Chapter Sixteen

She dressed.

Toks threw the few clothes she’d bought with her back into her bag and snarled. Packing light was the story of her life.

She had her suitcase to the very bottom of the main stairs to the Jerinja big house before she remembered she’d shared the driving with Richard and she was fucking well stuck there unless he wanted to leave too.

Fuck.

The breeze hummed a taunting tune.

To really hammer her failure and her misery home, Polly’s entire odd-bod family of misfits and weirdos peered over the balcony at her.

Except for Polly.

“You going somewhere, darls?”

The sunset was in her eyes when she looked up at them. An aura shone around Magpie’s comfortable bulk and lit up her lime green muumuu so she glowed like Gaia. The dry smartarsery in her tone did nothing to disguise the fact that the woman really seemed to care, and for a second, she was all the motherly warmth Toks had never had in her life. Toks actually swayed on the spot. She wanted to run a million miles from here. She wanted Magpie to squash her into that ample bosom and let her cry and howl at just how un-fucking-fair things seemed to be.

Something swirled like G minor in the wind.

“I was going to call a taxi,” she said, with the very last of her dignity.

Magpie grunted.

“Don’t think there is a taxi in Nerradja,” mused Daz.

Justin looked thoughtful. “Old Bert Hanson did Uber for a while.”

“Oh bless him, that man needs his grandkids just to unlock his phone. And that Nissan Shitbox of his is a death trap.”

“I said ‘did.’”

They regarded her solemnly.

Magpie still seemed to be thinking. “Nah, love. No taxi around here. Why don’t you come back up and have another drink. We can sort this out—”

“I’ll walk down to Crookhaven.”

The laughter was raucous.

“It’s a ten k drive! And with that storm on the horizon, you’re stupider than I thought you were. No, enough’s enough, Maestro. Hitch your high horse to the balustrade there and get back up here,” said Magpie. She held up one finger, as imperious as Toks had ever been on the podium. “No! Do as you’re told for once, woman. Don’t you dare leave her again.”

And that too was so incredibly unfair that Toks was pacing on the spot with her fingers clenched in her hair and an even greater tangle in her mind. She flung herself onto the second last step and sat there, her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. The view of the wood between her feet slipped out of focus. She nearly cracked completely when the green muumuu flapped around her ankles and the steps creaked as Magpie sat next to her.

Daz settled on her other side. Justin sat behind her. Richard pressed a glass of something red into her hand and leaned against the balustrade. Tilda knelt on the step in front of her.

“Please don’t go, Maestro.”

Toks sniffed. “I told you ages ago, it’s Toks. Can’t I just be Toks again. Here? Can’t I?”

Magpie put a hand in the middle of her back. It wasn’t quite the motherly hug she needed, but it still made something wobble inside her. “Can you, darls?”

She’d have walked away from the whole lot of them, and that challenge in Magpie’s voice, if it wasn’t for that warm hand and the pleading in Tilda’s eyes.

“Mum really needs you,” Tilda added.

Toks heaved a steadying sigh and sat upright. Her gaze slipped over Tilda’s head and fixed on the storm front eating its way up the coast. The first hints of the ice it carried swirled into the wind and the heat dropped a degree or two with each miserable moment. She sipped the wine. Another swell of G minor tainted with a thoroughly irritating clashing C sharp rang in her ears.

“I don’t think she does,” Toks whispered. She gave Tilda a sad, defeated smile. “Pearlie has everything here. She has a clever daughter. She has loyal friends. She has a beautiful home. She hasn’t needed me – she hasn’t wanted me – for a long time.”

“You’re so wrong about that, darls.”

“I’m not.” Toks shook her head. That damned hum in her ears again. “Polly hasn’t needed me for— What is that noise?” Suddenly, she couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’ve been hearing it all day. I heard it last night too. In the middle of the night! I heard it last time I was here as well, except it was— different,” she finished, lamely. “No matter where you go at Jerinja there’s always this— this— What is that?”

Magpie took her hand back.

Tilda looked nervously away.

Daz cleared his throat.

The storm front threw a gust of the southern Pacific at them and the noise swelled louder.

It was a clash of notes. Her mind raced as it hunted them down and tried to corral them into some kind of order. It was a jumble – a mess of tones and intervals. Then the wind swirled harder and a splash of higher frequencies made the whole thing even more complex.

“That is a C minor 9 in the lower register” —she tipped her head— “though there’s a flattened 11th in the mid frequencies. Which kind of makes it Locrian, though very destabilised. But then it’s definitely a G minor 9 plus 13 at the top.” She skewered Tilda on her gaze. “And that’s not an accident.” It was moody as hell. Enigmatic and ballsy. Belligerent yet yearning. Very, very deliberate. Toks hummed, purposely pitching an F sharp into the gathering storm. Now the whole thing clashed horribly.

Tilda winced.

“And there isn’t an F sharp in that entire sequence,” Toks gritted. “Can one of you please tell me what the fuck is going on?”

The whole damn lot of them exchanged looks. Toks wondered exactly how long they were going to cover for Polly, and just how long she was going to hide.

Tilda broke first.

She grabbed Toks’ hand, pulled her up the steps and along the balcony to its end. The others stumbled after them.

“It’s the Steinway,” she said. “Mum’s ruined pianos. You must have seen them?”

Of course she had. “There’s one at the waterhole,” Toks said, weakly. She had an awful feeling about this.

“And one on the escarpment,” Richard added.

“The orchard,” Daz muttered.

“I like the one at the dairy,” Magpie said. “Well, that’s on your land, I ‘spose, Toks, but even your cows like it. They stand around it, mooing, and it resonates.”

“There’s one in the forest. There’s one at the crossroads near Willoughby’s. And there’s one completely taken over by blackberries down in the south paddock.”

Toks stopped at the step to the deck around the study. “But—”

Justin cleared his throat. “And that’s just the ones around Jerinja. You’ve seen the one in the garden at Draga’s retirement home. There’s one in the playground of the primary school. There’s one in the foyer of the library.”

Tilda tugged her across the deck and on to the balcony that skirted the bedrooms.

“There are two in two different council playgrounds in the new estates down near Merribee. A cafe at Thirteen Mile commissioned one for their courtyard. She’s put one up near the Crookhaven lighthouse—”

“Don’t forget the one near Merri Beach. I fucking love that one,” grinned Daz. “You should have seen the full-on, clandestine mission we had to go on to get it down onto the rock shelf at low tide. Midnight, so no one would stop us, but a full moon so we didn’t slip to our deaths. It has barnacles and shit growing on it now, but mate, the noise it makes when the waves crash through it—”

“Does it have an F sharp in it?” Toks’ suspicions only deepened.

Richard looked stricken. He shook his head minutely.

“Do any of them?”

“Everyone loves the beach one,” Daz finished.

“But why?” Toks begged. She suddenly realised she had her hand over her mouth and tears in her eyes. “Why?”

Tilda pulled her onwards. They were trekking the whole length of Jerinja’s balconies, all the way around the house. “It’s what she does. She’s always done it—”

“She hasn’t,” Toks insisted. Sure, there was complex and there was totally loopy but Polly hadn’t been crazy before.

“Well, as long as I’ve known her,” Tilda said. “But the Steinway is her triumph. Final proof that my mum is absolutely, batshit fucking bonkers, and I love her so much.”

They reached the end of the balcony. Tilda pointed out over its edge and Toks finally turned to see.

The frame of a grand piano hung from a branch of the vast, old eucalypt near the dam.

It was weathered, but it glittered gold in the sunset, shining against the bruised purple of the storm clouds looming at its back. Stray, broken wires twisted around the frame and rope as thick as Toks’ wrist looped through the holes in the web but the frame hung true, like a harp in the wind. A gust – cold now – clashed through it and the mad, tortured chord rang again.

It was striking – poetic and broken in a crazy kind of way – and both the image of it and its sound echoed against a growing suspicion in Toks’ mind.

“What—?” she managed.

“That’s the piano,” Tilda said brightly, her smile willing Toks to understand. “I mean, the piano. We use a sample from that beast in all of our work. That’s the sound that is Tightly Strung.”

Toks narrowed her eyes at the others. They all coughed and looked out at the storm.

“When—?”

“Oh, it’s always been there,” chirped Tilda. “Mum is obsessed with—”

“Where is my piano?” Toks asked, as steadily as she could.

Tilda swallowed. The first drops of rain struck like acid.

“You should ask her. Ask Mum, I mean. She—”

“Where is my piano?”

But a sudden roll of thunder made them all jump and the piano in the tree sang its song at twice its volume. A flash of white and a rose-printed dress and Polly was there standing beneath it, long skirt, long sleeves and her hair blowing across her face in the breeze. As tortured and damaged as the chord singing on the wind, and a million times as beautiful. She stared up at Toks and shrugged – one shoulder up to her ear like this was some mad shit she couldn’t explain either.

Toks barrelled down the stairs and down to the tree.

Polly’s brown eyes were as dark as the storm. The wind was cold and the rain drew closer.

The piano began to howl and Toks knew it was hers.

“What is wrong with you, Polly?” she yelled.

Polly shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, softly. She tugged her sleeves down to her wrists. “Everything.”

“That’s my Steinway, isn’t it?”

Another long, low roll of thunder set the C minor mess resonating again. Toks was lost in the nowness of it, the present tense clashing against sixteen years of bitterness and confusion, the anguish of the 9th, regret rising up through the tangled G minor and threatening to overflow as tears.

She flung her arms wide. “You have – what? You have six bashed up pianos around this place, Polly, not counting the absolute massacre of instruments in the music room. My Steinway wasn’t ruined. You could have strung any other piano up there! You trashed my piano, Pearlie. You fucking hung it in a tree!”

Raindrops hit her face. She watched them strike Polly’s hair, her shoulders, seeping through the fabric of her shirt until her skin showed through.

“I wanted to hang yours,” Polly said.

“You wanted to hurt me, you mean.”

“I wanted to hear it sing in the wind.”

Toks snarled. “Bullshit. That is the biggest crock of shit—” She swept her own hair out of her eyes. It was pouring now, fat, heavy drops that were icy cold. She had to shout over the wind. “You wanted to hurt me.”

Polly looked at her. “I did.”

That nearly drove her to her knees. “More than you already had?” Toks cried.

Polly made an ugly sobbing sound. She pressed her fist against her mouth.

“But, why Polly? Why?”

There was a blinding flash and an ear splitting clap of thunder as lightning struck ridiculously close. The Steinway boomed back at the sky – every note and all their harmonics screaming at the heavens. The towering tree, the violence of the storm. The tear of the escarpment at the edge of the world. The ice of the ocean at their feet, the blazing heat of the centre at their backs. The devastation of refinement and all of humanity’s music and art weathered wild and fierce as the woman in front of her—

And it was—

It was magnificent.

So was Polly. Soaked to the skin, proud and regal, and begging Toks with her eyes, she was as beautiful and alluring as she’d ever been – and Toks realised she was impressed. She didn’t understand it, and she was swamped by a bizarre blend of total fucking outrage and desperate adoration, but Polly had done something extraordinary, and she was here.

Toks took a step forward and felt her heart flip over in her chest when Polly smiled.

“I won that thing, you know,” she pointed out, calm now. She knew how this was going to go.

“You always had a big head over it.”

“I was the best,” Toks protested. “I beat three-hundred and thirteen other world class players for that piano.”

“You dazzled the judges with a handful of showy Rachmaninoff tunes and a sexy haircut.”

Toks blinked. Water streamed down both their faces. She was glad. It hid her tears. They were going to be okay. She stepped closer.

“Sexy haircut?”

“I didn’t mean to say that,” Polly admitted.

“That was the first time I cut it short,” Toks remembered. She let her hands find Polly’s hips. “You never said it was sexy at the time.”

Polly’s hips fell against hers, just the way they always had. Her body was warm behind the rain. “Your ego didn’t need any further stroking.”

Toks felt her lips twist. Polly’s eyes dropped to them instantly. Her own lip caught in her teeth.

The piano roared again as thunder struck once more.

Polly flinched in her arms, but Toks held her tight.

“That was a one-hundred and eighty-thousand dollar piano, you mad bitch,” she murmured.

“You’ve got another one,” Polly shrugged.

Their lips were nearly touching.

“I’ve got three,” Toks whispered.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, you insufferable—”

A piercing wolf-whistle cut through the noise of the storm. They turned to see Magpie hollering at them from the balcony.

“Just hurry up and kiss, you idiots.”

Toks tweaked an eyebrow. It crumbled Polly’s resolve just like it did every time. She nearly crowed, but Polly’s hand found her chin.

Her lips were softer than she remembered, but the flavour was the same. Pearlie Paterson tasted divine.

Like home.

“And get the fuck out of the rain,” Magpie yelled.

Polly grinned like the sunrise, seized Toks’ wrist and ran with her back to the house.