Puccini's Ghosts (24 page)

I notice that Enid has not exerted herself enough to get her face shiny never mind sweaty, but she draws a hand across her forehead and widens her eyes at Billy, stretches her arms up behind her head, lifts and drops her hair, and sighs with exhaustion.

Billy says, Keep her steady. I’m just away to get some sacks.

I stand there keeping her steady. It is delicious following orders, and I feel a pang that it is Billy and not Joe telling me what to do. Enid tests the length of her arms and examines her nails from a distance. I lift the keyboard lid and pick out my aria with one finger until Billy comes back with an armful of sacks, head down as he walks along, assessing the ground we have to cross. The shed seems a long way away.

We’ll put these down where it’s rough, he says, setting the pile on top of the piano.

We trundle our load across the yard, manoeuvring the tiny castors over cracks where camomile and vibrant willowherb sprout—weeds so jaunty and bitter-smelling they seem fertilised on neglect—around dips and hollows in the concrete where slicks of rich emerald slime grow across the oily surfaces of puddles that never dry up. Billy places the sacks carefully to avoid filth and uneven patches. We go slowly, the squeak of the castors mingling with the suck of the wind in the sycamores. We are too wary of one another to pretend we are having fun, or perhaps we are all too desperate to be taken seriously to draw attention to how silly we must look.

Still I have a lonely feeling, as if I am doing all this by myself.

Sherpa appears and sniffs around the piano, escorting us in this way until we reach the shed. We push the piano up a ramp of ribbed concrete at the doorway. It shudders all the way, notes rattling from inside in hysterical disorder. Enid laughs. I catch a look of pain on Billy’s face.

It’ll be all right, I whisper. You can get it tuned again.

Billy makes a face. My mum’d kill me.

I thought you said it was yours.

It is now. It was hers.

Enid is still doing Doris Day, as if everything in the world has been put there just to enliven her. She laughs and plays with Sherpa as if she’s never seen a dog before or as if Sherpa is, of the species, uniquely and irresistibly captivating. She jumps up and runs forward with him and yanks at the high sliding door of the shed. It grinds open, she disappears inside, switches the lights on and out comes a high yelp of surprise. I strain to see in but can’t. Enid comes back and I glance at Billy and dart away to the entrance myself, leaving them steadying the piano on the ramp.

What makes me gasp is the transformation from farm shed to the cool hangar where I now stand. I take a few steps in, gazing. The breezeblock walls have been splashed with bucketloads of whitewash and are so vibrant they almost buzz. The metal spars above my head are now free of cobwebs and wisps of plastic sheeting, the floor is clear of straw, stacked timber and tarpaulins, and every trace of spilled engine oil and dirt has gone. Here and there are freshly laid concrete patches and the whole place prickles with the tang of new paint and disinfectant. And it is huge.

I see for the first time in my life that it is possible to be excited by whiteness, by nothingness, by mere space. I want to clasp Uncle George’s hands and tell him that now I understand, and I believe. I believe in space and emptiness and the white desert in which anything can happen because here, nothing is confined and there can be no concealment. I want to run and shout and sing in all this air, in this joyful
availability
of air, this space that is waiting to have my sound spilled into it. I try a few scales and each note swirls and melts into the one that follows, in a rushing, ecstatic whirl of echoes. Something else, something strange is happening. If even the white space has limits, those limits surround me like mirrors. I am seeing myself from the outside, as if free of the constraint of also being me, and I think I see a person who is very nearly relevant, whose presence in this white space may even be called for. I skip into the middle of the floor and whoop. It does not escape me that reaching into this space alone and leaving Billy and Enid somewhere in the dark behind me is an important part of my excitement. I laugh back at them, too loud, to try to include them, but only as my audience. But still I cannot rid myself of the feeling that they are not really there. Surely I am alone.

Billy calls from the entrance. Come on. We’re nearly there, a wee bit further and we’re in.

Together we shove and the piano slides over the top of the ramp, rattles down and rights itself on the floor of the shed, but I hardly notice that we have got it in safely because my foot is caught underneath. The full weight of the piano rolls over it. Enid and Billy and the cool white shed disappear.

I hear a crash like boulders falling and a noise like a bomb going off inside the piano. But it is my head that feels like the crater, exploding with ringing notes from deepest bass to the highest, shrill and desperate. A real scream rises from my throat and I am suddenly awake with pain, standing in nightclothes outside Seaview Villas and under a dark sky. My mother’s piano is upturned and split on the patch of front lawn, its innards disgorged and vibrating with twanging sounds that mix with the pulsing glare of the streetlights across the road. In the orange light my foot is spilling bad brown blood and a cold wind flattens my dressing gown against my body.

Hands tug at me. Christine’s. Something quilted that makes a glassy noise and smells of cigarettes is pulled around me, someone’s anorak. I hear mention of reasonable limits, of fucking four o’clock in the fucking morning. Back into the house we go.

16

B
illy and Enid stood by the piano in the doorway and watched as Lila whooped and twirled and danced and sang.

Enid pursed her mouth and said secretly, ‘If you ask me she’s not right in the head. She’s just showing off.’

Billy glared. ‘No she’s not.
She’s
not the showing off type. Not her.’

Then he called through the doorway, ‘Come on. We’re nearly there, a wee bit further and we’re in.’

Lila returned to the entrance and all together they shoved. The piano slid over the top of the ramp, rattled down and righted itself on the floor of the shed.

Enid marched into the middle and looked round. ‘There’s no stage,’ she announced. ‘Where’s the stage?’

It was a sensible question, to Lila’s surprise. She hadn’t thought of it.

‘They’re building it straight after the ceilidh,’ Billy said. ‘Out of beer crates.’

‘Beer crates?’

‘Aye. They’re after getting thousands of beer crates. Your Uncle George says wee travelling companies used to do it with beer crates and we’re to do the same.’

Lila didn’t understand but left it to Enid to say so. ‘What do you mean,
beer crates
? What have beer crates to do with it?’

Billy was strolling around the walls, scratching at the paint and rubbing his fingers together. ‘They need to be the old wooden ones, of course,’ he said nonchalantly, turning to answer Lila. ‘They’re all getting the fancy plastic ones now, the breweries, they’ll give you the old ones for nothing. You turn them upside down and nail them together on the inside, like you’re making a big raft. Loads of them, hundreds, thousands, you can make it any size.’

‘Oh, that’ll look just dandy,’ Enid said.

‘Mr Brock’s lending the coal truck to get them brought. You cover them with cloth or canvas or something and then you paint it,’ Billy said. ‘You can make hills. Steps. Even buildings. ’Course, you use other timber as well, to fix it all together. But mainly it’s crates.’

He made his way back to the piano and stood with his hands hovering over the keys. He nodded up to the far end of the shed. ‘And then they’re to hang cloth down the back there to cover the wall and the back doors, and they’re putting loads more cloth at the sides. And lights, they’re to be hanging lights up in front, proper stage lights.’

Enid seemed more pleased with this. Billy looked up from the keyboard, smiled at her and played a chord.

‘Right,’ he said, closing the lid. ‘C’mon out of here.’

They wandered back to the house. None of them was able to say anything that would either prolong or end their time together; the only sound was the breeze in the sycamores. In late July their leaves were already a dark, bitter green and against the white sky they flapped to and fro like black rags. It was the kind of day with no real weather except for the wind that blew all other features away, a day when the sun would push neither light nor heat through the clouds. Everything betrayed its truer listlessness; the sparrows that flittered around the tree trunks and pecked in the yard seemed elderly and disappointed. They gathered on the fence and waited for the day to end like creatures sagging in a queue, too ballasted with weariness to hold themselves straight. The smell of manure dust from the yard mixed with a sour green scent off the fields.

Enid pranced ahead across the old garden in front of the house. Picking her way over a heap of tractor tyres and balancing on a tipped-over zinc tub almost lost in the long grass, she turned to check that Billy was watching her, and then she stretched into the dingy wreckage of the flowerbeds and squealed as a rosehip caught her sleeve. She pulled at lupins and catmint that were either dead or gone to seed. Billy, from a distance, did watch.

Lila looked away down the track towards Seaview Villas. She was picturing Joe in the attic, his eyes closed but not asleep and lying not on the camp bed but on a bed more appropriate to Joe and to Prince Calaf: something carved and grand, a soft, noble, romantic bed that would bless them both when they lay in it together. She tried to make him open his eyes and think of her and remember her face, but she could not make it work. She felt isolated and jealous. Uncle George would be standing guard, idling in the hall with his plans and lists, talking on the telephone and frowning against the smoke snaking up his cheek and into his eyes from the cigarette that was now always in his mouth. His lips had altered, thinning at the corners into tight shadows deep enough to hold the smouldering stump permanently in place.

She was wearing again the dirndl skirt with the white blouse but had reverted to her flat sandals because the court shoes had blistered her feet. Staring away down the track, she wanted to be dressed in anything else in the world, to be standing anywhere in the world other than here on pocked concrete with her hair whipped in her face, her confusion exposed by white, shifting darts of light slanting down through the trees. She craved any sky, even one ready to split with lightning and storms, rather than this
nothing
sky; she wanted thunder and trouble to pit herself against. She closed her eyes. If she could just be out of clothes altogether, out of these garments designed for some mistaken idea of her, out of the big wrong shoes. She felt a touch on her arm.

‘You’ll be needing something to drink.’

Billy turned back towards the house without waiting for an answer. Enid looked up from her flower picking and scuttled after him through the front door. Lila heard her laughing down the hall. On the grass she set the zinc tub straight for a table, sat down on one of the tyres and pulled at the sorry bunch of flowers Enid had picked and thrown down. Sherpa padded over and lay at her feet, sniffing once or twice as she chucked leaves and petals at him. Billy came out with orange squash in three different glasses on a tray, Enid followed with biscuits. It was a self-conscious picnic to begin with. Enid rolled around making a daisy chain and when it was finished Billy refused to wear it so she threw handfuls of grass at him and attached the daisy chain round Sherpa’s neck. They all laughed. They fed biscuits to the dog and Billy raised his glass and said cheers and then clammed up.

After a while Enid said, ‘So your dad gets mad just about moving a piano.’

‘He’s not mad, he’s upset because it was my mum’s,’ Billy said. ‘She passed away.’

‘I thought that was ages ago,’ she said.

‘Eight years. What’s that got to do with it? People get upset when somebody dies, haven’t you heard?’

‘Yes, but they get over it after a while,’ she said, informatively.

Billy scowled at her.

‘Maybe if it’s true love,’ Lila said, using the chance to be the sensitive and operatic one, ‘you never get over it.’

‘I don’t ken about that, I was only ten,’ Billy said. ‘Anyhow, that’s no the point. My dad gets upset when he sees stuff that reminds him.’

‘But he must see the piano every day,’ Enid insisted, ‘in the house.’

‘We’re never in the front room. It just sits.’

‘Well, maybe it’s better putting it in the shed and people getting the use,’ she said. ‘Maybe he’ll be pleased once he gets used to it.’

‘That’s what I told him!’ Billy said. ‘I told him it’d be good to get it played. I told him a bit of music wouldn’t hurt. That’s why he’s letting the opera in the shed. Plus he likes your Uncle George, says he’s a character.’ He bit off half of a biscuit and chewed it with his mouth open, then fed the rest to Sherpa. ‘He doesn’t like thinking about my mum, that’s all.’

Lila recalled the stale face of Mr McArthur and thought that he might not be old at all, just tired.

‘Believers don’t get as upset as ordinary people,’ Enid said. ‘Believers know that people don’t really die. They get gathered unto the Lord’s eternal embrace.’

Billy and Lila looked at each other.

‘You’re to be happy for people when they die, the minister says.’ Enid always tried to make things sound simple and tidy when she was cornered, and cornered was what she was—the only one in her class to be deprived of a father by the war. Others further up the school whose fathers hadn’t come back had taken the brunt of the teasing, though Enid was still sometimes singled out for not even having been born when he died. Though she clung to the simple and tidy idea that she was lucky for never knowing him (for how could you miss what you’d never had?) she knew her ignorance of him and his absence for what they were, a double loss.

‘What do you know about it?’ Billy said. He dipped his head so that his hair covered his eyes. Sherpa edged further along the grass towards him and pushed his snout under his hand. ‘Nobody believes that rubbish, anyway. My dad doesn’t and I don’t either. See church? It’s rubbish.’

‘That’s blasphemy. If you don’t repent that you’ll be cast from the loving presence,’ Enid said smoothly. ‘And we’re not a church, we’re—’

‘Aw, Enid, just shut it,’ Lila said. ‘We don’t need to hear all that again. You know you don’t go anymore.’

‘Well,
that’s
nice. Oh, pardon
me,
just because I’m missing Gathering and doing you a favour instead,’ Enid said, rolling her eyes, offering Lila a chance to stay on her side. Lila looked away and pulled at the grass. For a while nobody spoke.

Enid got up. ‘Well, I’m away then,’ she said, planting her feet and folding her arms. ‘I’ll just be off.’ She waited. ‘Somewhere I don’t get insulted. For my beliefs.’

It was Lila’s last chance. ‘Cheerio, then,’ she said without looking up. ‘See you.’

Billy had hold of Sherpa’s front paws and was shaking his head into the dog’s grinning face; their silky hair mixed and tangled together.

Enid, with a final glazed look at Billy, stalked off. Lila watched her swing down the track, heading, no doubt, straight to the Locarno and Senga McMillan.

In the lull that followed, Billy kept his face buried in the dog’s neck. Enid turned around twice, walking backwards for a couple of steps before spinning back and striding on. The third time she turned Lila lifted a hand and waved, then she took up the broken daisy chain and began shredding it in her fingers.

Billy looked up. ‘So, that your friend away home in a huff?’

‘I don’t care. She’s a pain,’ Lila said. She wanted to go, too, but she would have to wait until Enid was too far away to see her get up and leave. She might loiter at the end of the track until Lila caught up.

‘She’s just a bit daft,’ Billy said.

Over Billy’s shoulder, Lila watched the tractor roll across the back of the yard and stop. Sherpa pulled away from Billy and fixed his attention on Mr McArthur as he swung down from the seat. Billy turned round.

‘That’s him getting in the straw for the ceilidh,’ he said.

‘What d’you need straw for?’

‘Never been to a ceilidh? Straw bales, for sitting on, round the side. For falling over, if you’ve had a few too many. Eh?’

‘There’s not to be a proper bar, there’s only to be soft drinks and tea. Mr Mathieson says we’ve not got a licence and things get out of hand if there’s drink.’

Billy laughed. ‘Aye well, we’ll see. Mr Mathieson won’t know what’s going on round the back, will he? Maybe some folk’ll bring in a wee bottle or two. For private consumption, eh?’

‘You’re not going to get drunk, are you?’

‘All depends. You’ll be going yourself, will you?’ he said. It was a statement with no possible answer, somehow less than either a question or an invitation.

‘Uh-huh, I might,’ Lila said, trying to sound faraway. ‘I might, I suppose.’

She wanted Billy to think she had the ceilidh under consideration, that she might have a choice, but Joe would be there so of course she was going. She had already cast and directed the event in her head in the same way Uncle George moved her about during rehearsals, pushing her around, making her look one way when she sang this, lifting her eyes here, hands there, to sing that. The ceilidh night was to be not just the first time she and Joe danced together—
Do you remember our first dance? Oh, of course I do
—but the night of their first kiss and proper declaration. They would whisper the words, their faces still warm from the dancing. As was natural Joe would say it first, having led her outside away from the music and lights, holding her hand tight as they breathed in the grassy, cool air.
Oh, Liù, I love you.
And she would whisper back,
Oh, Calaf, I love you, too,
and then they would kiss, a powdery and fragrant, dreamy, private kiss; no wetness, no cat-calls in the background, only music. Lila had already chosen the spot, avoiding the slimy trough up next to the fence with the permanent cloud of midges above it. She would steer them clear of the nettles on the verge so that they could pause naturally by the field gate where there was a clump of meadowsweet and a spriggy briar rose that would, since this was to be perfection, offer up its scent to lovers and the night air. It would not rain.

It was deflating to look at Billy and be reminded that other people would be there too, milling in the background with their eyes fixed on the same surroundings, degrading the scene.

‘Are you coming or no?’ Billy said.

‘Oh. Well, I’ll be going I suppose, right enough.’

‘Right, well. So. I’ll get a dance with you, will I?’

Sitting cross-legged, Billy leaned towards her a little, stretching his forearms onto the grass in front of him, close enough for Lila to smell his skin. She was horrified by how acutely she felt that he was already touching her, through air. He wore a jersey that looked scratchy but his arms as they came around her would be soft over the hard muscle, the hairs fuzzy and sweet.

‘So you’ll give me a dance?’

She must be making a mistake. She could not want Billy this close. She wanted the smells of all Joe’s soaps and bottles in the bathroom cabinet at Seaview Villas, the sweet mix of them with the sharp sweat of Joe’s skin, clove and Elastoplast and something rich and spiced and antiseptic, like very clean marmalade.

‘I’m not staying here!’ she announced.

At once Billy leaned back and got up. ‘Aye, right. Right, off home then, are you?’ he said, scraping his feet on the grass. He nodded over towards the tractor and trailer. ‘I need to go and give him a hand, anyway.’