The Orphan Choir (2 page)

Unscientifically, it is the putrid essence of Justin Clay, encapsulated in music. His soul made pop.

Finally, Queen’s rant-with-a-tune ends. This is my chance. I know from experience that one song never follows swiftly on from another on these evenings. Efficient DJ’ing is not one of Mr Fahrenheit’s strengths. I used to think that the long gaps between musical assaults were his sadistic attempt to lull me into a false sense of security in order to blast me again just as I’m nodding off, but that was unfair of me. I underestimated how long it takes to transfer the various ingredients of an
unrolled spliff from a lap to a coffee table without mislaying any of them, especially while stoned, and then shuffle over to the stereo and make a decision about what to play next.

Now that the music’s stopped, I can hear muffled voices, though I can’t make out what they’re saying over the drumming of the rain. Carefully, I make my way down the stone staircase backwards so that I can hold on to the steps above me as I go. Once at the bottom, I turn and find Angie, the girlfriend, looking at me through the window, which, tonight, is a water feature. ‘Jub, the lady from next door’s here again,’ she says after a few seconds of mute staring, as if shock has delayed her reaction. She’s wearing a short green-and-white dress – fabric inspired by a lava lamp, by the look of it – with a longer beige knitted cardigan over it. Bare feet.

‘Oh, you are giving me the
joke
!’ Mr Fahrenheit cries out. I resist the temptation to ask him if that expression is popular in the playground at the moment. He’s bent over his music system, his back to the window. At this proximity, I can hear him easily thanks to the single glazing. He’s in no hurry to turn round and engage with me.

Neither he nor Angie seems to have grasped basic cause and effect. They know that I object to their playing of loud music late at night because I’ve told
them so unequivocally, yet they seem surprised when they do it and I turn up at their house to complain. It’s clear every time that they have not anticipated my arrival. Afterwards, I can’t help pointlessly reciting to Stuart the conversation they must regularly fail to have:

You know, if she can’t sleep because of our music, she’ll need to find something else to do to fill up her night. What if that something else is coming round here and giving us a hard time?

Oh, yeah. I see your point. I’d say that’s pretty likely to happen, since it’s what always happens. If we don’t like her coming round and moaning, maybe we shouldn’t prevent her from sleeping.

Mr Fahrenheit walks over, opens the window, stands well back from the rain. ‘Hello, Louise,’ he says, his voice as sullen and weary as his face. ‘Come to give me a bollocking?’

I try not to feel hurt, and fail. Was I secretly hoping he’d say, ‘Come and join us, grab yourself a drink?’ I think I might have been, stupid and naive though it undoubtedly is. I’ve often thought that if I can’t sleep and there happens to be a party going on next door, I could do worse than join in and try to have some fun. I’d have to decline, of course, even if Mr Fahrenheit were to invite me.

I wonder if he knows that I would gladly stop hating him and be ready, even, to like him a bit if he would only show me a tiny bit of consideration.

‘I find my midnight visits as inconvenient as you do, Justin,’ I tell him. ‘Especially when it’s cold and the rain’s bucketing down. Are you finished playing music now? It’s nearly midnight.’

‘No, I’m not
finished
playing music.’ He sways backwards.

‘Tell her to fuck off,’ his walking-boot friend calls out, waving at me from his cross-legged position on the floor next to a free-standing lamp that’s as tall as he is, seated, and has what looks like a red tablecloth draped over it. He and the lamp are two islands in a sea of empty wine bottles on their sides. The room looks as if a couple of dozen games of Spin the Bottle have been abandoned in a hurry.

I say to Justin, ‘In that case, can you please keep the volume low from now on, so that it doesn’t travel through the wall to my house?’

The fat woman with the red glasses appears at Mr Fahrenheit’s side. ‘Be reasonable, love,’ she says. ‘It’s not midnight yet. Midnight’s the cut-off point, isn’t it? It is where I live. You’ve got to admit, you sometimes try to shut us down as early as quarter to eleven.’

‘And Justin often plays his music until at least one-thirty,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you encourage
him
to be reasonable? If I’ve come round before eleven it’s because that’s when I’ve wanted to go to sleep.’

‘God’s sake, Louise, it’s fuckin’ Saturday night,’ Mr Fahrenheit protests.

‘I sometimes go to bed early on Saturdays, and stay up late on Tuesdays,’ I tell him. ‘What if I was an airline pilot, and had to get up at four in the morning to—’ I bring my sentence to an emergency stop, not wanting to give Mr Fahrenheit the chance to tell me I’m not an airline pilot and imagine he’s proved me wrong. ‘Look, all I want is to be able to go to bed when I want and sleep uninterrupted by your noise.
Please
, Justin.’ I put on my best friendly, hopeful smile.

He raises his hands and backs away from me, as if I’ve got a gun pointed at him: one he knows isn’t loaded. ‘Louise … I’d like you to
fuck
off back home now, if you wouldn’t mind. You’ve spoiled my evening again, like you’ve spoiled I don’t know how many evenings – well done. Nice one. I’m not wasting any more of my time arguing with you, so … go home, or argue with yourself, whichever you’d prefer.’

‘Chill out, next-door neighbaaah!’ the man with the floppy fringe yells at me from the far side of the room. He’s sitting at the big dining table that’s dotted with torn Rizla packets and wine stains. The table stands directly beneath the elaborate glass chandelier, pushed up against the room’s only wallpapered wall. The paper is pale blue with gold violin-shaped swirls
all over it. It’s beautiful, actually, and was probably expensive, but brings on eye-ache if you look at it for too long. Mr Fahrenheit cares a lot about interior design. He cares equally about getting drunk and high, and not at all about tidying up. His house is an odd mixture of two distinct styles: camera-ready aspirational and documentary-reminiscent den of vice – ashtrays kicked over on expensive sisal flooring, takeaway cartons sitting in front of designer chairs as if they’re matching footstools.

Floppy Fringe Man shares Mr Fahrenheit’s dress sense: checked shirt over a white T-shirt, faded jeans. The only difference is in their choice of shoe: Mr Fahrenheit favours a hybrid trainer-clog and Floppy Fringe wears a range of cowboy boots. I spot his rucksack, leaning against tonight’s pair. The drugsack, I call it.

‘Liking the raincoat,’ the frizzy-haired dance teacher says loudly to the room, not looking at me. ‘Hood up, drawstrings pulled tight – stylish.’ The rest of them laugh.

This is the first time Mr Fahrenheit has sworn at me, the first time his friends have weighed in on his side. I wait for the feelings of humiliation to subside, and tell myself that it doesn’t matter what some rude strangers think about my raincoat. I hope I don’t cry. When I feel calm enough to speak, I say, ‘You can
ignore me tonight, Justin, but my problem with your behaviour isn’t going to go away. If you won’t listen to me, I’ll have to find someone who will. Like the police, maybe.’

‘Good luck, mate,’ says Angie, stressing the last word sarcastically. ‘And … dream on. No one’s going to stop us listening to a few songs in our own house on a Saturday night.’

‘Whose house?’ Justin teases her. She pretends to laugh along but I don’t think she enjoys the joke as much as he does.

‘Louise!’ He points at me, arm raised. More of a salute, really. ‘I promise you, one day you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of the killjoy shit you’re so keen on giving out. Yeah! Wherever you’re living when your boy’s a teenager, unless it’s somewhere out in the sticks with no neighbours, some twat’s going to bang on your windows when your lad and his pals are letting their hair down and you’re going to think, “What a fucking twat, they’re just having a laugh.” You know what, Louise? You’re that twat, right here and now.’ He nods as if he’s said something profound. ‘Oh, wait, sorry – I forgot, your son’s already left home, hasn’t he? You’ve sent him away – isn’t that right? How old is he, again? Seven? Bet your house is nice and quiet without him. That why you did it? All this choir shit just an excuse, is it? What, did he
turn up the theme tune of fuckin’ …
Balamory
a bit too loud one day?’

I am a solid block of shock. I cannot believe my neighbour would say that to me. That he would think it, even when angry. He couldn’t have said it if he hadn’t first thought it.

He did. Both. Said and thought.

I can’t find anything to say in response. It would serve Justin right if I were still standing here this time tomorrow, glued to the ground by his cruel words.

‘Leave it, Jub,’ Angie warns. She sounds anxious. I wonder if I look alarming: as if I’m considering climbing in through the window – a dripping, hooded black figure – and choking the life out of him. What an appealing idea.

‘She sent her seven-year-old son away?’ the dance teacher asks. ‘What the
fuck
?’

‘Would you rather I played
classical
music?’ Mr Fahrenheit taunts me. ‘Would you still be such a fuckin’ killjoy if I played, I don’t know … Mozart?’

I wonder why he’s imitating Hitler, with his finger in a line over his upper lip. Then I realise it’s not a moustache; he’s pushing his nose up to indicate snobbery.

‘Mozart?’ Walking Boots laughs. ‘Like you’ve got any.’

‘I have, as it goes,’ Mr Fahrenheit tells him. ‘You’ve
got to have your classical music. Isn’t that right, Louise?’ To his friends, he says, ‘Wanna hear some, you lowbrow wasters?’

No one does. They groan, swear, laugh.

‘Looks like it’s just you and me, Louise – the cultured ones. Culture vultures.’ He leans closer to the rain barrier between us to wink at me.

I can’t be here any more. As quickly as I can without slipping, I climb the steps to the street and hurry home, to the riotous applause of Mr Fahrenheit and his friends.

‘Stuart. Stuart!’ Words alone aren’t going to do it. I push his shoulder with the tips of my fingers.

He opens his eyes and stares at me, flat on his back. ‘What?’

‘Can you hear that? Listen.’

‘Louise. It had better be the morning.’

I disagree. Until I have had at least six hours’ sleep, it had better not be. I can sleep in later now that I don’t have to get Joseph ready for school, which is why I never do. Every morning I switch on at 6.30, exactly the time I used to have to get up; it’s my body’s daily protest against the absence of my son.

‘Sorry. Middle of the night,’ I say. I cannot allow myself to define the present moment as morning, even though technically it is. I haven’t had my night yet. This is the Noisy Neighbour Paradox: does one say, ‘But it’s three in the morning!’ to impress upon the selfish oaf next door that it’s very, very late? ‘Four in the morning’, ‘five in the morning’? At what point does it start to sound as if, actually, busy people are already singing in the shower, pushing the ‘on’ buttons on their espresso machines, preparing to jog to the office?

Stuart reaches up with both hands for the two sides of his pillow, left and right of his head, and tries to fold them over his face as if he’s packing himself carefully for delivery somewhere. ‘Middle of the night,’ he says. ‘Then I should still be asleep.’

‘Can you hear the music?’

‘Yes, but it’s not going to stop me from sleeping. I’ve got a wife for that.’

‘It’s Verdi. Before that we had Bizet, a bit of Puccini.’

The security light on the St John’s College flats at the back of us comes on, shines in my face. A car must have driven too close to the building. I lean forward and drag our single bedroom curtain to the right. The curtain is too narrow; we have to choose which side of the window we want to leave
exposed: the security light side or the students’ bedroom windows side.

‘Mr F must have got a “Best of the Classics” CD free with his Saturday paper,’ Stuart says, closing his eyes again.

‘It’s aimed at me,’ I tell him. ‘A melodic “fuck you”. He’s bored of attacking me with his music, so now he’s doing it with what he thinks of as mine.’

‘Isn’t that a bit paranoid?’

I could admit that I’ve been next door, had yet another argument with Mr Fahrenheit, that the subject of classical music came up. That’s the context Stuart’s missing. If I told him, he would concede that I’m right about the malice in this latest noise-attack, but he would also criticise me – critisult me, Joseph would say; his invented word that he’s so proud of, a hybrid of criticise and insult – for going round on my own: a defenceless woman without my husband to protect me. And then I might critisult him back, because I’m exhausted and frustrated and would find it hard to be tactful. I might raise my voice and point out that whenever I suggest we visit Mr Fahrenheit together to lodge our complaint, or that Stuart goes instead of me for a change, he always responds in the same way: ‘Come on, Lou, let’s not steam in there. Look, we don’t want a scene if we can avoid one, do we? He might call it a night soon.’