The Dying Fall
Chapter 17: Vannah
Song for this chapter:
Chapter 17: Vannah
“You look awful,” Nano said, when he opened the door to Carrie on Sunday evening.
“Thanks, Nano,” Carrie replied as she followed him down to the basement.
“What happened?” Nano asked, his brow wrinkling as he watched her sit on one end of the sofa, shoulders curled inwards as she folded her hands into the sleeves of her jumper.
Carrie shook her head as if to dismiss her own words. “My mother found the music book and my buds.”
“Shit.”
“She destroyed them.”
“Double shit.”
Carrie gave him a wry smile. “Yeah. Something like that.”
“You need a cup of tea and a packet of biscuits,” Nano said decisively. “Fortunately, I happen to have both. Make yourself comfortable.”
He headed to the kitchenette and Carrie took his advice and slipped off her boots so she could huddle herself into the corner of the sofa. She wasn’t sure she was hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten since yesterday evening. Her mother had knocked on her bedroom door a couple of hours after their argument, announcing only that she was leaving Carrie’s dinner outside the door. Carrie had eaten her dinner in her room and then snuck downstairs to listen at the living room door and confirm her mother was listening to the daily news bulletin, before she went to the kitchen to clear up. Once the job was done, she’d returned to her room and lain on her bed, staring at the ceiling until Lights Out. And then she’d lain on her bed and stared into the dark whilst her mind continued to freewheel. Usually, when Carrie was this agitated, she’d hit up and let rhythms and melodies soothe her, but without her buds she was left in limbo, with no way to anchor or channel her emotions. The moment she tried to focus her thoughts, they shifted like clouds on a breeze, fragmenting and drifting apart, evading her attempts to achieve clarity.
Eventually, as the early morning light splintered through the gap in the curtains, Carrie had wriggled into a sitting position, with her legs crossed under the covers, and opened Savannah’s journal to scribble down the new lyrics that rose out of her turmoil. No one disturbed her the entire day, for which she was extremely grateful. Carrie’s feelings had deep roots but little bloom: they didn’t express themselves quickly or easily, even to her own consciousness. It took time to dig them up and examine them for herself before she could adequately articulate them. It was one of the few traits she had in common with her mother. Her mother’s decision to keep her distance was no doubt because she was going through the same process herself.
Carrie wasn’t sure how she and her mother would ever be able to talk to each other again as more than just two people living in the same house. How could they ever mend the tear in their relationship that had been slowly ripping open for nearly two years? She was seriously beginning to wonder how many more ways there were to lose the people you loved.
Nano returned from the kitchenette with a mug of tea and a packet of biscuits. Carrie received both with an attempt at a smile and then watched Nano walk to the metal shelving and rummage around in a box before coming back to perch on the sofa next to her.
“Here you go,” Nano said, opening his hand to offer her a couple of black discs.
Carrie looked at the buds and then at Nano as she sucked thoughtfully on the inside of her cheek. She could see from his expression that this wasn’t a temptation offered by a dealer, but a gesture of kindness from a friend.
“This is what you need,” Nano assured her. “Trust me—either of these buds will do the trick.”
Carrie took one of the buds and Nano handed her a controller. Carrie synced them up, put the bud in her ear and activated it. Nano got up from the sofa and wandered down to the far end of the basement to set up the laptop. The first notes of the first track shot to Carrie’s eardrum, sparked in her brain and flashed along her synapses; and soon, her whole body and mind were overtaken by it.
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Carrie was surprised she had fallen asleep, curled up in the corner of the sofa, the bud still in her ear. It had run through all the tracks, so she knew she had been asleep at least an hour. She shivered, despite the blanket Nano had tucked around her, and eased her feet to the floor. Outside the basement windows, the alley was cloaked in darkness and the far corners of the basement were hidden in the gloom. There was a light on in the kitchenette behind Carrie and another at the opposite end of the room, where Nano was sitting at the table with the laptop open and headphones on.
Wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, Carrie crept across the concrete floor to the far end of the basement. Nano glanced up as she leant against the table next to him. He smiled as he took off his headphones.
“What time is it?” Carrie asked.
“Nearly eight.”
“Eight?” Carrie winced. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to fall asleep. You should have woken me.”
“I wasn’t sure it was safe,” Nano smirked.
“Ha-ha.”
“You look a bit better.”
“A bit less awful? Thanks.”
“Hungry?”
“Starving,” Carrie admitted.
“Me too.” Nano got up from his chair and Carrie followed him to the kitchenette. “I’ve got noodles if you fancy that?”
“Have you got proper food to go with those? Or are these the sort you just add boiling water to in a mug?”
“Maybe you should go back to sleep.”
Carrie scoffed and Nano cast her a look as he took a pan from a rack. “There it is,” he said with a raised eyebrow. “I was wondering when you’d finally give me a smile.”
“I smile!” Carrie protested.
“Yeah, when you’re high on a bud or the undersound.”
“I smile at other times.” Carrie’s tone was less confident and her mother’s words came back to her: when you used to smile.
“Not at people,” Nano said, placing a chopping board and knife on the counter in front of Carrie. “Not with me, anyway. Your mouth moves in the right direction, but you’re not smiling. Chop that,” he instructed, placing a pepper on the board. “I don’t mind,” he added. “It means that when you do smile, you mean it.”
“Oh.” Carrie rearranged the blanket so it wouldn’t slip off her shoulders and began slicing the pepper with a thoughtful frown. She tried to think of times she had smiled and realised few of them had occurred after Savannah’s death. Joy, fun and smiling had seemed forbidden since the day Savannah died. Over time, it had become her habit to avoid them; they seemed like things too fragile to touch. And what was there to smile about anyway?
But Nano had finally caught her off-guard. Carrie glanced across at him as he set about preparing a sauce for the noodles. She didn’t know why Savannah had charged Nano, of all people, with looking out for her but she had to admit that he had recently become a reliable, and, in some way, comforting, part of her life. Even before they had begun working on Savannah’s song, visiting him on a Saturday morning under the railway bridge had been a routine she’d depended on to get her through each week after her sister’s ash-scattering. Now, here she was, cooking a late dinner in Nano’s basement as if this was something they always did together. A spark of a familiar but long-missed emotion fired inside Carrie, rushing through her veins in a way that was not unlike the high she got from a bud.
Once they’d had dinner, they left the dishes in the sink and sat down at the laptop to work on the track.
“You know you’re going to need a title for this song,” Nano said, after they’d listened through once to what they’d put together so far.
“It doesn’t feel right deciding on a title without Savannah,” Carrie replied. “Most of the lyrics are hers.”
“We’ll just call it ‘Savannah’s Song’ then.”
“Vannah,” Carrie corrected hesitantly. “It should be ‘Vannah’s Song’. That’s what we always called her—her whole life she was Vannah.” She shrugged weakly. “I don’t know why mum and I started calling her by her full name after she died. Perhaps we thought we’d forget parts of her if we didn’t—but she was always Vannah, really.”
“She definitely didn’t like ‘Sav.’” Nano said after a pause.
“That can’t have ended well.”
“She hit me pretty hard.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Nano passed Carrie their notes and pulled the laptop closer. “Let’s see if we can get this riff fixed before you head off.”
Nervous excitement squeezed Carrie’s stomach as she put her headphones on and Nano lined up the riff. It was easy, too easy, to get lost in the task. The harmonies, rhythms, and layers of sounds and effects were part of a world that Carrie was so attuned to, she found organising them effortless—feeling her way through them, almost as if she could physically see and touch the colours and tones they created.
It was only when Nano got a call from Dryce on his mobile phone that Carrie was pulled out of that world and into the real one. Nano swore when he saw the caller I.D. and the time.
“It’s gone eleven,” he groaned. “Dryce is going to kill me.”
Carrie couldn’t hear exactly what Dryce said when Nano answered the call, but she gathered from Nano’s expression that he wanted to know why Nano wasn’t at the undersound yet and when he was going to get his arse down there. Leaning casually back in his chair, Nano lied without batting an eyelid, claiming he had a fever and had fallen asleep. Carrie didn’t know if Dryce bought this bullshit or not, but the conversation ended shortly after and Nano didn’t seem as perturbed as before when he hung up the phone.
“You’re not going then?” Carrie asked.
“Not unless Dryce comes down here himself and drags me out,” Nano replied. He quirked an eyebrow. “Which he probably would if he was mad enough.”
“I’ve missed the curfew,” Carrie observed grimly. “I can’t believe the undersound is still on when the Patrol are crawling all over the streets right now. My mother is going to actually kill me when I get home.”
“Don’t go home,” Nano suggested. “It’s safer for you to stay here. You can call your mother and tell her you’re crashing at a friend’s place.” He offered her the phone.
Carrie gave him a doubtful look, even though she knew he was right. It was the sensible choice to stay put and then head to work from here in the morning. She hoped her mother wouldn’t pick up when she rang her work mobile, but she did, and it took Carrie a couple of seconds to find her voice and keep it steady. She didn’t give her mother a chance to respond when she answered the phone, just told her she wouldn’t be home and would be back tomorrow, after work. Then she hung up and handed the phone back to Nano, who tossed it on the table.
“Great!” he said brightly. “We can get this final chorus sorted out now.”
“I want to try stripping it back so it’s mainly Rox’s vocals,” Carrie said, shifting closer so she could get better access to the keyboard. She could feel a strange frisson, somewhere between anxiety and exhilaration, rising in her chest. On the one hand, her nerves were trembling with the thought that she was close to completing the song that had been living in her head for months; but on the other, she felt sick at the idea of the project coming to an end. What would she do once it was done? How would she fill the yawning, silent hole it would leave?
Somehow, she kept working through this simultaneous drive and pull, until, finally, they found themselves initiating the final render. Carrie got up from her seat and walked away from the table, clenching and unclenching her hands by her sides as she paced the concrete floor. She had no idea what the time was—the ache in her joints told her she’d been sitting at the laptop for hours, so it had to be well past midnight—but she felt strangely buzzed, as if she could go running, right now, through the dark streets for miles and miles, and never get tired.
“Okay,” Nano said, after what seemed both an age and just a few heartbeats. “Are you ready?”
Carrie stopped about half way up the length of the basement, turned and nodded. Nano turned the speakers up to full volume and queued the song to play. Carrie closed her eyes as the intro began so she could filter out everything but the music. This was the moment of truth: how close had she got to replicating the sound in her head? In trying to give the song physical, air-shaking life, had she lost its soul?
In just seconds, Carrie knew the answer and her senses were overwhelmed as the music—her music married to Savannah’s lyrics—washed over her. She opened her eyes to check Nano’s response and found him standing in front of her, a smile on his lips and a brightness in his eyes. Carrie returned his smile and Nano stepped closer. Instinctively, their hands touched, drawing them closer until their foreheads rested together. Neither of them seemed to breathe as the siren melody soared around and through them. For a moment, Carrie was aware of nothing but the music, her fingers interlocking with Nano’s, and her heart fluttering in her chest like a trapped butterfly.
If music be life, give me excess of it
Until I die.
That strain again,
Sweeter than violets, loading my senses,
Lifting me high.
Here it comes again,
That dying fall,
Stealing my senses, taking my all.
But when I die, then I’ll rise:
Rise louder than before.
Carrie wasn’t sure if it was the music heightening certain feelings, or if it was her sudden, unexpected closeness to Nano, but as the song began playing again on its repeat setting, she lifted her arms and wrapped them around Nano’s neck. Nano’s response was to gently circle his arms about her waist and pull her against him, so she could feel his heart beating in time with her own. It had been a long time since Carrie had held anyone this closely, but there was a naturalness to the embrace that surprised her. Any remaining shred of the world outside that moment—the disconnection she felt with her mother, the loss of her sister, her abandonment by her father and all the tedium, fear and anger of her everyday life slipped away. For the first time in her life, Carrie felt nothing but whole and free.
Next weekend: Chapter 18—Meg
The Dying Fall: Index
Welcome to the index page of The Dying Fall. Please scroll down to find links to each published chapter. If you need any help, let me know via the message button at the bottom of the page.
Author’s Notes:
One of my favourite chapters. This would be a nice way to leave them, wouldn’t it? 💛
Chapter 18: Meg, coming next weekend.
PJ
I love this one too