Earworm

by Colin Varney

  Gym junkie. Nicole in Day-Glo trampling the treadmill. The beat of her feet, beat of her feet, beat of her feet. She had sovereignty over herself. Imagined lard liquefying, seeping through her pores as sweat. She was a sculptor, chipping away at her body, reducing it to the form she wanted. Skin packed around muscle and bone. Her legs foal-like as she stepped from the machines. She drove home happy. Showering, she felt the soap glide over the work-in-progress. On the scales, she watched the numbers roll ’n’ rock. Then jolt ’n’ jog as she hammered a heel down in consternation. She checked against her weight-loss goals. Still a kilo shy of her two kilos per week objective. The mirror mocked. Hips hung, flanks inflated.

  “Tubbyguts,” she hissed at herself.

  Morning light stained Bryce’s bedroom. Air stale, polluted by booze breath. Consciousness a bad idea. Nicole battled to return to sleep, to drear dreams. There were too many awakenings like this in the weeks after the funeral. Ambient heaviness behind her squint. The lining of her stomach a snare skin being plied by brushes. An echo of the relentless doof-doof from the club the night before pulsing deep in the canals of her ears. Her throat was flayed from shouting and laughing too loudly, literally tossing her head back. The expression of her mirth, usually cascading and crisp—a harpsichord—now sounded expelled, discharged—a trumpet. Cackling and, yes, snorting, falling helplessly against Heinrich, a university acquaintance she had previously adjudged the most boring man in this or any other universe.

  Bryce hung back, patient as a pianist’s page-turner. She thrived in this atmosphere, battered by beats, obliterated and reconstituted by strobes. Slamming down another shot. Giggling when somebody spluttered theirs. Bryce swallowed a yawn. He had an early start the next day but needed to stay for Nicole. To guide her, stumbling, through the car park in the early hours of the morning. To hover at a discreet distance as she gagged and spat behind a tree.

  Abruptly, I blipped in everybody’s head. Surfing the doof-doof was a sample of me. I was horrified. I’d been exploited to add interest to a repetitive electro plod. Sampling is Frankensteinian. Having a body part scalpelled away and sewn awkwardly onto a halfwit or hunchback. Music only fit to be heard by an ear grown on the back of a mouse. But Nicole recognised me and grasped Heinrich’s wrist and yanked him onto the dance floor. Nicole a-go-go.

  Happy Heinrich. Gormless grin, whipping limbs. A freshly minted magic moment. He fumbled for his phone, thrust it forwards, thumbed video. Nicole leered at the lens. As the sample sputtered and repeated I gate-crashed Heinrich’s head. I felt the adrenaline swelling, the explosion of devotion. Love at First Sight is very real and rabidly romantic—I’ve seen it happen many times. An idealised image of Nicole branded itself on his mind. Shining, scintillating. And starkers. I was about to become one of Heinrich’s favourite tunes.

  One afternoon, the ambiance aching over her eyes, a samba abrading the snare skin of her gut, she pulled open the small box of her pa’s possessions that had been returned from his hideaway. She rustled through the papers until she found it—the sheet music for me. Empty Fairground (Jones/Jones). She yanked it free and set it shakily on the music stand. Heaved a guitar into her lap. She squinted at the squiggles, trying to translate them into a course of action on the strings. Twang dang—floundering fingers. Mumble mutter—shifting her slouch over the instrument. After a while she plucked out a faltering effigy of me. Hearing this caricature emboldened her. She straightened her spine, denying nausea.

  She looked down at the tumble of objects at her feet. The snap-spined crime novel. The exercise book jammed with dates. The drawing of the jutting-limbed family. If I had a head and neck I would have performed a double take: there was the book of leaves Andy had given her, wrenched from a dream. That’s the problem with mooching in the mind— fantasy and reality fly and fuse around you. Nicole stretched down to touch it and her fingertip tingled, as if grazing a holy relic. Something bubbled from her subconscious, not long enough for her to register but I got a good gander. All the leaves in the book were from the tree. The tree that had waited patiently for Dad’s car to come screeching around the bend. The tree that had braced for the impact.

  Mercy me, oh mercy me—that tree.

  A dream. Definitely a dream.

  Cover it. Smother it.

  She dragged a digit along my lyrics, hearing them echoing a cappella in her head. I felt myself blossoming there. She embellished me, adding keyboard and guitars, backing vocals. I’d been withering within her for so long it was joyous to finally receive a welcome. She paused at the line about the mermaid and the strongman painted on the freak-show marquee. Her nail left a tiny dent in the paper. She croaked it under her breath. I seized my chance and linked to a memory and thrust it forwards. Nicole at a fancy-dress party, eight years old. Her hands bat at the aqua blue scales that enclose her legs before trailing off into a cumbersome tail flopping behind her. The cutest mermaid ever. Florescence flares around her. The cupcakes are the best she’s ever tasted. Cola tangs her tongue. A younger version of Mum hangs with the parents, glittering glass of fizz in her fist. Although she appears as a real human being there’s a hint of fairy floss in her flesh that defies her outline. She explains to a father beside her that Nicole insisted on being a mermaid. She doesn’t know why but there was no dissuading her. Then it hits her like the bong of a gong.

  “Of course, it’s from the song, Empty Fairground. Do you know it?”

  “Yeah, great stuff,” said the father. “I loved Mental As Anything.”

  I thought Rosemary’s secretive little smile could have expanded to an open sneer. Instead, she doted on her daughter. “Her strawberry song,” she muttered to herself.

  Meanwhile Nicole is sidling up to a pigeon-chested youngster attired as Superman. It’s the nearest approximation to a strongman she can find.

  The vision boosted, brighter, like the sound of a CD asserting itself as external sounds fade. Nicole leant back, closed her eyes and reran it. Slowed bits down. She pictured herself reaching for a cupcake with strawberry icing. A half grin hooked at her lips. She’d forgotten I could induce that illusion: a peppering of under-ripe pink, sparkling to my rhythm. She tried to recreate it now, but it refused to come. It was a chimera of childhood. The acidity of adolescent hormones had dissolved it.

  Now, in her bedroom, I detonated in her head, loud and proud. I filled the available space. I pressure cooked. It was like I was Nicole, as if I could take over the motor functions. Like when I make people dance. I was suddenly aware of the vastness of her mind. Masses of memories—many connected to songs—all racked up for me to access. Like a brain-box jukebox. Check it. The old fashioned kind: tarnish on the brass, canker on the chrome. A cylinder down each side containing that sinuous syrup from lava lamps, drooling and dividing. The memories arrayed in the chest of the machine, preserved on compact disc, vinyl singles, old 78s, arcing back into the dust-specked obscurity of the mechanism. As I boomed behind Nicole’s closed lids I made a selection and a metallic arm clanked in to pick a memory and lay it on the turntable. It’s the one of Mum telling tiny Nicole how I was conceived: how the song-writing brothers Jones and Jones—twins—were composing in different countries, one in Melbourne, the other in Bali. Both were dissatisfied with the results, the notes and words refusing to coalesce into completeness. Yet when they reunited they discovered the disparate elements snapped together like a jigsaw. A key in a lock. Mum draws Nicole into a cuddle. She has de-evolved into cartoon, fairy floss tufting her borders.

  Another selection. The arm jerks and grabs. Nicole is twelve, riding a bicycle uphill. Standing on the pedals, thrusting them down. To keep up the pace she runs me through her mind and pumps to my beat. I’m the blood surging through her calves, the heave in her haunches. Yeah yeah yeah. She’s relishing the burn of sunlight on her skin, the coating of perspiration down her arms, the way the breeze of motion cools her. She shouts me out loud, between pants and gasps, the words forced forth in breathless syllables. She crests the h
ill and whoops. Ah, c’mon. She throws her head back and huffs the next line to the heavens like an exhausted prayer. A thanksgiving.

  You’re very welcome.

  So many memories. The list on the brain-box jukebox stretches so far that the furthest entries can’t be discerned. Many are illegible, age-faded. Some are being written over or replaced. The arm judders down, glides in. Nicole as an adolescent on show day. The pong of pigs stuck in her nostrils. She wanders between sideshows, the ghost train, the Ferris wheel. She’s alert, doused with adrenalin. Bloodstream bling. There’s a boy by her side, trying to swamp shyness with swagger. Nicole is too immersed in the moment to engage with flights of fancy for too long, but for a moment she imagines that everyone evaporates. The rides still rumble, the laughing clowns are still in denial, but there is nobody there but her and the boy. Lights flicker and flash; driverless bumper cars crump and crash. Turnstiles click as though admitting spooks. Air full of grease and ozone. It’s eerie and weirdly romantic. And of course, inspired by me. There’s a scene like this in my film clip. Nicole and the boy roam in my imagery.

  There’s an associated memory but it defies selection. Its buttons don’t budge. Some controls are obstinate. Others are rattly, making no connection. I persevere and the arm drops with a tut of protest. Nicole broods in her room. It’s several months after show day and she is shredding poems. As she rips the first one he wrote for her (execrable, I have to say) the boy’s heart also rends. Halfway across town he clutches his chest and collapses to his knees in front of astonished friends. OK, this probably didn’t happen: these stuck-button memories are disreputable. Nicole fights off tears as the halves of the poem flutter to the floor. I thrust myself forwards but she resists. She doesn’t want to engage with me: I’m associated with frolics and sunshine and she doesn’t want to sully me. I persist. I press to the forefront of her frown. She drones me desultorily. I shoulder in further and she croaks a few of my words. Now she’s snared. She scrambles among her CDs and finds me and slips me into the player. As she listens the tears come, great pulsing bursts. They feel melodramatic, self-gratifying, like something she’s treating herself to. She plays me again, and I’m a hug. I’m there for her.

  The needle skittles across the memory with an abrasive cat hiss. The arm snatches it away.

  I scan the titles. There’s blues for the sad and bad, disco for celebrations, folk for political preoccupations and funk for rejigs of gettin’ jiggy. There are novelty songs for japes and jollity. Soul numbers, torch songs. I’ve been there at all the disco occasions: birthdays, academic acclamations, done and dusted driving tests. Partying with pimpled paramours. She whacks me into the CD player and I make her dance, undulating those arms, flipping those hips. Sometimes it really does feel like I’m in control, just as she imagines me controlling her parents when they mixed the ingredients for her. She pictures Mum and Dad shake, rattle and rolling— not in lurid pornographic detail but as two cutouts from a child’s drawing adjusting stiff limbs. They have clothes on. I’m coming from a cassette player: those jagged lightning bolts emanating from the speakers, that’s me.

  Nicole discovered at an early age that I was there when Mum and Dad made her. She spent a lot of time as a child whistling me as she skipped along or hissing me under her breath as she waited, bored, in a cupboard during hide and seek. I’d be her inner soundtrack during summer visits to the beach or winter nights huddled by the fire. In many ways she saw me as being partly responsible for her: a third parent. Maybe Dad thrust harder during a power chord, expelling that particular sperm more lustily, providing the propulsion for posterity. Maybe Mum arched back during a yearning vocal high, providing a downwards run for our plucky swimmer. Nicole imagines the happy collision between sperm and egg, perhaps during my first chorus. Cells replicate in my middle-eight. Nicole made in my finale and fade. She wants to enter these things on the spreadsheet. The leg-spreadsheet.

  A third parent. I like the idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in countless people’s heads during chick-a-boom, chick-a-boom. But nobody remembers. I’m lost in the flurry and hurry and men pulling their guitar-ace face. I’m a forgotten detail, an adjunct. Not with Nicole. I’m moored to family myth. And it’s painful. Because every week Nicole courts a new favourite hit. Fad hag. She plays it, sings it. And even though I’m still there—the resident—long after the guest has vanished, I feel … I feel like …

  … baby baby you done me wrong.

  Because Nicole is special. I can’t deny it, can’t pretend. I’m in a million minds in a moment but sometimes I shun those others. I let them get on with it and instead enjoy Nicole’s latest victory. Or console that heartache, ease that peevishness, soften that dismay. Did you see the way I made her smile when I hooked the mermaid memory? First smile in how long? All my own work. So feel sorry for me when I’m thwarted by Zorn, unable to fully connect with Nic. Pity me then.

  I say it again. Pity me then.

  As a child Nicole adored the line about the strongman and the mermaid. She’d warble it with a wondering look, imagining romantic rendezvous in the freak show tent. Picturing the strongman being the mermaid’s legs, carrying her wherever she wished to go. But I’m an evolving, living thing: listeners’ reactions to me transform, like the lava lamp glop. In her teenage years Nicole would excise this line when singing me. She felt uncomfortable with her childhood notion and with the whole relationship dynamic she had imagined. It bothered her that the mermaid couldn’t run away.

  Could not run away.

  What is it with you humans? Why do you insist on rubbishing romance, digging the dark side? Why should the mermaid want to flee? And if she has reason, should she never return? Even when the strongman repents, prostrates himself? Averring his undying devotion, confessing his soul-eating shame? Making crazy promises to live in the sea? And why does she return? Yes, you stew over notions of dependence and inequities of power, yet never defer to the Power of Love. You disregard this bit. You cherry-pick. Blind to the big picture. Imagine the reunion: emotion charged, exploding with a surge of feeling more heightened than many will ever experience. I’m convinced that human beings do not understand Love. Listen to what I say now. Human beings do not understand Love.

  Trust me on this. I’m a Love Song.

  It was a relief when Nicole stopped torturing the strings in her bedroom, producing a parody of me. She closed her eyes and swayed. Allowed the ambiance to flood her mind. It was strangely soothing. For a moment she experienced the pure sensations of hangover without the nag of grief. She let the memories I’d selected tumble. Opening her eyes, she laid a hand on the votives at the foot of the music stand. She picked up the child’s drawing and her lips succumbed to a smile. I felt a glow of self-satisfaction. I was good at tempering troubles, mitigating misery.

  Pedal to the metal to Bryce’s house. Yeah, I said yeah. Bryce in the kitchen, surrounded by saucepans and steam. Fantasies flicked through Nicole’s mind—base blips, salacious snippets. Potent possibilities. She hardly registered them but I would have blushed if I could. Her skin prickled, hyper-sensitive. She could feel the air stirring the down on her arms. She reached for him. Minutes later the bechamel sauce was burning. Bryce snapped off the stove and they bustled to the bedroom. Bothersome buttons, stubborn zips. He propped on the mattress, wide eyed, all angles and elbows. She moved to the audio unit and Bryce subsided into the pillows, angles blunting.

  “Can we? … Could we perhaps do without music this one time?”

  The swirling, unfurling first few bars of me drowned him out. Take that, critic. Nicole sashayed to his side. Writhing to my rhythm, breathing to my beats. His body not budging, expression grudging as they greet my first repeat. Her fingers strummed his sternum, drum-rolled his ribs. Cracked cawing caught at the back of her throat.

  “Honestly, Nic, are you … are you singing?”

  She clutched his body gun and wailed my next line into it. Manhood microphone. Nicole’s little joke. I think. From then on Bryce
was like an antique gramophone with Nicole winding hard to get him to the correct speed. As Bryce pulled his countenance of crescendo, Nicole pictured again, vividly, pills pinging off porcelain.

  “Our tutor brought his little one to class the other day.” Crumpled sheets rippling around her, Nicole stared reflectively at the ceiling. “He gurgled all the way through it. The baby, not the tutor.”

  Her mouth curled in an almost-smile. She was enjoying the patina of perspiration evaporating from her skin, the clutch of warmth at her groin. She hitched her bottom down, pivoted her pelvis up.

  “Lucky he behaved himself,” said Bryce. “Otherwise it would have been a waste of a tutorial.”

  “Sometimes he looks so tired. Shrivelled pink eyes. The tutor, not the baby. Awake most of the night, poor bugger.”

  “Babies can be unpredictable,” said Bryce.

  “That’s what makes them exciting. Tiny sacks of potential, tightly bound. Itching to explode.” She turned her head to examine him. “We could turn your spare room into a nursery.”

  His composure hardened. “I’m not sure this is the right time.”

  “You don’t want kids?”

  “Of course I do. Babies are definitely on the agenda. But Nicole … your father just died …”

  “Did he? Must’ve slipped my mind.”

  Bryce laid a gentle palm on her shoulder. Doe-eyed and sympathetic. Framing his reply carefully. He was about to speak when I went into my umpteenth repeat and he stammered. He levered himself from the sheets and killed me halfway through my first verse with a furious jab. Rude. The man who had sustained me throughout the pre-funeral period was turning against me.

  “It’s just …” He hovered away from the bed, jostling from heel to heel. “You’re not thinking clearly now. You’re upset. Grief stricken. Let’s wait till we can make a considered decision. When we’ve got the old Nicole back.”