A Little Wanting Song (8 page)

Gus says when he met Beth he heard drums everywhere. “Drums in my blood. Drums in my sleep. Kid, when I met Beth, the air drummed.”

“We met at a rock concert,” she told me later. “The air actually was drumming.”

Nina Simone’s playing in the background today, but she’s not what’s putting jazz in my blood. It’s the thought of seeing Dave tonight. I’ve got little skipping beats in me. Whenever I check the clock, it’s ticking backward. Rose finally walks in at four. I grab snacks from the shelves. “You’re so lucky,” she says. “Your dad lets you do anything.”

“I’m so lucky I can hardly stand it,” I say, and ring the bell a couple of times on the way out the door.

I follow Rose and it occurs to me that the answer to my burning question might be in my arms. She and Luke want to hang out with me because I’m a ticket to free food.

“Ever notice it’s impossible to walk straight when you’re trying?” Rose asks on the way to her place, holding her arms out. Her feet topple into the grass but she catches herself easily.

“Dad took me to a circus once and the tightrope guy walked blindfolded from one side of the room to the other,” I say.

“Did he have a net?”

“Just a thread of steel to balance on.”

It was the first circus I’d been to since Mum died. Dad and I saw loads of things, but it was that guy I dreamed about. He swayed on the wire in my dream, and once he fell he became me, grabbing at huge handfuls of air.

“It’s all in their minds, isn’t it?” Rose asks. “They don’t fall because they imagine they won’t. You try it. Close your eyes and walk.”

I watch Rose feel her way along the edge of the grass with her toes. I pretend to do the same but I keep my eyes open half a moon. She’s got nothing in her arms and I’m carrying stuff so I can’t use mine for balance.

“Sometimes I’d rather be at school than on holidays,” Rose says, eyes still closed. “What’s your school like?”

“It’s okay.”

“More than okay, I bet. There must be loads of clubs and excursions. Are you in the band?”

“I’m in the big choir. I’m this little dot way up in the back.”

I can sing in front of people like that. I sink into the music and disappear. Dahlia wanted me to play my guitar and sing solo at the final school concert this year. It’s a big deal, and you have to audition in November to get a spot, and then the show’s on in the last week of school. “You could perform one of your songs,” she said.

“It’s not my thing,” I told her. I could sing in the shower, sure. I could play songs in front of her, too. But performing to a crowd? I could already taste that crumbling song.

“It is your thing,” Dahlia said. “It’s exactly your thing, only no one knows it. You’re always saying people don’t like you but people can’t like something that’s not there.”

“What are you thinking about?” Rose asks, staring at me.

I didn’t realize she’d opened her eyes. “I’m thinking I’m hungry.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m hungry, too. But there’s nothing to eat at home.”

I hold up the snacks.

“It’s a good thing you came to town.” She smiles.

Mrs. Butler’s on the way out as we’re walking in. She pushes a basket of washing toward Rose. “Put these on the line for me, love. Could you look after your cousins? I have to work late, and your dad’s sleeping.”

“Luke and Dave are coming over.”

“They can come tomorrow. Jenny’s sick. I have to do her shift.”

Rose calls Luke. “Mum says I have to do housework. You
can’t come over.” She hangs up, grabs the washing, and slams the back door.

“Nice to see you, Charlie,” Mrs. Butler says, and slams the front door.

“Nice to see you, too.”

Rose’s yard looks different from the ground. The last time I sat in Gran’s plum tree all those summers ago, Rose was alone, lying in the yard. Every now and then she’d roll over onto her back, slowly baking herself in the sun. That was the day I stopped hoping she’d invite me over. It was clear she didn’t need anyone. “You don’t have to help,” she says. “Go watch the movie at Luke’s place with Dave.”

I peg washing on the line.

“At least falling off a tightrope would be exciting,” she says.

“For a second, I guess. Before the crushing pain.” I hang things carefully so they don’t come undone in the wind.

“Crushing pain’s better than crushing boredom.” She stabs her mum’s jeans with the pegs and slaps at the legs. “Don’t you ever feel like doing something different from what you do every day?”

“All the time,” I tell her, but she’s not listening. She’s talking without taking a breath. “I call this Mum’s scuba suit,” she says, holding up underwear. “She gets pissed and tells me I’ll know all about being old one day. Even when I’m old, I won’t wear that.”

Pegs fall. She leaves them on the ground and pulls more from the basket. “I bet you’re glad you don’t have to cook for
your cousins. Bet you’re thinking, Thank God I don’t have to hang out my mum’s underwear. Thank God my mum doesn’t make me hang out washing from the caravan park. Thank God my mum doesn’t make me stay at home while she’s out working.” She steps on a peg and cracks its back.

I peg a towel so it hangs between us but her voice keeps going in the background. “It’s like I talk and she doesn’t hear,” Rose says.

I peg another towel.

“It’s like she’s not even there.”

And another.

“Like …” She stops, and what she’s said catches up with her. A yappy dog barks from a yard down the street. We finish hanging the washing in silence. I walk out from behind my towel fence and pick up the fallen pegs. “I might go home now.”

“No, wait. Stay. I’ll cook you dinner.”

“Why?” I ask.

The shadow of a bird passes over her face. “People change,” she says. I’m not sure whether she means me or her. I hang around for dinner either way.

Rose turns on the TV for her cousins. I look through her CD collection while she’s cooking. I don’t have a problem talking to Gus or Beth or the customers at the music shop because we’re talking about things I know. People say, “There’s this song by a girl and it goes kind of like this.”

I listen and say, “Yeah, that sounds like Luscious Jackson,” and I find it for them. I pull out a few other things I know they’ll like and I get a kick out of watching while they listen.
They’re thinking, This track is my life. Exactly. The music kicks in and maybe the bad times kick out and maybe the world’s a little better for them than it was before. After they’ve gone, Gus says, “You’re the biz, kid.” But I didn’t find them music for the money and he knows it.

Rose has mostly chart stuff in her collection, the kind Dahlia likes. It’s all fast beats and boppy. I’m not against the boppy beat, but there’s better boppy beats out there. There are songs that swing a person out of themselves for a while.

“Dinner’s ready,” Rose calls, and we sit down to burned chops and lumpy potatoes. “God, this is disgusting. Sorry,” she says, spitting some out.

“You know, I’m really good at making toast because my dad’s a chef.”

“Toast sounds good,” she says, staring at something that might have been a chop in another life if she hadn’t burned it beyond all recognition. “Toast sounds really good.”

While I’m spreading butter, I think about how I like the noise in Rose’s house, lines of music, threaded and knotted over the top of one another. Knives hitting plates, chairs scraping floor, kids screaming, her dad’s slippers shuffling his solo, “Can’t a Man Get Any Sleep Around Here?” Mixed together it sounds like a little kitchen symphony.

Mr. Butler takes over babysitting, and we sit in Rose’s room. She’s got this picture on her wall of tiny churches and dollhouses floating in a dark ocean. “They’re protistan shells,” she says. “Made of silica and lime. We learned about them in science.”

Before today, I never imagined Rose would be the sort of
girl to care about school. I imagined her to be the sort to hang around the back sheds, smoking. I guess you have to listen to a person to really know them. “What are protistans?” I ask.

“They’re these tiny organisms that live in the ocean. You can’t see them unless they’re magnified about two thousand times. People look right through them,” she says. “It seems like such a waste for things like that to be invisible.”

I look closely at the floating glass houses. “I hear my old music box when I look at them,” I say before I think that it might sound stupid.

“When I was a kid,” she tells me, “I wanted to know how someone trapped music in that tiny space. I smashed it to see. You ever do that?”

I shake my head. Mum gave me that music box.

“What’s it like living in the city?” she asks. “What do you do when you’re not at school?”

“I play guitar and write songs. I work at a music store on Acland Street, down on the beach. It’s close to where I live, close to loads of places to eat. Luna Park’s near the water. From the Ferris wheel, Mum and I used to look over the ocean on one side and the city on the other.”

“I’ve never been to the ocean. I want to go there. Go to the city. Go somewhere that leads places.”

“The river leads somewhere,” I say.

“Yeah, but I can’t see further than the bend.”

Gran used to tell me where the river went. She described the way one small trickle met up with another, how eventually you’re at a roaring mouth. She loved to talk about where she
and Grandpa had traveled before Dad was born. “My gran’s been heaps of places. She said this town was as beautiful as any she’d seen.”

“Yeah, but she got to see all the others.”

“You’ll see them,” I say.

“How do you know?”

I look at her poster and think about it. “Because you want to.”

Down the hall, one of her cousins cries. “I can’t stand kids screaming,” Rose says.

I plug my iPod into her computer and play a different mix than the one in her kitchen. I play some stuff to make her feel like she’s someplace else, someplace better.

A minute into Moloko and Rose is up and dancing. Apart from Mum and occasionally Dahlia, I never dance in front of other people on account of me being so shit at it. But I watch Rose jumping around and she doesn’t look all that much better than me. She looks kind of like Dahlia does when she bounces on my bed. “You got to cut loose once in a while,” Mum says. Five minutes into Moloko and I’m on the bedroom dance floor with Rose. I’m someplace else, someplace better.

I dance to Charlie’s music, spin and spin and forget about my cousin screaming and my mum pissing me off and how sick I am of this town. She loads songs onto my laptop and I need her to be like that, to want to be my friend, but I’m thinking at the same time, Why would you do that? Why give yourself away to someone who said the things I did in the backyard this afternoon? I said them by accident; I didn’t mean to hurt her, but I still said them.

“This song was my gran’s favorite,” she tells me, and I’m expecting some old guy to come on but instead “I’m gonna smash up the world” screams from the speakers. “We didn’t play it at the funeral,” Charlie says, and almost laughs.

I wouldn’t go to her gran’s funeral and it was practically
next door. “I barely know the Duskins,” I’d told Mum when she asked, and it’s the first thing she didn’t push me on. I guess she figured she couldn’t make me care. Dave went with his parents and I gave him shit about wearing a suit.

Charlie and her dad stayed for about a week. Dave and I were sitting at the bus stop when they left. We weren’t waiting for anything; we were filling in time. She kissed her grandpa goodbye. He barely kissed her back. I looked at Dave to say something, but he was staring at his shoes. “Let’s find Luke,” he said, and took off ahead of me up the street.

Old Mr. Duskin still ran the shop after that, but there wasn’t much you could buy in the place. Mum sent me in for things like cans of tomatoes and pineapple that we didn’t even need. I started sneaking into the supermarket when Mum sent me for things. The only time I went back into the Duskins’ shop was when Dave wanted something. “You can get that at the supermarket,” I told him.

“I know,” he said, and went inside to buy it from Charlie’s grandpa.

“Thanks,” I say before Charlie goes. “For the music. For hanging out.”

She acts like it’s no big deal. “I’ll burn you some more stuff,” she says.

“You should bring your guitar next time. Sing me some of your songs.”

“Nah. They’re just things I write to make me and Dahlia, my best friend, laugh.”

“If Dahlia laughs, then I probably will.”

“Dahlia’s not hard to make laugh,” she says. “She still cracks up when you say ‘butt’ to her.”

I think Charlie might be lying. I don’t think she plays at all. “Well, I’ll listen when you feel like it.”

After she’s gone, I play the music she left me. I watch the tiny protistan shells, and I think about her telling me I’ll leave here. The light makes them look like old blue Fords and guitars drifting through the ocean. The last song on my laptop is about a night with no moon. The singer’s voice is velvet and sad. “Silver dots in darkness,” she sings. “She’s miles away from morning. Midnight blood is thick with longing.”

I drift, almost sleeping, and the voice drifts around me. A thought about silkworms drifts as well. Mum bought me some a long time ago. They spin silk inside the cocoon, but to get at it you have to boil them alive before they hatch. One of my teachers told me and I came home and asked Mum if it was true. She nodded. “But we just won’t use them for silk,” she said. “We’ll keep them as pets; that’s all.” I ran my hand over the rough cocoon. I wanted so bad to see the silk.