Song Of Time (10 page)

Tumbling in my bed, restless as the sky, first hot and then drenched in freezing sweat as I tried to find a position which would bring me ease, running through impossible phrases on a huge violin, it often seemed that Leo was still with me, uncurling in dizzying angles from the storm-beaten light, although his limbs were thin and contorted, and his face was masked by a vomit-filled plastic bag. Leaflets pasted the storm-swept streets for this or that extremist group whilst the television raged with pictures of yachts driven through the roofs of houses in Florida, and the endless watery wastes of poor Bangladesh.

This was the future, Sis, and Leo, who was right about so many things, was also right about Venice. Channelled by the workings of an ill-advised attempt to shield the lagoon, waves broke gleefully across St. Mark’s square. The campanile keeled. The basilica collapsed. The residents fled. Amid endless talk of a restoration which no nation, in this time of numberless humanitarian crises, could possibly afford, Venice sank back into the tidal mud from which it had risen.

As with WRFI, there were many who believed that that winter of catastrophes was the work of a vengeful god. In this new world, and in this still-young century, their claims were harder to laugh off. Then came a day when the sky above Birmingham was pegged back, huge and grey and like a stained marquee, and Dad was suddenly all elbows and whistles as he banged around in the back kitchen, screw-drivering the lids off tins of paint. Still whistling, he headed upstairs with rollers and step ladders to Leo’s room. The sour, homely smell of wet emulsion had just begun to emerge from Leo’s room when Mum returned from the shops, dropped her bags and ran up the stairs to ask just what the hell he thought he was doing. The rest of the day was filled with accusatory silence and for years after a rollered tide of white on the wall of Leo’s room ended above his bed.

The only music in our house now came from my violin. Once, experimentally, I raised the lid of the upright piano and strummed, somewhat inexpertly, the first chords of the
Raindrop Prelude
. Dad came in from next door with the numbers of a spreadsheet crumpled glowing in his hand. In a quite voice which trembled from the strain, he asked me if I minded not playing when he was trying to work. I never touched that piano again.

But I was good by then. I was no longer taught violin by Miss Fully, and in my fierce impatience with being merely good, I was already starting to have my doubts about Mister Phillips, who insisted I call him John, and was well past his prime after a life of hard labour in provincial orchestras. But I still thought of music as an abstract thing. Before I took my first journey to Cornwall with Mum and Dad in our first Leo-less summer, I’d never imagined that it might be encompassed in the swell of waves or a tumble of granite. But, as we escaped the city of our grief, heading away from concrete towns which still bore the stains of last winter’s storms, then along lanes of wind-contorted trees which twisted down towards deep, unexpected valleys and framed glorious glimpses of the sea, I began to understand.

I remember the queue for the Bodinnick ferry, and the stacked rooftops of a town on the water’s far side. Then came a longer, straighter road, high-hedged, with a slot of sky over-leaned by twisted oaks, and a sudden fork leading down to our rented cottage. I remember the nettle-scented twilight, the high grass which almost reached to the windows, and the absolute, whispering silence of that tiny valley. One day, I decided, this will be my home. Even now, and although the thought feels like sacrilege, Morryn sometimes feels like second best to that cottage where I spent my first summer in Cornwall.

What would I have given then to be better than merely good? What, if I’m totally honest, would I still give now to regain the touch and finesse I once had in these dying fingers? As I wandered the clifftops and discovered squat churches and got barked at by angry dogs in decaying farms, Leo was always with me. Not now the fever-Leo of the long winter, but my companion and confidant and guide. I listened endlessly to the Heifetz recording of the Sibelius
Violin Concerto
which he’d downloaded for me into that Seashell player, which was precious to me in itself although it had already been supplanted by yet cleverer devices. I bathed in the music’s icy passion as I wandered the dangerous paths along the freshly broken cliffs and turned my face to the reborn sun. This, I thought, as the wind and the music shivered through me, is how I want to play. This is what I want to
become
.

Being away from Birmingham meant something to my parents as well. Even if they were no longer capable of happiness, they sensed that I was at least experiencing my own version of that emotion in that cottage. Gone were the relentless day trips and guide book consultations of our previous holidays beside the then hot beaches of France. For them, as they collapsed in long-suppressed exhaustion, Cornwall was an escape from Leo, but for me it was a way of getting closer.

Mum and I drove into Fowey one hot afternoon. There was the traditional hunt for a parking space which the automatic machines indulge in to this day and then, as we wandered beside the new harbour workings and explored the shops, I got the impression that she wanted to talk. In my better Cornish mood, I was even prepared to turn off Heifetz to listen. I was still wearing one of Leo’s old tee shirts, but today, amid the boutiques which still then predominated in such places, Mum nudged me towards trying out some more feminine clothes. I held tops and dresses before long mirrors, judging them against the chilly look which might best encapsulate the Sibelius slow movement.

I was taller than my mother now. In the wake of Leo’s death, she had changed and shrunk. With their cross-cultural marriage and commitment to rational education, Mum and Dad had entered adult life imagining that they were part of what all society would eventually become. Now, as the divides widened, that belief had gone. She had a story of a nurse who’d refused to believe that she was Leo’s mother during one of the times when he was in hospital. Even here in Cornwall, lads drinking outside the Duke of Prussia called down at us jeeringly as we walked past the harbour towards the shops. Mum was still an active member of the local WRFI group, but even that was starting to fade. The condition, of its nature, was almost exclusively confined to white people…

“Can you believe they’re saying
prayers
now at the start of every meeting?” she said to me now as we bore my new designer bags back up to the car park. “Not just any old prayers, either, but exclusively Christian ones. So I just stood up and said I had no desire to participate. The ridiculous thing is, they acted so surprised. You could see them thinking—we thought you were one of us!” Mum gave the nearest thing she now gave to a smile. “Well, I told them I was a committed Hindu.
That
shut them up…”

Even through the worst of times, and despite the abandoned piano, Mum and Dad had encouraged my attempts to become more than merely good at the violin. But they still imagined that I was working out my grief and anger at losing Leo. Despite the enormous progress I’d made, they were still expecting me to lose interest.

“If you really want to make music a career, Roushana,” Mum said as we drove back towards our cottage along the hawthorn-clawed road, “you need to think about how difficult that will be.”

“Do you think I
haven’t
?”

“Of course. But there’s that phrase about putting all your eggs in one basket.”

“Isn’t that just what Leo did?”

Her hands massaged the wheel. Uppermost though my brother was in all our thoughts, it was rare for any of us to mention his name. “Leo was—”

“You think he had talent and I don’t, is that it?”

“Nothing of the sort.” Her mouth twitched. “But you saw how much pressure it put on him. I think,
we
think, that it was partly why he…Well, why he killed himself. Whatever happens, we don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Music is what’s got me through this, Mum.”

“I understand. And that’s
one
thing. And no one disputes you’re exceptional now—after all, you won that competition.”

I ground my nails into my palms. I hated those competitions and recitals, which took place in the same dusty halls as Mum’s WRFI meetings. Hated them when I won them, and hated even more when, as the upstart new girl who appeared seemingly from nowhere amid the rumours of her lost, brilliant brother, I lost.

“All I mean, Roushana, is that music’s so uncertain. And you’re good at English and maths—top set and all of that. We don’t want you to throw any of what you can be away. You’ll need a well-rounded education if you’re to succeed at anything. Of course, we’re proud of what you’re achieved with the violin. It’s almost a miracle, the way you’ve come on so quickly. But we’d be proud of you in any case. You don’t have to prove anything. Not ever. So all I’m saying is that music’s fine, but that it would be useful to have another plan as well.”

I snapped, “I don’t need any other plans,” and turned up Heifetz on my Seashell.

I must, by any standards, have made an alarming and irritating figure as I strode about inside my arrogant, self-absorbed bubble. At school, and at music seminars and classes, I kept my head high, my gaze unfocussed, my thoughts to myself. I’d probably have been a candidate for bullying if I’d have responded in the slightest to the stuck-up Paki-girl taunts which sometimes wafted in my direction. But I didn’t. I was, I was sure by now, destined for higher things.

Good was
nothing
. Good simply wasn’t good enough. At night, my hands raw and aching after the four or five hours’ hard private practise I now generally managed to put in at the end of the day, my head simply wouldn’t switch off as I finally lay stunned and exhausted in my bed. I didn’t even find the loss of sleep and rest frustrating. Yes, it was abnormal, as I’d heard Gran Maitland and Nan Ashar privately whispering, and yes I was straining myself up to and beyond the limit. But why
should
I want to be normal? Weren’t the limits of so-called normality simply barriers to be broken through by people like me?

Amid those fatigue-flickering nights, in the TV-less quiet, amid the occasional sighs and stirrings from the far bedroom where my parents battled their dreams, amid the growl of the wind, and the blare of car horns and the mutter of police helicopters and the swish of the rain, many ghosts reached out to me. First came my warmest allies, my closest friends, Heifetz and Pearlman and Mar and Menuhin, and of course Barbirolli and Karajan and all the great composers, their cheeks gaunt, their eyes hollow with the pallor of grief and pain.
It’s alright
, they would whisper. We have been with you in this place.
Feel, listen—we understand.
The deader they were, the better. I could barely bring myself to listen to performances given by anyone living. There was Mahler and there was Tartini, as well, and Paganini, and Chopin and Liszt…Wild-haired misshapen romantics all, and to me impossibly glamorous.
What would you give?
they always wanted to know. And I’d mew in my roiled sheets on those hot, freezing nights and I’d spread my arms and I’d tell them that I would give everything, and still it would never be enough. No, no, no, no, they would mutter and laugh as they filled up the shadows and crawled out from under their posters and dripped with the rain and crammed aside what else was left of my thoughts.
You don’t understand, Roushana. Everything is nothing.
There has to be more…

I was exhilarated. I was terrified. My skin crawled. I drove myself so hard and did without sleep and ignored my mother’s occasional pleadings.
This isn’t the only thing in life, Roushana. You’re over-stretched.
How stupidly wrong could she be! Of course it was the only thing! I wanted to be stretched so far that I snapped into disparate pieces and then to examine my flayed body and find out what those pieces were, and what lay beyond. That might get rid of this curse of being merely good. That, at last, might be something. The swaying figures surrounded me. I was touched by gaunt fingers. I felt their hollowed breath. I shared the fatigue of centuries. On summer nights, as barricades went up and the helicopters flickered closer and cars were rolled and the flaming streets of Balsall Heath played orange across thunderous skies, I breathed the acrid smoke of funeral pyres. When the rains raged and the gutters giggled like gargoyles and fish-condoms swam in the streets, my teeth were gritted with the soils of the grave. On broken-glass mornings, exhausted but elated, the taste of dried blood was still on my bitten tongue as I trudged through the blasted world. My bleeding fingers stained the strings of my violin. It had to hurt. When it didn’t, I knew I hadn’t done enough. I was a walking stigmata, weird Goth-girl who didn’t even listen to modern music, with her eyes purple-kohled from sleeplessness and a gaze which saw right through you into the impossible beyond.

I was close, I suppose, to self-harm. But I still think that, for all the teenage drama, my self-sacrifice and self immolation were, essentially, about music. Good was bad. Good was rubbish. Good was so far off the scale as to be inaudible. The only books I read were books about music, often technical, or—as my sole relief—the lives of great composers and performers. Poor old Gustav, poor old Petyr, smashing themselves against the hopeless rocks of public apathy, but I didn’t think of them in that way. The death of a child, a wife, a lover, debilitating disease, devastating shyness or critical flaying—these things weren’t sad in any proper sense, because that was what life was like, that was exactly what was to be expected. Grief, hopelessness—the more raging the emotion the better—were all simply things to be captured and made sense of within the music, which would last long after the flesh had fallen from the bone. Emotions themselves were worthless spasms of chemistry and electricity.

Yes, I was getting better. It wasn’t some delusion. This really was my life’s work, and sacrifices had to be made. That chuckle. His rarer laugh. What remained of his scent fading from his tee shirts into the back-ground odours of this house and this century. His lips warm and hard against mine on that New Year’s Eve. His room still lay across from mine, scarred as if by some wan sunrise by the white shadow of Dad’s brief attempt to emulsion it, but otherwise the same. Sometimes, I waited for him to come to me, long-haired and gaunt in that old faded red dressing gown amid the other Romantic greats. After all, my brother was hardly out of place. He was beautiful and talented and dead. What did it matter if it was WRFI or TB, suicide or madness? He, too, would uncurl from the restless hiss of my breathing and the sound of my heart beating against the springs of my bed. As blind as Carolan. As deaf as Ludwig. Torn from the present, nailed to the past, he was there with me, gaunt and pale and knowingly mocking. But the closer he got, the thinner and more pitiful he became. Leo and not Leo. Not a figure of power, no—or not of power entirely. For he was the dust-picking of breezes. He was the buzzing of flies. He was the open sores of child-hoods of endless starvation and pain. He was the hopeless joy of giving in, and a distillation of suffering. He was the savage white light which lay beyond the deepest black. Sometimes, on the best and worst of nights, I let this Leo who was not Leo embrace me, and still I wanted more and more of him. For I would have given everything.
Anything
. And I knew by now he would have taken it. And perhaps he did.