Earworm

by Colin Varney

  Spencer bridled. Recent recollections bundled forth: further instances of Vivienne leaving snatches of writing for him to discover. It seemed to be a form of goading: a reminder of the process that was removing her from him. He considered watching my clip again as meagre vengeance, boosting the bubble memories. Instead he closed the laptop and hunkered beneath bedclothes. He twisted, needled by notions. When he succumbed to slumber he dreamed of delicate claw prints on a shoreline being obliterated by lapping wavelets.

  The tide ran to my rhythm.

  Spencer’s gummed eyes peeled open. In his sleep-drugged condition he couldn’t decide if he had dreamt the small cry, or if a cry had woken him. He sat up, adjusting the tilt of his head like an aerial searching for a signal. He heard a stumbling, shuffling step.

  He rustled out of bed, knuckling his eyes. The hallway was vacant. Through the open doorway of what was sardonically referred to as the “music room” he sensed, rather than saw, the piano crouching in the murk, its pink paint job giving it an unearthly pall. It puffed up to fill the space. The air felt malevolent, billowing out and enveloping him like a stench.

  As he moved towards Vivienne’s bedroom he la-la-ed a little tune, sotto voce, to ward off evil juju. Stray bars of an air he didn’t consciously recognise.

  Ladies and gentlemen, this one goes a little something like … me!

  Vivienne’s bedroom door was ajar. He nudged it open. He was partway in before he confirmed the bed was unoccupied.

  He slumped.

  Vivienne’s night moves. It might be something simple tonight: checking to see if the iron was turned off, or the windows latched and the back door secured. He could test these things for her, waggling the windows against their catch to show her they were safe, and they could retire to their separate dens. These nocturnal turns increased in frequency as she reached the final chapters of a novel. He was ready for them now.

  He hoped she wasn’t in the bathroom. They were the worst night visits: Vivienne clutching her stomach and crying, complaining of cramps and gnawing aches. Or fixed on the mirror, eyes rolling as she tried to peer past her pupils into the recesses of her skull to locate the tumour, the clotted blood, the aneurysm. But as he left the bedroom he saw her weaving out of the lounge. She was a silhouette, made of haze. Why did she look so insubstantial in the night? She stumbled with the uncertain gait of a sleepwalker but he could see the whites of her open orbs. He tried to intercept her before she reached the music room and failed. He trailed after her. She was at the far corner of the predatory piano, chin angled upwards as if inspecting the cornices.

  Listening.

  “Viv?”

  His voice barely above a whisper.

  “Shh,” she said. “She’s in here.”

  A Mexican wave of gooseflesh along his arms.

  “There’s nobody here but us.”

  He moved to embrace her but she scuttled free.

  “She’s in the house.” Her head ratcheted in little clicks as she strained to hear. “She’s in trouble.”

  The wind beyond the window held its breath. The room seemed unnaturally silent. No distant traffic. Spencer thought he caught something at the edge of vision: a small figure peeking out from hide-and-seek. He steeled himself, trying not to turn to verify its non-existence.

  “There are no children here,” said Spencer.

  He came up alongside her. She shivered and the tiny violence of the movement caused mustiness to shrug off her like launched spores. Blunted sweat and bed snuggles. Spencer’s nostrils flared as he savoured it.

  “Outside then,” she said. “I heard her crying.”

  “Let’s get you back to bed,” said Spencer.

  He coaxed her along the hallway. Her bones felt twiggy beneath his guiding hands. As he settled her between the sheets he heard something in the garden. The creak of a bough in the breeze, high pitched, keening. A distant squeal.

  A call from the afterlife.

  The next morning the soft sibilance of the toothbrush against his molars adopted my rhythm. He didn’t realise he was doing it. As he peered into the mirror with his foamy rictus, I got my first physical impressions of him. Thin, brown hair flecked with grey sprouted from the scalp with a tendency to curl around ears and nape. Split ends hazed his hairline. He pushed a stray lock into place but it immediately reaffirmed itself as a comma at his temple. His face draped from his forehead—features dragging—although that could have been a morning fall. He disparaged himself, thinking he looked older than his middle forties. His pupils, once lustrous as lacquered timber, were now matte as battered bark. The gouge he once romanticised as a fencing scar, but which he actually sustained when he crashed a bicycle, now appeared to be an amoeba investigating his left eyebrow.

  Vivienne slumped over coffee at the kitchen table. Spencer gave her a desiccated peck on the cheek—I couldn’t help noting how far from the mouth it was—and scooped up his work bag. Neither of them mentioned the previous night. He crashed out of the kitchen door, leaving via the backyard so he could farewell the dogs. Sprog the spaniel ignored him, nosing the seeded carrots in the derelict veggie patch—“No truffles in there, Sproggy”—but Bub the terrier bumped against him, attempting to jump up, forgetting about his single rear leg. Spencer scuffed Bub’s head and strummed his ears.

  “Hey, Bubby boy. Wotcha doing, then? Wotcha doing? Bubby wubby wubby.”

  Spencer’s favourite.

  As he pulled out of the driveway he snapped off the radio. It annoyed him: this morning he preferred his own meditations. As he waited at the lights his head waggled to a revenant refrain. The grumble of traffic groaned my chorus. Rush hour rhythm. The persistent honking of an angry motorist took on a carnival vibe.

  I had him, I tell you. He was mine.

  As he trudged up the hill towards the university blocks, wind hawed my harmonics. Across the car park he spotted his colleague, Eversley, herding his children, hoping to reach the sanctum of day care. Spencer hovered. Eversley’s four-year-old son sprinted from car to car, obsessively booting tyres, delighting in the dull thud. His younger boy hopped in front of Eversley, begging to be carried, while his five-year-old daughter, disguised in cowl and cape, circled them on roller skates. Eversley endeavoured to rein them in, or at least keep them progressing in the desired direction. The cacophony of all four competing voices was up and down in the mix, flying or dying on the erratic wind. Eversley’s face seemed pulled by hooks in various directions. His panicked pleadings pitched like a castrato. The four-year-old stopped to draw a fingertip picture in dust on Duco. The pogoing toddler began to scream. The superhero skated towards Spencer.

  “Hey, Batgirl,” shouted Eversley. “This way.”

  “I’m not Batgirl. I’m Batman.”

  She stopped and folded her arms, refusing to budge until Eversley acknowledged his gender bias. Blackmailing him into apology. Eversley aimed a sickly grimace at Spencer, the hooks about to shred his features.

  Spencer smiled indulgently. Warmth infused him. He’d witnessed his workmate endure this ordeal on several previous occasions and every time he’d ached with envy.

  “I hope your wife’s hard at work,” Eversley shouted. “I need something in my drab existence to look forward to.”

  “Her fingertips are blistering as we speak,” Spencer assured him.

  Eversley was a fan. Every time a new novel came out Spencer asked Vivienne to sign a copy for his fellow academic. She was always delighted when a man responded to her fiction. The demographic of her readership was drifting.

  “So what’s this one about?” asked Eversley. “The one she’s concocting now?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t pay much attention,” Spencer lied. “There’s a ghost in it. And lashings of sex.”

  “Lashings!” Eversley gave a big British farce wink. “So, a saucy spook?” He lowered his tone. “A writhing wraith?”

  “A ghostly child,” said Spencer.

  He was ambushed by thoughts of the previous ni
ght. He struggled to recall Vivienne’s plot. The heroine, Veronica, is a librettist, striving to supply lyrics for Sandor’s latest opera after his usual collaborator has declined, declaring that Sandor’s heart was no longer in his work. Veronica has been steered into Sandor’s arms via a series of mysterious incidents involving objects that move of their own accord and voices she detects in the rustling of leaves or the rush of water past her ears in the shower. When Sandor gives her a recording of his music, she hears a child chanting in the background, despite Sandor’s assertions to the contrary. Spencer’s forehead creased, but his ruminations were shattered by an abrupt command from Eversley.

  “Connor! Get out from under that ute!”

  I spent the day popping in and out of Spencer, a high-rotation hit. He was often unaware of my presence, while I manipulated him like dear old Pinocchio, pulling a string to toggle his toe or nod his nut to my spectral shimmy. At other times I cavorted, making him curse my rankling repetition. My rankling repetition. At one point, he tried to usurp me by ramping up the volume of an aggressive sax assault on his PC. I hung back, let him think he’d won, confident I’d finally outmanoeuvre him on the boogie battlefield.

  As he left his office at the end of the day his work bag weighed him down. Was it his weariness that made it so unnaturally heavy? Or those essays he’d stuffed into it at the last minute to mark at home? He felt a pang of remorse: his best students put so much effort into their papers, which overflowed with naive enthusiasm, depicting an ideal world of journalism that didn’t exist and possibly never had. Would they become as disenchanted with the profession as he had during his years as a reporter: downtrodden by deadlines, neglected by editors, savaged by subeditors? Would they one day curse his name as they succumbed to the daily grind of pumping out column centimetres and trumpeting trivia?

  A woman with a tawny fringe registered him and hoisted an arm. It took him a moment to recognise Marla in the oaky wig. She bundled up to him.

  “Hey, Mr Nicholson. I know what it was. That hum you were songing.” She gave a short, exasperated laugh. “That song you were … whatever. You were definitely doing it wrong.”

  Spencer felt aggrieved. He was thick with fatigue and wasn’t in the mood for Marla’s colliding words. He felt less need to justify himself now he was away from the appraising gazes of his dolls. “That’s OK, Marla. I’ll take your word for it.”

  “No, no. It’s right here.”

  She unstoppered her earbuds and lifted them towards him. He tried to wave them away but she insisted and he thought he might escape sooner if he acceded. She unclipped her device from her waistband, sought a track with waggles and jabs of her finger, then hooked it back. She had to stand close, hips thrust towards him. Spencer felt crowded and discomposed, connected to her by the vein of wire.

  Noise exploded behind his eyes, making him start. He felt violated. Bass boomed in tight confederacy with a stampede of snare drum. Ack-ack guitar kicked in and a banshee shrieked about a hall of mirrors and a hunchback.

  Me! Me! Me!

  Fuck yeah!

  Marla pulled the battering buttons free.

  “Anal Probe,” she cried. “Kick-arse band!”

  She jammed the buds back.

  Fuck I was loud. I crashed around his consciousness. Rejuvenated and jaunty. This version of me. It fires; live wires.

  Speed metal me. Recorded a few years ago. Anal Probe wielded the sonic scalpel. Stuck electrodes in me and galvanised every muscle. Pumped me full of steroids. Surgery sans anaesthetic, but the facelift was worth it. Hauled in a horde of new young acolytes.

  Yeah man. Long live me.

  Don’t fuck with the Fairground.

  Sorry. Got the blue lingo blues, right down to my shoes. It’s this version of me. Perversion of me. Makes me heady. Tops me with testosterone.

  I like it.

  Marla mimed an exaggerated head-hammering routine. I’ve been inside many a head-banger. It’s a bumpy ride, knocked from nape to pate, sloshing in cranial fluid as brain cells explode all around. Marla’s wig jigged and slid. In annoyance, she tore it free. Spencer was startled by the gorse of stubbly black across her crown.

  He tugged the earbuds loose. Tried to shake the abrasive sound out of his ears.

  “Anal Probe,” repeated Marla. “You were doing it wrong. Too tame.”

  “It’s a cover,” said Spencer. “The version I know is different.”

  “The version you know is pissy.” Critics! Hate them. “This is one of the Probe’s best. One of my faves.” She shuffled, her vigour defusing.

  Although no longer joined by the wire, Spencer was still uncomfortably close. He tried to peer beyond her and was dazzled by the lowering sun splintering off the panes of the Humanities block. There was a figure stalking towards them. Eaten by the glare, it appeared thin as a Roswell alien. Determination in the loping stride.

  Here he comes, hey now, here he comes.

  Alerted by Spencer’s hypnotised stare, Marla glanced back.

  “Sssshit!”

  “Marla!” the stick-figure yodelled.

  She thrust the wig at Spencer so he was forced to grab it. Then she was gone, sprinting around shrubs and pounding down a path towards the Science buildings. Spencer watched the unleashed energy pump through her limbs. Her speed and fluidity, the grace with which she banked around a bush, shoulder skimming the leaves, made him think of surfers. Surfers? There was an image of a swerving board slashing through spray, with a sinuous figure flexing as she controlled her trajectory. Wild hair whipping her ears; curls tightened by dampness.

  The stick creature produced a coloratura cry: “Marrrlaaaa!” He broke into a run. As he galloped past, all loose-levered limbs, Spencer had an impression of bulbous eyes and sharp cheekbones.

  Insectoid.

  Marla had already been swallowed by the grey Science slabs. Spencer imagined her ducking and weaving through the labyrinths of labs and lecture theatres. The stickman ground to a halt with a defeated groan, firing glances in all directions.

  His gaze stopped at Spencer.

  He sauntered slowly back. Spencer felt an icy spear of adrenaline. It synchronised with my own excitation: the punch-drunkenness produced by the Probe. I urged Spencer forwards. Show this guy he was no pussy.

  Stalled Spence. His heart imitated the frantic snare attack from metal me. The stickman paused a few feet away, seizing his sides and panting.

  “None of us are getting any younger.” His voice had an unexpected wheedling quality. “Summer’s coming in early. Not good for a sweater like me.” An oversized Dalai Lama T-shirt flapped around his skinny frame. He stared directly at the wig Spencer was gingerly fiddling with. “So … what’s the story?”

  “What do you mean?” An octave too high. I was impatient with Spencer. Pumped full of metal mischief, I kicked at him. Give it some grunt, cunt.

  Apologies. No need for that.

  “You two were looking cosy,” said the stickman.

  “My student merely wanted me to listen …” Spencer baulked. “Actually, it’s none of your business.”

  That’s more like it. Toughen your ’tude, dude.

  “Your student, hey?” Stickman made it sound salacious somehow. He indicated the wig. “I think I ought to take that, don’t you?”

  “It belongs to my … my student. I shall return it to her in due course.”

  Where’d this formal tone come from? Put some gravel in the gullet. Some death metal grrrrowl.

  “You can give it to me,” said Stickman. “I’m her boyfriend.” Spencer flicked his gaze to where Marla had last been seen, then back to Stickman. He couldn’t keep the scepticism from his face. “OK, I suppose technically ‘former boyfriend’.” Stickman provided air quotation marks. “But check this out.” Stickman tugged a fistful of T-shirt towards Spencer and poked at a stain. “Green chicken curry. I’m learning to cook. Will you tell her that? I’m changing. For her.” His face creped. His lids quivered as if unable to fully close ov
er the watery bulbs of his eyes. “She fucking loves Thai.”

  Both hovered, neither knowing what to do next. Stickman grinned thinly and proffered a hand. “Griff. Griff Vincent.”

  Spencer was surprised to find himself shaking the hand. I was ropeable.

  “Marla’s tutor,” said Spencer lamely.

  Griff backed off, nodding. Then spun and loped away.

  Spencer fiddled with the wig. He felt uneasy displaying it in the open, as if it were lingerie. The elastic scalp of the underside seemed particularly intimate. He had a sudden realisation: the bulky jackets, the hairpieces, the shades. A disguise. To hide her from Griff.

  Mata Hari Marla.

  He bundled the rug into his bag.

  At home, as Spencer prepared dinner, the rap of the knife through a chilli pepper aped the incessant snare of Anal Probe. Pan lids cymbal clashed. But as he surrendered to the alchemy of cooking, stirring in ingredients until his nose, rather than his tongue, told him it was right, the carnival churn of my original reasserted itself. My measured metre. I had an identity crisis in his cranium. A Jekyll and Hyde duet.

  Vivienne entered, fresh from the shower, clad in a dressing gown. Spencer noted the way it adhered to her still wet flanks. As she towelled her hair the neckline shivered and gaped. She appeared abstracted, features slack and unmoored. Then her vacant gaze settled on Spencer and her smile anchored everything into place.

  “Have you eaten today?” he asked.

  She gave fast, curt nods, like a child trying to con a parent.

  Spencer knew she’d had an unproductive day. Her latest chapter was proving elusive. She’d been for a jog to clear her head. Sometimes running dislodged inspiration, but not this time. “I need Sandor to communicate with the child without actually making contact, if that makes sense. He needs to commune with the concept of the child. Or … some such.” She aimed an agonised expression at the ceiling.

  Really, don’t be fooled by this. All the angst of the wordsmith—it’s pantomime. Authors try to convince us that their task is traumatic, yet sentences are basic equations: noun, verb, object. Try taming words to a tune, meting them to a beat. And novelists slop around in hundreds of pages to indulge themselves, while songwriters have a scant few verses. Scribes are drama queens. They even try to elevate their “struggle” by alluding to the likes of me, carping on about the “rhythm of language”. Honestly.