‘What do you say? Fancy giving it a go?’ he asks. ‘Just you and me.’
I look over his shoulder. The room is empty. ‘But why?’ I ask.
‘Just to see how it feels,’ Mr Milford says.
I hesitate.
‘No pressure,’ he adds softly. ‘I promise.’
He starts to play the introduction. It really is a beautiful song.
I don’t know if I’m going to sing or not until the very last moment, the first few notes that leave my mouth taking me almost entirely by surprise.
When I reach the end of the verse, I expect Mr Milford to stop playing, but instead he urges me to ‘keep going!’ and before I know it, I’ve sung the entire song.
When we’re finished, we sit side by side in silence. My palms are sweaty. I rub them on my school skirt but the scratchy polyester isn’t exactly absorbent and just seems to move the sweat about.
‘Have you sung that piece before, Ro?’ Mr Milford asks.
‘No, sir.’
‘Were you familiar with it at all? Before today’s rehearsal, I mean.’
‘No, sir.’
He pauses and looks thoughtful. ‘I’m going to try something if that’s OK, Ro. Do you think you can sing an A for me.’
I steal another glance over my shoulder. There’s definitely no one else in the room. It’s just me, Mr Milford and the piano. I take a deep breath and sing an A.
Mr Milford lets it carry for a few seconds before playing it on the piano. The notes match.
‘And a D,’ he says.
I sing a D. Again, Mr Milford plays the note on the piano. Again, they match.
Next, he tries a G, an A flat and a B sharp.
‘Ro,’ he says, resting his clasped palms on his lap. ‘Have you ever heard of something called perfect pitch?’
‘Don’t you mean Pitch Perfect? As in the film?’ I saw it at the cinema with Dad years ago. He fell asleep halfway through.
Mr Milford laughs. ‘No, not the film.’
‘Oh. Then no. I don’t think so.’
He turns to face me, tucking his right leg under his left. ‘Ro, perfect pitch is a rare auditory phenomenon, characterized by the ability of a person to identify or recreate a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. In plain English it means the majority of people cannot do what you did just then.’
The word ‘phenomenon’ makes my brain fizz. It just doesn’t fit. He must have got it wrong. I’m ordinary, average, unremarkable, as far from ‘phenomenal’ as you can get.
‘Are you joking, sir?’ I ask.
He smiles. ‘No, Ro. I’m pretty certain you have perfect pitch. Not to mention a very beautiful singing voice.’
I stare hard at the piano keys, my vision blurring so the black and white melt into each other.
‘You seem surprised,’ Mr Milford observes.
I shrug it off.
‘Is anyone else in your family musical?’
‘My mum,’ I answer reluctantly. ‘She’s … she’s kind of a singer.’
Mr Milford’s eyes light up. ‘Really?’
‘Just weddings and social clubs and things.’
‘Do you ever sing together?’
Once upon a time we did. Back before the house got really bad and I began to spend more and more time holed up in my room.
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘She’s pretty busy …’
‘I see.’
The bell rings for afternoon registration. I stand up.
‘It was a privilege to hear you sing today, Ro,’ Mr Milford says. ‘Truly.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I murmur.
‘See you next week?’
I nod, scoop up my bag and hurry out of the classroom, the words ‘perfect pitch’ and ‘phenomenon’ ricocheting around my brain like the ball bearings in a pinball machine. And although I know my dominant emotion should be anger towards Tanvi and her meddling, it’s completely obliterated by the unfamiliar yet really rather pleasant sensation of pure unadulterated excitement.
15
I take a deep breath and half run, half walk up Tanvi’s driveway with my head down. The leaflets are halfway through her letter box when the door springs open and out she jumps, like a human jack-in-the-box.
‘Hi!’ she says.
She’s fully dressed today, wearing skinny grey jeans and a T-shirt with the Cookie Monster on the front, her wispy hair pulled into two slightly wonky Princess Leia-style buns.
Even though her appearance isn’t exactly a surprise, it still makes me jump, the leaflets slipping from my fingers and fluttering to the ground.
‘Sorry,’ Tanvi says as I bend down to pick them up. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that I’ve been sitting here for the past hour waiting for you.’ She claps her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God, did that sound super stalkery? I promise I’m not obsessed with you! Well not that much, ha ha ha! It’s just that I’ve been feeling sooooooo bad about what happened in choir yesterday.’
‘It’s fine,’ I growl, heading back down the driveway.
This is a lie, of course. I’m still absolutely furious with her.
‘No,’ Tanvi calls after me. ‘I was totally out of order and I want to make it up to you. Which is why I got you this.’
Curiosity gets the better of me and I turn round. Tanvi is holding out a big wicker picnic hamper, the sort posh people fill with champagne and fancy cheese at Christmas time.
‘A peace offering,’ she says. ‘Well, don’t you want to know what’s in it?’ she asks when I don’t respond.
‘Not especially.’
I know I’m being rude but I refuse to feel guilty about it. Not after yesterday.
‘I promise it’s nice,’ she says.
‘I don’t care what it is.’
‘Oh, just have a look, will you!’
She flips open the lid of the hamper to reveal an Aladdin’s cave of goodies – mini freshly baked baguettes, three different flavours of kettle chips, little tubs of olives and sun-dried tomatoes, hummus, chocolate chip cookies, Percy Pig sweets and bottles of pink lemonade. And that’s just the stuff I can see. My stomach lets out a quiet grumble. Breakfast was half a custard cream from the very bottom of the biscuit tin at work.
‘I thought we could eat it in the park once you’ve finished,’ Tanvi says, setting it down on the doorstep. ‘Have you got much more to do?’
Before I can answer, she’s already got her nose in the trolley.
‘You’ve hardly got any left!’ she exclaims. ‘Amazing!’
I open my mouth to protest but she’s already bounded back into the house, leaving the door wide open. She reappears less than a minute later, wearing a lilac hoodie over the top of her T-shirt and carrying a rolled-up tartan picnic blanket under her arm.
‘I really don’t have the time for this,’ I say.
‘But I really want the chance to make things up to you. I felt so bad last night I could barely sleep.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Uh-huh,’ she says solemnly. ‘Check out my eye bags.’
I frown. Tanvi’s under-eye area looks perfectly smooth to me.
‘Please,’ she says. ‘It would really mean a lot if you let me do this for you.’
She looks so hopeful, her hands in prayer position, her stupidly big eyes blinking expectantly. With every bat of her eyelashes, I can feel myself softening.
Damn it.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘But I haven’t got long.’
‘Yay!’ Tanvi cries, tying the blanket around her shoulders like a cape and picking up the hamper.
She insists on helping me with my last few leaflets.
‘This is so much fun!’ she exclaims, scampering back down the final driveway, her eyes shining.
‘You’re very easily entertained,’ I say.
‘I know,’ she replies, grinning. ‘It’s one of my very best qualities.’
I glance up the street. A middle-aged man is hovering about five metres behind us. The seco
nd he realizes I’ve clocked him, he widens his eyes in panic and leaps behind a bush.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘This is going to sound weird but I think we’re being followed.’
‘Huh?’ Tanvi says.
‘There,’ I say, pointing at the pair of legs with an overgrown gorse bush for a body.
Tanvi lets out a deep groan. ‘Seriously, Dad?’ she says, her hands on her hips. ‘It’s a good job you’re a pharmacist and not a private detective, because you’d be utterly rubbish at it.’
Dad?
The man steps out from behind the bush and walks towards us with his hands up in surrender. He is short with a rounded belly and bushy moustache.
He smiles sheepishly.
‘Ro, this is my dad. Dad, this is Ro – the girl I’ve been telling you about. He’s a tad overprotective,’ she says, turning to me. ‘And by a tad, I mean a colossally mortifying amount.’
‘But this is your first time going to the park by yourself,’ he says.
Tanvi covers her face with her hands. ‘Dad!’ she wails.
‘But it is, bachcha.’
‘Well, it isn’t really. Since I’m not actually by myself, am I? You’re here.’ She jabs him in the chest with her index finger before whirling round to face me. ‘How long have you been going to the park without your parents, Ro?’
‘Er, I don’t know,’ I say, trying to think what an appropriate age might be. ‘Um, since I was ten or eleven maybe.’
‘See!’ Tanvi says, spinning back to face her dad. ‘You and Mum are being totally over the top!’
‘I prefer to think of it as being careful.’
‘Well, whatever it is, it’s annoying and totally unnecessary. I’m fourteen! Juliet was married at fourteen!’
‘Considering what happened next, that’s probably not the best example,’ her dad points out.
‘Well, maybe if she’d been allowed to go to the park by herself instead of being cooped up at home with her parents all the time, she wouldn’t have bothered with running off with Romeo in the first place? Ever thought of that? We’re just going to sit on the grass and eat our picnic. And if something does happen, which it won’t, I’ve got my phone.’ She pats the pouch of her hoodie.
‘We won’t be long,’ I add. ‘I’ve got to be home in a bit anyway.’
Tanvi’s dad looks from me to Tanvi. ‘OK then,’ he says. ‘Just … be careful.’
‘It’s my default state, Dad,’ Tanvi says. ‘Now go. Preferably somewhere out of sight.’
‘Nice to meet you, Ro,’ he says.
‘Er, yeah, you too.’
‘Love you, bachcha.’
‘Love you too,’ Tanvi says with a dismissive wave of her hand.
‘What does “bachcha” mean?’ I ask as we watch Tanvi’s dad slope back up the street.
‘It’s Hindi for “baby”,’ Tanvi says, rolling her eyes hard.
*
Ostborough Park is pretty busy. After much one-sided debate on Tanvi’s part, we settle for a spot of grass near the tennis courts, one of which is occupied by two elderly women wearing immaculate tennis whites.
‘Help me with this, will you?’ Tanvi says.
Together, we spread out the blanket on the grass, weighing it down in each corner with our shoes, and begin to unload the contents of the hamper.
‘I didn’t know what you liked,’ Tanvi says. ‘So I got a bit of everything.’
‘No kidding,’ I murmur, surveying the spread. There’s enough food to feed an entire family.
‘Sorry about before,’ Tanvi adds, prising the lid off a tub of hummus.
‘Before?’
‘With my dad. Like I said, he and my mum are a bit overprotective.’
‘Is this really your first time in the park by yourself?’ I ask.
That sort of concern is kind of hard to imagine when I’ve been left to my own devices for so long.
‘Yes,’ Tanvi admits, her cheeks glowing. ‘I bet you think I’m super lame, right?’
‘No. It’s nice they care so much.’
When it comes to parents, I’m hardly in a position to judge. I could probably tell Bonnie I’m off to join ISIS, or sell my body in Soho, and she wouldn’t even blink. And Dad is only capable of parenting when I’m right under his nose. Tanvi’s situation is so far removed from mine it’s not even worth comparing.
‘They’ve always been pretty protective,’ Tanvi says, pausing to dunk a kettle chip into the hummus. ‘But I definitely think my cancer sent things up a gear. Like, when I was in Year Seven, they let me walk to school on my own, but now they insist on dropping me off and picking me up.’
‘How come? I mean, what exactly do they think is going to happen to you?’
Tanvi grins, obviously pleased by my question. ‘OK, so I have a few theories. So, the kind of cancer I had, it’s called rhabdomyosarcoma, and it’s pretty aggressive. It’s also really rare, like fewer than sixty kids are diagnosed with it every year and most of them are boys under the age of ten. And I was a twelve-year-old girl. Based on the tumour location and stage, I was given a forty per cent chance of survival. Put all that together, and the odds were stacked against me the entire way. And yet here I am. Which is obviously amazing, but has also made my parents super crazy and convinced there must be a catch or something.’ She pauses and dunks another kettle chip. ‘Ever watched the film, Final Destination?’ she asks.
‘Isn’t that a horror film?’
‘Uh-huh. They’re my absolute obsession by the way. Well, one of them. I kind of have a few.’
‘You’re into horror films? Really?’
With all her peppiness and overflowing optimism, Tanvi strikes me as more of a Disney fiend. The idea of her getting off on blood and gore is more than a little unexpected.
‘Yep,’ Tanvi says, grinning. ‘I love ’em.’
‘But why?’ I ask. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘I dunno. I just really like being scared, I suppose,’ Tanvi says. ‘I like the adrenaline rush I get. My mum and dad would go bonkers if they knew.’
‘Wait – they don’t know you’re into them?’
‘No way. You met my dad just then. As if he’s going to be cool with me watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’
‘He’d be upset?’
‘Big time. He thinks The Great British Bake Off is too tense half the time. Anyway, back to Final Destination. So, in it, a load of high school students narrowly avoid being in this massive plane crash when one of them has a premonition about it and tells them all not to get on the plane, but after that they all start dying in really bizarre accidents.’
‘Right,’ I say, not quite sure where Tanvi is taking this.
‘See, the thing is,’ she says, shuffling in closer, ‘it turns out they were supposed to die in the crash, which is why they’re all getting killed now, because Death is ultimately in charge and they’re on borrowed time.’
‘Wait, are you saying you think you were supposed to die? That you cheated death or something? That’s kind of messed up, Tanvi.’
‘Well, it is when you put it that way! It’s more like I get the feeling my parents think we were lucky, that they don’t quite trust that we’re out the other side yet. It’s not quite like in the film, obviously. It’s not like they actually think I’m going to be impaled on a kitchen knife or decapitated by flying shrapnel any second now. They just worry a lot, and want to know I’m safe at all times, hence my dad’s stalkery behaviour before.’
I take a deep breath and ask the question that’s been playing on my mind since Tanvi started talking.
‘Could you get ill again? I mean, could the cancer come back?’
‘The doctors don’t think so. There’s a possibility I might develop side effects in later life: a possible reduction in bone growth, infertility, a change in the way the heart and kidneys work, a slight increase in the risk of developing another cancer’ – she ticks them off on her fingers, the way you might items on a shopping list – ‘and my immunity
is still a bit weak, but there’s no point in fixating on any of that stuff. It’s all ifs and maybes. Try telling that to my mental parents though.’ She rolls her eyes and drowns a veggie Percy Pig in hummus.
Another deep breath. ‘How close were you to dying?’ I ask.
Tanvi’s face changes slightly and for a second I’m worried I’ve gone too far.
‘I was pretty poorly for a while,’ she says slowly. ‘I never thought I’d actually die though, even when things were really touch and go and my parents had puffy eyes from crying all the time, even though they always pretended it was hay fever. Like I said the other week at school, I kind of always knew I was going to get better.’
‘Wow,’ I say softly.
‘Anyway, enough about me. What about your mum and dad?’ she asks, licking her fingers. ‘Are they ever overprotective?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Lucky.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Do you have brother and sisters?
‘Not really.’
The second the words leave my mouth, I regret them. Why didn’t I just say ‘no’?
Tanvi tilts her head to one side ‘“Not really?” What does that mean?’
I should have known she wouldn’t let that one slide in a million years.
‘It’s no big deal,’ I say, picking at a piece of bread. ‘It’s just that my dad’s wife has a daughter.’
‘So you have a half-sister? Cool!’
‘We’re not related by blood,’ I say stiffly. ‘She was four when my dad got together with her mum.’
‘So he’s not her dad?’
‘Not biologically, no.’
‘Wow, that must be hard for you,’ Tanvi says, reaching over and giving my knee a gentle squeeze.
Her sympathy makes me feel uncomfortable. Time to deflect.
‘Not really,’ I say swiftly. ‘So how about you? Brothers? Sisters?’
‘Two brothers.’ Tanvi says. ‘Anish and Devin. Both older than me. Anish has got a family of his own and Dev’s doing his masters at the moment. He’s living back at home to save money and driving me up the wall. His girlfriend just dumped him, so he’s being a total misery. And when he’s not moping around, he’s winding me up. They both do that actually, at the same time as being ultra-protective. It’s a very annoying combination.’
Paper Avalanche Page 9
