Earworm

by Colin Varney

  “The old Nicole?” She scooped herself into a sitting position. Bryce’s love elixir leaked. “This is Nicole. I’m Nicole.” She prodded her chest. “That girl you just fucked.”

  Potty mouth.

  One! … Two! … Three! … Four! Bryce gathered her up and they rocked together on the bed, clutching at each other. Arrows of anger deflected by amour’s armour. All traces of Zorn blown from the room.

  Clucky Nicole. I’m not surprised. This often happens. I’d been expecting it since she’d tried to write that tune, the one expressing her feelings for her father. Failed songwriters often contemplate kids. Artistic people who aren’t quite artistic enough resort to progeny as Plan B. The easy option. A few minutes then settle back and bake. It’s a short step from poor creation to procreation.

  One more thing, you know it’s true—Nicole’s period was overdue.

  Did Bryce suspect? In the clubs, disoriented by doof, mistuned by mirror ball, did he watch as Nicole raised the glass to her lips, then hesitated? Lowered it, regarded the boisterous bubbles with trepidation. Nursed the drink as her friends gulped and gurgled. Tried to abandon it on the bar before a well-intentioned stranger alerted her to it. Finally, in an unobserved moment, emptying it behind a floor-length drape.

  Nicole considered the leg-spreadsheet. The mind-numbing succession of events that’d had to tumble into place for her to exist. I’ve pondered this too, about myself, prompted by those swots cobbling together theses about me: my enigmatic lyrics cribbed from Syd Barrett, himself influenced by Edward Lear and music hall. My keyboard riff adapted from eighties post-punk, inevitably mutated from the Blues, itself begat from tribal trance and dance. How far back do you want to go? A Neanderthal hitting a bone on a cave wall? The cave carved by erosion out of rock formed by cooling magma? In Nicole’s teenage years it seemed that the likelihood of her being a being was like winning the lottery a thousand times in a row. She was obliged to continue the line of luck, the daisy chain of destiny. She yearned to make another entry in the spreadsheet.

  Another spreadsheet was causing consternation: her weight-loss goals. The strike of Nikes on the running treadmill. The angry shush of the rowing machine. Nicole loved the whine of fatigue in overwrought muscles, the deluge of endorphins. She willed the kilojoules away, focusing on thighs, belly, bum. Felt her skin sealing her in, taut trap. Home, on the scales, threads shed, her enthusiasm withered. She double-checked the spreadsheet, praying she’d misread it. The discrepancy between the numbers was galling. She wanted to lash out at her reflection, that sour, vanquished figure with the bloated jowls and pouchy chin.

  I can only interpret Nicole through her own perception— through her filters and veils—and she morphs every time she confronts a mirror. Nic the chameleon. As she yanked on her clothes, she swore at the material dragging over lodes of cellulose. Or was it just sticking to her sweat? She slumped in front of the telly, spooning peanut paste from a jar. Later, crouched over the toilet with her fingers attacking her throat, her harsh utterances sounded like a distortion of the laughter she never afforded the sit-coms.

  Ubiquitous me: on the iPod at the gym and in the boudoir. On the CD player in the car. Emanating loudly from Mum’s lair. Mum had exhumed the record player from the loft and was spinning me on a single. 45 RPM. Usually I appreciated this: I had a warmer, richer resonance and there was something intimate about the crackles and snaps. Like an open fire. But Mum’s copy had scratches and they jarred me. It was sickening. Imagine losing a relatively insignificant body part—a pinkie or ear lobe.

  The atmosphere in the house was strained. The spare room was spare once more. The departure of Terry’s sister meant that Nicole and her mother no longer huddled like allies. They still took the opportunity to reach out and glancingly touch as they passed, causing a firecracker burst of Zorn, but each also began to retreat. Mum listening intently to my mutilation. Nicole palpating her paunch to sneer at the folds of fat. Or wondering if there was something hiding in there. And if there was, how much did it weigh? She’d spend some evenings mangling me on her dad’s guitar. It was a relief when she’d pause to frown dreamily at the icons at the base of the music stand. Frowning, because she was sure something was missing.

  She would often escape to Bryce’s house. Before they’d do the Blueberry Hill thrill she’d surreptitiously remove her pad, uncertain if she was relieved or dismayed by its dryness. Then she’d program me on repeat and Bryce would wilt.

  No matter where she spent the night, she would have the same dream: her dad fixing a swing to the branch of a tree and perching her on it. She sees herself, a little girl, giggling as Dad’s firm palms settle on her shoulder blades, pushing her higher.

  “Touch the sky with your toes, Sunny Bunny,” he implores.

  Wind breaks around her as she sails upwards. She leaves her body and sees the scene as if from afar. She recognises the tree.

  Mercy me, oh mercy me—that tree.

  Dad reaches out to touch the trunk but draws back at the last minute. A presentiment makes him shiver.

  Morning smothered the dream. When it threatened to surface I piped up in her head, exhorting her to hum.

  As Nicole passed Mum’s room her gaze gravitated to the bruise-blue brick on the dressing table. The plastic pot of precious ash. Cremated pater. The colour of the canister reminded her of overcast skies. When they’d taken possession of it, curiosity immediately got the better of Nicole and she’d peered inside. Her first crazy notion was that Dad had been dehydrated: she only had to add water to get him back.

  There was a burp of Zorn as she stalled, captivated by the canister. Her gaze strayed to the bed where Mum’s handbag gaped. Two charred pages had been crammed into it. On one, she glimpsed a colour-saturated cartoon of a porcine aeroplane. With a start, she realised what had been missing from the shrine in her room. She listened to reassure herself that Mum was clattering around the kitchen, then made for the bed.

  The first sheet was indeed her childhood drawing: Nicole, Mr Nicole and progeny, the fat jet overhead. She blinked at it, puzzled, wondering why her mother had snatched it and then apparently tried to incinerate it. The second sheet contained the lyrics of a song. Something twanged within as she recognised Dad’s distinctive scrawl. She noted the words: “hutch”, “infected” and “breeding like bunnies”. Most of it had been scorched away. Flakes fluttered from its fringes. The drawing was more intact. A flowerbed, the cats and half of the dog had been lost. Nicole stuffed the sheets back in the bag and crept away.

  Several times that evening, as she passed Mum, her lips parted, threatening to spill questions, then clamped closed. It wasn’t just that she’d have to explain what she’d been doing rummaging around in Mum’s belongings. There was something else. The damaged pages smelled of secrets, reeked of regret. Half burnt, they denied destruction.

  In her dreams, Nicole pushes the swing. Her daughter sits upon it, grinning and gurgling, stretching her toes to the sky. Leaves rustle in the bough above.

  The gym was a refuge. Breath hawing; muscles imploring. Harsh rasp of apparatus. The always broken vow not to consult the scales. But once she’d left the gym she didn’t know where to go. She was caught between two enervating environments, avoiding the bleakness of home but unable to meet Bryce’s quizzical kindness. Guilt nestled within her like … well, like a song. One of those catchy ones she didn’t like but which clung there, nagging, tempting her to whistle, to reveal her bad taste.

  At Bryce’s house, she found herself with a palm pressed to her lower abdomen, whipping it away before her boyfriend saw. Recalling the pills popping off the porcelain with a nudge of nausea. Constantly on the cusp of confession: One! … Two! … Three! … but no Four.

  Arguments proliferated: over the washing up, over missing the beginning of a TV show, over Bryce being too loud or too quiet. She hated the way he’d back down. Resenting his irksome compassion, his indomitable dignity.

  She’d abscond to her own abode, seeking sanc
tuary in her bedroom, but she found Mum’s domain oppressive. Me too. Mum was still playing the record of me and it had suffered further scratches. I was losing more body bits, like being caught in a slow hail of bullets. It made me jumpy. Literally. What was she doing with that single? I knew, of course: I was in her head. But I’m not telling till later. I may not be a ballad but I know how to tell a story.

  Some days, a black burden descended on Nicole. Pain pulsed, rippling back from her hairline. Her legs became logs, her arms armoured. Her GP investigated any propensity for self-harm and supplied a referral for a blood test to determine Vitamin D levels. Nicole knew the drill. Her father had insisted she see a doctor about this sort of thing before. Then, the tests suggested she was healthy, that she became upset when bad things happened. The GP proposed the same diagnosis now, insisting that grief could manifest in many ways, including physical symptoms. Nicole binned the referral as soon as she reached the street, unprepared for bulletins from her blood.

  Reams of dreams. Rustle tussle—a little girl Nicole knows is her daughter romps and riots in a pile of leaves. Cackle crackle—the child tosses them in the air and they cascade around her, twirly whirly. Sticking to her cheeks, her chin, her forehead. One! … Two! … Three! … Four!— Nicole there, panicky, trying to tear them away, but they don’t budge. I say it again. They don’t budge. Pan back. The leaves are from a solid, spreading tree. Its lower trunk has been damaged. Dented. Bark gouged away. Mercy me, oh mercy me …

  A refugee from domesticity, Nicole found herself marooned in multiplexes watching random movies. Quick pick flicks. She enjoyed none of them. I’m not surprised. Flimsy, fatuous film. To make an impression it needs pictures, dialogue, CGI effects and something like me lacquered over the top. And ninety minutes to two and a half hours. Overkill. Literally, if it’s a high-body-count actioner. I’m done and dusted in four minutes twenty-two seconds. The only pictures I need are conjured between the ears. Superior CGI like you wouldn’t believe, especially with my stygian imagery and woolgathering groove.

  Nicole drove to Bryce’s place after enduring two movies in a row. She’d already forgotten what they were about. She felt summoned; Bryce had left a string of messages on her phone. Despite this, she was incurious. She parked further along the street than necessary and sauntered towards the lighted porch. Her head stuffed with thought-absorbent material, her gut lined with lint.

  Something pink on the doormat snared her attention—a candy blotch with indistinct outlines—one of her drawings intruding into reality. As she came closer it resolved into a fairy-floss cardigan, woolly and preternaturally tiny. She scooped it up and it crushed and fluffed in her palm. Bemused, bewitched, she clicked her key in the lock. The door swung to reveal a puppet-sized powder blue jumper on the floorboards. As she straightened from retrieving it she became aware of Bryce silhouetted at the end of the hall.

  “Of course we’ll have kids.” Wobbly words. “Beautiful, wonderful kids. Straight away. No time to lose.” He gulped hard to keep control. One arm cantilevered, extending rigidly from his shoulder. “I’ve made a start. Accessed some essential resources. Here.”

  He looked frozen in the act of boxing someone on the schnoz. A pacifier protruded from his fist like an absurd little hat.

  She paced the few steps and grasped the latex in a pinch. His fist fell away. The ring attached to the dummy’s underside was small and gold.

  “What’s your answer?” he warbled.

  Some humans understand Love.

  Nicole the ambushed animal. Caught-in-the-spotlight eyes. “This is not fair.”

  When Bryce’s face paled, the teardrop blemish above his lip leapt out like an exclamation mark.

  “I take it that’s a ‘no’.”

  All Nicole could see were her dream daughter’s features warped with weeping beneath a mask of foliage. Each leaf shaped like a tiny Zeppelin. Nicole tugs and they dog-ear but do not budge. Leaf leeches.

  “Seriously, Bryce,” she fanned her hands down her flanks, “what is this lardy sack of shit going to look like in a wedding dress? Have you thought about the photographs? We’ll be stuck with them for the rest of our lives.”

  “Don’t be silly, Nicole. Look in the mirror. You’re not fat.”

  The dog-ears tear free to leave vegetal fibres that irritate her daughter’s cheeks. I hoped she’d forgotten this dream.

  “And there you go—being nice. Niceness as a weapon.”

  “Nicole, calm down. Let’s sit and talk.”

  “So you can belittle me with your compassion?” Nicole akimbo. “Nobody likes a victim, Bryce.”

  Bryce performed several variations on befuddlement. “How am I a victim?”

  Nicole in damage control. Mouth clamped. Upper body twisting as if uncertain where to turn. She thrust the dummy back at him and broke for the open door. Bryce called after her, once. She drove back to the multiplex. It was blank faced, closed. She scrambled into the back seat of the car. Sleep, fast and deep. Drenched in dreams.

  The bough creaks as the swing sails back. Nicole thrusts her arms forwards to push but they greet only air. The seat is empty.

  Nicole tries to reject all notions of a vanishing child, but every time she pushes the dream away it lobs back.

  This is another area where songs are better than humans. When we are aborted, bits can be recycled. My middle-eight is a section of verse from an abandoned previous ditty by my creators, Jones and Jones. But with humans, it’s all or nothing.

  Nicole eschews the unanswerable question: if she made the child vanish would she confess to Bryce? Would it be more terrible to sing, or not to?

  “How are you and Bryce getting on?”

  Nicole roused from a doze, head lolling against the back of the car seat. Her vision focused on the low hills slipping past. Scudding cloud cover made them changeable, unstable. Ephemeral as the pop fads that scudded through her mind. Engine drone lured her back into slumber but the weight of the bruise-blue brick in her lap and her mother’s question made her stir herself.

  “Yeah. Good.” She forced herself to sit up, repositioning the canister. The streamer of highway unfurled before her, mottled by shade.

  “You scored yourself a good-looking one. So spunky with his new haircut. Do you think he’d let me tousle it?”

  “Mum, please. Don’t say things like that. Makes me feel icky.”

  Mum uttered the bluesy burlesque cackle that filled Nicole with equal parts affection and embarrassment. Getting away from the house and the city had cheered both of them. Mum had tried to dress down and, as usual, hadn’t succeeded. There was too much zest in the scarf. The clogs weren’t appropriate.

  Nicole hugged the container securely. Surge of Zorn. “Are you sure Dad changed his mind about this?”

  Nicole always believed her father wanted his ashes scattered on the east coast, in a bay where he and his teenage mates once lit bonfires and huddled with guitars playing the back catalogue of The Smiths and Neil Young. Dreaming of being in a band together, making up their own dirges about heartache and mortality and rain. But now she and Mum were heading up the Midlands Highway to Ulverstone. To leave his remains somewhere along the path he’d taken that night, perplexed by pills, darting for his sweetheart and Hobart, leaving graffiti for astronauts and aliens.

  “Course I’m sure.” Mum’s voice sharp, brittle. “He told me.”

  “When?”

  Mum flicked over her shoulder to the back seat. The vinyl single of me lay there, pitted and nicked.

  “As long as you and Bryce are good. That’s all that matters.”

  “We’re peachy.”

  “Because all relationships hit bumps. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Like the last bump you and Dad hit?” Nicole clutched the canister to her stomach. A fantasy flashed: her dad and her unborn daughter communing through the barrier of flesh and plastic. Before she had time to savour it her subconscious squirreled it away. “Why did Dad leave?”

 
Mum squinted at the road as if expecting hazards. Wobbled the gearstick, fiddled with the headlight controls. Settled back with a theatrical sigh that signalled everything was in order. “You’re not spending much time with Bryce.”

  “How do you know?” Nicole had spent nights dossing on the back seat of her Nissan. Brief bouts of troubled dreams, fighting for comfort with a single blanket that smelt of car boots and spare tyres. “And how did you know about his haircut?”

  “Hobart’s a small place. I’ve seen him in town.”

  Shuffle scuff—Nicole angled so she could drill a stare into her mother.

  “OK,” said Mum. “He came to see me.”

  Nicole thought the car might disobey its steering, veer out of control. Vertigo-go-go.

  “He’s worried about you, Nic. Says you’re acting strangely.”

  She had a vision of her loved ones clustered, plotting against her. Bryce, Mum and, strangely, her father.

  “Was that before or after he proposed?” Nicole wanted to sound disgruntled but her voice was dead.

  “After he what?” The car navigated a long stretch unsupervised as Mum shone at her. “You said yes? Of course you said yes.”

  “The Zeppelin’s coming, Mum. Dad’s Zeppelin.”

  Nicole turned to the hills. The sliding shade became the umbra of airships.

  “That’s nonsense.”

  Mum’s tone blithe as a xylophone.

  “It’s true. It’s coming for me.”

  “It never has before. Why now?”

  “I’ve done some terrible things, Mum. Terrible things to Bryce. He’s too good for me.”

  “You’re grieving, lovey-dove. That’s all. It’s natural.”

  “I’m thinking of getting an abortion.”

  Mum’s face performed a glissando. Gaze glued to the road. The sound of the engine like a long vocalisation as somebody struggles for expression. Errrrmmmmm …