He walked out of the cemetery gates blinded by an accusing sun. Its harsh glare seemed to persecute him. The only woman in his life who was worthy of his love and respect, and now she was gone. If ever he had been lonely for a woman before it was a feeling he could always counter, but in his current state it was a deep trench of emptiness and loss.
He would never have thought to reach out to anyone for support in the past but he decided to contact a woman who had pursued him several years ago. She had written him love letters, erotic stories, sent him photos and made concerted attempts to engage him in some kind of romantic relationship from a distant country. He largely ignored her, and after a year of his infrequent and patronising responses he heard no more from her.
All he had was a post office box and some old phone numbers and attempts to contact her by email had failed. He knew her line of work and figured he could track her down. He had two weeks holiday so on a whim he booked a flight to Sydney, Australia. He arrived to find a gorgeous harbour city with generous parklands of elephantine fig trees and rolling lawns. The public spaces were relaxed and in shops people spoke quietly, if at all. On first impression they were an odd, blank folk who seemed to be hiding from each other.
He went to some music venues and asked around about the woman. In no time at all he met a former colleague who told him that she had been very active in her work since returning from overseas. The colleague also said that he hadn't seen her for quite some time and wondered what had happened to her. He supplied the number of a close friend and suggested he contact her for more information.
The woman he spoke to said that her friend was a recluse, not professionally active due to an extreme negative reaction to what she described as "an unacceptable mediocrity" around her, and was last known to be woodshedding a project involving string harmonics. Apparently she was working on a recording of multi layered harmonics of the six string electric bass and the double bass. It was unknown how she was earning a living because she had sworn off teaching or doing any gigs. Bob told the woman he had been romantically involved with her friend and that he wanted to reconcile aspects of this with her. The woman looked at him with some suspicion, and then said,
"She was deeply affected that you wouldn't return her love," ventured her friend.
"Couldn't, not wouldn't," Bob replied.
"Whatever," the woman said curtly, and handed him her friend's address and walked off without another word.
Of course there was no one home, that day, that night, or any other morning or evening when he visited the old house where she was supposed to live. He couldn't stalk the street as he was a tourist without a car, so periodically he would try the house and then walk down to the local shops and use his laptop in a café.
Eventually he left a note in her letterbox to arrange a meeting. When the arranged day and time arrived he was a half an hour late due to getting lost on the Sydney rail network. She wasn't at the café, if she'd ever been there, so he walked up to her house. He had just turned the corner to her street when he saw some activity at the house. A late model black BMW was parked in the driveway, numberplate "JL", and he barely recognised her getting into the passenger side as her hair was now a rich auburn and she was dressed immaculately in a cherry pink suit and high heels. He called out to her but she appeared not to hear. The car drove by brusquely. He waved at the smoky tinted windows but there was no response.
He returned to the café feeling dejected and, bored out of his mind, started trawling his favourite websites -- the porn parade type. He found the Chicks Over Fifty site and enjoyed seeing the graphic photos of grey haired duchesses taking in seven and eight inches of hardness from behind. At the side of the screen he noticed a link to a website called Just Lust, a brothel that specialised in escorts over fifty years old, and double clicked on it.
"Fulfilling that special niche where gentlemen appreciate experience that comes packaged in a mature woman. Private and discreet."
He had never been to a brothel in his life and although he felt wretchedly lonely for a woman he had never had to pay for sex and wasn't about to now. The ad showed full body shots of the women without their faces. He scrolled through the photos of Kim Kum Asian Spice, Jewels of Julie, Theresa's Tease, and one Perpetua's Revenge, a name about which he pondered. The photo showed the torso of woman who had beauty spots near her navel, rounded breasts, and smooth relaxed hips. He felt his member rousing in his shorts and thought he'd better keep moving, so he paid the bill and headed back to the woman's street and left another note in the letterbox to explain his non-appearance at the cafe.
After a day he had still not received a call from her so he thought he had better work a little harder in hunting this woman down. He hadn't expected an object so elusive, he had come all this way, and at this rate he was going to be returning home without ever speaking with her. He Googled her name and came up with links to her academic thesis and old threads on electric bass forums regarding string harmonics. A surprising hit came up on the subject of field recordings of birdsong being used to make soundscapes and the link was to a community radio station. It was a long shot but he took down the phone number.
As it happened it was a local radio station broadcasting from the very suburb he was in. He could walk there. An overstuffed noticeboard displayed the programme schedules: Smooth Jazz for Drivetime, Tenors of our Time, they had it all covered, including the experimental music show: "Perpetua" which was described as
"exploring the textures of the dark hours with original soundscapes"
And it was hosted by none other than Madame Perpetua herself.
He lay on his hotel bed at midnight all churned up from the Jack Daniels and his fractured state of loss and confusion and tuned into 97.5 FM. Her voice was unmistakeable: clear and precise, economic in phrasing, and sweet in tone, if a shade dark. Over the course of an hour she played two tracks: one from The Necks, and a soundscape of her own making. It was some of the weirdest construction of sounds he'd ever heard. He could barely keep listening for its intensity. It was layered sound "parcels" which were made from spliced fragments of birdsong that were being used as musical notes and then woven into elaborate rhythmic structures. It was very rich but strange. He rang up the station as soon as she had programmed the next item.
"It's Bob."
"I went to the café," she answered with a neutral tone, and it was hard to gauge her mood.
"Can we talk?" he offered.
"Ring the bell five times at about lunchtime tomorrow," she said and then hung up abruptly.
After all his efforts to find her and here he was now standing outside her door and his heart was pounding. He rang the doorbell five times. At least a minute had passed before he heard any footfalls down the hall. She answered the door in her pyjamas and her hair was tousled as if she had just risen. She smiled at him and leaned forward and kissed him on his right cheek. She was very talkative, and spoke quickly with the words sometimes runningintoeachother. She shared the house with two others who were at work. Her room was a large dining room off the wide hallway. Inside a cacophony of cables and equipment dominated the room and tucked into a corner was an unmade single bed. He really wanted to kiss her and give her his big warm embrace but she talked frenetically about the sound projects she was working on.
She described how she had made numerous field recordings when she was overseas and played him a charming Jamaican folk song with the refrain: "Brown Girl in the Ring", and asked him if he remembered her playing it to him the afternoon she recorded it off the pier in Ocho Rios. He didn't and it seemed to disappoint her a little. On a small mp3 recorder she had also collected strange clusters of frequencies that had occurred naturally in the environment. There was a very strange combination of sounds taken from a toy shop in Chinatown, San Francisco of a huqin busker. She had collected all manner of material: king salmon jockeying for position in an Alaskan river, squirrels, jangling horse carriages, a steam train, noisy flocks of gobsmacked tourists at the sight of a grizzly bear, a Canadian baseball match, a Garifuna percussion troupe, Honduran marimba, the bizarre tongue spoken in the Dutch Antilles called Papiamento, and so on. She had software on her computer which could sculpt a note of any length, articulation, or dynamic from the raw material. Then she would put the "notes" together using Cuban and Bulgarian dance rhythms. It was quite weird and he thought that she may be just a little mad.
"Did you miss me?" he finally interjected with some impatience.
"This is what I've been up to," she digressed, and walked over to the double bass resting in the corner. She played a long solo. It began with the bow singing long, plaintive, serpentine phrases from the harmonic minor scale that reached to the higher registers. It snaked its way in a steady 7/4 melodic line and then picked up to a sprightly 6/8 dance. Then she plucked out a hypnotic ostinato phrase in 5/4 which made him feel relaxed and more than just a little horny. It moved into a fast odd meter dance and then she tapped on the body of the bass a Bulgarian 11/8 dance figure and then, without dropping a single quaver, picked up the line on the G string with lots of ghosted notes and it worked its way up and down the G string become more and more frenetic until it gave way in a release of the open G. She played through chords and double stops with a gentle strumming. The piece ended with some bluesy Charles Mingus like phrases.
He felt saddened by it, by her remoteness, by his pain of loss, and he shed a quiet tear. She noticed but responded by offering to get him a coffee. While she was gone he tried to work out what was going on. To him her life seemed extremely disorganised. If the room and her appearance and demeanour were anything to go by it was a mess, yet she was producing something extraordinary, if eccentric. He looked around the room for clues. A large walnut wardrobe was in one corner. He quietly opened it and saw hanging inside more than a dozen glamorous outfits, a tight black cutaway dark brown leathercatsuit, laced bodiced corsets, a red leather halter neck minidress, high heel boots, stilettos, fringed belts, and a box overflowing with scanty lingerie with price tags on them.
There was a bikini made entirely from torquoise peacock feathers. There were French style knickers made out of small pearls and light pink silk. There was a pair of panties made out of hot pink soft goosedown. He came across a silver G string with diamante studs spelling "Just Lust". His heart missed a beat. Then he heard her approach the bedroom and he quietly closed the wardrobe.
"What are you doing?" he asked impertinently.
"How do you mean?" she asked.
"What are you doing for a living?" he demanded.
