Song Of Time (3 page)

Leo ate, but he wouldn’t stop playing. He chomped and sneezed and blew his nose and cannoned at the piano as I turned the pages whilst Blythe sipped a can of Diet Pepsi and the sky pooled in darker patches around the chimneys and aerials outside. Sometimes, we’d finish these rehearsals with an easier piece to which I could make my own contribution on three-quarters violin. I lost the beat as often as I found it at the tempo they played, but the specialness of making music with Blythe and Leo more than compensated. There were even times when, for just a few bars, I would get that tightrope sense of being possessed by the melody. But such moments were short-lived—the very realisation that they were happening was enough to make me fluff my notes—and they didn’t come at all that day.

Without warning, Leo stopped in mid-phrase on an intended final run-through. Blythe slid to a halt a moment after, her lips jutting in wounded anticipation, but he was already pushing past us, muttering something we didn’t quite catch, although the explanation became clear as we heard the raised latch of the outside toilet which lay beyond the kitchen. The door to this Victorian relic only went three-quarters up, and the sounds of my brother voiding his bowels were unmistakable. Thoughtfully, Blythe drew a few long notes from her cello. I, meanwhile, re-considered the supposed effects of corn chips and dope.

“Sorry about that,” he said when he returned. “No more sandwiches…” He attempted a laugh. “Anyway. Where were we?”

But the session never really got started again. Leo, for whom everything had to be perfect, was too distracted and Blythe was far better at being solicitous and sympathetic than I was. Why, she’d been this way herself a week or so before. Summer flu—it was going the rounds. He’d probably even caught it from her…

The evening thickened. Mum and Dad returned from the teachers’ union conference they’d been attending, and Blythe headed off in her clever little car towards the gates and fences which were then already starting to enclose Edgbaston’s Calthorpe Estate. Forgotten, tired, sticky, I drifted out into the back garden. In those days, in that lost summer of that lost century, scarcely any stars hung above Birmingham, there was so much light and smog. The French windows still hung open, and it seemed for a moment that Leo and Blythe and I could still be playing inside. Not struggling in fits and starts through the Brahms, but making music which shaped itself like the cool flow of a midnight river. I could almost hear that lovely, inexpressible sound over the boom of next door’s television and the drone of evening traffic on the Alcester Road.

Something clattered as I stooped to pick up the forgotten rug we’d left beneath the cherry tree. It rolled, shining, towards the pale solar lanterns which hung around the borders of the garden like marsh ghosts. I smiled as I picked it up.

Leo’s bedroom light wasn’t on when I went upstairs, but I knew that he’d still be awake.

“There.” Sisterly-proud, I plonked the Smith Kendon tin down on the bed where he was lying in semi-darkness. “Saved your bacon.”

“Yours as well.” Rolling over, he slid out the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet and shoved it into the hidden space beneath.

“I’d just tell Mum and Dad you made me do it.”

“And I’d say it was all part of your education, which is exactly right.”

Leo’s room was at the front of the house, near to a sodium-yellow streetlamp which splattered plane-leaf shadows across his thin curtains, and his face had a sweaty gleam as he lay there. Seeing the stubble of his chin, I remembered the pinprick shadows of the lawn, the different colours and shapes of our hands…

“Thanks, anyway,” I said.

“For what?”

I shrugged.

“You know, Sis, what I was saying this afternoon—it’s not really true.”

“You mean dope really
can
harm you?”

He gave a chuckling sigh. “I mean, what I said about the future. I was wrong. The future isn’t something waiting ahead of us any longer. We’re living it. It’s with us. It’s everything. It’s here.”

So this was the future, and the future was Leo seemingly recovering from his stomach upset after a few days, and then me and Dad going down with the same thing. It was trips to the chemist, a stink in the toilets, and the washing machine grinding through endless sheets, and all of us getting better, although Leo seemed to find it harder than the rest of us did to shake it off.

And the future was going to Ikea on a weekend soon after to get a new uplighter for the lounge, and the future was queuing for hours on the gridlocked M5 with Dad turning on the heater fan as the engine of his battered Renault threatened to boil whilst Leo sat beside me in the back, sweating and complaining as he stifled ugly-smelling burps. We finally returned home through the ozone evening with no uplighter, but several boxes of glass tumblers, many pot plants, a ridiculously huge wall clock, and a tinkling mountain of all the different varieties of light bulbs which were somehow then needed. There were so many
things
in that lost world. Our house overflowed with Dad’s old tapes, records and CDs, and Mum’s ornaments, and both of their books and magazines, and all of our musical impedimenta, and my and Leo’s many toys, which we never played with, but still regarded with totemic reverence.

As Leo’s unwellness continued through that hot, irritable summer, we found ourselves drawn into closer contact with both sets of grandparents. I remember the arrival of vivid trays of Indian sweets and gelid pots of restorative Irish stew, and the absent pinching of my cheek before the prow of my grandmothers’ bosomy attention was steered towards Leo. Not that he was really ill, and the performance of the Brahms with Blythe and several other events still went ahead, but there was this thing, this bug, this stomach virus, a kind of summer flu or mild enteritis, which he was admittedly finding it difficult to shake.

We even spent our usual hot fortnight in one of those long, tin rectangles, named the
Clarion
or the
Belviour
which basked in lines in an arid park beside beaches in southern France. Neater versions of the post-Yellowstone refugee camps of twenty or thirty years later, they were stuffed with smaller and more temporary versions of all the things we had in our own homes.
Wine glasses, 6, frying pan, 1, corkscrew…
I remember how I would work through the laminated inventory on the day of our arrival in the hope that I might catch a missing toilet brush or tea caddy, delaying the moment when I would have to walk the aisles between the gas bombs to face the obligatory space of playground sand where the other kids hung out. Mum might heedlessly sunbathe and ignore the glances which people gave her as they flip-flopped beside the waves, but I was just a kid, and often as not one of the few children on the site who looked remotely Asian. Mum’s father Ram Ashar had come over to England from Gujarat the late 1950s in the search of a new life and a decent wage, taking a variety of menial jobs until he was able to set up a moderately thriving jewellers in Handsworth and bring over his new wife. Dad’s family were of immigrant stock as well, but from a different century—Irish, and Catholic. The way things had worked out, Leo looked very much like his father, and I looked like my mother. The listless swinging on car tyres would stop as the red here-for-a-week faces of the other kids who inhabited these resolutely Anglo-Saxon enclaves of those holiday parks turned to regard me. What are
you
doing here? They didn’t have say it; the question was already in my head. Often as not, I’d end up wandering the fenced pines with the sole Afro girl or the Chinese boy who’d been similarly marooned on this sunny outpost of England. Then, as at home, I’d wait for Leo to return from his book, his guitar, or the admiring crowd he was always good at attracting and rescue me. But on that last summer we spent on one of those French holiday parks, he felt unwell, and mostly sat alone.

Back in Moseley, trudging home under contrailed skies from my local comprehensive at the start of the autumn term, I’d often find my brother still sitting at the computer in his pyjamas, or banging harshly at the piano, or sometimes not even out of bed. Then, one day, I discovered Mum, who was normally out doing locum teaching, on her knees in the kitchen surrounded by sodden newspapers and wilting boxes of pizza as she defrosted the freezer.

“Roushana…” She looked up with a frown, wooden spatula in one hand and hair dryer in the other as she attempted to prise out another sheet of ice. “I’ve been trying to
ring
you. Why didn’t you turn on your
phone
? Leo’s…” She studied the pooling ice. “He’s had to go into hospital. It’s nothing serious—just tests, this thing that’s been troubling him.” She tugged at her tied-back hair. “Heaven knows why I started this. Look—will you help me put it all back. Then we can go and see him…”

Silently, solemnly, we re-stacked the leaking packs of ready meals, then set out through the interminable urban rush hour. Always a healthy child, I’d never visited a hospital before, and was astonished that illness should be such a huge industry. The corridors rolled on and on. Wards. Signposts. Lifts. A thousand swinging doors. People in wheelchairs and people on crutches. The nurses wore masks. Dire warnings of imminent epidemics flashed on the posters, and there were brazen glimpses under poorly arranged sheets of flesh, plastic and steel brownly encrusted with blood.

Leo was sitting up, and looking cheery, for all that he, too, had a tube running down into him arm from a crystalline sack which dangled above his bed. He and Dad, who’d travelled with him in the ambulance, both commented on the speed in which the treatments and investigations were proceeding. He had a room to himself, as well, which, along with the double doors with a code which you had to press to get through, I took at first as nothing more than the Health Service’s acknowledgement of my brother’s outstanding abilities.

Dad went back home through the traffic to collect all the things which Mum and I had forgotten, whilst Mum headed out along the corridors in search of a doctor, leaving Leo and I alone. As was often the case recently, we seemed to have little to say to each other. Still, the room was high in one of hospital’s towers, giving a fine view across the gardens and golf courses of autumnal Edgbaston, and Leo twisted around to look out from the big metal frame of his bed as we debated whether we could see the house where Blythe’s parents lived, and silently urged her expected arrival—her cool, lineney sense of calm…

Then we fell silent, and it was in that awkward moment, and more wanting to fill the alarming emptiness which had settled between us as the hospital resounded with distant clangs and booms than out of any real desire, that I said something to Leo which changed my life.

“I’ve been wondering,” I said, “if I could get a bit better at playing the violin. I mean…” I made a clumsy, dismissive gesture. “Not that I could ever get to be as good as you are. Or Blythe. But I’d like to improve. And I thought perhaps you could help me.”

Leo considered this. He made a slight raise of his chin. “We might as well,” he said, “begin now.”

I should have known. Asking Leo for his opinion on anything to do with music was like unstoppering a dam, and he was already deep into describing to me how practise was nothing, practise was
worthless
, unless you’d
planned
and
understood
, when Blythe finally arrived, laden with flowers, and also a brand-new Sony Seashell music player. This expensive gift was already filled with all of Leo’s favourite music, and he strung its silver chain around his neck, played with it for a while, then pressed the tiny transmission stud to the lump of bone just behind my ear, and glorious music poured in.
That, Sis, is exactly what I expect from you!
We all laughed.

Was I any good at that time? Did I have an ear? Did I have a crumb of talent? Music was certainly an activity we all enjoyed and took for granted in our household, but Leo’s gift was something else. It had been there from the first moment Mum sung to him and he’d gurgled back to her from his cot, and when Dad sat him on his lap before the piano when he was barely two and he prodded the notes he’d just seen played. There was never any question of them forcing him in the way that those ghastly parents with their maths and tennis prodigies then used to do. Not to allow Leo to develop his musical skills would have been like denying him the ability to walk. I, on the other hand, was as moderately competent at music as I was at most things. Mum might praise my screeching scales in much the same way she’d stick my pictures on the fridge, but I knew that I was an average child, and in that knowledge I, who stood out in other ways because of my racial mix, remained averagely happy.

Leo must have already known that I had no great musical gifts, when, back from hospital with several bruises on his arm and a whole new battery of tablets to take and a blotchily photocopied restrictive diet to adhere to, he sat me down and told me to put away my violin—which was a cheap thing in any case, coated in brittle plastic and with an equally brittle tone—and simply
listen
. Progress was slow. There were still no great new leaps, no sudden agilities of my awkward fingers, or a miraculously acquired perfect pitch. What there was instead, what mattered to me most, was a chance to spend time with my brother.

Despite his illness, Leo somehow contrived to keep up most of his attendance at King Edwards. This, after all, was the year of his A-levels when all the decisions which then so dogged bright children had to be made. Music, English or Modern History? A combined or single degree? The Royal Academy, or Durham, or possibly Oxford? Then there were the grants and bursaries to be fought over if he and my parents weren’t to be burdened with a huge bill. Then there was all the revision, practice, study. Amazing, really, that Leo found time for me at all. But at least Blythe, who was faced with similar studies and decisions, had decided that she would not longer concentrate on the cello. She was, she now admitted, unlikely to be able to make a career out of music. She had also, the thought occurred to me, found other ways of pleasing Leo.