The Orphan Choir (23 page)

‘The music you were playing yesterday, when I was outside,’ I blurt out. ‘What was it?’

‘Music? Oh, you mean on the radio? I don’t remember. Why?’

‘Was it “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen? If it wasn’t, then I really am losing my mind.’ I start to weep, except it doesn’t feel as if it’s coming from me. It’s as if a flood has started inside me without warning. Normally I know a few seconds in advance when I’m about to start crying; I can get away from whoever I’m with and do it in private. I hate crying in front of people.

I try to apologise but can’t get the words out through the tears.

Bethan takes the mug from my hands and puts it down on the coffee table next to her. I pray that she won’t hug me or, even worse, pat me on the back. If she says and does nothing, and doesn’t touch me, I might be able to pull myself together. ‘I think it was,’ she says. ‘It was definitely something by Queen. Yes, I’m pretty sure it was “Don’t Stop Me Now”.’

I pull my bunched fists out of my eyes and look up at her. She’s frowning. Wanting to be certain she’s given me the right answer. I feel guilty for thinking bad thoughts about her perfume, and her bathroom habits.

‘Louise, what’s wrong?’ she says gently. ‘I don’t want to pry, and you don’t have to talk about it if
you don’t want to but … well, I’m always happy to listen. And I never judge.’

How is that possible? I judge all the time. So does everybody I know: Stuart, my family, his family, my colleagues, the choir parents, Dr Freeman, Mr Fahrenheit. Even Pat Jervis, who has no bloody right.

I wonder if ‘I never judge’ is the polite way of saying, ‘So you’d better not judge me.’ If so, I can’t imagine that it’s a particularly effective strategy. The judgemental would surely blacklist the non-judgemental ahead of any other group.

I can’t figure Bethan out. At all.

The urge to cry is gone, completely vanished. I couldn’t if I wanted to, even though my face is still wet. What I feel compelled to do instead is tell the story from the beginning. To someone who isn’t Stuart, someone who doesn’t know me very well and is capable of being objective because there’s nothing at stake for her. Someone whose reaction I can’t predict: a woman who sits too close to me on the sofa but doesn’t hug me when I burst into tears. Who appreciates the beauty of Swallowfield, but furnishes and decorates her home here like a buy-to-let inner-city landlord with no time and little imagination.

I want to know what Bethan thinks. I need to know.

I tell her everything – the whole story, even the parts of it that I might have imagined or hallucinated. I tell her about Mr Fahrenheit, Pat Jervis, Joseph being a boarder at school and how much I hate it, the choral music that I heard in my bedroom and then on the street – the music no one else heard.

And then, because I can’t allow the secret to swell inside me any longer, I tell her about the Orphan Choir. She listens without interrupting, without looking scornful. When I get to the end of the story and she’s sure I’ve finished, she hands me my mug of coffee. ‘It’ll be cold by now, but …’ She shrugs.

‘Thank you.’ I take a sip. It tastes disgusting.

‘I can make you another one if you like? A hot one.’

Then why wait to offer until I’m drinking the cold one again?

‘This is fine,’ I say.

‘My son’s very musical too,’ Bethan says. ‘Ed, he’s called. He’s nine, so a bit older than Joseph, but he’s in his school choir. He’s one of the best singers they’ve got, and I’m not just saying that because I’m his mum. It’s only a state school – we can’t afford private – but the music teacher’s brilliant. They learn all sorts – songs in Latin, Irish folk music. They’re absolutely incredible.’

It’s a relief not to have to justify, immediately, the
more implausible aspects of the story I’ve just told. A relief to hear anything that isn’t:
But you can’t have seen that. It can’t have happened. It’s just not possible
.

‘Where’s Ed now?’ I ask. ‘Hasn’t his school broken up yet?’

‘No. Tomorrow they break up.’

Why is she saying nothing about the Orphan Choir? Is she too non-judgemental to tell me that my story sounded like complete nonsense? I interrogate myself silently: did I definitely tell her? Could I have imagined telling her?

‘But … Ed doesn’t live with me, so …’ A shadow passes across Bethan’s face. ‘I won’t be seeing him, even over Christmas. He lives with his father. Rod. We’re separated.’ She blinks away tears: more discreet ones than mine – tears that will take no for an answer. ‘I know how painful it is to lose a child, Louise. Believe me. Death and abduction aren’t the only ways it can happen, though they’re the only ways people sympathise with. Ed’s getting on with his life, getting on well at school. He seems happy. I see him every fortnight, for the weekend. No one can see that I’ve lost him except me. I mean, people know he lives with Rod, but … that’s different from a tragedy, isn’t it? In most people’s eyes. It feels like a tragedy to me, though.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘Did you … Could you …’ I
don’t know how to ask without making her feel as if it’s her fault, or as if I think it might be.

‘I didn’t fight Rod for custody, no. No point.’

‘He’d win?’

‘No, I think I would. But winning would be losing.’ She shakes her head, murmurs something under her breath. ‘If I tell you, you’ll think I’m spineless.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Rod told me from the start – before we had kids, before we were engaged, even – that he’d never let any woman take his child away from him to live under another man’s roof. He wouldn’t have married me if I hadn’t agreed. I was in love – I thought it was sweet, that it was fine because we were never going to split up. Rod was so serious about being a dad, he wanted it so much, but he wouldn’t have gone into it if there was even a chance that some woman would separate him from his kids. It used to really worry him – even stopped him from having relationships for a while. Before he met me. We used to tease each other about it when things were okay between us. If Ed and I were nipping into town, Rod’d say jokily, “Taking my son away, are you? I seem to recall promising to kill any woman who did that.” And I’d say, “Don’t worry, you’ll have him back in a couple of hours – you’ll be poorer though, because we’re going into town to get him a new coat. Lucky you’ve not sworn to kill
anyone who spends too much of your hard-earned money!”’

Seeing my expression, Bethan says, ‘I know it sounds awful but it was just one of our running gags. Neither of us thought the situation’d ever arise.’ She falls silent.

‘And when it did, you let Rod keep Ed because you knew it wasn’t really a joke?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know if he’d actually go as far as killing me. I’d rather not find out. He’d do something, that’s for sure. Kill himself, maybe. I can’t risk it. Anyway …’ Bethan smiles determinedly and pats her lap with both hands: the signal for a cat to leap up into it, except there is no cat. ‘You didn’t come here to listen to me pouring my heart out with a tale of woe. We should be talking about you and what happened to you yesterday. I must say, that’s something we
don’t
have in common: I’ve never had a … an out-of-body experience like that. What do you think it means?’

‘The Orphan Choir?’ It feels so odd saying the words out loud. ‘It wasn’t an out-of-body experience exactly. I was in my body, and my mind, but they were … different. Everything was different. It’s so hard to explain. But I do know what it means – I think. No, I
know
. But it’ll sound crazy if I tell you. Crazier than what you’ve already heard.’

‘Try me,’ says Bethan. ‘Like I said, I don’t judge.’

‘Then can you start now?’ I am joking but not joking. Like Bethan’s ex, Rod. ‘I need someone to tell me if everything I’m thinking is a complete fantasy and I’m stark raving mad or if there could be any truth in it. I don’t trust myself any more.’

‘Go on.’

‘I think the Orphan Choir’s … visit was a warning. It was Joseph’s choir.’

‘You saw Joseph with them?’ Bethan asks. ‘You didn’t mention that.’

‘No, he wasn’t one of them, but the three that told me their names – they’re Saviour choirboys.’

‘But one of them was a girl, you said – Lucinda Price.’

‘Yes. Sorry.’ Why is my brain not working properly? Bethan shouldn’t know more about what happened yesterday than I do. ‘The two boys, Alfie Speake and George Fairclough – they’re choristers. Lucinda Price isn’t, obviously – no girls are allowed in Saviour’s choir. She must be one of the choirboys’ sisters. In fact, all the girls I saw must be. That’s why it’s the Orphan Choir – what else can it mean? If the choirboys are orphans, their parents must be dead. If their parents are dead, that would make their sisters orphans too.’

Jagged and silver in the night; blue-white eyes shining. Wide black mouths scream-singing.

‘So … you said you thought it was a warning?’ Bethan prompts.

‘Sometimes Saviour’s choir sings in other places apart from the college chapel. Not often, but it happens. In February they’re going to be singing at St Paul’s in London. They’re going by coach, with the choirmaster, Dr Freeman. There’s a separate coach booked to take parents and families.’ Since yesterday, my mind has been full of all the terrible things that might happen to that coach. Will it plunge off a hill road and crash into the valley below, killing everyone on impact? There are no hills between Cambridge and London, so probably not. Will it overturn on the M11 and burst into flames?

‘And you’re worried it’s going to crash and kill you all?’ Bethan asks.

‘Not me, not Stuart. We’re not going to be on that coach. I need to warn all the other parents, but how can I? They won’t believe me. You don’t believe me, do you? I won’t blame you at all if you don’t. I’d rather be wrong. I’d rather be mad! At least if I’m the crazy one then the rest of the world still makes sense!’

‘The girls, though,’ Bethan says, frowning. ‘That’s where your theory falls down.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if they’re sisters of choirboys, they’d be on the second coach too, wouldn’t they? The parents’
and families’ coach, the one laid on to transport the audience. Not the one that’s taking the choirboys. So –’

‘They wouldn’t be alive and orphaned. They’d be dead along with the parents.’ I finish Bethan’s sentence for her. ‘Yes, I thought about that. But … maybe not everyone on the second coach died? Or some of the choirboys’ sisters might have been left at home with a sitter, a grandparent – maybe those girls are the ones I saw and heard in the Orphan Choir.’

‘“Dies”, you mean. Not “died”. None of these parents and sisters are dead yet, are they?’

I appreciate Bethan’s matter-of-fact approach. She’s the one making it possible for us to continue this conversation, not me.

‘Should I warn them?’ I ask. ‘We’re going to Cambridge this Friday for a Choral Evensong. I’ll see all the choir parents there.’

Bethan rubs the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right as she thinks about it. ‘I don’t think you need to warn anybody,’ she says eventually. ‘Why wouldn’t the Orphan Choir warn the other parents, if they warned you? To be honest …’ She stops. ‘Do you want to know what I really think?’

I nod. A grey stone of dread has started to form at the base of my throat. I need to be right about
this. I know I can avoid that coach trip; I need it to be that and nothing else that I have to avoid.

In case I can’t.

‘I think it was a warning, like you say, but nothing to do with a coach trip,’ says Bethan. ‘I honestly don’t think all the choir families are going to die on the way to St Paul’s Cathedral. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything supernatural like that – do you?’

‘No. Nor premonitions, not usually, but … I can’t deny what happened to me yesterday. It definitely happened.’

‘Yes. It happened in here’ – she taps the side of her head with her finger – ‘because you desperately want your son back. You want and need to get him out of Saviour College School – you’ve been miserable since he started there.
That’s
the warning. You’re missing Joe so much, you’re seeing orphaned choirboys who’ve been tragically separated from their parents. You don’t like this Dr Freeman, or trust him further than you can throw him … The mind’s a powerful machine, Louise. It can do an awful lot to us that we don’t understand.’

‘I know that.’

She’s wrong. The Orphan Choir means more than she thinks it does. It didn’t come from inside my head.

She’s wrong because of the girls.

Why would my mind produce girls, when the choir from which I am desperate to extricate my son is a boys-only choir?

‘Your subconscious is panicking, Louise – that’s what’s going on. Here at Swallowfield you’ve got Joe with you and you’re happy, but this holiday period can’t last for ever. Subconsciously, you know that the start of term’s going to be even more painful because you’ve had Joe back for a bit – and soon you’ll have to say goodbye to him again.’ Bethan shrugs. ‘Or else it’s this Dr Freeman – maybe you don’t like him for a different reason from the one you assume. He might not be fit to look after children – he might be a monster.’

No. Ivan Freeman isn’t a monster; he is someone whose wishes and self-interest clash with mine, that’s all. That’s enough.

‘Maybe on a gut-instinct level, you’ve worked out that you need to get Joe away from Dr Freeman double quick.’

My son’s name is Joseph. Not Joe.

‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I definitely believe dodgy people can give off danger vibes that can make alarm bells ring,’ Bethan says. ‘And so can situations. I don’t know if it’s separation from Joe you’re afraid of or Dr Freeman, but whichever it is, you should heed the warning your brain’s trying to give you – all the warnings you’ve had since Joe started school – and
move him to a different school, a day school. Get him back for good and I promise you, you won’t be seeing any more choirs of orphans hovering above lakes.’

Wrong. I will see and hear them again. Until I understand.

I intend to get Joseph back for good, of course, but she’s wrong about the rest. I would say so, but I can no longer motivate myself to tell her what I’m thinking.