Dead People's Music

by Sarah Laing

  ‘What happened with the guy?’ I say.

  ‘He was screwing someone else. A girl he met at the ASPCA where he volunteered.’

  ‘But you’re still friends with his sister?’

  ‘Marcella was so mad at him,’ says Wendy. ‘She told him he was making a big mistake.’

  ‘So how long has it been since you two broke up?’ I ask.

  ‘A couple of years. I haven’t seen anyone since then. He totally emotionally scarred me and now I have trust issues to resolve.’

  ‘That sucks,’ I say, my brain almost coming right now, a slight residual headache from sugar deprivation, my lips still numb. ‘I wonder where Toby is. Maybe he’s gone to an interview already.’ Not that I’m scared that he would cheat on me, he seems devoted. Sometimes I worry that it will be me that does the cheating, because he might love me more than I love him. How do you know if love is equally distributed, not dispensed in a lump sum that one person might hog?

  ‘Maybe I should peroxide my hair again,’ says Wendy. ‘I looked good, right?’ She has filed the album, and is plugging her camera into the computer, where she will become Millie Vanderlost, resurrector of abandoned furniture, twenty-three comments.

  Marcella has arrived with her leather suitcase, her blue velvet coat, her lank copper hair and her tarnished complexion. I immediately want to feed her a pot of steamed broccoli, make her some beans and rice. The job hunt hasn’t been going well, but she has found a position in a Soho hotel, shift starting at 6 a.m. Why she hasn’t found a mezzanine bed to rent in Manhattan is beyond me.

  She has brought a bottle of gin, and Wendy administers shots like medicine. ‘I don’t normally drink,’ she says, ‘but it helps me loosen up. Otherwise I can’t enjoy going out.’ In between shots, she is transforming herself from slob to new wave chic. In cultivating a pompadour, she has created a hairspray microclimate. Every ten minutes or so she has to put on more because the pompadour starts drooping.

  Toby and I are sharing a bottle of Beaujolais — we have discovered that five dollar French wine isn’t so bad. We couldn’t get over New Zealand twelve dollar sav plonk, suddenly twenty-five or thirty dollars on the US shelves. I tried to tell the wine seller that he should buy some of our riesling, our chardonnay, but he shook his head, telling me that New Zealanders only knew how to make sauvignon blanc. I felt affronted, then wondered whether I was patriotic and delusional after all. I’ve put on my black going-out clothes, now charcoal grey thanks to the local laundromat.

  Marcella is complaining to Wendy about her ex-boyfriend, her original thesis supervisor. She had to swap supervisors after they broke up, and that’s why her PhD took so long.

  ‘He only ever wanted to have anal sex. I like anal sex, sometimes, it gives me a little thrill, but not all the time. Do you like it? Hold on, I don’t want to know — you’ll be telling me about my brother’s sexual habits.’

  ‘I like it, but your brother was quite conservative. A missionary man.’

  ‘I said I didn’t want to hear,’ says Marcella.

  ‘You started the conversation. Hey, look, it’s ten, we should call a car service.’

  A car service sounds like something that movie stars take, but Wendy tells me it’ll be cheaper than a yellow cab. Our one is an Oldsmobile driven by a Hispanic man, a Virgin Mary stuck to the dashboard, a crocheted lace cross hanging from his rear-vision mirror.

  ‘Can we have some music?’ yells Marcella at the driver. He nods, not saying anything, turning on some ragtime.

  ‘Can you change the radio station to 105.5?’ Wendy asks.

  He acts like he doesn’t hear.

  ‘I love you, all right? Just switch the goddamned radio!’

  The driver bows his head and pushes the seek-button, Toby and I exchanging looks.

  We are let off somewhere in the Lower East Side, but I don’t know where. Using her auditioning-for-the-History-Channel voice, Marcella tells us that this used to be tenements where the immigrant German, Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish communities lived. The hipsters live there now, driving up the rents and pre-gentrifying the place like everywhere else in Manhattan.

  We stand in line outside a club, and when a clutch of people exit, we are allowed in. Toby hands over twenty dollars for the two of us, and I flinch, hoping that my wedding quartet will be able to pay me in cash on the day.

  Inside the club is crowded and I can’t see much, but I can smell the incense used by the Aleister Crowley devotees back home. There is also the damp chemical aroma of dry ice. The band is setting up on stage while new wave plays so loudly I can feel it in my teeth. I don’t recognise any of the songs: our eighties pop was dispatched from England, not America. This place is nothing like what I saw on sit-coms.

  ‘You want a drink?’ I ask Toby.

  ‘Yeah, an East India Pale Ale.’ Toby is becoming a connoisseur of the micro-breweries, working through the different blends.

  I push my way towards the bar, and fix my gaze on the blur-of-a-barmaid with the Japanese tattooed sleeve. But I’m distracted by the bartop go-go dancers, a pair of skinny boys in drag. Half-English grammar school, half-Rocky Horror Picture Show, they strut over the piles of dollar bill tips in high heels, pink fishnets, grey flannel shorts, skinny bare chests. I keep my hands by my side; I’d hate to be stigmata’d by a stiletto.

  Finally the barmaid smiles at me, her front teeth filed into points. Freaked out, I look past her as I order a glass of red wine and Toby’s beer. Will she get her teeth rebuilt later, or will she be a scary old lady? I reluctantly leave the two-dollar tip, even though it seems wrong; the drinks were expensive enough in the first place. I push my way back to Toby, picking his head out by its double-crowned sandy swirl. With each push, red wine sloshes down my front. Duran Duran, I recognise this. I cleave the crowd with a new purposefulness. I shove the beer into Toby’s hand and, slurping my wine, begin to dance. But then Wendy grabs my arm, Marcella in tow.

  ‘Fuck!’ The wine drenches my top.

  ‘You gotta come upstairs, Rebecca, it’s totally great up there.’ She’s yanking me, her squashy heft making air pockets for us to move through. Then we’re heading up a narrow wooden staircase, the kind that people trip on and break their necks, dips in the steps where too many feet have trodden, and I am running my fingers across the cool, embossed walls.

  ‘They’re made out of tin, so the building won’t burn so fast,’ says Marcella, who then frowns. ‘Listen to me, so much freakin’ useless knowledge. I just can’t shut the fuck up, and what am I doing with it all?’ She seems on the verge of crying.

  ‘No, really, it’s interesting,’ I say.

  Marcella rolls her eyes like she doesn’t believe me.

  Upstairs, it’s no longer new wave, and it’s not so crowded. It looks like a spiritualist salon. There are armchairs and long red silk curtains, gathering in folds on the floor. Candelabras are screwed to the black lacquered walls, and the wax that drips from them has formed stalactites which, remarkably, haven’t been snapped off. Although there are a few oddballs in jeans and sneakers, most of the men wear morning coats and carry canes. Steam punks — they’ve probably copper-plated their espresso machines. A woman is dressed in a black crinolined skirt below a corseted waist, her breasts like panna cotta. Her shoulders are bare and she wears a top hat.

  On stage is a string quartet in monochrome Tyrolean attire: the cellist and first and second violinists wearing black dirndls with puff-sleeved shirts, and the viola player in black lederhosen. They are playing Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ in a lilting, melancholy way. I feel my nose prickle, tears brinking, my chest flooded with a melting sadness. Swaying slightly, I beam. When they finish, I clap and whoop. Why am I subbing for a wedding quartet? Couldn’t I be in something like this instead? The steam punks call out requests and the quartet members yell back, No, not that one, I hate that one. I haven’t brought the music. Oh yeah, we have that on the list. My fantasies of infiltrating dissipate — they are tight.r />
  I feel arms threading through my elbows, a warm body pressing into me, hands on my belly.

  ‘There you are,’ I say, leaning back on Toby’s shoulder, swaying together. His erection grows into the small of my back. I wonder how many couples have slipped behind the curtains.

  ‘You should come downstairs again. The band is going off,’ says Toby.

  ‘But I like it here,’ I say.

  CHAPTER 5

  Wellington, 1990

  Lydia, my cello teacher, was the only one I told about my cello. My mother drove me to York Bay every Wednesday after school. She didn’t much care for driving. She braced herself against the wheel, swearing softly at the idiots who didn’t indicate, the very long time it took to get from Wilton to Eastbourne. The radio sensed her high level of static energy and untuned itself. She spent a lot of time trying to get it back on the right channel, not letting me fix it, steering one-handed, and then cursing when another caramel-voiced announcer skidded into white noise. When we got there, she would drop me off at the gate, and drive to Days Bay, buying herself an ice cream for a stroll if it was fine, sitting in the car and reading magazines if it was miserable.

  Today she came inside with me; she wanted to have a chat with Lydia.

  ‘Get yourself tuned up and start on a few scales,’ said Lydia, showing my mother down the corridor to the kitchen, where I had been only once before.

  I played an A on her piano, and began the feathery harmonic tuning process. I was proud of my ear, able to get the notes precisely. I played open-stringed fifths to confirm my adjustments. I put my book of scales on the music stand, then paused before starting, staring out the wobbly-glassed sash windows, at the trees beaded with wax-eyes. Behind Lydia’s place it was all bush, extending up to the high ridge, and this room smelt of moss and ferns. Some of the houses around her looked like tree houses, and the people who lived here were interesting: potters, junk collectors, painters, naturalists. I liked coming to Lydia’s place because it was bohemian compared with my home’s ship-shapeness. Lydia grew her own vegetables and fired bowls in her neighbour’s kiln. She’d had a husband once, but he’d died young, an air bubble to the brain while he was skindiving. There were photos of him in the hall, on a yacht in the Caribbean. Lydia was there too, sitting tanned at the prow in a Marimekko bikini. There was still something of the hippy about her, her long silver hair leaving trails on all the chairs.

  Lydia came in as I was halfway through my ascent of G-major. I stopped.

  ‘Carry on, it’s sounding good. Make sure you relax when you go into thumb position — let it be part of the shape of your hand. Now don’t back off as you get up to the top. Keep it loud.’ She watched me as I began my descent, making a face when my intonation was off.

  ‘So what was my mother talking to you about?’

  ‘She was just explaining to me about your diabetes,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Oh.’ My face went red. I felt angry at her; why did she have to tell everyone? I had my glucose tablets on me; I could handle it myself.

  ‘Have you been practising your study?’

  So she wasn’t going talk to me about it, to reassess me with a Monday night movie gloss. She wasn’t going to be cloying, like my hitherto short-tempered social studies teacher, who had taken it upon herself to feel sorry for me.

  ‘Yes, but I was in hospital for a week. I didn’t practise then.’

  ‘Number seventeen, wasn’t it?’

  I was a little disappointed at the lack of sympathy. ‘That’s right,’ I said, opening my book with its decorative Victorian cover to the Andante sostenuto.

  I enjoyed the fullness of the notes, the crescendos and diminuendos. I remembered all the sharps, finishing on an E, sustaining it for as long as my bow would allow.

  ‘Good, some lovely phrasing there. But make sure you’re not sliding unnecessarily. You want to make the transitions as clean as possible. Shall we try again?’

  There was the sound of the door shutting, a blur of red and blue up the corridor. ‘Hold on a minute,’ said Lydia. She poked her head out the door. ‘Bruno, is that you?’

  ‘Yeah, Mum, just getting my judo gear.’

  ‘Will you be home for dinner?’

  ‘Not till after six.’

  ‘Are you riding your bike? Make sure you wear your helmet.’

  ‘God, Mum, give me a break.’

  Then another blur, the door slamming behind him and a revving sound. I had never seen Bruno or Dominic, but I had heard a couple of exchanges like this one. I imagined them to be tall and lean, with black hair and golden skin. I wondered how old they were; whether they had girlfriends or not. I wondered whether they went to Hutt Valley High or university.

  ‘Okay, where were we? The Järnefelt?’

  ‘The study.’ I liked having a chance to play something again, after I had broken it in.

  ‘Of course, of course. But tell me, whatever happened to your other cello? This one doesn’t sound nearly as nice.’

  ‘It was damaged,’ I said. ‘It was — fallen on. And now there’s a crack along the belly.’ I looked down at the rented cello’s shiny Japanese varnish, wishing the f-holes would swallow me.

  ‘Oh dear. That’s no good at all.’ Lydia looked worried. ‘Those things are hard to fix, what a shame.’ She bit her lip. ‘I saw your grandmother perform, you know.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes, it must have been the late fifties, I was about nine or ten. She was very commanding on stage, such emotional depth. Saint-Saëns, it was, she made it seem effortless. It was then that I decided to learn the cello.’

  ‘Did you meet her?’

  ‘No. Well, perhaps a part of her, through your cello. A terrible loss, she was so talented. And so young when she died.’ She looked sternly at me over the top of her glasses, and I felt implicated in her death. Then Lydia sniffed, pushing the glasses back up her nose. ‘Oh well, nothing to be done. You must take it to Giovanni, on Cuba Street. He’ll be able to take a look at it.’

  My mother smelt of ice cream when I climbed into the seat beside her.

  ‘What flavour did you have?’

  ‘Hokey-pokey,’ she said, staring straight ahead, indicating.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’ I slumped down into my seat, hating her.

  My mother hummed, her eyes bright at the intersection, head darting left and right. The line of cars was relentless, and the humming rose in pitch as she waited. ‘Bugger this,’ she said, pulling out to the wail of horns, the screeching of brakes.

  ‘Fuck, Mum, you almost killed us.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be using language like that.’

  ‘Why not? You do.’ I glared at her and she glared back, something flashing in her eyes. ‘And why did you have to torture me like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The hokey-pokey.’

  ‘You can have ice cream if you like.’

  ‘Yeah, but only a small scoop of vanilla.’

  ‘Oh, Rebecca, don’t be such a drama queen. We can’t be expected to give up everything in life just because you have to.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said, throwing my Doc Martens onto the dashboard. I was wearing them despite the hole they had gouged in my foot; I had criss-crossed bandages all over the wounds.

  ‘Rebecca!’ said my mother. ‘Put your feet down. I’m only preparing you for adulthood, where there’ll always be people around you eating chocolate. Besides, I hope you realise this is hard on me too.’

  ‘You don’t have to do injections. You don’t have to test. You don’t have to worry about dying young. How’s it hard on you? You always like to claim all the drama in the family. Well, for once it’s me that’s suffering.’

  My mother pulled out onto the roundabout to another wail of horns. ‘You just — oh, I can’t be bothered. Wait till your father gets home. He’ll have a word with you.’

  ‘Diabetes Youth Group,’ said my father. ‘Thursday night. It’ll be great fun, you’ll get to meet so
me other kids in a similar situation.’

  ‘But Samantha and I are going to the movies tomorrow,’ I said. Megan wasn’t coming; she had a date with Jeff.

  ‘You’re going, young lady, whether you like it or not,’ said my mother.

  ‘Helena,’ appealed my father.

  ‘You don’t have to deal with her on a day-to-day basis,’ said my mother, slipping into a well-grooved argument. ‘You get to go to work. I’ve had it up to here. I know it’s a difficult transition, but she needs to stop feeling sorry for herself if we’re going to live harmoniously together. There are plenty of people with far worse things to deal with.’

  ‘I’m not other people.’

  ‘I think your mother has been in the nursing profession too long,’ said my father, smiling conspiratorially at me. ‘Look, I’ll drive you — it’s on my way to fencing. You never know, you might have fun.’

  In a creaky two-storey villa near the hospital, a group of teenagers sat in a circle of frayed hessian chairs. None of them looked attractive under the fluorescent lights. Quite a few were plump, with pimples and greasy hair. There didn’t seem to be any alternative types, just regular kids in different coloured jeans. I recognised someone from my school: she was in the sixth form and had a bad-girl look about her. I had seen her smoking cigarettes on Pipitea Street, and she wore eyeliner and foundation, and hemmed her school skirt too short despite her thick thighs. Maybe I would try and talk to her later on; it might just be a front. She glowered, like she didn’t want to be here either. She turned to another girl, whispering something, and they laughed.

  There were a few boys in the room; one of them was talking about his night hypo, where he had convulsions. He poked out his tongue — it was swollen and purple from where he had bitten it.

  A psychiatrist was sitting in on the session: the idea was that we hang out and talk, forming relationships, until it was our turn to see the specialist. He called our names as if we were in school, asking each one of us whether we were a diabetic, or a person with diabetes.