Eighty Days Yellow (2 page)

I hadn’t ever encouraged him to try more than one finger again.

Darren put his cup in the sink and walked past me to the bedroom. I waited a few moments after he had disappeared from sight before getting up, embarrassed at the thought of how obscene I would look to him as I rose nude from the floor, although I’d now fallen thoroughly out of my Vivaldi-induced reverie and my limbs were beginning to ache and chill.

‘Come to bed, then, when you’re ready,’ he called back behind him.

I listened to him undress and get into bed, pulled my underwear on and waited for his breathing to deepen before slipping between the sheets beside him.

I was four years old the first time I heard Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
. My mother and siblings had gone away for the weekend to visit my grandmother. I had refused to leave without my father, who couldn’t come because he had to work. I clung to him and bawled as my parents tried to bundle me into the car, until eventually they relented and let me stay behind.

My father let me skip nursery school and took me to work with him instead. I spent three glorious days of almost total freedom racing around his workshop, climbing stacks of tyres and inhaling deep rubber-scented breaths as I watched him jack up other people’s cars and slide beneath them so that just his waist and legs were visible. I always stayed close by, as I had a terrible fear that one day the jack would fail and the car would drop and cleave him in two. I don’t know if it was arrogance or foolishness, but even at that age I thought I would be able to save him, that given the right amount of adrenaline, I would be able to hold up the body of a car for the few seconds that it would take him to escape.

After he’d finished working, we’d climb into his truck and take the long way home, stopping for an ice cream in a cone on the way, even though I wasn’t usually allowed to eat dessert before dinner. My father always ordered rum and raisin, while I asked for a different flavour every time, or sometimes half a scoop of two different sorts.

Late one night, I’d been unable to sleep and had wandered into the living room and found him lying on his back in the dark, apparently asleep, though not breathing heavily. He’d brought his record player in from the garage and I could hear the soft swish of the needle with each turn of the record.

‘Hello, daughter,’ he said.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Listening to music,’ he replied, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

I lay down alongside him so I could feel the warmth of his body near me and the faint smell of new rubber mixed with heavy-duty hand cleaner. I closed my eyes and lay still, until soon the floor disappeared and the only thing that existed in the world was me, suspended in the dark, and the sound of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
on the hi-fi.

Thereafter, I asked my father to play the record again and again, perhaps because I believed that I had been named after one of the movements, a theory that my parents never confirmed.

My early enthusiasm was such that for my birthday that year my father bought me a violin and arranged for me to have lessons. I had always been a fairly impatient child, and independent, the sort of person who might not seem predisposed to taking extra lessons or to learning music, but I dearly wanted, more than anything in the world, to play something that would make me fly away, like I had that night I’d first heard Vivaldi. So from the instant that I set my tiny hands on the bow and the instrument, I practised every waking moment.

My mother began to worry that I was becoming obsessive, and wanted to take the violin away from me for a time, so that I could pay more attention to the rest of my schoolwork, and perhaps also make some friends, but I had flat refused to relinquish my instrument. With a bow in my hand, I felt as though I might take flight at any moment. Without it, I was nothing, just a body like any other body, welded to the ground like a stone.

I quickly worked through the levels of my music primers, and by the time I was nine years old, I was playing far beyond the capacity my astounded school music teacher could conceive.

My father organised more lessons for me, with an older Dutch gentleman, Hendrik van der Vliet, who lived two streets away from us and rarely left his house. He was a tall, painfully thin man who moved awkwardly, as if he were attached to strings, and as if the substance he moved through was thicker than air, like a grasshopper swimming through honey. When he picked up his violin, his body became liquid. Watching the movements of his arm was like watching waves rise and fall in the sea. Music flowed in and out of him like a tide.

Unlike Mrs Drummond, the school music teacher, who had been shocked and suspicious of my progress, Mr van der Vliet seemed largely unmoved. He rarely spoke and never smiled. Though the population of my town, Te Aroha, was small, few people knew him and, as far as I was aware, he did not have any other students. My father told me that he had once played in the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam under Bernard Haitink and had left his classical career and moved to New Zealand when he met a Kiwi woman at one of his concerts. She had died in a car accident on the day that I was born.

Like Hendrik, my father was a quiet man, but interested in people, and he knew everyone in Te Aroha. At some point or other, even the most reclusive person would fall victim to a flat tyre, whether attached to a car, a motorbike or a lawnmower, and with a reputation for taking on even the smallest repair job, my father’s time was often consumed with doing odd jobs for various locals, including Hendrik, who had come into his workshop one day to have a bicycle tyre repaired and had left with a violin student.

I felt an odd sort of loyalty towards Mr van der Vliet, as if I was responsible in some way for his happiness, having come into the world on the same day that his wife left it. I felt bound to please him, and under his tutelage I practised and practised until my arms ached and the tips of my fingers were raw.

At school, I was neither popular nor an outcast. My grades were consistently average, and I was unremarkable in every way, other than in music, where my extra lessons and aptitude put me far ahead of my peers. Mrs Drummond ignored me in lessons, perhaps fearing that my extra expertise would make my classmates feel jealous or inadequate.

Every night I went into our garage and played the violin, or listened to records, usually in the dark, mentally swimming across the classical canon. Sometimes my father would join me. We rarely spoke to each other, but I always felt connected to him through the shared experience of listening, or perhaps by our mutual oddity.

I avoided parties and didn’t socialise much. Consequently, sexual experiences with boys my own age were limited. Even before I grew into my teens, however, I felt a quickening inside that signalled the early onset of what would later become a hearty sexual appetite. Playing a violin seemed to heighten my senses. It was as if distractions were drowned in the sound and everything else disappeared into the periphery of my perception other than the sensations of my body. As I entered my teens, I began to associate this feeling with arousal. I wondered why I was so easily turned on, and why music had such a powerful effect on me. I always worried that my sex drive was abnormally high.

Mr van der Vliet treated me as if I were an instrument rather than a person. He moved my arms into position or laid a hand on my back to straighten my spine as if I were made of wood not flesh. He seemed completely unconscious of his touch, as though I were an extension of his own body. He was never anything other than completely chaste, but despite that, and his age and slightly acrid smell and bony face, I began to feel something for him. He was unusually tall, taller than my father, perhaps about six foot six, and he towered over me. Even grown to full height, I was only five five. At thirteen years of age, my head barely reached his chest.

I began to look forward to our lessons together for reasons beyond the pleasure of perfecting my own playing. Occasionally I affected an ill-considered note or an awkward movement of my wrist in the hope that he would touch my hand to correct me.

‘Summer,’ he said to me softly one day, ‘if you continue to do that, I will teach you no longer.’

I never played a bum note again.

Until that night, a few hours before Darren and I fought over
The Four Seasons
.

I’d been at a bar in Camden Town, playing a free set with a minor would-be blues rock group, when suddenly my fingers had frozen and I’d missed a note. None of the band members had noticed, and aside from a few hard-core fans who were there for Chris, the lead singer and guitarist, most of the audience was ignoring us. It was a Wednesday-night gig, and the midweek crowd was even tougher than the Saturday-night drunks, as aside from the die-hard fans, the punters were just at the bar for a quiet beer and a chat, inattentive to the music. Chris had told me not to worry about it.

He played viola as well as guitar, though he had largely given up the first instrument in an attempt to create a more commercial appeal with the second. We were both string musicians at heart and had developed a bit of a bond because of it.

‘It happens to all of us, sweetheart,’ he’d said.

But it didn’t happen to me. I was mortified.

I’d left the band without having a drink with them afterwards and caught the train to Darren’s flat in Ealing, letting myself in with the spare key. I had mixed his flight times up, thinking he’d arrive later in the morning having taken the red eye and gone straight to the office without dropping by home first, giving me a chance to sleep in a comfortable bed the whole night and listen to some tunes. Another of my reasons for continuing to date him was the quality of the sound system in his flat, and because he had enough floor space to lie on. He was one of the few people I knew who still had a proper stereo, including a CD player, and there wasn’t enough space in my flat to lie on the floor, unless I put my head in the kitchen cupboard.

After a few hours of Vivaldi on repeat, I concluded that this relationship, while mostly pleasant, was strangling my creative drive. Six months of moderate art, moderate music, moderate barbecues with other moderate couples and moderate lovemaking had left me pulling at the chain I’d allowed to grow round my own neck, a noose of my own making.

I had to find a way out of it.

Darren was usually a light sleeper, but he regularly took Nytol to help him avoid jet lag after his flights back from Los Angeles. I could see the packet glinting in his otherwise empty wastepaper basket. Even at 4 a.m. he had dutifully disposed of the rubbish rather than let an empty wrapper rest on his bedside cabinet until morning.

The Vivaldi CD sat face down next to his lamp. For Darren, leaving a CD out of the case was the ultimate expression of protest. Despite the Nytol, I was surprised he’d been able to sleep at all, with it lying beside him, getting scratched.

I slipped out of bed before dawn, having had one or two hours of sleep at best, and left him a note on the kitchen bench. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘for the noise. Sleep well. I’ll call you, etc.’

I took the Central line tube into the West End with no real idea of which direction I was headed. My flat was permanently messy, and I didn’t like to practise there too often as the walls were thin and I worried that the tenants in the rooms next door would eventually tire of the noise, pleasant though I hoped it was. My arms ached to play, if for no other reason than to wear out the emotions that had built up over the previous night.

The tube was packed by the time I’d reached Shepherd’s Bush. I’d chosen to stand at the end of the carriage, leaning against one of the cushioned seats by the door as it was easier than sitting with my violin case between my legs. Now I was crushed in a throng of sweaty office workers, more cramming in at each stop, each face more miserable than the last.

I was still wearing my long, black velvet dress from the gig the night before, along with a pair of cherry-red patent leather Dr Martens. I played in heels for classical gigs, but preferred to wear the boots home as I felt they added a threatening swagger to my walk as I made my way through East London late at night. I stood straight, with my chin high, imagining that, dressed as I was, most of the carriage, or at least those who could see me among the crowd, suspected I was on my way home from a one-night stand.

Fuck them. I wished I had been on my way home from a one-night stand. With Darren travelling so much and me playing as many gigs as I could get, we hadn’t had sex in nearly a month. When we did, I rarely came, and only as the result of a hurried, embarrassed shuffling, me desperately trying to reach orgasm while worrying that my self-pleasuring after sex would make him feel inadequate. I still did it, even though I suspected that it did make him feel inadequate, because it was that or spend the next twenty-four hours pent up and miserable.

A construction worker got on at Marble Arch. By now the end of the carriage was completely rammed, and the other passengers scowled as he tried to squeeze into a small gap by the door in front of me. He was tall, with thick, muscled limbs, and he had to crouch a little so that the doors could shut behind him.

‘Move down, please,’ a passenger called out in a polite, though strained, voice.

Nobody moved.

Ever well mannered, I shifted my violin case to create a space, leaving my body unencumbered and directly facing the muscled man.

The train set off with a start, throwing the passengers off balance. He jolted forward and I straightened my back to keep myself steady. For a moment I felt his torso squeeze against me. He was wearing a long-sleeved cotton shirt, a safety vest and stone-washed denim jeans. He wasn’t fat, but he was stocky, like a rugby player in the off-season, and crunched up in the carriage with his arm stretched out to hold the overhead rail, everything he was wearing looked slightly too small for him.

I closed my eyes and imagined what he might look like beneath his jeans. I hadn’t had a chance to check below the belt as he’d got on, but the hand holding the rail overhead was large and thick, so I figured that the same was true of the bulge in his denims.