repititions

When the news comes about the fellowship, it’s him she phones first. He is the one who rooted music in her brain, in her blood, in the very way she’s wired. He is where all of this started. It was his records playing in the living room when she was five, six, seven, while she lay on the floor, waving her toes in the air to the beat. His records playing in their after-dinner discos, him trying to replicate her dance moves and – so she told him at the time – doing it all wrong. His records playing on those calm Sunday mornings spent wrapped in sound soft as the duvet she’d emerged from. 

They listened to the full album, always. He was the one who taught her how to listen – let it come to you, he always said. Don’t try too hard, the first time. Be open. Let it make its impression. He was the one she tested out her first ideas on, the words awkward and rectangular in her mouth. Keep talking, he would say, when she struggled to get something out, hesitated, trailed off. I’m all ears.

I knew you would get it, he says, when she tells him the news. You had the best teacher. 

The phone makes his voice somehow rougher, more angular, but she can hear the glint of a smile curling upwards in his sentences. He knows her research well. He read her first pieces, when she realised that for her, writing was easier than speaking about sound. Together they have wrestled with whether you should write about it, whether you can – how can she translate this thing that seems to skip past her conscious being to reach right inside her? How can she write about its power to change everything, when its power is precisely that it’s more than words? They have settled that it only works when you don’t try to capture it on the page. You cannot contain it. Instead, words are a response, a conversation, a harmony. 

I start in October, she tells him, the words like a beacon, an incantation. A beginning.

To celebrate the fellowship, he sends her a record. No note attached, but she knows it’s him. She recognises the cover, the sleeve a little frayed at the edges. Joan Baez. Her first foray into the ways music could create change. Still standing the test of time. He is reminding her of the wonder it created for her, at the beginning. He has watched her stutter and sway through the PhD, the postdoc, underpaid, uncertain. Now she has earned the space to discover wonder again. 

She plays it on repeat in her flat that summer, wondering what the neighbours must think of her, unable to exist in silence. They are probably glad she is leaving. She sinks into the vibrations of the vocals while washing up, catalogues her belongings, prepares for her move. Fantasises about the places she will visit, the person she will be, when she is in Glasgow, free of the constraint of a city that knows her. 

She has an album for every phase of her life – never CDs, always vinyl, a habit she picked up from him. He treasures his, knows where they skip, every scratch. The only years she has no records for are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, when she rebelled against sound. Acted as if her Music A-Level was a chore and nothing more. She didn’t even study it at university, initially. 

But away from home for the first time she found herself craving the comfort of her dad’s records, until she realised that what she wanted to study was the ways that sound can shape a life, lives, move us to be different in ways that words cannot. The ways that we crave to be recognised in it. The ways it can reach us. Heal us. That was when she started phoning home again. 

Now she calls him every Wednesday, drives across to visit every other Sunday. She tidies his house while she’s there, brings him groceries, checks the bills are paid. He never was so good at the realities, the practicalities of existence. Now that he has no-one to tidy for, she suspects he would never do it of his own accord. 

He has never said it, but she worries he gets lonely. He never expected to start retirement alone. When her mother died, they listened to Slowdive – her mother’s favourite band – for hours, days, weeks. Even now she can’t hear Pygmalion without her body and her sense of time upending themselves. They don’t – can’t – talk about it much, anymore, not directly, anyway. But she knows he’s finding the transition hard because he is filling his days with as much as he can, as if to see how much his hours can hold without breaking. He’s reading anything and everything. He tells her he’s running, most days. She wonders if his body can take it. These days she notices the slight hunch, the lines in his skin like radio waves, the small glints of grey at the side of his head. But even so, he’s keeping busy. As if to stop, even for a minute, might bring the whole shaky edifice down. As if he wouldn’t know how to start again. 

I’m ok, he says, when she asks him how he’s doing after he admits he’s so busy he got his schedule mixed up. I’m ok. Now – remind me when you start? 

The words ring hollow out of the speaker. 

The months tick towards her start date faster than she expects. She starts saying goodbye to friends when she sees them. Accumulating last times as she unloads herself of belongings. As the summer ripens, a weed of nervousness grows inside her ribs. She knows this feeling. Can she move this far away? Can she write something worthwhile? She tries to bloom fear into a garden under her skin. 

In their phone calls she paints a good picture. She tells him she’s hoping to be out on the hills every weekend, maybe visiting Inverness, getting closer to their Scottish roots, to Mum. And she’ll visit the places he grew up. Maybe he can come and visit, come and show her. 

I found a flat, she tells him after a week of panic and virtual viewings. It’s gorgeous, I can really imagine writing there. Big windows and warm afternoon light, set against the angularity of the city. She doesn’t tell him about the kitchen, or the building it’s in, but it’s not a lie, it’s an omission. 

I’m glad you’ll be living outside of university accommodation, he says. You need to – what’s the word – well, another way to say would be – you need to surround yourself with the real city. Don’t let the institution trap you. Really live there. 

She starts saying goodbye to her favourite places. She takes him, sometimes, when he’s free. They arrange to get takeaway from the Vietnamese café they used to go to when she was younger. 

He’s late. She picks up the food while she waits. 

This is my last time here, she tells the teenager who serves her, although the girl is new and they’ve never met. I’m actually leaving town. I used to come here a lot. 

Oh, the girl says, making a baffled face towards the floor. Have a good life, I guess. As she exits the shop, half-giggling and half ashamed, she sees him rushing towards her. 

Late again, he says, I’m sorry. Making a habit of it. Was thinking about my book. Took the wrong turning. 

She just hugs him and hands him the foil package. His chaos feels like something familiar, viewed askance. The way the living room used to look lying on the floor. She always imagined his mind like a cluttered professor’s office, books and papers everywhere, no discernible structure, decades of knowledge, of curiosity. The kind of academic’s room she pictured when she was younger, before she actually became one and realised lots of them don’t have rooms, can’t afford so many of their own books these days. He has always had a disordered mind, and yet he used to be able to summon any part of it instantly. But lately, even he seems not to know his way around his thoughts. 

They sit in the park to eat the banh mi, her cross-legged on the bench, him hunched into its corner. The light stretches out long beyond the day’s warmth. 

Are you almost all ready to go, then? he asks, as he unwraps the sandwich from its foil. 

Getting there, she says, although the number of tasks still to do is beginning to build a bubble of concern inside her. The half-packed boxes in her flat, the administration still not complete. 

And where will you be living? He looks directly at her. She feels his focus. 

She wonders if he’s asking because wants a different answer, because what she told him last time was too vague. When she was a child, he was always like that, nudging her to say more, to expand. To learn to take up space with her voice. She tells him again about the flat she’s found, phrases it differently. She embellishes, talks about the flooring, the light. Little details about the furniture. A place that can be home, she says. At least I hope so. 

As the weeks tick into September, the temperature begins to drop and she shifts from counting time left in weeks to days. They are supposed to meet for dinner, but he loses his car keys and by the time he’s worked out what he’s done with them it’s too late for him to come out. She waits outside the restaurant for an hour while a series of texts come in – I’m running late, I’m still stuck, I’m sorry. She tells him not to worry – he’s busy, it’s an easy mistake – and promises to phone him tomorrow instead. 

She’s driving home, listening to Julianna Barwick, when it slots together. She has to pull over, press her head against the steering wheel, breathe for a moment. Suddenly she can’t help but see it, the past few months reframed like a bassline surging into view. That their conversations recently have been more like waves, the circular motion of water under the surface. Tidal. A little more each time. She wonders if he knows it, somewhere. Realises that she did. 

She phones him on her last night in town as she finishes packing up her apartment, tells him she’ll drop in on him before driving up to Glasgow tomorrow. His voice echoes out of the speaker as she surveys the empty flat. Without her belongings it looks worn, sad. It has lost the traces of the life she lived there. How could she have thought she was happy here? 

And where will you be living? he asks, and for a second she’s back in her car on the side of the road, counting her breaths to calm down. And when do you start? 

She answers the question she thinks he’s really asking, that she’ll look after herself, and phone, and drive down to visit every month. That it’s just for one year, that she’ll come back, even though at the start of the summer she was hoping to stay there. That it’s not really a goodbye, even as she’s beginning to realise the ways in which it is one. 

She sets a decision in her stomach like a rock. Tomorrow, when she’s with him, she will bring it up. Open the discussion, make a plan. 

For now, she just puts him on speaker and sinks into the texture of his voice like a pebbled stream, the music of its rumbling cadence. She thinks of his repeated questions like the bassline of an old record, reverberating around the taped-up boxes and the empty room, the dance of their rhythm, of recurrence.