by Gill Hornby
We’re up all night to get lucky
‘You know what?’ said Pat, putting away her specs. ‘I’m not sure we are.’ She reached for her bag.
‘I’m not sure we ever were,’ added Lynn, with a tone of regret, as she rose and picked up her mac.
We’re up all night to get lucky
They were trying it for the second time now, and–perhaps because it was new to them, perhaps because it was song at its most virulently infectious–it was starting to really take off. The men on one side were singing across to the women on the other–goading, baiting, bouncing in their seats, dancing with their arms.
We’re up all night to get lucky
‘Up all night with indigestion more like,’ shouted Pat over her shoulder as she stomped off to the door.
‘Owph.’ Lynn ran to keep up with her. ‘Don’t. You’ll set me off.’
We’re up all night to get lucky
But with their leaving, something was released in the room–as if they were ballast and without them the Choir could at last take flight. By their third run-through, they were all up and bouncing around in the centre of the circle of trust. They couldn’t help themselves; the music was irresistible. Jazzy was dancing with Katie’s wheelchair, Maria and Lewis were jiving, Annie and Bennett were grooving back to back.
We’re up all night to get lucky
‘I must say, it isn’t quite what I was expecting,’ Emma shouted at Lewis’ rear as he twerked in her general direction. ‘I take it this is something of a one-off?’
We’re up all night to get lucky
And in the middle of it all, up on a chair, singing to the maximum capacity of her powerful lungs–
Up all night to get lucky.
–was Tracey.
When they finally had to accept that the session had come to its end, the applause seemed to go on for ever.
‘Don’t forget the Talent Show,’ bellowed Lewis over the noise. ‘All in a top cause. We’re raising funds for the coach to take us to the Championships. We need notice of your acts NOW for the programme. It’s a big week next week: Connie is even now working on the set for the competition so that we can at last get CRACKING. Goodnight, everybody.’
‘Night.’
‘That was brilliant.’
‘Can’t wait for next week.’
‘Well, that was certainly different,’ smiled Annie as she finished up in the kitchen. ‘Tum tum ti-tum ti-tum lucky. What fun.’
‘Hey, Dad,’ Katie called over her shoulder to Lewis. ‘Are you all right driving home on your own? Jazzy says she’ll walk me back.’
Lewis’ delight was so extreme it almost winded him. He slumped against the car and managed to splutter out a forced, casual, ‘Yep, fine by me.’ Tracey–who was until that moment still singing, who wasn’t so much walking but more shimmying her way home–caught it, bit her lip and looked away.
You could always just tell when it was Saturday morning, even without opening your eyes. The traffic made a different noise, for a start–less impatient, not as uniform, none of that everybody-having-to-do-the-same-thing-at-the-same-time military precision that you got on a weekday; instead, there was a pleasing individuality to all those engines out there–a sort of auto self-expression. Tracey enjoyed that. She also enjoyed the conversations that floated up to her window from the pavement below. People liked each other on a Saturday morning, in ways they quite forgot midweek. Their children were less annoying, their partners more attractive… Tracey turned over in bed and sank into a long and lazy stretch.
It was always her favourite day, hands down. She was aware, of course, that this was just a hangover from her youth. She knew she loved it because it meant wearing her own clothes, hanging round the Rimmel counter in Boots, parading with a gang of girls up and down the High Street, baiting gangs of boys. It was the only day of the week when she didn’t have to account for her whereabouts. Wearied by the demands of Monday to Friday, the army of adults at school and at home–the ones who combined to make her life an imprisoning misery–even they seemed to take the day off, too. None of these privileges meant so much to her any more–hey, it’s great being a grown-up, you can just hang around that Rimmel counter whenever you fancy–but she felt the pleasure of them just the same.
By the same token, she hated Sundays–yes, yes, you could go shop your head off on a Sunday these days, but you couldn’t then, so it didn’t count. A Puritan air hung around the Sundays of her youth: walks were taken, rooms tidied, lawns mown; her parents sang along, actually sang along with their own hymnbooks, to Songs of Praise. If it wasn’t for the Sunday-night music charts on the radio she probably would have topped herself before her fifteenth birthday.
She got out of bed, pulled her old kimono around her and went to open the blind. Look at that–it wasn’t even raining, for the first time this week. She nodded at the sky with satisfaction. That was Saturdays for you, in a nutshell–unlike the other days, your Saturday could be relied upon to deliver. Lewis and Katie were already up and on their way out. She stopped for a moment and watched them as they bumped their way over to the disabled parking space and started the necessary manoeuvres to get into the car. Tracey remembered now, they were off swimming this morning; she would pop round for a cup of tea this afternoon. It was so odd that they had all lived so near to each other for so long. How had she never noticed them before?
Trotting down the stairs in slippered feet, Tracey thought of all the things she did not have to do that day–go to work, go food-shopping, get in the car… there was no end to the list of irritants that she did not have to suffer. Though she would go into town later on–just to see how things were settling down with Jazzy and her mum. She poured some coffee into a filter paper and switched on the machine. Not all the Saturdays of her life had been quite this perfect. When Billy was younger, he kept taking stuff up in an enthusiastic sort of way, and for a good few years there were all sorts of sporting nonsense involving early mornings and clean kit and Tracey standing outside in the cold. It was really pretty grim for a bit, but he gave it all up soon enough, bless him. She could now say, with pleasure and not a small amount of pride, that most Saturdays he did not even stir before nightfall.
It was only once the toast had popped up and the coffee machine ceased to gurgle that Tracey noticed there were other noises coming from elsewhere in the house. She cocked an ear as she spread her butter and marmalade, and then took her breakfast into the living room for a closer listen. It was coming from the stairs, the stairs down to the front door, the ones that nobody had ever gone up, ever, other than Annie Miller. She couldn’t be breaking in, could she? Not on a Saturday… Annie Miller was, like teachers and parents, exactly the sort of person whom one should never have to encounter on a Saturday. She opened the door, and there was Billy.
‘Bills! Hello,’ she said through her toast. ‘Thought you were a burglar, or a choir nutter.’ She took a slurp of coffee. ‘Late night? Haven’t gone to bed yet?’
‘Been up for an hour,’ called Billy cheerfully from behind a bin bag halfway down.
‘Why?’ Tracey was aware of sounding rather stern; parental, almost. He was peculiarly alert; not even hungover. ‘Billy, what on earth…?’
‘I was just looking out that old rucksack—’
‘Rucksack?’ She didn’t like where this might be going. ‘What possible use could you have for a rucksack? Would you mind, Billy, telling me exactly what is going on?’
He stood up straight, with the rucksack slung over one shoulder and an armful of Warhammer, and began to pick his way over their domestic rubble towards the top of the stairs.
‘Who knows, Mum?’ Now Tracey was aware that he sounded a bit sarky; cheeky brat, even. ‘Perhaps at some point in the next sixty years I might go away for a night or two, somewhere out of the dump that is Bridgeford, and need something to, um’–he looked around him wildly, clearly trying to take the imaginative leap towards what someone who went somewhere might reasonably be expected t
o take–‘put a… a–I dunno–a shirt in.’
‘Fine. Good luck. Enjoy.’ She turned her back to her son and took her breakfast over to the table. ‘And you’re taking all your Warhammer with you, too? Packing all your favourite toys when you run away from home?’
‘TBH, Mum, twenty-two-year-olds don’t tend to “run away from home” so much. They tend to more, like, “move”.’ Billy emerged into the room and spread his reclaimed stuff all over the table–all around Tracey’s sacred Saturday morning breakfast. ‘And I just found all this and it was, like, Wow, this is seriously not cool having that on the stairs just doing nothing. There’s some little dude out there who would love this stuff, and there’s Mr William Leck ford Esquire who could make a few quid by selling it.’
‘Selling it? Selling it? Who are you, then, all of a sudden: Donald Trump?’
‘Hey, did he sell his Warhammer?’ He opened the still-intact boxes and examined the contents. ‘And isn’t he like really rich? Cool. Oh, yeah, talking of rich…’ He looked up and straight at Tracey; her breath was arrested by a sense of impending doom. ‘Been meaning to go over all this with you. I think it’s time I got the low-down about Dad’s allowance and all that. You know, no reason, just like to get across it, you know what I mean?’
‘Billy Leckford,’ Tracey rose and so did her voice, ‘what is it with you today? You, mate, are seriously harshing my Saturday-morning mellow.’ She stormed off up the stairs and slammed and locked the bathroom door.
Tracey took another gulp of air and then sank again into the soapy water. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out.’ That’s what her mum and dad were always telling her in that boring, predictable, sad-sack parent kind of way. She shuddered, these days, when she reflected on how she herself had been brought up, and ‘Be sure your blah-di-blah’ was just typical: never once did they sit down with her, examine her choices, help her through her own behaviour. Instead, they just spouted this kind of stuff–lifted off the nearest tea-towel–and hoped for the best.
To be fair, it had almost worked. She didn’t enjoy any of these pithy aphorisms, but she had believed them. The evidence was there to back them up. When Tracey lived with her parents, her sins did find her out, more often than not. But then she was being constantly monitored and her sins were of the low-level variety, the nicking of the last chocolate digestive, the failure to clean out the guinea pig: pretty harmless and of little consequence.
But in the past twenty-two years, she had lost faith in it entirely. For over half her life now Tracey had been living with sins of a different stature altogether. Her sins were her lies and those lies were enormous; colossal great things; lies the size of magnificent buildings–that was what she lived with. In fact, so big were these lies, so spacious and capacious, she didn’t just live with them, she lived in them. It was perfectly nice in there: comfortable, quiet. Perhaps it got a bit boring, occasionally; other people might find it lonely, but Tracey was fine.
Sometimes she read, in interviews and magazines, about ‘impostor syndrome’: it afflicted people who were so successful–High Court judges, CEOs–that they couldn’t quite believe it; they lived with the constant fear of being tapped on the shoulder and told they were in the wrong life. It amused her. Because there was Tracey, who was meant to go much further, who should never, by rights, be living this life of anonymous under-achievement, who was an actual, genuine impostor, and she had no fear whatsoever of being found out any more. Everything, every landmark on her biographical landscape, was untrue–who she was, what she used to be, who Billy was, where he came from–it was all lies, all of it. But somehow, and this was perhaps because of the very scale of it all, nobody had ever tapped on her shoulder. Contrary to her parents’ wisdom, and almost to her own amusement, she had never been found out at all.
Until today. She came up out of the water, took another deep breath, and stayed up. Tracey loved everything about her sweet little boy, but the quality that had been so useful to her over the years, and of which she was most particularly fond, was his overwhelming incuriosity. She really shouldn’t berate him for suddenly asking difficult questions now, just be grateful they had never entered his brain before. And all was not lost, not quite yet. He had only made a simple enquiry, not suddenly turned into Sherlock. The situation could be retrieved, she was sure of it.
Leaping out of the bath, Tracey grabbed a towel, dripped her way over to her bedroom and quietly shut the door. She stood silently for a moment, listening out for Billy’s movements, working out what he was up to. He was back on the stairs again, she reckoned, whistling while he foraged about, bringing up more stuff. She shook her head–talk about impostors: who was this stranger in her house?
It didn’t matter. The coast was clear. Tracey burrowed to the back of her wardrobe and pressed the buttons that opened her safe.
There must be a stage in the history of all great institutions when they somehow develop instincts and survival skills all of their own; when they come to life, throw up their hands in despair at the mess their members have wrought and seize control of their own destiny. They must at the very least have one hand on the tiller as they navigate the course from one generation to the next. Otherwise, how to explain the continued existence of, say, the House of Commons, or any of our organised religions? Surely they are only still with us despite, rather than because of, the competence and common sense of man.
Looking in at the Bridgeford choir at this critical moment in its history, it seems to be exhibiting the behaviour of an organism all too keenly aware of its own mortality, even as its own members are sleep-walking towards oblivion. On this particular Tuesday evening, Lewis and Annie were in the middle of the circle; Lewis was doing the talking, Annie looking suitably grave.
‘… what we were hoping for, I’m afraid. Until the weekend, Constance was, as you know, making an excellent recovery and was, apparently, hard at work on the set list even on Saturday morning. Sunday, though, saw a little dip and sadly she hasn’t been able to do as much as she had hoped since then.’
‘Poor love,’ said the altos.
‘We’ll manage,’ said the basses.
‘So when is she going to get round to it then?’ the sopranos wanted to know.
‘Listen to me.’ Lewis obviously felt the need to turn this from an announcement to a rallying cry. ‘The underlying trend is UP. She WILL be better by the end of the week. She may even be WITH US for the contest…’ He continued in that vein: they were in good shape, things could not be better… And most of the singers seemed happy to take his word for it; the institution itself, though, could clearly see right through him. As he adjusted his blinkers and blathered on, the Choir was busy at work on a variety of alternative futures for itself.
And it was doing very nicely. After all, against all the odds, Tracey was still there. She was sitting in the circle of trust with the rest of them and rolling her wide brown eyes at Jazzy as Lewis spoke. Despite the constant irritation of Annie’s presence and her monstrous interference in Billy’s life, Tracey did keep coming, week after week: Annie repelled her, but somehow or other the Choir kept drawing her in.
And Bennett was there, too. It wasn’t an easy gig, not only being the sole tenor but being a damn fine tenor, too: the basses gave him a hard time, the sopranos made far too much of a fuss of him. But he had stuck it out anyway and was sitting quietly listening to the latest health bulletin with a worried frown.
And just as Lewis’ speech entered its final cadence, in walked Emma. She was back for more, and this time she was not alone. The hall fell silent as everyone assessed the vision that swaggered towards them: two men, both mid-forties, dress smart/casual. They had, as far as anyone could tell, absolute lashings of their own hair; their BMI was, quite remarkably, just fine. They clearly came from another town. They possibly came from another world.
‘Hmm,’ said Maria, to nobody in particular. ‘Who do we have here?’
‘I hope you don’t mind’–Emma beamed–‘taking in
two more refugees from my old place? We all feel the need to move on, and you were so welcoming to me last week. I was hoping you could find space…’
‘Well, I don’t think we need to audition them,’ said Pat, sucking her cheeks in.
‘Great,’ said Emma. ‘Well, this is Edward and this is Jonty and Jonty just happens to be a pianist too in fact he was the pianist at the Operatic weren’t you Jonty I don’t suppose you’ve brought some music with you here tonight oh you have, how fantastic, oh it will make such a difference won’t it to be accompanied instead of just wandering about all over the place so does anyone have any suggestions or shall we leave it to Jonty over there, oh listen, not a bad sound at all, shall we get cracking?’
‘Uh, hello, hello, and steady on. Woah, there. If I could just hold you back for a minute.’ Lewis was back on his feet, holding up a cautionary hand and looking most concerned. ‘Good-evening, Emma. Welcome, Edward, and welcome… um, J… J… brjzsh.’ He choked a little. Lewis had a private, unofficial list of names that he could never comfortably say out loud and, as it happened, ‘Jonty’ was near the top. He would always be polite, of course. He would never be outwardly unpleasant. But he would not, under any circumstances, let the word ‘Jonty’ cross his lips–unless it was to condemn said Jonty to the guillotine, or to order the placing of his very smug head upon a very sharp stick. ‘We do have a programme already for tonight, thanks for your input—’
‘Not. Again,’ Jazzy groaned.
‘We have to practise our Sound of Music medley for the upcoming County Championships. While our leader, Constance, cannot be with us, not tonight anyway’–he walked over to the piano and put the sheet music upon the stand–‘she has asked that this be done.’
‘Then who are we to argue?’ smirked Jonty, with a wink to Edward. ‘Here we go then.’ He chortled as he opened the overture. ‘Haven’t heard this for a while.’