that he’d offered her the money for an abortion.’

  The watcher could feel the woman begin to summon the Chaos spirit with her hatred. Incredibly the boy seemed to feel it too. The watcher felt his terror but also his courage as he rushed through the door and flung himself into his startled mother’s arms, sobbing. Her anger was quenched by shock and then by dismay as the boy clenched himself around her.

  ‘Oh, Honey, not the monsters again?’

  ‘There’s only one, Mama, but sometimes it gets inside people,’ he whispered to her. ‘It’s inside Granddad, but I don’t want it to get inside you!’

  There was a devastated pause and when the woman spoke her voice had lost the hard hurtful quality of angry despair. ‘What makes you think that what … what is inside Granddad will get inside me?’ she asked shakily.

  ‘It likes being in him because he’s angry inside. It likes it that angryness is inside you, too. It can’t come otherwise.’

  ‘Lilly …’ the man had a note of worried authority in his voice. Don’t go on with this, it seemed to say. The boy heard it clearly and looked at his father.

  ‘Da, that monster would like it if a baby died.’

  Oh, the parents reeled at how much the boy knew. And like the boy – because of the boy’s awareness – the watcher felt something crack open inside the woman and a hard black fury leaked out like pus as she began to cry.

  ‘Don’t be angry any more, Mama,’ the boy said softly, stroking his mother’s hair. ‘Maybe we can have that baby if the lady doesn’t want it. We will love it so that no angryness can get inside of it.’

  ‘Timothy,’ the father wrapped his arms around both of them and began to cry silently too, and the love binding the three began healing something wounded in them, which stemmed from the dark secret wounding of the woman. Then, all at once, the watcher heard the Song in all of them. But incredible as that was, more incredible still was that the boy heard it, too.

  ‘It’s all right, Mama,’ he whispered. ‘I can hear the music again.’

  ‘My precious boy,’ the woman mumbled, half laughing. ‘What a fool I’ve been. I feel as if I am waking from a dream of being poisoned. And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to see that young woman …’

  ‘Oh Lil, please …’ the man said.

  ‘No. Listen. I didn’t even think about her and how she must have felt. Timmy made me see that just now. If she wants to have the baby, we’ll help her.’ She laughed. ‘And if I wanted revenge, this would be an exquisite revenge. Except I don’t want revenge. I want to see if I can help her.’

  The Song strengthened and the boy held his mother tightly. ‘I love you, Mama,’ he whispered.

  The watcher withdrew and segued, trying to encompass what it had seen. It had believed that the Chaos spirit was drawn by despair and indifference, but now it understood that anger was an even greater magnet. Was it because, in the aftermath of damage done by anger, despair and indifference were spawned? Was it that, if it could seep into people with anger, it could generate greater and greater despair and, finally, the indifference which was the Void it craved?

  So what was the lesson? The watcher had begun to see everything it noted as a clue which would eventually, perhaps even in time, lead it to the answer it sought. Clearly the boy’s uncanny awareness was part of the answer. But it was more than that. The boy had shown great courage in opposing the chaos he had sensed.

  With a shiver that would have dug into its soul, had it still possessed such a thing, the watcher suddenly understood that what was needed was not just the ability to see beauty, but the courage to see its opposite.

  Suddenly, it sensed that the danger which, here, had been miraculously nullified, had produced an echo on Keltor, a disaster that loomed like a black tidal wave. The watcher sped to the other world, skating across the Void on a segueing strand from one world to the other with a terrible sense of impending doom …

  16

  My brother believed the ability to segue in the Void is unique to

  humankind precisely because the Song of Making did not complete us, and

  therefore do we contain within ourselves an echo of the Void. In this

  minuscule emptiness abides all that the Void held before the Song rose

  from it; all the potential for harmony and for chaos. Indeed, he believed

  madness is not woven in us by the Song, but is risen from the void within.

  Thus a passage to each heart is open to the Void spirit through no evil

  doing on the part of an individual. Nor may that passage be blocked by

  fear or anger, for these emotions are generated within this void, but only

  by constant awareness, constant moral vigilance, and by a striving for

  completeness that will extinguish the emptiness. This inner void

  corresponds exactly to the Void, and my brother thought of segueing not

  as an outward journey, but as an inward one; if one would defeat the

  Chaos spirit and thwart the binding of the Firstmade, the battle must be

  fought within the inner void. Thus did he train me in his final days to

  know camla, the inner emptiness …

  THE ALYDA SCROLLS

  Glynn was dreaming of the jogger who had found Wind’s suicide note, if that was what it could be called. She had not recognised the woman initially because the shiny bob of walnut hair had grown long and wavy, drawn now into an untidy plait, and there were a few lines around her eyes and mouth. Perversely, she looked beautiful rather than pretty now, even slumped at a table in a small untidy-looking kitchen, wearing a loose-fitting tracksuit.

  ‘I have to decide before it’s too late,’ she addressed the chair opposite with a dead kind of weariness. She rubbed her stomach and went to the window. Beyond her, Glynn was startled to see the town was the one she had grown up in, Quarry, but seen from an unfamiliar angle. It took her a few minutes to work out that the woman must be sitting in the new apartments that had been built on the other side of the river. West Bank Apartments.

  There was the sound of a key in the door and an older man in a dark suit entered. He stopped when he saw her.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d be here,’ he said defensively.

  The woman shrugged. ‘I’m not here, for you.’

  The man frowned. ‘Why do you have to be so melodramatic about everything. You can’t just be normal, can you? You can’t bear to think you might be like other people.’

  ‘I thought you loved me because I wasn’t like other people,’ she said, but dully.

  The man said stiffly, ‘Can we just talk? Things have to be decided. You should try to be sensible.’

  ‘It’s strange how you didn’t urge yourself or me to be sensible when you were falling in love with me and leaving your wife. I wonder that she can stomach taking you back. I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said coldly, but her words had brought a faint flush to his cheeks and an edge to his voice.

  ‘I am absurd in your world,’ she said with a flash of weary aggression. ‘But absurd or not, I will decide what I will decide. It’s nothing to do with you. You made that clear.’

  ‘You weren’t even g
oing to tell me you were pregnant,’ he accused, but mildly as if his indignation was a performance in which he had no faith.

  ‘No. And I needn’t have bothered. But I thought it might save us.’

  ‘I’ve told you I’ll pay for an abortion.’ Businesslike. ‘If you were not such a dreamer you would appreciate the magnitude of what I …’

  ‘What if I want to keep it?’ the woman asked, standing suddenly, and for a moment that rounded mature beauty blazed out at the man so that both she and Glynn had the fleeting notion of a gleaming sword flying up between them.

  He lifted a hand in unconscious defence. ‘I don’t think you have the right to bring a child into the world if you can’t offer it a stable, mature set of parents,’ he said heavily, and his voice pressed her back and down.

  ‘I wish you’d go,’ the woman said, sinking back into her seat. ‘What did you come for anyway?’

  ‘I told you, things have to be decided.’

  ‘Oh don’t play games. You didn’t even think I’d be here!’ Impatience.

  A silence. ‘I would have left a note.’ Now he sounded sulky. ‘I came for some papers I forgot about.’

  ‘So get them and go, please, and this time, leave the key.’ She turned to look out the window again. There was another silence and then the man began to open and close cupboards. Papers spoke in furtive little whispers as he put them into the case he carried. When he had finished, he went to the door and opened it.

  ‘If you would be sensible …’ he said.

  She answered him without turning. ‘You are a coward and a liar no matter what you pretend to yourself.’

  The door slammed shut and, after a beat or two, the woman’s rigidity dissolved and she laid her head on the table and wept.

  Glynn tossed and turned, first drawing nearer to consciousness, then falling away from it into another dream that was a memory of the one occasion she had accepted an offer from Ember’s musical agent, Harrison Bonn, to see Hard Goth in a recording session. Curiosity had made Glynn bite back her initial impulse to refuse. She always felt vaguely grubby after time spent with Harrison, but she did not dislike him – one could as easily dislike a street sign. He had picked her up in his silver BMW and had driven her to Caliban Studios, filling the drive with a stream of figures and awards and industry accolades amassed by Hard Goth, stopping now and then to offer an aside about whatever artist was performing on the radio programme he was tuned to. Specifically about their marketability. Or not. Glynn only half listened. She got this once a month when she met with Harrison to hand over Ember’s work and receive their advance cheque for the last batch. Royalties went straight into an account but the cheques came from Harrison, who had negotiated the advance and took his cut before sending the balance along to them.

  Glynn was already regretting the waste of time on this trip. She needed to go to the library, and there were a pair of Ember’s shoes to be picked up from the repairers, and she wanted to go to the supermarket and also to their travel agent.

  ‘Here we are,’ Harrison said and the car purred into a park in what seemed to be a huge empty car lot. It was a Sunday and most of the workers – the ants, Harrison called them – were at home with their families. He clearly thought families a waste of time, except of course as customers and future customers; the people who listened to the songs and bought the disks.

  The recording studio was not glamorous, being no more than a cluster of grey cement blocks with tinted windows surrounded by car parks and severely manicured shrubs, and ringed by a high wire fence with security guards on the gate. Inside the building they entered, Block G, were dozens of rooms, all identical – offices, and then a series of different sized studios – all empty, except for the studio where Hard Goth were setting down tracks for their next album, which was larger than their others and alive with activity. There were assistants and catering people and photographers and press journalists and girlfriends spilling from a green room into a hallway that led to the studio, either talking to one another or glued to mobiles or headphones. No one was quiet. A couple of muscular types that looked like body guards were examining the centrefold of a magazine on fitness. Hard Goth was inside the bare recording room with its matt black floor, dove-grey dimpled walls, and metres of wire writhing from microphones, instruments, wall sockets and amplifiers. The room was dotted with styrofoam coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays. Everyone in Hard Goth smoked – part of their anarchic image. Who cares if I die young? Ironic given the fate of their songwriter. Not that they knew. Or anyone else other than the doctors, who knew nothing of Ember’s musical career. Harrison Bonn could not have resisted making Ember a copy line.

  Glynn watched from behind a thick wall of glass as technicians pushed buttons and watched meters, consulting notes and murmuring to one another in technese. The band was coming to the end of a song that sounded to Glynn as cacophonous as all other music. She kept her face politely interested and was glad when it ended. Everyone else applauded, but Glynn had the feeling a lot of it was hype. Sometimes she wondered if she was not like the child watching the emperor with his new clothes – the only one honest and naive enough to name his nakedness. Maybe everyone heard the awful racket she heard and convinced themselves it was fine and wondrous … except Ember had tried to kill music in herself and it would not let her go; there had to be something if it could do that.

  The moment the red light in the studio blinked off, the lead singer, Gabriel, slung his guitar to the ground and unleashed a flow of invective on a hapless sessional musician seated to one side. Harrison had already told her that the man, and several other musicians who did not feature on the covers, had been brought in to provide additional musical texture. Glynn didn’t understand the problem, of course. Something to do with levels and misreading a cue. But the older musician’s answer was as quiet and non-aggressive as his appearance, and oddly noncommittal. He neither defended himself nor admitted to a mistake. Nor did he look browbeaten. He looked, with his receding hair and neat brown pullover and corduroys, like a high-school teacher listening to the tantrum of an hysterical schoolboy.

  A sotto voce comment by one of the technicians suggested the lead singer was angry because the musician was too good.

  ‘Is that true?’ Glynn asked Harrison when they were leaving.

  ‘Course it’s true.’ He flashed Glynn a wink. ‘Gabe screwed up. That little performance was his way of saying they’ll have to do it again. Fourth time, and time is money. Gabe doesn’t like Peter Cade – he’s the clarinet player – so he makes the perfect scapegoat. But he’s a regular these days because he’s good and the bottom line is that the disk has to be good or Hard Goth is history.’

  ‘Why don’t you make that clarinet player famous, if he’s so good?’ Glynn asked, puzzled by the admiration in the agent’s voice. Did he admire Gabriel Vesey for pushing the blame for his mistake onto someone else?

  ‘You must be kidding. Did you take a good look at him? Dull doesn’t do it!’

  Glynn said nothing. She had looked at the sessional musician because he had seemed to her the only real person in the room. He was older than the others and his eyes had been both gentle and sad, even when Gabriel had abused him. He had looked deeply tired, too, but not in the over-emphasised way that the Hard Goth band members did, with impossible black shadows painted onto chalk-pale skin. Heroin chic, it had been called back when models affected that look briefly in fashion magazines. Under Harrison’s tutelage they had switched from pink to all black clothing and pallid skin.

  ‘He looked nice to me,’ Glynn said. ‘Besides, what does it matter if he looks dull, if he’s so good musically?’

  ‘Glynn baby, music is not what this game is about,’ Harrison said. ‘Haven’t you figured that out yet? This industry is about style and economics and fashion. Image is all! It’s about what people want and what they think they want.’

  ‘Don’t they want good music?’ She asked this with a throb of inner irony.

  Har
rison gave her a little lecture. ‘I’m talking about life. See, people live with this central perception of themselves which is mostly false. They see themselves as bright or beautiful, courageous or wise, deep or charismatic. Whatever. Their aims stem from that image. And they don’t want anyone telling them those illusions are not true or the whole shebang falls down. Music has to reflect what people want to see. Support it. You ever heard the expression music to soothe the savage beast? They want to be soothed. They want their illusions reflected back at them.’

  Glynn reminded herself yet again that Harrison was no fool, and wondered why his words made her feel vaguely sick. ‘I thought art was about disturbing people and making them think.’ Oddly, it occurred to her that while music did not give her pleasure, it did disturb and unsettle her. Maybe she was not so much deaf to music as impossibly, unbearably sensitive to it, she thought ironically.

  ‘Music is not about art,’ Harrison was continuing their conversation. ‘It’s about economics.’

  Glynn began to feel tired and she remembered this always happened when she was with the agent; this profound drain on her energy. She should shut up but she asked, ‘What illusions do Hard Goth project then? Rage?’

  ‘More like laughter. It’s the sneer end of hate rock. Rage as the boredom of despair. You know, that music of your sister’s would have gone down like a lead balloon a decade back. With wars over and walls down and countries reunited and peace accords signed and sealed after years of negotiation, there was a liberal era in which people felt like maybe the world just might survive; maybe no one would drop the bomb or start another war to end all wars. There was hope and optimism, and you know what kind of music worked then? Defiant music. Because people were not afraid, they felt safe to be defiant. Like kids poking out their tongues at strangers from the back window of the school bus.

  ‘But then there were the terrorist attacks on America and bombs falling on Afghanistan and trouble in the Middle East and in Indonesia – nothing new for the world – but what was new was that television could project scenes of all that stuff into your living room while they were happening, so you could watch a baby starve a little while you slurped down your TV dinner, or see a man shot in the head by police for being in a protest march while you thought about having the lounge repainted. People had despair and sorrow and violence rubbed in their faces until they were bored with it, but it was so compelling as theatre, they had to keep on looking. So – boredom and rage, and Hard Goth get rich reflecting it.’