A Song for Ella Grey Read online

  He played and sang. He saw the phone and laughed.

  “Who’s that?” he said.

  “My friend,” I managed to say.

  “Why’s she not here?”

  “They wouldn’t let her.”

  “They!”

  He came closer. He took the phone from me and grinned and put it to his lips.

  “You should be here and all,” he said. “Tek no notice of they.”

  Then he sang directly into it, soft, sweet, hypnotic.

  I thought of her, in her boring narrow house with her boring narrow parents, lifted away from all that boring narrowness by Orpheus’ sound.

  “Who are ye?” he said.

  He repeated it.

  “Who are ye?”

  He sang again, with eyes closed, held the phone to his lips as if he wanted to pour himself with the sound right into it, and into Ella’s ear. Ella, the beautiful dreamy one. I imagined her now, with the phone to her cheek, dreamier than ever, lost in the music just like we were, gone.

  I imagined her silence.

  Orpheus laughed.

  “Speak to us!” he said. “Tell us your name.”

  I imagined her dreamy whispery voice as she struggled to reply.

  “Ella Grey,” he said. “Now speak again, Ella Grey.”

  He listened. He laughed softly.

  “This is a song for Ella Grey,” he said.

  And he breathed a low sweet song into the phone and into Ella’s ear so many miles away.

  Then silence. His face seemed to darken.

  “Say yer name again,” he whispered.

  “Aye,” he sighed. “Just like that, Ella.”

  He sighed as she spoke. He sang a few more lingering notes to her.

  Then he placed the phone into my hand.

  “She’s called Ella Grey,” he whispered.

  “Yes. Ella Grey.”

  “She must be very beautiful.”

  “She is.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “I see her,” he breathed. “Hell’s teeth, I see her there.”

  Then he slung the lyre across his back, turned away from us, headed into the dunes.

  “Orpheus!” Maria called. “Don’t go yet!”

  He turned back for a moment and held up his hand against the brightness of the sky.

  “Don’t follow,” he said. “I’ll find ye. You’ll find me.”

  “How?” I said.

  “Because we have to.”

  Then he was gone. We did try to follow after a time. We went to the top of the dunes. We saw his footsteps, the slither marks of snakes. We saw his black hair in the distance, his purple coat appearing and disappearing. Then we weren’t certain if we saw. There, we said, as we had with the dolphins. And there! Then it was over, and the dunes and the fields beyond were just the dunes and the fields beyond. The silence was just the breeze and the sea.

  Orpheus had wandered. He was gone.

  I whispered into the phone.

  “Ella.”

  But the phone was dead.

  Ella was gone.

  NINE

  That afternoon clouds gathered out at sea. Beautifully illuminated drifts of rain fell on the Farnes. The sea became more turbulent. Luke and Lorraine took empty wine bottles to Bamburgh village for water. They filled them at taps outside the public toilets on the main street. A policeman saw them.

  “Who are you?” he snapped. “What you doin’ here?”

  He didn’t let them answer.

  “Are you the ones been making mayhem on the beach?”

  He took a notebook out. He wrote down their names.

  “You’re not eighteen, are you?” he said. “What you doin’ drinkin wine? Who d’ye think ye are?”

  He confiscated the bottles.

  “The fun’s over. We don’t want the likes of you up here. Decent folk didn’t want their peace disturbed by half-crazed townies. You understand?” he said.

  They nodded.

  “We want you gone. I’ll be there with the dogs tomorrow. I expect to see no sign of you.”

  They came back with a couple of bottles of lemonade that we shared. We kept the fire burning and we ate some beans and bread.

  Angeline played her guitar.

  “It’s weird,” she said. “How can I get so much better in such a tiny amount of time?”

  Carlo glared at her.

  “It’s called practice,” he said. “You’ve not stopped playing the bliddy thing since we got here.”

  She turned her back on him.

  “What’ll we do?” said Michael. “Can they really send us packing?”

  “We’re not harming anybody, are we?” said Maria.

  “Let’s stand our ground,” said Angeline.

  Carlo snorted.

  “Stand your ground. Who do you think you are? Che bliddy Guevara?”

  We drank wine and beer. We did some dancing and stamping. We found ourselves yelling the name of Orpheus, maybe just celebrating what he’d brought to us, maybe trying to somehow call him back.

  “Why did he go like that?” said Angeline.

  Carlo spat.

  “He’s a chancer. He’s trying to mystify us.”

  “No,” said James. “He’s more than that.”

  Carlo grinned.

  “Oh aye?” he said. “So it’s not just the girls that he’s got gagging.”

  James blushed and cursed and looked away.

  “D’you think he will find us again?” said Angeline.

  “He found us today,” said Maria. “He said he heard us, so he came.”

  “Orpheus!” we yelled. We hooted like the seals and screamed like the gulls, and we laughed at how daft it seemed. But there was passion in our laughter. We wanted him again, his voice, his presence.

  “Orpheus!” we yelled into the darkening air and into the yearning inside ourselves. “Orpheus!”

  As night came we gazed at the constellations, which now were being crossed by scudding clouds. We looked for the Dog, the Swan and the Lyre, as if they could help bring him to us. We couldn’t see them right, but Carlo wouldn’t help us. We yelled our words towards the sickle moon. The light of Longstone lighthouse swept across us and swept across us, moving us from shadow to light, shadow to light. Soon, drizzle fizzed on the embers.

  I slept with Sam again that night. Rain pattered on the tent as we made love. He seemed so clumsy. His muscles, honed by years of going to the gym, seemed too solid, too manly. I lay awake and listened to the rain and wished more than ever that Ella was here. I wanted to talk to her, to sleep with her. I started to become strangely troubled by the thought of her. What if something’s happened? I thought. What if when I get back she’s no longer there? I told myself not to be stupid. But what if? I asked myself. What if she’s gone?

  I kept hearing the song that Orpheus had sung to her. So beautiful. But what were those deeper notes I now heard in it, the grief that was in it?

  By dawn, I was trembling with fright at the thought of her.

  I was already packing by the time Sam woke.

  He grunted something.

  “I’m going back,” I said.

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to.”

  “But this is great!”

  “Is it?”

  “What about your tent?”

  “It’s wet. And you’re still in it. You can have it. You can bring it back if you like. Or just leave it.”

  “Claire!” he said as I left but I didn’t turn back.

  There was cloud from horizon to horizon. The sea was grey, the islands black. The ashes of the fire were wet and black. I walked over the jetsam man. I hurried along the beach, by the jetsam line. There was a dead seal washed up among it. There was the droning of a foghorn somewhere and the lighthouse light still flashed, paused, flashed again. I ran beneath the castle walls into the village. A bus was groaning to a halt outside The Star. I jumped on board. />
  “Single,” I said.

  “Where to?”

  “Where you going?”

  “Ashington.”

  It was in the right direction.

  “That’ll do.”

  The driver rolled his eyes.

  We travelled south, through Seahouses with its amusement arcades and its chip shops and its lobster pots and fishing boats; past the jagged ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle jutting into the sky; past the airfield at Boulmer, its security fence, its cameras, its warning signs. We turned inland and moved across the ancient Northumbrian coalfield, past its abandoned mines, its turved pitheaps, its blocked-up shafts. Behind me an old man wheezed, and coughed into a handkerchief. A little child sang The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. All so ordinary, so commonplace, but inside me everything so turbulent, filled with weird joy and dread. Rain splashed on the windows. I saw it gathering in pools in the fields, running down into roadside gutters. I took out my notebook and tried to write and found my hand seeming to move of its own accord. Words moved beyond the weird dread, beyond the coughing of the old man, beyond the rain and the grey sky, and as they moved they said how beautiful this all was, all this stuff I passed, every little bliddy insignificant thing, the fall of a raindrop across the pane, the tiny crack in the seal of the window, the patterns in the skin on the back of my hand, the squeak of the bus as it turned, the bowing down of the trees before the breeze and rain, the gathering of water into rivulets and streams, my beating heart, these flowing words—how all of this, each fragment of each fragment, was extraordinary and must be praised.

  The world, I wrote, and everything in it, is all an amazing song. What we have to do is bliddy sing it.

  I laughed out loud as the child sang louder and sweeter.

  I turned round and applauded him. His mother flinched: who was this, this weird scruffy writing lass, turning on the bus to her lovely bairn? But maybe she saw the joy in me, because she relaxed, and smiled, and clapped the baby’s hand and said,

  Look, this lady thinks you’re a grand singer.

  In a bus shelter just outside Ashington, with the rain falling in sheets before me, I wrote again. Nothing that really made much sense: just names of things, and invented words and imaginary words and words that swooped across the pages like birds and flowed over them like water.

  There was a colliery museum nearby. I glanced towards it and the wheel over the shaft started to spin. This is how it would have spun years ago to drop pitmen and pitboys down into the depths. I shuddered at the thought. I shuddered to think of the earth all pockmarked with holes, of the tunnels deep down beneath me now, of the tunnels spreading everywhere inside this earth. I looked at the ground beneath my feet and it seemed just an illusion. At any moment it could collapse, crack open, and down I’d fall through potholes, sinkholes into spaces that hadn’t been entered since a distant age. I stopped writing at the thought of such darkness and danger, of the deaths that had occurred in the world below. And my anxieties about Ella came flooding back, and I shuddered and trembled again, and turned my eyes from the wheel and forced myself to write again. To write her name as if I was calling her, as if I was singing her. Ella, Ella, Ella! To write the beauty of the world around me. To make words sing to keep Ella and the world alive. And the words helped lift me out of the darkness and dread and back to that light.

  And then a bus clattered to a halt in front of me and I clambered on and it carried me back towards the Tyne.

  TEN

  I went straight to her place, the square grey house on the slopes above the Tyne. Her mother let me in.

  I knew that nothing had gone wrong, nothing apart from the usual sense of wrong that always shadowed Mrs. Grey.

  “You’re back quick,” she said through thin pursed lips.

  “Yes.”

  She made me aware of my shabbiness, the dirt on my skin, sand in my hair, scent of firesmoke, stale-wine breath.

  “So it would have been a waste, wouldn’t it, for her to go? Too much for you, was it?”

  I put on a smile.

  “It was wonderful, Mrs. Grey.”

  “Was it now? She’s upstairs studying should you need to see her.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t stay. She is in mid-essay. And you appear to need a shower and some sleep.”

  Ella hugged me as I went into her room.

  “Was she horrible to you?” she said.

  “No.”

  “What brought you back so fast?”

  I shrugged.

  “It rained.”

  It sounded pathetic.

  “What about turning Northumberland into Greece?” she said. “What about bringing Tuscany to the North?”

  I shrugged again. Why had I come? Why didn’t I turn around and go straight back now? It would be easy.

  “I missed you,” I said, again pathetically.

  She smiled and hugged me.

  “Me too,” she said.

  I picked up her essay.

  Discuss the Connection between Earthly and Divine Love in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne.

  I dropped it again. Yuk. That was something I’d have to answer in a week or so.

  “I was worried about you,” I muttered.

  “Worried? About me?”

  “Aye.”

  “How silly!”

  “I thought something terrible had happened, or was going to happen, or…”

  “And here I am, all fine, just the same as ever. Ella Boring Grey.”

  She laughed.

  “You!” she said. “Too much imagination, that’s you.”

  I sighed. Me. Me and my daft anxieties. I sat on the bed. I looked at the photograph of her on the wall. She’s two years old in a bright white dress and it’s Adoption Day. Mr. and Mrs. Grey, both dressed in grey, lean down to hold her hands as if they want to hold her forever and forever. Another: first day at school. She’s in a red checked dress with her hair in ringlets and a little rucksack on her back. And me and her, tied together for a three-legged race on school sports day. Ordinary stuff. The kind of photographs we have at home of me. And a shelf of books and posters on the wall and a dozen types of makeup and the iPod and the CD player and a mug of pens and dirty coffee cups and clothes scattered on the floor and this little house with Tyneside all around and the river flowing nearby. Ordinary. Ordinary.

  Mrs. Grey called up the stairs.

  “Ella! Don’t forget there is work to complete today!”

  “She wants me gone,” I said.

  “Listen,” said Ella. “She says if I really knuckle down, it should be possible for me to come next time.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yes. So be extra nice to her. That’ll help as well.”

  “I’ll try.”

  She looked at me then burst out giggling.

  “Well?” she said. “Are we not going to talk about it?”

  “About?”

  “About the wonderful thing that happened when you were gone.”

  “The wonderful thing?”

  “Stop playing games, Claire. Him, of course!”

  “Orpheus?”

  “Duh! Orpheus.”

  “But it was just a few minutes. A few seconds. A…”

  “Yes! But you said yourself how incredible it was.”

  “Yes,” I sighed.

  She took my hands in hers.

  “It was something I’d never heard before, and something I’d known all my life. It was like something I’d known forever.”

  She squeezed my hands tight.

  “You must have all felt it, too. You did, didn’t you?”

  I looked away.

  “Yes. We did.”

  “To hold the phone, to listen, to imagine you there with him, to imagine him there with you, and to hear that song.”

  “So what did you imagine of him?”

  “Ohhh.” She grinned and did her dreamy look. “Golden hair, slender limbs, pale loos
e clothes, clear blue eyes…”

  “He’s nothing like that.”

  “Ah well. Never was one for the imagination, was I?”

  “Claire!” called Mrs. Grey. “I really think it’s time now!”

  “Is he there still, with the others?” said Ella.

  “He went away.”

  “But he’ll come back, won’t he?”

  “He said he would.”

  “He’ll come and find me.”

  “Will he?”

  “Of course. He has to. Mebbe next time we’re at the beach. Mebbe earlier. He couldn’t sing to me like that and never sing to me again. Go on. Go home. Toe the line now, and we’ll get wild later.”

  She led me to the front door.

  “Sleep deep,” she whispered. “Dream of him.”

  Kiss.

  Grin.

  “Just think,” she said, “if you hadn’t phoned, I wouldn’t have heard a bliddy thing.”

  “No,” I said.

  Thud, went my heart, then thud again.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  Kiss. Kiss. Thud.

  ELEVEN

  Carlo was the only one who came back that week. I saw him one afternoon in the street, and waved, but he turned away. All of the others stayed. Then they appeared in ones and twos, in dribs and drabs.

  We gathered on our bank of grass outside The Cluny.

  “Why did you leave?” they asked me. It was just a squall. The sun came back, bright as ever. The sea calmed down, everything dried. And yes, the policeman came with his dogs, but he was so much kinder now. He said that mebbe we should just move further down the beach, away from where the families went. He said he didn’t want to be a killjoy. Been young himself one day, believe it or not. And could tell us a thing or two himself about nights on Bamburgh beach. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Michael caught fish on a line. We cooked them on stones at the edge of the fire. The pasta and tomatoes lasted for days. We spent an evening in the Victoria bar and got paid in drinks for singing songs to Angeline’s melodious guitar. Carlo? Aye, he’d had enough. Said we were all a bunch of daft bairns. Said Angeline was more in love with her damn guitar than she was with him. He told us to grow up, and he shoved off all alone. A bunch of kids from Gateshead arrived. They were just like us, mental and bright. They brought fresh supplies of wine. They had a flute and a tin whistle and two guitars. The music we all made! We partied deep into every night. Orpheus? No, didn’t come back. Not another sight of him. But sometimes it was like he was there with us. We told the Gateshead kids about him. We said if you listened really hard, you’d hear him singing somewhere, so we all just shut up and start listening and pretty soon we’re whispering. Yes! Bliddy yes! There. And there and there! And even the kids from Gateshead hear him, even though they’ve never even seen him nor heard him in the first damn place. Aye, we’ve got drink inside us, and aye, we’re fired up simply by being there, but we hear him, Claire, his singing in the night. Orpheus. How can that be? Oh God, it was magic. Oh God, you should have stayed. It was so great. It was everything we bliddy wanted. We were so free. And you weren’t there…