by Alexis Hall
“Oh yeah? Highlights?”
Flossie reclaimed her seat. “This German couple took Miskha’s spot. But we soon had them put to rights.”
“I meant,” said the alien being who had replaced Ellery, “musically.”
“The Halle, I think. Gave us some smashing Mahler.”
Ellery shrugged. Now that was more like her. “Das Lied?”
They nodded.
“Eh. Every time I hear that, I’m like…hurry up and die already. Don’t hang there in D forever.”
John was polishing his glasses on the edge of his sleeve. “We should have guessed our lonely, half-forgotten Bela would draw you out.”
Another Ellery shrug.
“Did you know he was supposed to have composed much of this piece while at a nudist camp?”
“Look that up on Wikipedia, did you?”
John’s forehead went pink as the others laughed.
“Anyway”—Ellery pulled out her phone and checked the time—“we’d better get going. Got our own queue to join.”
Oh great. We were queuing as well?
My face must have reflected something of my feelings on the subject because Dick smiled up at me. “Never you mind, lad. It’s part of the fun.”
“You should come with us one day,” Flossie was saying to Ellery.
“Nah. Arena’s for people who want to be part of something. Gallery’s for people who don’t.”
“You know you’re always welcome.”
Ellery smiled—and, wow, she looked bizarrely sweet. “Save me a heave.”
“If you save us a ho.”
Then she caught me by the hand and dragged me off down the steps. And I couldn’t say I was any more illuminated. Our queue led all the way from the west side of the Hall, along a street, and past the back of a church.
“We’re good,” Ellery announced, having sized it up.
“Are we?”
“Oh yes,” said the lady in front of us, “I’ve been right at the bottom of Bremner Road and still got in.”
Since something was clearly expected of me, I offered a slightly anxious “yay.”
Ellery lowered herself to the ground, crossed her legs, and pulled her backpack into her lap. Then began rummaging around inside it like Mary Poppins had gone seriously off the rails.
Not really knowing what else to do, I plopped down next to her and pulled my knees up to my chin. A suspicion was…not so much forming as being ominously confirmed. “Ellery,” I asked, “are we at the Proms?”
“Maybe.”
“Why are we at the Proms?”
She shrugged.
My knowledge of the Proms was scanty to put it mildly: they were an annual classical musical festival and the last night of them was a big deal and would be shown on BBC2 or something, with much pomp and circumstance and fireworks. “I thought you weren’t into rich people shit.”
“Arden.” Ellery hooked a finger under her glasses and pulled them down her nose so I could receive the full force of her appalled look. “Anyone can go to the Proms. That’s the whole point.”
“But I don’t know anything about classical music.”
“It’s not about knowledge.”
“Right now it seems to be about my arse getting numb. How long do we have to wait?”
There was a lengthy silence. Finally, Ellery took off her sunglasses and folded the arms with a click. “I knew you wouldn’t get it.”
Should have seen that coming. I stifled a sigh. “How can I get it,” I said, as gently as I could, “when you won’t tell me anything?”
Silence again.
“Like…” Ellery’s newly naked eyes looked oddly vulnerable—their shades softened by the sunlight “…ever since 1890-something the Proms have been about making music available to the people who get told that shit isn’t for them. All you have to do is turn up and pay a fiver—well, it’s six quid now. And you can go to a concert.”
I risked a small smile. “Wow, that’s pretty cool.”
“She’s right,” said Unasked for Queue Lady. “This way you get to be part of something that goes back over a hundred years.”
Ellery didn’t exactly strike me as a raging traditionalist. “I just don’t know what we’re doing here.”
“Because I like it, okay?” Her raised voice startled a couple of pigeons on a nearby wall and they took to the skies with a crackle of wings. “And you asked. You asked what I liked. And I trusted you. So either…fuck off and die. Or have a strawberry.”
“Have a what?”
“A strawberry. I brought strawberries.” She wrenched open her backpack and pulled out a brown paper bag.
“Oooh. Don’t mind if I do.” Unasked for Queue Lady leaned over me and helped herself.
“Well, maybe I won’t fuck off and die,” I said.
Ellery was still flushed and full of scowls. “Yeah, whatever.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Can I have a strawberry?” I made my cutest face.
For a moment, I thought she was going to say no, but then she relented. “Oh all right.”
It was probably the closest to forgiveness I was ever going to get. And the strawberry tasted amazing, sparkly sweet and bright as the juice exploded over my tongue.
“What are we going to see…um, hear?” I asked.
“Bluebeard’s Castle.”
“I shouldn’t know that, right?”
Unasked for Queue Lady gave a little hop. “You’re in for such a treat, love.”
Ellery just put her sunglasses back on, her lips curving into an unreadable smile.
Chapter 8
What had started out as the worst queuing experience of my life gradually became one of the best. Not that, in all honesty, there was that much competition. The evening got a flood of last-minute warmth, like a guilty start from the sun just as it was slipping away. I lay with my head on Ellery’s lap and she fed me the rest of the strawberries—at least the ones she could wrest from Unasked for Queue Lady.
I couldn’t help but notice that lots of other people were drinking wine but Ellery had gone all ascetic on me and only brought water. Probably it was the right call—I wasn’t sure whether my capacity to appreciate classical music would be improved or diminished if I was wankered. And, besides, I was slightly floaty anyway—on the balmy evening air and the brush of heat across my skin and the strange liberation of having nothing to do but wait.
We were briefly interrupted by the click-whir-flash of a camera. And I startled out of a not-quite-daydream to find a…well, there was no nice way to say it, a twitchy, rat-like man in a leather jacket taking photos of us from the other side of the street.
“New boyfriend, Ellie?” he called out.
“A friend,” she threw back. “Now fuck off.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?”
“Oh suuure. This is Billy Boyle, an independent photojournalist. And this”—she flapped a laconic hand in my direction—“is none of your fucking business.”
“You know I’ll find out anyway.”
“And you know I’ll set your car on fire.”
“I love it when you get feisty.” He gave a frankly creepy shiver.
“Okay. Fine. How about you fuck off now and I’ll be at Tansy Stourburton’s twenty-first on Friday.”
“You’ll make it worth my while.”
“I’m hurt.” Ellery gave a magnificent yawn. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”
Boyle grinned with sharp teeth. “I’ll be watching.”
“Yeah, yeah. Try not to get cancer.”
Unasked for Queue Lady had listened to the exchange with unabashed curiosity. As soon as Boyle had oozed away, she turned to Ellery and asked excitedly, “Are you famous?”
“Nope.” Ellery settled her sunglasses more firmly on her nose. “I’m notorious.”
A couple of fairly relaxed hours later, there was a judder down the line of people, which was snaking so far beyond us I coul
dn’t see the end anymore, and we were moving. Funneled, with surprising efficiency, through door 10, and into the Royal Albert Hall. Ellery, who had a crumpled tenner and two pound coins already in hand, paid for me.
Then there were stairs.
A lot of stairs.
No, really, so many stairs.
We finally emerged, me wheezing and Ellery barely winded, onto the gallery. It was kind of otherworldly: a corridor of gleaming stone that curled gently around the entire hall. Ellery dragged me into a space between two decorative pillars and…Oh God, we were high, the tiers of seats sloping away from us so sharply it made me feel like I was about to topple over. Even though what I was actually doing was clinging to the rail as if I was on a roller coaster.
Down in the…was it still a mosh pit if you were in a concert hall? Anyway, the people jiggling about down there were pinheads. And the orchestra might as well have been a flea circus. Other prommers were filtering in behind us and around us, and there was a bit of jostling for the best spaces, but it didn’t feel crowded at all—especially in comparison to the audience below, who looked like hundreds and thousands tossed too liberally over an ice cream sundae.
Ellery was stretched out on a travel rug, her backpack tucked under her head. “You sitting down?”
“But I won’t be able to see.”
“It’s music. You listen.”
A quick glance around us confirmed that, while some people had chosen to stand by the railing, others had brought cushions and blankets of their own. No wonder Ellery liked it here—it was its own secret world.
After a moment or two, I lay down beside her and rested my head against her shoulder. Considering we were about to spend an hour or more on a stone floor, it was pretty comfortable, and I could still see through the gaps in the railing—mainly the arches on the other side of the gallery, which shone faintly gold, and the strange disks hanging from the ceiling.
“It’s like an alien planetscape,” I said, pointing.
“They’re for the acoustics. Apparently, there used to be an echo, so they put those up in the sixties.”
It made sense. Giant floating ceiling mushrooms: the solution you’d come up with if you were high on LSD and sexual liberation.
Various noises floated up to us: the jingle-thonks of an orchestra getting ready and the rustle-creaks of an audience settling down. The lights slowly began to dim.
“Hang on.” Ellery thrust a bundle of papers at me. “I brought you a libretto.”
“You wha—”
And then a deep voice broke across the darkness: Once upon a time, where did this happen? Was it outside or within? Once upon a time, there was an old story. But what does it mean, my lords and fine ladies? The song begins and you watch me, watching you, the curtain of your eyelids raised. But where is the stage? Is it outside or within us, my lords and fine ladies?
The music crept through the words, twisted round them like ivy. A gathering sense of foreboding, sobbed softly over cello strings. Then clarinets…violins…and, oh, I was there. In a dark castle, where the walls wept, and the air tasted of blood. It turned out only the prologue was in English and the rest was…um…something else? But Ellery was right, I didn’t need the libretto. Not when I had two voices and a whole orchestra to tell me a too-familiar fairy tale of love and pain.
Despite being up in the gallery, I didn’t feel far away from the music at all. I felt surrounded by it. Suffused by it. Like I’d taken emotional heroin and nothing I would experience from this moment forward could ever be so pure a hit. It was perfect, it was overwhelming, it was ridiculously fucking numinous.
The bit in the middle, when Judith opened the fifth door to reveal Bluebeard’s kingdom, and the orchestra just…exploded—as if the music itself was light—and the mezzo-soprano hit a note I had no idea human beings were capable of producing, I honestly thought my heart would burst. And, afterward, when the sixth door revealed a lake of tears, I started crying too, almost without realizing I was.
I liked it, is what I’m saying.
And, when it was over, and Judith had taken her place among the other wives, and everything was dark again, there was this moment of absolute silence.
Followed by a storm of stamping. And then rapturous applause.
I lay back and tried to remember how to do ordinary things like breathing and thinking and functioning.
Ellery still had her eyes closed, one arm flung above her head. There was something oddly abandoned about the pose. Not exactly sexual because, God knows, I didn’t want to think of Caspian’s sister like that. But content maybe?
“Well?” she asked.
I gave a shaky laugh. Because there was only one answer really. “It was so good I nearly peed my pants.”
“Come on.” She grabbed my hand. “Let’s get out of here before we get Debussied. Can’t stand that syrupy shit.”
* * *
I was slightly dazed as I followed Ellery out of the Royal Albert Hall and into the lingering warmth of the night. We wandered silently between the pale white mansions and red-brick towers of Kensington, letting the memory of the music linger.
Next time I paid attention to my surroundings, we were on the Old Brompton Road. This was the closest Kensington got to having a commercial district, but it was still Kensington so that meant incredibly posh flats, boutiques that sold nothing anybody would reasonably want to buy, upmarket restaurants, unnecessarily large branches of Pret A Manger, and somewhere in the middle of it all the pub where Private Eye was founded.
Ellery grabbed my hand and pulled me into a late-opening gelato parlor so dinky that I would probably have walked straight past it if I’d been on my own. The sight of the long counter, with the different ice cream flavors all fluffed up like perfect little clouds, and as bright as birds of paradise, made me legit squeak.
It earned me a dubious look from Ellery. “You okay?”
“OMG”—I flailed like a Disney princess about to go to the ball—“yes yes yes.”
“Because you look like you’re about to die.”
“I have died. And I’ve gone to heaven.”
Ellery was still mid facepalm as I hustled her over to the menu.
“What’s best?” I asked, jumping up and down. “What do you recommend?”
“It’s all fine.”
It the sort of place where they told you exactly where everything came from: Grand Cru chocolate, Channel Island milk, Chilean sultanas. Where even the pistachios were superior. And so, of course, I wanted to eat everything.
Ellery ordered a chocolate cone of green tea gelato—though they called it Té Verde. And I finally overcame my greed-paralysis enough to get the stracciatella. Since, as far as I was concerned, the only thing better than chocolate or vanilla was when you were allowed to have chocolate and vanilla together. There might have been a moral in there somewhere.
The place was nearly empty, what with it being close to nine on a Tuesday, so we sat in the bay-window and stuffed our faces. At least, I stuffed my face. Ellery ate ice cream with the same air of mild contempt she brought to everything.
Well, everything except music. As I’d learned today.
“Thank you for this,” I said. “It’s been the best.”
She shrugged. “Yeah.”
“So um”—I chased a curl of chocolate with the edge of my spoon—“any particular reason for that opera?”
“Maybe I just like the music.”
“And the story was irrelevant?”
She gave me a look I couldn’t quite read, her eyes greener than they were blue in this softer light, and less like Caspian than usual. “Well, what do you think?”
At this rate we would be here all night. Like the vultures in The Jungle Book, I broke cover. “I think Judith chose her fate.”
“Huh. Interesting. Because I think she married a psycho who murdered her.”
“I think”—I squirmed—“it’s a touch more ambiguous than that.”
“He has a torture c
hamber in his head.”
“But also a lake of tears.”
She crunched off the end of her cone. “Probably from the people he’s tortured.”
“Or maybe it’s all him: his own pain and grief and darkness. The wives could represent the hopes and dreams he’s lost.”
“Or maybe some castles are dark and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Except, y’know, accept the castle is dark. Instead of worrying about how it isn’t light.”
“Whatever.” Ellery pulled out her phone and checked the time. “Okay. I’ve got to go.”
I glanced at my half-finished ice cream and then at the counter, wondering if I had room for another scoop. Because, fuck me, the stuff was amazing. So rich and sweet and sharp all at the same time. “I might stay here. For the rest of my life.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to say something but she just stood there, idly kicking at the leg of her chair.
“It’s not like Caspian’s going to murder me,” I said.
“Yeah, but maybe you deserve a nicer castle.”
And, with that, she picked up her backpack and disappeared into the night, leaving me with my stracciatella and some slightly tangled thoughts about my relationship.
Which quickly unraveled into me missing Caspian. Wanting to hold his hand across the table. Share a milkshake with him. Lick the sweetness from his mouth.
That was the thing about billionaire non-boyfriends, though. They could do anything. Be anything. Reshape the whole fucking world.
But you’d probably always be left eating ice cream by yourself.
Chapter 9
My Instagram account, which I only intermittently remembered to update, had been a lot more lively since @i_hate_ellery had started tagging me. But I woke to find it was going notify-crazy, with no intervention from her at all. Which, given that my last post had been a suggestive butternut squash I’d seen at the farmers’ market down on Bute Street, meant that something else was going on.
Cringing, I opened Google and fed it my own name.
Not a bean, beyond my usual stuff, social media accounts I’d forgotten about, and some of the articles I’d written.