Dead People's Music

by Sarah Laing

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Because you know how diabetes damages the small blood vessels? Well, it damages the ones in the penis as well. If men aren’t careful, they become impotent.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, making a mental note not to fancy any of the boys at the group, not that there were candidates. I was going to find another Morrissey fan to love, never mind if they were gay. But the comment worried me — surely I had small vessels in my sex organs too? Was I in danger of a kind of female circumcision? I had to have sex before it was too late.

  But the psychiatrist never talked about sex at the sessions; in fact he had stopped attending altogether. He must have thought we were well adjusted or beyond redemption. It was the diabetes specialist who announced that one of us had died, of a night hypo.

  I should have guessed something serious had happened; the normally gossiping girls were quiet. One of them was gone, not Pamela from my school, but Kylie, from Wellington High. All last week, her blood sugar levels had been dropping in the middle of the night. Her brain protested, triggering seizures, and her parents had been woken by her limbs flailing against the wall. Kylie had made a time to see her GP about it, but the night before her appointment she’d swallowed her tongue and suffocated.

  ‘You’re to be very careful,’ said the specialist, addressing us all, so tall he perpetually anticipated door frames, long strands of hair sliding off his waxed freckled skull. ‘You’re to stay up for half an hour after you’ve first treated yourself, to make sure that you’ve made full recovery. This is very important. We cannot stress how important this is.’

  I reverberated with shock. Someone had died. Diabetes was not a disease that you died of young. Leukemia, cystic fibrosis, yes. Asthma, maybe. Epilepsy, possibly. But diabetes took its time — my mother was always telling me how lucky I was to have this and not something else. Lucky that it was a condition no one could see, not like myopia. Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.

  The gossipy girls knew about this already. They’d had diabetes since they were children; they’d been attending camps and sugar-free socials together for years. They’d talk to Kylie, and even though she wasn’t part of their inner sanctum, she had an ease about her, a diplomatic immunity. Kylie had seemed relaxed and kind, untainted by these girls. If only I had got to know her too.

  The gossipy girls talked about the funeral. It had been held in a chapel, a large photo of Kylie projected on the wall. It was standing room only and people spilled out into the foyer, even though they held another memorial service at Wellington High. They told us how her boyfriend had broken down at the podium while ‘Candle in the Wind’ had played. A naff song in my opinion, I hated Elton John, but at least she didn’t die a virgin. Jealous of the dead, how low was that.

  The specialist was distracted when it was my turn to show my book of blood sugar results and insulin doses. ‘Have you been eating sweeties?’ he asked, running his finger across a string of high blood sugars.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm, well, maybe it’s hormonal. You’ve had a few night hypos.’

  ‘A couple,’ I said. Some nights my dreams caught in ruts, words and images repeating in a loop. Some nights I would feel like I was stubbing my toes on planks of wood, licking ice-block sticks, my body rigid with skewed logic. Wake up! Wake up! Rasputin did your maths homework! I would struggle free and rise, drinking a glass of juice, stuffing myself with peanut butter toast. It was more than I needed.

  ‘We’ll have to put an end to those.’ The doctor sounded grave, and I felt excited, as if I were a person in need of rescuing.

  I thought of Kylie a lot even though I didn’t really know her. The randomness of it all. She was sporty, a model diabetic, and yet she had died. How had she found a boyfriend? Did I need to take up indoor volleyball? Or could I wait till the National Youth Orchestra performed in Auckland and Christchurch, where I might see my timpani player? There were definitely no options in the local youth orchestra, where the boys were too thin and pimply, too certain of their musical genius.

  Trying to drown out all the voices in my head, I practised. Lydia decided it was time I started on Shostakovich, so I went to the music store at the end of Cuba Street. I rummaged through the bins, covers imprinted with nineteenth-century designs, some of the sheet music yellowed by sun and age. When I found the cello sonata, I paid with the money my mother had given me, pocketing the change.

  I spent it at Midnight Espresso on the way back to the bus stop. I loved the edginess of the café, the staff rude, wearing tank tops regardless of the weather, their arms tattooed and their hair razored and bleached. They were always unfriendly, like they were doing you a favour by serving you, and on the occasions that they smiled, I felt bathed in the holy spirit. Sometimes I glimpsed the cook, lush and lipsticked in the yellow kitchen, preparing tofu burgers and nacho chips. Sometimes the owner stormed through, swearing and mafioso, black combi van still idling on the kerb. The clientele was an assortment of Goths and poets, guitarists and rebel public servants. The flashing pinball machine was played by men in low-riding jeans, wacking the flippers, roaring when their ball was swallowed. Always, there was a man in a yellow raincoat, hair dyed brown, and sometimes tourists stumbled in, yelling at the staff that they just wanted a filtered coffee, with cold milk. Today, I took a caffe latte and a savoury muffin to the window seat. A napkin collared the glass, and I sipped it slowly, watching people walk by.

  ‘Hey, aren’t you Mum’s student?’ came a voice from behind. I turned: a tall boy with wavy brown hair, a roman nose and an Amnesty International T-shirt held a chocolate brownie in one hand and a hot chocolate in the other, embellished with cream and marshmallows. I looked at him; nearly all of the teachers at school were mother-aged, except my English teacher, who was young and plump and nervy, a picture of her toddler framed on her desk.

  ‘You play cello, right?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

  ‘Lydia teaches you. You’re one of her good ones — I can tell because she comes out humming afterwards.’

  ‘What does she do after her bad ones?’

  ‘Sighs a lot. I don’t know why she doesn’t just kick the bad ones out.’

  ‘Maybe the bad ones sometimes turn good.’

  ‘But often they just stay bad. Do you mind if I join you?’

  ‘Um.’ I was in shock. He must have seen me without me seeing him. It gave me a delicious, creepy feeling. My heart raced, already my tongue was succumbing to paralysis. ‘Sure, sit down,’ I managed to say.

  Lydia’s son (was he Dominic or Bruno?) put the chocolate in front of him, and straddled the seat, scuffed sneakers propped on the foot bar. Then he jumped down. ‘Better get my skateboard. Don’t want it to get nicked.’ He strode back to the counter, high-fiving a few people, not tentative and gatecrashing like me. Board underarm, a mess of green and blue graphics poking out either side, he dropped it against the window and got back upon the seat. ‘You didn’t eat any of my brownie, did you? I mean, you could have. I should have said, help yourself. Do you want some?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, even though I’d been staring at it, imagining the chocolate melting on my tongue, the rasp of the biscuity base.

  ‘You’re not one of those girls on a diet, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m full up on muffin.’ I still didn’t like telling people I was diabetic.

  My silence was so effective that until recently, the school had forgotten it. That changed a few weeks ago, when, rummaging for the right textbook, I dropped a syringe on the biology lab floor. I was summoned to the deputy principal’s office along with the five other girls, Samantha included, who sat at the same bench.

  ‘Can anyone explain this?’ the deputy principal asked in her cramped voice. She had accordion lips; her face was dusty with powder. She stared hard at Samantha’s spiky Goth hair. Hands latex-gloved, the deputy principal held the syringe with tweezers, a napkin in her other hand in case it fell.

  The
syringe looked unfamiliar to me in her hands, and I turned to the girls, searching each other’s faces for junkie signs. Samantha had smoked marijuana. She knew a guy, a doctor’s son, who used heroin, but she hadn’t mentioned using it herself. We had agreed it was dangerous. One hit and you’d be hooked for life. Theft, prostitution, STDs and overdoses would follow.

  Then, after a few long moments, I registered the fifty mil markings, the white ribbed plunger with its little nub of black rubber, the needle slightly bent.

  ‘It’s mine,’ I said. The deputy principal looked shocked. ‘It’s for my’ — and here my voice faded and I felt like I’d come to school with no clothes on — ‘diabetes.’

  Then, embarrassment, coughed into an embroidered handkerchief, lips smoothing into a fake smile. ‘Of course, we’d hoped it would be something like that. Rebecca, you stay here. Girls, you are excused. Back to your classes — you will be missing some important lessons.’

  I was taken next door, to the principal, who was with a heavyset man with a moustache. The deputy principal whispered in the principal’s ear. The principal’s cheek twitched.

  ‘Rebecca, this gentleman is from the drug and alcohol counselling service,’ she said. ‘We had thought that we might have a problem that needed immediate attention. But I’m told you are diabetic. Now, why haven’t you informed the school of this?’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘Two years ago, when I was first diagnosed. It’s on my records.’

  ‘But your biology teacher doesn’t know.’

  I shrugged. She should; I thought it was written next to my name on the roll.

  The principal frowned. Excusing herself, she took me into the corridor. She quizzed me about my injecting habits. I told her I injected in the bathroom, in the classrooms, that no one ever noticed because they were too busy doing other things. She showed me her own personal bathroom, the vase of camellias upon the cistern. ‘You can come and do your injections here,’ she said, and I nodded, but knew I never would. That would be admitting my own separateness. I wanted to be alternative, I didn’t want to be weird.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ said Lydia’s son, spooning the last of the brownie into his mouth, finishing off his hot chocolate.

  ‘I do,’ I said, rubbing my nose where he had chocolate on his. But he didn’t take the hint.

  ‘So are you still at school?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sixth form. What about you?’

  ‘Varsity. BA. I’m studying anthropology, which is amazing. My favourite is the endangered cultures paper. You wouldn’t believe the shit the colonists did to the indigenous people — makes you ashamed to be a whitey. I’m really involved in student politics up there. Bloody Lockwood Smith and his student loans. Are you going to Vic?’

  ‘I’m planning on studying in London.’ The idea was new, something Lydia had mentioned in passing, and seemed incredibly exciting. I’d be in the thick of things, going to bands, stalking stars, completely reinventing myself.

  ‘Is Mum priming you for an international audition? Way to go.’

  But I couldn’t talk about it. That might jinx it.

  ‘Um, you’ve got some chocolate on your nose.’

  ‘Have I? Oh, shit.’ He flushed pink, and spat on a serviette, rubbing his nose violently so that when he put it down, the tip was pink and flecked with white paper. ‘All gone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hey, nice talking to you, I gotta catch my four o’clock lecture. See you around.’

  ‘Yeah, see ya.’

  I watched him blur around the corner, kicking myself for not asking his name. I licked my fingertip and stretched it out to his brownie plate, gathering the crumbs. A hand stretched out from behind me; one of the tank girl waitresses was clearing my bench. Was I being evicted? My bus was coming anyway.

  I thought about Lydia’s son the rest of that year and into the next. I found out that he was Bruno. I had no plans if music fell through; I became distracted in English, art history and economics, wrote unrequited love poems in biology. I could become a music teacher if I failed to get into music school, but there was something tragic about them — as if they had been on the cusp of a brilliant career, and something had come in their way. A broken heart, a lack of talent. That wouldn’t happen to me. I already saw myself on the stages Jacqueline du Pré had inhabited: Wigmore, Carnegie Hall, the Albert Hall. I forced myself to study theory, deconstructing chords in my records to identify each note.

  What I thought about as I practised obsessively was Bruno, perched on that stool next to me, telling me that he knew me even though I didn’t know him. I turned over every word, every expression that we exchanged. I agonised over whether our conversation had increased or dulled his opinion of me. Should I have taken a spoonful of the brownie? Bruno had probably dismissed me as one of those vain diet girls, and I didn’t want him to think of me that way. Magazines said that women who were comfortable with their bodies were the most attractive.

  I was only comfortable with my body when I was playing the cello. My father had taken a picture of me playing, and I had nothing of my grandmother’s grace. I looked sweaty and intense, my hair tucked severely behind my ears, my thighs splayed, skirt hitched up. But the thing was, I wasn’t thinking of my stomach, which had swollen into twin pin cushions, the flesh whitened by successive injections. I wasn’t thinking of my legs, whose hairs had darkened and thickened, just as my mother warned me they would if I started shaving them. I was thinking of the bow, of my fingers, of how I was melding into the instrument, becoming a sinew of the music.

  It was months after he introduced himself at Midnight Espresso that I saw Bruno at Lydia’s place. He knocked first. Lydia and I had been discussing a practice schedule for my auditions. She had been prepping me for failure, in case I was unsuccessful in my London bid. She thought I would definitely get into Victoria and Auckland; she had taught at Victoria and I was easily good enough. But London was tough; everyone wanted to study there. And I would have to get at least a partial scholarship: my practical-minded parents would be unwilling to front up cash for a pitifully paid career.

  When he opened the door, the blood rushed to my head and my tongue instantly dried. I had been imagining our next encounter every day, and now that it was happening I felt sure I would screw it up.

  ‘Oh, hi there, good to see you,’ he said, looking at me. ‘Hey, Mum, mind if I stay for dinner? My flat’s run out of food.’

  ‘Long time no see, stranger. Of course. Although I was planning on lamb cutlets tonight. I suppose I could have them tomorrow.’

  ‘Why don’t you make one of your veggie pies instead? I’ll wash the leeks if you like.’

  ‘Good idea. And some carrots and mushrooms too, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Sure thing, Mum.’ He closed the door behind him, my heart swelling. Meat, as Morrisey said, is Murder.

  ‘Do you know each other?’ Lydia asked.

  ‘Not really,’ I said, disappointed that this was a surprise to Lydia, that he hadn’t been quizzing her about me, that he still didn’t know my name. Then again, my mother knew nothing of my romantic interests. Apart from suggesting that I take her boss’s son to the ball, she seemed oblivious. Nadia took up too much head-space, a door-slamming, parent-hating fourteen-year-old, who had been spotted around town holding hands with a rugby player from St Pat’s.

  But the ball, the ball. It was my last year of high school, and you couldn’t go unless you had a date. No, I couldn’t take the ugly doctor’s son. I wanted it to be Bruno.

  It was silly, I knew. They played bad commercial music and charged too much, but still I wanted to emerge, Cinderella-like, in a moonlight-silver dress. Is that you, Rebecca? I wanted people to ask, surprised by the beauty they hadn’t noticed until now.

  Samantha wasn’t going because she was stauncher than me; she didn’t fall for that bullshit. It was a cliché, an industry: Francine Pascal had written over three hundred Sweet Valley High books that ended i
n a prom and she’d never even been to one. Katherine Mansfield had pointed out that beauty was transitory, the ball a comma between idealistic youth and embittered, ruined middle age. Or else Samantha’s record store boyfriend wouldn’t go with her; besides, they were too busy sneaking her into bands. Megan was going. She had a new bank teller boyfriend. Jeff had disappeared to Auckland to study fine art. The bank teller was a better match, and although Megan offered to set me up with one of his workmates, I refused.

  I mentioned my date-free status to Lydia.

  I had thought she would get it, immediately offering to ask Bruno for me, but she just looked concerned, then told me that it was probably better that I didn’t have distractions at this critical time. So I asked her directly.

  ‘Bruno? Oh, well, I don’t see so much of him now that he’s flatting. But I’ll ask him next time he comes over. He’s usually here once a week, to take a few loaves of bread from my freezer and get his washing done.’ Lydia grimaced, and I was suddenly aware of her, alone in this house, the once rowdy corridor and kitchen quiet. I wondered whether she missed her dead husband even more; whether she had to bottle her tomatoes and gooseberries since there weren’t sons around to eat them off the vine. I wondered what she did with her evenings, whether she met friends in town for theatre and movies, or whether she watched television until she fell asleep in her chair. It was strange to spend so much time with someone and still not know a lot about them.

  I was surprised to hear her voice on the phone a few nights later. It sounded lighter, slightly amused, less commanding than it did in her music room, where the upper register made the A on the piano ring. Yes, Bruno would take me to the ball. She had given him my number; he would call to arrange things.

  He had my number, he would call. He wouldn’t want to wait for the ball, he’d want to go out beforehand. Maybe for another coffee at Midnight, or better still we could go to Straitjacket Fits together. I looked at the phone feverishly, willing it to ring. I ran home from school, throwing the door open, searching for the scrap of paper that would have his details on it. Bruno called. Wants you to call back. But the note never appeared.