The baton came down, the bows came up, and the storm ended. The silence was as ringing as the strings, and rolled in like an angry tide to reclaim the stage, flooding over the orchestra until the very last memory of the tempest in Vivaldi’s Summer had been washed away.
Mr. Weber lowered his arms slowly, with an air of grandeur, looking down his long nose at the boys as though they were not boys, but failures.
“I suppose,” he pronounced heavily in the empty theatre, “that that will have to do.”
They stared back at him, unblinking, waiting.
“You are merely children,” he continued. “You do not know the power and rage behind such storms. You have not the ruthlessness of this energy. You only have playtime. Perhaps it is too soon to expect this of you.”
Still they waited, used to their maestro’s moods.
“You are dismissed,” he snapped, waving them off and turning away. “I do not need boys. I need men. Return when you are men.”
He barely paused long enough to gather his bags before sweeping out of the empty theatre; the moment the door clanged shut behind him, the assembled orchestra rippled into subdued life, the tangled squeaks and wails of the strings clashing and protesting with their rough treatment at the hands of teenagers as they packed up the stands, returned the chairs, and zipped their instruments back into their bags. Over it all, the noisy hubbub of voices in various stages of breaking failed to harmonise, much like the violins in their dubiously executed storm.
And as the noise swelled and ebbed from their assigned seats to the messy outpouring at the door, one hung back.
“Catch you tomorrow, Peacemaker!” someone yelled, and then the door boomed shut for the second time, and a single figure remained centre-stage, lit by the bright halogens used in the absence of a performance.
He would have cut a tragic figure, perhaps, had he remained and played the haunting solo on the empty stage to the empty hall. He would have echoed not only the genius of a long-dead composer, but the ghosts of all the heroes ever written and forgotten, had he simply stood and played. But defiant tragedy was not his style.
He retreated, with the exquisitely designed violin, to a backroom beyond the stage, a back entrance for technical crew and minor actors, littered with dust, mouse droppings, and deep shadows impenetrable by the bright lights of the stage. There, he closed the door, flicked on a single bulb, and tugged the violin back to his shoulder.
Without music, he played. With no primary violin, he played the distant echo of a concerto in A-major, the violin sounding detached and mournful in the absence of its leader, in the absence of its partner.
Alone in the darkness, he played Vivaldi.
* * * *
This is gunna be our year! xxx
Eight-thirty in the morning. Tuesday. A brooding September sun, low in a milky sky, and the crunch of leaves on the path that ran between Attlee Road and Churchill Street. That strange autumn warmth-that-isn’t-warm that made the school blazer too thin, but a coat overkill. That hushed lull of a neighbourhood evacuated to the rush-hour traffic, but not yet in the silent throes of abandonment. The kind of quiet contentment that came with a life used to its own course, but not yet jaded
It would have been nice if it wasn’t the first day of school.
Jayden sifted his shoes through the leaves as he ducked through the gap in the hedge into Churchill Street, and wished—not for the first time—that he was an adult already. He had turned sixteen yesterday, but it still wasn’t close enough. In two-and-a-half years, he would never have to go to Woodbourne Comprehensive again, and those two-and-a-half years seemed like a lifetime away. A year before he could take the scholarship exam to St. John’s Independent, the boys’ private school on the other side of town. Eighteen months before he could apply to university. Three years before he could actually go
He couldn’t wait—but he had to.
So Charley was a liar, or an optimist, or both. She said the same thing every year, and every year, it wasn’t true. It wasn’t going to be their year, or at least not his. It would be exactly the same as last year. And last year…kind of fucking sucked, actually.
Charlotte Cross of Churchill Street was waiting on her garden wall for him, once Jayden stopped dragging his feet through the leaves long enough to reach her. After a blazing summer of denim shorts, a new style every day for her long fair hair, and perfecting the art of makeup and pouting in mirrors
apparently it looked sexy; Jayden wasn’t stupid enough to argue with her
, she looked younger now, scrubbed clean, ponytailed, and those endless legs hidden in tights and a shorter-than-regulation black skirt. Younger, but still outrageous, as she demonstrated by sliding off the wall into a hug and crooning a greeting in his ear.