A Song for Ella Grey

by David Almond

  I groaned.

  “Hell’s damn teeth, Ella.”

  “It’ll be simple and beautiful. Just music and dancing. Some wine. Some sunshine. And love.” She kissed me again. “What better place for it? What better way to turn Northumberland into Greece?”

  She giggled.

  “Don’t be so serious,” she said.

  She took an apple from my bedside table and crunched into it. She smiled and said she was bliddy famished. They’d been so preoccupied with each other they’d eaten nowt all day.

  She laughed at me.

  “Oh, Claire, can’t you just be happy for me? Yes? No?”

  She stood right before me. The light from the window poured in from behind her. Oh, she looked so beautiful. She looked so changed, suddenly more than the dreamy Tyneside girl. She looked as if she was shining.

  “Be happy. Please. At least for today. Yes?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yes,” I told her. “At least for today.”

  “Good. Now I have to go. And listen, the Greys mustn’t suspect anything. You won’t tell them anything, will you? You won’t tell them I left school today. You won’t tell them about Orpheus. You won’t tell them about me marrying him at half-term.”

  I sighed at her ridiculous list.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t tell them.”

  “Good. And, Claire, I want you to give me away.”

  “Give you away?”

  “It’s what the father usually does, of course, but I don’t have a proper father, so I want it to be you. I want you to put my hand in his and give your blessing. Please say you’ll do that.”

  I couldn’t say a word.

  She gripped my hand. There was sudden distress in her lovely eyes.

  “You’ve been everything to me,” she whispered. “Ever since the day we met at primary school. Remember?”

  “Yes, of course I remember.”

  Miss Simpson’s class, all those years back. Two little girls at a little wooden desk singing together, counting together, chanting the alphabet, the days of the week, the months of the year. Two little girls holding each other’s hand beneath the desk and whispering that they were each other’s very best friend and would always be so, and were always so as the years passed by.

  “Then say you’ll do it for me, Claire. Please.”

  I looked at my poor delighted distressed friend. What could I do for her? How could I prevent this all happening? There were a few short weeks between now and half-term. Maybe it all would change. Maybe she’d see sense. Maybe Orpheus would disappear. Maybe…

  “Say it, Claire.”

  I tried to please and comfort her, as I always had.

  “Yes,” I said. “If it comes to it, I suppose I will.”

  “Brilliant!”

  She giggled again.

  “Oh, it’ll be such fun!”

  She turned to go.

  “Oh, and I want him to meet your parents,” she said.

  Jesus Christ.

  “I can’t take him to meet mine, can I?” she said. “Your parents will understand him. They know about people like him. And I’ve always felt so close to them. Please say I can bring him. Please say yes.”

  TWO

  They came that Sunday evening. I didn’t tell Mum and Dad much in advance, just that he was a lad we’d all met at Bamburgh, that he was a singer, that he’d come to see us all again and had met Ella.

  Mum laughed.

  “Is it love?” she said.

  “Who knows?”

  “Ah well, let’s hope so, at least for a little while. She really deserves a nice boy.” She winked. “As do you, madam.”

  Then she cuddled me and told me Sam was fine and to take no notice of her.

  I said that Ella would like them not to speak to the Greys about him.

  “So they don’t know about him?” said Mum.

  “No. So best if you don’t tell them. Not yet anyway.”

  Part of me wanted them to snap back, “Yes, we will tell them, and right now!”

  But Mum just said, “They are rather overprotective, aren’t they.”

  “Rather?” said Dad. “Anyway, when do our paths ever cross theirs?”

  “So he’s a bit challenging for them?” said Mum.

  I shrugged.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Well, it’s great she feels she can bring him here,” said Mum.

  “Quite an honour, in fact,” said Dad.

  “What does he eat?” asked Mum.

  “Vegetarian, I think.”

  “Ah. Excellent!”

  Ella had said they’d come at four. It was almost six by the time they turned up.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Ella. “We lost track of time. If it’s too late…”

  “No,” said Mum. She took Ella’s hand and drew her in. “And this must be Orpheus.”

  “Aye,” he said.

  She stepped aside and guided them into the kitchen.

  “You’re very welcome,” she said. “Call me Elaine.”

  I was waiting with Dad at the kitchen table. Ella was wearing a long blue flowery flowing thing and strappy sandals. He was like always: the coat, the boots, the lyre, the hair.

  “I’m Tom,” said Dad.

  “Claire,” I said. “Remember?”

  He cast his eyes over me. He blinked.

  “I was on Bamburgh Beach,” I said.

  “Oh. Yes.”

  So weird, to see him in a kitchen, in a house. On the beach he’d seemed at home, but here he was uncertain, awkward, edgy.

  Mum took his coat from him. He had blue jeans and a worn blue shirt beneath. He rested the lyre against the table leg.

  “What will you drink?” said Mum.

  “Wine?” said Dad. “You girls could have some as well.”

  Orpheus turned to Ella. She squeezed his hand.

  “Juice,” said Ella, “if that’s OK. Or just water.”

  “Water,” said Orpheus.

  We all sat down. There were platitudes: about Ella’s work at school, about her lovely dress, and whether her parents were well.

  “So you sing, Orpheus?” said Dad.

  “Yes.”

  His gaze roamed across the walls, the Picasso print, the African masks, the shelves of pasta and beans and chilli sauces, the dangling garlic, the Le Creuset pots.

  “And are you from around here?” said Mum.

  “Kind of.”

  Close to, I saw how beautiful he was. Cheekbones, jaw line, full lips, clear dark blue eyes, skin unblemished beneath the scrawny beard. And I saw how beautiful Ella had become, as if he’d reached deep down towards the beauty that had been in her always and had drawn it out into the light and enabled it to shine.

  “He likes wandering,” said Ella. She squeezed his hand again. “Don’t you, Orpheus?”

  “Aye.”

  Ella laughed.

  “I think he’s been everywhere,” she said. “Far more places than I’ve ever been!”

  His eyes kept moving, as if he was just waiting to be gone again. I watched Ella watching him. She’d go anywhere with him, would follow him anywhere.

  “We’re travellers as well,” said Dad. “Or have been.”

  He reached for the lyre.

  “Do you mind?” he asked.

  Orpheus shrugged.

  “No,” he said.

  “We saw things like this in Kashmir,” Dad said.

  “And Marrakech,” said Mum. “All those musicians in that marketplace!”

  “The Djemaa el Fna,” said Dad. “Otherwise known as the Square of the Dead. And those conjurors and snake charmers! Wow.”

  Orpheus nodded.

  “You’ve been to such places?” said Mum.

  “Yes.”

  “So marvellous, aren’t they?”

  Dad plucked a couple of the strings. The notes sounded dead, flat. He laughed.

  “I never had the musical touch,” he said. “You’ll play a bit for us.”
<
br />   “Tom,” sighed Mum. “Leave the lad alone. He hardly knows us yet.”

  There was a plate of falafel, another of dolmades, a bowl of salad, lots of bread, water, juice. Ella said how delicious it was, how she never got food like this at home. She talked about her walk with Orpheus that morning. They’d followed the Tyne westward. They’d seen salmon jumping, canoeists on the river. There was a whole blossoming hawthorn tree spinning in the current that must have been washed out from the banks further upstream.

  “And those daft ducks!” she laughed. “Remember, Orpheus.”

  He narrowed his eyes, remembering, and he smiled at her.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Daft ducks. Oh, aye!”

  The quack of a duck came from his lips and we laughed.

  “Thought we’d never get rid of them,” said Ella. “They’d have followed us to the end of time!”

  He ate some lettuce, a couple of dolmades, a tomato or two. He sipped his water.

  “We went to the Ouseburn,” said Ella. “And I told him about when we were little.” She laughed. “That’s why we were late. We took a little detour into the past.”

  “They were such lovely little girls,” said Mum. “I see them now, with their dolls and their summer dresses and…”

  “Mum…” I said.

  “I know. And where were you a little boy, Orpheus?”

  “A little boy?” he said in surprise.

  “Yes, when you were a bonny little boy? Were you somewhere around here?”

  He seemed confused, like the questions were difficult for him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Not too far away.”

  He looked at Ella nervously. Yes, he wanted to be away.

  “And your parents. Can I ask…?”

  He rolled his eyes upward.

  “In Heaven,” he said.

  “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s all right.”

  We had some fruit afterwards. Orpheus accepted some hibiscus tea. The day outside darkened. Ella said she’d have to be gone soon. She said that everything had been lovely. She said thank you for accepting Orpheus into your home.

  “Perhaps…” said Mum. She indicated the lyre. “If he wouldn’t mind, before you both go…”

  Ella smiled. Orpheus shrugged. All the awkwardness fell from him. He lifted the lyre, started to pluck its strings, to make the deep notes and the high notes, the warm and the cold, the dark and the light, to draw these things together in the music. He started to hum, then to make separate sounds, some of them like words, some of them like birdsong, some of them like the cries of beasts, the laughter of children, the whispers of lovers, their groans of joy. And we leaned towards him as he sang and played, we began to lose ourselves in him, we disappeared, we felt that the music he played came out of us. I don’t know how much time passed. Time was nothing. Time was gone.

  And when it was done, he simply stopped singing, stopped plucking his lyre. We came out of our dreamless dreams and he was already putting his coat back on, he was already taking Ella’s hand and helping her from her chair, and they were both leaving us and opening the door alone and going out into the dark.

  We watched them go. We sat together, mother, father, daughter, at the kitchen table. Nothing we could say. The wind chimes were chiming upstairs. Birds were singing, birds that should have been silent at night. The house itself seemed to tremble, to vibrate. And the table, and the chairs we sat on did also. And our hearts, and ours souls, had a music in them that must have been always there but that until now we had not heard, had not known. But now we did, for Orpheus had been with us, if only for a little time.

  THREE

  I heard him play once more before he went away again. Outside The Cluny, of course, where we and others like us gathered, where we lay at fretful ease on the sloping grass to dream of being artists, where we explored the ways of love and friendship, where we trembled with the weird joys and pains of being young and getting older, where we yearned for freedom and ached just to belong. And as he played, they came out from the workshops and the bars, they hurried down from the bridges, they came running from the pubs and restaurants on Newcastle’s quayside. And they all slowed as they came closer, as the sound possessed them. Some tried to hum along but soon were silent. Impossible to keep up with him. Impossible to imitate. There must have been two hundred or more gathered around the boy in the dark coat with the lyre in his hands, with the Ouseburn flowing through its gates at his back. He sang, and played, and enchanted, and many fell in love with him that night, but the only one he looked upon was Ella, my friend Ella Grey.

  And then he was gone, as was his way, and she went with him for a little while.

  And we who were left behind came to our senses.

  Who the hell? What was that? How did he do that?

  And then Bianca and Crystal were at my shoulder, with Carlo between them.

  Crystal licked her lips and clung to Carlo.

  “I tell you,” Bianca whispered. “If I don’t have that Orpheus before I die…”

  FOUR

  How could someone change so much? How could she suddenly know so much, think so much? Krakatoa was astonished.

  “Ella Grey, you amaze me. How has what I have been saying for months suddenly got through to you?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” she told him.

  “I have not changed my methods. I have not been aware of you giving me greater attention. Have you been reading widely?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Perhaps your parents have been helping you a great deal.”

  “They always want me to do well, sir.”

  “Of course they do. And your father is…”

  “A joiner, sir. And Mum’s a cook.”

  “Indeed. Truly the ways of the mind are mysterious.”

  He strolled through the aisle between the desks.

  “Tell us again your thoughts about Mr. Milton and his Paradise Lost if you would.”

  “Sir?”

  “About the apple, and destiny, and free will.”

  “Well, sir. God knows from the very start how things will turn out. He knows that Adam and Eve will be thrown out of the garden. He knows that trouble after trouble will be the result.”

  “Did Adam and Eve not have the chance to make things turn out better? What of free will? They didn’t have to eat the apple, did they?”

  “They did, sir. They had a kind of free will, but it wasn’t really free will. If it really was, it would be in conflict with God’s knowledge, and in the world of Paradise Lost, that could not be allowed.”

  “So they had to do what they did?”

  “Yes, sir. God put the apple there. He made man and woman. He made their nature. Because of that, he knew what they must do, and they chose what they were destined to choose.”

  All of us were watching her again in astonishment. Was this the Ella we knew?

  “So their apparent free will?” said Krakatoa.

  “Was part of their destiny, sir.”

  Krakatoa laughed.

  “What a conundrum Mr. Milton sets us, Miss Grey!”

  “Yes, sir. He does.”

  He put his hands on his hips. He regarded her from on high.

  “Do you believe such things yourself, Miss Grey? That our lives are shaped by forces beyond ourselves?”

  “No, sir. I believe in freedom, sir. Milton wrote at the time of Milton. That time is gone.”

  He smiled at her. He shook his head.

  “Miss Grey, you have sat in silence and dream for these past months and now you begin to come out with this. Is this what you have been daydreaming of all this time?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I wasn’t aware of daydreaming of anything in particular, sir. I was just kind of…”

  “Empty?”

  “Yes, sir. As you often told me yourself. Empty.”

  He laughed again.

  “Maybe it’s just Milton, sir,” she said.

  “Milton?”

 
“Maybe that’s why he’s a great poet. He gets through to you even if you don’t believe what he believed, and even if you’re a bit thick. And maybe poets get to you best when you’re sort of dreaming, when you’re hardly there at all.”

  Krakatoa groaned, from deep within.

  “Oh, perhaps, perhaps. But goodness gracious, what does that say about teaching methods? What does that say about analysis, about writing essays, about…But best not to think of such things, perhaps.”

  He scanned us all.

  “Miss Finch?” he called.

  “Yes, sir?” said Bianca.

  She paused in her nail-filing.

  “Have you any light to cast on the obscure ways of the poetic voice?”

  “Dunno about that, sir. But Ella certainly looks different, sir.”

  “Does she now?”

  “Yes, sir. If you ask me, looks like she’s been getting a proper good seeing-to, sir…”

  Krakatoa rolled his eyes.

  “Ye Gods!” he muttered.

  He turned back to Ella.

  “You have illuminated us on John Milton, Miss Grey. You have shone light onto the metaphor of John Donne. What other gifts are you about to bring us as time goes by?”

  She smiled.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Ha. Perhaps more daydreaming is in order.”

  “Yes, sir. Perhaps it is.”

  He watched her for a long time.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know, sir…I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

  “Nor do I, Ella Grey. Nor do I.”

  FIVE

  “Are you?” I asked her as we walked home that day.

  “Am I what?”

  “What Bianca said.” I tried to make a joke of it, tried to imitate Bianca’s voice. “Are ye gettin’ a propa good seeing-to, pet?”

  “I’ve hardly seen him yet.”

  “But…”

  “But we find places.” She smiled. “We’ve made love, if that’s the word for it.”

  We walked on.

  “And?” I said after a time.

  “And…” She looked away from me, towards the river, towards the earth. “And it’s like it’s nothing to do with me, and not even anything to do with him. It’s like we disappear, or something.”