Song Of Time (4 page)

Each evening, I would gauge whether Leo was at home when I returned from school by checking to see if his bedroom window was open or closed, and it had been shut on the hot autumn afternoon when I was sent home early from school after another bomb alert, and it simply hadn’t occurred to me that he might be in as I threw off my blazer and headed upstairs. My reaction to the sound which came from beyond his door was of some small disturbance—a mouse, perhaps; we’d had them before—so I headed straight in as I’d never have done if it had occurred to me that that he was in there, and least of all if I’d known that Blythe was with him as well. But there they both were, entirely naked on the bed in the unaired heat of his sun-facing room. Of course, I already knew they had sex. In that dying liberal age, my parents had made it plain to me that there were times when my brother and his girlfriend were not to be disturbed. Sex was one thing, but it was quite another to find Blythe crouching down over my brother in quite the way that she was. Blythe un-crouched and hooked a strand of hair from her mouth and her arm moved towards her breasts whilst Leo attempted to cover himself, but by then I was already slamming the door and running down the stairs.

They both came down soon afterwards as I sat hugging my knees and staring at the cartoons on the television to explain how it was entirely their fault, that they should have warned me they were in the house. But this was the future, and everything was part of it in that strange, unsettling autumn, and especially the music to which Leo introduced me. We explored the Bach
Partitas
. He played them for me on guitar or piano. He found key performances. All I had to do was listen. Leo had thinned somewhat by then. He’d turned gracefully gaunt and his skin, his breath, his whole presence, felt hot if you were close to him. He’d grown his hair longer, as well, and he looked like Chopin as he tossed back his locks and unravelled—
it’s here, Sis, can’t you see?
—the notes for me across the keyboard with his fine, quick hands. Meanwhile, our house had become a small battlefield in the war against whatever it was that afflicted him, with different towels for us all onto which Mum had sewn labels, constant warnings about washing hands and a permanent reek of disinfectant, but this was my escape, my way of being with my brother, and if I had not yet learned how to play music, I was at least learning how to hear it. He’d lent me that Seashell which Blythe had bought him. All the warhorse romantic concertos—the Mendelssohn and the Brahms and Elgar and the Sibelius and the Bruch—were new to me, and they were thrilling to listen to as I hunched home from school against the booming wind, alone with all the other rain-slick figures but knowing that Leo was with me amid those yearning orchestras.

Christmas loomed. Leo had another short spell in hospital, pre-planned this time, and there were more tests, and the postponement of others which, seeing as at least two girls in my class were suffering from what seemed like the same thing, he was on an ever-lengthening waiting list to undergo. He didn’t come with us when we went to Christmas dinner at Mum’s parents because Mum, anticipating the fuss there would be about his special diet, had decided it would be better if he spent the spend the day with Blythe’s parents instead. I remember how the snow had fallen that year in incredible, world-stopping, heaps; how Birmingham, even Handsworth, looked beautiful on that slow and steamed-up journey, the houses transformed by white eyebrows and stalactite eaves.

Nan Ashar didn’t bother to hide her disappointment that her grandson hadn’t come, and could only manage a cursory pinch of my cheek as she filled the doorway of her terraced house. Like most Indians, the Ashars had accepted Christmas as just another festival, and plump Santas and assorted cherubs and reindeer complemented the usual pictures and figurines of Shiva and Ganesa. Then came dinner with us all jammed elbow to elbow around the oval table, and the
turrrkey
, which Nan Ashar presented with much pride and oompah, although I noticed that she and Grandpa only pecked at the various vegetables and dips. Also here were Mum’s brother and his family. Uncle Indra lived just around the corner with broad, quiet, Aunt Rupa, and had followed his father into what he liked to call “the trade”.

Afterwards, I was encouraged to go off and play with their two boys who squabbled upstairs in a stuffy room over a dusty computer. The eldest, Kapil, was only a year younger than Leo, and fancied himself musical—a “deejay”. As the loading bars crawled across the screen, I remembered how he’d once demonstrated to Leo what he called his
latest composition
, apparently the product of weeks of effort, and how Leo had produced something infinitely sweeter, funkier and better with a few quick prods of the mouse. But I was alone with them today, not so much a girl as a lesser boy, which was a position I encouraged in the way I tied back my hair, avoided make-up and wore big, baggy tee-shirts, often borrowed from Leo, to hide my growing breasts. Finally, a game loaded. Bright with helicopters, innards exploding, and loud clashes of flesh and metal, I discovered there was a knack to playing it which I didn’t possess as, after blasting their way through several levels, Kapil and his brother finally let me have a go. In five seconds I was zapped by a many-armed Kali-thing, and they could continue playing.

New Year’s Eve was at Dad’s parents’ house in Hall Green. At least Leo was there with us this time, but I was no great fan of this particular night with all its drink and bluster. I was allowed champagne, which I refused. I was encouraged to dance, which was an activity I then detested, and I hated the smell of cigarettes and beer, and all the jolly jostling in those tiny, semi-detached rooms. Hated, as well, the way Leo could manage to blend in with these anonymous creatures, who seemed to be mostly Gran and Pa Maitland’s stupid neighbours. How
could
he cheer like everyone else when Big Ben finally chimed and link arms and then go around hugging people?

“Happy New Year, Sis.” Taking my hands, my brother whooshed me up from the sofa on which I’d been hiding. He’d been drinking like everyone else, and he seemed to lean, unbalanced, across my body, and the pressure of his lips close to mine, the whole sense of being in his arms, lasted for longer than such moments are supposed to as he kissed me—and the world fell away.

Next morning, I was awoken by rattle of rain against my window, and the sound of Leo playing in the house below, as beautifully as I’ve ever heard it to this day, Chopin’s
Raindrop Prelude
. Such sadness and delicacy: the emotion there, but held back, unshowy in all but the distant thunder of those softly rumbling middle chords. I could imagine for a while as I lay up in bed that Leo really was Chopin and I was Georges Sand, that we were sharing that grey rainswept house in Majorca which Leo had told me about, and which Chopin had so hated, and yet had managed to produce some of the world’s most beautiful music within it.

Leo played the piece again, yet more quietly and brilliantly. I crept from my room and hunched on the stairs listening and watching through the dining room’s open door as he sat in his faded red dressing gown, entirely rapt in a moment which I never wanted to cease. Finally, he looked around, and he seemed almost self-conscious to see me there, which was something Leo never usually was when he was at the piano. He joked as he stood up that he only dared play quietly because of his hangover, but we both knew that that he was playing as he’d never played before: that on that first morning of a new year in that still new century, he’d passed beyond mere technical facility, and was using Chopin’s music to express not what Chopin had once felt, but what he felt himself.

Mum and Dad were out that morning, buying yet more
things
in one of the prefabricated cathedrals to consumerism in which people then seemed to spend most of their spare time. Leo wasn’t in a good way. He muttered about his gluten intolerance as he swilled down tablets—how he’d stupidly forgotten that beer and whisky were both made from grain. Leaving the piano, he sat at the computer in the kitchen. I imagined that he was researching some essay, but there was something about his slumped posture that made me go over and stand beside him an hour or so later. The screen was stacked with websites, images.

“I know what it is I’ve got, Sis,” he murmured without looking towards me. “It’s called white plague.”

Just like Mum, I’d never been able to drink milk. Leo, just like Dad, always had. It went back to our human heritage, to the tribes of Babel which once supposedly scattered themselves across this earth. Those who came to live in the cooler climes of the north became cattle rearers and husbanders and acquired by slow selection a continued ability to digest milk which those who hunted and foraged in earth’s steppes, deserts and jungles continued to lose after infancy. Effectively, lactose tolerance is something which northerly white-skinned people have evolved, but which the rest of humanity mainly lacks. There are many exceptions, from the Bedouins and the Tuareg in Africa to the people of northern India. Even amongst the native Finns, almost 20% are unable to consume milk without suffering indigestion. Any virus intentionally keyed to react with the production of the digestive enzyme lactase would certainly be an instrument of exceeding bluntness with which to wage against the then-wealthy West. But it would be an instrument nevertheless.

I remember the Styrofoam cups of orange juice or coffee which I helped pour and serve from trestle tables in meetings at school halls. I remember laying out the special biscuits; flat, eggy things which tasted vaguely like pizza even when they were sweet. I remember the scrapy microphones Mum and Dad leaned into as, founder members of the South Birmingham Branch of the WRFI Society—WRFI, or Wide Range Food Intolerance being white plague’s official name—they invited comments from the floor. Leo was also there at these meetings whenever he was up to it, hanging back at first but invariably pushed into the spotlight as an example of what WRFI sufferers could achieve. The local press got interested. He even gave an interview on regional news although publicity for the sake of publicity was something he’d always hated, especially if it meant giving a wide airing to his piano performances, which, despite their easy brilliance, remained an embarrassment to Leo, who could only ever compare himself to Glen Gould or Alfred Brendel. He only played in public, he once told me, because if he didn’t he’d never become any good at it, but now he was accosted by neighbours about this or that lovely tune they’d heard him play, and so it went in that rainy spring of England’s small monsoon, when, amid their many other activities, Mum and Dad decided to put our house up for sale. They planned on buying somewhere bigger, closer to Edgbaston or possibly Harborne, away from this place which they somehow blamed for Leo’s condition, and also, although they never quite said it, from the encroaching ethnic poverty of Balsall Heath. They talked about finding a nice, big Victorian house with a proper music room for Leo and a full-sized piano, although the For Sale sign was frequently vandalised, and people were superstitious about new diseases, and the right offer never quite came.

Something between one in fifty and one in two hundred native English people were said to be suffering from white plague by then, although the numbers remained uncertain, and there were many experts who still disputed WRFI’s existence as a separate condition. All I knew was that Leo had been well until that summer’s afternoon when we’d smoked dope in the garden and I’d made him his special sandwiches, and that he’d never been well since. His diet—which had to cope with his small intestine’s widening intolerance to a whole range of carbohydrates—was a complete minefield, and our fridge was its booby-trapped fuse. Woebetide anyone who took anything on Leo’s special shelf. I never did get the talk about drugs from my parents which Leo had predicted, but I got several about my need for
caution
, for
simple common sense
, and for
responsibility
. Not that my parents weren’t always acutely conscious of how difficult life could be for the sister of an ill sibling, and there were times when Mum would put an arm around my shoulder, and try to talk, or to listen, or say nothing at all. But I’d always stiffen, clam up, squirm away.

If Mum and Dad blamed themselves, or our house, for Leo’s condition, I was more clear-cut. I blamed God. I took my cue from the fundamentalist websites which claimed that white plague was the vengeance of God or Allah or Jehovah, and then from my grandparents who saw Leo’s illness as punishment for not having been baptised, or not having gone through the rituals of the samsaras, or simply for my parent’s ill-advised cross-cultural marriage. Of course, the prayers, the offerings, were well meant, but I’d always hated those grisly images of Christ nailed to two squared planks of wood, whilst Nan and Pa’s Hindu gods with their many arms and weird methods of transport seemed like a poorly thought-out set of cartoon superheroes.
Why
? I kept wanting to ask. What has this got to do with anything?

The tempests of spring finally blew themselves out with one last spectacular storm and another summer crept in on its warm heavy tread, breathing a lion-breath of carrion drains. I experimented privately before the mirror with Mum’s make-up, suffered an ear infection, and had my first period. I also acquired my first full-sized violin, a second hand thing nearly fifty years old and the product of some anonymous French workshop, but with a nice, deep tone. Leo had taken the lead in its purchase, and I always thought of his voice when I played it, and his guiding hands, and the soft pressure of that New Year’s kiss. Miss Freely my violin teacher, a spinsterish woman who smelled unaccountably of dog, was surprised at my sudden burst of progress. More surprising still, I suspect, was the ragged passion with which I had began to practise.
Heard you playing in your room last night
, Leo would say, bleary-eyed from another bad reaction as he shuffled down in the mornings to pick through the remnants of what he was still allowed to eat.
Lovely tone, but you need to pace yourself and slow down now you can play the phrase at that speed, especially on that last down-bow…