The Lost Love Song

by Minnie Darke

  ‘12A’s the one you want,’ Arie said, ‘but for some reason, the A gets dropped off the address all the time. I have a lot of people showing up on my doorstep thinking they’re about to move in. The key safe’s not easy to find, either. It’s behind the pot plant.’

  She smiled with relief. He had the feeling that she was all out of energy for obstacles and challenges. She walked up the path to the front door and pushed aside the foliage of a climbing rose.

  ‘Got it?’ Arie checked.

  ‘Thanks!’

  ‘Welcome.’

  She referred again to the piece of paper in her hand, punched in the combination to the key safe, and let herself inside. Idly, Arie wondered how long she’d be staying.

  THREE DAYS AFTER Evie arrived at the Airbnb on Tavistock Row, she stood in the middle of the living room and acknowledged to herself that she had wrecked the joint.

  When she’d first come into this room, it had been the picture of Vogue Living perfection. The walls were white, the windows were covered with white louvred shutters, and sparse mid-century Danish furniture had been artfully arranged. The polished floorboards were partially covered with a cowhide rug, and a few fashionable novels and non-fiction titles had been stacked in symmetrical pyramids on the shelves of narrow white bookcases. It had been hot outside when she arrived, but the cleaner had left the air-conditioner ticking over, and the radio softly playing ABC Classic FM, so that the place exuded a cool, studious calm.

  Now, though, the living room looked like a bad day at a charity shop. There were cardboard cartons closed up with perished and peeling tape, opaque plastic tubs with cracked lids, battered suitcases, a rusty ironing board, a rolled Persian rug, a sewing machine and a guitar, both in their latched-up travelling cases. Evie had pulled all of this out of her Beetle and ferried it back to the Airbnb in a rent-a-car. The Beetle itself – dusty and cobwebbed – would have to stay where it was until she could replace its tyres and get it re-registered, or try to sell it.

  The owner of the garage was a middle-aged and tightly be-denimed guy known only as Crosby; he’d once been in a pub band with Evie’s brother-in-law, Reuben. With some difficulty, he’d flung up the tilting garage door to reveal Evie’s Beetle, parked next to a motorboat that looked like it hadn’t seen the sea in a decade.

  Crosby had nudged one of the Beetle’s flat tyres with his toe. ‘She still goes. I checked her now and then, turned the engine over. Lucky you didn’t leave it too much longer, though. I was only going to give you one more year, then I was going to scrap the bloody thing. You know, if Reuben and Stella didn’t want to deal with it.’

  But when Evie hefted a case of cold Crownies into his arms and thanked him repeatedly and enthusiastically for his trouble, he’d looked pleased and told her that it really hadn’t been a bother at all.

  ‘How are Reuben and Stel, by the way?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t seen them for bloody years.’

  The same was true for Evie.

  ‘They seem to be fine,’ she said.

  Crosby nodded. ‘Where are you going to go, now you’re back?’

  Evie had shrugged and smiled. ‘Not sure yet. I’m just going to . . . take it as it comes.’

  Now, hands on hips, hair held back with a headscarf, Evie stood in the centre of the mess she’d made and wondered where and how to begin the task of sorting through the possessions that her past self had considered worthy of bequeathing to her future. From a suitcase she’d exhumed the crumpled summer skirt she now wore, and from a shoebox she’d extracted the Amy Winehouse CD that was playing on the house stereo. It was time to get seriously Marie Kondo.

  ‘Do you spark joy?’ she silently asked the Husqvarna.

  ‘I do,’ the trusty old sewing machine confirmed, reminding Evie of dresses past. It would be nice to make herself some new clothes, whenever, wherever she settled. Evie moved the heavy case to the side of the room she intended for the ‘to keep’ pile.

  Next, she identified which of the cardboard cartons contained the china dinner service that had been handed down to her mother, from her own mother. When Evie’s mother had died, Jacinta – the eldest of Evie’s half-sisters – hadn’t wanted the china, and neither had Stella. Evie had been only eight years old at the time, and Stella had decided to pack the boxes away in case Evie grew into the kind of young woman who would one day want a Royal Worcester dinner service.

  Evie undid the packing tape and peeled the yellowed newspaper away from a teapot with a fussy, gilt-edge floral pattern. As she did so, she glanced at her wristwatch, which was, as ever, reporting that the time was a few minutes to five o’clock, even though mid-morning sun was shining in bright beams through the gaps in the shutters. Evie, feeling an old familiar sadness, breathed out and then forced her lips into one of those smiles that were supposed to make you feel better if you faked them for long enough.

  ‘Do you spark joy?’ she asked the boxes full of china.

  ‘Actually, no,’ was the answer from the dinner plates and the side plates, the soup plates and the bowls, the teacups and the saucers and the matching salt-and-pepper shakers. ‘We give you guilt and a storage problem.’

  One of the things she had known before she had begun this task was that it was going to require her to make hard decisions about the physical objects that were all she had left of her mother’s life. Evie sifted through the faded, moth-eaten memories of her early childhood, but she didn’t think she had any real, actual memories of her mother using the Royal Worcester. Fine china had never really been her mother’s thing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Evie murmured to the boxes, and moved them to the side of the room for things that had to go.

  She sighed, summoned another modicum of strength, and approached a series of cardboard cartons clearly marked BOOKS. Inside, she knew, there would be novels and poetry, plays and non-fiction, old books, new books, books, books, books . . .

  ‘Do you—’

  ‘Don’t you dare even ask,’ the cartons replied, and Evie moved them all to the ‘to keep’ pile.

  Next was an archive box, and written in her own long-ago handwriting on the side were the words SENTIMENTAL STUFF. Evie, trying to remember what she might have classified in this way, peeled away the tape.

  Here was her first pair of shoes – a pair of tiny doeskin moccasins, stored inside lemon-coloured tissue paper in a decorative cardboard box. And here was a pair of pink silk ballet slippers. Evie had never been a dancer, not for a moment, but at the age of sixteen it had been her fashion statement to wear them everywhere, their tatty ribbons criss-crossed up her calves. Reuben had glued on a pair of makeshift leather soles to help them last.

  There was a pair of beloved jeans, patched until they were composed more of patches than denim. Her first passport. The first pot she’d thrown in ceramics class at high school – lumpy, but with a beautiful midnight blue glaze. Beneath these odd treasures were her diaries.

  Just like the notebooks that filled her backpack, they were a haphazard collection. The earliest were covered in bright-coloured contact paper, presumably by Stella, while the ones from her teenage years were her own creations, their covers decorated with intricate collages of magazine pictures – actors, singers, roses, mermaids, swans, scraps of paisley print. Evie opened the earliest of the books and began to read.

  In the childhood handwriting she’d once thought so grown-up was a story called ‘The Girl with Six Sisters and None at All’, and another called ‘The Seven Princesses of Peregrine’. Book by book, as the writing settled into something Evie recognised as her own hand, the imaginative content gave way to self-examination (why must you sulk, go quiet and retreat, instead of saying what you want?), dreams (one day I will live by the beach with a very small dog and a very large cat), accounts of loves begun and ended, scraps of song lyrics and charts for guitar chords, stanzas of dreadful poetry, and doodles of dying roses.

  Hours passed. Occasionally Evie got up to go to the bathroom, get herself a drink or make yet another
round of the Vegemite toast on which she was subsisting, but mostly she sat, cross-legged on the cowhide rug, and read. There were so many stories, so many thoughts, so many feelings . . . but she could hardly remember having any of them. Between the pages of these books she had pressed, like flowers, herself as a dreamy child, the introverted teenager, a young woman on the edge of adult life. The eight-year-old child wanted her mother back, the fourteen-year-old girl wanted to kiss Will Daintree, the twenty-two-year-old woman wanted to see the world. Every page so different, and yet every one of them a private record of the same thing . . . I want, I want, I want.

  Evie wasn’t sure how diaries so full of anticipation, hope and ideals had been written by the same person who had ended up thinking it was a good idea to move in with Dave Wright, just because he had a spare room and the ability to spin life into words like straw into gold. She wondered, as she read, if the process of growing up was the process of learning not to want, or to squash the wanting deep down inside you where it couldn’t be seen and could only be felt dimly, until something happened to sharpen its edges. Like hearing a love song in a train station.

  By the time Evie came to the last page of the last diary – I am casting off into the world, I wonder what I will find there – the light coming in through the shutters had the golden tone of late evening. She felt drained. Diaries, after all, had a habit of sifting out the average parts of life and leaving only the extremes, but sixteen years’ worth of highs and lows was a lot to absorb in a single sitting. She loaded the diaries back into the archive box and replaced the lid.

  ‘Do you spark joy?’ she asked the box.

  ‘What a dumb question,’ the box replied. ‘I hold the archive of your heart, Evie Greenlees – its joys and its sorrows.’

  Adding the small box to the ‘to keep’ pile, Evie became aware of just how little progress she’d made on sorting through her belongings. Her neck was stiff, her eyes felt dry, and she’d been cooped up in this room all day long.

  Since arriving in Tavistock Row, she’d been contemplating the prospect of the banana lounges in the brick-paved courtyard in the front garden, and now seemed like the time to try them. On her way out the door, she picked up her guitar case.

  ‘Do you spark joy?’ she asked it.

  ‘Cheeky cow,’ the guitar said. ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Just checking.’

  Outside, the sky was a greyish-blue with cloud-strokes of yellow. The scorching heat of the day had dissipated, and the air was mild. Arriving back in the country, she’d found she’d become re-sensitised to the dusty mint of eucalypt trees, and she could smell it now, along with the fragrance of the jasmine that was rioting all over the front of the house next door.

  Evie perched on the edge of one of the banana lounges and settled the guitar’s curvy, symmetrical concert-style body into her lap. As ever, she was pleased by its rich sunburst pattern which moved through shades of reddish brown to amber to pale gold. Once, this guitar had been Reuben’s. Evie was thirteen when Reuben had upgraded to a new guitar, and the old one she’d loved had disappeared – sold and gone forever, she imagined. Then, when Christmas came, the old steel-string was under the tree for her and Evie had played it all day long – the same three songs over and over – until she had blisters on her fingertips.

  Evidently, she’d been diligent enough to loosen the strings before putting the instrument in storage, so it took a while to get it back in any sort of tune. She hadn’t played at all the entire time she’d been away, but although her fingertips felt soft and unfamiliar on the strings, her left hand shaped itself into chords on the fretboard without too much trouble. As a few elementary finger-picking patterns emerged from the muscle-memory of her hands, she found that she still knew how to play the songs that Reuben had taught her – old folk songs that told sad stories, like ‘Scarborough Fair’, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Barbara Allen’.

  Evie had only ever been the most amateur of guitarists, and usually confined her playing to the moody privacy of her own bedroom. All the songs she’d written had either been love songs with repetitive, boppy chorus lines, or break-up songs in a minor key. Now, just as she had done as a teenager, Evie wished she were a better musician. If she were, she might have been able to replicate the love song she’d heard in Waverley Station, played on the cello and the flute.

  Since the day she’d heard it, little grabs of that song’s melody had repeated themselves in her memory. She couldn’t remember it all, just a couple of phrases. Closing her eyes, she hummed one of them, then tried to produce the same sequence of notes on the guitar. Close, she thought. Not exactly, but close. Gradually, little by little, the sound the guitar was making moved closer to the sounds she could hear in her memory. She wondered where the song had come from, whether it had been written by the red-haired boy, or the sandy-haired girl, or someone else entirely.

  Playing just these shreds of the song didn’t give her the same feeling as the one she’d experienced in the train station. But – sitting there on the banana lounge that evening, imperfectly finger-picking the barest bones of a song on her old guitar, while mosquitoes grazed on her ankles – she was able to summon up a trace of it, at least.

  Evie would have been the first to admit that the notes she was playing were a pale imitation of the song in its full glory. They were a wisp of the real thing, at best. And yet, they drifted upwards like a thin trace of smoke, past the star-shaped flowers of the jasmine vine, to brush against the glass of the bay window on the upper storey of the house next door.

  It was fortunate that the window was open just a little, because it allowed the notes of the song to slip into the piano room, slide across the gleaming top of the Steinway, and sneak under the frame of one of the frosted glass doors to the landing. But that was about as far as they could carry on the still air of that summer night. There, the song could do no more than wait and hope to be heard.

  WHEN TOM WENDALE was on the road and found himself with a night to spare in Vancouver, he rarely bothered to alert his mother, even though she lived in a beautiful home in the West End and would for certain have wanted to know he was in town. Rather, it was Tom’s style to slip into the city undetected – doss down for the night on a friend’s sofa, or even just catch a few Zs on the floor at whatever party or jam session he’d managed to find – then slide out again without a trace. Today, though, a combination of sentiment and guilt had made him hump his guitar case and duffel bag all the way from Waterfront Station to Haro Street, where he found himself standing across from a pretty-as-a-picture nineteenth-century weatherboard with a front yard full of magnolias and Sitka spruce.

  Tom crossed the road and stepped onto the verge, sending a grey squirrel scurrying up the trunk of a tree where it paused, furry little arms outstretched, claws gripping the bark, as it watched to see what this slightly roguish-looking man would do next. Tom took a deep breath and opened the gate. He lugged his gear up a wide flight of steps, set it down on the front porch and knocked on the door. While he waited, he observed that the house was freshly painted – its boards in an elegant shade of slate blue, its trimmings as white and bright as royal icing. Ruched curtains hung in the windows of the boxy bay window that protruded out onto the porch, where an outdoor table of white-painted wrought iron was surrounded by matching chairs. Three of them. Even the doormat was pretty, its patterned threads in a blue that matched the colour of the house.

  He knocked again and waited some more, but it seemed there really was nobody home. It occurred to him that he could head back into town – just pick up his guitar and his bag and be on his way without Cassie ever being any the wiser. She’d just keep on with her weekend, oblivious to his proximity, being all tied up with her wealthy husband and her second son and her market basket full of fresh sourdough and big bunches of jonquils, or whatever it was that Cassie did on Saturdays nowadays. But while the thought of absconding gave him some kind of self-defeating pleasure, the walk from the station
had been tiring, and his luggage was heavy.

  Just visible beneath the fronds of a hanging plant at the side of the front door was a key safe. Cassie was fond of key safes. Back when she’d been a single, working mum and Tom had been her only kid – her latch-key kid – she’d usually installed one outside the front door of their apartment. There had been many apartments over the years of his childhood: apartments that were never freshly painted, and – no matter the city – never in the kind of neighbourhood where you’d just go ahead and leave an expensive matchy-matchy doormat lying around outside.

  Tom considered the key safe.

  Was it possible that he knew the code?

  He scrolled the tiny dials until they made the combination 1812, four numbers that nodded to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, but were also one way – of Canada’s many ways – to write Tom’s birth date: 18 December.

  Tom had a guitarist’s fingernails – short on the left hand for finding the notes on the fretboard, long on the right hand for finger-picking – and he used one of his long nails to flick the small catch on the safe. It slid easily and the safe door popped open, revealing the key; which proved, Tom supposed, that at least in this small four-digit way he was still a presence in his mother’s life.

  Inside, hats and coats and scarves were hung on a row of hooks, all the garments artfully tossed together like something out of a magazine spread. Tom supposed you couldn’t go far wrong if everything you bought was blue or grey or cream and cost a bomb. He took off his boots in consideration of the plush dove grey carpet, but suddenly his creased black stovepipe pants, his denim jacket, and indeed all the rest of him, felt dusty and shabby and road-worn.

  Once upon a time in this house’s history, a weary traveller might have been shown to a room with a washstand, and given a big pitcher of warm water and a freshly laundered towel. Instead his welcome was a noise that sounded something like yerr-rrrrowwwellll. It took Tom a moment to realise that the sound was coming from the smoosh-faced Russian blue cat that had appeared in the hallway, her tail curled into a question mark, her smoky coat toning beautifully with the carpet.