Murmurs
written by: June Hunter
As she gazes at the photograph, Ella sees herself as she used to be. Her hair had been her glory in those days – auburn and lush, framing her alabaster face and her large doe-like eyes. In the picture, her long, thin fingers are resting on the keys of the concert piano her father had given her for her eighteenth birthday. Her fingernails are trimmed so as not to make clacking sounds as she played, and her only piece of jewellery is a black velvet choker necklace with a gold locket that had belonged to her grandmother. She is wearing a pink chiffon dress, chosen by her father because it had been her mother’s favourite colour and because it enhanced the pale vulnerability of her complexion. She had never liked that dress.
If she closes her eyes, she can still hear the murmur from the audience as she took her seat at the piano, how it subsided as she flexed her fingers in preparation for her first recital. As the music plays in her head, it bobs in time to the tempo of the first piece from The Carnival of the Animals, and she recalls the rapid swelling of the bass notes as they roar in The Royal March of the Lions.
With a trembling hand, she reaches for the half-full bottle of white wine on the table next to her and drinks straight from it, her pharynx moving up and down as she swallows. When the bottle is empty, she pulls it away from her lips, and the sucking sound it makes reminds her of a baby being torn from its mother’s nipple. She puts the empty bottle on the floor next to the others and reaches for the other photo on the table. A child with alabaster skin and hair long and lush, just as hers had been, smiles at her. She cradles the picture in her arms and rocks from side to side.
With the relentless presto of Wild Donkeys swivelling in her head, she pushes out of the chair and steadies herself before moving across the room to the window. She slides the curtain a little open and peers into the darkness. The street is empty, and she can just make out the shapes of the apparatus in the children’s playground across the road. Her fogged mind takes her back to the summer of the year before, the last time she had taken her daughter there. She wants to be in that playground where, even now after all this time, she might find some remnant of the child. A ribbon from her hair, perhaps? Caught in a bramble, its colour washed dull by rain. Or maybe a sock left behind and buried in the sandpit?
She clings to the door of the fridge as she bends to get another bottle of wine from the lower shelf.
“That’s the last one,” she whispers as she unscrews the cap, then grabs her coat from the hook beside the front door and lurches out into the cold night.
Her legs feel heavy as she crosses the road, and she chuckles to herself when she recalls the images of swinging trunks and stomping feet created by the low piano sounds for The Elephant.
The synthetic turf of the children’s playground is damp, but she wraps her coat around herself and sits down on it anyway. She puts the bottle to her lips and throws back her head. As she swallows, she squints at the night sky, noticing how full it seems to be. The fingers of her left hand rise and fall as if she’s playing the piano again, and she hums Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, recalling how it appeared as a ‘quote’ in Fossils.
“He was a funny man, Saint-Saëns,” she whispers.
At the edge of her vision, she sees the shape of the swings where she’d pushed her daughter, the jungle gym where she’d been watchful as the girl had climbed, and recalls her pride when the child had helped another, younger than she was, onto it. That all seems so long ago. The time before — that’s how she refers to it.
She would like to compose a piece of music. One that would tell the story of her own life. But, if she were writing such a piece, it would not be in fourteen sections as was The Carnival of Animals. Her life consisted of mere murmurs, so she would separate the piece into only three movements, each dominated by three different images: First, The Piano; second, The Child; third, The Carafe.
She holds the bottle above her open mouth and waits for one more globule to drip its way onto her tongue. One more tangy taste is all she wants. When no more drops trickle from it, she licks its rim and throws it over her head. It lands, with a thunk, on the grass on the other side of the fence. Then she turns onto all fours, pushes herself off the ground, and staggers down the road to the crescent where the Social Security houses are, and where she knows old Liam has a fridge full of wine. She also knows that he never locks his front door.
When she reaches his gate, she tries to creep on tiptoes, but the symphony now playing in her head is the staccato of Hens and Roosters as they peck, peck, peck. She giggles as she stumbles up the pathway to the front door. She turns the handle and lets herself in.
Inside, she stops for a while and listens for sounds that Liam might still be up, but she hears no music from the radio, and no chatter from the TV. So she moves inside as quietly as her present state will allow. As she passes his half-open bedroom door, she takes a peek inside and can make out Liam’s form, tucked under the blankets, in his bed. He is lying on his back and the sound of his snoring is muffled by the mask across his face. She can hear the gentle hissing of the oxygen flowing from the cylinder on the floor next to him.
The light inside the fridge doesn’t work anymore, and the door opens with a squeak. She peers inside and sees two bottles lying next to each other on the shelf. They clang against each other as she takes them out. She slips one into each of her coat pockets and moves, with exaggerated stealth, out of the kitchen and down the hallway.
As she gets to Liam’s bedroom she can’t resist peeping in again. He is sitting up in the bed, his oxygen mask pulled down around his chin.
“They’re non-alcoholic,” he wheezes, as he switches on the bedside light.
She wonders, for a moment, if she should feign ignorance. She arranges her face into a puzzled expression, begins to say: “Wha…?” but changes her mind and turns back to the kitchen. The fridge door squeaks again as she opens it and lays the bottles back down on their shelf.
“Sorry,” she says as she passes Liam’s room and makes her way back down the hallway and out the front door.
As she reaches her own house her mental symphony is coming to an end, and she hears the applause of the audience as she finishes the final piece in her concert – her favourite. She falls onto her own bed with the cadence of The Dying Swan reverberating in her head.
