The Long Distance Playlist

by Tara Eglington

To: taylor_hellemann@gmail.com

  Sent: Wednesday 21 August, 5:19pm

  Subject: RE: So . . .

  That’s weird timing. I’m in Mum’s office right now, she’s looking at what’s available.

  From: taylor_hellemann@gmail.com

  To: IsoldeByrne@hotmail.com

  Sent: Wednesday 21 August, 7:22pm

  Subject: RE: So . . .

  Would it still work for you guys if you came the weekend before? Like, flew in Friday the 13th instead?

  I kind of have this thing on the 14th . . .

  From: IsoldeByrne@hotmail.com

  To: taylor_hellemann@gmail.com

  Sent: Wednesday 21 August, 5:27pm

  Subject: I’m not a fan of that sentence, you know

  Last time you used it, you were telling me you had a date ;)

  From: taylor_hellemann@gmail.com

  To: IsoldeByrne@hotmail.com

  Sent: Wednesday 21 August, 7:32pm

  Subject: Oops

  Foot-in-mouth moment #4521.

  I don’t have a date. Well, I kind of do, but it’s with a Snowboard Cross course.

  I’m competing at a qualifier. And I’m kind of hoping the girl I’m keen on might be able to be there – you know, to give me a kiss for luck before I throw down.

  From: IsoldeByrne@hotmail.com

  To: taylor_hellemann@gmail.com

  Sent: Wednesday 21 August, 5:36pm

  Subject: I think that can be arranged ;)

  From: taylor_hellemann@gmail.com

  To: IsoldeByrne@hotmail.com

  Sent: Wednesday 21 August, 7:39pm

  Subject: Just so you know

  I might sneak a few extra kisses in the lead-up. You know, Friday afternoon, Friday night, Saturday morning . . . etc. Part of the training schedule, of course.

  From: IsoldeByrne@hotmail.com

  To: taylor_hellemann@gmail.com

  Sent: Wednesday 21 August, 5:54pm

  Subject: RE: Just so you know

  Mum and Vi both saw your proposed make-out schedule over my shoulder. A little awkward.

  But I’m officially winging my way over to you on the 13th of September :)

  Isolde

  Friday 23 August

  I thought the anger would last forever. It was so hot and furious I couldn’t sleep from it most nights, even though it was the middle of winter and the temperature went down to single digits at 4am. My hands would ache, and then I’d realise it was from clutching my sheets like I unconsciously wanted to rip the flannelette to shreds.

  And then three days ago, when I woke up the fury was gone.

  I wish I could go back to feeling angry. Grief is worse.

  I keep thinking of moments that are never going to happen again. We’ll never have another Christmas Eve where Dad, Mum, Vi and I all wear dorky matching red plaid pyjamas, and we gobble up Mum’s mind-blowing dark-chocolate mousse in front of the TV as we yell out lines from Home Alone. We’ll never tease Dad again about Mum’s not-so-secret crush on Jude Law, as we follow Home Alone up with The Holiday.

  We’ll never wake up again all together in the same house on Christmas morning. That realisation, especially, makes me cry in the middle of the night.

  We’ll never do another family trip down the South Coast, where Vi and I sit in the back seat of the car, complaining about Mum and Dad’s taste in music. Or have a picnic at Balmoral Beach, where Dad insists on bringing the stinkiest blue cheese you could ever imagine, and we make him sit a metre away from our picnic blanket on his own towel, and toss him crackers now and then out of sympathy when he starts warbling a sad aria.

  I’m never going to run down the hall to ‘their’ room again. It’s just Mum’s now. I have to call Dad to speak to him, instead of just shouting upstairs the way I always have.

  It’s never going to be us – the four of us: Vi, Dad, Mum, me – ever again.

  The loss of all those infinitesimal moments, the quirky traditions that were unique to our little family, feels unbearable sometimes.

  I can’t talk to Vi about how I’m feeling. She’s still furious. I can see it when she’s sitting at the kitchen table in the evenings, trying to finish off the last of her thesis paper, which is due in a couple of weeks. She’s not touch-typing. Her fingers all-out attack the keys.

  Mum’s in a completely different stage now altogether. Getting on with things, I hear her label it on the phone to her friends. I guess she’s had longer to adjust. She’s weeks ahead of Vi and me in terms of processing what’s happened.

  Now she and Dad are officially separating, there’s all the practical stuff to think of. Everything’s connected. Bank accounts. Health insurance. The loans on the cars.

  They’re going to sell the house. I know it makes sense – after all, when Vi goes back to Cambridge in mid-September, there will be only two of us left here – but I feel sick over the news anyway.

  I’ve lived in the same place my whole life.

  Mum’s saying she’s going to use her share of the sale to buy one apartment here in Sydney for her and me to live in, and one in Queenstown – not just as an investment in a rising market, but so we have somewhere to stay whenever we visit. Mum thinks we should go back to spending Christmases and long weekends there – ‘get away from Sydney now and then’.

  I should be happy – we’ll actually own something in my favourite place in the world – but I just feel hollow.

  Isolde’s Mobile

  Violetta

  Friday 30 August, 4:45pm

  I just got home from the library. The letter’s here.

  Isolde

  Friday 30 August

  I wish I’d been the one to get the letter first, I think as I walk through the front door. Mum and Vi are both pacing in the hall like they’ve been waiting for me the whole time since Vi texted.

  I got the text during the half-time break of my pointe class. I didn’t want to rush out early because I knew what the letter was going to say.

  I remember the slim envelope from last year. The one-page typed letter inside it.

  Thank you for applying for a place at the National Ballet School. We regret to inform you that you were not successful on this occasion.

  I remember how disappointment had sunk heavily into my bones, weighing me down for months afterwards.

  This year feels different. I know I’m going to feel sad – that’s natural – but it won’t be the crushing devastation of last time. Not getting a place doesn’t mean what it used to – failure. Now it’s just a turning point where my life goes in a slightly different direction than what I once planned. That doesn’t mean it’s the end of doing what I love.

  I know that I’m going to keep dancing. All the emotions that I’ve experienced the last few months – the high of falling in love, the joy of being loved back, the grief and fury and fear that’s coursed through my body during Mum and Dad’s separation – I’ve poured them into ballet. I’m not faded any more. I can feel all the colours of emotion bleeding through me, from my toes to my fingertips, seeping into every movement I make.

  With that colour comes memory. The reason five-year-old me started dancing: to express things. This is the reason I’ll never stop, even if ballet just becomes me, alone in a studio, finding solace and joy and flow.

  As I look at Mum and Vi’s anxious faces, I know I’m ready for what’s inside that envelope.

  ‘I promise I haven’t opened it,’ Vi says as she moves her hand from behind her back and gives me the mail.

  It’s not a slim, C4-sized envelope. This one is much bigger and it’s thick. My heart starts pounding.

  Calm down. They’ve probably included a brochure about patronage or something.

  I rip the envelope open with shaking fingers, and my eyes scan the top of the letter.

  We are delighted to offer you a place within our Level 5 program at the National Ballet School, commencing in January.

  I read the same sentence over and over, sure that I’ve got it wrong. And
then Vi, who’s peeping over my shoulder, lets out a scream right in my left ear.

  ‘You DID it!’ she shouts. ‘I knew you would. I just knew!’

  Mum starts crying.

  Vi’s shaking my shoulders now. ‘She’s in shock,’ she’s saying to Mum.

  ‘Are you sure it’s an acceptance?’ I say to Vi as I hand her the letter to look over. I don’t trust myself.

  Vi riffles through the papers, and then pulls one out from the back, waving it in front of my face. ‘This is your enrolment form, silly. You fill that in, you’re official.’

  I hadn’t realised how much of me had still been holding out hope. Not until now, when I’m staring down at the enrolment papers, shaking from emotion.

  I did it.

  Mum and Vi have their arms around me now. I look up for the first time and I see the three of us, reflected in the hall mirror.

  ‘We’re going out to celebrate,’ Mum says. ‘Grab your coats, girls.’

  We go to a bar next to the Opera House. Mum and Vi have champagne. I’m not allowed, of course, but I feel tipsy anyway from pure elation. I keep wondering if I’m going to wake up tomorrow and this will all just have been a dream.

  ‘What do you bet she’s going to be dancing in there one day?’ Vi says to Mum, pointing at the Opera House.

  ‘She just might,’ Mum says, smiling.

  I know that’s a whole stratosphere away from this moment right now. Dancing on one of those stages, inside one of the world’s most beautiful buildings, is something that might happen one day – if I manage to get a place with the National Ballet Company.

  But it feels like a possibility. Everything does.

  ‘I’m going to call Taylor,’ I tell them.

  ‘Let’s do it now!’ Vi’s hyped up on a half-glass of champagne. She grabs my phone, opens Skype, and the next second, Taylor’s face is staring back at us. Mum and Vi are crowded around me, yelling into the phone at the same time.

  ‘She got in!’

  ‘She has a place!’

  In the garble of noise, it takes him a minute to realise. And then he’s beaming, his smile as wide as the one he’d worn after I’d kissed him in Aoraki National Park.

  ‘My girlfriend’s a legend!’ he shouts.

  ‘Ooooh, girlfriend, hey?’ Vi says.

  ‘What are you, six?’ I laugh, taking the phone from her.

  I wander down to the end of the outdoor section, where it’s quieter. For a few minutes, our conversation is excited – about a dozen I’m so proud of yous from his side and even more I can’t believe its from mine. And then the tone of the call changes.

  ‘I wish I was there,’ Tay says softly.

  ‘I wish you were too.’ I’m feeling sad for the first time tonight. I hate that we can’t be together for moments like this.

  There’s a beeping noise on the line.

  ‘Someone calling?’ Tay says.

  ‘Ana,’ I reply, looking at the name flashing across my phone screen.

  ‘Take it, Is. Ana’s going to be over the moon.’

  ‘Chat tomorrow?’ I say.

  We need to talk. Everything we’ve discussed over the last eight weeks – how we’re going to work – is different now.

  Backpacking’s not going to happen. Or at least not till we’re much older. Once I start at the National Ballet School, I’ll be in Melbourne till I’m twenty, until the last year of the program. And then after that, I’m going to be aiming for a place with a company. Jumping on a plane for a long weekend isn’t going to be as simple as we’d thought. It’s not impossible, but I know I’m going to have ballet commitments on a lot of Saturdays now, which means fewer visits with Taylor.

  Fewer than we’d planned.

  I love him so much, I hate the idea of fewer.

  ‘Yeah, I think we should,’ Taylor says.

  I can tell by his voice that he knows what the conversation’s going to be about.

  ‘I love you,’ I say.

  ‘I love you too.’

  Taylor

  Friday 30 August

  I know she wants to talk about us.

  It’s stupid not to.

  I just wish we could have the conversation in person, sitting side by side. So I could hold her hand, like a promise, when I tell her: I want to go the distance with you.

  Isolde

  Friday 30 August

  Dad arrives at the bar just after 7pm. I hear him before I see him.

  ‘My prima ballerina assoluta,’ he shouts, before he picks me up and spins me around.

  He means most notable or legendary ballerina.

  ‘Not quite,’ I say, laughing, as he puts me down.

  When Mum had called him from the car on the way into the city, telling him where to meet us, a tiny part of me hadn’t wanted to see him. I was worried that seeing him and Mum together – and knowing they’re not together any more – would bring all that rage that I’d only just got a handle on roaring back to life again.

  But I don’t feel angry now he’s here. After all, it’s been hard not to think of Dad since I opened the letter. In all of my memories of ballet, he’s there on the sidelines.

  Way back when I was five – when I started dancing – there’s Dad, brushing my hair, smoothing it up into a bun for ballet class. After a few weeks, I’d started asking him for braids, or twists, the more complex buns I saw the other girls in my class wearing. Dad learned them – from Google, or from asking another mother on the sidelines – and once I was a little older, he taught me how to do them.

  Dad driving to sports stores to buy foam rollers and tennis balls for warm-down. Dad threading needles for me, the first time I ever sewed ribbons on a pointe shoe. He’d sewn sequins onto tulle too, more times than I could remember.

  Dad in the waiting room of the physio two years ago, comforting me when I was a teary mess about an ankle injury that wasn’t healing fast enough.

  Dad waiting anxiously outside class after every audition for a Winter Extravaganza, or an end-of-year production.

  On his feet at the end of every one of my shows, shouting Brava!

  After opening night, back at home, we’d always sit in the kitchen together and drink hot chocolate and talk about the show. What had gone right or wrong. What I was proud of or wanted to improve. They were always long talks, where I could see him taking in everything I had to say like all of it mattered a lot to him, not just because I was his daughter, but because art mattered to him as well.

  He wasn’t a dancer, but he loved ballet, just like I did.

  I have to close my eyes for a minute as I think of that, because I don’t want Mum, Dad or Vi to see the tears.

  I’d wondered if Mum and Dad would be weird around each other tonight. But they’re not. Maybe it’s my news, or the fact that we haven’t all been together like this since the wedding, but things are fine. Mum’s smiling and relaxed. Dad’s upbeat. He orders more champagne for Vi and Mum, and pizzas for us all to share. We eat them, watching the lights appear on the Harbour Bridge, and Vi tells Mum and Dad about the Cook Islands, and how Jack dubbed her the ‘speed demon’ after they shared a jetski and her antics behind the wheel sent him flying off the thing. Dad tells us about his new job and makes some bad jokes, which Vi and I roll our eyes at.

  It’s like old times.

  Until we all head to the parking garage. Mum, Vi and I get into Mum’s car, and Dad stands to the side as we buckle our seatbelts and close our doors. His car is on the next floor down, but he wants to see us off.

  ‘Drive safe,’ Dad says as Mum backs out of the car spot.

  As we pull away, I look at him, standing in the empty parking space.

  All I can think is: Why aren’t you coming home with us?

  Taylor

  Saturday 31 August

  We talk into the middle of the night. Issy tells me how wrong it felt to drive away without her dad.

  ‘I just want it to stop hurting,’ Issy says, crying.

  My heart is breakin
g for her. All I want to do is make everything better. But all I can do is listen and try to say something – anything – that I think might help.

  ‘Thanks for being here for me,’ Issy says quietly sometime after midnight.

  ‘I’m always going to be, Is.’

  ‘I’m scared, Tay,’ she says. ‘About us. About what’s going to happen.’

  I’m relieved she’s said scared. It’s honesty instead of bravado. A secure starting point, instead of building our conversation on the shaky ground of not wanting to offend the other person.

  ‘I’m scared too,’ I admit.

  ‘I want to be with you.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘That’s simple, right?’

  ‘The hard bit is how,’ Issy says. ‘How’s it going to work? Like, once I’m in Melbourne, and if you start travelling for training and comps.’

  ‘I want it to be as easy as we love each other, and we’ll work it out as we go,’ I reply. ‘But I know it’s not.’

  ‘I love that you have something you love doing,’ Issy says. ‘You know that, right? The last thing I want to do is limit your dreams, or make you feel guilty for going for them.’

  ‘Me either,’ I say. ‘I love that you have massive goals. We’re the same like that.’

  ‘We know what we’re getting into,’ Is says. ‘It’s really tough.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’

  I think back to when we used to skype – me in Colorado, her in Sydney. The months and months apart. And we weren’t even a couple back then.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Issy says.

  ‘I still want to be with you,’ I reply. ‘We understand each other, Is. We understand this kind of life. If anyone can make it, we can.’

  ‘I know,’ she says quietly.

  I know we’re both thinking of the last year. The way that distance has already been there that whole time, and yet, we’re even closer than we were twelve months ago. Who’s to say that won’t be the case again in another year?

  I know my answer. It hasn’t changed since the moment back in April when I realised I was in love with her.