Dead People's Music Read online

  TO MY FAMILY

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  New York, 2003

  Flying isn’t easy with a cello: it needs its own seat. So we place it between us, Toby collecting extra drinks and meals on its behalf on the Auckland to LA, LA to O’Hare, O’Hare to JFK flights. When I look at him, tucking into his second pot roast with creamed spinach, he says, ‘Well, we paid for this, didn’t we?’ He has pulled a sick bag over the cello’s head, drawing eyes, a nose, a gap-toothed grin, and placed his woolly hat on top. The air hostess startles, then smiles. By the fifth Bloody Mary, she doesn’t think it’s funny any more.

  I feel hung-over, my body unable to metabolise the lost hours. Sweat tightens my skin and my stomach is bloated. I jiggle my feet up and down, dislodging the clots that may be forming in my inner thighs. Drawing circles with my toes, I feel my ankles jolt into notches. One o’clock, four o’clock, six o’clock, twelve. The plane tilts to the right and suddenly the Manhattan skyline is peep-holed through the windows, for once not movie credits but the real thing. I am embarrassed by the cliché of it all, but then my diaphragm catches in my throat and my nerve harmonics begin to sing. I am here. Almost.

  We don’t have to go through customs: we’ve already crept along the LA visitors’ visa line. My American grandmother did nothing for my status. There, our backpacks were disembowelled by a latex-gloved security guard, my Merino singlets, period-stained underwear and insulin syringes intestined across a bench. Disgusted by my slatternliness, his fingers kept probing, determined to find the plastic explosives. I crammed my possessions back into the pack, and checked it onto the domestic flight, but my potentially garrotting spare cello strings were confiscated at the cabin luggage X-ray machine. They let me keep my spike.

  And here come our backpacks on the JFK conveyer belt, plastic bagged so the straps don’t catch. Toby comes over all gentlemanly and pulls them off, loading them onto a trolley. Now we have to find a yellow cab, following the signs out into the icy (New York, New York!) night air. I feel anxious, like I am going to veer the wrong way, fall into some imposter’s car who’ll poke out my eyes unless I divulge my cash card pin number. But Toby forges ahead, confident even though this is the first time he’s travelled further than Sydney.

  The email from Wendy says we shouldn’t have to pay more than $25 to get to Park Slope. I don’t know Wendy, but she is a friend of a friend from music school — Lily and Wendy went to the same high school in Ohio. Lily tells me that Wendy was pretty cool back then, a few years older and always in the art room, screenprinting posters for the local bands. Lily had one pinned to her hostel wall, and I used to look at it when I visited: a black lace dress hanging in a window, a chandelier silhouette in the foreground, the band name in elegant serif type above a blank space for time and venue. I wanted to climb into the picture, to gaze out the window, which I was sure would contain Paris.

  I haven’t seen Lily for seven years now, and she hasn’t seen Wendy for five, but we’re both on Lily’s group email list, the one that details her Paris-Rome-Budapest-London music career. Usually I can’t stand them; they make me jealous. But the latest one was a relief: Lily’s boyfriend had broken up with her because she’s hardly ever home. I sent my condolences, I told her I was moving to New York City. Wendy replied too, complaining about her room-mate crisis, and Lily match-made us.

  We find a taxi driver, basketball-tall and black, and yet again I fight my sense of unreality, like I’ve been sucked into the TV set. He slam-dunks my cello into the boot (so that’s why I bought the airline seat) and we sit in the back, a grille between us as if we might be the ones to attack. Eartha Kitt purrs at us to put our seatbelts on.

  ‘Excuse me? Where did you say you were going?’ The driver screws his face up like we’re speaking a foreign language.

  ‘President Street, Park Slope,’ I say again, this time curling my tongue to say the ‘r’ in ‘Park’.

  ‘But where on President Street?’ He’s frustrated: stupid cul-de-sac tourists, oblivious to the nuance of the grid.

  ‘Between Sixth and Seventh Avenue,’ says Toby. He’s read the email to the end.

  ‘Hey, nice to meet you. Rebecca, right? And Toby? Come in, come in,’ says Wendy. Her hair is lank, beige roots gradating into black, and her skin is puffy and pale, like she doesn’t see enough sunlight. She looks older than her thirty years, peering at us from behind thick 1950s framed glasses as we manoeuvre our baggage inside.

  Her apartment is hip but overfilled. Exposed brick walls and mid-century furniture, a Herman Miller recliner next to a leather sofa, a salvaged-metal bookshelf clamped and bolted, a spot-lit shelf of Scandinavian glassware, a giant Macintosh computer, an even bigger television. Stuff everywhere.

  ‘Tea? Water? Soda?’

  ‘Water would be nice,’ I say.

  ‘Me too, please,’ says Toby. In the taxi he admitted to having overdone the inflight hospitality.

  We pull out pea-green upholstered chairs to sit around her table. ‘Danish modern. Do you like it?’ Wendy says, stroking the wood grain. ‘I got it at this place on Atlantic Avenue and then I found the chairs stacked beside a dumpster a few blocks away. People throw the best stuff away.’

  Wendy dispenses water from a filtered tank into hand-cast glasses. Toby gulps his down and stands to pour another. The water is warm and I wish I’d asked for tea instead. I look around the kitchen, at the stove, the fridge, both so much wider than the ones we’ve left behind. Everything is bigger in America. I feel disconnected, in a dream-like state, and yet sitting at a table is familiar. This is what my water tastes like now.

  ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to sleep in my bed for a few nights until my other room-mate moves out. His dad is coming to pick him up from Baltimore sometime soon. I’ll sleep on the couch.’

  I feel irritated that he hasn’t left, that the promised room isn’t ours yet. ‘Why is he going back to Baltimore?’

  ‘The employment situation. He’s a freelance proofreader of websites, and there hasn’t been much work in that industry since the bubble burst. New York is an unforgiving place if you don’t have a job.’

  ‘Really? I’m a web designer.’ Toby shoots me an I-told-you-so look; he thought we should have gone to the UK. That way, he’d cruise in on his grandparent visa, I’d have secured a working holiday visa, and he could have lined up a job before we left Wellington. Toby’s an Anglophile. He loves punk and Neville Brody, filing ten years worth of Face magazines into beer crates. Colleagues from his start-up web design company already work over there, and they send emails about music videos they’re animating, bands they’ve been to, provoking Lily-sized jealousy pangs in him. Come over, we need a kick-arse flash developer with a crazy brain, they write.

  But I told him that I couldn’t go back to London; the thought fills me with dread. I could only return there
with tangible proof of my indie success: a critically acclaimed CD, a write-up in a music magazine. See, I did it my way. But I haven’t got either of those yet — I’m still a nobody.

  ‘San Francisco?’ suggested Toby, when we were still fighting it out, when he was threatening to go to London without me. ‘There’s fresher design on the West Coast — it’s the home of the Mac.’

  But I insisted on New York; it was where my grandmother came from, and it was edgier, more avant-garde. I reminded him that it was the other birthplace of punk. I told him that if he went to London alone, we would be through. As stubborn as he is, Toby didn’t want to break up — I’m the first person he has loved. I love Toby too, but with wavering conviction. I’ve been in love before.

  ‘Have you got a job already?’ asks Wendy.

  ‘No,’ says Toby. That accusing look.

  ‘But don’t worry, we can cover the rent,’ I say. Toby and I have been saving for two years now, forgoing meals out, me working as an assistant registrar at the censor’s office, and spending nights noodling on the cello, never quite able to pin down the songs in my head. I’ll start composing seriously in New York, I kept telling myself. I’m too busy, too tired here. The last six months have been an intake of breath, but our money will be breathed out in three. That’s our deadline. Three months to make it happen.

  ‘Well, good luck to you,’ says Wendy. ‘I used to work in the web industry, as a design director, and I got paid $100k, but I lost my job after 9/11. The company was going to the dogs anyway, and our building was in Tribeca, a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center. Tell the truth, the fallout saved my boss from telling us he was bankrupt — instead he claimed post-traumatic stress disorder. He was in the middle of renovations. Last I heard he had to sell his Westchester house only half-lined in Italian granite.’

  ‘So what do you do now?’

  ‘I freelance, I blog, I sell some stuff online. I got some 9/11 compensation and lived off my savings for a while. I don’t have health insurance any more — I think I need different anti-depressants but I can’t afford the doctor so I’m just using up my old ones.’

  I try not to look at Toby, even though he’s nudging me with his sneaker under the table. Everyone is a bit nutty in New York, I want to hiss. Haven’t you seen the Woody Allen movies? But all the same I’m nervous; this apartment is small and the last thing I want to do is act as therapist.

  ‘What about you? You must be a musician. Do you play in orchestras?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘But you were at college with Lily, right?’

  ‘Yeah, but I got disillusioned with classical: it’s covers of dead people’s music. I’m more experimental these days. Original compositions, indie, punk, multi-media collaborations, that kind of thing.’ I don’t tell Wendy that I bombed out of music school completely. I don’t want her to think badly of me.

  ‘She’s talented, Lily. She’s in the London Symphony or something?’

  ‘The London Philharmonic, which is amazing. It’s almost impossible to get into one of those big orchestras.’

  ‘Beck is really talented too,’ says Toby. I thump his arm and make a face, but I am secretly pleased to have a fan. I cinched it when I wrote him a song, early on in our relationship, performed naked in his bedroom.

  ‘You’re going to love it here, there’s so much going on. I don’t get to nearly as much as I should. So many free concerts in the park, so much art — you’ll be completely inspired,’ says Wendy.

  ‘I hope so,’ I say. What I’m scared of is that there’s too much talent and no room for someone like me. I suddenly wish that I’d stayed in Wellington, where I could be locally famous and guaranteed to find a venue, a collaborator, an audience for my next composition. We could have used our savings to book time in a recording studio, bypassing the record company. We could have put a deposit on a little house. I can feel tendrils of Island Bay seaweed reaching out for me, pulling me back to Cook Strait.

  ‘So do you know anyone here?’

  ‘We’ve got a few contacts,’ I say. ‘My dad really wants me to visit my great-aunt. She lives in the Upper West Side.’

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful near the park,’ says Wendy, taking off her glasses and polishing them vigorously on her limp sweatshirt. Her eyes are pale blue, almost aquamarine, and her face is generous without the subdivision of black plastic. She holds the specs up to the brushed metal lightshade, then spits on offending spots, rubbing once again. ‘I need the trees. If I didn’t live in Park Slope, I’d live there. It’s so great to have family in the city. I wish my sister didn’t live in Colorado. Why didn’t you go stay with your aunt? You could have saved a heap of money.’

  Toby asked me the same thing, but I’ve explained to him that it’s a delicate, diplomatic mission. ‘My dad never kept in touch. It would have been a bit weird, like, Hi, I’m your long-lost great-niece that you’ve never heard of, can I come and live with you?’

  ‘She probably has a small place too. Only the super-wealthy have spare rooms.’

  My dad doesn’t want me to just meet my great-aunt; he wants me to find out about the other cello. The one that was made at the same time as my grandmother’s, the one that’s theoretically just as beautiful, and undamaged. If she still owns it, he wants me to procure it. ‘Why can’t you talk to her about it?’ I asked him, desperate to avoid this embarrassment. ‘She used to send you presents — you could ask her for a really big one.’

  ‘I’ll send her a letter, but the cello is your responsibility,’ said Dad. He has archived her gifts in his basement: the Robert McClosky books and tartan-lined duffel coat, the functioning train set. They stopped coming when his mother died — or so Dad thought until it was time to move Grandad to the rest home. Then he found the stack of letters and parcels in the linen closet, unopened, unforwarded to his boarding school. The cashmere scarf had been turned into lace by silver fish. The packages tailed off in 1967; Aunt Esther must have given up by then.

  I am excited about the prospect of meeting my aunt, who almost qualifies as a New York native. But I’m also scared: What if she hates us? What if she’s spent the intervening years nursing her resentment? Why has she never come to visit us? Why hasn’t my dad visited her?

  Toby yawns, his mouth stretching open so wide that I can see his uvula, silver crowning his back teeth. He covers his mouth as an afterthought. He looks greasy and wrecked, dark crescents beneath his hooded, half-drunk eyes. I probably look the same.

  ‘You guys must be tired from your flight. I’ll just get a few things from my room and then it’s all yours,’ says Wendy.

  ‘That’d be great,’ says Toby, standing, stretching arms above his head. It’s been twenty-eight hours since we left Auckland, thirty-two since Wellington. I’ve slept maybe three or four of those hours. I wonder whether I’ll be able to sleep again.

  Wendy shows us her room. ‘Wow, that’s the biggest bed I’ve seen,’ says Toby. It is a perfect square in the middle of a high-ceilinged bay-windowed room.

  ‘California king. I could probably share with you and you wouldn’t notice.’

  I look nervously at Toby. She won’t, will she? ‘Where are you going to sleep?’

  ‘On the sofa — it’s long enough. It’s silly, having so much bed for one person. But I’ve gotten used to it. Well, goodnight.’ She closes the door behind us.

  We’re in the room alone. Although it isn’t quiet, with the sound of cars passing beneath our window, I’m relieved I no longer have to listen to the plane engine, its nerve-wracking changes in pitch, its mid-air graunches. Toby sits on the side of the bed and loosens his shoelaces, easing a swollen, earthy-smelling foot out of his sneaker. I unzip my pack, and my balled clothes burst out. I find the bottom half of my striped pyjamas, the same as I wore on my last night in Wellington. There’s my toilet bag, my long-acting insulin to last me through the night. I give up on finding my pyjama top; I’ll sleep in my T-shirt. I wander around Wendy’s room, fingering
her racks of clothes, her shoe tree, snapping shut her book on mutants at the sight of a child with two faces. She has hat boxes stacked in one corner, a glass bowl full of rings. So many accessories, and yet she was unadorned. ‘You want your toothbrush?’ I say to Toby, who is lying on top of the bed, eyes closed, still wearing his jeans. I stroke his cheek with the bristles and he sits up, surprised. For a moment he doesn’t know where he is.

  Teeth cleaned, face washed, blood sugars tested and injection given, I lie on Wendy’s pillows. Her sheets are smooth and cool like water. We are here, at last. I feel the seaweed loosen its clammy grip. I float towards sleep, Toby twitching beside me, on this giant raft of a bed.

  CHAPTER 2

  Wellington, 1990

  Everything came unstuck when the cello broke. Until then, I thought that pimples would the blight of my adolescence. But then I started running to the toilet every ten minutes and gulping water straight from the bathroom tap. Then my tonsils were always swollen, my nose snotty and my school uniform suddenly too big, sliding down my hips as I walked.

  Technically, I wasn’t the one to crack my grandmother’s valuable cello, made by a renowned New York luthier, and presented to me when I passed my grade four exam with merit. But I had provided the circumstances in order for it to happen. I had taken it to Samantha’s place as a foil. I’d told my mother we were having quartet practice, but we were in fact having a party. Samantha’s parents were away, and we had found boys to invite. Boys who went to Wellington High, who Megan had started chatting to waiting in line at Midnight Espresso. The boys were going to stop by Aro Street Video and pick up some vampire movies while we invented cocktails and prepared snacks.

  Samantha’s parents were looser than mine; I put it down to the second marriage. Samantha’s real father was AWOL, last heard of from an artists’ colony in the mountains of Mexico, and Samantha’s mother had remarried a lawyer from her firm. She specialised in family law; his area was corporate tax. They had a child together, a golden-haired golden boy, and Samantha felt like a first draft that her mother had subsequently revised. They had taken the boy with them to Australia, but Samantha was a doll-faced, sun-shy waif who wouldn’t enjoy Noosa, and at fourteen she was full-fare. Samantha acted happy that she had the seventies split-level house to herself, able to eat and read and watch what she liked, play her music as loud as she wanted, go to school or not. She poured slugs of gin, rum, lemonade and Frangelico into a jug, not bothering to refill the bottles with water. I wasn’t jealous, though. I got spooked out when I was alone.