by Colin Varney
The second club had a less defined queue and scattered smokers gathered in the gutter. The music busting loose from the interior was electro and relentless. Behemoth beats and freaky shrieks. As Nicole ingratiated herself with the punters, somebody tapped her on the shoulder. She was smartly dressed, an office worker rife for the nightlife. The only thing that betrayed her was her wariness, the way she held herself aloof while her pupils flicked, assaying her surroundings.
“Can I help you with something?” she asked.
When Nicole made her request the woman turned her down. But Nicole spun a tale about recalcitrant doctors and a travelling troupe of musicians requiring medication. She knew she didn’t have to convince the woman, only sow enough doubt to salve her conscience. Producing a wad of cash helped seal the deal.
“Come back in an hour,” said the woman.
Me, I was still haunted by the reflection on the tarnished steel. Those eyes. I see Randall’s smile all the time. I see it in the minds of his mates when they play me to remember him. Of course, they resurrect his old grin, the one he shone at them long before he put me on repeat, sank into the bath and watched his blood blooming in the water. They see the glint of flinty mischief in his boyish broadside beam. Towards the end, that spark failed. His pupils became matte, like something that has charred and cooled.
That’s what I saw in Nicole’s eyes.
Crumbly carbon.
There’s a story about my birth that goes like this: I was written with four verses, not three. Jones and Jones realised I would be too long to be a radio hit and decided to cut one. They agonised for weeks over which stanza to sever, then each chose a different one. The disagreement became fierce and almost split the band. Another family fable: Lily’s research suggests that in fact they combined two verses, scrapping and conjoining individual lines rather than culling a complete entity. And they did this over a drink rather than torturing themselves for weeks. Her researches confirm they created me together rather than writing separately and using their telepathic twin powers to produce compatible parts. And everyone adored that they were twins. Except look at them: Morris with his lanky limbs and the gaunt charisma of a consumptive poet and Johnny with his broad shoulders and grizzled swarthiness. They have no physical features in common. So, no, not twins—they were lovers. That’s why I’m a great Love Song.
Lily deigns to pooh-pooh the apocryphal and rein in romance. Personally, I prefer to be legendary. My myths are moreish. I just can’t get enough.
Now, like Jones and Jones, Spencer had to sever. Unlike the celebrated songsmiths, he couldn’t combine elements. He sat in a tutorial, distracted by Marla, making a hash of a discussion on media diversity. He kept contradicting himself, bewildering his students. He’d decided that after the tute he would draw Marla aside and have the Serious Talk in which he would delineate them as Grown Adults Not Flirty Teens. Last night, he’d brimmed with the affection that had welled up in him when Vivienne had wrung her birthday tribute from the piano.
You can imagine my mortification. For centuries, pop tunes have been blamed for leading people astray, making them impetuous, lathering their libido. Destabilising the establishment. Yet I can’t so much as push a middle-aged man into an affair despite enforced celibacy. I suddenly doubted my potency. Come on, Spence. Vivienne may be a poignant pianist but she is still not holding you tight, treating you right. Listen to me now.
Marla had breezed in and shoved an envelope into his hand before taking her chair. Spencer peeked into it as he began his introduction and saw it was two tickets to JayJay’s reunion. He avoided Marla’s blinding grin. The temperature had forced her to abandon her jacket. He couldn’t help noticing she was wearing the short-sleeved shirt she’d worn when they met Griff at the coffee shop. He remembered the children plucking at it, ravenous for attention. Suddenly he was revisiting the airport fantasy, driving beneath swooping planes with Marla in the passenger seat and a passenger within Marla. He pictured Griff’s progeny in a playground being chased by two younger sprites he knew were his and Marla’s. Unreasonably, Bethany is there too, calm wisdom adorning her noble forehead. And then, because he was feeling generous, he included Eversley’s kids. He forced himself back to the office as he realised he’d been reeling out a rambling roundelay of a sentence that senselessly ate itself.
At the end of the tutorial Marla remained seated as the others ambled out. Spencer thanked her for the tickets and was about to say they needed to talk when she leapt up and kissed him on the lips. It was short and shocking. A trio of students was still jammed on the threshold and Spencer was sure they’d seen. It both chilled and charged him, resurrecting the thrill of almost being discovered by Terry all those years earlier. Marla was at the door now, shooting a saucy grin over her shoulder. Spencer didn’t dare make eye contact with the dolls. He registered that undertone again—the low hum of an amp warming. Hrrrmmmm.
He checked his messages. There were two phone calls from a young man called Bryce: maniacal exhortations to meet and discuss a missing girl. Spencer suspected a ruse: a scheme concocted by Griff to pry Marla’s address from him, perhaps. He ignored the calls.
Later in the day Munchkin musicians played the Habanera in his pocket. Yes, he’d changed the ringtone that signalled Vivienne. When he answered, all he could hear was her ragged breathing. The fizzle of the connection made it sound electric.
“Vivienne? What’s up?”
The haw and crackle continued for a moment longer before she said: “No. No, can’t tell you on the phone. Wait till you get home.”
She hung up.
He tried to concentrate on answering emails, but all he could hear was her fishrasp exhalations. It reminded him of the evening after she’d finished her first novel: swerving the car to the roadside after leaving the restaurant, pawing at each other frantically. The guttural gale of her breath. Had Vivienne completed her final chapter? Spencer refused to acknowledge the pictures splashing into his head, but I saw them all. There was Vivienne on the phone, booking a restaurant, her tone frayed and husky. With a gleam of mischief, she books it under the names Veronica and Sandor. Or she doesn’t bother with dinner; she just claws at him as he walks in the door. Tugging at his clothes.
He spent the remainder of the afternoon in a state of heightened distraction, forcing himself to complete mundane tasks. Another call came from the manic young man, which he dismissed. Everything seemed trivial. He became hyper-aware of his own body, flexing his fingers just to feel the stretch and pull of tendons. Innocent statements made by others seemed to be coded with euphemisms: everybody was secretly discussing makin’ whoopee. Not far into a tedious conversation in Eversley’s office he found himself drifting, dreaming. He evoked the ski lodge, the cracking, snapping fire. He and Vivienne shagging on the shagpile. The Habanera fading up. The jackboots of its four-note stomp accompanied by bursts of ruddy flak. In the dream but not in the dream. The winding, tensile verses causing thick snakes of scarlet to squirm around the couple’s arching, undulating forms. It was an unnatural shade of scarlet that Spencer had never seen before: otherworldly; Martian. He and Vivienne grasped the thick whorls and draped them around their cavorting bodies. Some of the tubes were so plump that Spencer could hook his arms over them. They romped in the pliant Colour, which squished like plasticine and moulded around them but never broke. It cleaved or constricted, fusing them together.
When Spencer left Eversley he stalled in the hall. There was a stranger pacing outside his office, overwrought and wound up. Spencer knew this must be his manic caller— Bruce, or Tyson, or someone. Why can’t this guy get a name right? I urged Spencer forwards. Perhaps together he and Bryce could concoct a strategy to find Nicole. Bryce was the lifeline. True Love always finds a way. Yeah, finds a way, hear what I say.
Spencer spun on his heels.
He clattered down the stairs and headed for the car park. On the drive home, Martian scarlet squiggled in his sight, but it was the Habanera that was surfing it out
into the real world, not me. Bizet’s bruiser blossomed in his brain, bouncing its bulk against me, trying to sumo me out of his skull. Spencer kept seeing the embarrassing gyrations of the aging rockstar, but every time he considered turning the car around the assertions of the rockstar’s seedy manager reassured him that audiences loved the lascivious leer, the pelvic thrusts. He pressed harder on the accelerator.
When he entered the house he found Vivienne in the hall. He had the impression she’d been waiting there for some time, rather than recently stepping from another room. She was wide eyed and electrified, limbs hovering awkwardly by her side. He prepared to race into her arms.
“Guess what?” she said. “I’ve won the Eros Prize.”
Stymied Spence. He didn’t quite know how to stand. Precarious posture. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I haven’t won it. Not yet. The award presentation isn’t for a few weeks. But I’m going to. Eva got the nod.”
She was suppressing exhilaration like holding back a sneeze; her features writhed with the effort.
“But you withdrew the nomination.” He resented his own whine.
“Eva didn’t do it. I told her to, but she didn’t. And now … I’ve won, Spence.” She was abruptly vulnerable, her zeal dissipating. They were separated by several steps. Spencer’s bag heavy in his hand. “Spencer, you have to come to the presentation with me. It’ll be meaningless without you.”
“We’re going to Spain,” he stated plaintively.
“We’ll go to Spain. One day. Tell me you’ll come to the presentation.”
“Yes.” But the word sounded empty as the la-la-las that litter Eurovision songs. “Of course.”
“This award’s not for me. It’s not for us. It’s for our little girl. You know that, don’t you?” Her tense stance had slackened. She’d shrunk. “If I stopped writing I’d be letting our little girl down.”
Spencer wanted to drive. The airport road. He imagined staring up at the destinations on the departures board.
Which one would he pick? Sitting alone on the plane. In-flight drinks.
He thought of the tickets nestled in his bag. JayJay’s reunion. There was something forming in his mind. A smudge; a protoplasm. A nascent notion that hitched onto me and pulled me into its confidence.
I told you, Spence. She don’t hold you tight, treat you right. Listen to me. Fire your desires. Marla’s the one. The one you’ll always love.
For now.
“Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” said Vivienne.
Spent Spence: too defeated to be angry. He knew it would come later, when he was alone. Venting itself in ineffectual muttering. Or perhaps he’d call up my film clip and betray Vivienne with memories and make-believe. Incontinent rage, seeping out of all the wrong valves.
“Well done,” he said.
La-la-la.
Lily wrote: Relationships are an empty fairground: something once dazzling and thrilling that has become muted and cold. Romantic Love is the fairground in full swing. Lurid and alluring. The smell of electricity sparking in the air. Fast rides making you giddy, sick, dizzy. The narrator of the song has lost love, but perhaps not his lover …
But who’d want to be a Relationship Song? Not me. For a start, I’d go on too long. The turgid jive. I’m imagining something along the lines of:
Let’s drown in domesticity, babe,
Let’s eke the everyday.
Come home from work and a-kiss-a-me, babe,
Then put the tea things away …
All right now! Uh, feels good. She got a ticket in her hand to see a rock’n’rollin’ band. Tickets to the show, oh, go Nic go!
Baby baby come back. Return to my charms and my open arms. If I had arms. Tonight’s JayJay gig will be a dual reunion. Jones and Jones on stage and me in the spotlight in Nic’s nut. Taking a bow. Welcomed back.
Together forever.
Was that the way it was going to play? Ah, step back. This was not a brand new day, not a ringing note of hope. Her purchase of the ticket had something to do with the clutch bag she’d bought and the isles of clarity in her fuscous thoughts that prompt these preparations. I’ve seen it all before and now it’s one more time with feeling.
After buying the ticket she mooched around the metropolis. She could have bunkered in a hotel but the prospect of checking in daunted her. She couldn’t bear the thought of the receptionist fixing her with suspicion as she handled the credit card. She’d be inviting discovery. She tried napping in the park but warmth blanketed her. In an air-conditioned supermarket, the icy breath from a freezer compartment tantalised her arms. So delicious. But censuring stares from shoppers and staff directed at the opened back of her dress drove her outside.
In the cool of a library, while flipping through the street press, she came upon an article about my two dads—the pops of pop. There was a picture of the writer posing with her subjects. Nicole felt the world contracting around her as she recognised the woman Spencer had snogged at McDonald’s. It was as if obscure machinations were at work, grinding inexorably against her. Kismet the misfit. Adversaries unaware of her existence were banding together, forming cabals. She now knew the woman’s name—Marla Winters—and the knowledge was too intimate. In the article, Winters dissected doctrines that Nicole had once held sacred: that I was composed by twins while separated by an ocean; that Jones and Jones were siblings rather than ex-lovers. Publicity duplicity. Nicole had fallen for it when she was younger and Winters was ridiculing her gullibility. The lies about my origins became entangled with her own family fables of invisible cloaks and midnight missions to cross Tasmania.
Miffed by myths, she left the library to find her car. She had a show to go to. Heat was a substance she had to push through. She investigated the faces of strangers, still searching for glimmers of herself, fantasising about a half-sibling striding towards her. Perhaps it would be another Nicole: a contented version, absorbed in her own destiny, not noticing the dark double passing by. Would the real Nicole watch her depart with a nod of affirmation, comforted by her completeness? Or would she jolt with jealousy? Lines of poetry Bryce had written snagged in her brain: A dreamboat but not a dreamer; my ardent angel. Whoever Bryce loved it wasn’t her. It was a doppelganger. A false twin.
Then something blew through her blues. Every now and then, in the sullage of her mullings, something would glint. She pictured her favourite photograph of Bryce: the one where he stands in a pristine lake, his reflection slung beneath him in perfect proportion. Scintillating symmetry. She’d framed it and stuck it on the wall, stepping back to admire his suppleness, his boyish grin. When he saw it, Bryce uttered a snort.
“You’ve hung it upside down,” he said.
The slightest stirring of air would ripple that reflection. Corrugations transmitting up the haunches and making him belly dance. Quivering the stretch of neck and preciseness of jaw. The birthmark would bob. Nicole could dive into him, smashing the surface and submerging into the coolness of the river, the suffocating swelter exploding away from her in a shock of sensation. His image shattering then reconstituting itself in wobbling waves. Bryce would be all around her, embracing her, refreshing her. Her parched skin reinvigorating and bobbling with goosebumps.
Nicole hauled her phone from her bag. She switched it on and flipped to pictures of her boyfriend. She lingered on details: the birthmark punctuating his handsomeness or the way his expression quivered between levity and gravity. She pulled up pictures of Rosemary with her ancillary sadness, ever-present but secondary, like a rind. Nicole mined the minutiae, sucking it in and storing it. Scoring it on memory. Hobart hazed before her as people and place connected. She saw the mountain frowning over the city; the weather in rapid flux above the rooftops; and the capricious viciousness of a spring gale. The light was tarnished silver, the colours brittle and somehow antiquated. I’ve seen this chromatic effect before in the minds of exiles. Their forever lost homelands gilt-edged in their heads.
Organ chord
again—blarey and scary.
So frightened, baby, and I don’t mean maybe.
Her phone tootled Bryce’s theme. She regarded it longingly, yearning to answer. Ah, c’mon. Do it!
She stabbed the green button.
Yeah. Ah yeah.
There was dumbfounded silence at the other end: her boyfriend unable to believe his luck.
“Nicole. It’s me. It’s Bryce. Nicole?”
“I was just thinking of you.” Her voice was 45 RPM spun at 33⅓. It stretched and dragged.
“Thinking of you too. Thinking of nothing else.” Bryce gushed in a tremulous torrent, like a man on the cusp of crying. “You OK?” When she didn’t reply he changed the record. “Where are you?”
“Adelaide.”
“Yeah, me too. Flew in this morning.”
“Hot enough for you?” Was this play-acting, like her performance outside the clubs? Or was communing with Bryce allowing access to an impishness buried deep inside?
Bryce gave a strangled half-laugh. “Oh, man, tell you what. I’m melting. Let’s get together somewhere cool. Drinks are on me.”
“I don’t drink any more. It’s a cloak.”
“We’ll just talk then. You and me. No one else matters.”
“Like when we met.” Her mind was skipping grooves, jumping tracks. “Remember? At your work that day?”