boYs by Kathleen Winter

Author:Kathleen Winter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2011-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

FAURÉ CAN BLOW OUT a thousand candles and no one will know. The new director tells the choir to put Fauré away and take out a medley from Guys and Dolls. The second sopranos remind each other how much fun it was when they did this before, in ’87 or was it ’89, and they even wore costumes. What horrifies Lena, next to losing her true conductor, is that no one notices the difference, except maybe Alice and Holly, who have never spoken to her about the metaphysics of choir. Lena fears bringing it up in case she has imagined their sympathy. She considers quitting choir, wonders if she should stay just to keep learning about time signatures, slurs, staccato. Maybe even this stomping new director will let drop a few details about the history of music, the minutiae of composers’ lives. Lena starts searching the choral room itself, and the music building, for scraps of the nourishment Neil used to give. She sees a portrait of a famous soprano, for-sale signs on the bulletin board: a cello, a full-sized keyboard. She scours locations beyond the music building for signs of the world she fears she has lost. On a shelf over sweaty jackets at Second Time Round is a chipped plaster Beethoven head whose curls spill past his collar like Neil’s. She buys this and places it between her jewellery box and tin of postcards.

One evening Taste O’Ireland’s mechanical cheese grater breaks down so she has fifteen extra minutes to wander the halls of the music building. It doesn’t have chandeliers or keystones or round walls, just bulletin boards and huge orange doors, but music escapes through the doors and she is frozen by each set of notes: a student playing an organ, a quartet’s scrap of Christmas a capella. She follows violin notes through a stairwell exit. Over the banister she sees the hair and arm of a student on the next landing down, her music sheets spread over the radiator. Even Lena knows the mathematical star paths of Bach. She imagines this student has had violin lessons since she was a child. Can pick up her instrument and fling notes up the echoing stairwell and open the doors of heaven while Lena sits, her bum on the cold tile and rubber edge of the top stair, not daring to move lest the student catch the smell of fried onion from her hair.

The music carambolas up, down, and across the stairwell, then collapses. The student has made a mistake against which all the former notes and the few she can’t stop from coming after lean and fall, and the music crashes like the tenors’ broken music in the lobby before the concert. Lena knows how that feels. It amazes her that this broken music happens every time the choir practices, right up to the last rehearsal, then in performance somehow the music stays intact. It’s a miracle, that’s the only thing it is, and here it is, the same breaking happening to the violinist.

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