The Warning Read Free

bloke’s got magic powers? He hasn’t. He’s just a charming, handsome man with red bicycle clips. This is Freya’s achievement, not his.”
    It is a week after the Joseph auditions. I’m in the Eagle pub on Benet Street, having a drink with my best friend and harshest critic, Lorna Tams. Lorna is 42, ten years older than me. Two years ago, she left her husband, Josh. She has since divorced him, and invented a tagline to describe him: “A nice enough bloke, but not the husband I deserve.”
    When I first met Lorna, she worked in a brewery. Now’s she’s given that up and is training to be a Methodist minister. When I asked her about the change of direction, she said, “Beer got boring.”
    I know next to nothing about the Methodist church. I hope they like their ministers to dress provocatively and simmer with disdain, or else Lorna won’t fit in at all.
    “Tom Rigby didn’t cast a spell that made the judges say yes to Freya,” she says now. “He did you a favor for sure, but he isn’t some kind of . . . good luck charm on legs.”
    Then why do I feel as if that’s exactly what he is?
    “A hundred and twenty-three children auditioned for the chorus,” I tell Lorna. “Only twenty got in. Freya was one of them. I’m not saying it was down to Tom Rigby alone, but . . . there was something magical-feeling about the whole experience.”
    “Magical? You mean you fancied him?”
    “No, I didn’t,” I say indignantly. “I didn’t think about him in that way at all.”
    “Hmm.” Lorna narrows her eyes. “All right, then. So we’re going to stop talking about him, are we, and talk about your talented daughter instead?”
    I bite my lip. Sometimes I wish Lorna weren’t as clever as she is. It would make my life a lot easier.
    The truth is, I am not quite ready to forget all about Tom Rigby.
    “I need to thank him,” I say quietly—so quietly that I can hardly hear my own words over the louder voices of the students at the table next to ours. I don’t like this part of the Eagle. I would prefer to sit in the room to the right of the front door, which is never as noisy as this, but Lorna always insists on sitting in what she calls “the historical part.”
    “You did thank him,” she points out, like a police detective trying to pick holes in a suspect’s story. “Profusely, several times, from what you’ve told me.”
    “I said thank you, yes, but I’d like to thank him properly. He did us such a huge favor.”
    “Right. By ‘thank him properly,’ you of course mean hunt him down and force him to marry you?”
    “No, I mean I’d like to get him a card, or . . .” I daren’t finish my sentence. I stare awkwardly down at the table, too embarrassed to say any more.
    “A card or ?” Lorna laughs. “You’re so transparent! A card or ,” she repeats. “You’ve already got him a present, haven’t you? What? Tell me! What did you buy him? Ugh, Chloe, I despair of you. Have you bought anything for your star of a daughter, by the way? The one who actually, y’know, got the part in Joseph ?”
    “Yes. I made her something.” I don’t feel like telling Lorna that the “something” was a necklace: a tiny opaque glass box on a chain, with a miniature technicolor dreamcoat inside it. It took me four whole days to get it right. It’s beautiful, and Freya loves it. If Lorna wants to think I’m neglecting my daughter in favor of a handsome stranger, let her. It will serve her right to be wrong.
    “And what did you make for Tom Rigby?” she asks, eyeing me warily.
    I feel my face overheat. My present for Tom took me only half a day to make. It was much less intricate: a tiepin. A sequence of musical notes inside a rectangular metal frame. Notes from “The Ash Grove,” Freya’s audition song.
    Down yonder green valley where streamlets meander. . .
    “You’re too embarrassed to tell me what you’ve made for him,” says Lorna, watching me closely. “This does not bode well. Is