The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me Read Free Page B

and shuddering.
    In a hazy sea of faces I caught sight of Mum and Dad, who had obviously just realized what was going to happen. Mum’s eyes were bursting out of her head. With pride or embarrassment I’d never know, although pride was unlikely. All I knew was that as Mrs Badger started playing the introduction to ‘L’ho perduta’ I felt a stunning certainty that nothing was going to come out of my mouth.
    Nothing came out of my mouth. I stood, frozen, a littlegirl with a scab on her chin and a badly fitting pinafore dress, completely mute.
    Mrs Badger was having none of it, and started the intro again so that I could collect myself. Once again I caught sight of my parents, who seemed like they were in cardiac arrest. Mum’s face, white and frozen, looked like it did the day the police came round and told her that the woman found in the Wolverhampton canal was her sister Mandy.
    Then I felt warm liquid run down the inside of my left leg. I stood right there on stage, in front of all the other parents (
and
Jim Babcock, who I knew was going to dump me), and felt the warmth sliding down towards my feet, pooling in a fat oval shape on the floor. I stopped thinking, maybe even breathing, and stood there until Fiona ran on from the wings and dragged me off.
    When we got home, Mum marched upstairs where she ran a bath. She filled it with Matey bubbles and rubber ducks, even though it had been years since I’d liked rubber ducks and they were all mouldy and black on the bottom. While it was filling she took me into my bedroom and said, in a scary voice, ‘Where is it?’ It wasn’t a question, it was a command.
    I didn’t even bother to ask what ‘it’ was. I simply reached into my wardrobe for my
Opera Favourites
cassette and handed it to her, along with the
Opera
magazine I’d bought a few weeks ago so that I could stare solemnly at the pictures of big-boobed singers.
    Mum looked at the cassette and magazine as if I had presented her with a steaming pile of dog shit, and took them downstairs. ‘Sally,’ she called sharply. I followed. Mum threw both in the kitchen bin, then scraped theremains of Dennis’s ketchupy fish fingers on top of them. For good measure she added a pile of orange mush, the remains of Fi’s. Fi’s favourite thing at the moment was to mash up her dinner and not actually eat any of it. I could see Maria Callas’s face with blobs of deep-fried breadcrumbs sliding slowly down it.
    ‘No more singing,’ Mum stated.
    My lip wobbled. In spite of what had happened tonight, I knew I loved singing. It was the best feeling I’d ever known.
    ‘You can’t do that!’ Fiona butted in. Fiona was the only person in the house who ever dared take on Mum. ‘She’s really good at it!’
    Mum didn’t even look at her.
    ‘
No more singing
,’ she repeated. ‘If I catch you at it again there’ll be serious trouble. It’s for your own good, Sally.’ Mum never really raised her voice, just hissed in varying shades of angry snake. ‘We don’t need no more trouble with …’ Mum paused. ‘With
performing arts
,’ she concluded shakily. ‘Now go upstairs and get yourself clean, Sally.’
    That was that.
    But that wasn’t that, not really. I carried on singing because I couldn’t not. Now I did it
only
in my wardrobe and
only
when there was no one else in the house. ‘Nobody,’ I promised myself, ‘will ever hear me sing again.’
    On the outside Sally Howlett resumed being normal, dependable and solid. There would have been no point in trying to be alternative and unreliable even if I’d wanted to be: Fiona provided enough drama to keep the entire primary school (indeed, at times what seemed like the whole world) entertained. It sent Mum and Dad crazyand Fiona was punished again and again, although seldom with any effect. Fiona set fire to things. She tormented people. She showed her flat chest to the boys during Thursday-afternoon hymn practice, then flashed at the headmaster when he tried to