Music From Standing Waves

Copyright © 2015 Johanna Craven

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of
the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is
purely coincidental.

PART ONE

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

PART TWO

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

PART THREE

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’m the last one off the plane. And
regretting that scrap of toast I forced down for breakfast. My
housemate Jess would be proud of me for coming home if she knew.
She’s going through some pop psychology phase and told me I have
avoidance issues. I suggested she stop smoking weird things and
find herself a less offensive hobby.

I slide my handbag onto my shoulder. It’s
made of snakeskin leather and makes me feel like a superior being,
even if it is a hand-me-down from Clara. When I left this place, it
was with a plastic Coles bag dangling off my arm. At least I’ve
gotten somewhere.

My violin is lying alone in the overhead
locker. I consider leaving it there.

‘Music gives love a voice,’ the cover of my
old notebook said. Music gives love a voice alright; then rips out
its vocal cords and kicks them into the gutter.

I take the violin. I swing it onto my back;
my shoulders hunching under its all-too-familiar weight. I’m chased
onto the tarmac by a vacuum-wielding flight attendant. Heat slams
me. Humidity squeezes my lungs and it’s hard to breathe. Even the
air smells the same. It’s thick and salty and there is rain nearby.
Behind me, propellers churn and splutter on a plane the size of a
toy. No one wants to fly up here.

When I dare to look up, I see my brother
inside the terminal. He’s making that goofy
‘fancy-meeting-you-here’ face that Dad used to pull at the school
gates. The monotony of this place is hypnotic. I’m still at the
airport and already, it’s like I never left.

Seventeen years I spent in this steamy,
forgotten top corner of Australia, watching the seasons cycle
between hot and hotter; wet and wetter. I grew up yelling across
fences instead of using telephones, climbing trees to find escape
routes and whittling away the tedium with water pistols, cricket
bats and make-believe. Childhood in Acacia Beach wasn’t the type of
youth that slides through your fingers like sand, but a boggy, ice
cream flavoured swamp you couldn’t climb out of if you tried. My
violin lessons became a life raft against a tide of sameness that
threatened to drag me under. All my memories of this place are
underscored by an Elgar Sonata; the violin soaring above the piano
with a background of cicadas, frogs, and outboard motors. Music has
the strangest way of making you remember.

Justin and I soaked up our childhood on the
yellow grass behind his house. Our world was the size of his
backyard. For an entire short lifetime, we’d shared the same shadow
and breathed each other’s air. We’d skim stones across the ocean
and play noughts and crosses in the gravel while the sun turned our
arms the colour of milky coffee. Our feet were bare and dirty, our
hair tangled under our caps. We smelled of grass and sunscreen.

Justin taught me to blow bubbles in my chewy.
He was two weeks younger than me, but being a boy, he was better at
making things like bubbles, spit bombs and traps for small animals.
We’d pinch and poke each other like we were made of play-dough.

“Don’t let him touch you like that,” my mum
would say. “Lord only knows what’s going through his mind.”

I had no idea what was going through his
mind. Rachel, the city girl, did, apparently.

“Men only think about one thing,” she
said.

Whatever that was. I would nod at my mother
to avoid another argument, then let her words disappear into some
make-believe world we were in the midst of creating. I made-believe
because I didn’t want to be no one. I wanted to be an explorer, a
city girl and then later, the passion wrapping itself around me the
way a snake strangles its victims, a concert violinist. I dreamed
big because I lived small.

If I was twelve again now, I’m sure I’d spend
my time texting pimply guys with braces, but back in 1994, our town
was still reeling from the invention of the telephone. Acacia Beach
was one perpetual nanna nap. A buried time capsule.

“Oh look,” people would say when they dug us
up. “The kids here behave like
children
. How odd…”

Shipwreck had been my idea. I loved the idea
of escaping on a boat, even if it did always end in a struggle for
survival.

“Would you really sail away on a ship, Abby?”
Justin asked me once. “If you could?” His eyes sparkled at the
prospect; bluey-green like our little piece of the ocean.

“Of course. Wouldn’t you?”

Justin shrugged.

“We should do it one day. You and me. It’d be
fun. Best friends forever. B.F.F.” I made him pinkie-swear.
“B.F.F.”

We piled into the old fibreglass dinghy on
Justin’s back lawn. The floor of the boat was mouldy so his dad
never took it to sea any more. For as long as I could remember, it
had lived on the grass behind the washing line.

“We’ll sail south,” I said. “Towards
Antarctica, where there’s ice and snow and penguins.”

In my Antarctica, castles of ice rose from
the ocean and snow fell like splintered stars. In my Antarctica, we
weren’t hemmed in by sea, or by the endless green nothing that
surrounded Acacia Beach. Our adventures lifted me out of reality
even if it was just for an hour or two. For those hours, I could be
anything, anyone and anywhere.

“Are we meant to be sinking now?’ my little
brother asked, thirty seconds in. Grotty, clueless Tim, eight years
old and smeared with Nutella, would grow up to be my parents’
favourite.

Rachel rolled her sophisticated, city-slicker
eyes. “Not yet!”

Disaster struck.

Rachel pointed into the raging storm. “A
deserted island!” she shrieked.

Justin raised an invisible telescope. “I
think it’s Fiji!”

Rachel huffed. “How many times do I have to
tell you? Fiji is not a deserted island. It has people and houses
and streets and cannibals…”

I needed make-believe to breathe. Without it,
I was suffocating in a palm-treed paradise. Our games were my
lifeline. Would we make it to Antarctica next time? Could I beat
Rachel’s long-held Tetris record? Was the house across the road
really haunted like Justin claimed? I wanted to grow up, but
couldn’t quite work out how.

Until suddenly I found more.

I learned violin from Acacia Beach’s only
music teacher. Andrew was straight out of Brisbane Conservatorium
and taught four instruments at the local high school. Twenty-one,
passionate and new to the town, he may or may not have been
responsible for the sudden obsession with piano lessons among
Acacia Beach’s teenaged girls. I had my classes in the basement at
his house. It was always cool down there, and there were windows
near the ceiling so you could see people’s feet when they walked
past. The walls were covered in faded blue wallpaper, and in the
corner was a Steinway upright. Andrew was principally a pianist and
far too brilliant a one to be teaching violin in the arse-end of
nowhere. Then again, he had his reasons. Or reason, at least.

Her name was Hayley; glamour-girl of Acacia
Beach and the pretend big sister I had latched onto once I realised
my older brother was a dickhead. It had taken Andrew approximately
half a nanosecond to meet, greet and marry her, pissing off all the
local guys who had spent their entire lives trying to do exactly
that.

Dad dropped me at their house for a lesson on
Saturday morning. Hayley opened the door and poked me into the
kitchen. Blonde curls bounced around her shoulders.

“Come in, sweetie,” she said. “Andrew won’t
be long.”

I put down my violin and climbed onto a
wobbly wicker stool at the bench. Hayley handed me a glass of
juice.

“How’s things?” she asked. “How are Mum and
Dad?”

“Okay.” I hiccupped.

The silver bangles on Hayley’s wrist jangled
as she opened and closed the fridge. “Are they getting ready for
the Christmas rush?”

My parents owned the local caravan park. They
had bought the business before I was born and, over the years, had
drifted into a stupor where the state of the caravan curtains, or
the toilet block, or some tanked feral running around our backyard
consumed their every minute.

“I guess,” I said. “Mum keeps telling Dad to
fix stuff.”

Hayley laughed, pouring a jug of water over a
withered cactus on the windowsill. “Do you think I should water
this? It doesn’t look very well. Is water bad for cactuses?”

My pretend big sister Hayley was born and
raised in Acacia Beach like me, yet had managed to emerge from the
experience favourably, like an exotic, suntanned Barbie doll. Her
parents were what my older brother Nick called ‘shit rich’, making
a fortune on their farm, supplying sugar, cattle and lavender
toiletries to everywhere from Cooktown to Perth. My dad had worked
for them when he had first come to Acacia Beach and married Mum.
After Nick finished school, he got a job there too, milking the
cows and pitching hay.

While I grew up watching other people take
holidays, Hayley had grown up going on them. She and her family had
been all over the world. Hayley had told me stories about the Swiss
Alps and the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids; things I’d only ever
seen on TV. I listened in amazement and tried to flick my hair over
my shoulder the way she did. I longed to be like Hayley. To have a
perfectly bronzed complexion instead of t-shirt tans and freckles.
To be able to fill out the top of my bathers so that guys had no
choice but to look down it. And to be able to attract someone like
Andrew, so that when he came to Acacia Beach on a graduation
holiday, he was never able to leave. I was surprised she had
managed to kill a cactus.

“What did you do to it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Maybe it didn’t like the
weather.” She pawed at the wilting stems with long red fingernails.
“Do you think it’s dead?”

Andrew wandered into the kitchen, running a
towel through his dark hair. I grabbed the score of my Mozart
sonatina and held it out to him.

“Wait til you hear me play this,’ I
announced. “I practised so much I failed my maths test.”

He smiled. “Well you know Mozart was your age
when he wrote that so he probably failed maths too.”

“You’re making that up,” I said.

“No I’m not.” He held a glass under the tap.
“You should play it in the school concert.”

My heart fluttered. I’d never really thought
about performing before.