by Minnie Darke
Later that afternoon, Cassie Carter stood at her kitchen bench surrounded by all the things she needed to make a big hearty braise. Kilmauski was threading through her ankles, begging for the scraps of beef, and through an archway, in the living room, Tom and Felix were jamming. Cassie couldn’t for the life of her name the tune they were playing; she only knew that there was pressure at the corners of her eyes and that she had never before been so grateful for onions, because they meant she could cry for a perfectly good reason, and not because it made her so insanely happy that her big son and her small son were making music together, Tom with his slide guitar on his lap, Felix right beside him on the cello.
Cassie listened to the glittery, shimmery sound of the slide guitar. Underneath it was the smooth, stout-and-meltedchocolate voice of the cello. She didn’t recognise the tune, but she knew the feeling that it spelled out, and her swollen heart was singing along.
WHEN THE SONG arrived on the landing at Arie’s house that warm February night, the space was otherwise quiet and still. The frosted glass panels of the piano room doors caught traces of streetlight, refracting them into a soft glow that touched on the timber banister, the half-open doors that led into other rooms, and the framed photographs that were mounted on the wall of the stairwell.
There was a picture of Diana – pensive, hands clasped together behind her back – outside the front of Carnegie Hall in her famous red dress. And one of Arie, in sunglasses, resting on the oars of a dinghy in Central Park, with flowering trees and skyscrapers behind him. And one of Diana and Arie together, kissing, the picture taken so close up that the famous Duomo of Florence had been reduced to nothing more than a smudge of Tuscan colour in the background.
The stairs leading down from the landing fell gradually into the shadows of an empty hallway rimmed with closed doors, and behind one of these was Arie, sitting on a stool at the kitchen bench. A stubby of beer stood open at his elbow, and his sister’s wedding invitation was propped against the screen of his laptop.
Arie could picture Heidi, at her table in Sydney’s Blue Mountains with her stack of freshly handmade paper, dipping her fountain pen into a bottle of ink. She’d have been wearing a pinafore most likely, made of something homespun, and a pair of house slippers she’d fashioned herself out of a repurposed woollen jumper and a bicycle tyre. Or similar. Their father described Heidi as the ‘mung bean’ of the family, and she’d met her match in Greg, a park ranger with a headful of remarkably tidy dreadlocks.
The wedding was to be held in an orchard close to their home, some nine hundred kilometres to the north of Melbourne. Although Arie had been well aware that he needed to get on with the business of arranging his journey, it was only tonight, when he’d looked again at the date on the invitation, that he’d come to the acute realisation that the event was now less than two weeks away. He hadn’t needed to look at the calendar to know that between now and then lay the minefield of 4 March. Diana’s birthday. This year, she’d have been thirty-five years old.
Arie wondered if he and Diana would have had a wedding by this time. After everything he’d said to her on the night before she left, would she have come home with an answer for him? Would that answer have been yes? Or would Heidi and Greg have beaten them to the altar, even now? What would Diana have been like at the age of thirty-five? Would she have begun to hear the ticking of her biological clock by now? Or would she have been one of those women for whom the clock somehow remained dormant?
He brought her face to mind, in extreme close-up. He considered himself lucky that he had spent so much time studying it. He could easily picture the small indentation at the tip of her freckled nose, the uneven lay of the individual hairs of her pale ginger eyebrows, and the many different colours between amber and green that jostled about in her irises. It would have been nice to know which parts of her a child would have inherited, and which parts of him, but Arie knew this was thinking that did nothing but hurt. He tried to refocus himself: on Heidi’s wedding, on practicalities.
The rest of the Johnsons had already booked their flights and arranged for their hire cars, and Arie knew that his parents and his older sisters, their partners and children, were all bunking together in the same sprawling guesthouse, where the cousins would be able to run riot together in the hallways and gardens.
His mother and older sisters had been on his case in recent weeks, urging him to get organised, but each time they asked how he was planning to get to the wedding, and where he was intending to stay, Arie had been evasive. If he told his mother that he was going to drive, then she might come up with some kind of ruse to ensure he had company on the ten-hour journey, and if his sisters knew, they might embark on a campaign to persuade him that it was time to start catching planes again.
It wasn’t that he was afraid to fly, exactly. It was that everything to do with air travel – advertisements on billboards, spam emails about flight sales, the sight of jet streams in the sky – had a tendency to set off his own personal movie reel of the last minutes of Diana’s life. As far as he could, he avoided driving anywhere near the airport, because this only reminded him of the morning he had driven Diana there and just . . . let her go. Going anywhere near that place made Arie feel negligent. He couldn’t fathom how he’d taken her there instead of taking possession of her passport, or why he’d kissed her and waved her farewell instead of begging her, begging her, to stay.
On his laptop, Arie searched for the guesthouse whose name his mother had messaged to him. Several times. It turned out that there was a room available – a single on the top floor – but when Arie paused to imagine the combined force of all his nieces and nephews, from the sulky tween to the toddler, he clicked open a new browser window and launched a search for nearby alternatives. The place he eventually settled on was a cottage of sorts that had once been a barn. The online pictures showed rustic timber interiors, an open fire, and geese grazing on a stretch of green grass beyond the windows. Given the season, he wouldn’t need the fire, and neither would he need the second of the two bedrooms, but the place looked comfortable, and – more importantly – it was staggering distance from the wedding venue.
Reaching the part of the payment page where he needed to give his credit card number, Arie felt for his wallet in the back pocket of his pants. It wasn’t there, but he knew where it would be: on his bedside table. He stepped into the darkened hallway and took the stairs two at a time.
The music reached him just before he set foot on the landing, and although it seemed to be coming from the piano room, it was not the sound of a piano. It was a stringed instrument . . . possibly a guitar. What he heard was nothing more than a series of notes, being played in a halting way, but even so this was enough to make him stop. He stood for a moment, his feet bare on the carpet of the landing, his shirt half untucked. He listened to the way the music began purposefully before dwindling away into nothing . . . and then started again.
He pushed open the glass doors. Inside the piano room, the dark lid of the Steinway gleamed like the surface of a lake. One of the angled panes of the bay window had been left open, and through the narrow gap between sash and sill, the phrase of music came again – soft and tentative, and somehow familiar.
Standing in the half-hexagon shape of the window, Arie looked out over the front yard of the house next door. The woman he’d seen arriving in her winter-weight clothes with that massive pack on her back looked entirely different now, sitting on the edge of one of the lounges with a guitar on her lap, wearing a light summer skirt and a pale camisole top, her dark hair held back with a headscarf. Her bare legs were crossed at the ankles, her head was bent in concentration over her guitar, and as he watched her play, it seemed to him that she gave off an air that was at once entirely self-sufficient and just a little lonely.
She played until the song petered out again, as if she had followed a thread as far as she could and had now come to its frayed end, leaving a special kind of expectant silence in its wake. Arie had a
sense that he knew this song, and that he knew how it ought to continue, but he couldn’t grasp it well enough to sing it, or hum it, or even really to picture it in his mind. It was like playing hide and seek with a ghost, or trying to catch a cloud with a butterfly net.
Arie wasn’t good with music; not in that way. He was nothing like Diana. All she’d ever needed was a short string of notes, and then she’d be singing the rest of the tune as if it were the simplest thing in the world to draw that particular ribbon of song out of the hundreds, thousands, she kept in her musical memory.
‘Listen!’ she’d say to him in good-natured frustration when he was unable to name a song. ‘You know this one. You’ve heard it before.’
Once, when they had been together for a few years, Diana had taken him with her to a nursing home not far from her mother’s house, to visit her first music teacher. The woman was ancient and almost frighteningly frail, and although she had not been able to remember Diana, precisely, she had been perfectly pleased to have young visitors. Arie and Diana had helped her into a wheelchair and taken her to the recreation room, where she had sat beside the piano and happily sung along to every single song Diana played for her.
‘Music is the last thing we forget,’ Diana had later explained. ‘I read a book about it. Apparently, we have this special place in our brains for remembering music, and it’s completely separate from the parts where we store every other thing. And when we hear music that we know, our brains light up in completely different ways than when we hear music we don’t. We’re wired up to feel something special when we hear music that reminds us of something.’
Was his brain lighting up in that special way right now? Did he know this song, or was it only his imagination that it sounded something like the song Diana had played, here in this room, on the night before she went away? Was it the same song, or was it only the fact that he was standing here in this particular room, on a summer night, that made him think it could be? For the life of him, Arie would not have been able to say, but he wanted to know.
When the light was on outside 12A Tavistock Row, as it was that night, a semi-circle of brightness spread outwards from the portico at the front door. The curve of light swept over the courtyard with its matched pair of lounges, over the well-kept garden beds and lawn, and ended at the low wall which separated the yard from the footpath. This wall was broken by a gap in the brickwork where you might have expected a white picket gate to swing, although none did.
When Evie looked up from her guitar, she saw that someone was standing in that gap, just on the far side of the rim of light, and it took her a moment to realise that it was the man from the house next door. The way he stood – slightly awkwardly, one hand at his chin – gave Evie the impression that he wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. He looked as if he’d have appreciated a door to knock on, but instead had found himself standing at a threshold made only of warm summer air.
Although it was past ten o’clock, he was wearing what looked to be a work shirt, mostly untucked. His sleeves were rolled halfway up his forearms, and he wore a pair of sandals that Evie suspected might have been an afterthought, put on as he left the house.
When she’d encountered him on her first day here, her fleeting impression had been that he was one of those men who were good-looking quite by accident. He was lean, with longish dark-blond hair, brown eyes and gentle features – not at all one of those sharp, put-together types who were out to make an impression in their shiny shoes and fashionably cut pants.
She placed a silencing hand over the sound-hole of the guitar and smiled at him curiously.
‘Hello,’ she said, in a way that was both a greeting and a question.
He smiled back, although the expression around his eyes appeared anxious, as if he had something difficult or awkward to say to her.
‘I, um . . . you were playing the guitar,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ Evie said, colouring now that she understood. He’d come to tell her the noise was bothering him. ‘I’m so sorry. I meant to play quietly, but I can stop.’
Evie made a move to put her guitar down, but she could see he meant it when he quickly said, ‘No, no. That’s not . . . that’s not it at all.
‘I’m sorry,’ he went on, ‘but . . . you know how it is when you hear a song, and you can’t quite place it? I heard you playing, and I felt like I knew the song, but . . . I wasn’t sure. I just came over to ask what it was.’
Evie was taken utterly by surprise. ‘The song I was playing just now? This one?’
She played a few bars, even more tentatively now there was somebody watching her.
‘Yes,’ he said, taking a step within the boundary of the property, into the semi-circle of light.
‘You know it?’ Evie asked, sparking up with hopefulness. For all she knew, it was a song that half the world was familiar with, but one that had somehow passed her by. If he could tell her what the song was, then she’d be able to find it and listen to it again properly. ‘What is it?’
‘I have no idea. I just thought I might have heard it once. That’s all. I was hoping you’d . . . be able to tell me.’
‘Ah, I see,’ Evie said, realising that this was not going to be simple after all. ‘I wish I did know.’
‘Where did you come across it?’
‘In a train station, strangely enough,’ she said. ‘I heard a pair of kids playing it. I mean, I say “kids”, but they were teenagers. One of them played the cello, the other one the flute. It was so beautiful, and I’ve been trying to piece it together, but I’m not even close to doing it justice. For one thing, it had two parts, and this is just what I can remember of the melody.’
She played through the scrap of song again, then let her hand fall away from the guitar. ‘I’m sorry. That’s as much as I know.’
‘Train station?’ he asked.
‘Edinburgh.’
He nodded, although he seemed more lost in his thoughts than present. Now that the anxiety had disappeared from his face, Evie could see something else in his expression. It was in the lines at the sides of his mouth, and the faint hollowness around his eyes. She knew that look – had known it in her own face. Sorrow. She wondered what it was that had put it there.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you,’ she said, plucking one string of her guitar, ‘with the song.’
‘I guess it’s just going to remain a mystery.’
‘I guess so.’
He seemed to shake a thought away. ‘Well, it was probably just my imagination. The song . . . I probably don’t know it.’
A silence settled between them then, but rather than rush to fill it, Evie counselled herself to sit quietly and see what he would do next – keep the conversation going, or just let it drop like a rope into a river.
‘Well, I should go,’ he said.
Evie gave a small wave of farewell, while somewhere in her imagination a rope went splish.
IN THE DAYS and nights that followed, Arie listened out for the sound of guitar music from the house next door, but it never came. Instead, the song played on his mind, the insistent companion to his thoughts as he stood in the shower, waited in queues for coffee, and climbed the stairs to the offices of Sonder Digital. The song was like a nagging question, and part of him wanted to search out the answer, to solve the mystery. Another part, though, already knew that this was a quest doomed to failure. He was all too aware that there were some things you could never find by determination alone.
In a moment of confidence, though, he downloaded a song-recognition app onto his phone. He sang the notes he could recall into the microphone, feeling like an idiot as he did so, but the only soundbite he could manage was too short, so the technology could give him no answers. He tried a different app, and then another, and by the time he was willing to admit the complete hopelessness of the enterprise he’d been at it for over two wasted hours, behaving like a thirsty man in a desert, intoxicated by a mirage.
While the song eluded him, though, t
he woman in the house next door seemed constantly on the edge of his consciousness. It wasn’t that he did anything as deliberate as watch out for her, but he found that he was very aware of her, there on the periphery of his life.
On Wednesday morning, he noted that she had remembered to put the garbage bin out on the street on the correct day, and also that she was a conscientious enough guest to clear the junk mail from the mouth of the letterbox. That night, coming home late after dinner at Richard and Lenka’s, he saw that she’d put the light on in the front yard, and was sitting out on one of the lounges in the balmy, late-summer evening. She had no guitar this time, but was instead writing feverishly in a notebook. Arie realised he’d quite like to talk with her again, but although he swung open the gate to his yard as noisily as he could, she was so deep in concentration that she didn’t look up from her page.
The following morning, he saw her sitting on the low brick wall, wearing a crumpled dress and a hat with a broad brim, the twin points of her dark hair framing her face beneath it. He noticed that her forearms and calves were now not quite so white as they had been, and that her shoulders under the straps of her dress were pink with sunburn. Arie waved to her, and she waved back, and as he slid behind the wheel of his car, he considered asking if she needed him to drive her somewhere. He was still trying to decide if this was a good idea or not when a car pulled up to the pavement in front of her, and she spoke for a moment to the driver through the wound-down passenger-side window before opening the door and getting in.
Friday morning there was no sign of her, and it occurred to Arie that she might easily have come to the end of her time at the place, and that the next people he would see letting themselves into 12A would be the husband-and-wife cleaning team, with their buckets and mops and white stacks of fresh linen. When there was no sign of her again that evening as Arie got out of his car and went indoors, it began to seem even more likely that she had gone.