by Colin Varney
Her grimace made Spencer want to hug her, yet he hesitated before doing so. His arms snaked loosely about her. Tentative touch.
I can’t help noticing they haven’t kissed. Lips are zippers, fastening you to your sweetheart. The Velcro of Venus. The pucker is Love’s sucker.
“I’m thinking of pulling out of the Eros Prize,” she murmured. Her damp breath broke against his ear. “Refusing the nomination. Then I could finish the book and we could go away somewhere. Just the two of us.”
His caress firmed. “I’d love that.”
But he wasn’t convinced. He’d heard these plans before, near the conclusion of other novels. The holidays never eventuated. Instead, Vivienne was drawn into a whirlpool of publicity, during which she began jotting notes for her next story, terrified that her muse would become impatient and abandon her.
Soft, evening light filtered through the window. Gloom drew the room tighter, cordoning them together. They stood draped against each other rather than pressed, swapping idle suggestions for possible getaway destinations. Barcelona. Istanbul. Malaysia. Spencer described dawn illuminating a palm-fringed beach and I nudged forwards as he pilfered from my film clip.
He could smell her wet hair and was aware of the contours of her body. He relished the feel of her. Fingertips probed the small of her back. A red mirage shimmered before him. In the room but not in the room. He was bemused again. The Colours were the result of counterpoint between melody and the chafings of chick-a-boom, chick-a-boom. Rhythm plus randiness. So where was the rhythm?
Hello! Hi honey ho!
The cycle of respiration adjusted her pressure against him. Each increment made his heart lollop. What would happen if he intensified his grip, jamming them together? Should he nuzzle into her neck, brushing his lips above her collarbone? There was a tautness between his legs and his face simmered as he realised he was getting an extended play. A big ten-inch, as Aerosmith said. He hitched his hips away from her, his bum protruding awkwardly.
Vivienne gave a hoarse chuckle.
“Down, boy.” She flapped her fingers at his ding-a-ling in playful, chastening fashion.
He felt unevolved, a mass of urges. He has seen aging rockstars on TV, courting the comeback circuit with their once vital paeans to teenage lust. He has watched them attempting suggestive dance moves, their corroded hips thwarting their pelvic thrusts, leering moues drawing in the drapes of their jowls. He felt as ludicrous now, dangled against Vivienne. He had expected these unstoppable assaults to decrease with age. He thought the Colours would fade, like over-washed clothes. Instead, he’d find himself lingering outside the bathroom while Vivienne was showering, listening to the hiss of the steaming water and picturing what she was doing.
Oh, baby baby.
She overuses the soap. All those cascading suds.
Vivienne became rigid. She pulled away from him. He saw a rush of revelation on her face—almost an expression of wonder—and knew an idea had hatched for the ailing chapter. She hauled her notepad from the capacious pocket of her dressing gown and snatched a pen. She snapped on the light and the blurred lines of evening sharpened in the sallow ooze of the energy-saving bulb. She fell into a chair at the table and began scribbling intently.
The rockstar had been booed and heckled.
Spencer clattered about the stove, ladling stir-fry into a bowl and setting it before his wife. Engrossed, she picked at it. Spencer felt stranded and inarticulate, snared in his own skin and topped full of a heat he couldn’t siphon away. The belly-dancing red lingered before him, ineffable as the echo following a slow-bowed cello. The holiday fantasies persisted. He saw himself and Vivienne on a shoreline in the sunset and I burst full blown into his head.
Instead of fetching his own meal he retrieved his laptop and opened it on the table opposite Vivienne. She glanced up from her notes, peeved. Harbouring some nebulous notion of retribution, Spencer sought me on the internet. He couldn’t recall my name—huh!—and when a list of websites relating to me scrolled out, he hovered the cursor briefly over my film clip before deciding to stream sound-only.
He’d supply his own visuals.
The Wurlitzer waltz of my intro wound forth. My original incarnation, not that adolescent upstart that pumps me full of satanic scenes and amphetamines. Pictures puffed before him: limpid impressions that he couldn’t grasp. Whitewashed scenes from a colouring-in book. Then one of the transparencies suffused with wan hues. Wishy-washy; memory gruel.
Yellow and black striped leggings snatched from the arm of a chair. An alto-vibrato of panic.
“He’s here!”
The bunched stripes hauled over a heel and shimmied up a shin. The calf is tacky with droplets and the material catches. It snags on the knee.
The knee. Smooth and round, flanked with tiny indentures. A mould of his cupped palm. Soft flesh folded at its underside. Not tanned, but brushed with caramel.
“Grab your fucking clothes,” she cries.
He smells the hair before he sees it: a dank, bready odour. Her bedraggled curls are scalloped about ears and temples. Their spring and tension disabled by damp. Wet hair has always intoxicated Spencer, speaking of the sensuousness of the beach or the fine filigree across the forehead caused by hoochie coochie. Or the steaminess of the bathroom. Yes, he can hear a shower running somewhere. The petulant plash of an empty cubicle.
As Spencer listened to me on his computer, pawing at the past, the Colours came. A rising stain of cherry infused the sepia light of the kitchen, its advance unctuous and blobby. Stalagmites of strawberry, scarps of scarlet. Yeah, ahh yeah. I love this. Because I am the Colour; I am the stain. Oh, don’tcha know. And I am out of his head, in the real world. Setting the pace in space: I said, in space, I’m setting the pace. Flexing, waxing. Spreading like a sunrise. This doesn’t take me by surprise. I’ve been experienced by synaesthetes before and it’s sublime. I become blossoms in the brain, or ink-in-water behind the eyes, or—best of all—I curl and skirl and breathe through the ether.
I exist. Stretching through air as I imagine you do.
In his mind, Spencer saw a small, shabby lounge room. He had a notion of cracked corners and threadbare carpet. As he sensed, rather than saw, his body, the twinges and weariness of age evaporated. Muscles tightened. Sinews took the strain. An essence coursed through his veins, sluicing through limbs and trunk. Not blood red, as expected, but the raw green of ripening fruit. He felt fresh as a remastered recording.
“Get the fuck out.” The girl seems large—Amazonian— but he knows this is false. Her eyes are fiery beneath ember curls. “He mustn’t catch you here.”
Spencer retreats to the bathroom where the shower still streams and steams. He peeks through the barely opened door and sees the girl leading a stranger down the hall. She has an arm around his waist to steady his stumbles and pulls him close, welding them together. The newcomer is young, nudging into his twenties. His hair is matted; he bristles with stubble. He clutches an empty beer bottle, but looks more than drunk. He’s fevered. He has the air of a frontiersman returned from the wilderness. Hairy and malarial.
“You caught me in the shower, lovey-dove,” the girl says.
The stranger fumbles, trying to tousle her locks. Spencer burns with jealousy. He has tugged his trousers on. He’s damp too. He and the girl had broken out of the shower when she’d heard the rumble of a car pulling into the driveway.
“I’ve missed you, lovey-dove,” Rosemary tells the young man.
Rosemary.
Rosemary emerges from myth and nostalgia. No longer a sketch, she is vividly arrayed. The bumblebee leggings blaze down her thighs. She wears a blouse of splotches that befuddles vision, blurring the lines of her upper body. She dresses to dazzle, and it often looks wrong. Inappropriate as a kazoo blowing an elegy. Spencer recalls her attending a job interview looking like an artist’s palette. She’s the fun at the funeral, wakey-wakey at the wake. The drying hair is working free from its damp density, giving her a hint
of Gorgon. Its red lustre is reconstituting. He remembers her laugh, raucous and husky, as if constantly responding to a filthy joke. Sometimes, while searching for just the right words to express herself, her splayed fingers would bank and dive in interpretative dance. She is compact: stray hair tickles his chin when she stands too close. It’s her zest, her sprightliness that makes him think of her as an Amazon. She is only small in stature.
And she was always playing that song. That red song. Playing it or humming it or wailing it into a hairbrush.
I stretched and sighed and felt myself condense into carmine. I became lightly textured; puckered and blistered like old bubble-wrap. It was sensuous and lovely.
Hey, mama mama.
Imagine the first few bars of the Twilight Zone theme as we time-travel, squiggly-wiggly, back to the kitchen and the smell of cooking staling in the air. My fade-out has streamed from the computer and—awwww—I dropped and glopped from the world. Sucked back into Spencer, cramped and claustrophobic.
Sulky.
Spencer surfaced into the present like a patient coming out of anaesthetic. He blinked at Vivienne as if surprised to see her. She was absorbed in her notes, flicking to a new page. Spencer’s chest pumped out a tawdry funk tattoo—the wacka-wacka of a seventies porn flick. How long had he been holding his breath? It burst free now in a series of shudders. He was lightheaded. Nerves frayed; live ends sparking.
He felt the schoolboy thrill of having done something forbidden without being caught.
He peered around at the aligned spice jars, the hanging pans and the racked plates. A gibbet of cups was strung along the underside of a shelf. Vivienne liked order in the house when she was working, especially as her writing room was covered with strewn notes, screwed-up paper and gaping dictionaries. Spencer examined the hospital-white walls. The laminated cupboards were Mondrian. The dishwasher displayed the precision of its push-buttons. The neatness clashed with the messiness he had sensed in the lounge.
The energy-saving bulb made the room anaemic. Vivienne shot glances over the rim of her glasses. My presence had unsettled her. I don’t know why: she was closed to me. Her fortifications were formidable. I bounced from the bulwarks of her brain.
“Are you watching something saucy on that thing?” she asked.
Spencer uttered a dismissive laugh. Pitched too high. Her closeness and her flitting eyes both frightened and thrilled him. Wacka-wacka at his ribs.
He prodded play again.
Potency poured through me. I reigned in Spencer’s brain: flooding his frontal lobes; occupying his occiput. My frequencies were rich and full. His mind remix was superior to anything he could be hearing from the tinny laptop speaker. I was in command: a maestro of memory.
The lounge room rushed back. There was more detail now. Scattered books and magazines, a jacket thrown across the back of a chair. The carpet has mange. Decades of smokers have tanned the wallpaper a deeper umber. Spencer knew now it was a pokey flat in the northern suburbs of Hobart. There was a poster of JayJay on the wall. Hey, Dads!
Rosemary has led the dishevelled young man in. He studies the floor, trying to figure its function. His boots crunch empty CD cases. He’s unaware of skulking Spence who has crept from the bathroom to haunt the hall, just shy of the doorway. The young man cocks his head up at Rosemary and his face creases into an affectionately gormless grin. What was his name again? Tommy? Tony?
Terry, I want to scream. The young man’s name is Terry. I could see the older version of him in Nicole’s consciousness at that very moment. I tried to inject the name into Spencer’s brain. Terry. Terry.
Rosemary settles the young man in an armchair with his back to Spencer. The man reaches for Rosemary and she sinks towards him. Spencer’s mouth twists. He hates her for surrendering. He wants to get back at her.
Yes sir, yes sir, back at her. Back at her.
He steps forwards, framed in the threshold.
Rosemary boggles over the young man’s crown, flushed with fear. Spencer stabs an urgent finger at the coffee table, indicating that something incriminating is there, but when she looks there is nothing. He moves forwards and she shakes her head, no, no. He leans in, an arm extending.
Kitchen Spencer is struck by Lounge Spence’s stolid stance. There he is, racked forwards, shirtless. Poised; posed. Torsion in the torso. Coiled and well oiled; screws tightened, nothing rattling. Kitchen Spencer recalls a science lesson from long ago, a teacher balancing a ball bearing on a slope. The teacher spoke of potential energy, the power inherent in the object at the apex of the slide. How that energy seethed away as heat as the tiny sphere trundled. Other students suspected a con, a trick to make the equations balance and maintain the myth of energy conservation in a closed system, but Spencer could see it. As the ball bearing rolled he witnessed the energy wreathing free: a smoky electric blue. He sucked hard and inhaled it.
He knew the blue was there now, deep in the core of Lounge Spence, whose hand is almost brushing the scruffy young man’s shoulder. Lounge Spence grabs a chunk of air from the coffee table and draws it back. Rosemary’s eyes slit, uncomprehending. Spencer takes great pains to mime wedging something against an eye, closing the other. Adjusting an invisible lens with middle digit and thumb. An index finger clicks down. Say cheese!
Rosemary’s perplexity clears. Earlier, Spencer had been enacting his future as a firebrand reporter. He’d scribbled in an air-notebook, snapped pictures with an invisible camera and banged the story out on a quasi-keyboard. He’d dripped determination, brooding and glowering. Rosemary had pivoted back, laughing, and he’d swung his air-lens towards her. He’d clicked as she’d convulsed, then laid the chimera camera on the coffee table. They’d collapsed into cuddles.
The young man in the armchair shifts to see what’s troubling Rosemary. Something behind him. His movements are rusty and before he gets far she vices her palms on his head, effectively blocking his ears, and kisses him long and hard. Lounge Spence teeters back on his heels, on the point of retreat, but he’s mesmerised by the way her fingertips twine tenderly into the scruff’s tangles. Spencer’s lips compress, splitting his face. When Rosemary pulls free and sees he is still in the room, her jaw juts in fury. Spencer flinches at the hatred she fires at him.
“Is somebody there?” asks the young man—Timmy? Toby?—struggling against Rosemary’s grip.
Terry. His name is Terry. Impotence overwhelmed me. Sure, I have a slow burn capacity, worming into people’s personalities, building dioramas of their past. But I have no punch, no immediate influence. I crave instantaneousness, like singer/audience call and response. I want everybody in the house to say Terry.
TERRY!
Lounge Spence grabs his shoes, socks and shirt from the bathroom and pads down the hall towards the back door, clenching his jaw. In a blind moment, he thumps his fist into the wall.
“Who’s there?” he hears the young man slur.
Triple chorus and fade. Twilight Zone; squiggle-wiggle. The streaming petered; the Colours collapsed. My sighing self was sucked back into Spencer’s skull. He puzzled over the modular cupboards, the clinical walls. The dishwasher looked like sci-fi. His breath came in a series of semiquavers. The delicious guilt of reliving his fling while perched quietly across from Vivienne clashed with his remorse at riling Rosemary all those years back. The arrogance of that version of him, daring to be discovered.
He peeped over the screen at Vivienne. Her face had soaked up the lardy light and the corner of her mouth twitched. He found himself raising his hand with an invisible card pinched between thumb and forefinger. He held the air-photo so that the lustre of Rosemary’s clear, taut skin and flashing eyes were superimposed over his wife. The snap captured during that body-convulsing laugh. Vivienne yawned: her face crinkled and aged like a time-lapse sequence.
Spencer lowered his arm.
Regret washed through him. The air-portrait was all Spencer had. He never did take a real photo of her.
Rosemary.
“I’m hoping we’ve had enough of that song now.”
Spencer left Vivienne in the kitchen and slunk along to his bedroom. He opened a lower drawer and sorted through old clothes and rattly junk. Old cufflinks, a doll’s arm, belt buckles.
“Ahhh.”
In triumph, he held aloft a ball bearing. He’d returned at recess to sneak into the science lab and snatch it from the teacher’s desk.
I’m so at home in his head now I can return to North Hobart with ease.
“Who’s there?” he hears the young man in the armchair slur.
“A poltergeist.” Rosemary’s voice is impish. “I’ll protect you.”
Spencer, in the hall, imagines her snuggling in. Swarming all over him. Terry’s boyish, self-indulgent chuckle.
Terry, that’s right. All together now.
TERRY.
Spencer breaks from the back door. At the last second he grabs it to stop it slamming, enjoying the pain as his fingers jam in the jamb. Strangely, he believes he’s the one being cheated on. He snarls at the shrubs and gnashes at the gnomes in the shared garden of the stalag of units.
He finds his battered Renault. He slots Thelonious Monk into the tape player and ramps it up until the sound distorts. Despite the chill that’s creeping in, he winds the window down, then leans across to crank down the passenger side. It’s the early hours of the morning and he’s blitzing the ’burbs with a bebop broadside. He’s glad to be educating them, those smug sleepers in their trim, tidy bedrooms. As he drives he feels the electric blue fuming from his flesh.
