Bass Clef

‘We need to leave!’ Nonno announced from his seat when we opened the door to his room. He was impeccably dressed in brown pants, a white polo shirt tucked in and a leather belt. He looked at us with urgency through his square tortoiseshell glasses, gripping the head of his walking stick with both hands.

‘Don’t worry, I have already packed!’ he said.

My parents and I were there to take him to the funeral.

‘Yes, Papa,’ Rebekah said as she helped him to his feet, ‘we need to leave.’

Nonno looked at us with disbelief. ‘Finally!’ he said, and smiled.

As we were about to close the door he stopped.

‘Wait—’ Nonno said ‘—the cases!’

My dad and I looked at each other, and without saying anything we each picked up a suitcase.

We started to exit again, and then ‘—and the lamp!’

My mother guided him out the door. ‘We’ll come back for the lamp,’ she offered.

For my twelfth birthday party Cate and a few other girls from school came over. At the park near our house one of my schoolmates had heard a high-pitched screech. It was a baby bird. We all stared up at the trees and tried to spot the nest, until Cate realised the cry was coming from the ground.

A rainbow lorikeet chick, all green-feathered and fragile, had fallen from its nest. Its little hard beak opened with every squawk. We picked it up carefully, Cate holding it in her skirt; we stroked its ratty body with our fingers, and took it home to my Dad.

My father took one look at the tiny bird, shook his head and told us it would die. After it did, lying in a lined shoebox we’d prepared, I cried on my bed inconsolably.

‘Whatever is the matter, Grub?’ Dad said as he sat on my bed and rubbed my back.

I sat upright, glaring at him. ‘You were supposed to save it!’ I screamed into his chest before I buried my face back in the pillow.

‘Oh, Grub,’ he said and then clucked his tongue. ‘It was very weak, and had fallen from a great height: it hadn’t a chance.’

‘But that’s why we brought it to you – we thought you could fix it.’

‘Ahh, I see.’ Dad turned my ponytail in his hand like rope, and somehow this action soothed me. ‘I wish I had that kind of power, Grub, but I’m up against nature,’ he said, ‘and sometimes nature is cruel.’

Removing splinters. Untying difficult knots. Retrieving balls from guttering. Dad had always been very proficient at the technical parts of parenting. Quadratic equations. Driving lessons. Applying for a tax file number. Perhaps that was why I assumed he could save the bird, could save my brother.

I thought about that lorikeet chick as we drove to North Ryde, where large swathes of Sydney bury their dead. I thought about the bird, and my nonna with her old hands and young heart, and Elijah. They had all become the same thing. Maybe what I had failed to recognise was that as I grew the problems around me became more complicated: bigger beasts, larger boxes, all piling up at my father’s feet.

While I was frustrated that Dad had not tried earlier or harder or louder for Elijah, maybe adulthood meant I had to take ownership of the threatening feathered clumps around me, and not expect others to always clean them up. Or at least acknowledge tragedy was not always under someone’s control.

I could fume at my father’s ineptitude but at least I had a clear vision of him. When I looked back and tried to focus on Rebekah, she was slippery. Her actions were outside my field of vision, off-screen. I was unable to determine exactly when she had mentally left, or to lay side by side the timeline of her infidelity with Elijah’s derailment.

There were green lawns and multicoloured rosebushes when we arrived. We drove past a sign that pointed to different sections of the cemetery. Nonno read the directions aloud:

‘Anglican … Orthodox … Jewish … Muslim …’ he said. ‘So many religions! Sydney is just like Alexandria, only not as beautiful.’

It was quiet there, too peaceful to bury Elijah. I wanted it to be deafening, blinding and alarming. I needed the day to reflect at least some of what it was: horror.

At the service there were no flowers on the coffin and twelve men wailing who I had never seen before. I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like an actor playing a role: the part of a young woman whose older brother had died.

Dad, Rebekah and I stood at the front. My mother brought an old cardigan that she put on over my clothes. The rabbi walked in front of us and made a small cut in our clothes, on the right side of the cardigan. After that we all had to extend the tear. We stood in front of the congregation, our friends and family who had come to pay their respects, to witness our sorrow. We stood there and shredded our clothes; we made a larger opening for the grief to pour out of our hearts.

Dad had relinquished control to my mother, like he always had and would, and Elijah was to be laid to rest in the Jewish section next to my nonna.

After the service the guests spilled out around the synagogue and into the surrounding courtyard. I thought people might share stories about Elijah but everyone just stood there in silence.

A young man in a dark grey suit and black tie pushed his way towards me. He held the hand of a woman in a navy dress. It took me a longer than usual to register that the man was Zed.

His hair was freshly cut and he was clean-shaven. He appeared healthy. The woman he was with had a wholesome look, an hourglass figure and a kind face, like a kindergarten teacher.

‘Grub, I can’t believe it, I mean, we are so sorry for your loss,’ Zed said, almost as if he’d rehearsed it, and reached his right hand out to touch me, perhaps on the elbow. I jerked back instinctively before he could make contact and looked at him with disbelief. Was that all he was going to say? Was he not going to admit the part he played in Elijah’s death?

Zed’s hand hung for a moment surrounded by air, and before he retracted I saw the new marking, a lowercase e in old typeface on the back of Zed’s right hand, in the triangular space between the base of his thumb and first finger, and next to the e was Elijah’s bass clef.

I looked to Zed with a flash of recognition, wondering how it was possible to feel this devastated and angry and despondent all at once. There was too much emotion inside me; it rose like a dark tide and broke the riverbanks in my heart.

My mind was searching for the term for that part of the hand, wondering if I’d covered it in anatomy class or if it even had one. In the moment that also seemed important: to know if there were still parts of the human body that hadn’t been named.

‘That’s—’ I was still trying to find words to speak when my aunt Lillian screamed. There was a ripple of movement in the crowd.

At the epicentre, I saw Rebekah, fainted. She lay awkwardly on the ground, her legs bent at the hip and the knees, her hair unravelled around her head and her long skirt fallen around her thighs.

She was a body in an old movie: an official should have traced her outline in white chalk. Shadows and stitches. For once she didn’t look good.

I wondered if it was the shock that made her fall, of realising she was only my mother now.

After the funeral we went back to the house. There were candles lit and when I went to the bathroom the mirror was covered with a shawl.

I recognised people from the art gallery and swimming club. A lot of the girls from his year of high school were there, those whose adolescence had been defined by their adoration of Elijah. I saw Lewis; he was with a small group from the youth orchestra, dressed in dark suits. They stood next to a larger crowd, music fans of a different kind perhaps. They wore brighter colours, and some had dreadlocks, nose and tragus piercings. A curious tapestry of personalities only he could weave. I wondered what my brother would make of all of it. Some of the people there he loved, others he was fond of, and others again I thought he barely knew. Maybe, though, that was my own bias. It made me think of all the claims I had on people – the ones I knew up close and from afar who’d influenced my life. It was disorienting to consider other people, maybe people I barely knew, who might feel they held a stake in me.

There was a photo board where people had pinned pictures of Elijah: winning the point score championship at twelve, shaking the hand of the school principal. Playing in his first quartet. In the pictures his beauty was overwhelming; it hurt to look at. There were no recent photos.

Cate was there. Her presence felt like a truth deep down I always knew; the sight of her brought me relief and made me feel small again. Her company was a touchstone, something close to my core, and made of onyx. All the pettiness between us in the months before had evaporated. I thought of our names on the gum tree where we carved them years ago and wondered if they were still there, maybe higher up now.

‘Grub! Oh my gosh, I’m still in shock!’ I was pulled into an awkward clutch to a shoulder that smelt of hairspray. When I was released I saw the face attached had thick drawn-on eyebrows and lips that stuck out from her face as if erected. Her cheekbones looked so pronounced I couldn’t tell if it was from filler or contoured make-up.

‘… Louisa?’ I guessed.

‘We just can’t imagine what you’re going through,’ said the echo machine standing to Louisa’s right. I looked around for the other one but she was absent. Missing in action.

Since leaving school and making friends who’d grown up in different suburbs, I’d learnt that most girls’ schools had a logroller like Louisa. So I guess it was true what they said about power and vacuums. Of course, what I’d come to understand in my twenties was that all those machinations were far more reflective of the aggressor, and not of their targets as I’d originally assumed.

‘Are you still in touch with Lucas?’ the echo machine asked. Lucas … it took me a while to place the name of the boy whose formal I’d gone to all those years back.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I heard he’s over in Scotland playing club rugby,’ Louisa said. I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying; I kept looking at her face, trying to figure out which parts of it weren’t moving.

Later, when the house had emptied, I would go online and google Louisa’s full name and discover that she’d founded a PR company that specialised in working with female-led businesses. Your Business Tribe, the banner encouraged in colourful script. When I scrolled down there was a cartoon gif of brown, black and white women giving each other a leg-up: an endless chain of illustrated women hoisting each other higher in a human pyramid to reach the stars.

Lift As You Climb! the caption read.

‘Oh, give me a fucking break,’ I would say, under my breath.

The only person I wanted to talk to after the funeral was Zed, but I couldn’t see him at the house. I imagined lunging at him when I found him, telling him it should have been him. I thought back to the first time I met Zed in the carpark at the beach. In my mind the day shone a little too brightly. I remember Zed and Elijah as they stood with their surfboards, tans on lean torsos. Just skin on muscle. Their shaggy hair sun-bleached and salt-stained. I wanted to rewind time, so that Elijah and I didn’t cross paths with Zed that day, ricocheting off him like billiards. Or at least I wished I knew then what I did now: how that day when we stood in the carpark, with the heat of the asphalt burning our feet, signified the end of something.

Some of Elijah’s high-school mates had his old green Malibu board. At dusk we took it down to the baths. Flowers were placed on the fibreglass, and then photographs. Cate brought a paper lantern. She and I swam the green board out together, around the pool and into the open harbour. The others followed, some on surfboards and others swimming. They made a circle around us and then splashed water in our direction.

Cate had a box of matches in a plastic ziplock bag to keep them dry. We were both treading water, holding onto the board with our hands. She somehow managed to light one of the matches, to keep the spark dry. She lit a flame underneath the lantern and the hot air expanded and pushed against the rice paper. We let it go from the surfboard and the lantern sailed upwards, away from the harbour and us.

A singular flame against the indigo sky. It looked happy, swaying side to side in the evening breeze. I wanted to be weightless enough to go with it, to hold on with both hands and lift skywards, limitless; to not be here, down below: left.

~

‘Tell me again,’ I said.

Dad and I were sitting on the floor of the back veranda, drinking whisky. It had become our nightly ritual.

‘You weighed less than two kilograms when you were born. A tiny slip of a thing. All papery skin with little protruding hips. Rebekah stayed with you for nearly a week in hospital, until you were strong enough to feed.’

I leant back against the bricks and listened to my father’s voice. The rolling melody of it, the catch of its lilt. These were my favourite, self-defining stories.

‘Rebekah was beside herself,’ his face dropped and the shadows moved across it, as if he were back there in time, ‘but I never saw you like that.’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘Weak. I remember the midwife trying to get you to latch on the breast, your slate-blue eyes; I only ever saw the fight in them.’

Something inside me moved its wings then, small and bright. I wondered how much of my identity, of my fibre, was tied up in storytelling. If I were a ragdoll, stories would be my stitches and stuffing. Holding me together, padding me out. Tales of things I had done, or those that grew and evolved outside of the truth. New yarns, waiting for me to write them.

‘We brought you home on a midwinter morning in a cream dress, wrapped in a white cotton blanket; you had on a long, tapered hat with a knot in the end of it. Elijah had been with his cousins. They’d spent the morning kicking a soccer ball around an oval until they discovered the lawn was infested with witchetys.’

I grinned then, in anticipation of what was coming.

‘When he came home Elijah put his face right up into yours; he examined you. Intensely.’ Dad chuckled as he held up his left hand, pretending that was me; he was enacting Elijah. ‘He looked at your skin, colourless and luminescent as a new moon, your curled fingers, the blackness of your eyelashes. He pointed at you then, his eyes lit with recognition. He looked up at us, his small, pudgy finger gently hovered over you, and he said with a knowing look, “Grub”.’