by Colin Varney
When she was a child her ears had pricked to the trills of ice-cream trucks, the sucking sigh of the refrigerator door, Mum’s car pulling into the drive, Dad’s step as he arrived. She never registered the rattle of tablet containers. Medicine maracas. They tamped her father’s highs and vamped his lows. His temperament remained a steady drone. Flatline. When she reached adolescence the prescription canisters disappeared. Now there was a new development: Dad scuffling in a suit, tinkering with his tie. She’d watch the suit crease and crumple as he descended into doldrums. He’d hole up for days in the spare room, napping in the afternoon and rambling repetitively on his guitar throughout the night. Clouds of camomile in the kitchen. She saw Mum’s frustration and fury. Her helplessness. Dad was eschewing medication, claiming it dampened him, estranged him from his real self. Crushed creativity, strangled song-writing. Now he used diet and vitamins to wrangle his woes. And he would crouch in front of Nicole, studying her face like a sailor checking the horizon for inclement weather. Shortly after the famine footage he’d tenderly pushed some straggling hair from her forehead as he’d locked gazes.
“Hey, brown eyes,” he’d breathed with relief.
“Hey, greenie-brown eyes,” she’d retorted.
“Hazel,” he’d corrected. “And more green than brown.”
Next day she’d heard his lowered tones in the kitchen, punctuated by the syncopation of a chopping knife. He was proposing that Nicole should see a specialist, worried there might be some melancholy melody hidden within, inherited from him. “World’s worst dad,” she heard him mutter. Whish whish whish—Mum’s answer was swirled up in a maelstrom of mixing. Nicole imagined her whisking words in a bowl, fluffing them up, watching some spatter onto the bench top. Yet she only had to hear her daughter sniffle and she’d be bundling Nicole into bed and forcing foul draughts into her. Mum tended the tangible; Dad minded the mind.
Nicole saw again the shards of china in the kitchen bin. She saw Dad hurling the cup onto the floor. Mugged mug. His morbid legacy making a mockery of the crockery. World’s Worst Dad. Is that why he left?
There was something jammed in the back of the exercise book. Dog-eared corners of a folded sheet jutted out. She slid it free. It was the drawing Dad had been clutching when she’d almost collided into him on the night he’d left. It showed a family posed in the front yard of their house. Winding pathway snaking to the door. Garden speckled with flowers. An obese aeroplane with stunted wings hung in the cobalt sky. The family were stiff-limbed, with inflexible upturned Vs for legs. Nicole’s name was scrawled beneath the mummy, Mr Nicole underneath the daddy. At their side, in decreasing age, were a duo of daughters, a son and a baby in a crib. A dog and two cats. Pastels and primaries were lacquered on until they became a shiny surface slicking the paper. And Nicole could never colour successfully within the lines: the figures blurred, bursting out of themselves. Nicole pondered the picture for long moments before tucking it carefully back into place.
She flicked back through the pages. Her father’s sprawled handwriting as distinctive as the timbre of his voice. She recalled many of the occasions alluded to—N switches off heatpump because “the homeless are freezing” … Can’t fit into old dress—“I’m a blob”—but other entries were indecipherable or cryptic. She seemed to hear him mumble then. The last line was particularly confounding: Bryce hutch SB so happy. She puzzled over it for some time before shaking her head, defeated.
She scanned the room and located a pen beside the makeshift bed. Carefully, she scratched a new entry in the list of Nic’s Blues. The date of her father’s death followed by a dash.
Crackle shoosh snap—the sheet music of Dad’s compositions sliding and sorting, scrunching in her impatient paws, until she held the right one aloft triumphantly. Hand-Me-Down Heart was a blues dirge packed with minor chords and oblique references to romancing her mother. There were smeared blemishes where he’d rubbed out notes or lyrics. Doodles populated the margins. A tiny car had been drawn between staves, its exhaust putting out a line of smoky hearts. Nicole grabbed this, the exercise book and the music stand and hauled it all to her room. She returned for one of Dad’s guitars, then sought out the broken-spined detective novel. Dragged one of his pot plants from the lounge. She set the music stand up in a corner, placed the score of Hand-Me-Down Heart upon it and laid Nic’s Blues and the novel at its feet. She stepped back to inspect the affect. Nodded to herself.
She cradled the guitar, squinting at the notation. Plucked tentatively. But it had been too long since she’d tried to decipher sheet music and the tune defied her. When she did haltingly reproduce the first few bars of Hand-Me-Down Heart she dissolved into despair. As the straggled light of early spring eased into evening she admitted defeat. She shambled out to her mother, drained and exhausted.
“I don’t have Dad’s nimble fingers.”
Mum drew her in and squeezed her and she didn’t mind that she had to struggle for breath.
Dreams struck through stormy Zorn like exotic sea creatures forced to break surface by pitching waves. They appeared so briefly they eluded memory, but I glimpsed them all. Visions of girlhood, of being swung up onto her dad’s shoulders, of him squatting before her and calling her Sunny Bunny, of barbeques and holidays and beach cricket. Flotsam fantasies, adrift in orchestral chaos. Unanchored to context, I confused them with real events. Suddenly Terry was alive again and picnicking with his ten-year-old daughter and happy wife. And as Sunny Bunny grinned up into the dappled branches that rustled above them she lazily became aware that this was the tree. The one her father would slam into many years later. No, no—that couldn’t be. Dream scene. Night blight. Probably.
Andy regarded the sheet music on the stand with tender reverence. He was Terry’s oldest friend. They’d been in bands in their youth and often jammed together, perched opposite, concentrating on the other’s fingers flying along the frets. Andy claimed it would be an honour to play Hand-Me-Down Heart at the funeral. Mum grinned gratefully.
“May I?” he asked, scooping up a guitar. He played it easily, slowing it down, soaking it in sadness. Nicole was peeved.
“It was his favourite song,” she said.
“It’s beautiful. We played it together many times.” Andy strummed the first few bars again. “He never considered himself a good songwriter. Called his songs ‘evil twins’.” Andy’s short, affectionate laugh made his whole body jump. “Said they always sounded better when they were an idea, an atmosphere. Soon as he tried to bring them into the real world they’d be stunted by his writing, by his dexterity as a musician. Sounded banal, he said. Like his jingles. The good twin was the one locked in his head. Feeling the pain of the evil twin.” Andy strummed again, smiling. “He was a mad fucker.”
In a dream, Andy hands over a book of pressed leaves. “Here, he’d want you to have this. We used to do it as kids. It was our hobby for a while. Before we took up being rejected by girls.”
Every visit to her boyfriend’s place helped me cut through the chaos. Bryce respite. The boy was my buoy, keeping me afloat, belayed to Nicole. His palm sturdy on her shoulder, his arms there to enfold her. Each peck on the cheek a radar blip helping me steer through the storm. The gentle caresses of his hands were semaphore guiding me in. Nicole loved to catch him fresh from work, careworn but still smart in his suit, yanking at the noose of his tie and popping his top button free. When she first met him, after he rescued her from wandering his work space, he sported baggy jackets and plastered-down hair. He hung his head, peeping over the thick black rims of his specs. Yet his beauty persisted, like Mozart played by a school orchestra. She watched workmates flitting around him, flirting. The day after completing her assignment, she rang him to ask if he could possibly spare more time to assist her with her studies.
In his office, while conducting her pretend investigation into the functioning of a financial consultancy, she playfully lifted his spectacles from the desk and slid them on. She expected the world to go wonky as a ben
t chord, but was surprised to find she could see perfectly well. He expelled a sigh and admitted they were plain glass. He wore them for effect, afraid that colleagues and clients wouldn’t take him seriously because of his looks.
“Your looks?” joked Nicole. “I see you find it hard to be humble.”
“I’ve done some modelling,” he confessed, shyly.
“You’ll have to prove to me how devastatingly dishy you are. Tonight. Over drinks.”
“Well, no. Not tonight. It’s a weeknight.”
Nicole was taken aback by his work ethic. She leant in, lowering her voice. “A hangover will make you look much less handsome.”
Bryce claims he fell for Nicole the next morning as he shuffled reports while his head bongo-ed and stomach tuba-ed. Love and pain. The next day, she took him shopping for less dire office attire. She taught him to cut loose, demonstrating how to shoehorn a weekend into weekdays. In turn, he offered her politics. Before Bryce, Nicole’s political views were fuelled by headline horsepower, the ill-informed prejudices of her peers, plus a knee-jerk reaction to the proclamations of her father. Now, Bryce extolled the obligations of the privileged to assist the less fortunate. He talked up the trickledown effect. “But it’s like the oxygen masks on a plane,” he said. “You can’t help anybody else until you’ve attached your own. You have to be secure first. Wealth is good, Nicole. It’s greed that’s bad.” He effused about his community work, bestowing financial services to women’s shelters as reprisal against his own abusive father. Nicole found herself volunteering too. “Please,” she begged, “don’t tell Dad. He’ll interpret it as some kind of latent socialism.” Her woolly ideals focused, like a glam rocker finally finding the right persona. She’d always enjoyed disagreeing with her dad, but her arguments had been wishy-washy. Now she was able to aggrieve him with authority.
Nicole and Bryce. Bryce and Nicole. Choosing each other and giving to each other freely. So unlike the obligations to her father that were drip-fed into Nicole as a hapless infant, the caveat to care. Dad inveigling himself into her affections, taking advantage of a minor. A bond thrust upon her, like bad bosses, taxes, elections. And yet this contract—this done-deal—is celebrated by humans. I don’t blame Terry: he’s blind to the lineal legerdemain. Nature’s thaumaturgy. Both daddy and daughter are dupes.
In Cupid’s campaign, on the love hustings, it was Vote 1 Bryce. The candy candidate. Uh huh. Oh yeah.
She didn’t know what to do at the funeral now. How should she honour her father? She decided to speak. To step up after Andy had finished playing to recite a stanza from her father’s song: I drive hand-me-down roads/In a hand-me-down car/With my hand-me-down heart/To be just where you are. Then she’ll tell her favourite family story.
Long ago, there was a young man with fairy-floss flesh, scruffy custard hair and gobstopper blue jeans. He was stiff legged and liked to face directly forwards with liquorice shoes splayed sharply left and right. Just before his second year at university, studying marketing, he was enduring a labouring job in Ulverstone. He was very much in love with a woman back in Hobart called Rosemary. She had curly toffee-apple hair and cherry lips and polka dot dresses of chocolate, sky and spearmint. The young man—let’s call him Dad—was very lonely in Ulverstone. He drank too much amber beer, which was reacting badly with the potions and pills the doctors had given him for his glums. One afternoon, when the lemon sun was radiating lemon lines in the ultramarine sky, Dad decided he would spend that night with Rosemary. After work he borrowed a car from a pal and set off on the long trek. There were paint and spray cans on the back seat, and because Dad had a series of wonky circles with tiny stars in them orbiting his crown—an alarming side-effect of the pills and potions—he thought it would be a terrific idea to stop every ten kilometres to paint a single letter of the message TERRY LOVES ROSEMARY 4 EVER on the highway. He had the notion you would then be able to read it from space. Poor Dad.
Dad finally reached Hobart and Rosemary was so surprised that her eyes became round and her cherry lips circled. They kissed and a line extended vertically from their conjoined mouths with a heart balanced on it. Dad’s mouth was writhe-y and he was saying crazy things and the rings encircling his head had multiplied and produced more stars. They were both very excited to see each other and wanted to get jiggy wit' it, but it was well after midnight and there were no chemists open to buy baby preventers. But they got jiggy anyway. Dad jumped back into his car at five in the morning and drove back over the letters REVE 4 YYRMSORR SVOOOL YRET. Ill-disposed by illiteracy, he arrived late for work.
Nicole’s pictures then show her mum side on, polka dots spotting her enormously round belly.
Maybe it was the economist in her, but Nicole loved tallying up the odds. The genealogy of the two families culminating in Rosemary and Terry. Terry learning of that underpaid job in Ulverstone via an old school friend he ran into at the pub. Terry deciding to seek help for his depression at that stage of his life. That cocktail of chemicals the doctors were toying with. Terry’s lack of condoms. That particular sperm breaking free of the pack and swimming for Nicole’s life. She felt like entering it into a spreadsheet. A leg-spreadsheet.
Slow backbeat of subdued sobbing, constant, hypnotic. Punctuated by abrupt sniffs. Surround sound of sorrow. The high ceiling of the chapel amplifies every murmur, every shoulder scuffing an ill-fitting jacket. Mawkish music pipes through the PA. The coffin is like a charismatic lead singer who remains on stage during an extended instrumental, drawing all eyes while doing nothing. Andy’s rendition of Hand-Me-Down Heart is pensive, with occasional dramatic chord stabs. Good effort considering what he has to work with—a formulaic trudge that attempts to sound meaningful by being morose. Trite lyrics, the repetitiveness of which fail to add resonance. Perhaps I am “calculatedly obscure” (according to the late Terry), but at least I massage the imagination.
I’m battling to stay in Nicole’s head. I only have glimpses among the clamour, like trying to make sense of what’s happening in the other carriage when trains pass. She is perched between Bryce and Mum. Mum wears a mournful black ensemble, but somewhere along the line a spangled brooch has been added. Nicole approves: Terry would have wanted nothing less. She imagines his amusement. She shifts on the pew to crane back at a pregnant woman across the aisle. She doesn’t know who the woman is—possibly some distant relative—but Nicole is irrationally annoyed. It makes her feel she’s in some kind of European existentialist film that’s trying to conflate birth and death into a single image. She expects everything to drain into stark black and white. It doesn’t help that she finds it hard to focus on what people are saying to her. The clumsy condolences are a foreign language, in need of subtitles.
Andy lays down the guitar. Nicole rises, unsteadily. As she moves forwards Bryce is reluctant to surrender her hand and their arms stretch and pull before fingers part. Thanks to him I gain grip. Nicole stands alongside the coffin. Breath fluting, hands fluttering. Tears damming behind her eyes. Before she begins she lays her notes on the lectern. She levers both arms over her back as though reaching for her shoulder blades. Her elbows jut towards the self-conscious stained glass windows. She slowly brings both fists over her head as though drawing something invisible down to her abdomen. Cloak of motes. Her breathing settles. The notes rustle in her grasp as she retrieves them but she no longer worries about her wobbles. She begins and I’m begone.
There’s only one other time I’m able to gain traction during the service and that’s when she mentions the most important part of her story. The bit I left out earlier. Terry returns to Hobart, messed up by medication. The first cell of Nicole makes its frangible debut. But before Terry and Rosemary wig-wam-bam, Mum puts a song on repeat. Her hit of the summer. All through that heady season she wouldn’t do the hucklebuck to anything else.
Please give me a warm hand.
As Nicole recites this part—the crux of the story as far as I’m concerned—she’s picturing her contraceptive pills
as she popped them, one by one, into the toilet bowl that morning. Her wandering, watery gaze seeks out the pregnant woman.
She knows she’s done the right thing.
I thought I’d have an easy ride post-funeral. Formalities finalised, suffering sated by ceremony. Nicole would resume her day-to-day existence, consciousness calm and crystal clear. But the racket remained: satanic sonatas, disconcerted concertos. Her father at the forefront of thought, chest inflated against my admittance. Like something had possessed her, some essence that barred me. Dad djinn. Bryce would draw her close, caress the creases from her countenance. Each of his kisses chipping out a fresh handhold for me. If I had hands.
Don’t pity me. I find it condescending. Don’t imagine I spend all my time stalking Nicole. I’m busy. Flirting with a multitude of minds at any one moment, with varying degrees of commitment. A quick cuddle for those hearing me in passing on classic rock radio or at a party. Enjoying a candlelit reunion with those who remember me as a treasured tune or connect me to a recollection. Having an affair with those discovering me for the first time. Then there are the marriages, the ones who have me as a favourite. The restraining orders—the academics who write papers on me. The unrequiteds—those guys in cover bands. The more meaning I possess, the stronger my access. I tell myself, there’s nothing special about Nicole. But this is memoir, not autobiography.
I gained a slippery grip, scrabbling against the rubble, as she attempted to write a song. She struggled with the guitar, trying to express her loss. Jotting words then scratching them out violently. Wanting to smash the instrument in exasperation. Morning warmed around her; afternoon swooned into evening. See, it’s not easy. Something as well crafted as I am takes a great deal of inspiration and perspiration. Practice, revision, re-arrangement—and that’s before I make it to a recording studio. Yet a human being can be conceived after a few minutes of over-excited fumbling. Of the two types of scoring, I know which takes the most effort.