CLICK TO PLAY Sorry for your Loss MP3
Read by Jo Widdowson
The music begins immediately, as mother and daughter pull out seats on the patio. Lucy, hurried, wants this meal to be over so that she can join her friends at the pub. Janine, aware of her daughter’s impatience, sighs as she fusses with napkins that threaten to fly, like huge yellow birds, into the wind. It is that soft time before sunset, the sky etched with pink, paper-thin clouds, a warm breeze that carries the scent of tea-roses. A perfect evening for supper outdoors.
"Listen," Janine says. "Who on earth is that?"
She struggles to put a name to the singer. The pitch, the intonation, the way the voice trembles slightly, are all known to her and recognisable. But no name comes to mind.
Lucy tilts her head to one side, frowns as she listens.
"Mum, it sounds like you."
"Me?"
"Yes. Listen."
And it does. The words she doesn't know, hummed in the same exact place. The way she begins again with the chorus. The notes she can’t quite reach. She feels her skin prickle. The sound seems to be coming from the bedroom, Lucy's bedroom, where eighteen years ago she sang this song to soothe her baby daughter to sleep.
"It's you, Mum," says Lucy. Her voice holds a pinch of fear. "How can you be singing in the house?"
"Don't be silly," says Janine. "It's a recording. Probably on a CD. Maybe your dad recorded it."
"But who's playing the CD?" Lucy whispers.
Then comes the sound of a baby crying and the lullaby begins again. After half a minute it stops. Mother and daughter look at each other.
"Please turn it off," Lucy says. "It's not funny."
They can find no CD player. Janine knows that in those days, the days when she sang lullabies to baby Lucy, they had not possessed one. But it seems important to search for - something.
"If you talk to Dad tonight, tell him it's not funny," Lucy says later, as she stands on the doorstep, ready to leave for an evening in town. She is home for the summer and has dressed up to meet the old friends she hasn't seen since Spring Break: her eyes are darkened with frosted blue liner, her blonde hair tied up and back, she wears a fake tattoo on her shoulder. Her face, though, as she stands biting her lip, shows the confusion of a lost child.
"I will," Janine promises. "I'll tell him he scared us."
But she has no intention of calling Mike. This is not something he would do. He dislikes practical jokes; they are not his style.
"And I'll be late," Lucy warns. "So, don't wait up."
As soon as her daughter turns out of the driveway, Janine prowls the house, checking again in cupboards, under beds. Nothing. The house is still and silent, though the wind begins minutes later, a low growl against the walls. She switches on the television for company.
*
The following afternoon it is piano music they hear as they wash dishes in the kitchen. Janine recognises it instantly. Lucy playing Mozart, during those early lessons when she was perhaps ten or eleven. It is unmistakable: the way she hesitates before beginning a new section, the repeated keys. Janine moves slowly into the lounge, barely able to breathe; Lucy trails behind, her breath coming in fast, nervous bursts.
. The piano sits solidly in the corner, a shaft of sunlight illuminating the pedals. The lid is down. The music is in the room, but it is not coming from the piano.
"I don't like this, Mum," Lucy's voice is harsh, close to tears. "Tell Dad to stop it."
Janine places an arm around her daughter's trembling shoulders.
"I will. Tomorrow. I promise."
The following night they hear the piano again. This time it is a more accomplished piece, a Beethoven sonata. Lucy playing with practised care at fifteen.
That evening, Janine calls Dubai. It takes the switchboard long minutes to locate her husband and when he comes to the phone his voice is already anxious.
"What's up?" he asks. "Is everything okay? Lucy? Is she-?"
"Lucy’s fine. We’re both fine. It's just - you haven't arranged some trick, have you, Mike?"
“Trick?” he asks.
She tells him, faltering as she speaks, of the lullaby, the baby cries, the piano.
"Can’t make sense of it,” she says, finally.
“Janine, what are you talking about?" he asks. “You been smoking something?”
"Don’t be daft. It’s just – well, I can't explain it."
"For God's sake, it's probably noise from the neighbour's TV. Is Roger-next-door still working on that ridiculous extension? I bet he’s got workers there all hours, playing music.”
“It’s not – that kind of music.”
He’s silent for a moment but she can hear the amusement in his voice when he asks:
“You really believe you're being haunted by your own ghosts?"
"Something like that."
He laughs out loud then. "You're losing it, sweetheart. But look, I've got work to do. Everything else okay? No other Big Crisis?”
Janine bites her lip, feeling foolish. "Everything's fine."
Lucy is out when Janine hears Callum’s music, the music he played all the time when he was here, hanging out with her daughter, crazy in love. He left passionate notes on the fridge for all to see, and gazed at Lucy so adoringly over dinner that Mike murmured under his breath and shook his head. The crush became so obsessive that finally Lucy told him to go way, just go away. At first Janine thinks Lucy has returned home early, is playing Callum’s music out of nostalgia, but her car is not outside, the front door remains locked. The plaintive sound of a flute and a violin, an eastern music he loved, soars through the house then stops abruptly as if cut off. Janine stands in the hallway, listening, but the music does not continue. She is shaking badly and drinks a large scotch fast. When her daughter returns, bright-eyed, wine on her breath, Janine says nothing about the music.
*
A week before her husband is due to come home Janine begins to long for him. He will arrive three days before Lucy returns to University. There will be time to eat together as a family, to talk and to tease. He will tell Lucy she’s grown more beautiful, as he always does, and he will add with a smile, almost as beautiful as your mother, and they will all laugh. These are her thoughts as, just before sleep, she hears a hard scrape on the wall outside. She sits up in bed, eyes wide in the darkness, listening. Callum? He had thrown stones at Lucy’s bedroom window once, had lost his nerve when Mike woke and began yelling and they saw the boy running so fast to be end of the garden, then vaulting over the fence. She listens hard. Silence. A tree branch, then. Nothing. Maybe it’s Callum, she thinks, who’s planting this music in the house. He’s techno-savvy, he’s capable. But Callum was not around when she sang to Lucy as a baby. He was a baby himself. Maybe he’s found a recording somehow. It was unlikely but not impossible. There’s a logical explanation, she tells herself. There is always a logical explanation.
It is almost dawn when she wakes and hears the crash of a window thrown open in her daughter’s room. Then a hard thump that chills her blood.
She is out of bed in seconds, racing to Lucy’s room, fractured prayers on her lips.
Her daughter sleeps serenely but the window is open, the curtains blow in the cold draft. Is it dawn, or later? She slams the window shut. Why is the window open? How? Lucy opens her eyes, yawns
“Mum? What-?”
“Why is your window open? It’s so cold-” she begins, then hears the screech of a power saw, muted music.
She runs to the window, opens it again.
A trip, a moment when she feels as if her heart has skipped a beat, a number of beats, and she feels the sun warm on her face. Her daughter’s voice comes from behind her.
“Mum? What-?” Lucy pauses. “Jesus. What’s that freakin’ noise?”
Janine leans out of the window and there is Roger-next-door, in shorts and cotton shirt, his hands on hips, watching the young builder and his team working on the redwood patio.
“Roger,” she calls out of the window. “Please. Do you have to start so early?”
He turns and waves.
“Morning, Janine,” he says, then consults his watch. “What do you call early? It’s after ten.”
She looks at Lucy’s bedside clock. So it is.
“Oh. Okay. Sorry,” she turns back to her daughter.
“I thought it was earlier,” she says. “I thought it was dawn.”
She stands a moment, trembling with uncertainty.
“I thought it was Callum,” she says.
“Callum? No way,” Lucy says, yawning. “He’s on a gap year in some weird place. Venezuela or somewhere.”
Janine listens to the beat of the music.
Bam, bam.
“Can you hear the music?” she asks Lucy.
“Of course I can hear the friggin music! Jesus. I bet they can hear it fifty miles away.”
“It’s happening now, then? It’s not something in the past?”
“What?”
“Tap it with me.”
Janine tries to tap - bam, bam. It is hard to keep up. It seems too fast, a fraction of a beat ahead.
“Please, Lucy.”
She taps the window ledge again. Lucy gives a long, weighted groan and stretches out a hand to the bedside table and taps with her.
One, two, three. In synch. Janine checks her watch again, the clock on the bedside table, the position of the sun. It is all correct. There is music outside. It is happening now. At this moment. The present.
“Are you done acting crazy? Can I go back to sleep?” her daughter asks, and turns over, pulling the bedclothes up to her chin. At the door, Janine turns: the window is open, her daughter is asleep. The room is as it was when she arrived. She closes the window again.
“I’m going nuts,” she says to her daughter’s oblivious, sleeping form. “Menopausal or crazy or both. But maybe it will be okay now. Maybe.”
*
Two nights later she hears the voices downstairs. They murmur in hushed tones. The light is grey, luminous and the air heavy with a pungent scent of flowers, of earth and something else, a chemical she doesn’t recognise. She hears the clink of a tea cup. And then, clearly, her husband’s voice. She sits up straight in bed. How. Can. This. Be.
Roger-from-next-door says something, his voice so quiet. He is downstairs then, too. And Wendy‘s voice can be heard, speaking softly. Yes, it is definitely Wendy. Her best friend. Here? She lives two hundred miles away. The voices murmur, murmur. There is Alice, an old friend of Lucy. And Dom, from work. She listens for her daughter’s voice but cannot hear it. She cannot hear her own. Her arms prickle with a weightless feeling of lifting fear. She remains rigidly still, listening, trying to make out the words. Then, with a clarity, so cold, so clear, she understands what the voices are saying downstairs, to her husband. And knows that she has gone beyond the yesterday of the music, the present of the open window and the men working next door and she is now beyond that, into a future she cannot see but can hear.
Sorry for your loss, the voices murmur. So sorry for your loss.
(C) Mary McCluskey, 2013
Mary McCluskey is a UK journalist with a base in Los Angeles and a home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her short stories have been published in literary journals in the UK and US and read on BBC Radio 4. She day-dreams a lot.
Jo Widdowson has just returned home after a couple of years touring the country performing roles such as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit, Snug the Joiner in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Queen Victoria and "Nursey" in a Blackadder panto. Acting aside, Jo's major passion is her Triumph Legend motorcycle.
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