“Maybe,” Da said. “But I’m afraid I don’t think it’s the business of an artist to want to change the world.”
“No?” Aaron Rayc looked weirdly delighted. “What about your ‘Song for Aya’? That is virtually a protest song.”
“You’ve heard that?” Da laughed in disbelief. “I don’t think of it as a protest song, though. I wrote it for someone, because I wanted to tell her how I felt about what had happened to her. I guess you could say it was as much a song about me as anything, although I didn’t think that at the time. It was my way of trying to bear what was happening to her. My helplessness … but maybe you know the story behind the song?”
Aaron Rayc made a gesture that might have been a nod.
“Anyway, I don’t write songs to protest about things,” Da said. “I write to understand things more deeply.”
“But surely there is an outward urge as well as an inward one?”
“Of course, but it’s secondary. If you want to know the truth, I think of my songs as a kind of howling at the moon more than anything else. Wolves howl because they can’t help it, you know. The moon demands it of them, just like the world demands a response in music from me.”
“Very poetic. Do you write all of the songs for the band, then?”
“I work with the others to produce the music, but the lyrics are mostly mine. Neil has written some of them. Of course, a lot of our music is instrumental, and it just evolves.”
Aaron Rayc nodded, but his eyes were unfocused, as if he were thinking about something else. I wondered why he was here. Their conversation wasn’t giving me any clues.
The entrepreneur spoke again. “You will not deny that regardless of your intent, the music you make requires a response from an audience? Is, in fact, a spiritual call to arms.”
Da frowned. “I don’t deny that people react to the music. I hope they do. But I don’t see it as a call to arms because that implies I want them to do something. And I don’t. If I think of the ‘outward urge,’ as you call it, I see myself and the others as sometimes giving voice to things that can’t speak for themselves. Children or animals or the earth—but we are also trying to learn how it feels to be that thing we are writing about. To understand it better.”
“You believe that you can understand another species? Is that not an arrogance?”
Da nodded. “Of course, but I don’t think it is a bad arrogance if the result rouses people to feel for something other than themselves and their own species.”
“So you do want to change the world?”
Da laughed. “I wish humans would evolve enough to belong to life rather than wanting always to dominate and use it. But the truth is that when I make music, I’m trying to figure out what I think about things. I am not setting out to tell others how to feel or think or act.”
“And yet people may act differently because of the way your songs make them feel. Do you not concede that? And if it is so, then don’t you have the duty to use that power actively to make the world a better place?”
“It would be truly arrogant to think that I could tell other people how to make the world a better place,” Da said.
Aaron Rayc gave an extraordinarily beautiful laugh, and there was no mistaking his pleasure in Da’s words. “I knew you would be a true idealist, Macoll. ‘Song for Aya’ showed it to me as much as it showed me the power of your music and your persona. But I wanted to be sure.”
Da shrugged. “Maybe I sound naive to you.”
“Not at all.” The entrepreneur glanced at his watch, pushing his thick lower lip out, and got to his feet. “I am sorry to have to end this most fascinating conversation, Macoll, but you can be sure we will continue it at some other time.” He stood, and Da stood, too. They shook hands, and the air between them swirled and shuddered.
“What did he want?” I asked Da when we were alone.
“I’m not quite sure,” he admitted with a slightly puzzled laugh. He crossed to the sink and began filling it with hot water. “He called this morning. He said he had been at the Urban Dingo gig and he’d like to meet me, and I said what about today. To be honest I was half joking, because a man like that usually has appointments lined up from first thing in the morning to last thing at night for a year in advance. But he just said he would come by. I thought then that he must want to offer to manage us, but he didn’t mention it. Maybe he wants us to do a gig. He gave me his card just now.”
“He would have mentioned a gig, don’t you think?” I asked.
Da shrugged. “He didn’t mention the band much at all.”
“Did you like him?” I asked curiously, thinking again about the suppressed excitement in the businessman and the way he affected the air around him.
“I didn’t dislike him,” Da answered finally. “It was like meeting a figure on television. He seemed slightly unreal.”
“You think it was about religion? He sounded that way a bit when he was talking about changing the world. Maybe he wanted a donation.”
Da laughed genuinely then. “In that case he was really barking up the wrong tree. One look at this place falling down around our ears would have told him that. But enough armchair psychoanalysis. I don’t suppose we’ll meet again despite what he said. Probably he was just curious.”
I went upstairs, wondering what it could possibly mean that I hadn’t been able to smell Aaron Rayc’s essence. Or what those tiny fish I had felt in the air might mean. That brought me up against the usual problem of finding it hard to think about things for which I had no words. My thinking felt muddled, and it occurred to me that I could take the advice I had given Jesse and write about how I saw the world through my extended senses. I knew from composing essays that you always knew a lot more than you thought you did about things, once you started writing down what you remembered.
I changed out of my uniform into home clothes, got out a fresh notepad, and, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my back against the wall, wrote as much as I could about what had just happened in the kitchen. Then I took a break and read over what I had written.
I hadn’t come up with any useful ideas, and the writing seemed uninspired. Maybe I needed some sort of specific form. Stream of consciousness was too loose and floppy. I tried writing like a scientist making research notes, but I hadn’t written much before I realized the sort of words you use in science essays couldn’t say what I wanted to say.
I decided to try diary mode, although I had always hated the way diaries made your life sound so drab. They seemed to force you to write nothing but mean, brooding rants about people who made you mad, and long, dull shopping lists of all the incredibly ordinary things you did in a day or the meals that you ate. Sure enough, even though I was trying to write about events that were anything but boring, I found myself writing so much detail that I soon ground to a halt.
I made up my mind that a simple journal style would work best, but it might be easier if I pretended to be writing it for someone in particular. It would have to be someone who was knowledgeable but still capable of believing strange things if you presented them well enough. Someone interested and smart and a bit stern. I put in the sternness because I thought that would make me less likely to exaggerate or ramble on. The person I ended up imagining was like Professor Kirke in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Sitting as I was with the blackness of Serenity’s side of the room staring me in the face, I began to write down what my senses had been telling me about her since the accident. I wrote fast and left blanks where I couldn’t come up with the right word, knowing I could come back and fill them in later. I wrote of the shadows on her side of the room and how at night they almost seemed alive. I wrote about the bleak poetry snatches I could hear in the air, even when no one was in the room but me. I described how the Serenity part of Serenity smelled of violets while the Sybl part smelled of licorice. I wrote about how she had got so thin and pale over the past months and how most of her time was spent in her room or at the library. I wr
ote about her not playing her cello anymore and biting her nails. I wrote about how she had seemed so much her old self the day after Luke was born, but the very next day she had begun dressing entirely in black, rather than just mostly. I remembered how Neil Stone said that she looked like she was in mourning for the dead, rather than celebrating a birth.
I wrote seven pages straight and only when I stopped because my hand was cramping did I realize that the form was perfect. Maybe I would borrow the typewriter from Mum once she had finished her labels. I couldn’t use the family computer. Mirandah was so possessive of it that the minute I got on it she would be hanging over my shoulder, reading what I was writing and commenting on how slow I was or suggesting this or that shortcut. Then she would want to check her e-mail. All she ever seemed to get were reams of forwarded jokes from all over the world sent to her by people too busy to be bothered to send a proper letter. They would send a joke that had been sent to them by someone who was also too busy to be bothered with communicating. What was the point?
I sighed and rested my head against the wall. Fatigue began nibbling at the edges of my consciousness, and I didn’t resist. I slipped into sleep and into a queer vivid dream in which I was a wolf prowling through a huge, ancient ruined city. The sky over it was dark and polluted-looking, clogged with clouds streaked sulfur yellow and bruise purple. The city smelled as if there were animals in it lying dead and rotting, but the wolf-me was not afraid or repelled. It pushed aside the stink of rot and caught the scent of humans hiding behind their chipped doors and broken windows.
I woke to the bang of a door and the smell of food.
* * *
Jesse had turned himself into a gnocchi factory, and there were a dozen trays of potato dumplings sitting on every surface in the kitchen, waiting to be dunked in boiling water. Some were colored green with basil, some pink with tomato paste, and some orange with pumpkin. Jesse was so absorbed that he didn’t hear me come in, but I knew that any minute he would want to freeze them. Jesse had a mania for freezing things. We were always coming across mysterious packages of stuff so altered by their descent into the refrigerator ice age that even Jesse couldn’t figure out what they had once been.
I noticed that in his gnocchi frenzy, he had completely forgotten to make any sauce; perhaps he had even forgotten that he was supposed to be feeding us. I went to the fridge, got out mushrooms, garlic, and tomatoes, chopped them up, and fried them.
“What are you cooking?” Jesse asked.
“A sauce to go with your gnocchi,” I said.
“Ah,” he murmured. Sometimes Jesse reminded me of those sideshow clowns with open mouths that you feed a ball into and wait a few seconds to see if it will fall into the right slot. He turned back to his gnocchi and smiled peacefully. “I’ll just put some of this into the freezer.”
Da came through a moment later with a music student, a small, painfully shy girl called Portia Sting. He ushered her through the kitchen, talking quietly to her as if she were a wild doe that might bolt. I was startled to see the air distorting around him and sparking the way it had done the night of the gig.
After seeing her out, he came back shaking his head. When he had gone upstairs to wash for dinner, Jesse gave me a sorrowful look. “Poor Portia Sting,” he sighed. We both burst out laughing, although I felt a bit mean, because it must be horrible to be so shy.
* * *
Halfway through dinner, Neil Stone turned up. He turned down gnocchi, and once I finished eating, I played a game of chess with him while Da finished the dishes. We both knew that it wouldn’t take long for him to beat me, and it didn’t.
“You have to learn to think a few moves ahead,” he said, after he had checkmated me.
“You always say that, but I don’t see how I can guess what you’ll do before you do it,” I complained.
“You learn by looking at what I’ve done before. Chess masters actually study their opponents’ previous games before competitions.” Neil was packing away the chess pieces carefully in the felt-lined box he carried them in. He had a beautiful chess set that had been carved for him by a friend, and I watched him put it away, thinking that if I were to evoke my new ability to remember, it would not be long before I would beat him. But to use my extended sense in such a way seemed like cheating.
After the meal Neil and Da disappeared into the shed, and Mirandah asked Serenity to take Luke up to bed. I was surprised to see Serenity hesitate. When she passed me with him in her arms, I caught her mismatched scents of licorice and wet violet, but they were tinged with a thick, musty smell that reminded me of a piece of wet clothing that has been shoved into a corner and forgotten.
Mirandah was talking on the phone, so I went out on the veranda to read a novel for English. Usually I read all of the assigned novels over the summer before school started, but I had put this one off because its title, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, made me think it might be about sex. It was not that I minded reading about sex; it was the knowledge that Mrs. Barker would almost certainly choose me to read aloud one of the sections dealing with it. She always picked on me to read what she called challenging passages because she thought I was mature and that that was a good influence on the others. Sometimes teachers have the weirdest ideas.
I opened the book with a doomed feeling, but the main character turned out to be this sad old woman who reminded me a bit of an older Portia Sting. Since she was absolutely unlikely to have sex with anyone, I could relax. Judith Hearne was as lean as her life sounded, and I knew right away that her desperate need to have something important of her own was never going to be answered. I thought it was going to be dreary, but instead the book turned out to be strangely riveting.
I would have read on into the night, but it got cold. I went up to the bedroom to find the light already out and Serenity fast asleep. She shifted as I slipped into my sheets, and I focused my senses on her without meaning to. A few seconds was all it took for me to know that she was lying there wide awake.
* * *
It’s funny when people change. If you live with them, you don’t really see it happening because you’re too close. I had only been noticing Serenity lately because my senses had given me a new way to perceive her. Now I found myself wondering why she had changed.
Neil’s chess advice about examining the past floated into my mind, and I tried to pinpoint the beginning of the change in Serenity. The first thing that came to me was her announcement the year before that we were to call her Sybl. She had made a speech at the time giving her reasons, which I couldn’t remember. Mirandah had promptly announced that it was stupid and she wasn’t doing it. Mum never used the name, and after a little while of trying to remember, I gave up. I told Serenity that the name just felt wrong. The truth was I was tired of having her snap at me when I forgot. Jesse still called her Sybl as often as he called her Serenity, and Da managed to remember most of the time, although he called her Serenity to the rest of us. I don’t think any of us had imagined that she would go on insisting on the name change after all this time.
I thought how skinny she had gotten and how little appetite she had, and wondered if she could be taking drugs. The thought that anyone in our family would do such a lost thing scared me, but it didn’t really make sense anyway, because Serenity always said that people who took drugs were cowards.
A sinister little voice whispered that Serenity might believe that, but who knew what Sybl believed.
* * *
I woke the next morning to find Serenity’s bed empty. For some reason it made me feel uneasy, but when I went downstairs for breakfast, Da told me that she had left for school early. I asked if he knew why, and he said that she probably had arranged to meet a friend before class. He was making oatmeal when he said this, so he didn’t see me gape. How could he not know that Serenity didn’t have any friends?
I realized this was another aspect of the change in her. She used to have friends, but not anymore. I had seen her solitary state as a melodra
matic choice she was making. But for the first time I wondered, with a pang of guilt, if the friendlessness hadn’t been the catalyst for the other changes. Maybe all that was wrong was loneliness.
The school was in chaos with final preparations and rehearsals for the play. It was scheduled to open at the end of the week, and the few classes where teachers were not involved in getting ready for the play—or for the interschool sports tournament that was to happen the following week—were like little pools of sanity in a hurricane of overexcitement. Mrs. Barker’s class was not one of them, because she was directing the play. In fact, most of her classes that day were taught by substitute teachers. Our session turned out to be one where there were no spare subs, so the class was to be split and sent to sit at the back of two other classes to do worksheets.
Harlen had already been selected for group A when I came in, and he was standing with some of the others at the back of the room. Mrs. Barker selected me for group B, and I was sent to wait at the front of the class. I did not know whether to feel disappointed or relieved.
Gilly had been put into group A, and being without her made me restless. It was amazing to think that we had hardly spoken before the accident, because I had come to love the clean sea smell of her, which perfectly expressed the honesty and openness of her personality. I felt I was foolish not to have been drawn to her before. But she had always seemed so conventional in her neat stockings, shiny shoes, and perfect, sleek braid.
Once I had completed the worksheet, I asked permission to go to the library to work on an assignment. I was still there, absorbed in a book on the Antarctic, when the recess bell rang. Ten minutes later Gilly came in. She grinned at my surprise and said loftily, “There are people who take refuge in libraries as naturally as lemmings look for a cliff.”
It struck me that she was probably, and unexpectedly, my first best friend.