For a moment neither of them said anything. She watched the feelings battling in his face, she watched him attempt to smother the hate or cover it over at least. When he spoke at last his words were cold and emotionless. He told her he wanted her to sing with his quartet in the Seabrook Christmas concert.
That was not what she expected. She didn’t know what to make of it. The first thing that came into her head was that it must be a set-up for some kind of revenge, like in that film where they pour blood on the girl?
We need a singer, he said, Skippy told me you could sing. Can you?
She didn’t say anything.
We’re trying to send him a message, he said, send Skippy a message.
Skippy’s dead, she said automatically and instantly she got that horrible picture of kissing him in her room only his skin has gone green and his mouth is full of clay.
I know, he said, still we’re trying to do it.
She didn’t know what he meant, did he mean like a Ouija board? It sounded weird, and also Ruprecht didn’t look well, he looked like he had a fever.
How? she said.
He started talking about strings. Apparently there are these really small strings that everything is made of. Once the strings were part of a much bigger universe, where everything was all joined together. But then it broke in two. One half of it became our universe, which got bigger and bigger and spread out faster and faster and made suns and planets including planet Earth. The other half did the opposite, it shrank until it was extremely tiny, tinier than you could ever conceive of. Now the miniature universe is hidden inside this one, except it’s too small to see or touch. But the strings still join them both together and Ruprecht believed he could use them to conduct this song through to Daniel.
You think he’s in the miniature universe?
There is a certain amount of scientific evidence, he said.
Science has always been Lori’s least favourite class and she did not fully understand what he was talking about here. It sounded like he was talking about Heaven, and in her mind she had a picture from one of Mom’s art CD-roms of everyone looking up at the sky which had been part sort of torn away and light was coming through the hole and angels stood there with Jesus who was holding a flag. She had never imagined Daniel being in Heaven, she never thought of him being anywhere really, because whenever she did think of him her throat bunched up and she had the clay vision.
You don’t have to understand, Ruprecht said. You just have to sing.
His eyes blinked and begged behind their thick glasses. She thought of how desperate you would have to be to come to someone you hated and ask them to do something this weird.
How can I sing? she said. I can’t leave here.
We have a plan for that. But will you do it?
I don’t know, she said, I don’t know. Once she had always wanted to be a singer, but it was so late now for anything like that, she was so tired, her body ached like a heap of old bones, like a game of Jenga that had been going on for ever and now just wanted to fall down. Then she asked Ruprecht what song he was going to do.
BETHani, Ruprecht said. ‘3Wishes’.
And for a split-second it was like everything in the garden lit up, FOOM! as if secretly there was a thousand-watt bulb hanging in the clouds and someone had turned it on. Because ‘3Wishes’ was the song she’d sung that night to Daniel, on the way home from the Hop, and how many dreams had she had where she was back in that night singing it to him?
And so next morning – the morning of today, though it feels so long ago! – she took an extra-long shower and practised scales and training exercises she’d learned from the Internet, and she listened to ‘3Wishes’ a trillion times even though the words were burned into her heart long ago. Then after Group ‘dinner’ she came upstairs and locked her door, and even though she wasn’t leaving her room she did her make-up and hair and put on the dress Mom got her for the interview.
Then she took the pills from Lala’s tummy and laid them out with the pills the nurse had given her on the dresser for when she was finished, because as soon as she’d heard Ruprecht say it, she knew the song was a sign – a sign that the Plan was ready, that tonight the sirens would come for her.
It was weird how the idea of singing in front of people, even just down a phone, was actually more frightening than being dead. Eight o’clock came like something falling out of the sky, getting huger and huger until it was all there was. She tried to get sick but there was nothing in her to get sick with. She bit her nails and listened to the tinny crackle of applause, Titch Fitzpatrick introducing the acts, other singers in her phone. Then at last Ruprecht’s voice came in her ear. We’re going on.
She could hardly hear the music but she sang as well as she could, just hoping. She sang walking around barefoot on her carpet and then she stood at the window and sang it looking out at the trees and stars and houses. The metronome tocked in the corner of her room – Ruprecht had set it the night before – she closed her eyes and imagined she was BETHani; then she imagined she was herself, walking back from the Hop with rain in her hair and Daniel beside her. She imagined the song was bringing that night to life around them, and if she kept singing it right, they would be able to walk right back into today… Then there was that freaky noise and the line went dead and she was standing on her own in a silent room.
She thought Ruprecht might call afterwards but he didn’t. Still, she supposed that didn’t matter now. She was feeling a strange floaty feeling – not like when you don’t eat and you’re going to faint, more like when she was little and she’d walk around the garden holding out a mirror and pretend she was tumbling upwards into the treetops and the sky. She stopped the metronome and sat down on the bed for a while, not even thinking. Then she got up and went over to the dresser where the pills were. She was wondering what to do when the pebble came rattling against the glass. Ruprecht! She ran to the door and tripped down the stairs – Don’t get cold, Lori! I won’t – and out into the garden.
But when she went behind the pergola and saw the expression on Ruprecht’s face she got a surprise. His eyes were emptied out and his enormous fatness seemed somehow even heavier than before. It was like they had switched places from the previous night, like now she was feeling lighter but he had sunk deep into himself. In a low flat voice he said to her, It didn’t work.
What didn’t work?
The experiment. The song.
Oh, she said, though she didn’t quite understand, how can a song not work?
The Wave Oscillator crashed. The feedback blew the speakers and shorted out the sound-desk. We only did thirty per cent of the cycle. The message didn’t go through.
Oh, she said again. And then, I’m sorry.
It wasn’t your fault, he said. But I thought you’d want to know.
Thank you, she said. It was then she noticed the rucksack on his back. Are you going somewhere, she said.
I’m leaving, he said.
Leaving? He had a box of doughnuts in his hand too. Where are you going?
I’m not sure, he said. Probably Stanford, they’re doing some really interesting work on strings there. He told her this in a flat heavy voice, as if they could be clubbing seals or baking brownies and it wouldn’t make much difference to him.
Are you leaving because the experiment failed?
He shrugged. There doesn’t seem any particular reason to stay.
What about your friends?
He shrugged again, and smiled a nuclear-winter smile; and with a shudder Lori realized that here was someone on the verge of something terrible – that whatever he might say about Stanford or anywhere else, his plan was the plan of someone starved of hope, who saw the future merely as an exit sign leading into a black void. She knew because this was how she saw it too, and she knew it was all because of Daniel, because of that gap in Ruprecht’s world which he had left there. But what was Ruprecht doing here? What did he expect her to do about it? Hunched beside his bloated body in the cold dark suddenly she felt exhausted, as though the weight of him was dragging her downwards; a nauseating gust of oniony sweat wafted to her from his body and with a violence that surprised her she wished he would go! Bother someone else! Leave her to her plan, the pills that had been arranged on her nightstand to spell lorelei, that would take her away away away from the world and its endless problems.