by Colin Varney
“Excuse me, Spencer Nicholson …” She almost called him “Dad” but in her mind I could see that word welded to Terry. “Excuse me, but I’ve taken pills.” Nicole displayed a palm and drugs dribbled between her digits. “Too many. Help me.”
Freeze frame. Like the flower teetering at the tip of the waterfall in my film clip. Spencer enmeshed in the moment as he appraised this apparition.
“Nicole!” Rosemary loomed at him. The real Rosemary. She yanked the girl into an embrace. Her eyes flung tears. “I’ve got you, lovey-dove.”
The endearment tremored through Spencer. He saw the sample. The copyright. The couple before him in a hall of mirrors, one glass distorting the woman into youth, the other reflecting the girl into late middle age.
Something about the girl conjured Bethany. There she was, in the forest of legs, wearing a bittersweet beam. Spencer’s Sherlock subconscious sifted the clues. He noted the slight overhang of Bethany’s forehead that he always bequeathed to her and which tainted her childish puckishness with an almost parodic seriousness. Her teak irises were an inextricable alloy of sad and glad. When he returned to the girl he registered the woody orbs, the balcony brow. A swirl of comprehension condensed but he fought it. He remembered spying young Rosemary earlier. Orange ribbons snaking around her body and infiltrating her dress. The aging rockstar preparing to bump and grind.
Lock up your daughters.
Spencer gagged. Acrid lava scalded his throat.
“Mum …”
Nicole slumped. Rosemary clamped her arms tighter. Spencer lurched forwards to help. He was startled to find that the girl had substance, that he could seize her.
Bethany’s face fell.
I guttered and gasped in Rosemary’s head, her concern for Nicole nixing me. But I had enough of a hold to see that she hadn’t recognised Spencer. She’d hardly registered him, her attention fixed on her daughter’s dazed otherworldliness.
Bolts of blue blazed around JayJay. They flashed off the audience, transforming them into sporadic Smurfs. Dry ice smoke billowing from the stage seethed with sapphire. Sky mist. Spencer watched it strobing about Nicole. Spilling off her, unable to adhere. He had an urge to scoop it up, to plaster it onto her in great handfuls. He looked to Bethany for encouragement. She returned a wan smile. Untouched by the light show, her complexion pale. Her dress glinting like icing. Non-reflective revenant.
His fevered gaze returned to the girl and something ripped behind his ribs.
He was Stuart Sutcliffe, watching The Beatles from afar.
As they propped Nicole up, Spencer’s fingers encountered the back of Rosemary’s hand and he felt the rasp of the skin and the cable of vein.
“Let’s get her to the foyer,” he shouted. “We’ll get an ambulance. She’ll be all right.” The woman pivoted up and seemed to see him for the first time. He held her gaze. “She’ll be all right, Rosemary.”
He felt the gymnastics of his lips as he said her name. The pout followed by the smack and the final, semi-grinning gape. The word rolled round and out of his mouth. He felt its weight.
“Memory’s an empty fairground. Memory’s an empty fairground. Memoreeeeeeee’s …” the singer gave the finale his utmost “… an emp-teeee fairground!”
HIDDEN TRACK
Cheers, caterwauls, walls of applause. Johnny throws himself at Morris and pashes him. Hysteria swells.
“We’ve played some hip places in our time,” pants Johnny. “From Sydney to Singapore, Hobart to Hong Kong. But we’ve never played to anybody like you guys. You are crazy motherfuckers, man! You’re the motherfuckerest!”
I issue from some people like an expelled sigh. Fickle funsters: I don’t miss them. Most let me settle like bilge in the brain cells. As they clap, muscles relax. They’re sated, spent, while I lounge in their lobes with a cigarette. Others applaud more fervently, whooping, replaying me in their minds, craving more. Lily leaps and scythes the Pinocchio schnoz in the air, hoarse from hollering. One couple heads for the exit, clutching each other, sharing half-lidded ooh la la looks. They only came for me, and later he’ll whisper my words to her as they do the hucklebuck. My kinda couple.
They pass Marla. She isn’t clapping. The celebration surrounding her is a taunt, a gloat. She wanders aimlessly, harassed by the happiness of others. Mocked Marla. She’s rejecting JayJay’s version of me, considering it puny. She’s missing the slavering sneer the singer of Anal Probe lathers into my lyrics. Pining for juggernaut drums, gunning guitar. Sometimes, when she plays metal-me loud enough, she feels it annihilating her. She wonders if she has enough money to get drunk. And if so, when she wakes with a hangover and encounters the photograph of her mother in the lounge, will she still believe in second chances?
Far away, in suburbia, Vivienne is spinning me one more time. She’s being a little condescending, considering me to be mildly diverting for a pop product. She generously bestows praise on my turns of phrase and the assonance and internal rhythms within my stanzas. She grudgingly affirms some of the imagery. She is such a snob. The main thing she appreciates is that I summon Spencer. I warm her. She’s grateful for the sacrifices he makes for her, and feels again the sear of his disappointment when she drubbed his dreams of Spain. She wishes she could have given him a child. She imagines the callisthenic chick-a-boom, chick-a-boom they will indulge in when her novel is complete and smiles. She reminds herself to let him know how much he means to her but deep down she knows she’ll neglect this.
There’s boyfriend Bryce, still stalking the hall. The squall of applause plagues him as much as it does Marla. He feels powerless against its might. He screams Nicole’s name into it as he blunders blindly about. Then finds himself just shouting. Drear Lear. He feels his phone vibrate and clambers at it. It’s Rosemary. He can just about hear her in the tumult.
“I’ve found her. We’re in the foyer.”
Rosemary and Spencer support Nicole between them, walking her around, coaxing her from coma. Her feet flop and slap and slide. Spencer pockets his phone after calling an ambulance. Rosemary coos to Nicole, assuring her she’ll be all right in a lullaby lilt.
She glances at Spencer, remastering him. She thickens his hair, rehydrates his complexion, plumps the cheeks and hitches them back onto the bone. Refuels him with restlessness. Wakens him. That summer shimmers before her. A reinterpreted version, as different in mood and resonance from Spencer’s take as Sinatra and Sid Vicious’s renditions of My Way. Regret supplants reminiscence, and rather than dwelling on the raunch, she fixates on the result. Not makin’ whoopee, but making Nicole. I’m still the soundtrack and I dam-burst into her, guttering no more. Hey ho, Rosemary! It’s good to be back, unscarred and unscratched.
“Her name’s Nicole,” she tells Spencer. “I called her Nicole. They didn’t want me to. I made them.”
Spencer doesn’t trust himself to speak. He pipes a note at the back of his throat to let her know he understands.
He studies Rosemary, taking in the crimpled version of the crisp countenance he’d yearned for and an undertone of tenderness lows within him. I harrumph, preparing to flash through the family album and remount the memory montage of Vivienne, but see I don’t need to. The phone remains in his pocket.
“Her dad died recently. Her real dad.” Rosemary’s face crunches as she longs for lucidity. “Her other real dad.”
“Terry?” asks Spencer, and Rosemary nods.
Spencer thinks of his old rival. Terry bested him at every turn. He got the girl, and he brought up his—Spencer’s— daughter. Guiding her through those early years when she pulsated with promise. A tiny packet of prospects. He remembers how badly he’d wanted the blue mist to stick to her.
He peers at Nicole. Her avalanched features; pupils swivelling behind quivering lids. Who was this stranger? How had she come to this? What kind of parents must Rosemary and Terry have been? He found it hard to tame his peevish judgements. He felt he should be harbouring loftier thoughts—pondering epiphanies.
Nicole’s head is muffled and muddled. Decomposing dreams lock onto discomposed thoughts to form strange hybrids. The brain-box jukebox of memories has ground into silence, springs pinging and cogs cracked. She’s not sure what’s happening and doesn’t know where she is. Where’s Dad? Where’s Bryce? Where’s Nicole? She senses Mum at her side, and has the crazy notion there’s somebody pretending to be her father, but he’s too tall and broad and his voice is dubbed. He’s wrong but oddly apt at the same time, like an ordinary Joe in very precise Kiss make up.
She’s slipping. I can’t help thinking of Randall: his final minutes.
I didn’t know I could feel cold.
Bryce bursts in and hurtles towards Nicole. He shoulders Spencer aside, taking his burden, features twisting.
Nicole tries to rouse herself. She knows she needs protection, so she struggles to reach behind, to grab invisible cloth. She flounders, unable to control nerveless limbs. She fears she might fall. She feels hands that she knows belong to Mum aiding her, enabling her to pull the cloak over.
“It’s that thing she did with her dad,” she hears Mum say. “The cape of … what was it? … Hanzov. Thick as thieves, the two of them. Hanzov. I mean, why call a thing …?” There’s a pause in which Nicole hears Mum draw in a breath. “Oh for fuck’s sake. It’s Hands-off. The Cloak of fucking Hands-off!”
She hears Mum’s burlesque cackle and wishes she could command her muscles to grin.
Rosemary wonders what the vinyl single of me would say if she put it on now. Tender heart tender heart tender heart.
Nicole mutters: “Bry …”
“I’m here,” says the man holding her, voice fracturing.
Spencer sees Nicole’s eyes flutter open. Her anaesthetised lips attempt to smile. She tries to croak the name again.
Spencer scrutinises the newcomer. Sure, he was good looking. He appeared to have money. But how had he allowed Nicole to fall into this condition? I caught the thought: is that the best she can do? Is he good enough for her?
It was then that Spencer noticed wisps rising from Nicole: fragile blue fibrils issuing from her pores.
Yo daddio.
Nicole thinks she can hear an ambulance, way off in the distance. She sees it speeding towards her, racing to the rescue. She knows it’s being driven by her dad. There are spray cans in the back, rattling around among the medical equipment. She hears the long moan of the siren punctuated by the whoop-whoop-whoop. But everything is distorting. The harsh pulsing whine takes on a crooked carny vibe. The gimcrack backbeat plunges into a regular rhythm.
You’ve been a great audience. Give yourself a big hand.
Acknowledgements:
I owe a crescendo of gratitude to Danielle Wood, who inspired, cajoled, criticised, advised, supplied mondegreens, bought coffee and turned Earworm into a novel. Thanks for being my teacher, then mentor, then friend. A big Presley thanyouvermuch to the creative writing class, University of Tasmania, 2012, for invaluable feedback while kickstarting this project and to Professor Anna Johnston for guidance and wisdom.
To Les Goolies, Ugly Ugly Ugly and Rim of Hell for nurturing and to Stephen, Bob, David and Ian Baby for musical education and escapades. Many thanks to Sarah Tooth for insight on getting published and to Kate O’Donnell for editing, questioning and possibly rolling her eyes. To Helen Gibbons, Bert and Jean for absolutely everything. And to Caroline Wood, Richard Rossiter and all at Margaret River Press for going out on a limb. Ah yeah.
