by Джоан Харрис
‘I’d like to go to school,’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t.’ That was Catherine, with the warning note in her voice. ‘Patrick, stop talking shop. You know how it upsets her.’
‘It doesn’t upset me. I’d like to go.’
‘Perhaps I could take her with me one day. Just to see—’
‘Patrick!’
‘Sorry. Just — you know. There’s the Christmas concert next month, love. In the school chapel. I’m conducting. She likes—’
‘Patrick, I’m not listening!’
‘She likes music, Catherine. Let me take her. Just this once.’
And so, just once, Emily went. Perhaps because of Daddy; but mostly because Feather was in favour of the plan. Feather was a staunch believer in the healing powers of music; besides, she had recently read Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale, and felt that a concert might boost Emily’s flagging colour therapy.
But Catherine didn’t like the idea. I think now that part of it was guilt; the same guilt that had pushed her to remove all traces of Daddy’s passion for music from the house. The piano was an exception; even so, it had been relegated to a spare room, where it sat amongst boxes of forgotten papers and old clothes, where Emily was not supposed to venture. But Feather’s enthusiasm tipped the balance, and on the evening of the concert they all walked down towards St Oswald’s, Catherine smelling of turpentine and rose (a pink smell, she tells Emily, pretty pink roses), Feather talking high and very fast, and Emily’s father guiding her gently by the shoulder, taking care not to let her slip in the wet December snow.
‘OK?’ he whispered, as they neared the place.
‘Mm-mm.’
She had been disappointed to hear that the concert was not to take place in the school itself. She would have liked to see Daddy’s place of work; to have entered the classrooms with their wooden desks, smelt the chalk and the polish; heard the echo of their footsteps against the wooden floors. Later, she was allowed those things. But this event was to take place in the nearby chapel, with the St Oswald’s choristers, and her father conducting, which she understood to mean guiding, somehow; showing the singers the way.
It was a cold, damp evening that smelt of smoke. From the road came the sounds of cars and bicycle bells and people talking, muffled almost to nothing in the foggy air. In spite of her winter coat she was cold; her thin-soled shoes squelching against the gravel path, and droplets of moisture in her hair. Fog makes the outside feel smaller, somehow; just as the wind expands the world, making the trees rustle and soar. That evening Emily felt very small, squashed down almost to nothing by the dead air. From time to time someone passed her — she felt the swish of a lady’s dress, or it might have been a Master’s gown — and heard a snatch of conversation before they were once more swept away.
‘Won’t it be crowded, Patrick? Emily doesn’t like crowds.’ That was Catherine again, her voice tight as the bodice of Emily’s best party dress, which was pretty (and pink) and which had been brought from storage for one last outing before she outgrew it completely.
‘It’s fine. You’ve got front-row seats.’
As a matter of fact Emily didn’t mind crowds. It was the noise she didn’t like: those flat and blurry voices that confused everything and turned everything around. She took hold of her father’s hand, rather tightly, and squeezed. A single pump meant I love you. A double-pump, I love you, too. Another of their small secrets, like the fact that she could almost span an octave if she bounced her hand over the keys, and play the lead line of Für Elise while her father played the chords.
It was cool inside the chapel. Emily’s family didn’t attend church — though their neighbour, Mrs Brannigan, did — and she had been inside St Mary’s once, just to hear the echo. St Oswald’s Chapel sounded like that; their steps slap-slapped on the hard, smooth floor, and all the sounds in the place seemed to go up, like people climbing an echoey staircase and talking as they went.
Daddy told her later that it was because the ceiling was so high, but at the time she imagined that the choir would be sitting above her, like angels. There was a scent, too; something like Feather’s patchouli, but stronger and smokier.
‘That’s incense,’ said her father. ‘They burn it in the sanctuary.’
Sanctuary. He’d explained that word. A place to go where you can be safe. Incense and Clan tobacco and angels’ voices. Sanctuary.
There was movement all around them now. People were talking, but in lower voices than usual, as if they were afraid of the echoes. As Daddy went to join the choristers and Catherine described the organ and pews and windows for her, Emily heard wishwishwish from all around the hall, then a series of settling-down noises, then a hush as the choir began to sing.
It was as if something had broken open inside her. This, and not the piece of clay, is Emily’s first memory: sitting in St Oswald’s Chapel with the tears running down her face and into her smiling mouth, and the music, the lovely music, surging all around her.
Oh, it was not the first time that she had ever heard music; but the homely rinkety-plink of their old piano, or the tinny transistors of the kitchen radio, could not convey more than a particle of this. She had no name for what she could hear, no terms with which to describe this new experience. It was, quite simply, an awakening.
Later her mother tried to embellish the tale, as if it needed embellishment. She herself had never really enjoyed religious music — Christmas carols least of all, with their simple tunes and mawkish lyrics. Something by Mozart would have been much more suitable, with its implication of like calling to like, though the legend has a dozen variations — from Mozart to Mahler and even to the inevitable Berlioz — as if the complexity of the music had any bearing on the sounds themselves, or the sensations they evoked.
In fact the piece was nothing more than a four-part a cappella version of an old Christmas carol.
In the bleak midwinter,
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
But there is something unique about boys’ voices; a tremulous quality, not entirely comfortable, perpetually on the brink of losing pitch. It is a sound that combines an almost inhuman sweetness of tone with a raw edge that is nearly painful.
She listened in silence for the first few bars, unsure of what she was hearing. Then the voices rose again:
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow —
And on the second snow the voices grazed that note, the high F sharp that had always been a point of mysterious pressure in her, and Emily began to cry. Not from sorrow or even from emotion; it was simply a reflex, like that cramping of the tastebuds after eating something very sour, or the gasp of fresh chilli against the back of the throat.
Snow on snow, snow on snow they sang, and everything in her responded. She shivered; she smiled; she turned her face to the invisible roof and opened her mouth like a baby bird, half-expecting to feel the sounds like snowflakes falling on her tongue. For almost a minute Emily sat trembling on the edge of her seat, and every now and then the boys’ voices would rise to that strange F sharp, that magical ice-cream-headache note, and the tears would spill once more from her eyes. Her lower lip tingled; her fingers were numb. She felt as if she were touching God —
‘Emily, what is it?’
She could not reply. Only the sounds mattered.
‘Emily!’
Every note seemed to cut into her in some delicious way; every chord a miracle of texture and shape. More tears fell.
‘Something’s wrong.’ Catherine’s voice came from a great distance. ‘Feather, please. I’m taking her home.’ Emily felt her starting to move; tugging at her coat, which she had been using as a cushion. ‘Get up, sweetheart, we shouldn’t have come.’
Was that satisfaction in her voice? Her hand on Emily’s forehead was feverish and clammy. ‘She’s burning up. Feather, give me a hand—’
‘No!’ whispered Emily.
‘Emily, darling, you’re upset.’
‘Please—’ But now her mother was picking her up; Catherine’s arms were around her. She caught a fleeting smell of turpentine behind the expensive perfume. Desperately she searched for something, some magic, to make her mother stop: something that would convey the urgency, the imperative to stay, to listen . . .
‘Please, the music—’
Your mother doesn’t care much for music. Daddy’s voice; remote but clear.
But what did Catherine care for? What for her was the language of command?
They were half-out of their seats now. Emily tried to struggle; a seam ripped under the arm of her too-tight dress. Her coat, with its fur collar, smothered her. More of the turpentine smell, the smell of her mother’s fever, her madness.
And suddenly Emily understood, with a maturity far beyond her years, that she would never visit her father’s school, never go to another concert, just as she would never play with other children in case they hurt or pushed her, never run in the park in case she fell.
If they left now, Emily thought, then her mother would always have her way, and the blindness, which had never really troubled her, would finally drag her down like a stone tied to a dog’s tail, and she would drown.
There must be words, she told herself; magic words, to make her mother stay. But Emily was five years old; she didn’t know any magic words; and now she was moving down the aisle with her mother on one side and Feather on the other, and the lovely voices rolling over them like a river.
In the bleak midwinter,
Lo-ooong ago —
And then it came to her. So simple that she gasped at her own audacity. She did know magic words, she realized. Dozens of them; she had learnt them almost from the cradle, but had never really found a use for them until now. She knew their fearsome energy. Emily opened her mouth, stricken with a sudden, demonic inspiration.
‘The colours,’ she whispered.
Catherine White stopped mid-stride. ‘What did you say?’
‘The colours. Please. I want to stay.’ Emily took a deep breath. ‘I want to listen to the colours .’
Post comment:
blueeyedboy: How brave of you to post this, Albertine. You know I’ll have to reciprocate . . .
9
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy posting on:
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Posted at: 23.03 on Monday, February 11
Status: public
Mood: scornful
Listening to: Pink Floyd: ‘Any Colour You Like’
Listen to the colours. Oh, please. Don’t tell me she was innocent; don’t tell me that, even then, she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Mrs White knew all about Boy X and his synaesthesia. She knew Dr Peacock would be near by. Easy enough to feed her the line; easier still to believe it when Emily responded by starting to hear the colours.
Ben was in his first year at school. Imagine him then: a chorister, all scrubbed and clean and ready to go in his blue St Oswald’s uniform under the frilled white cassock.
I know what you’re thinking. He failed the exam. But that was just the scholarship. With money she had set aside, as well as with help from Dr Peacock, Ma had managed to get him into St Oswald’s after all, not as a scholar, but as a fee-paying pupil, and here he was in the front row of the school choir, hating every moment of it. And if they didn’t already have good enough cause to despise him, he knew that the other boys in his form would never leave him alone after this, not to mention Nigel, who had been dragged along most reluctantly, and who would take it out on him later, he knew, in gibes and kicks and punches.
In the bleak midwinter,
Frosty wind made moan —
He’d prayed in vain for puberty to break his voice and release him. But whilst the other boys in his class were already thickening like palm trees, reeking of teenage civet, Ben remained slim and girlish and pale, with an eerie, off-key treble voice.
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone —
He could see his mother three rows back, listening for the sound of his voice, and Dr Peacock, behind her; and Nigel, going on seventeen, sprawled and scowling across the bench; and sweaty and malodorous Bren, looking terribly uncomfortable with his lank hair and his pursed-up face, like the world’s most enormous baby.
Blueeyedboy tried not to look; to concentrate on the music, but now he caught sight of Mrs White, just a few seats away from him, with Emily by her side — Emily, in her little red coat and her dress of rose-pink, with her hair in bunches and her face illuminated with something half-distress, half-joy —
For a moment he thought her eyes caught his; but the eyes of the blind are like that, aren’t they? Emily couldn’t see him. Whatever he did, however he tried — Emily never would. And yet, those eyes drew him, skittering from side to side like marbles in a doll’s head, like a couple of blue-eye beads, reflecting ill-luck back to the sender.
Blueeyedboy’s head was beginning to spin, throbbing in time to the music. A headache was coming; a bad one. He searched for the means to protect himself, imagining a capsule of blue, hard as iron, cold as stone, blue as a block of Arctic ice. But the pain was inescapable. A headache that would escalate until it wrung him like a rag —
It was hot in the choir stalls. Red-faced in their white smocks, the choristers sang like angels. St Oswald’s takes its choir seriously: the boys are drilled in obedience. Like soldiers, they are trained to stand and keep their position for hours on end. No one complains. No one dares. Sing your hearts out, boys, and smile! bugles the choirmaster during rehearsals. This is for God and St Oswald’s. I don’t want to see a single boy letting down the team.
But now Ben Winter was looking pale. Perhaps the heat; the incense; perhaps the strain of keeping that smile. Remember, he was delicate; Ma always said so. More sensitive than the other two; more prone to illness and accidents —
The angel voices rose again, sweeping towards the crescendo.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow —
And that was when it happened. Almost in slow motion; a thud: a movement in the front row; a pale-faced boy collapsing unseen on to the floor of the chapel; striking his head on the side of a pew, a blow that would require four stitches to mend, a crescent moon on his forehead.
Why did no one notice him? Why was Ben so wholly eclipsed? No one saw him — not even Ma — for just as he fell, a little blind girl in the crowd suffered a kind of panic attack, and all eyes turned to Emily White, Emily in the rose-coloured dress, flailing her arms and shouting out: Please. I want to stay. I want to —
Listen to the colours.
Post comment:
Albertine: Nice comeback, blueeyedboy.
blueeyedboy: Glad you liked it, Albertine.
Albertine: Well, liked is maybe not the word —
blueeyedboy: Nice comeback, Albertine . . .
10
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:
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Posted at: 23.49 on Monday, February 11
Status: public
Mood: raw
Listen to the colours. Maybe you remember the phrase. Glib coming from the mouth of an adult, it must have seemed unbearably poignant from that of a five-year-old blind girl. In any case, it did the trick. Listen to the colours. All unknowing, Emily White had opened up a box of magic words, and was drunk with their power and her own, issuing commands like a diminutive general, commands which Catherine and Feather — and later, of course, Dr Peacock — obeyed with unquestioning delight.
‘What do you see?’
Diminished chord of F minor. The magic words unfurl like wrapping-paper, every one.
‘Pink. Blue. Green. Violet. So pretty.’
Her mother claps her hands in delight. ‘More, Emily. Tell me more.’
A chord of F major.
‘Red. Orange. Ma-gen-ta. Black.’
It was like an aw
akening. The infernal power she had discovered in herself had blossomed in an astonishing way, and music was suddenly a part of her curriculum. The piano was brought out of the spare room and re-tuned; her father’s secret lessons became official, and Emily was allowed to practise whenever she liked, even when Catherine was working. Then came the local newspapers, and the letters and gifts came pouring in.
The story had plenty of potential. In fact, it had all the ingredients. A Christmas miracle; a photogenic blind girl; music; art; some man-in-the-street science, courtesy of Dr Peacock, and a lot of controversy from the art world that kept the papers wondering on and off for the next three years or so, caught up in speculation. The TV eventually caught on to it; so did the Press. There was even a single — a Top Ten hit — by a rock band whose name I forget. The song was later used in the Hollywood film — an adaptation of the book — starring Robert Redford as Dr Peacock and a young Natalie Portman as the blind girl who sees music.
At first Emily took it for granted. After all, she was very young, and had no basis for comparison. And she was very happy — she listened to music all day long; she studied what she loved most, and everyone was pleased with her.
Over the next twelve months or so Emily attended a number of concerts, as well as performances of The Magic Flute, the Messiah and Swan Lake. She went to her father’s school several times, so that she could get to know the instruments by feel.
Flutes, with their slender bodies and intricate keys; pot-bellied cellos and double basses; French horns and tubas like big school canteen-jugs of sound; narrow-waisted violins; icicle bells; fat drums and flat drums; splash cymbals and crash cymbals; triangles and timpani and trumpets and tambourines.