Unchained Melody

by S. K Munt

  ‘A what?!’ Callie felt every cell in her body pop like fairy lights plugged into White Zombie’s amp. She hated herself for her weakness and the brittle sound of her voice but then she saw Hunter’s mother’s eyes bug out of her head and she instantly felt a little better not to be the only shocked one. Then she felt worse, because if she wasn’t overreacting, then shit was getting bad. She’d slipped on one of Hunter’s green flannelette shirts earlier and now she pulled it more tightly around herself.

  ‘Category five?’ The older woman’s awed tone reflecting Callie’s alarm. ‘Where is it hitting?’

  ‘They’re saying closer to Airlie now. The whole town has gone into lockdown.’

  Callie shuddered like electricity was trying to purge itself from her bloodstream. Airlie Beach was only just over an hour away! That didn’t put them in line for the eye but if it was becoming a category five then Horizon was going to get beaten by the outer edges of the storm.

  ‘Oh honey, don’t worry.’ Hunter’s mother crossed to her and drew her into her arms. ‘It’s not supposed to hit until the middle of the night. That leaves us with over nine hours for it to weaken over the reef.’

  ‘Which it always does.’ Mr M pointed out. But his face was strained. He looked at his wife and said. ‘I am worried though, about Sadie…’

  Sadie? It took Callie a moment to realize who he was referring too and then she remembered; Hunter’s parents kept an eighteen foot, show-room condition sailboat down at the Shale Creek Marina.

  ‘Right...’ Josie Marks blanched. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Gazza says we can put it in his air-hangar but we need to hurry if we’re going to get to Shale Creek before the roads go under.’

  Callie’s stomach dropped. Uh-oh. She thought. Drive to Shale Creek? In this?

  ‘Okay. Good.’ Josie shot Callie an apologetic smile. ‘I hate to do this to you Callie but…’

  Callie looked from Hunter’s mother, then to his father, and bit her lip. ‘Look guys, I totally get it- you need to go get the boat, and you know damn well that I won’t be going anywhere near that outside mess that’s a-brewin’.’ She smiled, trying to keep her mood light. ‘It’s okay. Just go. I’ll barricade myself in Hunter’s room and crank up Metallica until someone comes back.’

  Hunter’s father’s forehead creased. ‘Thanks Callie, but we promised your parents that we wouldn’t let you out of our sight-’

  ‘An optimistic promise for parents to make about a teenage girl at the best of times.’ Callie was working the heels of her hands against the cuffs of her sleeves- she didn’t want them to go! But she knew they had to.

  ‘We’ll wait until Hunter comes back.’ Hunter’s mother said to her husband, her eyes cautioning him to play along.

  But Callie shook her head. Storms were scary, but costing her mate’s parents over ninety thousand dollars in damages? That was chilling. ‘Hunter won’t be back for hours. I’ve actually handled this weather a thousand times better today, with you as witnesses, than I’ve handled a thunderstorm in the past. Mum was right- I can deal if I just try.’ She motioned to the door. ‘Now scram! If worst comes to worst, I’ll be under the bed,’ she smiled thinly, ‘with one of those sandwiches I’ve yet to finish.’ Trying to be the picture of calm, Callie walked on trembling legs to the dining table, collected her plate and her cup of tea, and inclined her head towards the hallway. ‘I’ll keep the phone close by and ring someone if I start to lose it. Which I won’t.’ She bit her lip, pausing on Hunter’s threshold. ‘Just… be safe okay? And quick.’

  Hunter’s parents exchanged a look. Callie could see that they were trying to protest, but that her argument had sold them on her stability.

  Ten minutes later, Callie was back in Hunter’s room, her untouched sandwich on the plate while she wriggled under the bed with Hunter’s walkman at her side and the largest earphones she could find on her head.

  But even Nothing Else Matters cranking at thirty decibels in close range couldn’t muffle the sound of her crying from herself, as the wind increased, the rain began to fall like lead, and Callie Clay began to come apart.

  *

  The weather had gone from creepy to downright unnerving and with every passing second, Hunter’s inner anxiety over Callie’s state of mind began to increase. He felt stupid for having gone to school; half of the kids hadn’t shown up anyway, but the principal wasn’t letting anyone leave unless they were collected by a parent. Apparently, the roads were washing out and the bus services cancelled.

  Still, Meredith was there and despite her displeasure over how the wind and rained ruined her hair, she was as excited about the gig as she had been the week before and promised Hunter that they’d all be there with bells on to dance and cheer. Hunter had hugged her in his excitement, grateful for her and her loyalty, and completely drowning in guilt for having almost cheated on her the night before. And feeling guiltier still because he knew that despite the regret he was already feeling, he’d just as soon jump into bed with Callie anyway if the offer came up again- even if his girlfriend offered it first- because it was Callie he wanted, Callie he was falling for. He was using Meredith for her friends, and as soon as he and Ryan had impressed the lot of them, Hunter was going to find a way to end things with Meredith so he could pursue his best mate. He was a horrible person but screw it, he was going to be a legend, and legends had stepped on heads in the past and would again.

  Besides he’d heard Meredith and Sacha giggling and whispering about what a ‘basket case,’ Callie Clay was for having missed so many days of school over weather. In the past, they’d always covered up her absences by saying she was sick or whatever but because Reece and Marnie had walked in on Callie during a meltdown the week before, the cat five was out of the bag and the way a lot of people were reacting to learning that she had a severe phobia was just as Callie had always feared; she was being mocked. More than usual. Meredith was being lovely to him, maybe, but he could see now that she wasn’t a lovely person through and through, not like Cal, who’d sent Marnie her electric typewriter on Tuesday so Marnie could stop writing the book she was working on by hand. Marnie wasn’t gossiping about Callie’s Astraphobia. Marnie, like Callie, was sweet. Meredith was jealous and petty, so he’d use her for what he could until Callie demanded exclusivity, which hopefully, was coming. He honestly didn’t know where she was at. The comment about Ryan’s blue eyes was still gnawing on his pride.

  The day dragged on but eventually, he and Ryan made it to his car, getting saturated in the process, before driving over to Wolf’s. Hunter was so relieved to see that the neon red wolf’s head silhouette was lit on the roof of the bar that he could have cried. Inside the bar, everything was as it was supposed to be although it looked weird in the daylight and seemed to smell worse.

  ‘I hope you guys have an unplugged set planned.’ Darren, the owner said, sliding a pot of beer along the bar and into the hands’s of Zeke Green, one of the solo musos who frequented the bar, and the marquee out front. ‘I don’t know how long this power is going to hold out for.’

  ‘I heard it’s a cat five now.’ Zeke said, before taking a long swig. He wiped the foam off his upper lip off the back of his tattooed hand and shook his head. ‘Getting closer too. They reckon it’s going to make landfall around one now.’

  ‘Seriously?’ A line appeared between Ryan’s eyes. He glanced at Hunter. ‘Should we just reschedule?’

  ‘Hell no.’ Hunter didn’t even consider it- he wanted this moment too much! He went to the bar, which was a dusty black, and placed the wet music stand in front of a stool. ‘There’s a busload of tourists stranded down at the Comfort Inn tonight- they’re gonna want to drink, and they’re going to want to enjoy their authentic ‘Aussie’ experience. And we need to be that experience.’ He’d been looking forward to this slot for two months, and they’d have to pry it from his cold, dead hands. ‘We go on. And yes, we have acoustic instruments in case things get a bit campfire around here.’

/>   The phone on the wall jangled and Darren hefted himself off the bar lazily to answer it, exchanging a smirk with Zeke, no doubt thinking of how ‘cute’ Hunter was to be so excited for his big night.

  ‘I guess that could be cool.’ Ryan admitted. ‘Hey I told you about the song I wrote right? The one Callie’s gonna sing with me?’

  Hunter nodded curtly, feeling his mood sour at the recollection of when he’d learned about that song. Then he thought about all of the ‘Callie’ songs Ryan had written, and his annoyance turned to guilt. He shot Ryan a sideways glance and asked: ‘How are you going with Marnie anyway?’

  Ryan shrugged despondently. ‘She’s cool.’

  ‘Hey Hunter… you’re mummy’s on the phone…’ Darren boomed, cracking himself up as he held the standard issue and heavily stained Telecom phone out to Hunter to take. Hunter snatched it, too worried to be embarrassed and hoping he could talk low enough not to be audible over Fire Water Burn on the juke box.

  ‘Mum? What’s going on?’

  ‘Hey honey. How are you holding up in this mess?’

  ‘Fine.’ Hunter flipped Darren off, who had draped a tea towel over his head like pigtails and was pretending to skip around the bar in an unlikely representation of Hunter being a ‘girl.’

  ‘That’s good. Look I’m just calling to let you know that dad and I have gone to tow Sadie back to the house. We shouldn’t be too long, and Callie swears that she’ll be fine but I just wanted to let you know that you should probably hurry home as soon as-’

  Hunter didn’t bother to hang up the phone. He dropped it before his mother had even finished speaking, whirled on Ryan and spat out: ‘Fuck! Mum and Dad left Callie at home in this to save their damn boat!’

  ‘What?!’ Ryan’s features contorted in fury. He was already reaching for his black leather jacket, shrugging into it. ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Beats me!’ Hunter jogged to the door and looked down the street as though he could see through the buildings and to his house but he could barely see the glowing red of the traffic lights twenty meters away for the rain! It was already getting dark, the sky turning a color that was like black smoke burned from yellowish green flames. ‘But we have to go, now. She is going to flip out if she hasn’t already!’

  ‘Agreed.’ Ryan turned and pointed to the stage. ‘We’ll be back. Don’t let anyone touch my shit and if Rathe shows up, tell him to just set his own up.’ Rathe was one of the junior music students they were getting in to play bass for them that night. Hunter hoped he’d work out and get them one step closer to being a band.

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ Darren wasn’t laughing anymore. All the guys at Wolf’s Breath were sweet on Callie, and always had been. ‘Drive safe.’

  ‘Will do.’

  As soon as they got to the curb, Hunter realized that driving unsafely wasn’t an issue-because although his green Torana was still high and dry, there were police officers in fluorescent yellow parkas setting up traffic cones at the intersection in the kind of arrangement that did not allow for cars to get through. Above them, the traffic lights had stopped being red and had started flashing orange. In the ten seconds that Hunter stood there, wondering if the streets were open at the other end of town, he got saturated, and then, he began to shake. If the power was out there, Callie was in a dark house alone.

  ‘Shit.’ Ryan said. ‘Pond way? Then round the Abbot’s place?’

  Hunter nodded and dragged his keys out of his pockets. Just then a rumble of thunder so loud and so jarring that Hunter himself let out squawk and jumped clapped above them and his heart didn’t just skip a beat; it was more like a typewriter furiously smashing at a page with fifteen broken stems.

  ‘Move,’ he grunted to Ryan, shoving his key into the lock on the driver’s side and almost ripping the door off its hinges in an attempt to get in. The car smelled like thirty year old stale cigarette smoke, fish oil polish and Callie’s hat. And something about that scent without that presence beside him made him feel bereft.

  It wasn’t often that Hunter had bad feelings, but he was having one then. And it was telling him that he was about to lose is best friend. Just to what, he did not know.

  *

  Callie couldn’t take it anymore. Metallica hadn’t drowned out the storm ripping the world apart outside and neither had Sepultura. Hunter clearly hadn’t vacuumed under his bed in forty-eight years because the amount of dust and discarded guitar picks under there was making her sneeze constantly and yet despite the panic, she had somehow managed to get bored out of her mind.

  When the lights flickered for the third time and something else struck the roof of the house hard enough to send a vibration through the floorboards, Callie began to cry and inch out from under the bed army-style, keeping low like Dorothy bracing for a landing in Oz. The storm was freaking her out but she was handling it better than she had hoped. However, Callie’s fear was not what she was currently facing, but what was to come when Cyclone Addison made landfall.

  Callie had been through cyclones before, more near-missed than hits, but the last substantial one Joy that had hit while she was in primary school had scared the be-jeesus out of her. She could still remember being huddled in the bathroom with her mother and father- could still hear the sounds of the roofing screws screaming in protest as they fought the wind for their hold on the Colourbond steel. Many roofs in Horizon had lost that particular battle- would Callie’s house withstand it again? Would Hunter’s?

  Callie stood in the centre of the room after she’d pulled herself to her feet, and instantly wanted to crawl back under the bed. But she knelt instead, reaching for a Cypress Hill C. D on Hunter’s shelf, quickly switching discs in the walkman and hating every second of silence lapsing between the final strains of Roots Bloody Roots and the beginning beats of Insane In The Brain. She bopped her head, hugging herself and wondering if she looked like a cold chicken.

  That was when she noticed Ryan’s open duffel bag on the floor, and his sheet music folder peeking out of it like a bright blue promise of distraction. She grabbed it, deciding to use her time to go over Are You Game and began flicking through the pages, still chanting along with Cypress Hill. ‘Yes I’m the pirate-pilot of this ship!’ She rapped loudly, knowing she would scream the lyrics if it muted the thunder even a fraction more. The first title in the folder was: ‘Always.’ And it was a professional script purchased through the music store in Townsville where they all ordered their stuff through. Bon Jovi, of course. Cali flicked a few pages ahead, and was just beginning to breathe evenly again, comforted by the stream of treble clefs and minims and quavers that made up her most favorite language, when a bunch of sheets fell from the back. They hadn’t been sheathed within the plastic pockets, but stuffed behind the rear cover. By the look of them, they’d been stuffed in several places before that, smoothed out and then stuffed again.

  The lines were the photocopied type, and the titles and notes were all hand-written in Ryan’s tiny print. She read the first title, and frowned. ‘Fisted Heart.’ Then she shrugged, shuffled two pages ahead, because the song was incomplete, and read the next: ‘She wears his hat.’ That made Callie suck in a breath and as desperately as she wanted to read the words, the bright yellow of a Post-It marking a page further towards the back of the stack beckoned to her. She dropped the others, lifted the post it and read the title, feeling everything inside her turn to jelly.

  ‘I want to be inside you Callie.’

  Callie dropped the pages, her hands coming to her mouth to stifle a sound that was half yelp, and half gasp. But even in her lap, the lyrics were easy to read: ‘You touch me like it’s nothing/ but you know you are my all/ You’re sweet and hot and cherry ripe/ you whet my every appetite/ I’m gonna take you home tonight and pin you to the wall.’

  Callie pressed her head into her shoulder like a shy baby bird, caught off-guard by the lustful candor of her gentle Ryan’s words and yet excited to the point of hyperventilating. Was that seriously how he thought about her?
It was so unlike him! Then she saw the post-it she’d peeled off, which at first she’d assumed to be a page marker, but now when she read what it said, her world blew apart.

  Callie,

  I hope you care about me enough to snoop, because the only way I can tell you what I’m thinking without him knowing, in a way I know you’ll understand, is to do it in song. And so here are my songs; they go deeper, hotter, lighter and sweeter than anything I could ever think to say to you, but read each, and you’ll have a fairly good idea of what I’m trying to say.

  Yours for now, but fear forever

  Ry.

  A fat tear slid off the end of Callie’s nose and made the word ‘Ry’ blossom like a navy-blue bloom on the bright paper. She wanted to read the rest of the songs for some perspective but then she thought of the way she’d been in Hunter’s arms the day before and she felt queasy with guilt. Then the lights flickered, and continued to flicker, and Callie’s heart seized so sharply that when the lights went out, and the C. D skipped by the force of the thunder rattling the house and Callie’s every cell, there was nothing left inside her to constrict, but her mind.

  ‘Insane in the brain. Insane in the brain. Insane in the-’ Callie tore the headphones off her head, flung them to the wall, and ran for the door.

  12.

  Shit!’ Hunter dragged his hands down his cheeks and then brought them back up to muss up his hair. ‘Oh shit!’ He moved from one room of his house to the other, but he knew he wasn’t going to find Callie there. His boots made a slurping sound as he sloshed back to his bedroom, the first place Ryan had gone, leaving puddled footprints stamped on his mother’s previously gleaming floors.

  They’d taken too long and Callie was nowhere to be seen. If they didn’t find her soon, they were going to have to alert the authorities!

  I cannot hold you or let you go/ until you hear what I’ve come to know/ my girl next door/my saving grace/ I’ll kiss your lips and touch your face/ between our bodies leave not a trace/ of wasted wasted space/ Not second place/ Cotton to lace.