The Unexpected Life of Carnegie Lane (4 page)

Is there any just cause for feeling like this?

On the surface I'm a name on a list

“
I just died in your arms tonight”

Written by Nick Van Eede

Recorded and released by Cutting crew in 1986 – Broadcast Album

It
had been a long night for Nate Bowman. Great sell out concert, heady after party and lots of camera flashes in between. Now it was 8.30am and he had until late that afternoon to sit comfortably at Katalies flat and get himself back together before they flew out to another destination, to a new crowd, a new bed and a thousand fans all wanting a piece of him. As much as he loved it, there were times when he wished every photo snapped of him didn’t result in the accusation of a new girlfriend, or the possibility of an affair if he already had one. He wanted to walk down the street and into a store unnoticed. He wanted to have one day just to himself.

The rest of the band were staying at a hotel in downtown London. That was where the cameras were waiting for him. He lay on his sisters lounge just enjoying the peace without someone screaming his name from the street below. His sister had been called into work for a meeting, she would be home by noon. They planned to attempt lunch at a local café she had recommended since breakfast had been removed as an option. As she ran out the door, she mentioned the new submissions and told him he was welcome to have a look if he liked. All she asked was not to mix them up. They might not be titled well enough on every page to put them back together successfully until she got a good look at them herself.

He made himself a coffee, then went and looked at the mountain of large A4 mail that sat on her table. He could almost hear them screaming... “Pick me!!! Pick me!!!”

Wow
…he thought to himself as he touched them. Which one he picked up, opened and began to read would be a lucky dip. He didn’t know what they were about. He didn’t even have a cover to look at, just the hand writing on the address labels that may or may not have belonged to the one who wrote it anyway. As if selecting a tarot card, he ran his hand over them all, playing an internal game of ‘
eany meany miney mo
’. Finally his hand wrested on a package. He picked it up, and with coffee in hand he took it back to the lounge to open it.

He looked at the return address, it read:

Carnegie Lane

27 Willow Street

BUNDABERG QLD 4670

AUSTRALIA

He opened the envelope carefully, and pulled out the contents. It began with a bio that he read quickly, really holding no interest as to who Carnegie Lane was at that particular point in time. He looked at the photo of her that was attached and decided that she was an average, dark haired forty two year old who looked tired. He nodded in agreement when part of her bio pointed out that she thought The Cure was the best band in the world, in fact as he kept reading he noted that she had titled her story ‘
Impossible things
’ as a tribute to the band.

Putting down all the peripheral information, he picked up the manuscript itself and began at page one. By the time he made it to page forty, he was absolutely and irrevocably hooked. Words became pages and pages became chapters. As if he was in a frenzy and recognizing he had no time to waste, he read entranced by every word as if they were air. Within the pages of the book was something relatable to him. He read words that he himself could have put together and found new lyrics behind a sentence that he understood. The entire book rolled in front of his eyes as if it was a movie. To Nate, the story was more than just a work of fiction. It was strangely a story about him, a girl, and an impossible heart wrenching connection that was fated at every turn.

When Katalie turned up at lunch time, Nate gave her a wave but his eyes never left the page.

“Having fun are you?” Katalie enquired as she put her coat on the hook and walked into the kitchen to get a drink. She noted the pages spread out all over the lounge and hoped it was recoverable.

“This book is great… hang on I’ll just get to the end of this chapter, then I’ll stop.”

“Good hey. How many did you look at?”

“Just this one, hang on a sec Kat, getting to a good part.”

Kat rolled her eyes. It was hard for her to think that her brother might have magically picked up the best story in the pile. There had only ever been a limited number of manuscripts that had held her interest from start to finish. In saying that, mostly, it was because she had a million to get through. Some she recognized had a great story. They just needed editing and some love and attention to really make them shiny. There were a lot of books she had chosen that made up her collection in the spare room. She always read them with a feeling of satisfaction.

Katalie made a coffee and put on the television, she watched the news and laughed as a report about her brother being interviewed before going on stage came on, backed by his latest hit. She looked to see if he was watching with her, he wasn’t. He was still totally involved in the story he was reading.

“You can’t take it with you when you leave you know that don’t you?” Kat was looking at her brother, wondering how attached he really was to that story. The reality was, by the time they did lunch and he regrouped with his band, there wouldn’t be much time in between to keep reading.

“Can I photo copy it?” He asked innocently, still not looking up from the pages as he did so.

“No of course you can’t.” She replied. Then she got up, showing him that it was time to make a move.

“Ok, just let me read to the end of this page then.” Nate Bowman, now realizing that his time was very limited had
no intention
of moving from that lounge until he had devoured every word that Carnegie Lane had taken the time to put on paper. He was two hundred pages down when Katalie got home, he had three hundred and twenty to go. Even though it sounded like a huge amount of pages, it was luckily in double spacing. An hour later, she got up, grabbed her coat and mumbled something about take away. Nate didn’t really hear her, he just mumbled back to be polite.

By 5 o’clock that afternoon, Nate had turned off his blackberry phone and his sister was getting the calls asking where he was, and if he was planning on surfacing any time soon. By 7 o’clock that night, he had fifteen pages to go, and Kat had soothed the screaming crew by promising to get him to the airport in the next forty minutes.

“Just take the last pages with you, we have to go Nate, there’s going to be a swat team breaking my door down any minute if I don’t confirm that we are on the road.”

“Ok… ok!” He replied and jumped up off the lounge. He gathered the entire package together, shoving what he could back into the envelope. He held onto the last fifteen pages of that story for grim death as he followed his sister down to the underground car park. Once on the road, he continued reading as Kat called everyone to let them know they were on their way. At one stage, she turned on the radio. He reached over, without looking up and turned it off. The music was wrong for the story. He just needed to read the ending with nothing but his own choice of sound setting a background tone.

Five minutes out from their destination he read the final word. He was overwhelmed with emotion. It had been a long time since he had read a book and loved it, and he had never read one that resonated with him quite the same as this one had.

“That was fantastic…I’m finished…wow.” He said to no one in particular. He was muttering to himself.

“Thank god for that.” Kat replied genuinely under her breath, as they waited at the lights just before the turn into the International Flight Departure area of Heathrow Airport. Nate put the pages on his lap and then started rumbling through the envelope looking quickly for the bio page of Carnegie Lane. He pulled out the photo and had another look. This time, she didn’t look like an average forty two year old woman with tired eyes. She looked beautiful. He turned his Blackberry back on and waited for it to boot up.

A myriad of ding dongs greeted him as his frantic missed messages began piling in. He opened the address book, copied the address, phone number and email details of Carnegie Lane into it. Then he put everything back into the envelope as neatly as he could and placed it on the back seat of his sisters’ car. He didn’t know why he so desperately needed to know where to get hold of her, or even if he ever would. All he knew was, right now, he needed to know that he could find her. Somehow, she had begun to matter.

They pulled into the departure drop off zone and Kat started unloading her brother as best she could surrounded by screaming girls who were amazed that he was there, arriving through the front door. Security guards realizing what was happening moved in to allow a path through the crowd and the flashes from the cameras began.

Nate gave his sister a hug and apologized for not really spending that much time with her. He thanked her for the opportunity to read the story. He told her somehow it had just changed his life. Katalie rolled her eyes and hugged him back. She figured that he needed space from his world, and if reading a possibly poorly written manuscript would do it for him, then so be it.

The folder that now contained the mixed up pages of Carnegie Lanes’ book slipped from the seat in the back of Katalie Bowman’s car and fell to the ground, disguised by a million things that had managed to become permanent travelers. Katalie almost had a wardrobe in the back and amongst it were papers, books, folders and the occasional fast food coffee cup. By the time Katalie made it home, she forgot all about that manuscript as she wearily made her way up to her flat and crawled into her bed. It had been a very… long …day.

The following night, to a crowd of hundreds, Nate Bowman and his band Sheeva’s Disciples played enthusiastically. He held the microphone out for the crowd to sing the chorus of his latest hit. He had forgotten for a moment the words and the story that had haunted him the night before and long into the following day. That was until he made it to the final verse in his new song. The very same song he had sung in his head as he read the final words of Carnegie’s manuscript.

“
Be still my heart, I’ll find another love for you”

As the crowd roared, his band went off stage to have a quick break and wipe the sweat from their eyes while Nate picked up an acoustic guitar and began playing with his fans. He sang acoustic bits out of previous hits he knew they wanted to hear. He sang choruses of covers to songs that he loved. It was then he decided to sing another song, one he himself had loved, yet never attempted on stage. He walked over and grabbed a stool that was in the wings and headed back to the microphone in the middle of the stage. He sat down and began to speak.

“This is a song, for a girl I haven’t met yet. It’s her favorite song, by her favorite band, The Cure… It’s called… ‘
To wish Impossible Things
’. ”

The crowd went wild and some even sang along, overjoyed they knew the words. Others just wished they had heard of it and were determined to go home and look it up on YouTube. Never the less, there wasn’t a lighter that remained unlit or a mobile phone not held up above heads in the entire venue at that point in time.

On the other side of the world, in the middle of the day, Carnegie was performing a routine concert of her own as she dusted and cleaned her humble little home. At the exact same time, if time was exact, and holding a can of furniture cleaner in her hand as a makeshift microphone, she engaged her ornamental audience with her eyes. She sang the verse that had for all time meant the most to her. It became a harmony of sound between two voices that no one would ever know had happened, except for the angel of fate that had allowed it in the first place.

“
It was the sweetness of her skin, it was the hope of all we might have been, that filled me with the hope to wish, impossible things….to wish impossible things….to wish impossible things.”

Nate Bowman finished the song to a roar of applause, just as she did in her head. She took a bow and thanked the books and statues for being such a great audience. The drums began to beat out a solo just as Nate’s band hooked into the second last song of the night. He gave his acoustic guitar to a roadie and someone removed the chair. Her washing machine rang out a series of chimes reminding her to go hang the clothes on the line. From that moment on, everything he sang reminded him of the girl he had never met and the story that had changed his life.

Carnegie Lane, single mother of four, idol to inanimate objects, and almost Author, had suddenly and unexpectedly, acquired her very…first…fan.