The Second Cure Page 3

  He shifted across the canvases, pointing at textures and colours and shapes as the music played out its strange, disturbing rhythms and tones. Despite their unfamiliarity to Charlie, the painting was making sense of the music, and the music was making sense of the painting. He was using terms she didn’t know as he explained it to her – ostinato, augmented fourth, the devil’s interval, diminuendo – but she was feeling the connection between sound and sight as his arm swept across the colours.

  ‘Okay, it’s coming up,’ he said. ‘The Glorification of the Chosen One, the maiden to be sacrificed …’ Now the hypnotic tones and the tension were growing, almost going somewhere, then breaking off, painfully. Blues and purples on the canvas, then sharp angular blood reds as a brass instrument split the room with harsh, rising cries that accelerated to an unbearable pace and the strings drew the sound up with a rush of energy, colours of golds and silvers until –

  Eleven vast beats of drums and strings, so deep in pitch you felt them as much as heard them, purple-black assaults on the floor beneath the canvas, and the entire orchestra became a frenzy of throbbing and beating, the piccolos shrieking in white, thin streaks. Charlie’s hand went to her mouth; she was so overcome by the sensations engulfing her, as the music played on without mercy, brass and strings and rhythms and power.

  Then silence. Richard had turned it off.

  ‘Do you see?’ he asked.

  She nodded, mute.

  ‘There was a riot when it was first performed in Paris a hundred years ago. I guess you can tell why. Though I gather they found the choreography a bit shocking, too. Music like that, you can hardly do a sedate pas de deux.’

  Charlie stood and slowly walked around the studio, looking at the paintings he’d made. ‘Richard, these are incredible.’

  ‘I hardly remember doing them now. You know, Stravinsky said after he’d finished “The Rite of Spring” that he’d just written down what he’d heard. That he was the vessel through which it passed. That’s how I feel about these. I’ve painted the music, Charlie. I am seeing the music and I painted it.’

  She went to him and he enveloped her in his long arms, her head against his chest.

  ‘So when you say, “seeing”, you really mean “seeing”? Literally?’

  ‘Yes, I’m seeing music. It’s fantastic.’

  ‘Has this only just started happening?’ she asked. ‘It’s just come on?’ She was having trouble interpreting it as ‘fantastic’.

  ‘It started a few weeks ago, but nothing as intense as this. It’s not just music. It’s other sounds, like voices. Your voice is the colour of maple syrup.’

  ‘I think we need to get you to a doctor, sweetheart. Something like this developing is, well, a bit scary.’

  ‘Scary? Are you kidding? It’s brilliant.’

  ‘Well, the effect might be, but what about the cause?’

  ‘Shh,’ he told her, then leant down to kiss her lips. His hands ran down her back and cupped her buttocks. He pulled her close and she could feel him hardening against her. ‘I want to fuck you,’ he whispered.

  A florid neuro episode wasn’t Charlie’s idea of foreplay. Now? What about dinner? ‘Aren’t you exhausted?’

  ‘No, I’m wired.’ He pulled her down onto the day bed and started peeling off her clothes. This sexual urgency in Richard was new too, she was forced to acknowledge. At least once a day his desire for her had begun to overwhelm every other want or practicality. Last week, they’d actually had sex behind an exhibit in the Biology Museum when he’d come in to meet her for lunch: anyone could have walked in. Charlie had been startled at first by the change, but welcomed the renewal of passion – after all, most relationships eventually start to cool, and this was the opposite – but what had been welcome now troubled her. Was it part of the same mania he’d had with his painting? Her distraction meant that she couldn’t find her way to engage with his passion, not now. ‘Condom,’ she told him, grabbing her backpack. His unpredictable urges had taught her to be prepared. As he moved on top of her, she responded on automatic, her mind spinning through possibilities, none of them good. This must be neurological. A brain injury? Some sort of stroke, an aneurysm? A tumour?

  But his desire was sated as quickly as it had appeared, so quickly he hadn’t noticed her lack of zest – or, worse, he was so self-absorbed he hadn’t noticed – and he threw himself back on the bed, prostrate and spent. He closed his eyes and she flashed to a memory of one of their first nights together. He’d fallen asleep beside her, and she looked down at his face, was suffused by a feeling of tenderness she’d never before experienced, and she had known she loved him. All down to the oxytocin and dopamine, no doubt, but knowing that didn’t make the moment any less moving. When she told him that, later, he laughed, called her his gorgeous geek, and they’d made love again. They were so different: impulsive Richard with his painting and his music; restrained Charlie with her science, but they fitted together in a way that surprised and delighted them both and astounded their friends.

  Now the fear of something being wrong with him, of taking him from her, loomed like a physical thing threatening her world. She rolled towards him and stroked his brow. He reached for her hand and kissed it.

  ‘Have you ever heard of synaesthesia?’ she asked. ‘That sounds like what you’ve got, or at least a subset, chromaesthesia – seeing sounds.’

  ‘Is that like when people see letters and words as colours?’ he murmured.

  ‘Yes. That’s grapheme-colour synaesthesia. Or names of people or days of the week have a colour associated. Like … Wednesday is “yellow”.’

  ‘Oh, come on, everyone knows Wednesday is grey!’ He was smiling now, emerging from his languor. He wasn’t sharing her anxiety, clearly. But, then, he wasn’t a biologist.

  ‘There are lots of variants. It’s not uncommon – in fact, everyone probably has it to varying degrees – but, from what I understand, it’s unusual for it to suddenly develop like this.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ve never had this before,’ said Richard. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you’d miss.’

  ‘We studied it briefly in undergrad, in Intro to Neuroscience. The classic example is something a psychologist came up with ages back called the “bouba/kiki effect”. People are shown two abstract shapes, one with smooth flowing lines, the other with straight lines and sharp edges, and have to decide which is “kiki” and which is “bouba”.’

  ‘Kiki is the straight-lined one, right?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘That’s what just about everyone says, and it seems to cross language groups. And when we use words like “loud” to relate to colour, or “sharp” to relate to a taste, it suggests it’s deeply embedded in language and our brains.’

  ‘I am starting to hear music when I see colours too …’ Richard said. ‘The sky yesterday – you saw how blue it was? It was in B-flat minor.’

  ‘This is just boggling.’

  ‘But you got what I was doing, right? Painting the music?’

  ‘Oh, definitely. I don’t see the colours, but yours made so much sense. They felt … right. What was it you were saying before, something about the devil?’

  ‘The devil’s interval. Diabolus in musica. A tritone made using a diminished fifth or an augmented fourth.’ He stood up from the day bed and went to his piano, opened the lid. ‘It’s about the most dissonant interval in music, three whole tones apart – it was actually banned during medieval times. And it’s one of the reasons “The Rite” is so potent.’ Naked above the keyboard, he leant down and played some chords. ‘You even hear it in some police sirens because it grabs the attention like nothing else.’ He demonstrated. ‘Oh, and you know where else it is?’ He was across the other side of the room, looking through his CDs. ‘The opening riff of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” …’

  ‘Please, Richard, no. No more music now.’

  He grinned. ‘Yeah, sorry.’ Then, ‘Are you hungry? I’m starving.’

  ‘Me too. I bet you haven’
t eaten all day, right?’

  ‘No …’ He looked at the time on the sound system. ‘Damn, it’s late. Poor old Goblin must be wasting away.’ He headed to the staircase to get to work in the kitchen, scooping his tracksuit pants off the floor on the way through.

  Following him, Charlie paused at the eleven purple-black drum-beats Richard had painted on the floor. ‘You’re not allowed to be sick, Richard,’ she murmured. ‘You’re just not.’

  Over breakfast next morning, Richard was effervescent. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look …’

  He stuck his toast in his mouth and swung the laptop around to Charlie, and pointed at the screen. Pulling the toast back out, he said, ‘Here. Composers with synaesthesia. Scriabin, Ligeti, Liszt, Messiaen, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bernstein, Sibelius. And artists!’ He tapped the mouse pad to reveal another tab. ‘David Hockney, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Carol Steen, Charles Burchfield … This is fantastic.’

  ‘I don’t know who half those people are,’ said Charlie. She was eating muesli and yoghurt. Her coffee hadn’t kicked in yet and she wasn’t a morning person. But Richard was on a roll, his words falling over each other.

  ‘Well, geniuses, mainly. But it explains a lot, how their work is so … visceral. And what’s great is, I’m not a composer, I’m not a painter. I am a composer and a painter. Just imagine, melding the two to make a single work of creation. Redefining the audio-visual. ’Cause that’s the thing, right? Painting is static, at least when it’s perceived by the viewer. But music exists in time, through time. It’s dynamic. This is a way to insert time into painting. Maybe I need to think about digitalising it, making the painting happen within time too, contemporaneously …’

  Charlie was beginning to wonder if he’d sprinkled cocaine onto his Vegemite. She looked at the clock. ‘I’ve got to get moving,’ she said, standing. ‘I’ve got a big day at the lab, plus a lecture to prepare.’

  ‘No time for a quick root, then?’

  She turned to him, ready to tell him to pull his head in, but the grin on his face told her he was joking. ‘You goose.’ She bent down to kiss him on the lips. ‘Will you make an appointment with your doctor?’

  ‘Sure, I will.’

  ‘And, listen, if you decide to – I don’t know – paint the complete symphonies of Mozart, keep the volume down, yeah? And let Goblin out for a wee now and then.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘And let Lenny know you’re alive? He might be a prick, but he was genuinely worried.’

  ‘I will. I’ll even help him blow away the leaves.’

  Charlie tousled Goblin’s ear as she headed out the front door. She did have a big day ahead, but hadn’t told Richard what her first task was going to be: hitting the library database to read up on causes of sudden onset synaesthesia. The task wasn’t one that filled her with optimism.

  Cows don’t eat grass.

  They graze on grass, they chew grass, they swallow grass, but they don’t ‘eat’ it. They don’t digest it. Bacteria in the cows’ guts digest it. The cows ‘eat’ the waste products from the bacteria. These bacteria use cows for food, for shelter, and as transport. Cows use the bacteria to allow them to gain nutrients from otherwise indigestible grasses. This is one of many millions of examples of biological symbiosis occurring on our planet.

  Cows are dependent on bacteria, but their evolutionary success is also dependent on another species: humans. Without humans farming cows, Bos taurus would be an unremarkable bovine species. Ten millennia ago, a handful of cows were domesticated. Now there are nearly one and a half billion cows in the world. How did cows manage to convince humans to increase their population by such an extraordinary extent?

  Humans have a gene known as LCT and it produces the protein lactase. Lactase allows us to digest the sugar found in milk, lactose. In most people on Earth, the activity of lactase decreases in infancy, which is when we’ve been historically weaned from our mothers’ milk. In a proportion of humans, an adaptation has evolved allowing the persistence of lactase production, and the advantage of being able to digest the milk of a range of other mammals and benefit from its nutritional constituents has created a selection pressure for the trait.

  So here we have human genetic evolution being influenced by the bacteria living in the gut of cows. It is one of millions of ongoing interactions between species, ranging from the distant to the utterly intimate. Our species, and all other species on the planet, form an unimaginable interweaving of cause and effect, of dependence and opportunism and serendipity. We are part of a four-dimensional web – existing through time and space – with both subtle and violent pressures in all directions. This is the essence of ecology and the essence of symbiosis.

  Zinn, Charlotte, ‘Symbioses’, In: JF Thompson and C Loh, eds, Evolution and Ecology, 2nd ed, Fitzroy University Press, Sydney, 2012

  5.

  Charlie’s reading of the scientific literature on her office computer had done nothing to reassure her about Richard’s sudden neurological changes. Spontaneous cases were rare, with most being the result of brain injury or pathology. Now she was scouring her memory for any behavioural changes in him that she might not have registered. Had he been hiding anything from her? Headaches, disturbed thinking, hearing issues? She needed to ask him.

  One thing she’d encountered in her reading was fascinating: there was a higher proportion of synaesthesia among people with absolute pitch than among the general population. While around four per cent of people had synaesthesia, it affected up to twenty per cent of those with absolute pitch. And Richard had absolute pitch. It was his party trick. Someone would sing a note, and he’d identify it – B flat, F sharp, whatever – and then go to the piano and hit precisely the right key. That suggested that he was more prone to synaesthesia than others, but it didn’t answer the crucial question of ‘Why now?’

  She heard his approach before she saw him in the late-afternoon sun. She was standing outside the science store, sweltering in her leathers and holding her helmet. She had learnt to recognise the particular whirr of his motorbike, his shiny BMW R1200GS. It was a recent purchase and one of which he was curiously proud. Charlie liked it well enough, but to Richard it was a work of art.

  ‘Good day?’ he asked. He had taken off his helmet and they kissed hello.

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Nature is fast-tracking our paper. It’ll be out in a few days.’

  ‘That is extremely cool. Bravo, you!’

  ‘Thanks.’ Charlie knew that a year or two ago he would have had no idea what being published in Nature signified. But, then, she wouldn’t have understood anything he might have said about chromaticism, chiaroscuro or BMW bikes.

  ‘I’m so proud.’ He kissed her again.

  ‘How were you today? Did you paint? Was it the same as yesterday?’ She heard herself sounding wooden, like she’d rehearsed this. Which she had.

  ‘It wasn’t Stravinsky, so it wasn’t quite as full-on. But, yeah, it’s still happening. It was fantastic. Not so much panic. Maybe I’m getting used to it.’

  ‘I looked into it a bit today. You need an MRI scan so we can see if we can find out what’s causing it.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  She knew he’d be dismissive. ‘I’m serious, Richard. I’m worried.’

  ‘Let’s talk about it later.’

  ‘You always say that when you don’t want to deal with something.’

  ‘Drop it, Charlie, okay?’ He put on his helmet. She saw she couldn’t push it now, and wished she knew how to wrangle him. Richard was like so many men, a big whinger when it came to something harmless like a cold, but resistant to seeing doctors over things that really mattered. It had been the same last year when he ignored weeks of background pain in his belly that had eventually escalated into a burst appendix – he’d only narrowly avoided peritonitis. He’d actually called her a ‘nag’ at one point, accusing her of smothering him. He apologised for that later, after he’d emerged from the anaesthetic, and gave her permission to tell him �
��I told you so.’ Still, the memory of his anger and intransigence remained, and she didn’t want to revisit it.

  They set out to the northwest, to Normanhurst, where his mum lived. Charlie was looking forward to it. Winnie was like a warm embrace, generous and genuine. Whenever they got together, Charlie chided herself for not seeing her more often, but, then, inevitably, life would get in the way again. Tonight Richard’s little sister would be there too, down from Queensland. Despite Richard and Charlie having lived together for years, she still hadn’t met her. She didn’t get to Sydney too often, apparently.

  As they swung between cars in peak-hour knots of traffic on Beecroft Road, Charlie leant into Richard’s back, savouring the closeness and trying to relax. She had been distracted all day, finding it hard to focus on work. Now, in addition to worrying about Richard’s health, she was worrying about how to convince him to get it investigated.

  He pulled into the driveway of the 1950s dark-brick bungalow, and Charlie was assailed by the sight of Winnie’s garden in full bloom. The small, neat lawn with perfect edgings was dwarfed by garden beds crowded with lush colour. Hydrangeas and geraniums, roses and annuals, all flowering exuberantly, all thriving. To one side was a handsome magnolia tree, now covered in lush foliage. In July, when it flowered, it was spectacular. From a dense plot of lavender flanked by red bougainvillea emerged a tall, thin woman, hose in hand, hat on head. Winnie. Her resemblance to Richard always startled Charlie. The same lanky physique, the same angular facial structure, though instead of Richard’s short, curly dark hair, Winnie sported a mass of grey which tumbled to her shoulders when she took off her sun hat. And she had nothing of Richard’s impulsivity, which sometimes felt reassuring.

  Charlie and Richard climbed off the bike and removed their helmets. Charlie caught his eye. ‘I love you, you know,’ she told him quietly. She hated him being angry with her.