After listening to the evening radio concert, my parents joined me in my bedroom, curious to know what could produce such hoots of laughter, honks of disbelief. I could still hear them reading selected fragments aloud to each other as I lay in bed, at midnight, their voices amused and worried, carrying along the outside of the house:
His sole personal effects were a copy of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Gods, and a set of stainless steel false teeth
I was forbidden access to the book on subsequent nights. Unsuitable, my father decided. Biased. Out of Context.
‘Out of bounds,’ he warned, placing the scrapbook on a high shelf, just as in infancy all kinds of fragile and exquisite valuables had been stored beyond my grasp.
I could have reached the shelf easily, of course—but some sort of symbolic taboo remained, a shortfall in psychological reach, and I left it alone.
The scrapbook was handed to me as I left for my lesson the following week. After turning the first corner, I slowed to a crawl, then stopped altogether, leafing through:
Compensation Shock. Bereaved parents lash out. ‘How can money bring back our son? $40,000 is nowhere near enough. We expected twice as much.’
Keller removed the book from my grasp as I entered the room.
‘You father has written,’ he said. ‘He feels you should not have an education.’
‘And you?’
He squeezed the bulging scrapbook back among its companion volumes, and smiled grimly:
‘If only at your age I’d had such textbooks.’
I let this pass without comment. I was interested, yes—but no longer obsessively. If he wanted to waste his life clipping stories of stupidity and squalor from the newspapers, so be it. I had better things to do.
‘The Mozart?’ I suggested, slipping a sheet of music onto the stand.
The Wet was ending, the frogs outside my bedroom window croaking ever more loudly each evening in their shrinking creek, for diminishing returns. Fruit was suddenly everywhere: in snackbars, roadside stalls, gardens. My father couldn’t pass a shop without stopping to buy smooth-skinned pawpaws, rough, soft avocados, a dozen crinkled passionfruit …
He had begun planting our own garden with seedlings and treelings: banana, custard apple, mango, babaco—and his prize possession, a single precious cutting of the legendary rambutan, a gift flown in illegally by one of his patients from Timor.
‘The world’s most delicious food,’ he assured us.
‘We’ll have to take your word for that,’ my mother teased.
‘Only till the first crop.’
He was experimenting, he elaborated. Even perhaps planning to buy a few acres south of the town, and try something commercial. In the near future.
Medicine increasingly bored him. He felt burnt out, needed to recharge the emotional reservoirs. Each evening he sat over his evening meal imagining some hilltop dream plantation: sprawling verandahs, rattan blinds, musical evenings amid the tropical fruit.
‘Mangoes and Mozart,’ he joked. ‘Now that’s living.’
‘Mangoes and fruit bats,’ my mother cautioned.
‘Bananas and Bach.’
‘Bananas and bankruptcy.’
He could smell Asia in the north-west monsoon, he liked to claim. The Spice Islands, three hundred miles away. Fecund, orchid spangled jungles. Rare, exquisite fruits. Fishing villages …
‘I feel I’ve come home,’ he said. ‘Finally. I felt it instantly, that first night we stepped off the plane. The heat, the Wet—like a blanket.’
‘Instantly? Seems to me you fought it.’
He smiled: ‘Not for long. I’ve realised we’re part of Asia here. Not Europe. We’re Asians.’
‘You don’t look Asian.’
‘We are what we eat. I’ll buy you a wok.’
‘A what?’
‘A wok.’
‘What on earth is a wok?’
‘I don’t know. But you need one. And some books. Malay cooking, Thai. That is what we should be eating—not grills and cold-climate vegetables.’
The Friday-night soirées continued that year, usually amid heaped bowls of tropical fruit, and in the lingering, saturating aroma of my mother’s latest attempt at fish sambal, or stir-fry chicken and chillies and ginger.
A sub-committe had been formed with the purpose of flying concert artists up from the Southern cities. That Christmas in the South, during which my parents had attended every concert they could squeeze in, had whetted their appetites, made them remember the one thing missing from their life in Darwin. With the end of the Wet they scored a major coup: a visit from the Brisbane Symphony.
The town gentry were out in full that day, filling the natural amphitheatre in the Botanical Gardens: itinerant professionals from the South mostly—teachers and doctors, lawyers and civil servants—plus the odd local car dealer or furniture magnate or fruit-shop owner.
The rains were newly ceased, the sky washed clean and transparent. Cicadas roared in the trees, the gardens spilled over with colour and scent: frangipani, bougainvillea, hibiscus, poinciana. I sat with my parents on the terraced, grassy slope, trying to maintain some distance between myself and Rosie Zollo, who had abandoned her own parents to plop down at my side.
‘You told me you weren’t coming,’ she teased, playfully, attempting to introduce a private bantering tone between us.
‘Changed my mind,’ I squeezed from one corner of my mouth, gazing fixedly in the other direction.
My mother leant across me, mistaking my sullenness for shyness:
‘Perhaps you could introduce us to your friend, Paul.’
‘Rosemary,’ Rosie smiled. ‘It’s so nice to meet you, Mrs Crabbe.’
‘That’s a lovely frock you’re wearing, Rosemary—isn’t it Paul?’
But I had spotted Keller, shuffling into the gardens among the late stragglers, his white panama and glowing red face unmistakeable.
‘Look.’
My father half rose to his feet, waving a programme:
‘Won’t you join us, maestro.’
Keller doffed his hat, clambered with some difficulty up the steps and seated himself beside us. He did not look well. His hands trembled, and he clutched tightly at the brim of his hat as if trying to suppress that trembling. The sun beat down on him fiercely, magnifying all blemishes: the terracotta redness of his face, the deep fissures and cracks that gave his skin the texture of crudely fired pottery. I guessed he’d been drinking heavily—a hunch confirmed by the eloquent nose-wrinkle my mother gave my father behind his back.
‘This is Paul’s friend from school,’ she smiled. ‘Rosemary—this is Herr Keller, Paul’s piano teacher.’
Rosie gushed: ‘Paul’s told me so much …’
Keller inclined his head slightly then returned his gaze to the soundshell. The orchestra, clad in white summer suits, was assembling. For the first—and probably last—time, his own formal tropical costume did not look out of place.
As the musicians finetuned their tools of trade, Rosie moved closer, squeezed against me by latecomers. Her thigh pressed suddenly against mine, and against my will I felt my pulse lurch and change tempo, accelerando.
I glanced at her, and found a miracle had occurred before my eyes. Or perhaps after my eyes, the miracle taking place somewhere between eyeball and brain. The mousy hair, usually held in prim school plaits, looked suddenly thick and lush. The nose—a bony wafer—was now almost dainty; the podgy baby-fat had become feminine softness. I watched—hypnotised—the slow, tidal rise and fall of her breasts with each breath.
My heart hammered inside me. I slipped an arm behind her, and she leaned slightly into me. Her perfume seemed an all-consuming sexual solvent …
Somewhere else the concert was beginning: Prokofiev, Peter and the Wolf, a children’s classic.
‘They’ve got Darwin’s mental age worked out,’ I breathed in Rosie’s ear, feeling carnal, arrogant, invulnerable.
Various predictable favourites followed: th
e Jamaican Rumba, a Tchaikovsky Waltz, a couple of De Sousa marches. Each offering except the Tchaikovsky was rewarded with thunderous applause. The Tchaikovsky was followed first by a sort of communal sighing noise, a vast collective aah: the sound that I imagined the thirsty might make after a first long quenching. Especially the sentimental thirsty.
Rosie and I spent the Intermission pressing arms and thighs, trembling with excitement while appearing to remain still. The reckless confidence of lust had taken hold of me: I squeezed my hand along the grass beneath her, and held my breath, disbelieving, as she shifted herself on top of it. Somewhere in the background I could hear my parents attempting small talk with Keller, a task rendered even more difficult than usual due to his drunken state.
‘You are enjoying the concert, Herr Keller?’
‘The Prokofiev has a certain innocent charm.’
‘I love Tchaikovsky myself.’
‘My condolences, dear lady.’
After Intermission came a Mozart Piano Concerto, the C Major. A smattering of applause broke out in the audience after the first movement, and I shook my head and laughed harshly, manfully, at such ignorance.
‘The plebs think it’s finished,’ I sneered to Rosie, who halted her own cupped hands, mid-clap.
No so Keller. He leant forwards into my field of view and began to deliberately strike his hands together, maintaining the noise, solo, long after the rest of the audience had stopped, and the conductor was waiting, white baton poised, to resume.
‘We are meant to clap between movements,’ he told me.
He rose to his feet, braced his shoulders, and sat again:
‘And stretch our legs. It is you who are ignorant.’
His public rebuke infuriated me. I had been dragged to concerts in the South as soon as I could walk. I knew the correct procedure: proper concert-going etiquette. I took pride in knowing when a piece of music had finished.
Not even the second movement, the famous Andante, could soothe me. I soon decided it was being played very badly. This time Keller seemed in agreement: he withheld his applause after it, and again after the Allegro which followed.
‘Wasn’t that beautiful,’ my mother murmured, as the soloist took a third bow.
‘No,’ Keller said, simply.
Wagner completed the programme: the Act 1 Prelude from Lohengrin. I can’t listen to the piece now without seeing again the strange events that followed: a scene that seems to grow clearer in my mind the further I recede from it, like a slowly developing polaroid print, gaining colour and texture and detail even as I watch. Things I hadn’t thought I’d noticed—too immersed in Rosie perhaps—have only surfaced since. Now I see it perfectly clearly: as the first bars of the Wagner shimmered into the air, and vanished, shimmered again and vanished again, Keller became very silent. Of course he would have been silent anyway, listening to the music, but this silence was somehow different, deeper, stronger: a zone of silence in the noise of the music, so deep that it … screamed.
The muscles of his face had frozen, his eyes were unblinking.
And suddenly he was wobbling to his feet, shouting in German.
A swirl of shushes washed against him from all sides, but he wouldn’t be stopped. Neither would the orchestra: the conductor half-turned at the first interruption, and a few prim faces and glinting spectacles turned upwards from their instruments momentarily, but the music continued.
Tears were filling the deep fissures of that parched landscape, Keller’s face. Weeping in his white tropical suit, he stood in the audience like a stranded member of the orchestra, unable to reach the stage, or not allowed to play.
Two ushers—volunteers from the Musical Society, well-meaning, dithering—were at his side:
‘Please, maestro. Not again.’
Not again? The word stuck in my ear, and stayed there, trapped, buzzing.
‘If you don’t wish to listen, perhaps you could leave.’
He shrugged the various guiding hands from his elbows and moved slowly off up the grassy slope, alone. As suddenly as they had appeared, the tears had gone, sucked into the dry skin of his ravaged face.
‘Bah!’ he muttered—exactly like that, the only time I have heard the exclamation spoken as it is so often written: ‘Bah!’.
My parents could talk about nothing else afterwards—an upper-case Scene—but I had other things on my mind.
‘I’ll just walk Rosie home,’ I excused myself.
‘Don’t be late,’ my mother smiled knowingly, meaning, I suspected, exactly the opposite.
The two of us wandered slowly, with a kind of aimless, accidental resolution, towards the thickest, darkest regions of the Gardens. In a small hollow among fig tree roots and ropes of lantana we managed to find some joint excuse to sit down, and then a further stammered excuse to lie down alongside each other.
But that was the end of stammering. We spent the rest of the afternoon in an agony of touchings and pleasures, fired by the kind of passion and inventiveness that only two frustrated loners were capable of, choreographing every sensual pleasure imaginable as if we had been dreaming of and planning for that moment for years.
For the first time as I climbed the wooden steps at the Swan that following Tuesday I heard the sound of a piano: music was being played on the Bösendorfer, the supine; and it was the kind of music that made me stand and listen outside the door, disbelieving. Keller playing for himself? And even—for now his voice came to me—singing?
I knew the piece well; Wagner again. My father often played orchestral excerpts from Tristan on his gramophone. But I had never heard it played quite like this: a piano transcription, accompanied by snorts of contemptuous laughter, and phrases of angry, broken singing.
There was passion in the voice, yes, but under immense pressure: a passion that was given in hints, then snatched away, given again, and disallowed again. It was an impossible, contradictory duet, or not so much a duet as a duel: a debate between two instruments, voice and piano. Or perhaps, more accurately, between head and heart. Contempt and self-hatred fuelled the singing of the voice, and all the while the hands played, autonomously, with an abandon and rapture beyond anything I had ever heard.
I stood transfixed at the door, overwhelmed, goose bumps rising, the hair on my neck standing on end. When he had finished, I waited some time before knocking tentatively.
‘No lesson today,’ he called gruffly through the door.
‘But …’
‘Practise your Mozart.’
I shifted feet for another minute or so, then knocked again.
‘Are you alright?’
The door opened and he was revealed, his white suit crumpled and slept-in. But the eyes were clear.
‘You are a good boy,’ he said. ‘Of course you must come in.’
The room was in darkness: the slats of the wooden louvres tightly shut, the lights off. A white blur of unmade bedsheets in one corner caught my eye, and light from the open door glinted here and there, reflected from various bottles on the floor.
No music stood on the grand piano. I realised he had been playing from memory. Or even—it would not have been past him—improvising.
‘You have been listening?’
‘It was wonderful. Magnificent.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It was interesting. Cheap tricks,’ he continued. ‘The interest here is technical only. How Liszt manages to transcribe Wagner’s orchestral colour onto a piano.’
‘But it’s brilliant. It reaches in and … lifts you.’
‘An intellectual exercise only. Listen—here are the first violins …’
He resumed playing, and with the first chords I was transported again to that same sensual, aching zone. The music seemed nearer to lovemaking than to music … and now I knew about lovemaking. I looked across at him; the tortured, booze-ruined face. His eyes were fixed on his silver clamshell of family photographs: on the woman standing behind his younger self, her mouth open in song. Perhaps she had been singing Wag
ner as the photograph was taken.
He reached the final crescendo: a great washing ocean, rising and falling, rising and falling … then he stopped, abruptly.
‘It doesn’t quite work here, you agree?’
‘Well …’
‘The rubato,’ he said. ‘A problem, no?’
‘No,’ I said, bravely. ‘It’s perfect. The most beautiful music I’ve ever heard.’
He turned sharply: ‘Then we must continue your education. You cannot have heard much.’
I smiled, but internally, unseen, using no visible facial muscles. I was increasingly impervious to his criticism. I knew my kind of music when I heard it. The world of the mind was slowly losing its hold on me; the world of the senses replacing it. Each day my eyes seemed to be opened just a little wider, and more of that sun-drenched town of lush gardens, scents, and sexuality seemed to cram itself in. Nothing I heard in that dark, humid room in the Swan had much place in my new world—except perhaps the music I had just heard.
I wondered how I could get my hands on a copy of the transcription, and play it one lunchtime for Rosie.
‘Okay, lovebirds—out. You’re trespassing.’
‘But we practise here every day,’ Rosie protested.
The door to the Music Room had flipped open, mid-lunch, and half the school pushed in, Scotty Mitchell at the head of the crowd, clutching an electric guitar.
‘Practise what?’ he asked, and his entourage chortled.
‘You heard,’ Jimmy Papas, standing at his shoulder, jerked a thumb towards the door. ‘Out.’
Megan, her blonde cumulus of hair visible somewhere back in the crowd, intervened:
‘The band needs somewhere to practise, Paul. You can’t have the Music Room to yourselves every day.’
Scotty was already plugging his guitar into some sort of black box. Papas closed the lid of the piano I was playing, just slowly enough to allow me to extract my fingers without serious injury.
Rosie and I sat pressed together on the stool. I didn’t want to move. The bulge in my shorts that she had been fondling as I played would surely cause even more laughter among the new arrivals.
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