by Colin Varney
Songs on the skin. Indelible decibels. I like it. This is my kind of girl.
I have a lot of respect for painters. Their work produces an instantaneous emotional moil, but in the midst of the maelstrom you can close in and pick out detail that may sway your perspective, much as a butterfly’s wing can wrangle the weather. It doesn’t need to sprawl before you for hours like film or fiction, and you can go away, perhaps for years, and discover new things upon your return. Differences in mood or age affect your appreciation. It’s a lot like … well …
Let’s give me a big hand.
Before Marla lowered her shirt, Spencer spied the underline of her bra. In Footscray, a jogger pounding to my beat pretended not to see a female colleague emerging from an adult bookshop. A teenager listening to me at a pool party on the Gold Coast tried not to stare at her best friend’s boyfriend emerging from the water. Six-pack heart attack. The lager in Spencer’s mouth seemed frostier compared to his simmering cheeks.
“I should get more drinks.”
He broke from the booth, staring doggedly ahead. Self-blinkered. Caffeine chased around him. His stomach protested its emptiness with gastric glissandos. Nerves spatted like a loose connection to an amp. He sensed people staring at him but dared not look around. He was convinced his students were cramming the crannies of the bar, brandishing notebooks, archiving his antics. What tales they would have to tell of their tanked tutor. And he wasn’t even drunk, just hyped up on coffee. He should confront them. Glare them down and tell them what to expect in their chosen, cherished calling. That newspapers were dying and TV was dumbing down and they’d find journalism as soul draining as any other job. There’d be no exclusives, no noble battles against corruption, no “hold the front page!” There would be community events, celebrity drivel and traffic accidents. Deadlines that dissuaded you from delving and subeditors dismantling your sentences.
When he returned to the booth Marla was missing. He saw her striding back from the video jukebox, beaming.
“This one’s for you.” She slid into her seat.
Ah, my intro. I swelled in Spencer’s head. I owned him for a moment, making him close his eyes and drift. Marla’s mind was less amenable: I abraded against the version of me she was familiar with. Identity crisis, like Janus debating with himself over which visage was more handsome. On screen, the hunchback saunters through a crowded sideshow alley. He sees the hag straggling towards him. As she passes the marquee of the hall of mirrors she is reflected back as the babe. The crowd vanishes from around them.
“Ah, it’s …” Spencer squinted at my title in the corner of the screen. I was insulted that he never bothered to note my name. “It’s … um …” I boosted my chorus in his head, trying to help him. He blustered. If only I could whisper, intone, shout. Johnny Jones appeared on screen in his Pinocchio guise and I sympathised.
Oh to be a real boy.
“It’s the red song,” Spencer blurted.
Marla looked quizzical. “What do you mean?”
Spencer shrugged, trying to disown his statement. He’d tried to explain the Colours before and watched people slowly withdraw, thinking him mad or fanciful. It had injured him. They’d disregarded something precious: the way he interpreted his surroundings and expressed his feelings. It was so much a part of him that, until recently, he believed everybody reacted to rhythm and arousal the way he did. These days he clutched the experience tighter to himself; his unique quirk.
Beer merged with coffee so that Spencer still felt on edge, but enjoyed it. His nerves fizzed playfully. Somewhere beyond the barriers of the booth, he heard a woman’s wine-wrought disclosure: “Man, I love this song.” Shadows flicked and tripped over tabletops and he realised the woman was dancing, just out of sight. In a dim alleyway of his mind she became Rosemary, twirling to her favourite tune, his hunting eyes tracking her as she swayed and undulated: a conflagration of carmine licking into vision.
“Red song,” he murmured.
“What do you mean—‘red song’?” Marla’s forehead puckered. The asterisks at her eyes bit deeper.
He waggled a finger at her. “It gives you rosy cheeks,” he said delightedly. He could hear the purr of his car, see the planes coming in to land. Marla in the passenger seat.
He pushed his beer aside and sniffed. Too late, he realised he was trying to savour Marla’s scent. He yanked the glass back beneath his chin, snuffling the bitterness.
“What are you on?” she asked. “There’s nothing red in this song.”
“No, it’s just …” Spencer felt adrift. “It’s a mood. Songs have moods. Don’t you think?”
“Red moods?” Suddenly she was out of her seat and nudging up against him. He panicked, bum-bumping over. A corner of photo-frame dug into a buttock. “What do they call those people who, like … see music? Patterns and shit?”
He fought to control his face but his muscles were free jamming. “A synaesthete.”
“Are you one of them?”
Something about knowing the word made it harder to deny. “A little. A semi-synaesthete.”
Her eyes blazed. She bounced. “You have to let me paint what you see.”
“I don’t think so.”
Her pupils switched from side to side in apoplectic hops. “I’ll play music, you describe it, and I’ll paint it.”
“It’s not going to happen. I’m too busy.”
She was so close her features furred. Spencer imagined the students scribbling fervently in their notebooks. He extended an arm to ease her away. She calmed by increments. He detected a stratum of tea to her aroma.
Same blend as Rosemary.
In Melbourne, the PhD student ponders the name “Rosemary”. She tut-tuts to herself. She considers it ham-fisted to name my narrator’s longed-for love after a sprig of shrubbery representative of remembrance. Too obvious, she asserts. That’s students for you—picky, picky, picky. They make critics look laid back. I was created by two twenty-somethings in a pop band, more obsessed with ooh poo pah doo than subtleties of expression. Give them some credit for achieving the impressionistic sense of numinous longing that means so much to so many. They gave me life, and I may live forever.
The student’s name is Lily. Perhaps her parents wished to acknowledge her mortality.
For the first time in many months, as Spencer slid the key from the newly opened door, he pictured Bethany stampe-ding to greet him. I studied the image: a vague outline of an eight-year-old, all flouncy dresses and tresses. Yearning arms. Her face is indistinct, with the plump cheeks and severe forehead from the baby photo looming in and out of focus. Or would she be too preoccupied with strewn toys to come for him? Would he have to seek her out, swooping in to gather her off the carpet? Her timber tawny eyes twinkling beneath her scarp of brow. He trampled the thoughts as a quake rippled from his chest. The photograph was buried deep in his bag, hidden from Vivienne.
He was about to shout a greeting when he heard distant muttering. He traced it to the writing room and nudged the door. Vivienne was bowed over her keyboard, massaging her temples. He leant in close to catch her rambling mantra.
“The flat of her tongue found the knob of his nipple … The tip of her tongue tickled his nipple … The furled tongue tip hitched on his nipple …”
Spencer gently eased the probing points of her fingers from her hairline. He saw cruel crescents where nails had gouged. The faint impression of her crucifix was visible where she had been pressing it to her forehead. Because she had lifted it directly from the chain at her neck the indentation was upside down. It made him think of the satanic surge of Anal Probe.
“You OK, Viv?”
“Head splitting.” Her attempt at a reassuring smile made her appear to be gnashing her teeth. “My body’s out to get me.” The flesh of her lower face looked waterlogged, like tub-time fingertips. She was wearing the T-shirt a gym had presented to her while she was researching kick-boxing for her second novel. You’ve Got The Power was emblazoned across the
top. It was stained with coffee and flecks of food. “The piano tuner was in today.”
“Piano tuner?” Spencer frowned.
“Sounded like he was torturing the thing.”
“Have you taken anything?”
As she shook her head her eyelids draw-stringed. “Paracetamol dulls creativity.”
“It’s near the end of the day,” said Spencer. “You could take something now.”
She fumbled the crucifix at her throat. “I should get back to work.”
She swung to her computer. Spencer imagined the screen searing her sight. He winced as if sun blinded himself.
“Why do you insist on having the piano tuned?” he asked. “Who plays it?”
With a series of jabs, Vivienne deleted the sentence she’d just typed, letter by painstaking letter. She lifted the crucifix to her forehead. Spencer backed away. He knew he’d be unable to reach her now.
He paused in the doorway of the music room. The piano looked less bloated, as if the tuner’s ministrations had eased it. A memory blundered forth: a Godzilla that razed all before it. Spencer comes home to find Vivienne beside the piano, her features enlivened. The instrument had been brown when he’d left for work that morning. Now it is startlingly pink, with streaks of dun trying to break through here and there. The new hue gives it a hint of the visceral, as if it were some gigantic gizzard. A grin transforms his face and he drops his bag. He yanks Vivienne into his arms, relishing the squash of her belly against his waist. He imagines the baby bumping around inside her.
Pink.
That was the moment he knew he had a girl.
Bethany.
Vivienne would start Bethany on the piano, demonstrating the joy of plinking the keys. Later, she’d be entrusted to a tutor, to master the discipline of musicianship. Bethany the concert pianist. Or Bethany the classically trained jazz wizard, depending on which parent you spoke to. Or would she be ushered off to a voice coach? Her childish intonations waiting to assimilate the richness of the lower registers. Vivienne and Spencer dreaming and scheming as Vivienne’s belly burgeoned.
Spencer planned to keep the newspaper on the day of the birth. He saw himself in the future, showing it to his wide-eyed daughter, her exquisite digits crinkling the newsprint. Vivienne adapted the notion: he should preserve the following edition, as that would describe the events of the happy day. Spencer bristled. He wanted a commemoration, with the magical date displayed at the top of the yellowing pages. They debated vehemently.
Then the fat lady sang.
There it is, that maleficence deep inside Spencer. The black storm: gyring, eating itself. It ambushes him. Wraps me in its rip. Drags me into its depths.
Bethany was born late in the evening, never opening her eyes or trundling her chubby arms. Her tiny body perfect, but still. Next day, Spencer pushed through the increased gravity of the street towards the newsagent as if programmed to continue with his plan. A haze loured above him. He was angry with the sky for being so nondescript. Trees were hushed, their leaves subdued. The newspaper was thin and limp. When he flipped through it he couldn’t believe the banality of its contents. A squabble over a budget prediction; a higher than expected wheat yield; a loss in the cricket. He’d expected a great calamity on the front page, the fall of corporate giants in the financial section, an unsolvable Sudoku.
He raked the cavalier sky. As a toddler he’d made his eyes ache straining into the cerulean blue, trying to penetrate the azure to spot Heaven. He was certain it was there: you only needed to stare hard enough. He tried binoculars, sure he’d be able to pick out a pearly gate or seraphim on a smoko. He hypothesised that it was OK to stickybeak because Heaven drew in clouds when it wanted to shield itself. The secrecy of cirrus; an anonymity of nimbus. Upon consideration, he could never discern why Heaven would want to hide. Now he realised it was ashamed. As he trudged home he knew he’d never search for Heaven again. None of the above.
In the ensuing months he watched with distaste as the crucifix at Vivienne’s throat became more than an ornament.
They brought Bethany home. That afternoon, they clung and clutched at each other. The three of them in a tight tangle, unwilling to be torn free. They communicated via sniffles, sighs. The tilt of a head; the barest increase in pressure of a fingertip against a shoulder blade. Spencer had never felt closer to Vivienne. The few words they used were whispered. Adhesion of silence. I know the power of sound-lessness. It’s often in the quiet of my conclusion that I get my greatest traction. I’ve unreeled like a fishing line, my hungry hook flailing. I gather and seep into grey matter, sopped up like gravy. Silence is the soaking time.
Something of that monastic muteness infected them. It settled like dust on the furniture; infused the walls. In the following days, their conversations were halting, as if they didn’t like to disturb each other. They still spoke via touch and reaching arms, but this, too, lessened. Spencer felt words damming up within him. He had much to say about Bethany. He continued to plan futile futures for her. Vivienne blocked him, unwilling to hear her name. Spencer framed the photograph of his daughter and placed it atop the piano, but the next time he passed he saw it had been knocked onto its face. He set it on a shelf in the lounge but it disappeared and he discovered it in a drawer. He stuffed it into his work bag.
Bethany became the infant in the room.
The storm memory convulses. Belches crackles of lightning.
Spencer would watch Vivienne avoiding the music room, her shoulder buffing the far wall as she passed the entrance. The repetitiveness of Vivienne practising scales used to irk him: now he longed for it. He missed those moments when she would break free of discipline and launch into the drama of an aria or the raunch of ragtime, her unsteady mezzo- soprano soaring above the runaway rhapsody. He’d be lured to the doorway to watch her upper body bob and twist. The piston pump of her legs. The Colours would blister into vision. The house felt paltry without her playing. The furnishings seemed faded. Sometimes, stepping inside after the roister of a work day, Spencer would suddenly feel like a mime artist.
One evening he found her circling the piano stool, studying it suspiciously. As if she could discern an outline there, a spectre at the keys.
During the pregnancy they’d amassed toys, dolls and baby clothes. A pram stood abandoned in a corner. Vivienne wanted to donate everything to charity but Spencer vetoed it. When he began bringing further dolls home, she shot sidelong glances. Spencer would take the photograph of Bethany to the toyshop while making his selection. Vivienne referred to them as “ghoulish”, so he cleared a shelf in his campus office. He enjoyed the bemusement of students as they endured the dolls’ beady regard during tutorials. Soon he had to clear a second shelf.
They discussed moving into a smaller house. Vivienne had been told she could no longer have children and the multiple bedrooms mocked their decayed dreams of a large family. Then Vivienne bought a new computer and set it up in the room they’d recently repainted for Bethany. Morning light spilled across her desk, before slowly scaling the wall and diffusing. Vivienne found this suited her writing cycle, splashing garish ideas across her screen in the early glare, before tempering her prose in the musing afternoon. She’d previously written two failed novels—a family saga and a romance—and was part way through a third. She scrapped this and started anew. She quit her job. Spencer had never seen her so determined. He became accustomed to her working into the evening, while he turned up the thermostat in a lounge that had become discernibly colder. He perched on his own side of the couch while reading or watching TV, until one night he swung his feet up and reclined along its length, wheezing with satisfaction.
Vivienne became a restless sleeper, waking and scratching in a notebook by torchlight. Spencer abandoned their shared bed for the spare room. Although they still touched and hugged, communicating via emotional osmosis, they hadn’t done the hucklebuck since Vivienne’s later stages of pregnancy. Spencer resorted to hermits’ hoochie coochie while strainin
g to hear the tipping of her typing, while Vivienne found eroticism bursting across the pages of her new work.
You humans like to think you’re complicated and mysterious, beyond the clichés of pop psychology. So how are you going to retain your smugness when I tell you it took nine months for Vivienne to gestate her novel? And that it has taken a similar period, give or take a week, to finish each successive one? “Pop” isn’t the pejorative you like to think it is. When the final sentence was written Spencer and Vivienne sought out a restaurant. They rushed through dessert. On the way home Vivienne screeched the car into the curb and they wig-wam-bammed each other’s brains out in the back seat.
That night, Spencer moved back into the shared bed.
Spencer could still hear muttering emanating from the writing room. He circled the piano, skimming his palm along the top. The pink had looked like icing that first day, as he’d clutched Vivienne and relished the press of her abdomen. Now it was pallid as a sucked sweet.
He sank onto the stool and lifted the lid. The keys gleamed, pleading to be played. He levered a finger. The pure, plangent note rang throughout the house. Blasphemy in E. He imagined Vivienne starting from her chair. The piano sighed, the taut wood softening. The echo hung like a fragrance, piquant and tart. A fine job had been done, but he wondered again why Vivienne insisted on the annual ritual of tuning an instrument that was never played. He struck another note, its chime freeing something within him and easing the pent-up torture of the piano. He hit another, then prodded at the sharps.
He sensed a shifting in the light and turned to see Vivienne in the doorway. Her forehead was scuffed but her mouth was struggling with a smile. He was relieved; he’d expected her to be furious. He stood, stepped away, beckoning her to the stool. She shook her head.
“Please, Viv.” He was surprised by his imploring whinny.
