Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow –
And on the second
snow
the voices grazed
that
note, the high F sharp that had always been a point of mysterious pressure in her, and Emily began to cry. Not from sorrow or even from emotion; it was simply a reflex, like that cramping of the tastebuds after eating something very sour, or the gasp of fresh chilli against the back of the throat.
Snow on snow, snow on snow
they sang, and everything in her responded. She shivered; she smiled; she turned her face to the invisible roof and opened her mouth like a baby bird, half-expecting to
feel
the sounds like snowflakes falling on her tongue. For almost a minute Emily sat trembling on the edge of her seat, and every now and then the boys’ voices would rise to that strange F sharp, that magical ice-cream-headache note, and the tears would spill once more from her eyes. Her lower lip tingled; her fingers were numb. She felt as if she were touching God –
‘Emily, what is it?’
She could not reply. Only the sounds mattered.
‘Emily!’
Every note seemed to cut into her in some delicious way; every chord a miracle of texture and shape. More tears fell.
‘Something’s wrong.’ Catherine’s voice came from a great distance. ‘Feather, please. I’m taking her home.’ Emily felt her starting to move; tugging at her coat, which she had been using as a cushion. ‘Get up, sweetheart, we shouldn’t have come.’
Was that satisfaction in her voice? Her hand on Emily’s forehead was feverish and clammy. ‘She’s burning up. Feather, give me a hand—’
‘No!’ whispered Emily.
‘Emily, darling, you’re upset.’
‘Please—’ But now her mother was picking her up; Catherine’s arms were around her. She caught a fleeting smell of turpentine behind the expensive perfume. Desperately she searched for something, some magic, to make her mother stop: something that would convey the urgency, the imperative to stay, to
listen
. . .
‘Please, the music—’
Your mother doesn’t care much for music
. Daddy’s voice; remote but clear.
But what
did
Catherine care for? What for her was the language of command?
They were half-out of their seats now. Emily tried to struggle; a seam ripped under the arm of her too-tight dress. Her coat, with its fur collar, smothered her. More of the turpentine smell, the smell of her mother’s fever, her madness.
And suddenly Emily understood, with a maturity far beyond her years, that she would never visit her father’s school, never go to another concert, just as she would never play with other children in case they hurt or pushed her, never run in the park in case she fell.
If they left now, Emily thought, then her mother would
always
have her way, and the blindness, which had never really troubled her, would finally drag her down like a stone tied to a dog’s tail, and she would drown.
There must be words, she told herself; magic words, to make her mother stay. But Emily was five years old; she didn’t know any magic words; and now she was moving down the aisle with her mother on one side and Feather on the other, and the lovely voices rolling over them like a river.
In the bleak midwinter,
Lo-ooong ago –
And then it came to her. So simple that she gasped at her own audacity. She
did
know magic words, she realized. Dozens of them; she had learnt them almost from the cradle, but had never really found a use for them until now. She knew their fearsome energy. Emily opened her mouth, stricken with a sudden, demonic inspiration.
‘The colours,’ she whispered.
Catherine White stopped mid-stride. ‘What did you say?’
‘The colours. Please. I want to stay.’ Emily took a deep breath. ‘I want to
listen to the colours
.’
Post comment
:
blueeyedboy
:
How brave of you to post this
,
Albertine
.
You know I’ll have to reciprocate . . .
9
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blueeyedboy
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Posted a
t:
23.03 on Monday, February 11
Status
:
public
Mood
:
scornful
Listening to
:
Pink Floyd
: ‘Any Colour You Like’
Listen to the colours
. Oh, please. Don’t tell me she was innocent; don’t tell me that, even then, she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Mrs White knew all about
Boy X
and his synaesthesia. She knew Dr Peacock would be near by. Easy enough to feed her the line; easier still to believe it when Emily responded by starting to hear the colours.
Ben was in his first year at school. Imagine him then: a chorister, all scrubbed and clean and ready to go in his blue St Oswald’s uniform under the frilled white cassock.
I know what you’re thinking. He failed the exam. But that was just the scholarship. With money she had set aside, as well as with help from Dr Peacock, Ma had managed to get him into St Oswald’s after all, not as a scholar, but as a fee-paying pupil, and here he was in the front row of the school choir, hating every moment of it. And if they didn’t already have good enough cause to despise him, he knew that the other boys in his form would never leave him alone after this, not to mention Nigel, who had been dragged along most reluctantly, and who would take it out on him later, he knew, in gibes and kicks and punches.
In the bleak midwinter,
Frosty wind made moan –
He’d prayed in vain for puberty to break his voice and release him. But whilst the other boys in his class were already thickening like palm trees, reeking of teenage civet, Ben remained slim and girlish and pale, with an eerie, off-key treble voice.
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone –
He could see his mother three rows back, listening for the sound of his voice, and Dr Peacock, behind her; and Nigel, going on seventeen, sprawled and scowling across the bench; and sweaty and malodorous Bren, looking terribly uncomfortable with his lank hair and his pursed-up face, like the world’s most enormous baby.
Blueeyedboy
tried not to look; to concentrate on the music, but now he caught sight of Mrs White, just a few seats away from him, with Emily by her side – Emily, in her little red coat and her dress of rose-pink, with her hair in bunches and her face illuminated with something half-distress, half-joy –
For a moment he thought her eyes caught his; but the eyes of the blind are like that, aren’t they? Emily couldn’t see him. Whatever he did, however he tried – Emily never would. And yet, those eyes drew him, skittering from side to side like marbles in a doll’s head, like a couple of blue-eye beads, reflecting ill-luck back to the sender.
Blueeyedboy
’s head was beginning to spin, throbbing in time to the music. A headache was coming; a bad one. He searched for the means to protect himself, imagining a capsule of blue, hard as iron, cold as stone, blue as a block of Arctic ice. But the pain was inescapable. A headache that would escalate until it wrung him like a rag –
It was hot in the choir stalls. Red-faced in their white smocks, the choristers sang like angels. St Oswald’s takes its choir seriously: the boys are drilled in obedience. Like soldiers, they are trained to stand and keep their position for hours on end. No one complains. No one dares.
Sing your hearts out, boys, and smile!
bugles the choirmaster during rehearsals.
This is for God and St Oswald’s. I don’t want to see a single boy letting down the team.
But now Ben Winter was looking pale. Perhaps the heat; the incense; perhaps the strain of keeping that smile. Remember, he was delicate; Ma always said so. More sensitive than the other two; more prone to illness and accidents –
The angel voices rose again, sweeping towards the crescendo.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow –
And that was when it happened. Almost in slow motion; a thud: a movement in the front row; a pale-faced boy collapsing unseen on to the floor of the chapel; striking his head on the side of a pew, a blow that would require four stitches to mend, a crescent moon on his forehead.
Why
did no one notice him? Why was Ben so wholly eclipsed? No one saw him – not even Ma – for just as he fell, a little blind girl in the crowd suffered a kind of panic attack, and all eyes turned to Emily White, Emily in the rose-coloured dress, flailing her arms and shouting out:
Please. I want to stay. I want to –
Listen to the colours.
Post comment
:
Albertine
:
Nice comeback
,
blueeyedboy
.
blueeyedboy
:
Glad you liked it,
Albertine
.
Albertine
:
Well
, liked i
s maybe not the word –
blueeyedboy
:
Nice comeback
,
Albertine
. . .
10
You are viewing the webjournal of
Albertine
posting on:
[email protected]
Posted at
:
23.49 on Monday, February 11
Status
:
public
Mood
:
raw
Listen to the colours
. Maybe you remember the phrase. Glib coming from the mouth of an adult, it must have seemed unbearably poignant from that of a five-year-old blind girl. In any case, it did the trick.
Listen to the colours.
All unknowing, Emily White had opened up a box of magic words, and was drunk with their power and her own, issuing commands like a diminutive general, commands which Catherine and Feather – and later, of course, Dr Peacock – obeyed with unquestioning delight.
‘What do you see?’
Diminished chord of F minor. The magic words unfurl like wrapping-paper, every one.
‘Pink. Blue. Green. Violet. So pretty.’
Her mother claps her hands in delight. ‘More, Emily. Tell me more.’
A chord of F major.
‘Red. Orange. Ma-gen-ta. Black.’
It was like an awakening. The infernal power she had discovered in herself had blossomed in an astonishing way, and music was suddenly a part of her curriculum. The piano was brought out of the spare room and re-tuned; her father’s secret lessons became official, and Emily was allowed to practise whenever she liked, even when Catherine was working. Then came the local newspapers, and the letters and gifts came pouring in.
The story had plenty of potential. In fact, it had all the ingredients. A Christmas miracle; a photogenic blind girl; music; art; some man-in-the-street science, courtesy of Dr Peacock, and a lot of controversy from the art world that kept the papers wondering on and off for the next three years or so, caught up in speculation. The TV eventually caught on to it; so did the Press. There was even a single – a Top Ten hit – by a rock band whose name I forget. The song was later used in the Hollywood film – an adaptation of the book – starring Robert Redford as Dr Peacock and a young Natalie Portman as the blind girl who sees music.
At first Emily took it for granted. After all, she was very young, and had no basis for comparison. And she was very happy – she listened to music all day long; she studied what she loved most, and everyone was pleased with her.
Over the next twelve months or so Emily attended a number of concerts, as well as performances of
The Magic Flute
, the
Messiah
and
Swan Lake
. She went to her father’s school several times, so that she could get to know the instruments by feel.
Flutes, with their slender bodies and intricate keys; pot-bellied cellos and double basses; French horns and tubas like big school canteen-jugs of sound; narrow-waisted violins; icicle bells; fat drums and flat drums; splash cymbals and crash cymbals; triangles and timpani and trumpets and tambourines.
Sometimes her father would play for her. He was different when Catherine was not there: he told jokes; he was exuberant, dancing Emily round and round to the music, making her dizzy with laughter. He would have liked to have been a professional musician: clarinet, and not piano, had been his preferred instrument, but there was little call for a classically trained clarinet player with a lurking passion for Acker Bilk, and his small ambitions had gone unvoiced and unnoticed.
But there was another side to Catherine’s conversion. It took Emily months to discover it; longer still to understand. This is where my memories lose all cohesion; reality merges with myth so that I cannot trust myself to be either accurate or truthful. Only the facts speak for themselves; and even they have been so much disputed, queried, misreported, misread that only scraps remain of anything that might show me how it really was.