Dead People's Music

by Sarah Laing

  ‘I can’t practise on Thursday afternoons, because that’s when I have my advanced mathematics group,’ Frances said.

  ‘Musical people are so often good at maths,’ said my father pointedly. He still hadn’t forgiven me for not putting Engineer on my career form.

  There was something alien about Frances. It was the quality of her skin: yellow and pink at the same time. I could see veins tangling, ridges of bone rising from her wrists. When my father put his knife and fork together at the end of the meal, she stood up and took her plate to the kitchen, scraping the macaroni into the compost bucket, which she instinctively found.

  ‘Do you mind if I go to my room?’ she asked.

  ‘But we have dessert. I made apple crumble,’ said my mother.

  Frances patted her stomach. Her mouth was very small and pale-lipped, as though she might have trouble getting a dessert spoon through it. Maybe it had evolved to form a tight seal around the oboe reed. ‘I’m feeling really tired after my bus ride.’

  My mother and father looked at each other. The trip only took two and a half hours.

  ‘Would you like a towel, love?’ my mother asked, rising from her chair. She opened the hall cupboard, taking out one of the fluffy white ones that my sister and I weren’t allowed to use. On top, she placed a flannel. Frances took the towel and pressed it to her chest, crossing her arms around it. She backed out of the room, nodding to each of us.

  ‘Maybe she has an iron deficiency,’ said my mother after we heard her door close.

  ‘Nah, she’s an anorexic,’ said Nadia.

  ‘Nadia!’ said my father.

  ‘She’s probably right, you know,’ said my mother. ‘These girls, they get frightened of puberty and they starve their periods away.’

  ‘And their tits.’ Nadia had grown hers in the last year, quite abundantly, and she encased them in sports bras so they were like river stones, unbudging as she raced after the soccer ball. My father looked at her fiercely. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Are you going to send me to my room? Tits, tits, tits. Tits, tits, titties.’

  ‘She’ll hear you,’ said my mother.

  ‘And that’s a bad thing? It seems like she needs to come to terms with them,’ said Nadia.

  ‘How do we know? Maybe she’s got leukemia,’ said my mother.

  ‘You always think of the worst-case scenario,’ said my father.

  ‘And you don’t? Not letting me get a new dishwasher because of your debt phobia? You’d prefer that I slaved over the sink like your mother, all that wasted time, all that frustration?’

  ‘You didn’t know Mama.’

  ‘But I can imagine.’ My mother sculled the rest of her wine and plonked it on the table, hard enough to snap the stem. She had broken several wine glasses that way already.

  ‘Helena!’

  My mother went to the oven, also contentious. Brown enamel and gas-fired, it caused her cakes to burn on the bottom yet remain uncooked in the middle. ‘What, you’re going to tell me I can’t buy wine any more too? Am I drinking your retirement fund?’

  ‘I just think you should consider why you are drinking.’

  ‘Frankie, you are such a puritan. I know you have your reasons, but I’m not the one with the bad blood. Haven’t you heard of loosening up at the end of the day? I had far too many warts to zap this afternoon. Anybody would think those boys were cultivating them on purpose. And Mrs Cavendish and her disgusting leg ulcers. Ugh, I need something to help me forget about it all.’

  ‘Please, can we save this for next week?’ I asked. These discussions preceded cupboard door slammings and inventories of each other’s shortcomings, my mother’s voice rising, my father becoming quieter and more threatening.

  My mother widened her eyes at my father, chomping down on all the words she might say. ‘Dessert,’ she said, dropping the ceramic dish onto the hotspot. She spooned it into the bowls, two ladles each except for me. I got half, a crumble taster. ‘Sorry, Rebecca, I put lots of sugar in this. I didn’t think our guest would like it unsweetened.’ She doled out my two spoons of ice cream.

  I hated dessert because I would be given just enough to make me hungry. Everyone else had second helpings, digging in like they never did with my mother’s first courses. She was a pudding genius. I would sneak to the fridge after everyone else had gone to bed, spooning crumble or custard or blackberry pie straight from its dish, the edges cold, the middle holding ghost heat. I would take incremental bites so that it seemed I was hardly eating at all.

  I had heard of bulimics, how they would stuff whole blocks of cheese down their gullets, crunching bags of chips so that the broken crisps would scratch the insides of their cheeks, the salt would sting their vomit-scoured throats. I had tried to throw up but couldn’t bring myself to push hard enough on my soft palette to make myself gag.

  How could Frances sleep with the two sides of her stomach touching, not braced with food? Was there some kind of delicious ecstasy? Did she have visions? Then again, maybe it was just my mother’s macaroni.

  My father dropped us off at the university the next morning on his way to fencing class. He was teaching a group of twelve-year-old boys that my sister had already outstripped. She was with the adult class.

  The director welcomed us, a Canadian with a shock of prematurely white hair, thin and tall, his swarthy wrists extending from the too-short sleeves of his checked shirt. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please find your names on your chairs.’

  I removed my cello from its case and walked along the rows of straight-backed chairs. My name was second to the back. Ursula was deputy lead cellist, and she made a show of waving at me as if I was a ship leaving for England. I flash-smiled at her. I noticed that Frances was the lead oboe player, which probably meant she would get to play a solo.

  A young man with dark blond James Dean hair sat upon the Matthew Armstrong name. He shrugged off a leather jacket to reveal a white T-shirt. He reached under his jean-clad butt to remove the paper before adjusting the spike on his cello, a dark varnished instrument. Again, I felt self-conscious about my rented cello, secreted into my grandmother’s hard case because my parents wouldn’t accept me taking second-best.

  Frances played the concert A, and I sneaked looks at Matthew as I tuned up. He had cheekbones and full lips for a boy. When he bent forward to adjust the fine tuning, a strand escaped his quiff and settled on his nose. He blew it out of the way.

  ‘Your D is flat,’ he said. I blushed. I hadn’t been paying attention, and my intonation was my pride, the empirical fact of my musicality. I twiddled the fine tuner until the harmonics played the same note, and he nodded in approval.

  I couldn’t lose myself in the Shostakovich. Usually the swelling of sound filled me with a football hooligan fever, but I was distracted by Matthew Armstrong’s style. While the cellos sat quiet so the first and second violins could play on their own, I cast my eye around the orchestra. Sure, there were some interesting-looking people. The timpani player wore a purple paisley shirt over top of a Cure T-shirt, and his hair was a stubbly number one. But he was too gaunt, too hollow eyed to compete. There was a translucent blonde trombonist, her hair undulating past her waist, contrasting with her black clothing. A male flute player looked clean-cut like Michael J. Fox. But mostly people were a bit geeky, their plumpness or skinniness, their bad skin, their lank hair, their unfashionable clothing belying the composure they might yet assume.

  I followed Matthew out the door at morning tea time. Ursula had loitered around me, but I pretended I didn’t see her, and she went ahead and introduced herself to another cellist. I overheard the words ‘Christchurch’ and ‘Grade eight … ATCL.’

  He sat on a small wall a little up the hill, smoking a cigarette, talking to the timpani player, who pulled up his black jeans to reveal his sixteen-hole boots. They braced his skinny calf like a Victorian corset. Matthew wore oxblood bump-toed shoes. The two boys looked up, straight at me, and I walked forward purposefully, eyes fixed two lampposts ahead, as
though I had somewhere important to go. Then, when I got to the third lamppost, I paused a little and turned around again, walking back to the hall where everyone was settling down to play the Brahms.

  I watched Matthew load his cello into the back of his lemon Triumph at the end of the afternoon session.

  ‘You have fun, girls?’ asked my father.

  ‘It was great. There’s nothing like it,’ said Frances, her eyes filled with a zealous gleam.

  ‘What about you, Rebecca? Are your fingers sore?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, distractedly, as Matthew pulled out, as he sped away, far too fast for the cramped street.

  The next day and the next I watched him surreptitiously. Sometimes he would comment on the music, saying ‘That was a hard one’ or ‘God, I hate triplets’. I would laugh in agreement and think I should say something in return, but the words would bunch up in my throat and by the time I had formulated an answer, the conductor had lifted his baton. At break time, Matthew put his cello away quickly and hurried outside to join the timpani player. The blonde trombonist had joined them, and every break they moved a little closer until one afternoon they were play-punching, hands all over each other. I was filled with dread and grief, but then reassured myself that nothing was set in stone; he still had a chance to fall in love with me if only I could show him my beautiful mind. The trombonist took a drag from Matthew’s cigarette. I didn’t think it was such a good idea for wind players to be smoking.

  I took long walks around the twisty streets, past the villas with the vines that grew up through the verandahs, shrouded in dampness. I searched for Matthew’s car, sometimes down the hill, sometimes up, once in a residents’ parking zone with a ticket fluttering under the wipers. I made clouds on the window with my breath, squeezing my index finger to stop it from drawing a love heart in the condensation. A small gold Buddha had been Blutacked to the dashboard, and a few tapes were scattered across the passenger seat. I could see a Dead Kennedys one, a Jesus and Mary Chain tape. There was The The, The Stone Roses. No Smiths, no Morrissey, even though he would be coming in September and his face was plastered around town.

  Ursula made other friends at the camp; I was relieved. I didn’t need to acknowledge our commonality. I left it to a brittle girl with a face like a tombstone. They hunched over anaemic sandwiches together: I was glad her attentions were distracted, yet I was conscious of my aloneness. I tried to talk to her at morning tea and she turned her shoulder to me.

  But it didn’t matter, I was working my way up to joining the Matthew clique. The timpani player would move in and take the trombonist, leaving Matthew open.

  Frances had made friends too. She had invited a flautist back to our place for dinner, to help her eat the meals she continued to scrape into the compost bucket. The flautist sat next to Frances on our sofa, looking through the wedding dress section of my mother’s expired Vogue pattern books.

  ‘That would look gorgeous on you,’ said the flautist. ‘Look at the décolletage. The seed pearls are simply stunning. Would you get married in white? I’m thinking coral. Did you know you can get a regular pair of shoes satin covered in the same material as your dress?’

  ‘Really? Wow.’ Frances nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘I can’t wait to get married,’ said the flautist. ‘I’m going to dress my bridesmaids in red with spaghetti straps. And I’ll have tiger lilies, those ones that come in orange. I don’t think I’ll have a string quartet at my wedding even though I know heaps of people who could play for me. I think I’ll have a jazz band instead. More contemporary.’

  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but my sister has one and she might get married after he’s graduated from police college. She’ll want me to be the bridesmaid, I’m sure, but I think she’ll probably dress us in turquoise, which really isn’t my colour. That’s in the autumn colour palate and I’m more of a summer, I think, with my tanned skin and my blonde hair.’ She didn’t look very tanned to me. ‘But this is going to have to be the last time I’m a bridesmaid because they say twice a bridesmaid never a bride, and I was a bridesmaid for my aunt when I was ten. I still have the bouquet. It’s hanging on my wall. It was made of roses and I had it sprayed so they wouldn’t crumble after they dried out.’

  Frances was enthralled: how could she listen to that shit? I was never getting married; I would rather live in sin.

  ‘Do either of you guys know Matthew?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, he came last year too. But you weren’t there last year, were you?’

  ‘No.’ I felt the sting of the implication that I wasn’t as precocious as them.

  ‘He hooked up with that viola player, what’s her name? Katrina? But I haven’t seen her around.’

  ‘Probably at the unmarried mothers’ centre.’

  ‘You’re sitting next to him, aren’t you?’ said the flautist. ‘He’s cute, but not husband material.’

  I resolved to talk to Matthew about The Jesus and Mary Chain. I had borrowed their album from Samantha, and I wanted to know which was his favourite track. Although it was a bit noisy for my taste, I found myself singing ‘Sidewalking’. I took my place next to his chair and practised my casual yet penetrating remark while I waited for him to arrive. Hey, I just got this great album. Have you heard it? He was always late.

  ‘Move up next to Rebecca,’ said the conductor to the girl behind me. The cellist who had once had a mate, someone to turn the pages, was suddenly on her own, the uneven numbered dinner guest, doomed to die.

  ‘Matthew won’t be joining us today. He had an accident,’ he said. ‘Stop that gasping, it wasn’t terminal. He just messed up his arm a bit when his car rolled. It was lucky he had that leather jacket on. Could have lost his arm altogether. But his dad is a doctor and he thinks he’ll be playing again soon, so everyone can relax.’

  Only we couldn’t. I felt as though I too had been in an accident, and the mention of flesh wounds made the orchestra overexcited. We played too fast. We were panicky, we jittered and fidgeted. Or else I did, filled with a frustration that he would no longer be sitting next to me, that my overture would be wasted, that Samantha and Megan were getting laid and at almost sixteen I was destined to be alone, forever after, a virgin to my grave.

  ‘Concentrate, people! The concert is tonight so unless you skip the bum notes and focus, you’ll all be worrying about your busted arms. Did I tell you I have a black belt in karate?’ The conductor chopped at the music stand with his baton.

  ‘I like your T-shirt,’ I said to the timpani player after the concert. It was all over and I was flushed with adrenalin-fuelled confidence. It was a Surfer Rosa Pixies T-shirt with a topless flamenco woman.

  ‘Thanks, great album this. I play tracks off it far too often on my show.’

  ‘You have a show?’

  ‘Yeah, on bFM. A drive show.’

  Not a prospect; he came from Auckland. But that made it easier to talk, knowing that I had nothing to lose.

  ‘I really like student radio. Commercial radio sucks.’

  ‘It’s those ads, eh. Bloody annoying. Where do they get those people? So cheerful. Don’t they know that the world is fucked?’

  ‘Do you think I could get a show? On Radio Active, I mean, not Radio Massey.’

  ‘Probably. They’re a bit narrower down here, they have a particular house style. Maybe they have more playlisting, but you should go visit them, let them know what kind of music you’re into.’

  ‘I like Morrissey, and the Smiths.’

  ‘The Smiths. Well, that says a lot.’ He smiled at me, tilting his head back, allowing his gaze to slide down his cheek. Appraising me. ‘Not such a big fan myself, too moany, seesawing on the same two notes, can’t get the droning out of my head, but I respect the man, I like what he is doing. Yeah, he’s funny. But too up his arse for me.’

  ‘I’m going to Morrissey’s gig. I can’t wait,’ I said. It was my first pop concert ever; until now I had only been to the Well
ington Symphonia and the NZSO. I’d been dreaming about Morrissey, how he picked me from a crowded community hall to dance a tango, how we went for a walk through the word ‘NEVER’ growing in marigolds. When I first heard that he intended to play here, it was as if I had willed it.

  I laughed and suddenly this was easy; I could say anything to this man because I would probably never see him again, and there wasn’t a chance in the twenty minutes before my parents insisted we go home that I could kiss or be kissed.

  But then, with the house expunged of Frances, who had been collected by her fat, squat parents to be driven back to Palmerston North, I removed the cloth case of my grandmother’s cello that hid in the back of my wardrobe. Before I put it back into its hard case, I ran my finger up and down the crack that had been rejoined, blowing into the f-holes.

  You wasted your chance, whispered the cello. You should have picked the other one.

  It was true, Matthew was futile. He was too arrogant, too vain, dismissing me because of invisible criteria, or else unable to imagine himself with anyone who wasn’t blonde. The timpani player was interesting and interested. But I’d been blinded by Matthew’s headlights. I should have known the romantic formula; it’s the one that you don’t notice at first that will be yours. Had my grandmother’s cello accompanied me, it would have set me right. But I couldn’t have inflicted its mosquito buzz on the orchestra; I would have been banished.