The Lost Love Song

by Minnie Darke

  Just because Evie was used to going places alone didn’t mean she always liked it, and tonight she was particularly aware of herself as a spectator for those couples who swung through the front doors arm in arm, and also for the people who turned up alone but were quickly enfolded into their groups with exuberant greetings, hugs, kisses: one cheek, then the other. The gin cocktail lent her a kind of artificial buoyancy, but she imagined that if someone had cut her in half at that moment and looked at her in cross-section, they would have seen a thin layer of joyfulness around the edge but something darker and sadder at her core.

  The auditorium doors were thrown open and Evie joined the rush. Within, there was a smoky feel to the old place, despite the fact that there had for decades been no actual smokers to fuel it. The flammable note of alcohol was in the air. Low-standing platforms had been installed at the sides of the room to create some different levels for the audience, and upon them stood tall, circular tables for people to cluster around. Evie chose a spot at the left of the room, on the front edge of one of these platforms, hoping for a good view.

  The crowd kept coming, so that the early arrivals were pushed forward by those still pouring in through the doors, and there was music playing – folksy and electronic at once. The Curious Lovers didn’t keep their audience waiting. Soon, the drummer was settling himself in behind the barricade of his kit, and the guitarists were plugging in their instruments.

  There had been only one fiddle player in the band pictures that Evie had seen, but there were two on stage – a short, buxom woman in a floral tunic, and a rather gorgeous-looking man with black hair and blue eyes. Front and centre, though, was Lucie Doran herself, her fair hair shining gold in the stage light, her electric banjo strapped high and tight across her chest with a thick, woven strap.

  She wasted no time on an introduction to the first track, only stamped her foot – one, two. This was music that you were supposed to dance to, and it was clear that some of the people right at the front of the room had come for that express purpose. Around the edges of the room, though, were people – like Evie – who were content to tap their toes and sway.

  The first track was instrumental, a set of reels both joined and separated by bridges of shifting tempo and key. When it was over, Lucie Doran stepped up to the microphone.

  ‘So, next we’re going to play you a song from our new album,’ she told the crowd. Her speaking voice, lightly accented, gave a hint of just how beautiful it was going to sound when it shifted gears into song. ‘I didn’t write this one – I wish I had, but I didn’t. We don’t know who wrote it. We’ve asked around, and the best we can say is that it seems to have been jumping from ear to ear and heart to heart, which is how all the best songs make their way across the world.’

  The bass guitarist at the back of the stage leaned into his microphone. ‘So, the news is that our Lucie here is going to be a bride, and I’m afraid it’s kinda gone to her head, hence all the talk about hearts.’

  ‘Well, thanks for sharing, Frankie,’ Lucie said, a little bashful, her face still turned to the crowd. ‘But it is true that this next one is a love song. It came to me in New York City, and before that, it came to my fiancé – oh yeah! I said the f-word! That’s Elijah right here’ – the blue-eyed fiddle player made a half-bow – ‘and this song found him in Toronto, Canada. We don’t know what this song was called at the beginning of its life, but we call it “For Real”.’

  Lucie played alone for a time, but then, as the rest of the band joined in, Evie felt the beat in the floor come rising up through her legs while the melody poured through her ears and amplified in the beat-box of her chest. As she knew she would every single time she ever heard this song, she thought of Arie.

  The journey to the island was not a smooth one. Arie’s plane passed through several pockets of turbulence, causing the flight staff to switch on the seatbelt sign and send everyone back to their seats. Each time the plane fell into a sudden patch of dead air and Arie was jerked upwards against the restraint of his lap belt, he felt his own fragility. He tried to stop himself from thinking about Diana’s small frame – how it would never have stood the faintest chance against the colossal forces of wind, weather and engineering.

  At last the plane began its descent, something that could hardly come soon enough for Arie. Not only was he desperately ready to step off the craft and onto solid ground, he was also aware that the flight was running behind time and it wouldn’t be long until the Lucie Doran and the Curious Lovers gig began. He could only hope there would be enough taxis at the airport, that the drive into the city would be quick.

  As the plane passed through a bank of cloud, Arie’s porthole window filled with static before clearing to reveal a spectacular view. The outlines of mountain ranges were visible against a midnight-blue backdrop patterned with wind-blown clouds, and the city of Hobart was a spill of coloured lights split in two by the intricate black bays and inlets of the River Derwent. Not far from a bridge across the river that was picked out in spans of red neon, a huge beam of light rose up into the sky. This, then, was Spectra.

  Arie had read about the midwinter festival and its light installations, but he’d not been prepared for the impressive scale of it, nor the way its presence seemed to make some sense of this lunatic mission. The beam appeared like a gigantic beacon. In the face of all his questions, the light seemed to provide some kind of answer.

  But instead of descending further, the plane swooped upwards again and banked in a wide turn. A few minutes later, the pilot spoke over the sound system. ‘Well, folks, as you probably worked out, we didn’t make our landing into Hobart on this pass. The conditions are very difficult, with westerly winds gusting to thirty-five knots. So, if you’d be so kind, hold tight while we circle around and have another go. Rest assured, we have your safety uppermost in our minds at all times, so please sit back and enjoy what is going to be a slightly extended flight.’

  ‘Slightly’ turned out to be an understatement. By the time the pilot started his second attempt at landing, Arie knew that he’d missed the beginning of the gig. Then, instead of bringing the craft to the ground, the pilot once more pulled up and made another huge swooping turn, so that Arie had the feeling the plane was spiralling around Spectra like a chair tethered to a fairground ride. He checked his watch again and felt all the hope leach out of him.

  Something Arie had always hated about air travel, even before PQ108, was that once you stepped aboard you were committed to whatever the flight held in store. There was simply no changing your mind. It amazed him that the flight attendants could cope, day in, day out, being trapped inside their workplace, all choice removed from them. Again, he tried not to think of Diana, and again, he failed.

  The pilot announced he would make one more attempt at landing. If it turned out, he said, that it was still too dangerous to proceed, the flight would be diverted to the northern Tasmanian city of Launceston, a two-hour drive away from Hobart. Arie closed his eyes as the plane made its third descent, juddering and jostling in the cross-wind.

  This time the plane landed, wheels hammering down hard before its big body hurtled down the runway, shimmying left and right. Eighteen minutes later, Arie Johnson was among the first off the flight, clattering down the metal stairs and hurrying across the windswept tarmac towards the terminal building.

  There was a taxi waiting, and the drive to the city was as swift as Arie could have hoped for, but when he arrived at the Avalon Theatre the place was all but empty. A few groups of people lingered on the footpath outside, talking and laughing together, while inside the foyer a woman at a merchandise table was folding T-shirts into a cardboard carton. Propped on the bar was a sign advertising gin cocktails, but the lights above the bar were switched off and there appeared to be no bartender on duty.

  Door staff in black clothes noted his presence as he passed by them and into the auditorium. On the now-deserted standing platforms, discarded paper cups stood on glass tables. Behind the soun
d desk, a guy with a huge beard stood bathed in the light from a screen; amid the abandoned instruments on stage, a couple of techs were busy rolling cables. He went back into the foyer where the mirrored walls forced him to acknowledge the stupidity of his journey.

  ‘Can I get a CD?’ he asked the woman at the merchandise table.

  ‘I’ve disconnected the EFTPOS machine,’ she said, ‘so I could do cash, but I haven’t got any change.’

  The CDs were twenty dollars; Arie had only fifty-dollar bills. Throwing good money after bad, he thought, handing one over.

  ‘Keep the change, in that case.’ At least he wouldn’t go home completely empty-handed.

  Outside the venue, Arie tried to get his bearings. He’d never been to this city before, so its lay-out was a mystery to him. With his overnight bag slung across his shoulder and phone in hand, he searched for directions to his hotel. Fifteen minutes by foot, apparently, or six by car. The walk would do him good.

  He turned in the direction of the arrow on the screen – left. Following the street, he began to climb, and each time he turned to look back, his view over the city was a little different, although one thing remained the same: Spectra, its light shining steadily upwards into a cloud-scribbled sky.

  Behind the Avalon Theatre, in one of the city’s usually disregarded and undeveloped parking lots, a pop-up bar had sprouted out of the gravel and the weeds. It had the look of a zoo enclosure, with multiple levels and rampways between them. Fires burned in glowing 44-gallon drums and sent occasional showers of sparks pluming up into the air. Beside one of these sat Evie Greenlees, sipping a furiously strong short black and silently humming a tune.

  For quite some time, she watched the people with her poet’s eye, capturing the vividness of their clothing, their mannerisms, their laughter, their touching. So many people, all around, and so many of them seeming to radiate with the knowledge that they would not be going home alone, as Evie would be.

  At last, she pulled her sheepskin coat tight around herself and began the climb up the hill out of the city. As closed-up cafés and dark-windowed shops full of homewares gradually gave way to weatherboard townhouses and sandstone cottages, the foot traffic diminished and the gradient increased.

  She had to step into the road to get out of the way of two girls – loud, tipsy and shrieking with laughter – who were walking backwards down the street because the heels of their tall, glossy boots were too high for the slope. She could feel the climb in her thighs.

  At last she turned into the cross-street where the car was parked, which was – mercifully – on the level. She sought the Beetle, and found it, its familiar rounded shape glowing where she had parked it beneath a streetlight. But there was somebody beside it. A man, and he was pacing the pavement.

  Nothing worth stealing in there, she thought, and felt in her pocket for the safety of her phone, though she hardly knew what she intended to do with it. Her heart rate, already high from the uphill walk, lifted another level as she watched the man stride up and down the pavement, never going further than the length of her car. It wasn’t until he paused to blow on his hands, and to roll his wrist over as if checking the time, that Evie realised there was something in his movements that was familiar to her. Wasn’t it . . . ?

  It had been three and a half months since she’d left Melbourne. But Evie was wise enough to know that even if you did spend all that time thinking of someone, wanting them, longing for them, it wasn’t enough to make them appear like a midnight wish by your car. Was it?

  She blinked, expecting when she opened her eyes for her vision to have cleared.

  Then he saw her.

  ‘Evie?’

  Her heart went faster still, beating it’s him, it’s him, it’s him.

  In her dreams, Evie was the kind of cool, calm and collected person who would somehow have the composure to . . . stroll . . . the final distance that lay between them. But in reality, she was the kind of heart-on-her-sleeve girl who had to hold herself back from breaking into a run.

  When she reached Arie, she didn’t stop to think. She hugged him, and he hugged her back, and for a while they stood there, chins on each other’s shoulders, breathing in time. She felt that he was cold, even though his suede jacket was zipped up and his scarf wound tightly at his neck. When she pulled away from him, his brown eyes and his wide smile were the only warm things about him. His face was pale and his shoulders tight with shivering. But that smile. Those eyes.

  ‘I found you,’ he said.

  Evie didn’t know if the expression on his face contained more happiness than relief, or more relief than happiness – but she knew that it was all for her.

  ‘You did. But . . . how are you even here?’

  ‘KFP 532,’ he said, quoting her number plate. ‘I was walking up the hill, and it was just pure dumb luck. I looked left, and there was your car. And in there, on the seat – I knew they were your sunglasses. So all I had to do was . . . wait.’

  ‘You’re freezing. How long have you been here?’

  ‘A while,’ he said.

  ‘But . . . how? Why? What?’

  ‘I needed to tell you that I found out the name of that song,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to know.’

  He pulled the CD from his pocket, then Evie tugged the matching one from her purse.

  ‘You found it, too,’ he said.

  ‘Or it found me.’

  ‘You were at the gig?’ he asked, putting the CD back in his pocket.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I tried to get there, but the plane—’

  Plane, Evie processed.

  ‘—it couldn’t land the first couple of times. I feel like I’m always doing this with you, Evie. Eventually getting where I need to be, but always a bit late.’

  She didn’t say anything. She wanted to hug him again.

  ‘You left me without saying goodbye,’ he said.

  That wasn’t true, actually. Evie remembered every single thing about the moment she had said goodbye – the early autumn breeze gusting lightly down Tavistock Row, the faint trace of Arie’s warm cologne, a sad kiss still echoing on her lips. That seemed at the same time terribly long ago but also like yesterday.

  ‘There hasn’t been a day over the last few months when I haven’t thought of you, and missed you. And there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t asked myself what you would have done if I’d asked you to stay.’

  Smiling, Evie gave a shrug. ‘I would have stayed.’

  ‘My, stupid, mistake.’

  ‘Eselverue?’ she asked.

  ‘I think I might need a new word for this. One that means I don’t want to have to imagine that it’s only in another place and another time where it works out for us.’

  He opened his hands to her.

  She regarded them.

  ‘I’m ready,’ he promised. ‘This time, I’m ready.’

  Evie knew that in a moment she would kiss him for the second first time. A little later, in a boatshed that no longer felt so empty, they would make love for the second first time. Tomorrow, Arie would miss his flight to Melbourne, and he wouldn’t go home the next day either, nor the day after that, and in the several days that he and she would remain hidden from the world, watching the wintry waves of the bay through the boatshed window, they would marvel at their good fortune to have been listening to the radio at the same moment when ‘For Real’ played over the airwaves, and she would read him poems from her notebooks, including the one about the match, and he would tell her about the red dresses going up in flames on the solstice, and in the months to follow there would hardly be a weekend when Arie wasn’t in Hobart, or Evie in Melbourne. There was more beyond that, too. Much more, but it was all yet to come.

  For now, they were standing in a cold street, and he was holding out his hands.

  This time Evie took it slowly, not because she was uncertain but because she wanted to be sure that she would remember every single thing: the feel of the wind; the tarry smell o
f the street; the slightly overfull feeling of her heart, which only wanted to rush. She closed her eyes and remembered her own words. Do you know what’s going to happen to me next in my life? 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.

  She hadn’t been exactly right. It hadn’t been simple. Not so far. But as Evie reached out her hands, she knew that it didn’t matter. Because Arie did want her, really and properly. His hands were cold against hers, but his grasp felt entirely safe. His fingers closed, tightly, around hers, as if he had no intention of letting go ever again. And if, in that moment, Evie had the slightly giddy feeling that she was placing her entire future in those hands, it was only because she was.

  IT WASN’T RED Somerled’s idea to pull the Locksmiths back together for a revival tour; Tony the drummer had been the one to track them all down and talk them into it. He’d phoned up Red a couple of months after Disc & Co’s demise, when Red had been in a funk, sleeping late on weekdays and putting away a good deal too much Jim Beam and Coke in the evenings.

  ‘Who wants to listen to a bunch of old losers like us?’ Red had asked.

  ‘Yeah, but here’s the thing,’ Tony had said. ‘Who cares?’

  It was a good point. Now here they were, on a tiny stage in a Fremantle pub on a roasting December afternoon. It was a far cry from their glory days, when the crowd used to press up against the edges of the stage, and Red – behind the keyboard – could feel the heat from the eyes of a hundred different women. Now each of the Locksmiths sported a bald head, turkey wattles or a gut like a belt-buckle soufflé, or all of the above, and the Sunday session crowd was sparse.