THE CORRIDOR IS SUDDENLY empty. In front of Denise there is a white-green wall with Winnie the Pooh painted on it, and a princess with birds flying around her head. There’s something wrong with them though. Someone copied them from a picture, but they haven’t worked out. The black lines are too thick, the colours are too simple. It’s their faces. Their faces are a bit wonky, like they know they’re not real; just a copy of someone else.
She looks all around the wall for a clock, but it must be too late by now. She must have missed it.
‘Not to worry.’ She strokes her violin case – it is covered in brown fabric, not plain black plastic like everyone else’s. ‘Not to worry.’
A rolling sound, and a nurse walks by pushing a trolley with a baby on it. At first the way the nurse looks past the baby makes Denise think it’s just a doll or something. It’s a bit smaller than Baby Peig. It has colourful wires in its nose, and blue knitted socks on. It lifts one of its feet, and turns its head, pulling the wires with it, and that’s how Denise knows it’s a real baby.
She taps her left-hand fingers on her violin case, the fingering for ‘Animal Parade’. She can play it perfectly now, with all the feelings – the heavy elephants and the cheeky, chattery monkeys. Imagining the animals – a different one for each repetition – that’s what makes it special. That’s what Mo says. She hums the tune very quietly, inside her mouth. She taps the beat with her right foot.
Sometimes the music scoops her up and takes her with it. Even if she is just playing the scale of G; lovely dark honey at first and then up to the silver E and F and the sparkling golden G at the top, and down again. A tumbling water sound. The little stream that time when she went for a walk – just Den and Daddy – and saw it there, jumping out of the rock and the sun on it as it trickled down the stoniness and around the scraggly little bushes – even if it’s just a scale it can take her with it and all the notes are right and the sound is good, like earth and wood and water and sun. That’s since she got to use the bow. Before the bow, she always had to pluck and it sounded like raindrops and marbles.
Soon, Denise will learn vibrato. Sometimes, Mo does it when she is showing Denise how to play something, and Denise asks, ‘How do you do the wobbling? I want to do the wobbling.’ And Mo says, ‘Don’t worry about that yet, Denise,’ but Denise wants to learn it. Mo says she can exercise her fingers by wobbling them on her hand, but not the finger board, and then, when she is six, and after she has played ‘Animal Parade’ really, really well at the Spring Show, where she will be the star, she will teach her how to do vibrato for real.
And the problem is, she’s missed the Spring Show now.
Denise should be worried, but mostly she is bored. If Megan is dead she knows she’ll feel really bad. But if she’s okay then it’s Megan who should feel bad because of Denise missing the Spring Show. And Daddy too, cause he’s the one who didn’t bring her. They were on the way there, just Den and Daddy, when the school called about Megan and Daddy started saying about allergies, really calm and then not at all calm and then he just forgot about her concert and went to the hospital.
So now the Spring Show is happening without her. She should be playing ‘Animal Parade’ right now, but she is sitting here instead looking at the wonky princess.
Her mammy was already here when Denise and her daddy arrived. She came rushing to them and her face looked weak. After her birthday party the balloons were left lying around and they got soft and weak.
‘Oh, Pat,’ Mammy said. ‘She’s all swollen. Don’t get a fright…’
It was Mammy who sat Denise down here and told her to not move. Daddy went in. He took Baby Peig in with him, and left Denise here alone.
It is a pity about the concert. Daddy spent a long time getting all the bumps out of her hair. And Denise spent a long time practising.
She’s very bored. Just when she is about to get up and start looking, Mammy is here with a frightening face saying, ‘Sorry Denise, sorry, darling.’ In a clap of anger Denise sees that her mammy has been crying, is maybe even still crying.
‘Mammy…!’
‘I’m okay my love. I just got a big big fright.’
‘Where is Megan?’
‘She’s just in here, I’ll bring you to her. Oh my goodness, Denise, that was a big fright, wasn’t it?’
Denise shrugs.
‘So it turns out Megan is very allergic to chickpeas.’
‘Even more than egg?’
‘Even more than to egg, yes. Her tongue swelled up and she couldn’t breathe, but she’s okay. They gave her an injection and she’s okay now… we just have to be careful not to let her near chickpeas…’
Denise is afraid to see Megan with her mouth stuffed up with tongue.
‘Will it go back to normal?’
‘Will what go back to normal?’
‘Her tongue.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it your fault, Mammy?’
‘I suppose it is, darling. Sort of.’
Megan’s ears have been stuffed for ages. That’s all Mammy’s fault because Mammy said no to anti-bs and put castor oil in her ears instead and it was an infection. Denise knows that because she sits on the bottom step some nights after bedtime to hear Mammy and Daddy relaxing with a glass of wine, and one night, Daddy got angry about vaccinations and said about grommets and antibiotics. Denise thinks Mammy is scared about Megan’s grommets, because she heard a little cheep cheep inside her mammy’s voice then, like a frightened baby bird.
Grommets sounds like small people with wool for hair, and boots, and spanners for fixing ears, but that can’t be it. Denise will ask someone what are grommets. She asked her cousin Jem, because Jem is a know-it-all-boaster, but Jem doesn’t know either. Maybe Mo knows.
Megan is in a room with lots of other beds and they all have bath curtains hanging down beside them. Daddy is standing beside the bed holding Baby Peig, and Megan is there but her face is blurry.