Eighty Days Blue

by Vina Jackson

  ‘We weren’t sure what you’d miss most,’ Mum said, ‘so we got everything.’

  Her eyes were getting misty, but she was still smiling.

  ‘I’m never going to be able to eat it all before I have to leave,’ I protested.

  ‘Oh, yes, you will,’ she replied. ‘I’m going to make you.’

  ‘There’s food in New York, Mum.’

  ‘Not like your mother’s cooking, though, is it?’

  ‘No, that’s for sure,’ I said, giving her shoulders a squeeze as I slipped back into my seat.

  Benji saved me from more nagging, though I knew her gentle ribbing was just a sign she missed me.

  ‘So, sis, tell us about life in the big city. What’s it like being famous, eh? Do you get your own dressing room?’

  I laughed. ‘Nah, it’s much less glamorous than it sounds. I love the performing, but get sick of the hotel rooms and living out of a suitcase.’

  ‘Living out of a suitcase?’ Fran said. ‘Sounds right up your alley. You’re never going to come home for good, are you?’

  ‘I will one day.’

  Mr van der Vliet was the next to help me out of an awkward spot. ‘Where are you playing next?’

  ‘Well, I was lucky to get a free week here first. Then I’m going down south and working my way up. Christchurch, then Wellington, then Auckland and flying out again a day after the last concert to Melbourne, then Sydney. But only a few days in each. A bit of a flying visit. I’m playing with local orchestras on each occasion, part of the selling point, and it also keeps costs down, so I’ll be spending a fair bit of time in rehearsals.’

  Fran burst out laughing and poked me in the ribs. ‘“On each occasion,”’ she repeated in a mock-English accent. ‘Listen to it. When did you get so posh?’

  One of the dogs barked his agreement in the corner.

  Mr van der Vliet ignored them both. ‘They’re working you hard, then?’

  ‘Yes, very much so, but I know how lucky I am. Most violinists only dream of it.’

  ‘I read that you were playing with the Venezuelan conductor Lobo?’

  ‘Yes, Simón,’ I replied quickly.

  ‘Are you blushing?’ asked Fran, who’d been watching me closely. ‘What’s going on with the conductor, then? Tell us.’

  ‘Nothing, honestly. We’re just friends.’

  ‘Oh, God, don’t move to South America,’ my mother interjected, her hand flying to her face in shock. ‘New York is far enough away as it is!’

  ‘Venezuela is closer to New Zealand than New York is, Mum, but don’t worry, I’m not moving there.’

  ‘Who are you living with in New York, then? Do you have a home to go to on your breaks?’

  ‘I was flatting with a Croatian couple who play in the brass section, but I moved out when the tour started. I just crash with friends when I’m back for the odd night, and do my washing at the laundromat.’

  I was staring at my food, becoming more and more uncomfortable as the conversation wore on. I wasn’t really sure why I didn’t want to tell them about Dominik. I could easily have mentioned that we were dating, without adding that I liked it when he tied my wrists behind my back or made love to me with his hand wrapped gently round my throat, just like every other person doesn’t discuss the details of their love life in polite company, even if they didn’t get any more kinky than doing it at the foot of the bed.

  My father barely said a word all night, though he didn’t once drop his beaming smile. He had nabbed a guest ticket to every concert that I was playing, planning a bit of a tour of it himself, he said.

  My mother couldn’t make it to all of them, though the whole family would come to watch me play in Auckland, at the Aotea Centre on Queen Street. ‘Someone has to watch the dogs,’ she said apologetically.

  It wasn’t until I crawled into my neatly made-up single bed in the same bedroom that I’d had throughout my childhood that I began to feel desperately lonely.

  I had become so used to traffic rushing by at all hours that the sounds of the city were as soothing to me as a CD of whale song or the rolling waves crashing on the shore, and here there was barely a noise outside. The intense silence was suffocating, as though I was trapped in a sensory-deprivation tank.

  I opened the window, despite the rain that had begun to fall again outside, and kneeled on my bed, staring into the dark. I expected to see stars, but there were none tonight.

  Usually the sky was full of them in New Zealand, the air so clean that they shone like beacons.

  People said that I was a traveller, but how could anyone from my part of the world be anything else? The desire to seek out new things beats fast in our veins. I could understand why we come back home, of course. I’d never shake my love for the place, no matter how long I was away, but I could never understand the people who didn’t want to leave at all.

  I wondered if Dominik was the same. If he’d come to New York just for me. If we’d ever really be able to be together. On the one hand, it seemed doomed. I wasn’t sure if he’d ever really forgive me for leaving him behind and going on the road. On the other hand, I couldn’t stomach the thought of being without him. I had tried all sorts of things to mimic his company, most of them daft or dangerous, or both.

  I’d lately avoided tying the rope round my throat in private, because the implications frightened me so terribly, and the fact that my fear turned me on scared me even more. Even Dominik wouldn’t like that, I thought, though the chances of me tripping over on something, catching the rope and strangling myself were virtually nil.

  I still had it in my suitcase. My heart rate had quickened as I’d gone through customs, imagining all of the excuses that I would need to use if they searched my case and found it. Rock-climbing, or girl-scouting, as I had told Simón when I kissed him goodnight.

  Perhaps I’d be honest and whisper that I just liked a spot of bondage, and where was the crime in that? But my bags had gone through without any questions every single time. I hadn’t taken the rope from the case. It sat in there like a snake hidden in sand, the prospect of danger ever present but hidden from view.

  How on earth had this happened? I mused, staring out at the moon, my face and the windowsill now wet and chilled with rain. Trees whistled in the breeze, gracious companions to my thoughts, and the odd animal scuttled across the ground in the shadows.

  Even the dark seemed darker here, with only the odd streetlight to cast a glow. I shut the window and surveyed the contents of my bedroom, unchanged since I had left it.

  I had thought that with us kids gone, my parents might move into a smaller house to save themselves the maintenance, or perhaps get a boarder in to make a little extra money. At the very least, redecorate our bedrooms as guest rooms, or use them for storage. Instead, each was unchanged, exactly as we’d left them when we left home, like the architectural equivalent of a time capsule.

  I’d been a minimalist as a kid. Just a few books, piles of records, cassette tapes and CDs, a globe that I used to spend hours spinning and staring at, imagining all the places that I was going to visit. There was my first violin, child’s size, still in the original case with a tiny bow alongside, most of the strings broken. A white vase with an oriental pattern painted onto it, tiny cherry blossoms, which my father had given me one day, not for my birthday or for Christmas, but because he had seen it in a shop and thought of me. ‘For when you go to Japan,’ he had said. I still hadn’t been.

  The sun finally came out again on the morning of my talk at the former school. It was the strangest thing in the world, addressing kids who looked so much younger than I ever thought I was at the same age. They were waist-height, babies. I had been terrified that they would heckle me or throw things, but instead they sat there sullenly staring into space as if they had never been so bored in their lives.

  The corridors and school buildings were almost exactly the same as I had remembered them, and many of my old teachers were still there. I was invited into the staffroom f
or the first time and was surprised by the warm responses from teachers I had thought hadn’t liked me at all. Even my maths teacher, Mr Bleak, who had always seemed like such a gruff man, frustrated to the point of explosion by my inability to understand algebra, smiled from ear to ear when he saw me by the water dispenser.

  ‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘You went out into the world and made something of yourself. If only half the kids here would do the same.’

  His face fell again as he enunciated the last words and he turned away, mug and teabag in hand. He hadn’t waited long enough to add hot water.

  I took my mug and looked for a seat, nearly bowling straight into the man standing behind me in the process, knocking my hand and splashing scalding coffee up my arm.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry,’ he said, flustered. He dabbed at my wrist with his own shirtsleeve and then pulled away again as if he were the one who had been burned.

  ‘Graham?’ I whispered.

  Silence enveloped the room like a wave. He was the only person, I realised, whom I had called by his first name, instead of his last. ‘Mr Ivers’, it should have been, just as I had called my maths teacher ‘Mr Bleak’ and still called my music teacher ‘Mrs Drummond’, though she had laughed and insisted I call her Marie. I just couldn’t get into the habit of calling my teachers by their first names.

  Mr Bleak cleared his throat and kindly began a loud conversation about the weather with the person standing next to him. Soon, the normal sounds of chatter resumed as the staff forgot their interest in our moment of intimacy and carried on as they were.

  Graham was my old swimming coach, and the man to whom I had lost my virginity.

  He’d caught me masturbating in the girl’s changing rooms one day after swimming practice and had asked me if I would like to feel a man inside me, to which I had responded, ‘Yes.’

  I hadn’t told anyone about it, not even Mary, my best friend at the time, though I think she had always suspected.

  The only person who knew about it was Dominik, but I hadn’t told him the full story – that I had continued to swim and swim for Graham, enjoying the discomfort of every length completed under his watchful gaze.

  My mother had been thrilled with my new interest in the sport, believing as she did that I was developing an unhealthy obsession with my music. There was even talk that I might compete in the Waikato Swimming Championships. I had invented more and more reasons to stay late after coaching sessions, late enough for all the other girls to leave so that I could masturbate with the door open, hoping beyond hope that the swimming coach would come in and fuck me again.

  The other girls began to gossip about it, of course, and perhaps that talk had spread to the staffroom. One day, I came to swimming practice and we were told that Graham had been transferred to a neighbouring school. His replacement was a bow-legged middle-aged woman who wore a green swimsuit that made her look even more like a frog than she had without it on.

  I had dropped out of swimming classes and renewed my vigour for violin-playing.

  ‘I’m glad you’re back,’ Mr van der Vliet had said, even though I hadn’t missed so much as an hour of violin rehearsal. ‘I was beginning to worry.’

  I had never been angry with the swimming coach, though I should have been. I had just been sad that he hadn’t wanted me again. Rightly or wrongly, I’d enjoyed it. At the time, I had imagined myself an adult, though looking at the girls around me, with their fresh faces and lunchboxes, who looked as if they should be in bed by 8 p.m. watching Disney films, I was shocked by how young I must have been.

  I couldn’t help feeling responsible, that the whole thing had been my fault. Mr Ivers should have known better, but I would never say that he had done anything to me that I hadn’t wanted, enjoyed and been in a position to say yes or no to.

  He certainly hadn’t made me this way, just blown air on a flame that had existed from birth, as much a part of my make-up as my red hair. He was as responsible for the way I’d turned out as the sand is responsible for catching a wave that falls on the shore.

  All of a sudden, my stomach churned. I excused myself and headed to the girls’ toilets.

  In the mirror, I looked as grey as the corridors outside. I splashed water across my face to regain my composure and wiped my mouth wearily.

  I checked my watch. The minutes were rushing by, and I was late to meet the senior music students, with whom I would be playing that evening at the concert. I had the rest of the day rehearsing with them.

  Time to pull myself together.

  Graham was waiting outside the girls’ toilets as I emerged.

  ‘Probably not the brightest place for you to hang out,’ I remarked, impatient now to get to my rehearsal.

  His face turned a blotchy shade of crimson. He had lost some of his youthful athleticism and was beginning to gain a double chin. His thick hair was receding, giving his forehead the appearance of an egg protruding from the backside of a duck. He had taken up smoking and was surrounded by the odour of stale cigarettes. I held my breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I added. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Are you coming to the concert tonight?’

  He nodded.

  ‘See you then,’ I said breezily, and made my way to the music room to meet the musicians who’d been lined up to play with me.

  They were decent, and not nearly as nervous as Mrs Drummond. I’d sent them the suggested music in advance. I’d spent hours planning it, trying to bring classical music to earth for a town that for the most part probably hadn’t listened to a note of it.

  Most of it was Enzso, the Split Enz and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra collaboration. Starting with ‘Message to My Girl’, the song that I had played in the Washington Square hotel room, after leaving Victor, when Dominik had reappeared like magic in my life. The song made my heart ache, even by the tenth time we played it.

  I threw in a couple of the instrumental themes from the Lord of the Rings film, which the kids seemed to particularly like.

  The Te Aroha College assembly hall, low key though it might be, was my first chance to put my own spin on things, and despite the informal setting, it was the concert that I had most been looking forward to. The music for the other shows in the main centres would be more formal and included mostly classical standbys, as well as the Vivaldi, which had become something of a theme tune.

  The hall was brightly lit, no spotlight here or dimming for the audience. I could see the faces in the crowd whenever I looked up. Though I tried to lose myself in the music as I usually did, it wasn’t as easy as when I was playing into a larger, darkened room, where even with a thousand people in front of me, I felt as though I was alone on stage because I couldn’t catch any of their eyes.

  I was much more alert during this performance, conscious as I was on encouraging the music students, some of whom had been as pale and quivering as white sheets on a washing line on a windy Wellingtonian day before we went on stage, and it was the first time I’d played publicly for my friends and family since I was in high school.

  My family had dressed up in their fanciest gear for the occasion, and even my friends Cait and Mary, who had travelled down especially for the occasion, had pulled out their smartest frocks, though they both looked bemused, being more accustomed to nights out in Auckland and Wellington. The thought of not living up to their expectations filled me with much more trepidation than the presence of the classical world’s sharpest critics.

  The first set went well, and we had a brief intermission, a fifteen-minute break, to catch our breath. I didn’t have the heart to make my way through the room, accepting the congratulations of well-wishers and the curious stares of the locals who wanted to see how I’d turned out. My agent had told me that I needed to make more of an effort to engage with my audience, but I thought that even she would forgive me my reticence this time.

  I scrabbled through my bag for my mobile phone, feigned receiving an important call, then snuck out through a side exit and leaned a
gainst the outside wall of the assembly hall, enjoying the cool air. It had stopped raining for once, though the clouds felt as thick and heavy as they always did, burying the town in a permanently damp vapour. The grass was slick with rain, and drops on the trees shone in the moonlight like glass beads.

  I was interrupted by a cough, from further along the wall, and the flicking of a lighter. My companion was cloaked in darkness, besides the glow from his cigarette, but I could smell him, and see the outline of his head against the night sky. Mr Ivers.

  ‘I’m glad I caught you alone,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you.’

  The end of the cigarette zipped back and forth like a firefly. His hands were shaking.

  ‘Oh?’ I replied.

  Surely he couldn’t be planning to proposition me. I took another look at him, now that my eyes were beginning to adjust to his presence in the dark. I’d probably get used to the cigarette smell, and it had been a while since I had been with Dominik. There was little time for romance, with all the moving from one city to another, and by the time the shows ended, I was exhausted, ready to drop into bed.

  I’d considered just paying for it, hiring an escort, but the Internet had proven little help in that regard, full of women who offered the same services but very few ads for men that looked legit. I had been so worried about the embarrassment or risk that might ensue if I got it wrong and had given up.

  Maybe it would be interesting to go with Mr Ivers again, for old times’ sake. We could probably even go back to the scene of the crime.

  I spread a flirtatious smile over my face and moved a little closer to him.

  ‘You know, I’m sure we could find a way to get into the changing rooms again, after the show. You probably even have a key.’

  ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ he hissed, visibly shocked by my suggestion.

  ‘But I thought you—’

  ‘God, no. I’m getting married in a month. I only wanted to speak to you to say that I was sorry and check that you . . . you hadn’t talked about it. I don’t have much money, but if it would help you to . . . move on, I can pay. I have savings, not much, but—’