The Architecture of Song

by Gary Crew

  ‘Do make yourself comfortable,’ the unseen alto cooed.

  He understood then that she was behind a screen of embroidered roses in the corner, hiding among the petals there. Prepared to wait, he sank onto a pink-buttoned pouf, since that was all he could reach.

  Miss la Vie appeared in a haze of musk, a Venus in rosy silk. Seeing her there, he felt his first pubescent surge. Only then did he understand that to woo this Madam, this whore – improper as she was – he must first find a song, and singing, grow.

  She stood imperious, her gown of pink silk spiralling upward from a shimmering pool spread wide upon the floor to wrap, close-fitting, about her creamy breasts. (Those fat potted creams.) Her yellow hair piled high, her brows dark-pencilled, fine and arched, her blue eyes cold, her cheeks rouged, her lips scarlet and moist, the skin of her throat aging yet taut. (Those squat-potted unguents.) One hand extended, long-gloved, amply ringed, to greet. And everywhere, all about, the cloying scent of roses.

  ‘Augh!’ she exclaimed upon seeing what he was. ‘I was expecting …’ but she did not say.

  Augustus clambered from the pouf, gabbling, ‘I am Augustus Trump. I share the shed down the back with Rosa. You call her Rosebud. And there’s Stan, my mate,’ and somehow he brushed the back of her hand with his lips.

  ‘Mon cher,’ she said, whether charmed or otherwise was impossible to tell considering the set of her mouth. ‘You are in need of my services?’

  Augustus suppressed a gulp. ‘Madam,’ he muttered and blushed, and since he could think of nothing more, he stood, stupid.

  ‘I should be flattered,’ she conceded, ‘but there are laws. And besides, I am expecting another …’ She inclined her head towards the door.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, recovering. ‘I will be brief. I was wondering …’

  ‘Go on,’ she demanded. ‘I am, as I said, expecting …’ and she made a move towards the door, presumably to check.

  ‘I sing,’ he blurted, foolishly.

  ‘Sing?’ She stopped. She turned. She looked down. ‘You sing?’

  Flagging, Augustus sank into the pouf. Why did I come here? he wondered. What should I say? So he flustered, his palms clammy, his eyes cast down. Never had he been in the presence of a person who so confused him. Who so attracted, yet repelled. Finally, he mumbled, ‘I want to sing for you.’

  ‘Ah,’ she breathed, drawing herself up. ‘Then it’s Absalom you are after. He likes that sort of thing. At the piano, out in the Crimson Parlour …’ And she waved a hand towards the door.

  Augustus clenched his tiny fists. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, making a stand. ‘I have been living in the shed down the back for some weeks, and have already spoken to your friend Absalom. It is yourself I wish to sing for. Yourself, alone.’

  ‘Sing? For me?’ She was already planning a strategy to terminate. ‘Songs mean nothing to me. None of my girls have time for songs.’

  ‘Without song I could never grow,’ he began. ‘I could tell you …’ But it was too hard, and he faltered, and blushed, and fell silent.

  Miss la Vie saw her chance. ‘You are a boy,’ she said. ‘Too young. Too small. I am expecting another. A man …’ and ushering him out in a rosy mist, she closed the door.

  Augustus stumbled into the Crimson Parlour. He heard Absalom’s snores thundering from his flat, and looked to the piano. Vulnerable as he was, an image of the instrument in the big white house, with his mother seated there on that black leather stool, flooded his mind and crossing the room, he clambered up, stretching to touch the keys. But when he saw, he drew back. These ivories had yellowed, the ebony dulled. Nor was there music on the stand as there had always been at home: a sonata, a waltz, a song …

  Overcome with yearning, he slipped to the floor to crawl beneath that keyboard, to enter that sanctuary, that womb, to hide there again, crouching, eyes closed in that shadowy vault – the very architecture of his childhood – listening for the song of the strings, longing (if fate would allow) to begin again, to leap out, reborn, voice appassionato – to hear his mother say: ‘Augustus, my son, my man, sing for me …’ But looking up, expectant, he saw (did he?) only that tall man, that captain in white (a vision, was it?), his gold-braided cap under his arm, knocking at Miss la Vie’s door, and her opening to him.

  Augustus cursed aloud, railing against his fate, but in raging he saw a plaster rosette of cherubs surrounding the light on the ceiling, each naked putto rejoicing in song, yet not one as big as himself. He wondered what had just happened: Who was that whore to affect him so? His muse? His mother?

  Stepping out, he walked the blood-red passage to the door, determining to sing, to grow. To be that man. To become.

  Stan sat outside the shed. He drank Bushells tea from the brown china teapot that he liked.

  ‘I went in there the other day,’ Augustus said, looking up at the house.

  ‘You told me.’

  ‘Not the time I saw Absalom. The day before yesterday. In the afternoon, when you were at work. I saw that Miss la Vie.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Stan held his blue enamel mug halfway to his mouth.

  Augustus shrugged. ‘She was good looking, but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But hard.’

  Stan grunted. ‘She’s a whore.’

  ‘She wouldn’t let me sing.’

  ‘You was surprised?’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  The conversation lagged.

  ‘You tellin’ me what happened, or what?’ Stan wanted to know.

  Augustus told.

  ‘So she was waitin’ for some bloke?’

  ‘I’d say.’

  ‘You see him?’

  ‘Don’t know. When I was in that Crimson Parlour, by the piano there, I thought I saw a man in a white uniform. Like a sea captain. With gold braid on his cap.’

  ‘A sea captain? In Ipswich? Garn …’

  ‘Hmmm,’ the boy mused.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I have imagined him before.’

  ‘You lost me, mate,’ Stan admitted, not being taken with the idea of imagining men in uniform. ‘Did you see a bloke or not?’

  Augustus reflected on the events of that afternoon and, deciding that sensory experience was all (reality being irrelevant to the poetic spirit), he said. ‘It was her windows that got me excited. The light coming in. You see there?’ He pointed to the casements at the back of the house.

  ‘You sayin’ this captain came through the window?’

  ‘No, no,’ Augustus corrected. ‘But the light coming in was beautiful. Blinding. Through those casements. Up there, see? Running along the back of the house. Behind them is the flat where she lives. She’s on the left and Absalom’s on the right. I imagined that the verandah went right round the house, but it doesn’t. Or it did once, and it’s been closed in by those casements to make the flats. Thing is, you can’t tell from here, from the outside, because they’re dull, but from inside, with the afternoon light shining through, they’re dazzling and the corner bits that look black from down here, they’re actually purple. Like amethysts, like jewels, and her flat looks like a fairy’s cave. Enchanted. You follow?’

  Mistaking his mate’s silence for meditative appreciation, Augustus finally made his point. ‘Stan,’ he said, ‘there’s something I want to talk to you about. About Miss la Vie, up there. And what happened.’

  ‘Yeah …’ Stan grunted, wary.

  ‘I told you that she wouldn’t listen to me sing …’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Well, I was wondering, what would you do if a woman did that to you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That.’

  ‘She wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I can’t sing.’

  ‘No, no. I mean, what would you do if a woman denied you?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Stan,’ Augustus insisted, ‘Stan, Stan …’ until the wretched man looked at him. ‘What am I going to do? I mean, I real
ly want to sing for her. I do, to show her I’m a man, but she’s so, well … hard.’

  ‘I never even seen her,’ Stan parried. ‘I seen the others when they come down …’ he nodded towards the outdoor privy up the yard, ‘but I never seen her.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They come down the dunny. You seen ’em, haven’t ya?’

  ‘Who is they?’

  ‘Them tarts from up yonder. Maybe ’cause I work shifts it’s only me who sees ’em, late at night like, when I sit out here by meself, but I do. ’Cept her.’

  ‘Miss la Vie?’

  ‘Yeah. The Madam.’

  ‘Stan,’ Augustus sighed.

  ‘I reckon she thinks she’s too good for any dunny down the back. I reckon she uses a chamber pot and that Mary Smokes empties it. I seen a china one out on the verandah early one mornin’ when I come in, newspaper on top, keepin’ off flies, and that Mary Smokes carryin’ one down just a bit later.’

  ‘Stan, you’re obfuscating.’

  Ignorant, Stan chose to sulk.

  ‘Stan,’ Augustus moaned, ‘I was simply asking what a man does when a woman says no. That’s all. I don’t want to know about Miss la Vie’s bowels …’

  ‘Mate …’ Stan began.

  ‘Come on,’ Augustus urged. ‘I bet you know a lot about women, eh?’

  ‘Mate,’ Stan hedged, eyes cast down. ‘Mate …’

  ‘Yes,’ Augustus leaned forward, expectant. ‘Go on ….’

  ‘Augie,’ Stan said, ‘I need to tell you somethin’.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I never got knocked back.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘I couldn’t. I never asked.’

  Augustus sat up.

  ‘Augie,’ Stan said. ‘You gotta know. I’m a virgin.’

  Augustus said nothing, the concept of virginity having no meaning for him.

  ‘Yep,’ Stan sighed, reaching for the boy’s hand. ‘I never asked a woman and no woman ever asked me.’

  Augustus sat.

  Stan fiddled with the lid of the teapot. ‘That’s how come Hogie meant so much to me. I ain’t got no-one now. ’Cept you.’

  Silence.

  ‘Stan,’ Augustus said, ‘I’m sorry. I think. I mean, that’s bad, isn’t it? Being a virgin when you’re grown up?’

  Stan fiddled again.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You could still help me, couldn’t you? Like you did before? Remember the chariot you made? You could give me an idea.’

  ‘Mate,’ Stan said, ‘I’m a moron.’

  So they sat, until out of the blue, Stan said, ‘I got one idea. You see that mango tree, outside the casements there?’

  Augustus nodded.

  A smile lit Stan’s skinny lips. ‘Birds sing in trees, eh?’

  ‘They do,’ Augustus agreed.

  ‘Well,’ said Stan. ‘The way I see it, that particular mango tree is real close to your fairy’s window.’

  Then Augustus saw.

  As a result of his loitering beneath the jacarandas, Augustus developed an interest in trees. He thought especially of how a tree trunk, gnarled and knobbly as it was, could become a piano leg. He knew of an item in an encyclopaedia that told how Michelangelo had imagined his David within a block of stone. He figured that the makers of a piano leg shared that same skill: to both see and realise the unseen.

  He also came to understand that each tree had its own architecture, since all were homes, harbouring life: grubs and beetles – both furry and hard – snakes – a python one time, draped languid in the mango – and lizards and moths and butterflies. And birds too, as Stan so rightly said.

  He spent time among the gums down the back. These were not grand trees, not forest giants, as the cliché went; rather they were straggly and twisted and bent, their bark peeling, their leaves grey and brittle. Some days, if he turned quickly as if to catch them, he saw these trees as the bodies of the aged, crippled, their clothes in tatters; other days they were just trees, so insubstantial they cast no shadow.

  He took a good look at the mango. He stood in its black shade, stroking its rough bark; fingering its leathery leaves, so tough they neither decomposed nor burnt like the heaped foliage of others. He also considered the new leaves: pink, translucent membranes, easily bruised. Most of all he wondered at the fruit: weighty gonads forming in the trunk (like that David, in the stone) to squeeze down the branches, bursting out at the ends in clumps.

  ‘Them mango no good,’ Mary Smokes informed him. ‘That mongrel tree, that one. That kero mango. Bad, that one.’ Augustus did not understand until he peeled back the skin, putting the orange, juice-oozing flesh to his lips, expecting the exotic but tasting only the bitter fluid Stan used in the lamp down the shed. Grimacing, he chucked the dribbling seed to the ground.

  Jacarandas were different. He loved running his fingers over the rills and valleys of their grey bark, wondering that a surface so fine could nurture the clouds of misty blooms rising from the foliage. And when the flowers dropped, he would choose one to cup in his open palm, thinking of the depth in the purple throat there – was that the stigma or the style? – and how it had been made: Surely not by some fluke, not by some accident of biology, but a miracle, of God. So Augustus loitered beneath the jacarandas, thinking, That same God made Miss la Vie.

  His time with the Blue Butterfly was short, brief as the life of the insect itself.

  She sat in a cane chair beneath the red lantern by the front door, the blue fabric of her dress shot through with green. Seeing her arms dangling and her sleeves billowing, he thought immediately of a butterfly he and Mary Smokes had seen beneath the verandah. Some cruel wind had knocked the insect from among the jacaranda flowers and it crawled in the dirt, flapping its gorgeous wings, doomed. He might have crushed it, putting it out of its misery, but Mary Smokes placed her black and spotty hand over his, shaking her head.

  ‘That one die,’ she said. ‘Die soon, eh. Don’ need your help …’

  So he left it.

  Even when he stood beside her, the blue woman did not look up.

  ‘I’m Augustus Trump,’ he said.

  She adjusted her eyeglasses, the lenses black and round.

  He understood then that she was blind, though he never could remember if she was pretty. Or how old she might be. Or the colour of her hair. Although he did remember her blue-green wings and the huge black lenses of her insect eyes.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, stepping back. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you. I didn’t know.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Are you waiting for someone?’ he asked, not so much to busybody as to help.

  ‘I work here,’ she said, and he accepted.

  ‘I live here with Rosebud,’ he said. ‘And Stan, my mate. In a shed down the back. I sing, you know.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said, addressing no-one in particular, least of all him, unless he was perched on the verandah rail, which he was not.

  ‘It’s said that I sing very well.’

  ‘Oh?’ she addressed a roof beam.

  ‘I am thirty inches tall,’ he said, since she could not have known.

  ‘Oh?’ she said, turning in his direction. ‘You are that young? A boy soprano?’

  ‘I can sing any part,’ he said.

  ‘Oh …’ she said, growing bored.

  ‘And you?’ he asked, determined. ‘Do you like to sing?’

  ‘What would I sing about?’ she asked the sky.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Miss la Vie calls me the Blue Butterfly because, she says, the colour suits me.’ She laughed a harsh laugh. ‘I never saw a butterfly or the sky, not even the colour blue. I never saw anything.’

  He made a sorry sound. Presently he said, ‘Would you like me to sing for you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, adjusting her great round eyes. ‘I am not one for songs.’

  ‘Oh?’ he said. ‘Nor is Miss la Vie.’

  ‘There is a reason for that,’ she declared
, animated.

  ‘What?’ he asked, eager to conspire.

  ‘Because …’ she stretched, extending her blue-green wings, ‘because Miss la Vie lost her first love.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Augustus begged.

  ‘Hmmm, it’s not really a story for a kid, but … Bossy Watts was his name. He owned the Sunset Mine. He owned this land too, this house … I never saw him, you understand, on account …’ she adjusted her eyeglasses, ‘but I did know him. Once … His voice … His hands, soft for a miner …’

  Augustus squatted, absorbed.

  ‘I remember …’ she sighed, then recollecting her audience, ‘they were married for just one day. Him and Daphne Fooks – now Miss la Vie. One day, one night, then he went down without his bird …’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘His bird. Miners take canaries down pit. In cages. If there’s gas down there, poison gas, you understand, the bird dies. When it falls dead in the cage, the miner knows to get out before he dies himself.’

  ‘Ah …’ Augustus thought of Stan.

  ‘This particular day, the day after his wedding, with his new bride waiting at home – this was his home, I might add, this very house – Bossy wasn’t paying attention. So when his bird dropped dead – I guess, not being there myself, having only heard – he didn’t notice and when he lit a smoke – I guess – the place went up, Young Bossy with it, like that!’ She clapped her hands, to demonstrate.

  ‘Goodness!’

  ‘That’s why Miss la Vie is miserable. She lost her first love, you understand?’

  ‘Love …’ Augustus sighed, eager to please.

  Blue Butterfly laughed her harsh laugh. ‘Although she was happy. Briefly. For one night. One moment, you might say. But later, much later, when she’d done with her mourning, she took us out, us girls, to a hotel, myself included, where they had a stage show, very lively. Some woman must have sung alone – I wished I could have seen her – her song was awful sad – the whole place falling quiet as the grave – and when she finished, Miss la Vie stood to applaud. Not that I saw her – although I know that she did – but I did hear her applaud. “Lovely,” she called. “Just lovely.”’