Earworm

by Colin Varney

  She trailed him, hanging back, becoming jittery as she drew up close at red lights. Craning to see if he had one of those cartoon families displayed on his back window: the bone-coloured stick figures of pony-tailed girls with hockey sticks or freckled boys on skateboards. A line of descending height, starting with Dad wielding barbecue tongs, progressing through to sons and daughters and then perhaps impish grandchildren. But the window was clear. She tried to penetrate the cabin to catch that elusive visage.

  She was disillusioned when he pulled into McDonald’s. She’d hoped Spencer would have better culinary standards. But perhaps this meant he had a heart robust enough to boost blood through ever-thickening arteries. She became aware of the throb in her own chest. She followed and tried to keep track of him as she prowled for a park. He was already out of his car and ambling for the entrance. He was heavy about the waist but had trim limbs. There was no sign of infirmity in his movements: no rheumatic limp or arthritic clicks. He had rounded shoulders and there was a droop of the head that produced a morose demeanour. He hesitated, as if putting off an impending appointment. There was something about his gait that she found effeminate. Then she reassessed. The contracted stride and under-swing of the arms felt overly familiar. And something about the way he hefted his hip upholstery made her aware of her own girdle of new girth. He didn’t walk like a woman: he walked like her.

  A car backed out in front of her, causing her to slam on the brakes. She pulled into the evacuated space, but as she manoeuvred the vehicle she lost track of her quarry. Killing the engine, she glanced back to see him talking to a woman and, startlingly, a clown. The woman sported dark shades and had a jacket tossed over an arm. She was topped with an obvious auburn wig. Mismatched thatch. She hung close to Spencer and Nicole felt a shiver of suspicion. The juxta- position of Spencer and the clown confounded her. His hangdog hauteur and funereal frumpiness clashed with the clown’s rainbow raiment. A duet between Leonard Cohen and Liberace.

  There it was again, in the way Spencer held himself. The left leg kinked at the knee when he was at rest. The compensating tilt of the head to the right. Nicole felt a resonance in her ribs. She watched them file into the restaurant.

  She wanted to One! … Two! … Three! … Four! … but couldn’t move. There were tingles along the surface of her skin. She fumbled with the door handle. When she stood her legs were bendy as a musical saw. She edged nearer the restaurant, concealing herself behind the children’s climbing fort, with its slides, pipes and peepholes. Muffled squeals and scrabbles came from within. Nicole strained to penetrate the glare flaring across the restaurant window. She spotted Spencer’s head inside with its inquisitive tilt. He was seated at a table. Once again, wig woman was too close. She remembered the face she’d encountered at the bedroom window and a quiet alarm sounded. Spencer was stiff and uncomfortable, watching the clown entertain a family at the next table. When he responded to the clown’s antics the laugh was quick to die. For a moment, she feared he might be dogged by a Zeppelin. Same design as her own.

  She told herself she was stalking him to gather information, to prepare herself for that fateful moment when she faced him. As she loitered behind the shapeless hulk of the climbing structure, she doubted she’d ever be brave enough to initiate that meeting. She was still aware of the disconcerting fibrillation in her chest. She felt as if she was about to be given meaning, like a freshly composed score on the music stands of an eager orchestra. She was about to be interpreted. It scared her.

  Yet she was hungry for more details of Spencer’s face. After some time, she moved away from the playground, edging closer. She could discern the ovals of his eyes now, the muscles working in his cheek. It stopped her in her tracks. It was something no photograph could capture: the way the features fluctuated. Their subtle restlessness. She could see the influence, like a band that has a huge hit and follows it up with a different song that sounds the same. Spencer was Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and she was Two Tribes. He was Wild Thing by The Troggs and she was I Want You. Even JayJay had a go at this, following me up with the dire dirge Sideshow Shadows. Never heard if it? Not surprised. Didn’t even make the compilation album of singles. And, let’s face it, that line about the “rock’n’rollercoaster” was beneath them.

  Nicole laid a hand over the cardiac thwack behind her ribs. She sensed it was in rapport with the convulsing organ in Spencer’s chest. Not pulsing in synch: rather, she thought of their hearts as a bongo beat—twin tom-toms producing a complex, intertwining propulsion.

  Her indrawn breath produced a curt cry.

  She was overwhelmed and unsure what to do next. Should she stride into the diner or hail a taxi for the airport. She suddenly craved the comfort of loving arms, the jolt of hot coffee on a brisk Hobart morning. Bryce’s face swam before her. Could she explain herself to him? Could he ever forgive her? She closed her eyes and wished herself away from this hostile environment with its thirsty air. Could she get her job back? Return to study? She felt a fleeting cosiness as she recalled her old existence. Her cloaked life. Even Terry made a guest appearance. She saw his guarded grin as he riled her with a jibe at her politics. She wanted to believe this manifestation of her family still existed as badly as Mum wanted to extract Terry’s voice from a scratched record. She opened her eyes and saw parents gathered around tables, children brandishing burgers or slurping shakes, chins daubed with special sauce. All of them captivated by the clown, who was wrestling a tangle of balloons to suddenly produce a giraffe. The over-bright decor and the clown’s harlequin hues brought to mind the way she’d once envisioned her family myths as colour-injected animations.

  She took out her phone and scrolled to Bryce’s number. She stared at the digits, thumb poised to activate.

  Wig woman slid up close to Spencer and pecked him on the cheek. Nicole watched Spencer turn to the woman, his eyes drawing tight. Nicole was close enough to see the burst of hucklebuck. Spencer clamped his lips on the woman’s mouth. They crushed into each other. Nicole numbed.

  This was the real inheritance. The infidelity gene. Dominant in both her mother and Spencer, it raged inside her.

  In that moment she knew who she was.

  A large family group fussed in front of her, but through the obstruction of bodies she saw those hucklebucky eyes open. He spied her and jerked back. Disbelief contorted the distorting mirror of his face. Desire drenched his dial, as if he hadn’t shaken it free after smooching his mistress. Nicole felt the gall gurgling up her gullet. She saw Spencer lurch to his feet and feared he was coming for her. Somebody bumped her and she staggered. It spurred her into action. She backed away, still held by his Satyr stare, then spun and ran. When the crying hit it emerged like truncated foreign words.

  Lily the PhD student has meticulously sequenced my genome. She’s done the DNA testing. She’s isolated the naive but threatening bucolic blackness inherent in Morris’s obsession with Syd Barrett from the poppy dynamism of Johnny. She’s noted the dormant mid-career Beatles gene and investigated Johnny’s childhood fascination with carnival themes. She’s unearthed that Morris honed his skills by playing along to the more sorrowful songs of The Reels. My congealed genealogy. I felt dissected: reduced to constituents. She should leave room for a little mystery. I flicked into her head as a distressed Nicole swung out of the car park of McDonald’s, almost sideswiping a van. Nicole didn’t get far, slewing across the road and parking. Gripping the steering wheel, suppressing tears. Feeling as betrayed as a fan who has invested a lifetime of devotion in a performer, only to discover they’re a sex offender.

  Lily was in Adelaide too, wandering the streets that nurtured Jones and Jones. Wondering if it was the drabness of the ’burbs they grew up in that forced them to over-stimulate their imaginations and saturate their songs with vividness and verve. She’s excited about the reunion. Only one day to go.

  When Spencer came home the house was hushed except for the scampering taps of Vivienne at the computer. His greeting
sounded weary. She didn’t answer but met him in the hall. She seized his hand and pulled him into the music room. He watched as she lifted the piano lid and sat on the stool. She paused with her fingers curled above the keys. He expected her to suddenly leap back, repulsed by her own pose. Instead the hands settled into the ivories with surety and grace. He watched, bewitched, as her fingers flexed and licked.

  She played a slow, soulful version of Happy Birthday To You.

  Her body swayed and jerked to the chords. He could sense how each note hurt her. Reverberating in her bones. When she’d finished she froze with her fingers splayed in the keys and her head hanging. He dropped to one knee and wrapped her in his arms. She fell into him.

  Spencer’s headspace became uninhabitable. Orchestral mess. Untuned tubas and harping harpsichords. Loony lutes, mad marimbas. A threnody for Bethany walloped me. I was still in his head but deafened, numb and dumb and unable to link to his cognitive functions. After all this time—eight years—his grief is still powerful enough to roll me. Doesn’t he realise he’s been bamboozled by biology? Nature forces you to bond with your child so you’ll protect it. Try to force a human to do anything else and they bristle and complain, but show me the protest song about being strong-armed into caring for your kid. There isn’t one. No “Free The Genes” or “Make Love Not Wards”. The offspring are equally compromised: learning to adore their parents through dependency. There’s nothing magical or spiritual about these connections. It’s filial fascism. Viva la evolution.

  I’m superior in this respect. Johnny and Morris worked actively and passionately to form me. I wasn’t a process that simmered away inside Mum while she was busy doing something else. I was an investment, a deep expression of their innermost being. Not a biological bingle of sperm and ovum. They moulded me into what they wanted me to be. Try doing that with your kids. Modifying your toddler, taming your teenager. Johnny and Morris made me and chose to love me. Morris’s affection has waned a little, but I can respect that. His love was Real. His love was True.

  Spencer believes he loves Bethany. Yet what does he love? Did Bethany ever have a personality to enthral and entrance? I have tried to understand this, I really have. I’ve tried to compare it with something I comprehend intimately. There is nothing more romantic, more potent than spying a stranger across a room or at a bus stop and knowing they are the one for you. Ahhh yeah. Love at First Sight. There’s something in their smile or in the twinkle of their eye that conveys their personality, their essence. Their sensuality. And the levees of love, the dams of desire, rupture. I conjectured that perhaps this is what happens when a father first claps eyes on a shrivelled scion. Except babies have no personality to convey with a twinkle. And that smile is a grimace of expelled wind. Then there is this: Spencer believes he was in thrall to Bethany before he saw her. When she was a blind, amphibious blob—a clenched creature like a shaved mole cowering inside Vivienne. Doting on a zygote. As far as I can make out, he was cock-a-hoop over a concept: Love at First Suggestion. And when Bethany entered the world he didn’t so much transfer that feeling from concept to object; rather, the concept transformed into the object. From maybe to baby. Or at least that’s what Spencer conceives.

  It’s all noise to me. The conductor has succumbed to epilepsy and the orchestra’s trying to follow her flailings. I will never understand. I will never be a real boy.

  Nicole watched her card being gulped by the ATM, wondering how much she could extract from credit after exhausting her savings on the air ticket to Adelaide. When her account blipped onto the screen she saw there were several thousand dollars in it. Somebody had transferred a large amount of cash. It could have been Mum, but she suspected Bryce. As if to confirm this, her phone trilled his ringtone. He had called her several times already, his theme jockeying with the bleating bars that indicated Mum. Their messages banked up in her inbox. She had listened to one: Bryce entreating her to call him back, to let him know where she was. “Are you in Adelaide? Rosemary thinks you’re in Adelaide.”

  She hadn’t expected this interference, having convinced herself she was no longer a vital part of their lives. Surely after she’d caused so much bother they’d be glad to be rid of her. But of course they’d try to find her. Bryce especially, with that caring persona he loved to project. She realised how simple it would have been to trace her. Following Mum’s revelation about Spencer they would readily assume she had fled to Adelaide. The trail was painfully uncluttered.

  The phone trilled again so she switched it off. She withdrew five hundred dollars and stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans, then grabbed her holdall and sought a public toilet.

  In the loo, Nicole buried her nose into her armpit and sniffed. She recoiled and peered into the sheet of steel that substituted for glass on the wall. No plunging into this mirror to find it splashing around you and transporting you to underwater wonderment. No transformations here. She was confronted instead with an imprecise facsimile, blotted with the specks and dents suffered by the surface of the metal. She was bedraggled in her sloppy top, underarms spreading with sweat. Her hair had bled colour, the curls unsprung. Strands smeared her temples like incursive creepers. Her features lacked definition, flesh disconnected from bone. She couldn’t relate the mirage to herself. It looked flimsy, yet she felt heavy. The tonnage of her thoughts unbalanced her head and her body was laden. As she stared, she realised this copy was what her pursuers were after. It was the idea of Nicole they loved—the representation, the projection—not the unwieldy reality. I was aware of Nicole’s reflection too and it was the eyes that struck me.

  The eyes.

  Cue late-show horror-flick fright chord on the pump organ.

  She regarded herself for moribund moments before abruptly ducking towards a sink and dowsing her face. She combed fingers into her thatch, trying to coerce it into shape. She hauled her shirt off and sloshed handfuls of cool water beneath her arms and around her midriff. She pulled the holdall close and rummaged, pushing aside trackie dacks and a hoodie. She pulled out a bundle of black and let it unfurl from her fist. The fall of fabric danced a gentle sashay then settled.

  “Ahh, nice!” said a woman applying lipstick at the basins.

  It was the dress designed by Paul McCartney’s daughter. She remembered holding it against her in the ritzy restaurant beside the Derwent years before. No, not years; only a few months. Grunting with relief, she peeled her jeans free. The dress rustled over her head but didn’t drape properly. She tugged it into place. It wisped about her legs but wrapped her waist. She slapped the saddles of flab around her thighs. Too fat for fashion. The zipper jammed halfway up her back. The woman at the basins stepped forwards and yanked it home. Nicole felt the material entrapping her. She felt netted.

  “Can’t breathe.”

  “Suffer, sister,” said the stranger. “Let me tell you, it’ll be worth the pain.”

  Why this new interest in appearance? I tried to define what she was up to, but these days her thoughts were masked from me. More than that, I believe they were masked from herself. She was loath to dwell on her intentions, keeping them at one remove.

  I’ve seen this sort of thing before, but I too prefer not to dwell.

  Mercy me, oh mercy me.

  As Nicole coaxed her hair into decency, somebody in a stall started to warble. The tune wasn’t me, unfortunately, but it was lilting, although rendered hesitantly. The stranger at the basins paused to listen, then joined in, her robust rendition convincing the crooner in the cubicle to proceed with more gusto. The stranger nodded at Nicole to join in. She declined, but the tune penetrated her heart. In the public toilet, with its lingering odours, floor puddles and grimy plugholes, the women’s song was a momentary balm.

  In a far-flung outreach of Damascus, a young soldier listened to me on an ancient Walkman. He was a foreign fighter, terminally homesick and regretting his enthusiasm for righteous violence. The fact that he was listening to me on cassette confirmed his idea that warfare was r
eversing civilisation, driving the country backwards in time. Savouring me allowed him to block the future and cease predicting what the next hour, the next day, might bring. It provided a respite, a small oasis of forgetfulness. A surrender to sweet sorrow. Something to hold onto for 4.22. You want mindfulness?—live in that moment. I do some of my best work under such conditions. Consoling; ennobling. Proud of myself. A large swathe of cassette tape had been mangled and somebody—probably the soldier—had smoothed it with painstaking digits. Still, I was garbled; stretched and distorted into something that is me and yet not me. Chewed and crinkled, I had that submarine sound, muffled and mumbled. I can’t help wondering: is this how Nicole is at this moment? Smothered and scrunched, battling to be herself? Has the entirety of her tape been crumpled?

  The stranger patted her on the shoulder. “You’re gonna knock ’em dead,” she said.

  Nicole drove into the city. The sun no longer seared the sky but buildings hugged the heat jealously. The glow of bars and restaurants added a new tenor to the streets as daylight dwindled. A transition was taking place: a new dominion being established. Patrons spilled onto the pavement, standing and clutching drinks or commandeering tables. They exulted in the sultriness, celebrating it with gaudy garb, laughter and chatter. Nicole slunk past, tacky with perspiration. She found it difficult to move in the dress, each inhalation binding it around her. She tried to inhale shallowly and found herself panting, so she reached behind and released the zipper. The loosened flaps of fabric folded across her shoulder blades like wings.

  As night deepened, Nicole’s ears pricked. She detected a bass-and-drum pulse and tracked it. It pulled her into a laneway where a straggle of youth filed before a nondescript door flanked by bouncers. I tried to fool myself into thinking she would join the line and enter the club, hitting the dance floor and allowing her body to usurp her and banish her blues, the fluidity of her moves flushing joy across her face. Perhaps she would approach the DJ and request me. All wishful thinking. Instead, she bothered the edges of the queue, interrupting conversations with cautious enquiries. She was doing her best to be personable: play-acting. Her mouth was wrought into a smile but her eyes gave her away. Her eyes. I can still see her eyes in the reflective steel. The dress wasn’t enough to make her fit in. She got nowhere with her questions. She headed back to the main drag and tried to pick up a new pulse.