by Colin Varney
She shook her head again, but her nascent smile was rueful. “You,” she said. “You play.”
“You know I don’t. I only know the one thing you taught me.”
He perched back on the stool and after a series of false starts managed a plunking travesty of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Vivienne had encouraged him to learn it while she was pregnant so he’d have something to play to his daughter.
She was behind him, leaning in. Her warm exhalation made the sound of scuba breathing in his ear. Her lips chafed his cheek. She laid her forehead against his temple. He had the notion that Vivienne was unintentionally transmitting her migraine to him through their shared skin. The throb almost made him draw away. She reached an arm across his chest and manoeuvred him away from the piano so his hands lifted from the keyboard.
Vivienne closed the lid, then returned her arm to his chest, her thumb at his collarbone. Her headache shimmered through his skull.
That night, the pillow crackled. His hand slithered into the slip and extracted more of Vivienne’s words. He held the creased sheet up to the bedside light and read.
The heroine, Veronica, has finally got jiggy with the cynical Sandor. As her eyes spring open after chick-a-boom, chick-a-boom, she is astounded to see a child crouching beside the bed.
She sucked in a sharp breath. Sandor, thrilled by the husky intake, pulled her to him. When she twisted free to look again, the bedside was vacant. He clamped his hands around her head to force her back to him. His lips seared against hers and her eyes sealed shut. She pulled away to study his weathered teak irises. The rogue curl at his damp forehead rode the pulses of an urgent vein. Every muscle in her body was relaxing and she felt the sweat cooling along her chest. She slumped onto him. She could stay lying here, half tumbled off Sandor’s broad chest, forever.
Spencer screwed up the paper and dropped it on the carpet. He nestled his head, snapping off the bedside lamp, but his eyes remained open. The lunar landscape of his pillow blurred before him. Why had Vivienne left the words? It was vindictive: her post-coital prose emphasising the very thing she was denying him. And how could he still be prey to such urges? If he were an aging rockstar, wincing at the rheumatism that accompanied his hip grinds, then lust was his manager, booking the RSL halls and strip clubs. Assuring him he’s still “got it”.
Spencer tossed and bucked, ensnaring himself in the sheets. Perturbation mocked him and the gloom was oppressive. When he finally freed himself from the covers and swung his legs out of bed, his soles crunched the screwed-up paper.
He padded into the lounge and switched on the TV. Talk shows failed to distract as random tableaux from the day floated before him. Griff’s snide amusement; the children bumping around Marla; Vivienne gently lowering the pink lid. He felt ridiculous because he was jealous of a fictional character: Sandor was receiving more than his fair share of sugar sugar, while Spencer was going without. I wanted to console him. Envy of fictitious creations was more common than he thought. Many humans longed to know the Rosemary who was described in my lyrics and to feel the passion and, yes, the sorrow of my lovesick narrator. Many wanted to be as desired as Rosemary. Spencer was being too hard on himself, in my opinion. But, of course, he was deaf to me.
He surveyed the shelves bursting with books, CDs and Vivienne’s opera records. There was the record player, unused. The piano tuner loomed again, badgering him. He wanted to march into her bedroom and shake her awake and demand to know why the instrument needed maintaining. He suspected she’d squint up at him, bemused and unable to answer.
He scanned the array of her publications along the top shelf, the spectrum of spines illustrating their titles. The first one still shrugging off its fellows, aloof. Love Is Pink was the tale of a rural music teacher who finds herself pregnant after a dalliance with a visitor to her town. An attempt to locate her ex-lover lands her in the seedier niches of inner-city Sydney, where she discovers the father of her child has connections to the drug trade. He insists that she terminate the pregnancy, but as she is about to do so, she becomes involved with a lighting designer working on a production of Carmen at the Opera House. Her penchant for pink jewellery inspires the lighting of the stage show, but the ex-lover reappears, demanding again the abortion of his child. The combination of underworld sleaziness, romance, theatricality and intensely torrid shake, rattle and roll proved popular. A grope opera.
Vivienne had terminated a pregnancy during her teenage years. She told Spencer that the memory of it recurred like … well, hi there. Sometimes I manage to loop in the head of someone who doesn’t like me, squirreling myself away before leaping into the forefront of thought and cavorting brazenly. It’s really enjoyable: one of my favourite pastimes. Try terminating me! Vivienne rarely mentioned the abortion, so Spencer was astonished when she brought it up in an early interview. She claimed she never regretted her decision, but has always carried the consequences. He imagined her gaze drifting then, the memory aching.
Late one night, while banished to the chill of his lonely bedroom as Vivienne worked on her second novel, Spencer woke to hear her stumbling along the hall. He found her clutching her stomach, complaining of cramps. There was a paperback crushed in her grip. He could tell from the pink spine it was her book. He calmed her, settled her back in her bed. Her breathing quietened and she appeared to slip into slumber. When he tried to ease the paperback from her grip, she seized his arm.
“I killed her, Spence.”
“You’ve got every right to. You made her.”
She gawped at him in horror and he realised she wasn’t talking about one of her characters.
“Who? Who did you kill?”
“Our daughter.”
Spencer sank onto the bed. “You know that’s nonsense.”
“When I had the abortion all those years ago, something went wrong inside me. I know it did. It’s like … I set a trap for her.”
He shook his head gently and wound his arm around her. He was blinking madly, trying to fox the teardrops. “That’s not true, Viv.”
He pulled the paperback free and lay alongside her, lost in the lullaby of her breathing. He awoke several hours later, the arm wrapped under her thick with numbness. The paperback was folded, pages scrunched. When it was slipped back into the bookcase, its deformed hunch shouldered the others away.
All the next day he thought he could catch the students murmuring about him behind his back. He kept hearing the crackle in his pillowslip. He burnt with indignation at the taunting pages Vivienne had planted, glowering so fiercely he could see his own hunkered brows like barbed wire gabling his vision. In the enclave of his office, he fished out headphones and summoned me on his computer. I resurrected Rosemary for him, swinging her hips to my licks, and was rewarded with a ride into the world on probing crags of crimson. Ahh yeah. I wormed through the mote-filled air, wondering if I could dip onto his desk to bloody the scattered essays.
A rap on the door startled him. He pulled the phones free but there was a little time before I retracted behind his eyes like a reluctant snail into its shell. It was Marla, her pale cheeks ruddied by the lingering stain on his sight. She wafted a carton cup under his nose.
“Emergency caffeine rescue. You looked like you needed this.”
He sipped. The barbed wire lifted from vision. Marla dragged the back of her hand across her forehead.
“So humid out there.”
She unbuttoned her jacket, unleashing a tang of tannin. Spencer stuck his nose in the coffee, telling himself he was unaffected. I could sense what he was repressing: a sort of under-drone, like the sound an amp makes as it warms, before the power chords come bursting from it. Mrrrmmmm.
Marla tipped the picture of Bethany, her expression softening. Then she displayed the photo she was carrying in her other hand. A henna-haired woman in a hospital bed, a plastic tube curving from her nostrils. Brave smile grafted onto her face. “This is who I’ve lost.” Marla’s voice was in the wrong key. “My mum.”
“How long ago?” he asked quietly.
“Five months. Things happen to me and I still think: Oh, I’ll tell Mum about that.”
She was in constant movement, soft-shoeing in front of his desk.
“Can I ask?” said Spencer. “What did she …?”
“Cowel bancer.”
She bit her top lip, angry at her mistake.
“The pain gets easier to handle, Marla. It doesn’t fade but … it blunts. Changes. Sometimes I look at Bethany and feel … well, happy isn’t the word but … something like that.”
Marla thrust the photo forwards. “She’s the reason I’m here. The reason I stopped wasting my life and became a swot. Dumped Griff. Dedicated myself to painting.” She pulled in a breath to slow herself and broke her next pronouncement into syllables. “Sec-ond chan-ces.”
“Your mum’s still giving you good advice.”
Spencer felt embarrassed by that. Too sentimental. He was out of his depth, unaccustomed to personal confessions from his students.
“But I’m having trouble and I need your help,” said Marla.
“Of course.”
“I can’t write up my case studies. I’m all over the shop. No concentration. Know why? Because my art’s going badly. Painting slows me up, connects me with myself. The heat of creativity warms me. The ire of fart.” She gritted her teeth, flustered. “Fire of art. Like it says in the song. In the red song. Tinder art, still soul.” There it is again: possibly the best line Jones and Jones ever wrote, because nearly everybody gets it wrong. I love a good mondegreen. Whether it’s Alex the seal, s’cuse me while I kiss this guy or there’s a bathroom on the right, humans take the words and warp them to their own needs, creating an interpretation that’s meaningful to them. I become indispensable, melding with their worldview, fusing to identity. Versatile and adaptable, that’s me.
You know—oh yes, you know—it’s Tender heart, steal soul. But don’t let that best you if there’s something better to bestow.
Marla aimed an accusation at her tutor. “But my painting’s going wrong. No inspiration; no fire.”
“I see where this is going.”
“All you have to do is listen to music and describe what you see.”
“If you recall I considered your proposal previously. My answer still stands.”
“Hasty.” She grinned, and the cracks around eyes and lips were lost in the mix. Her pale skin exuded moonlight. “Let me know when you change your mind.”
“It’ll be soon after hell freezes over.”
“Good. Satan’ll look cool in a beanie.”
She gave the photo of Bethany a quick kiss and swept from the room.
“I didn’t think this was your sort of thing at all.” Vivienne wore her distaste face. “It’s a bit … I don’t know … bubblegum.”
Bubblegum! When a critic is a connoisseur of well-crafted pop and has a fine-tuned understanding of the cultural crucible that moulded it, then their venom can sting. Vivienne’s vitriol therefore left me cold. If I had another cheek I’d turn it. Besides, bubblegum bombed in the eighties, you Boeotian, bodice-ripping bard. Just the sort of bile I’d expect from an opera snob.
Cheek turning was never my forte.
Spencer skirred and skittered around the kitchen. He chopped to my bop, grated to my groove. The shimmying chef. On the way home he’d detoured into town to pick me up on CD. Now he and I were both cookin’ as I repeated in the player, causing Vivienne to shrink into herself and spout spurious subjectivism.
“It’s fun,” said Spencer. “You remember fun.”
He tossed his spoon aside and bore down on her. She recoiled, but her eyes glimmered with glee. He enfolded her and wound her around in a wonky waltz. She coughed a broken laugh. Stiff in his grip, legs stamping. Her dry hair irritated his cheek and fenced with his lashes, making him tic. Her trunk was unyielding. I helped Spencer recall the suppleness of Rosemary’s waist: the way it would flex in his embrace. The sweet suffocation of her flossy mop. Rosemary vital in his arms, always about to squirm free. The ephemeral electricity of their proximity locking him into the moment. Red splotched his vision like oils squeezed from a tube and I poured myself into the kitchen within it. Yawing into space, shaking the cramp loose.
C’mon, take me.
In a Townsville hotel a woman dirty-danced to me with a much younger man to enrage her husband. A man singing me in a karaoke bar in Darwin directed my lyrics to the woman sitting across from his wife. After an argument with his boyfriend, a man hums me as he prowls for revenge tutti frutti on a beat in Brisbane.
There’s a snazzy little four-note hook that Morris Jones plinks just before Johnny sings my first verse. He slips it in again as I segue into my middle-eight, and if you listen carefully you can just catch it in my fade out. Lesser songsmiths would have overused it, but JayJay refrain from the refrain. The eerie echo of it in the outro makes you raven for more, so, like Rosemary in that long-gone summer, you play me again. It’s the frill that adds a thrill. Spencer was having a similar relationship with the dissonance that whined within him as he clutched Vivienne but pictured Rosemary. The shot of shame added zest, but it was volatile, threatening to boil up and overwhelm him. He was tempted to tamp it, but then he’d hear again the rustle of paper within his pillowcase.
Yes sir, yes sir, back at her.
Her ear burnt against his lips as he crooned to my chorus.
“Memory’s an empty playground …”
An empty what-ground? What is it with this guy and my name?
Vivienne became pliant. She squashed against him, her nose nuzzling his neck. She anticipated his movements, her legs gliding with his, her feet no longer stomping. Their bodies blended. Surprisingly, the barricades of her brain began to crumble. I was almost able to breach them.
Spencer’s lids shuttered down. Awww! I surfed the scarlet but in blackness. No longer hitchin’ ’round the kitchen, but drooling through an infinite dark dimension that seemed to exist in the interstice between lens and lids. Spencer summoned the tannin smell, dwelt on energy loosed through lithe limbs, the frottage between dancers. His mind wandered. When his eyes flicked open it took a split second to realise that the presence pressed against him wasn’t the one he’d been picturing.
The real surprise was that he hadn’t been picturing Rosemary.
He’d been sensing that droning amp. Mrrrmmmm.
“Down, boy.” Vivienne’s hot breath broke against his lobes.
Faux pas de deux.
Spencer recalled the aging rocker, trying to gyrate convincingly, cracked lips mouthing metaphors of youthful urgings. He pulled away from Vivienne, but felt her disengage simultaneously. They stood awkwardly, turned away from each other as if they’d mislaid the manual on what to do next. Vivienne wore a coy, affectionate smile, tinged with melancholy.
“Spain,” she said wistfully. “Barcelona. When the book’s finished. Just the two of us.”
Spencer thought of the flurry of publicity and the queue for interviews that would precede and trail publication. Any escape they had would be fleeting.
“Ole,” he said.
“Maybe I should take a break before the next one? A year off? … Something …?”
Her voice dithered.
“We’ll see.” Spencer tried to smile.
The red splayed and wavered. I felt myself thinning into vapour.
“Well, if dinner’s not ready I’ll sneak back to work,” she said.
In the days before success, Spencer had been able to seduce her from her desk. He was certain that was how Bethany had begun, Spencer luring Vivienne from a troublesome chapter. There are crannies in Spencer’s consciousness where he conceals unwanted nuggets of self-knowledge. Ignominious ingo
ts. Occasionally they dislodge and he has to poke them back. One popped free now: the confession that he’d liked Vivienne as a failed author, all those years ago. He’d found comfort in it, having attempted a non-fiction book himself only to see it dwindle. And she had dealt with her disappointments with humour and a stinging, self-deprecating wit.
“Perhaps you could turn the bubblegum down while I’m writing,” Vivienne suggested.
In Hamburg, a boy has me on his device while indulging in hermits’ hoochie coochie. A woman listens to me on the radio while improvising with herself in Manchester. In Adelaide, a man has me on computer as he performs solo. Gettin’ jiggy wit’ himself. Really, I’ve got over the indignity of this kind of thing. I like to think I’m made for a higher purpose, but I’m prepared to bring joy and meaning in any way I can. It’s not as if they’re really listening. The one thing I can’t abide is the way I’m forced out of their heads as proceedings reach a conclusion. It’s like smelling something delicious cooking but being evicted from the kitchen while it’s taken from the oven.
And yes, the man in Adelaide is Spencer. Being a one-man-band was becoming a compulsive hobby. As if he were in training. I was enjoying a romp into the room on rivulets of red, the dye deepening as desire built. I was there to resurrect Rosemary, but, discomfited after the tortuous tango with his wife, the woman in Spencer’s mind was an amalgam. She had the lithe limbs of a young surfer; the weathered, woebegone smile of a distracted wordsmith; and a pageboy wig. Spencer tried to fix the figure but it fuzzed and morphed. Her frailty suddenly fizzed with verve; the furze of dark hair sprouted into fiery untameable tangles.
His head rolled on the pillow and he heard rustling. He ignored it, focusing on the job in hand, but now every movement, no matter how slight, produced cracks and crinkles that distracted him. Eventually he reached into the pillowslip and pulled the printed sheet out. He screwed it up and was about to fling it when curiosity overcame him. He smoothed out the paper and tilted it towards the bedside lamp.
… As Veronica fled between the trunks the mist parted before her like gossamer veils. Her feet crushed the soft undergrowth, releasing fecund odours that both disoriented and intoxicated. The full moon flickered through the clutching boughs above. Her shoes were made for waltzing, not running, and she staggered. A root snagged her toes, wrenching her ankle and sending bolts of fire through her shin. She fell against a tree, feeling its cold abrasiveness on her spine. And suddenly he was upon her, as if the mist had solidified into his form, laying a palm each side of her head and braced on his muscular arms. Moonlight caught the pale scar above his eye, making it phosphoresce. His irises reflected the bark all around them, as if he was part of the forest. Elemental. His chest pumped and his panting breath was steeped in the loam of the undergrowth.
