The Candle Dancer / The Way That You Found Me (7 page)

Benjy was surprised when I turned down his offer to sing with his new band.

‘It’s sweet of you to ask, but I don’t want to. The desire has simply gone. I’m an okay musician but my voice isn’t that great, and I don’t have that persona to project, like Doll had.’

‘You were amazing on stage.’

‘Well—that was easy. I was being Suzy Quatro! All I had to do was watch clips of her, imitate her, cut my hair like hers. ’

‘It wasn’t as easy as all that, Suzanne.’

The two of us were at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, watching the technicians set up for
The Black Keys
. They pushed in the drum kit on a portable stage, already miked up. When they tested the light—four movable pillars strung with high-beam discs—it flashed over the crowd with ruthless, searching lucidity. I pressed myself under Benjy’s arm to keep warm, the wind tugging my hair.

‘What will you call your new band?’

‘We don’t know, yet.’

I took out a slip of folded up paper from my purse and handed it to him. It was the first draft of a song.

‘You can have this. If it can be worked up into something half-decent.’

Benjy read it and hummed the chords. I waited anxiously.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s good.’

‘Not doggerel, then?’

He grinned, reading it over. I sighed, listening to the drummer testing the snare while the wind sent raindrops spinning through the light like white-gold moths. In life, Doll would have loved it: a song written about her. She would fix the lyrics to project what she wanted, editing what she didn’t, in the same way she arranged herself like a curio cabinet. In this last year, she must have loved being photographed by professionals. I wished, more intensely than I have ever wished anything, that I could hear Doll fussing over my clumsy lyrics.
Leave out the moustache, darling, that was just a phase! I’m glad you didn’t mention the tampons—that would have been vulgar. And don’t forget I died young and that’s got to be good, doesn’t it, I get a chance at immortality that way
…

That’s right, Doll, I thought. You will never have to watch youth take its leave, or suffer a double chin. You won’t have to go back to rehab, or one day walk on ancient feet with collapsed arches, clasping a fur stole over your hunching shoulders. And I won’t get to see what you might have become, making good on those small glimpses of majesty.

In Benjy’s humming I heard the song take shape, and sensed where his gifts would take it. The song would have its own life, become a thing apart, but it would never be equal to her.