Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison

  She blinked.

  ‘No to what?’

  ‘No to the treatment to fix my hands. No to playing the piano again. No to staying in Chardwell Road. No to it all.’

  ‘Right,’ and she took a deep breath, let it out. ‘I mean, it’s your choice, of course.’ She sat there for a few moments. Then she said, ‘Can I ask why?’

  Richard walked back into the room.

  I could have said it then, it all flashed before me – my disastrous performance of the Rachmaninoff concerto, everything that had happened before it, all that had happened since. But there was so much, and I found I still couldn’t start. Maybe I was out of practice. Maybe it had something to do with that place, Oxford. Or maybe it was simply that there were more immediate priorities.

  They were standing a few feet apart, not looking at each other; both of them had their arms crossed.

  ‘I think it’s practice time,’ I said, ‘isn’t it?’

  89.

  Currabin, December 22nd, 2006

  It is dusk. The land cools. Three galahs sit on the top wire of the fence with their beaks open, fat grey tongues poking out. Time for a drink.

  When did I last do anything except write? I wondered this morning. I took the car out for a break – and because I couldn’t bear yet to finish this. The car came with the house; I found it parked in one of the big sheds with a notice under a windscreen wiper, the letters hand-scrawled: Looks like shit/Runs like a dream/Keys R inside. Frank taught me to drive one summer when Edward was away. We bowled down Oxford side streets as he yelped, in his mild way, Left! Right! No!

  About ten minutes after I left the block I saw an extraordinary sight in the distance. It was the colour pink and a great mass of it was billowing in the space where the land meets the sky. With the lack of rain the top surface of the land had lifted itself, shuddered and dispersed. It came closer and closer to me, or I to it, red dust landed in clots on the windscreen and slid down the glass, then whole clods of earth careened out of the sky and landed, thumping, on the bonnet and roof. Branches skittered across the road, the white grass at the verges was bent flat. I saw a piece of fencing wire tremble and lash free, a big lone gum tree swept into the shape of an arrow, and finally the storm was upon me, slamming hard into the side of the car. I held the wheel tight and drove straight into it.

  All of a sudden everything was dark, still, quiet. I flicked the headlights up to high beam, lifted a sticky hand from the wheel, stretched it out. I was driving very slowly; I could hardly see a thing in front of me, the dust was so thick. Small trees beside the road swayed in a slow waltz. I felt the bitumen of the road beneath the rolling tyres. As quickly as it had descended the darkness lifted, the dust dissipated, and I was out of it, and the car sped forward.

  When I got back I was overcome with a feeling of doubt so huge that I got all the food I have made these past few days (soups, stews, quiches) out of the freezer, wrapped the sultana cake in plastic, packed it all in the boot, reversed down the drive, fast, and gave it all to Shirley. She said she wouldn’t accept it but I made her.

  And now I sit here to write the end of this. Every day, it is like throwing myself off a cliff; it is the only way I can do it. If I am going to do this, I can only do it with my life in my hands and the knowledge that it could all be blown away on the wind, any day now, any day.

  90.

  Oxford, March, 2006

  My room at the nursing home was on the second floor and had a view of the car park, which was almost empty on the night I chose, a Saturday two weeks after I had arrived. In the middle of the car park stood a golden ash and a solitary squirrel was scampering up and down it, intent on mysterious industry I could not fathom, despite watching it for several hours. I had the window open as far as it went, about the width of two fists; a breeze was pushing the brown curtain out and sucking it back in. I could hear cars on nearby Banbury Road, but mostly it was the television next door I heard, which was turned up loud, as usual, on a foreign language news channel. An elderly man lived there and every time I walked past I saw him sitting hunched up next to it, shoulder touching the screen. Once I’d seen him jabbing at the controls with a finger, muttering.

  The night before, I’d watched the woman across the corridor from me die. I was still thinking about it. Her door had been left ajar as people walked in and out, to sit by her bed and to hold her hand, or to simply look at her. When it got late her door was propped open all the way, and I could see her lying on her back in the bed with her eyes closed and her mouth open, a dark well in her face. I think they had removed her false teeth, which would account for the sinking chasm of it. After she died (there had been no sound or movement from her to mark this) the staff came in, covered her body with a sheet and wheeled the bed swiftly out. Then two women, relatives, perhaps a daughter and a granddaughter, started putting her things into two black garbage bags, backs bent, not talking, just stuffing the things in.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall; it was time. I picked up my bag, the stick they had given me from behind the door. I walked out of the room, down the corridor, got into the lift, got out at the ground floor, then walked over to the front door. I punched the code into the pad at the side (I’d watched visitors do it, noted the way their fingers moved over the buttons), the doors slid open soundlessly and I walked out. Just like that. I walked out.

  I could have asked permission or told someone of my intentions; I didn’t have the time, I couldn’t risk it. I had waited far too long. On Banbury Road I flagged a cab and it skimmed along the wide road into the city centre.

  I got out at the Sheldonian Theatre and started up the long flight of steps, but something was not right; there was no one around. I got to the top; a sign at the entry said Sold Out. And then I heard it, that sound of a theatre full of people waiting for a performance. And I did not have a ticket. I had not bought one, I had assumed I could buy one at the box office. I had not accepted one from Emily or Richard; I’d thought it best to keep out of their way entirely after wrecking things between them so badly.

  There was an usher standing at the door of the auditorium. I went over to him quickly and asked him if there was one more ticket, if he would let me in. No tickets left, he said, shaking his head. I looked past him, saw the orchestra walking into the performance space.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I’ll stand at the back and no one will notice me.’

  The violin played the concert A, the strings took it, the woodwind, the brass, the whole orchestra was tuning up.

  ‘I can’t,’ he was young, with acne on his cheeks. ‘It’s regulations, see.’

  ‘But regulations,’ I said, ‘they don’t mean much, do they? I mean not to you, not to me.’

  The A was surging, rising, splitting, the flutes were throwing scales into the air.

  ‘Lady, tickets for this concert have been selling on eBay for hundreds of pounds.’

  The tuning stopped; the conductor was making her way to the podium, high heels tapping on the hard floor then muffling as she stepped up onto the carpeted podium.

  ‘If you turn your head away,’ I said, ‘you won’t see me. You won’t hear me, either, I can guarantee it. I’ll just slip past you and no one will ever know. Please. I’ll give you all the money I have,’ and I fumbled for my purse.

  ‘Sit there,’ he said, pointing abruptly to his own seat, right at the back near the door. I clasped his hand in both of mine.

  Emily walked in not long after, and instantly everyone was still. How relaxed she was, the way she walked, the way she sat, and how content, how at home. She looked at the conductor, she looked down at her hands, lifted them and began to play, and out they came, those opening chords. And that night she emphasised the top note in them, which I hadn’t heard her do before, she intoned them like a bell, and as she played it was as if the whole neighbourhood, the whole town, was walking towards her, walking towards that music, and as the music got louder their footsteps got louder too, and soon there was a great
converging, the people and the music, and I knew it would be a brilliant performance (not perfect, better than that) and the strings took the theme, the music swelled, the melody soared, and I rested my head on the back of the chair and listened well.

  At the interval another piano was rolled onto the stage and positioned facing Emily’s, then a screen was placed between the two pianos. The audience returned, the lights were dimmed. Emily came out again and then Richard; they took their seats at the pianos on either side of the screen. Then they began to play. And I knew this music, of course I knew this music, this strange music, except, listening to it now, I could hear that it contained references to the concerto, which had not been in it before, surely, and they tossed these references back and forth between them, and soon they were transformed, onwards, beyond it, transcending the concerto, creating something else. There was a stopping and starting to their playing, a falling apart, but then a drawing closer together, and then another falling apart, which created a mood that had us all sitting forward, eager, salivating, almost, as the music slowly built then dropped, built then dropped. And when the various climaxes arrived it was as if they were poured over us, warm and glorious, until the music built all over again. It was a beautiful thing, that music; it was like a conversation, I suppose, but more than that, because it went somewhere entirely different, yet still existed between them. I wondered why I had found it so strange at first, because it suddenly seemed to make such sense to me; perhaps it was just that it hadn’t sounded like that at the beginning, it had taken a while to form, or perhaps I was simply listening differently.

  When it finished, after a slow, calm dwindling, like hands being held then slipping out from one another, just fingertips touching, then nothing at all, the applause started, and it was loud, and soon people were standing up and shouting. Emily and Richard got up on their respective sides of the screen and they smiled and bowed, still standing by their pianos, and the audience kept clapping and roaring, and they kept standing there and bowing. I expected them to step beyond the screens and join hands, embrace, bow like that, but they remained where they were. I started willing them to do this, and I was sure others around me were expecting this, too. I found I wanted them so badly to do this, it was as if my life depended on it. But they didn’t, they turned and walked off in separate directions. The audience kept clapping, and eventually they came back on, and someone gave them both large bouquets of flowers, and they bowed again, and then again, and Emily waved and Richard placed two hands briefly on his chest and pointed to her, or where he imagined she stood, and that was it, they both walked off.

  The theatre emptied around me. I sat looking at the empty stage. Still waiting, still hoping. I sat there for a long time.

  ‘You have to go now.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The concert is over, everyone has gone. You have to leave.’

  I looked up. It was that boy again. I thanked him for the seat and looked back at the stage, picked up the stick.

  ‘So,’ I said, standing up, ‘no encore.’

  ‘They didn’t need an encore after that,’ he said, puffing out his cheeks.

  ‘What did you think then?’ I asked, partly because I still couldn’t bear to leave the theatre.

  ‘Oh, well. This was a very important concert.’

  ‘Was it now?’

  ‘We had reviewers from all the London papers; a few even came from New York.’

  ‘For the Rachmaninoff?’

  ‘No, no, that was just to start,’ he sniffed. ‘For Haywood’s new work. It’s been years since he’s composed a thing, you see, been quite a fuss, written about everywhere, Facebook pages, the lot. “Wall Music”,’ he said. ‘Brilliant, hey?’ and he handed me a program.

  Wall Music, it said, A Concerto for Two Pianos. Composed by Richard Haywood with Emily Green.

  ‘It says here,’ I said, pointing, ‘that she wrote it too.’

  He looked at the paper, frowning.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Still, you know …’

  I stood at the top of the stairs looking down at the White Horse pub. A lot of people were standing at the bar that night, concert-goers perhaps, or perhaps not. Nothing much changed in this town, I thought, not really. A taxi was parked outside the pub; I asked the driver to take me to Heathrow.

  91.

  Currabin, December 23rd, 2006

  The sun is falling, the cicadas have started up, the birds are swooping in the gum trees by the fence, and they are happy now, because there was rain this afternoon after that whirl of dust, but no great storm in the end, no thunder or lightning, just an opening up of the sky, a great, tumbling birth of water onto the soil and roof. Afterwards, when I came back out here, everything looked and smelt different. I sat on the veranda among the birds and insects drinking coffee. Under the apricot tree three white corellas are eating something out of the ground, pulling at it with their beaks.

  I came here because I did not come before, and now that I have seen the place (and watched the oranges die) I won’t stay anymore. I was told this morning that the place has finally sold. Someone local has bought it and intends to replant it with indigenous species. Acacia, dodonaea, feathery cassia, eumong wattle, heath and grasses, and mallee, which pleases me. The birds will be pleased too. I am told such planting will bring sulphur-crested cockatoos, mallee ringnecks, red-rumped parrots, fairy wrens, red-capped robins, eagles and even more galahs. And if the mallee grows old some rare bird species – the mallee fowl, the mallee emu-wren, the regent parrot, the black-eared miner, the red-lored whistler – may return to this little patch.

  Shirley told me about the birds. She came around at lunchtime to discuss the sale, and also to tell me that she and Harold are reconciled. I asked her what had happened, what had made the difference, and she wasn’t precise about it, she just said that last night she asked him to sit and listen to her, which he did, and then she listened to him, indeed for quite some time, and that tonight they will be having a candle-lit dinner.

  I will be leaving anyway. My visitors have called from the airport, asking for directions. They are coming, and the happiness this brings me; I am full to the brim.

  I wrote to them as soon as I arrived to tell them where I was, and to invite them to visit, when they were ready. Six weeks ago I heard about the arrival of the baby and their plans to travel to Australia, but I didn’t dare believe it would actually happen. Perhaps it means I have been forgiven, for all that I thought, and all that I did.

  What does it matter? Here is a car on the drive, three passengers in it, Emily and Richard, back together, and their baby daughter, Grace, six weeks old. How she has made the journey I do not know, it is like a miracle – but it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, just show me the child, show me the girl.

  I rise on wobbly legs to greet them.

  92.

  Currabin, December 24th, 2006

  It is night, three people sleep in a temperature-controlled room down the hall. I can hear the low hum of the enormous air-conditioner, the occasional whoosh as it powers up again to meet the heat of this night. The sight of them together yesterday, walking towards me up the drive, such happiness, such bliss. Then holding my granddaughter in my arms, the feeling of it, like a perfect aria, the note that hits a perfect pitch and hovers, hovers.

  After I leave here I am going to find a place in London that is small and modern and has good heating and is near a park, where I will walk and look at the trees and the birds, and write all day, and see that child. And I will write, because that is what I do now instead of playing the piano, it is what I like. One voice exchanged for another: it may appear a loss, or an act of sacrificial love, but I don’t see it like that, for writing suits me better. Besides, it is not only a voice, is it? It’s a different way of thinking, of being, a different way of life.

  I think resurrection is a process rather than an event. I think it is a to-ing and fro-ing between a certain sort of life, and a certain sort o
f death. I think I have written this to ask you to put your hand inside all sorts of strange-shaped wounds, to ask you to believe. And to finally tell them, of course.

  How long will it last, this happiness, this peace, which I see in my son and his new family? The odds are stacked against them, surely. Family is such an ideal, a romance. How differently most of us relate and live. Living in hope for those times of grace, of music, making up all sorts of stories.

  Before we had dinner tonight, I was bringing a load of washing in from the line, and it was growing dark (I perform such tasks slowly, partly because I am old, partly because I am thinking about what I will write next; the words are piling high) and when I turned with the basket in my arms I saw that the old house was all lit up, and through the kitchen window I could see Richard stirring something on the stove, frowning with concentration. They had brought the bassinet into the kitchen and Grace must have woken up and started to cry, although I could not hear her from where I stood. I watched Emily bend and slip her hands into the bassinet, every muscle of her body moving with care, and she lifted Grace, put her over her shoulder, and Emily started bobbing in a circle, her mouth moving, perhaps she was talking to Grace, or singing, then Richard’s mouth started moving too, his face now relaxed. He put the whisk down and went to them and they all circled together, Emily holding the child, Richard holding Emily, the three of them moving to the music I could not hear.

  The sun had almost set behind me, I was casting a great shadow across the lawn, and I walked through the darkening garden, past the shapes of trees and shrubs, where the birds were already nesting. When I got to the back steps I put the basket of washing down to open the door, but by then the singing had stopped, and the baby was calm. I walked into the kitchen, got out these pages. I turned to face my family. I am an old woman, a happy old woman, and I am alive, I am alive, I am alive.