MUSIC FROM STANDING WAVES
JOHANNA CRAVEN
Copyright © 2015 Johanna Craven
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
PART TWO
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
PART THREE
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE
ONE
I’m the last one off the plane. And regretting that scrap of toast I forced down for breakfast. My housemate Jess would be proud of me for coming home if she knew. She’s going through some pop psychology phase and told me I have avoidance issues. I suggested she stop smoking weird things and find herself a less offensive hobby.
I slide my handbag onto my shoulder. It’s made of snakeskin leather and makes me feel like a superior being, even if it is a hand-me-down from Clara. When I left this place, it was with a plastic Coles bag dangling off my arm. At least I’ve gotten somewhere.
My violin is lying alone in the overhead locker. I consider leaving it there.
‘Music gives love a voice,’ the cover of my old notebook said. Music gives love a voice alright; then rips out its vocal cords and kicks them into the gutter.
I take the violin. I swing it onto my back; my shoulders hunching under its all-too-familiar weight. I’m chased onto the tarmac by a vacuum-wielding flight attendant. Heat slams me. Humidity squeezes my lungs and it’s hard to breathe. Even the air smells the same. It’s thick and salty and there is rain nearby. Behind me, propellers churn and splutter on a plane the size of a toy. No one wants to fly up here.
When I dare to look up, I see my brother inside the terminal. He’s making that goofy ‘fancy-meeting-you-here’ face that Dad used to pull at the school gates. The monotony of this place is hypnotic. I’m still at the airport and already, it’s like I never left.
Seventeen years I spent in this steamy, forgotten top corner of Australia, watching the seasons cycle between hot and hotter; wet and wetter. I grew up yelling across fences instead of using telephones, climbing trees to find escape routes and whittling away the tedium with water pistols, cricket bats and make-believe. Childhood in Acacia Beach wasn’t the type of youth that slides through your fingers like sand, but a boggy, ice cream flavoured swamp you couldn’t climb out of if you tried. My violin lessons became a life raft against a tide of sameness that threatened to drag me under. All my memories of this place are underscored by an Elgar Sonata; the violin soaring above the piano with a background of cicadas, frogs, and outboard motors. Music has the strangest way of making you remember.
Justin and I soaked up our childhood on the yellow grass behind his house. Our world was the size of his backyard. For an entire short lifetime, we’d shared the same shadow and breathed each other’s air. We’d skim stones across the ocean and play noughts and crosses in the gravel while the sun turned our arms the colour of milky coffee. Our feet were bare and dirty, our hair tangled under our caps. We smelled of grass and sunscreen.
Justin taught me to blow bubbles in my chewy. He was two weeks younger than me, but being a boy, he was better at making things like bubbles, spit bombs and traps for small animals. We’d pinch and poke each other like we were made of play-dough.
“Don’t let him touch you like that,” my mum would say. “Lord only knows what’s going through his mind.”
I had no idea what was going through his mind. Rachel, the city girl, did, apparently.
“Men only think about one thing,” she said.
Whatever that was. I would nod at my mother to avoid another argument, then let her words disappear into some make-believe world we were in the midst of creating. I made-believe because I didn’t want to be no one. I wanted to be an explorer, a city girl and then later, the passion wrapping itself around me the way a snake strangles its victims, a concert violinist. I dreamed big because I lived small.
If I was twelve again now, I’m sure I’d spend my time texting pimply guys with braces, but back in 1994, our town was still reeling from the invention of the telephone. Acacia Beach was one perpetual nanna nap. A buried time capsule.
“Oh look,” people would say when they dug us up. “The kids here behave like children. How odd…”
Shipwreck had been my idea. I loved the idea of escaping on a boat, even if it did always end in a struggle for survival.
“Would you really sail away on a ship, Abby?” Justin asked me once. “If you could?” His eyes sparkled at the prospect; bluey-green like our little piece of the ocean.
“Of course. Wouldn’t you?”
Justin shrugged.
“We should do it one day. You and me. It’d be fun. Best friends forever. B.F.F.” I made him pinkie-swear. “B.F.F.”
We piled into the old fibreglass dinghy on Justin’s back lawn. The floor of the boat was mouldy so his dad never took it to sea any more. For as long as I could remember, it had lived on the grass behind the washing line.
“We’ll sail south,” I said. “Towards Antarctica, where there’s ice and snow and penguins.”
In my Antarctica, castles of ice rose from the ocean and snow fell like splintered stars. In my Antarctica, we weren’t hemmed in by sea, or by the endless green nothing that surrounded Acacia Beach. Our adventures lifted me out of reality even if it was just for an hour or two. For those hours, I could be anything, anyone and anywhere.
“Are we meant to be sinking now?’ my little brother asked, thirty seconds in. Grotty, clueless Tim, eight years old and smeared with Nutella, would grow up to be my parents’ favourite.
Rachel rolled her sophisticated, city-slicker eyes. “Not yet!”
Disaster struck.
Rachel pointed into the raging storm. “A deserted island!” she shrieked.
Justin raised an invisible telescope. “I think it’s Fiji!”
Rachel huffed. “How many times do I have to tell you? Fiji is not a deserted island. It has people and houses and streets and cannibals…”
I needed make-believe to breathe. Without it, I was suffocating in a palm-treed paradise. Our games were my lifeline. Would we make it to Antarctica next time? Could I beat Rachel’s long-held Tetris record? Was the house across the road really haunted like Justin claimed? I wanted to grow up, but couldn’t quite work out how.
Until suddenly I found more.
; I learned violin from Acacia Beach’s only music teacher. Andrew was straight out of Brisbane Conservatorium and taught four instruments at the local high school. Twenty-one, passionate and new to the town, he may or may not have been responsible for the sudden obsession with piano lessons among Acacia Beach’s teenaged girls. I had my classes in the basement at his house. It was always cool down there, and there were windows near the ceiling so you could see people’s feet when they walked past. The walls were covered in faded blue wallpaper, and in the corner was a Steinway upright. Andrew was principally a pianist and far too brilliant a one to be teaching violin in the arse-end of nowhere. Then again, he had his reasons. Or reason, at least.
Her name was Hayley; glamour-girl of Acacia Beach and the pretend big sister I had latched onto once I realised my older brother was a dickhead. It had taken Andrew approximately half a nanosecond to meet, greet and marry her, pissing off all the local guys who had spent their entire lives trying to do exactly that.
Dad dropped me at their house for a lesson on Saturday morning. Hayley opened the door and poked me into the kitchen. Blonde curls bounced around her shoulders.
“Come in, sweetie,” she said. “Andrew won’t be long.”
I put down my violin and climbed onto a wobbly wicker stool at the bench. Hayley handed me a glass of juice.
“How’s things?” she asked. “How are Mum and Dad?”
“Okay.” I hiccupped.
The silver bangles on Hayley’s wrist jangled as she opened and closed the fridge. “Are they getting ready for the Christmas rush?”
My parents owned the local caravan park. They had bought the business before I was born and, over the years, had drifted into a stupor where the state of the caravan curtains, or the toilet block, or some tanked feral running around our backyard consumed their every minute.
“I guess,” I said. “Mum keeps telling Dad to fix stuff.”
Hayley laughed, pouring a jug of water over a withered cactus on the windowsill. “Do you think I should water this? It doesn’t look very well. Is water bad for cactuses?”
My pretend big sister Hayley was born and raised in Acacia Beach like me, yet had managed to emerge from the experience favourably, like an exotic, suntanned Barbie doll. Her parents were what my older brother Nick called ‘shit rich’, making a fortune on their farm, supplying sugar, cattle and lavender toiletries to everywhere from Cooktown to Perth. My dad had worked for them when he had first come to Acacia Beach and married Mum. After Nick finished school, he got a job there too, milking the cows and pitching hay.
While I grew up watching other people take holidays, Hayley had grown up going on them. She and her family had been all over the world. Hayley had told me stories about the Swiss Alps and the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids; things I’d only ever seen on TV. I listened in amazement and tried to flick my hair over my shoulder the way she did. I longed to be like Hayley. To have a perfectly bronzed complexion instead of t-shirt tans and freckles. To be able to fill out the top of my bathers so that guys had no choice but to look down it. And to be able to attract someone like Andrew, so that when he came to Acacia Beach on a graduation holiday, he was never able to leave. I was surprised she had managed to kill a cactus.
“What did you do to it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Maybe it didn’t like the weather.” She pawed at the wilting stems with long red fingernails. “Do you think it’s dead?”
Andrew wandered into the kitchen, running a towel through his dark hair. I grabbed the score of my Mozart sonatina and held it out to him.
“Wait til you hear me play this,’ I announced. “I practised so much I failed my maths test.”
He smiled. “Well you know Mozart was your age when he wrote that so he probably failed maths too.”
“You’re making that up,” I said.
“No I’m not.” He held a glass under the tap. “You should play it in the school concert.”
My heart fluttered. I’d never really thought about performing before.
“Those kids should keep their damn noise to themselves,” Mum had said after sitting through the school’s obligatory Christmas knees-up. “It’s a waste of everyone’s time.”
“Don’t you think I should keep my noise to myself?” I asked Andrew.
“Who told you that?”
“My mum.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Why the hell would your mum-” Hayley whacked him and made him slop his water. “It’s not noise, Abby,” he said. “You play very well.”
I felt a surge of pride through me then. The first hint that this thing might swallow me whole. I followed Andrew to the basement. He guided my arm through long, careful bow strokes. My violin grumbled like a tenor with a scratchy throat.
“Listen to your tone. Not so much pressure… Good.”
“Will there be lots of people? At the concert, I mean.”
Andrew laughed a little. “I wouldn’t hold your breath for a record turn out.”
I laid the sonatina out on my music stand, nestled my violin under my chin and let the bow rest on the opening string. I had practised like mad that week. I wanted Andrew to be proud of me. Hesitating, I lowered my bow.
“My mum said it’s noise,” I said again.
He perched on the piano seat and ran a hand through his wet hair. “Well,” he said finally. “Some people appreciate music and some don’t. But I don’t want you thinking that you shouldn’t be performing, okay?”
“Is performing the reason we do music?” I smiled at my revelation.
“I’m not sure there is a real reason for music, Abs. It’s just something some of us can’t live without.”
Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
That pissy little concert would change everything for me. If only I’d been a good girl, listened to my mother and kept my damn noise to myself.
TWO
The course of my life was set in a high school gym that smelled of shoes. Standing at the top of the basketball court in front of an audience that may have just cracked double figures, I nailed my first violin performance.
The gym became a concert hall. The three-point line of the basketball court a real stage. The parents in plastic chairs and Stubbies shorts sophisticated music lovers who had paid to see my performance. I forgot about Tetris records and Shipwreck. I thought of nothing but the hum of my violin as my little sonatina hung in the rubber-scented air.
Those were the days before I learnt to analyse every performance within an inch of its life; picking at every note, tearing the articulation to shreds, and cursing my shaky tone. That night in the gym, I had played the best I knew how. The excitement lit me up inside and I couldn’t keep still. I bounced around the back of the hall while some year eight girls warbled into microphones over the top of a Mariah Carey CD. Made up stupid dance moves until Andrew booted me into the courtyard and told me to have a drink of water.
I met my parents outside. Mum was pacing around the car park while Tim tugged at her sleeve and bleated about how bored he was.
“My little possum,” said Dad. He gave me a bear hug and I could smell his shaving cream. I peered up at Mum. Her cheeks were flushed; her mouth pinched. She was looking at her watch.
“Did you like it?” I asked.
She managed a tiny smile. “It was very nice.” She rummaged through her bag. “Do you have the keys, David?”
I followed my parents back to the car, a huge grin slapped across my face. My heart was still racing. I couldn’t wait to share my excitement with Justin. I wished he had heard me play.
I lay in bed that night mentally replaying every note. I sang the sonatina in my head. Felt my fingers twitch. I climbed out of bed and padded down the hall. The house was silent, except for the humming of the fridge. Outside the window, frogs gurgled like drunken cows. I could hear laughter in the caravan park. Flicking on the lamp, I knelt beside the stereo. Neither of my parents listened to music much, but under the record player there was a bo
x of old cassettes. I rifled through the clutter of black plastic. At the bottom of the box was a recording of Dvorak’s A Minor Violin Concerto. I was surprised to see my mother’s name scribbled inside the front cover. I couldn’t imagine my mother ever sitting through a violin concerto.
I raced back to my room and climbed into bed, sliding the tape into my Walkman. The recording sounded tinny through headphones, but I closed my eyes and imagined the orchestra filling the stage. I let the music wash over me. The violin slid to its top register and I shivered. I tightened my fist around the corner of my pillow. The music surrounded me and I wanted to see it, touch it, feel it. It was an excitement I had never felt before and my mind tangled trying to explain it. I remembered Andrew’s words:
“I don’t know if there is a real reason for music…”
Rolling onto my back and hearing the entry of the orchestra, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I had found it.
“I’m going to be a concert violinist,” I told Justin the next day. Our legs dangled into the rock pool that was built into a curve of the white beach. The sand was dotted with candy-cane umbrellas. Gulls shrieked in a cloudless sky.
Justin squinted into the sun. “What’s a concert violinist?”
“It’s someone who plays the violin in the concert hall.” I kicked my legs and sent beads of water flying.
“Why do you want to do that?” Justin flicked the strap of my bathers. They snapped noisily against my skin.
“Ouch!” I shoved him into the water. His tanned face lit up.
“Wanna have a wrestle?”
“Okay.” I slipped into the pool and dog-paddled to the middle. “Ready, set-” I spat water out of my mouth. “Go!”
Justin dived under the surface and grabbed my waist. I wriggled around, pretending to protest. I grabbed his shoulders and pushed him backwards until we both flew to the surface, gasping for breath. Underwater wrestles were our secret. I didn’t care how impressed Rachel would be, I vowed never to tell anyone I had let Justin touch my boobs.
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