me, if you please.’ Most get up with indecent haste and file after him, chattering, into an adjoining building. There is a vague scuffle for the good seats. Near him, near the piano. By sheer force of will, the St Joseph’s girls come out on top.
Tiffany makes sure she’s front and centre to the action, taking me with her.
The man is tall, slim, Nordic-looking. Late twenties or early thirties, with ruffled, sunlit hair and a bohemian edge to the way he dresses. Dark cords and scuffed workboots, artfully layered poor-boy shirts and a vintage waistcoat hanging open beneath a battered single-breasted jacket, a thin, striped scarf. Steel-framed glasses, electric blue eyes, just a hint of stubble.
Everything just so. A picture. Vain, then. I know I have come across his type before, somewhere.
All the girls sit up straighter in their chairs, eyes bright, colour high. ‘This is more like it,’ Tiffany says with satisfaction.
Paul shoots her a quick look under his extravagant lashes, a lingering smile guaranteed to stop her breathing — I know, because I hear the catch, the re-engagement — then he says brightly, ‘Let’s take it from Figure 1, shall we, soprani?’ He seats himself at the piano stool, begins to play with his beautiful, long-fingered hands. There is a flutter of movement as the front row — me in its midst — congratulates itself on its foresight.
As Paul runs the general chorus through their paces, I bide my time, learning the music, learning the faces, watching the clock, waiting — reluctant and on edge — for Figure 7. Just miming along, because I’m still not sure if what I have in mind is going to work.
It’s stop and start. There are plenty of hands this morning as Paul patiently answers every stupid question the girls dream up just to get him to look at them. Like, ‘Ah, Paul, isn’t that supposed to be a demi semiquaver?’
(‘No, it isn’t, Mary-Ellen, but you’ve raised a good point there.’) For Tiffany, he has extra time and attention, asking her to demonstrate a bar here, a phrase there, over and over, with great charm and the flash of white teeth, until the other girls in the room are openly mutinous. But Tiffany laps it up, shooting me sly glances, playing with the ends of her sleek side pony, blowing us all away with her big, Italianate voice. Such a standout, such a talent, it’s obvious what Paul thinks. He grins when he hears her putting the rest in the shade, his approval clear.
There is electricity in the air between them.
We don’t get to Figure 7, and I’m relieved. Maybe it won’t be today.
When Paul finally says it’s time to rejoin the rest of the choir, there are audible groans.
‘God, I hope we get him again tomorrow,’ Tiffany says fervently. ‘What a total honey.’ Then she gives me a piercing look. ‘You up to it?’ Everything a contest. I shrug. ‘I guess. Wait and see.’ We file back into the main assembly hall and throw ourselves into our chairs. Mr Masson exhorts us feverishly to ‘Take it from the top!’, the orchestra blares back into disembodied life and the whole room rips into it. And though the basses are off, and the altos keep missing their entries, and the tenors can’t keep the time, there’s a growing sense that things may just come together. You can see the amazement in people’s eyes.
It’s beginning to sound kind of like … music.
All the smug St Joseph’s girls around me are poised like hawks for Figure 7. I’m packed in tight — Tiffany on one side, Delia on the other, girls at front and back — like there’s been some secret directive to not let me escape, to block all the exits. Miss Fellows follows me with her dark eyes, ready to breathe fire at a single misstep, a single fluffed demisemiquaver or whatever.
There is a moment of doubt, a tiny breath of uneasiness in me, a catch in my ribcage — Carmen? Can we do this? We can do anything, right? — as Mr Masson looks straight at me, beats me in, drills the air in front of him with a closed fist so that I can’t miss the entry point.
Everyone is looking my way. And it’s now, now.
And then I am singing the words I should have sung yesterday morning, the music I should have known yesterday morning, but committed wholly to memory in one desperate hour before Mrs Daley called out that dinner would shortly be served.
The room bursts into open speculation, Mr Masson beaming with pleasure — two sudden spots of high colour appearing on his cheeks — Miss Dustin holding her chunky, ring-infested hands to her jowly face. For some kind of alchemy is taking place. It is Carmen’s body doing all the work, her musculature, her impossibly tiny frame, her breathing, but I am the animus, the reason, the force.
And I have remembered every word; sing every word as if it is a language that I alone have created. Together, we are sublime, I know it. Some things the body just remembers.
I see the dark-suited, old music teacher’s undisguised excitement, Miss Fellows nodding tightly, Paul Stenborg’s suddenly mesmerised expression, as everyone strains to hear my instinctive phrasing, my superlative attack, my entries, my exits, the clean, lyrical beauty in my voice. Not too big, not too showy, not Italianate. Something else altogether. Something almost otherworldly. Sweetness with power. The cadences rising and falling towards the ceiling, single notes hanging there, suspended, as if they have their own lives, are made of lambent crystal.
I’m leaving them all behind. They are singing, the other soloists — the girls of St Joseph’s, the quavery tenor, the hopeless bass and so-so baritone — but they may as well be miming now. Tiffany is furious. Her face is lit up like a Christmas tree with ill will and bad choler as she tries to outsing me, but fails. A lark striving to catch a burning phoenix arcing skyward. The whole room is listening so hard that the entire chorus, almost two hundred people, fails to come in after Figure 10 and I sing on alone for what feels like an eternity, and I wonder how much of this glorious sound is Carmen and how much of it, if any of it, is me.
Mr Masson abruptly shuts off the sound system and I stumble to a halt, my last word ringing in the air.
Creasti shimmers there. Created.
‘Well, let’s leave it there for now. We’ll reconvene at four this afternoon,’ says Mr Masson delightedly, eyes shining, as the room erupts into noise and movement.
‘We might have a concert on our hands, boys and girls, we just might. Good work, Carmen. Superb.’ He gives a nod in my direction.
Beside me, Tiffany lets loose a long breath, like a hiss.
‘Beautiful,’ declares Miss Dustin, clapping me so hard between the shoulderblades with one of her man- hands that I almost fall off my chair. ‘Really wonderful, Carmen. There was a quality in your voice today I don’t think I’ve ever heard before.’ I’m speechless, still grateful that my gamble has paid off. Turns out I have some kind of weird mnemonic memory for music and lyrics, and Carmen has a set of lungs to write home about. Who knew? It’s some kind of lucky break.
‘You certainly showed us,’ Miss Fellows snipes nastily before moving away to speak with Mr Masson, who keeps stealing glances at me as if I might dematerialise.
I think what Miss Fellows really means is showed off.
I speak subliminal messaging better than most people.
Around me, Tiffany and some of the other girls stand up abruptly, clutching their scores to their chests like armour plate.
‘I’m Laurence Barry,’ interrupts the elderly music director of Little Falls, moving forward with his right hand held out. Not scowling at me today, not at all.
‘Have you considered —’ Someone else cuts in before the old man can finish his sentence or touch me, which I’m grateful for. ‘Paul Stenborg,’ he says, as if he hadn’t ignored me all morning, his light, luminous eyes looking over and past Carmen Zappacosta’s nondescript head, her nondescript features.
‘Though of course you know that already. Certainly hiding your light under a bushel there, young woman, extraordinary, so unexpected …’ I feel eyes on my back and turn. Catch the back view of Tiffany tossing her side pony over her shoulder.
She leads the other St Joseph’s girls away to first period without a word and I know from the way she’s holding herself that she thinks I’ve engineered all this deliberately to give myself a bigger profile.
Someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s the spotty tenor who’s been following Tiffany around like a whipped dog for the last few days. By the weirdly attentive look in his eyes, it seems he may now have switched his unnerving allegiance to me. Behind him stands the bulky, dark-haired bass singer, Tod, and three local girls, the witchy Brenda — Ryan’s ex — among them, all watching me closely.
