The Orphan Choir (4 page)

‘Can you describe to me the nature of the problem?’ says Chibnall.

‘Every second or third Saturday night, he plays loud music that stops me from getting to sleep. I can feel the bass-line pounding in my house.’

‘Approximately from what time until what time, or does it vary?’

‘Not really. They always go to the pub for a few drinks first, so it tends to start at about ten. And finishes between one and one-thirty. Hello?’ I say, when Chibnall doesn’t respond.

‘It’s later than one-thirty now,’ he says.

‘Yes. This is the latest he’s ever gone on, and it’s his way of saying “Screw you”. I went round about two hours ago and asked him to turn it down. This is my punishment. But even when he’s not punishing me, the music is always this loud or louder and it usually has lyrics, and Mr … Clay and his friends all yell along to them.’
Drunkenly
. I don’t say that, in case I sound prudish. Which I’m not. I have friends who drink far too much and who wouldn’t dream of depriving their neighbours of sleep or peace of mind. It’s possible to be a considerate alcoholic. ‘I mean, that’s not okay for him to do that to me, is it? Can you … I mean, is there something you can do to stop him? He must be breaking a law – disturbance of the peace, antisocial behaviour –’

‘Someone would need to come out to you to assess the situation before offering an opinion.’

‘Right.’ My rage pulls itself tight inside me. ‘So … could that person be you, tonight?’ I try to disguise my sarcasm as harmless banter, and end up sounding like a grotesque parody of a Hollywood romantic comedy. I grimace at myself in the mirror
above the fireplace. My skin looks faded. I have too little colour, while everything else in my lounge has too much: the purple flowers on the curtains seem to throb against the mint green background; the white wall behind me looks almost yellow. It’s the light: up too high, parodying daytime. It should have been switched off hours ago. I would turn it down, but I’m too far from the dimmer switch, and there’s something grimly satisfying about this ghastly vision of my haggard self: this is what Mr Fahrenheit has done to me.

‘If I can fit you in before handover, I’ll attend myself,’ Trevor Chibnall says. ‘If not, it’ll be my colleague. I think that’s going to be more likely. Either way, someone should be with you within the hour.’

‘Oh.’ This is unexpected. I run his words through my mind a few times to check I understood them correctly. Yes, it seems so. Apparently something is going to happen. The inert voice misled me; Trevor Chibnall is about to spring into action. I hope it’s the action of sending his colleague rather than himself. I am willing to wait longer if I can have someone who knows how to put expression into his or her voice. ‘Great,’ I say.

‘Thank you for your call.’

‘Wait, I … if you send someone out to me, is that
an official thing?’ I ask. ‘I mean, does it get … recorded somewhere, formally? My husband thinks we might have trouble selling the house if we register a noise problem and then –’

‘No, nothing becomes official in that sense simply by our coming out to you.’

‘Not that we
want
to move, and hopefully we won’t have to, but –’

‘It’s not helpful to us when people spread scare stories about it being impossible to sell houses because of a noise dispute with a neighbour,’ he says. ‘If we find that there’s a noise nuisance, we take steps to remedy the situation.’

From someone more imaginative, this might be a euphemism for slicing Mr Fahrenheit’s head clean off his neck. Not from Chibnall, I don’t think. I picture him thinking inertly about the filling in of forms, looking as washed-out under the glare of the neon lights in his office as I look in my lounge mirror. I can’t assemble a face for him in my imagination: a featureless taupe blur is the best I can do.

‘Once it’s remedied, there’s no reason why someone wouldn’t buy a house that formerly had a noise problem,’ he drones on. ‘But we can’t find evidence of a noise nuisance and set about rectifying it if people don’t report these things because they’ve heard from a friend or a colleague that they reported
a similar problem and were then obliged to declare it and couldn’t sell their house.’

‘I agree,’ I tell him. Though in theory I’m happy to gang up with the council’s environmental health officer against my husband, I’m slightly concerned that he seems more exercised about scaremongering in relation to the sale of houses than about Mr Fahrenheit’s behaviour. ‘That’s why I’m reporting it, and very much looking forward to your rectification.’

‘An environmental health officer will be with you shortly, Mrs Beeston,’ says Chibnall.

‘Thank you.’

The line goes dead. I put the phone back on its base, go to the kitchen where Mr Fahrenheit’s music is slightly less audible, fill the kettle with water and switch it on. I need strong tea. It’s past two in the morning, I’m exhausted, and I’m about to have what I can only think of as a very important meeting.

I wonder if I need to prepare in any way. Nothing about the house needs sorting out; everything is in order and ready to give a good impression: no empty wine bottles on their sides, no upturned ashtrays.

No evidence that a child lives here. All Joseph’s toys are tidily packed away in his room, as they have been since the beginning of term.

I drum the palms of my hands on the kitchen countertop while I wait for the kettle to boil. Will
Chibnall, or his colleague, need to inspect the whole house, every floor? What if he asks me why there’s a room that clearly belongs to a child but is empty? He’s bound to be thorough, to want to see how far the noise from Mr Fahrenheit’s stereo travels, but maybe if I close Joseph’s door then he won’t go in there.

I have a better idea: if I close Joseph’s door, I can tell Chibnall that Joseph is in there, asleep. Yes, it’s a lie, but a harmless one. I might not even need to tell him explicitly. There’s a sign Blu-tacked to the door saying ‘Joseph’s Room’, each shaky capital letter a different colour. If Chibnall sees that on a closed door, he will assume that there’s a sleeping child behind it, and won’t ask to be let in. Anyone would make that assumption. Where else would a seven-year-old boy be in the early hours of a Sunday morning but at home, safely tucked up in his bed?

Stop it. Don’t think it.

Safe in his bed, with his mum and dad just along the hall in case he needs anything in the night, in case he has a bad dream and needs a cuddle …

I bend over, gasp for breath. Why do I do this to myself? It might not be so bad if I didn’t fill my mind with the very words that will hurt me the most. There’s another way of defining Joseph’s absence,
one that’s nowhere near as painful. Other words to describe the situation, which is, in so many ways, a good and fortunate situation – so why do I never use them?

The sound of the kettle clicking off snaps me back to sanity. I move towards it, put my face near the steam; close enough to feel its wet warmth without risking a burn.

Was I really, only a few seconds ago, planning to deceive the council’s emergency noise person about the whereabouts of my son? Crazy. I mustn’t do it. It would imply guilt that, according to Stuart, I have no need to feel. We have done nothing wrong: the opposite. We’d be harming Joseph by keeping him at home, harming his future. I will tell Chibnall the truth, and, if he looks disapproving, I will pretend to be Stuart and say all the things he says to me several times a day.

Warning myself that I shouldn’t – silently insisting that I won’t and am not – I open the drawer where I keep tea towels. I lift them all out and take out the small plastic pouch full of cannabis that I stole from Mr Fahrenheit’s house a few weeks ago when I went round to complain. We were standing in his kitchen, which has a large granite-topped island at its centre – extra drug preparation space – and shiny silver pans hanging down from the ceiling above it
like a contemporary art chandelier. Mr Fahrenheit got angry with me and left the room, and I picked up one of the three little bags of marijuana from the island and slipped it into my jeans pocket.

I wonder what effect it would have on me. Would I relax so much that I wouldn’t care about anything any more? I haven’t got any cigarettes or Rizlas in the house, so I can’t roll a joint, but I’ve watched Mr Fahrenheit do it another way: with a plastic bottle, a hole burned out of its bottom. The bottle fills up with smoke at a certain point, I think, but I’m not sure how or if there’s any other equipment involved – I only saw Mr Fahrenheit do it once, when I was walking past his house and he’d forgotten to close the curtains. He was on his own in his lounge. He takes drugs in every part of his house, every day, Stuart and I have worked out, but only ever listens to music in the basement.

Sighing, because I would try some if it were easier but it isn’t, I put the little plastic bag back in the drawer and cover it with the tea towels. I probably ought to throw it away in case Trevor Chibnall stumbles upon it, but I don’t want to. And he’s unlikely to root around in my kitchen drawers. How ridiculous that I’m worried about him discovering my son’s absence but not my stash of illegal drugs.

I stir two sugars into my milky tea, although
I don’t normally take sugar. It will give me some energy.

The Rachmaninov stops. I wonder what Mr Fahrenheit will play next. He must be sick of classical music by now.

Come on, Mr F. Put something on, anything. Something really crass and intrusive that will prove my point, so that I won’t need to say anything at all when Chibnall arrives.

My doorbell rings.

‘It stopped a few seconds before you rang the bell, literally,’ I tell Patricia Jervis, the Trevor Chibnall substitute who is sitting on my sofa, holding the mug of Earl Grey I made her in one hand and a pen in the other. She is short and stocky – in her late fifties, I’d guess – with curly grey hair held back from her make-up-free face by a green sweatband that is consistent with the rest of her PE teacher look: navy blue tracksuit, ribbed white socks, blue-and-grey trainers. I have been told to call her Pat because everyone else does, though she sounded far from happy about everyone else doing so when she said it. She’s writing in a notebook that is balanced on her lap. ‘Are you parked right outside?’ I ask her.

‘Hmm?’ she says without looking up. ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

Five seconds to lock her car and check it’s locked, another seven to walk to my front door … I know from my own experience that whenever Mr Fahrenheit’s music is audible in my house, it’s also audible from the street. ‘Didn’t you hear anything when you first got out of the car?’ I ask. ‘Classical music. It was loud. You must have heard it.’

Pat Jervis smiles down at her notebook. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my hearing,’ she says, dodging the question. ‘We all have to take hearing tests regularly. If you’re worried that I don’t believe you, don’t be. Our department handles upwards of two hundred noise disputes a year. Would you care to guess in how many of those cases the complainant turns out not to have a valid objection?’

I shake my head.

‘This year so far, none. Last year there was one. People don’t sit up all night chatting to environmental health officers because they like the attention. It tends to be a desperate last resort.’

‘Yes.’ She wouldn’t like it if I threw myself at her feet and said, ‘Thank you for understanding.’ Does everyone do that as well as calling her Pat? Has anyone ever done it?

‘Seems to be an unfortunate fact of life that those adversely affected by noise nuisance are often so
doubtful they’ll be believed and so reluctant to cause trouble that they suffer in silence for years.’

‘Or suffer in noise,’ I quip.

‘Yes, they suffer in noise for years.’ She repeats my silly joke, straight-faced, then smiles at her notebook again. ‘Meanwhile, the antisocial neighbours responsible for the anguish and disruption tend to have no such confidence problems,’ she says. ‘No doubts about their rights and righteousness whatsoever. They’re convinced that any official procedure will find in their favour, and couldn’t be more astonished when we tell them we’re going to be taking legal action against them if they don’t adjust their behaviour.’

Anguish. Legal action. These are all good words. I prefer Pat Jervis to Trevor Chibnall. I prefer her vocabulary. She bends forward to rub her ankle with her left hand. I noticed as she wandered around my kitchen looking at the seascapes on the wall that she rocks slightly to the left and right as she walks. ‘You like paintings of the sea, then,’ she said, touching the glass of one frame with the tip of her index finger. I told her the sea was only in the kitchen; none of the other rooms have themed art. I am averse to themed anything, generally, and have no idea why I decided to fill the walls of one particular room of my house with pictures of boats, sandy beaches, waves against
distant horizons; I told Pat Jervis that too. ‘Very interesting,’ she said, sounding as if she meant it, but, at the same time, wanted to draw a line under the subject.

I am working on a theory that people employed by the council are not the same as the rest of us. It’s still in the early stages of development.