‘As opposed to saving lives and delivering babies in third-world countries?’
They both turned to the sound of a car engine, and within a minute they saw what was making it. A cream ute, the colour of a couch, came up the winding dirt road and pulled in beside the rental car.
‘I think it’s the guy Georgia mentioned,’ said Sam. ‘He’s come to fix something.’
‘Hello, I’m Albert Tucker.’
A wiry man with a snowy beard tipped his broad-brimmed leather hat to them both. Eve recognised him from the funeral service on Tuesday. His nose was too big for the rest of him, and his legs were bowed, with a few chunks randomly taken out of them. His arms had patches that looked as though they had been burnt or eaten away by insects. What was left was a very practical, unattractive body.
‘I’m sorry for your loss. The whole town is sorry.’
They both nodded, still clutching their cups of tea. Eve didn’t feel like talking and willed this old man to be the strong, silent type.
‘Well, I better find this bike or Georgia will kill me, or at least make me put tea-light candles all through The Crown beer garden tonight to create some, as she would say, ambience.’
Albert walked around to the back of the house with Sam trailing. Leaning against the laundry in the downward dog position was a yellow bike. It was missing a wheel and a seat.
‘You wouldn’t happen to know where the wheel and seat are? Not much good without ’em.’
‘Must be around here somewhere?’ Sam ventured.
The two men began searching the obvious places: the laundry, the small shed a hundred or so metres away, under the verandah. Eve stayed put and finished her cup of tea, before going to the kitchen to wash up. The men had run out of hiding spots.
‘These help?’ she said, opening the back door, dangling a wheel and a bike seat from each hand. ‘They were in the kitchen, of course, beside the fridge and with the pots and pans.’
‘Sorry to take up more of your time, but I think it’s best if I put them on before I try to sell it at the market. It’s a bit of a ride home, and I was hoping to drop off a fully functioning bike into town this afternoon.’
‘Of course, Albert,’ Sam said.
‘What market?’ Eve asked, her left hand keeping the flyscreen door ajar.
‘The market in town tomorrow, part of the Festival of the Four Grains.’
‘What?’ Eve opened the flyscreen door fully and let it crash shut behind her. She stood on the cement step, looking at Albert and Sam and the yellow bike with one wheel and no seat.
‘The Festival of the Four Grains. Georgia and some townspeople started it a few years back. Something to do once a year, I guess.’
Eve didn’t hear the last of this because she was doubled over with laughter, holding her stomach. She sat down on the cement step, and her body twisted down the stairs, with her feet ending up under the tap. Tears began to stream down her face.
‘What. Is. That. All. About?’ she said, in between hard-won breaths and snorts. ‘The Festival of the Four Grains. It sounds like a Motown cover band. This is too good. Too good. Seriously.’
Eve ran back into the house, and the bathroom door was slammed shut.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sam said, picking the seat and wheel off the ground. ‘It’s a strange time, and Eve’s not herself. Well, I think she’s not herself. I’m sure it’s a …’ – Sam was stuck for a word that wouldn’t come across as condescending – ‘a great festival.’ It would have to do.
‘Don’t worry about it, mate. She’s right. It’s a shit name, stupid really, but it’s a bit of fun, chance to get together, so who cares.’ Albert looked at the excuse for a bike in front of him and clicked his tongue. ‘I think we’re going to need a spanner for this and a few small bolts. I didn’t bring my toolbox. You don’t have something like that ’round here?’
Sam headed straight for the shed, throwing Eve a dirty stare as he went past. She had returned to the back step, drying her hands on a tea towel, still shaking her head. She grabbed at the front of her T-shirt and pulled at it to circulate some air around her torso. A line of sweat was making its way from under her breasts to her belly button.
‘Apologies, Albert. I’m sure it’s a fine festival.’ Eve kept pumping the air with her shirt.
‘No need to say things you don’t believe, love. But it’s better than sitting around discussing rain, I reckon.’
‘Of course. Of course. I really am sorry, Albert. I don’t know what came over me. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘I’d love one. Whatever way it comes is fine with me.’
Eve found some biscuits in the kitchen and put them on a plate. The milk still disturbed her, so she made Albert a black tea. When she returned to the backyard, Albert was leaning by the laundry wall, having a smoke, so she placed the tea and biscuits on the cement step.
‘I know he’s a doctor. You a doctor too, love?’ he asked, blowing the smoke away from the house.
‘No. I’ve known Sam for …’ – Eve surprised herself – ‘nearly two days now.’
‘Righto. So you’re not a doc?’
‘No. I went to school with, um, Meg.’ Eve tried to slip around the flyscreen door before Albert could engage her any further. She had made him a cup of tea, found biscuits and apologised for laughing at something that was funny by anyone’s standards.
‘What do you do, then?’ he called.
‘I play the cello.’ She was too slow. She turned to face him.
He flicked his cigarette to the ground and stubbed it, smiling the entire time, shaking his head and showing off a set of beautifully straight white teeth. ‘Ripper. Like for a living?’
She edged her way half-around the back door. ‘Yeah, for the Royal Opera in London. Well, I did. I’m taking a break for a while.’
‘’Cause you’ve come back here? For this?’
‘No, no. I quit about six months ago,’ Eve replied, then she cleared her throat, even though there was nothing to remove. ‘Quit everything.’
Sam stood around the side of the house with a spanner and a pump in his hands. The shed had a couple of dirt bikes and piles of junk, but also plenty of tools, and it was all very orderly and logical. He took two steps back to make sure Eve couldn’t see his shadow from the back step.
‘I wanted to do a few different things. Time for a few different things. You know.’
‘I don’t know much, love. That’s why I’m out here fixing up a crappy bike for the Festival of the Four Grains. But you must have your reasons.’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Now, why does everyone say that these days? It’s complicated. Complicated trumps everything in life.’
Eve didn’t know whether Albert expected an answer but thought he didn’t have a clue about her life. He pumped up bike tyres and fixed jammed windows when Georgia told him to. ‘Because sometimes things are.’
Sam appeared from the side of the house, bearing tools. Albert’s fingers were like stout little tree trunks. Not one fingernail was clean, but his hands were nimble and he knew what he was doing. He and Sam worked on the bike, passing and holding bolts, rubbing grease off their hands onto the patchy grass beneath them, spinning the wheel to check something important, pushing down on the seat. Eve watched their silent, physical work from her seat on the cement step. They were enjoying it. It wasn’t complicated.
Albert thanked them both and hoisted the bike into the back of the ute. ‘I live about twenty minutes away. Are you leaving soon?’ he asked, standing by the open driver door, one leg inside the car.
‘No, we’re in town for a bit,’ Sam said.
‘Well, I’m gonna come right out and ask it. May as well. Opportunities like this don’t come along all the time.’
‘Ask away, Albert,’ Sam said. Did he have a mole that didn’t look right? A buzz in his left ear? Did he want a prescription for Zoloft?
‘My wife, Nancy, she plays the cello. Well, used to. Would you play i
t for me?’
‘Albert, I’m sorry. Meg didn’t play. I don’t have a cello to play here,’ Eve said, untangling her arms from the pole she was leaning on and clinging to, relief washing over her.
‘I do, and I can be back here in thirty-five minutes with it.’
Sam looked at Albert. Albert looked at Sam. Eve tried to get Sam to look at her.
‘Go on, mate. We’ll be here,’ Sam said.
Albert jumped in the car and sped off, dirt and pebbles spraying out from his tyres. His boot disappeared down the driveway, and the sound of his engine grew faint.
Eve immediately marched into the house. ‘Where are the car keys?’ she yelled behind her. ‘We’re not staying. You had no right to tell him I would play. You didn’t even look at me. Give me the keys.’
Eve was standing at the top of the front steps, staring down at Sam, who still had his back to her.
‘I have the keys and I’m not telling you where I put them.’ He didn’t move. ‘You can start walking back into town now and he’ll drive straight past you and offer you a lift. You are stuck.’
‘Sam! I’m serious. Give me the keys. Let’s go. I need to call my parents. The phone isn’t on here and my mobile doesn’t work. I have to use the landline at the pub.’
‘Eve. I was sitting next to you when you called your mum yesterday afternoon. You can call her later. The landline’s not going anywhere. It’s just you and me and Albert.’
‘Bullshit. I don’t have to play if I don’t want to. Out here.’
‘Oh, stop.’ Sam turned to look her in the eye. ‘Eve, we are waiting here for Albert. If you don’t want to play for him when he gets back, you’re a big girl, you tell him. Don’t run away. Jesus. Why don’t you want to, anyway?’
‘Fuck!’
Eve circled the house like a shark, sometimes swearing, sometimes picking up a stone and throwing it at the side of the building. She went to the toilet twice. Sam finished off moving the boxes inside and piled up paperwork by the front door. Eve checked the car just in case Sam had left the keys in the ignition.
When Albert returned forty minutes later, he had a passenger in the front seat and the cello, on its back in its case, carefully strapped into the tray of the ute. Eve had prepared a speech in her head about why she was not going to play. It relied on Meg’s sudden death, grief and bad memories. She was in a corner.
‘Hello!’ he yelled. Sam and Eve could have been far away at the bottom of a garden instead of right in front of him at the bottom of the steps. ‘This is Nancy.’
‘Hi, Nancy,’ they said in unison.
Albert walked over and lifted his wife out of the car. She had a body of extremes. Parts of her were twisted and backwards. Parts were straight and so relaxed they fell onto other parts. She was dribbling out the left side of her mouth.
‘Stroke,’ Albert said as he walked past them, carrying Nancy upstairs, where he put her gently on a verandah armchair. He patted her knee and ran back to the car to grab some pillows. He squashed a couple into her side to keep her upright and put another under her slack feet and then wiped around her mouth. Sam grabbed a few more pillows from inside the house and leant them against the chair for Albert to use as he wished.
‘There you go, sweetheart,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘We’re going to have a concert.’
When Albert returned to the car to get the cello, Eve marched into the house to get a dining chair for herself. Sam passed her in the hallway with tall glasses of water for everyone.
‘I’ll just say “No, I don’t feel like playing to an old disabled lady” shall I?’ she hissed as they went flat against the wall for each other to pass.
Eve placed her chair a good five or six metres away from Nancy. Even if her hearing was suffering like the rest of her, this was close enough. A couple of galahs screeched a warning from the trees. They made so much noise. Eve looked up at them circling and diving, the sun lighting up the tips of their wings.
‘This is going to be good,’ Albert said, laying the cello case carefully on the verandah floor next to Eve and opening it up.
Eve took a step back and hit her chair with her heel. ‘It’s a Gagliano.’ Eve moved towards it, touching its side, its ribs, and ran her hand along the maple purfling, the ridges, the strings, then snapped her hand back as though it had stung her fingers. ‘She has a Gagliano,’ Eve repeated. ‘I mean, Nancy has a Gagliano.’ She wasn’t expecting this. She was expecting laminated wood and a fat, factory-produced bum at the end, not a two-hundred-year-old, handmade, exquisite, $100,000 cello.
‘Oh, yes,’ Albert said. ‘Nancy’s played all over the world.’
Eve and Sam looked at the woman dribbling onto a small red cushion. Albert sat next to Nancy, his bulging fingers over her waxlike hands.
Eve sat on her dining chair and gave the cello a quick tune, plucking the strings and turning the scrolls. She gave it a stroke around its waist.
‘I even miss that sound. When she used to tune it.’
Eve’s thighs gripped the maple; her hands took interest in the neck. ‘Any requests?’
Albert looked at Nancy for an answer and then back at Eve. ‘Oh, no, love, wouldn’t dream of it. Anything you like.’
‘Well, how about an old crowd-pleaser? Bach is one of my favourites. And, Sam,’ – she looked up at him standing behind Albert and Nancy – ‘here’s a titbit. They say the cello is the closest-sounding instrument to the human voice. It talks to you, Sam.’
It was like a thunderclap, the sound when she began the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. It was so forceful that Sam took a step backwards and hit the wall. At first, Eve stared back at her audience, assessing each one, eyes resting on Sam just in case he was unsure of her feelings of entrapment. A wind blew some masking tape from the boxes across the verandah floor and Sam watched it tumbling aimlessly around. When he looked up, Eve’s head was now down, her chin lolling, her eyes closed.
And then she began to sway, just a little. She pulled at the neck of the cello, pulled it, a tiny way, into her and then away from her. Fingers danced up and down the neck. Her elbow stabbed at the air. Eve was in control, every part of her body falling into line, doing its part to create the sweet melancholy that swept around the house and down the hall, around and around as though the notes were going to join together and pick Meg’s house up and the audience with it and take them up into the blue sky, wash them and let them start anew up there.
Sam closed his eyes. Listened. Then it stopped.
‘Beautiful, Eve,’ Albert called, removing his hand from Nancy’s to clap. ‘Beautiful.’
Sam followed Albert’s lead and let Eve continue. For half an hour, she filled the house, the sky, the trees, the bodies in front of her with music. Sam saw sweat run down the side of her cheek and slip down her neck. The sound of wind through trees sometimes swept behind her, another member of the orchestra.
‘Oh, love. Thank you. I remember those. They get under your skin, don’t they?’
As fast as Albert had set up Nancy on the verandah, he packed her up, carried her down the stairs and headed for the ute.
‘How ’bout that for a sleepy Thursday morning?’ he said to Nancy as he strapped her in the passenger seat and adjusted her head. Eve packed up the cello and stashed the bow in its hiding spot, and Albert slid the instrument in the back like a surfboard. His crooked arm punched the air as he closed Nancy’s door. ‘Woo hoo,’ he yelled and ran to his side of the car.
‘Albert,’ Eve called to him as he shut his car door. He stuck his head out the window to hear her. ‘Thank you.’
‘No, thank you, love.’ He popped his head back inside the car and then popped it out again. ‘It’s none of my business, I know, but you can’t give up something you play like that. It’s yours.’ Albert nodded his head solemnly in the direction of the house, where he could still see the music. ‘That up there. That is yours.’
Then he wound down his window fully, reversed and waved his half-eaten arm
out the car window. From behind, they could see Albert put his strong hand around the back of Nancy’s neck and turn to talk to his wife.
Sam heard an intake of breath beside him. Eve began to gather up the water glasses and couldn’t help clinking them together.
‘You’re really good,’ Sam said, ignoring her affected industry. ‘Meg said you could pull people’s guts out when you play. Now I know what she meant. You’re going to go back to it, right?’
Eve turned near the top step and let her arms drop by her side, making it look like she had long icicles for fingers. ‘You know what, Sam? I don’t even know if I miss it. I don’t know any more.’ She took a step backwards into the doorway. ‘I play, I don’t do. In the scheme of life, playing is not important.’
‘You’re kidding, right? You’re right, that …’ – Sam waved his arm up and down the verandah, end to end – ‘is not playing, Eve. That’s about living. That’s about why we’re all living, trying to live.’
‘The almighty Georgia asked us to ring Sarah.’ Eve slipped into the shadowed hallway. ‘I should get into town so I can call her so she’s got time to get here by tomorrow afternoon.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The roar was loudest from Sarah’s small bathroom window. The clever architect had made sure the bathroom was closest to the busy road. The Thursday-morning peak-hour traffic was building already to a steady stop, start, crawl, all those offices and workstations to rule over.
Sarah stood in her three-bedroom-plus-study house a suburb away from where she had always wanted to live, behind a front fence that would not have been miscast guarding a detention centre. Compromise was like the rendered brick that needed to be repainted to hide the mynah and magpie shit outside: it was what her life was built on now.
At least the house was quiet and cool this summer morning. Andrew had taken Sebastian to day care. He was going to go into work a little late today. Sarah finished her daytime make-up – same amount of time taken as in the evenings, for a much more natural-looking result. She didn’t want to look like a try-hard wearing three shades of eyeshadow and a dark-berry lipstick pushing a trolley full of toilet paper, nappies and tropical poppers in Woolworths.
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