Everybody lives for the music

[warning: it wouldn't be a story without sensitive content.]

I turn on the ignition. When I feel the motorbike vibrating under me, I tell myself: this must be what sex is like with someone you truly love. Not that I would know.

I make the engine roar, once, twice, to drown out all the thoughts I know are coming. When that’s not enough, I press “play” on my Walkman. Pretty soon the synths start up and I’m on a highway of sounds. Bright lights, the music gets faster. And it never fails to conjure up all that I can’t face in silence.

Like Jeremie.

*

It was 1981 and we were full of hope. Earlier in May, for the first time in 35 years the Left wing had won the French Presidential election. In the months that followed, you could feel a change in the air, a new-found jubilation in the streets. People’s steps and faces were lighter with a sense of renewal.

It wasn’t just France. In England, which Jeremie claimed we could see on a good day, a new era was dawning. A princess of hearts and a princess of pop, as they would respectively be called, were both starting their reign. Fairy-tales all around and for a while, it looked like everyone would get their happy ending.

1981 was the summer of the Kims, with “Bette Davis Eyes” and “Kids in America” battling it out for the top slot on the French charts. Jeremie and I had made it a ritual to meet in a secluded cove every afternoon around 5 pm, in time to listen to the top ten. We loved both songs but “Kids in America” had the edge, or maybe it was the singer.

“That girl,” Jeremie grinned. “She sure looks as good as she sounds!”

I nodded, recalling the record sleeve. A young blonde girl with tousled hair, unsmiling, looking like she would challenge you to a fight before letting you kiss her. Her appeal laid in defiance. To someone like Jeremie, it was the ultimate turn-on.

At 17, Jeremie was a couple of years older than me. At first he dismissed me as one of the “city boys” coming to spoil the island. But with my uncle and aunt being locals, I was eventually accepted. “At least you’re not from summer camp” he said, and I nodded as if I knew how bad that would be. Jeremy professed to hate the kids from camp. “More sheep coming,” he’d say as we watched another boat coming into the bay.

“We should throw one overboard,” I suggested, “see if the others follow.” He laughed and I was pleased to have my first attempt at cynicism approved.

“At least it might scare them off from coming again,” he said.

The irony was that Jeremie’s mother was a local but he was from the mainland. He had come to live with her only the previous year after his father’s death. He didn’t get along with his new stepfather and thus spent most of his time outdoors, riding his motorbike at odd hours which didn’t endear him to the natives – except for my uncle Richard who owned the same model. That’s how Jeremie showed up one day at my uncle’s for maintenance advice. I was younger than any of his peers and therefore invisible. So I was surprised when the following day, as I walked up to the beach, his motorcycle slowed down besides me.

“You’re Richard’s brother, right?”

“Nephew,” I corrected. “I’m Jules.”

“Right, Jules. Your uncle lets you ride his bike?”

“I’m too young, he says. Maybe next year.”

“Wanna go for a ride?” I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses but his smile looked genuinely friendly. Despite the heat, he wore a leather jacket over a white tank top which brought out his deeply tanned chest.

Just then, aunt Liz appeared at the end of the lane. “Jules!” She called, and her tone made it clear I was to come right away.

“Maybe some other time,” I said, my voice weak with regret.

“Sure,” he said and took off in a cloud of dust.

*

Whether from his family situation or his character, Jeremie was notorious for his mood swings. This might be why shortly after, he broke off with his group of friends and took up with me, an inexperienced kid who had little to offer him. Maybe he enjoyed the easy adulation I provided with little effort on his part. At first I was constantly on the look-out for any mood variations, like a sailor watching for signs of unrest on an uncharted sea. After a while I started to trust we had reached the shore of our private island.

There were times when I actually fantasized that we would charter a boat and live on one of the desert rocks off the coast.

“And why should we do that?” He teased me.

“Well, to get away from people,” I said: “The farther from fools, the closer to freedom.”

I wasn’t always so eloquent but it rolled off my tongue naturally. Maybe I was bolstered by his presence. He stared at me. His eyes were dark brown, almost as dark as his curly hair which made him look like the Great God Pan’s long-lost brother or a demon, depending on the mood. For they could get either dark as night in anger or soft as velvet, enveloping you in their embrace.

“You get me like no one does,” he finally said, not quite smiling. And that hint of a smile was like his eyes then, a caress that reached you inside.

*

To Jeremie, music was the Pandora’s box of memories: “All that you thought dead and forgotten, coming back to hit you in the face.” He had a theory that music was alive before it was even heard. But where does it go afterwards, with all it conjures up? Pondering the question, he looked like a hunter bent on capturing the most coveted game of all.

“Which moment would you capture if you could?” I asked.

“Which one would you?” he asked back.

“This one,” I admitted. I knew he could see right through me.

He smiled and got up: “Come on. And take the radio.”

*

“Shouldn't we have helmets?” I asked as I sat behind him on the motorbike.

“Just hold on to me and don’t let go of that radio,” he said as he cranked up the volume. The DJ was announcing: “Coming up next, Kim Weeldah!” French people prided themselves on having no ear for language other than their own.

Holding on to the radio against his torso as if it was part of him, arms around his waist, legs pressed against his thighs, my chin on his back; I had never been so close to anyone. I felt the vibrations of the music as if it was passing from his body to mine. We were part of the song, its speed and ours merging like the soundtrack to our life.

I was dizzy when we stopped. It was hard tearing myself away from him. It was even harder to walk straight. My muscles were all stiff, especially where they shouldn’t be.

“Your first time?” He grinned.

“What do you mean?”

“On a motorbike,” he said. “What did you think I meant?” He threw an arm around my shoulders. “Look.”

We were on the highest cliff of the island, overlooking our cove. We stared at the horizon as the song reached its crescendo.

“If I could fly into the sunset,” he said softly, his arm still on my shoulders, “I would do it now.”

I wasn’t sure if “now” meant this moment in the song, its climax like an albatross flying towards the horizon, or this moment in our lives – but either sounded good.

*

Aunt Liz had seen us riding without a helmet and I was grounded for the week. On the third evening I climbed down my bedroom window and ran to the cove, hoping Jeremie would still be there despite the late hour.

He was, but not alone.

“This is Janine from summer camp.”

I didn’t understand. If the summer camp was the bane of our island, what the hell was she doing here? Then again, it wasn’t hard to guess. One look at her full lips, blue-green eyes and tousled blond hair, and I was reminded of Jeremie’s words about the girl sounding as good as her song.

Janine smiled and extended her hand, but remained sitting close to Jeremie. I knew from experience how hard it was to tear yourself away from him once he had his arm around you. This was the first time he showed interest in an outsider since I knew him, and it was jarring. Is our time up and on to the next fire? I wasn’t sure if this came from a song or the deepest part of my soul. I just knew I could never ask.

“So you’re Jules?” Janine said. “That makes you the third J!” With one finger she drew a J on the sand. Jeremie drew a heart around the J, winking at me over her shoulder. Maybe his heart was meant to include me. Maybe it was his way of marking territory. But who belonged in it, I couldn’t tell for sure.

I should have left, I know. But a perverse part of me was rooted on that spot. I pretended not to notice that I was the third wheel on the J bike, and they pretended to be cool with it which annoyed me even more. Something acid was running through my veins and I couldn’t get enough of its bittersweet taste even as it was burning me.

And then what should come up on the radio but our song.

“Oh, I love that one!” Janine explained.

Then shut up and listen, I wanted to yell. Instead I waited till the end of the song to ask: “Don’t they have curfew at camp?”

“I’m sixteen,” she said. “Curfew is for kids.”

“Funny, she was sixteen too.” I said.

“Who?” she asked.

“The girl it happened to,” I said.

“What girl? What happened?”

“He’s putting you on,” Jeremie said. “There was no girl.”

“You wouldn’t know,” I said to him. “This was two years ago. My uncle told me. They found her on that beach one night.”

“And…?” Her breathing had altered. The weird thing was that I couldn’t help liking her, it was hard not to, and that made me want to scare her – or hurt her in some way. As if this was my only hold on her and you can only hold on to what you’ve got.

“No one knows. She couldn’t speak, you see. Part of her face was gone.”

She winced. “Did she die?”

“Maybe. They had to lock her up in some asylum, so no one can tell.”

“You’re lying,” she said.

“I’m not. You can ask my uncle. And you know the weirdest?”

She shook her head. I wasn’t sure what I’d say next but couldn’t stop.

“The same thing had happened to another girl, just two years before that. My uncle says it happens every couple of years on this beach.”

“Stop it, Jules.” There was something final in Jeremie’s voice, as if he was a million miles away from me.

“What? You said we should scare off the sheep, didn’t you?”

Janine got up abruptly. “That’s not funny,” she said and walked away.

“Janine, wait!” Jeremie cried out, but she had already disappeared round the bend.

“Thanks a lot mate,” he said, getting up. Even in the dark I could see the glare in his eyes. He ran after her without another glance at me.

I stayed there, staring down at Jeremie’s heart in the sand. Pretty soon it was too dark to see where it had been.

*

Janine’s disappearance was never solved. Since there was no body, nothing could be pinned on Jeremie – though the cloud of suspicion remained.

I left the island soon after, before I could see him again.

But every time I heard “Kids in America”, that Pandora’s Box opened.

*

I didn’t come back until autumn of the following year, for the “Toussaint” – All-Souls day, a holiday to celebrate the dead. The irony was not lost on me.

It was late afternoon and I was alone in the house. Richard and Liz had gone to the mainland for the day and I meant to welcome them back with “crepes”, the only kind of pancakes people will consider eating in Brittany. I was in the kitchen stirring dough when the radio caught my ear.

“...new Kim Wilde single,” the DJ was saying. By then she had grown into a huge star in France and even he had learned to pronounce her name correctly: “Here is ‘Child, Come Away’ and it’s quite a departure for the Wilde one.”.

I listened, hoping to catch the same kind of magic from her first hit – and maybe conjure up a lost friendship. But what came out was indeed different, the melody unlike anything I had heard from her or any other artist. Even the rhythm, slowly building up like waves coming with the tide, or the ominous, faraway roll of thunder before a storm.

Her voice too sounded different, mysterious with a hint of underlying menace, as if she was telling a fairy-tale gone sour and holding on to its secrets. A ghost story put to music, I thought. And then I heard the lyrics:

“They found her on a beach that night.

“They said the light had gone out of her eyes

and no one thinks she’ll ever be right.”

The way she drawled out the word “e-eyes”, like a witch incantation for an unsuspecting Macbeth, sent chills down my spine. As did the memory of the story I had told on that beach a year ago.

That’s when I saw the girl standing in the garden, looking right up at me. It was hard to make out her features through the windowpane, the ancient glass blurring shapes as if underwater. By the time I had managed to get the window opened, she was gone.

With the strange sensation that I was not alone, I turned around.

And saw the silhouette in the doorway, right before a gust of wind closed the door with a bang.

When I found the courage to open it again, the landing was empty.

*

I kept telling myself I had hallucinated. That the song combined with my state of mind had created some subliminal image; that it had been a trick of the light; that my cornea had imprinted the shape of the silhouette from outside into the doorway.

But I knew it had been more than a far-off silhouette. For I had seen enough to make out her face – or what was left of it.

*

I walked along the beach. The heart Jeremie had drawn in the sand had long been erased but now it seemed to live on in a song, the new single everyone agreed was so untypical of its singer.

‘Cos all they found were some marks in the sand

A message saying: “She is mine.”

She’s got a mark on the side of her face

Not for the first time, I wondered where do songs come from and where do they go. Just as I wondered, not for the first time either, whose initial Jeremie had really meant to include in his heart.

*

I had to talk to him, but I hadn’t seen him since I came back. Still smarting from the souvenir of his rejection, I was wary of getting another door slammed in my face. I decided the best way might be through uncle Richard and their common passion for motorbikes.

“Say, have you seen Jeremie lately?” I asked as casually as I could at lunch the next day.

My uncle and aunt exchanged a look. Liz got up and cleared the table, starting on the dishes even though coffee was still brewing. Richard cleared his throat.

*

My uncle’s motorbike feels almost like the one I first rode on, two summers ago. I stole the ignition key while he was in the shower and now for the first time I’m in the driver’s seat.

I’ve cranked up the Walkman so high even the roar from the bike can’t drown out the music. Bright lights, the music gets faster – and so am I. Now with the wind in my face, I can almost imagine I’m Jeremie. And feel invisible hands holding on to me like the old me did to him; the old, younger me.

You know life is cruel, life is never kind.

No one knows why he did it, but there was talk all over town. You know what people are like, my uncle said. I hardly knew what people were like, but I knew Jeremie. And how the music and the motorbike both made him feel. Maybe he just wanted to fly.

Or maybe he couldn’t live with the suspicions anymore than he could with the memories.

Now I understand better what he meant about music being a Pandora’s Box. Whether what comes out of it will nourish you or eat you up. Whether a girl won’t smile because she doesn’t want to or because she can’t anymore. Even as she’s standing right before you.

For music brings back what you can’t forget. Even when you don’t want it to.

Maybe in an endless night there are no curfews, I tell myself, as long the song goes on. Everybody lives for the music goes round.

I pick up speed. Soon I’ll reach the top of the cliff, the way he did that last time. Like him, I can only hope to fly into the sunset.

And when I fall, with a little luck I will land right where he did.