by Minnie Darke
Prince Edward Island
Dear Red,
I imagine this letter comes to you out of the blue, although I cannot work out if it seems to me a very long time ago, or only yesterday, that you and I were playing pubs by night and terrorising the fish by day. I fondly remember your boat – what was it you used to call it? A tin dish? I have never forgotten how kind it was of you to take me, an old man even then, under your wing, and just for the record I never did find a fish that pickled half so well as your West Australian herring.
I don’t even play the banjo much these days as my hands have got too old. Same can’t be said for little Lucie, though, my granddaughter. She’s doing well with her band the Curious Lovers, as you will see from the enclosed CD. The Guardian over here writes that her music is ‘perfectly positioned at the crossroads of folk and pop’, which I think might be cribbed from an article written about the Locksmiths some thirty years ago. What it really means, I think, is that people are oftentimes surprised to find themselves enjoying folk music as much as they do.
This month, which I always have to remember is the middle of your winter, Lucie’s touring your part of the world, and I promised her that I would send a letter to you, my friend, on the chance you could do something or indeed anything at all to promote her gigs.
It’s hard to believe that our little Lucie is not so many years shy of forty. Although the mathematics say that I’m eighty-seven already, I sometimes struggle to remember that I’m any older than forty myself. Lucie is soon to be married, which I am pleased about because she gave all of her young years to her music, and it was hard not to feel somewhat responsible for that. Her man is a fiddle player whose people are from B.C., but we won’t hold either thing against him because at least he is a devout fan of the Montreal Canadiens.
In other news from the Doran clan, Margaret is no longer with us, which is a cause of sadness to me every day, though I am pleased to have the comfort of her voice on all those Salt Strings albums. I sometimes hear her voice in Lucie’s, too – that same trueness. If I was to direct you to any of the songs on Lucie’s album it would be to the title track, ‘For Real’. It has a quality that I can’t put my finger on, but it’s something ghostly and when I listen to it, I could almost swear that Margaret is right beside me again. But you will be thinking these are the ramblings of an old fool, so I will sign off now and send you my very best, my friend. I hope you will enjoy Lucie’s music, and that you and I will meet again one day.
Your friend in music,
Kit Doran
Well, Red thought, letting the letter fall to the desk. Kit Doran. Red had met Kit somewhere in those years that followed the Locksmiths’ nanosecond of national fame – the years in which the band played up and down the coast to fans of their music style, which was a little bit pop and a little bit rock, but had something acoustic and folksy in its roots.
Kit Doran, Red thought, remembering the Canadian’s relaxed clawhammer banjo style and his elegant backcast, a dance so often reflected in the still waters of a trout-laden lake.
They’d talked, Red and Kit, as they’d stood on wave-washed rocks and knee-deep in rivers, and dangled their legs over the edges of jetties and trolled for herring in Red’s tin dish. Kit talked about his wife, Margaret, with a kind of down-to-earth reverence that Red had never come across, not at all, in any man of his acquaintance, and which he certainly never expected to see in a man who could also gut a fish with three strokes of a sharp knife and put a bullet in a bunny on the far side of a farm dam. Red had decided that it must be a north American thing, or at least an unobtainable thing. There were plenty of women, after Locksmiths gigs, in hostel dorm rooms and the backs of panel vans, but Red Somerled never did marry, or settle down, or partner up, or have kids. God knew he was never too careful, so he occasionally allowed himself to wonder if it would ever happen that some ginger-haired individual would turn up on his doorstep with the words ‘I’m your daughter’ or ‘I’m your son’. It hadn’t happened yet. Maybe the truth was that he shot blanks.
On Kit’s advice, Red toggled the CD forward to the track called ‘For Real’, and what happened next to Red Somerled was something he’d never in his life be able to explain. There weren’t too many words in ‘For Real’. For the most part it was an instrumental piece with a bottom end that rose and fell in sequences of three, and a top end that strummed Red’s heartstrings in such a familiar way that he could have sworn this was a song he already knew. Even, it seemed possible, from the way the song harmonised with some deep-down twist of his musical DNA, it was a song he not only knew, but a song he had written. Was that right? Or was it maybe the case that the song was already written on him?
Red didn’t hear the words, but even if he had, he wouldn’t have needed them to tell him that this was a love song. But not only a love song. For the life of him, Red wouldn’t have known whether this song belonged on his compilation for wistful, or his compilation for lovesick, or even on his compilation for lonely. ‘For Real’ seemed to him to jump across all the categories. Or else, it needed one all of its own.
Red didn’t know he was crying until Ann Cooper from the weather desk was beside him, tugging a lace-edged hanky out of her bra, and he couldn’t stop even while she patted his shoulder, or even after the song had finished and he’d pushed his headphones back down around his neck. Head in his hands, elbows on his desk, Rory ‘Red’ Somerled, at the age of sixty-four, cried and cried until the little hanky was all wet through, and until everyone in the room was either watching him cry or studiously not watching him cry.
He cried for love, and he cried for loss. He cried because he hated Louise Trethewey with a passion, and because he detested every smug syllable of her weasel-worded bureaucratese. He cried because Disc & Co was being dragged off the air after fifteen years of solid ratings, and because he’d never see Kit Doran again, and because Lucie Doran sang with a voice like a half-fallen angel. He cried for all these reasons and a hundred more he couldn’t name. He cried because he was human, and because it was only human to cry when bittersweet music ran – loud and clear – through your veins.
IN THE CAR park at the far end of the boatshed track, Evie switched off the Beetle’s engine and sat for a moment in the sudden stillness. She’d worked for the last five days straight, and this had been a busy Friday – full of businessfolk taking long lunches to the extreme, after-work drinkers putting the week behind them and midwinter festival patrons getting a jump on the night. Now it was almost ten o’clock, and although she was tired, Evie didn’t relish the prospect of the quiet weekend that stretched out ahead of her. It took energy and optimism to keep loneliness at bay, and right now she wasn’t sure where she was going to find either one.
At last she forced herself to leave the warmth of the car for the chill of the outdoors, and when she looked up into the sky, she saw the beam of Spectra emerging from behind the low mound of the Queen’s Domain. Shreds of cloud drifted around and through its pillar of brightness as she made her way carefully down the sloping path to the water’s edge.
Opening the boatshed and stepping inside was the opposite of coming home to company and a warm house. Everything inside the boatshed was quiet, cold and still, and tonight the place seemed especially desolate. Evie turned on the gas heater and flicked the switch on the small transistor radio which sat on a shelf above the kitchen sink.
The radio was small and battery-operated, quite old, with a close-fitting leather case with holes for all its buttons and dials, and a circle of large pinpricks for the part that covered the speaker. Standing at the sink, still in her coat, Evie scrolled through the stations, catching snatches of sound – the frenetic tones of a horse-race caller, a burst of orchestral fanfare, the shaky voice of an elderly man recalling a memory, a few bars of jazz, a song played on the fiddle, banjo and guitar. But not just any song. It was the song.
The radio wasn’t perfectly tuned to the station, but Evie pulled her hand away from the dial, scared that if
she altered anything she might lose the transmission altogether. Suddenly unaware of the cold, she stood staring at the small radio, listening hard, as if she could turn her own body into a receiver. No, she wasn’t imagining it. It really was the song – the one she’d last heard being played on cello and flute in Waverley Station in Edinburgh, the one she’d tried to piece together on the strings of her old guitar.
She almost laughed with relief; hearing it again was like watching a lost bird fly voluntarily back through the open door of a cage or having a butterfly land on your hand. She held her breath, nervous that if she made a move to capture it, she’d startle the creature back into flight.
All she had to do though, she told herself, was keep listening. At the end of the song, someone would tell her its name, or at least the name of the artist. Or even if the announcer had already introduced the song before it started, Evie would be able to call the radio station and ask about it. Whatever happened, the song was now hers in some way. She had a lead on it, a thread that would allow her to find it.
It sounded different, played in this folksy combination of guitar, fiddle and banjo. Even so, it was still entirely itself, full of love and longing. Closing her eyes to listen for a moment, Evie knew that this song, for her, would always be bound up in the time she’d spent at Tavistock Row. It would always be the song that told the short, bittersweet story of the time she fell in love with a man who could almost love her back, but not quite.
There came a pause in the music, as for an intake of breath, and then a voice – a woman’s voice – began to sing. Hey, lover mine, do you want . . . do you want . . . do you want to do this thing . . . for real? Those were all the words she sang before the instruments rose up again to take over from her voice. Evie – hooked, carried along – felt the song’s building tensions as the fiddle and the banjo skirted and circled each other in an intricate, intimate exchange. It made her feel a particular kind of pain, but not the kind she wanted to back away from. She wanted to feel it, because it was all of a piece with how beautiful the music was.
Finally, the song came to an end with a sequence of chords that Evie predicted half a heartbeat ahead of time. She could already feel the shape of them, so that when the actual sounds arrived, they resonated in her chest cavity with perfect rightness.
Then a man’s radio-practised voice broke in: ‘I’m Red Somerled, and that brings us to the end of Disc & Co, not just for tonight, but for always.’
The name of the song, she thought. Tell me the name of the song.
‘You’ve been listening to the title track of For Real, the new album by an up-and-coming Canadian folk band, Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers—’
Evie felt the cage door swing shut, her hand close tight. Got you.
‘—who are, as it happens, in Australia at this very moment. They have one final concert as part of their national tour, down in Hobart where the midwinter festival is about to wrap up. If you’re lucky, you might still grab a ticket to see them live at the Avalon Theatre tomorrow night. Well, that’s all from me. Now, it’s news time and the end of an era. Goodnight, Australia. You’ve been listening, for the very last time, to Disc & Co.’
Evie’s weekend, all of a sudden, was no longer so empty.
It had been a long time since Arie had arrived home to find music playing in the house. Tonight, he’d been out at the pub shooting pool with some of the Sonder crew, but when the others had been ready to kick on to a cocktail bar, Arie had called it quits.
He heard the music as soon as he opened the door. It was coming from the kitchen – from the radio, presumably. He must have left it switched on, he thought, as he hung his coat on a hook and tossed his keys down on the hall stand. Although that seemed strange, because he couldn’t remember listening to the radio that morning.
In the doorway of the darkened kitchen, Arie stood for a moment while the equaliser lights of the radio rose and fell like a monitored heartbeat, and then he understood what it was that he was listening to. It was at once completely recognisable and strikingly new, like seeing an old friend with a radically different haircut, or an old house repainted in an unexpected colour scheme.
He took a couple of huge strides and reached urgently for the volume knob, turning the sound up until it hit that point Diana used to talk about, where the music was loud enough to fill his head entirely. But it wasn’t just filling Arie’s head, it was flowing all the way through his whole body, like a current, like his own blood.
In the mix of the music he heard fiddle and banjo, and in the background, guitar. It was definitely the one – the song he’d heard Evie play on her guitar.
What was it? Arie pulled out his phone and opened one of the several song-recognition apps he’d downloaded, back in February, to his phone. He tapped the screen and a series of concentric blue rings began to pulse in time with the music.
Listening, the screen said.
Then it delivered its verdict: ‘For Real’, by Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers.
A thumbnail of an album cover flashed up alongside the words, and Arie could just make out the shape of a woman in a pink dress on a jetty, her blonde hair all blown about and a banjo strapped across her middle.
He’d found it, and all he wanted to do was tell Evie.
‘I’m Red Somerled,’ the radio announcer said, breaking into Arie’s thoughts, ‘and that brings us to the end of Disc & Co, not just for tonight, but for always. You’ve been listening to the title track of For Real, the new album by an up-and-coming Canadian folk band, Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers, who are, as it happens, in Australia at this very moment. They have one final concert as part of their national tour, down in Hobart—’
Hobart?
‘—where the midwinter festival is about to wrap up. If you’re lucky, you might still grab a ticket to see them live at the Avalon Theatre tomorrow night. Well, that’s all from me. Now, it’s news time and the end of an era. Goodnight, Australia. You’ve been listening, for the very last time, to Disc & Co.’
Hobart.
Evie.
Was she there? In that small city at the bottom of the world? A traveller like her – she could have gone anywhere in the country. He knew that. And yet he felt as if the song on the radio had just dealt him a clue. It was the city where she’d grown up, the place where her sister still lived. And now it was the place where a band was playing her song.
Perhaps he was just desperate and clutching at the slenderest of straws. But, what if she was there? What if . . . ?
Hobart.
He could go, if he wanted to; there was nothing stopping him. What was it that Evie had said? Well, you actually are that free. Really and truthfully . . .
What did he have to lose? If he went, and didn’t find her . . . he’d be no worse off. If nothing else, he would hear Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers playing that song, live.
He began to calculate: the gig was tomorrow night. It was on the far side of Bass Strait. Then the realisation hit him: there was only one way to get there in time.
LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR hours later there he was, watching a flight attendant with an immaculate blonde ponytail move through the cabin, counting the passengers with a clicker. The silver constellation brooch that glinted on her navy blue lapel was a symbol Arie knew only too well. He couldn’t quite believe this. Not only was he flying, he thought with amazement as he buckled his seatbelt, he was flying Air Pleiades.
He had made his way through the airport reasonably well, if he did say so himself, grateful that this journey required only that he tackle the domestic terminal, and not the international one where he’d said goodbye to Diana. At security, he’d calmly handed his bag to the explosives tester. In the bar, he’d sunk only two shots of whisky. At the gate lounge, he’d picked up a free newspaper and even if he’d not precisely read any of it, he’d managed to hold it in front of his face and absorb the shapes of some of the words with his eyes.
Even as Arie had walked down the airbridg
e to the waiting plane, what he was doing had not seemed entirely mad to him. So what if he was flying – flying – to Hobart to see a gig? So what if he’d heard a song on the radio, then impulsively bought a Hobart-bound flight, at a ridiculous last-minute price, and a night in a hotel? So what if the only available flight would put him on the ground with half an hour or so to spare before the gig started? So what if he’d gone to all this trouble solely because he’d imagined there was half a chance – a quarter of a chance? an eighth? one-sixteenth? – of seeing Evie again?
Until this moment, none of the above had seemed especially crazy. But now the small screen on the back of the seat in front of him was playing the safety video. It didn’t matter that the video was cleverly done and beautifully shot, that the cast were lovely-looking human beings and that the locations were exquisite, and it didn’t matter that the instructions were delivered with irreverent and deeply Australian humour, because there was nothing in the world that could stop him from feeling nauseated at the sight of a life jacket being tugged over somebody’s head . . . fasten the straps behind you . . . and nothing that could stop his breathing from getting shallow . . . with a light and a whistle to attract attention . . . when he saw a vision of a yellow oxygen mask falling from a ceiling compartment . . . fit your own mask before assisting others.
The closest place Evie could find to park her car that night was a ten-minute walk from the theatre, on a side street in the city’s hilly western quarter. It was windy, and as Evie made her way down a steep street to the Avalon, she had to keep a hand on her head to stop her beanie from being swept away into somebody’s lavender hedge.
When Evie was little, the theatre had not been called the Avalon. At that time, it had been a huge electrical shop, known only by the name of its proprietor, but in recent years both its name and its art deco elegance had been restored. At last, Evie stepped gratefully out of the wind and into the plushly carpeted foyer, where Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers T-shirts and CDs were for sale at a merchandise table. The nearby bar was doing a brisk trade in the midwinter festival’s signature hot gin punch. It didn’t seem quite right to Evie that a paper cup of the punch cost almost as much as the CD, For Real, but in any case she bought one of each.