There’s a girl in my class with vinyl palms, whose hands look as though they have been pressed into a melting record. So what? she shrugs, but she does it with a smile because her gloves are full of music. After lunch, we sweep the classroom, and the scritch scritch of my brush-in-hand is interference to her palm psalm. In sewing, I trace a needle over the grooves in my hand and the feedback is a spluttering stutter and my skin bleeds, leaking flat rhythms onto my skirt.
Why was I born without hands of music? I ask my parents, but my mother’s hands are pressed together in prayer, while my father’s roam the expanse of the babysitter, who does not have grooves but wild-mint skin that only releases scent when rubbed.
I listen to the girl with the vinyl palm with my eyes and my ears and my bones, searching for a clue that she once had pink whorls instead of polished black spirals. She gives a class presentation about flamenco, and even the teacher is enraptured by the songs that fall from her hands. She gets an A and the rest of us lose hope. They’ve always been this way, she tells the new girl who asks the thing we’ve always wondered but never asked. I press my hands together tight between my knees, a fallen prayer that I might one day wake up to jet grooves and circles on my hands.
On a stumbling Autumn walk home, I’m thinking about how everyone pays attention to the girl with the palms of vinyl and I’m passing the acrid burn of roadworks and before I can stop to question it, I’ve plunged my two hands into a spitting barrel of tar. Before the burn has reached my pain receptors, I recall that tar is coal and bitumen and asphalt, not a riot of chords and melodies.
The nurses suck their teeth while my parents fill disinfected air with moth-bitten reprimands and sighs. Maybe if you spent less time praying…Perhaps if you spent more time at home…A heavy metal duet while I stare at the fat bandages muffling the songs that want to be there. They don’t ask me why I wanted hot-tar hands.
Why’d you put your hands in tar? asks the girl with the vinyl palms when I get back to school. I don’t answer, but reach into my bag for the pain meds. The skin on my hands is red, puckered like a deflated old balloon and tight when I try to bend it. She taps my hand and the pill rolls under the desk, hitting the table leg with a hopeful clink. Hey, I say, but I only half mean it. She says where do you think the music comes from? Her head is tipped to the side. I tip mine to match because she’s making me feel dizzy. From your hands? I ask. She laughs and it twitters like a chime. From the pain, she says. Then she leans close so I can smell apple on her breath. Feel it, she says.
For the rest of the day, I watch arias shoot from her fingers, hear a tripping percussion when she claps. Her music doesn’t come from pain, I think. Her music is an exhilarating, uplifting thing. I examine the ruptured expanse of my hands and wonder where the grooves have gone that once formed my handprint: my signature now erased.
What did you mean? I ask after recess. About the pain. She reaches for my hand and examines the pucks and troughs and stinking red valleys left behind. She says, people say they can read palms, but they’re all phoneys. They can only read the music. You’ve got to play the tune. She passes her hand across mine, and despite the patches of dead where I will never feel again, there’s a fizz there, a static energy hovering there between us.
At church, a mournful Jesus gazes at the holes through his palms while my mother spits out prayers on clipped fricatives. I compare the saviour’s hands to mine, and they’re equally mangled and disgusting, and there can’t be a person more sung about than Jesus, so perhaps the girl has a point. I rub mine across my cold bare knees and I think there’s a hum.
Later, I tune out the martellato battle downstairs, slip my broken flesh under my pyjama top and run my hands across my belly. There’s something there. Faint, but sweet. Trying not to ruffle the blankets, I let my palm drift in a determined circle around my navel. There! A soft, melting etude, sweet, plain. I pause and it stops. The grace note of the front door slamming brings quiet downstairs, and I go back to my skin song. Under the tattered topography of my hands, I play in glissando, elegantly sliding across the notes of my belly and everything in there. I wriggle out of my bedclothes to broaden the scale and I sweep and slide, proud notes, building, dancing, singing, filling the air with sound. This song is a furious, guerriero anthem, and I stop caring whether whoever didn’t slam the door can hear me. Let them.
Dreams that night are wild and loud, though I wake with a clean stave. I did it! I will tell the girl with the vinyl palms. I became music.
But the girl with the vinyl palms is not there. Gone, they say. Off to be a carnival or an orchestra or a movie soundtrack.
I can be your friend, says the new girl who asked about the palms, and she holds out her hands. When I take them in my own, she doesn’t flinch, but listens, and I play her my palm song, fortissimo and strong. Wow, she says. She smiles, starts to sway, and in the middle of the school playground we dance.
