by Sarah Laing
The hostel was in Chelsea, somewhere my parents’ friends were very impressed by, telling me that I would never be able to afford to live there if it weren’t for my scholarship. They had lived in dodgy parts of town, in Brixton, in Camden, in places that took an hour on the tube. I was living near the Queen, but Morrissey said the Queen was Dead. Roberta dropped us off at the door, suddenly cheerful, promising to let us know about the International Students Ball, and the hostel matron ran her fingers down the list of names, dispensing keys. Lily was to share with a Spanish girl on account of her last name (‘But I don’t even speak Spanish. My dad walked out when I was four,’ she said); the Australian was sharing with a horn player from America; and I was to have a room to myself. The other two looked envious: What had I done to deserve this? Maybe the matron thought I might share needles.
My room was small and smelt of varnish. There was a particle board desk, a particle board bedhead, a particle board wardrobe and a mirror tile stuck inside the door. I opened up my pack and hung some clothes on the three hangers. The rest I shoved, still ball-shaped, on the shelves. I took out my guide to London, and opened it, extracting the Mapplethorpe postcard that Bruno had given me as I left. This reminds me of us, it said. I pinned it above my bed. I sat down on the thin mattress, my cello taking up most of the floor, and wondered what I should do next. Maybe I would take a nap.
It was dusk when I woke again. I had the strange sluggish feeling of displaced blood sugars, of too many hours of sleep yet not enough. I looked at the hostel timetable: a meal would be served at six. It was four and I was starving; I took out one of my muesli bars. My mother had secreted five boxes in the bottom of my pack; she thought it would be good for the morning and afternoon teas that weren’t supplied by the hostel. I was no longer at home, able to fix myself snacks whenever I wanted to. There was a communal kitchen where we were to make ourselves breakfast — the hostel provided lunch and dinner — but fridges in hostels weren’t to be trusted, my mother said: anyone might steal your food. I filed the rest of the muesli bars in the top of my cupboard, next to the needles for my pens and my three-month supply of blood-testing sticks. I looked at my cello, wondering whether I would have to continue sharing the room with it, or whether there would be places in the practice rooms for me to stash it. If it stayed there, I would trip over it going to the toilet in the middle of the night.
The toilet. That was what that ache in my belly was. I opened my door and turned right, past a door where two girls chatted in French, another room that was darkened apart from the flicker from the television. No bathroom. Perhaps left. I went down the corridor. ‘Hello,’ called a cheery English male voice, operatic even in speech.
‘Hi,’ I said, glimpsing the framed Ferrari on his wall, the fake tigerskin rug.
The bathroom was unisex, with a series of lockable shower and toilet stalls. The pee that I expressed was dark yellow, dehydrated. I wished that I had remembered my toothbrush, because the muesli bar left a strange chemical aftertaste, but it was in my room, in my toilet bag. I rinsed my mouth instead, only afterwards thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t just drink from the tap like I did at home. I went back to my room and pulled my knees up to my chest, staring at my Mapplethorpe postcard, the way the stamen rose from wrap-around white petals like a finger or perhaps a boy’s erection. This was my new home, but it seemed so gloomy, so cell-like, I wondered whether I’d made a terrible mistake.
‘Never practise more than four hours a day. If you need to do more than that, you don’t have what it takes. Now, let me hear that exercise again.’ Nigel stood up and moved around me, his rollie cigarette crackling in my ear. He pushed at my shoulder, shaking it and I wondered whether I was to stop. ‘No, keep going. You’re too stiff, your bow arm is appalling. Whoever taught you the cello?’
Lydia had told me the same thing, but I was left-handed and always used this to excuse my crappy technique. Nigel pulled on my elbow. ‘This should hang, earthwards, feel the gravity. We’re not doing the chicken dance, for God’s sake. No, I want to hear it all the way through.’ He ran his hands through his hair, which perhaps he fancied to be like Hugh Grant’s, but was instead a bit greasy. He had an interesting mouth, wide, down-turned and expressive, acknowledging the irony in every situation. There were gullies carved into the side of his face, and his skin had lost its elasticity, even though it was remarkably white. ‘Thumb, thumb, look, it’s caving, I want it bent, I want it queer. Where are your bones? Are you made of marzipan?’
I might have cried by now, but he was funny, his fierceness offset by the exploits he recounted at the beginning of the lesson. I had thought he was gay, but then Lily told me that he was having an affair with one of the other students, a witchy contralto with long purple hair and fingernails. We instrumentalists had to keep our nails short, although we painted the stubs. Nigel never said her name, just told me of the E that she had given him in the weekend. ‘I know I’m too old for that kind of shenanigans, but it made me feel so gloriously loved-up, like my whole body had defrosted and all my cursed cramps melted away.’ The cramps he was referring to were the ones that caused him to abandon his performance career. He’d won the ‘most promising student’ prize at this college. He’d played at Wigmore and the Albert Hall. We saw him as a cautionary tale, but he was relentless during lessons, never giving me a chance to do my stretches. ‘I couldn’t stop stroking the sofa, it was so deliciously velvety. But God, what a comedown. Couldn’t get the black dog off my chest.’
E, E, E — I heard that letter a lot, and only sometimes in regards to music. It was as if the whole of London was trying it, and going to raves in the middle of fields that you only found out about if you appeared under the right bridge at the right time. I hadn’t come across it yet, but I was still concentrating on my music. We hadn’t started on any pieces, apart from the music that
I was to play in the orchestra. I was to improve my bowing, and until I had acquired the perfect set of angles, I wasn’t going to move on to real music by bona fide composers. Some of the exercises were pretty enough, but I practised them so much that they began to play in my dreams. My strange dreams, of a distorted Wellington, the Allenby Terrace steps coming out of Greek houses, of valleys traversed by gondolas and flying foxes. Sometimes Bruno was there, emerging from trains that didn’t cross Wellington, riding up and down the endless tube station escalators, but mostly my dream Wellington was populated by strangers, or my new friends. Nigel sat in Lydia’s kowhai tree yelling at me to float the bow, but I found it growing heavier until my cello had splintered beneath me, strings popping out, Heinrich Weiss’s label a hunk of crayfish flesh.
I wasn’t yet friends with Lily, but I was working on it. When we stood in the dining hall, I pushed my way past people to sit at the same table. I lent her my new Björk album, and she lent me PJ Harvey. I sat next to her in composition and aural classes, and gave her my theory homework to copy. I had competition, though; her beautiful eyes, her thick lashes, her slender neck attracted a lot of attention. Everybody wanted to rub her shaved head, which felt like moleskin. If she wore a low-cut blouse, they wanted to pull it down to see the tattoo on her breast. I catalogued all the things she told me, about her Cuban fireman father, her Midwestern librarian mother. She’d started the violin, Suzuki method, at the age of four, but had swapped to the viola at twelve. She’d also been accepted into the conservatory in Chicago, but she’d picked London, because it was outside her comfort zone.
I was beginning to feel a bit embarrassed by the one-sided, fan-club/stalker nature of the relationship, when Lily asked me out. ‘I’d kill for a drink — I gotta get out of this place. D’ya wanna come?’
‘Sure.’ I was completing my third hour of practice, my arm achy along the tendon as though someone had winched it tight. I was struggling to find the musicality in my study, the notes separated into stones, refusing to become rivers and streams. It was so easy to feel untalented here, where musical genius was the norm. I had been rereading
biographies of Jacqueline du Pré, adding to my anxiety. The cello was a part of her. At the age of three, she’d heard a grandfather clock strike one, and declared it out of tune. Her mother had hot-housed her, writing little compositions that she placed on Jacqui’s pillow for her to play when she awoke. She had wild overly expressive movements, but the sounds she could draw out of the cello were electrifying. All she wanted to do was play the cello, and she won prizes, had her Wigmore debut at the age of sixteen. I was eighteen, already past it.
Lily stood over me as I strapped my cello into its case, black-and-white striped tights rising out of bump-toed shoes. I loved her style. I asked her where she got her shoes; I wanted to get some just the same.
‘They’re Red or Dead. I love their stuff. C’mon,’ she said, linking her arm through mine. She had a retro leather jacket that squeaked in my elbow. ‘I’ve found this great place, you’d never guess it was there.’ We cut through twilit side streets and along an alley. We took some stairs down, and we were in a cosy bar, furnished with winged armchairs and taffeta lamps. ‘I’ll get you a beer.’
I sat nervously, looking at the clientele, mainly elderly gentlemen, maybe ex-judges who liked to be spanked by school girls. Lily brought our beers over, putting them down on thick cardboard coasters. We were skipping dinner, but I hoped the beer would make up for it, that I wouldn’t get low. ‘Back in a jiff,’ she said like an East Ender, going off to a cigarette vending machine, feeding coins into the slot.
She returned with Camels, banging the soft pack against the table.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Packing the tobacco. It always gets tight around the filter, so I gotta redistribute it. Do you want one?’
‘Okay.’ It seemed like everyone smoked around here, and my former paranoia had evaporated, replaced by the desire to be with, or maybe like, Lily. I inhaled, the smoke grating my throat on the way down, and I struggled not to cough.
‘So what do you think of music school so far?’ she asked, exhaling through her nose, picking imaginary tobacco off her tongue.
‘Okay, I guess. It’s really exciting to be here. I just wish I could play something other than studies.’
‘Oh yeah, I hear that Nigel can be a bit of a bitch like that. Count yourself lucky you aren’t just playing scales. He’s hung up on perfect technique. Not as bad as the flute teacher — I heard she made one student play the same note all year. I’m loving my tutor Veronica. She’s in that great quartet that played at the Albert Hall last week. So gorgeous, six foot tall with biceps like Sarah Connor from The Terminator. She thinks that’s the way to go, to get yourself into a quartet or something. That way you don’t languish in the rear end of the orchestra.’
‘So you’re not planning on being a soloist?’ I said.
‘I am, but I’ve got a back-up plan as well. Don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I want to be in a band.’
‘I was in a garage band in Ohio, but I had to quit, I was scared I would screw my ears. But people who are in orchestras go deaf too — it’s not just pop musicians. When I quit, they were experimenting with heroin, so I left at a good time. I could be a deaf junkie. My ex-boyfriend got hooked. I had to break up with him when I caught him trying to pawn my viola.’
‘Oh my God, that’s awful.’ I was nearing the filter. Now that I’d started, I didn’t want to stop. Lily reached forward and gulped at her beer, her movements a rough juxtaposition against her dainty features. I gulped mine too; I needed something to soothe my throat.
‘Tell me about it. It was a miracle I happened to be on my way to get a new tattoo when he was taking it to the pawn shop. I didn’t normally hang out in such a seedy neighbourhood.’
My head was spinning from the beer, the nicotine, the revelations. Lily had been living a dizzyingly glamorous life. How had she become such a good viola player as well? Just six months with Bruno had seriously compromised my technique, and I was still making up for lost time.
‘Shall we have another round?’
‘My shout,’ I said. I wanted to know more. I wondered what I would look like with my head shaved.
Everything was different about living in London, but some things remained the same. I still had to go to diabetes clinic, only I didn’t have my mother driving me there, or my father plotting my results into attractive graphs to present to the doctors. Although I was still taking injections and sporadically doing blood tests, now with my new electronic machine, I wasn’t as careful as I’d been under Mum’s surveillance.
The diabetes clinic waiting room was wood panelled, its chipped veneer coffee table covered with magazines. They were all at least a year old, some with their covers ripped off. I’d brought an NME; these appointments always took forever. Not the consulting, just the waiting.
‘Miss Quinn? Rebecca Quinn?’ It was the nurse, slight, crop-haired, frazzled.
I stood, waving. ‘Here.’
‘Let’s get you weighed. Now did you bring a urine sample?’
‘No.’
The nurse huffed. She handed me a plastic jar with a pink lid, sticker affixed with my name and National Health number. She gave me a paper bag like the ones you might buy a sandwich in. ‘Do that first. Toilet along the corridor to the left. Drop it off at the nurses’ station once you’re done and then I’ll weigh you.’
‘I’ll be 200 grams lighter,’ I said, but the nurse didn’t smile; she’d heard that joke too many times before.
The nurse pronounced my height and my weight, a few kilos heavier than when I left, despite my sense that I wasn’t eating enough. She scowled again, then took me to the place where I was to have my eyes checked.
‘A D F H Z P T X U D Z A D N H P … N … T? No, E … F … Is it X?’ I gave up.
‘Take your time. Now the right eye.’
I swapped the cover, racing, then stumbling as I did before.
‘I do think you’re in a hurry, dear. You’ve rushed it.’
But I hadn’t, I always did it this fast. I was sick of this test, tired of the anxiety, the fear of being pronounced going blind. The nurse scribbled more stuff on the paper; she wasn’t going to tell me any of the results, they were for the doctor. ‘Now sit in the waiting room, dear. The doctor will call you soon.’
The doctor had glasses sliding down his nose, grey hair, tie pulled tight at his wattle, the chicken skin pouching over it.
‘Hello, Miss Quinn. Now I hope you don’t mind if these medical students look in on this appointment. It’s very important for them in order to become doctors.’
‘That’s fine.’ As if I could refuse. I took them in, a girl and a boy only a little older than me, both with white coats pulled over their clothes. The boy was pimply, still narrow, the girl fashionable, her sleek black hair pulled into a chignon, affixed with a couple of chopsticks.
‘Now what insulin are you on?’
I told him, and he scribbled.
‘Do you smoke?’
‘No.’ Not seriously, not officially.
‘Drink?’
‘Not really.’
‘What do you mean by not really? One drink a night? A bottle of vodka?’
‘A few drinks a week?’ My voice rose uncertainly; the doctor shook his head.
‘Take drugs?’
‘No.’ I was thinking about E, about what would happen if I tried it.
‘And your test results?’
I handed over the book. He peered at it, then started transcribing it into his notes. ‘Gosh, you’re all over the place, aren’t you. Not much control.’
I smarted.
‘Oh dear, you are in a state. We’re going to have to sort you out. Here, take this card — you should ring the nurse educator and do some work with her. You young people, you’re so irresponsible. If only you could see some of the older generation that I have to deal with, that would stop your late-night parties and passing out on the street corner after a bottle of cherry brandy.’ The girl snickered behind him; the boy cleared his throat
.
By the time I left the clinic, humiliated and exhausted, I felt like a teenage mother with a child she couldn’t care for, but that no one was willing to foster.
Chamber orchestra was my favourite part of music school. The conductor was an old Hungarian man, maybe Jewish, possibly the survivor of a death camp. He stared at us with an intense gaze, and we felt as though we had to give him the very best pieces of ourselves, considering what he might have been through. We speculated during breaks, me joining the smokers, where the best gossip happened.
‘I think he was definitely in Auschwitz,’ said a violin player. ‘My neighbours were survivors, and they didn’t have tattooed numbers.’
‘Maybe he was one of those forced labour slaves,’ suggested another. ‘That the Soviets used to build roads and shit.’
‘How do you know he’s even Jewish? Maybe he just escaped when Hungary was becoming communist.’
Whatever the truth was, our conductor had been through something. We could see it in his eyes. He dispensed one fact that made us hungry for more: he had been Béla Bartók’s student.
I loved the muscularity of the music, exhilarated by being within the sound, as if I was some kind of organism, sure that I would infect others, that no one could remain unmoved. Lily was in chamber orchestra too, and after our rehearsal finished we would take the stuttering tube, calming our frayed nerves with a jug of margarita after yet another mid-tunnel blackout. We would check out the fashion shops on the Kings Road, trying on all the clothes despite our inability to afford them. We’d seek out the op shops, go to the Camden markets, finding sixties dresses to team with our heavy shoes, buying fake fur coats and big sunglasses. Bruno kept sending me letters throughout this time, but I was beginning to feel funny opening them. The tone was too cloying, too in love with me. When I wasn’t thinking of music, I was thinking of Lily.