The Lost Love Song

by Minnie Darke

  ‘I am a solitary

  wooden match,

  all out of patience

  with this interminable tilt

  towards light.

  Scratch

  and my fire

  would burn down our walls

  and cast us together,

  displaced persons

  in the wilderness

  of desire.

  There is so much

  more

  for our hearts

  to know.’

  Evie surprised even herself with the depth of feeling that had come through as she spoke the words on the page, and when she finished, the room was hushed. Her heart was in her throat now that she had come back from whatever place her poem had taken her to, and she was unsure, for a time, whether she had in fact done something shocking, or if her poem had been just plain terrible.

  She had the same feeling as the one she sometimes had in dreams, when she realised she had been going about all the business of her regular day while wearing not a stitch of clothing. She was relieved when she glanced down and realised she was actually wearing a dress. The hush seemed to go on and on. Then someone’s whistle went off like a loosed cork, and the room filled suddenly with a burst of applause.

  As he drove out of the city towards Belinda’s house, Arie watched the sun retire early behind the distant mountains and knew that the year’s longest night had begun. His car towed a full trailer-load of firewood that caused it to labour on the uphill stretches and gather momentum on the downhill. When he was only a few minutes away from Belinda’s, he phoned ahead so she could be waiting for him at the gate that led into the paddock beyond the apricot trees.

  Bordered by wire fences on one side and thick bushland on the other, the paddock was grazed not only by sheep, but also by the marsupials that came down from the hillsides in their dozens each night. Arie pulled into the paddock and saw in the last of the day’s light that Belinda – her small frame dwarfed by a large plaid jacket – had done just as she said she would. She had selected a patch of close-cropped grass suitable for their purposes, and collected enough dry leaves, she-oak needles, sticks and fallen branches to provide a solid bed of kindling.

  With all the competence of a city driver, and grateful for the forgiving expanse of the paddock, Arie backed the rented trailer up to the site, following Belinda’s impatient hand signals as he half understood them in his rear-view mirror. Getting out of the car, he felt the give of soft earth under his feet and caught the scents of eucalypts and the cold.

  She nodded a greeting, and Arie handed her the smaller of two pairs of gloves he’d bought that day from a hardware store not far from the firewood depot where he’d filled the trailer to capacity.

  ‘Very thoughtful,’ she said, accepting them, and Arie knew that in Belinda-speak this was close to effusive praise.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ she said.

  Arie liked the feeling of this physical work – grasping the roughly split chunks of timber in his gloved hands and piling them on top of the kindling. He and Belinda made no attempt at an elaborate structure for their bonfire, but tried as best they could to make sure there was space between the logs for air to flow.

  When the trailer had been emptied, the wood pile on the ground was as high as Arie’s middle. Belinda reached into the pocket of her jacket and drew out two boxes of large matches, then handed one to Arie. Silently, they began – on either side of the pyre – making their way slowly around and, at intervals, holding their small flames to the kindling.

  It was a relief to have something to do, and Arie thought this was something he and Belinda had in common. They were both better off with actions to take, motions to go through, challenges to achieve. They were good at getting apricots into buckets, jam into jars, logs into heaps, sparks into flames.

  Arie lit one last match, and the sandpaper scrape of the head against the striking strip loosened something inside him. Then the flames began to creep – a hot, bright vine of orange and yellow and red – up through the stack of firewood until the entire structure was well alight. From another deep pocket of her coat, Belinda brought out a leather-jacketed hip flask, unscrewed the lid, took a slug of the contents and handed it to Arie. Rum, he discovered, as the liquid fire hit the back of his throat.

  ‘So are we going to do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Good a time as any.’

  Arie went to the back of his car and drew out an armload of scarlet fabric. Four famous red dresses, each one of which had been worn in the great concert halls of the world, each one of which had held the beloved body of Diana Clare. He gave two to Belinda and kept the other two for himself. He noticed that he and Belinda mirrored each other’s movements, holding the dresses first to their faces and then tightly against their chests.

  It was their plan, in the morning, once the fire had reduced all of its fuel to ash, and once that ash had chilled against the midwinter ground, to come back to this place and scoop up a portion of what remained. Then they would go to the cemetery, and there, inside the walls of the rose garden, they would remove the screws in the four corners of Diana’s silver plaque to reveal the drawer hidden away inside the brickwork: the drawer that they would no longer have to think of as empty.

  And so, in the darkness of the longest night of the year, they threw the dresses onto the flames. It was barely any time before the flimsy things had dissolved into heat and nothingness, but for a moment their fabrics caused the flames to flare – high and bright – and while it lasted, Arie took a chance putting his arm around Belinda’s shoulders and holding her tightly. He felt her relinquish just a little of her tension and lean into him as together they watched this too-brief and beautiful spectacle, and remembered the fire that was Diana Clare.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ Arie said after quite a long time, although the truth was he didn’t really want to tell her at all.

  ‘I think I already know.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘You met someone.’

  Standing beside her, his arm still around her shoulders, Arie couldn’t see her face. He wished he had a better sense of the thoughts that were going on inside her head. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Well, I figured there had to be a reason you wanted to do this, to say a different kind of goodbye.’

  ‘Well, what if I had? Met someone?’ he asked, feeling the heat of the fire on his cheeks.

  ‘Will I like her?’

  Arie gave a bitter laugh. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever find that out, unfortunately. The chance I had with her’ – he winced at the memory of it – ‘I wasn’t ready for it.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘She went away.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Now I can’t find her.’

  Belinda took a slug from the hip flask and handed it to Arie.

  ‘We have a special talent, don’t we?’ she said. ‘For losing people.’

  ‘We do,’ Arie agreed. ‘We sure do.’

  JUST BECAUSE RORY ‘Red’ Somerled drove a Mercedes-Benz was no good reason to think he was wealthy. He’d owned the big, beamy station wagon for nigh on thirty-five years, and it had been second-hand when he’d bought it.

  Red had chosen the Merc, all those years ago, mostly because it was big enough to take a five-piece band’s guitars, amplifiers, cables and mike stands, as well as his portable keyboard. But he couldn’t have denied that the purchase was also in part down to the influence of the Janis Joplin song, which was one of the few covers that the Locksmiths ever played. ‘Mercedes-Benz’ was, in Red’s view, the perfect song to pull out when you found yourself in front of a crowd that was just itching to sing along.

  Red lived in North Fremantle, a suburb sandwiched between the Swan River and the Indian Ocean and graced by the iconic Dingo Flour silo, but once again it would have been a mistake to regard his address as a marker of financial success. He�
��d bought the house – a tumbledown limestone worker’s cottage with a sun-faded tin roof – not long after he’d bought the car, in the days just before the America’s Cup turned the world’s eyes to Freo, beginning the gentrification process that would surely and steadily change the port city from a cruisy backwater to a place with a café strip and its own team in the AFL.

  Deep inside, in a part of himself he didn’t choose to look at too often, Red knew that he’d fucked it. Life, that was. Thirty-five years ago, he’d had a shiny blue Merc and a full head of hair, a band with songs in the charts and every reason to think his life’s trajectory would be steady and upwards. But then, somehow, he’d stalled. Year by year, the Locksmiths diminished in popularity and notoriety, until they were barely able to fill a local pub to three-quarters of its capacity. It was Red’s cross to bear that he’d been given a great start, but somehow failed the test. He hadn’t converted. He hadn’t capitalised. He’d coasted.

  Such thoughts were dangerously close to the surface of Red’s mind that chilly June morning, when he sat behind the wheel of his Merc trying to coax the old beast into life. In Freo, winter really only lasted for about six weeks, but this day felt like the very heart of it. The wind that was whipping the Indian Ocean into a frenzy was so Antarctic that Red could smell penguin shit on the breeze.

  The car spluttered and choked, then – finally – fired up. Red revved the engine, blew on his hands and considered what music to play on the way to work. In his car, Red kept a bunch of CDs he’d burned for himself, and they were catalogued not according to artist or genre but curated according to mood. He had songs for being angry and songs for being wistful, he had songs for being bored and songs for being lonely. What did he need today?

  It wasn’t precisely anger that he felt, although he was pissed off. It wasn’t precisely wistful that he felt, although he certainly longed for the past. It wasn’t precisely lonely that he felt; it was more like broken and useless. He’d been feeling this way, acutely, for the past three weeks, since Louise Trethewey, who was now his boss, had called him into her office and served him up the news. With a sigh, he picked out the CD he kept for his most forlorn moments and slid it into the stereo – once the height of technology, now an outmoded piece of crap.

  Today was a day for Leonard Cohen, if ever there was a day for Leonard Cohen, so Red forwarded through the tracks until he hit ‘Hallelujah’. He cranked the volume until it reached the sweet spot, loud enough for the song to drown out every other thought in his head, and drove out onto the highway, where the wind pushed the big old Merc sideways with every powerful gust. He listened to the lyrics and he sang, not giving a single flying fuck that he could be seen through his car windows and in his rear-view mirror. Even when he had to stop at the lights, and he knew that he was some freaky mime show for the people in the car beside him, he didn’t stop belting it out.

  In the East Perth studios of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Red stood in the canteen queue and fished for coins in the pockets of his too-tight black jeans. He knew there were only so many times he could wink at Barb-behind-the-counter and have her chalk up his coffee – black, three sugars – to the never-never. Besides, if Kimmy-behind-the-counter ended up being the one to serve him today, then the wink would be useless.

  It was yet another sad fact of Red’s life that the wink now only worked on women north of a certain age. With those women, there was a chance they’d once ridden on their boyfriends’ shoulders in a mosh pit at a Locksmiths gig, or sticky-taped one of those posters to their wardrobe doors – the ones in which Red had appeared at his keyboard with his big ginger-blond hair. The hair had lasted Red through his forties and even into his mid-fifties before the uncompromising combination of a fluorescent light and a mirror-lined elevator had told him that the gig was up. It was ten years now since Red had deposited his crowning glory on a barbershop floor. These days, the most youthful attribute Red could boast was that he’d never since his glory days gone up more than a single size in black jeans.

  By hanging back in the queue, he was able to make sure that Kimmy served the person ahead of him, and that it was Barb, slamming the cash register drawer closed after her last transaction, who turned to him and said, ‘Cold enough for you out there, darl?’

  ‘Yeah, bit chilly today, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll say. So, what’s news with you, Red?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘They’re canning my show, mate.’

  ‘Nah,’ Barb said in a you’re pulling my leg tone.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She wouldn’t.’

  She was talking about Louise Trethewey.

  ‘Actually, she would.’

  ‘Disc & Co? She can’t! That program’s a nationwide institution! Your listeners will freak. You having coffee, darl?’

  Red nodded. ‘Institution or not, it’s on the way out, I’m afraid.’

  Barb plucked a cup from the top of a stack and set it under the outlet of the coffee machine. ‘But why?’

  Red gave a shrug of deep bewilderment. Over the churning of the coffee maker, Barb asked, ‘So what are you going to be doing around here now?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not going to be doing anything around here now.’

  ‘They’re letting you go?’ The spoons of sugar Barb tipped into Red’s coffee were on the generous side of things. ‘She can’t do that.’

  ‘Well, she has.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Red. Really sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Yeah, me too, mate.’

  ‘When’s this all happening?’

  ‘End of financial year, Barb. Because that’s what it’s all about, right? The dólares.’

  ‘Shit, Red. So when’s your last show?’

  ‘Next Friday night.’

  ‘That’s a real shame, Red,’ she said, passing over the steaming cardboard cup.

  Red put on a sheepish face. ‘I’ve only got a dollar on me,’ he said, holding out a gold coin in his palm. And just for good measure, he winked.

  ‘Oh, go on with you,’ Barb said. ‘You bloody rascal. I’ll put it on your account.’

  Red carried his cup along corridors and upstairs to his desk, pretending not to notice each time coffee slopped onto the carpet. It wasn’t, after all, carpet that he was going to have to live with.

  He walked past Louise’s office. He could see her through the glass, sitting in the chair she’d occupied on that particular Friday afternoon, the one when she’d called him in for ‘a talk’. He could see, too, the chair in which he’d sat while he listened to her deliver her pronouncement.

  ‘It’s not my job to be popular, Red,’ she’d told him. ‘It’s my job to do the most we possibly can with the resources we have available.’

  Red had argued. He’d cited his show’s impressive nationwide ratings, and reminded her that Disc & Co had blazed a trail through the earliest days of the podcast market. He repeated back to her some things she’d said herself about how important it was for some of the national broadcaster’s content to come from the west, so the country’s vision of itself wasn’t entirely produced by the eastern states.

  But when she’d responded, picking her words out of a limited set of Big Brother-approved phrases, he’d known that she was performing. That their meeting was not, for her, primarily about the end of his career, but how well, how seamlessly, how professionally, she was managing her ugly little task. Passing her office now, Red allowed a particularly generous splash of coffee to land on the carpet tiles.

  Red’s desk was in a far corner of a large open room, by a window. Having been the presenter of Disc & Co for fifteen years, and of various other music programs before that, he had amassed a sizeable collection of CDs. Stacks of them rose, three rows deep, from his desktop to the height of his cubicle divider. Although enough room had been left under the desk for feet and knees, the space was otherwise taken up by
towers of cardboard and plastic cases. Along the full length of the window beside Red’s desk were milk crates, shamelessly filched from the canteen and stacked floor to sill, every one of them packed to capacity. So, when Red arrived back at his desk to find a couple of letters and a small, square parcel sitting on his keyboard, there was really no great mystery about what the parcel was likely to contain.

  Red noted the long strip of Canadian stamps and the way his name and address had been written out by hand. The shape and height of the sloping capital letters faintly kindled something in his memory.

  Even after all these years, and even after all the many thousands of parcels Red had received from record companies and eager self-starting musicians, he still got a little buzz when a fattened envelope landed on his desk, and he still opened parcels like a kid at Christmas time. This CD, Red saw as he tugged it unceremoniously out of its wrapping, was in a cardboard case – one of those pesky tri-fold things that, like a pair of new shoes, were just a bit too tight until you’d had a chance to wear them in. For Real, it was called, by a group called Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers. The cover was all grainy and romantic, with a windswept blonde girl in a dusky pink dress standing on the edge of a jetty. Waves the colours of blurred ink and whipped cream were trying to jump up at her feet; in her arms was a banjo. Doran, he thought. Lucie Doran.

  Red put to one side the folded letter that had slipped out of the parcel and concentrated on winkling the disc out of its casing. He slipped it into the slot on the side of his computer and settled his big plush headphones over his ears. When the first track began in a rush of Acadian banjo-and-fiddle folk, Red’s memory coughed up the connection. Lucie Doran. Kit Doran: banjo player with the Salt Strings, and later with Mercy Reid’s backing band. Kit Doran. One of nature’s gentlemen, if he was even still alive; Red hadn’t thought of him for twenty years or more. Toes tapping, Red unfolded the letter.

  Charlottetown