Second Fiddle (3 page)

“Well, of course it is,” I said, to Gillian rather than to Tim. His ears were so far up I felt I'd have to shout to talk to him. “I
know
what a violin is. I mean, how come you play it, and why
here?
”

“I play it because…,” Gillian began pertly. Then she stopped. “I don't know why I play it.” She gave her brown cloud of hair another little toss.

Lord preserve me from soulful persons! I bet she practices that toss of her head in the mirror.

There was only one Kit Kat left, I noticed, in the rectangular lunch box they used as a sort of biscuit tin. But I was the visitor after all. Surely they'd offer it to me—they'd have to, if they had any manners.

“Have a Kit Kat,” Gillian said, as if she'd heard me thinking. She offered me the almost empty box. She wore nail polish, I noticed, the see-through kind, no color. It made her fingers seem even smaller and pearlier than they were naturally. My mother wouldn't dream of letting me wear nail polish. Not that I had ever wanted to.

“Well then,” I said, taking the Kit Kat casually, as if there were dozens of them left. “But in the woods,” I went on. “Playing a violin in the woods. It seems strange. You'd think it would get … oh, warped or something.”

“Warped?” Gillian seemed puzzled by this idea.

I gave up on her. She struck me as not too bright.

“Why don't you sit down?” I said to Tim.

“Because there are only two chairs,” he said. It seemed he'd heard me, in spite of the long-distance ears. I love that about Tim. He always answers exactly the question you ask, even if it's not quite the question you mean.

“Well then,” I said.

That was true, about the chairs. It wasn't exactly what you could call furnished, the foresters' hut. It was full, but not furnished. The two chairs and the table weren't even all in the same place. The table had a jar of teabags and a gas ring on it and a bottle of gas under it, and was at the back of the hut, under a tiny, cobweb-festooned window. One chair was plonked at random in about the middle of the room. Gillian sat on that. My chair was near the door. You couldn't easily move the chairs, as there was so much junk on the floor.

Of course, it mightn't be junk if you were a forester. Coils of rope, tools, sacks of things tied with twine, dirty plastic bags bulging with nails and screws, piles of jackets and ragged pullovers, metal bars, bright hard hats looking a bit like fireman dress-ups from a toy box, and everywhere, resinous piles of wood shavings and sawdust. (You should look up
resinous
if you don't know what it means, because I will be using it quite a lot since it is very apt for a book set partly in a forest. It isn't all set in the forest, by the way, in case you are getting tired of leaves and trees and things.)

I thought about offering Tim my chair. I'd rather he sat down and I stood up. That way we'd be about level and I could look at him and have a conversation. But he might think that was peculiar, so I didn't in the end.

“You mean, does it go out of tune?” said Gillian.

I looked back at Gillian. “Do I?” I said. I couldn't remember what we'd been talking about. And then I remembered about the violin. How it didn't seem to get warped in the woods. Yes, I suppose that was what I had meant—that it might go out of tune.

I expected that Gillian would tell me it
did
go out of tune, actually, and then go on to explain what she did to counteract that, or that it didn't, as a matter of fact.

But Gillian didn't say either of those things. Instead, she put her mug down carefully at her feet, between two sawdust hillocks, and picked up the violin from where she'd laid it in its open case on one of the piles of jackets. The inside of the violin case was lined with red silk. It reminded me of the lining on a cloak that had belonged to a magician who'd performed at a birthday party when I was small.

“Shall I play for you?” Gillian asked shyly. She was fingering the wood of the violin as if it were a pet that needed comfort and reassurance.

I couldn't remember what it had sounded like last time Gillian had played, but it couldn't have been too bad, because I'd have remembered if it had been terrible.

“Hmph,” I said, remembering my woodland voice again all of a sudden. “Yemp.”

It was terrible. Truly terrible. Like a sick cat. I listened in horror as Gillian drew dreadful squawks from the strings. Her too-small face was all screwed up with concentration. She looked as if she was in pain. I certainly was. No wonder she had to play out in the woods where she couldn't upset the neighbors!

Suddenly Gillian stopped. “Right,” she said. “What'll I play?”

“Hmph,” I said. “What was that? What you just played there now, the first thing?”

“Nothing. I was only tuning up.”

“Oh,” I said. “Hmph.”

Gillian laughed. “You didn't think that was
music!
”

“'Sall the same to me,” I said grumpily. “'Sjust noise.”

It wasn't true. I can hold a tune as well as the next person. I used to be in the choir in my old school. Oh, I think I told you that already.

“No, it isn't,” said Gillian. “Listen to this. It's a blackbird.”

She stood up and went out onto the porch.

“I can't play in there,” she called through the open door. “Too stuffy, it makes the music go all limp. Now, listen. It's a blackbird, I think.”

Then she picked up her bow and did that listening thing again, just like the other day, only this time I could see her face. She'd closed her eyes so you didn't have to think how pale and uninteresting they were, and her whole face was dreamy, creamy, hardly like a face at all, more like a picture of a face, all the features perfectly aligned and perfectly at rest. Her eyebrows made perfect arches. I hadn't noticed that before. And her head didn't look too small when she cradled it into the violin.

I hardly heard when the music started. I could see the bow moving over the strings, but the sound was so soft, it was barely audible. Then gradually it began to swell and drift in from the porch and fill the dark and resinous little hut with melody.

Suddenly the music stopped. I opened my eyes. I hadn't realized I'd closed them.

“'Snot a blackbird,” I said at last in my woodland voice. “I never 'eard a blackbird that sounded like that there.”

“No, you're not following me.” Well, that part was true enough. Gillian's face looked small again, and bland, now that she'd taken the violin from her shoulder. She was like the overlooked mousy person in an Agatha Christie story who turns out to be the murderer. My mother has dozens of those books and I read them when I run out of library books. “I don't mean it sounds like a blackbird
sounds.
It sounds like a
blackbird.
”

Of course I didn't follow. How could I?
It doesn't sound like a blackbird sounds, but it sounds like a blackbird.
That doesn't make sense.

“It doesn't sound like a blackbird
sounds,
” Gillian said again. “It sounds like a blackbird
being
a blackbird. Listen again.”

She settled the instrument back in the hollow of her collarbone and played. Her bow glided over the strings, her eyebrows disappeared under her hair, her elbow almost scraped the floor.

“Well then,” I said, and then I listened. I closed my eyes again and concentrated.

And the blackbird—the blackbird swooped out of the trees, sailed right over the hut, and came to rest on the railing beside Gillian. Even with my eyes closed, I could see it, and something happened in my heart. I didn't know there could be a connection between your ears and your heart, but I was sure, quite sure, that something moved in there, something I hadn't known was there at all.

Gillian

That woodland creature, the girl who hangs around the woods—she looks as if she's waiting for the hunter-gatherers to come home and throw her a bone. But the odd thing is, she
got
the music. Kids never get it. My mother says it's because they haven't got the training, their ears are ruined by rap and hip-hop, and maybe that is true, but even grown-ups hardly ever get it. They clap politely because they know that's what they're supposed to do, but you always know it's hollow. But this scruffy Mags creature—she really
heard
it. It was like being showered with sunlight, watching her getting it. It was like watching something becoming human.

Mags

“What's this about some girl you met in the woods?” my mother wanted to know. She tried to sound casual, but I knew she was interested. My mother is always on the lookout for friends for me. It worries her that I spend so much time alone. Parents these days, I have noticed, think it is important for their children to be sociable. Something has changed since those books I like to read, where parents thought that packing their children off to grim boarding schools or to forbidding mansions on the Yorkshire moors with no friends or toys, or leaving them with cruel aunts who beat them and made them eat lumpy porridge, was an OK thing to do. I sometimes think I would have preferred to be a child in the olden days. It sounds like more fun, although also a bit scary, especially the porridge part.

My mother was knitting a cardigan for the new baby. Lemon, in case it was a girl and wouldn't like blue, or a boy, who would be permanently damaged if he wore pink.

“White would work too,” I said, fingering the wool, “or green. Mint green, only very pale; it goes with babies' skin. Or lavender.”

“You're changing the subject, Mags.” My mother managed to make changing the subject sound like a minor crime.

It wasn't our baby. It was a neighbor's.

“What was the subject? Oh yes, Mira— I mean, Gillian. Isn't that a terrible name?”

“No,” said my mother.

“You always disagree with me,” I said sulkily.

“
You
always disagree with
me,
” countered my mother with a sigh. Under her breath, she went on with her endless murmuration: “Knit one, purl one, knit one, slip one, knit one, pass the slipped stitch over the knit stitch, knit one.…”

“Nobody knits these days,” I said. “Especially not at breakfast.”

“Well, I must be nobody then,” my mother said, with that little nod she always gives when she thinks she's made a point particularly well. “Purl one, knit one, slip one.…”

“She plays the violin,” I said. “She's good.”

“Hmm?” said my mother, pulling the slipped one over the knit one, always a tricky bit. “That's nice.” Trying to sound casual again.

“But her face is too small,” I said.

My mother raised her eyebrows but didn't say anything, because she was counting under her breath. Her needles clicked comfortably.

“She's got a brother,” I added. “He's a forester. He's very tall.”

My mother turned her knitting and began again from the other end.

“I always thought you should take music lessons,” she said. “It was your father who said you didn't have to if you didn't want to. You can blame him.”

I knew she didn't really mean that, about blaming my father, but it seems to me that being dead puts him at an unfair disadvantage, and my mother shouldn't say things like that. He died just over a year ago. My mother and I had rattled about in our house afterward. At least, that's what my mother always said:
We're rattling around in that house.
People told her not to make any rash decisions, do nothing for the first year, but as soon as the year was up, she sold the rattly old house that I had loved and we'd packed up and come to live near my grandfather, and that's how we got to be here. To make it more like a family. I think that was the plan. Only Grandpa is being contrary, wanting to go on living in his dingy little cottage. He doesn't like the airy bungalow my mother chose, all large windows and views. He says it makes him feel as if he is on TV all the time. I can see his point. I don't much like it either. So we live in our house and he lives in his, and it isn't any more like a family than it was before, except that Grandpa lives nearby.

I sometimes wonder if dead people have special powers, like angels, and can read your mind. That is a spooky idea. Don't have this idea in the middle of the night if you can help it. Especially not if you are thinking angry thoughts about the person who might have the special powers. Sometimes I am very angry with my dad for not being there. It's all right to be angry. The bereavement counselor told me that, apparently, it's all part of what they call the “grieving process.” But it doesn't make that nice pat kind of sense in the dark for some reason. In the daytime, when things always seem less terrifying than at night, I try to compensate by thinking only nice thoughts about him. I hope he does the mind-reading thing in the daytime as well.

“Maybe you should have made me,” I said now, meaning about the music lessons. “I wish I loved something the way Gillian loves her violin.”

“Oh, I'm sure you do,” my mother said, in that vaguely reassuring way mothers do that especially irritates their daughters.

“Like what?” I asked, curling my lip. You read that in books, about people curling their lip, and it sounds a bit unlikely, but I have practiced it and I can do it pretty well now, though it is more a wave than a curl, I have to say. Still, you can't say “waving my lip,” as that sounds ridiculous.

“Hmm?” said my mother again. She stopped knitting for a moment and put her knitting needle in her ear.

If I did that, she'd murder me. She'd tell me I was going to skewer my brain or something. But grown-ups can do what they like, can't they? Up to a point, I mean. Don't try this at home, by the way. I will not be liable if you skewer your brain. You have been warned.