Weird Tales #327 Read online

  This was last year. She liked to sing and she sang well, but she didn’t like to make a big deal of it. So on the Saturday of the festival just she and I made the hour’s drive to this tiny little town you’ve never heard of, way out in the middle of the flat country between home and the coast, with her entry slips and her piano copies and a bottle of mineral water.

  They’d been running an annual festival here since nineteen forty-eight, and we’d done it twice before. This year Vicky’s singing teacher had entered her for four different competition classes, spread throughout the day. The room where the earliest would take place was the one we liked least, the village hall with its high ceiling and tiny stage and no acoustic to speak of. Well, you could speak of it, but you’d have to shout to be heard at the back. And it was always so cold in there that at this time of year you could see your breath.

  We sat outside in the car for a few minutes.

  “All right?” I said. “Anything else you need?”

  She shook her head. She didn’t seem keen. I knew she’d had a bad throat for a few days and wasn’t feeling entirely at her best, but in we went.

  They’d already started and so we waited for an interval between competitors to find a seat. When the opportunity came, we dodged around empty chairs and a photographer’s tripod and made our way down the hall.

  The judge had her table out in the middle, while the spot for the singers was by an upright piano before the stage. The stage had a home-made backcloth for The Wizard of Oz. The judge was a woman in her late ’fifties, straight-backed, powdered, a little severe. None of which meant anything. I’d found you could never really get the measure of them until you heard what they had to say.

  Vicky’s name came halfway down the pro­gramme, so we settled in. The class was Songs from the Shows and the age group was the youngest. There was low winter sun coming in through the windows at the back of the hall and it was making the singers squint.

  Early morning voices, little kids singing. Some in tune, most not, every one of them the apple of someone’s eye.

  Andrew Lloyd Webber was getting a real hammering. In the space of half an hour we had three “Whistle Down the Wind”s relieved only by a couple of “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No”s. I recognised a few of the entrants from previous years. Only two young boys got up to sing and, bless ’em, you could tell that this was not their chosen element.

  Vicky got up and did her piece. As she sat down beside me again she said, “That was rubbish.”

  It wasn’t, but I knew that it wasn’t a patch on what she could do at her best. But I also had that sneaking feeling that I’m sure I shared with every parent in the room, that out of this bunch I had the only real singer and the rest of them might just as well give up and go home.

  We had a song from Annie and a song from Les Miserables and then another “Whistle Down the Wind,” and then the judge did some scribbling and called the next name.

  She mispronounced it the first time and I looked at my programme to check…Cantle? But the name was Chantal, exotic enough amongst the Emmas and the Jennies. There was movement over on the other side of the room and I craned to see what a Lancashire Chantal might look like.

  Up stood this little girl in a cardigan, with a bow in her top-knot and a dress that looked like funeral parlour curtains. She was tiny, and I reckoned she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old.

  She stood by the piano and waited for the judge’s nod and then the accompanist started up, and then little Chantal sang a perfect piping rendition of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

  Let me qualify that. It was perfect, but it was also horrible in a way that I still can’t quite put my finger on. Her diction was clear and her intonation was bright. She hit all the notes dead-on, and she even acted the whole thing out.

  But to see this eight-year-old doing such a precise imitation of mature emotion was like watching a wind-up doll simulating sex. She’d been drilled to a frightening degree. On one line her hand moved to her heart, on the next she gestured to the crowd. When the lines were repeated later in the song, she did exactly the same movements again in exactly the same way. There was a slightly American intonation there, as if she’d learned the words by listening to the movie soundtrack so many times that it rang in her head like tintinnitus.

  I looked for her mother. Sure enough, there she was. She had a little boy of about five or six beside her. The little boy was ordinary, fidgeting, eyes wandering, all his little-boy energies struggling against the imposed stillness like cats in a heavy sack.

  The mother, though…she was as much of a study, in her way, as the little girl.

  She wasn’t old, or even middle-aged. But her youth was only there in traces, as if it had been harried out of her too soon. Her hair was a dirty-blonde froth of curls, cut short and pushed up high on her head above her ears. She was staring at her daughter as she sang, her lips twitching along. She wasn’t mouthing the words as some of the mothers do, vicariously living the performance or, even worse, trying to conduct it from the sidelines. To me it seemed that she was just rapt, quite literally lost in the song, as the tenderest of souls might be overwhelmed by the greatest of artists.

  I reckon you could have wheeled out Madonna herself and the London Symphony Orchestra, but you couldn’t have given her a performance that could affect her half so much. And my cynical heart softened then, because whatever form it comes in, however it’s expressed, it’s hard to be critical of such uncompromising love.

  The song ended. There was the standard scattering of applause, and the little girl’s smile switched on like a bulb. Two seconds later it switched off again and she walked back to her seat as the next singer went up to take her place. Her mother bent over to whisper something but I was distracted then by a metallic bang from the back of the room, and I looked around to see a nondescript man noisily folding up his camera tripod.

  The father, I assumed. My heart promptly hardened up again. I don’t like it when people make it so obvious that they’ve no interest in the efforts of any other child than their own. It may be a universal truth, but I think we’ve all got a responsibility at least to pretend otherwise. Yet still you see them at school shows and concerts, not looking at the stage, flicking through the programme book, sometimes not even bothering to join in the applause. They’re here to see the Third Wise Man triumph, and to them all the rest is just noise.

  We’ve got a camera of our own, but I’d stopped taking it along. I’d started to find that if you make a big thing out of recording the moment, what you lose is the moment itself.

  They stuck it out for one more song, which was about as long as it took for him to pack the video gear away, and then in the gap between entrants the four of them got up and left. The girl went out in front and her brother got dragged along behind, bobbing around in his family’s wake like a rag doll caught up on a motorboat.

  * * * *

  We slipped out ourselves about ten minutes after that. Done quietly, it was no breach of etiquette. The class was running late and we had another one to get to, so for this one we’d check the results and pick up the judgement slip later in the day.

  That was how it worked; young singers and their minders in constant motion from one hired room to another, getting nervous, doing their best, hoping for praise, fearing the worst.

  We planned to get some lunch after the English Folk Song. They always set up a tearoom in the church but, being no lover of grated cheese and pickle sandwiches, I had other ideas. On our way to the car, we stopped to pick up the slip from that earlier class and to check on the list of prizewinners.

  Strange little Chantal had taken the first prize. Second and third places went to performances that I couldn’t remember.

  Well, what can you do? You note it and move on.

  We got into the car and drove out toward the coast, which was only another three or four miles. I thought a change of scene would be a good idea. I could sense that Vicky was un­happy;
not peevishly so, just unhappy with her own performance, unhappy with the way she felt, unhappy with the day ahead and the sense of a course to be run that had no great promise of satisfaction in it.

  After being quiet for a few minutes she said, “I don’t think I want to go back.”

  “No?”

  “I just want to go home. There’s no point.”

  I said, “If that’s what you want, then fine. I’m not going to force you to stay. But be sure in your own mind that you’re not throwing it in for the wrong reasons. All right?”

  “Mmm.” She was looking out of the window.

  We found a cafeteria over an Edwardian parade and, wouldn’t you know it, they’d run out of ham for the sandwiches but had no shortage of grated cheese and pickle to offer.

  Over lunch, we talked about the morning. Specifically, about Chantal’s win.

  “I can’t say she didn’t deserve it,” I said. “Technically she’s very impressive and in two or three years’ time there’s a chance she’ll be really good. Right now I’d say she’s been drilled too much. She’s very mechanical and ­over-controlled. But I’d also have to say she’s got an obvious natural gift. From here it’ll depend upon how naturally it’s allowed to develop, as opposed to being forced.”

  Vicky sat there sucking her Coke through a straw, not over-happy but not disagreeing, either. She needed a straw to keep the ice from bobbing against the metal of her brace.

  I said, “And of course, we know for a fact that the room’s got a curse on it and the judges are always peculiar.”

  I said it as a joke, but felt there was a grain of truth in it. This was the third time we’d had the same experience. It was a catch-all class that started the day, with the age range heavily weighted towards the very young. The prizes had always gone to shrill little girls who maybe didn’t get the notes but did a lot of eye-rolling and arm-waving. The judges marked high on smiling and gestures, and some of the teachers played to that. A real singer probably flew right above the radar.

  Well, it got her laughing when I said it was no insult to miss out on a prize in a freak show. And as we were walking to the car she said, “I think I will go back.”

  So instead of going home, we went back.

  I was glad, because later in the day was when the big girls came in and the musicianship got more serious. Vicky was caught somewhere in between the moppets and the teenagers but when she sang amongst the best, she sounded as if she belonged there. Even if she didn’t get a prize, it would be good for her to see it through. Prizes are nice. But what really matters is who your peers are. The quality of the people amongst whom you clearly belong.

  We were laughing about something else in the car when it came to me. The little girl had stuck in my mind and had been troubling me for some reason, and I suddenly realised why.

  I found myself recalling an image from a TV documentary that I’d once seen. It was about the second world war, the London Blitz. I don’t know how old I’d been when I saw it, but it was an early and shocking memory. Outside a bombed-out house, this family had been laid on the pavement. One was a baby, clearly dead, but not in repose. Its mouth was open, as if caught in mid-chortle.

  The image was in my mind now because it shared something with the face of the girl I’d seen that morning. I’d hate to say what. But if I close my eyes I can still see her now, eyes hooded with dark rings under them, her downturned mouth hanging slightly open, her tiny teeth like points.

  I saw her again, about half an hour later.

  We’d moved over into the church, which was a big improvement. Inside the church there were several large informal rooms as well as the wood-panelled nave, and they were decently heated. In the nave was the best acoustic of them all, and the best piano to go with it.

  I slipped out while we were waiting for Vicky’s turn in the British Composer set piece. She was complaining that her throat was dry and the water bottle was empty. She stayed behind in the hall.

  The tea room was in the middle of the building and had no windows. Metal-legged tables and plastic chairs had been set up amongst the pillars, and service was through a hatchway from a kitchen staffed by volunteers. There were some uncleared plates and crumbs on the tables but otherwise the seating area was empty apart from me and Chantal.

  I recognised her easily, even from the back. That top-knot, that cardigan. Just like a dressed-up doll. She was drawing something aimless in spilled sugar on one of the tables, and she was making a singsong whispering sound as she did.

  “Hello, there,” I said.

  She jumped. Not literally, but you could see her start. She turned around.

  I said, “I heard you this morning. Congratulations. You sang really well.”

  I was sorry I’d started this. She seemed panicked. I’d spoken to her and she didn’t know what to do or how to respond. Her eyes were looking at me but her eyes were empty.

  I didn’t know what I could say now.

  “Chantal,” I heard from behind me.

  It was her mother. I glanced back and saw her. She didn’t meet my eyes but her gaze kind of slid around me to her daughter, as if she knew I was there and she ought to acknowledge me…and she was acknowledging me in her own way, but her own way was not direct.

  She muttered something about being late and the two of them went off together, with me stepping aside to let them by. I don’t know if she’d been speaking to me or to her daughter. I felt like an idiot, to be honest, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

  More than feeling stupid, I felt a little bit spooked. That was one creepy family. Chantal’s eyes had been empty until her mother spoke. But I can’t say for sure what I’d seen in them then.

  The rest of the afternoon passed by. Other classes came and went and the voices got better and better. We heard some thrilling sopranos and one bean-pole of a teenaged boy who ran in late and sang Handel like a spotty angel.

  Our final session was in the nave of the church. Vicky was more or less resigned to the fact that this wasn’t her best day, and she was taking something of a gonzo attitude to it all now…by which I mean that she wasn’t worrying about placing or prizes, but was just getting in there and doing it. Which I’ve always liked better. Do a thing for its own sake, and let anything else that comes along be a surprising bonus. That’s how to be an original. That way you can’t lose.

  So there we were. The first thing that I noticed on entering the church, up on the empty balcony above our heads, was the nondescript man with his tripod and camera. Once we were in our seats, I looked around for the other three.

  And there they were. The boy was in the middle. Slumped, glowering. He was the one I felt sorry for. He looked like the normal one in the family and I could imagine his patience being tested to near-destruction by a day like this. It must have been Boy Hell, having to get scrubbed-up and endure hours of boredom and sitting still in the company of grown-ups, and all for your sister in the spotlight.

  Vicky was up third. She sang her piece, and sang it well. The throat problem hadn’t gone and she was up against her limit by the ends of some of the lines, but in contrast to the morning she was warmed-up and relaxed, and it was a great room to sing in. The atmosphere was completely different. The piping-little-kid factor was almost completely absent, but then I had to remind myself that all these mature and impressive young singers had probably been piping little kids once.

  While Vicky was singing, there was a sharp noise from one of the rows. It didn’t throw her - in fact she told me afterwards that she hadn’t even noticed it - but it made me look back.

  Chantal’s brother had dropped something, I guessed. Probably a hymn book from the rail in front of him. His mother was giving him a kind of gritted-teeth, staring-eyes silent scolding. I looked past him to Chantal. She was completely slack, as if she’d been switched off.

  That was when I started thinking of her as a little dead girl, in her funeral home curtain dress. In fact I fantasised about the whole family of them
living above the funeral parlour, and climbing into the boxes to sleep at night.

  But not for long. My kid was still singing.

  Even the applause sounded better in here. She sat down flushed, and I could see that she was pleased with herself.

  Chantal was the youngest entrant in this class. She went up about twenty minutes later.

  If anything, her performance was more ex­treme than the one I’d seen that morning. Her diction was so sharp that it was unpleasant to the ear. Every r was rolled, every t was a gunshot. Whatever had served her well before, she was doing more of it now. The light-bulb smile was a bizarre face-pull.

  I nudged Vicky and she followed my glance over at the mother. The mother was doing it again, her mouth unconsciously making the shapes of the words, living the song with her daughter. I couldn’t see the balcony from my seat but I knew for sure that Cecil B would be up there, capturing it all on tape for endless home replay.

  It was only the youngest member of the family who seemed to have used up all his reserves of team spirit. He wasn’t paying his sister any attention at all. To be fair to him, he’d probably sat through this a hundred times at home. He squirmed in his seat and stuck an arm up in the air, stretching. His mother quickly pulled it down so he stuck it up again, instantly computing that he’d found a way to annoy her. She pulled it down almost violently now and he tried it a third time, but by then the damage was done. The movement must have caught the little girl’s eye and distracted her for a second. She’d stumbled on her words. I’d only been half-listening but when she went wrong, I knew it at once.

  So did her mother. God, now there was a look. Medusa would have asked for lessons.

  When it came time for the judge to give his results, Chantal got a kind mention along with everybody else but Vicky got a very respectable second prize. It was all the more welcome for being unexpected, and she was only one point behind the sixteen-year-old who took the first. I’d have been happy at the fact that she’d held her own so well amongst such a high class of singers. But what the hell, it was nice to get an envelope as well.