The Lost Love Song

by Minnie Darke

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered when at last she believed her poem was done.

  ARIE, FINDING EVIE nowhere in the virtual world, was reduced to watching for her in the real one. He looked for her in crowds and developed a habit of slowing down when he passed long lines of people queuing for coffee. Cutting through the heated domains of department stores in his lunch hour, he watched for her at shop counters and looked for her on escalators. He scanned the faces of people at tram stops and sought out her shape wherever crowds gathered to listen to a busker finish a song, or a magician finesse a trick. But she was never there.

  Wandering the city blocks one lunch hour, Arie paused at the window of an outdoor shop, where backpacks and wet-weather coats were on display in their confident and unisex colour schemes. He didn’t want to buy any of these wares, but he did want to imagine for a moment what it would be like to be the sort of person who disappeared into the mountains and the stretching plains that loomed all over the shop’s billboards, to shrink all his necessities down to what he could carry on his back.

  Well, you actually are that free. Really and truthfully. That’s what Evie had said to him, and perhaps she had been right. Arie was realising that so many things he had come to consider essential were, in actual fact, only essential to a version of his life that no longer existed. He’d put so much time and effort into laying down its cornerstones – buying the house in Tavistock Row, and building up Sonder Digital to provide financial security. But all of this was predicated on a life he no longer lived. The house with the bay window had been Diana’s dream, not his. Sonder Digital was now big enough, strong enough, that were he to walk away from it, Richard would simply carry it on.

  These thoughts were new, and they made Arie’s pulse speed up a little, as if he really were standing on that trackless tundra, with every shred of his known world swept away and out of sight – nothing but tawny grass all around him, nothing to hold on to, no path to follow, no map in his hands. When he blinked his actual life back into focus, feeling the familiar shapes and structures rise up around him, he felt safer again, but he also had a sense of being hemmed in, and maybe a little bit bored. He wanted to tell all of this to Evie, but Evie was nowhere to be seen.

  As April slipped into May, and May gave way to June, temperatures fell and rainfall increased. Deciduous trees raised bare branches to the sky, and Arie, going to his wardrobe for the first time in the season for a winter coat, knew that the time had come.

  He phoned Lenka.

  ‘I’m ready,’ he told her.

  What happened the day before she came, though, was something Arie did not expect, and it happened on the only Saturday of the year – the one belonging to the Queen’s Birthday long weekend – that Arie allowed Richard to drag him along to the football. Arie had ended up with his team the way some people got first names or titles: it had been handed down from his grandfather to his father, and in turn to him.

  Arie did nothing to maintain his allegiance, other than own a red-and-navy-blue scarf and go to the footy with Richard on the June long weekend, when Arie’s team played Richard’s in an annual blockbuster. Since Richard’s team had been looking good in recent years, while Arie’s had been languishing near the bottom of the ladder, Richard was especially keen.

  They spent the afternoon drinking overpriced beer that tasted like horse piss in plastic tumblers and eating pies with innards so hot that Arie ended up with a burned tongue. Richard’s team won, which was an excellent outcome because it made him stupidly happy and didn’t bother Arie at all, whereas the alternative outcome would have made Richard morose and brought Arie only minimal pleasure.

  After the game they piled onto a tram so crammed Arie couldn’t get a handhold, either above his head or on the corners of any of the seats. He had to rely on the crush of bodies to keep him vaguely upright as they hurtled around bends. That’s where he was when he saw it. Through heads topped with black-and-white beanies, and heads crowned by red-and-blue polar fleece dreadlocks, he saw her name in print on the wall of the tram. By Evie Greenlees. At least, that’s what he thought he saw. A guy with a face-painted kid riding on his shoulders had shifted position, blocking his view.

  Arie craned, trying to see. There were several poems – part of some kind of public art competition – and they scrolled down the curve between the tram’s ceiling and its walls. Each time the tram took a corner and its passengers swayed sideways, he was able to catch a little more . . . when Icarus fell . . . Strange that to be found . . . the tide of night. His pulse was speeding.

  They were not far from Richard’s house now, only a block and a half from their stop.

  ‘Ready, pal?’ Richard asked, squeezing himself through the crowd towards the door.

  ‘You go. I’m going to stay on.’

  ‘What? Your car’s at my house, you great numpty.’

  ‘I’ll double back,’ Arie assured him.

  ‘What the—?’ Richard began, but he was swept off the tram with the outgoing tide of passengers.

  Stop by stop the tram emptied, until Arie was able to stand right beneath the poem.

  Turning

  in memory of PQ108

  Some say the sea wept

  when Icarus fell,

  a billowing keen of grief

  and still

  the idea of flight remained.

  Strange that to be found

  we must first be lost,

  the sun every day rising

  somewhere

  turning the tide of night.

  Lenka arrived in Richard’s station wagon, not with a roll of garbage bags but with a stack of brand-new packing boxes – not too big, so they didn’t get too heavy. She’d also brought a copious quantity of tissue paper, and a plan to do the job with the maximum of love and respect. Together, she and Arie chose an album of the cheeriest music they could stomach, a compilation of ‘feel-good’ songs, and turned up the stereo to a distracting volume.

  Out of the wardrobe they pulled dresses and shirts that had once smelled of Diana but now smelled of clothes stored too long in a closet. There was no better person than Lenka to help with this task. As Arie lifted garment after garment off their hangers and passed them to her, he thought how awful it would have been if he’d mistakenly asked for the help of somebody who wanted to try things on, or who too obviously wanted some souvenirs. Lenka, oxen in her determination, just put her head down alongside him, without pressure and without subtext. Together they folded and wrapped and stacked, taped the boxes closed when they were full, and carried them out to the station wagon.

  ‘Where will you take them?’ Arie asked.

  ‘Away. Where they can be of use, and where you won’t have to worry about seeing Diana’s favourite jumper on another woman’s back.’ And this – as Lenka had clearly intuited – was all that Arie really needed to know.

  At last, Diana’s drawers stood empty, and with the exception of Diana’s dynasty of famous red dresses, the wardrobe now contained only his own clothes.

  ‘You are going to keep them?’

  ‘No,’ Arie said.

  ‘So what are you going to do with them?’ Lenka asked, touching a hand to a fold of scarlet.

  ‘I’ll tell you when it’s done,’ he promised.

  Lenka nodded and did not pry. ‘I’m starving. You?’

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Arie felt duty-bound to join her in a soulless lunch of celery, carrot and tahini, all washed down with strong coffee.

  ‘Can I see this poem, then?’ she asked.

  Arie had told Lenka the whole story of Evie, leaving out only two things. One was the part about putting Evie out of the car after arriving home and finding Belinda on his doorstep. He’d not have been able to bear the look of disgust that Lenka would have been justified in giving him. The other thing he kept to himself was the night he’d spent with Evie after Heidi’s wedding. That had seemed much too private to share.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, handing her his phone. She magnified
the photograph he’d taken and her brow furrowed as she read, and re-read, Evie’s words.

  To Arie, the poem was a kaleidoscope. It seemed to shift, allowing him glimpses of new angles, new perspectives. At first it had seemed only to be a poem about the plane crash, but then his attention was drawn by another part of the poem, the part at the end of the first stanza: ‘and still/the idea of flight remained’. Even if Icarus had fallen from the sky, and even if he had flown too close to the sun, the idea of flight hadn’t been extinguished. And Evie, Arie knew, was trying to say by extension that even if we’re burned by love, even if its heat melts the wax that holds our feathers to our wings, that’s no reason to stay forever grounded.

  ‘You see these lines here,’ Arie said. ‘“Strange that to be found, we must first be lost”.’

  ‘Yes. What are you thinking?’ Lenka asked.

  ‘It’s not about Diana, is it? It’s about her. Is she telling me she’s lost?’

  ‘Isn’t she telling you more than that? Isn’t she telling you that she’s waiting to be found?’

  THE SUN WAS setting on the longest night of the year as Evie stepped out of the boatshed and locked the door behind her. The inky waters of the bay swished about beneath the planks she stood upon, and the brackish scent of the estuary was sharp on the carrying breeze. A harmless dragon, she breathed pale mist as she took the path behind the sheds, her knitted hat pulled low over her ears and sheepskin coat zipped high under her chin.

  Each time she reached a gap between the sheds, she glanced out over the bay to check on the sunset, the colours of which were changing by the second. The scrubby bank on the far shore of the bay was an indigo silhouette, feathered at the tops with the outlines of individual gum trees. Away to the west, the sun – having already disappeared behind the mountains – was throwing a last few beams of brassy light at the undersides of the clouds, and this same light dripped down onto the bay, where it caught and quivered on the surface of the rippling water. Tomorrow, which was the shortest day of the year, was Evie’s birthday; she would be twenty-nine years old.

  Although the solstice shuffled its date around on the calendar from year to year, it couldn’t move very far, so for all of her life Evie had celebrated her milestones in concert with one of the Earth’s. For all the years she’d lived in the northern hemisphere, she’d had a midsummer birthday instead of a midwinter one, and this had never seemed quite right. But now she was home again, where the nip of the cold wind, the salty scent of the water, and the fast-fading colour-work of the setting sun made her feel like this really was her time of year.

  As she walked, Evie checked her watch, which told her – probably reasonably accurately – that it was just a few minutes to five o’clock, and she felt a surge of nerves squeeze at her chest. A couple of weeks ago, when this particular June Saturday had seemed very far in the future, she’d put her name down to perform in a poetry event called ‘Fly by the Seat of Your Pants’. But now that the day had actually arrived, Evie couldn’t think for the life of her what had possessed her to volunteer. It was no small walk from the boatshed to her destination, but she figured the exercise might stop the nerves from taking hold of her body and paralysing her brain.

  In the years Evie had been away from Hobart, the city had changed its mind about how to do midwinter. Nowadays, instead of hiding away in their suburban homes, turning up their heaters and worrying how on earth they were ever going to pay their electricity bills, the locals had accepted the invitation of an eccentric gambler and art fancier to turn the solstice into the party of the year, complete with irreverent performance art, Bacchanalian feasting, poetry readings and huge-scale light installations. Visitors flooded in so that the city’s Airbnbs were at capacity and it was hard to get a seat on a flight or the ferry.

  The centrepiece of Hobart’s midwinter festival that year was an installation called Spectra. It was as simple as it was impressive – a single brilliant column of light, generated by a bank of powerful globes, that rose fifteen kilometres into the sky above the city. On clear nights, its luminescence seemed eventually to dissipate among the stars, while on hazy nights it projected an enlarged circle onto the underside of the clouds, giving it a resemblance to a sweeping, Gotham City search-beam.

  Tonight Spectra had a blue tint to its light, and where it intersected with a thin band of high cloud it set off a glow, so that the whole thing looked like an enormous wand casting a spell. As Evie neared the city on foot, she felt like she was part of a pilgrimage. Coming down the steep streets of the suburbs as if drawn by the light were couples walking hand in hand, groups of teenagers already primed for excitement, and adults with children wrapped in puffer jackets, beanies and scarves.

  Evie’s poetry event was on the fringe – both of the festival and the city. It was to be held in a stolid old corner pub with an open fire, a low stage, and some canny advertising for cheap drinks that had successfully detained a lot of the pilgrims who would eventually press on to the heart of the city when the festival got going in earnest, later in the night.

  When Evie arrived at the pub with pink cheeks and a sense that her make-up had been blown off by the breeze as she walked, the Mistress of Ceremonies was on the stage adjusting the standing mike. Her name was Viv, and she was an eccentric middle-aged woman whose business card announced her as a ‘cobbler of both shoes and words’. She wore a tailcoat that had no hope of being fastened around her comfortable girth.

  Evie took in the stage setting: a long table with a white cloth, three chairs, three writing pads, three glasses of water and three ridiculous ostrich-feather pens. The deal was that Viv would throw prompts at the poets, and they would have just a few minutes to hurl together a poem in response. Evie felt the urge to turn around and walk straight back out of the door.

  ‘Evie!’ Viv boomed into the microphone. ‘Come on up, come on up.’

  Viv wiggled the mike out of the holder and thrust it into Evie’s hand.

  ‘So, you’ve used one of these before, right?’

  Evie nodded.

  ‘So, rock star, okay? Not ice cream, right? Show me?’

  Evie gave her a baffled look and Viv took back the microphone.

  ‘Rock star is like this,’ she said, demonstrating, holding the device horizontally to her mouth. ‘And ice cream is like this.’ She turned it vertically in front of her chin and put out her tongue as if to lick it. ‘So none of the ice cream business, okay? It’s rock star all the way. Now go and pop some more lippy on. Bit more eyeliner too if you’ve got any in your bag – the stage lights’ll wash you right out.’

  Evie did as she was told and by the time she returned, the other poets had arrived. She’d not met either of them before. One was a nervous young man – a boy really, barely out of his teens, Evie thought, from the patchiness of his facial hair and the loose, al dente look of his long limbs. The other was a neat middle-aged woman with a button-up cardigan and a smooth auburn bun, but a look in her eye that made Evie suspect there was something less tidy underneath the surface.

  In the first round, the smooth-haired woman went first and Evie realised she had been quite right about her. The poem she performed – in response to the prompt ‘moist’ – was entirely, delightfully smutty. The boy, though, surprised her with a gust of unexpected rage as he recited an angry poem in response to the prompt ‘fickle’. As for Evie, she thought she managed passably well to come up with a vaguely coherent few lines that responded to ‘quiver’. Her poem was, or at least was supposed to be, about both archery and affairs of the heart.

  Viv was announcing that they were ready to get on with the next set of poems. In front of Evie, Viv placed a small slip of paper, and when Evie turned it over the word written there was ‘match’.

  Evie picked up her feather-pen, and time – mercifully – slowed. ‘Match’ was a word that offered multiple meanings. A contest. A pairing. A tool for making fire. But when the nib of her pen touched the paper, Evie understood that this one didn’t require
conscious thought. Somewhere inside herself, she had been writing this poem – or a version of it – for months.

  Every time she sat down with notebook and pen, there he was: Arie. She pictured him wet from head to toe on a sun-scorched street while she held the hose, and cupping her face in his hand by the side of a river full of drowning lights, and asking her to get out of his car on a side street – oh no, she had not forgotten that. Urging her to open a box containing a word in a bottle, dancing with her at a wedding, standing in front of her on damp grass while she wrapped a duvet around his cold skin.

  And then Viv announced that her time was up, and Evie found herself standing at the microphone, her sheet of paper shaking visibly. The stage lights were hot and bright, and within seconds of coming to stand beneath them, Evie could feel sweat on her upper lip and underneath her hair. But while the heat was uncomfortable, the brightness was a blessing, because it reduced the crowd to shadows.

  The room was not silent. Evie could hear the talk and laughter from the next room, the occasional clink of colliding eight-balls, and hoots of celebration. But the people in this room were paying attention. She could feel but not see their eyes on her; she had a sense of the room’s collectively held breath.

  ‘Hello again,’ she said into the microphone, and although she had whispered out of nervousness, the microphone somehow translated the texture of her voice into something nearer to sultry. ‘My topic for this round is . . . match.’

  Evie felt the powerful way her voice leaped, like a creature of its own volition, out of her mouth and into the whole room. She took a breath and glanced at her page, although she barely needed to, for this was the poem that had been cooking inside her. She hadn’t seen the words in print until just now, until they’d come flying off the nib of that ostentatious feather-pen in her own handwriting, but the emotion they contained was well rehearsed.