by Sarah Laing
My performance exam went okay, all things considered. I wasn’t as sharp as I was meant to be; the drug and the shock still had a grip on me. The funny thing was that I didn’t care. Lying in a gloom all the previous week, only getting up to practise (ineffectively) and to eat my hostel meals, I’d had a niggling thought, one that told me that I didn’t love classical music enough to make it my life. Because the songs that filled my head as I stared at the ceiling were pop: by Pulp, Elastica, Blur and Morrissey, by Pavement and the Pixies, Sebadoh, Kristin Hersh and PJ Harvey. Sometimes Schubert surged inside me, usually the opening bars from the trio in E flat minor, sometimes I laid down all the notes in my Fauré sonata, but mostly I sang bitter-sweet lyrics to my favourite songs. I thought about all my fellow music students, and I felt as though I didn’t share their single-mindedness, their one-dimensional obsession for classical music. Lily was different; Lily understood. I didn’t see her much at all that week; apart from her popping in to explain that it was the trannie from the toilets who told her I’d passed out on the banquettes and to confess that she had to split that night because needles freaked her out.
‘So shall we go out and celebrate?’ I said to her, after we’d both finished for the term.
‘Oh. Do you think you should?’ Lily said.
‘Of course I should. Why not?’
‘I just feel a little nervous, you know, after last week.’
‘I know how to handle it now. The doctor gave me a few tips. Besides, we wouldn’t take E again tonight, would we? I was just thinking a few beers.’
‘Okay,’ said Lily, but she looked as if she couldn’t trust me any more.
Just as I feared, I hadn’t done so well in the exams. The beginning of the second semester, the dean called me into her office, telling me I had to pick up my game if I expected my scholarship to be rolled over for another year. Nigel had heard through the grapevine that I’d been in a coma, that I’d been in hospital, and he cooled his acid tongue and became tentative and saccharine around me. I couldn’t stand it; I ribbed him about his obsessive-compulsive disorder, my explanation for why he got carpal tunnel syndrome instead of a brilliant performance career. But I couldn’t restore our former dynamic; I was now eggshell-girl. I went into the practice studios, trying to tap into my former fervour, but it was gone, and quite often I put the cello back into its case mid-practice, and went walking around London, finding myself in parks and mazes, in obscure museums and tea shops. I would return to my hostel room, sometimes finding a note slipped under my door from Lily, but quite often not. I felt acutely lonely. I would sit down to write my essays, to complete my theory exercises, but I would be too tired to make any sense.
Knock knock. ‘Hey, Rebecca, wassup? You want to go to the Tate with me?’
I didn’t answer. I had to write this essay. It was late; I’d been out walking too much.
‘Come on, Beck, open up. There’s an artist-in-residence there who’s doing really interesting things with sound.’
But then again, it was Lily, and I was grateful for any Lily opportunity. I opened my door. Lily was excited by the intersection of art and music; her big brain encompassed this as well as everything written in the NME, the classical repertoire and which composers were gay or had syphilis.
‘Put your coat on, it’s raining.’ Lily opened my cupboard to a shower of instant noodle packages, which she kicked back inside. She got out my coat and I held out my arms, letting her put it on me as though I were a child.
‘I couldn’t stand to be studying any more,’ she said. ‘The viola da gamba was driving me mad. I’ve got quartet this afternoon, but Sylvia’s out of control. She’s so goddamned uptight, and thinks she’s the most musical, but I tell ya, she’s cold. I should lead the quartet, if only they let violas do that. Hee hee, she’s gonna kill me.’
‘God, this rain, it’s making me really depressed,’ I said to Lily, as we made our way to the desolate Millbank, where the Tate sat.
‘Good for your complexion. You know, you’re down quite a lot these days. Maybe you should see the school counsellor.’ We climbed the stairs to the entrance hall, all arches and tiles.
‘I’m fine, I just feel happier when it’s sunny, that’s all.’ All of a sudden, New Zealand with its sharp light fish-hooked my heart.
‘Come on, let’s look at the pre-Raphaelites,’ said Lily, dragging me into the room on the left. She was fascinated by them, the Lady of Shallot in particular, her red hair teeming into the river. ‘Hello, fair lady,’ she said, curtseying in front of the painting. She had the postcard on her wall. I liked seeing Bacon, his agonised popes.
We went through the contemporary part of the gallery, where someone had dripped paint from the tops to the bottoms of the walls in neat lines, and someone else had cast naked rodents out of pink resin. Through to the back where the artist-in-residence was working.
We peered through the open door, and there was a room, part occupied by stones suspended at waist level from the ceiling, another part by wires strung between ceiling and floor. Among this, portable record players spun half-filled glasses, a latex finger poised above to stroke them into a hum. The room was discordant yet beautiful.
‘Bugger,’ we heard someone say, and it was the artist, crouched above a record player, a slick of water around him. Lily grabbed a cloth from a neighbouring desk.
‘Catch,’ she said.
‘Cheers,’ said the man. He sponged up the water. ‘Hopefully it didn’t get into the electronics. Took me an age to source all these record players.’
‘What are the wires for?’ asked Lily.
‘I play them with a bow. See, by the wall.’
‘How cool. May I? I play the viola.’
The artist looked unsure. ‘Let me show you.’ He picked up the bow himself, and, holding it in his fist, pulled it across the string. It made a sound like a saw or a theremin.
‘You’re holding the bow wrong.’ And Lily took it out of his hand and showed him how to curve his fingers and thumb into the frog, how to pull the horse hairs across the string to the ivory tip. The note sprang out, fuller, richer, picking up the harmonics in the other strings. The artist’s brow smoothed, and he looked carefully at Lily’s hand.
‘How do the stones work?’ I asked.
The artist went over to one and swung it. It hit another and then another, each going off into random angles and infecting the next stone. An anarchic Newton’s pendulum, the pop-pop, thwack-thwack getting louder and denser by the second.
I wanted to do that. Make new sounds. Suddenly the old ones seemed irrelevant, already perfected, dead. I wanted to be making music that I hadn’t heard before, music that could take some physical shape. I felt a great sense of agitation. Lily was asking the artist questions. Was he a musician before he was an artist? No, he wasn’t. Did he record his work? Well, he’d made some records but they weren’t listenable, they were more conceptual, slabs of vinyl sheathed in card with his signature across them, a limited edition of fifty sold for a thousand pounds each. Yeah, onto a good racket. What kind of music did he listen to? He liked Elvis and Johnny Cash. Did he want to go out for a drink with us? Thanks for the offer, but he really needed to get that last glass to hum, perfecting the angle of the prosthetic finger so that it didn’t tip the water glass again.
Lily and I sat together in a café down the road, eating chips and mushy peas. The peas weren’t what I thought they might be, bright green and squashed. Instead they were the split variety you found in soups. Lily had given me her sausage and I was eating two, dipping them into brown sauce. ‘What’s wrong with ketchup?’ sighed Lily. ‘What’s wrong with coffee?’ She sipped her tea. Normally Lily was enthusiastic in her Anglophilia, but today she was feeling dissatisfied — maybe I’d infected her.
‘It’s all about refinement, isn’t it? They tell us that if we perfect our technique we’ll be able to express a full emotional range, but I think half the students become so perfectionist that they can’t remember what
a natural emotion is. Maybe it’s a British thing. Maybe us Americans are more self-aware because we’re all rehearsing to be on Oprah. Of course Marco could make you cry, but he’s Italian.’ Marco was a tenor who was getting more chances than usual to sing solo.
‘Whose emotion are you expressing anyway?’ I asked. ‘At least in pop music you can tell: I loved you, you didn’t love me, now I’m fucked in the head.’
‘Too obvious, the highbrows would say.’ Lily took one of my cigarettes and lit it. ‘And God, look at the concert halls, filled with grey heads, and so many rules: you can’t clap between movements, you can’t cough while the music’s playing. I know it’s annoying as hell when you’re playing a piece and all you can hear is rustling, but the audience are almost as uptight as the musicians.’
A noisy party entered, taking over a couple of tables behind us, erupting into arpeggios of laughter.
‘Singing students,’ hissed Lily.
‘How long before they break into song?’ I hissed back.
‘Let’s give them a minute.’ Lily flicked through a Hello! magazine on the table; the Spice Girls were on the cover, Baby Spice sucking her lollypop. ‘This is an outrage, I mean, how do these people get to be called musicians? They’re just confectionery with a drum machine.’
‘Which one’s your favourite? Sporty or Baby Spice? Or maybe Posh is more your style?’
Lily considered each one, while rolling her eyes at the other party. ‘Here they go.’
They sang ‘Summertime’ in harmony before breaking into more laughter, looking pleased with themselves. ‘Scary Spice … no, Sporty Spice. At least they’re not as bad as Nigel Kennedy, that phony Cockney. And what about Vanessa Mae, is she real at all?’
‘You could be like her, Lily. You’re cute enough.’
‘But her taste is questionable. She makes elevator music. Middle-aged men masturbate over her sleeve notes.’
‘I’m thinking about chucking it in altogether, Lily.’
‘You’re not.’ She leant forward, looking shocked.
‘It’s like you say, too controlled. I don’t think there’s room for me to express myself. I don’t care enough about classical to move people. And it’s all been done before. I want to be like that guy we just saw, more experimental.’
‘You’re not going to swap to composition, are you? All those freaks shovelling gravel into a wheelbarrow and calling it music. And then you have to sit through their performance — it’s torture.’
‘Or maybe I could be like PJ Harvey.’
‘I could live with that.’ We’d both seen her play the cello version of ‘Man-sized’ at the Brixton Academy, and it was amazing how much raw noise she could get out of the cello and her collection of guitars, piano and fuzz boxes. She was so tiny — we wondered whether she was anorexic or half-sparrow — that it made the largeness of her sound more incredible. ‘But you can’t chuck it in, Beck, you’ve worked so hard for this.’
‘Tell me about it, wasted youth. All those hours practising when I could be, I dunno, saving the whales.’
‘I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else other than playing my viola. It’s like it’s a part of me, and I’ve been practising since I was practically born.’
‘Lucky you. I keep on having fantasies about working in a shop or picking grapes in France, anything to escape this pressure. Besides, the dean told me that if I don’t get a B-plus average or higher, they won’t roll over my scholarship. I couldn’t afford to pay my fees, and neither could my parents.’
‘Hmm. You’d have to do pretty well in end-of-year exams, but I’m sure you can manage it. You have talent, Beck, you do. I think you’re just getting end-of-year burnout. Hang in there. It would be a tragedy to have come this far only to throw it all away.’
The students broke into song again, this time something Italian and far too loud for the small space. The person behind the counter looked annoyed. She was far enough from the music school not to have to humour us. She turned up the radio, another fried egg and chips order came out of the kitchen, and suddenly it was aria and Sandy Shaw and grease all mixed up together.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Lily.
‘So you’re gracing us with your presence, Rebecca,’ said the Hungarian chamber orchestra conductor, as I rushed in late again. It had taken longer to get back than I thought. ‘Please, sit.’
I took my place in the fourth row, turning my attention to the music. I had practised it this week, imagining the other parts in my head while I played my sparse one. I’d practised the run, the shift that appeared in an exposed place. But maybe not enough; when the passage came, my finger didn’t quite stretch far enough but the note still rang out with my heavy bow, jarring with the others. The conductor sucked his false teeth, shook his head and carried on. But once the movement was finished, he said ‘You prepared for this rehearsal, didn’t you, Rebecca? You worked on the run before you came?’
‘Yes,’ I said. All the other members of the orchestra looked at me.
‘Perhaps you were thinking of other things while you played it. If you people want to be successful, you must live the music entirely. It must consume you, you mustn’t be distracted by the noise of life. Now,’ he lifted his baton as my cheeks burned, ‘the andante.’
Afterwards the conductor pulled me aside. ‘Is everything okay? You are not pregnant or anything?’ He adjusted his 1970s spectacles.
I looked down at my stomach, which was poking out a little more thanks to fatty English food. ‘No!’
‘You don’t seem to have that same focus you had when you first came here. I see it happen — a young person moves away from their family and their home and they realise that perhaps the desire to become a concert musician was not their own. It was perhaps their mother’s, their father’s.’
‘My dad wanted me to become an engineer. But it’s in my blood — my grandmother was a concert cellist.’
‘Really? Where did she perform?’
‘In New Zealand. But she came from New York. Actually, Berlin first. She was Jewish.’
I wondered whether he would say ‘Me too’, but he smiled faintly, perhaps dismissively, because New Zealand wasn’t anywhere.
‘So you are doing this for your grandmother?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe because I love it.’
But I didn’t sound sure, my conversation with Lily echoing in my head.
‘Think carefully about this, Rebecca. Music is a snobbish host, and it invites only the very best into its salon.’ He patted me consolingly on the arm, but the action suddenly seemed threatening, as if he himself might be the one to bar the door. Suddenly I didn’t care if he had survived Auschwitz or not: he was a horrible old man.
Finals were a month away; I’d restored enough of my former doggedness to make it through. Or at least I was simulating it, so that I could make a decision about my future, rather than one being made for me. Nigel had been mean to me once again, a good sign, telling me my bow sounded like it was strung with overcooked spaghetti, my playing was as sloppy as Bolognese sauce. After exams I would take a holiday, maybe in Italy or, if I could get enough money together, in Thailand. I would meet Bruno and we would lie on Koh Samui, eating mangoes and crabs. Bruno seemed abstract to me, like someone I’d made up, but if I was with him, I might forget my infatuation with Lily, I might love him again.
In the meantime, Lily and I were going to a party. It was in Brixton, where we’d gone to get our tattoos, hosted by Martin the viola player. He came from London; he didn’t need the security of the hostel. He was flatting with some people from art school.
I was nervous getting ready. What precisely did Martin mean to Lily? She was cagy about what they did together, although she was spending more and more time away from the hostel. I’d run into her Spanish room-mate, and she said that some nights Lily didn’t come home at all.
Careful with my choice of clothes, I squeezed myself into a Chinatown cheongsam and poked chopsticks into
my hair. I Cleopatra’d my eyes and dusted myself in silver glitter. Lily came to my room in shiny PVC hotpants, fishnets and a fun fur bomber jacket, her head freshly shaven, false eyelashes applied. Normally she didn’t dress up so consciously, relying on her natural style. I wondered who she was trying to impress. She pressed the corner of her eyelid. ‘These things are a bitch to stick on.’
Brixton was different at night; the Big Issue sellers had gone off drinking and you didn’t have to push your way down the road. We found Martin’s flat on the corner, opposite a little fenced garden, and he opened the door. He was heavyset, with a cleft, stubbled chin and dense eyebrows, a mop of prematurely white hair. ‘Hey, Lily of the Valley,’ he said, kissing her on the lips, drawing her inside. ‘Hi, Rebecca,’ he said to me.
Björk was playing on the stereo, and some girls emulated her, their hair done in tiny coils and pinned around their head. I wished that I’d dressed like that; I was feeling uncomfortable, scared that if I sat, the seams might split.
‘Shall I get us a drink?’ I said. I liked to be doing things at parties, to look as though I had a purpose, to hide the fact I didn’t know where to stand, who to talk to, if I could talk to anyone at all.
‘Yeah,’ said Lily, kissing someone else hello, a short balding guy in a Clash T-shirt. She didn’t introduce us, so I went to the kitchen, half-filling two paper cups with vodka, and sloshing in some diet Sprite I’d brought to avoid oversugaring myself. When I returned to the living room, Lily was talking to a emaciated girl whose pelvis jutted supermodel-style, blabbing on about Foucault and post-modern discourse. I chugged my vodka, surprised to finish it within a few minutes. I returned to the kitchen to pour myself another, interrupting someone snorting speed at the sink.
When had Lily met all these people? It seemed like she’d been living another life that I wasn’t invited to. I found her again, but she was still talking to the pelvis girl, who was telling her about what a cool guy Proust was.