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.Mate, you should take out a ticket in the lottery.’I gripped the phone.‘What are you saying? What’s the violin worth?’He laughed.‘The violin? Nothing, mate.It’s a piece of crap.Worth about twenty bucks.’There was a pause.‘I’m talking about the bow.’‘You’ve lost me.’‘The bow.The violin bow that came in the case.When I saw the inlay I knew you had something there, but I had to check with the Conservatorium to make sure.’ He mentioned a foreign name that sounded like a brand of expensive vodka.‘What I can’t understand is how it ended up at Camberwell market.’‘What’s it worth?’ I interrupted him.And I was tensing my stomach, ready for the blow, almost expecting it now.‘I’d say around $700,’ said Lewis.Later, eating a crumpet and looking down at the city of Vienna, I notice the piece of jigsaw I thought was missing is in fact hidden under the ashtray.I just couldn’t see it for looking.I slide it out and fit it into place, feeling the whole configuration resist, and move slightly out of skew.I move it back with the flat of my hand, feeling it shift.Strengthen.Interlock.SoundtrackRachel is cooking cauliflower cheese when her daughter tells her she has joined a band and they will be practising in the rumpus room starting next Saturday.Rachel leaves off stirring the white sauce and turns to look at her daughter incredulously.Emma is slumping in the doorway wearing the look of tired defiance she wore the day she got the tattoo.Rachel burst into tears that day, not because the tattoo was bleeding or defacing or even offensive — a Celtic cross surrounding a yin-yang symbol just above her breast — but because she was transported in a moment to a day seventeen years before when she had tickled that plump, powdered body, kissed it noisily just where the yin yang now twisted.Yin and yang, the flux of being: the irony of this is not lost on Rachel, who was a child in the 1960s and by the 1970s hung a batik sarong featuring this very symbol as a curtain in her doorway in the old house in Cardigan Street she shared with seven others.But now she is thirty-eight and grating cheese for dinner, thinking she can live with her daughter’s tattoo and even the navel ring and boots, but she has heard the music Emma listens to and does not want it punctuating her Saturdays.Emma is not asking, though; she is informing.Where does a seventeen-year-old get so much certainty?Rachel feels winded — tossed in front of a camera and told to act, the only person without a script and in someone else’s costume.She has been feeling lately, in fact, that her life has a kind of soundtrack.Sometimes she can almost hear it: a melancholy instrumental as she stirs sauce, a frenetic salsa as she runs round in the morning like a cartoon, clashing foreboding cymbals as her daughter drops a bombshell.Soundtrack when she finds the battery in the Datsun is flat and hits her head dully, theatrically, on the steering wheel.Soundtrack as she stares at her reflection in the bathroom.The film and the score of the film that seem to compose the key scenes of her life are driving her crazy.Mirror shot, something authoritative says in her head as she scrutinises the lines under her eyes before she goes to bed.Pan around as she touches her face and reaches for moisturiser and … cut.There is a kind of a Richard Clayderman piano number swelling in the background.The scene spins, fades, some audience somewhere applauds, some director is a contender for an award.Now, as she grates, she tries to stem the tide rattling away in her head, describing her movements shot by shot, she tries to actually clear a space to think, to put her case to Emma.But the babbling continues: Close-up as she grates.Cut to her face struggling with emotion.Cue soundtrack, cello solo.Rachel’s mouth opens and closes, as if waiting for its lines.She is losing the trick of improvisation.She grates the cheese down to a nub as Emma tells her there are only four people in the band and that they are called Melting Carpet.Rachel, with a large, disassociated part of her brain, musing like a bewildered spectator, wonders if the problem is television.Rachel’s husband Jerry still sports the ponytail he wore to Sunbury ’74, and he is still a sweet man who wants a Harley.When Emma’s friends come over, he often tells them he once played blues harmonica with Max Merritt and the Meteors.Jerry thinks the group may have had a revival recently, like so many other bands of his era.He lets Emma’s friends play his Jimi Hendrix LPs, eagerly showing them how to lower the stylus.Rachel, watching, can’t believe that fate has bounced like this and they like Jimi Hendrix.She can’t believe she lives in a world where her own child doesn’t know how to play a record.Everything, Rachel thinks, is going too fast.On bad days she looks askance at Jerry and Emma together, wonders if they could perhaps have been sent from a casting agency, derides the big clumsy strokes this script seems to be written in and contemplates what might yet be getting drowned out in the noise.’Scuse me, she drones to herself, while I kiss this guy.Jerry had wanted Emma to be a home birth, in their large, airy bedroom in Warburton.He would have received her into his big hands saying ‘Unbelievable’ and ‘This is blowing me away’.He would have wrapped her in the sarong with the yin and yang symbol, pulled from the door and given a quick shake.He would have had Brian Eno on the stereo, thinks Rachel.Back then, that would have been the soundtrack.She hesitates, remembering the hospital birth, Jerry indignantly telling the nurses that they weren’t wrapping his daughter in alfoil, no way.What had the cleaners been singing as they hauled the industrial polishers up and down those corridors outside her room? Streisand oozing that she was a woman in love.Rachel, her world collapsed into baby adoration, had absorbed all those lyrics as if by osmosis, and agreed.Rachel has just discovered she is pregnant again.She wonders what Jerry will say now, and what he might put on the stereo this time.The news has hit her like a stun-gun.It is a twist to the plot she would never have dreamed of.Even now, three days after receiving the results, listening to Jerry trying to sing along to Powderfinger in the lounge room, to Emma describing the musical ambitions of Melting Carpet, watching something as ordinary as cheese melting under the griller, Rachel finds she has to push herself off from the profound edge of disbelief into the far shallows where such ideas might be viewed from a sane and manageable distance.Rachel’s mind paddles this way and that, trying to encompass the idea of pregnancy.Faintly across the water comes music; the string section swells as she floats at the far side of possibility.She hears ethereal voices sing: Out of the blue, you came out of the blue.She can’t decide whether it’s something her subconscious has invented, or whether it’s Burt Bacharach.‘You’re having me on,’ says Jerry the following Saturday.He is washing the dog under the hose, and straightens up staring at her.Rachel says, ‘Are you happy or not?’They seem to be floundering with the dialogue; she wants to cut and do the scene again.Slow pan around the two figures, chatters the voice in her head, followed by close-up of husband running a soapy hand through his hair in a gesture of amazement.Close-up of wife’s face as she tries to form the words: ‘We don’t have to have it.’ Long overhead shot of the back garden
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