The Lost Love Song

by Minnie Darke

  ‘An only child with six sisters?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Seven girls? Sounds like a fairy tale,’ Arie observed.

  ‘Funny you should say that. When I was unpacking all the stuff I left behind in Melbourne, I found this old story I wrote when I was a kid. Kind of embarrassing, really. It was called “The Seven Princesses of Peregrine”. They all had special talents,’ she said, laughing at herself.

  ‘And when you say “they”, you mean “we”?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So, what was yours?’

  ‘Ah. Mine was very special.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  He could see her consider whether or not she wanted to share.

  ‘My special ability was that I could turn back time. Get things to turn out differently.’

  Arie felt these words go through him like a sword, and he saw that Evie had seen it happen. Concern furrowed her brow, but he shot her a smile he hoped was convincing. ‘More wine?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and he poured.

  ‘So,’ he said, searching for a way to steer the conversation back to safe ground, and remembering the night he’d seen her lost in concentration with notebook and pen, ‘do you still write?’

  This, Arie saw, set something sparkling a little more brightly in her eyes.

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  ‘What do you write? Fiction? Non-fiction?’

  ‘Nothing so sensible,’ she said. ‘I write poetry.’

  ‘I’ve never met a poet before.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t be getting ahead of yourself just yet.’

  A waiter swerved in beside Evie, as if on silent roller-skates, and placed a plate of ginger duck in front of her, then coasted around to Arie’s side of the table to deliver a prawn laksa, which Arie now regretted ordering. All that awkward potential for things to drip and leave turmeric-coloured splotches on his pale blue shirt. He was grateful for the thickness of the napkin he settled in his lap.

  When dinner was done, Arie suggested a walk on the narrow pathway that led away from the restaurant along the water’s edge. The night was mild, and the path empty except for one or two other couples strolling hand in hand, and the occasional cyclist standing high in the pedals while swooping around the many bends.

  As they left behind the haze of light from the restaurant, Evie felt the release of a small amount of pressure now that they were walking side by side rather than looking at one another constantly in the eye.

  ‘What’s the time?’ Arie asked.

  Evie didn’t even look at her watch. ‘It’s still a few minutes to five.’

  ‘It’s not, of course,’ he said.

  ‘Not here, I guess,’ Evie said. ‘Or not now.’

  ‘I hazard a guess that there’s a story behind that watch.’

  If Arie had been an archaeologist, Evie thought, then he’d just decided to dig a layer deeper. She said, ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Is it a story you tell often?’

  ‘Almost never.’

  ‘Almost never. But not absolutely never.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Will you tell it to me?’

  So, this was where it happened, Evie thought. Here, with the dark river at their feet and the lights of the city hovering just beneath the ripples of its surface – this was where she traded her story for his. This was where she told him why she wore a stopped watch, and he told her why it was that he had never married. Evie took a breath.

  ‘It was my mother’s watch. She died, though.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘That’s so young. What kind of accident?’

  ‘She was an aid worker with Médecins Sans Frontières, a nurse. She went to Sudan.’

  ‘Hang on. You just said you were eight? Where were you when this happened?’

  Evie felt warmed by his incredulity, even at the same time as she didn’t want him to think badly of her mother.

  ‘My mum . . . she was kind of done with the mothering thing by the time I was born. My big sisters are quite a bit older than me, and she was over it, really. The only reason I was born was because my dad wanted me, apparently, but then he left to start a whole new family’ – he didn’t want me that much, as it turned out – ‘so there was my mother with this little baby, when what she really wanted’ – what she wanted more than she wanted me – ‘was to go overseas and help people. She had a calling, I guess. She waited until I was eight. The plan was that she was going to go for a year. Just a year.’

  ‘She must have been brave.’

  ‘She was,’ Evie said, even though she knew herself to be surmising just as much as Arie was. Her memories of her mother were twenty years old or more. Only a handful were crisp and vivid. The rest were either shapeless things, colourless, or else they looked suspiciously like the photographs that had survived from the first seven years of her life.

  ‘So, what happened to her?’

  ‘It was a landmine. She was in a Jeep, with two colleagues. They were driving in convoy, and the car my mother was in . . . it was in the lead. They were blown apart, all three of them. It was the driver from the car behind. He was the one who found her watch, and sent it home with all her other things. But it had stopped.’

  ‘At almost five o’clock?’

  She nodded, and then averted her thoughts from the track they were travelling down. Sometimes, in dreams, Evie couldn’t avoid all the images that came along with the story of her mother’s watch.

  ‘I really don’t know very much more than that.’

  This was true. What Evie remembered of the time when she was eight years old was that the surface of her existence had yawned open and swallowed her mother whole, but then – like the sea after a tidal wave – it had all smoothed over again, and life had gone on, with her wondering what the hell had happened and if it would ever, could ever, happen again.

  Half a heartbeat before Arie reached out to take Evie’s hand, she knew both that he was going to do it and that she wanted him to. His hand made hers feel small, and the warmth of his skin made her realise that hers was a little cool.

  It was so weird, Evie mused, the way things like this happened. His hand, her hand, curled together – it was at once very innocent and entirely intimate. He and she had just crossed a line together. This was the first time they had touched. And yet they had just kept walking, and the moment had gone unremarked between them. Although, she supposed, one way of thinking about it was that the touch stood in for the words. I like you. I want to be closer to you.

  ‘What was it like for you, to lose your mother?’ Arie asked.

  Evie sighed. It was not a question with a simple answer. They walked in silence for a moment while she thought of the best way to answer it.

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Mandela Effect?’ she asked.

  ‘As in Nelson Mandela?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He has an effect?’

  ‘He does. It’s this thing about collective misremembering. It got its name because there are a large number of people who claim to have remembered hearing about Nelson Mandela’s death in prison, back in the 1980s. Which, of course, never happened. But there are people who are sure, really sure, that it did. They’re even convinced that they remember seeing footage of his funeral on television.’

  ‘What does that have to do with your mother?’ he asked – curiously though, not impatiently.

  ‘Nelson Mandela’s death is only one example. There are lots of others. The children’s books, The Berenstain Bears? People will swear black and blue that in their childhood, they were called the Berenstein Bears, with an e. And the logo on Ford cars? There are people who vow that the Ford logo is wrong, that the way it looks now doesn’t match their memories. And it isn’t just that the logo’s been changed recently, they say – if they look at old ph
otos, they claim the logo has been changed in those old photos, too. That the photos are wrong.’

  ‘But how is that possible?’ Arie asked.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s possible or not. But the point is that people see the Mandela Effect as evidence of a . . . of a . . . what would your Doctor say? A tear in the space-time continuum? They say it could be proof that the multiverse exists. Maybe the Mandela Effect happens because there’s some kind of crossover between this version of the world – the one where Nelson Mandela lived and was released from prison and went on to govern South Africa – and another version of it, where he died in prison before any of that was possible. Or maybe it’s proof that people are time travelling and changing the course of history – you know, saving Nelson Mandela’s life, but not erasing everybody’s memory of his death. Or just messing about with details, like the Ford logo, or the way you spell “Berenstain Bears”. But what it means to me is that I’m at least allowed to dream. To imagine that somewhere . . . somewhere out there, in another reality, on another version of Earth, my mother was in the second Jeep, and not the first one. Which means in that other reality, there’s a version of me who has a mother. Somewhere to go home to. I like to think of that version of me, sometimes.’

  ‘A different version of the same life,’ Arie said.

  Evie nodded. And waited for Arie to tell her about Diana.

  They had come to a small timber platform built out over the riverbank, where a pair of park benches offered a place to sit and rest. Arie and Evie did not sit, but let go of each other’s hands and stood, almost touching, as they leaned on the railing. Out on the river a late-night water taxi chugged past, leaving behind the diagonal pulses of its wake and a short burst of an overplayed pop song.

  Arie looked up at the city’s sky, smudged with smog and all the light it trapped. It had been a long time, he thought, since he’d seen a proper night sky, clear and black and filled with stars. Was it possible that somewhere out there, beyond the fug, beyond the stars even, beyond all that was known, beyond all that could so far be proven to exist, there lurked facsimiles of this Earth orbiting facsimiles of this Earth’s sun?

  Right now, Arie supposed, would be the perfect moment to tell Evie about Diana. He could tell her that somewhere, on one of those other Earths, his beautiful and talented girlfriend went away on a concert tour, first stop Singapore. Then, uneventfully and quite safely, she flew from that city to Paris, where she played Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2 and the audience gave her a standing ovation. Onwards she travelled to Salzburg and Prague and St Petersburg, and then she came home to him, and they were married.

  For several enjoyable months they tried for a child, and although Diana was very sick in the early months of the pregnancy, she glowed during the second and third trimesters, and although it hurt her to turn down the many invitations she received to perform in the far-flung corners of the world, and although she shed a few tears over the hiatus in her career, it didn’t matter so much when she gave birth to their . . . daughter? Son? Arie didn’t know. There was no telescope in the world long enough or powerful enough for Arie to look into that world and find out.

  Yes, the way was open to tell Evie all of this. But Arie didn’t want to. Not yet.

  ‘So what do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the multiverse? Alternative worlds? Do you believe in all that?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Evie admitted. ‘But I like to think about it. I like to think of that other me, out there on her other Earth.’

  ‘You find it comforting?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  But Arie wasn’t sure this was how it was for him. Thinking of himself and Diana living on in another reality made him feel as if he’d been abandoned here on this particular, benighted Earth, while his actual life went on somewhere else.

  ‘It doesn’t make you feel as if the real you is gone, and it’s only the husk of you that’s been left behind here?’

  He saw Evie smile in profile.

  ‘Oh, no. I imagine that we’re both quite real,’ she said, still looking out over the river. Then she turned to him, just one elbow on the railing now. ‘That other me? She’s out there, doing her own thing. I’m here, doing mine. We just got dealt different hands, that’s all.’

  ‘But there are winning hands and losing hands, aren’t there?’

  ‘I know winning is the point when you’re playing cards. But in life, I’m not so sure it’s always the best goal.’

  ‘So, how are you different, you two?’

  Evie thought. ‘She has more confidence than I do. She’s stronger.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because her mother didn’t go forever, only for a while. Because her mother did whatever she needed to do and came home again. They had time, that Evie and her mother, to replace whatever was missing.’

  ‘And what about this you?’

  ‘This me?’

  ‘Yes, this one right here. What’s her story?’

  ‘Me? Oh, I’m just blowing in the breeze.’

  She looked so wistful saying this that Arie acted entirely on impulse. Without thinking at all, he reached out and touched his hand to Evie’s face, his palm against the pretty curve of her jaw, her silver earring brushing the back of his hand. She didn’t pull away, but closed her eyes and breathed out. He felt a vague heaviness as she allowed his hand to take up a fraction of the weight of her head. With his thumb, Arie stroked her cheek, and she opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  ‘Is this all right?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said.

  When he kissed her, it was nothing like the stilted kiss he’d shared with Grace on New Year’s Eve. This was real.

  Eyes closed, heart beating, he could smell mint in the foreground, and in the background the scent of the gum trees that hung their leaves down over the water. He could feel the warm softness of the front of her body pressing against his chest. To his happy surprise, as one hand slipped up under her hair and the other rested on her hip, pulling her gently in to him, he found that he remembered exactly what to do.

  Do you know what’s going to happen to me next in my life, Evie had said to Dave. I’ll tell you. I’m going to meet somebody. Somebody nice. Somebody really nice. And they’re going to want me. Really, properly want me, not just kind of. And it’s going to be as simple as that.

  And Arie did want her. Evie could tell from the way he kissed her. His story, any more of her story . . . that was all forgotten for the moment. As the kisses became deeper and deeper, Evie knew that she was right. He really, properly and truly wanted her. And it was going to be as simple as that.

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS quiet inside the Renault on the drive from the restaurant car park to Tavistock Row, it was the opposite of quiet inside Arie’s head. He didn’t want to be presumptuous, but at the same time he’d felt what was inside and underneath that kiss, and his mind was reeling with it.

  He watched the road but was aware of Evie in the passenger seat, fidgeting with the moonstone ring she wore on the middle finger of her left hand. He didn’t know for certain what was going to happen next – she might not want to take things any further, she might decide no. Equally, she might really want to. He had remembered how to kiss her, but that part was easy in comparison. It had been nine years since he’d made love to a woman for the first time, and over two since he’d been with anyone at all.

  Whether or not they ended up in bed together, Arie was almost certain they weren’t going to say goodbye out on the street. He tried to think of a way to make sure they went to her house and not his. At his house, there were pictures of Diana on every second wall, and an entire room devoted to a piano that he didn’t play. Diana’s winter coats, her hats, her umbrella . . . they were all still hanging on the rack just inside the front door.

  Arie hadn’t been into 12A since it had been renovated, although he and Diana had taken the opportunity to look inside during the open home when t
he place had been on the market. Perhaps he could tell Evie he’d like to see what the owners had done with the place.

  As he turned the car into Tavistock Row, he was aware that he felt more alert than he could remember feeling in a very long time – awake in a crisp, fresh kind of way. It was the complete opposite of the drained, lead-heavy wakefulness of the insomniac in the early hours of the morning.

  But as he approached the stretch of the street where his house stood, he saw that there was a car already parked out the front, and his sense of anticipation turned swiftly into a different kind of anxiety. It was as if his fizzing nervous pleasure had undergone a chemical reaction and changed its colour to guilt. The car was small, and white, and familiar to him. The interior light was switched on, and in its glow he could just make out the shape of somebody sitting in the driver’s seat. It was Belinda Clare.

  Evie saw the car, too. There was nothing remarkable about it, but she felt Arie react as if he’d been given an electric shock. She glanced over at him and saw that his jaw was tight with stress.

  There was room to park his car right outside number 12, even if the white car had possibly made the gap a little tight. As they came closer, Evie caught a distant glimpse of the rear-view mirror inside the car. The person reflected there, she was fairly sure, was a woman with short fair hair. Evie expected Arie to slow to a stop and reverse into the free space, but instead he hit the brakes, threw the gear lever into reverse, and backed into the driveway of the nearest house before retreating along Tavistock Row in the direction they’d just come.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Evie asked.

  ‘Not . . . really,’ Arie said.

  ‘What’s going on? Is there something wrong?’

  He turned the car out of Tavistock Row, left into the nearest cross-street, his hand clenched tight around the steering wheel. He pulled up at the kerb and looked at Evie, his face pained.