Read an extract from A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing by Jessie Tu.
Home is Sydney. An old terrace house with cracked walls. Tasteful damp. I live on a quiet street in Newtown, a suburb in the inner west lined with milk crate cafes and bike stores owned by bearded white guys with sensible tattoos. Most practice takes place here, away from the chaos of the city. Away from my mother. Away from Banks.
A week after the funeral, Olivia and I find an evening to practise together. I’m in bed pushing a glass vibrator between my legs when I hear her arrive. I wipe myself clean and slip on a T-shirt and shorts before opening the door.
She wheels her bike onto the verandah as I step out, barefoot. Her hair bunched in a loose ponytail; violin case strapped to her back.
‘Why did you cycle here? It’s dangerous on King Street.’
She shrugs, unties her hair and whips it around like a dog shaking off its wet. She’s clutching her helmet in one hand and extracting a Tupperware container from her shoulder bag. ‘Brownies. I just baked them this morning.’
‘These don’t have hash in them, do they?’
I follow her into the kitchen. She pours herself a glass of water.
‘Why would I want us to be stoned while practising?’
We’re auditioning for a permanent place in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; both of us have been casuals since the beginning of 2015 sustaining on sporadic incomes. The audition is a few months away. Only one position is opening. My best friend and I are vying for the same role. It’s new terrain for us.
The orchestra performs four nights a week, beginning Wednesday. Most of the time, we’re called on Friday or Saturday nights. The programs on those nights require larger numbers. Mahler. Brahms. Big romantic symphonies. The pay is decent. One concert is enough to cover a week’s rent. I have a small amount of money left from my time as a soloist. Most of it I’d spent on books during university.
‘Did you warm up already?’ Olivia slips off her case and begins unzipping.
‘Yep.’
We play chromatic scales. G, G sharp, A, A flat. All the way to F sharp. Then down again. We pick each other apart sonically. Whoever fumbles on intonation has to buy dinner. In the last two weeks, I’ve had to pick up the bill. Olivia thinks I’m deliberately hitting the wrong notes because I pity her. We both know I am the better player.
The first five minutes, we play flawlessly, two violins in unison. We hit each note with the calibrated precision of a sniper. During a fast-descending passage of the F harmonic minor scale, her notes scatter off-key. I blast her.
She dips her chin in defeat. ‘I can only afford Thai.’
After graduation, Olivia moved in with Noah. They’d met Theatre Sports one Tuesday afternoon when Olivia was in year ten at Barker College. Noah was in year twelve at Newington. They started fucking a few weeks later and haven’t spent a weekend apart since. They have once played an entire Bruno Mars album on repeat at a party. I had to leave to find another party, one with better music. Their studio is on the ground floor of an apartment block in Enmore. They tell me they don’t mind the forced physical intimacy.
Before Olivia, there was nobody else. I was one of those girls people saw coming and going, appearing too busy to socialise. I’d never known how to relax, how to ‘hang out’. I had no idea how to ‘be’. Recently, Olivia has been the one coming and going. Perhaps it’s her job teaching violin at her old primary school in the Blue Mountains. Perhaps it’s
her mother, whose illness she has not yet named. Perhaps even she does not know what it is.
We finish the scales, arpeggios, bow exercises and move on to the excerpts. On my laptop, I bring up the third movement of Beethoven’s 9th. We play along.
‘Can we do it separately?’ Olivia sighs through her nose.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘You’re playing too loud.’
‘It’s supposed to be loud— fortissimo.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Then order.’
It’s past ten when the food arrives. A slim man stands at the door with a helmet on, holding a package at his chest. Olivia brings in the bag and I set up the plates in the kitchen. She scoops half the noodles into my bowl, the rest into hers.
‘Let’s put on some music.’
Silence makes Olivia nervous. When I first met her, she was always wearing earphones. She’d have them in even during class. One ear, usually the left. She was always distracted, in some other place.
‘Beethoven? Mozart?’
‘You pick.’
I settle on Ravel, the second movement of his Piano Concerto in G. Its sad waltz-like gentleness always soothes the bottomless need I feel to move, to do something. We eat, hum along, eat more. I look around the kitchen, stop at a small magnet in the shape of Royal Albert Hall on the fridge door. My mother had bought it when I debuted there in
another life. Was I eight or nine?
Since I moved out of home, I have seen less of my mother. She was reluctant for me to leave the North Shore, but I’d grown weary of the stifling whiteness of the upper middle class. The casual wealth. The polite faces. The polished performance of adulthood. Pressed pants. Dark blazers. Straight hair. My mother didn’t like the inner city and she didn’t like my flatmates either. She thought I’d catch homosexuality.
As we’re washing up, Mike and Jacob shuffle through the front door carrying a large canvas.
‘What’s that?’ Olivia steps out to peek.
‘The exhibition,’ Jacob says.
They plant the picture against the back of the couch.
Mike’s hair is damp with sweat, fringe clamped to his forehead.
He stares at the canvas, picking at a loose thread on his denim jacket.
‘Do you think it needs more, grit?’
Olivia and I look at each other, then back at the canvas. It is blank, a single shade of beige.
‘I don’t get it,’ Olivia says.
‘More grit, yes. Definitely,’ Jacob says.
Mike disappears into the kitchen and returns with the pepper shaker. ‘Let’s do it now before it dries.’
Jacob lays the canvas on the floor and leans forward, twisting the shaker. Black flakes fall— ash on white sand. He looks to Mike, who is cupping his cheek with one hand and staring at the painting as though it is a text he cannot translate. ‘Maybe.’
Olivia goes to her violin and begins packing up.
‘I better go.’
I reach for her arm. ‘We’ll do this again?’
She shrugs, noncommittal. At the door, I wrap my arms around her shoulders. My ring catches the end of her ponytail. We spend a few seconds disentangling it.
I watch her ride away.
I am settling for a good orchestra. Something permanent. But Olivia. When have I ever wanted what Olivia wants? When did I settle for playing a melody with eight other violinists? I won’t be alone in the spotlight anymore, like I used to be.
Before I destroyed everything.
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing
by Jessie Tu
Growing up is always hard, but especially when so many think you're a washed-up has-been at twenty-two.