The Astrid Notes Read online

Mad Dog. Mad Dog? What was his real name?

  I can’t remember.

  My head has a fire inside it; beads of moisture dribble down my back.

  A man’s voice shouts, ‘How come you got all the luck, Jacob Skalicky?’

  Along with everyone else, I swivel toward the voice at the back of the chapel. Skittles’s dad sprawls across two chairs, beaming. As if there’s something to laugh about. I can’t stay here and charge for the exit, tripping on one of the spare metal chairs. I pick up the chair and throw it at the back wall, then launch myself outside and down the steps.

  With each step Mad Dog’s socks, still on my feet, glower at me.

  The socks get to stay.

  What was the last song Mad Dog heard? His profile pic on Instagram rattles my brain, with his sly sideways glance that shows off his square jaw. Will someone delete his account or will he beam at the world, the number of followers logged at 921, forever? How long will it take for people to stop searching for his name – six months? Six years?

  He’ll never get past the bum-fluff stage, and it doesn’t matter that Skittles did.

  My rib cage clenches against the howl trapped inside me. My fist punches my open palm. I’m overwhelmed by the urge to fling myself on the ground, grind my face into the dirt, and pound my fists into the earth. But my father’s curt call stops me. We watch each other. I saved your life. The words sit in his eyes like magnets.

  ‘If I hadn’t insisted you visit Aunt Jane, that’d be you in a box,’ he says. ‘Be grateful you have a second chance.’

  Bet he’s been dying to say that for days. ‘It’s not that simple,’ I spit out. ‘It should’ve been me.’ And if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have driven while drunk.

  Dad pats his ginger-blond hair, meticulously combed back and smoothed, tucks his trilby hat under his arm, and returns to the chapel service. Parenting is the only thing he and Mum have ever failed at.

  I fumble with the buttons on my formal shirt, touch the spot of spilled sauce on JW’s T-shirt beneath. It seems to throb on my belly. He ate spaghetti a few days ago.

  ‘I will never wash this shirt. Ever. Okay, JW?’

  I still can’t accept that if I call their mobiles they won’t be on the other end. They’ll never pick up again. Where are their phones now? Had the coppers logged and zip-locked them with their belongings, ready for a parent to claim? Along with the bodies of their sons.

  They’re all gone. Harper’s gone. She has a whole new life on the professional tennis circuit and she’s in love with someone who isn’t me.

  I’m alone again. And without the band, forgettable.

  I tug off my jacket and formal shirt, dump them on the ground, and go in search of my motorbike.

  2

  Astrid

  After my sister died, I did everything I could to follow her.

  Trying to die was easier when I was five; I didn’t understand there’s no coming back. The other pull heaven had on me was that it had already taken our mum, so Savannah would discover the big secret of how she died as Maestro had refused to tell us until we were eighteen, and old enough to understand such things.

  I turn the page of the book on the music stand and sing, ‘Sempre tua per la vita.’ Sighing, I glare at the alphabetised opera scores on the shelves above the row of music stands Maestro sets up every morning. Each score waits to be learnt. Each one wants a piece of me. I slam shut the arrangement for La Bohème, feeling as though I need to scratch an itch. Except it’s so deep inside me it can’t be reached.

  An afternoon breeze lifts my hair and tickles my cheeks. I slump into the window seat and scan the Sydney skyline in the distance. A hint of the salty ocean fills my nostrils, along with the scent of the eucalyptus trees on Honeycomb Avenue where my younger self once stepped off the curbside into oncoming traffic – on purpose. Maestro, who was simply Dad back then, virtually pulled my arm out of its socket to save me.

  I was nine years old the day we decided I would become a famous opera singer – like Maestro and Mum were, and my sister had dreamt of being. That day I woke knowing I was one day older than Savannah would ever be. I needed a hug from my ever-silent father and snuck downstairs to the music room to find him.

  Maestro was standing in the open French windows watching the sky, a beautiful canvas of greys and blacks networked with lightning. He swirled brown liquid in a crystal glass, his back to me. On his record player, ‘Pie Jesu’ played. I sensed he needed to be comforted, but I didn’t have the words. So I sang. I concentrated more than ever on all he’d taught me, and tried to express how sad I felt, and that he wasn’t alone.

  At first, his shoulders slumped, then his head. I thought he was crying. But when I finished, he looked toward me, and it seemed as if my singing had breathed life back into him. His eyes roared with delight. His lips curled into a giant smile. After the meningitis had taken Savannah, he had disappeared inside himself. He had become as automated as a metronome, ticking through each task of each day with the exact same precision and blank-faced expression. So the energy pouring from him in that moment was a miracle.

  Shaking his head, he said, ‘Your singing is –’ His voice cracked. ‘Heavenly.’ He opened his arms for me to run into. ‘Speaking as an ex-opera singer and a voice coach, not your dad. I have goosebumps all over.’

  Grateful for my miracle, I hugged him.

  ‘Tell me, Astrid. What do you wish to do with your voice?’

  There was hope in his features, and it was clear that without my singing he’d ghost through life forever. Suddenly, I needed to sing more than I needed to die. ‘I’d like to follow in Mummy’s footsteps. I want to be a famous soprano.’

  It was the right answer. He’d been a faded black and white version of himself, but my singing resurrected him in technicolour. I suppose you could say my singing saved his life.

  And now that makes us even – because clearly it’s my fault Mum died.

  Why else won’t he tell me the truth until I’m eighteen? Mums die. All the time. They have cancer or heart attacks or car accidents; I’m seventeen and a half – why would Maestro think I couldn’t cope with knowing what happened? Unless it’s something truly terrible, but that would’ve made the newspapers. Google reported my mother withdrew from public life after giving birth to her second child. Maestro said it was a publicity strategy used to stop her funeral and our lives turning into a media circus. Therefore the truth must point the finger at me, and given she died right after I was born, I’m guessing my birth caused her death.

  I reach for my maths notebook, except it doesn’t contain complicated equations or geometry. Instead, it’s chock-full of lyrics and snippets of music I’ve written. I scan over the pop song I’m working on, humming happily to myself. The phrasing in the last line needs to match the melody better.

  ‘Have you finished rehearsing, Astrid?’

  I startle as Maestro enters the music room. I slap shut the book and shove it behind me. He peers around the vase of calla lilies on the black grand piano. Although he’s only fifty, his hair is so bushy and white-grey, his vocal students nicknamed him Dr Who because he resembles the original doctor, Jon Pertwee. That was before Savannah died, before he retreated from the music world. Then about five years ago, he began to teach again and insisted on reverting to Dr Bell. I assume he thought the nickname inappropriate.

  Some of his braver students from the Con gave him a new nickname: Maestro. That one he appeared to prefer – perhaps it matched his suddenly more serious demeanour, and it worked with the Dracula-style cloak he’d taken to wearing in colder weather. Somewhere along the line, normally on the days he drove me to sing for longer and longer hours, I began to call him Maestro, too.

  ‘Zut, alors. It’s the weekend,’ I reply, using the phrase I picked up in Paris earlier in the year. When he leans over to shut the piano, I shove the notebook under some cushions an
d tug my hair into a messy ponytail. ‘It’s been a long week. I’m exhausted.’

  Maestro pretends a deep frown. His face is loose and animated, as if made from liquid clay; it has the power to express a thousand facades. Perfect for opera. ‘You’re always exhausted. Too many late nights.’

  ‘I go to bed at 10 pm every night. No partying, no drinking –’

  ‘Don’t think I can’t see the light in your room at midnight, young lady.’ He retrieves the sheet music from the music stands, playfully swipes them across my arm. ‘Reading silly romance novels, no doubt.’ He beams, the love he has for me in plain sight. ‘Instead of learning your music.’

  He’s wrong, but I don’t correct him because what I’m actually doing is, in his view, more wasteful than reading romances. And because I love him too much to disappoint him.

  Maestro places the music in a neat pile on the piano. ‘Are you too exhausted to go out?’ He’s still dressed in his work clothes – a dark grey suit, white shirt and sky-blue tie. ‘I’ve booked Bernados and ordered the soufflé in advance. It’s quiet there. You needn’t shout to be heard across –’

  ‘I know, I know. Protect my voice. Are we going to the Opera House?’

  ‘I have tickets for Janacek’s From the House of the Dead. It’s Czech.’

  I give an exaggerated grimace. ‘That’ll be a cheery opera.’

  Maestro origamis his face into a ‘death throes’ expression. But he knows I’ll listen to anything. Besides, we rarely go out; cool night air is bad for my throat; shouting in loud places is bad for my throat; late nights are bad for my throat.

  ‘Wear a pretty dress,’ he adds, glancing at my leggings and over-size jumper. ‘We’re sharing a box with some of the benefactors of the Music Conservatorium.’

  ‘The Con. Say the Con. Everyone else does.’

  He checks his vintage watch, the kind that needs winding every day. ‘You’ve got fifty minutes.’

  ‘Maestro, did you ever sing in Czech?’

  His features kink into a frown. ‘I did.’ He glances at the painting of Mum above the fireplace. Her pose is almost haughty, like the Mona Lisa, but there’s a feisty gleam in her eyes. ‘As did your mother.’

  I shift the cushions in the window seat to make room for him, careful to keep the notebook hidden. ‘Tell me about how you met Mum at the Opera House in Vienna again.’

  ‘We don’t have time now.’

  ‘It was a stormy, icy night, the day before Christmas Eve . . .’ I reach for him, knowing he can’t resist when I ask about Mum.

  He sigh-smiles and perches beside me. ‘. . . and I was running late for a performance.’ I nestle into his bear-like chest. ‘The stairs were slippery as marble and as I mounted them, two at a time, I skidded and twisted my ankle. I hopped up the final step and clung to the big brass handles of the double doors, catching my breath, when a woman’s voice said from behind me, “You certainly know how to make an entrance, Sean Bell. Let’s hope you don’t repeat that onstage.” And I swung around and saw an angel. I wondered if I’d hit my head when I slipped, then died and gone to heaven. Even her voice sounded angelic.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘She shimmered, all in white – her dress and cape flowed to the floor in soft layers, and diamantes glittered from the edging around the bust line. But none of them were as bright as her smile or as sparkly as her grey eyes.’

  ‘Eyes the same as me and Savannah. And what did you say back?’ I snuggle closer.

  ‘I said, “I see you came dressed for our wedding. You accept my proposal then?” And she laughed this tinkling, captivating laugh, making my legs, already unsteady from the fall, more or less give way. She helped me inside and called for ice –’

  ‘You forgot the bit about her saying, “Who do you think you are, Cary Grant?”’

  ‘Yes, she said that. And we talked awhile about Vienna and opera and her home in London and how she had a ticket in the first row for my performance.’

  ‘And after the performance?’

  ‘She sent her ticket to my changing room with the words, My proposal is we meet at Higgins’ tomorrow at 9am. Do you accept?’

  ‘And you did.’

  ‘And the rest is history – now come along.’ Maestro stands and smooths the creases in his suit trousers.

  ‘But what did she wear the next morning?’

  ‘You must get dressed, Astrid.’ He moves away and straightens the already straight line of music stands. He points at the music to La Bohème. ‘Tomorrow we must continue with that. Come, come.’ And he disappears from the room.

  I’m usually ecstatic to leave the house, to take a break from striving to become, as the newspapers reported of Mum, ‘the most outstanding vocalist of her generation’. But today something’s niggling me. I toe one of the music stands harder than I intend. They become dominoes; the row of stands clatters to the floor and La Bohème flies across the room.

  3

  Jacob

  Why would you name your house after an opera that’s about torture, murder and suicide?

  Dr Bell’s house appears ancient from the outside. Huge slabs of stone, mapped with moss and lichen, make up the surrounding wall. A terracotta-tiled roof emerges at the bottom of a long gravel driveway. Compared to our house, made of box-like shapes of glass and steel arranged on top of each other, this home has history. And heart. Except they’ve gone and called it Tosca.

  My phone beeps. A text from Dad. Going into court. Don’t miss that lesson.

  Two days ago, a month after the funerals, Dad paid me a visit. He and Mum work at lawyering fourteen hours a day and they rarely come into my music studio. Dad picked his way through the dirty dishes and instruments on the floor – if I hadn’t been so goddamn sad I’d have laughed at how he inspected the business suit he wore, afraid he had something sticky clinging to it.

  ‘You’re eighteen and no further forward than you were this time last year,’ he said, his critical eyes pale to the point of being translucent. Then he dropped his bombshell: ‘You need a goal. Your mum and I have decided you will audition for the Sydney Music Conservatorium at the end of November again. You have three months to get your act together. But this is your last chance at a music career. If you fail again, given you didn’t make the grades for university, you choose a career, and start working your way up from the bottom rung. I refuse to fund your drop-out lifestyle any longer.’

  This time last year I had a real chance of making it into the Con. My ex-girlfriend Aria and I had practised our instruments in her kitchen every day, but we broke up, and I got distracted by her sister, Harper.

  ‘I don’t need an effing certificate to tell me I’m a musician,’ I spat back at him. ‘Keep donating wads of cash to the Con – that’ll impress your friends and clients enough.’

  Because I will never be enough.

  As always, I lost that argument. Should’ve kept my mouth shut because I probably made everything worse. Like the main character in a Step Up movie, I either pass this audition or my music dreams are over, and apparently Dr Bell is the man who can make my dreams come true. He comes highly recommended by one of Dad’s cronies at the Opera House. If I fail, I leave home and join the work force. No studio. No time or money for music. A forgettable life laid out for me.

  Dad knows he’s won this clash because we’ve been here before. I left home for a week once. That’s when I figured out I wasn’t qualified for anything – a waiter’s salary wouldn’t cover the rent, never mind a guitar or a tour van. Or food. My music dreams would stay on hold, possibly forever. I came crawling back to all the advantages I have, tail between my legs. Leaving again now would be an overreaction that wouldn’t solve a thing. But it’s more than that: I’m kind of afraid the world might chew me up and spit me out: a forgettable nobody.

  I knock back the last of my beer and crush the empty, h
ide it in a hedge, then trek down the driveway carrying my music in the new leather case Mum bought me. The gold plate by the latch lock is engraved with my name and the dot over the ‘I’ in Skalicky is a diamond. For Mum, there’s nothing that can’t be solved with presents. Especially of the leather or jewelled variety.

  A playful piano intro floats through the open windows of a room to the right. It’s joined by a woman’s voice. Opera’s not my thing but doesn’t mean I can’t recognise talent when I hear it. My crunching footsteps in the gravel seem rude; I stop to listen. The song’s from an opera I can’t name and she’s singing in Italian. When the song ends she begins another – this one I’ve heard Yolanda Gustav sing. I don’t know every opera star, but she’s my favourite female – Aria liked dragging me to the Opera House every chance she got.

  A magpie lands on the birdbath beside me, cocks its head, seeming to listen. The woman’s voice is mesmerising; it releases some of the tension inside me. When she begins a third song, I decide I need to interrupt – Dr Bell is expecting me. I skulk to the entrance.

  The huge front door has an old-fashioned knocker. Its beat of brass against wood is jarring and makes me wince for intruding. The singing stops. The door swings open. There, framed by the door, is a well-dressed Dr Who. The original one, with the bush of thick grey hair. I peer over his shoulder for the TARDIS but find a grandfather clock instead.

  ‘You’re late,’ he says, adjusting the knot on his tie and buttoning his suit jacket. ‘I don’t tolerate tardiness.’

  I smirk. TARDIS. Tardiness. ‘Um. Sorry. I wasn’t. I was listening –’

  ‘Come in.’ He pivots and disappears stage right. That’s a personal record – three seconds to make a bad impression.

  We walk through a dining room wallpapered in beige candy stripe. The space is classy, with antique furniture and a tiled fireplace. The crystal chandelier could’ve been lifted from the Queen of England’s palace.

  Dr Bell’s Armani-looking shoes clunk on the floorboards. I match his quick footsteps so mine don’t clatter. We enter the room where the woman must’ve been singing because in the centre is a black grand piano and several music stands supporting sheet music. I search the bright room for her, taking in the crackling fire, the enormous oil painting above the fireplace, the cream curtains that reach the floor, the patterned rugs and vase-based lamps. Instead, I find the expectant expression on Dr Bell’s face.