by Minnie Darke
‘You do?’
‘You have a flute player’s lips.’
‘Is that a good thing?’
‘It’s the best. Can I kiss you?’
That was how and where Felix kissed Beatrix for the very first time, and his lips – to her – were exactly right, not too warm and not too cool, not too forceful and not too wimpy, and his tongue touched hers just gently, not too little, not too much. The way he kissed her made her feel like there were fairy lights strung along the underneath of her skin, making bright tracks all over her body, and by the time the ride brought them back to earth, Beatrix had entirely forgotten that the Star Flyer had been anything other than perfect.
The second day of the camp went pretty much the way the second days of music camps usually did, with the students divided up into their various orchestral sections. Because the different groups took their breaks at separate times, Beatrix did not see Felix at morning tea, or lunch, and this made Beatrix violently regret her childhood decision to take up a stupid woodwind instrument like the flute, when clearly she ought to have picked the violin or the viola. Hell, she’d have signed up for a lifetime of lugging around a double bass if it had meant that today she could be with Felix, and not sequestered away from him with a bunch of oboists, clarinet players, bassoonists and a handful of other flautists, while suffering from the knowledge that her best friend, who didn’t even like boys, was spending the entire day in the same room as Felix, just because she’d had the good sense – when she was, like, five years old – to pick the violin.
Although Beatrix’s body was present in the practice room, and although she was ostensibly playing along with some bouncy little scherzo for woodwind choir, her heart and soul were still sixty metres off the ground, turning 360 degrees above the night-time city. Physically, her lips were on the mouthpiece of her flute, but in every other way they were still pressed against the lips of Felix Carter.
Her playing wasn’t anything to write home about, but she got through to the end of the scherzo without stuffing up in any obvious way, and when she felt her phone vibrating in her pocket, she did not react with any particular excitement. After all, Felix didn’t have a phone. Beatrix left it in her pocket all the way through to the end of the session. It wasn’t until the final break of the day that she took it out and read the message from Olivia. So, F and I have talked. You lovebirds can have our room from midnight to 2 am if you like. Y or N?
By midnight, Olivia – having made arrangements with a Scottish viola player who lived only a short distance from the school – was already gone. She’d slipped out the door with her boots under her arm so that she could tiptoe past Ms Kay’s door in stockinged feet.
Alone in their room, softly lit by a bedside lamp with one of Olivia’s silk scarves thrown over the shade, Beatrix could neither sit nor stand for more than five seconds at a stretch. She sat, then stood, then smoothed the bed coverings, as if that made any kind of sense. She twirled a length of her hair around her finger, paced the short distance from one end of the room to the other, and then – for the umpteenth time – went into the bathroom to check that her lipstick was on straight. As if that made any kind of sense, either.
In the vanity mirror, Beatrix studied her face as if trying to remember it. As the seconds ticked down to midnight, she wondered if, tomorrow, her face would have gained some new way of looking. Or if it would have lost an old one. Or neither. Or both.
At precisely midnight, Beatrix heard a soft tap on the door. She took a deep breath, and as she stepped out of the bathroom, her mirror-self slid sideways out of the frame.
She opened the door no further than was necessary, and Felix sidled in, tall, thin and almost inconceivably gorgeous. He had not come far, only from the floor below, where the boys slept two to a room with their male teachers stationed in rooms at either end of the corridor. He was wearing loose pants and a T-shirt. It was the first time Beatrix had seen him like this, and there was something undressed about him that drew her particular attention to the sharp bones of his elbows and wrists and clavicles.
‘Haloo,’ he whispered, once the door was closed behind him.
‘Haloo,’ she whispered back, and for a moment she wished she was armless, like the Venus de Milo, so she didn’t have to worry about where to put her hands. She didn’t want to let them creep into her pockets, or reach up and start fiddling with her hair, which was what they seemed to want to do, but they felt all weird and wrong just hanging by her sides.
All the ease of the night before had gone. The casual, sparky flirtatiousness that she and he had shared as they’d walked the market and talked had now disappeared. The omnipresent fact of what they might be about to do had filled the room to the point where it didn’t seem to leave space for much else. Like talking. Or even breathing. Or moving in any way. They were still standing, face-to-face and almost paralysed, just inside the door.
It was Felix who managed to break the spell, reaching out with one of his cellist’s hands so that his fingers disappeared into the thickness of Beatrix’s curls, and his thumb was gently caressing her cheek. Beatrix, melting on the inside, closed her eyes.
Then they were kissing. They kissed standing up, and then they kissed sitting side by side on the bed. And then they kissed lying down, and soon Felix was lying on top of Beatrix, and just the weight of his body on hers was enough to make her light-headed. Soon clothes were coming off, item by item, and her breasts were in his hands and in his mouth. Only a few more moments passed before there were only underpants left between them, and also the single sock that Beatrix couldn’t manage to wriggle off with the bare toes of her other foot.
Beatrix tugged at the waistband of Felix’s boxers.
‘Wait, wait, wait,’ he said. ‘We can’t.’
‘We can’t?’
Felix, his nose just inches above Beatrix’s, shook his head.
‘I had this plan to skip out of dinner and go find a drugstore, but all the teachers were stressing because a couple of people got busted going outside to smoke. I couldn’t swing it, and so I don’t have any—’
‘It’s okay. I, um, have some,’ Beatrix said, extracting a little red packet from the bedside drawer. ‘Oh God, now you’re going to think—’
‘That you actually are a goddess,’ Felix said, kissing her again.
So it was that after a bit of only moderately awkward fumbling – during which Beatrix had cause to be grateful for Juanita, and some lessons in condom application that had involved an overripe banana – that Beatrix and Felix made love for the first, memorable, sweet, sticky, slightly painful and absolutely exhilarating time.
It was only the next day, in the late afternoon, when the English and Canadian students were shepherded to Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. But love moves fast when it is all brand new and has no barnacles on it to slow it down, and by the time Beatrix and Felix were sitting beneath the domed ceiling of the station’s waiting room they had already exchanged addresses and promises, and made a thousand plans about how and when they would see each other again.
‘I want you to have this,’ Felix said, unclasping the gold chain from around his neck. It was so fine that when the entire length of it was all puddled together, the metal took up less than the space of a penny in Beatrix’s palm. ‘My mother gave it to me, when I was really little. I’ve had it almost all my life.’
Beatrix closed her hand for a moment, and felt the preciousness of the gift.
‘She won’t mind you giving it away?’
Felix shrugged. ‘If I told her how I felt, I’m sure she’d understand. Can I put it on for you?’
Beatrix bundled her hair into her hands and held it out of the way while he slipped the chain around her neck and fastened it. She could feel the warmth of his breath on the back of her neck and sense his concentration. When he was done, she let her hair fall, and turned around to kiss him. ‘I won’t take it off,’ she said.
Through the waiting room’s loudspeakers came the announc
ement that flooding on the tracks had caused an hour’s delay to the ScotRail service that was to take Felix and his schoolmates to Aberdeen. While a ripple of annoyance passed through the waiting room, Beatrix and Felix reacted as if they’d just had news of a stay of execution, kissing each other with the kind of passion that made Ms Kay – sitting at the far end of their row of seats – look up from her magazine and cough, meaningfully.
‘I love this,’ Beatrix said, putting her hand to her throat. ‘I wish I had something to give you in return.’
She thought through the contents of her overnight bag, remembering how much he’d liked her socks, the ones with the little pizza slices on them, but that was a stupid idea. He’d given her a necklace that he’d worn for most of his life, and she was proposing to give him some socks that were almost certainly manky and in need of a wash?
‘Wait,’ she said, remembering. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’
She’d seen it during the morning’s workshops, when the woodwinds had been given a composition task to do in their manuscript books – that song, that love song. There had been this little phase in her life when she and her dad used to play it together, she on her flute and he on his keyboard. It must have been a year or more since they’d done this, but its melody was part of the musical library in her mind, and every now and then, she would find herself humming it.
Beatrix tugged the manuscript book out of the smaller of her two bags.
‘Here,’ she said, opening the book to the right page. ‘It’s the best I have.’
Felix kissed her. ‘Will you play it for me?’
‘It has two parts,’ Beatrix said.
‘Just the melody, then?’
Beatrix took out her flute and fitted its parts together. As she played the notes of the treble clef, Felix’s eyes moved from Beatrix to the sheet music and back again. By the time she had reached the end, he had taken his cello from its case and begun to play the notes on the bass clef, improvising to fit the piano music to his own instrument.
In twenty-seven minutes from now, the final call would come for Beatrix to get on the train to London. She would be crying while she kissed Felix goodbye, and not gentle little sniffs either, but great big racking sobs that made her worry she was going to get snot on his face. And then the doors would close, and Felix would be left to stand there, nothing in his hands but a leather-bound manuscript book, watching the train haul its many carriages out of the station and away, ripping his heart out of his chest and towing it behind as if on a string, a sad little red thing bouncing along on the tracks.
But that wouldn’t be for twenty-seven minutes yet. For now, Beatrix returned to the beginning of the song, and Felix followed her lead. As she played, she glanced up now and then from the sheet music to watch Felix’s fingers pounce from string to string, effortlessly and unerringly finding their mark. To Beatrix, the song was familiar, but for Felix this was true sight-reading – a prima vista – and yet the two pieces of the song fitted together as if they had always been meant to be played together on a flute and a cello in a waiting room in a cold train station, where backpacking couples unburdened themselves of their luggage and stood rubbing their shoulders, and men came out of M&S with bunches of flowers to take with them on their journeys by way of apology or seduction, where business people towed tidy little suitcases as they hurried on through the concourse and an elderly lady sat with a dachshund on her lap, its coat made from the same tartan as her shopping bag.
WHEN EVIE WOKE, she had no sense that this day would be significantly different from the one before, or the one before that. Although the morning sky was still dark when she threw back her ugly floral curtains, she knew that it would lighten only to the motley January-grey colour it had already been for weeks on end. And while there was a pile of clothes on the floor beside her bed, the clothes were all – as usual – her own. Not a single visual clue remained to confirm that Dave had even been here in the night.
It was often like this, so much so that Evie had become accustomed to waking up with the idea that she might only have imagined him. Sometimes it seemed to her that the Dave she knew in the darkness – tender and fragile – was some kind of dream-creature and not a real man at all.
Evie showered and dressed in her coffee-making blacks. Downstairs, Dave was sitting at the kitchen table with a pen in hand, a notebook splayed open in front of him, and the slightly wired aura of someone who had consumed the entire contents of the large coffee plunger that stood empty on the table. Probably he’d been awake since the time he’d left her bed in the early hours.
‘Morning,’ she said.
‘Working,’ he replied.
How did I sleep? Not bad, thanks. You? Evie thought, flicking on the kettle.
‘The milk went off,’ Dave said, without looking up from his notebook.
Evie registered the carton sitting in the sink. Without milk, there was no coffee that Evie could be bothered with, so she took a clementine from the fruit bowl. She put her thumb through the skin of the little soft patch at its crown, peeled it, and ate it segment by segment. Still, Dave said nothing, but neither did he write any words on the blank page in front of him.
If Dave was actually some kind of fairy-tale character, Evie thought, then he was probably one of the sort cursed to go about in the daytime inside a prickly pelt that he could only throw off after dark. If he and she were in a fairy tale, then maybe there would be a way to release him from his curse. Perhaps she would be able to find his discarded skin and throw it in the fire. Or something.
Dave tilted in his chair, just ever so slightly, enough to allow a fart to escape from beneath one cheek of his bum, and Evie’s thoughts of fairy tales evaporated. Instead, she thought that maybe her relationship with Dave was more like that of a long-married couple, except that she and Dave had skipped the part where they’d fallen in love and believed in a happily-ever-after future, and just fast-forwarded themselves to the bit where they no longer reserved for their partner a single cup of coffee out of a full-sized plunger, and where it was fine to fart out loud and not excuse it. Maybe it was some kind of strange blessing that there had been no passionate love affair that had hollowed out or gone sour, and no golden age to look back on and regret having lost.
Evie gathered up all the little orange scabs of clementine peel from the table, and as she walked past Dave on her way to the rubbish bin, she thought about how normal it would be for most people, in a moment like this one, to drop a kiss onto their lover’s head; at the very least to deliver a tiny touch to their shoulder.
Evie’s morning at Starbucks was standard, and her visit to the poetry library at lunchtime was pleasant but unremarkable. She worked steadily through the afternoon, smiling approvingly at the customers who remembered to bring their keep-cups and shrugging ruefully along with the much greater number of customers who forgot. When the day was done, she walked to her bus stop and had been standing there for a few minutes, waiting in the cold, when a very ordinary thought occurred to her. Milk.
While Dave could be relied upon to replenish the house stores of beer and whisky, it wasn’t wise to trust that he’d go out to the shops for milk. If Evie wanted coffee the next morning, she’d have to provide for herself; the nearest shop she could think of was the M&S in Waverley Station.
The chill of the January afternoon seemed to chase after Evie as she descended on the steep escalator into the station’s heart. After locating the full-cream milk amid the bewildering array of low-fat and no-fat milks, she paid for her purchase at one of the self-service booths that both pleased her introvert tendencies and made her worry about being complicit in the layoff of supermarket staff. She made her way out into the ticket hall, and that was when she heard it.
Evie didn’t know if she heard the cello first or the flute, or if she heard them both together, but the picture her mind immediately made out of the two sounds was of a pale silk ribbon twining around the branches of a dark-wooded tree. Her eyes quickly sought out the source of
what her ears had already found, and there they were. A pair of teenagers, he playing the cello, she the flute.
On those unexceptional railway station chairs, the two musicians sat as close to each other as their instruments would allow, their bodies angled inwards, a book of music propped open on the seat between them. The young man was almost ridiculously good-looking, his dark red hair overgrown and his long limbs both lanky and fluid as he played. She, too, was beautiful, with thick sandy-blonde curls and a poised way of holding her body – shoulders back, chest open – that seemed to be all of a piece with the way the music flowed through her and into the flute and out into the hallway.
Evie moved closer, feeling the way the music made something inside her rise and fall in accord with its rhythms. The cello’s part ascended and descended in a discernible pattern while the flute’s part darted and soared. Evie could feel the song reaching into the very middle of her, tugging on different threads. If she’d had to describe the feeling, she’d have said it was something like the bittersweet feeling of wanting to cry for happiness.
But if Evie was honest – and she always tried to be – watching these two, listening to them, was also bringing out in her the bright green sting of envy. Evie could see in the set of their bodies, and hear in the notes of their music, that the cellist and the flautist were in love. Not just any kind of love, either. What they were feeling, what they were playing, wasn’t tepid love, or friendly love, or practical love, or sympathetic love, or convenient love. Flowing between them in the music was passionate love, all-or-nothing love, a-little-bit-dizzy-in-the-head love – love of the kind that Evie had only ever seen from the outside. It hurt her even to admit how much she wanted to feel it for herself.
What was it, Evie wondered, that made some people fit for a love like that, and left other people wanting? Was love like a radio signal, and you just had to be lucky enough to be born with your heart’s dials tuned to the right frequency? Or was it something that could only happen to you when you were young and fearless? And, if so, had Evie already grown too old and too scared? Had she already missed her chance? Or was there still time?
