8.13 pm

I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE VIOLATING MY TRUST LIKE THIS PEN, WE HAVE A DEAL

ARE YOU OKAY?? TEXT ME BACK

PEN WHERE ARE YOU?

There are two violins, though one is larger so maybe it is a viola. A small guitar too. A cello. A double bass. Two pianos, somehow. Each instrument makes a different noise, but it is not like chaos in your brain, it is like making sense of the world because this is the sound of the world. And the notes are up and down, up and down, with an invisible line that seems to string the notes together. What does the world sound like? A mournful slow wail from the strings and the soft drum, a key striking on the piano, and together they are like the sound of connection. Down, down she goes, following them until a shaker lifts her up, and the man at the piano quivers his head back and forward.

Alice is sitting next to her and Pen reaches for her hand and Alice squeezes her fingers and they are one.

Alice is not sitting next to her and Pen clenches her fists on her thighs, braced for what this feeling is.

The musicians change instruments and begin a song the leader calls ‘Protection’, he says it changes every time they play it because at some point they get lost. Pen wonders how this happens, that they could get lost, because it must be written down or planned so if they still get lost maybe it means they want to.

Pen had texted Claire back.

OKAY. AT A CONCERT. IT WAS A SURPRISE FOR ALICE.

But the vibrations had kept coming. So even though the usher on the way in had said, ‘Please turn off your phone,’ Pen knew she had to talk to Claire. It was okay, she thought, because it was still early, and she was the only one sitting in her row.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Pen, I said you could go to the demonstration, but a concert?’

‘Mmhmm,’ which is what Pen says when she doesn’t know what to say.

‘Why didn’t you tell me, I’ve been worried!’

‘Mmhmm.’

‘It’s Monday-night pizza, it’s your favourite.’

The notes of her mum’s words were strained, alternating between high and low, sharp and blunt.

‘This is really not okay, Pen. And what kind of an example is it for Soraya?’

Claire sighed and Pen thought that it wasn’t fair to hurt someone else just because you were hurting, but that’s what she has done to Claire by not coming home.

Now, the group are playing a song called ‘Found Harmonium’, and Pen thinks, oh, it is not just music for the lost. The harmonium looks like a box so it should be a piano, but it sounds like the wind through trees, noisy trees, like an organ, that’s the right word. The music is like a wash of tiny moments.

Claire’s voice got louder.

‘I’m going to drive in to get you and Alice, no-arguments-young-lady.’

Pen had not heard that voice in ages.

‘Alice isn’t here.’

‘What, Pen?’

‘I’m on my own. And,’ Pen looked up at the ceiling, ‘other teenagers do this all the time, go to things on their own. It’s safe, Mum.’

Claire exhaled loudly, for so long that it was amazing there was that much air inside her lungs, and then it was silent, them just breathing, and Pen imagined her mother, in the hall, car keys in her hand, leaning against the wall.

‘Okay, Pen, okay,’ Claire said. ‘You haven’t been drinking, right?’

‘No.’

‘And you’ll get the bus home at nine, I don’t care what’s going on, you come home and if it’s at all scary, or you’re freaking out, just get a taxi and I’ll pay him when he gets here. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘This doesn’t mean everything is forgiven, Pen, there will still be consequences,’ Claire said, but then her voice changed. ‘But you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.’

And that’s when Pen knew it really was okay. Because she could still smile, and her mother could still laugh, at the ridiculous way language works. Pen is a teenage girl not a stealer of sheep, or lambs, she has never stolen anything.

The man onstage turns to the audience and his face is quite small and far away but she can still see it, and he says this song is called ‘The Life of an Emperor’, and Pen suddenly sees a blue sky with cirrus clouds and snow flats stretching to the horizon and she sees the notes stretching out between the sky and the snow, and music itself is almost visible if you think about it, reverberations, disturbances of the air, stretching between the bodies of the instruments and the body of the person bent over the vibrating wood and the head, the ear, her body, all their bodies.

Pen is sitting surrounded by people and no one needs her to talk or be or look a particular way. She risks looking at the people near her. Their faces are blank, unreadable. Which maybe means every single person is just being themselves. Pen wonders if they can see what she can see, if she sits really still and lets the vibrations happen, a building with spaces and columns rising in the empty space above their heads. And she wonders if they can see themselves and their lives.

The notes are coming into her body and the musicians don’t really look at the audience, they look down at their instruments, at their music stands. Not out at the people. Pen imagines that some of them are like her. Quiet.

Once Alice had shown Pen a notebook filled with words, with lists of words. Confused, Pen had stayed still. ‘They’re lists of what I’m grateful for,’ said Alice, ‘my parents make me keep the lists when I get a blue.’ She had paused, Pen had held on.

‘They’re to keep me grounded.’

‘Do they work?’

‘Not like they’d hope. They want me to be okay.’

‘Parents always want you to be okay.’ Pen had thought of her mother driving her every week to the woman-therapist’s office. ‘They don’t know, that’s all.’

Alice had said she was tired of pretending and Pen felt like she had been let in, to the space of not-pretending.

Everyone thinks that Alice is not quiet, that Alice is the opposite of Pen. But that is because they are in the pretending space and Pen is not. Alice told Pen that she just wanted to blend in, that was why she went with the gang, because it was a way of not being seen (no one is looking at you). Alice is not like the others, though she is pretty and popular, so you could make the mistake of thinking she is into showing off, but actually the real Alice is quiet. Which is why Pen likes her. Liked. Likes.

‘Look at your hands, Pen.’ It was meant to give you a feeling of control. Her hands on her thighs, pink with shiny nails against the denim. Alice had asked her if she did, like, manicures, ‘You have really nice nails, Pen.’ But Pen said, ‘No, they just grow like that.’ Alice’s mum takes her to get their nails done, ‘girls together’, and Alice pulled a face when she said that and Pen kind of laughed, which was one of the first times they had ever really talked or shared something.

But there are no vibrations from her.

No text saying, wait for me. No text taking back the no, the look, the cold shoulder.