Music of the Night

Dorothy lay in her bed, the heat of midsummer pouring down her body in little globules of perspiration. The window was open, despite the police warnings of a prowler gaining access to houses in the area through screened windows.

She listened to the sounds of the night. The reggae music poured into the darkness and mixed with the sounds of laughter and bottle clinking. Smells of late night cooking rose from hibachis and seeped through her screened protection.

The Saturday summer gatherings were regular rituals in the back lane and Dorothy hated them. She knew that the morning would reveal unpleasant sights of litter, broken beer bottles and the mark of men on the garage doors; the smell would be rife in the hot humidity.

Even though she dreaded these nights, she felt sorry for these immigrants who were taken advantage of by landlords getting rich off their desperation. Dorothy understood their need to escape from the dark and airless rooms in which their poverty forced them to live; their need to go into the night air, to sit on fire escapes and in unwalled concrete yards.

They were full of hope when they came to Canada, and an infusion of the music of their homeland was a renewal of optimism to them like an infusion of blood would replenish the white blood cells of a leukemia victim.

But this music was not the sound of Dorothy’s culture and she found its loud, intense rhythm frightening. It invaded her space and made the police warnings become a personal threat to her. She could not sleep. The insistent beat, the primal sound, the pounding, threatening voices of reggae, made her afraid. It would obscure any sounds of break and enter, as it overshadowed the quiet music coming from her radio, the music she played in an attempt to lull herself to sleep.

Mark, I miss your reassuring presence in the darkness, the presence that gave me strength in times of fear. I am afraid and alone. My heart beat fuses with the drums so that I cannot tell which is my fear and which the vibration of the music.

The night sounds faded toward morning. Dorothy drifted into sleep to the reassurance of love songs sung by Neil Diamond and Johnny Mathis, Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand. In her dreams Mark held her close and calmed her fears; they danced till dawn. She awoke, chilled by the evaporation of her body’s perspiration, and reached for Mark to warm her. But he had disappeared with her dreams and vanished into the silence of the lane.

Dorothy rose from her bed and began another day of putting her life in order. She turned the radio up in an attempt to let its music and talk drown out her thoughts and heart beat. She had to stop grieving soon and listen for a new beat, a new song, a new voice. Perhaps today she would take her daughter’s advice and look for an apartment and open her heart to a fresh start. The music of the night had forced her into an awareness of a life grown stale. She made up her mind. She must begin again and this time she would, as the old song said, begin the beguine.

 © Judith Lawrence