A Song for Ella Grey Read online

  “Naah,” said Michael. “It’s nowt.”

  But it wasn’t nowt. Otherwise why would we all get up like we did and start searching for its source? Why did we all say that yes, we could hear it? Or is that just how we were then, ready to find weirdness and beauty where they didn’t really exist? Was it just the Valpolicella and the swan and us being together and being young and being daft?

  Whatever it was, we got up. I swigged the last of the wine and chucked the bottle into a bin. We went down the grassy bank to the Ouseburn, which flowed through the deep shadow cast by The Cluny. Water, spinning and spiralling and gurgling as it flowed down to its meeting with the Tyne. The slick black glossy mud at the edge clicking as it dried. Footsteps of a couple as they crossed the narrow steel bridge over it. I held Ella’s hand as we walked.

  We followed the stream to where it emerged from its tunnel beneath the city. It gushed through the metal bars of locked gates. We gazed at the bolts and massive padlocks, the rusted warning sign with the skull-and-crossbones on it, the arched tunnel beyond, the deepening darkness.

  “God, how scary this used to be!” she said.

  “Remember staring in, peeling our eyes to see who could see furthest?”

  “Seeing all those fiends and monsters?”

  “And all those rats that slithered out that time?”

  “And running away yelling and screaming?”

  We giggled.

  “There’s one!” I said.

  “And another, Claire! Look! The one with horns! Oh no!”

  We were joking but we trembled. I drew her to me and kissed her full on the lips. It was in just this place that I had done this first, those years ago when we were still those infants scared by the dark.

  “Listen,” she said. “It’s like it’s in the water, Claire. Can you hear?”

  We listened to the way it flowed through the gates, between the banks.

  “Aye!” I said.

  We laughed.

  “Tinkle tinkle,” I said.

  “Gush gush gush!”

  But then the sound we searched for seemed to come from everywhere. We walked away from the water. It came from a different direction at every corner, from a different place each time we paused.

  “Where is it coming from?” I said.

  Ella closed her eyes and turned her face to the sky.

  “From inside us!” she said.

  Carlo Brooks, who looked the oldest of us, went into The Cluny bar to get more wine. We swigged it and we walked on, not searching now, just wandering through the sound. Maria and Michael, who’d been teasing each other for weeks, slid into a doorway, held each other, and started to kiss passionately at last.

  “Yes, go on,” called Catherine. “Love each other now!”

  A group of drunken lasses swaggered past us.

  “It’s the hipster crew!” they laughed.

  We giggled when they’d gone.

  “Hipsters!” we scoffed.

  “That’s us!” laughed Sam.

  We kept on listening. Did it fade or did we just stop hearing it—or was it never really there at all? Who knows? Anyway, we realized it was gone. We came to the quayside. We walked by the bars and the restaurants, through gangs of drinkers.

  There was a busker under the Tyne Bridge, an old bloke with a lined filthy face playing a battered mandolin and singing something foreign in a croaky voice.

  “Mebbe it was just him all the time,” said Sam.

  We stood and listened for a moment.

  “He must have been lovely at one time,” said Ella.

  The bloke gestured down to the old mandolin case on the ground at his feet.

  We found a few coins, threw them in.

  He smiled at us and held his mandolin towards the sky.

  “The Gods will reward ye,” he said, and he played again with new verve.

  “Wow!” said Carlo. “How good would you get if we threw some tenners in?”

  The bloke laughed.

  “Give me your everything,” he said. “And you will see.”

  I walked homeward with silent Ella.

  “Maybe it was nothing,” she said. “Maybe it was just something coming out of us.”

  I left her at her gate. She hardly moved. She stepped back, stared at me like it wasn’t me she was staring at.

  “It’s mad,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “Being us, being young! It’s amazing! Isn’t it, Claire? Isn’t it? Say yes! Say yes!”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  And she giggled, shrugged, turned, was gone.

  TWO

  Next day we discovered that some of us had gone on hearing it, in our sleep, in our dreams. Not me. Their eyes widened and they gasped as they realized they weren’t the only ones. They said they wanted to hear it again, find it again.

  In English, Ella was off with the fairies again.

  “So,” said Krakatoa. “ ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name.’ ” What are your thoughts about this, Miss Grey? Miss Grey! Your thoughts!”

  I elbowed her awake.

  “I think,” she said, “it is really beautiful.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “And…weird, sir. Like sort of dead mysterious.”

  “Ah, the Beautiful, Weird and Like Sort of Dead Mysterious School of Criticism. Excellent.” His face darkened. “Sadly, this is not a school acknowledged by your A Level examiners. Miss Finch?”

  Bianca jumped.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, Miss Finch. What do you think our Mr. Donne is on about.”

  Bianca drew a file across her nails for a moment as she pondered Krakatoa’s face.

  “Well, sir,” she said. “I think Mr. Donne is saying that he’s gagging for a good shag.”

  She paused. Krakatoa didn’t flinch.

  “To be honest,” she continued, “I think that’s what them poets is always on about.”

  She contemplated him.

  “Or mebbe you don’t get that sort of thing, sir.”

  We watched the face of Krakatoa. Was this to be an eruption day?

  No. Not this day.

  THREE

  Back then, exams were approaching, the walls of the system were closing in. Ella’s parents said they were deeply concerned about her attitude. She’d been such a clever girl but was rapidly turning into a silly dreamer. She was squandering everything. Her reports were extremely disappointing and her anticipated grades were in steep decline. Didn’t she want to have good results? Didn’t she want to get to a good university? Didn’t she want a successful life?

  “What do they mean, a successful life?” I said.

  “Money and stuff, I suppose.”

  “Money and stuff?”

  “And a good job and all that stuff.”

  I imagined how vague she’d be with them, how she wouldn’t stand up for herself, how she’d just shrug and um and err and shut her eyes, and tell them she was sorry and she’d get better and try harder.

  “And what did you say?”

  “Not much, I suppose.”

  I glared at her.

  “Not much? Whose life is this they’re talking about?”

  “Mine. Trouble is,” she said, “I know what they mean.”

  “Eh?”

  “They’re right. Even you say the same thing. I am bliddy hopeless.”

  “Hell’s teeth, Ella. Don’t put me on their side.”

  “And they say I can’t come round so much. And this sleepover thing…”

  “This sleepover thing?”

  “It’s getting out of hand.”

  “Out of hand?”

  “They say it’s what little girls do. They say it’s fine when you’re in junior school. But this is not appropriate.”

  “What?”

  “They say an occasional Saturday might be OK, but…”

  “And what did you say to all this?”

  “Not much.”

  “N
ot much? Bliddy hell, Ella.”

  “And that Easter thing…”

  “That Easter thing?”

  “Yes. That is right off the cards.”

  “What?”

  That Easter thing. It was the thing we’d all been planning since the depths of last winter when the sleet was splashing down and we thought we’d all get beriberi or something for the lack of sun. The North! We wailed. Why do we live in the frozen North? Why not Italy? Or Greece? We laughed. One frosty night we sat outside The Cluny with our breath swirling around us, all tucked in tight together to keep the heat of our bodies in. Sod this, we said. We’ll make our own Italy! We’ll make our own damn Greece! Where? In Northumberland, of course. We’ll go first chance we get, in the Easter holidays, in spring. There should be at least a bit of sun by then. If there’s not, we’ll just pretend there is. We’ll get drunk and dream there is. We’ll go to the beach for a whole damn week. We’ll get the bus, or we’ll hitchhike there. We’ll take tents and sleeping bags and camp in the dunes. We’ll take guitars and flutes and tambourines and drums. We’ll take a couple of massive pans, a ton of pasta, gallons of pesto, a thousand tins of tomatoes. We’ll take a binbag full of frozen bread. We’ll save up and stock up on boxes of Lidl Chianti and Aldi Chardonnay. And up there we’ll catch fish from the sea. We’ll nick spuds from farmers’ fields. We’ll light bonfires and have beach parties every night. We’ll sing and dance and get away from Holy bliddy Trinity and from Krakabliddytoa and from Paradise damn Lost. We’ll forget about anticipated grades and adjusted grades and passes and fails and averages and stars and all the stupid boring bliddy stuff that stops us being us.

  Yes! It was going to be great. It was going to be the kind of thing we thought that being sixteen and seventeen would bliddy mean. We were going to be free!

  And now here’s this. Here’s the boringest farts in the whole damn world stopping my best friend from sharing it with me.

  “But, Ella,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered. “But, Claire, it’s different for me, isn’t it?”

  “The adoption thing, you mean?”

  “Yes. The adoption thing. Without them, I’d be…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. You know that, Claire. Absolutely nothing.”

  FOUR

  We went anyway, the rest of us, just like we said, first chance we got. We broke up for Easter on the Friday, started heading north next morning. I couldn’t travel with Ella, so I chose to go alone. I wanted to experience that thing of being just me, moving on my own across the earth. An adventure, even if it lasted just fifty miles or so. I told the others I’d hitch but I found I didn’t have the nerve. I took a tangled route to make sure I crossed nobody’s path: a string of local buses zigzagging north from town to town, coastal village to coastal village. My rucksack was heavy with tomatoes and wine. Beyond Alnmouth the bus passed Carlo and Angeline flat on their backs in the sunshine in a field. At Boulmer I saw a rapidly running figure I took to be Luke. I’d told myself I’d start to write a journal and I scribbled empty comments on the beauty of the spring, the flashing of the sea, the darkness of cormorants on a dark wet rock.

  I wish Ella was here, I wrote, and I wrote it at least twice again.

  In the bus shelter at Beadnell, I tried to write some poetry.

  Come on, I whispered to myself. Something, come!

  No good. I abandoned it.

  Too early, I told myself. Mebbe in a day or so.

  We gathered at Bamburgh, as we’d planned, on the field below the castle. All of us were there by three o’clock. Each of us was welcomed with whoops and hugs. We moved onto the beach and followed it a mile or so southwards, to where the beach was wide and the dunes were high and where the view of the Farne Islands, scattered eastward across the sea, was most intense. We gathered driftwood as we walked. The sky was clear. The sun burned golden as it fell towards the Cheviots.

  We pitched our tents in the dunes and laid our sleeping bags inside them and made our first fire on the beach. We ate pasta and drank wine. We sang. We yelled and whispered at the beauty of the night, the stars, the moon, the turning of the lighthouse light far out on Longstone, the shushing of the sea, an owl’s persistent call from somewhere not too far behind. And shooting stars, a little storm of them for ten minutes or so at two a.m.

  We stood at the edge of the sea and held hands and swayed and sang.

  “My bonny lies over the ocean…”

  “We all live in a yellow submarine…”

  “Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea…”

  As we tired, we changed, and our voices and our bodies became stiller, more driven, and we chanted chorus after rising chorus of “The Magpie” into the deepening night.

  “Devil, devil, we defy thee

  Devil, devil, we defy thee

  Devil, devil, we defy thee.”

  Later, in my tiny tent, I texted Ella.

  Oh you should be here.

  She phoned immediately back.

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  “It’s just lovely,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  She laughed.

  “Deciding how to please them so I can come with you next time.”

  “Good!”

  Before I slept, I heard the lovers among us making love, and a guitar, and someone singing as clumsily as I’d been writing poems.

  FIVE

  I hardly slept. We swam next morning, when the sun was hardly risen over the Farnes. I threw my clothes off as I ran to the water, and others did as well. The sea was cold as ice, but we had a blazing fire to run back to. We pulled on our clothes, wrapped ourselves in blankets, wore scarves and hats and ate huge bacon rolls and drank from tin mugs filled with steaming tea. Right from the start there was always someone singing: low breathy choruses of shared voices, outbursts of wild wailing, leaps into ancient Border Ballads and old Tyneside tunes. The tide was out, and we searched the rock pools as we had as children. I plucked a crab from its hiding-place beneath a stone, held its shell between my fingers while its legs and claws waved in the empty air. I put a fingertip between its claws and grinned at the tiny nips it tried to give. The heads of hooting seals popped up from the sea.

  “Hello!” we called. “Hello, seals! Hoot hoot hello!”

  They dived out of sight, surfaced again in a different place, looked at us again, hooted again.

  “They’re answering us!” we called. “Hello! Hoot hoot! Hello! Hello!”

  Terns danced above the shallows and gannets plummeted into the depths.

  Michael stood on tiptoe and pointed far out and yelled,

  “Dolphins! Look! Bliddy dolphins! There! And there!”

  We looked and said we couldn’t see, then said we thought we saw, or were they just the patterns of the waves? We kept on looking, looking.

  “Yes!” I said. “There, look! There!”

  Then Michael said they’d gone, and maybe they’d never been there at all.

  A few families roamed the beach now. Children splashed in the shallows and dogs leapt in the surf as the tide turned and the sea came in again.

  We went to find more fuel for the fire.

  It was Angeline who discovered the snakes in the dunes. She didn’t scream, didn’t run. I was close by. She crouched, called me softly.

  “Claire! Claire!”

  She held up her hand, beckoned me towards her, finger pressed to her lips, eyes wide with astonishment and warning.

  There were two of them, curled up on a pathway through the marram grass, just two yards or so away from us.

  I held my breath. The sun poured down on them. Motionless, they gleamed, rusty-brown, dark zigzag patterns on their backs.

  “Adders,” breathed Angelina.

  “Like you could just reach out and touch them,” I said.

  I leaned forward, arm outstretched. She caught my arm.

  “They’ll bite,” said Angeline.

  Now Carlo was with us.

  “B
ut wouldn’t kill,” he said.

  “No?” I said.

  “Not venomous enough. Enough to kill a dog, a sheep, but not one of us. Not you.”

  “Oh, look!” gasped Angeline.

  One of the adders started to uncurl. We saw its forked tongue flick. Carlo stamped the sand and the other uncurled. One slithered across the other, then both of them slithered away from sight, into the grass.

  We gazed at the strange tracks left in the sand. I leaned down and traced them with my fingers.

  “There’ll be dozens of them,” said Carlo. “All coming out for spring.”

  “So beautiful,” we whispered.

  Beautiful. Such a privilege, to see such gorgeous things that spent so much of their existence in darkness, in the earth, unseen.

  “Wish I’d dared to touch,” I sighed.

  There was hectic drumming from the beach, the sound of waves crashing onto the sand.

  “Anybody else feel famished?” I said.

  We hurried back down. We ate hot beans from our tin mugs, swiping them up with chunks of sliced white bread. There was hardly any water, no one wanted to walk to the village to find some, so we drank beer and wine. Michael came from the dunes with an armful of fence posts. He threw them down beside the fire for the night.

  I wish you were here, I texted to Ella.

  Me too, she texted back.

  It’s beautiful & wild. The sun shines down.

  It’s dull. I’m at my books. It’s cold.

  There are seals and crabs. We think we saw dolphins!

  Dolphins! Oh I wish that I could see!

  Imagine them!

  Dark arcs leaping through the waves.

  And we saw snakes, Ella!

  Snakes?! Keep clear. You must come back home safe again.

  They’re harmless. Are you being good for them?

  A paragon. They say they’re very pleased with me.

  xxxxxxxxx

  xxxxxxxxx

  I tried to write poetry again. I leaned back against the sand and wrote that the islands seemed to float, that maybe the whole world was a floating thing, that thoughts were like dolphins that leapt out from our depths to surprise us, that dreams were like snakes.

  “Leap like dolphins, poems,” I whispered. “Crawl out of me like snakes.”