LITMIR.BIZ

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shook her head. Besides, she was not exactly sure who the father was. She had hoped it was Hugh, the blond aesthete from the London Chorale who wrote lyrical poetry and had a way with money, but when Lily was born with a thick crop of black hair and olive skin, the odds on Hugh lengthened. Strangely, and despite the difference in colouring, mother and child looked alike. There were the prominent cheekbones broad and angled, the almond-shaped eyes beneath the arched eyebrows, the compact, sharp-edged mouth, the finely carved nose, and the slight frame – all features inherited from Juliet Bayle, Anna realised. Then there was the music; like Anna, Lily was very musical.

      ‘But she’ll be tougher than I was,’ Anna said aloud, and noticing she was still holding the phone, replaced it and went to make some coffee.

      It had been her decision to take Lily to Raphe’s yesterday, she had wanted time alone to prepare for the trip to Melbourne. So much for the peaceful morning she had planned, ruined by last night’s mistake, the drinking, the stranger, the sex, all had been a mistake, her head was throbbing and she could hardly swallow for the putrid taste. Long gone were those mercurial nights of forgetting, far-flung nights of booze and pills and sex; if it were oblivion she had been wanting, she would have done better with a new form of forgetting. But the fact of the matter was, Duncan’s letter, the first since she had left home, had caught her unawares, had revived feelings she thought long dead, and she had been terrified. Here she was, a dozen years distant from her father, a grown woman, a mother, a successful composer, and still he could unsettle her. So it was not surprising, that when she found herself in need of a form of escape, she had resorted to the well-tried strategies of the past, long alcohol-sodden nights laced with anonymous sex.

      The first time she had been only fourteen, during those redraw days following her decision to give up the cello. Such a terrible wrenching it had been. Duncan, never one for deep emotion, had been delighted, and Anna was pleased to have made him happy, but, and she only realised this much later, his had been an unfair price for a father’s love. It was then that her own love for him had died, buried along with her dreams of becoming a solo cellist. Again, with hindsight, she would come to see that the loss of her love was a way of never forgiving him. And she did not forgive him. Not that he ever knew, ever suspected anything was amiss; she had continued to work with him as if nothing had changed; each day after school she would sit with him in the music room, studying his work, discussing it, playing it and revising it. Music helped anaesthetise the pain.

      At night, however, it was different, at night she would lie awake picking over her lost dreams. Ever since the age of three when first she had heard the cello – heaven’s music she had called it, much to Duncan’s amusement – she had wanted to be a cellist, had wanted to explore the sprawling landscape of that indomitable instrument. And now would not. ‘A composer should avoid allegiance to any one instrument,’ Duncan had always said, and she had listened to him, everyone listened to him. When finally she decided, he put his arms around her in an uncharacteristic show of affection and kissed her. ‘We’ll have much more time together now,’ he promised. And so they did, but the pleasure she expected did not materialise, instead, just a lukewarm sadness like a perpetual bereavement that would become so pronounced she no longer knew where she ended and the rest of the world began. It was then she was compelled to act and for a few hours assume a different persona far removed from the arid plains of her disappointment.

      It would happen once, maybe twice a week, Duncan and her mother asleep in their room, no lights, just the lumbering shadows of a house grown dry in the joints, all asleep except Anna, lying in her bed trying to dodge the phantoms of wakefulness as they rush at her through the granular night. And in their wake, a sickly, sticky quivering that clutters the air and clings to her skin and eventually drives her from her bed. She goes to the window and parts the curtains, stares at the city lights and tries to comfort herself. After all, the loss of the cello has not left her entirely bereft; there is still the work with her father, and if it is less than what she needs, it nonetheless has its moments. She talks softly and calms herself and returns to the bed. But within minutes the quivering is back and the hurtling shadows, and she must rush to the window, to the city lights so close, urging her away from the house, away from Duncan and her mother, away from this blank misery she cannot define. Staring and glaring, the bright lights coax and promise, and finally she can stand it no longer, the loss, the stifling emptiness. If she could escape her body, she would think, shed it like a cicada, she would do so. For the loss of the cello was visceral, a very particular amputation; without its swollen warmth her balance was disturbed, without its majestic tone she was weakened.

      She tried to tell herself it was only a partial loss, that she could still play the cello whenever she pleased, but with their future together gone, with no reason to plumb its depths, it had become a gelid love. What had been essential, what had fed her body and nourished her spirit, had been reduced to something casual, and in the process had been transformed. As was she; only fourteen, yet possessed of a puny half-life and growing smaller. It was not enough to play the cello as a hobby, as a form of relaxation, for without the studying and the exploring, without the edging towards perfection, there was no seduction, no craving, no appetite at all.

      And so she learned that the casual artist was a contradiction in terms, that to be an artist, to delight in one’s art and thrive on it, one must confront it over and over again, must on a daily basis learn to know it anew. When she was young, people used to say that with her natural talent the cello came easily. But they were wrong, the natural talent could do no more than show her the potential of the instrument; the rest, the striving to reproduce its vast universe was the labour of her days. So it mattered not that she could still play for comfort or pleasure, she had never sought that from the instrument, and while she might still dabble a bit, the cello as she had known it was gone. As for the work with her father, it certainly helped fill the gap, but there was something about his carefully-felt phrases that could not sustain her, and certainly not during long nights flayed by ghosts.

      Which was when she would decide to go out. She would dress, put on makeup and leave the house, and every time she left, she knew with an intuitive knowing that others before her had done the same, had crept down the stairs while their parents slept, into the hallway skirting the loose floorboards, down the two stone steps worn smoothly concave after a century of use, and out the kitchen door to the small back garden. She sensed these others as she climbed over the back gate and into the lane, for to think her misery was unique would only compound her suffering.

      To the city she would go, its pubs and bars pumping life into the night. The proprietors soon got to know her and stopped pestering her for identification, leaving her to drink and laugh until late, to pass a few hours when she could forget the burnt-out days of life without the cello. At closing time, more often than not, she would take to the back lanes for sex with a stranger, which was just another form of forgetting, probably the best of all. Over the years there must have been hundreds of men, anonymous men, young and old; and sometimes there was money, which she always accepted – after all, the sex was blatantly utilitarian, so why not the occasional prostitution?

      Looking back on those days she was amazed she never got into trouble, but did not, or at least nothing she could not handle. Besides, if she had focused on the dangers she would have had to devise other forms of forgetting.

      She was about fifteen when first she took the car, and this proved to be as effective a pain-killer as sex with strangers, particularly in winter, cold turbulent nights and the streets deserted, and she would pull on her clothes and leave the house. Juliet insisted the car be parked in the lane; her only interest, apart from Duncan, was the garden, and given it was such a small plot, she refused to part with any of it for off-street parking. With the car in the lane, stealing it was easy.

      Anna always followed the same route, driving away from the city towards the bay. The road curved around the beachside suburbs, past large, glass-fronted houses with blank, tinted stares, and on the other side, the wintry water, chopped and frosted by the southern winds. The window would be open and she would inhale the salted air; her hair, still brown in those days and very long, would lash her icy face. On and on, forty kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, on through the satellite suburbs and then the climb. The road cut into the side of the cliff and rose steeply above the bay, turning suddenly inland at the summit. When

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