chapter xi: the window does not trap what it views
At the wilderness fundraiser we are third from the top, through no merit of our own. We are a last-minute substitution, they’ve bought tickets expecting to see a rockabilly quintet from Melbourne. It’s two months since we last played. From backstage we can hear the crowd talking in a dull roar between sets. I am perched on a stool with Sid’s drumsticks, riffing along the back of the rank green room couch trying to dispel a sudden onset of nerves.
Pommie Dave the bass player leans like a bouncer against the green room door, trapping the five of us in. His bulging arms are folded, he is retelling an interminable story. His marriage – that doghouse, that hobble, that curse – has finally come to an end, and inexplicably he’s decided to fight his wife for custody of the three kids whose birthdays he forgets year after year. The repetition of his bewilderment, the gloomy force of his aggrieved pursuit, have driven both the name bands out of the room towards the bar. He is used to holding court with endless tales of his wife’s cupidity. Now he is reduced to an audience of one: the borrowed fiddle player, a wiry folkie seconded from our guitarist’s Celtic project, who is too much of a guest, presumably, to tell Dave where to get off.
The fiddler lays out his borrowed chord sheets and frowns over them. I hope he’s had time to learn the songs. I wish Dave would leave him to concentrate. I have met the wife a couple of times, and liked her: a leathery, crop-haired woman who does not in any way resemble the sailor girl tattooed on Dave’s left bicep.
Secretly I applaud her feist in quashing his outrageous bid. Through her lawyers she has made allegations of drug use (true) and mental incompetence (debatable). As a result Dave has had to undergo ‘a state test’ of his sanity, and he is spluttering from sheer insult. “I mean, a test of your sanity?” he half-shouts, for the dozenth time. “What does that even mean?”
The fiddler’s name, I suddenly remember, is William. He calls himself Sweet William, but I can’t bring myself to. Behind him Sid hunches over his mess of rolling papers, dropping splinters of wiry tobacco. I feel for my own packet, deep in my bag. Like a wounded boxer Dave lurches his head, looking for a response. None of us is game to meet his eye.
“Seriously,” he says again. His voice rises. “What’s sanity, anyway. How can you test it. How can any of us prove our sanity?”
Rashly, I snort. He swings on me, points his trembling finger. Terror nibbles at me, vague and tiny and far away. “You, for example,” he says bitterly. “You crazy hippie chick. What could you possibly offer to prove your sanity to a court?”
Could I? What could I? I look from one face to the other. The others stare blearily back, too lazy for hostility. Is this my life then? I ask myself. That I should be shouted at by angry guys, be penned in the back of a beer-stinking hall, be pleased to be playing for free in someone else’s stead?
My mediocre guitar, my vague ambitions. The ill-formed songs I labour over in the middle of the night, with their lyrical subtleties no audience ever hears. Outside the crowd begins to roar and I catch a blur of movement in the long bank of mirrors. It is me, lissom and wiry in a tank top and sequinned shorts.
“Come on then,” accuses Dave doggedly. He levers himself upright at last. “Just name one thing you could prove in court – to prove your so-called sanity.”
This malice is new in him. Performance adrenalin kicks in. Something in my gut turns, a key in the lock of me, and I say quietly, “Any aspect of my fucking life, mate.”
“What’s that? Speak up!”
I stand up, knocking over the stool. I throw down the sticks. “I said,” I say, through clenched teeth, “any – aspect – of my – fucking – life.” I suck in a deep breath and all of a sudden I am shouting. “Go through my private papers, I don’t care! It’s all me! It’s all proceeding from the same intersection!”
Dave retreats, muttering. “Well that’s all very well,” he mutters. Behind me I hear a strangely unexpected sound. William the fiddle player is humming, actually humming. He has taken up the drumsticks where they fell and is plying them like a pair of chopsticks, pretending to be picking up letters off the chord charts and gleefully eating them. Our eyes meet, his are smiling, he offers me a secretive encouragement. From his couch at the far side of the room Sid stands up. “They’re done,” he says, and it’s true: the MC is back onstage, this is it, we’re on. “Ok!” says Dave. “Ok!” He touches my arm lightly as we pass through the narrow door.
We start hard. We play a tight set, angry, gradually unfolding, becoming joyful. Up the front people are holding out their hands across the lights. Dave shoots me a glinting glance of apology or challenge. We are in it for the music, and the music is in us. The low ceiling glints with lights. Men up the back leaning against the bar are bobbing their heads over their beers. We have set up a good pulsing dirty old blues with plenty of forwards but plenty of side-to-side. By the fourth number the whole place has that groove on, it has grown into a massive solid swaying, back and forth as though all of us were growing out of the sand on some shallow, shared seabed.
“Integrity means integrated,” Trix likes to say. I can hardly hear the fiddle over the din of the drums. But on the last song William steps forward into the light. He raises his bow and lets it descend, his long arms taut with an unexpected muscle. I step back, humming a backing vocal to give him the room. With a half nod he turns to stare at me hard, over the red-shining body of his old violin. He is mouthing something and I almost start forward, catching myself, gaining the chorus. The song crashes to an end and we are stumbling off in the dark, jostling one another at the door.
In the long narrow hallway William slows infinitesimally, letting me come alongside. He leans in and says, “You looked like the queen out there.” I take a breath, feeling the coils of my blood pulsing hard under his words. “Well,” he says, the other blokes pushing from behind – “not The Queen. But queen of some other, nicer world.”
Somehow it happens that after the bump-out and shoulder-slapping William offers me a lift in his old postal van. I climb in, sweating under my sequins, and we hurry home, screeching through the streets perhaps not fast but with the feel of speed, from his ill-tended brakes and the gleam in his eye, his flying scruff of hair and reckless cornering.
The city is sultry under low cloud. I follow him up the dark staircase to his flat. We crawl under the covers like two sleepy animals. Then he turns, and takes hold of me, and our animals are not in fact sleepy at all. We are racing, singing, climbing, falling, finding eachother and falling away, grimacing with a certainty that is fleeting and false but compelling. Compelling. Compelling.
