March 17. Today I'm cleaning at Claire's house, one of those arrangements that is transactional and intimate.
I think we'd be friends if she wasn't paying me. Maybe one day, I'll stop cleaning and we can actually try. Does it work like that? Lucia Berlin wrote a short story, probably based on experience (she was dismissive of enquiries about the 'truth' in her writing) called "A manual for cleaning women". It's funny and true.
(Cleaning women: As a rule, never work for friends. Sooner or later they resent you because you know so much about them. Or else you’ll no longer like them, because you do.)
"I'll put the radio on for you," Claire says. "Magic ok?" she asks a bit nervously.
"That's fine," I say, "I can do Magic". It wouldn't be my first choice but I can't imagine what would. I haven't listened to a radio station in years.
She leaves, family tasks to attend to. Her absence is successfully obscured by chirpy male and female DJs, doing a sort of teasing couple bit.
A prerecorded voice announces "hits from the 80s till now," which strikes me as an absurdly elastic category, spanning nearly half a century, as if it were a unified cultural moment. The voice brags about not repeating songs for "the whole workday".
What unsettles me in the continuing broadcast is the realisation that I know every song. I've been there for every song. I'm someone in every song.
The Backstreet Boys emerge from the speaker - their harmonies engineered for maximum teenage yearning -and I'm thinking of Jalin, a fighter I knew who used them for his walkout song, which paired with his professional brutality - earned him the adoration of the crowd. I realise I have been gone from that life for over three years. Do I still have claim to those people, and that version of me? I leave him a voice message, compelled to find out.
Natalie Imbruglia sings "Torn," and I remember the video, her iconic, baggy, low slung combat pants. That cool side fringe. She must still eat out on this song. There is probably someone listening to it every minute of every day, somewhere.
Savage Garden follows - they were never good.
Wham's "Freedom" plays, thin, tinny in a way I've never noticed before. I'm transported to an optimistic, wide eyed pre-teen, fantasising about having a boyfriend, and whether George Michael would really fall in love with me should we be thrown together in unusual circumstances (turns out probably not). I can't help but smile, and I feel an urge to whirl around a bit with my cleaning rags.
I don't listen to music anymore. This is something I don't tell people because they look at me as if I might be unwell, or unclean. Music makes me uncomfortable in a way that's difficult to articulate. I'm unwilling to revisit songs from my past, as if there is no value there. None of the new songs impact me, as if I lack the ability to be moved by music.
Yet here, trapped in the commercial cathedral of Magic FM, I'm experiencing something like involuntary integration. With each familiar chorus, disparate fragments of my history collide and briefly cohere. Puzzle pieces that don't quite fit but suggest a larger picture. The pre-teen finding their own music, the teenager so excited about going out, the first broken heart, the second... the breaker of hearts.
Is this why people subject themselves to the randomness of radio? Is this the function of music itself - to bring our scattered pieces together? The thought occurs to me while spraying glass cleaner on Claire's bathroom mirror, watching myself disappear behind circular motions of the microfibre cloth.
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