The Astrid Notes Read online

  ‘Take a seat.’ He gestures toward a beige sofa against one of the walls; its curtain of tassels around the base swings and sweeps the floor when my feet approach. ‘I hear you’re a pianist, but additionally play the guitar, flute, double bass, violin – quite the talented young man. And you sang in a band – for about two months.’

  With his last words it’s as if a truck ploughs into me.

  He makes it sound trivial. We may have toured for a short time, but we’d been jamming together for years.

  ‘With three months to go to the audition for the Conservatorium,’ he continues, ‘I understand you’ve decided to work on one instrument. Probably wise. Which instrument have you chosen?’

  ‘Piano.’ My voice sounds like the crack of ice. I swallow the frozen chips and don’t elaborate.

  The good doctor scans me, assessing. My fingers thread through themselves and my left leg bounces. Harper hated that habit, but it’s just energy needing to be released.

  ‘Let’s see what you can do, Jacob, before we make any decisions. We can start on piano though. Did you bring your music?’

  Before I can answer, a petite girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, enters the room carrying a tray of glasses and a jug of something yellow. She dresses like my mother on weekends: pale peach jumper, grey trousers. Her gaze stays on the jug till she reaches the circular table beside me. Then she glances my way from under long lashes. She’s low-key attractive – long wavy brown hair to her elbows and the sunlight catches strands of red, light freckles over her nose, grey eyes. But it’s the full lips that snag my attention. I pocket the thought.

  ‘Pineapple juice,’ says Dr Bell, indicating toward the jug. ‘Good for the throat. Like anything that helps you salivate, because salivation lubricates the gullet. Have you tried it before you sing, Jacob?’

  ‘Nope. But olives help – and there are usually olives in bars.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Both are preferable to water or tea. But best not to drink the juice ice cold. This is my daughter Astrid, by the way.’

  She gives me a curt smile.

  ‘Was that you singing – before?’ I ask. Her flush before she nods matches my red T-shirt.

  She’s shoeless. I’ve never noticed a girl’s feet before, but hers belong in a magazine – pale and dainty, and as if they had never been squashed into a pair of bad-fitting shoes or climbed trees or the rocks on the beach.

  She circles back to her father. ‘I’ll be upstairs.’ She leaves without looking back.

  ‘Play me something.’ The doc performs a flourish with his hands toward the piano stool. As I position myself and my music, I’m shaking a little. I play something classical, more the Con and less indie pop. I’m grateful to focus on the notes and lose myself in the melody; my nerves evaporate.

  The doc stands off to the side. When I stop he nods. ‘Good. Another.’

  He lets me play and I gradually relax. Then he asks me to demonstrate my flute skills, followed by violin. We stop there because he doesn’t teach any other instruments.

  ‘Your skills are highly accomplished,’ says the doc, stroking his neck with a faraway expression. ‘With whom have you studied?’

  I tell him about the different tutors over the years, each one impressive, each one expensive, but leave out the voice coach. The infamous and respected Dr Sofia Adessi spent four years grappling with my voice as though it was a naughty child, until she had it exactly where she – and Dad – wanted it. But the child grew up and after failing the Con audition, chose an indie-pop band instead of classical jazz solos and popera, a decision she would not accept. She abandoned me on the spot.

  ‘Right.’ The doc claps his hands once. ‘Now let’s try the instrument God blessed you with.’

  I play dumb and scowl at the giant vase of lilies on the piano, the same flowers as at the funerals. I haven’t sung since – since the universe disbanded Purple Daze a month ago. To sing without them is like saying I can live without them – like I don’t need them. I clutch the neck of the violin, then return it to its case. ‘I don’t sing anymore.’

  Dr Bell raises an elastic eyebrow. He has the kind of supple face that could express a hundred different emotions, yet I haven’t made it smile once.

  ‘So, do you agree I should play the piano?’ I ask, perching back on the piano stool. ‘For the Con audition.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking. Beer? I can smell it on you.’

  I shrug and stare through one of several over-size windows toward the harbour and freedom. Harper and I used to jump out of her parents’ dining room window when we were little, because we believed ghosts lived in that room. We dared each other to circle the table twice, but we never made it all the way around before leaping out the window. Now I’d give anything to jump out the doc’s windows. Strike that. I’d give anything to bump into the ghosts of Purple Daze.

  ‘Jacob, it’s eleven in the morning.’

  ‘Yeah, Doc. I can tell time.’

  ‘Not Doc. It’s Maestro or Dr Bell.’

  Maestro? I hide a smirk. ‘I’m not drunk though.’ Just escaping a little.

  ‘I won’t tolerate it –’

  ‘It doesn’t affect my playing.’

  ‘If you come here smelling of alcohol again –’

  I slam both hands on the keyboard. The jarring chords stop his words. ‘What does it matter, so long as it doesn’t affect my playing?’ I yell, expecting him to walk away, like Dad does when I lose it.

  ‘It’s a matter of discipline, Jacob. Of respect. Of focus. It tells me your head’s in the wrong space.’

  ‘Yeah? You’d be about right there.’ I stand so fast the stool falls backwards. ‘Five of my mates, guys I’ve known for six years, just died. I’d be a pretty weird person if my head was in the right space, don’t you think?’

  The doctor’s mouth clamps shut. He spins round, his back to me. I’m grateful because my face crumples, my throat tightens. I breathe through the sensation.

  After a few minutes Dr Bell pulls in a breath, lets it out again. ‘Is that why you don’t sing anymore?’ he asks, without turning around. I swear he’s upset.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  He moves toward a side table, arranges some sheet music into two piles. ‘I’ve heard you sing before. You have an amazing tone. I judged part of the auditions at the Conservatorium last year.’

  ‘I wasn’t good enough though.’

  He keeps staring at the sheet music. ‘The way you sang that day. We could hear your heart wasn’t in it. You didn’t want to be there enough. And you seemed distracted, as if you’d rather have been anywhere but there. That’s why you didn’t make it in. It wasn’t your voice.’

  ‘Still not singing,’ I say to his back. Coming here was so not a good idea. ‘I’ll have to get better at the piano.’

  ‘How does giving up singing help? Does it help you forget your friends?’

  ‘I will never forget them,’ I bellow.

  Dr Bell straightens and spins round. ‘Well then, remember them. Honour them,’ he says, in an explosion of words. ‘Through your singing.’ He’s not going to butter me up. He’s not going to dismiss me or walk out. ‘I doubt your friends would want you to give up on their account.’

  I seize my music. The sheets scrunch when I shove them into the leather case. I march toward the exit as Astrid appears. Embarrassed, I push past her, hurrying into the sunshine where there’s no chance of me thumping my ex-music teacher.

  4

  Astrid

  When Maestro’s student pushes past me he’s all untamed animal dashing for freedom. His blue eyes are wild, his blond hair covering half his features. But the scowl on his face is like a bruise.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask, rushing further into the music room.

  Maestro slumps into the armchair, slapping his thighs. ‘The boy’s having some issues. J
acob Skalicky.’

  ‘You mentioned him before. The surfing singer who was in a band?’ Maestro’s students are normally pimpled teen girls or shy academic boys. Even before he arrived, Jacob Skalicky didn’t fit into Maestro’s neat and elegant music room. ‘What happened to make him run off? He seemed upset.’

  ‘The problem isn’t what happened here. He needs grief counselling after a recent loss. In addition, his father said there was a girl, a break-up some months back that left him broken-hearted.’

  ‘Is he the one you said failed the Con audition last year?’

  ‘Don’t let this distract you, Astrid. Get back to your geography homework and then start on the new score – Czech will be a challenge for you. No downloading romance novels, Buttercup.’

  ‘Zut, alors,’ I reply, instead of explaining I’ve never read a romance in my life. But how do I explain that when I write chart music it’s like escaping inside a bubble where my dead sister and mother don’t exist? And it’s a relief. When I’m doing everything Maestro asks, it’s like I’m a spinning top, whirling through my life but bumping into things, getting up again to swivel and reel like performing an exhausting, never-ending dance. But when I write music I’m inside that moment when the spinning top stops jerking sideways, when its tip spins on a precise point, centred and serene.

  Upstairs in my bedroom, for the first time ever, I can’t settle back into the song I was writing; I spotted my own grief in Jacob, and now it’s haunting me. He looked like he wouldn’t survive his emotions. And because I’ve been there too, I feel connected to him. Perhaps one of his parents died, or a sister. Both. My whole body hums with the possibility that maybe we’re the same – maybe he’s the one person who could comprehend what I’ve lived through.

  I slap shut my maths/songwriting book and open my atlas to do some homework. I could put a pin in almost every continent on the map, but even though I’ve travelled the world, my father escorted me from luxury hotel to concert hall, from art museum to renowned restaurant. I’m betting Jacob’s surfed some beaches abroad, stayed in hip hostels, eaten in cafés where the ambient music isn’t classical. Although we’re clearly similar in age, he seems much older. If not older, then worldly.

  I believe everyone embodies a soundtrack, but I hope we get to change the soundtrack because mine is Adele’s ‘Million Years Ago’; because of the guilt of causing Mum’s death, I wish I could live a freer life. Expand my horizons. Right now, Jacob’s is a mash up of Bruno Mars’ ‘When I Was Your Man’ – the haunting ‘should haves’ that led to losing his girl, and Pink’s ‘Beam Me Up’. The way his grief evaporates off him pulls at my heartstrings.

  There’s something else too – a wildness about him. Maybe it’s his long hair, or the intensity in his manner, or the fact he was in a band. His horizons are unlimited. We’re the same in that we both grieve the people we lost every day, yet we’re total opposites; I’m caged songbird to his roaming lion.

  As I take stock of the view through the same window I’ve stood in front of all my life, the itch I can’t reach prickles, then morphs into a gnawing ache. It’s as if Jacob opened the songbird’s cage door, and even though I could fly into the blue sky – want to even – somehow, I can’t.

  5

  Jacob

  I kick at the plates of half-eaten toast and glasses stuck with juice pulp, then fling drumsticks at the walls of my studio and launch the drum kit into the cymbals. They crash to the ground with a satisfying blast of sound. The grief Dr Bell’s words ignited sweeps through me like a bush fire and the only way not to get burnt alive is to destroy everything in my way.

  All my life I’ve traded with my parents – I’ll learn the flute if they pay for guitar lessons; I’ll behave at school if I can have a drum kit; I’ll audition for the Con instead of forming a touring band if they build a music studio at the bottom of the garden. When I failed the Con audition last year, I figured Dad would tear down the studio. Reckon I got in first with the Harley drama. For about a month they actually paid attention to me – spent some time at home. We even watched a black and white movie as a family. I didn’t like the subtitles though.

  What will we trade this time?

  ‘I won’t sing again. No trade,’ I shout.

  Steve. Mad Dog’s name was Steve. I remember. ‘Same as Skittles.’ I whoop and throw a glass against the wall. It bounces instead of breaking and I turn to find new targets.

  Skittles was designated driver. I picture him perching on the drum stool – his throne – the one place he said felt like home. Home. Funny how that word is so important. Funny how home has always been next door, at Harper’s house.

  I kick the throne, rip sheets of music in half, fling them in the air, boot over the music stands, snag one of the guitars and strike it against the wall of the studio. It’s only when I’m left holding the neck of the guitar, now separated from the body, that I stop. I’ve owned the Gibson Hummingbird with its maple fingerboard since I was ten. I look to the door, half hoping someone will come in and calm me down. Even my parents would do. I realise I actually want my dad to grab me, pin my arms to my side, and hug me until the feeling of wanting to destroy everything around me passes. But no one’s coming.

  Needing Harper, I race outside and with one step on the pool box, I vault over the wall that divides us from the Hunters’ garden. Tom and Annie aren’t home much these days, but instead follow their daughters around the globe. When we became neighbours, it didn’t take long for the Hunters to become my adopted family. As children, Harper, Aria and I would play in the Purple Woods at the bottom of their garden for hours; we loved spring the most, when the lilac blossoms provided a secret world to hide in.

  I stumble toward the woods, but it’s late August and winter has stripped the jacaranda branches bare so that they resemble hundreds of old crooked wizard fingers. After reaching the Mother Tree by the river, I climb it as though I’m being chased by ghosts.

  When my muscles burn from pulling myself through the boughs, I straddle a branch and lean against the trunk. Below, yellow leaves litter the ground. Eventually the wind will sweep them away.

  ‘Like someone swept away Emery,’ I tell the Mother Tree. ‘They took down his Instagram profile.’ The one he created for his fans. We each had one. The messages of condolence slowed to a trickle and then stopped altogether, and next thing his page disappeared. I wanted to add a new message every week, but how many times can you say the same thing?

  My life for yours.

  ‘Did dying hurt?’ I ask the breeze.

  The branch between my legs smudges; I blink until it comes back into focus.

  Harper named the Mother Tree when we were small – something about it being the biggest because even when the three of us linked hands we couldn’t surround the circumference. Using the thumbnail I keep long for picking on guitar or violin or double bass strings, I lift pieces of bark from the branch and discard them. They sail haphazardly toward the ground, one then another, and another. A fall from this height would kill me if it was a straight plunge, but there are loads of branches to hit along the way. I’d probably just break a few bones.

  Lifting my chin to the weak winter sun, I face heaven. I face them.

  ‘I miss it,’ I yell. ‘When we performed, it felt surreal.’ The music became the air we needed to breathe and the bond that held us together. We were – my family. ‘We were supposed to become famous and stay in glamorous hotels.’ I’m shouting so loud now my head hurts. ‘We were supposed to get chased by hordes of fans and have bodyguards on tap.’ My voice crackles with tears.

  The future I once imagined is like the fading chords of a melody that will be forever lost.

  ‘There’s nothing left for me here,’ I croak. My chest heaving, I punch the branch three times before I hear the crack of a bone.

  Cradling my fist, I slump against the trunk, exhausted. Maybe I’ll fall asleep . . .r />
  I’m thinking about dropping out of this tree. How can I live inside the same skin as the boy who chased Harper’s paper boats down the river or who climbed the Mother Tree in his pyjamas so we could spot shooting stars? How can I have the same reflection in the river as the boy who named his band after the Purple Woods?

  My thoughts tumble away at the sound of a cracking twig. Leaves rustle under shuffling footsteps. I shrink against the tree and freeze. Someone starts to sing. The voice is smooth and modulated, smoky in a guy sense. He’s singing a Justin Bieber song – about as well as the man himself. I glance around and suck in my breath. A boy is headed for the Mother Tree. His singing gets louder the deeper into the woods he strays. He’s flashing a torch on and off, even though it’s lunch time. He gets to the river and stands on a rock, launches into another JB song. That’s when I recognise him; our housekeeper Maria’s kid. When he was a little, Maria used to bring him with her when he was sick. He’d sit and snuffle on the couch and hog the TV, so I’d go hang with Harper and Aria. I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember his name. All I know is now he’s fifteen and he’s been secretly helping Maria with the housework for the last six months. She’s sick or old or something and she’s terrified the parentals will find out. I think he even skips school to help some days. In exchange for keeping my mouth shut, Maria’s agreed not to clean my studio. I hate people touching my stuff.

  I work out it’s not a torch he’s flashing – it’s fire. He’s doing something with a closed fist, then opening his hand to reveal a flash of fire in his palm, like a magic trick.

  ‘Hey,’ I yell. ‘Whatchadoing? You could burn the woods down.’