““Then one day, when we were driving from the bus station after she had picked me up again, the sound stopped altogether.””
I must have heard the song at least once before that summer, but my only memory is listening to it with my first girlfriend, on a tape that we found in the stereo of her car some months after we’d started going out together. She’d been given the car by her parents after they’d bought a new Honda. The old car was a Volvo, white and square-looking, and the seat coverings were real leather, but worn and cracked and they smelled faintly of cats, and the steering was very heavy, I remember. In fact, now I think about it her parents hadn’t gifted it to her. Instead, she paid five hundred pounds for the car, at her parents’ suggestion, when in all honesty it probably was worth nothing. Five hundred pounds was a lot of money back then, and would have taken up all her savings, because she worked in a framing shop and couldn’t have had much more money than me. But she seemed happy just to have a car of her own.
We drove around with no real destination in mind. I was living with my parents in the neighbouring city, and I’d come over by bus, and she would be waiting on the seat at the end of the bus shelter, and we’d go to where she’d parked the car in a quiet road by the station, and just drive. The tape was home recorded from a vinyl version of the album, and when you played it loud enough you could hear the scratch of the needle, and an occasional pop of dust or something. It was the only tape in the car. The radio didn’t work too well because the aerial was broken, and so we played it over and over again. I didn’t know anything about the artist at the time, and I’m not even sure either one of us ever took the tape out to see whether there was a label to suggest whose music it was. I’m pretty certain she didn’t know, either. Although, I realise that if the tape had been her parents’, which I have to assume it was, surely they would have played the same music at home sometimes, and therefor perhaps she did know the album very well, and the artist, too. Whatever the truth of it, when we played the tape she nodded and smiled in a way that seemed to say Who is this? Weird. But neither of us ever tried to turn it off, and secretly we enjoyed listening to the music as we drove. It became an essential part of those hours we’d spend together alone.
There wasn’t much opportunity to be together. Her home seemed always to have friends of her parent’s visiting. Her father was a music teacher and so there’d often be a student there, playing piano, which was nice. I enjoyed listening to the sound, especially the inevitable mistakes they’d make in practice. The mistakes seemed to make the music more human somehow, and touching. Anyway, the constant activity in the house meant that moments where she and I could be together were rare. My parents were much less busy, socially. They never had many friends and, but for my aunts, very few people ever came over. My room was small, though, as was the house, and so there was little privacy, especially if we wanted to play music and kiss or have sex, for instance. So the car was our place of privacy.
I don’t remember ever being frightened by the song, not back then. The lyrics were odd, of course. At least, I thought so. And I found it hard to accurately identify just what he was singing, especially at the beginning of the song. It wasn’t my kind of music, although ironically now, if I could listen to it, it would fit perfectly into the kind of things I’m interested in. After her last birthday, my wife started taking lessons to play the guitar. I met her around five years after my first girlfriend, and we’ve been together almost ten years now. Every week, a young woman comes over and she and my wife go to the small bedroom at the back of the house and shut themselves in. I pretend not to be curious about what they do in there, but I find myself stopping my work and choosing to go downstairs to make a cup of tea just around the time they begin. In the kitchen, the sound of my wife attempts at playing carries through the floor, along with the creak of floorboards as she shifts her position on the chair she uses. As far as I can tell by the various sounds of their conversation, and the direction of their voices, the young woman, who I think must be a student, sits on a stool opposite my wife, I think. Or that’s how I picture it. Very occasionally I hear them laugh over a joke one or the other has made, but I get the feeling they don’t talk about much and have very little in common. I wonder at the intimacy of it, two people in a small room, concentrating so hard on a discipline that one of them is very accomplished at, and the other is not. I wonder at the dynamics of the relationship. I wonder if my wife enjoys the attention of the other, younger, woman. I wonder if that is part of the attraction for her.
She is at a very early stage in her training, and she rarely makes it through a whole piece of music without faltering. There’s one particular song she plays, and the chords remind me of the music under the chorus of Pink Moon, and when I hear it, that’s when I turn on the kettle. The kettle is fairly old and noisy, and we’ve discussed buying a new one but I prefer to keep this one and my wife seems to understand. Usually, by the time the water is boiled the song will be over, but sometimes the student directs my wife to play it again, and rather than boil the kettle a second time, I walk out into the back garden where you can only hear the traffic passing on the street behind the hedge.
I know he killed himself, but that’s not the reason I don’t like the song. And, in fact, it’s not that I don’t like the song. I have very good memories of it, and as a piece of music I believe I would probably find it to be very melodic and affecting, emotionally, if I listened to it. It’s difficult to describe accurately what may happen if I did listen to it, because there have been many different variations of my thinking over the years. I remember when we were driving in the Volvo, sometimes I had the sense that the steering would fail, perhaps at an approach to a junction or when she was turning a corner, and we might careen into oncoming traffic. I think it was because the steering wheel was so heavy to turn. Not that she complained, but her knuckles would turn white once we’d been driving for some time. It really was a very heavy car to drive. I never told her my fears, of course. She would never have understood. She was a very simple woman, in some ways. Much more intelligent than me, more accomplished, I believe, and generally happier, too. Sometimes she would be anxious about university, because in the time we were together she had applied for a place on a history course, and she was waiting to hear whether she’d been accepted. She cried, and I would hold her and because I didn’t really ever know what to say to console her, we’d just sit in silence, and she didn’t seem to mind that I had no words of comfort. Then afterwards, she’d smile and look embarrassed and blow her nose, and then we’d start driving again. Sometimes I’d arrive home after our time together and I’d find my collar was damp from her tears or there was some mucus or saliva on my jumper, and I wouldn’t know how to feel about it exactly.
When the tape eventually broke, neither of us was surprised. The sound had become distorted for a while now, and we would joke that he was drunk again, and would he get through the song this time. Then one day, when we were driving from the bus station after she had picked me up again, the sound stopped altogether. I reached into the slot on the stereo and tried to unjam the cassette with my fingers, but it was stuck fast. Eventually, I managed to drag it out, but the tape had become tangled up in the mechanism of the player. As I pulled, the tape stretched and twisted. We could both tell it would never play again. I’m not sure how we got it out of there, exactly, but we must have done. I remember we were subdued the rest of the day, and it was less than a month later that she told me that she had been accepted on her course and she would be going to the university in a city that was a four hour journey away by train. Although we never formally ended the relationship exactly, we both realised the implications of the situation. I wasn’t unhappy about it, because we’d both privately wondered what would happen, and so there was no surprise.
In the garden, while my wife plays guitar, I find that in the night a fox or a cat has dug up the tulip bulbs we planted in August. Under the crabapple tree, a dead starling chick lies in the black soil. I bury it, before going inside to work. Back at the house, in the back bedroom, the student laughs and my wife begins to play again, and the silence in between songs seems to last longer than usual, and I have the feeling my wife is getting better, and before I shut the room to my study I remind myself to tell her later, when we are alone again.