The Orphan Choir

by Hannah, Sophie

  If I were less tired, I might put the counter-arguments to myself. I would challenge my shameful retrospective plotting, my hyperbolic use of certain words – ‘conspiracy’, ‘stolen’, ‘fault’ – but at the moment I have neither the energy nor the inclination.

  I hear Stuart’s voice say, ‘I thought you were going to sleep in the study,’ and realise I’m not alone in the room. I throw back the duvet, trying not to notice the small blue and red sailing boats on its cover. Joseph chose it himself. He ought to be the one throwing it back this morning, not me.

  A cross-section of my husband appears in front of me, blocking out some of the light: part of his legs, his waist and chest. The top bunk blocks his face from my view, but I can imagine what it looks like when he says, ‘You’d better get up. Imran’ll be here in fifteen minutes. And remember, soon as he leaves we’ll have to set off to Saviour, so you need to get properly dressed now.’

  I spring up off the bed and am on my feet before he gets to the door. ‘I’m sorry?’ I say belligerently. ‘Since when do you tell me when and how to dress?’

  He looks surprised by the strength of my reaction, and I feel guilty. ‘You’ve just woken up, so I thought I’d … you know.’

  He’s right. I have just woken up, less than two hours after falling asleep for the second time. Why would I do something so foolish? I wouldn’t – not of my own accord. I would do the sensible thing and stay asleep until quarter to ten, which would still give me enough time to leap into the shower before setting off to Saviour College’s chapel for Joseph’s gig. That’s how I irreverently think of the services.

  ‘Did you wake me up?’ I ask Stuart.

  ‘Yes. Eventually. It wasn’t easy.’

  ‘Thanks a lot. You know what time I got to sleep? Probably about ten past six.’

  ‘Well, I know it was after five-twenty-five a.m.,’ Stuart says irritably. ‘What should I have done, Lou? Imran’s coming all the way from Stamford and he’ll be here in—’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about Imran at this precise moment, Stuart! He’s not a visiting dignitary that I need to impress, he’s one of my oldest friends. You could have said, “Sorry, Imran, Lou’s asleep – she’s had a hellish night and I didn’t want to wake her.” He’d have been totally fine about it.’

  ‘Right.’ Stuart raises his eyebrows. He takes an unsteady step back, as if an unpredictable wind has knocked him off balance. ‘Sorry, I assumed that since we’re going to be talking about the work to the house, you might want to be there.’

  ‘Why? You’re not going to listen to what I say anyway. You didn’t last night, when I asked you to text Imran and put him off. I don’t want the house sandblasted! The last thing on my mind at the moment is the colour of the brickwork …’

  ‘And yet you’re saying I should have left you to sleep and given Imran the go-ahead without you,’ Stuart points out with infuriating patience. ‘It sounds like you, me and Imran all need to be there, since we’re likely to have different opinions. Mine’s certainly different from yours.’

  He tries again to leave the room. ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘How do you know I didn’t get to sleep till after twenty-five past five?’ As I ask, I realise that there can only be one answer.

  ‘I found your noise diary,’ says Stuart accusingly.

  And nothing else? I really ought to hide the drugs I stole from Mr Fahrenheit’s place somewhere cleverer. It’s not inconceivable that one day Stuart might decide the tea towel currently in use needs washing; it’s unlikely, but just about possible, that instead of taking a clean one from the top of the pile in the drawer, he might take the whole lot out and have a look at them all. If he did that, he would spot the small plastic bag full of marijuana underneath and subject me to a horrified interrogation.

  ‘Obviously you were busy last night after I went back to sleep,’ he says. ‘Much as I’m keen to hear all about what you got up to, we don’t have time. Seriously, Lou, since you are now awake and Imran’s going to be here any minute—’

  ‘I rang the council, not the police,’ I say. Then, with heavy sarcasm, ‘I didn’t disobey you, Master, if that’s what you’re annoyed about.’ It isn’t true – I called the police first – but Stuart doesn’t need to know that. I don’t believe that all is fair in love or in war, but I am coming to believe that all might be fair in marriage, which is a combination of the two.

  ‘I thought I made it pretty clear that I didn’t want you ringing anyone,’ says Stuart. ‘But you did, so there’s no point discussing it, is there? Though I have to say, if someone told you to keep a noise diary, I’m sure that … thing on the kitchen table isn’t what they had in mind.’

  ‘I was told to keep a record,’ I say as neutrally as possible. ‘I’m keeping a record.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it reads like the obsessive ramblings of a sleep-deprived neurotic. And while we’re on the subject, since you evidently don’t care about being ready when Imran arrives … would you mind sleeping on the sofa bed in the attic instead of in Joseph’s bed if you can’t sleep in our room? As I suggested last night.’ Stuart sighs as if there’s no point trying to reason with me. ‘Remember? I said why don’t you make up the sofa bed in my study?’

  While we’re on the subject? We weren’t. Where I ended up sleeping last night has nothing to do with what I wrote in my noise diary. I am baffled by this until I realise what Stuart must mean. His ‘subject’ is neither of those things, though both are instances of it. I wonder how he’d define it if I asked him: my dubious behaviour? My insistence on acting in accordance with my own ideas rather than his?

  ‘Don’t make out this is that, Stuart, okay?’

  Stupid. I should have phrased it differently. There is no ‘that’. ‘That’ is something Stuart believes in that doesn’t exist. It’s one of the more distasteful strands of his campaign to prove that his specialist subject, ‘Isn’t Louise Mental, Folks?’, deserves a place on our core curriculum.

  ‘Three things,’ I say. My voice is an ice sculpture. ‘One: at six in the morning, on no sleep, why would I choose to make up a sofa bed when there’s an already-made bed in here, nearer and warmer than the attic? Two: I didn’t sleep in Joseph’s bed. He always sleeps in the top bunk. I slept in the bottom bunk, where he never sleeps, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me sleeping there if I want to. Three: all this is irrelevant in this instance because I didn’t plan to fall asleep in Joseph’s room or anywhere. I’m amazed I was able to after all that stress. I only lay down because I was too knackered to stand up—’

  ‘In Joseph’s room, which you haunt like a fucking—’ Having cut me off mid-sentence, Stuart does the same to himself. He turns away and stands still with his back to me, as if we’re playing ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?’ and he’s counting.

  ‘Haunt?’ I say.

  ‘That was the wrong word. You know why?’ Angry Mr Wolf turns round. ‘Because no one’s dead! You’re not dead, Joseph’s not dead, I’m not dead! We’re among the most fortunate people on the planet, in fact. So why do I keep finding you in here, moping around your son’s ever-so-tidy room as if you’re … mourning him or something? It’s creepy, Louise. Can’t you see that?’

  The doorbell rings.

  ‘And now there’s Imran,’ Stuart snaps, though the emotional charge of his words is And now look what you’ve done. Even though I never wanted Imran to come round this morning and asked for him to be put off.

  Your son’s ever-so-tidy room …

  Most people would zoom in on the references to death and mourning, which I agree were pretty unforgivable, but the ‘ever-so-tidy’ was worse. Subtler, but more potent if you take the time to unpack it.

  ‘This feels a bit like a witch-hunt,’ I say calmly, thinking that the defendant always dresses presentably for a court appearance, and this is my feelings doing the same. ‘I’m not mourning Joseph in this room or any other because, as you point out, he’s very much alive. There’s another word that begins with an “m” that
fits much better – missing. I’m missing my son, who’s only seven and who isn’t here. Is that all right with you?’

  Stuart walks over to the sash window and opens it. ‘We’ll have to talk about this later. Imran!’ he shouts down to the street. ‘Hang on. I’m just coming down.’

  I consider tearing out two smallish clumps of my hair, to demonstrate my frustration. In my current mood and predicament, hair doesn’t feel like something I need each individual strand of. I’d still have plenty left after my grand gesture. ‘Don’t ever talk about death and mourning in connection with Joseph, ever again,’ I say. ‘And don’t say that his room is ever-so-tidy, because that’s a death reference too. Don’t … yes, it is!’ I’m not interested in hearing him deny it. Tears sting the insides of my eyelids, bitter, like a wash of acid. ‘Joseph’s bedroom is tidy because, since he’s not here at the moment, he hasn’t had a chance to mess it up since I last tidied it. It’s a tidy room – that’s all it is! Call it that!’

  Stuart is thinking only of Imran: closing the window so that he doesn’t overhear.

  ‘Lou, you’re massively overreacting to something completely innocuous. I—’

  ‘It wasn’t innocuous! “Ever-so-tidy” – I know what that means! Parents whose children die and they meticulously keep the room exactly as it was while they were alive. Like a shrine!’

  ‘I didn’t mean that at all.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me!’ I yell in his face. ‘If you didn’t mean that, why didn’t you just say “tidy”? Why the “ever-so”? Well? You’ve got no answer, have you? Because I’m right – you were trying to make the point that Joseph’s room’s too tidy, like some kind of … museum-preserved bedroom of a dead boy!’

  Stuart flinches. He backs away from me. ‘I’m going downstairs to talk to Imran,’ he says. ‘Please don’t join us if you’re going to be like this. I wish I’d listened to you and cancelled him, to be honest.’

  ‘So do I,’ I say. ‘Cancel him now. Send him away.’

  I know it isn’t going to happen.

  Imran smiles at me as I walk into the kitchen. I wave at him and mouth ‘Hello’ but say nothing, not wanting to interrupt Stuart, who is sitting with his back to me and is in full flow: ‘If I could afford to pay you to do all my neighbours’ houses too, believe me, I would. So far I’ve managed to focus my dissatisfaction on our house looking knackered – and let’s face it, at the moment it’s the grottiest by some distance – but as soon as you’ve worked your magic and it looks brilliant, I’m going to start minding the way all the other houses look.’

  ‘Losing battle,’ says Imran, his eyes still on me. He is trying to include me because it would be rude not to. I hang back, not yet ready to be part of the conversation. Several sections of this morning’s Sunday Times lie before Imran in a neat rows-and-columns pattern that makes me think of a card trick. I can guess what’s happened: Stuart left them scattered messily on the table as he always does, and Imran felt the need to impose some kind of order.

  ‘Not a battle,’ says Stuart. ‘A positive-spirited campaign, that’s how I like to think of it. Leading by example. Hopefully people’ll see how stunning our house looks and think, “Hey, why don’t we do that too? It’s obviously possible.” I think that’s it, you know: people assume that if they buy a soot-blackened Victorian house, there’s nothing they can do about it – that’s just the way it is. It’s crazy. They think nothing of ripping out the innards, but getting the outside cleaned? Doesn’t seem to occur to anyone, even those who wouldn’t dream of letting dirt pile up anywhere else in their house – they’re happy to leave more than a hundred years of the city’s belched-out waste smeared all over their brickwork. Which ought to be, and once was, yellow! Our voluble next-door neighbour’s a perfect example.’

  ‘Of someone who ought to be yellow?’ Imran chuckles at his own joke.

  ‘No, of a tosser,’ I chip in.

  Stuart turns. ‘Oh, hi, love. Come and join us.’

  I have always admired my husband’s optimism, his willingness to leave the bad stuff behind. If only Imran were able to sandblast the crust of dark thoughts and memories off the surface of my brain.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Stuart asks me.

  I nod.

  A new day. A new start. Light pours in through the kitchen’s two large windows.

  If I sit down at the table with Imran, will he notice what’s happened to my face? The swollen patches under my eyes have burst and torn the skin. I now have two semicircular red slits, like tiny lipstick grins, one beneath each eye. If I touch them, they start to bleed. And the swellings have not subsided. I’ve tried to cover the marks with concealer but it hasn’t worked as well as I hoped it would.

  ‘I assume Stuart’s filled you in?’ I say to Imran. ‘Our noisy neighbour woes?’

  ‘He has. I feel for you. It’s got to be up there in the top five nightmare scenarios.’

  Imran likes ranking things. He has ever since university, where the three of us met. One of the first things Stuart and I learned about him was that courgettes are his number one vegetable. I asked him why and he said, ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Stuart and I still laugh about it.

  ‘You’ve got to be up there in the top three wild exaggerators,’ Stuart says, filling the kettle. ‘Noisy neighbours might be nightmare number thirty-five if it’s lucky.’

  ‘I knew you’d say that,’ Imran crows. ‘You’re wrong. Top five for sure. Maybe number five, but a solid five – nothing’s going to knock it off its spot. And before you start listing murder, torture, rape, fatal illness –’

  ‘Dinner with vegetarians,’ I mutter, sitting down opposite Imran at the kitchen table. ‘At their house or yours.’

  ‘Right.’ Imran nods enthusiastically, as I knew he would. ‘Of course all those things are qualitatively worse, but they’re not as widespread. You have to take that into account. Not everyone I know’s been murdered. Not everyone I know’s had a fatal illness –’

  ‘You mean “got” a fatal illness,’ says Stuart. ‘Because—’

  ‘If I were a political party and I wanted to get elected or re-elected, you know what I’d make my number one policy?’ Imran talks over him. ‘Any more than three complaints made against anyone for noise that affects neighbours, bang, they’re out on the street. No appeal, no due process, nothing. If you rent privately, if you’re on housing benefit – out you go. If you own your own home – sorry, it’s not yours any more, it’s been repossessed.’

  ‘Superb idea.’ Stuart winks at me as he hands me my cup of tea.

  ‘You think?’ Imran sounds surprised.

  ‘No. But I’m not going to waste my time attacking an opinion you’re pretending to hold just to provoke me.’

  ‘I suppose it’s too open to abuse.’ Imran frowns, criticising himself instead. ‘Anyone could pretend their neighbour was noisy just to get rid of them. It would lead to innocent people being culled.’

  ‘You think?’ Stuart echoes, teasing him. ‘Actually, if someone wants to get rid of a next-door neighbour that badly, chances are the neighbour’s an arse, like ours is. I was chatting to him the other week about the sandblasting – warning him there’d be some noise and mess. Know what he said, the pompous sod? “It’s your decision, obviously, but I’d never have that done. I bought a Victorian house because I love the history, you know? If I’d wanted something shiny and clean, I’d have bought a new-build.” As if centuries of grime all over your facade’s some kind of period feature, like a ceiling rose or cornicing! I said to Lou, “I bet he’d do it like a shot if he could afford it, but he’s spent every last penny on his flash interior.” ’

  Imran opens his mouth to respond, unaware that he’s interrupting. We haven’t quite reached the end of the story. I know this because I’ve heard it several times already. The hammering home of the moral is still to come, and it’s Stuart’s favourite bit. Now, seeing Imran poised to break into his flow, he’s going to have to rush it. ‘The fact is, this
will still be a Victorian house once you’ve buffed it up,’ he says. ‘It’ll look the way it looked the day it was built – an unspoiled Victorian house, restored to its original glory.’

  Record time, and word perfect.

  A disloyal thought passes through my mind: is this why Stuart has been determined, since we bought 17 Weldon Road, to tackle the outside first and leave the redecorating of inside until later? So that all the neighbours who can’t afford to have their brickwork sandblasted, including Mr Fahrenheit, can start to envy us without delay? I wanted to have the inside done first because it’s where we live, but Stuart wouldn’t hear of it. In the end I capitulated, worried that I might develop an aversion to him if I heard him say ‘the fabric of the building’ one more time.

  ‘What if Mr Fahrenheit complains about Imran’s noise?’ I ask him, surprised I didn’t think of it before. ‘It puts us in a weaker position if our house is generating as much noise during the day as his does at night.’

  Imran’s shaking his head. ‘Everyone has the right to do work to their home during working hours. If he tries to stop you, he’ll fail. I’ve seen it happen time and again. Sometimes council jobsworths come and have a poke around, but I’ve never been stopped midway through a job and I’m confident I never will be.’

  ‘Lou’s got a point, though,’ Stuart says. ‘This guy works from home a lot. There’s no doubt we’ll disturb him.’ He turns to me. ‘Perhaps you should ring the council first thing tomorrow morning and withdraw your complaint.’

  ‘What? Why would I do that?’ Another small grey pebble, poised at the top of the chute, ready for the long roll-down.

  ‘Well, it’s hardly fair, is it?’ Stuart says. ‘Whatever position the council might take, and even if Imran’s right, if we’re going to subject Fahrenheit to weeks of sandblasting noise, perhaps we should wait to complain until it’s over and we’re no longer noise pests ourselves. Otherwise it looks hypocritical.’