by Minnie Darke
It was here that Cassie applied the six-month rule: a rolling program of decluttering that had been in operation since Felix was a baby. Anything in his room that she considered borderline went into a plastic tub. The plastic tub went into the back shed, and if – within six months – Felix asked after any of its contents, she was able to produce them, with a smile. But when the time was up, all that remained went into a charity bin.
At the end of a long, dirty couple of hours, Cassie closed the door on Felix’s clean and fresh-smelling bedroom, and crossed the lawn with the heavy plastic tub in her arms. She shoved it under a low shelf in the shed and went back indoors for a well-earned cup of tea and slice of cake. And somewhere in the middle of that tub was a half-full and beaten-up music notebook, bound with black leather, and with a strip of red ribbon for a placeholder. Within its pages – written in pencil – was a love song in the hand of Diana Clare.
On the east side of the North American continent, where the day was a few hours older than it was in the west, Lucie Doran was taking a bath. Her tub wasn’t the sort in which stretching out was possible. Rather, it was the sort that fitted into the bathroom of a cramped apartment on New York’s Upper East Side: so small that she had to dangle her heat-reddened legs over the ceramic edge while she soaped her calves and got ready with the lady-pink Schick. But before Lucie swiped away the stubble, she wrote something in the whiteness of the lather.
One word. Two letters.
NO.
By the time Lucie got out of the bath, the sky beyond her window had taken on a pretty pink-and-orange glow. She dressed carefully. In track pants. Ha! Take that! However, if she was truthful, the track pants she’d chosen were her best: dusky pink and high-waisted and just nicely clingy around a butt that was keeping its shape pretty well considering it now belonged to a woman of almost thirty-seven years of age.
Yes, this year, Lucie Doran, lead singer and banjo player for Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers, would turn thirty-seven. The precise date in October when this would occur was firmly on her horizon and had been for much of her life – for such was the fate of a girl whose name was a soundalike for that of a pop song heroine. Ever since little Lucie had misheard Marianne Faithfull singing ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, she’d regarded the age of thirty-seven as some kind of landmark, a deadline by which time she had to have her shit together.
While Lucy Jordan had longed for Paris, and a sports car, and a warm breeze blowing through her hair, Lucie Doran – being a girl from Prince Edward Island – wasn’t overly fussed about convertibles. And since her band had hit the medium-time (not the big-time, yet), she’d been to Paris, more than once, and a lot of other cities besides. No, Lucie Doran didn’t want a soft-top and a baguette. She wanted not to be dicked around, not by anyone, but especially not by men, and most especially not by him.
She and Elijah Tripp had history, and a lot of it. Lucie and Elijah had been twenty-three (her) and twenty-two (him) the very first time they’d met, on a cold summer’s day in the dance hall of an Alaskan resort hotel under the shadow of a snow-capped Denali. He was tall, thin and elfin, with almost-black hair and eyes of heartthrob blue. He was standing by the stage when he called out, ‘Hey, banjo girl! Can you come over here and give me a hand?’
She hadn’t known his name, but she’d seen him around – with a tray in the line-up at the resort canteen, leaning on the railing with a beer in hand and taking in the view, crouching down in his black pants and cowboy boots by the hot tub talking to the cruise ship girls. She’d also watched him play the fiddle on stage with a bluegrass outfit that was, other than him, made up of guys with silver hair and impressive moustaches. He played the kind of music that made something inside of her want to sing, and the way his face looked while he played – eyes closed, brow creasing in new ways with every note – told her that there was one hell of a big, deep well of feeling inside of him. If he wanted a hand with something, then twenty-three-year-old Lucie would oblige.
‘What d’you need, fiddle boy?’
‘Jump up there a minute,’ he’d said, indicating the stage. ‘I just want to see if the stage is level.’
So she’d stepped onto the stage in her long skirts and tall boots, unsuspecting, her banjo hanging across her body by its strap.
‘Now what?’ she’d asked.
‘Can you play a bit?’
Eager to impress, she’d launched into the Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’. Lucie played the banjo clawhammer style. She’d learned it from her grandfather, Kit Doran; on the Atlantic coast, that was a name music people knew. While she played, fiddle boy had stood down on the floor, tapping a toe on the boards and grinning.
‘So,’ she said, over the notes of her own music, ‘how is this supposed to help?’
‘You must know, banjo girl.’
‘Know what?’
He winked at her, creasing his whole face. ‘What I was always told about how to find out if a stage is level, is that it’s when the banjo player’s drooling out of both sides of their mouth at once.’
In the moment all she’d been able to do was call him an ass-wipe, but she’d got him back properly a few days later by sneaking backstage at the dance hall and unstringing his fiddle right before a gig.
The pranks had gone back and forth for a week before Lucie found herself in Elijah’s bed doing tequila laybacks and singing drunken harmonies to campfire songs. That wasn’t the only thing they’d done in his bed, of course. That was the problem. From the very beginning it had seemed that Lucie’s body knew Elijah’s, and his knew hers, like those bodies had been sneaking off together for years to practise without the brains or hearts within knowing a single thing about it.
For nearly fourteen years, that’s the way it had been. There had been some periods of time when he had some girlfriend or another, or when she was seeing someone else, but just about every time their paths crossed that old electricity would arc up and they’d find themselves between the sheets. Lucie was ashamed to admit that there hadn’t always been a clear demarcation between her relationships with other men and her dalliances with Elijah Tripp. He’d been the cause of her breaking up with several serious guys, with serious intentions – not because her lovers had found out about her infidelity, but because being with Elijah always had the side effect of making other men seem kind of . . . colourless.
But any time in her life she’d tried to pin Elijah down – ask him what their relationship was all about, suggest they try to coordinate their lives so they saw each other more often on the road – all she’d got for her troubles was a cheeky grin, a kiss goodbye and a promise that she’d see him again, somewhere down the track.
Lucie blow-dried her hair – shoulder length, fair and wavy – and took to it with the straightening tongs, half freaking out about and half enjoying the faint smell of singeing it caused. She put green paste under her eyes to conceal the bagginess there, and smoothed foundation over the top. She spent a good fifteen minutes on her eyeshadow, but before she traced the curving outlines of her lips, she took the liner pencil and wrote herself a little message on the bottom corner of her mirror. NO.
‘No,’ she said to her reflection, over-enunciating. Then, ‘Uh-uh. Nope. Nah. Not happening. Never again. No, no, no, no, no, no.’
Somehow, the last six syllables started to sing the doo-dahdays from ‘Camptown Races’, and then Lucie Doran was humming, putting her make-up away in the cupboard, checking the pasta sauce in the pot – nothing fancy, mind. And there would certainly be no dessert.
She tweaked the alignment of the cutlery on the table, and had to admit that the setting looked kind of cosy. But then, what could you do in an apartment that was only big enough for a table the size of a postage stamp, and where you were better off with stools than chairs on the basis that they took up less space?
When she heard the knock at the door, Lucie felt a surge of nerves, but she took herself in hand and breathed. With the help of a sticky note fixed to the back of her fron
t door, she rehearsed, quietly.
‘No.’
And then she opened the door to Elijah Tripp.
In the many years they’d known each other, Lucie Doran had opened a lot of different doors to Elijah Tripp. Doors that belonged to resorts up and down the Alaskan coast, doors in the homes of people who were kind enough to billet her at folk festivals in Woodford and Cygnet, Stornoway and Telluride, the Brecon Beacons and Ballyshannon. Hotel doors, motel doors, doors of rented apartments, the downstairs door at her mom and dad’s house on PEI.
No, Lucie reminded herself. No.
‘Well, hello Lucie D,’ Elijah said, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek.
‘Good to see you, friend,’ she said. Friend. Say after me, friend.
It had been six months since she’d last seen him – six months since they’d shared a stage at the Celtic Colours Festival, and a bed in an old and pretty hotel in Baddeck on Cape Breton Island. At that time Lucie had just turned thirty-six, which meant she’d been thinking a lot about how there was only one year to go. That fact had made her panicky, which was why she’d launched, probably stupidly, into a version of ‘The Talk’.
‘Come on, Lucie D,’ he’d said to her, with an acre of the hotel’s frilly, floral bed linen rucked up around his naked hips. ‘We’ve got a good thing, haven’t we? Don’t go getting all serious on me.’
Now, here he was standing on her doorstep with his fiddle case in one hand, his duffel bag in the other and a bottle in a brown paper bag under his arm.
‘Say, Luce – why don’t they have banjos in Star Trek?’ he asked.
‘Because it’s the future,’ she said flatly.
‘How do you tune a banjo?’
Lucie yawned. ‘Nobody knows.’
‘So, tell me. How can you tell one banjo song from the next?’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Heard that one, too. By their names. Now shut up and come inside.’
Lucie hadn’t lived here long, in New York City, and she wasn’t planning to stay either. It was only where she’d decided to base herself while she wrote the tracks for the new Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers album, and where she and the guys would be recording it, starting in just over a week. She was still short of a track or two, but she had faith that she’d find a couple more songs somewhere – at the bottom of a Starbucks takeaway cup, maybe, or stuck to her shoe after she’d gone for a jog through Central Park.
‘So, what brings you to town?’ she asked him. ‘Gig?’
‘Nope. Just came to see you.’
‘Right,’ Lucie said, making no effort to hide her disbelief.
She watched Elijah scan the apartment, taking in the tiny table with its two stools, the kitchen the size of a yacht’s galley, the cowhide rug on the floor, the two-seater couch and the three different banjos lined up on their stands. He put down his luggage, screwed the bottle out of its paper sack, and set it down on the table. Tequila. He took off his jacket and fished two big, fat lemons out of the pockets.
‘I’m trusting you’ve got the salt,’ he said, and pulled up a stool at the table.
In the kitchen Lucie found a small dish filled with salt flakes, and a plate and sharp knife for the lemons. From behind her came the sound of the bottle cap being twisted free, but from the cupboard she took only a single shot glass.
‘Here you go,’ she said, placing it in front of him.
‘Hey,’ Elijah said, frowning. ‘What’s the story?’
‘No story,’ Lucie said. ‘Just . . . not tonight.’
She studied the squinty look on Elijah’s face. There was puzzlement in it, certainly, and some disappointment, too. But what was that other thing there in the mix? Lucie couldn’t for the life of her say.
Elijah put the cap back on the bottle.
‘You don’t have to do that. You can go right ahead if you want.’
Elijah shook his head. Sadly, she thought. ‘Wouldn’t be any fun without you, Luce.’
And that was more or less how dinner went down, that night. Elijah tried all the usual ways into their old routine, and Lucie found new and interesting ways to block the path. He pulled a face and slurped his pasta like a three-year-old, but Lucie only smiled back at him like an indulgent, slightly bored adult. When they stood together at the sink washing up the dishes afterwards, he put soap bubbles on her nose, but she just calmly wiped them off with the tea-towel and didn’t take the bait. Lucie Doran, aged thirty-six-and-a-half, thought she was doing pretty well. Until Elijah Tripp said, ‘Hey, there’s this song I want to play you.’
A song is not so very different from a recipe. After all, who invented bolognese sauce? Sure, it was Pellegrino Artusi who was the first – in 1891 – to publish its recipe in a book, but we can be fairly sure that the meal itself had been travelling, from stove to plate, from host to guest, for a long time before that.
Once released into the world, songs, too, have a tendency to make their own way, each new musician reinventing them: removing an ingredient, adding a wild new flavour, changing the balance of the spices.
So it was that when Felix Carter’s big brother, Tom Wendale, left Vancouver with a love song in his guitar case and took it to Seattle, it sounded a little different there, when he jammed with his friends on their acoustic guitars, slide guitars and keyboards. It picked up a lilting tone when it travelled to Osaka with one of Japan’s most famous Irish fiddlers, and it got more up-tempo down in Buenos Aires where it went on the road with the guitarist from a mariachi band.
It developed an electronic vibe in San Francisco, where the producer of an acrobatic circus seized on it as the perfect theme song for his trapeze-flying lovers, and it turned out all cute on a ukulele in Vanuatu, where just a handful of its notes would eventually be heard through the radio speakers of the archipelago as the jingle for a new local brand of icy pole.
The song had developed a little bit of a bluegrass accent by the time it flew east to Toronto, and was carried off the plane and into the city by the members of a folk band who were that night playing in a Leonard Cohen tribute concert at the Danforth Music Hall. That’s where Elijah Tripp first heard it: out the back after the gig, while the musos from half a dozen different bands chilled down with a few drinks, instruments never far from their grip.
There was a decent sprinkling of rosin dust on Elijah’s shirtfront as he sat examining the shredded horsehair of his bow, and his plaid shirt was wet at the armpits and down his back because of all he’d sweated under the stage lights that night. He felt like he’d been on the road for a long time; in fact, there had been days lately when he’d felt like he’d been on the road forever. He was getting tired – not in a regular way, but in a right-down-deep-in-the-soul kind of a way.
That was how he was feeling – tired and spent – when a bunch of musos began to play. Some of them were his old friends, some he knew at a distance, and some he’d never seen before, and the fabric of the music was tight already without him. Before long, though, his toe was tapping, and soon he’d picked himself a spot in the weave where he could slide in the sound of a fiddle.
The way some people look funny without their glasses, and other people are harder to recognise without the hat they always wear, Elijah somehow looked just a little bit more like himself once he’d settled his instrument into his body. He’d pushed his stool back to give himself some room while Lucie stayed where she was, elbows on the tabletop. As she watched him finetune the fiddle, she noticed that there was a slight tremor in his hand. What was this? she wondered. Because this was weird. Never before in her life, not in all the backstages and green rooms they’d ever shared, had she seen Elijah look nervous.
He resettled the fiddle under his chin, and started to play. Nothing Elijah ever did with a fiddle looked like it caused him any trouble. His left hand moved about the fretboard, finding the notes so effortlessly that he didn’t even seem to be pressing down on the strings, and his right hand on the bow looked loose and relaxed no matter how fast or hectic the notes. He pl
ayed just the way she’d always loved to see – eyes closed, forehead creasing up with what it cost him to dredge his feelings up out of the deepest parts of him. He continued, sprinkling the melody with delicate grace notes, and Lucie knew that what she was listening to was a love song, but she didn’t expect for the life of her that Elijah would begin to sing.
His wasn’t a strong voice, but it was tuneful and clear, and the texture of it made Lucie think – for no particular reason that she could work out – of hazelnuts.
‘Hey Lucie Doran,’ he sang. Lucie waited for the lyric to turn into a joke, or for Elijah to somehow work in an insult about banjo players, but to her amazement his face was utterly sincere.
‘Do you want,’ he sang on in his hazelnut voice, ‘do you want . . . do you want to do this thing, for real?’
Still Lucie waited; for the sting in the tail, the punch in the solar plexus, the moment when this performance of devotion dissolved into what it surely had to be – one of Elijah’s pranks. But Elijah kept playing, and no joke arrived to pierce the mood.
Then the song ended and Elijah’s bow came to rest. Now all Lucie could hear was a muted version of the New York City melody: sirens, zooming motor vehicles and honking horns.
Elijah looked at Lucie, and Lucie looked at Elijah.
At last, she said, ‘Give me that fiddle.’
She took the instrument out of his hands and laid it carefully on the couch. Then she went back over to where he sat. Expectant, vulnerable. Just sitting there, empty handed, in his blue jeans and plaid shirt. No boots; he’d taken them off. He was looking up at her, waiting. Waiting. Then Lucie lifted one foot and kicked him full in the chest. Taken entirely by surprise, he toppled, landing heavily on his back on the floor while the stool flew out from under him. But Lucie wasn’t all that practised at kicking. She lost her balance too and went sideways, hitting the floor with her hip. Ow, that was going to bruise.