The Nightmare Musical

Old Hubble rolls round the Earth into a night only ninety minutes long: sleepless, rapt in dreamlike recollection of light millennia old, and silence. 

Ding.

            The bell’s waves wash across the din of the dinner rush.

            Ding.

            Three quarters of their range stick in the chef’s fat fist. The rest shoots forth into the dining room, tossed in the turbulence of knives striking plates and high shrieks meant as laughter. 

            Ding.

            The sound arrives in the jaw of a waitress and tightens her smile round the specials.

             ‘And the fish of the day is whole roast Baby Snapper, served with citrus vinaigrette.’

            ‘Thank you, miss...?’

            Great... ‘Penelope.’

            ‘Penelope, I’m Edgar and these are my parents, Nancy and Frank. May I call you Penny?’ Stay. You’re so beautiful. Take my mother’s eyes off me.

            Ding.

            ‘If you like, Edgar.’

            Ding-ding.

            ‘What do you really do, Penelope? Are you a dancer?’

            I’m a singer.

            Frank inhales, ‘Let the girl get on with her job, Ed.’

            Cheers, Frank. Smile, Pen. ‘I’ll check back with you in a minute.’

            ‘I do miss the restaurant culture in Melbourne, Frank.’ The first-name stiffens his father’s shoulders. ‘The staff are so much more… present, than in Vienna.’ And Edgar cringes, thinking, God, is this how I talk now?

            ‘Well, you should come home more often, sweetheart.’ His mother waves the slender wands of her fingers at the Arts Centre spiring above them. ‘This is where you were baptised.’

            ‘Not as grand as the cathedrals of Europe,’ her husband grumbles into his beer. ‘S’pose if you were a cricketer you’d play for England.’

            But Edgar is distracted by a tuxedoed admirer, ‘Your Scarpia is mag-ni-fi-co, magnifico! What a voice you have. And what …’ he fondles the air before his pursed-up face, 'emotion.'

            The fevered punter echoes Edgar’s stance from an hour before, fists raised to the heavens, and translates Scarpia’s words, ‘Tosca, you make me forget God!’

            ‘Thank-you. Thank-you. Enjoy your evening.’

            Nancy takes Edgar’s hand like she’s helping herself to seconds and asks, ‘Do you ever get sick of it, sweetheart?’

            ‘Boy looks like he just found something under his shoe.’

            ‘Frank!’

            ‘Get a better class of toady in Vienna, do you?’

            ‘I feel at home wherever there's music, Franklin.’

            Mother's titter tinkles the chandelier.

Above the embering lights of Australia’s eastern shore, Hubble dances southwards toward Melbourne, arms wide in a long, slow pirouette, its eye fixed upon heaven.

            Ding! Ding!

            ‘What’s with you lot tonight?’

            ‘Table number, Chef?’

            ‘It’s on the bloody docket.’

            Penny moves down the row of tables-for-two called Lovers’ Lane, in and out of the bubbles of talk couples make, Like chords along a staff, Penny thinks. Each table's got a high note and a low. 

‘Happy anniversary.’

            ‘...anniversary.’

            His glass of water clunks against her pinot noir. The hum envelops their kiss, fades, she withdraws, and he’s left arched over the table.

            ‘Laura…’

            ‘Waitress, hi, we’ve finished.’

            Hollow scrapes of cutlery on ceramic fill the pause.

            She’s tapping her nail around A and he's banging with both fists five octaves up.

            ‘Dessert list?’

            ‘No,’ the girl says too quickly.

            ‘Oh. No. Thanks.’

            ‘You can have one if you want, Theo.’

            ‘How ‘bout we share?’

            Laura sighs a thin smile, ‘Fine.’

            Discord. Dead keys. Walk away.

‘Look at her, Franklin.’

            Edgar’s dad follows his gaze across the lamp-lit tabletops to where Penny glides and swerves.

            ‘Like the look of her, do ya?’

            ‘She’s all music. Like the best of us are.’

            ‘She’s waiting tables, mate.’

            ‘No Frank, she’s dancing. See how she humbles herself to the rhythm of the dinner rush, every motion made elegant by the press of necessity.’ His posture remains fixed upon her as he turns his eyes back to his father. ‘You’re right – Dad – I didn’t need to leave home – to find music. It’s everywhere. But I had to leave the old noise behind to hear it.’

            Franks lowers his eyes to his glass.

Hubble does not hear the long slow waves swell from the deep distance and pour down its narrow well of mirrors. It does not know it is the first earthly instrument to play these notes. It only transmits its impossible telemetry: for the next three and one third minutes transfixed in static orbit over Melbourne.

Tyson sweats over the kitchen bin, humming Bom, bom, ba-lom-bom. Bom, bom, ba-lom-bom. Scrape off the-dishes. Knives, forks and-dishes.

            Penny unloads her arm of plates and smiles. ‘Roxy Music. Love is the Drug. Nice.’

            ‘Is that what I’ve got in my head?’

            ‘Ain’t no big thing, Ty.’

            Ding.

            They smile together and sing, ‘The toll of the bell.’

            ‘Did you put it in my head?’

            She shakes her head and stacks the plates in time to the tempo, singing, ‘Aggravated – minimum pay.’

            ‘I stroll downtown back to table eight.’

            ‘Ha-ha. Get up, order up – table four.’

            ‘Munch up the mush. Don’t ask me for more.’

            ‘Tyson, Penny, get out of my fucking kitchen,’ Chef spits from inside the smoke and fizzle of the stoves, thinking, Pan sear the-Dory. John to help-Pastry. Long spoon for-tasting. Three ta-bles-waiting...

‘What are you on about, son?’

            ‘What I have always been on about, Frank, but you don’t listen. On stage, it’s not the audience I’m singing for. I don’t want all the acclaim. I only want to be surrounded by the best musicians in the world, in the rooms built to concentrate all that beauty on the spot I get to stand. You have no idea what it’s like to be inside of that energy! To vibrate and join it with what comes from inside.’

            Penny has emerged from the kitchen. He watches her, rapping his knuckles on the table in time to her footsteps, ta ta ta-ra-ta, ta ta ta-ra-ta. ‘When I see someone who has it, it makes me hopeful.’

            ‘Of what, dear?’ wonders his frightened mother.

            ‘Whether I might stop travelling from city to city looking for mere moments of it.  Whether I might find it in another person. Someone with whom I might find a home.’

            ‘Have another drink, mate.’

‘I got the peach sorbet cos I thought we were sharing. You love peaches.’

            ‘Ok, thanks, Theo, but I don’t want any. You finish it.’

            Last bite. Laura feels in her mind for her bag. Then we can go.

            Putting down his spoon, Theo asks, ‘Remember that Grace Jones concert? When we’d just got together?’

            Laura sighs and retracts her hand from the bag, ‘Yeah?’

            ‘Remember the encore she did, her cover of Love is the Drug?’

            ‘Yeah, why?’

            ‘That’s the best concert sing-along I’ve ever been in. Remember she got us singing ‘oh-ho, oh-ho’ for what seemed like ages – ‘oh-ho, oh-ho.’

            ‘Not so loud,’ she hisses at his swirling hands.

            ‘And then she started singing over the top of us, goading us on, telling us, ‘Melbourne, you’re beautiful’. And the band’s grooving and it feels like that's only place in the world to be. Like it's the centre of the universe.’

            ‘Yeah, so?’

OOOOOOOH, OH-OH-OH….

Boy’s got tears in his eyes. ‘You ok, son?’

            ‘But there is no home. There’s only the tour, the festivals, the galas. It never stops. You keep being raised higher and higher and you want to jump but you never do. Cos I’m in orbit now and if I let go I’ll just float away. And there’ll be no sound and no music anymore.’

            But all his dad can say is, ‘Drink up, mate.’

OOOOOOOH, OH-OH-OH….

‘Well, it felt like a ceremony and she was our priestess. Like it was one of those mass weddings the Moonies do in China.’

            Oh shit.

            ‘I think it was in that moment, singing with you, I decided to…to be your man, and become a better man, for you.’

            ‘Like your drinking?’ she says, and grips her wine.

            ‘Right, and I don’t even miss it. I like who I’ve become. I know I resisted at first. I thought you were just trying to tame me.’

            I loved getting down with a lunatic. I just hated waking up with a zombie.

            ‘But then I realised that the person I was becoming for you was actually the person I wanted to be.’

            But I don’t recognise you anymore. Where’s my rockstar? I want my rockstar.

OOOOOOOH, OH-OH-OH….

‘But darling,’ Nancy says, taking her son’s rapping right fist in her hand, but the tapping tempo trembles up out of his left, ‘You’re right here now. You are home.’

            ‘Not really, Mum. I’m up there. I’m like the Voyager probe. Dad, you know the one, out in deep space. It’s carrying a record. Everything from Chuck Berry and Beethoven to whale song. It’s a bloody demo tape. Like we’re trying to get the attention of the Great Impresario in the Sky so he’ll give us a contract and take us up.’ He stands and yells up past the chandelier, ‘TAKE ME AWAY, YOU BASTARD! TAKE ME TO THE PLACE WHERE EVERYTHING IS MUSIC!’ 

OOOOOOOH, OH-OH-OH…. 

What I mean is, Laura, I believe in you, and in us.’

            You do? In me? But I’m so mean to you? What do you see in me? Show it to me, please. ‘Okay,’ she says, pulling on the tattered rags of old feelings.

            ‘I mean I really love you, Los.’

            Oh shit. ‘I really love you too, T.’ The words thrill through her nerves like the relief that comes after illness.

            ‘I think we’ve got what it takes.’

            ‘Me too.’ And I mean it. ‘Do you mean?’

            ‘Yeah, I do.’

            ‘Me too.’

            ‘Yeah?’

            ‘Yeah, I do, T. I do!’

OOOOOOOH, OH-OH-OH….

LOVE IS!

LOVE IS!

LOVE IS THE DRUG!

The last ripple of the signal shivers down Hubble’s spine, shoots three hundred and fifty miles earthward to chime in the spire atop the concert hall, boom through its theatres and restaurants, and sizzle its foundations. But the sound does not end there. It spreads in all directions, radiating through asphalt and brick, teeth and bone, water, wood and plastic. At the speed of sound, it rumbles north past the suburbs, the hills, over countryside to desert, and on to the tropics; southwards the ocean thrills and groans, quaking the Antarctic pole.

            The wave dilates across the globe, up through Africa and South Americas – wailing dogs, crowing birds, opening flowers at the moon. At its widest yaw it pauses, as though gathering momentum for the downhill run.

            The tempo of Bogotan foot traffic slows to the pace of Mauritian dreams.

            A diaspora of sleepwalkers dances in unison.

            Then on into day it races, drawing itself back in across the dunes of the Sahara, writing an alien and inscrutable name in the sand.

            Through the belfries of Europe it rings, reminding old bones of feast days.

            The steel and glass towers of the dis-United States hum briefly in unison.

            Across the face of every instrument – every horn, string, drum and vocal cord - moves the same beckoning breath.

The polished floorboards of the restaurant still. The speechless tableau of waiters and customers pant in their positions, like performers awaiting applause, or lovers squeezing the last drop of joy from their rapture.  

            Down Lovers’ Lane the couples read like a step-by-step guide to courtship, from one man lost in his lover’s scarves, through to Theo, down on one knee.

            ‘Sorry. What did you say?’

            ‘I said, “Laura, will you marry me?”’

            The words fan out over her face, widening her eyes, dragging her lips out and down. They catch in the tendons of her neck.

            ‘Huh?’

A champagne cork thocks and the bright spume gushes over a bald head, to end in a drizzle that putters in the silence.

Smoke. I smell smoke. Something’s burning? What the.. ‘Fuck! Get those steaks off the grill!’

            ‘Yes Chef!’

            ‘Edgar, son, come down from there, mate.’

            ‘Steve! Get your shitting hands out of my dress!’

            ‘Waiter, this man is….!’

            ‘Waiter, can we please…?’

            ‘Waiter, get out of my lap!’

A cacophony echoes in the bar and the kitchen: hissing, banging, clunking, alarmed words. In the belly of this writhing beast, Penny is calm. It’s all noise again. But for a minute there was music. Ohhhh-oh. Ohhh-oh. That song. But was it that song? Or did it only remind me of it? Ohhhh-oh. Ohhhh-oh. No, it was something else. Something I haven’t heard before.

            ‘Penny! Move your arse!’

            ‘In a minute, Chef. I’m listening. Can’t you hear that?’

            ‘What?’

            Penny looks at her hand. Under the skin, her bones are humming.

            The bell on the pass still rings, faintly; but not fading, sharpening.

            The chef’s bleary eyes are tightening around the sound. A low growl oozes from between his lips like a note slowly squeezed from a dying accordion.

            Penny pushes off the pass, away from the chef and his bell, to find the source of the signal.

            ‘No.’

            ‘No?’

            ‘No, Theo!’

            ‘But a second ago...’

            ‘I dunno. I’ve drunk too much. But no, Theo, no.’

            ‘But why not? I’ve done everything you asked, quit drinking...’

            ‘I know. But you’ve gone too far.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘You’re so obnoxious now. So energetic, so positive, so….’

            Her jaw clenches around what she’s getting at but she can’t quite chew it into the word she needs. ‘Ngaaahhhh!’ she says, and that sounds right.

            Theo gets off his knee and sits back in his seat. He picks up Laura’s glass, flicks it with his nail, and closes his eyes, listening to it ring.

            He draws it to his lips, and drinks.

            Ghung-ghung-ghung-ghung. Each gulp booms down his gullet and up into his skull, like the drums that call Kong from the forest to come get the sacrificial girl.

            Laura points at the glass, her teeth grinding, and moans in an upward inflection that says everything about her frustration and disappointment, years-deep and spilling over the edges of her lips.

            Ghung-ghung-ghung-ghung.

            He drinks to his sorrow.

            Ghung-ghung-ghung-ghung.

            And with every gulp that monster gladdens.

Penny moves down the aisle. She purses her lips and coos a g-minor, like she’s calling to a hidden child.  

            Behind her, the chef bangs the bell until it cracks. Undeterred, he pounds the little dome into the wooden counter. ‘PE-NNNNNEEEEEE!’  

            But she cannot hear him. She tunes her voice up and down through tones and semitones. Past the monstering couples she moves. She’s less disturbed by the faces and growls they’re making at each other than she is by the earworm that demands her attention, this awful residue of the blessed music that had raptured the room only moments ago.

            When she reaches Theo and Laura, she slows.

            Horror almost makes her forget to sing.

            The couple have climbed into each other. He is tearing at her lips with his hands, looking down her throat and moaning. She is clawing at his shirt, digging out handfuls of flesh. Searching for the heart they thought was theirs.

            Penny lifts her voice out of their awful noise.

            She stumbles out of Lovers’ Lane into the main space. The tables are all in uproar. Distended sightless eyes, gaping tuneless mouths, bodies reduced to an unnameable craving.

            Only one man has kept his shape.

            Edgar stands atop his table, his arms upstretched towards the ceiling. He has found the note that Penny’s looking for. His eyes are shining amongst the jeweled chandeliers.

            His father holds one of his legs, propping him towards the light. His eyes are going out, but he sees enough to fend away the clawing hands of Edgar’s mother, who tries to climb the singer’s other leg, like she would reach into his gullet and take back the life she gave him.

            Penny steps past her onto the little stage and harmonises with the virtuoso.

            Their faces are bathed in the humming halo of crystal.

            They look into each other’s eyes and sing, ‘You make me forget God.’

            The stage lurches out from under them.

            They crash to the ground, still holding onto one another to sustain the fragile note.

            Over the upturned circle of the table, the chef’s hollowed features loom. His fist is mush from smashing the bell. He raises the stump over the singers.

            Penny feels the song within her breaking to a scream.

            Edgar stands and pulls her close, hugging her back into the aria.  

            Together they draw towards the door. Edgar’s voice calls a farewell elegy to his parents, who eat each other where they lay. Penny’s is a soaring middle-finger to the restaurant she thought she’d never leave.

            Out the doors they dance into a nightmare musical.

            Cars are crashing.

            Trams are rushing their stops.

            The high born and the fallen feast on each other’s tuneless flesh, chewing for music.

            Twirling through the night, Penny and Edgar’s song is all that remains of who we thought we were,

while Hubble falls over our heads: a shooting-star foretelling the approach of the Great Musician in the Sky, who would hear what sound our souls make when they’re struck.