The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me Read Free

stairs like a precision missile in pink pyjamas.
    Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras changed my life that night. I found their Andrew Lloyd Webber megamix a bit so-so, but when they started the serious stuff, I was listening. And when they brought that ancient stadium thundering down with ‘Nessun dorma’, I knew that nothing could ever be the same again.
    Fiona had been completely unmoved. Dennis had fallen asleep.
    I raided my piggy bank and bought a tape called
OperaFavourites
.
Everything
on it became my favourite. I tingled with pleasure listening to it and after a while – singing as quietly as I could – began to join in. While my school friends rapped along with MC Hammer I kept it real with Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne, who sang words I couldn’t understand to tunes that I really could.
    If there was anything odder than a seven-year-old girl developing an opera-singing habit, it was a seven-year-old developing a top-secret opera habit. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why but I felt instinctively that I could never, and
should
never, sing in front of anyone else. So I sang in my wardrobe where nobody could hear me.
    And I never really questioned this because extreme privacy was a core value in the Howlett family. Mum and Dad, in spite of living on a council estate where private issues were mostly discussed in murderous screams, shared a strangely fearful, Victorian attitude towards privacy. They spent their lives muttering about how our neighbours had no shame, living their lives on show like that, and tried with all their quiet might to be completely invisible.
    Which was quite a problem for them, because the circumstances under which Fiona had come to live with us recently had been reported not just in the local papers but the nationals.
    Woman’s body found in Midlands Canal
    Where’s the daddy? Nationwide search mounted
for touring actor: who will claim this little girl?
    No father for Fiona: Canal orphan taken
in by dead woman’s sister
    We were a family ‘beset by tragedy’, the papers had said. They showed pictures of Mum at her sister’s funeral and gave them captions like ‘Frozen with grief, Brenda Howlett with her little niece Fiona’. At school Fiona and I overheard a special assembly (from which we had been banned) where the head told everyone that our family had been torn apart by a dreadful catastrophe and must be treated with the greatest sensitivity and respect.
    I wondered if everyone had confused us with a different family. There was no grieving in our house. No sense of catastrophe. When Mum was told that her sister had been found floating in a lonely section of the canal, she thanked the officers for their time and went to bed for a week. Then she got up, put on a black nylon dress for the funeral and never spoke about it again.
    Dad had busied himself making Fiona a bedroom while a half-hearted search for Fiona’s dad had taken place, and Fiona had just watched TV all day and all night. Dennis and I hadn’t said anything about it because nobody else was saying anything about it.
    That was just the way we did things in our family.
    The press, hoping for a big circus of grief and hysteria, didn’t like it. They stayed on our doorstep way longer than necessary. ‘Tell us how you’re all coping,’ they wheedled, through the letter box.
    ‘We don’t air our dirty laundry in public,’ Mum reminded us all. There was a frightening edge to her voice. ‘Mandy has gone and we don’t talk about her, in or out of this house. Understood?’
    So, by the time all the fuss had died down, the press had straggled off our estate and Fiona had been installed in theconverted cupboard under the stairs, just like Harry Potter, Mum and Dad’s hatred of being visible had become pathological. ‘Seen and not heard’ was no longer enough. From now on, the Howletts did not wish even to be seen.
    Years later, a man with intense blue eyes and an unironed T-shirt would hold my hand in a jazz bar