Dead People's Music

by Sarah Laing

  The barman didn’t ask for ID either; maybe Megan’s lipstick had helped. Holding the plastic cup in both hands, I walked up the stairs to the mezzanine floor. Daylight saving had kicked in and it was still light on the harbour, a few boats drifting through the gloaming. I found a chair to sit in and waited, puckering my lips at my beer, searching for Bruno. I felt very alone, wishing that I had convinced Samantha, Megan, anyone, to come with me.

  But there was Ursula with her second violinist; for once I was happy to see her. ‘Hey, Ursula!’ I called from the balcony. She looked up, frowning. She bounced up the steps, pulling her boyfriend behind her.

  ‘Hi, Rebecca, how are things?’

  ‘Good, I didn’t expect to see you here.’

  ‘I don’t normally like popular music, but Robert is a big fan,’ she said, hugging her boyfriend around the waist. He nuzzled his face into her hair, and I felt slightly repulsed.

  ‘How did your audition go?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, awful, I completely messed up the sight-reading. I probably won’t get in.’

  ‘But you played your prepared pieces beautifully I bet. If they were even half as good as what you played me, you would have wowed them,’ said Robert. He seemed so adoring and supportive, I was jealous.

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get in. Drop out and go WWOOFing or something.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You know, working on an organic farm picking asparagus or something.’

  ‘That sounds cool.’ I was impressed; I’d thought she might do something far more boring — filing at her dad’s office or something.

  ‘Yeah, Robert’s done it a couple of summers and he says it’s great fun. What about you? How was your audition?’

  ‘It was fine,’ I said, not caring any more.

  ‘Are you applying for Auckland and Canterbury too? I am. I’ve got to go north next week.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I hadn’t told Ursula about my London auditions; it was embarrassing enough that I’d leap-frogged her to become principal cellist.

  ‘In some ways I would really like to get out of here. It’s so small, I feel claustrophobic. Everybody knows about you.’

  ‘For sure,’ I said, thinking about Ursula’s father, who, it was rumoured, had taken up with a nineteen-year-old at his firm — only two years older than us. I scanned the room again. ‘Oh look, there’s Bruno.’ He was moving through the crowd, not looking up.

  ‘Is that the guy you went to the ball with?’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘He’s cute.’

  ‘Aren’t they amazing?’ said Bruno, his lips grazing my ear. It felt alive, like a sea anemone, invisible tendrils waving, fixed to the rock of my groin. Graeme Downes was howling into the microphone as though he’d been struck by lightning. The music permeated me, replacing the blood in my veins, and I jumped up and down, forgetting myself, Bruno jumping beside me. If we couldn’t fuck, at least we could dance. A mosh pit gathered in front of me, filled with big boys in heavy boots. Someone surfed across the crowd and their T-shirt fell in my face, sopping with sweat. Someone grabbed my arse, but when I spun round, I couldn’t tell who it was out of the line of boys, all staring straight ahead. Maybe it was the man pushing ahead of me. I pushed ahead too, further into the mosh pit, people moving as one polymorphic beast. I felt myself absorbing testosterone, able to jump higher, faster than ever. I felt someone kick my knee, and a wetness on it, but I didn’t register pain, I just kept on jumping.

  My shoelaces were soaked by the time the Verlaines put down their guitars. I squeezed them and my fingers were fibre-stamped with blood. My stocking had split and the wound grinned out at me. ‘Look at my knee,’ I said to Bruno.

  ‘Nasty,’ he said. ‘Let’s go get some fresh air.’

  I hobbled along beside him, hoping this wasn’t going to be another epic journey. Since the adrenalin had gone, my leg was killing me. We walked up Salamanca Road, turning down Bolton Street towards the cemetery. Past the statue of Richard Seddon, the naked figure of Harry Holland. We walked alongside all the old Jewish headstones, names inlaid in Hebrew, and past the Protestant graves, picket-fenced and angel-patrolled. Bruno stopped when we came to the park bench surrounded by old-fashioned roses. Sitting down, he grabbed my hand and pulled me next to him.

  He turned to me, his face coming closer. His lips banged mine, firm and full. I wondered what I was meant to do with them. Our teeth clinked. ‘Ow,’ I said, pulling back. Then his lips were on mine again and we really were kissing now, tongues moving, a moistness exchanged, the strange taste of his mouth in mine. I stroked his cheek and it was rough with stubble. He put his hands in my hair, running his fingers down until they snagged in tangles. His other hand was up the back of my jersey, a kidney-chilling wedge exposed to the crisp air. He was pulling at the hooks of my bra strap, and when he had undone it, he moved his hands around to my chest, pushing them beneath the underwire, measuring them in his palm, stroking my nipple. I put my hands beneath his T-shirt, finding his chest furred. This was it, this was it, but we weren’t going to have sex in a graveyard, were we? That would be bad luck, and besides, men had no respect for girls who went all the way the first time.

  It was a good thing that Bursary was almost upon us, because my concentration was shot. Whenever I went to read about Elizabethan England or think about The Tempest my brain started absorbing information but rapidly veered off to Bruno. I went into the examination rooms, dutifully filling out the papers, but I didn’t cry when I discovered I couldn’t answer half the questions in the calculus exam. I was anaesthetised by Bruno’s taste, his lips, the measure of his ribs. I buoyed myself by thinking that, after exams had finished, I would be able to hang out with him. It would be his holidays and mine, and we would spent it entwined, at beaches and cafés, at small towns and bands. We would go up to the Big Day Out together; The Breeders and Smashing Pumpkins were coming.

  But my father had different ideas. He had figured out a way to punish me for the cello, and it involved paying back the $30,000.

  ‘Give her a break, Frank. Surely we could get some insurance money to pay for this?’ My mother’s initial anger had softened, and she was beginning to take my side.

  ‘Not if it’s been three years since it was broken, and she already had it fixed with her own pocket money. I want Rebecca to get a job, and start making some down-payments.’

  ‘Well, I’ll see if they need some help at the practice.’

  I rolled my eyes — I didn’t want a crummy reception job, working alongside Mum, or worse, another cleaning job, the men’s toilets more scummed with shit than the women’s. I wanted something glamorous. I wanted to be a tank girl barista. I wanted to work in a book or record store. I wanted a job at the needle exchange or the Aids Foundation, to be in a travelling gypsy band that people threw handfuls of silver at. ‘I could busk,’ I said. ‘I earned a potload of money doing that last holidays.’

  ‘You could do that in the weekends, but I think you need to have a regular job. Keep you level-headed. How about you come to my office and help me with filing and administration? You’ve got a nice voice — you could answer my phone. It never stops ringing.’

  I sighed; it didn’t seem like I had much choice in the matter.

  I started the next week, a load of proposals on the table beside me, my job to catalogue them. Dad wanted me to transfer the important information into a database, but he didn’t know how the software worked, and I’d hardly used computers before. Perplexed by the manual, I typed in numbers and pushed enter, frustrated when it beeped and froze, and when I put things in the wrong place altogether. Once they were there, I couldn’t figure out how to undo them. There were random meaningless entries under certain letters. I pitied the poor person who would have to retrieve the information. I spent half my day in a state of cringe about how much I was screwing up. But Dad didn’t seem to notice, acting proud to see me concentrating so hard beside him. Sometimes we went out for coffee
, but things were slightly awkward between us, like we didn’t know how to talk to each other in unfamiliar settings. I was embarrassed to be seen with my father, given the white hairs that burst out of the top of his shirt and his tendency to be brusque with the people serving the coffee, complaining loudly if it arrived lukewarm or the muffin was unheated. Dad took the opportunity to lecture me about my future; although it was too late to study engineering, I still had a chance at technology at Massey. And if I had to study music, it would be wise to do a double major in psychology or commerce so I could enter the public service.

  The main thing about the days was how long they were, how the minutes stretched out forever, and how wonderful a lunch break was, when I could drift around town, looking at clothes, listening to records. Not that I could buy anything; all my earnings were going directly into a bank account. After lunch, I would drag myself back to the office and feel like crawling into the little space beneath my desk to snooze. This pull wouldn’t leave me until about 4 p.m., and then it was only an hour till home time.

  My letter came. I’d been accepted for Victoria University. I danced around the kitchen whooping and hollering.

  ‘Does this mean you don’t want to go to London?’

  ‘Of course I want to go to London. It’s just that Victoria doesn’t look so bad.’

  ‘I’d like it if you stayed here,’ said my mother, looking wistful.

  ‘But I’d have to get a flat.’ Samantha had already got one on The Terrace, not that her parents noticed her absence since they were never around. The flat was creaky, a half-rotted ramp leading to the door, another flat beneath it. She lived with a DJ from Radio Active and an anarcho-feminist. Samantha had hung a batik throw on the wall to cover the mould, and when you looked out the window you could see Upper Cuba Street and the Carillon.

  ‘I think you’d have to talk to your father about that.’

  ‘I’m going round to Bruno’s to tell him the news.’

  ‘Well, make sure you’re home before midnight.’

  ‘But it’s Friday.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ My mother had given me the sex talk in pieces, and I had quilted it. She’d slept with a guy before my dad and then he hadn’t talked to her again. The first time was never fun, only painful. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Sex was a spiritual act, a marriage of sorts. It shouldn’t happen unless you were going to embark on a long-term relationship. It wasn’t just physical, an insertion of one organ into another, it was somehow transcendent. Two became one. Orgasms were little deaths. It wasn’t as much fun for the woman as it was for the man. Blowjobs were disgusting and only whores swallowed spunk. You had to pee after you had sex because it would flush away the bacteria. You had to make sure that the person you did it with wasn’t diseased or unhygienic. If they were oozing, they probably had herpes. You could get a birth control prescription but it might affect your libido and give you cancer. Your father is keen, and men think of sex every seven minutes.

  I wasn’t going to have sex. Or was I? Bruno’s flat was in Newtown, and I could take the bus from my place to his. When I got there he was in the back garden with his flatmate, drinking beer and smoking. I got a little shock at the sight of a cigarette in his mouth. Maybe this was something he did when he was with his mates.

  The back garden was a little warm oasis, Newtown always a few degrees hotter than where I lived in Wilton. Bruno passed the cigarette back to his flatmate, who was long-haired and tattooed like the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The cigarette crackled loudly as he inhaled, and he held the smoke in his mouth. He had a leather bag around his neck.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s my amulet. It protects me. It’s got some herbs and my birthstone in it. Also my girlfriend’s toenails ’cause I want good shit to happen for her.’

  ‘Oh.’ It wasn’t a cigarette, it didn’t smell right. They must be smoking marijuana.

  ‘Have you read The Celestine Prophecy? It’s my book of the year. All about divine coincidences and wisdom from ancient texts. You gotta look for the clues in your dreams, man, then you know where you’re going.’

  If that was the case, I wasn’t going anywhere. Night after night I opened letters from the UK, saying that I hadn’t got into the college. The flatmate offered the joint to me.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. I didn’t want to touch it, I didn’t want to lose control. ‘Bruno, can I talk to you in private?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ he said. His eyes were a little red and he was slower than usual.

  ‘Are you guys gonna get laid? I wish my girlfriend was around. I could do with a bit of relief.’

  ‘No!’ I said, shocked at someone voicing my secret plans.

  Bruno put his hand on my bum as we walked through the kitchen, plants growing on the windowsill, burnt knives next to the stove, a ginger beer still emitting yeasty smells, lemons bobbing in froth, looking half-alive. When we got to the hall, he pushed me up against a giant Betty Blue poster, and I heard the pins rip the corners of the paper as he kissed me hard.

  He shut the door behind me, lighting a stick of incense. His room was decorated in old protest placards and Amnesty International flyers. An army blanket hung in place of the curtain, and when he switched on the light, the room glowed red from the coloured bulb.

  ‘I’ve done some shopping,’ he whispered to me, pointing at the plastic-wrapped box on his bedside table.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘But you have to hear my news, I got into music school.’

  ‘In London?’ Bruno looked worried.

  ‘No, Victoria.’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear.’ He began unbuttoning my top.

  ‘Stop,’ I said. I was feeling shaky; the walk up the hill to his house had made my blood sugars low. Normally I tested myself in the bathroom so he couldn’t see, but if we were going to sleep together, he would discover the needle holes, the bruises, the swelling. I got out my test kit and jabbed my thumb with a syringe, as I had misplaced my finger pricker.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘A blood test.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m diabetic.’

  ‘You’re what? How long for?’

  ‘Since I was fourteen.’

  ‘We’ve been going out for a month and you’re only telling me now?’

  I wiped the blood off the stick and put it down to wait for a minute. But it was pale, not saturating. I opened my bag, started rummaging around for my glucose tablets.

  ‘Oh my God, this is totally freaking me out. You’re not going to faint on me, are you? Some guy in my ecology lecture passed out because he was diabetic.’

  ‘No, that doesn’t happen to me.’ I put a chalky tablet into my mouth, wincing at its extreme sweetness, its artificial orange flavour. I waited for the buzzing world to regain its stillness.

  ‘I just think diabetes is a pretty major thing to hide from someone. I feel like I don’t know you any more.’

  ‘It’s not something I like to talk about. I hate it when people who normally ignore me suddenly act all sympathetic when they find out. Besides, we might not have got that far if you’d known.’

  ‘So do you have to give yourself injections and shit?’

  ‘Yeah. Mostly I use a pen.’

  ‘I hate needles. They give me the shits.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice.’

  Bruno was pacing the room, running his hands through his hair in an agitated fashion.

  ‘Why are you being so weird about it?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I’ve never had to deal with something like this before.’

  I looked at Bruno in disbelief. Obviously I didn’t know him either.

  He sat down beside me and touched my jaw. ‘You’re okay now?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘So, if I do this.’ He unclasped my bra. ‘You won’t pass out or anything?’

  I picked up the glucose packet and ate another tablet. ‘That�
��ll make sure of it.’

  I lay on the bed, naked, and Bruno pushed at me. I didn’t think he could get in. Maybe my hymen was made of cartilage. Maybe I wasn’t lubricated because I was more scared than aroused, or because I was diabetic. Bruno pulled back again and got the tube of KY jelly. He slathered his condom with it and then rubbed some into my vagina. It felt cold.

  Then he pushed and he was in. The shock of it was exhilarating. I was beyond the threshold, no longer a virgin. I wouldn’t die not knowing what sex was like. I’d been punctured and now someone else was inside me, inserted, tongue and groove, assembled like kitset furniture. He was moving back and forth inside me, and my vagina was burning. I moved back and forth too, tilting my pelvis, trying to find the place that would make me come, but not finding it.

  Bruno had found that place. He made noises that came from deep inside him, animal noises, yelping and grunting. I felt his penis become bigger and hotter and then it throbbed and juddered. He collapsed on top of me, suddenly heavier than before. I felt a little put out that I hadn’t come; I wasn’t even near.

  ‘Wow,’ said Bruno. ‘Wow, wow.’

  ‘Remember to hold onto the condom before you come out of me,’ I said. That was another piece of information in my sex compendium.

  He rolled off me and then peeled back the condom, knotting it and tossing it on the carpet, where it looked like a jelly fish stranded on a beach.

  I lay on top of his patchwork bedspread, which must have been hand-stitched by Lydia, my skin bathed red. I looked at Bruno, my desire making me nauseous. His penis, limply curled on his pubic hair, looked like pâté. I reached for it and it twitched, swelling slightly. I stroked it a little more and it began to straighten, the head peeking out of the foreskin. He turned towards me and began kissing me, his breath stale. I kissed him back, pushing myself against his groin. And so we began again.

  We couldn’t see any blood on the sheets, but Bruno believed me when I said I was a virgin. He walked me to the bus stop, to take the last bus back to Wilton. I’d make it home before midnight and my mother would never guess.