The Orphan Choir (6 page)

I have just put the phone down after having had the following conversation with Doug Minns from Cambridge City Council’s environmental health team. What follows is pretty much word for word, I think.

So, as I hope the above script demonstrates, I was not allowed to explain the situation. I will attempt to do so here, where there is no danger of my clogging up an important phone line.

At 2 a.m., when I rang the council’s out-of-hours noise number for the first time, my neighbour at number 19 Weldon Road, Justin Clay, was playing loud music which Trevor Chibnall heard. Mr Clay had been playing loud music continuously since shortly after 10 p.m. What I did not tell Trevor Chibnall was that at first he was playing pop and
rock music as he always does, but that after I went round to complain and ask him to turn it down (during which conversation he accused me of being a music snob who only likes classical) he turned off the pop and put on loud classical music instead. I cannot see any way to read this apart from as a deliberate taunt.

Pat Jervis then came out to my house to assess the situation, but by the time she arrived the music had stopped. I worked out that she must have parked outside my house at the exact moment that Mr Clay turned off his music, and I believe he timed this deliberately, to make it look as if I had exaggerated, imagined or spitefully invented the problem.

After Pat Jervis left, I went to bed and took a while to fall asleep because I was so upset and agitated. I finally fell asleep and was then woken again at 4.20 a.m. by more music, again coming from Mr Clay’s house, except that this time it wasn’t coming from his basement but from his bedroom. Previously, he has always confined his musical activities to the basement. His bedroom is right next to mine (our two houses are mirror images of each other), separated only by an inadequately insulated Victorian wall, and he knows this. When he and I
first met, shortly after my family and I moved in next door to him and before there was any problem between us, we looked round each other’s houses at his instigation. I thought it was an odd thing for him to suggest, since we didn’t know one another, but it soon became obvious that he wanted to show off his no-expense-spared interior. So I hope I’ve proved that he knows very well where his bedroom is in relation to mine.

The music he was playing in his bedroom was choral music. Specifically, it was a boys’ choir, singing liturgical responses of the exact sort that my son sings every Tuesday and Thursday evening at Choral Evensong in Saviour College’s chapel: another deliberate taunt. Mr Clay played the responses over and over again – I don’t know exactly how many times because I became too upset to count. How loud was it? I suppose these things are relative. My husband, woken by my distress rather than the music, said that it was barely audible. Yet it was loud enough to wake me.

I believe that Mr Clay waited until he saw Pat Jervis leave my house, allowed me just enough time to calm down and fall asleep, and then deliberately woke me up, using a piece of music that he’d
specially selected in order to provoke me. What has happened to me tonight is far more serious than a simple noise nuisance. It started as that, but has turned into something vicious and menacing that an unimaginative man like Doug Minns has no predetermined procedure for. Although there is currently no music spilling from my neighbour’s house into mine, the problem is ongoing in the sense that there is basically zero chance of me getting any more sleep tonight. I’m too scared of being woken again, which is precisely the effect Mr Clay must have wanted to achieve. Given his malicious and calculating track record, he might well decide to turn the music back on in another half-hour, and if he doesn’t it will be because he knows he doesn’t need to – he knows he’s instilled enough fear and dread in me that I won’t risk closing my eyes. So, yes, the problem is very much ongoing, because I’m terrified that he will do this again – maybe not every night but as often as he feels like it. He can do it any time he wants, and stop whenever he sees a council officer’s car pull up outside my house, so that no one ever hears or witnesses anything. And he knows I know that.

Look, I’m not a fool. I get it. Obviously emergency out-of-hours noise officers can’t waste their time
rushing to houses where once, long ago, there was a noise somewhere in the vicinity – that would be ludicrous. I understand why you lot have the rules you have, but would it kill you to be a bit flexible? Actually, I’m sure if Pat Jervis had picked up the phone instead of Doug Minns, the response would have been quite different. Pat seems to be properly on my side. I’m sure she’d have bent the stupid rules, come round, knocked on my neighbour’s door and told him in no uncertain terms, ‘Cut it out right now, or you could end up in court. This is harassment.’

Maybe I ought to try the police again and tell them that the council’s environmental health department has no interest in preventing a gruesome murder on Weldon Road. That would get their attention.

I open my eyes and see wooden slats above me. That’s right: I lay down on the bottom bunk of Joseph’s bed at about 6 a.m., not for a moment imagining that I might fall asleep. That I did feels like a victory, briefly. Then my triumph gives way to disappointment that I didn’t manage to sleep for longer. I feel worse than I did before: as if someone’s scraped the insides of my eyelids and scrubbed at my brain with a pumice stone.

What time is it? It’s fully light outside, and no darker in here. The curtains in Joseph’s room are useless: white and gauzy, thin as tissue paper. I’ve been meaning to replace them since we bought the house and not getting round to it. Joseph, thankfully, cares no more about daylight seeping in than he minds
about the noise Mr Fahrenheit makes every other Saturday night. He’s completely unaware of both. I’m lucky. Or I used to think I was, until he left home.

Don’t say ‘left home’. He still lives here. You know that.

Joseph has always been a brilliant sleeper: 7.30 p.m. until 7 a.m., however light, dark, loud or quiet his surroundings. Other mothers think I’m lying when I say this but it’s true: he has slept all night every night since he was four weeks old. Even his rare sick spells have always involved the kind of illnesses that have made him need to sleep overtime and more heavily. I used to feel sorry for my friends who had it harder – Eniola, who went three nights without sleep when Matthew had terrible colic, and Jenny, with her frequent dashes to A&E on account of Chloe’s asthma.

I envy them now, both of them, and not only them. I envy any parent whose child hasn’t been stolen by a school for no good reason, which, come to think of it, is nearly every parent I know – any mother whose son is too insecure and clingy to settle or be happy away from home. It’s my fault that Joseph is as relaxed and independent-minded as he is. As a new parent, I wasn’t anxious or neurotic. I regularly left him with babysitters; I believed there was a strong chance they’d be at least as good at looking after a baby as I was, if not better.

If I’d foreseen a conspiracy to take my son away from me, I’d have made sure to be one of those mums who never lets her child out of her sight. I’d have done everything I could to turn Joseph into the sort of boy who believes something bad will happen to him if his mother’s not there to protect him.

If I were less tired, I might put the counter-arguments to myself. I would challenge my shameful retrospective plotting, my hyperbolic use of certain words – ‘conspiracy’, ‘stolen’, ‘fault’ – but at the moment I have neither the energy nor the inclination.

I hear Stuart’s voice say, ‘I thought you were going to sleep in the study,’ and realise I’m not alone in the room. I throw back the duvet, trying not to notice the small blue and red sailing boats on its cover. Joseph chose it himself. He ought to be the one throwing it back this morning, not me.

A cross-section of my husband appears in front of me, blocking out some of the light: part of his legs, his waist and chest. The top bunk blocks his face from my view, but I can imagine what it looks like when he says, ‘You’d better get up. Imran’ll be here in fifteen minutes. And remember, soon as he leaves we’ll have to set off to Saviour, so you need to get properly dressed now.’

I spring up off the bed and am on my feet before he gets to the door. ‘I’m sorry?’ I say belligerently.
‘Since when do you tell me when and how to dress?’

He looks surprised by the strength of my reaction, and I feel guilty. ‘You’ve just woken up, so I thought I’d … you know.’

He’s right. I have just woken up, less than two hours after falling asleep for the second time. Why would I do something so foolish? I wouldn’t – not of my own accord. I would do the sensible thing and stay asleep until quarter to ten, which would still give me enough time to leap into the shower before setting off to Saviour College’s chapel for Joseph’s gig. That’s how I irreverently think of the services.

‘Did you wake me up?’ I ask Stuart.

‘Yes. Eventually. It wasn’t easy.’

‘Thanks a lot. You know what time I got to sleep? Probably about ten past six.’

‘Well, I know it was after five-twenty-five a.m.,’ Stuart says irritably. ‘What should I have done, Lou? Imran’s coming all the way from Stamford and he’ll be here in—’

‘I don’t give a fuck about Imran at this precise moment, Stuart! He’s not a visiting dignitary that I need to impress, he’s one of my oldest friends. You could have said, “Sorry, Imran, Lou’s asleep – she’s had a hellish night and I didn’t want to wake her.” He’d have been totally fine about it.’

‘Right.’ Stuart raises his eyebrows. He takes an
unsteady step back, as if an unpredictable wind has knocked him off balance. ‘Sorry, I assumed that since we’re going to be talking about the work to the house, you might want to be there.’

‘Why? You’re not going to listen to what I say anyway. You didn’t last night, when I asked you to text Imran and put him off. I don’t
want
the house sandblasted! The last thing on my mind at the moment is the colour of the brickwork …’

‘And yet you’re saying I should have left you to sleep and given Imran the go-ahead without you,’ Stuart points out with infuriating patience. ‘It sounds like you, me and Imran all need to be there, since we’re likely to have different opinions. Mine’s certainly different from yours.’

He tries again to leave the room. ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘How do you know I didn’t get to sleep till after twenty-five past five?’ As I ask, I realise that there can only be one answer.

‘I found your noise diary,’ says Stuart accusingly.

And nothing else?
I really ought to hide the drugs I stole from Mr Fahrenheit’s place somewhere cleverer. It’s not inconceivable that one day Stuart might decide the tea towel currently in use needs washing; it’s unlikely, but just about possible, that instead of taking a clean one from the top of the pile in the drawer, he might take the whole lot out and have a
look at them all. If he did that, he would spot the small plastic bag full of marijuana underneath and subject me to a horrified interrogation.

‘Obviously you were busy last night after I went back to sleep,’ he says. ‘Much as I’m keen to hear all about what you got up to, we don’t have time. Seriously, Lou, since you
are
now awake and Imran’s going to be here any minute—’