The three members of the band had been friendly when they’d turned up at Tom’s doorstep, but they’d refused to be drawn on any specifics regarding the type of music they played, nor why they did it, nor why they felt the need to play for free in a town dominated by the already-known rock and country cover bands. Tom had offered each of them a beer when they arrived, but all had declined, and while they had been friendly and smiled often, none had been interested in entering a conversation. It had quickly become a little awkward.
The three members of the band were Greg, Richard, and Ebony. Their instruments were a nylon acoustic guitar, a recorder, and an electric guitar, respectively. The ensemble didn’t put Tom’s mind at ease, because tastes in the town were conservative. When he’d asked Greg what kind of venues the band usually played, Greg had replied that they’d usually played in their house. When Tom had asked where the band was from, Greg’s answer was even stranger: he’d said he didn’t know where the band was from. Tom had laughed, because he thought it was typically ostentatious rock-star talk, but Greg hadn’t smiled, and his face had even seemed a little offended at the laughter. When Tom had then asked where each of the three band members lived, neither Greg nor Richard nor Ebony could name where they lived, which Tom had taken to mean that they were country people. But he hadn’t cared to confirm it, because at that point he’d sensed that Greg, Richard and Ebony were delicately sincere, and that his attempts to banter with them or to initiate conversations were making them uncomfortable. Tom had wanted very badly to clarify that they all lived on a farm together in the country, outside of any town or place with any name, but to enquire any more seemed inappropriate and rude.
The band members hadn’t had the innocent air one might expect from country people who’d had little exposure to outside life. Nor had they been arrogant in the way some country people are. Nor had they been scornful of Tom’s manner of speaking and dressing. When Tom remembered Greg, Richard and Ebony, he did not imagine childlike adults, but nor did he imagine them being conscious of their detachment: they hadn’t seemed to be making any calculated effort to appear any certain way. When Tom’s attempts to engage them socially had proved a failure, the band had sat in his lounge room studying the integrity of their instruments. Greg had run his fingers up and down his fretboard, stretching the strings in order to ensure that they were stable. Richard had dismantled his recorder to occasionally peer through the hollow cylinder, and Ebony had occupied herself by adjusting the knobs on her small practice amp. She’d left the reverb and echo knobs at their highest settings. Eventually Tom had gotten fed up sitting there watching them do this, so he’d gone to his room, leaving them alone until it was time to drive to the show. The situation had been especially awkward, because at that time Tom had been always smoking bongs and doing so made him sensitive.
Tom had helped them load their instruments into his van and they’d driven the three blocks to the venue. The Out of Towners had refused to do a soundcheck. They’d said it wasn’t necessary, because they had, in Greg’s own words, “already checked their sound”. Tom hadn’t pressed them on this because the simplicity of their instrumentation would be easy enough to mix within a minute of them commencing their performance.
Tom had told everyone ahead of time that The Out of Towners were a little bit odd. And yet, once he had been safely surrounded by familiar people at the venue, he’d become excited by how strange they’d seemed. He’d been able to see them as the novelty they were, and had looked forward to hearing what they did with their unusual combination of instruments.
The Out of Towners were given the headline slot because they were from out of town. As the first three bands had played — two of which Tom played guitar in — Greg, Richard and Ebony had sat at a table in front of the stage, nursing their instruments. They’d not wanted to store their instruments in the small designated room behind the stage. When local drunks had tried to initiate conversation with them, most often specifically with Ebony, the band’s reluctance to enter into any meaningful conversation had been interpreted as sinister. Ill will grew among the patrons of The Vic throughout the support acts. By the time The Out of Towners had started setting up on stage, many in the pub had already made their mind up about them.
When the band had finished setting up, ready to perform, they’d stood very closely together but did not perform for several minutes. They did not fidget, had not been busy preparing their instruments or checking sound levels: they had just stood there looking at the carpet beneath them. This had given the audience an opportunity to express how they’d been feeling about The Out of Towners, based on the attempts to make small talk throughout the night. There had been a lot of scattered heckling and laughter during this long moment, but Greg, Richard and Ebony had not flinched. They’d just smiled – not nervous smiles, nor confident smiles. Uncomplicated smiles.
Tom scrunched his Quarter Pounder wrapper and tossed it between his legs. He didn’t know how to describe The Out of Towners’ music. Many would say that it hadn’t been music at all. It had certainly been a very experimental type of music, but that description did it an injustice, because there had been nothing cerebral about it. When the band had finally started, for several minutes Richard had just played two notes on his recorder, over and over again. It had been an awkward several minutes because many at the venue had started to suspect that this was all The Out of Towners’ performance would amount to. The two notes played together had been unusually sad, Tom said, but they’d only started to become sad after the prolonged period of repetition. After Richard had played those notes for several minutes the room had been in an austere mood indeed.
Eventually Ebony had kneeled in front of her practice amp with her electric guitar, generating calm drones of feedback. These drone waves had seemed to stand at odds with Richard’s recorder playing, but after many minutes it had become clear that she was harmonising with Richard, in a tangential way. Their two sounds had seemed to evade each other, but within every circulation of Richard’s two notes the two instruments met perfectly, for only a split second. Richard and Ebony had performed like this for another ten minutes, and it had seemed a miracle that no one in the audience had become restless. Everyone had seemed reverent and focused.
The music had sounded alien, remote, like nothing else the audience had ever heard. More than a mere sound, it had come to resemble a portal, an access point to a foreign region. Ebony and Richard had no longer seemed responsible for the sound; the sound had come untethered from the ensemble, had become its own sad and ghostly phenomenon.
Both musicians had performed their parts without any visible strain. No one in the audience had even thought to sip their drinks during this long, half-hour repetition of sound. Tom certainly hadn’t. He’d forgotten that he was even holding a beer, and he’d forgotten that he was watching The Out of Towners, whoever they were. The mystery had become unimportant, and their music had ceased to be a simple mix of sounds – it had inherited an illusory complexity. Sometimes faint melodies had emitted from this repetition, faint phantom melodies that were perhaps not really there.
Greg had eventually intervened into the sound with a simple guitar chord, played over and over. He’d strummed freely, hitting gently on each string, and that’s when things had taken a peculiar turn. Tom had felt himself begin to cry, and he’d seen John at the sound desk begin crying too. Old Warren behind the bar had sniffed and turned his back, and all the people standing against the walls on both sides of the band room suddenly had small specks on their cheeks, each tear reflecting the orange lights of the stage.
And then Tom had realised that he was shaking, and that he could not stop himself from shaking. The sound in the room had been the most unutterably sad sound he had ever heard in his life. It was the sound of everything that he had never been able to gain control of. It was the sound of his complete lack of dominion, and in this way the sound had seemed to travel directly backwards in time, briefly capsizing during its passage on ea
ch spectral memory. It had brought to life sensations which had been forgotten. Each and every time Greg had played his simple guitar chord in conjunction with the strange drone Ebony and Richard had gradually shaped, Tom’s body had been less in his control.
The Out of Towners had played for several nights and days without pause. Everyone in the audience had cried for several nights and days while The Out of Towners had performed their very simple and very beautiful music. Nobody had exited, and The Out of Towners had never seemed to tire. The sadness had not been a phenomenon that could tire anybody. That sadness, and its manner of revealing the limits of their control over the passage of time, had not been a sensation of which anyone in the room had been prepared to let go. The sadness had liberated them, rendering them innocent. There had been nothing they could do, and in some vague way they’d all been victims of something far beyond their ability to fight. It had made them want to live more, and that seemed so naïve, now, to Tom.
Passersby had peered inside The Vic and had wondered what was happening inside, though no one ever tried to enter for fear of the unknown. Eventually the media had turned up, but could not find a way inside. It had only been when the police forced themselves in and switched the mains off that The Out of Towners had finished their set.
Tom didn’t know where the three band members went. Amid the confusion of the police’s entry they had disappeared, and no one ever saw them again. And no one had wanted to, Tom added, turning the bus back towards the town proper. Once they’d all shaken off the stupor of those days and nights in the pub, everyone had felt deeply ashamed.
I disembarked the bus at the terminal and wandered the short distance to Ciara’s flat. She still wasn’t home, but I found a cassette tape in the stairwell outside. I had no way to play it, so I left it there, and bought two longnecks of stout on the way home.
*
Weeks later I found Ciara in an undercover car park. She was trapping cassette tapes under windscreen wipers, tossing them into ute trays, and wedging them under front tyres. It was a late Sunday afternoon, and fewer than half-a-dozen vehicles were parked in the underground complex.
Ciara flinched when I approached, and then we exchanged hellos. She asked how Rob was going. I told her he wanted to become a drug addict. He might as well, she said.
For the first time I noticed lines beneath her eyes. She had not bothered to brush her hair or do up her shoe laces, and she moved dispassionately, hunched from one chore to the next. She sat on the bonnet of a Holden station wagon and lit a cigarette.
She told me she didn’t know why she bothered with the tapes anymore. No one wrote to her. No one ever called the station. There was no one in the town except her.
I told her that wasn’t true. I was there. Her breaking up with Rob was no reason for us to stop being friends, because Rob was an idiot anyway. It was a surprise to me that she had bothered with him at all, I said, but it would have been inappropriate for me to say so before. Now you’re free to find someone better, or to find no one at all, and in the meantime I could be someone to spend time with. I could even help you make contact with the mysterious keyboard musicians, and with our efforts combined we would surely find them. There are mysterious people everywhere, I said, making strange keyboard music in their homes, probably right at that moment. I didn’t believe it, but it must have been true. Ciara’s chaotic flat had confirmed it.
Ciara said it was impossible for the tapes to have come from the town. After all, she knew everything about the town. She even knew who owned all the vehicles in the car park we were right then sitting in. This one belongs to Denise, she said, tapping on the Holden’s bonnet. Denise who works at the Subway.
She placed a neat tower of three cassette tapes on Denise’s roof and lumbered on.
She might as well stop doing the tapes and her radio show, she said. It would be much more sensible to get married to Rob and have some babies. If she did that she would be so busy that she’d stop hoping to find secrets in the town. Maybe then its familiarity would be a comfort instead of maddening. The town was just there and that was that. It was a bunch of people living in houses who all just get by. I should just get by, she said.
Ciara was only repeating what I had been led to believe many months previous: that there was nothing special in the town. Nothing ever happened in it to warrant the attention of anyone else. Assess the matter closely, and it wasn’t logically possible to be proud of the town, nor upset about it.
But even if some cruel underground syndicate was responsible for sending Ciara strange keyboard music — possibly composed en masse in a shady warehouse on the outskirts of a distant city — then surely she herself was the start of something interesting about the town. She believed that she could only create illusions of mystery, though. No one would wake one day and believe the town was interesting because she had made stuff up. If they did then they would be kidding themselves, she said, sliding off from the bonnet. Or she would be kidding them.
She started walking away in a manner which suggested she didn’t mind if I followed.
She said she had tried to be satisfied with the fictions she’d created. Maybe it was possible for some people to enjoy their own fantasies unreservedly and forever, but not her. Even when her fantasies breached the threshold of her mind and seemed to become real — she shook her plastic bag of cassette tapes — they were still impossibly elusive. Someone was playing a trick on her.
The town was deserted. When we emerged from the car park into the orange afternoon no cars were parked along the street. The Mitre 10 and Pizza Hut were shut, and all was silent except for the cicadas. We kept our eyes to the ground, on the alert for any new holes that might have emerged. Some old ones were still draped lazily with yellow tape. They were all small holes, barely the width of a small child’s waist. The town had ceased to be outraged by them.
The year before, Ciara had tried to make contact with a man who wrote the music column in Australia’s major national newspaper. She had sent him five cassette tapes, with a note asking whether he had heard anything like it before, and if he hadn’t, whether he could identify the specific keyboard model that might have created it. She had written five pages explaining her predicament. She’d told him she considered herself the pioneer of the strange keyboard music, and that her initial broadcasts had prompted many others — many hundreds, perhaps thousands — to follow suit. She’d told him the cassettes had piled up in her pigeonhole at speed, but that none could be traced to a source. If he couldn’t help her, then he might at least be intrigued enough to write a story about it for the newspaper.
He’d not replied to her first letter, so she had sent a briefer, more urgent letter with even more cassette tapes. Then she’d sent a third letter, and then a fourth, and then she’d finally stopped sending letters. She had still sent him cassettes, though, on a daily basis, partially out of spite, but also because she’d needed to get rid of some cassette tapes.
Finally she’d received a reply – not from the music columnist, but from another person at the paper. They’d urged her to stop sending tapes because the paper only reviewed professionally recorded and distributed music. Ciara had been happy because she’d gotten someone’s attention, so she had written back explaining that she was seeking information, not publicity.
She’d not heard back. Instead she’d received a giant box returning all of the cassette tapes sent over the course of several months. Deflated and angry, she’d spent nearly fifty dollars sending an even larger box of strange keyboard music to the newspaper. In fact she’d sent two.
The music columnist was someone who would sometimes write very negative things about music, Ciara said. Sometimes he would blame music for all the bad things in the world. He was a writer able to make readers feel frightened on behalf of the artists he demolished. She used to read him for that reason, really: to see what music he thought was ruining the world. When he’d never responded, she’d wanted to make him so angry that he would demolish all o
f the strange keyboard music. Maybe if she flooded him with hundreds of kilos worth of cassettes he would become so angry he’d feel compelled to write something about it.
She’d finally received a terse letter written by the music columnist himself. He’d written that if she didn’t stop sending the cassettes he would call the police. What she was doing could be classed as harassment, the music columnist had claimed.
We turned onto the highway and walked towards the McDonald’s. Naturally Ciara had written him back. She’d repeated everything in her response that she had written in her first letter. She’d also added that no one ever went to gaol for sending cassette tapes to a newspaper. His articles were trash anyway, she’d said in her response – he should try creating something of his own that he wanted to exist, rather than just destroy others’ efforts. Along with her response letter she’d also sent him several editions of her handmade magazine about the strange keyboard music, hoping this would enlighten him to the urgency of her queries.
She’d never heard from him again. It made her think cities weren’t so special after all. But how would she know, she added, having never been to a city.
There was a crowd of teenagers in the McDonald’s car park. They smoked their cigarettes and stared out at the highway, waiting for something to happen. I told Ciara about Tom the bus driver, how he had once seen a performance by some out-of-towners that had caused him to immediately stop pursuing a career as a musician. Ciara was not surprised at all. Old people always blow things out of proportion, she said. They always make it seem like very important things happened in the past.
We went inside the McDonald’s and each ordered a McValue meal. We ate in an important silence – I did not want to trivialise Ciara’s frustration. Then, after binning our wrappers and skolling the rest of our Cokes, Ciara led me to a back street on the outskirts of the town. As afternoon faded, the houses in those distant streets seemed older than they were. Each home emanated the indeterminate colour lights of shifting television screens, and the smell of meats and boiled vegetables drifted towards us. After a few blocks walking along this back street we reached a clearing with lush overgrown grass and an electrical tower standing in the evening light. A deep gully ran through the centre of the clearing, and in the direction of the town it ran beneath a rickety bridge, towards which Ciara wandered.
The Town Page 12
