From the gusts of laughter and the occasional clatter of applause, Jimmy can tell that the speeches have begun. Even from the car. And after an hour and a half of chain-smoking and listening to the radio, he has at last decided upon his moment. When the speeches are concluded and the applause has ceased, he will join the party, having specially selected from the stack of forty-fives beside him the record he will place on the hi-fi he sold to Patsy Bedser the previous autumn.
But for the moment he lights another cigarette and turns the radio up while the speeches continue. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, while he looks around at the flat, square houses that are gradually beginning to fill the vacant spaces left over from the old farms. Music, like that which leaps from his car radio and from the hi-fi’s of the shops. Music like that, once in a lifetime music, doesn’t come from suburbs like these. Nothing comes from places like these. You must follow the music. You must follow it back into the speakers from which it comes. You must crawl back into the speakers, along the cables and wires along which it runs, to the hi-fi itself, to the arm and the needle, and spin with it all until the record finishes and the needle takes you back into the hole at its very centre, then you must disappear down that hole, like Alice, until you finally reach the source of it all. And once you are there, you will have arrived at the only place on earth that matters, because nothing matters more to Jimmy than the music that daily leaps into his life from the radio of his car and the hi-fi’s of the shops that he visits. This music is calling him, and he is determined to follow it all the way back to its source. And when he is there he will be at the centre of things, at the centre of this sound. For, at the moment, he knows he is sitting at the extreme edge of it.
Light applause and cheers issue from the open windows of Patsy Bedser’s house. Soft music begins and Jimmy knows that the speeches are over. He takes the record he has chosen from the top of the stack beside him, pushes the car door open, and steps out onto the dirt footpath. The car door creates a faint thud in the night as Jimmy closes it. He drops his cigarette on the footpath and begins the short walk to Patsy Bedser’s front door.
At first nobody notices him. Or nobody cares. He’s just walked in through the front door and he’s standing in the lounge room with the record in his hand. He looks around the room, eyeing the faces for Patsy and noticing that he is beginning to attract a bit of attention because the guests are all realising that individually and collectively nobody seems to know who the young man is. He is, the relay of shrugging shoulders suggests, a stranger. But, of course, nobody is a stranger. And those of the party who are not dancing or deep in conversation, continue to stare at the young man either expecting him to explain himself or expecting the riddle of his presence in George Bedser’s lounge room to be solved any second. And it is.
Patsy, he suddenly says. She’s holding a tray of sliced cake and offering it to somebody in the corner of the room when she hears her name called. When she turns the first thing he notices is that her dress is all wrong. It makes her look like she’s already been married a lifetime. Like she was always married. And all she can say when she turns and sees him is oh. And then, you? They’ve only spoken three words between them, but they’ve got the whole room in. Including George Bedser and the young man Patsy’s just got herself engaged to.
Jimmy holds the record out to her. It’s a present, he says. Congratulations. I hope I’m not intruding, he adds. But I was in the area and it seemed wrong not to congratulate you on such a special day. He’s still holding out the record but Patsy Bedser hasn’t accepted it because she’s still staring at Jimmy like she’s stumbled into a dream. And it’s not hers. Take it, he says. It’s an import. A first pressing. In fifty years it’ll be a collector’s item. Believe me.
And she does, because Jimmy knows his music. In the silence that follows, because the record on the hi-fi has just finished, she suddenly suggests they put it on. And when the music starts it is unlike anything that has been on the hi-fi that evening. It is a disturbance and the music confirms the unspoken suspicions of everybody in the room that this young man is trouble. And, aware that the whole room is watching, desperate to say something, to do anything but stand there and talk with the whole room straining forward to listen as this song pours out from the speakers into the room and then through the open windows and over the dark, swaying paddocks of the suburb, she suddenly curtsies before him as if inviting him to waltz, to dance. And then, suddenly, they are dancing.
That’s when the room clears, creating a large space for the two of them in the centre of the lounge. Within seconds, Patsy and Jimmy are dancing like two well-rehearsed professionals. Like two people who are used to dancing with each other. This doesn’t escape the party. Nor does it escape George Bedser who is now looking at the floor, wondering who on earth this young man is while knowing all along that he is trouble because he knows his type. He knows them already. He’s seen them before. These slick, smooth poetic types that have no guarantee in them, like the shoddy goods they sell. And the more the music imposes itself on the party, seeming to render them all either obsolete or at the hour of their death, the more George Bedser wants to smash it.
But the dance continues and neither Bedser nor the puzzled young man who is her fiancé, can believe that the young woman dancing in the middle of the floor is their Patsy. And, of course, it isn’t. It’s another Patsy altogether, but they’ve only just discovered that.
And then, after a seemingly eternal two and a half minutes that bring with it a change so fundamental that the mood of the party is irrevocably altered, the music finally finishes and the dancing ends.
On the front porch a few moments later, Jimmy explains to Patsy that he’s leaving the country. Her mind still turning round in circles as if she were still dancing, she asks where. And when he says Nashville she asks him again, convinced that she couldn’t have heard right. But she did. He’s going to Nashville because that’s where the music comes from, and he wants to follow the music. He’s tired of standing in hi-fi stores, listening to the most important thing that has ever happened in his life, from this impossible distance. He wants to climb into those speakers and follow the sound back along a pathway of connecting wires and leads, for as long as it takes, until he finally arrives at the source of it all. And that’s why he’s going to Nashville. He’s no singer, he knows that. No performer. But, one day, perhaps, he just might be able to make those records whose music leaps out at him through the speakers of the hi-fi’s he sells.
Then he’s gone, with a wave and a kiss for luck blown through the air, his long legs crossing the street in easy strides, those cowboy lopes that she knows so well and is watching, she knows, for the last time. And as Jimmy’s car passes, he waves again from the open window.
Broken-hearted melody …
She might have no desire to follow Jimmy, but she also knows now that she has no desire to return to the party. The soft, romantic music now playing on the hi-fi that Jimmy sold her is not her music, and the Patsy Bedser who, ten minutes before, was handing out slices of engagement cake to the guests, is now alien to her. And always was.
And so she sits, vaguely aware of the talk of her neighbours near her on the front lawn, and searches for the words she knows she will have to find.