Earworm

by Colin Varney

  The night pressed against the windows with an intensity that made them bulge inwards. The tinted panes made everything moonless and murky. A figure crossed the road and it seemed the darkness squeezed him out. His stride slow and purposeful; his outline mutable as shadow. He didn’t coalesce into her father until he stood directly on the far side of the glass. The fabric of his jacket was scuffed and scruffy, looking like a costume, something adopted. Nicole felt a pulse of relief: if he was wearing the suit the Zeppelin hadn’t landed. His countenance was yearning, burning. Be strong, hold on. Come on, baby, come on. With studied deliberation, he performed a striking pantomime, each arm cranking over its shoulder so that his elbows levered above his ears. He vogued for a moment, then brought both balled fists over his crown and down to his sternum. Drawing something invisible over his head. Cloak of motes. A smile twitched at his mouth and Nicole felt her own lips slewing up on one side.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she told Mr Comb-over, her voice impersonal, but civil. “I’ll fetch the correct dessert immediately.”

  She snatched the tiramisu and turned unhurriedly towards the kitchen. Spine straight, head high. Hold on, yeah, hold on. She stole a glance at the window.

  Night black and bare, no one there.

  Tables emptied, revelries wound down. Every time she returned to the dining room her eyes darted to the window, but she did not see the figure again. Phantoms flickered around her. She delivered coffees and drinks with detached professionalism, communicating with Mr Comb-over with icy politeness. Symonds’s stare flitted but refused to alight on her. He was the last to leave, tottering and tootling. Nicole cleared the cups and glasses and fled for the kitchen. Slumped against a wall, she closed her eyes and let delicious darkness engulf her.

  “Guy with tickets on himself—he’s not happy.”

  She smelt stale cigarette smoke and her lids unpeeled. It was Steve, a fellow waiter, returned from a smoko out the back.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The big guy. The terrible singer. He’s in the car park, ranting. Someone’s vandalised his Volvo. Two-bob stripe down the driver’s side. Gouged the fuck out of it.” He gave a smirk of satisfaction. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.”

  I’ve never been debased in an ad. Reduced to a jingle. Nicole’s dad worked for a small advertising firm and has penned many such ditties: poesy for product; mammon’s mnemonics. The most well known was for a chain of reject stores. Puerile and perky, it colonised TV and radio. And if you thought I was good at lodging in heads, her dad’s creation had Velcro verses. Crampon choruses. Nicole has passed schoolyards and heard children chanting it.

  She remembered teasing him: “Your claim to fame.”

  He’d recoiled, shrinking into himself. “My symphony of infamy,” he had muttered back.

  Groceries arrived almost daily. Vestibule comestibles. Green shopping bags lolling on Bryce’s doorstep, left overnight and limp with dew. Their contents increasingly eccentric. Party hats, stickers, novelty notepads. One morning all the items were richly hued—over-ripe cherries and mangos, toffee apples, red-waxed gouda. On another, Bryce traced a line of ants to some badly boxed baklava. Every Saturday there was a bottle of wine: Rosé, then Merlot, then Pinot Noir.

  The house Nicole shared with Mum was glum as grunge. Mum’s presence was signalled by a series of scuffs and scrabblings. She read fitfully, swapping between her favourite Stephens—King and Hawking. Even with all the bulbs blazing the lounge brooded. Nicole felt ambushed by the framed photographs. She stared, captivated, at the one perched on the telly: the family sprawled beneath the protective boughs of a tree, sun dappled, detritus of a picnic strewn about them. Mum lifting a glass of champagne, Dad delicately fingering a wedge of Camembert. Seven-year-old Nicole’s beaming features smeared with chocolate cake. She remembered the day well: the hugging heat, the eager insects. She could almost taste the lemonade.

  She peered closer at Mum toasting the unseen camera- person. As usual, there was an impurity in her smile. It didn’t mar it, but contributed complexity, like a flaw in a gem. What makes Mum’s sunniest dispositions slightly overcast, contaminated by a background radiation of ruefulness? What is the grain in her shoe that affects her gait? Lemme tell you ’bout it. In a faraway fairy tale summe—

  …

  …

  It’s gone. It’s offline. I was building to a revelation— could you feel it?—but whoever’s head I was harvesting slipped away. Was I briefly in contact with Rosemary? Had she thought of me after all these years?

  Here’s the irony: I’m a Rembrandt with recall, a ringmaster of reminiscence, yet my own memory is a mystery to me. I have no synaptic loops branded onto grey matter; no cherished scenes to re-screen at will. I’m a mosaic of the memories of others, a conglomeration of the consciousnesses I am in cahoots with during this eyeblink. Now this eyeblink. Once connection with a host is severed those recollections sift from my grasp. My memory’s a slate roof in a hurricane. Repairs can be made but only if the dweller beneath indulges in me once more. Then the lost loops may flood back— perhaps re-edited by their capricious and irresponsible owner.

  The ease of access depends on how much I mean to an individual. In a real votary like Nicole I can occasionally glorify in the gamut, but usually I have to scrabble, I have to grope. And I have no capacity for storage. I’m a short-term memory entity, albeit with massive—if sometimes dubious— resources. I’m a gestalt gadabout.

  The atmosphere at home depressed Nicole, but she refused to relocate. Bryce’s place had an understated but insistent masculine aura that branded her as a visitor. Whenever she left cosmetics in the bathroom they looked outnumbered and cornered. As incongruous as a panpipe in a punk song. And there was another reason: just as people connect with Cobain in the streets of Seattle and hear Mozart in the zephyrs of Vienna, so Nicole felt her father all around her in her family home. The detective novel still lay splayed on his chair.

  Deepening dusk made everything soft and soluble as Nicole pulled up outside Bryce’s house. In full sunlight she might not have recognised the vehicle beneath the overhanging acacia further up the road but the shade thrown by the tree had fumed away. One! … Two! … Three! … Four!—the car door slammed behind her. As she approached her father’s battered Corolla she heard the ignition turn. He revved but never left the kerb. He wore a slumpy jumper, frayed food-stained jeans. Briared hair. Dishevelled, bedevilled. A beard pied with white made her count off the three weeks since she’d last seen him. He did not meet her eyes. She rapped on the driver’s side window. As he lowered the glass Nicole became disoriented: for weeks she’d suspected strangers were Dad in disguise, but now this person was someone mimicking her father. She didn’t know why, but lemme tell you ’bout it. The cut-price Old Spice wasn’t there to trigger familiar associations. Instead, wafts of sour scotch drifted from the cabin. Nicole saw drafts of advertising designs on the passenger seat blotted with tan lily-pad spills. She tried to swallow but her saliva had become glue.

  The Zeppelin was overhead.

  “Want to come inside?” she offered. “Cup of tea?”

  He shook his head, stared ahead. “No. Better be off.”

  “You got things to do?”

  He loosed a bitter spurt of mirth. Nicole noticed an empty container of vitamin D on the back seat and I watched memories welling up. Her father stirring piquant concoctions of what looked like grass clippings in a cup, assuring her that camomile soothed the soul and warded off woe. Vitamin capsules aligned alongside. She’d know that tomorrow or the next day his steps would scuff, his voice would mire in monotone. He’d pop the capsules and smile at her to prove he was perfectly all right. A thin, grafted grin. His remedies never worked, infuriating Mum, who beseeched him to take his lithium. Perhaps this is why he’d left: they’d had a blistering battle over his reluctance to medicate?

  He’d often ply Nicole with his concoctions, begging her to binge on vitamins. She’d fob him off, trying
to defuse his funk with humour. Then catch him inspecting her, peaky with apprehension.

  There was her reflection in the back seat window. Her face weary, weathered by stress. Her pronounced forehead louring. She balked, imagining Bryce leaving her soon for somebody prettier. And was it just the dusk that dusted her features, or was there a creeping malaise welling from within? A Zeppelin rising into view?

  The abandoned container on the back seat alongside its lid disturbed her. She smothered the image. I caught the association with overdose.

  “Come on, Dad. Bryce’d love to see you.”

  He turned to her then and they shared a flashbulb grin. There was her dad in that fulgurant moment. Too fleeting.

  “I need to go, Nic.” He kissed his fingers and tapped them alongside her lips. “Hope Bryce can contain his disappointment.”

  The car ground into gear and revved unnecessarily. Then he was hauling the gearstick into neutral and shoving open the door. He pulled her into a suffocating hug, the engine idling like an overlong song intro beside them. She smelt stale smoke in the weave of his jumper and something lodged in her throat. He had given up smoking just before she was born. I heard the chimp combo again, tuning up in her head. Before she knew it, he was back in the car and roaring down the street. But she could still feel his grip all around her.

  The groceries stopped coming.

  As soon as Nicole stepped into the house she knew something was wrong. For an irrational instant, she believed Mum was performing gentle ooh la la in the kitchen. There were soft utterances, intakes of breath tinged with traces of voice. Her eyes flicked over the hallway walls. They were bare. Yet she could detect illusory oblongs where the photographs had hung, as if absence emitted a frequency of light just beyond the limit of the human eye.

  The click of the front door closing behind her hung in the air like a bum note. She became aware of the pulse beneath her ear. Heart drum solo.

  The utterances were sobbing.

  One! … Two! … Three! … Four!—into the lounge.

  The top of the TV was swept clear, the bookcase was uncluttered. The aspic grins and rictus mouths that had appeared in huddles of photos were gone. Her saliva dried and her tongue became an intrusion in her mouth. She blundered into the kitchen.

  In the overcast conditions shadows sidled and outlines shivered. It made the room uncertain as a tune’s slow fade. Wind shushed beyond the window, admonitory. Mum, sitting at the table, didn’t look up. The photographs were a collapsed stack beside her chair. One fingertip delicately dabbed a single frame propped before her. The picnic scene.

  “Nicole …” she said.

  When a band is about to crash into action, the drummer’s arm raises and time suspends. Nicole’s mind veered wildly, inventing reasons for the photographs to be down. They’d been removed for dusting, for reframing. One had fallen and cracked and the others had been taken down as a precaution. She wanted to fire off questions but was terrified of answers. The drummer’s arm remained in the air.

  Mum sobbed again.

  Skid marks, country corner. Windscreen mosaic. His upper body had slammed against it but not smashed through. Seat belt dangling, unbuckled. Bottle of scotch rolling around his feet. It may have lodged under the brake, preventing him from reducing speed on the bend. Or he might have aimed for the tree. Or been so drunk he was wondering why the tree was screaming towards him. Concertinaed metal, jagged angles. Peaty musk of spilled scotch mixed with the iron tang of blood. It’s vivid in Nicole’s mind, extrapolated from the scant details she was told. Other things she pushed aside, like the possibility he didn’t die immediately. She pictured this, then dunked it in forgetfulness, but first she showed it to me. It’s the noises she mustered that are most evocative: guttural, gargling. Then puling, pleading. Sometimes I hate being in humans’ heads.

  Nicole’s dad has left the building.

  There was a bottle of cheaper scotch by a discarded guitar on the floor of his filthy flat. E string snapped. Another unopened bottle in the kitchen. On the music stand not far from the guitar was … me. The sheet music for Empty Fairground (Jones/Jones). My DNA. Nicole’s mum wept uncontrollably when she heard. I’d been one of her favourite songs during their courtship, soon after my birth. There was some conjecture that he had been learning me to serenade her, possibly as an overture to a reconciliation. He couldn’t have got far—when people are practising me I can access them in intermittent bursts, but there had been nothing from him.

  Stillness settled. Hushed house. Nicole on tippy-toe, mummer Mum. They navigated the rooms as acolytes might creep around a crypt. Yet I was besieged by racket: several symphonies played simultaneously by monkey maestros. Avant-garde bombard. Remember our old friend Zorn? All that gratuitous emotion fazing me. Crazing me. I battled to cling to Nicole but the cacophony contorted time, fusing days so I only received scrimped impressions of events. Moments loomed through the discord. Nicole in the dead of night desperate for sleep. As she stirs, bedclothes coil and compress. Boa blankets. The quietness grates: she sets her jaw against it. Sometimes she seems to be in a dream she is struggling to wake from, at other times she knows she is locked into an unforgiving reality.

  Nicole sneaking past the spare room because someone is in there. Now I see her, the guest. Glaring across the breakfast table, pupils roving Nicole’s features, raking her like a searchlight. Kristina, Dad’s sister. Nicole knows it’s not her Kristina wants to see, but the hints of Dad that shine through her. “You’ve got his bone structure,” she whispers. Nicole knows her aunt is disappointed. She wants the eyes. She wants her brother’s hazel orbs to stare back. But Nicole has irises like polished timber. If Kristina wants to see her sibling’s eyes, Nicole thinks, she should consult a mirror. Because in the twilight, in the shadowy house where no music plays and the squawk of the telly seems like sacrilege, Nicole keeps spying her dad in drag.

  The house was too small. I sensed too many unwanted encounters in the bathroom and kitchen. Kristina grilling Mum about her brother’s final weeks. Why had he been living away from home? What state of mind had he been in? Nicole found herself stepping between them, physically shielding her mother from interrogation. Although she wondered too, prey to conspiracy theories. Nicole couldn’t help noticing how worn her mother looked, yet an undercoat of strength and beauty was still apparent beneath her dragging countenance. Nicole remembered her father, in one of his effervescently fond moods, likening Mum to an exotic aquarium with grimy glass. Then waggling a finger. “Never tell her I said that,” he warned.

  Nicole weathering Kristina’s wistfulness. “You’ve grown into quite a serious young lady. I remember you as a little girl, performing your favourite song. Your strawberry song, you called it. Such an irrepressible little imp.” Nicole felt the feathery dance of Kristina’s fingertips across her forehead. “But that …” Her expression veered between pleased and uneasy. “That’s Terry’s frown.”

  Nicole inspected herself in the nearest bright surface. The coffee pot elongated her head into a Popsicle, thickened her frown into a notch. It looked like a black core seamed through her cranium, like letters through a stick of rock. She felt a surge of panic. Sensed the Zeppelin over the horizon, awaiting a signal to hover into view.

  Let’s see Nicole’s performance as an irrepressible imp. It’s her birthday and she wears a dazzling party dress. She sings with an enthusiasm that negotiates several octaves. A gaggle of grown-ups cluster, basking in her radiance, gawping like laughing clowns (fairground imagery—I can’t help myself). Other kids have skulked away, pouting and petulant. They know they can’t compete. Nicole’s a beacon. And she’s singing her favourite song. She’s singing …

  … me.

  Her strawberry song. I’d forgotten I could do that— sprinkle pink across her vision. A fine frosting sugar-coating her world, reminding her of bobbled berries.

  Kristina hummed the Jingle. The bopping hop about reject shops. Jejune tune. She expressed her desire for it to be pla
yed at the funeral. Nicole scowled. Mum crossed the kitchen to stand beside her daughter.

  “It’s famous,” Kristina argued.

  “It’s his symphony of infamy,” said Nicole.

  Mum grasped Nicole’s hand. Demons sawed at strings and hobgoblins whipped up the woodwind. Swarm of Zorn.

  The spare room was invaded by Kristina’s belongings. Her suitcase lolled open, shirts and skirts erupting from it, crawling over its edges. Nicole glowered at the under-things strewn across the fold-out sofa bed. The knickers and bras seemed oversized, like dress-ups. She was disturbed that Dad’s guitars and music stand had been corralled into a corner. He’d called this room his oestrogen-free zone and now it had been violated.

  Nicole pulled papers and exercise books from a drawer and fanned them across the floor, reasserting her father’s presence. Emotions eclectic—she was both consoled and pained to see his scrawled handwriting on the sheet music. She was seeking one of Dad’s songs to sing at the funeral, in part to stave off the threat of the Jingle.

  One exercise book had a sun obscured by clouds doodled on the cover, with Nic’s Blues blocked in marker beneath it. She opened it, expecting to find musical notation, lyrics. Instead she encountered a list of dates.

  Sat. April 12—School friend’s cat hit by car. N and friend read poems over grave. Intermittent wailing.

  Tues 15—getting over cat.

  Famine on news. N upset by sick children. Seems better after we donate sizable chunk of wages. Nicole recalled her distress at the skeletal infants. Her dad loomed over her, his hand on her shoulder, occasionally fluttering up to her face. Voice low, mild. She glanced away and caught his reflection etched on the moonlight beyond the window. When he thought she wasn’t looking his face dissolved into sheer terror.