Earworm

by Colin Varney

  “What do you want to drink?” he asked.

  “Bring me what you think I’d like.”

  He looked dubious but plunged barwards. Nicole was irritated by the low current of conversation surrounding her. She had the unshakable notion that when she ceased looking at people, they deactivated, only reanimating when she glanced back. A couple at the next table canoodled, amalgamating into a single entity.

  Heinrich set semi-precious sparkling before her. Nicole peered longingly at the bubbles chasing up the glass. She could almost taste the ping and plash on her palate, the suggestion of sweetness. She recalled the many tribulations that had been blunted by booze. Her hand yearned forwards. She replayed Heinrich’s video in her head, her features spastic and elastic, tongue lolling. Face unfocused as she crowded the camera. Her hand withdrew.

  Heinrich was like an articulated action figure trying to relax. She could see from the way his pupils floated that he’d downed some Dutch courage. He embarked on a rehearsed rant about the classes she’d missed, emphasising their importance to an impending assignment. He intoned abstracts of the lectures and pushed carefully typed notes across the table. The paper soaked up spilled ale. She was aware of his eyes flicking over her. I’d spent time in his head and I can attest that his feelings were heartfelt. Poetic and passionate. His mind was in ode mode, with a dash of rugby song.

  “You haven’t touched your bubbly,” he said. “You don’t like Moet?”

  “I don’t drink. I’ve quit. Alcohol is a screen.”

  She balled her fists at her nape and drew them over her hair. Heinrich failed to rein in his amazement. Nicole glanced at the window, almost expecting to see Terry. She missed him suddenly, sharply.

  Heinrich surged back into his spiel. She laid a hand on his knuckles to quieten him. He jumped. Neuralgic with nerves.

  “What do you think of me?” she asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “Describe me.”

  He smacked his lips as if unsure about a morsel. “You have red hair … Brown eyes …”

  “No, no.” She shifted irritably. “What am I like? How do you see me?”

  He coughed out an uncertain laugh. Gulped a slug of beer.

  I could have helped him there. Since that night at the club I’d been tightly associated with his images of Nicole. She scintillated, coruscated. Hallowed and halo-ed. Nicole on a podium with a slouch of insouciance. She wasn’t always fully clothed.

  Heinrich had placed her on a bedestal.

  Beyond Nicole other women waited, unperturbed, killing time in the queue. In the days of CD shops, staff would often display the album that was playing with a message such as: You are currently listening to … Heinrich’s bedestal was similar. The sign read: You are currently worshipping the woman you will cherish for the remainder of your days. At 4.15 pm on that Friday afternoon in October it was Nicole.

  “Well, you’re … intelligent. Smart. An awesome dancer. Remember the night we—?”

  “Go on. Describing.”

  He wriggled. “You’re … witty. Interesting. A little sad. There’s …” he injected a tinge of intrigue “… there’s a touch of mystery about you.” He beamed, pleased with himself.

  “Keep going.”

  “You’re hard working. Diligent. Disciplined …”

  She scooped the glass and slurped several mouthfuls.

  “I thought you said you didn’t …?” Heinrich stuttered.

  The couple at the next table broke from a clinch but kept their heads in close proximity. Everyone acting. Nicole too. But at least she knew she was a performer. Not content to play her part. She felt suddenly superior. And alone. “You’re saying what you think I want to hear. Be brave. Go out on a limb. I’ve seen you perving at me.”

  He goggled around the room as if seeking an escape route.

  “Let’s be transparent,” she continued briskly. “I think you’re rather tedious and unimaginative. What do you think of me?”

  “You’re … I think you’re beautiful …”

  Timorous timbre.

  Nicole hefted her left leg in both hands. “What do you think of these tree trunks?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How about this gut? I’m filling out, Heinrich. Growing into myself. Like a baby growing into its clothes.”

  “I suppose you have … put on a bit.”

  His expression constricted like a band member realising they’re playing the wrong song. Nicole’s fireball of fury was rapidly extinguished by gratitude. She smiled and nodded. “Now you’re getting it.”

  The couple at the bar were still mesmerised by each other. Nicole imagined they could see tiny miniatures of themselves in the pupil of the other’s eye.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  Her chair scraped back.

  “You haven’t finished your—”

  “I don’t drink.”

  She grabbed his hand and led him from the bar.

  Rumpled and exhausted as discarded bagpipes, Nicole slumped on crumpled bed sheets. She regarded the three carefully handwritten pages on the carpet with an air of resignation. She remembered Bryce’s foot lashing out in the throes of sugar sugar, sending them rustling to the floor. She craned nearer to make out the words. She could hear Bryce’s vulnerable voice as he’d recited them earlier.

  “Nobody knows you like me,

  Nobody knows me like you.

  You make me see me in a different light

  You make me see me in a different hue.”

  Oh dear.

  The rhymes were crimes, the structure ruptured. Mutilated metre. Bryce might like to quietly critique me in his urbane baritone but he’s no great shakes in the lyric department. I think he might be appreciating how difficult it is to devise that aspect of me. Thankfully, with love poetry, it doesn’t matter if the rap is crap. It’s the feeling that gives meaning, the character that provides calibre. The amount of heart and soul determines diamond or coal. The fact that Bryce had attempted it in the first place, at Nicole’s request, made him a laureate. He had done his utmost to express his ardour, poring over the pages, scratching out adverse verse, runner-up rhymes. Taming his schoolboy sense of humour. The fact that he had managed to spin sentiments that would embarrass a greeting card was moot.

  Right now, he was crashing around the house, bumping into furniture. She hated to hear his explosive cursing. It didn’t conform to her view of him as imperturbable.

  Less than an hour before, he’d fidgeted before her, reading weedily, the page palpitating in his paw. He’d tried his best to be candid, to coax frangible feelings from their fortifications. The mulberry birthmark atip his lip appeared to have seeped, lightly staining his complexion. She noted again how this blemish emphasised his almost parodic good looks, the hewn-jawed handsomeness of another age. She beckoned him forwards for a kiss. As he knelt on the bed, his weight eased a depression in the mattress that tilted her towards him. Afternoon delight.

  As Bryce stroked she’d felt a second pair of hands bumping over her. Fumbling, phantom fingers trailing in his wake, inexpert and over-eager, a piano student trying to follow the master. Heinrich’s daunted digits. When Nicole had led Heinrich behind a stand of bushes in a park in Battery Point he’d looked unsteady. Pulse thumps, heart jumps. The sticks and withered foliage of the shrubs barely screened them.

  “You know I’m in a relationship?” she said. “A solid one.”

  He nodded, but appeared bewildered rather than remorseful.

  “You don’t care?”

  He started to shake his head, tried to reconfigure it into a nod.

  Nicole felt encouraged. There was something pure about his lust, undiluted by contrition or morality. She felt it was her he desired, the version of her that stood before him at that moment. The real deal. She moved in closer and suddenly he was on her. Suffocating smooches. Hands beneath her clothes too quickly. Palms clammy, leaving smears. She blinked and an image of Bryce blipped. Her knees weakened. B
oneless legs.

  The contents of her stomach break-danced. Bile boogie.

  She pounded his shoulder with her fist. Thrust him away. He grunted in frustration but stepped back.

  They glared at each other, uncertain how to proceed. Inspired by the couple in the bar, she sought the reflection of herself in his pupils. She saw only a cauldron of incomprehension. She stepped forwards again. They collided back into each other’s arms, more like wrestlers than lovers. Everything was concluded speedily. Technically, it wasn’t even gettin’ jiggy. Some grappling and groping and Heinrich’s guitar ace grimace.

  In the softening light filtering through the bedroom window, words wisped off the paper. Nicole thought they might fly at her, buzzing around her like insects. In a moment of revelation she saw she was her mother’s daughter. Terry had been terrified that the Zeppelin would rise from the gene pool; instead she had inherited Mum’s instinct for infidelity. She felt as wretched now as she had when she’d turned from Heinrich and instructed him to stay away from her. Twigs clawed as she’d crashed through the screen of bushes. She’d clomped blindly across the lawn, passing a family with cute keening children excised from an advertisement. She hit the street, climbing a rise. She wavered. Great bubbles percolated up her throat, blocking her breathing. They erupted into her mouth as cries that sounded like groans. She collapsed against a car bonnet.

  Heinrich was suddenly there, gathering her up. He nursed her along the street. She was repulsed by his closeness and thankful at the same time. He cawed reassuringly in her ear. Settled her in an anonymous corner of a coffee shop and placed something steaming and aromatically reviving in front of her. She noted the deep concern in his eyes. If only she could have seen behind his orbs, as I could, to her image emblazoned there. Heinrich was a true romantic, and would be so to any of the girls on his conveyor of bedestals. Knight errant.

  Nicole peeled a page off the carpet. It was the one Bryce had returned to after sugar sugar. He’d brought it to the bed and wound his arm around her waist, reciting:

  “Gravid with promise.

  Gravid with devotion.

  Harbouring our future

  Harbouring our potion.”

  Dear oh dear.

  The palm on her stomach had pressed harder. Nicole felt the weight of her secret, pulsing like migraine. She was ill with lies.

  “I’m not pregnant, Bryce.”

  He drew away, his face a jazz improvisation. Then the features cemented into a beetling perplexity. He launched himself off the bed and marched from the room.

  “I never told you I was,” she yelled after him.

  He was making enough commotion for two rampaging around the lounge. As if his double had stepped from the picture of him in the lake.

  Bubbles in her throat again. She swallowed hard, wondering how many wounds she’d inflicted on Bryce? She lay on her stomach and reached for the pages of poetry. He’d toiled to profess his affections. Rhymes had degenerated into blank verse when he’d felt that finding the right chiming syllable was mitigating his message, hosing down his honesty. A feeble excuse. What if Jones and Jones had compromised so readily?

  Words waltzed before her. Disciplined … Thoughtful … A dreamboat but not a dreamer ( a hanging offence, surely ). There was a reference to her quirkiness that she thought might refer to her obsession with me. As her eyes roved the lines, humiliation barged in, startling her. She evoked Heinrich and his trembly embrace. Klutz lust. She hadn’t detected the tiny double of herself in his eyes but, for a hurried, flurried moment, she’d had the distinct impression it was her he was holding. The Now Nic. As she digested Bryce’s verses, she saw he was describing somebody else.

  Her face flushed. She was reading a love letter to another and trying to discern what kind of creature her boyfriend was involved with. At first Bryce seemed to be describing Terry’s daughter, that pathetic party girl. Then she saw it wasn’t even Terry’s offspring who Bryce adored. She saw words like angel, dreamboat, numinous as Nyman (oh, woeful). There’s some imagery in my second verse, much eulogised by music writers and academics, in which the enigmatic Rosemary clings to her lover in the hall of mirrors. Both are misshapen and hunchbacked, but as they peer into the panes they see themselves perfect, aglow. Bryce’s tryst was with the funhouse mirror version of her former self.

  Refrain of Andy playing Hand-Me-Down Heart. She heard him outlining Terry’s attitude to his songs—that they were the evil twins of concepts that nestled in his mind.

  Bryce loved the concept. She’d been the evil twin.

  Bryce the betrayer. He was seeing somebody else. She was the victim, not the perpetrator.

  She counted off the people closest to her who had deceived her. Her mother fibbing about her father. Terry providing her with a mask to cower behind. And now Bryce. Heinrich was the only one who’d been sincere.

  She tried to sweep the pages from her with a swipe of her hand but they lifted listlessly before slicing back towards her. She was dizzy, adrift. Buffeted by conflicting emotions. Resenting Bryce and wanting murder ballad-style revenge; then aching for the wrongs she was inflicting upon him. She was an orchestra tuning up, different instruments weaving in and out in discord.

  Nicole unplugged the MP3 unit from the bedroom speakers. She flicked through a song file until she came to me. I bounced in her bean, thrilled. Ready for the welcome. When she hooked the unit up to a PC, foreboding flooded in.

  She deleted me.

  I felt it. It was physical. A dissipation, disintegration. A great heave of helplessness as I faded. With a shudder, I recalled Randall’s last moments.

  An over-reaction, of course. I’ve been deleted from song files before with no attendant sensations. I still had a stronghold in Nicole, even if the foundations were becoming shaky, the ground quaking around them. And I was still clattering around countless other consciousnesses. I’m meaningful to a multitude. Powerful and widespread. Frankly, I’m contagious.

  She deleted nothing else. Just me.

  She binned every CD I was on.

  Each day pursued by another. Her body lumpish and immovable. When she roused, an unsteady weight pitched in her innards, battling for balance. Friction of thought. Sleep was the great escape.

  She shrugged into her waitressing garb. Couldn’t remember saying goodbye to Bryce. The taxi driver talked at her but she never replied. Next thing she knew she was in a pub. Elbows adhering to a tacky tabletop. Her mouth welcomed the wine. She didn’t have to swallow: it suffused into her head through the roof of her mouth. A wheedling chipmunk voice chided her for succumbing to succour. It tried to make her stretch over her shoulders to clasp a charlatan cape. She scanned the room, lingering on faces. Unsure what she was looking for. Then knowing: she was searching for larval lips and ebony hair. A boy who might look handsome when sober. Her glance jerked around the bar with increased awareness. The Vic.

  Lager laughter. Raucous rock. The place full of jocks. Ale arrogance. The empty seats scattered around her table a screaming invitation. Curt skirts. Cavalcade of cleavage. Nicole sticking out like a sore thumb in her work uniform.

  She slurped at Shiraz, ruminating, returning to a familiar refrain, cloying and annoying: that summer twenty-two years before. Her mother as a young woman. She’d been beautiful: Nicole had seen the photographs. Latte eyes and dare-you smile. Wearing wiry red hair like she just don’t care. Nicole tried to recreate those snaps, identikitting the anonymous youthful countenances that populated them. One of them could have been him. Father.

  And all summer long there was only one song. Only one song all summer long.

  So the story went. But the stories were increasingly just stories.

  That well-worn rut in her nut. The needle stuck the needle stuck the needle stuck. I used to be proud when she pondered me; now I cringed, jittery. I struggled to link to some happy memories, to nudge her along. She wasn’t budging. She dragged her phone out. Thumbed a number she hadn’t used for some time.

  �
�Mum. It’s me.”

  Cage’s 4’ 33” at the other end of the line.

  “Was the song playing when you … when I was conceived?”

  “Nicole, come home.” The voice soft and broken. “Let’s talk.”

  “You said it always put you in the mood.”

  A muffled mewl. Nicole erected barricades. Suddenly conscious of wooziness. So easy to get sozzled now. If only it had been this speedy in the old days.

  The old days. How many years back was Terry’s funeral?

  Not long ago.

  “How are you, lovey-dove?” Mum’s voice reinforced by a splint. “Bryce says you’re not so good.”

  Months. Barely two months.

  “I need to know,” Nicole insisted. “About the song.”

  An eerie, guttural syncopation. Distant, suffocated. A pixie grunting beneath a burden. Elfin Atlas.

  “Are you crying, Mummy?”

  Nicole’s head was swimming.

  “No.” But Nicole heard the off-mike sniff. She pictured the phone being held away, arm’s length. “Your dad loves you, you know.”

  Nicole tried to define why this foxed her. The present tense. Her head cleared. “How do you know? Are you still in contact?”

  There was a long pause. Nicole thought she misheard the answer in the stew of pub noise.

  “What was that, Mum?”

  “I said ‘yes’.”

  The chair scraped as Nicole propped herself. She crushed a palm against her free ear to drub the hubbub. “Who is he? What’s his name? Where does he live what’s he do?”

  Another pause.

  “He’s dead, Nicole.”

  Baffled, Nicole snatched at her glass. It was empty.

  “Oh, I see who you mean,” said Mum. “No, not him. It’s your dad I’m in contact with.”

  Remember the scratched single of me? There on the back seat as Nicole and Rosemary hit the highway with the ashes? We’ll come back to it.