Facing the Music. Andrea Goldsmith

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ that could not sustain her, and certainly not during long nights flayed by ghosts.

      Which was when she would decide to go out. She would dress, put on makeup and leave the house, and every time she left, she knew with an intuitive knowing that others before her had done the same, had crept down the stairs while their parents slept, into the hallway skirting the loose floorboards, down the two stone steps worn smoothly concave after a century of use, and out the kitchen door to the small back garden. She sensed these others as she climbed over the back gate and into the lane, for to think her misery was unique would only compound her suffering.

      To the city she would go, its pubs and bars pumping life into the night. The proprietors soon got to know her and stopped pestering her for identification, leaving her to drink and laugh until late, to pass a few hours when she could forget the burnt-out days of life without the cello. At closing time, more often than not, she would take to the back lanes for sex with a stranger, which was just another form of forgetting, probably the best of all. Over the years there must have been hundreds of men, anonymous men, young and old; and sometimes there was money, which she always accepted – after all, the sex was blatantly utilitarian, so why not the occasional prostitution?

      Looking back on those days she was amazed she never got into trouble, but did not, or at least nothing she could not handle. Besides, if she had focused on the dangers she would have had to devise other forms of forgetting.

      She was about fifteen when first she took the car, and this proved to be as effective a pain-killer as sex with strangers, particularly in winter, cold turbulent nights and the streets deserted, and she would pull on her clothes and leave the house. Juliet insisted the car be parked in the lane; her only interest, apart from Duncan, was the garden, and given it was such a small plot, she refused to part with any of it for off-street parking. With the car in the lane, stealing it was easy.

      Anna always followed the same route, driving away from the city towards the bay. The road curved around the beachside suburbs, past large, glass-fronted houses with blank, tinted stares, and on the other side, the wintry water, chopped and frosted by the southern winds. The window would be open and she would inhale the salted air; her hair, still brown in those days and very long, would lash her icy face. On and on, forty kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, on through the satellite suburbs and then the climb. The road cut into the side of the cliff and rose steeply above the bay, turning suddenly inland at the summit. When she reached the top, Anna would turn the car around and stop, would stare beyond the road to the glistening sea, and in her imagination she would press the accelerator and surge forward in a wild soaring through the welcoming sky.

      So clearly did she see this death, she wondered if it were a common experience. She decided to ask her friend Nadia, older by a year and very much wiser, a gifted violinist, whose parents, so different from Duncan and Juliet, wanted their daughter to be a solo performer. Nadia had not liked the question and refused to answer. It was only when Anna persisted that gentle Nadia turned on her and grabbed her by the arms. ‘You can be so stupid sometimes,’ she had said. ‘When will you learn there are certain thoughts you must push away? When will you learn to turn your back? Anyone can see their death, but only a fool would give in to it.’

      Nadia was a serious girl, which made her a valuable friend but a not-always-easy one, and while she had wisdom beyond her years, on this occasion Anna chose to ignore her. For the fact of the matter was, that far from fear and danger, flying through the air in the moment before death was a kind of ecstasy.

      This is how it would be. She would be at the top of the cliff, would turn the car around so the sea is in front of her, the road descending for perhaps a hundred metres then curving to the right to follow the line of the cliff. She starts the car, takes the road only so far as the bend, continues straight ahead over the glimmering, heaving sea, hearing the rushing wind as she speeds through the air, and music rising in a fantastic discord that mocks the costive rhythms of her father. Never in her imaginings does she touch the water; she glides above the waves in a prolonged moment of insight and the music she hears is her own. So it happens, in her parents’ car at three in the morning, she always pauses before the descent to decide if this will be the night, and never actually decides, never actually knows who, at the last minute, turns the wheel, but feels the sadness of knowing what she has missed.

      ‘Are you afraid of dying?’ Anna asked Nadia a couple of days after the first death questions.

      Nadia was back to her usual self and had been quick to answer. ‘Not afraid,’ she said, ‘just not ready.’

      From Anna’s perspective, Nadia’s was a perfect life. Her parents believed the solo performer occupied a special place in the world, indeed, so exalted was the place, that when they heard Anna had discontinued her cello studies, they tried to persuade her to change her mind. They spoke of the loss, both to Anna and to music, spoke too, of the terrible disappointment for her father. Anna explained that Duncan fully supported her decision, and kept on explaining until they withdrew, but it was clear they did not understand. Their view was shaped by their daughter, the girl with everything, clever, talented and adored by all. ‘Not afraid,’ she had said to Anna’s question about death, ‘just not ready.’ Anna had looked at her and was puzzled, Nadia was the sort of person to live for ever. Then Nadia had laughed. ‘Just joking,’ she said.

      But she was not. During the ten years Anna spent in London, she had written a handful of postcards to Nadia and each time had received a long and considered reply. On arriving back in Australia she had tried to contact her old friend. When she failed to locate her at her past two addresses, Anna rang her family to find out where she was living. Five months before, Nadia had killed herself; perfect Nadia who played the violin like an angel and was loved by everyone, had killed herself. ‘She’d been depressed for a long time,’ her mother said. ‘Even if we’d known, we couldn’t have stopped her.’ Nadia had drowned; weighed down with whisky and valium, she had walked into the ocean and sunk. ‘She always liked the sea,’ Anna said, feeling as if she should say something. ‘She never liked anything,’ her mother had replied.

      Anna kept a photograph of Nadia on the mantlepiece. ‘This was Mummy’s friend Nadia,’ she would say to Lily. ‘She played the violin so beautifully people said she played like an angel.’ Often she would listen to her old tapes of Nadia, hearing now she was dead, the furious rushing at emotion that shaped the playing. And while she listened she would remember her wise friend who, even as a child, knew the perils of life, her soft-skinned, almost-smiling friend who never seemed quite large enough on a broad empty stage.

      Not so long ago, while playing one of Nadia’s tapes, Lily had joined her; the child had listened without comment until the music was finished and then announced she wanted to be just like Nadia and play the violin like an angel. Anna had not known how to respond, so shocked was she to think Lily might have anything in common with Nadia and her short, stained life. She had studied her daughter, searching for Nadia’s porcelain calm, the self-crushing gentleness, but to her relief found only the outspoken child bursting the seams of her young life. And when she played, she showed none of Nadia’s outward reserve. Lily’s face, indeed her whole body, was fused with the music.

      ‘I’ll play like Nadia,’ Lily said again.

      ‘And so you will,’ Anna had replied, ‘like an angel.’

      The violin was Lily’s first instrument but she could turn her hand to anything, the piano, percussion, even conducting a pets’ chorus. And Anna smiled, her daughter would be all right, and not just for the two days she was in Melbourne, Lily was a child to grasp opportunity with both hands and fly.

      Anna roused herself and turned her thoughts to the day. First, some food; she was not hungry but with Duncan and her mother looming, it would be impossible to eat later. She took a roll from the freezer, cooked it under the griller and ate it with an apple. Next, her luggage; СКАЧАТЬ