The Orphan Choir Part 1

The Orphan Choir.

Sophie Hannah.

To keep us this night without sin.

O Lord, have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us.

O Lord, let thy mercy be upon us: As our trust is in thee.

Turn us again, thou G.o.d of hosts: Show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole.

O Lord, hear our prayer; And let our cry come unto thee.

The Lord be with you; And with thy spirit.

Let us pray.

Give us light in the night season we beseech thee, O Lord, and grant that what we sing and say with our lips we may believe in our hearts and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our daily life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

ONE.

September, October.

1.

It's quarter to midnight. I'm standing in the rain outside my next-door neighbour's house, gripping his rusted railings with cold wet hands, staring down through them at the misshapen and perilously narrow stone steps leading to his converted bas.e.m.e.nt, from which noise is blaring. It's my least favourite song in the world: Queen's 'Don't Stop Me Now'.

There's a reddish-orange light seeping out into the darkness from the bas.e.m.e.nt's bay window that looks as unappealing as the too-loud music sounds. Both make me think of h.e.l.l: my idea of it. There are no other lights on anywhere in my neighbour's four-storey home.

My lower ground floor next door is dark and silent. We mainly use it as guest accommodation, and as we don't often have guests it is usually empty. It comprises two bedrooms, a playroom-c.u.m-Xbox room for Joseph, and a large bathroom. All of number 19's internal cellar walls have been knocked down to make a single, vast area: either a chill-out den or an entertaining s.p.a.ce, depending on whether you're talking to my neighbour or his girlfriend.

I think the label 'entertaining s.p.a.ce' worries him because of its public-spirited implications. The word 'entertain' suggests that one might give a toss about people other than oneself. My next-door neighbour doesn't.

Freddy Mercury's reflections about supersonic women are making me glad that I've never met one: they sound like a bit of a handful not very easy-going. I've never had ambitions in the direction of supersonicness, whatever it might be. What I want is far more achievable, I hope: to be warm, dry, asleep. At the moment, those are the only things I want, the only things I can imagine ever wanting.

The stairs leading from the pavement down to number 19's bas.e.m.e.nt are slimy with moss, rain and street gunge. Each step's surface was a perfect rectangle once, but more than a hundred years' worth of feet and weather have worn away corners and edges, making them too uneven to use safely, especially in tonight's waterfall-style downpour. Normally I look at them and feel a twinge of satisfaction. The woman who sold us number 17 had recently had all of its eroded stonework replaced. The steps from our lower ground level up to the street are beautifully straight-edged, with a new black-painted iron handrail bolted on to them for added safety, but what does that matter, really? If I can't sleep in my house when I want to, all its other virtues are somewhat redundant.

Number 19 has no handrail. I don't fancy attempting the descent while water cascades from one step down to the next like a liquid Slinky toy without boundaries, but what choice do I have? If I want to get my neighbour's attention, I'll have to put myself where he can see me, or wait for a gap between songs and bang on the window of the room that he and his friends are in. I've rung the front doorbell seven times and he can't hear me. Of course he can't; Freddie Mercury is drowning out all other sounds.

I'm wearing pink-and-white checked pyjamas, drenched from knee to ankle, a black raincoat and trainers that were waterlogged five seconds after I left the house. My feet now feel as if they're in two flotation tanks, weighing me down. It's the opposite of people putting slabs of concrete in their pockets to make them sink when they wade into water; I am weighed down by water, on the pavement's concrete. This is the kind of rain the skies pour over your head in a never-ending torrent. It's hard to believe it's composed of light individual drops.

I can't help laughing at the absurdity of it as Freddie Mercury invites me to give him a call if I want to have a good time. The problem is that my definition of a good time differs greatly from the song's, and from Mr Fahrenheit's. That's what Stuart and I privately call our neighbour, though his real name is Justin Clay, and I've heard his friends and his girlfriend Angie call him Jub. My definition of a good time is being able to get into bed whenever I want to yes, even quite early on a Sat.u.r.day night and for there to be no pounding rock anthems booming through my wall, preventing me from getting to sleep.

It only happens every two or three Sat.u.r.days. Thankfully, Mr Fahrenheit spends at least every other weekend at Angie's house, but when her kids are with their dad, Angie comes to stay at number 19 and it's party time or at least, it sounds to me like a party whenever it happens. Sometimes they decide to make the most of their child-free weekends and play loud music on two consecutive nights, Friday and Sat.u.r.day. Mr Fahrenheit a.s.sures me that it is never a party, always a 'little get-together'. I have tried on four separate occasions to explain to him that I don't mind what we agree to call it as long as he's willing to lower the volume of his music to an acceptable level.

The get-together guests are always the same the man who wears walking boots with the laces untied and tucks his jeans into his chunky socks; the stooped, too-tall man with the floppy hair and the rucksack; the frizzy-haired chain-smoking dance teacher who works at the performing arts school on Woolnough Road; the fat woman with red gla.s.ses and oddly sculpted hair dyed the colour of a blue Persian cat and Mr Fahrenheit always plays the same songs for them to sing and shout along to, though, to be fair, he does vary the order: '9 to 5' by Dolly Parton, 'Livin' on a Prayer' by Bon Jovi, Blondie's 'Heart of Gla.s.s', A-ha's 'Take on Me', 'Love Shack' by the B-52's, 'Video Killed the Radio Star' I can't remember who that one's by.

And the centrepiece of his every musical gathering: 'Don't Stop Me Now' by Queen, which expresses my noisy neighbour's att.i.tude to life far better than he himself does. I'm sure he hasn't a.n.a.lysed the lyrics as I have, but I don't think it can be a coincidence that he is a ruthlessly selfish hedonist and the song he blasts out more often than any other usually two or three times on a party night is a hymn to his ideology. The narrator in the song is not merely someone who wishes to have a good time (which would be reasonable) but someone who is acutely aware that the fun he intends to have (out of control, like an atom bomb) will adversely affect others to the point that they will find it unbearable and seek to put a stop to it. He antic.i.p.ates this, and makes it clear that he only wants to hear from those who agree with him about what const.i.tutes a good time.

Stuart would say has said, often that it's only a song and I'm reading too much into it. The inaccuracy of the criticism irritates me. The menacing lyrics are there for anyone and everyone to hear; there's nothing ambiguous about them. Stuart would be closer to the truth if he accused me not of finding meaning in the words that isn't there, but of imagining that 'Don't Stop Me Now' is more than a song, which is of course scientifically impossible.

Unscientifically, it is the putrid essence of Justin Clay, encapsulated in music. His soul made pop.

Finally, Queen's rant-with-a-tune ends. This is my chance. I know from experience that one song never follows swiftly on from another on these evenings. Efficient DJ'ing is not one of Mr Fahrenheit's strengths. I used to think that the long gaps between musical a.s.saults were his s.a.d.i.s.tic attempt to lull me into a false sense of security in order to blast me again just as I'm nodding off, but that was unfair of me. I underestimated how long it takes to transfer the various ingredients of an unrolled spliff from a lap to a coffee table without mislaying any of them, especially while stoned, and then shuffle over to the stereo and make a decision about what to play next.

Now that the music's stopped, I can hear m.u.f.fled voices, though I can't make out what they're saying over the drumming of the rain. Carefully, I make my way down the stone staircase backwards so that I can hold on to the steps above me as I go. Once at the bottom, I turn and find Angie, the girlfriend, looking at me through the window, which, tonight, is a water feature. 'Jub, the lady from next door's here again,' she says after a few seconds of mute staring, as if shock has delayed her reaction. She's wearing a short green-and-white dress fabric inspired by a lava lamp, by the look of it with a longer beige knitted cardigan over it. Bare feet.

'Oh, you are giving me the joke!' Mr Fahrenheit cries out. I resist the temptation to ask him if that expression is popular in the playground at the moment. He's bent over his music system, his back to the window. At this proximity, I can hear him easily thanks to the single glazing. He's in no hurry to turn round and engage with me.

Neither he nor Angie seems to have grasped basic cause and effect. They know that I object to their playing of loud music late at night because I've told them so unequivocally, yet they seem surprised when they do it and I turn up at their house to complain. It's clear every time that they have not antic.i.p.ated my arrival. Afterwards, I can't help pointlessly reciting to Stuart the conversation they must regularly fail to have: You know, if she can't sleep because of our music, she'll need to find something else to do to fill up her night. What if that something else is coming round here and giving us a hard time?

Oh, yeah. I see your point. I'd say that's pretty likely to happen, since it's what always happens. If we don't like her coming round and moaning, maybe we shouldn't prevent her from sleeping.

Mr Fahrenheit walks over, opens the window, stands well back from the rain. 'h.e.l.lo, Louise,' he says, his voice as sullen and weary as his face. 'Come to give me a b.o.l.l.o.c.king?'

I try not to feel hurt, and fail. Was I secretly hoping he'd say, 'Come and join us, grab yourself a drink?' I think I might have been, stupid and naive though it undoubtedly is. I've often thought that if I can't sleep and there happens to be a party going on next door, I could do worse than join in and try to have some fun. I'd have to decline, of course, even if Mr Fahrenheit were to invite me.

I wonder if he knows that I would gladly stop hating him and be ready, even, to like him a bit if he would only show me a tiny bit of consideration.

'I find my midnight visits as inconvenient as you do, Justin,' I tell him. 'Especially when it's cold and the rain's bucketing down. Are you finished playing music now? It's nearly midnight.'

'No, I'm not finished playing music.' He sways backwards.

'Tell her to f.u.c.k off,' his walking-boot friend calls out, waving at me from his cross-legged position on the floor next to a free-standing lamp that's as tall as he is, seated, and has what looks like a red tablecloth draped over it. He and the lamp are two islands in a sea of empty wine bottles on their sides. The room looks as if a couple of dozen games of Spin the Bottle have been abandoned in a hurry.

I say to Justin, 'In that case, can you please keep the volume low from now on, so that it doesn't travel through the wall to my house?'

The fat woman with the red gla.s.ses appears at Mr Fahrenheit's side. 'Be reasonable, love,' she says. 'It's not midnight yet. Midnight's the cut-off point, isn't it? It is where I live. You've got to admit, you sometimes try to shut us down as early as quarter to eleven.'

'And Justin often plays his music until at least one-thirty,' I say. 'Why don't you encourage him to be reasonable? If I've come round before eleven it's because that's when I've wanted to go to sleep.'

'G.o.d's sake, Louise, it's f.u.c.kin' Sat.u.r.day night,' Mr Fahrenheit protests.

'I sometimes go to bed early on Sat.u.r.days, and stay up late on Tuesdays,' I tell him. 'What if I was an airline pilot, and had to get up at four in the morning to-' I bring my sentence to an emergency stop, not wanting to give Mr Fahrenheit the chance to tell me I'm not an airline pilot and imagine he's proved me wrong. 'Look, all I want is to be able to go to bed when I want and sleep uninterrupted by your noise. Please, Justin.' I put on my best friendly, hopeful smile.

He raises his hands and backs away from me, as if I've got a gun pointed at him: one he knows isn't loaded. 'Louise ... I'd like you to f.u.c.k off back home now, if you wouldn't mind. You've spoiled my evening again, like you've spoiled I don't know how many evenings well done. Nice one. I'm not wasting any more of my time arguing with you, so ... go home, or argue with yourself, whichever you'd prefer.'

'Chill out, next-door neighbaaah!' the man with the floppy fringe yells at me from the far side of the room. He's sitting at the big dining table that's dotted with torn Rizla packets and wine stains. The table stands directly beneath the elaborate gla.s.s chandelier, pushed up against the room's only wallpapered wall. The paper is pale blue with gold violin-shaped swirls all over it. It's beautiful, actually, and was probably expensive, but brings on eye-ache if you look at it for too long. Mr Fahrenheit cares a lot about interior design. He cares equally about getting drunk and high, and not at all about tidying up. His house is an odd mixture of two distinct styles: camera-ready aspirational and doc.u.mentary-reminiscent den of vice ashtrays kicked over on expensive sisal flooring, takeaway cartons sitting in front of designer chairs as if they're matching footstools.

Floppy Fringe Man shares Mr Fahrenheit's dress sense: checked shirt over a white T-shirt, faded jeans. The only difference is in their choice of shoe: Mr Fahrenheit favours a hybrid trainer-clog and Floppy Fringe wears a range of cowboy boots. I spot his rucksack, leaning against tonight's pair. The drugsack, I call it.

'Liking the raincoat,' the frizzy-haired dance teacher says loudly to the room, not looking at me. 'Hood up, drawstrings pulled tight stylish.' The rest of them laugh.

This is the first time Mr Fahrenheit has sworn at me, the first time his friends have weighed in on his side. I wait for the feelings of humiliation to subside, and tell myself that it doesn't matter what some rude strangers think about my raincoat. I hope I don't cry. When I feel calm enough to speak, I say, 'You can ignore me tonight, Justin, but my problem with your behaviour isn't going to go away. If you won't listen to me, I'll have to find someone who will. Like the police, maybe.'

'Good luck, mate,' says Angie, stressing the last word sarcastically. 'And ... dream on. No one's going to stop us listening to a few songs in our own house on a Sat.u.r.day night.'

'Whose house?' Justin teases her. She pretends to laugh along but I don't think she enjoys the joke as much as he does.

'Louise!' He points at me, arm raised. More of a salute, really. 'I promise you, one day you'll find yourself on the receiving end of the killjoy s.h.i.t you're so keen on giving out. Yeah! Wherever you're living when your boy's a teenager, unless it's somewhere out in the sticks with no neighbours, some t.w.a.t's going to bang on your windows when your lad and his pals are letting their hair down and you're going to think, "What a f.u.c.king t.w.a.t, they're just having a laugh." You know what, Louise? You're that t.w.a.t, right here and now.' He nods as if he's said something profound. 'Oh, wait, sorry I forgot, your son's already left home, hasn't he? You've sent him away isn't that right? How old is he, again? Seven? Bet your house is nice and quiet without him. That why you did it? All this choir s.h.i.t just an excuse, is it? What, did he turn up the theme tune of f.u.c.kin' ... Balamory a bit too loud one day?'

I am a solid block of shock. I cannot believe my neighbour would say that to me. That he would think it, even when angry. He couldn't have said it if he hadn't first thought it.

He did. Both. Said and thought.

I can't find anything to say in response. It would serve Justin right if I were still standing here this time tomorrow, glued to the ground by his cruel words.

'Leave it, Jub,' Angie warns. She sounds anxious. I wonder if I look alarming: as if I'm considering climbing in through the window a dripping, hooded black figure and choking the life out of him. What an appealing idea.

'She sent her seven-year-old son away?' the dance teacher asks. 'What the f.u.c.k?'

'Would you rather I played cla.s.sical music?' Mr Fahrenheit taunts me. 'Would you still be such a f.u.c.kin' killjoy if I played, I don't know ... Mozart?'

I wonder why he's imitating Hitler, with his finger in a line over his upper lip. Then I realise it's not a moustache; he's pushing his nose up to indicate sn.o.bbery.

'Mozart?' Walking Boots laughs. 'Like you've got any.'

'I have, as it goes,' Mr Fahrenheit tells him. 'You've got to have your cla.s.sical music. Isn't that right, Louise?' To his friends, he says, 'Wanna hear some, you lowbrow wasters?'

No one does. They groan, swear, laugh.

'Looks like it's just you and me, Louise the cultured ones. Culture vultures.' He leans closer to the rain barrier between us to wink at me.

I can't be here any more. As quickly as I can without slipping, I climb the steps to the street and hurry home, to the riotous applause of Mr Fahrenheit and his friends.

'Stuart. Stuart!' Words alone aren't going to do it. I push his shoulder with the tips of my fingers.

He opens his eyes and stares at me, flat on his back. 'What?'

'Can you hear that? Listen.'

'Louise. It had better be the morning.'

I disagree. Until I have had at least six hours' sleep, it had better not be. I can sleep in later now that I don't have to get Joseph ready for school, which is why I never do. Every morning I switch on at 6.30, exactly the time I used to have to get up; it's my body's daily protest against the absence of my son.

'Sorry. Middle of the night,' I say. I cannot allow myself to define the present moment as morning, even though technically it is. I haven't had my night yet. This is the Noisy Neighbour Paradox: does one say, 'But it's three in the morning!' to impress upon the selfish oaf next door that it's very, very late? 'Four in the morning', 'five in the morning'? At what point does it start to sound as if, actually, busy people are already singing in the shower, pushing the 'on' b.u.t.tons on their espresso machines, preparing to jog to the office?

Stuart reaches up with both hands for the two sides of his pillow, left and right of his head, and tries to fold them over his face as if he's packing himself carefully for delivery somewhere. 'Middle of the night,' he says. 'Then I should still be asleep.'

'Can you hear the music?'

'Yes, but it's not going to stop me from sleeping. I've got a wife for that.'

'It's Verdi. Before that we had Bizet, a bit of Puccini.'

The security light on the St John's College flats at the back of us comes on, shines in my face. A car must have driven too close to the building. I lean forward and drag our single bedroom curtain to the right. The curtain is too narrow; we have to choose which side of the window we want to leave exposed: the security light side or the students' bedroom windows side.

'Mr F must have got a "Best of the Cla.s.sics" CD free with his Sat.u.r.day paper,' Stuart says, closing his eyes again.

'It's aimed at me,' I tell him. 'A melodic "f.u.c.k you". He's bored of attacking me with his music, so now he's doing it with what he thinks of as mine.'

'Isn't that a bit paranoid?'

I could admit that I've been next door, had yet another argument with Mr Fahrenheit, that the subject of cla.s.sical music came up. That's the context Stuart's missing. If I told him, he would concede that I'm right about the malice in this latest noise-attack, but he would also criticise me critisult me, Joseph would say; his invented word that he's so proud of, a hybrid of criticise and insult for going round on my own: a defenceless woman without my husband to protect me. And then I might critisult him back, because I'm exhausted and frustrated and would find it hard to be tactful. I might raise my voice and point out that whenever I suggest we visit Mr Fahrenheit together to lodge our complaint, or that Stuart goes instead of me for a change, he always responds in the same way: 'Come on, Lou, let's not steam in there. Look, we don't want a scene if we can avoid one, do we? He might call it a night soon.'

Call it a night, call it a morning. Call it a party, call it a little get-together.

That's why I go and complain alone. Because my husband always wants to give it more time, to satisfy himself that we're not a pair of troublemaking hotheads.

'I'm going to ring the police,' I say.

'What?' Stuart hauls himself into a sitting position and rubs the inner corners of his eyes with his thumbs, his hands protruding from his face like antlers. 'Lou, put the brakes on a second, please. The police?'

Yes, yes, the police. The Cambridge police. Not the SS, just a nice, polite, helpful PC in uniform, to say something soothing like, 'Can I respectfully ask that you turn the volume down, please, sir?' They're hardly going to storm Mr Fahrenheit's Farrow-&-Ball-reinforced drug den and riddle him with bullets. More's the pity.

'I can't get to sleep with that coming through the wall, Stuart. What else can I do? I've tried talking to him more than a dozen times, and nothing changes. He doesn't even pretend it will! He's proudly, defiantly noisy, except he calls it "not noisy".'

Stuart reaches for the chain on his bedside lamp and pulls. Then, as if the light is an affront to the room full of night that he ought to be sleeping in, he turns it off again. 'Maybe ringing the police is a sensible next step, but not tonight, Lou.'

'When, then?'

'First thing tomorrow?' Stuart says hopefully.

'What, when Mr Fahrenheit's asleep and there's no music playing?' I a.s.sume this will be enough to alert my husband to his temporary lapse into idiocy, but apparently not.

'Yeah. You don't need "Video Killed the Radio Star" pounding out to prove your point. You can explain the situation, the history. It's not as if the police are going to doubt you.'

'Really? You don't think their first thought will be, "Hmm, I wonder if the neighbour's music really is too loud or whether this woman is a neurotic spoilsport trying to make sure no one has any fun. If only we could hear the music and judge for ourselves that would be really helpful"?'

'All right, look, I just think ... I need to go to sleep, Lou. Imran's coming first thing in the morning. If you can't sleep in here, go up to the attic and sleep on the sofa bed in my study.'

No. No. I want to sleep in my own bed. If I sleep anywhere else, Mr Fahrenheit has won. And I wouldn't be able to fall asleep, anyway; I would lie flat on my back, rigid as a floorboard, with my heart pounding, and the knowledge that I had allowed myself to be driven out of my own bedroom buzzing in my brain like an unswattable fly.