The Orphan Choir

by Hannah, Sophie

  Whatever plans I make, they need to be beyond Mr Clay’s imaginative capacity, since he will be trying to second-guess me at every stage. I need to think about this more when I’m not so tired.

  Noise Diary – Thursday 18 October, 11 a.m.

  I don’t have much energy for writing today, so I’ll keep this as brief as possible. I’m not sure there’s much point in my continuing with this diary anyway, since I’m unlikely to be believed. I have no proof, and it would sound insane if I told anyone. Because it is; Mr Clay must be quite, quite mad to be doing what he’s doing to me.

  This can’t only be about noise – his right to make it, my complaints about it. Perhaps that was the catalyst, but the seeds of his aptitude for the kind of sustained, escalating vindictiveness he is now displaying must have been sown in his personality long before he met me. I know nothing about his background or childhood. Maybe he was the victim of a heinous wrong that planted a fountain of anger and vengefulness in his heart that’s been spouting ever since. Maybe he was too scared of the person or people who injured him to do anything about it, and that’s why he needs to get stoned all the time, to numb his rage. And then I entered his life, with my unwillingness to let his fun disrupt my nights, and suddenly his suppressed acrimony started to froth and bubble until it spilled out all over me – a polite, law-abiding woman he’s not at all afraid of; a convenient proxy target.

  I can’t prove that any of that’s true either.

  Anyhow, the bald facts are as follows: Stuart is away again, and Mr Clay has taken his campaign to a new level. Last night, I spent the evening in the lounge watching television. There was nothing good on, but I hate being alone in the house and I’d rather have the TV on than off, if only to hear the sound of human voices. (Pathetic, I know. But if I sat in silence, I might start to think about how much easier it is for Stuart to cope with Joseph’s absence during term time than it is for me, because he’s away quite regularly himself. I might then start to wonder if this has occurred to Stuart at any point. He hasn’t mentioned it, if it has. Before too long, I might be roaming the dark streets of Cambridge screaming, ‘Where is my superior second husband?’ All of that sounds like something worth avoiding, so I watch television instead.)

  At about ten-thirty I turned off the TV and the lounge light, and was about to go upstairs to bed when I heard boys singing. This time it was ‘Lift Thine Eyes’, and it wasn’t coming through any part of the wall my house shares with Mr Clay’s. It was coming from outside. I wasn’t sure at first, so I walked over to the window. As I got closer, my doubts evaporated; the voices were directly outside my lounge, on the street. The only thing separating me from them was a pane of glass and Imran’s cardboard, scaffolding and plastic sheeting.

  At first I was pleased. If Mr Clay was standing on the pavement with his ghetto blaster, I thought, then someone apart from me would hear it: one of our other neighbours, or a passer-by. If I could find even one person to back me up then I could prove to Pat Jervis that I was genuinely the victim of a hate crusade. I wondered if Clay was finally losing his grip – if he was so puffed up with venom that he’d forgotten about plausible deniability, which originally was the lynchpin of his campaign. Was the temptation of my wrapped-up house, which from the outside looks like a Christo and Jeanne-Claude artwork (if that means anything to you, Cambridge Council – if not, they’re sculptors whose USP is that they wrap things up, big things like the Pont Neuf bridge), too much for him to resist? Perhaps he decided it was worth the risk of revealing himself to our neighbours in order to experience the intense joy of pure, undiluted victory, however fleeting. He knew I couldn’t run to the window and catch him at it because my view is blocked by cardboard and plastic. I ran to the front door instead, but by the time I got there and opened it, he and the music were gone. As I knew they would be. A man in a checked flat cap was walking his dog along the pavement and had almost reached the corner of Weldon Road, where it meets Hills Road. ‘Excuse me!’ I called to him. He came back. I asked him if he’d heard the music and seen a man with some kind of device for playing it. He said he hadn’t. He must have been lying. There’s simply no way he could have been where he was, having walked past my house when he must have, and not heard it.

  A friend of Mr Clay’s, strategically placed to impersonate an innocent bystander, and torment me still further? I put my coat on, went out and rang number 15’s bell, to see if they’d heard anything, but their house was in darkness and no one came to the door.

  Noise Diary – Friday 19 October, 10.54 p.m.

  I don’t know how he’s doing it. Is it possible that the whole street is in league with him against me? Tonight he didn’t wait till I turned off the TV and the light. He started to play choral music outside the lounge window while I was watching, or trying to watch, EastEnders. He must have had the volume up as high as it would go. What equipment is he using? Some kind of boom box – a relic from the break-dancing-on-street-corners era? Does he have some cunning way of angling the speakers so that the sound pours into my house but not out into the street? I wonder if he’s pulled back Imran’s plastic sheeting and set down the ghetto blaster on the horizontal wooden platform inside the scaffolding, but even if he has, the noise would still spill out on to the street. And yet no one heard it, no one but me.

  Tonight it was another hymn: ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. I was nearly sick when I heard the first notes and realised which song it was. Saviour’s choir sang it at the first Choral Evensong Stuart and I attended after Joseph started school in September. It was the first hymn I heard my son sing with his choir. I started to cry as I listened, because it sounded so beautiful and Joseph was part of that, and yet I was so unhappy; I felt as if my heart was cracking into ever smaller pieces. Every note strained my soul nearly to breaking point, like a heavy boot leaning its full weight on cracking ice. I used to love ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ – it was my favourite hymn – but since that first Choral Evensong I haven’t been able to think about it and would take steps to avoid hearing it again. Strangely, I don’t feel that way about any other piece I’ve heard Joseph sing with the choir. I don’t know why. Perhaps because ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ was the first, or because it meant more to me than any other hymn – but how could Mr Clay have known this? I don’t believe it can be a coincidence that he chose that song.

  At first, when I heard it playing outside the lounge, I was too horrified to move. Then I stood up and, foolishly, ran to the window. It’s pathetic that even after so many days with no natural light, this is my automatic response when I hear a noise from the street. You’d think that by now my brain would be subliminally aware that I need to head for the front door instead.

  Predictably, the window showed me nothing but blackness and the reflection of my lounge – of myself in it, wild-haired with scabbed-up puffy eyes, wearing old pyjamas that, after several days, aren’t particularly clean or fragrant. It’s ironic that I’ve spent so much more time in my pyjamas since I’ve been unable to sleep properly. I pretty much only get dressed now to go to Saviour to hear Joseph sing. I turned and was on my way to the front door to try to catch Mr Clay in the act – the music was still playing – when something made me turn back. I don’t know what it was; something to do with what I’d seen reflected in the window, I think. I moved closer to the glass and looked again. There was nothing unusual or unexpected about what I saw: a sofa, two chairs, a lamp, a coffee table, two alcoves containing messy shelves with too many books crammed into them. Just my lounge, with me in it. Yet something about what I was looking at was making my heart beat dangerously fast, and a tiny voice inside me was warning me to turn away before I saw something I wouldn’t be able to bear. I had to get out of the room as quickly as I could, so I ran out into the hall, then had to lean against the wall for a few seconds to get my breath back. I decided there would be plenty of time later to wonder what disturbing thing I might have noticed that wasn’t immediately obvious when I looked agai
n, whereas I might only have seconds to catch Mr Clay, so I got to the front door as quickly as I could and threw it open.

  Nothing. No sound, nobody on the street. Not even a passer-by. This time I knew beyond doubt that what seemed to be the case simply couldn’t be: it was physically impossible. Seconds earlier, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ had been playing. Mr Clay couldn’t have switched it off and got himself off Weldon Road and back inside his house so quickly.

  I had an idea: maybe he’d left some kind of hi-tech music system on the pavement, then gone back to his house and controlled it remotely, from inside number 19. If so, he could have pressed ‘Stop’ at the exact moment that he saw my door open. I ran outside and looked: nothing. No ghetto blaster. No machine of any sort.

  How did he do it, then? Could he have done it without a machine on the street? Maybe he broke into my house yesterday while Stuart was away and I was out at Choral Evensong. He could have implanted some kind of invisible or well-concealed speakers in my lounge, somewhere near the window. Under the floorboards perhaps.

  I took the lounge apart (and am too shattered, for the time being, to put it back together again) and found nothing. I concluded that it was more likely that Mr Clay had devised some way to project music into the night – maybe he opened his lounge window and balanced a speaker on the sill, angled so that the sound was aimed directly at the pavement outside my house … That strikes me as feasible.

  One thing seemed to me to be certain: someone else must have heard a hymn played that loud. I brushed my teeth and my hair and went outside again. There were ground-floor lights on in three houses apart from mine: Mr Clay’s, number 16 and number 12. I decided to try number 16, since it’s directly opposite. The man who lives there alone, Philip Darrock-Jones, is a relatively famous musical conductor who has worked with all the major British orchestras and many international ones too.

  I like Philip. He has lived on Weldon Road for more than twenty years, he once told me, and, unlike most of the privacy-obsessed newer residents who install shutters or opaque glass in all their windows the instant they move in, he never even bothers to draw his lounge curtains, despite having what are very obviously rare and valuable paintings all over his walls. Being as left-wing as he is, he probably feels morally obliged to share his art collection with passers-by who can’t afford to buy original art themselves. I follow him on Twitter, so I know, for example, that he would very much like to be forced to pay more tax than he does at the moment. He doesn’t seem unduly worried about people like me and Stuart who don’t want to but would have to if he had his way, but despite disagreeing with him about this, I can’t help thinking that the altruism that is so obviously behind his opinions is quite sweet. I also like him because he annoys Mr Clay, who strongly objects to the ‘Vote Labour’ poster that is on permanent display in Philip’s bedroom window, even when there is no election in sight; I’ve heard Clay complain to his girlfriend Angie that the poster lowers the tone, makes the street look scruffy and studenty, and brings down the whole neighbourhood: the same view Stuart holds about houses with pollution-blackened brickwork. For all I know, Philip Darrock-Jones’s idea of tone-lowering might be lounging on your sofa, in full view of anyone who walks past, inhaling marijuana smoke through a plastic bottle with a hole burned at one end of it. These things are all relative.

  Philip came to the door when I knocked, and seemed genuinely pleased to see me. If he noticed that I was wearing pyjamas under my coat he showed no sign of it. I had to fight quite hard not to be dragged in for a cup of coffee, but eventually I managed to convince him I didn’t have enough time. I told him I just wanted to ask a quick question: had he heard a boys’ choir singing about twenty minutes ago? Was he in his lounge then? Had he seen anyone on the street, since he never closed his curtains? He frowned. No, he hadn’t, he said. He’d heard nothing, seen nothing, and he’d been in the lounge the whole time.

  I nearly fell down in a heap on his doorstep. I’d been frightened of him saying what he said, because I knew I would believe him if he did. Philip wouldn’t lie to me. If ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ were blaring out at top volume outside his house, he would notice it more than any other neighbour, being a music man.

  I must have turned pale or looked shaky, because Philip asked me if I was all right and tried again to get me over his threshold with offers of recuperative brandy. He asked me what was wrong and why I was asking about a boys’ choir. I had the weirdest physical sensation: as if someone was drawing, very gently, all the arteries, veins, nerves and muscles out of my body, leaving me empty and floppy, without substance. I shook my head and said it didn’t matter. If my own husband doesn’t believe me – if Pat Jervis, whose life’s work is to defeat noise vandals, doesn’t believe me – why should Philip, who believes that people are fundamentally nice and all want to look after each other? I can imagine him furrowing his capacious brow and asking, ‘But why on earth would Mr Clay want to be so nasty to you?’ and I couldn’t have held myself together if he’d said that.

  Philip was certain there was no music playing on the street twenty minutes earlier. He was an eye- and ear-witness to the absence of boys’ voices singing. I wouldn’t have been able to convince him that he was wrong and I was right.

  I didn’t bother asking any of the other neighbours. Once again, I realised, I’d underestimated Mr Clay. Of course he wouldn’t play empirically verifiable loud music in the street. He wouldn’t be so stupid.

  So. Hidden speakers in my lounge. It’s the only explanation.

  After I got back from Philip’s, I locked the door, went to the kitchen and took the little packet of cannabis out of the drawer. From another drawer, I pulled out a box of matches, and from the counter I picked up a half-empty bottle of mineral water. I took all three to the lounge and sat down on the sofa, thinking, ‘I am going to take some drugs. Maybe if I get high like Mr Fahrenheit (that’s what I call Mr Clay) I will be able to access his mindset more easily – the druggie wavelength; I will be able to look around this room and intuitively know where he’s planted the invisible speakers.’

  I didn’t go through with my plan to get high. I remembered that Mr Fahrenheit, when I saw him do this, had a piece of what looked like silver foil stretched over the top of the bottle. I couldn’t be bothered to go back to the kitchen for foil, so I stayed where I was and cried instead.

  At this rate, if no one helps me to prove what’s going on and put a stop to it, my next-door neighbour is going to kill me.

  TWO

  December

  7

  ‘Mum, look how high I’m going!’ Joseph yells at me, bouncing up and down on the trampoline. He’s with a friend who, so far, has jumped silently, as I’m sure his watching mother must be smugly aware.

  ‘Ssssh!’ I hiss, running over just in case I need to tell Joseph again because he didn’t hear me the first time. As I move towards him, I glance to my left at the hard-surfaced tennis court, on which a young blond married couple, protected from the cold by tracksuits and fleeces with hooded tops, are playing half-heartedly and laughing at their own uselessness. I met them at the spa last week and we talked for a bit – everyone seems keen to chat to the new homeowners, probably so that they can gossip about us later – but I can’t remember their names. Hers was something unusual like Melody or Carmody, but not either of those.

  Only about one in five of their shots makes it over the net. As I move towards the trampoline, I watch them to see if they are going to react at all to Joseph’s enthusiastic outburst or to my ‘Ssssh!’, but they don’t seem interested. They are too caught up in their own giggling, which isn’t much quieter than the noise I made, and is going on for longer. The mother of the other boy on the trampoline doesn’t seem concerned about the breach of the peace either. And Joseph is already mouthing, ‘Sorry, Mum! I forgot!’

  We moved into The Boundary less than a week ago, but I am already starting to work out the unwritten rules. It isn’t noise that people worr
y about so much as noise that no one is taking steps to deal with. My ‘Ssssh!’ would have reassured everyone in the vicinity that I was aware of the problem and would sort it out, and that is all people want here: the comfort of knowing that their neighbours value quiet and tranquillity as much as they do. After my experience with Mr Fahrenheit, I know that the killer aspect of unwelcome sound is not the decibels but the disempowering feeling of having no control over your own environment and life. Anyone could cope with loud music if they knew that it would soon stop, or could be made to if it didn’t.

  When I reach my son, I say, ‘You can stay here if you want, but I need to go and make a start on lunch.’

  ‘He’ll be okay here with me,’ says the other boy quickly, alarmed by the prospect of losing his playmate. ‘I’m staying out for a bit yet.’ He has a Welsh accent, copper-coloured hair and large freckles and, I notice, is dressed like a gentleman farmer – the miniature version – whereas Joseph looks like a city boy in trendy jeans and without a proper coat on, his high-top trainers sitting on the grass next to the trampoline beside a far more appropriate pair of small brown walking boots. I’ll have to take him into Spilling and buy him a green padded coat like the Welsh boy’s, wellington boots, a cagoule.