My Notes Are Driven

They say sometimes that your twin is your shadow. I know. I’ve heard it. But I reckon she was more like my other bit, the one that went in the accident. She wasn’t supposed to go. I always said that, because when she did things just didn’t work anymore. And things are supposed to work, right?

It’s kinda different to all that because we’re not full identical twins. We’re fraternal and I’m a guy and she’s not. Or we were. I was the first to see her, in the lake I mean. Near where the car crashed. Her hair was wet and stuck across her face. I thought she was asleep at first. It’s the only way you could tell us apart-her long dark hair. My neck kinked out for a while. The pain is still there. Sometimes I wake up in the night and I think it’s her hand back there on my neck playing with the bones like I play with the piano. I don’t really play anymore. I’m not so good at it now. At least I don’t feel like I should be. I keep thinking her hands should be on the piano beside me because we used to play duets. We used to win a lot of competitions. “You will both go far” they said. We were ready for anything.

Anyway my sister went a bit whacko about a year ago. I guess I did too and we stopped playing together. I was throwing a stink with everyone in the family and she’d gone weird. She used to change moods a lot and get upset about things that weren’t there. Except I sort of knew they were there. She used to wake up at night screaming at herself in the mirror. That really freaked me out. You know when you have the same dream as someone else? Well we did anyway and I’d wake up from one of those dreams and there she’d be across the hall, screaming.

I had this dream once, before the accident. We were in the big empty living room where the piano is kept and I was watching myself and my sister. We were sitting on two chairs back to back and we had blindfolds on and our hands were tied. I was all bruised and there was blood coming off my lip. She was quiet. There was this woman. I think it was a woman, and she had on a mask. Well it sort of was her head, but it was like a mask I gave my sister for our birthday. It was a medusa mask. Rachel found it in a trash and treasure sale. She was always digging up trash and calling it treasure, my sister. So I paid five bucks for it. She was really into Greek mythology stuff. Did some exam on it for final year.

Anyway this woman sort of drifts around us and she pulls the two chairs together and we can’t move. Then all the blinds on the windows fly up and my blindfold is pulled off but I still can’t see because it’s too bright and Rachel says “Its’ alright” and I wake up. I’d like to see Jung interpret that one. I never understood dreams but that one hung around. I just felt prickly for days. And then we had the accident.

Mirrors freak me out. I don’t like all those double images around the house. I keep thinking I’m going to see something in them that’s not there. In my room at night I turn all the mirrors over. Coz this place is full of them thanks to mums’ sense of post gothic décor. You know. It just bothers me.

Our home is really old. At least a hundred and fifty years. It was made by this carpenter guy who was really into parquetry. There are panels of dark wood on the floor, on the walls, on the staircase, on the ceilings and everyone goes “ooh-ahh’’ over the gargoyle carvings on the fireplaces. Personally I get a bit sick of it.

My sister and I used to hang around a bunch of fuddy-duddies from the music conservatory. Dads’ mates. We used to sit in the middle of the living room and play backgammon while these intellectuals of the music world drank wine and sifted Dads’ music collection. We fed on it, I guess, the little music stars. We got into the conservatory like that. One audition each. Rachel breezed in. I just made it because my theory sucked.

“You are not going to muck this up for me” Rachel used to say. And she’d make me do my theory. I guess we were both pretty smart. But she was getting edgy, freaked out. More like me as high school was ending and our first year at the conservatory was coming up. My mates were used to me being odd. My girlfriend just put up with me.

“You always want to hang out with your twin” she used to mutter. She said I needed to stop being so paranoid. I think she just thought I was flat- out weirdo.

We used to play for hours. We just went on and on. No one told us to start playing, we just did. Like we needed to or we didn’t feel right. People noticed. You can’t not notice us when we play. Our parents had put us in competitions. Got us tuition. And we kept stacking up the awards in the hall under that medusa mask. Rachel put up that mask over our awards. Why, I do not know. Then we’d muck around near the river with our dog, Chunk. Maybe swing into the water on a rope if it was hot. Then we’d play some more music and these awards, they just came. It was almost too easy.

There was music to listen to; music to write, music to play and the music that you just lived that was around, in you all the time. I don’t know how to explain it, like we had our own world, magic, like fairies or something but better than fairies. There’s a poem by Blake. I really like it. There’s a line especially: ‘…With sorrow fraught my notes are driven…’ I like that. ‘…My notes are driven’ it makes sense.

“I’m going to the conservatory next year and people will understand me” I said to my girlfriend when she rolled her eyes about the Blake poetry.

“Oh god you are getting unbearable” she said.

Then Rachel got the call for the audition in Sydney. Only Rachel.

I swear, I don’t get out of here, I’ll kill myself. That’s what I said every day in my head when I walked into school alone. The day dried everything into a boring fizzed up nothing where even the air seemed grey. I went into the chemistry store room to get a set of test tubes and the snakes just slithered out of the cupboards. They were everywhere. My teacher called the principal to get me off the sink. I remember smashed test tubes all over the floor and the guys in my class were ducking for the door. I didn’t go to school much after that. If they can’t see the snakes in the storeroom, then that’s their problem.

At night it’s like the air is shaking. Like everything is about to cry, like the whole parquetry- gargoyle- heritage- surprise- house is just going to start wailing. It doesn’t- but it feels like it will. That alone makes me wait for night because I feel that bit closer to her.

Rachel used to say that a god made our hands sing and I reckon she was right. I know burning our music was wrong but it was the only way I could do something that was mine. It’s like biting down on your knuckles-it feels bad, it hurts to do it-but you’ve just got to. Just to be in control, because so much of my life is out of control. Life’s just one whirring blur that changes everything I try to do. I didn’t want to go to the conservatory and learn theory without her. I didn’t want Rachel to take the scholarship to Sydney. Sure as the wheels on the car that night, driving straight for the audition- I thought;

Would they miss us that much?

Quotes from ‘The Mad Song’ by William Blake.