Love Song

by Sophia Bennett

  Twiggy urged me on, past an abandoned tennis court and behind the sunken garden, down the hill towards the lake. By the water’s edge I spotted a rowing boat tied to a post. It was a little wooden craft with peeling green and white paintwork, and the name Aurora painted loopily on the side. I hoped for a moment that I could use it to get to the island in the middle. I’d seen a stone building there, hidden in the trees, that I wanted to explore. But like everything else, the boat was rotten and broken. It could still float, but only just. I wouldn’t trust it to carry me as far as I could skim a pebble.

  When the boys finally surfaced, Declan went for a run. The others spent time with Orli in the kitchen, eating more of her pancakes and catching up on her news. They didn’t talk to each other, though. The rift between Angus and Jamie still hung in the air like a dissonant chord, making even Orli uncomfortable.

  I left them to it and went on the hunt for something warm to wear that didn’t smell of mothballs. The boys had a vanload of designer luggage and all I had, so far, was a moth-eaten dressing gown.

  The attics were a disappointment, containing mostly broken furniture and boxes of out-of-date baked beans and cornflakes. However, a delicate wrought-iron spiral staircase rose up from one of the rooms, disappearing into the roof. I followed it up, feeling like I was in Jack and the Beanstalk. At the top, I found myself not in the clouds, but in a little tower, whose grubby windows looked past the chimneystacks to panoramic views of fields and mountains. If it had been mine, I would have painted here. It would have made the perfect hideaway. Instead, it was packed with garment rails. Given my quest today, this was a promising start.

  The clothes on the rails were all neatly protected in garment bags, and underneath the plastic were silk dresses and fur coats. I needed warmth, certainly, but this was a bit extreme. Did the Otterburys do nothing except garden and go to balls? Then I spotted two large black bin liners in the corner marked ‘CHARITY’ and ‘CHUCK’.

  I opened the ‘CHUCK’ one and looked inside. The first thing I saw was a baggy, bright-turquoise, loopily hand-knitted jumper. I pulled it out to examine it and found a hole in the front the size of a saucer. Other than that, it was perfectly wearable, clean and smelt faintly of fabric conditioner. After hesitating for a millisecond, I put it on.

  Underneath were several other equally useful-looking items and some party clothes. Nothing seemed to date from after about 1990, and whoever they once belonged to was about three sizes bigger than me, but that didn’t matter.

  The ‘CHARITY’ bag was similar. It was full of men’s clothes, all neatly pressed and folded: stiff-fronted dress shirts, leather-buttoned cardigans, patched army jumpers. I didn’t think it would make much difference to the universe if I borrowed some of them and put them back later. They weren’t exactly what I’d have chosen on a shopping trip with Tammy, but they were a lot more practical than a kaftan. And nobody, except possibly Orli, would notice what I was wearing anyway.

  My official tasks weren’t difficult: helping to keep the place clean and tidy, and organizing the laundry, which was collected and delivered by a service in the nearest town. According to Orli, the Hall had an ancient, deaf housekeeper who was supposed to do all of this, but she was the person who’d twisted her knee and that’s when Windy had got the idea to call me.

  I was replacing a seventy-nine-year-old, infirm widow. Thanks, Windy.

  Anyway, the job left plenty of time for other things. I found some tins of house paint in one of the tumbledown courtyard workshops, and decided to paint a mural on the bare wall in the Silk Room. It would cover up some of the stains there, and give me the chance to capture some of Heatherwick’s eccentricity with my art.

  I didn’t usually go in for painting other people’s houses without permission, but someone had already decorated a room upstairs with psychedelic swirls, and there were the mismatched kitchen cupboards, and the painted armchair in the drawing room. It seemed to be an Otterbury tradition. Besides, I was living with boys who played Pizza-Frisbee in hotel corridors and moved suites at midnight. I was learning how to break the rules.

  I’d stopped caring what the boys thought about me, but after my brave stand against the walls of fluttering paper, they treated me with a certain respect. I began to like them, as I’d suspected I would. However, as the days passed, and an uneasy truce persisted, I began to wonder if Windy had brought them here too late. Angus and Jamie weren’t ready to break up the band yet, but The Point was like the Hall itself – grand, glamorous, and falling apart.

  Armed with his guitar, Jamie found quiet, cut-off places to work on his ideas for new material. Once, he disturbed me in the Fluttering Room, while I was trying to read some of the poetry. Another time, he somehow found a way on to the tower above the front door and sat with his legs dangling out of the window. When he saw me, he switched to ‘Greensleeves’. Henry VIII in a T-shirt and jeans. It made me laugh, but he cut a solitary figure – one boy, alone, against the facade of a crumbling country house.

  Angus, meanwhile, locked himself in his room with his computer, two guitars and a keyboard he’d swiped from the music room. I’d hear odd riffs and snatches of melody emerging occasionally, but nothing he seemed happy with: generally they were followed by silence and grunts of frustration.

  A week went by, and the number of songs they’d written was precisely zero. With no new material to work on, Connor played endless, lonely games of snooker against himself in the billiard room. Ignored by the others, Declan spent most of his time in the music room, trying out drums, keyboards, saxophone and whatever other instruments he could find – even a mandolin. He was quite obviously genius-level good on all of them, and particularly dazzling on bass guitar. This only seemed to make Connor more annoyed.

  It was Twiggy who found the path to the island, on one of our regular walks. One minute she was beside me, the next she was looking at me from across the lake, before disappearing into the bushes. I followed the water’s edge until I got to a clump of weeping willow trees, whose fronds cascaded like an extravagant green waterfall. Behind them was a rickety wooden bridge. I ran along it, and soon I reached the steps of the building I’d seen before, almost hidden by the thick vegetation.

  It was a folly, built of mossy grey stone like the house, and shaped like an ancient temple. Coming from inside, I made out the sounds of a guitar. They were the familiar chords of a piece Jamie had been working on during the tour. When I got inside, he was sitting with his back to the folly wall, wearing an ancient T-shirt and worn-in jeans, his guitar on his lap. Twiggy was sitting beside him, looking pleased with herself.

  He looked up and smiled.

  That Mona Lisa smile. It was bad enough normally, but its effect was magnified by a thousand whenever he was holding a guitar.

  ‘I was hoping you’d find this place,’ he said.

  ‘Why? Do you need something?’

  ‘No.’ He looked surprised. Then he seemed to remember that almost every other time he’d spoken to me, it was to give me instructions. He looked slightly ashamed. ‘Look, I don’t expect you to fetch and carry for us here. It’s kind of ridiculous.’

  ‘OK.’

  There was an awkward silence, in which we both remembered that I used to stand to attention while he looked on as his girlfriend gave me instructions for washing her underwear.

  ‘Anyway,’ he coughed. ‘I thought you might like to see the windows.’

  ‘Er, sure.’

  He placed his guitar down and went over to the nearest one. The panes were old and dirty and covered in scratches, but when I looked closer I saw that the marks were names and initials etched in the glass. Couples’ initials. Some of them were surrounded by hearts. This must have been a lovers’ meeting place.

  ‘It reminds me of one of your collages,’ Jamie said. ‘The one you made of Verona.’

  I was amazed. ‘You remember that?’ I could hardly believe he’d noticed.

  ‘Yeah. Those pictures were at the Juliet house, we
ren’t they?’

  I nodded again. While he’d looked at them on the plane to Gdynia, Sigrid had been whispering in his ear the whole time about what a thief and a flirt I was. Had he really been focusing on the pictures?

  ‘Anyway, that piece was the best. I liked the others too, though. There was one that was full of mostly hair products. And Connor, blurry in the background, checking himself out. That was a classic.’

  I smiled, remembering it. ‘You didn’t mind, then? That I took them?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shrugging. ‘You didn’t stick a camera in my face. You didn’t try and catch me with my pants down. Or steal my hair.’

  ‘Sigrid seemed to think I would,’ I sighed.

  ‘I know she did,’ he said gently. ‘People do that in her world.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  There was another silence, until Jamie laughed. ‘Have we run out of conversation so quickly?’

  I shrugged. ‘I was trying to think of a question I could ask you that I don’t already know the answer to.’

  He looked surprised. ‘You know me so well?’

  ‘You have one of the longest pages on Wikipedia. There are websites about your favourite breakfast cereal.’

  He groaned. ‘I’m sick to death of Wheetios. I mentioned them once and they sent me, like, a million boxes. If I never see one again, it’ll be too soon. Don’t tell anyone, or it’ll be another headline: JAMIE MALDON HATES WHEETIOS. COMPANY GOES BUST. Or gets firebombed, or something. I can’t open my mouth without … It doesn’t matter. What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  He considered the question. ‘OK – what’s your favourite cereal?’

  ‘Really?’

  He grinned. ‘You know mine.’

  ‘Fine … I think I might have to set up a shrine to Orli’s pancakes, as far as breakfasts go,’ I said. ‘She puts homemade jam on them. They’re just …’ I made a face to try and explain the ecstasy of eating them.

  He laughed. ‘Go on …’

  ‘What else? I come from a big family …’

  ‘Oh yeah! I knew that!’ He looked proud of himself. ‘Loads of brothers and sisters and cousins, all living in Sa’af London.’

  I couldn’t believe it. He was slipping into the Croydon accent, like it was a joke. I pictured his fiancée making fun of me behind my back, and I had to fight the urge to throw something. He saw the glowering look on my face.

  ‘I’m sorry! Sisi made it sound great. She was an only kid, like me. Her dad was a workaholic, and her mum was this freak-out gym bunny, always moving houses. She was mostly on her own.’

  I tried to form an expression that would look like sympathy for Sigrid Santorini. Before she got her break with Disney. And went out with Jamie Maldon.

  Even thinking about Sigrid seemed designed to put me in a bad mood. I didn’t want to spoil things, because I’d started to enjoy myself, but when I thought back to my family, my strongest memory was of Ariel cutting her hair before I left.

  ‘Do you remember my sister?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘She was with me the day I first met you. When I used the blanket. She used to be one of your biggest fans.’

  He cocked his head. ‘Used to be?’

  ‘Yeah. She slept with her face resting against yours on the pillow. She dyed her hair to match your favourite colour.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Blue. And yellow.’

  He sighed. ‘You see? I don’t have a favourite colour. They keep asking me and I just say the first thing that comes into my head. And then it gets all this … meaning.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘She cut the blue off, anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of me. Because I told her you weren’t the boy she thought she knew from the love songs. You were a rock star, living on your own special planet.’

  He nodded. ‘I was. Touring does that to you. It’s bad for the soul. It gives you the biggest highs in the world, but …’ He trailed off, embarrassed, I thought, at the person he’d become. ‘Ariel’s a lovely name,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘I’m sorry about the hair.’

  ‘Me too.’

  There was a scratching noise at the door. Twiggy was itching to go back outside and carry on with the walk. I joined her in the doorway, and Jamie sat back down with his guitar. I left him there, strumming a series of minor chords that hung in the cool, quiet air.

  According to Wikipedia (I’d looked them up before I came), Angus and Jamie had written Oyster together in a frenzy of creativity during their first year of touring. Whatever had driven them apart later on, a big country house wasn’t going to fix it. Not if they carried on like this. If anything, it just seemed to give them more space to avoid each other.

  Another day rolled slowly by, and then another, while the boys circulated around the house and grounds, like magnets set to repel. I was used to a place crammed full of laughter and noise, and little ones constantly demanding my attention. Here, the only sounds were slamming doors, abandoned chord progressions, the clicking of snooker balls, and Declan’s endless solitary drumming in the music room.

  At least meals were sociable times for Orli, me and Sam. The security man was quiet, but friendly. There was a keen intelligence behind his dark eyes. I sensed he wouldn’t have thrown himself on me if he’d found me wrapping a Hollywood star in a tablecloth. He was the one person who was allowed out of the grounds, and drove out each morning in a battered estate car to get provisions from the farm shop in the nearby village. Orli cooked something delicious with whatever he brought back, and we ate it together around the kitchen table.

  Sam managed to rig up a radio that could only get two stations: Classic FM and a local pirate station. So we listened to snippets of Mozart and Rachmaninov, or grime and dubstep, depending on which signal was better. It turned out that Orli and Sam were big fans of Dizzee Rascal. And each other. They’d met through the band before, and gave each other long, lingering looks across the table. I sensed a lot of history from previous tours and recording sessions.

  The boys avoided the kitchen at these times. They’d appear at random hours of the day, demanding instant food and disappearing with it to eat, separately and alone, in whatever sad little nook they were inhabiting that day. Orli disapproved, but said nothing.

  ‘I’m their chef, not their mum,’ she sighed. ‘My job is to make their job easier.’

  ‘But they’re not doing their job,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Not yet,’ she agreed, looking dubious. ‘Not yet.’

  Upstairs, in the big, quiet room I’d always dreamt of, there were times I missed my family so much it made my bones ache. I sat on my bed with the quilt wrapped around me, reading and re-reading a short, hurried letter from Mum telling me ‘everyone was fine’ and wondering about all the things she hadn’t said. What new phrases would the twins have learnt by now? What were they drawing? Was Josh crawling into my bed at night, like he used to do when I was home late, snuggling up to my ancient teddy bear? Or had Michael already commandeered my bedroom? Did it smell of old trainers and fresh Lynx yet?

  And Ariel – had she forgiven me? If she could see how things really were in this crumbling place, would that make things better, or worse?

  Ten days after our arrival, I woke up from a nightmare. I couldn’t remember what it was about, but my muscles were tensed, as if I’d been running for my life. My heart was beating fast. I sat up against the pillows and looked out through the crack in the curtains, at the moonlit clouds scudding past as if they were frightened too.

  Another storm was brewing and rain spattered the windows like gravel against the glass. The wind whistled and cooed as it rose and fell. Inside, Heatherwick Hall was an orchestra of rattles and groans that sounded like a mob of zombies breaking in and taking over the house. I had to tell myself that the cracks and rumblings were water pipes creaking in the cold air. The thumps, which sounded exactly like a heavy-footed swamp creatu
re walking up the stairs, were floorboards contracting. The scratching noise was a branch brushing against the eaves. Not armies of insects eating their way through the ceiling beams to get me. Probably.

  There was no way I was getting back to sleep. I grabbed the old woollen dressing gown and swung it round my shoulders, shoving my feet into the ankle-length wellies I’d adopted as a pair of slippers.

  What am I doing in this place?

  I paused in the corridor. Angus’s room was four doors down from mine, but I knew he had fears of his own. Nothing could possibly be cheesier than to knock on Connor’s door, or Jamie’s, and say I needed company. It must have happened to them a thousand times on tour. They’d never believe me that ‘company’ meant company. Declan still felt like someone I hardly knew. By now I was getting used to all the noises anyway. I decided I could brave the rest of the house on my own.

  Downstairs, there was no sign of life. Various lamps had been left on – which I was grateful for – but the rooms were empty. The sounds weren’t so bad here. In fact, down here it was possible to believe the house wasn’t being broken into, or eaten alive.

  I wandered through the maze of rooms, picking things up and putting them down. One of them was a book of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Dark, historical horror. It was perfect for a night like this, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words, so I abandoned it on a table in the library.

  Soon, I thought, Windy would have to end this experiment. It clearly hadn’t worked. There must be somewhere else the boys could safely go, where they didn’t just slowly drive themselves crazy. I missed Tammy. I missed my family, and what was the point? You couldn’t just make someone make an album. Even if you paid them millions, you couldn’t draw music from them. If the experiment had proved anything, it had proved that.