I knew that Da still wrote letters to the government and to various organizations in our country and Aya’s, trying to locate the family and urging that the laws about refugees and political asylum be changed. But nothing had changed except that the newspapers had found something else to write about.
I was no better than the government, I thought, feeling suddenly ashamed. I had not thought of Aya in a long time, and wasn’t it this sort of easy forgetting that allowed politicians to get away with their terrible inhuman decisions?
It came to me all at once that perhaps Serenity had not forgotten. That even though she had never spoken of Aya again after she and her family had left the country, this might lie at the core of her transformation to Sybl.
She had been so terribly angry and upset that final day, when we had gone with a lot of other people to make a last protest and stand vigil, to force the media to at least report the result of the government’s policy. All of us were there except Mum, who had been very close to having Luke.
Thinking back, it seemed to me that Serenity had not truly understood that we had failed until Da and the band had begun “Song for Aya.” I had seen the baffled rage on her face as she watched him sing. Dear gentle sorrowing Da, who was singing the song he had written, because there was nothing else he could do.
The song was not a protest song, despite what Aaron Rayc had said. It was a gentle and terribly sad ballad, and so beautiful that it had silenced the shouts and rage and jeers of the crowd. A helicopter that had brought a last-minute news crew carried away footage that was replayed many times on television in the weeks after the protest. The television cameras had also filmed the police stopping Da toward the end of the song, to tell him he had no right to perform there without a busker’s license. Da talked with them for the longest time, and even in the few seconds that made it to air, you could see those police officers found it hard to know how to deal with a man who was so nice and gentle and persistent. They had been trained to deal with people who were angry and wanting to hurt or smash something.
A record company had called Da, wanting to release the song, but Da had refused, saying it was Aya’s song, and that only she could decide what to do with it. Mirandah had thought Da was being idiotic, and Neil had said they ought to do it if only to raise awareness about the plight of the refugees. They could donate all the money they made. But Da wouldn’t budge. “I wrote the song for Aya,” he said, “and until she’s safe and free and able to hear it, nothing can be done with it, other than singing it.”
Unlike the others, I had felt like I understood. It would have been wrong to make a record, no matter who profited, when Aya had vanished and might even be dead. She and her whole family.
The night after that final protest, I had found it really hard to sleep. The sound of Da playing the guitar drew me downstairs, but when I looked from the doorway, he seemed so weary and hurt that I had not wanted to interrupt him. I had gone back to bed to lie in the dark, thinking about Aya and her little brothers and wondering where they were and what was happening to them; wondering how it would feel if that were my family.
I had called out to Serenity, but she had been asleep. But now, sitting on the school bench by the courtyard in sunlight that would not warm me, I wondered if she had really been sleeping at all.
There had been a week of despair and guilt and anger after the protest, and there had been phone calls from journalists trying to rehash the story, or link it to others. Da had been invited to speak to a few organizations, and there had been talk of a concert to raise money for refugees. But then Mum had gone into labor, and there had been the swift and thrilling trip to the beach in the old van with the midwife, and the long wait until Luke made his entrance into the world; and life had gone on.
Except, maybe it hadn’t gone on for Serenity.
* * *
I decided to catch the regular bus home that night because it was half empty. To my surprised pleasure, Harrison was on it. I went to sit next to him, wondering too late if that would embarrass him. He might have read my mind, for he grinned at me and said in a loud whisper, “We have tae stop meeting like this.”
A businessman in the seat across the aisle gave us a suspicious look that reduced us both to splurts of laughter. Then he looked indignant, and that made it worse. What is it about laughter that the more you try to repress it, the more hysterical you get?
“How come you’re out so far?” I asked when we had got ourselves under control.
Harrison gave me a burning look. “Because I wanted tae see ye again, ma bonny lassie.”
I laughed in delight at his exaggerated Scottish accent. “But seriously, you want to come over to my place for a while? You could just get a later bus to see your friend. Is that where you’re going?”
He looked as surprised to receive the invitation as I felt to find myself offering it, and I half expected him to refuse, but he just nodded and said, “Why not?” On the walk to my house, I asked him which school Sarry went to, and he said she didn’t mostly. “A lot of people think she’s a bit crazy, and she is, but only in a nice way.”
“Nicely crazy?”
He grinned and shrugged. “I think a bit of craziness is good for the world.”
Da was in the kitchen with Mel and Tich. I introduced them and asked Da how their gig had gone that day. He grinned and said it had been great—they had been paid on the spot. Harrison didn’t blink at Mel’s hair or the fact that Tich looked a lot like a white Stevie Wonder, right down to rocking from side to side like a distressed elephant.
“Good to meet you, Harrison,” Da said and shook his hand.
“Harrison? After the Star Wars guy?” Mel asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Harrison answered. “I think ma parents wanted tae make sure I’d have an inferiority complex so they could control me better.”
Da grinned, but Mel launched into his If-I-was-running-the-world speech, shifting the focus to attack oppression and injustice within the traditional bourgeois family unit.
“Mel, give us a break,” Da groaned. “Harrison, this man is not related by blood to us, so don’t worry.”
“Oh, he likes crazy people,” I said, and hustled Harrison out and up the stairs.
“Very funny,” Harrison said. “Now your father thinks I’m a nutter.”
“It’s OK, he likes crazy people, too,” I said.
Mirandah was coming out of the bathroom, her hair wet and dripping and very green.
“Green is a very organic color, don’t you think?” she asked in that vague way she has when in the process of changing colors. I think it’s like the trance snakes go into before they shed their skins.
“Is she on drugs?” Harrison asked when she had drifted downstairs.
“She’s on colors,” I said, opening the door.
Harrison stopped in the doorway at the sight of Serenity’s side of the room. “What’s this? You’re schizophrenic, or does that just represent your dark side?”
“I wish. That’s my sister’s half of the room. Her name used to be Serenity, but she is turning herself into Sybl.”
Instead of asking if Serenity was a vampire like Mirandah’s friends always did, Harrison asked quite seriously if there was something wrong with her. This was so unexpected that I found myself telling him about her transformation into Sybl, her growing isolation within the family, her thinness, and her strange aggression. I didn’t mention the thoughts I’d had that day about her transformation having been triggered by the fate of Aya and her family, but I ended up telling him about how she had suddenly appeared outside the library, claiming to have been inside all along, although I had looked for her without success.
“She accused me of following her.”
Harrison turned his gray eyes to me. “Maybe you should. You said she goes tae the library every Monday. Go after her next time. See where she goes.”
“Wouldn’t it be kind of sneaky?” I asked doubtfully.
He shrugged, a light li
ft of his shoulders. “She’s your sister, and you’re worried about her. What else would a decent person do but be sneaky?”
I laughed, as he meant me to. Then I sobered. “I am really worried about her.”
“Maybe subconsciously you ken that she’s in some kind of trouble. After all, the things you consciously notice are only part of what your mind takes in. A lot of other information comes tae you subconsciously. I believe our senses extend right from our conscious tae our unconscious.”
I actually felt dizzy. “Extended senses.”
“Aye. A lot of abilities that we call paranormal are probably just extensions of normal senses that work beneath the level of consciousness.” Harrison walked over to Serenity’s table and reached out to touch a finger to the slightly withered lily. He said softly, “People can be crumbling inside without anyone knowing about it. Ye shouldnae think you have all the time in the world tae do something, Alyzon. Bad stuff can come so fast it’ll make your head spin. You’d never forgive yourself if something happened and you hadnae tried tae act.”
His words made me feel cold.
“I’ll do it, if you like,” he offered diffidently. “Less chance of her spotting me.”
* * *
As I walked Harrison back to his bus stop an hour later, I told him that Gilly was coming to dinner on Friday if her gran agreed. “Do you want to come as well?”
“Another time,” he said. “It’s better if your sister doesnae know what I look like if I am going tae follow her. The main thing is that I ken what she looks like.” He patted the pocket containing the photo that he had chosen from those I had offered. It was actually a newspaper clipping of Serenity and me taken during the Shaletown protest.
I felt amazed at how much I had told him, let alone that I had agreed he should spy on my sister for me. It was what he had said about extended senses that had made me trust him so much. I mean, what was the chance of a person whose senses had been accidentally extended meeting someone who would mention extended senses?
It made me think of this book called Cat’s Cradle, where one of the characters in it believes that some people—and animals and even objects—are linked into groups, destined to tangle and intersect with and affect one another over and over, because of some central thing connecting them all, which they don’t know about.
Harrison and I could be members of that kind of group. It would explain why I had felt so easy with him as soon as we met, and maybe even how we had happened to bump into each other on the bus. The only thing I couldn’t figure was what the central focus of our group could be.
When I got back home, Mel’s van had gone and there was a gleaming white limousine in the driveway.
Inside, Aaron Rayc was seated at the kitchen table on the same chair as before, wearing a dark gray tux and a snowy white shirt. Beside him was a stunningly beautiful woman with a black evening dress so plain and perfect that even I knew it had to be a designer gown worth thousands. Her hair was black, too, and coiled into a perfect lacquered chignon secured with enormous diamond-studded spikes.
“Alyzon, you remember Mr. Rayc?” Da said. “This is his wife, Dita.”
I nodded to the entrepreneur, and once again I felt the little fish of his attention nudging and butting at my screen. Afraid the dislike I felt would show on my face, I turned to his wife and was startled by how familiar her face seemed. Then I realized it was probably on account of the perfectly made-up beauty she had, which you saw every other minute on magazine covers.
“Pleased to meet you, Alyzon,” Dita Rayc said in a smoky, caressing voice. I muttered something and slipped out. Mirandah was sitting on the stairs, eating an apple and playing with Luke.
“What’s going on?” I asked, nodding back toward the kitchen.
“Who knows,” she said. “They just turned up and that guy and Da have been talking up a storm ever since.”
“About what?”
She shrugged. “Life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“All of them, even the wife?”
“Dita, Dita, on the wall?” Mirandah trilled softly, fluttering her eyelashes, and we both laughed.
“I wonder what they want.”
Mirandah said darkly, “Guys like Aaron Rayc don’t just drop by to shoot the breeze. Everything they do is for a reason. But if he wants to manage Losing the Rope, why doesn’t he just say so? What’s with all the pussyfooting around?”
I shrugged, thinking of how my extended senses had shown me Aaron Rayc’s concealed excitement the last time he had been here. I didn’t know what he wanted, but like Mirandah, I was sure he wanted something.
Aaron Rayc began to laugh and we both stopped, listening to it.
“That’s a seriously great laugh,” Mirandah mused. “Pity the guy who owns it is such a … a … nebbish”
“All right, what’s a nebbish?” I asked.
“It’s someone who, when they walk into the room, it feels instead like someone walked out. I think it’s a Yiddish word. Here, take Luke. I better get my act together. I’ve got a hot date with Ricki.”
Luke stretched his arms out to me and I took him, thinking Mirandah had found the perfect description for how Aaron Rayc struck me. A walking absence. Maybe that was why I couldn’t smell him.
Mum called out to bring Luke in for his bath, and I carried him into the bathroom where she was stretched out like a mermaid with her hair flowing in wet lines over her white breasts and shoulders. I was struck again by how amazingly beautiful she was.
“Did you meet that Aaron Rayc guy?” I asked, undressing Luke and handing him to her.
Mum lowered him into the water, and he chirruped with delight and splashed wildly. She laughed and began to kiss him all over. She hadn’t heard me. But I wasn’t annoyed. There was no point in being annoyed with Mum for being who she was.
I watched Luke wriggle and plow the water for a bit, thinking how it must remind him of being inside Mum. I knew it was really cramped in there by the time a baby was ready to be born, but somehow I could only ever imagine Luke lying at the rippled edge of a vast sea under an endless reddish dusk, waiting to be born into the world. Partly it was how Mum’s stomach had sounded when she was pregnant that made me think that way. Listening to it had been like listening to the sea inside a shell. But also it was because of how Luke was born beside a sea that was on fire with a bloody, luminous light from the setting sun.
I left Mum and Luke to their bath and went back down to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich. Da and Aaron Rayc were still intent on their discussion.
“It’s true,” Da was saying. “Great art comes out of suffering, but you can’t suffer at will.”
“Exactly,” Aaron Rayc said eagerly.
Dita Rayc had curled her legs up under her on the chair, and she was now watching Da like a cat watches birds when it’s too fat and full to chase them. I moved close enough to smell her and almost gagged at the weird sickly combination of wet cement dust, overripe banana, and musky incense.
“I’m not saying it’s obligatory to suffer,” Da was saying earnestly. “But you do have to go down into yourself to see what you’re made of, and I don’t see how you can do that if you’re worrying about changing the world. It’s looking outward when you should be looking inward.”
“But don’t you think that striving toward the world is also a kind of suffering? A generous suffering, because it’s less ‘I’ focused?” Rayc asked.
Da thought about that. “You have a point. Maybe it is possible to be a true artist with integrity and a desire to save the world from itself, but I’m not that kind of artist. For me it’s very introverted and very personal.”
“I can see that,” Rayc said. He turned to Dita. “You can see that in his music, can’t you, my dear? I mean,” he added to Da without waiting for her to respond, “you could see it better if you were a solo artist, of course, or if you had a band that was more in the background.”
“How do you mean?” Da asked.
/> Rayc shrugged. “Today your striving was a little … obscured by all that was going on in the music and on the stage. Each of the musicians in Losing the Rope is so different. I can see what you say about this personal questing with music, but I find it hard to equate that with being in a band, and with this band in particular.”
Da frowned. “I think Losing the Rope has an energy that comes from our being individuals as well as from our unity, and from our having a respect for one another.”
Rayc made a self-deprecating gesture. “I am only a man who takes an interest. But when I see you onstage, Macoll, I see a band built like scaffolding around a soloist with a vision that gets a little muddied. In any cae, I enjoyed the performance today, and the organizers were very pleased.” He laughed that gorgeous welling chuckle. Dita gave him a radiant, strangely avid smile, and Rayc lifted a tailored cuff and looked at his watch. “We’d better get moving, my dear. We have a reception to go to. Thanks for the coffee and the chat, Macoll. Once again it has been edifying.”
Da got up. “Well, thanks again for suggesting us for the charity function and, of course, for the Urban Dingo gig. I had no idea that it was your doing until you told me.”
They shook hands, and I was aware again of the way they both affected the air around them. I tried to figure out the difference in the effects, but the distortion was too hard to see clearly. Then I remembered how clamping had enabled me to hear the disembodied whispering more clearly, and I wondered if it might not do the same for the distorting air. I tried it, and the sound of Da’s voice saying goodbye faded along with the color in the room. The whispering grew louder, but my attention was riveted on the distortions in the air around both Da and Aaron Rayc, which now showed quite clearly. Around Da, the air bent outward, as if he was emanating something; but around Aaron Rayc it bent just as strongly inward, as if he were sucking something toward him.
It was as if they were exact opposites.
I let my senses go back to normal and watched Dita insinuate herself off the chair like she’d taken a course in it. Da went out to their car to see them off, and I gathered my wits and pulled the phone book toward me.