The Song From Somewhere Else Read online

  TUESDAY

  When Frank woke the next morning there was an echo of something dream-like in her ears. Although she couldn’t hear the music of the day before, of Nick’s house, it was still with her, still in her somewhere.

  She tried humming it, but it was impossible to pin down, impossible to recall exactly. She needed to hear it again, to refresh her memory. That was the only answer.

  And then, as these thoughts circled her, she looked at herself and realised that she couldn’t remember the last time that she’d woken up happy. The last time before this morning.

  During breakfast Frank racked her brains to think of an excuse to go knock on Nicholas’s door. Had he been Jess, it would’ve been natural to run round and rattle the letter box and just say, ‘Is Jess in?’ And, had she been Jess, she’d’ve run over and knocked on a new door without caring. Jess was like that. (Though perhaps, she thought, not Nicholas Underbridge’s.)

  This boy was a completely different kettle of fish. She couldn’t just roll up, unexpected and out of the blue.

  But when they’d finished eating, her dad said, ‘It’s a beautiful day, Frank. Be a waste to spend it indoors. Why don’t you go out, get some fresh air? Get on your bike!’

  It was clear he’d forgiven her for the previous evening. He’d even unbuckled her back wheel and, although it wobbled a tiny bit and zwooshed against the brake pad every time it went round, it worked fine.

  ‘Where will I go?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ her dad said. ‘Is Jess still away? What about Amanda?’

  ‘No one’s around,’ she said.

  ‘Well, never mind them,’ he said, shrugging. ‘When I was your age I’d just buzz up and down the street, doing skids and seeing how fast I could go. I’m sure you’ll find something to do. Enjoy the freedom, the fresh air, the sunshine. It won’t be the summer holidays forever, you know.’

  He always went on about his childhood, like it had been a hundred years ago and all in black and white with nothing to do but kick tin cans in the street. Frank didn’t believe much of it. She couldn’t actually imagine him being a boy, even though they’d shown her photos. They could’ve been pictures of any boy, she thought. The boy they said was him didn’t have his beard, and although that wasn’t exactly surprising, the boy being only a boy, it meant he didn’t look anything like him.

  ‘OK,’ she said, scooting forward on her bike using her tiptoes. ‘I might go see Nick.’

  ‘Oh, this new boy. Yeah, your mum mentioned him. Where’s he live?’

  ‘Lime Avenue,’ she said. ‘Over by school.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Don’t go further than that though. And make sure you’re back in time for lunch. I’m cooking salad. OK?’

  That was the sort of weird thing he was always saying, trying to sound funny. Jess would laugh but Frank wished he’d just behave like a normal dad.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  And so five minutes later she was sat on her bike in the Underbridges’ front garden.

  At the bottom of the close where she lived there was an opening in the hedges round the park where the path went in. (They called it a park, but it was really just a field between the estates with a football pitch marked out for Saturdays and the playground tucked away over in the far corner.) Her heart whimpered whenever she leant to look round the hedge.

  It seemed like Noble spent half his time kicking dust up round the rec. If she saw him before he saw her, she’d turn away, go home or do something else instead.

  Today though, this morning at least, he hadn’t been there, the coast had been clear, but she’d still cycled as quick as she could out of habit.

  She dropped her bike on the little patch of scrubby front garden. She’d come this far, but, unsurprised at herself, she now didn’t know how to knock. What would she say? All she wanted to do was to ask Nicholas about the music (she didn’t want to hang out with him or anything like that), but that seemed rude. It seemed weird, too, to be there at all.

  After standing in front of the door for a minute, hand half-lifted to knock, her stomach half-talking her into picking up her bike and going, she heard whistling behind her.

  ‘All right, kid?’ a voice said.

  She turned and was face to face with a postman.

  He shuffled his bag up on his shoulder and handed her a pile of letters.

  ‘I don’t –’

  ‘And there’s this,’ the postman said before she could protest, pulling from his bag a long brown rectangular parcel.

  He balanced it on top of the letters she was holding.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, turning and heading across the road, whistling again.

  She stood there.

  It seemed the decision had been made for her. Had it just been the letters she could have slipped them through the letter box and been off and away, but this parcel wasn’t going to fit through, and she couldn’t just leave it on the step. Anything could happen to it.

  So she knocked.

  There was quite a long silence, during which she began to think no one was home, but then she heard movement and rattling inside and the door opened.

  It was Mr Underbridge.

  He stared at her as if they’d never met before. But then he pointed and said, ‘Francesca Patel.’

  She handed him the post.

  ‘A bit young for a summer job, aren’t you?’

  ‘I met the postman as I was passing by,’ she said. ‘He asked me to put these through your door. But that one didn’t fit.’ She pointed at the parcel.

  Mr Underbridge shook the box and, recognising the rattle, said, ‘Brushes. Great.’ He began teasing off the sticky tape and then he looked up. ‘Do you want to come in? Nick’s around somewhere.’ He looked over his shoulder and called up the stairs. ‘Nick? Your friend’s here.’

  Eek, Frank thought, there’s that word. The F word. Got to be careful. Don’t be too friendly.

  ‘Come in,’ Mr Underbridge said. ‘Best wheel your bike round the back first.’ He pointed up the side of the house. ‘I’ll meet you at the back door.’

  Frank and Nicholas sat in the kitchen drinking squash and eating biscuits again. Mr Underbridge leant in the doorway, sipping his coffee.

  ‘How’s Nick getting on at school?’ he was asking her. ‘He never tells me anything. You know what kids are like.’

  Her stomach laughed quietly.

  She was a kid. She had a good idea what she was like, but she had no idea what Nick was like. She couldn’t remember anything about his life at school. Well, nothing that she could tell his dad. How do you say, ‘Your son’s not very popular cos he’s got fleas and smells weird’? The only thing she could smell now was that pleasant yet strange, faint, earthy, foresty smell that she’d noticed the night before. Maybe that’s what he smelt like in the classroom and it was just the weirdness, the oddness of it, at school that made people roll their noses at him. Maybe they mistook the cool stony outdoorsiness of it for unwashed clothes.

  ‘Well,’ she said, trying to not catch Nicholas’s eye as she spoke, ‘everyone knows him. They talk about him a lot.’ That wasn’t a lie.

  ‘Popular, eh? You don’t take after me,’ Nick’s dad said. ‘Couldn’t stand it myself, all those tests. I just wanted to get some paper out and get drawing. That was all I cared about. Do you draw, Frank?’

  ‘Dad,’ Nicholas said pleadingly. ‘Leave her alone. She doesn’t need an interrogation.’ He turned to Frank. ‘He’s a painter and thinks everyone should be painters.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ Mr Underbridge was shaking his head. ‘There are lots of jobs in this world and many of them are important, but I don’t want them, that’s all. I found out what I was early on. I can’t do anything else. But, Nick, if you want to grow up to be the second assistant undermanager in the municipal sewerage works, then so be it. Plumbing’s important, very important … where would we be without it? But me? I just wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  As Mr Underbr
idge was talking, Frank felt a shiver go up her spine. Somewhere, just at the edge of her hearing, she could hear the music again. She still couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and a moment later it was gone and she wasn’t even sure she’d heard anything at all. Her spine tingled all the same.

  ‘I do like to draw,’ she said. ‘I do good treasure maps.’

  Mr Underbridge smiled.

  ‘Well, I hope one day one of them leads you to the right place to dig,’ he said.

  Then he took his leave.

  He went down the hall and through the door on the right into what would normally be the lounge.

  ‘That’s his studio,’ Nicholas said. ‘Once he shuts the door he’s not to be disturbed. He’ll be in there all day now, I reckon.’

  ‘What does he paint?’

  ‘Stuff,’ Nicholas said. ‘Those are his paintings in the hall there. He sells them to hotels to hang in the bedrooms. Next time you’re on holiday, check the signature. You might find yourself face to face with an Underbridge original.’

  From where they sat, Frank could see the colourful strange blobby canvases stacked against the white walls. Though she couldn’t see them well, she remembered them from the night before. She hadn’t known they’d been Nick’s dad’s paintings, but had liked them. She wasn’t sure that she’d want to sleep in a room with them though: they might have been full of light and colour, but there was a sadness in them too, as if a shipwreck was happening somewhere just outside the frame. She wondered if maybe it was to do with Nick’s mum being … you know … elsewhere. That was the sort of thing an artist would paint about, wasn’t it? Were they divorced? Was she dead? Nick hadn’t said.

  And then … there was that music again. It was quiet, far off. But definitely there.

  ‘What’s that music?’ she asked Nick, happy to have the opportunity. For some reason she had been worried about just bringing it up out of the blue. Hearing it last night had been like overhearing a secret.

  ‘What music?’ Nick said, slowly.

  Frank held up her finger, pointed into the air.

  ‘That music,’ she said, laughing.

  Nicholas put his glass of squash down with a heavy-handed bang.

  ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  He looked at the table. Rolled his fingertip through a mirrored pool where some squash had spilt. Cleared his throat.

  The music was faint, she thought. Maybe he didn’t hear it. Maybe his ears were so far off the ground, him being so tall and broad and heavy, that the sound wasn’t reaching them. It was a mean thought, she thought as soon as she’d thought it, but she didn’t take it back.

  ‘You must. Listen,’ she urged.

  If only she could tell where it was coming from. It was lifting her heart to hear it, even to hear a hint of it. She smiled. It seemed to wrap around her like a blanket.

  She caught herself smiling.

  She tried to hum along, tried to catch a melody, catch up with the melody and la la la it for him, but it was tricky. It kept slipping away from her, like a cat that didn’t want to be caught.

  Oh, she thought suddenly, poor Quintilius Minimus. Where is he?

  ‘Oh, that music,’ Nick said, rubbing a finger in his ear. ‘Um. That’s just Dad’s music that he works to. He likes to listen to it while he paints.’

  ‘Do you know what it’s called? Who it is? Who it’s by?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can we ask him?’

  ‘No, I told you. We’re not allowed in when he’s working. Why do you want to know, anyway?’

  Frank thought. She didn’t know quite how to put it into words. How to say what the music made her feel? How to explain it?

  A moment went by.

  ‘Here we go,’ said her stomach, as if it knew what was coming next.

  ‘I’m not happy,’ she said, surprising herself.

  ‘Those boys?’

  Nick looked at her, his grey eyes unmoving, unblinking, not unsad in themselves. He didn’t laugh.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How long … ?’ he asked.

  ‘Ages,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘But last night …’ she went on, ‘last night I heard that music … when I was here, just before I went home, and it … I don’t know, it … helped.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said again, nodding. He looked away. Scratched at the table.

  It was strange, she thought, talking to him like this. Him of all people. It was as if he understood somehow, in a way that Jess never did, in a way her parents never could.

  ‘Let’s have some more biscuits,’ Nicholas said, breaking the spell. ‘And then we’ll get some paper, draw some maps. I like maps too.’

  Half an hour later the kitchen table was covered with maps. Some were real, some were imagined.

  Frank had drawn a map of her house.

  Nick had replied with a map that explained a book he’d been reading: a long spine of mountains down the middle, a huge forest and a single mountain far off on the right. Here be the dragon, he wrote. His handwriting was surprisingly neat considering the size of his hands.

  She drew an island the shape of a skull, where Cutthroat Hake had buried not only his treasure, but also his cabin boy to guard it as a ghost.

  And, as they drew, the ghost of that faint, echoing, inspiring music buoyed them up; it was the treasure she buried, the gold the dragon guarded.

  With it there around them, they didn’t even need to talk. And then the phone rang.

  It was a harsh interruption, snapping them out of the daydream they’d fallen into.

  Nick lumbered as quickly as he could into the hallway, where the phone sat on a little table.

  He lifted the receiver and said the number.

  After a moment he said, ‘Hang on,’ and, holding the handset to his wide chest, lumbered back to the kitchen door.

  ‘It’s my gran,’ he said. ‘She rings every week. There’s no way to get rid of her. I have to be good and listen. I’ll be ten minutes, tops.’ And he pulled the kitchen door shut.

  Oh well, Frank thought, and leant back over the map she was colouring in.

  It was only after a minute that she realised something odd.

  The music wasn’t any quieter. It was still quiet, but it wasn’t quieter than it had been.

  She’d assumed it was quiet because Mr Underbridge’s studio door was shut, but now another door in between his studio and the kitchen was shut too and the music was no quieter.

  She had the strangest feeling, as if she’d learnt something important, but she couldn’t tell what it was.

  As she sat and thought, she knocked a pen with her elbow.

  She watched as it rolled across the table and fell to the floor with a clatter.

  Pushing her chair backwards she clambered down on to her knees, and as she knelt there on the cold tiles she saw something that made her go, ‘Oh!’

  The wall opposite her had a gap at the bottom. There was a good half centimetre or so where it didn’t reach the floor. It wasn’t the whole wall, just a section about the width of a door.

  She could hear the low rumble of Nick talking in the hallway.

  She clambered to her feet and went over to the wall.

  She hadn’t noticed this door before because it was painted the same colour as the rest of the kitchen and had a calendar hung on it. A plastic bag full of other plastic bags dangled from a hook at one side, a hook that, she now saw, was actually a latch.

  She touched it. Rested her finger on it. It was cold metal, painted white.

  She pushed down and on the other side of the door a catch lifted up.

  With an outward puff of cool air, the door opened an inch.

  Frank tested the door, pulling and pushing it back and forth without fully opening it. It swung easily on silent hinges. She couldn’t decide if it was a secret door or not. She did know, however, that it would be wrong to go through it, at least without asking.

  She let the door s
wing open wider and looked in.

  The music was louder, clearer.

  There were stairs leading down.

  The smell of the house, the foresty smell, was stronger now. The air was cool on her face. She heard birdsong, smelt moss, rivers, evening.

  Nick might come back at any minute, she thought. He must have known the music was coming from down here, but he’d lied to her. That meant (her brain ticked through the conclusions) that he didn’t want her going down those stairs.

  But it was unfair, wasn’t it, keeping such beautiful music, such kind and forgiving music, such perfect and clear and mysterious music, to himself?

  It wasn’t his music now though, was it? It was hers. It was in her ears, in her brain, sparking electricity across synapses in ways that made her unable to resist it. She was hooked like a fish.

  Knowing it was wrong, knowing she shouldn’t, she went through.

  ‘Tut tut,’ said her stomach, filling itself with butterflies.

  The kitchen door swung shut behind her. Not with a click, not locking her in anywhere, but with a shush of air and a tiny clink of the metal latch against its partner on the door frame. A narrow strip of under-door light lit the top of the stairs.

  Frank felt the smooth wall with her hand as she edged down, feeling each step with the toe of her shoe. The stairs went straight down until they reached a little flat landing, where they turned to the side and continued on.

  The crystal shimmer of the music, the swooping circle of it, was louder now. Not loud, but closer, nearer. She could hear other things in it too. There was a sharp, hurtful noise, like a violin playing at the very highest point it could go. It scratched inside her ears.

  She had no doubt that she had to get closer to it (even while her stomach spoke sense and said, ‘Back upstairs, quick, before you get us both in trouble.’). The music was its own whispered invitation. An invitation she felt bound to accept.