Earworm

by Colin Varney

  She sighed, exhaling the final disappointment.

  Johnny’s voice broke at the second chorus.

  “Memor-eeee … is an empty fairground …”

  One! … Two! … Three! … Four!

  The pills scoured her throat as they went down.

  “Here’s one that needs no introduction.”

  My opening bars purled and pirouetted and I was in four hundred heads. Spencer’s phone felt hefty. He met Marla’s gaze. The smile she returned was propped with rickety promise.

  Even beneath the thunder of me he could hear the thudding in his ears and the huffs of his ragged respiration. His fingertips tingled and he fumbled the phone as he lifted it. He let me flood his head, trying to block what he was about to do. The damning ramifications. Get it on, Spence. Yo, yo, let’s go.

  He jabbed the number.

  With the noise of me juddering into him the dial tone was a mousy burble, constant and cankering. He couldn’t decide what terrified him more, the prospect of Vivienne answering or the tone ringing out.

  “Cubby …?” Vivienne’s voice tinny and tentative.

  “Vivienne, there’s something I have to … have to …” Words mashed together belligerently, unintelligibly. He reeled, lips still working even after he’d ceased yammering. He steadied himself. He needed her to understand everything on the first take. “Vivienne.” He sucked in air but it was thin and unsustaining. “Vivienne, please listen …”

  “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

  “Listen …”

  A woman shouldered past, glaring around, panic stricken. As she wheeled wildly her face swung close to his, her features a blur. She weaved away and the assembly swallowed her.

  “Liiiife … is an empty fairground …” grated Johnny.

  Addled by noise and heat, his attention vouchsafed to Vivienne, the woman’s identity was a fog trying to thicken into form. He felt he was looking at an exploded memory, with the dust and debris reeling backwards and coalescing until, with an icy bolt of shock, he accepted who she was. Snatching a look back at Marla, he cut the call and plunged after Rosemary.

  Bam! I was in another head. I didn’t recognise the furniture. Unfamiliar qualms, fresh repentances. New networks of neurons and curlicues of cortex. It wasn’t somebody at the gig. Then I realised: I’d done it. I’d breached Vivienne. Hey yeah! Her defences had crumbled and I’d stormed the citadel. I had a strong hold in her stronghold: big and bolshy in her brain. She was listening to me on CD, the volume cranked up. Her immediate past ebbed by. I saw how she’d taken the phone call, heard Spencer’s words rear-ending each other. “Vivienne, please listen …” Then, just before he’d hung up, my chorus’s first strains, strained by the connection. Bloated and bludgeoning. She’d moved the phone from her ear. It took her a few moments to pick it: that thing Spencer insisted on pestering her with. Cubby’s new favourite tune. She pictured him at the show, excited by my arrival, ringing her on impulse to tell her I was being performed. In her mind he had the enthusiasm of a pants-wetting urchin.

  She was still lamenting the postponement of the Spanish trip. She knew she was letting Cubby down. But here was a small moment she could share with him. She’d dropped the phone and moved to the CD player. She knew I was nestled on the disc inside. It didn’t take long to skip tracks to reach me.

  So there I was: in the inner sanctum. Viva Vivienne!

  In the cluster of cogitations I had access to, I saw Sandor looming large. The tress at his temple; the quotation mark cicatrix. The brown eyes. A chisel-jawed version of Spencer. Honed clone. And I saw why she left those pages beneath the place where he dreamt. It wasn’t to ambush him, diminish him, to prod him with the products of her talent. They were love letters. Filthy epistles. Bodice ripping billets-doux. Whoa, look out. Beneath her twitchy, witchy surface, smothered under her obsession with deadlines and word count, was a woman who felt love. Mad love, bad love. Be-my-turtle-dove love. It called to me and I clicked into place with it. I saw the romance. Yet it was interred, buried alive in her psyche and clawing at the coffin lid. Six feet under the everyday.

  I deflated. I felt inadequate. I’d always considered myself a student of the human condition but now I realised I knew nothing. Perhaps those bulky books that banged on for pages knew more than me. Did those effusive films that needed to appropriate the likes of me to jack up their impact express more than I did? Perhaps I was a confection, a ditzy divertissement? An ephemeral four minutes and twenty two seconds? I was quashed. Sure, I understood True Love. But did I get the big picture? Why wasn’t I a concept album?

  Then I preened my self-esteem. Wished I had a chest so I could puff it out. I’m a Love Song. I proclaim the flame. I’m the effulgence, the fluorescence. With a twist of poignancy in my third verse to make the fireworks burst brighter. And OK, let’s face it, that flame wasn’t as fervid in Vivienne any more. But its warmth was. It kept her entire inner being toasty.

  Johnny’s voice fracked. Subterranean sorrow quaked beneath his aching octaves. He contorted to my winding rhythm— melody’s marionette. Adorned in that ridiculous suit—the original, from the film clip. He hadn’t been able to fasten the buttons about his girth and the sleeves were a tourniquet at his elbows. The elongated nose fenced with the microphone as he moved to my mojo. He looked tatty—a pauper’s Pinocchio—but even his ragamuffin not-real boy was better than me. How could I commune with Spencer? How could I tell him what he needed to know?

  Spencer manoeuvred into the middle-aged mosh pit, roving for Rosemary. Bodies buffeted him. He scoured for Marla and realised he’d lost her. He felt alone and bewildered. The arrhythmia of his heart free-formed beneath my solid beat. He paused to control his breathing. He knew he was prevaricating, allowing himself to be diverted. He glared at his phone with renewed resolution.

  “Memor-eeee …” Johnny’s contused tenor snapped the third syllable from the second yet held it by a thread. Johnny be good. “… is an empty fairground …”

  My chorus hissed through the valves of Spencer’s ears and trapped itself inside. If I were a material thing my pressure per square inch would be splitting his skull. His recollections were at my beck and recall and I flipped through them like a pack of cards. I needed a good one: the perfect one. I checked out his wedding day, which was rife with romance, but not what I was after. I peeping-tommed the first time he and Vivienne wig-wam-bammed but that wasn’t good enough either. Then—soon after va-va-voom but before their vows, I hit it.

  They’re panting on the floor of Vivienne’s writing room. Not the one she had now, but the one she’d set up in the ramshackle slum she’d rented when she was a jobbing journalist. The place was permeated with the fungal fumes of rising damp. Spencer had seduced her away from her writing and they were basking in the after-boom of chick-a-boom, lost in the conclusion of Carmen.

  “Something happens to you when there’s music,” said Vivienne. “You become … not distracted … but … like you’re on drugs. You’re experiencing things differently. You were blinking madly for a while …”

  “That was probably during that bursty saffron aria,” he said. “Those exploding daisy patterns … wasn’t that intense?”

  “Exploding what?”

  “During the woman’s song, a few tunes back. When the strings surged into those daisy bombs.” Vivienne looked puzzled. He struggled to elucidate. “Just after the jagged jade bit.”

  She propped herself on an elbow and inspected him. Some months previously she’d written a profile piece for a magazine on a pianist obsessed with Olivier Messiaen. The pianist had introduced her to the composer’s colour-coded compositions.

  “Spence? … Are you a synaesthete?”

  “Is that, like, someone who’s really good at sinning? Like an athlete is good at athleting?”

  “Have you ever heard of synaesthesia, Spence?”

  He thought she was joking when she revealed she couldn’t see the detonating daisies. Until that moment he’d th
ought everybody experienced music and makin’ whoopee the way he did.

  “How can you bear it?” he said. “Never seeing the song?” A sadness seeped in and he seized her hand. “I wish you could.” His voice quavered. “I wish you could share the daisies with me.”

  I let the memory play while I flicked through his fantasies.Like rifling through dirty postcards. I linked to the one where they cavort in Colours on a shagpile rug. Thick cables of interstellar scarlet snake around them but do not break or tear. I swear to you baby, I swear—they do not break or tear. It was backed by a soundtrack: the Habanera shouldered into me. And I did the unlikeliest thing.

  I shifted aside.

  First time ever.

  Let’s not make a big deal of it. Let’s not laud it as a self- effacing sacrifice. After all, I was bombarding his ears from a bank of powerful amplifiers at the time. That Bizet buffoon was outflanked. I had it in a pincer movement. But I let it have free rein for a while, before bouncing back and switching in Spencer’s art gallery dream. Screens of green and veils of vermilion float free of their canvases. Two dimensional daubings. But this time Spencer manages to reach the far end of the hall where thick founts and solid splurges have leapt from their frames and frozen.

  This is Vivienne’s section of the gallery. Chromatic sculptures. 3D spree. Randy retrospective.

  Come on, Spence. Ah, c’mon.

  I touched on a slew of visions of Vivienne, letting them montage in his mind. Naughty ones, nice ones. The comedic and the carnal, celebrations and commiserations. The times when they’d hidden from the world, cowering together. Two-part harmony. The times when she’d seemed to empathise with the gyrations of the aging rockstar and the encouragements of his seedy manager.

  I lingered on a final image. Spencer, dazed, shambles past the music room. He spies Vivienne on the far side of the piano with Bethany cradled against her chest. She cups Bethany’s head gently. Her face is turned down so that she and the baby are close enough to kiss. She sings a broken lullaby. The trill is crystalline in his ear. The air seems too clumsy to carry it. Vivienne hasn’t seen him and he feels he should leave them alone but is spellbound.

  There’s an umbilical cord connecting mother and daughter. That must be an enhancement. I think Spencer has added that.

  Yeah, Spence. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.

  “Tender heart, steal soul,” crooned Johnny. Acute angled arms, crooked and skewed like a puppet.

  Spencer waggled his fingers so that the phone jiggled against his palm. As if daring himself to drop it.

  He jammed the phone into his pocket.

  Yeah! I said yeah!

  S’what I’m talkin’ ’bout!

  If I had breath I’d need to catch it. I’m used to buzzing in a beehive of heads, personalities and prejudices swarming, but this was too much. Was it the helter-skelter of events that was exhausting me? No. No, it was Nicole. Nicole in the bathroom. Nicole gulping pills. It threw me.

  No baby, no baby, please don’tcha go baby.

  Bryce had slid down the wall and was hugging his knees. The phone call where Nicole revealed she had pills reverbed in his head. His eyes were red rimmed but no tears sprang forth. I fizzed sporadically behind his barricades, screaming. Get on up, Bryce. Bryce, get on up! You gotta move. The women’s toilets, Bryce. Search the toilets. He shook his head, gathering himself. Launched himself to his feet. He circled the hall again, staggering.

  Not the hall. The toilets!

  He massaged his face with his hands, muttering “Nicole” into his palms. Hopeless. Rosemary paced, snared in nightmare, sore throated from crying her daughter’s name into my unforgiving volume.

  A figure clambered on stage and sprinted up to Johnny. She smooched him long and hard, causing him to mangle my words. Morris broke into laughter. In the old days, they’d have had security to pull Lily away. She snatched Johnny’s proboscis and pinged it free of his face, then paused at the edge of the stage before diving. The melee surfed her above them as she held the puppet nose aloft, jabbing it into the air in triumph.

  In the convenience, Nicole’s body was an inconvenience dangling from her heavy head. Only ears, mouth and throat functioned, teeth chomping and tongue forcing the resulting paste and powder to the well of her gullet. Saliva was refusing to come now, making the process laborious. Throat coated and caked. And me in her ears—the anthem of her rise and demise. I boomed into the bathroom, blunt and bossy. I wanted to flee but couldn’t bring myself to try. I felt I should be there. There had to be a witness.

  Baby please don’t go.

  Another physical intrusion insinuated itself. At first it seemed unconnected, something existing beyond her. Then she located it. Between her shoulder blades. That same itch, so fierce she felt it was boring into her. She couldn’t believe her body was making another demand. She tried to ignore it, but it insisted. She shifted to scratch, suddenly aware she had limbs, that her torso was adjusting to maintain her balance. She levered her right arm over her right shoulder to dig her nails in. The posture felt familiar and oddly comforting. Terry wisped across her thoughts.

  Nicole scooped more pills from her clutch. She stared down at them, smacking her crusted tongue around the cavity of her mouth, longing for lubrication. She knew she should swallow more. She couldn’t botch this task. She needed to ingest enough medication to stop do-gooders from saving her. Just one more mouthful, she told herself.

  She faltered. Distraught with herself at this final failure.

  She recalled the times Terry had motivated her to defy difficulties: geeing her up for a job interview or pumping her for a poppet-performance before uncles and aunts. She imagined his vague outline before her, miming the movements, nodding at her to follow. She allowed the pellets to trickle back into the bag and pivoted her arms up and over each shoulder. Fingers clasped the immaterial material. Elbows reared above her ears.

  Warmth eased through her. As ungainly as she must have looked, enthroned on the bowl, this arrangement of her upper body felt right. The pose was embossed on memory. Like when you pick up a hairbrush and your body wants you to sing into it rather than tidy your do. Or when you need to wield a tennis racket like Pete Townshend rather than Pete Sampras. Her impending performance before relatives so long ago glimmered at the fringes of thought. She heard Terry’s hushed tones spinning tales of Count Hanzov and his incredible cloak.

  A fleck of affection interfered with her numbness. She fought to suppress it, even as she was dragging her bunched fists over her dome and down to her sternum. She stared into the bag on her lap. The motion had motivated her. Now she could devote herself to dying again.

  Nah nah nah no, I don’t think so, think so.

  Rock with me, Nicole. Roll with me. I’m gonna take you, honeychild—you’re gonna put your hand in mine. I’m gonna shake you, honeychild—I’m gonna take you back in time.

  I fossicked in the files for every moment I could find of Terry crouching before her with his arms cranked over his collar, drawing an invisible cape from his nape, his daughter mirroring his actions. Elbows heavenwards. Aerial akimbo. The morning before a class presentation. Prior to her driving test. She saw Terry’s awkwardness when he’d mimed it when she was older, before an exam. And his fanned-ember features when he’d performed it because she was daunted before a date with a beau. Battling his abashment to encourage his daughter to dally with an acned admirer who, frankly, wasn’t fit to share the same cosmos with her.

  She resisted. I heard the familiar honks of an orchestra in discord. The shonk of Zorn. It shoved at me, forcing me from her. Oh no. Nah nah nah no. I grasped. I grapple-hooked. I held on for her dear life. I netted another memory: Terry ghosting from the gloom beyond the window of the Italian restaurant. Born of the blackness. Arraigned beyond the pane, drawing the cloak over his head.

  She recalled Steve describing the two-bob stripe down the Duco of Ray Symonds’s car. She could barely imagine it: Terry grating the coin along the paintwork of hi
s hero’s Volvo. What had possessed him?

  A whimper escaped her.

  C’mon, Nic!

  I’m prepared to love Terry. But it’s conditional. Conditional on him saving Nicole. Do the most, ghost. Make the grade, shade.

  Turn me on, deadman.

  Ah yeah.

  I rescreened the scenes. Terry reconstituted from darkness, a father crouching before his daughter, four knobby elbows raised skywards. Come on, Nicole. Say you’re mine. All the time.

  Dry ice fumed around the band, cascading into the audience. Marla squeezed through a screen of grey groovers and caught sight of Spencer. He was castaway: hazed, glazed. Mist wreathed around him, snatching the flash of the band’s light show. He clutched his phone, but it was nowhere near his mouth. She watched him push it into his pocket with firm deliberation. Her expression contracted. She took on the aspect of girlfriends of pop stars who watch their lovers croon tunes dedicated to their exes: Heather Mills when McCartney cawed My Love or Suzie Bick hearing Nick Cave growl Into My Arms. She remained frozen as JayJay repeated my middle-eight and launched into yet another instrumental jag. I don’t usually like being flabby but this extended version was cookin’. Punters swayed and bayed. Spencer and Marla’s eyes snagged. They stood mesmerised by each other, waiting for a suitable interval to elapse, for time to pass from one era to another.

  The suspended seconds were smashed by a girl. She slipped through the cracks in the crowd without anyone giving way to her, a spiritess in a black, black dress. Unsteady on her feet and somehow somewhere else, she homed in on Spencer. She tugged at his sleeve deferentially.

  Spencer refracted from his surroundings. Young Rosemary had hailed from history once more but this time she refused to be a mirage. He tried to blink her away but she persisted. Disoriented by decibels and the batter of bodies, he felt sucked into a mash-up of past and present. The girl opened her mouth to speak. He craned close to hear.