The Children's Bach (8 page)

Vicki kept her eyes on the dark patch, and saw the pale blur of Philip's shirt, the faint shapes of the musicians creeping out, stepping over leads, fumbling with their instruments. Light and sound burst as one and she saw the shock wave hit Dexter: his eyes became slits and he turned his head this way and that like a baby with earache. Vicki charged down the front to dance beside girls she did not know but who meet her eye and smile at her as they leap and bob and twirl about in their cheap and cheerful dresses, in the brief camaraderie of moving to music. They are happy! They are laughing! They are young and silly and here to have fun!

Athena worked her way forward as far as the front row of non-dancers. She was blasted by noise but fired with curiosity. She could not tell which instrument was producing which sound, but she heard a guitar playing something that started as casually as water spilling over the lip of a basin and wondered if it was proceeding from Philip's fingers; she heard a boy behind her roar to his friend, ‘They're a bit
guitary
, aren't they?'; she saw the fat-hipped keyboard player raise his wrists up high and move his lips like a slow reader; and with a piercing envy she saw Philip's sociable demeanour, his raised head, his skipping turns, and the glances, the smiles of a tender complicity that passed between him and the others as they drowned themselves in sound.

At the first break Dexter forced his way through the shoulders to Athena and seized her elbow at the very moment her other arm was taken by Vicki fighting towards the bar. Vicki was glassy and smiling, Dexter frowning and wild-eyed. In their linked, three-way posture they might have been performing a country dance.

‘Let's get out of here!' shouted Dexter. ‘Those aren't instruments! They're machines!'

A passing boy sneered. Vicki's face closed. ‘I'll get a lift home,' she said.

‘I think I'd like to stay too, Dex,' said Athena.

Betrayed, Dexter did not argue. ‘I'll wait for you in the car,' he said, and ploughed away to the door.

Dexter stumbled out past the posters into the hotel carpark. It was a mild summer night. A warm wind puffed now and then, a wind that had passed across the river and through miles of suburban gardens, across the roofs of houses in which lived people's aunties, and doctors, and university professors, and adults and children whose families had put them into institutions. He had not drunk enough. The music was nothing to him now but a dulled thudding, though his head was ringing. How did the neighbours put up with it? He unlocked the car door and got in. His wide, short trouser leg snagged on the door handle. The inside of the car comforted him. He could smell his children in it, their grubbiness, their chip packets; and something else, something more than a smell, a faint fleshiness which was evidence that his wife had been there. Even Vicki's strident perfume could not swamp it. He picked it up as surely as a nesting bird recognises its mate's cry in the dense cacophony of an Antarctic island. Sometimes if he went to the lavatory after her he smelled it so strongly that it almost revolted him: it was his mother's smell, sickeningly rich and warm, an emanation from internal membranes.

What was that noise? He wound the window right down and stuck his head out. Someone was sobbing in the carpark, a woman, a girl. She was wailing, choking, trying to talk. He pulled his head in and went for the door handle but the moronic thumping of the music stopped dead and a man's voice spoke, light, reasoning, impatient.

‘Look, Donna,' it said, ‘why can't you just accept it? And make the best of it?'

‘But you don't – you never – I can't –' She was weeping without shame. They were standing in the dark behind Dexter's car. He heard the man click his tongue and sigh, then the sobbing became muffled. He's put his arms around her, thought Dexter, but he doesn't love her any more. He rolled up the window as quietly as he could, although his urge to go on listening was almost sexual. His heart was beating. The music began again, stamp, stamp, stamp. The girl's grief passed through metal and glass and became part of Dexter. His cells were sodden with it. He would carry it forever, long after she had recovered from it and gone on to love someone else.

*

Beside one of the speaker boxes crouched an androgynous creature in a raincoat. Its neck was bent, its hair was slicked back like a schoolboy's off its sweating, waxen face, it nodded its head in time and kept its eyes turned up sideways and fixed on the lit, jerking figures above it. Something damned in its posture and its crooked stare made Athena shiver. She followed it to the lavatory – so it was a girl – and heard it vomiting.

She found Elizabeth standing watching the band from the side. The music stopped.

‘Did you see that girl? Is she all right?'

‘I saw a thing in a raincoat,' said Elizabeth, ‘with no features on its face.'

‘She was vomiting. Do you think I ought to do something?'

‘What – clean up? They hire people to do that.'

‘But she looked like a child.'

‘They all do,' said Elizabeth. ‘They
are
.'

The girl emerged, paler than before, and slithered back to her crouching position of worship, or supplication. Athena noticed that from where Elizabeth was standing, Philip looked . . . famous. From below the stage, where Athena had spent most of the evening, he had looked like a bloke with a guitar doing a job of work.

When Athena opened the passenger door at midnight she found Dexter asleep with his head on his arms, and his arms on the steering wheel. He did not move, though people were shouting and laughing and starting up cars all around. She stood bent over, half in and out of the car, and looked at his face from the side. She found it pretty. It wasn't, but that was how she saw it. She thought, ‘You will never be anything to me but beautiful.' She slid in beside him and he woke.

‘Hullo, dearest!' he said. ‘All over, is it?' He stretched his arms backwards and arched his spine.

‘It was fun,' said Athena. ‘We've been dancing and dancing.'

‘I had a wonderful stroke of luck,' said Dexter. ‘I turned on the wireless and they were playing that Mozart clarinet quintet, you know, the one I like so much?' He pursed his lips and whistled a rising run of notes, one forefinger lifted like a prophet. ‘It's sublime. Beyond praise! Where's Vicki?'

‘She said she'd be home later,' said Athena.

*

They lay wide awake, smelling the summer night, restless, involved in their separate travellings, longing to slip off the edge into real sleep.

‘Are you still awake?' said Athena.

‘Yes.'

‘Stop thinking. How can I drop off next to a head full of thoughts?'

Dexter got up with a sigh. She heard his bare feet brush on the hall lino, and stretched out into the cool corners of the bed. What time could it be? Her feet felt dry-skinned and feverish. Her hair stank of other people's cigarette smoke. She turned the pillow over and over. A door creaked, someone laughed up high, there was a scuffling somewhere in the house, Dexter was up, he would see to it. Her muscles let go and she was away.

Someone was whispering above her head, through the window, tap tap tap on glass, calling her name. Her feet hit the floor and her finger the lamp switch before her eyes were open. ‘What? What?'

‘Come and open the front door, Thena! It's me!'

‘What on earth are you doing?' Dexter was standing on the front verandah in his pyjamas with both hands clapped over his mouth and his eyes rolling. He scampered past her and dived on to the bed.

‘He had her up against the fridge!' he snorted. He giggled and thrashed his legs like a naughty boy in a dormitory. ‘I was on my way to the lavatory. I turned on the kitchen light and they were –'

‘Who?' She pushed the bedroom door to and flicked off the light.

‘Him! The one with the tattoo! He had his trousers off, in the kitchen!'

‘What? Is Elizabeth here!'

‘No! It was Vicki! I had to come back round the outside of the house. They must have thought I was perving on them.' He took a big quivering breath. ‘Is there going to be a scandal?'

‘Isn't she a little monkey,' said Athena. ‘I hope she's on the pill.' She lay down, smiling to herself. The curtain moved on the air, settled, moved again. It was like waiting for a play to continue.

An engine slowed down outside, a taxi radio quacked, a door slammed, heels clacked to the verandah as smartly as if it were broad day.

‘Here's your scandal,' said Athena.

They lay flinching on the bed. Her knocking shook the house. The neighbour's dog began to bark.

‘Open the door,' said Athena. ‘She'll wake the kids.'

He scrambled into the hall. Elizabeth pushed past him and charged down the hall towards Vicki's room.

‘The back door wasn't locked, Morty,' Dexter sang out after her. ‘She'll think it's our fault,' he hissed to Athena.

‘Don't be silly. Let them sort it out for themselves.' She turned her back to him and he flung his arm around her.

‘This is awful!' he said.

‘This must be what people
do
,' said Athena. ‘Go to sleep.'

Dexter lay rigid as a board, braced for more sobbing, but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden, on a large, flat, well-kept lawn, where yellow leaves off poplars lay about in drifts. As she watched they began to rise off the grass and play in the air in orderly streams as if being squirted from a hose: they rose and fell and rose again, in a variety of patterns, and everything was beautiful and enchanting and as it should be.

*

They stood in the shade on the cool tiles of an arcade and looked into a shop window where an automatic photo printing machine was on display. Before their eyes it disgorged into the chute a single colour snap: a baby in a humidicrib. As one they turned away.

‘I used to play my guitar all day at home,' said Philip. ‘I used to think that if people could hear these certain notes played at this certain rhythm, then they'd understand everything and everything would change.'

‘Do you feel horrible,' said Athena, ‘when you've played less well than you ought to have? And exposed yourself?'

‘I used to,' said Philip. ‘I used to go looking for heroin or dope or a lot of whisky so I could get oblivious as fast as I could. Because of shame. And wanting to wipe out this person and be nothing. Not just after I've played badly either. When I've behaved like an animal. Hurting people. These last few mornings I've been shaving and I've looked in the mirror and thought, I could pull the razor across here like this' – he drew a line from ear to ear – ‘except that it would hurt so much.'

‘And make such a mess,' said Athena. ‘I think of jumping off buildings.'

‘Jumping, do you?' He was alarmed.

‘I don't mean I want to die,' said Athena. ‘I just get that feeling, when I stand on a high balcony, that I'd like to jump out into the air.'

He nodded.

‘Do you ever think it might be true?' said Athena.

‘What?'

‘Hell, and all that.'

He grabbed the back of her hair in a bunch and tugged at it. He looked upset. ‘No. No, I don't.' He kept his hand on her shoulder and then slipped it back into his pocket. ‘Will we go and walk round in Georges?'

‘I haven't got any money,' said Athena.

‘I can lend you some. They finally paid me.'

‘I'm not going to buy anything.'

‘Here. Just to hold. Fifty dollars to keep in your pocket till you get to the bank. So you won't be bereft.'

The note was new. Its surface was oily and it had a military smell, like calico. He went on ahead of her. ‘Ten minutes, at the corner.'

She looked at some jeans, the kind Vicki wore that she had to lie on her back to zip up. She went to the bank and took out the money for the food shopping. On her way to the meeting place she planned what she would say to him when she gave him back his money. In a light voice she would say, ‘Here you are, my sweetheart, my darling, my treasure.' She would get the tone just right. Her heart was beating. She got to the corner and stopped outside the bra shop. He was not there. The dry wind fluffed out her hair like koala's ears.

*

Dexter was out when Elizabeth and Poppy came in through the back gate. Athena, sitting on the concrete step in the evening, did not think she could entertain them on her own without the screen of his noisy sociability. She had wasted half the day wandering in the city with Philip, it was late, and she should have been, she should be . . . But the girl was carrying a cello in a case.

‘We came to ask a favour,' said Elizabeth. She pushed Poppy forward. ‘Go on. You ask.'

‘I have to go to my music lesson,' said Poppy. ‘My father forgot. He went off in the car and I haven't got any way of getting there.'

‘Do you want me to drive you?' said Athena.

They were embarrassed, having meant to ask Dexter.

‘It's straight out the freeway,' said Poppy.

‘She can show you the way,' said Elizabeth.

‘It's my last one for the year,' said Poppy. ‘It's already paid for.'

Athena got to her feet.

‘Do you want me to come?' said Elizabeth.

Everyone understood the meaning of this question.

‘Last summer,' she said, ‘I went to the concert hall when Poppy played in the music camp orchestra. I took one look at those rows and rows of skinny legs and enormous Adidas runners going tap tap tap and I burst into tears.'

‘Elizabeth doesn't like orchestras much,' said Poppy. ‘She doesn't like quite a few things.'

‘Opera.'

‘Cheese.'

‘Tracksuits.'

They pantomimed themselves for her, struck dramatic poses and exaggerated their elocution. She watched them, and looked for the father in the child. He showed himself only fleetingly: the colour was wrong, the cheeks were rounder, but she saw his jawline and the secretiveness of the smile.