by Cate Kennedy
‘I wasn’t in the station,’ she said.
They can pack a cruel stomach-punch, these kinds of coincidences. They can knock the breath out of you, make you look around for a camera, some cosmic punchline. As I picked off the masking tape around the jigsaw box, I was thinking of the violin and taking it to my man Lewis in Victoria Street for a valuation. But I should have known better, of course. Because what lay inside the box, nestled among the pieces, was a plastic bag of white powder. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never dabbled, but I’m not stupid. We were talking half a kilo of the hard stuff here.
I put the package down and thought for a while. Thought of the brother who’d gone overseas and left his well-meaning family to their spring-cleaning. Thought about needing seven hundred bucks and kissing goodbye my rent arrears and parking-infringement debts at the same time. Thought about the disguise a god might come in to test my character.
As I sat there I noticed two edge pieces of the jigsaw and pulled them out. Poked around and stuck a few bits of sky together. By the time I’d decided to go and see Lewis, I’d put together the whole top edge and half the skyline.
‘Interested in an old and rare violin, miraculously unearthed at a local flea market?’ I asked Lewis, swinging the case in front of him. He came around the counter, wiping his hands.
‘Always interested. Hasn’t happened yet, though, so don’t hold your breath.’
‘Lewis, I may have something here to restore your faith in miracles.’
He grinned, rubbed his eye. ‘Put it out the back. I’ll lock up and buy you a beer.’
Sitting in the pub the words jostled in my mouth, waiting to be aired: Lewis, how hard would it be to offload half a kilo of heroin? I drank a mouthful of beer, drowning them. Because I was scared of the answer, to tell you the truth. Scared of Lewis’s barking, incredulous laugh and his words that would commit me to the next step. Easy as this, Lewis would say, drawing on his smoke, pointing. See that guy sitting over there? Then I would be lost.
‘Give us a call about that fiddle,’ I said, picking up my keys.
‘No worries. But no promises.’
Back home, I filled in the rest of the skyline, a park and a cathedral. The bag of heroin lay there on the mantelpiece, looking for all the world like a wrapped-up bag of snags for a barbecue. What would old Carl Jung have suggested, I wonder. I didn’t have the book, I’d sold it to that guy for three bucks, just to see the pleased light of coincidence dawning on his face.
I filled out the buildings on the jigsaw, sorted the pieces into grass and brick, started working in from the bottom. Stone interlocked with stone, a blur of colour became a floral border in the park. I put on the cricket, and thought about friends who used, friends who were addicted, friends who’d gone into that one-way love affair and were no longer around.
If I hadn’t been thinking about Jung, I wouldn’t have done it. But I sat there piecing the jigsaw together and it came to me that old Carl actually came from Vienna, and here I was at 2.30 in the morning reconstructing it, and I had to give a smile for the hidden camera when I realised that just one piece was missing, and it was a doorway. I got up and tore a hole in the plastic bag and emptied the heroin down the toilet. I thought of lots of things as I flushed it; money problems mainly, but most of all how suddenly, bone-achingly tired I was. I went to bed and slept without dreaming, and didn’t wake up until the phone beat into my head and I picked it up and it was Lewis.
‘I’m just calling about the violin,’ he said, and my mouth went dry when I heard the uncharacteristic edge in his voice. ‘Where did you say you picked it up?’
‘Don’t joke with me, now, Lewis,’ I croaked. ‘I’m skint.’
‘I’m serious. I’m getting a bloke to come and look at it in an hour, but the shop’s in a bit of an uproar, let me tell you. Mate, you should take out a ticket in the lottery.’
I gripped the phone. ‘What are you saying? What’s the violin worth?’
He laughed. ‘The violin? Nothing, mate. It’s a piece of crap. Worth about twenty bucks.’
There was a pause.
‘I’m talking about the bow.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘The bow. The violin bow that came in the case. When I saw the inlay I knew you had something there, but I had to check with the Conservatorium to make sure.’ He mentioned a foreign name that sounded like a brand of expensive vodka. ‘What I can’t understand is how it ended up at Camberwell market.’
‘What’s it worth?’ I interrupted him. And I was tensing my stomach, ready for the blow, almost expecting it now.
‘I’d say around $700,’ said Lewis.
Later, eating a crumpet and looking down at the city of Vienna, I notice the piece of jigsaw I thought was missing is in fact hidden under the ashtray. I just couldn’t see it for looking.
I slide it out and fit it into place, feeling the whole configuration resist, and move slightly out of skew. I move it back with the flat of my hand, feeling it shift. Strengthen. Interlock.
Soundtrack
Rachel is cooking cauliflower cheese when her daughter tells her she has joined a band and they will be practising in the rumpus room starting next Saturday. Rachel leaves off stirring the white sauce and turns to look at her daughter incredulously.
Emma is slumping in the doorway wearing the look of tired defiance she wore the day she got the tattoo. Rachel burst into tears that day, not because the tattoo was bleeding or defacing or even offensive — a Celtic cross surrounding a yin-yang symbol just above her breast — but because she was transported in a moment to a day seventeen years before when she had tickled that plump, powdered body, kissed it noisily just where the yin yang now twisted. Yin and yang, the flux of being: the irony of this is not lost on Rachel, who was a child in the 1960s and by the 1970s hung a batik sarong featuring this very symbol as a curtain in her doorway in the old house in Cardigan Street she shared with seven others. But now she is thirty-eight and grating cheese for dinner, thinking she can live with her daughter’s tattoo and even the navel ring and boots, but she has heard the music Emma listens to and does not want it punctuating her Saturdays. Emma is not asking, though; she is informing. Where does a seventeen-year-old get so much certainty?
Rachel feels winded — tossed in front of a camera and told to act, the only person without a script and in someone else’s costume. She has been feeling lately, in fact, that her life has a kind of soundtrack. Sometimes she can almost hear it: a melancholy instrumental as she stirs sauce, a frenetic salsa as she runs round in the morning like a cartoon, clashing foreboding cymbals as her daughter drops a bombshell. Soundtrack when she finds the battery in the Datsun is flat and hits her head dully, theatrically, on the steering wheel. Soundtrack as she stares at her reflection in the bathroom. The film and the score of the film that seem to compose the key scenes of her life are driving her crazy.
Mirror shot, something authoritative says in her head as she scrutinises the lines under her eyes before she goes to bed. Pan around as she touches her face and reaches for moisturiser and … cut. There is a kind of a Richard Clayderman piano number swelling in the background. The scene spins, fades, some audience somewhere applauds, some director is a contender for an award.
Now, as she grates, she tries to stem the tide rattling away in her head, describing her movements shot by shot, she tries to actually clear a space to think, to put her case to Emma. But the babbling continues: Close-up as she grates. Cut to her face struggling with emotion. Cue soundtrack, cello solo.
Rachel’s mouth opens and closes, as if waiting for its lines. She is losing the trick of improvisation. She grates the cheese down to a nub as Emma tells her there are only four people in the band and that they are called Melting Carpet. Rachel, with a large, disassociated part of her brain, musing like a bewildered spectator, wonders if the problem is televi
sion.
Rachel’s husband Jerry still sports the ponytail he wore to Sunbury ’74, and he is still a sweet man who wants a Harley. When Emma’s friends come over, he often tells them he once played blues harmonica with Max Merritt and the Meteors. Jerry thinks the group may have had a revival recently, like so many other bands of his era. He lets Emma’s friends play his Jimi Hendrix LPs, eagerly showing them how to lower the stylus. Rachel, watching, can’t believe that fate has bounced like this and they like Jimi Hendrix. She can’t believe she lives in a world where her own child doesn’t know how to play a record. Everything, Rachel thinks, is going too fast. On bad days she looks askance at Jerry and Emma together, wonders if they could perhaps have been sent from a casting agency, derides the big clumsy strokes this script seems to be written in and contemplates what might yet be getting drowned out in the noise. ’Scuse me, she drones to herself, while I kiss this guy.
Jerry had wanted Emma to be a home birth, in their large, airy bedroom in Warburton. He would have received her into his big hands saying ‘Unbelievable’ and ‘This is blowing me away’. He would have wrapped her in the sarong with the yin and yang symbol, pulled from the door and given a quick shake. He would have had Brian Eno on the stereo, thinks Rachel. Back then, that would have been the soundtrack. She hesitates, remembering the hospital birth, Jerry indignantly telling the nurses that they weren’t wrapping his daughter in alfoil, no way. What had the cleaners been singing as they hauled the industrial polishers up and down those corridors outside her room? Streisand oozing that she was a woman in love. Rachel, her world collapsed into baby adoration, had absorbed all those lyrics as if by osmosis, and agreed.
Rachel has just discovered she is pregnant again. She wonders what Jerry will say now, and what he might put on the stereo this time. The news has hit her like a stun-gun. It is a twist to the plot she would never have dreamed of. Even now, three days after receiving the results, listening to Jerry trying to sing along to Powderfinger in the lounge room, to Emma describing the musical ambitions of Melting Carpet, watching something as ordinary as cheese melting under the griller, Rachel finds she has to push herself off from the profound edge of disbelief into the far shallows where such ideas might be viewed from a sane and manageable distance. Rachel’s mind paddles this way and that, trying to encompass the idea of pregnancy. Faintly across the water comes music; the string section swells as she floats at the far side of possibility. She hears ethereal voices sing: Out of the blue, you came out of the blue. She can’t decide whether it’s something her subconscious has invented, or whether it’s Burt Bacharach.
‘You’re having me on,’ says Jerry the following Saturday. He is washing the dog under the hose, and straightens up staring at her.
Rachel says, ‘Are you happy or not?’
They seem to be floundering with the dialogue; she wants to cut and do the scene again. Slow pan around the two figures, chatters the voice in her head, followed by close-up of husband running a soapy hand through his hair in a gesture of amazement. Close-up of wife’s face as she tries to form the words: ‘We don’t have to have it.’ Long overhead shot of the back garden.
The soundtrack to this confrontation is Melting Carpet, who pound from the back of the house, the same four bars over and over.
Jerry jumps up to hug her. ‘Wow,’ he says. Rachel is trying to imagine him with a baby papoose, a baby inside pulling his ponytail done up with a scrunchie. She thinks about disposable nappies, Emma’s friends, another eighteen years of running to salsa music every morning, her back as she hauls a two-year-old out of the car seat. And the money — my God. Seconds pass in these flash forwards, tiny zippy scenes Rachel fleshes out with a few moments of dialogue: presents under the Christmas tree, parent–teacher nights, going grey, the bathroom mirror scene repeated for ironic emphasis. She focuses on the dog lowering its head to bite the water flowing from the end of the dropped hose, strains to hear the soundtrack.
‘I think I want it,’ she says.
‘Whoa, it’s just kind of hard to get your head around,’ says sweet, ingenuous Jerry, just as he had done seventeen years ago.
‘Better to burn out and die young,’ howl Melting Carpet, ‘that’s what Kurt said before he ate his gun.’ Rachel, vacuuming, wonders if she has heard the lyrics right. The bass player in the band has a stud through his tongue, and Rachel thinks she might have got off lightly with the yin-yang tattoo. Emma had stared open-mouthed at the news her parents had conceived a baby, then stormed out saying, ‘That is so gross.’ Rachel knows she is embarrassed, confused, perhaps threatened. She has read comforting analyses of this in library books. But when Emma screamed that she was moving out as soon as she turned eighteen, and her friends would look at her now like she was some kind of freak, probably, Rachel had found herself screaming back: ‘Good! Go!’
‘I hate you!’ Emma had yelled.
Music like heavy metal had filled Rachel’s ears, discordant noises full of ear-splitting feedback that made her wince and want to cover her head.
Now Emma is talking with studied carelessness about group houses, about moving in with the band, who sit at Rachel’s kitchen table and eat whole cakes slice by slice and giggle uncontrollably. Rachel pictures the batik door hangings, the Kashmir Musk incense, the rattan matting of her own group houses, and doubts anything she can imagine will resemble the household Emma is planning.
The leather jackets of the band members look like some child has been firing at them with a pop riveter. Now Emma is playing the drums; she can hear her, it sounds enraged. Where does all that rage come from? wonders Rachel, remembering the meditation tapes and restful dolphin–rainbow mobiles of Emma’s babyhood. Massage for your baby. A piece of amber on a leather thong around that chubby, adorable neck, which today sports a livid lovebite covered with pale foundation. Melting Carpet has a gig, at the High School Students Only Rage. They have taken on a keyboard player because his father has a kombivan and can lend it to haul their gear. Jerry has offered to do the sound mixing, news greeted with suppressed, stoned hysteria by the band. Rachel is now five-months pregnant. Her condition has given her vagueness and detached dreaminess a force and a shape. She hears vintage Paul Simon as she walks in the park each morning, sometimes a touch of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
She clings to the soundtrack, conscious that it gives things form; it lets her settle back in the audience and be carried along. Still crazy … after all these years … she hums along to herself, pensively viewing a long camera angle of herself kicking up leaves, soft-focused and waiting for the next cue. She looks at baby photos of Emma and thinks: no bikinis without sunscreen, ever again and look at that, not even a hat and a piece of Amazon rainforest the size of a football field disappearing every minute. She watches the real-life cop shows and shakes her head in horror. What sort of a world, she thinks, and I’ll be fifty-nine at its twenty-first birthday party and how are we ever going to get enough sleep? She sees Jerry in a misty, future dream he has long held of motorbiking around Australia, both of them, and the soundtrack washes sadly over the filter effects. Impossible now. She almost hears the lyrics whispered, sees a tiny speeded-up video clip of Jerry selling his acoustic guitar, walking away to a lonesome Nashville instrumental solo. She reads in the paper of abducted children, children playing with computer pets, children going on diets at age eight. Things are out of control, thinks Rachel. They are awesome. They are so hard to get your head around.
When Rachel goes into labour Jerry is not home. She eyes her overnight bag carefully packed by the front door, her vision grey around the edges, sweat springing on her forehead. I’ve changed my mind, she thinks as her waters break. She doubles over the table — zoom in for a close-up on the wedding ring — her hands flat down in front of her. Jesus, have I changed my mind. Her own breath sucks in and comes out a yell. It’s not a cry, thinks Rachel from a new abstract eyrie, not a moan, a whimper, a feeble call. With each br
eath, another yell comes, unpretty and shocking in the silence of the kitchen, and brings Emma running to stare horrified from the doorway. Rachel hears white noise, background hiss, the stylus caught in the last empty grooves of the record, and nothing more to hum along to.
As she sinks deeper and deeper into what her own body is engineering, Rachel feels herself in bed, comes up for air to hear the bedroom phone extension snickering as someone dials out. Emma, Emma. Three calls. Rachel thinks about sinking, the going under in surrender, opening your mouth to water. She surfaces to gulp great lungfuls of air, knowing that the ambulance is not going to get here in time, knowing her husband, who she suddenly wants very much, is somewhere stuck in traffic. She feels transition start and recalls the barked instructions of the on-duty obstetrician she had recoiled from in her other labour, who had turned around and hissed Jerry out of the way, and Jerry’s hoarse, humble assent which had made tears spring in her eyes. It’s going to be here, Rachel thinks, and everything crowding up the airwaves stops suddenly to listen as she twists the Guatemalan quilt in both her hands and sets her jaw. Here and now, then, she thinks. Come on, then.
‘Up,’ says a voice, pushing pillows behind her back, and she’s confusing it with those nurses, the one with the chewing gum who did the rounds in her brand new Sony Walkman, bringing Rachel magazines. Rachel’s hand goes out gesturing for the mask, for nitrous oxide, and knocks both the digital clock and the bedside lamp off the table. Without time, without light, thinks Rachel, and I’m going to die now.
‘Here,’ says the voice, and puts a straw between her lips, and Rachel sucks apple juice like it is ambrosia, hears weeping that is not her own, and is enfolded in patchouli-scented arms which hold her still, slow her down.
Then as her second daughter is born, she sees through a blur of tears only the beloved, holy skin of her first — close, close to her and sheened with sweat; she is eye to eye with a never-ending Celtic twist, two fish tumbling forever in the struggling, messy flux of life. It is not quiet, it is never quiet, thinks Rachel, feeling the head crown, a leg jump with anticipation. It is not a meditation, that is a lie. At some point she senses Jerry there, she hears Jerry say that it is awesome. And Rachel thinks: Yes.