Vivaldi in the Dark

by Matthew J. Metzger

  “You’re such children,” Ethan said seriously and poked Darren in the shoulder. “Set up a date. We will accidentally interrupt it and interrogate your boyfriend.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s fun, Muffin. Now do it.”

  “No.”

  “Yes!”

  “No.” And thus the lunch period was lost, to the grass, and Ethan’s stranglehold. The year was off to a good start already.

  * * * *

  “Just so you know,” Charley said on Monday afternoon, “I’m not stupid.”

  Monday was more or less the only day that they left school together. Charley was everything Jayden was not at school: outgoing, confident, and involved. She wasn’t afraid to join all the clubs she wanted. But then, girls didn’t get bullied for joining the dance club.

  “I never said you were?” Jayden hedged. “Want to come over?” he added. “Mum took the day off to sort out the garden.” Which meant she’d broken off at lunchtime to obsessively bake, like always. For being so young, Jayden suspected Mum was secretly a 1950's housewife.

  “Yes!” Charley beamed, then promptly punched him in the arm. “Come on. You’ve been distracted all week, and you won’t stop going over that stupid storyboard of—oh don’t give me that look, I’m sure it’s great, but you have to admit that you’ve been obsessing.”

  He had, a little. He was supposed to have it finished by now so they could hold auditions and start costumes and learn lines—Mum’s side of the fun, not his. But Darren ranting about the virtues of Holst over Vivaldi and whether you could perform Mars (or whatever) with an orchestra comprised entirely of string instruments…it had triggered Jayden’s inspiration. And now he had to work out something to shove music in the play. He had to. What if it was what they’d been missing all along?

  “What’s your point?” he asked, instead of admitting to it.

  “Why?” she demanded flatly.

  “I had some inspiration.”

  “Exactly,” she said, squeezing his arm tightly as they walked past the bins and out of the gates. For once, the smokers ignored them. Canning wasn’t among them, and Jayden felt a twist in his gut. Something was going to happen. Canning wouldn’t take being threatened by a private school boy lying down. It was just a question of when. “So what’s inspired you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Really.” He knew better than to tell Charley about the fact he’d spent most of Thursday afternoon trying to guess the exact shade of Darren’s eyes while paying more attention to his fractured composing than his own homework. He knew Charley. “Just out of the blue.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “So it’s nothing to do with what April told me in French?”

  April Hamilton had to be the biggest gossip in the year, and Jayden suddenly, violently didn’t want to know what she had to say. And yet he asked anyway.

  “April told me that Shannon told her that Ross and Jade saw you in the Costa on Bright Street with some Johnny boy on Tuesday. And I told April to tell Shannon to tell Ross and Jade that that couldn’t be right because you don’t know any of them—except Mike, obviously, but Mike doesn’t count, and anyway, Jade apparently said he was cute and I love Mike but he is so not cute, and anyway, I said she had to be wrong but now,” Charley stopped to breathe, and smiled at him with all the warmth and friendliness of a hungry shark, “I think I might have been wrong.”

  “Um…”

  “Were you in Costa with a Johnny boy?”

  “Well, yes, but I don’t know him, I just…”

  “So why were you in Costa with him?”

  They had reached Attlee Road; Jayden suddenly regretted asking her over. “Because…look, he was at the theatre, okay? St. John’s string orchestra use it on Tuesdays, and…”

  “Oh, my God, Jayden, this is not allowed!” Charley shrieked, loud enough that Jayden winced, and as they neared his house, the front window opened and his mother leaned out with a bemused look on her face.

  “I thought I heard the two of you,” she said.

  “Hi, Livvy!” Charley said cheerfully.

  Mum insisted on Charley calling her Livvy. Charley and Jayden had been best friends since the first year of primary school, and anyway, “Mrs. Phillips makes me feel old!” She was anything but old. She was thirty-five, much younger than Charley’s Mum, and she looked even younger, with her long red hair and love for jeans and colourful T-shirts. When people said that they’d seen Jayden with his older sister, it was a genuine impression. And right now, leaning out of the window and rolling her eyes at the pair of them, she could have almost passed for sixteen herself.

  “How was school?” she asked. Jayden shrugged; Charley launched into an enthusiastic recounting of her day, and Jayden managed to abandon her in the front garden long enough to zip upstairs, change, and return to steal the first of the promised cookies on the counter-top before either of them noticed he was gone.

  Standing in the kitchen destroying the cookie, Jayden was forced to admit the other reason he didn’t want to tell Charley about Darren: her complete lack of sense. If he told her that Darren was not only cute but had put his hand on Jayden’s knee and then cracked a sex joke, she’d march right over to The Brightside on Tuesday afternoon and tell him about Jayden’s crush. And not having a problem with gay people was completely different from being okay with one of them crushing on you. One hundred percent different. He’d run a mile, and Jayden wanted someone to talk to who didn’t hear all the things he got called at school, and didn’t care if he was gay.

  Even if that someone was too attractive for Jayden’s own good.

  “There you are. Ooh, chocolate chip. Now,” Charley snapped, muffled a little by the cookie. “Come on. This isn’t on. You’ve gone and had a summer romance, haven’t you? While I was in Madrid for three weeks, you went and found yourself a cute Johnny boy, didn’t you?”

  “No, I did not,” Jayden said sharply. “I met him on Tuesday. I told you, he’s in the orchestra. I met him at The Brightside, and he went to get coffee, and I went with him. That’s all. I’ll probably not see him again.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Why do you—Darren.”

  “Darren what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll ask Mike,” Charley said, phone already in hand. “What?” she demanded. “It’s not exactly a big school, is it? Mike’ll know him.”

  Mike, another friend from primary school that they didn’t see too much of these days, had gone on to St. John’s on his grandfather’s inheritance. But Darren didn’t seem the type to be into comics and Japanese art, so Jayden doubted they did know each other. “Fine,” he said. “Please yourself. But you’re getting stupid over nothing, because it’s nothing.”

  “You’re a bad liar, honey,” Charley cooed and stole another cookie. “Is he cute?”

  Jayden reddened. “He’s…all right-looking, I suppose.”

  “Your face says he’s gorgeous,” Charley said and mock-swooned. “You’ve got a crush! You have! Oh my God, is he gay? Tell me he’s gay. This is perfect!”

  “No, he’s not gay.”

  Her face fell. “Did you ask?”

  “Yes,” he lied, trying to adopt Darren’s short, perfunctory tone. If it would get Charley off his back, he’d tell her anything he had to. If it meant she wouldn’t go and hunt Darren out and tell him herself, then he’d lie, and he’d do it well, for once.

  “Oh,” she said, and her face crumpled into an expression of gut-wrenching pity. “Oh, Jayden, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” Jayden shrugged. “I don’t even know him. It’ll pass.” At least that was true. He didn’t know Darren, beyond the wild hair and the amazing musical talent and the low tolerance for taking other people’s crap that Jayden suspected was actually ‘zero’ rather than just ‘low.’ He didn’t know him.

  But he’d like to.

  Chapter 5

  Jayden brought co
ffee as a bribe.

  It was the middle of October by the time he worked out exactly what idea Darren had sparked off in his brain for the play, and the cold was definitely with them. He caught the bus to The Brightside that Tuesday afternoon, and a gloom was settling over the sky by the time he shouldered his way out of Costa and headed for the theatre.

  He liked to think that maybe he and Darren were friends by now. They talked on Darren’s rehearsal days. Sometimes Darren would play silly songs for him on the violin. Once, Jayden had managed to persuade him to play on the clapped-out old piano in the storage room, and Darren had surprised him with a bawdy Irish drinking song and a powerful voice. But then, Jayden had also learned that Darren had a dry, dark sense of humour that leaned toward the macabre on occasion.

  On occasion. Darren had been moody the last couple of weeks, and Jayden was hoping that his hammered-out idea and a big cup of that gut-rotting espresso that Darren liked would be able to bribe him into doing what Jayden wanted him to do. Namely, perform.

  His detour made him slightly late, so he missed Mr. Weber’s usual flounce out of the theatre, and by the time he exchanged brief greetings with Dwayne and slipped into the auditorium, it stood empty. From the back, he could hear the faint strains of the violin, and he dumped his gear and the coffee on the edge of the stage before going in search.

  “Darren?” he called, knocking on the storeroom door before opening it. “What are you doing playing in the dark?”

  Darren shrugged, framed in the light from the corridor, and said, “Why not?”

  “I want to ask a favour of you,” Jayden blurted out. “Um. I brought coffee. Come out to the stage?”

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” Darren muttered, but packed up anyway. He had been playing from memory or imagination, with no sheet music and no stand. He moved stiffly, and Jayden bit his lip, wondering if this was going to work. Sometimes, he thought that Darren secretly didn’t actually like music. “Before I touch the coffee, what’s the favour?”

  Jayden laughed nervously and pulled him along the corridor by the sleeve. “The coffee is free. And not, you know, poisoned or anything,” he said. “I, um, I figured I could bribe you with another one, or one of their cookies or something, if you agree to my idea.”

  “Now I really don’t like the sound of it,” Darren replied, but dropped his bags into one of the seats and took the coffee anyway. “Come on then, out with it.”

  “Here.” Jayden rummaged through his bag and handed over the script, stapled roughly together at lunch break when he’d finished his notations. “Page nine. Um, Jacob Cooper, that’s the character. He’s nuts.”

  “And?” Darren asked, flipping through it. He pulled himself up on the edge of the stage to read.

  “Well, I wanted to experiment with breaking the fourth wall a little, you know, let him see things on the stage or in the audience that others can’t, because he’s mad, you know, but the lights are kind of blinding here and you can’t really see the audience, so I was maybe thinking he could see the props like props, but that’s not great for the rest of the scenes or the other actors, and then…”

  “Jayden.”

  “Sorry. I, um…well, I’ve never used music in a play before because we don’t have an orchestra pit here and hiring a musician would be too expensive and none of the actors play, and…”

  “You want me to play for your…play?” Darren asked and winced at the poor phrasing.

  “Sort of. I, um… Can you play and walk around at the same time?”

  “Yes.”

  Jayden blinked. “Really?”

  “Yes,” Darren said flatly. “At least, the violin, because I bloody hope you didn’t just ask me to lift a piano.”

  Jayden laughed breathlessly. “No, no, I…I just kind of thought that might be wishful thinking. You…really?”

  “You want a demonstration?”

  “Um…yeah, yeah, okay.”

  Darren shrugged, abandoning the script and retrieving the violin. Jayden scrambled up onto the stage, beckoning him up, and shifted on his feet through the plucking and high clinking of Darren checking the strings. How they could be wrong when he’d just been playing was beyond Jayden, and he felt impatient to show Darren what he meant, because it would be great, and once Darren saw how cool it was, he had to say yes, right? Even if it cost Jayden another coffee and an overpriced cookie?

  And he’ll have to stay for rehearsals if he says yes, that bitchy little voice in the back of his head piped up, and he squashed it. There was no point in that route.

  “Okay, so I was thinking, like, if you could literally follow Pete—that’s guy who’s playing Cooper—around the stage while he does his thing? Like…if you could just…I don’t know, play anything and follow me around?”

  Darren raised an eyebrow, violin and bow posed. In that graceful, arched stance under the bright lights, he looked utterly beautiful, and something alarming twisted in Jayden’s stomach. He turned away quickly to hide it, and a sharp, high note was sliced off the strings behind him. He paused.

  “Like that?”

  “Um…”

  Jayden took another step, and Darren repeated the sharp, short note. Jayden had only heard the long, warbling quality of the violin before, and the sudden shock of it was slightly jarring. As he paced away across the stage, a note chimed with every step, running down the octave and back up. When he turned on his heel at stage left, Darren dropped a full three notes into a dark, almost threatening hum as he turned.

  “Follow me,” Jayden coaxed.

  As he walked back, Darren walked to meet him, speeding up the notes until they rattled off in a chattering, humming cacophony, the higher in time with Jayden and the lower in time with Darren himself. It was so quick and so uncalled for that Jayden almost laughed; as it was, he couldn’t help the smile.

  “That’s…oh my God,” he said and gave in to the laugh rising in his throat. “That’s brilliant. I mean…no, I do mean, that’s…okay, um, if I read some of Cooper’s monologues…”

  He darted back to where Darren had abandoned the script; Darren mocked him, he thought, with another flurry of descending notes, and he stopped and turned on him accusingly.

  “Have you done this sort of thing before?” he demanded.

  “No,” Darren said. “But I’m guessing you mean in the style of those old cartoons. Like Tom and Jerry or something.”

  “Yeah…yeah, kind of. Um, I want to edit some of the lines, so…so Cooper actually thinks he’s being stalked by some violinist nobody else can see. So, you know, he’s going to turn round and yell at you, and all that. Um. If you could…I don’t know, like get out of the way, pull faces at him, just…I don’t know, generally act like…”

  “I’m crap at remembering lines,” Darren warned.

  “You don’t have to speak. Like…an exaggerated, annoying mime. With a violin. That nobody else can see.”

  Darren snorted and grinned, shaking his head. “This is the weirdest play I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Well, weird gets noticed, and I’m going to be famous playwright one day,” Jayden said. “So…would you? I mean, if you could come for a full rehearsal, and talk to Pete—the actor, for this guy—then we could work something out properly, and it would be amazing, it really would.”

  “I can’t stay until six-thirty,” Darren warned. “I have to walk home from here.”

  “Mum would drop you off,” Jayden said immediately. “I mean, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind, not if you were going to be part of the play, and it would be so good, Darren, it would be an amazing new thing to try out. Come on. I brought you coffee and everything, and we can go right now and get more coffee and a cookie if you say yes.”

  “This is blatant bribery.”

  “Yes,” Jayden said and clasped his hands beseechingly in front of his face. It would be perfect! Darren was so…so sarcastic, so naturally dry in the faces he pulled and the way he talked, and even his violin sounded like it was takin
g the piss, and it would be perfect. It would be, if only Darren would agree to it.

  “If I said yes, I’m not joining your am-drams group.”

  “You wouldn’t have to.”

  “And I can’t be coming to every rehearsal. I don’t have time for that.”

  “That’s fine. I mean, nobody else would need to rehearse with you, just Pete, and you wouldn’t need to be here to practise your music, not really, so…”

  “And it would be a one-off. I don’t do acting.”

  “But you perform in your orchestra.”

  “Yeah, sitting down, amongst thirty other people dressed in the same uniform and not moving around. You’re lucky if your own parents can pick you out in the middle of that. I don’t do getting up and performing in front of crowds.”

  “Okay. Okay, just this play, that’s fine—I mean, I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to do for the summer performance, so…”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine, as in…you’ll do it?”

  “Yeah.” Darren shrugged. “I guess so. Couldn’t hurt.”

  Jayden moved before his brain caught up with his body, flying across the stage and throwing his arms around Darren’s neck in a wild hug. The strings screeched as Darren gracelessly swept the violin out of his path, leaving them pressed chest-to-chest, and it was that violent squeal that alerted to Jayden to what he’d just done.

  “Sorry!” he stammered, letting go and stepping back hastily. Darren stared at him, looking slightly shell-shocked. “Sorry, sorry, I just—I’ve been trying to work out how to really play with Cooper’s madness and this theatre’s really limited and it’s been driving me up the wall, and—um—thank you? Thank you. I mean, seriously, it’ll be great, and, um…”

  His face was on fire. He couldn’t have felt any warmer if he’d doused himself in petrol and lit a match—and it would probably be less embarrassing, too. Darren was still just staring at him, and even as he regretted doing it, that stupid bloody voice in his head that Jayden swore sounded just like Charley sometimes was shrieking about how it felt to hug him.

  Namely, nice.