User:Yuanchosaan/Beautiful World/II

{|width="60%" II: Allegro con fuoco Fitzroy Park at a quarter past eight on a weekday morning was awash with people, a fact which never ceased to surprise Art. Still clutching his violin case, Art stood a few metres back from the path, eyes scanning the crowd: the last wave of corporate suits nursing briefcases, headaches and caffeine withdrawal strode forth before giggling packs of school children, whilst parents with toddlers in strollers or taking wobbly steps lagged behind, joggers with varying degrees of enthusiasm dodged retirees pushing walkers with a determination that suggested that anyone in their path was likely to be run over.

But no target. He checked his watch again without any hope. Far too late for that.

Artemis sighed and took out his violin. The fifth day in a row missing his target meant five days without playing music. He ran his fingers over the burnished wood, soft with familiarity. Alma deserved better than that.

Without conscious thought, he swung the violin up to his shoulder and rested his cheek against it, but did not play. Five days without work, without pay. He wondered if his employer could feel disappointment – if they felt as disappointed as Art did with himself. He closed his eyes. Bow on the strings. He felt a slight vibration, like a response to his tension.

Even if your target isn’t here, you should do some work, he told himself. There were other ways, surely. He could refine his technique for his job. Or he could just practise, an idea which had escaped him lately. Or hell, maybe he should actually busk for once.

What he really wanted to do was compose the piece for Angie. He could feel the music coiling inside him, formless and aimless creative energy, all frustration and weird impulses that more paralysed him than anything else. Somewhere amidst all that chaos were the right string of notes that would make the perfect composition for her. As easy to find it as to reconstruct an ice sculpture from a puddle of water.

“Mate, are you going to play or not?”

Art opened his eyes. A teenager wearing school shorts and a band shirt was staring at him with a kind of friendly belligerence, oblivious to the passers-by shooting him dirty looks as they were forced to divert around him.

“Do you do covers? Come on.”

He smiled and closed his eyes again. “I’ll play.”

Mozart Violin Sonata No. 20. A piece he knew by heart, as simple as scales or breathing. Artemis played without thinking of the violin, of the high schooler who might still be standing there, might have left to jig school somewhere else, might have given him the finger for picking such a boring old piece before being swept away by the crowd. Instead, he thought of Angie.

Fitzroy Park was never full in his memory. In his mind’s eye, he saw it late on a chilly night, he and Angie walking along the paths beneath sparse lights and sparser stars, one hand clutching flasks of tea, their free hand wrapped around the other’s in Art’s jacket pocket. He had spilt most of the tea during his re-enactment of his LMus performance – the third one so far, but only for her; of course Angie was the first one he had to tell. And when she invited him to play it for her, how could he not oblige, even with freezing fingers that were still suffering from hours of waiting and performance anxiety?

Between one draw of the bow and the next, Artemis shifted from playing the Mozart sonata to Paganini La Campanella. His LMus piece. How happy he had been, to reach that prestigious degree before he had finished year ten. He’d managed it before three-quarters of the slick kids he’d gone to music school with. For a week he’d felt delirious with joy.

His bow faltered. A good memory, yes, but one more about him than her. Angie hadn’t liked the piece that much. If he wanted to compose something for her, he had to be in her head: her music, her thoughts, her loves. Those thoughts were a little too much like work; with a deliberate effort, he forced his mind to go blank again as he began to play a contemporary piece that she often listened to when she was studying. It was the kind of light and fluffy thing that people played at weddings, not something he would ever have been caught playing when he was at university, but now? If anyone deserved something to pick themselves up at the moment, it was her.

He was reaching the end of the piece. Unconsciously, Artemis sped up, shifting from adagio into a brisker moderato. Next came a few unnecessary notes, flairs that the composer had never written into the work. He heard a clap and the clink of a few coins against each other as they fell into the silken lining of his violin case. Encouraged, Artemis intensified his efforts. Something new was at his fingertips; he could feel it, waiting to be released, antsiness transforming into something that could work, making that invisible jump from noise, a string of meaningless, soulless notes to music.

Now he was flying, out of the comfort and grasp of known ground, out in the open air, new creation – this was exhilaration, this was living. Someone in front of him laughed, and he wanted to laugh with them. Another person whooped, exactly the right pitch and depth that Artemis would have, if he had the time to shout and not to play. A third person was weeping – that, too, was correct. More coins were falling into his case, the clink mixing with the clumsy applause of a child, with the sound of glass crashing into concrete.

It was only when his fingers began adding pizzicato that he realised what it was that was driving him forward. Artemis opened his eyes – too late again – and took in the scene of what he had created. Three family members were screaming at each other as their toddler wandered off, following a guide dog who had suddenly lost all interest in its companion. Two children under the guidance of a tradie were helping an elderly lady with a full face of make-up float on her back in the pond. A third child chased the pond ibis into panicked flight, sending them up into heights that they had forgotten. Several businessmen had created a puddle of coffee in which a jacket lay discarded, slowly fading from black to beige.

The teenager who had made the request was still there, standing at the front of a small crowd that had overflowed the footpath, all of them swaying hypnotically to the music that he was still playing. Several panicked seconds passed as he tried and failed to stop himself; the bow kept stroking, his arms making their movements smoothly without conscious input from him, and for a moment he was seized with the certainty that the only way to get out of this nightmare was to throw Alma onto the ground and smash her. But with a twitch of his hand, he managed to lift the bow from the strings, pulling it away against the bridge that wanted to draw it in with magnetic force. The tip of the bow trembled as he managed to force it down and away, and almost in that great resistance he could hear the voice of his employer asking him the same question that he had asked himself for months:

Why don’t you want to play?

The crowd was waking now, eyes blinking uncertainly in the sudden sunlight, stiff jerks as they realised their proximity to each other. Though the violin was now in Art’s hands, he could hear the melody still playing, curling and fading like wisps of smoke in the air.

“I’m so sorry!” he squeaked, as around him birds began to dive from the sky.

Geraldine Ong was not at the park to witness the general chaos. As Artemis had rightly guessed, she had already taken her daily walk through it, bought two coffees (one long black, one piccolo) at the cart outside the gate, and had reached her destination before he had even entered the park.

Every Friday morning between the times of 7:52 and 7:55am, Geraldine entered the private hospital lobby. Today was no different.

She frowned slightly as she rode the elevator to the fifth floor. The woman beside her, a theatre nurse that she had worked with every fortnight for the past six months smiled at her and attempted a small wave, but Geraldine didn’t notice. She hated Fridays, for reasons that she couldn’t quite define to herself. Working in the private with Dr Papadopoulos meant that she could sleep in a little, yes, and it was the end of the week, and the private was always much less pressure than the public, with fewer eyes and judging minds to prove herself against-

But.

Perhaps that last thought was why she hated it, she reflected absent-mindedly as she drained the second cup of coffee dry. It was almost – disappointing.

Speaking of disappointing, her phone was ringing. When Geraldine checked it, she saw the name of her senior surgical resident and sighed. It was only just past 8am, and that girl was already calling her. And she wanted to do surgery. She wouldn’t get far like that.

She let the phone ring a few more times as she grappled with herself, then answered. “Yes?”

“Hi Geraldine; it’s An-”

“I know who you are. It says on my screen.”

“Right. Sorry!”

“What is it?”

“It’s about-” Geraldine zoned out as the resident told her a rambling series of events that had happened overnight. The elevator doors opened and she swept past the nurse who had been waiting beside her, through the operating theatre entrance, and straight to the list. Only six patients on the list today, none of them majors. She’d be out by 5pm.

“So I was wondering what you would like me to do?”

“What is your proposed plan?”

“I really don’t know. That’s why I’m calling you.” A slight note of testiness entered her resident’s voice. That almost made Geraldine smile. Better than nothing.

“Ask gen med for a consult. If they have trouble, you should talk to Nathan, who is the one actually in the hospital today. I’m at the private.”

“He’s in theatre.”

“So am I. Message the group if you need help.” She hung up.

Out by 5pm. Geraldine could imagine, but not really remember, a time in which that would have thrilled her. More time to do…whatever it was that she used to do. More time to study – something she could really use, with exams looming. Now all she could picture were endless hours of boredom and empty hands. A long Friday evening, then the weekend. She wasn’t expected for ward rounds, nor had she been requested for the private. She wasn’t even on-call. It would be the first time that had happened for months. She could hardly imagine anything worse.

On the weekend, all I want to do is die.

The words popped into her head without conscious thought. Geraldine did not pause in her automatic routine – get scrubs, change clothes, tie hair, put cap on, mask, scrub wash – but her mind froze for a moment as it realised what she had thought. It wasn’t precisely a lie to say that the thought had never occurred to her before – it had not, in so many words. But there was a kind of resonance to it which only the truth possessed, because the truth was she may not have thought it, but if the question was whether she had felt it-

I want to die.

The doors of the operating room opened soundlessly before her. For a moment, all she could she was a featureless white which blinded her, so she was stepping forward into nothing. Then her anaesthetist of the day smiled at her and said, “Hey Geraldine. Patient’s under already”, and all that blankness resolved into everything she knew so well: the motionless figure beneath the white sheets, the machines, the gently beeping monitor, the lines and bottles and theatre lamps and everything marked in her imagination as sterile and non-sterile.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Of course,” she replied, and stepped forward, scalpel already in hand. “Let’s begin. Opening incision…”