“Yeah, right. That’s why Dad was calling here five seconds ago worried sick about you.”
Clara reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a handful of fifty-dollar notes. She pushed them into my hands. “Give him this. Two hundred will be enough right?”
“Clar… I can’t take this.”
“Yes you can. What else are you going to do?”
I felt a sudden rush of gratitude. “I’ll pay you back. As soon as I can.”
“No you won’t. It’s fine. My dad keeps me well looked after. I won’t miss it.”
I hugged her tightly. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just get him out of here. I need to practise.”
I rode the tram with Nick to the airport bus stop.
“Should I come to the airport with you?” I asked. “Make sure you get off okay?”
Nick chuckled. “I think I’ll manage. You go to your violin lesson.” He punched my arm. “Hey sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you trouble. I just thought-”
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”
Nick pulled a cigarette from the front pocket of his backpack and stuck it unlit between his teeth. “So I guess we won’t be seeing you at home for a while then.”
I stared into the gaudy pattern on the tram seats. “Depends how my audition goes, I guess.”
A flood of nerves hit me. I had to get into the Con. Nothing else mattered. Beside me, Nick gnawed his cigarette and scratched his scabby arms. The alternative was unbearable.
TWENTY-THREE
“I’m so nervous I could puke,” I announced. Clara and I walked across the university grounds, clutching our violin cases.
“Lovely.”
We’d been scheduled to audition within ten minutes of each other. The thought of having to perform directly after Clara made my nerves a thousand times worse.
She flicked her hair coolly. “Would you calm down? You’re stressing me out.”
I wasn’t fooled. She hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning either and had spent half an hour pacing in the corridor outside the dining room.
I paused to check a signpost.
“It’s this way,” said Clara. “I have my lessons here sometimes.”
I jogged to keep up. A few students were strolling across campus, but with lectures finished for the year, the grounds were quiet. The coffee shops were closed, bike racks empty. Clara reached into her handbag and checked her phone. Her fingers flew over the keypad with the same whirlwind speed they did on her violin.
“I think this Julian guy’s developing an obsession with me. He keeps texting me and saying he’s outside our room.”
I frowned. “What? That’s a little scary…”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. He’s harmless. He’s at the Con. Plays the trumpet or something. I’m thinking about sleeping with him even though he might be, like, a psycho.”
I followed her into the Con foyer where she gave both our names. I was led into a waiting room, while Clara was ushered off to warm up.
I perched on the edge of a chair and tried to take a few deep breaths. Around me I could hear snatches of music; a pianist playing scales and a cellist in the middle of an audition. I tried to empty my mind of everything except my Mozart. I mentally bowed through the piece, imagining exactly how I wanted my performance to sound. My ringing phone cut through my thoughts. I cursed myself and flicked it hurriedly to silent. Dad was calling. I pushed the phone into my violin case and shut the lid.
The cellist emerged pale-faced from the audition room. As I was led to the warm-up area, I passed Clara in the hall. I tried to catch her eye, but her gaze was fixed on the floor. Her knuckles were white around the neck of her violin.
I closed the door of the warm-up room and played a few tense scales. My phone rattled and vibrated. I sighed and knelt down to turn it off. Five missed calls from Dad. The phone rang again in my hand.
Something was wrong. I needed to know what it was.
I hesitated. My hands were still cold. I let the call ring out.
I stood up and tried to focus. Smoothed my skirt and played slowly through the first bars of my piece. The phone buzzed and vibrated. Anger welled inside me. Why now? Why couldn’t Acacia Beach just let me go?
“Dad?” I said tensely.
“You lied to us.” Sarah’s voice was icy. “Where’s your brother?”
My stomach plunged.
“We know he came to see you, Abigail. His friend told us he drove him to Melbourne.”
I chewed my thumbnail. “He didn’t come home?”
“No.”
“I gave him money for a flight. I put him on the airport bus.”
“You gave him money? For God’s sake child, use your brain. What do you think he’s done with that?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“The right thing would have been to tell us! Why didn’t you at least go to the airport with him? Make sure he got on the plane?”
“I don’t… He said he’d be okay…” My voice was tiny. “I had a violin lesson…”
Sarah laughed coldly. “Of course you did. Typical.”
“Mum, I’m sorry,” I said. “And I don’t know where he is. But I really, really can’t talk now.”
“Don’t you even think about hanging up, Abigail.”
“I have an audition, Mum. I’ll call you when I finish. Can’t we talk about this then?”
“No. It’s time you got your priorities straight. Your brother is missing because of your lies. We talk about this now.”
My voice began to shake. “Mum, this is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.” In the next room, I could hear Clara’s Debussy dancing faultlessly. “I have to go. But I’ll call you back as soon as I’m done.”
“If you hang up on me now,” said Sarah. “Don’t bother calling back. Ever. Don’t bother coming back. If you can’t face up to the consequences of what you’ve done, I don’t want anything to do with you.”
Clara’s sonata drifted into silence. The door of the practice room creaked and the receptionist poked her head inside.
“Abigail? We’re ready for you now.”
I lowered the phone. Sarah barked up at me; her words distant and distorted. I hung up, snatched my violin and let a furious Ysaye sonata explode through cold and trembling fingers.
TWENTY-FOUR
Within two weeks, Clara, Jess and I had accepted places at the Melbourne Con.
“Why do you feel the Conservatorium is right for you?” the head of strings had asked in my audition.
I told her the truth; that music got me through every day and that there was nothing I wanted more than to be a concert violinist. I neglected to tell her that as of five minutes earlier, I’d been booted out of the family home and would be busking on the Flinders Street steps if I didn’t get into the course. Nor did I tell John about my spontaneous change of program. The moment had passed and there seemed to be little point. My Ysaye had been slippery and technically uncertain, but full of the passion John had spent weeks trying to conjure up in me. It hadn’t been my best performance, but I knew it had been enough. I knew that in her own twisted way, Sarah had gotten me into the Con.
Jess invited me to her house for the holidays. It felt strange waking up on Christmas morning without smelling the breakfast barbecue Dad cooked every year for the park guests. He would throw a pile of eggs and bacon onto the hot plate and the greasy smell would float through my window, taking me sleepily into the back yard. When we were younger, my brothers and I had been up long before the bacon hit the barbecue, pounding on Justin and Hugh’s door to test out our presents.
“Pull a bon-bon with me!” Justin always insisted, because he knew I didn’t hold the explosive bit properly and he would win every time.
Jess’s Christmas party was enormous, with ten of her cousins, their respective aunts and uncles plus her two younger sisters and twin brother. When asked, I told people it was too far
for me to go home for the holidays.
“Yeah,” I’d say breezily. “Maybe I’ll head up there mid-year…” And Jess’s mum would give me a cuddle and force another plate of food into my hands.
The cousins flocked around Grandma to watch her carve up the turkey. I had never smelled anything so good.
“Can I have a little taste?” begged one of the cousins. “Just that end bit?”
I imagined it was my own grandmother.
“Patience, chicken. The wait will make it taste even better.”
After the last of the relatives left, Jess and I lay outside on the hammock sucking mints left over from dinner.
“Are you okay?” Jess asked me for the billionth time. She started to plait the fringe of the rug we had thrown over our legs.
“I’m fine. Really.”
“Do you miss your family?”
I crunched my mint and stared into the glittery sky. I thought about Nick constantly. Sometimes I imagined him free and happy, cruising across the country in the back of some random’s car. Other times he was tired and miserable; scratching, sniffing, snorting, drifting. Then there was the image I tried to fight: him lying dead in a gutter somewhere because I had gone to my violin lesson instead of the airport. The image made me stiff and cold as though I was dead myself. I fought it away with Dvorak and Ysaye.
I had thought about the rest of my family a lot during the day too. More than I wanted to. I thought of my parents in their almost-empty nest; the birds locked out for bad behaviour. Addiction to music or addiction to heroin; each the same to my mother. Each a destructive drug she wanted banished from her life.
I imagined them sitting down to a dinner of cold roast chicken and coleslaw. I could hear Dad mumbling and Tim making fart jokes that no one laughed at. Pictured them wearing the crooked paper hats from the bon-bons, while Grandma fed scraps of meat to the cat under the table. And then there was Justin again.
“Hey check this out! It’s a Nintendo!”
I wished they would all just stay forgotten.
Before uni started, I made the big move out of the boarding house. I’d picked up a waitressing job at an Italian restaurant close to uni and managed to scratch together enough money to rent a two-bedroom flat with Jess. We found a unit on the outskirts of the city, across the road from a gourmet supermarket. It was the last in a row of four, with a crumbling brick fence and long driveway. Each wall of the lounge room was painted a different shade of cream and the kitchen floor was covered in worn brown lino, but my bedroom was blue and looked out onto the strip of grass behind the house. We bought a red velour lounge suite for forty dollars from the op shop and squeezed the whole set, a portable TV and Jess’s piano into the living room.
I loved to listen to Jess play. She would spend hours perfecting sweeping Chopin melodies, often closing her eyes and smiling. Then she would shut her music and improvise, making up lyrics in a deep, tuneless voice. But I liked it most when we played together. Sometimes we’d sight-read violin sonatas and other times belt through the soundtrack to Aladdin, while Jess recited one-liners from the movie between verses. I’d sit on the back of the couch because there was no room to stand, smacking Jess with my bow when my playing got too animated. Mostly, our pieces ended in gales of laughter. It reminded me of my jam sessions with Andrew and left a smile in the corner of my mouth. Though I didn’t want to say it, I was relieved to be free of the pressure living with Clara brought.
“Julian’s having a party,” Clara announced. “He invited me and I think you should come too.”
“Why?”
Clara sighed. “So you can meet people from the Con. You don’t want to show up on the first day and not know anyone. You’ll look like a complete loser.”
Julian’s house was a forty-minute ride from the city. When we got off the train, trees edged the road and rosellas screamed into the humid night. The house was a short walk from the station, up a winding hill. Clara and I skipped up the street in strappy dresses, clutching armfuls of premixed vodka. Street lamps cast pools of yellow light onto the footpath and gum trees hung motionless over our heads, their dappled grey and white trunks twisting above the bitumen. In the football ground across the road, sprinklers hissed rhythmically. Cicadas sung in the wet grass.
Julian’s house was missing some of its peeling white weatherboards and the front gate dangled on crooked hinges. A huge oak tree in the front yard spread its arms over the lawn, heavy with leaves glowing purple in the dim light.
“Smell me,” ordered Clara. “It’s Tommy Girl. Do I smell sexy?”
“Very.”
“Good.”
Doused in five-dollar body spray, I was feeling like the lame little sister. I’d made a big effort that night, but my lipstick never stayed on the way Clara’s did, and no matter how long I spent straightening my hair, I could never get the frizzy little kinks out of it. I’d just ended up with a ponytail again. Clara tossed her sleek red mane and strutted onto Julian’s concrete veranda. I had to jog to keep up with her. The front door was open and six guys wearing torn jeans were sprawled across the porch on banana lounges. I felt overdressed.
“Hey!” Julian leaned out the front door and draped a tanned arm over each of our shoulders. He was barefoot in board shorts and a t-shirt that said Bring Back the Mullet. I wondered how long it would be til Clara had him polished up in polo shirts and chinos. He pushed his blonde hair out of his eyes and called to his friends in the banana lounges.
“Guys, this is Clara and…”
“Abby,” I volunteered.
“Clara and Abby. They’re gonna be at the Con this year.” A huge bloodhound loped out the front door, an enormous pink tongue lolling from the side of its mouth. It stumbled over its paws to sniff Clara’s skirt. She squealed and Julian grabbed its collar.
“That’s just Brown Dog,” he said, shoving him back into the house. “He’s harmless.”
I followed the smell of dog into the house, my arms full of our drinks. The kitchen sink was overflowing with red plastic plates and crumbs were scattered over the bench. Powderfinger blared from the stereo. Underneath the table, a guy and girl sat clutching a watermelon with a hole in the middle. They laughed hysterically as they drizzled pink water into each other’s mouths.
“Come on Fag-boy!” teased the girl affectionately, her laughter filling the kitchen. She reached onto the table and grabbed a bottle of vodka, pouring it into the hole in the watermelon. The guy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and replied with a fit of giggles. I opened the fridge and shoved my drinks between the slabs of beer. I took two bottles outside and held one out to Clara, who was already perched on Julian’s lap. Julian took the bottle from me without bothering to remove his tongue from her throat.
I marched back inside, pissed at Clara for making me come, then ignoring me the second a better offer presented itself. I wandered through the house in a desperate search for faces I recognised from the College. Deciding there weren’t any, I slipped into the bathroom and locked the door. I sent Jess a help-me text, but no reply came. Then I did my hair again. After about twenty minutes, some girl belted on the door and yelled at me to stop hogging the bathroom. I edged back out into the party, clutching my empty bottle so I had something for my hands to do. Maybe I could go demand some attention from Clara.
“You look kind of lost.”
Matt.
The first thing I noticed about him was his ponytail. A long, dark liquorice strap of hair. It curled onto his shoulders and I wanted to touch it. Matt’s eyes were almost black, but seemed full of light, like the onyx crystals Justin’s mum kept on her coffee table. His skin was the colour of caramel.
I was as smooth as ever. “Me? Nah… I’m just… kind of…”
He raised his eyebrows and I felt my face flush furiously. I lifted the empty bottle to my lips.
“There’s nothing in that,” he laughed. “Do you want another drink?”
“Okay,” I managed. I followed him into the kitch
en, my sandals creaking on the sticky lino. He reached into the fridge and handed me a beer, lifting the empty bottle out of my hand.
“Real stuff,” he told me. “None of this lolly water.”
I yanked unsuccessfully at the twist top. Matt turned the lid for me.
“You’re such a girl.”
I flashed a nervous smile. “Last time I checked…”
He laughed in surprise as I took a long sip.
“Country girl,” I explained.
“Yeah? Where you from?”
“Acacia Beach,” I said. “North Queensland.”
“Never heard of it. It’s Abby, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Hi.”
Matt introduced himself, then wandered into the lounge, leaving me hovering dumbly in the kitchen. He turned and laughed. “You coming?”
“Oh. Yeah. I mean… if that’s okay.” I skipped after him and perched on the edge of the couch, mindful of my dress sliding too far up my thighs. I tugged self-consciously at the hem.
“Did you think I was just going to leave you there all on your lonesome?”
I felt myself blush again. “No. I mean… I don’t-”
“Hey,” said Matt. He touched my knee and an electric current shot through me. “Relax. Are you scared of me or something?” He tried to brush a thick layer of dog hair off the couch. “Would you look at this shit? Jules has clearly never heard of a vacuum cleaner. He gets dickhead points for that.”
I smiled nervously. Matt stretched his arm over the top of the couch. The hem of his t-shirt slid up his shoulder, revealing a black Japanese symbol tattooed on his arm.
“So how do you know Julian?” he asked.
“I used to room with his girlfriend,” I said. “And I’m going to the Con this year.”
“Jules got a girlfriend? He never told me! Who?”
“Clara. You know, the redhead.”
Music From Standing Waves Page 13