With two days left in Acacia Beach, the College was no longer an intangible dream. My bags had been packed for a week. My bedroom walls were bare, cupboards empty. I had taken most of my clothes to the op shop. The more things I gave away, the more I was relinquishing Acacia Beach; banishing it, forgetting. The College was as much about escaping the past as it was about shaping my future.
“Do you have any advice for dealing with the College?” I asked Andrew, during a farewell dinner with he and Hayley. It was a hot, humid night. The air was heavy with the promise of rain. Thunder rumbled like an approaching freight train.
“When someone asks what instrument you play, you have to do violin actions,” he said with a laugh. “You can’t just say it, you have to mime it as well.” Then he added: “Don’t let it get to you.”
I wondered if he was talking about the violin actions or the College in general. I wanted to ask, but Oliver had interrupted the conversation by dropping a bowl of ice cream in his lap.
After dinner, Andrew took me into the basement. As we climbed downstairs, the clouds opened. Rain hammered the tin roof and echoed around the house. Andrew reached into the piano seat. He handed me his leather bound score of the Elgar Sonata.
“I want you to have this, Abby.”
“I can’t take that,” I said. “It’s a family heirloom.”
Andrew pushed it into my hands. “Take it. Please. Consider it a going away present. Besides, you’ll have more people to play it with than I will.”
I threw my arms around him. I knew I would never play it with anyone but him. Andrew slid his violin case towards me.
“You can’t go home in this weather. Play it once more?”
I nodded. A knot was building in my throat. I knelt hurriedly and pulled out the violin. Thunder rattled the roof panels. The lights flickered and blackness fell over the street. The fan in the corner groaned into silence. Rain churned out of the gutters and thundered in the mud. I stood up in the dark.
“Hang on a sec,” said Andrew. “We have a torch somewhere.”
“I know it from memory,” I said. “You?”
“I think so. Guess we’ll find out.” He crashed his way to the piano. I lifted the violin to my shoulder and took a deep breath. I could smell the vanilla candles Hayley was burning upstairs. They mixed with the fragrant air that floated through the open window above our heads; a breath of frangipani and rain and the sea. They were scents that had surrounded me my whole life and only now, as I prepared to leave, did I realise how beautiful they were. I swallowed hard and gripped the fingerboard.
“Count in when you’re ready,” said Andrew.
My fingers found the notes of the first movement and wove my melody through the piano accompaniment. The arpeggios strained skyward and this time I went with them. Melbourne may not have had snow, but it rained and hailed and the leaves changed colour and fell from the trees. And Melbourne had a place for me in their Arts College. I was grateful for the darkness. Andrew couldn’t see the tears rushing down my face. All I had ever wanted was coming true and there I was crying like my world was collapsing. Music had lifted me out of my present so many times, but as the notes played their final encore, a part of me desperately wanted to stay forever in the past. To stay forever playing Elgar in Andrew’s basement.
The motifs from the first two movements twisted through the finale. I tried to cover my tears with a choked up cough. Andrew paused on the piano. He reached into the darkness and touched my bare arm.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Keep playing,” I said. “Just keep playing.” Music returned to the darkness and wove through the shadows. I closed my eyes and my hearing heightened. I swam in the sounds that had always made up the orchestra of Acacia Beach. Rain on the roof, croaking frogs and the Elgar E Minor.