Alyzon Whitestarr

by Isobelle Carmody

  I caught the bus after school on Friday, because I wanted to get home in time to wish Da luck before he left. The show wasn’t due to start till late, but bands always had to set up and do sound checks for about ten hours before they went onstage.

  Da was in the kitchen when I got in, having tea and buttered bread—his standard pre-gig fare. “How do you feel?” he asked when he saw me come in with Mirandah.

  “I caught the bus to save energy for tonight,” I told him. I could meet his gaze now, because of my number screen, but I was using a thinner bit of it because there was no point in having extended senses if I dared not make use of them.

  Da finished his food, drained his teacup, and said, “Take it easy.”

  “You take it easy,” I quipped, and he laughed, giving off coffee grounds and caramelized sugar and the new-rope smell that always seemed to come up whenever the band was on Da’s mind. I was close enough to notice the air distorting intensely around him, as it often did. But tonight the effect seemed much stronger. The air bulged and billowed around him, as if he were sending out invisible rays.

  Mum came in wearing a green silk wrap, her hair piled in this loose, casually perfect tumble secured by a giant red plastic chopstick. She was yawning, because she had got up after only a few hours’ sleep to say goodbye to Da. But her eyes sparkled with pride as she hugged him, and the drifting clouds that floated and hazed the air about her cleared for a moment when she put her arms around him.

  I turned away from them because they were now staring into each other’s eyes in this romantic but terribly embarrassing way. I looked at Jesse, who was totally oblivious to Da and Mum. He was shredding lettuce, his concentration so deep that he might have been cutting the facets of a diamond. Da had to wave a hand in front of his face to get his attention a minute later. Jesse looked at him blankly for a second, as if he wondered who Da was, then he laughed and hugged him, wishing him luck.

  That was when it hit me that I had been a fool to imagine Jesse was lazy. He looked lazy, because he did things slowly and seemed so absentminded. But there was something going on inside him, inside his mind. That was what I had felt when I brushed against him that first night home from the hospital. And whatever was going on with him had reached the point where it needed to come out, but Jesse wasn’t letting it. I focused all of my senses on him and let myself really take in the green, wild smell of his essential self. I could feel how poetic and intricate the shapes of his thoughts were, as well as how urgent they had become.

  “You should write them down,” I said, without thinking.

  My words fell into silence, and they all turned to look at me.

  “Huh?” Jesse said.

  “I … I said you ought to write down some of the things you think about.”

  “Jesse? Think?” cried Mirandah, who had just walked in the door. Everyone laughed.

  Not Jesse. He just went back to shredding lettuce. But I had the feeling he was mulling over what I had said, because the green-grass smell got stronger, like a freshly mown lawn.

  Mirandah frowned at me. “You know something? I am beginning to understand why you’re getting a reputation as a weirdo.” She was painting her nails gold to match her toenails and her dress and the current color of her hair. Gold, she said, was an evolved form of yellow.

  “Seriously,” she went on. “Sylvia Yarrow told everyone at the pool that Alyzon has been taken over by an alien.”

  “There’s a deeply intelligent theory,” Da said, getting a bottle of water out of the fridge.

  “Well, you must admit she’s been different since she came back from the hospital,” Mirandah said.

  I had always thought Mirandah bossy and abrasive, but these days I realized she was kind of blind about how people reacted to the things she said. And that made me pity her, like some sort of lame puppy you suspect is never going to be able to walk properly.

  “Mirandah—” Da began.

  I cut in. “It’s OK. She’s right about me being different. Knowing I was asleep for a whole month makes me feel like I’m seeing things properly for the first time, and maybe that makes me act differently.”

  “How do you mean, you’re seeing things differently?” Da asked, but the phone rang. It was Serenity saying she’d missed the bus and asking for a ride from the public library. Da looked at his watch and said he had just enough time to get her and bring her back. He pulled on his coat, kissed Mum, and hurried out.

  “How come Serenity went to the library tonight of all nights?” Mirandah complained to Mum.

  But Mum was gone, back into the vivid clouds of her imagination.

  It was nine when Jesse drove Mirandah and me to the venue. Serenity had announced that she was not going when Da dropped her home from the library. Da told her it was up to her, but I smelled a seashell sort of odor from him that I felt certain was hurt.

  I could have strangled Serenity whose only reason had been that it would be too loud. The old Serenity wouldn’t have let that stop her from seeing Da. That was one of the things I disliked most about how she had changed. It was as if we didn’t matter to her at all anymore. Not even Da, whom she had once adored as I did.

  Fortunately, the night was too full of promise for me to brood for long. And Mirandah was talking nonstop about some argument she was having with the long-suffering Ricki, which had resulted in him deciding not to meet us at the gig.

  The Dome was a huge concert hall made of steel and plastic. Its front was plastered with posters for Urban Dingo. Millions of neon lights were strategically positioned to cast a ghastly orange and purple glow over the throng of people lined up at the gate, making it look like a sort of end-of-the-world scenario. If anyone had doubted it, the crowd was proof that Urban Dingo had made it. The thought of all of these people seeing Losing the Rope made me feel breathless with excitement and nerves.

  Da’s band had come up with their name soon after they started jamming. There was this Swiss guy, who had looked like a ski instructor, staying with Mel. Whenever he became confused listening to people, which was pretty much all the time since he knew about ten words of English, he would shout: “Stop! I am losing the rope!” It was so funny that Da and the others started saying it whenever things got muddled. Then one day the drummer, Neil Stone, said it would make a good name for their band.

  Neil is this really huge guy like Meatloaf, only he dresses a lot better. He says he has to be big, because Stone is a heavy name to carry. People always say drummers are dumb, but he’s really smart and nice, and I love him, although sometimes I worry he might have a heart attack carrying all that extra weight around.

  It was Neil who had told me that while I was still unconscious, Urban Dingo’s manager wanted to break the contract with Losing the Rope because his band was suddenly getting so much attention that they could probably have asked a bigger name to open for them. But Urban Dingo had refused.

  I had never been inside the Dome before, but I knew it hosted everything from old-time dance marathons to Jell-O wrestling. Having Urban Dingo play there was a definite coup for the venue. Outside, it looked like a smooth silver dome, but inside, it was a great circular cave of a place, with tiered seating around the edges and a vast central floor. The stage was set up at one end where seats had been removed, and it was swarming with roadies. Quite a few people were down on the floor dancing in demented clots to the house music coming over the PA system, while others were talking and drinking and smoking near the bar.

  The music from the PA sounded to me like something alive that had gone crazy from being trapped in a box and was now trying to eat its way out. I recognized the band: the Rak, with its awful earwig music. I put my hands in my pockets to stop myself from putting them over my ears, and intensified my number screen.

  Then someone took out a cigarette and lit up. I wrinkled my nose, because using the screen only dulled the extended part of my senses, not the normal bit. I wished there could be a music scene without cigarette smoke. If you wanted to hea
r a band live, you had to put up with it; and I don’t mean the odd whiff, I mean a regular fog of smoke in Cancer City. Of course, it looked great because of the orange and purple laser lights playing over everything and the flashes of light being thrown from huge suspended pieces of smashed mirror on the stage. I tried not to think about what was happening to my lungs.

  Before long the place was bursting at the seams with crazed Urban Dingo fans, who showed their solidarity by howling like dingoes every other minute. I was OK because we had wedged ourselves into a corner formed by the side of a booth and the back of some toilets. It offered a good view of the stage, and I didn’t plan on venturing out.

  “This is so great,” Mirandah screamed in my ear. The hot strawberry of her essence was spiced up with cinnamon and coconut oil, and I held myself rigid, afraid she would suddenly grab me or even hug me. But she just hugged herself instead. Which made me wonder whether I was sending out touch-me-not vibes, because I couldn’t remember the last time any one of my usually very tactile family had deliberately touched me.

  Mirandah grinned at me. “I guess I was wrong,” she said. “It really looks like Da’s going to rock the world after all.” I smiled back at her, because she was as bluntly sincere with her apologies as with her unfavorable opinions.

  Jesse went off to get drinks and came back with a sheepish-looking Ricki just as an announcer stepped onstage. I didn’t hear the first bit of what he said due to a shouted postmortem of Mirandah and Ricki’s earlier argument. Then it occurred to me to see if I could use my abilities to tune in on a particular sound. I concentrated on hearing the announcer and suddenly I could hear his words perfectly. My delight lasted for about three seconds, because I realized that he was practically apologizing for the fact that Losing the Rope would be opening. The disgruntled manager must have got to him.

  “After tonight you’ll be able to say you were one of the lucky few who saw the Dingoes before they went nova,” he screamed. “But first, our little local band who lucked out tonight. Here they are. Losing the Rope! Weird name for a way-out band!” He backed off, making conjuring gestures at the empty stage.

  “Jerk,” Jesse muttered.

  Mirandah said nothing, because her lips were now glued to Ricki’s. I wished they would go somewhere else and do that, but the one time I had suggested it, Mirandah said haughtily that I was a prude. She didn’t see anything wrong with putting your tongue in someone else’s mouth right next to your little sister. I hadn’t actually kissed anyone except Peter Cos next door, and that hardly counted since we were both five and I had been pretending he was a frog. But in the unlikely event a guy ever kissed me again, I would rather it be in private. Then it occurred to me that with my extended senses I might never be able to kiss anyone, and that depressed me.

  The piped-in music stopped suddenly, and my heart sped up as Losing the Rope came onstage. Da and the others didn’t put on a dopey production like a lot of bands do. They just walked on in ordinary jeans and shirts. They took up their instruments with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of dignity, and, as Da slid the strap of his guitar over his head, a few people actually booed.

  “Idiots,” Jesse muttered, but he was grinning with excitement.

  Da started to play then.

  It’s funny, I’d heard him practice a hundred times and I’d heard him in gigs before, but he had never sounded better than on that night. It wasn’t just my new senses. I mean, they made a difference, but mostly it was like Da’d come to some sort of peak in himself. At home I had seen the air shimmer and bulge around him, but now, to my amazement, I could see sparks coming off him, tiny beads of light that flew out and into the audience.

  “Who is that guy?” I heard someone yell after about five minutes.

  Mirandah and I exchanged a look of perfect glee, and even Jesse pinched my arm with the thrill of it. I jumped at the sudden jolt of his excitement and pride in Da, but since it aligned with my own reactions, it only boosted what I was already feeling.

  It wasn’t just Da, of course. There were Mel and Tich and Neil. But even though it wasn’t the sort of band where everything revolves around this charismatic and egomaniacal lead, Da was the pulsing red center of the stage that night. All of the energy, all of the music’s glamour came from him. I don’t mean glamour in the dull, small sense in which it’s mostly used. I mean glamour in the sense of being some sort of ensorcellment.

  After one song the audience was hooked. From then on, they were almost too quiet while the songs played, then at the end of each one they went mad. That announcer had said the audience was lucky to be seeing Urban Dingo, but if Urban Dingo was a nova, that night Da was a supernova.

  Listening to that strange, beautiful, difficult music he played, I realized, maybe for the first time, what Da had been trying to do with it. He was trying to make people see the world differently, just like the people who made those art-house movies did. And that bending of the air I had noticed at home grew and grew until everyone in the audience must have felt it. It was like, for that bit of time, everything was altered slightly. Anything you felt bad or unhappy about was measured against this blissful sense of space and timelessness Da and the band were projecting, and you could see your troubles from this high lovely vantage point.

  Mirandah and Ricki dived in and started dancing, flinging their arms around and swaying and leaping in a way that would usually have mortified me, except that half the audience was dancing wildly by now, as if they just wanted to be part of the music.

  “You want to do that?” Jesse asked me, obviously reluctant but willing enough.

  I shook my head, yelling into his ear that I’d rather listen and watch. He nodded and turned back to watch the band.

  When Losing the Rope finished its set and went offstage, the audience screamed and thumped and thundered for more, until the organizers came out and announced Urban Dingo. A lot of the yelling died away then, but even when Urban Dingo was coming onstage, some people still called out for Losing the Rope. We stayed for the start of Urban Dingo’s set, but I was glad when Jesse shouted that we ought to leave. The music seemed gloomy and pompous to me, although at least it wasn’t earwig music or dopey pop. Jesse and I left Mirandah and Ricki, who wanted to say goodbye to friends and said they would meet up with us for hot chocolate at a nearby cafe.

  * * *

  As we were making our way toward the exit, I saw the announcer who had put down Da’s band talking to a tall man in a designer tracksuit and green sneakers and a big white-haired guy in a sleek suit. They looked like they were arguing; at least, the announcer and the guy in the green shoes did. The big guy in the suit was just listening. Then I saw a movement beyond them and recognized the journalist who had spoken to my English class before my accident: Gary Soloman. He was at the bar, but instead of watching Urban Dingo on the screens set up, like others waiting for drinks or food, his attention was riveted on the big white-haired man, Mr. Track-suit, and the announcer.

  The journalist turned his head and looked right at me. He was too far away for me to get a hint of his scents, but I saw puzzlement flicker across his face and guessed he was trying to remember where he had seen me. Before he could figure it out, a little crowd of people came, yelling and shouting and waving their tickets, and he and the others were all lost to view.

  * * *

  Sitting in the cafe an hour later, we were all so excited we could hardly sit still.

  “Your da was awesome,” Ricki enthused.

  “Urban Dingo must feel kind of upstaged,” I said. “I mean, how often does an unknown opening band outshine the stars?”

  “Exactly,” Mirandah said. “It’s practically illegal. Like the bride being outshone by her old maid.”

  “Old maid! You mean maid of honor,” I said.

  “Whatever,” she said, tossing her gilt hair.

  “Da must be so happy,” I said, smiling to think of it.

  “I think he found himself tonight,” Jesse said softly. “It was like he
just hit his stride.”

  “Oh man, can you imagine having someone really famous as a father?” Mirandah said.

  “You’ll have to have security systems and bodyguards. Hey, maybe I can be your bodyguard,” Ricki told her. She giggled and said it was him her body needed guarding from.

  Jesse frowned. “I wonder if that’s what Da wants. Fame like that. It can be a pretty fickle thing, and Da’s a deep kind of guy.”

  “Don’t be a moron,” Mirandah snapped, but I thought Jesse had a good point.

  “I wish he was here,” I sighed.

  “He won’t be back until dawn, I reckon,” Jesse said. “The band’ll celebrate and hobnob.”

  “We ought to go home and tell Mum what happened,” Mirandah said.

  So we slurped down our hot chocolates and Mirandah went into a ten-minute farewell clinch with Ricki that wouldn’t have been out of place on the Titanic, then we headed off. Mum was up, of course, although Serenity had gone to bed. We told her what had happened, eating Vegemite toast in her studio and watching her put a base coat on a newly stretched canvas. The clouds around her were this interesting green color shot through with rose streaks, and I wondered if it was her aura I was seeing and if other artists would have one like that, too. Then Luke woke up wanting to be fed, and I suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired.

  My last thought in bed before I dropped off was of the Coastal Telegraph journalist, the way he had suddenly looked over at me. I would once have dismissed it as coincidence, but it seemed to me that Gary Soloman might have felt my attention, like two fingers pushing lightly against the side of his head.

  * * *

  “Ah well, I guess that was my five minutes of fame,” Da said cheerfully over breakfast on Monday. He was still radiating a few sparks. He had said enough about the second gig for me to guess it had been even better than the first.

  As for the rest of us, we had jittered and reveled in his success all weekend, but Monday morning was Monday morning, and so we were pretty much back to normal.