A song for Piette

There was a crystal clear moment when Piette and I realised that we were not two souls sharing the same body.

The differences were readily apparent - blood poured from my eyes while tears bled from hers, my hands shook while hers gesticulated bladely, she whirled in anger with her spinning claws while I huddled on the floor trying to hold my face together. Actually, the cuts were superficial, as was her fury, and both healed relatively quickly. She hadn’t moved - the knife had sprung in to her hand from the bench.

That’s the way I remember it. That’s the way I’ll always remember it.

The fire has gone out at home.

As soon as the door closes behind me I can hear Jay crying in the kitchen. There is a plate of leftover spaghetti on the lounge room floor. A cold house, complete with wailing child and odour of stale sauce. The fireplace watches darkly like a blind malign eye, crying soot.

There’s something automatic in the way I hang my jacket on the plasterboard wall, a numbness in my feet as they kick off their loafers. A serious, heavy stride is heading my way from the kitchen. The wailing grows closer, an oncoming steam-train of sorrow. I close my eyes, still facing the wall.

“He wants to go to your mother’s house.” Piette unceremoniously dumps Jay onto the floor and our son latches around my leg, a snuffling, clawless koala. Piette frowns at him, sullen. “He’s had that photo of the three of you all day.” Jay buries his face into my thigh, presenting me with his full crown of light blond curls.

“He doesn’t understand, Pi.”

“Maybe his father could help him understand.” “If he was ever home.” Her eyes were flashing, her jaw tight.

“Piette…”

“Do you know who came here today? Do you? My first visitor all week, Parker, do you know who it was?”

I’m not supposed to know the answer of course, but from the way she isn’t blinking some response is obviously required. I feel tired now, so tired, as though all the blood has drained from my body. It’s a feeling I’m used to. Who the hell would have come here?

“Um. Your cousin came down from New Norfolk?”

“Damien wouldn’t drag himself here if I was on fire,” she spat. “The guy from the power company, Parker. The guy who reads the bloody meter. He knocked on the door and I was so excited, so excited that someone had finally dropped by. The fucking meter man.”

Jay squirms at my leg. He’s wiping his nose on my jeans. I don’t like him hearing language like that, not yet.

Piette watches me watching him. Her teeth grind. When I look up she gives the most sarcastic aren’t-you-the-best smile that she can muster, points it straight at my flinch. She knows exactly where to hit. I’m so goddamned tired. Jay squeezes my leg again, gives me the strength to speak.

“So what did he want? The power company guy.”

In a breath, Piette’s face is a serene mask calmer than a hurricane’s eye. It was the wrong question. She kneels down to Jay, arms opening.

“Time for bed, buster.” Her voice is set against the renewed torrent of wailing that greets her words. Jay wraps himself even more tightly around my leg, as though he can somehow meld himself into it. “Come on.”

The sight of her dishpan fingers hooking his woolly blue jumper is strikes me as horrible. I scooped the boy up into my arms. His crying lowers a pitch and Piette curses, hands on hips. She wants to let something fly; there is stark, unrefined anger in her eyes. When Jay is in bed, that anger will be unleashed on me. There’s no getting around it.

Resigned, I draw my sword and take aim.

“Shush honey.” I whisper into the whimpering boy’s ear while locking eyes with Piette over his shoulder. “It’s all right, Daddy’s here now.”

Her eyes crumple at the blow, turning to water and she flees the room. It was too much, of course, it was always too much. I sigh an exhausted, regretful sigh. It’s hard not to mourn the idea of a quiet, comfortable evening at home. It’s hard not to blame her for chasing my relaxation out the door with her piano-wire tension. At least I was getting a moment with the boy, a few brief moments of presence to complement the few we had shared

He pushed himself off my chest and looked into my face. His face was ruddy from tears but he was smiling, again the cherub. The bib covering his soft little chest had a picture of a growling green monster, partially subdued by spaghetti sauce. Small hands grasped my shoulders.

“Daddy,” He was very sure of this much, but it was obvious he was uncertain of the next bit. “Daddy, taken me to Nanny’s? Nanny’s house, daddy, Jay. Goin to Nanny’s house?” He is peering into my eyes, watching for an answer, but I have to steady myself. Breathe. Don’t cry at the boy, he doesn’t understand. I’m glad Piette is out of the room. Nanny was my mother. She died a few months ago. Her house and most of the signs she existed are gone, taken by some filthy bank manager.

Jay reaches out and lays his miniature hand on my cheek, chewing on his lip. His hand is warm and clammy, the tips of his fingers damp. He speaks more carefully.

“Nanny, Daddy?” Suddenly he seems heavier than ever before.

“Nanny doesn’t live in that house anymore, buddy, remember, like we talked?” I can hear Piette in the kitchen, dropping cutlery and crockery with accentuated force, banging empty mugs on the dinner table, letting me know she was waiting for me. “Nanny went away, remember?”

Fresh tears roll across his flushing cheeks. I hug him closer to my chest, but he pushes against me, wailing.

Piette reappears, fists resting smugly on her hips. She watches me set Jay on the carpet, where he collapses, as though his disappointment stops his legs from working. Her eyes seem more relaxed, now that she sees that I can’t stop him asking for Nan either.

For a moment I’m struck dumb; there is something I want to say to her, something I need to say to her, something so palpably obvious that it needs to be pointed out, right now - but I don’t know what it is, and then the moment is over. Her jaw stiffens and she steps forward and scoops the wailing boy off the floor.

“Bed time, Jay. You’re not going anywhere, buster.” Jay is limp in her arms, his cries gradually tapering into sleepy bleats. She glances at me one more time before she carries him out of the room. I wave goodnight, but he doesn’t see it. His bleating pans down the hallway into the small bedroom we all share, sustains momentarily.

Breathing fully for the first time since I walked in the door, I can finally kick off my shoes, untuck my shirt and loosen my belt. Home is the only place where I can relax, but even here it’s a matter of timing.

White noise fills the air with a lullaby of presence when I flick on the television. One of the channels is showing a loud, colourful game show, teams of married couples racing through different physical challenges. A young woman on the red team is about to swim twenty metres and change into a French maid outfit before negotiating a network of rope ladders. Her husband is holding up the maid’s outfit with a cheesy grin.

The kitchen sink is in a state of bio-containment, so I bypass my intended glass of water and open the bottle of beer I find in the fridge instead. There is minimal food, mostly Jay’s. I’m not hungry anyway. I rarely am.

While I’m settling on to the couch with a glass of beer, Piette reappears, pulling her hair back from her drawn face. She looks exhausted and frowns at the glass in my hand.

“Is that my Pale Ale? Did you open it?” She sits on the couch, next to me but not touching and I realise that we didn’t kiss hello.

“Sorry if you were saving it. I can go and get more in a little while?”

“You can’t drive if you’re drunk.”

“I’ll walk down, it’s only three blocks.”

“Whatever.” She turns to the television. I can see her jaw wrestling with her words, and after a moment the words win out. “I was saving that bottle, I bought it this morning because I thought that we could have a nice relaxing beer together tonight.” Her eyes have fixed on my face, round, rounder.

I look around for a second glass before I realise that I didn’t bring one in. I would stand up to fetch another but she has me caught in her gaze.

I offer her mine. “Let’s share this.”

There are moments throughout a person’s life that are so thick with feeling that they are deadlocked into memory, that upon being recalled can overcome the body, force it into a useless melancholic disposition unable to move, eat or hurt, able only to feel the small marble of despair throbbing dully in one’s chest.

A clever Frenchman once told of how a man, upon waking, consults the flow of time and the order of heavenly bodies to position himself in the maelstrom of existence. Memories can act as anchors do; they hold thoughts in position at a particular place and time, keeping the mind firmly attached to that moment. Every time a man positions himself in the universe, memories pull him in every direction and he can’t help but be dragged along by the strongest. His consultation will always be influenced by the heaviest anchor.

When the anchor is so heavy that movement away from it is impossible, we struggle hopelessly to arrest the universe instead.

We are grievously wounded by the indifference of time, terrified by the desperate need for it to return to that one single moment, appalled by the knowledge that it never will. We watch the universe slide out of reach while we remain with our memories, wondering where the time, and the light, has gone.

The room was steamy, even though I had opened the bathroom window. I had just emerged from said bathroom, freshly showered and wrapped in a white towel. Our bathroom door opens out into the kitchen and dining room, which itself has a glass door leading to the backyard.

When I came out of the bathroom, Piette was standing flaccidly next to the kitchen bench, a white bag of shopping in one hand, gaping, unblinking, at the backyard. Before I had time to look at whatever she was gaping at, her gaze had flared into fury.

Fury at me.

My white towel was scant cover. I was lost for words; she had been in a fine mood twenty minutes earlier when she had taken towards the shops for post-coital munchies and I had leapt in the shower. Now her eyes were wildfire. I stammered uselessly, cluelessly.

And abruptly she was screaming and flailing, scratch, shit bitch bite, bastard!

I fended her off, stunned, and she fell against the kitchen bench, gasping for breath.

“I saw her, you stupid fuck. You should have been quicker.” It made no sense. None of it made any sense. Her face was twisted with spite. “Don’t you love me?”

I couldn’t help but laugh, choking. It was the worst thing to do.

The knife made its way from bench to hand and she flew at me again. My hands up in self-defence. My wrist caught hers, sending the blade off course, towards my face.

She screamed again, twice as loud, sending me to the floor with blood in my eyes and panic in my ears. There was a terrible moment where I thought the eye was gone, but the timeliest of unconscious nods had set the blade into my eyebrow instead of the soft orb below. Or so I figured.

The fire was out. Blood and ashes.

Piette patched me up quickly and efficiently, crying the entire time, weeping hot onto ruddy red cheeks, her hands the softest and most delicate they had ever been. I still couldn’t think of a thing to say. When the bandage was in place around my temple, we stood and faced each other.

She takes the glass from my hand and sips on it delicately. As she hands it back, there is a young, wet woman in a French maids outfit climbing a rope ladder on the television. As soon as I notice it I make a careful study not to glance again. Piette is watching my face. I’m looking around the room, avoiding the television, and my eye falls on an open book.

“What are you reading?” I ask, white flags high and waving.

For a heartbeat, nothing, then…

“It’s Virginia Andrews. Flowers in the Attic.” She licks her lips.

At times I’ve wept over lives I didn’t lead, patching dreams together from the things I’ve known. Where should I be? Not here, that seems obvious. But where then? The roulette ball settles, rattling into place, and everything begins to make sense; nothing else would fit.

There are seven microphones across the stage. Three of them are mine and the backup singers have two each.

In between each of the massive fold-back speakers are rows of three blazing halogen lights, all pointing at different parts of the stage, different members of the band. Most of them are pointed at the centre of the stage, where the lead singer will stand. Where I will stand.

If I look at the lights for too long, they give me a headache. They are so bright that I can only see a few metres beyond the stage, but I don’t want to see any further. The mass of sweaty orange faces ripples, as though the arena is a massive cruise ship on a rocky sea.

I am the captain and the sea is waiting, watching.

“I haven’t read it,” I tell her. “What’s it about?”

“A young girl. She’s locked away in a room where nobody can see her except for her little brother and sister. She’s raising them, but they hate her. She’s all alone.” Piette takes the glass from my hand and drinks from it.

“Why doesn’t she leave?” I ask. “She shouldn’t look after them if they don’t want her to.”

Piette looks at me over the rim of the glass. “I’m sure she wouldn’t stay if she thought she had the choice.” There is no bitterness in her voice, but she doesn’t blink. Her knuckles are white against the pale amber beer.

“Maybe she finds something worth staying for.”

I’m lying. I read the book years ago, more than once. It doesn’t end like that.

But Piette is smiling at me, a tired, hopeful smile, then she leans into me and presses a kiss into the nape of my neck. Holding her head, I pluck the beer from her hand.

The television is cheering.

The audience is screaming as I step up to my microphone and wrap a slow hand tightly around it. A tumbling pattern of joints and cigarettes lands at my feet, flung from the crowd. When I pick up one of the joints and spark it, the sea boils.

The lead guitarist, a needle fingered virtuoso with dozens of faces, picks the first sweet notes. These leather pants feel good to move in. The scent of sweat and salt floats crisply from the sticky mass of audience and steams up the spotlights. A bouncer sprays water from a small hose. Those who see him do it gasp and throw their jaws wide, desperate for any few, precious drops. Behind me, the drummer strokes the rim of his crash, ever so slightly. The ringing guitar notes compress in the air above the crowd, vibrating faster, louder, more guttural than sweet. The snare pops loudly like a rib bone, once, twice, faster, and the audience begins to bounce.

The ball bounced, twice, thrice, then rolled across our backyard.

Surreal. My forehead throbbed. We watched it in silence, the too-jolly beach ball butting against our rosemary bush. Piette and I had lived here for five years and no balls of any kind had ever come over our back fence.

For a moment I thought that Piette’s knife had wounded me much deeper than either of us had suspected, that the bandage on my temple was a laughable cover over some invisible spurting gash in my brain. But Piette’s ruddy cheeks were slack in surprise; she could see the beach ball too.

And the next shock; following the ball over the fence came a nubile teenage girl clad in the afterthought of a bikini. Her bare feet landed in the dirt of our back yard with a practised thud and she looked straight up into our kitchen.

I didn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Piette took a single step backwards.

It was obvious from the girl’s sudden dismay that she could see us.

“I’m just getting our ball,” she called out anxiously. “It came over the fence.”

“No shit,” I said to myself, to the universe.

Piette flapped a hand at the girl, who took her cue and scrambled for the ball. A near naked girl in our backyard, trotting covertly through our backyard.

I saw her you stupid fuck.

All at once I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe. The drummer finishes his roll on the snare and the indistinguishable super guitarist booms out his first real chord, just one, a short, sharp melodic shout. Reverberation kernels into existence, a teardrop swelling into a monsoon.

The audience knows the song. A wave sways from left to right as thousands of them inhale as one in the carefully measured moment of silence. It is barely a second, a beat of two by the drummer’s air sticks, but it is rich, dripping with tension, bloated with expectation. More than any other moment tonight, this is what the audience has come for. The audience is enraptured.

The band is technically perfect in their silence, but in a heartbeat they will land with the weight of a jumbo jet in perfect tune and dynamic and power.

It will be my first note, bursting from my stomach and cleansed through my throat, carrying my soul unwaveringly into thousands of waiting ears. The microphone is sweaty in my hand. I still can’t breathe. A drumstick begins its descent and the audience gasps a solitary, arena wide breath as the last moment of silence stretches out like a chain brought to breaking point.

Oh shit.

Something cold and tight is around my neck, threading down my spine, pushing through my nerves like ice. Piette’s eyes have glassed over.

We watch her, stunned.

A voice calls from over the fence, but the bikini girl doesn’t answer it, opting instead to throw the ball back in a hurry.

At my feet was a blood stained towel. It had been white only minutes earlier. I had an incredible urge to take it out to the girl, show it to her.

There was a patch of dirt on her pert bikini-bubbled butt as she climbed back over the fence.

Piette stepped forward and wrapped her arms around my waist. She was crying again, sobbing into my chest, she was sorry, she was so, so, sorry. The heater in the bathroom was still on.

After a moment, she took me by the arm and looked into my face.

I didn’t know what to say.

She follows my gaze to the woman on the television, the wet wife in the French maid’s outfit laughing and sliding as she climbs the ladder.

Piette frowns and pulls away from me.

I lift the beer to my lips, hoping beyond hope that the camera angle will change. It doesn’t.

Piette is very still. Anger already radiates from her.

A line of beer trickles to my chin.

“Good view? You like that?” She says it quietly, her lips gleaming with beer, her eyes poisonous. “Can’t help yourself, can you. Fucking pervert.” She seizes my face with her fingernails, her teeth gnashing.

I don’t know what to say.

I don’t know what to sing.

The audience has stopped jumping. The sea of faces is motionless. All eyes are on me.

The band keeps playing the chorus since they can’t very well stop, but they’re all looking at me too.

Every single person in the thousands that are watching knows that I should be singing, that the song has started without me, that I have missed my cue.

My mind is blank. Fingers start to point. I’m the only person here who can’t remember the words. The chorus rounds off and starts again but still they don’t come.

The audience starts to boo. The wunderkind guitarist stops playing, shaking his head at me in disgust. One by one, the rest of the band follows him. The audience is shouting again but this time it’s furious. Bottles and cans pepper around me in greater numbers.

My hand has turned to stone around the microphone.

I don’t know what to say.

I don’t know what to say.

I don’t know what to say.