Music From Standing Waves (2 page)

“Those kids should keep their damn noise to
themselves,” Mum had said after sitting through the school’s
obligatory Christmas knees-up. “It’s a waste of everyone’s
time.”

“Don’t you think I should keep my noise to
myself?” I asked Andrew.

“Who told you that?”

“My mum.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Why the hell would
your mum-” Hayley whacked him and made him slop his water. “It’s
not noise, Abby,” he said. “You play very well.”

I felt a surge of pride through me then. The
first hint that this thing might swallow me whole. I followed
Andrew to the basement. He guided my arm through long, careful bow
strokes. My violin grumbled like a tenor with a scratchy
throat.

“Listen to your tone. Not so much pressure…
Good.”

“Will there be lots of people? At the
concert, I mean.”

Andrew laughed a little. “I wouldn’t hold
your breath for a record turn out.”

I laid the sonatina out on my music stand,
nestled my violin under my chin and let the bow rest on the opening
string. I had practised like mad that week. I wanted Andrew to be
proud of me. Hesitating, I lowered my bow.

“My mum said it’s noise,” I said again.

He perched on the piano seat and ran a hand
through his wet hair. “Well,” he said finally. “Some people
appreciate music and some don’t. But I don’t want you thinking that
you shouldn’t be performing, okay?”

“Is performing the reason we do music?” I
smiled at my revelation.

“I’m not sure there is a real reason for
music, Abs. It’s just something some of us can’t live without.”

Can’t live with it, can’t live without
it.

That pissy little concert would change
everything for me. If only I’d been a good girl, listened to my
mother and kept my damn noise to myself.

The course of my life was set in a high
school gym that smelled of shoes. Standing at the top of the
basketball court in front of an audience that may have just cracked
double figures, I nailed my first violin performance.

The gym became a concert hall. The
three-point line of the basketball court a real stage. The parents
in plastic chairs and Stubbies shorts sophisticated music lovers
who had paid to see my performance. I forgot about Tetris records
and Shipwreck. I thought of nothing but the hum of my violin as my
little sonatina hung in the rubber-scented air.

Those were the days before I learnt to
analyse every performance within an inch of its life; picking at
every note, tearing the articulation to shreds, and cursing my
shaky tone. That night in the gym, I had played the best I knew
how. The excitement lit me up inside and I couldn’t keep still. I
bounced around the back of the hall while some year eight girls
warbled into microphones over the top of a Mariah Carey CD. Made up
stupid dance moves until Andrew booted me into the courtyard and
told me to have a drink of water.

I met my parents outside. Mum was pacing
around the car park while Tim tugged at her sleeve and bleated
about how bored he was.

“My little possum,” said Dad. He gave me a
bear hug and I could smell his shaving cream. I peered up at Mum.
Her cheeks were flushed; her mouth pinched. She was looking at her
watch.

“Did you like it?” I asked.

She managed a tiny smile. “It was very nice.”
She rummaged through her bag. “Do you have the keys, David?”

I followed my parents back to the car, a huge
grin slapped across my face. My heart was still racing. I couldn’t
wait to share my excitement with Justin. I wished he had heard me
play.

I lay in bed that night mentally replaying
every note. I sang the sonatina in my head. Felt my fingers twitch.
I climbed out of bed and padded down the hall. The house was
silent, except for the humming of the fridge. Outside the window,
frogs gurgled like drunken cows. I could hear laughter in the
caravan park. Flicking on the lamp, I knelt beside the stereo.
Neither of my parents listened to music much, but under the record
player there was a box of old cassettes. I rifled through the
clutter of black plastic. At the bottom of the box was a recording
of Dvorak’s
A Minor Violin Concerto.
I was surprised to see
my mother’s name scribbled inside the front cover. I couldn’t
imagine my mother ever sitting through a violin concerto.

I raced back to my room and climbed into bed,
sliding the tape into my Walkman. The recording sounded tinny
through headphones, but I closed my eyes and imagined the orchestra
filling the stage. I let the music wash over me. The violin slid to
its top register and I shivered. I tightened my fist around the
corner of my pillow. The music surrounded me and I wanted to see
it, touch it, feel it. It was an excitement I had never felt before
and my mind tangled trying to explain it. I remembered Andrew’s
words:

“I don’t know if there is a real reason for
music…”

Rolling onto my back and hearing the entry of
the orchestra, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I had found
it.

“I’m going to be a concert violinist,” I told
Justin the next day. Our legs dangled into the rock pool that was
built into a curve of the white beach. The sand was dotted with
candy-cane umbrellas. Gulls shrieked in a cloudless sky.

Justin squinted into the sun. “What’s a
concert violinist?”

“It’s someone who plays the violin in the
concert hall.” I kicked my legs and sent beads of water flying.

“Why do you want to do that?” Justin flicked
the strap of my bathers. They snapped noisily against my skin.

“Ouch!” I shoved him into the water. His
tanned face lit up.

“Wanna have a wrestle?”

“Okay.” I slipped into the pool and
dog-paddled to the middle. “Ready, set-” I spat water out of my
mouth. “Go!”

Justin dived under the surface and grabbed my
waist. I wriggled around, pretending to protest. I grabbed his
shoulders and pushed him backwards until we both flew to the
surface, gasping for breath. Underwater wrestles were our secret. I
didn’t care how impressed Rachel would be, I vowed never to tell
anyone I had let Justin touch my boobs.

“If a boy makes fun of you, does that mean he
likes you?”

“Of course it does. Everyone knows that.”

I was sitting at Andrew and Hayley’s kitchen
bench, waiting for Dad to pick me up after my lesson. Hayley
grinned at me as she washed a strainer of lettuce.

“So who’s making fun of you?”

“No-one,” I said, suddenly embarrassed.

She smiled. “An
amant secret
,
hey?”

“What?”

“It’s French,” she said, emerging from the
fridge with a handful of vegetables. “It means, like, secret lover
or something.”

Justin was certainly no French lover.

“Geeky girl with her Mozart music.”

“Don’t be such a dickwad.”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

The taunts were endless and, if Hayley was
right, it scared me a little. This was Justin, my best friend, my
Shipwreck buddy, who I punched and tickled and teased without
consequence. Something was changing between us and I wasn’t sure I
wanted it to. I felt powerless to stop it like I was caught in a
rip I couldn’t swim out of. I tried to push my thoughts of Justin
away by focusing on my music.

“I’m going to be a concert violinist,” I
announced to everyone I saw, drilling Andrew with endless questions
and raiding his CD rack for anything that contained a string
section. I rested my chin in my hand and sighed contentedly.

“You are a little love-sick aren’t you,”
Hayley giggled as she sliced a carrot. Her red nails flashed like
Christmas tree lights.

“What are you making?”

“Just salad. Want some? I have the best
dressing.”

“I can’t. Mum will be mad if I eat before
dinner.”

"Okay." She held a stick of celery under the
tap. Her yellow skirt bounced around her thighs like a cheerleading
dress. I pulled a pile of CDs out of my violin case and began to
read the back covers.

“What are you looking at?”

“Andrew lent them to me. This is a Ravel
violin sonata and this is Tchaikovsky
Serenade for Strings
and this one’s Bach. Andrew says he’s very happy to have someone in
this town to share them with.”

“You know you’re sounding really good on the
violin,” said Hayley. “I can hear you in the basement. Sometimes I
can’t tell if it’s you or Andrew playing.”

I didn’t believe her. “I don’t know. My
double stops are really bad.”

“You musicians are all the same,” she said.
“You’re never happy. You always have to be better.”

“Of course. Isn’t a good thing to want to
improve?”

She shrugged. “I suppose. I just don’t think
you should stress so much about sounding perfect. You have to have
a life as well.”

“Music
is
my life,” I said. “At least,
it will be soon when I become a concert violinist.”

“Well,” said Hayley, tossing the vegetables
into a bowl. “I’m impressed. When I was your age, the biggest thing
in my life was deciding which boy I was going to have lunch
with.”

I wasn’t surprised.

On the first weekend of our school holidays,
Justin’s parents took us out in their boat. It was a trawler
Justin’s dad used mainly for fishing, but he had added a glass
bottom to the stern deck so he could take tourists out to the reef.
I sat with my legs dangling over the side, green water licking my
toes. A thin yellow haze rose from the sea. I inhaled deeply and
let the salty air fill my lungs.

Justin climbed onto the railing beside me.
“Nice hat,” he teased.

I had found a wide straw sunhat in my mum’s
wardrobe and tied it under my chin with a ribbon. I thought I
looked like Anne of Green Gables.

“I’m protecting my complexion,” I snapped.
“I’m getting freckles.”

Justin jumped off the rail. “You
are
getting freckles!” He poked a bony finger under my hat. “There’s
one, two, three, four-”

I smacked his hand away.

“Stop teasing Abby,” said Justin’s mum,
Michelle. She was stretched out behind us on a beach towel, reading
a book and drinking some lumpy green health juice that looked like
toxic waste. My mother called our neighbours ‘new age’ and ‘burnt
out hippies’. Michelle was wearing bathers and a cheesecloth blouse
with flowers embroidered on the sleeve. Her hair was tied back with
a scarf and she wore big hoop earrings. I didn’t think she looked
burnt out at all.

My dad said that if Michelle ever tried to
make him drink that wheat-grass malarky he’d chuck a mental. I
thought he could be a little more open-minded about the whole
thing. When I’d tried to tell him this, Mum had said:

“Don’t talk back to your father,
Abigail.”

My mother’s name was Sarah-Marie, which
always sounded to me like a good name for a glamorous movie star.
Mum wasn’t glamorous though, not by any stretch of the imagination.
She always wore shorts and long denim shirts, which were faded
under the arms where she had scrubbed out the sweat marks. I wished
my mum would try to be a bit more exciting, like Michelle was.
Maybe not with the hoop earrings and stuff, but a glass of toxic
waste wouldn’t hurt her every now and then. Maybe sometimes Sarah
could try to be a little more like her neighbours.

“My dad’s getting a new boat,” said Justin.
“It’s, like, twice as big as this one. I’m going to get my boat
license as soon as I turn sixteen. Dad already told me what some of
the questions on the test are.” His eyes were sparkling. I tried to
sound interested.

“Cool.”

I wandered into the cockpit and watched
Justin’s dad guide the boat through the shallow water.

“What’s out that way?” I asked, pointing
across the hazy ocean.

Justin’s dad chuckled. “More water. Some
islands.”

I leapt onto a bench. “Yeah, but if you just
kept going, what country would you get to?”

He pushed his lips to one side of his mouth
so I could tell he was thinking. “Well eventually you’d get to
Vanuatu and places like that,” he said. “The Solomons…”

“Fiji?”

Justin’s dad nodded. “Yeah, Fiji’s out that
way.”

“And then?”

He laughed his gravelly laugh. “You thinking
about running off with my boat, Ab?”

“I just want to know,” I said edgily. Apart
from the Shipwreck extravaganzas, I had never been any further than
Townsville, when Dad had driven his Ute down there to buy new sheet
metal for the caravan roofs.

“Why would you ever want to leave this
place?” my mum always said. “You’ve got beautiful beaches, and sun
and lots of peace and quiet… Why go anywhere else?”

“Can I have a go at steering the boat?” I
asked. Justin’s dad wiped his forehead with the back of his
wrist.

“Maybe on the way back. Anyway, I’m about to
stop. Why don’t you kids go get your snorkelling gear ready?”

For someone who had grown up on the reef, I
was total crap at snorkelling. I always breathed through my nose
and inhaled the seawater that kept filling up inside my mask.
Justin was much better. He could dive under the surface, then blow
the water out his snorkel when he got back up. He and his brother
Hugh knew the names of all the fish too.

“I saw a red emperor.”

“I saw a parrotfish.”

“Oh yeah, well I saw some copepod
plankton.”

Justin swam up behind me. “I saw a
shark
!” He poked my waist. I emptied the water out of my
mask while Rachel shrieked and thrashed her way back to the
boat.

“You did not,” I said.

“Yes I did.”

“It was a gummy shark!” cried Hugh, folding
his lips over his teeth and paddling towards me with a throaty
groan. I splashed him in the face and hoped he’d swallowed a decent
amount of copepod plankton.

“Stop scaring the girls,” said Justin’s dad
from the deck.