The Other Family

‘In what way?’

‘Wel ,’ Glenda said, ‘while he was here, I just thought what cheek, coming here when he knew you were out, and chatting me up, tel ing me what I could have if we worked with him, the money and the chances and things, and then after he’d gone I just felt flat, I just felt he’d taken something away with him and I could have cried, real y I could. The thing is—’ She stopped.

‘The thing is?’

‘I don’t want to moan,’ Glenda said, ‘you know I don’t. You know how I feel about my family. The children are lovely. And Barry … wel , Barry does his best, I don’t know how I’d be, stuck in a wheelchair al my life. But after Mr Harrison had gone, I felt something had gone with him. I can’t explain it, I just felt I’d let a chance go, and I wouldn’t get it back again.’

Margaret waited a few seconds, and then she said, ‘What chance?’

Glenda looked at the contract file on her desk.

‘You’l think me sil y—’

‘I won’t—’

‘You—’

‘What chance, Glenda?’

Glenda didn’t raise her eyes. She said quietly, ‘The chance for something to happen.’

Margaret said nothing. Then she came round Glenda’s desk, and touched her shoulder briefly.

‘Me too,’ Margaret said.

Scott had started to ask people from work back to his flat, to hear him play the piano. Once a week or so, he’d say casual y to Henry or Adrian,

‘Fancy a singsong at mine Friday?’ and the word would get round, and eight or ten people would gather in his flat and order in pizzas, and sometimes they’d sing – Henry did a bril iant version of Noel Coward – and sometimes Scott would play something classical, and they’d pile on the sofa or lie about on the floor and just listen, and after they’d gone, Scott would be conscious of having made a brief connection, through the music, which left him feeling curiously isolated and empty when it was over. And it was in one of those post-playing moods, closing the piano lid, picking up the pizza boxes, carrying the ashtrays – disdainful y – to the bin, that an impulse to ring Amy came upon him.

It was not a new impulse. He had, when the piano first arrived, thought he might ring to say that it was safely in Newcastle. Then he had thought that texting would be better – polite, but more casual. So he had composed a text, and deleted it, and then a second, less brief one, and deleted that, and realized that he would rather like to hear her vocal response to his description of where the piano now was. But his nerve had failed him.

There was no real reason, if he was honest, to ring her – unless, of course, he admitted to the real reason, which was that he didn’t want the piano’s arrival in Newcastle to mean that there was no further excuse for them to be in touch with one another. She was only his half-sister, after al , and there wasn’t any comfortable shared history between them, but even the scrappy communications that they’d had had given him a sense of how much better furnished he felt to know that there was a sister there – even, potential y, three sisters – and how very much he did not want to return to the state of being the only son of a single mother; he did not, emphatical y, want his human landscape to shrink again.

He dial ed Amy’s number with quick, jabbing movements, not stopping to think what he was going to say. She didn’t answer, and he listened to her rapid, awkward little message and then he said, with a flash of inspiration, ‘Hi, it’s Scott, just ringing to wish you luck,’ and, as an afterthought, before this burst of courage failed him, ‘Ring me.’ Then he put his phone on the piano, and sat down on the stool and began to play the theme from The Lion King, which someone had asked for earlier that evening, and which was running in his head with an insistence that was, he knew, the mark of a successful show tune.

His phone rang. Amy.

‘Amy,’ he said.

‘Hi.’

‘Sorry to ring so late—’

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she said. ‘I was doing stuff.’

‘I’m sitting at the piano,’ Scott said.

‘Are you? ’

He shifted the phone to his left ear and hunched his shoulder to hold it in place.

‘Playing this.’ He played a few bars. ‘Recognize it?’

‘ The Lion King,’ Amy said.

Scott was smiling. ‘Yes. The Lion King. I rang to wish you luck.’

‘What for?’

‘Your exams. Aren’t you about to start your exams?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Oh, I thought—’

‘The exams are starting,’ Amy said, ‘but I’m not doing them.’

Scott waited. He took his right hand off the keyboard and retrieved his phone. Then he cleared his throat.