Читать книгу When the Music Stops… - Joe Heap - Страница 8

ELEANOR CAMPBELL HAS NEVER been this angry in her whole life. Her skirt has rucked up and her knees scrape the tarmac of the playground. Her tiny fists, balled so tight that the knuckles shine, are pounding the sides and stomach of Kevin MacAndrew, who is curled like a hedgehog in self-defence.

‘Give … her … it … back!’

Kevin makes a wordless cry but does not open. If there is any sense in his bellow, it is lost in the noise of the crowd which has swallowed them both. Ella and Kevin are just seven, but the older kids don’t step in – there are rules. The grey Glaswegian sky is starting to spit rain, so she has to finish this before a teacher calls them in. The thing that Ella wants from Kevin is tightly clamped in the folded stodge of him, like a shilling in a Christmas pudding. She punches him again, in the small of the back. Rene hovers somewhere over Ella’s shoulder, hands cupped over her mouth in an expression of suppressed horror, or laughter, or both.

‘Give … it … back, you wee … you wee …’ Ella summons the worst swear word she knows. ‘You wee bugger!’

She punches him hard in the ribs at the moment of the curse and, like an unvanquishable picture-book dragon whose weak spot has been pierced by an arrow, Kevin’s eyes go wide. He uncurls, lying flat on his back, gasping for breath, the object of Ella’s battle displayed on his heaving belly – Rene’s calf-leather pencil case, with the red ribbon tied on the zip.

‘Ha! I win,’ Ella pants, and has a moment to savour her victory before she is lifted off the ground, upwards and backwards, by her collar.

‘Hey! Geddoff me you bugger!’

The curse, used once, slips out with the intoxication of triumph. The crowd gasps.

‘Eleanor Campbell!’

Ella’s eyes go wide at the adult voice, fear quenching her anger. She sees Kevin being hauled to his feet by another teacher while the headmistress marches her in the direction of the school, parting the tide of children like Moses. She hears whispers as they pass.

‘Man, she’s crazy.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘She’s a gypsy – they’re all like that.’

‘She’s no a gypsy – gypsies don’t go tae school.’

‘She is too! She has dark eyes and hair.’

‘Ella Knorr?’

‘No, Eleanor. Eleanor Campbell.’

‘She fights like an animal.’

With a backward glance, Ella spots Rene. She has escaped punishment, picking her pencil case off the floor and holding it tight to her chest. Nobody comes close; Rene is protected. Ella smiles and does not fight as the headmistress steers her with one hand toward the office.

* * *

‘Thank you, Ella.’

Rene is skipping, blonde ringlets bobbing. By Ella’s count, she has already thanked her eleven times since they left school.

‘Stop thankin’ me,’ she mutters under her breath.

Ella has spent the last three hours in the headmistress’ office, writing lines on soft paper with a blunt pencil until her hand cramped. She was spanked first, of course – ten strokes on the bottom being the highest penalty at Peterhead Primary. She would have taken many more to avoid the lines.

Three hours seemed like an eternity packed with eternities, only divided up by the heavy tick of the office clock and a sharp word from the secretary if she stopped. Ella would write some more, then stop, and count by the clock how long it took for the telling-off to come. Her record was forty-seven seconds. Ella finds that the memory of a punishment fades fast after it is over, but this one is taking its time. Like the time she sucked the ink from her father’s fountain pen and had to have her tongue scrubbed with soap.

‘But you got it back!’ Rene chirps happily. ‘I would never have got it back!’

Ella enjoyed the praise at first, but since they got out of the school gates it’s giving her a funny feeling in her stomach. She’s trying to ignore the children in the crowd who are looking or pointing at her, the ones who are whispering to their parents, who turn to look. She hasn’t seen Kevin or his parents. Maybe he went home.

Ella feels heavy, like she can barely lift her feet off the ground. Perhaps it’s the folded paper sitting in her pocket like a girder. She can’t stop thinking of the note, awaiting her father’s signature like a pact with the devil. Two weeks of no playtime, eating her lunch in the headmistress’ office and reading quietly while the sounds of the playground ring at the window.

‘I don’t want to go home.’

She says it quietly, and she’s not sure if Rene has heard her. She whispers because she doesn’t want anyone to hear, but also because it’s an admission of weakness. Rene draws a little closer and puts her arm around Ella.

‘I’m sorry …’

Most kids in their year are met by parents, but she and Rene live so close to the school, in adjacent Bedlay Street, they’re allowed to walk home together. They go to one of their houses, and whichever mother it is will give them something to eat. They do this every weekday except Wednesday, when Rene goes for her guitar lesson with Mr Veitch and her mother picks her up later.

Rene comes to school in the morning with the guitar in its case, smaller than a full-sized one, but still huge compared to Rene, painted blue with an apple tree on one side, done by her dad. Of all Rene’s possessions, this is the one that Ella envies the most, and the one which first convinced her that the Mauchlen family must be wealthy.

Ella has seen the guitar only once, because Rene is under strict instruction not to open the case until her lesson after school. But Ella has a very good memory. Like a camera, says her dad. (Sometimes, when Eleanor wants to remember something, she makes a little click under her breath like she’s taking a picture with her eyes, though she’s never held a real camera.) Ella can close her eyes and see the guitar. The body is the colour of caramel, the tuning pegs shine like six pearls in the dark case, which is purple velvet. The guitar even smells expensive. She ran her fingers over the strings, just once, and listened to them purr before Rene shut the case nervously.

Ella speaks again, feeling the shape of her plan before she knows what it is.

‘If we didn’t go home, we could go to the park …’

Rene takes her hand silently and keeps walking.

‘And if we went to the park … we would be late … Mam would be worried …’

Rene looks around for her older brother, Robert. Ella can’t see him in the crowds.

Ella can’t remember a time when Robert wasn’t around, though it feels like they’ve said no more than a dozen words to each other in all that time. Robert is like Rene’s shadow. He usually walks near to them on the way to and from school, making sure they don’t stray. But sometimes he stops to talk to a friend.

When they’re at Rene’s house, Robert is often sitting in the corner with a book from the library. Books with no pictures. Books with covers the colour of dust. Ella thinks he must be very clever. She’s impressed and irritated by the thought. She thinks Robert must look down on them – all of two years younger than him – as simple creatures. Ella wants to prove to him that she’s not a baby, but also wants to know what’s so interesting in all those books.

‘We’d get in trouble,’ Rene says.

‘I’m already in trouble …’ Ella lets this point hang in the air, leaves the ‘for you’ unspoken.

‘Yes,’ Rene concedes. ‘But … why do you want to be late? We could play in front of the fire. Mama might make us griddle cakes.’

This is a good point. The house alternates, and today it should be Rene’s house. Rene’s mother makes them hot cakes with butter, or brings out biscuits and cheese. Sometimes, she will fry them each a sausage, which they eat with slices of bread dipped in the fat. They have to share with Robert, but he doesn’t talk much and offers Ella the biscuit tin first. If the food is not as good at Ella’s house, Rene never says anything about it.

Her stomach rumbles, and for a moment Ella thinks about ditching her plan. But no – the note weighs heavy in her pocket, tugging one side of her cardigan lower than the other. Her father is a quiet man, which makes his temper all the more frightening. Ella wishes he would just yell at her, but his anger stays bottled up. The sandstone tenements tower either side of them like a canyon, and she can’t escape the feeling that this tide of bodies is washing her to her doom.

‘No, we should go to the park. Not far, just over the hill.’

Rene’s hand loosens on hers for a second, and Ella thinks she will lose her to the tide. But then she grips tight again.

‘Okay. We’ll go to the park.’

Ella smiles – she feels better right away. She’s sure that this plan is a good one. It’s so good, it’s like she didn’t even think of it herself. They will go to the park. They will hide until Ella is sure they’re going to be missed. Then they will go home. Her mum will be so relieved to see her that she won’t care about the note from the headmistress. She’ll just be happy that they’re safe.

* * *

‘Can we go now?’ Rene asks, for the fifth time.

‘Just five more minutes,’ Ella says, for the fifth time.

The park is empty, or near enough. It’s not really a park, just some open land at the top of Bedlay Street which crests into a small hill. Down on the other side are more tenements and Sighthill Church, where they go on a Sunday to hear about God. To the east, separated by a metal fence, is Petershill Football Ground. There aren’t any trees here, but everybody knows it as ‘Paddy’s Park’ and nobody knows why.

They aren’t far from Springburn Park, with its bandstand, Winter Gardens, and overflowing baskets of flowers. But even Ella wouldn’t dream of wandering that far. In Paddy’s Park they look like what they are – a couple of kids playing out after school.

Ella isn’t sure how much time has passed. It feels like hours, but there’s no clock in sight. She’s good at reading the time and likes clocks. She likes pressing her ear to her dad’s watch, listening to the ticking inside, the invisible mechanism hammering away like a tiny factory, forging the present moment.

Ella looks at her friend, who is sitting on the hill facing north, away from Bedlay Street, playing with the buckles on her satchel. They can see the church from where they are, and it’s hard not to feel that it’s watching them back. Ella believes in Him but is still on the fence about His rules and regulations. She thinks the priest might be exaggerating to stop her having any fun.

Rene coughs.

Rene Mauchlen is everything that Ella isn’t – blonde, rosy-cheeked, and (to Ella’s mind at least) rich. In later years, it will seem ridiculous to Ella that she ever thought of Rene’s family as wealthy. They live on the same street, in the same kind of two-room tenement flat. But in addition to a radio they have a gramophone, and more than a dozen shiny black records to play. They always have powdered chocolate in the cupboard for cocoa, and biscuits in the tin. The door on their cast iron range has brass hinges, which shine like gold ingots in the gaslight, whereas the hob in Ella’s house is dull black.

And there’s the guitar, of course.

Every minute or so Rene coughs again, but Ella is used to it. Rene always coughs or wheezes, especially in the winter. She has something called asthma, which is like having a cold except it doesn’t really ever go away. She has to take medicine for it every morning – a treacly syrup which is supposed to taste like strawberries, but which Rene says is like licking a penny. Sometimes, when it’s bad, she doesn’t come to school. Ella thinks this is pretty good, but Rene says it’s no fun. When the wind doesn’t blow, all the smoke from the houses and factories curls up on the city like a cat on a rug. That’s when it’s worst. Rene will sit at the edge of the playground with a look of concentration.

‘We should play a game,’ Ella says, though her mind is elsewhere. She needs to keep Rene here for now.

‘Hmm …’ Rene looks around, at the empty park. ‘What sort of game?’

Ella sighs and sits down next to her friend. ‘I Spy?’

‘Aye, okay. I’ll go first.’ She thinks for a long moment. ‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with … G.’

Ella fixes her gaze on the grey horizon.

* * *

When they finally leave, the light has gone from the sky and the lamps are all lit down Bedlay Street. At regular intervals down the roofs on either side of them, chimney rows smoulder. Rene has gone very quiet with the cold and is breathing quickly. Her arms are hugged around her. Ella is clenching her jaw shut to stop her teeth chattering. They go up the steps to Ella’s front door, into the gas-lit close. The light wavers over the bottle-green tiles covering the walls, which are scrubbed clean every Tuesday. They could go to Rene’s first, where they’re expected, but Eleanor wants Rene there to back up her story if her mum doesn’t believe her.

They climb the stairs to the third floor and knock. There are noises inside, and the door opens to reveal Ella’s mum, framed in golden light. She’s wearing her apron, and her hair is up in curlers and paper.

‘Girls? Isn’t it your day with Lorna?’

Lorna is Rene’s mum. With a sinking feeling, Ella realizes that her plan hasn’t worked – they’ve been gone all this time, and her mum hasn’t even missed them. Neither of them says anything, stunned by the warmth coming through the door and their own failure.

‘Well, you better come in before you let all the heat out. Come on now. I’ll make you some tea.’

Ella and Rene follow dumbly. There are two rooms in Ella’s house, unless you count the passage. The first room on their right is Ella’s bedroom. The second is the main room, where they cook and eat their meals. Her parents sleep in here on the fold-down bed. They step into the main room and Ella feels shivers of heat running up her spine. The fire is built up, and there’s something bubbling in a pan on the hob. The room smells of ironing.

‘What do you want, girls? Has Lorna already given you something to eat?’

She turns and speaks directly to Rene, who seems unable to say anything. Ella wants to say something to salvage her plan but can’t come up with anything before her mum speaks again.

‘Rene? Are you all right, hen? You look pale.’

Ella looks to her friend, whose eyes have gone wide. She thinks it must be because she has been caught in their lie. Rene opens and closes her mouth a few times, like a fish gulping on a riverbank, then takes a step forward.

‘Rene?’

Ella’s mum steps forward at the same moment, just in time to catch Rene. She holds under her arms, but Rene’s head rolls on her shoulders. She’s out cold.

Ella just stands there. What can she do? She doesn’t understand what’s happening. At least her mother seems to understand, scooping Rene’s limp body into her arms and, with a grunt, lifting her.

‘Come on,’ she says, but Ella doesn’t move, blocking her mother’s way. ‘Eleanor, move!’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To your room.’ Her mother pushes past, and Ella sees the scuffed underside of Rene’s shoes pass her face.

‘My room? Why?’

‘Because the fire’s not lit in there and the bed’s made.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘She’s had a funny turn. Probably because it’s too hot, and she’s frozen through.’

Eleanor follows into the hallway, and her mother gives her a backward glance.

‘Where were you, before this?’

Ella looks down and says nothing. Guilt is curdling in her stomach. Her mother pushes the door of the bedroom open with Rene’s feet. The lamps aren’t lit in here; the fire is built for later. Not much heat comes through from the main room and Ella can see her breath steaming. When Rene is laid on the bed, her mother goes back to the main room to fetch a taper for the lamps and some water.

Ella walks to where her friend is laid out on her bed. They’ve played games before where one or the other of them was Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, waiting for the Prince’s kiss, but Rene was never much good at lying still – she’s too much of a fidget, too suspicious that she’s about to be tickled. Now she’s playing the part perfectly. Ella is stretching out her hand to touch Rene’s cheek when her eyelids flicker. Ella pulls her hand back in shock as though burned.

‘Rene?’

Her friend makes a noise which is not words before Ella’s mum bustles in, holding a lit taper.

‘You back with us, hen?’

She looks down at Rene on the bed, her face lit in flickering light like a painting of Florence Nightingale.

‘Mm,’ Rene hums, which is the closest she’s got to speech.

‘Good.’

Ella’s mum gets up on tiptoes to light the lamps, putting the taper to the soot-blackened filaments until the flame rears up and is tamed by a turn of the tap. Though they’ve had electricity in the flat for the last two years, the landlord has never replaced the gaslights, until now. Tomorrow a man is coming to take them out and put brand-new electric lights in. Ella can’t wait. She thinks it will feel like living in the future.

Her mother comes to the bed and again nudges Eleanor to one side.

‘Have a drink of water, hen. You’ll feel better for it.’

Rene nods once, tries to lift her head from the pillow and fails. Eleanor’s mum lifts her head for her and brings the glass to her lips.

‘I wish your dad was home …’ she mutters, seemingly to Ella but clearly not looking for a reply. Then, more certainly –

‘Eleanor, I need you to go and get Lorna. Go and get Mrs Mauchlen.’

‘Mam?’

‘Just do it, Eleanor.’

* * *

By the time Ella gets back to the house with Mrs Mauchlen in tow, Rene is sitting up in bed, sipping tea and eating a piece of toast with butter. She’s still pale, and coughs several times so hard that her eyes water, but she tells them all how she’s fine. Mrs Mauchlen, who has wrung her hands and fretted all the way to the house, is visibly annoyed with Ella, who wasn’t able to explain what was wrong. They both get a telling-off for staying out, but no punishment is mentioned and Rene climbs onto her mother’s back to go home, linking her arms around her neck.

As they’re leaving, Rene looks over her shoulder to Ella, and there is something in her eyes that she’s trying to communicate, but Ella doesn’t know whether it’s regret, accusation or apology. It will bother her later that, though she can recall the expression exactly, she still doesn’t know what it means. Then they are gone.

* * *

A new day breaks. Ella swings her legs out of bed, toes sinking into the colourful rug that her mum made with scraps of fabric, pulling them through hessian. When they read the Arabian Nights in school, she imagined the flying carpets looking like this one. The rug is colder than she expected. She pads to the window in her nightie and, rather than pulling the curtain back, steps around it, as though stepping on stage.

It has snowed. Isn’t it too early in the year for that? Ella isn’t sure. But it has snowed. Not good snow, sure enough. Not snowball snow, or snowman snow, or sledging snow. A dusting as thin as a sheet, pulled over the streets and rooftops as far as Ella can see. It frosts one side of every drainpipe, silvers the acres of roofing slate. Only the warm chimney pots are free of its shroud.

Though she knows it to be false, Ella cannot shake the feeling that today is Christmas. A day for presents, special food and no school. It annoys her that she can’t get this out of her head, because she will be disappointed when she has to get her uniform on. School is no fun without Rene, and she has been off all week, since they came home from the park.

Still, Ella doesn’t feel like sleeping any more. She may as well find out if her parents are awake in the next room. Often, she will peek around the crack in the door to see if their bed has been folded into its recess. If not, and she sees the forms of her parents, rising and falling out of sync, she will sit and hum tunes in the corridor until they wake up and notice her. Sometimes she will crawl into the bed between them, though her dad doesn’t like this. Ella likes those mornings.

Today, there is no doubt. The bed is up, and the door to the front room is open a little. There is a soft glow – the lamps are lit. And there is a smell, unfamiliar on a school day. Frying bacon. Ella breathes big lungfuls of it in disbelief. She has skipped forward in time to Christmas Day, that’s the only explanation that makes sense.

A smile breaking involuntarily over her face, Ella steps forward, puts a hand to the door and pushes into the warmth and light and good smell of the front room. She stands in the space vacated by her parents’ bed and looks expectantly at her mother and father, who are surely waiting for her with presents.

They haven’t seen her.

Both of them have their backs to her, her mother hunched slightly over the cast iron range, prodding the frying bacon with the wooden spoon that she cooks everything with – clootie dumplings, onion soup, rice puddings with jam. Usually her father will be sitting in his chair at this time, polishing his shoes or trimming his nails. Always quiet, self-contained, as though he has not really woken up yet, and is performing these actions in a trance.

But today he is not in his chair, he is standing next to her mother, one hand on her shoulder. Ella has become fully convinced that today is, if not Christmas Day, a special occasion, and this is the first inkling that something might be amiss. She watches for a moment, tempted (as she always is when she has entered a room undetected) to creep up and startle them.

‘Morning.’

Her voice is cheery, but she does not shout. Nevertheless, her parents startle and spin around.

‘Eleanor!’ her mother says, taking a step forward hesitantly, still holding the wooden spoon. Her father doesn’t move, doesn’t say good morning. Her mother seems to think better of walking across the small room to get her.

Ella walks around the low sofa where she and her mother sit in the evenings, while her dad sits in his wingback armchair facing them. Without the sofa in her way, she can see that something is lying on the hearth rug. It makes her stop. She was right after all – it’s Christmas, or her birthday, or some other special day which doesn’t come every year. Her parents have got her a present. A big one.

She looks at the present. How did they know she wanted one? How did they know she wanted a guitar exactly like Rene’s?

No.

Not a guitar like Rene’s, but Rene’s guitar. The blue case painted with an apple tree in four colours – light and dark brown for the trunk, green for the leaves and red for the apples. She knows the painting, done by Rene’s pa, like a face, with all its asymmetries and wrinkles. Her parents say nothing. Ella says nothing. In the silence, she kneels down.

Ella has never seen a child’s coffin. She’s only been to the funeral of her great-aunt Lydia. Suddenly she is possessed by the strange notion that if she opens the case, she will find a body inside. Of course, the dimensions do not allow for that – the legs would be too squashed up in that long neck of the case.

‘Mrs Mauchlen came by this morning …’ her father begins, but her mother puts a hand on him and he stops abruptly.

Ella crouches forward and puts her hands on the case, then feels around the lid, undoing the clasps. She lifts the lid, which crackles as it hinges upwards. Gleaming in the warm light, Rene’s guitar is as beautiful as it ever was. Ella’s eyes trail over the floral pattern around the sound hole, the gleam of the tuning pegs, the thick velvet lining the case.

For all this, Ella doesn’t want it. She feels no desire for the guitar, to own it or even touch it. This absence of desire is the most troubling thing she has ever felt, so keen it is. She thinks this not-wanting must be a mistake and reaches to take out the guitar.

She lifts it slowly by the neck and body and places it on her knees. She does not strum the strings. She does not want to hear them. Both hands are placed over the strings, muting them, like a hand over a mouth. She hopes they stay silent forever.

* * *

Ella supposes it’s because she’s a child that she keeps waiting to see Rene. She doubts that adults expect to see their dead friends turning a street corner, or sitting on the step outside their close, waiting for them to come and play. She doubts they feel the same missed-step jolt in their belly when they remember. She doubts adults see those person-shaped holes in the world. It is a stupidity unique to childhood, she thinks, and cannot wait to outgrow it.

She goes to the funeral, undistinguished as Rene’s best friend among the rest of her class. She sees Robert, through the crowds, but does not speak to him. He’s wearing a black jacket and tie, with black shorts and a black cap. The whole outfit must have been bought for the occasion. Ella thinks he looks like a crow with skinny white legs. She watches as he’s hugged by a succession of relatives. They look like they’re trying to squeeze the breath out of him, and Ella wants to tell them to stop. Robert just stands there, unmoving, until they let him go.

Back at school, Ella sits at the edge of the playground. It’s not because she’s mourning, but because she can’t think of anything else to do. She comes home every afternoon, spends the evenings with her parents, half-listening to the radio until it’s time for bed, where she goes without complaint. On Sundays there is church, but Saturdays drag on endlessly, longer than the rest of the week combined.

Ella fades into the background. People stop noticing her. She becomes ghost-like. She doesn’t mind. After all, this is all her fault.

* * *

A month after the funeral, Ella is sitting on the low wall at one edge of the playground, her back against the wire fence. She’s examining her own shadow. The December sun is not shining, exactly, but the clouds today are paper-thin. As she watches, another shadow draws near and intersects with her own, creating a patch between them that is darker than either on its own.

‘Hello, Eleanor.’

She looks up and sees a halo of auburn curls surrounding a serious face. If Ella were to say that Robert Mauchlen looks angelic it would not be entirely complimentary. He looks like one of those Old Testament angels she’s seen in church, who the Almighty has given an especially onerous task – casting out Satan, evicting Adam and Eve, sweeping over Egypt to take the souls of first-born children. More than the average nine-year-old boy, Robert looks like he has something on his mind.

Ella has been expecting this moment. Hoping for it, even. She wants Robert to tell her off. She wants him to shout at her. She wants him to blame her for Rene. Even as fear curdles in her belly, she’s anticipating the relief of punishment. Robert just stands there, as though he’s about to say something. But the words never come. Then his hand shoots out and he places something in her lap. He sits next to her.

Ella can feel her heart pounding. The object in her lap is wrapped in brown paper. She assumes it’s something disgusting. Dog poo, perhaps. Or insects – a collection of earwigs and centipedes. She resists the urge to shrug the parcel onto the ground and pinches the corner between thumb and forefinger. The brown paper opens almost like a flower.

Sitting in the middle is the biggest block of tablet that Ella has ever seen. Of all the sweets that Ella and Rene most treasured – soor plooms, sherbet straws, Berwick cockles – tablet was the most precious. Mrs Mauchlen makes it herself, with a tin of condensed milk and a huge bag of sugar, stirring the pan until her arm aches and the mixture solidifies into something crumbly at the edges, fudgy in the centre. Ella’s mum always gets it wrong, overcooking the mix so it sets hard as toffee.

Ella breaks a piece off and pops it in her mouth. The sugar coats the roof of her mouth, makes the back of her throat tickle, and she finally believes it’s real. She quickly wraps up the precious stuff and shoves it in her cardigan before anybody notices what she’s got. She tries to think of something to say to Robert. He asks a question instead.

‘What do you like to do?’ Robert asks.

Before, Ella would have said that she likes playing with Rene.

‘I like listening to the radio.’

‘Oh?’ Robert’s eyebrows rise. ‘What do you like to listen to?’

Ella thinks. Actually, she doesn’t like the radio that much any more. She doesn’t like the comedians and the storytellers that were always her favourites. They all seem like they’re trying to distract her from how she feels, and she doesn’t want to be distracted.

‘I like the music,’ she says, at last. This is true. Music doesn’t distract her. Music lets her feel what she’s feeling more strongly. To Ella’s surprise, Robert is nodding.

‘Me too.’

‘You do?’

‘I’d like to be a musician, when I grow up.’

‘Don’t you want to do something with books? You could be a librarian. Or, um … the man who delivers books to the library.’

‘Hm.’ Robert sounds sceptical. ‘Maybe. But it would be fun to play music.’

‘Fun?’

‘Aye. Else why would they call it “play”?’

This is the most insightful thing Ella has heard anyone around her age say, by such a large degree, that it strikes her as mystical. She has never thought a job could be like playing before. It seems like a secret hidden in plain sight. For a minute they are silent. Ella feels she shouldn’t waste this opportunity.

‘D’you think it gets easier?’ she asks, very quietly.

Robert runs a hand through his curls, breathes in and out. He looks so adult to Ella, he might as well be one of the teachers.

‘People keep saying that … But I don’t know. Maybe they’re just saying it so that we don’t give up.’

‘Give up what?’

‘On being normal, I guess.’

‘Oh.’ Ella can’t say anything more. She couldn’t have expressed the feeling she has had for the last few weeks better than Robert just has.

‘You’re clever,’ she says at last. When she looks over at him, Robert is blushing furiously. He clears his throat.

‘I should go.’

‘Okay.’

He gets up to leave and walks away without looking back.

‘Thank you!’ Ella blurts out.

Robert turns. ‘What for?’

Ella frowns, realizing she isn’t sure. It just seemed like the right thing to say. Her whole being wants to say thank you to Robert for something bigger and more important than she can understand.

‘For the tablet, of course,’ she says, remembering the little parcel in her cardigan.

Robert hesitates for a second, nods tightly, and disappears into the crowd.