Hell's Music

by Therese von Willegen

  All the while either Rae or Emily paced, checked out the front door window until it became horribly late. All the while the pit of despair in Emily’s belly yawned wider, sucking her under until she wanted nothing more than to vanish into her bedroom and forget the world existed outside her window.

  “He’s not going to come,” Emily said.

  “Bastard,” Rae muttered. “What are we going to do now? I could give you his number. You could call him from the shop.”

  Emily took a deep breath then examined her hands. “No. I’m not going to go crawling to him. If he doesn’t call, it’s as good as an admission of guilt. I’m going to make out as if today is a normal day. I’m going to open my shop, and I’m going to try to forget any of this happened.”

  “You know that’s not the truth.”

  “But if I hide in my room, it’s only going to become worse. He must come see me. If he doesn’t, then I know it’s over.”

  “Call him.”

  As much temptation as that thought held, Emily shook her head. “He fucked up. He can come speak to me.” Just that morning, before he’d slipped out of her bed early, because he had pre-production issues on a new album to sort out, he’d been so present, so real. It seemed ridiculous that this might all have been a front. To think that he’d known all the time about that betrayal and could pretend nothing was wrong.

  He was an entertainer, a man used to wearing masks. He’d been playing her all along. But why, when it was clear he could have any woman he wanted? That rage seethed deep inside. Well, she’d show him. She wasn’t going to be pathetic like that burlesque dancer who’d killed herself over him. As far as she, Emily Clark, was concerned, Simon van Helsdingen could take a flying leap.

  In fact, the entire bloody male species could take a flying leap. She’d buy herself a vibrator. Hell, turning lesbian didn’t seem like such a bad option, either. A twisted grin played across her lips.

  Rae eyed her warily. “I don’t like that smile you’ve got plastered all over your face.”

  Emily sighed and wiped her eyes. “It’s nothing. I’m just a bit emo at the moment. I’ll get over it. I’ve got a shitload of new books to sort this morning. I’ll be fine so long as I’m busy.” Damn, she hardly believed her own words, but maybe if she repeated them enough they’d become the truth.

  * * * *

  Perhaps her choice of playing all her Diamanda Galas albums wasn’t so great, because the few customers who did set enter her shop left shortly thereafter once they’d eyed her warily. Emily couldn’t really care. This was her shop. If they couldn’t deal with it, sod them. As much as she tried to fool herself, her heart shuddered every time a person stepped near her door, and it was always someone other than Simon.

  Her phone shattered the silence and Emily hated the way she jumped at the sound, her foot accidentally tapping a neat stack of books on the floor next to her, to send them slithering into disarray.

  She grabbed the receiver and almost knocked over a half-empty cup of tea, which she only just caught in time. “Hello?”

  “I hope you’re not still seeing that man.” Her mother’s voice was clipped and cold, and sent Emily’s mood down by a few notches.

  “Mother.”

  “Well? We’re worried about you, you know. You’re not doing drugs, are you?”

  “No, Mother, I’m not doing drugs.” Now where the hell had that come from? That dreadful image from the newspaper popped into her mind and wouldn’t fade.

  “I hope it’s over.”

  This was the first time her mother had called her since that disastrous Christmas Day lunch and, realizing that, escalated Emily’s pulse. “You’re calling me now to gloat?”

  “This can’t go on, Emily. I’m your mother. I care about you.”

  “Well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it.” Not once had her mother popped in to see how the shop was doing, asked her how the business fared, or hell, even visited the house.

  A heavy silence reigned on the other end of the line, the babble of a distant television playing out some sort of soapie her mother must have stopped watching to call her. “Emily, why can’t we see eye to eye? I’m getting older and it just seems that my daughters are becoming strangers to me.”

  “You’re a stranger to me, Ma.” Hot tears pricked the corners of her eyes and Emily glanced up to check whether anyone stood near the door. It wouldn’t do for customers to see her like this. Diamanda continued her shrieking and groaning, and Emily picked up the remote to adjust the volume.

  “What are we going to do about it?” her mother asked.

  Emily gave a deep sigh. “I honestly don’t know. Really. But you can start by not passing judgment on me and Rae all the time. We’re not kids anymore, and even if we do stuff differently from you, that’s not to say it’s wrong just ‘cause you don’t agree or anything.”

  “You know that it’s difficult.”

  “Do you think it’s easy listening to you round up the family against us?”

  “I don’t want to fight with you.”

  “Me neither, Ma, but this has been carrying on... Hell, it’s been going rotten since Dad left and you know that’s the truth.” The heaviness of the situation created pressure on Emily’s chest and her breathing grew ragged. Now was not the time for a panic attack. First this shit with Simon, then it becoming a catalyst for a conversation she didn’t know she wanted.

  “How is Rae?” Her mother sounded hopeful, her voice cracking on the last syllable.

  “She hasn’t called you?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’ll mention it to her, but I’m not her mo–” Emily caught herself but it was too late.

  “When can I see you?”

  “Dunno, Ma. I mean...” It wasn’t as though she were busy, and especially since she had no idea whether Simon would ever be part of her life again. Emily bit the inside of her cheek. “How about this weekend? Sunday?”

  “I will ask Reinhardt to drop me off then fetch me later. Don’t worry about food. I’ll bring something from Woolworths. Just make sure your sister is there.”

  “Is it okay if she has her boyfriend over?”

  “She has a–”

  “Yup, she has a boyfriend.” Emily allowed herself a grim smile. “He’s a bit goofy but he’s not a bad bloke.”

  “I see.” Another long pause left a smear of sticky silence. “Will you... This whole thing with that man–”

  “I’ll be fine.” Fuck knew she was anything but fine, but Emily wasn’t about to let anyone know that. The tears burned twin tracks down her face to collect at her chin. She wiped at her face and dashed the moisture from her fingers.

  “I love you,” her mother said.

  What in the hell? Her mother really must be feeling some sort of horrid remorse to say those three words. Emily couldn’t remember when last she’d heard her say that. “Love you too.” She drew a deep gasp and looked wildly about the empty shop. “Hey, Ma, can you call on Friday to make final arrangements? I’ve got a gaggle of school kids pawing at my young adult section.” Anything to get her mother to put down the phone.

  The line went dead and Emily stumbled to the front door, which she locked and turned the Closed sign so it faced outward. Then she switched off the light and curled up on the couch, hugging one of the overstuffed pillows to her chest as she let wracking sobs loose with the rest of her tears.

  When she felt as though she couldn’t cry anymore, she sat in the stillness, the faint music sliding through the speakers, the volume low but audible. As if possessed by some sixth sense, the phone shrilled and jolted Emily into an upright position. She hated the way she flew at the device but she nonetheless answered with a breathless “Hello?”

  “Eugene Malan here. Is Emily Clark available?”

  The disappointment that someone other than Simon spoke made her want to throw the receiver down in disgust. Sourness rose from the back of Emily’s throat. “You’re that reporter from the Adamastor Mirror
.”

  The man gave a dry chuckle. “Indeed. Then you must be Emily.”

  “And if I said I wasn’t?”

  “I wouldn’t believe you.”

  “And if I put down the phone?”

  “I’d knock on your door.”

  Emily bit back an oath and looked outside. There, silhouetted against the glass, stood the tall blond man she’d seen that first, fateful day, cellphone held to his ear. He waved.

  “Rat bastard,” she muttered and put the phone down.

  She was tempted to hurl abuse, but after all her tears, she felt empty, wrung out. It was best to deal with the man so he could fuck off right out of her life.

  Emily unlocked her shop then stood on the threshold, regarding Eugene. She prayed her eyes weren’t too red from crying.

  Eugene inclined his head. “May I come in?”

  It struck Emily at this point that she had a choice: let the man in and spill her story, which would no doubt find its way into the papers and make a bad situation worse. She’d get pegged with all the sorry exes Simon had trampled–or she could tell Eugene exactly what he could do with himself in the nicest way possible, without him finding a way to do more damage.

  “You want to talk about Simon, don’t you? You’d like to run a nice, juicy little bit of editorial now that he’s brought further skandaal to South African climes.”

  Eugene shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it that way. People have a right to know, don’t you think?”

  A ragged sigh escaped Emily’s lips. What should she do? She was still pissed and it would feel really good to take a stab at the man. Really good.

  She wavered for a moment then squared her shoulders and looked up at the reporter and folded her arms across her chest. “I’m sorry, Eugene. Please tell your editor at the Adamastor Mirror that I am not available for comment.”

  * * * *

  Late Monday afternoon inside The Event Horizon was relatively quiet. Rae sat hunched on a barstool in the far corner by the downstairs counter, methodically peeling a beer label off the bottle while Davy unpacked a crate of cider into the refrigerator.

  The Metallica album had just cycled through to track number one, old, retro metal Rae hardly heard. It all sounded like noise to her today, music she’d listened to a hundred times before, but couldn’t think of anything new to latch onto, because it just didn’t have the right fuzz to it, for lack of better description. Davy always made sure to play her favorite albums when she hung out here.

  Damn, and only another two weeks until her twenty-first birthday. For some reason this event she’d been supposed to look forward to as a symbol of true adulthood just didn’t have the shine she’d anticipated. In fact, her life since she finished school and started college was just a haze of nothingness. Didn’t they call it a quarter life crisis or something? And she felt as if she were headed to it a few years early.

  Then there was this thing between Em and Si that had cast a pall on the past week. Maybe she shouldn’t have called Si. What if she’d just left things? Would he still have acted like a jerk-off by not contacting her sister again, or had her interference, which she’d intended as a heads-up, been misconstrued as malicious meddling? Too many unanswered questions vied for prominence.

  Those four golden circle tickets burned a hole in her wallet. She and Davy would go, of course. Emily would have gone, the fourth ticket belonging to their cousin, Eric, but now, with the damage done, Rae wasn’t even certain she wanted to watch the musician who used to be her favorite. Since last Monday she’d not listened to any Hellbound Heart tracks on her MP3 player. She’d almost deleted them. On purpose.

  And now this thing with her mother who’d dropped in so soon after the initial blonde-coke-bitch fiasco. At first Rae had distrusted her mother’s motives, but the afternoon had turned out far more pleasant than she’d expected. Was her mother doing happy pills or something? She’d been polite to the point where Rae had asked her several times if everything were all right. Fuck. Her mother had even been nice to Davy, despite the time she’d threatened to call the cops when she’d caught her and Davy sneaking in early one morning after a heavy night out.

  Davy placed his callused hands on either side of hers, his dark eyes capturing her gaze. “You’re too quiet.”

  “Just pondering.”

  “You’re thinking too much.”

  Rae sighed. “There’s too much going on.”

  “Want another beer?”

  “It’s a school night.” Rae gave a dry laugh. “I should probably be heading home in a bit. I only pray I don’t get there to find my sister with her wrists slashed open, or lying next to an empty bottle of Valiums.”

  “She’s not suicidal?” Davy’s brow furrowed.

  “She’s taking this too bloody well. That’s what’s got me bugged as all hell. She’s too calm most of the time, but at night I hear her sniffing and sobbing in her room. I’ve confronted her about it, but she absolutely refuses to talk about him. Plus, I just don’t see her eating.”

  “Have you tried calling Simon again?”

  “Why should I? He’s a spineless prick.”

  Davy shrugged. “Well, we all know how your sister feels about drugs an’ stuff. Maybe he’s running scared ‘cause he reckons he’s really blown things so bad. Besides, he heard from you, and even though you’re just a little girl, you can be a real bitch sometimes.”

  Rae narrowed her eyes. “Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  He remained unperturbed. “It’s the truth.”

  “Then why d’yah stick around then, hey? Little girls your thing? Even bitches?” He wasn’t being patronizing, that much she knew.

  “Because I love you, stupid.”

  A flush of warmth suffused her when he said that.

  “You’re blushing.”

  “Damn right.” Rae scratched in her sling bag for her phone before looking back at her boyfriend. “I’ll call him in a bit. I’ll apologize for being such a cow an’ all.”

  “That’s still not going to patch up stuff between him and Em.”

  “Duh. But I’ve got to think of getting her to that gig. If I can just let that douche know I’m sorry then somehow arrange for my sister to be at the concert, then maybe we can work it out that they end up talking to each other.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to him. You can’t expect to play matchmaker after the whole thing’s so blown apart. After all, he probably shagged that blond thing.”

  “Perhaps, but we don’t know that, do we? My sister just needs closure. I don’t care whether they hook up again.”

  “You gonna ask him to talk to her and he’s going to say no, he didn’t fuck her, and expect him then to apologize to your sister?”

  “Something like that. But not the believing he didn’t fuck the bitch part.”

  Davy laughed. A customer at the far end caught his attention and Davy left Rae to her own devices for the time it took him to accept the man’s money and pass him a beer.

  She examined her phone and slid her fingers over the buttons. All she had to go on was Simon’s word he hadn’t shagged the blond thing. The article hadn’t said who this other woman was save suggesting she was a groupie who’d followed the band during their tour.

  Either Simon was damn good at putting on a lovesick front and couldn’t help his womanizing ways, or it had been a case of him being caught in the exact wrong place at the wrong time, like a whole bunch of other celebs with patchy records that involved illicit sex and illegal narcotics. But recalling the way Simon always looked at her sister, kept touching her as though he weren’t sure she was quite real...

  “Damn.” She slipped off the chair and shouldered her bag. Rae took one last gulp of warm beer, then leaned over the bar counter to give Davy a sloppy kiss on his cheek when he leaned over the counter. “I’m going, okay? I’ll stop by tomorrow.”

  “You gonna do all your homework?” He grinned.

  Rae didn’t reply, only stuck out her tongue
and dashed out the door past two surly bikers who just entered and passed some comment at her exit she didn’t register fully.

  Her stomach gurgled as though she’d swallowed a bucket of bugs. She did not look forward to making that call.

  * * * *

  Emily sank into the couch with a groan. A low-grade headache had nestled at the front of her skull the whole day, colors seemed too bright and she’d been slightly nauseous. She blamed the heat and the fact that she hadn’t slept much the night before, alternating between staring at the ceiling and getting up to gaze out the window.

  Rae claimed to have Simon’s cellphone number, but she refused every effort her sister made for her to call him. No. He must call her. How could he have been so stupid? But then, by equal measure, she knew all too well how things could fly out of hand when you were at a wild party surrounded by people intent on obliterating what sanity remained. How the hell were musicians supposed to stay faithful when they were often separated from their loved ones for months on end?

  In a way she envied him that life, of not being tied down, of doing whatever he felt like. So many times he’d told her he was jealous of the order she had in her life, of knowing what lay around the next corner.

  “I’m not going to be able to do this for the rest of my life,” he’d said. “I’m pretty much over the hill already.”

  “You’re what, like thirty-five?”

  He’d laughed then and said, “That’s over the hill, love. I’m going to look really stupid if I’m balding and trying to look sexy at fifty.”

  Where was he? Emily had gone through an entire range of emotions, from disbelief to sullen anger, and now only the sorrow remained, the knowledge that she’d allowed yet another relationship to slip through her fingers, this time because of her damnable pride.

  It looked bad, really bad. And she still grew warm with anger thinking about the way that woman had lain there, lips parted while Simon had his face so close to her breasts. Miriam and Nadia talked about it, she was well aware of that, but they tactfully shut their mouths and looked away whenever Emily came out for a cool drink, their gazes filled with sympathy.