Friday 19 August

I shove the portal door open and escape, heart beating quickly, nervous breaths exploding as I hit the air. I skirt around the parts of lawn that are exposed by emergency lighting. There’s always a moment when I stop for a minute and take it in: the flood of grass rolling towards the gate, the line of darkness that runs along the edges, the strangeness of being the only person out here, awake, in a world that feels like it’s sleeping.

Oliver is waiting at the gate looking unsettled. It’s how he’s looked all week. In orchestra practice he’s been concentrating so hard on playing he’s been making mistakes, which is, as Mrs Davies commented, very un-Oliver.

Our session on Wednesday at the studio felt like a waste. Every time we tried to play we sounded wrong together. ‘You need to relax,’ I said, to which he gave the fair response that it’s hard to relax after someone’s told you to relax. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said, as we walked down Lygon Street in the smell of pizzas and garlic our stomachs rumbling. ‘I can’t seem to play.’

‘Maybe the audition’s freaking you out?’

‘I’ve performed all my life,’ he said.

‘You look nervous,’ I say tonight.

‘These are legitimate nerves. I don’t want you getting caught.’

‘Does your dad know you’re out with me?’

‘Yes,’ he says, and we start walking to the tram stop. ‘He doesn’t know I’m helping you escape. He thinks you’re a Max. She has permission to go out at night as long as she has her phone and her parents know where she is at all times.’

‘I’m envious,’ I say, and he wonders aloud if I am.

‘You think I like escaping through the portal?’

He puts his hand out for the tram instead of answering.

I don’t dislike it. I don’t want to get caught, but I like the rush. ‘I like taking control.’

He nods.

Oliver is quiet.

I like Oliver’s quiet.

It’s not really quiet. It’s a pause.

There are only two seats on the tram, facing each other. Things I’ve learnt about him this week: he is as obsessed with the Iceland scholarship as I am. He isn’t anally retentive, but precise when it comes to music. He concentrates. He wants to be as good as humanly possible. When he plays, he sees colour beneath his closed lids. His mother gave him his first lessons, and eventually he got a teacher (David) who is the most serious man I have ever met. He was at Oliver’s house when I arrived on Tuesday night. They’d just finished Oliver’s lesson and David, on Oliver’s request, showed me how to really play the double stops.

Oliver watched from the sidelines, grinning, as David informed me of the finer points of stops, gently adjusting my technique with his soft voice, eyes intent on my hands, taking in tone, movement.

‘Good,’ he said after thirty minutes of playing, and I knew why Oliver strove so hard to hear that word from him. Oliver isn’t anally retentive. Neither is David. They’re serious about their craft.

I study Oliver’s reflection tonight – his eyes look straight through himself to the world outside the window. He’s off somewhere in his head – in a piece of music, thinking about his mum, maybe – I want to know where he is.

Without warning, his eyes shift, and stare at the eyes of my reflection. I stare back.

We are crossing lines. I don’t know what they are exactly, though. Or where they lead.

*

The queue for Orion is long, but we walk straight past it. ‘We’re not going there,’ Oliver tells me, and before I can protest, he pulls out two tickets. I read the front of them. Frances Carter, Concert Hall. ‘I can’t afford this ticket,’ I tell him.

‘You don’t have to.’

‘You can’t afford this ticket,’ I say.

‘I don’t have to,’ he says.

Turns out it’s Oliver’s birthday and he asked his mother for tickets to Frances Carter. ‘For me?’ I ask, and then immediately feel like an idiot. These tickets were bought months in advance. I guess his mum couldn’t make it home.

I think about that in the dark, as Frances Carter plays. I think about a lot of things. That I am learning even still. That I thought there was nothing more to the world than St Hilda’s and then when I got here I thought there was nothing more to the world than Orion. The world keeps opening up more, note after note, unfurling. Sitting here tonight, the cello aching in my chest, surrounding me, I am filled with the thought that there’s nothing more thrilling than all those things in your future, waiting to be known.

We can’t go straight home after the concert. We’re too full of cello.

‘Coffee?’ Oliver asks, and he leads the way to a small shop, hidden in an alley, with dimly lit small rooms that run off each other, an open fire, red chequered table clothes that could be cheesy but aren’t.

‘You think we’ll get better in time for the audition?’ I ask, while we wait for our order – coffee and Portuguese tarts.

‘Can we maybe not talk about that tonight?’ Oliver asks. ‘Let’s talk about other things.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as anything. Such as your week, as it does not pertain to music.’

‘You have an odd way of speaking.’

‘I play better than I speak. Usually.’ He leans back to let the waiter put our tarts and coffee on the table.

‘You look disappointed,’ he says.

‘They’re small.’

‘Try them.’

‘Okay,’ I tell him after I’ve taken a bite. ‘No longer disappointed.’

‘Your week?’ he asks.

‘It’ll lower the tone of the conversation,’ I say, and when he indicates he doesn’t mind, I tell him I’ve been thinking about PSST and who might be running it and how I might bring down the site.

‘How’s Ady?’ he asks.

‘Are Basildon guys talking about it?’

‘Pretty much nothing else. First the post, and then Ady in class.’

I don’t want to talk about Ady, not even with Oliver. It feels disloyal. But I want to know if he has any thoughts on whether it’s Basildon boys.

‘Maybe,’ he says, picking up the last bits of pastry with the tip of his finger and eating them. ‘But it could be anyone. You can’t stop it, so ignore it.’

‘Ignoring is not an option and I am stopping it.’

‘By?’

This is obviously the problem. ‘It’s someone who knows Rupert and Ady, right?’

‘A lot of people know Rupert and Ady. They’re like the King and Queen of private schools in the area.’

It’s true. But I ask Oliver to keep his eyes and ears open at Basildon and to pass on anything he knows.

‘What would you do?’ he asks. ‘If you found out.’

I tell him exactly what I would do, and his eyes glaze over halfway through. ‘Okay, I understood nothing of that. You would what with a what? How did you get to be this smart?’

He has a small piece of pastry on his chin. It looks lovely. I’m disappointed when he brushes it away. ‘Why did you lie to me about the Orion sticker on your cello case?’ I ask, and he acts as though he’s giving it quite a bit of thought.

‘I don’t know,’ he says in the end. ‘I wanted to tell you all about it, and then, in that moment, I decided not to. Max has a theory.’

‘Which is?’

‘Ridiculous, so I’ll keep it to myself.’

I resist the urge to text Max right this second to ask her.