Something Inside
t/w: cancer
Kathleen returned her book to the bookstack she had collected it from, and left the library at some speed. Her steps were urgent and apprehensive, intent upon their destination as she crossed the quad and went uphill towards the main hall. Half-past seven was nearing with unreal speed, and she hadn’t yet purchased her ticket for the concert. The regional symphony orchestra were paying the first of their tri-annual visits to the campus.
The trees were only just beginning to redden. Lone, green specimens stood in the bluish gloom with their full arms raised somehow questioningly in the September chill. The light of a setting sun slanted nervously from the west; the brink of night filled the world with a kind of hush, and lent to the last light in the sky an anxiety, a stage fright. Kathleen joined the queue of tardy student-ticket purchasers, the latest in the line of those “cutting it fine” as the ticket salesman continued to admonish, grimly grunting the phrase again and again as though each time were the first, peering over the top of his spectacles.
“You’re cutting it fine,” the man on the counter said, coming face to face with Kathleen.
Kathleen flashed her student identification card and the ticket was diligently printed, showing the discounted price.
“Thank you,” Kathleen said, and joined the rising crowd.
Her seat was in the gallery, and she’d to climb a few flights of stairs in order to get there. She was eager to enter the marmalade glow of the hall, leaving behind the usher at the threshold, leaving behind all the world’s abounding mundanity, and joining the secret, enclosed, expectant spell of the filling auditorium, with all its kerfuffle and muttering and fluttering and human voices, some lowered, some raised. The upward spirals went on and on, and Kathleen was slowed in her flight. Many of the audience members were elderly, and found the staircase a great challenge to their infirmity. Kathleen wanted desperately to run through the slow, cumbersomely clambering crowds before her and quickly scale the stairs. She craved the lit safety of the hall, and found the delay almost intolerable. But she kept this urge quiet, kept it inside her.
Within three minutes she was seated in her gallery seat, looking down over the bustling hall. The stalls, boxes, gallery all hummed with activity. She surveyed the gathered people, some silent, motionless, waiting - some gregarious and talkative. A steady stream of audience members continued to enter through the open orifices, mostly husbands and wives clinging to each other with a sort of neediness that, to Kathleen’s mind, was very childlike. People on their own would enter too, of course. A man, a woman, another man. On the face of one man, there was a look of dismay. Having seated himself, his body became almost atrophied in the chair with frozen vacancy. All those souls, Kathleen thought, all those people, they and their array of reasons, their wildly disparate reasons for coming to this place, all united, at last, united by music.
The stage lay spread before the audience. Framed by a great proscenium arch, the entire orchestra of empty seats lay bare of instruments and bodies - except for a celesta, a piano, a timpani and bass drum, a harp, and three double bases on their sides. The stage was lit the white, clear light of butter, and waited - a great space of silence, a plateau of noiselessness, lifted like an empty bowl before the noisy hall. Soon the stage would fill, Kathleen thought, soon the lights would change and with this change of light the tables would turn. The watchers would be plunged into silent darkness, taciturn anonymity, and the authoritative, organised, silencing cacophony of the opening overture would reign in the hall.
Kathleen was a very particular concert-goer. She didn’t like noise, disturbance, or poor etiquette of any kind. She was quick to be incensed, readily outraged by a programme rustled too thoughtlessly, or a hearing aid left whistling and beeping on the wrong frequency - let alone the ring of a mobile phone. Even coughing irked her to ferocity. But it was talking, soft muttering, even very gentle whispering that she considered the greatest infraction. She had a “two strikes and you’re out” rule. Perhaps “out” was the wrong word, but certainly “shamed”, at any rate. Should whispering come to her awareness, she’d take note of the whisperer. Should the same whisperer whisper again she’d allow them one more chance. Should the same whisperer whisper a third time - and she took no pleasure in this - she’d raise a pointed index finger to her lips, turn to face the culprit in a thoroughly capacious manner, and sharply, unambiguously, shush whoever he or she might be. Should she be brought to this point, in the wake of her shush a kind of sheepish, subdued spell would settle upon the whole vicinity in which she happened to be.
Hiccuppers received a glare, telephonic offenders a tut.
In their elegant tails and black dresses, the musicians filed onto the stage, most of them chatting with their neighbours, casual but graceful.
Once they were all seated, it did not take long for the auditorium lights to dim, and for the concert-master - followed by the conductor - both to take their places on the stage.
Elevated upon his little podium, the conductor awaited perfect silence. It did not come. An adequate silence sluggishly arrived and just as soon as it did, he went suddenly taut with the music’s imminence, and with his forceful downbeat the orchestra was thrown abruptly into life. The concert had begun.
Immediately, violations in etiquette arrested Kathleen’s attention. The phone-screen of a dated flip phone but as digitally infringing as any device at a concert could ever be, badgered the darkness with its brightness. Kathleen saw the light blue glow pop into being - a prick of light - and was furious. The phone belonged to the woman in the row just ahead of Kathleen, her head was practically between Kathleen’s knees. The woman was texting. She was close enough that Kathleen was able to read the text that she wrote, as she wrote it, as it was clumsily typed into being, stark in the dimness:
Chemo didn’t work, it’s grown )!!
Kathleen noted the odd bracket-double-exclamation-mark construction that followed the news. Strange. She wasn’t sure what it was meant to convey. The dreadful update was sent silently off to its intended recipient, and the text joined the cascade of exchanges, permanent, recorded, the latest act of communication in a digital correspondence that might have been going on for years. Then the woman folded her phone away, with a little click.
The dull thud of anger was still there. Kathleen still considered it a breach: all texting, she asserted to herself, should be concluded before the concert’s beginning. And yet, she felt pensive. She felt pensive more than she felt angry. She began to ponder whether the woman was describing her own cancer or someone else’s. Kathleen pondered the problem of whether or not the woman before her had cancer. It was very hard to know. Kathleen tried to judge the woman’s state by looking at her. In the darkness, all investigations came to nought.
Then, Kathleen’s mind turned to the wider questions, the bigger mysteries. Her eyes ventured along the ranks of striving strings, sawing as one machine with all their bows; the two lines of woodwind players, their fingers flurrying and the pockets of their cheeks calm and flat; the waiting brasses, horns and trumpets and trombones on knees or bell-stands. Gradually, a great silence began to carpet the rich cacophony in front of her, above her, all around her, and Kathleen found that couldn’t hear the music. She couldn’t hear it. She filled with a sense - quite a new sense - of alienation, of being alienated from the spectacle sounding before her in the warm glow of the stage. She wondered if the giant tumult, the miscellany and pandemonium of those worthy sounds was, in the end, quite worthless. What did any of it matter compared to cancer? Cancer was so much bigger than this, so much bigger than all of it. But still she comes, Kathleen thought, still. Still she offers up the improbable gift of her presence.
And quickly, Kathleen grew to resent the woman. She grew to resent that she had stumbled, in the first place, upon this morsel, this spot of time fertile in meaning, this visionary experience contained within the small, blue-lit compass of a phone screen. Bars and further bars of the music flew past, blew windily past, and Kathleen could not hear them. Her consciousness, that she had intended to open up, wholly, to the full and delighting wonder of the music, had instead been taken hostage by other, deeper, greater, more distracting thoughts. Her mind, her mind’s eye, her mind’s ear, her inner reservoir of reception was so fragile, so breakable. Even a hiccup, the rustle of a programme, the pouring of wine from one of those little quarter bottles into a plastic-imitation glass could disturb her. Now she was lost, unable to comprehend what she was hearing. She waited for the overture to end, and didn’t applaud when it was over. Loud, appreciative applause rolled through the hall, punctuated by the occasional whoop. Kathleen sat in grim, motionless silence.
The piano was heaved into place downstage. There was a talkative bout while this manoeuvre was effected. Then a hush settled, and was general, once again, in the hall. Piano soloist and conductor strode with purpose to the front of the stage, weaving through the violins who were frailly and figuratively applauding by bouncing the wood of their bows on their legs.
The concerto began with familiar solemnity. The piano alone, sombre, slow, and then furious but no longer alone. The strings sobbed, loud and mammoth and humid, over and under and all around.
The movement meandered on, changeable, alluring, seemingly eternal.
By the time the second movement, the slow Adagio, was throbbing from the strings in low, quiet, haunted whispers, and the piano was twinkling above like a bubbling brook in the moonlight, Kathleen was wounded in wonder, rapt, and growing full of what she came to feast upon. The rivers, that she would imbibe all day if she could, filled her. She forgot all about the other people. She was deaf to the poignant silence of all those souls, sitting, huddling in darkness. She forgot all about programme rustles and the pings of mobile phones; she might even have overlooked a talker, if anyone had dared to break that silence. She forgot all about cancer, about chemo, about the little scene of life she had witnessed, quiet and fleeting in the seat before her.
And then, quite out of the blue, just as the music rose with joy and agony, on a great swell to a startling climax, a strange cough jumped from Kathleen’s mouth. She had been engulfed by the music, and unaware of her own body. The spell broke and she reacted with surprise and anger to the sound she had made. Nearby heads turned, not in irritation, but in concern. It had been a strange, spluttering, guttural, painful-sounding noise, half-way between a cough and a belch. Kathleen lay a pacifying hand on her chest. She was breathing quite heavily, her chest rose and fell with her panting breaths.
Then, unpredictable, unmanageable, and unnervingly new, the sound leapt out of her again, like a creature, like a fat frog of sound. What’s happening to me? What on earth is this? Kathleen demanded in frustration of herself. She tried to will the sound out of existence, she tried to will her body into obedience, into good behaviour. But, as the music went on bar by interrupted bar, the sensation only intensified. She wanted to belch, to vomit, to scream. This stifled screech, this horrible, giant, unfunny hiccup stuck within her like a swallowed unswallowable thing, burned inside her. She coughed, in little unhelpful, un-relieving coughs, but the great cry welling within her and coarsely filling her up just became more and more unbearable. The incongruity of the situation made her cry and curse with frustration. People around her were cordial and helpful, offering slaps on the back and tissues (whole packets of Kleenex), handkerchiefs, and water, entire water-bottles. The commotion was of such significance now that all in the hall were aware of it. Heads, further and further away, turned, or began to turn. Even the conductor’s ears pricked with the noise of the kerfuffle and he turned towards the audience, his arm still fluently, liquidly beating, an affronted grimace on his face.
And then, the woman directly before Kathleen in the gallery seats, turned around. They were in near darkness, but their eyes met, and something within them was legible, emotionally readable. Was it humanity? Some kind of sisterhood? Kathleen didn’t know. Kathleen huffed and sweated and coughed and spluttered. The woman before her turned, flashed Kathleen a look of kind, shining pity. It was too much. Kathleen got up quickly and hurried to the end of the aisle. People let her pass. She ran down the steps, ran along the right hand upper gallery rim, burst past the usherette and through the doors. She tore down all the spiralled steps, through the reception area, and out into the starlit night.
The ticket salesman, the same from earlier, sat at his desk, with the lenses of his glasses now snug over his eyes. He was counting cash. His hands continued to move, but he looked up. He followed Kathleen with his gaze, down the corridor, and out into the night. He didn’t get up. Her distress was noisy - she was sobbing, flying, as though she were being pulled by some indefatigable force, in an urgent, furious flight. In the corridor, her symphony of sounds, the showering music of her malaise, echoed, loud.
Outside, Kathleen cantered forwards a few agonised paces. She stopped. The firmament was black, blue-black, not as starry as she had expected. No visible moon. The terrible panoply of ailment - of ailed cries and wails of which she had seemed so full only a few seconds ago - seemed, with a very belated mercy, to have subsided. Very slowly, she sank to her knees. Through her tights, her knees felt the punishing hardness of the ground. An overhead lamp lit her breaths with a chilled, secular light. It’s a hard world, she thought.
And then, as suddenly as they had subsided, the sounds returned. Just a small itch at first. And then, a great burning crescendo mounted in her breast, and she poured and coughed, with impunity at last, a great and terrible cry, a howling, burping anguish - freed, at some cost, from her dark depths - into the quiet night.