Underpass Answers

The bedsit was nine paces by six and it cost more than she could afford.

Wren had measured it once, in an hour she had told herself was productive. Nine paces wall to wall if you cut the corner past the sink. Six the short way, past the bed and the wardrobe she had wedged between the bed and the window so the window did not feel so lonely. The window looked onto a brick wall and a slice of sky the colour of porridge. There was mould in the top corner by the ceiling that she scrubbed every other week and that came back every other week and that she had stopped arguing with. The radiator ticked like a slow, disappointed clock and gave heat only by accident.

The pigeons on the ledge she had named, because naming things was a way of making the room less empty. Bartholomew, who was fat. Coin, who had one white feather that caught the light. Shy, who came only when the other two were gone. She knew it was a child's thing to do. She did it anyway. The alternative was a ledge with nothing on it and a room with no one in it and twenty-seven years of being the kind of person nobody thought to check on.

She was twenty-seven and she had not done the thing she was supposed to have done by now, whatever it was. There was a list. The list was in the same notebook as the composition. She had not opened the notebook since March.

It was October.

The composition lived in pencil, smudged where she had rested her wrist. Four pages of a thing that wanted to be maybe twelve. She had started it the winter before, on a night she could not sleep, when the melody had come to her whole, almost, like a thing handed to her from somewhere outside her own head. She had written it down shaking because she had known it was good. Good things were the most frightening kind. Good things could be judged. She had closed the notebook and not opened it and told herself she would finish it when she was ready and she had not been ready in four seasons and she did not believe she would be.

Against the wall, in a case older than the bedsit, the viola.

She did not play it out. The viola was not for out. The viola was the other thing, the private thing, the voice that was actually hers, low and dark and wrong for busking and wrong for audiences. She had written the composition for the viola. She had not played the composition on the viola, or on anything, not a bar of it, not hummed in the shower, not whistled on a night bus. The viola sat in its case against the wall with the dry patience of an instrument that knew it was being waited for.

For the underpass she took the violin. The violin was the bright one, the loud one, the one people wanted to hear from a girl crouched by a tunnel wall. She played it like a mask. It gave them the tunes they expected and it kept her real voice, the viola voice, locked in the room where nobody could hear it and find it good or find it bad or find it anything at all.

She needed to go out. The bedsit was a place where thoughts bred if she stayed too long, and October's thoughts were the worst kind, the ones that wanted to count up everything she had not done and arrange it by how much it proved about her. She needed the underpass and the acoustics and the noise of other people's lives passing at speed, which was the nearest thing to company she could stand most days.

Out. October air, the kind that went through a coat and found the gaps. The bus was late and she apologised to no one for being early to the stop. A man coughed near her and she moved away and felt rude for moving and rude for having moved and stood in the cold with her violin case and her coat that was not warm enough.

The underpass was hers by eleven at night. By day it belonged to commuters and buses and the man who sold papers near the south entrance, but by eleven the foot traffic thinned to drunks and dog-walkers and the occasional couple who used the long acoustics to test their own laughter. It smelled of piss and rain and the sweet chemical of the cleaning fluid the council used on the tiles twice a month to no lasting effect. Wren set up against the wall where the tiles were clean enough to lean on, opened the case at her feet for coins she did not expect, and played.

The underpass sang back.

That was the only way she had ever been able to put it. A good acoustic bounced your sound at you, returned it shaped, and that was physics, and physics was fine. The underpass did something else. The underpass answered. When she found a phrase that mattered, really mattered, there came back a note she had not played, a harmony underneath, a warmth in the concrete like the place was pleased.

She had learned, over years of doing this, not to lean into it. Leaning into it made the lights do the pulsing thing, and the pulsing thing drew attention, and attention was the thing she could least stand. So she played small. She played the tunes people expected, the ones that got coins, and she kept the good phrases, the real ones, for the dead hours when no one was there to hear the underpass answer her.

Tonight there was someone.

She was standing at the far end, in the shadow past the last working light, and she was not moving. Wren's bow slowed. Too far to see clearly, a shape, a stillness, and Wren had the thought, the quick irrational thought, that she was listening the way the fox had listened that one time. Not the way people listened. People listened past music, through it, used it as wallpaper for their own interior film. This shape was listening at it, into it, the way you would listen at a door you had no right to be on the other side of.

She stopped playing.

The shape did not move.

She stood there with her bow off the string and her heart going, and she thought, very clearly, that she should pack up and go home. She thought, almost as clearly, that she was not going to, because there was something down there that had heard her and the part of her that had spent twenty-seven years pretending the strange thing was not real had stood up inside her and wanted to look.

The shape stepped forward into the edge of the light.

A woman. Ordinary in one way and impossible in every other. She was wearing a dark coat and she had a face that Wren could not afterwards describe except to say that looking at her was like standing near a low fire, warming and dangerous in the same breath. What she remembered was the smile, the way someone smiles when they know a secret about you.

Keep playing, she said.

Her voice carried the length of the underpass wrong. It arrived at Wren before her mouth had finished moving, or after, she could not have said which. Only that the timing was off, that the sound and the sight of her were not married the way they should have been.

I don't take requests, Wren said, and her own voice came out steady, which surprised her.

The woman's smile widened. She took another step. The light above her, the last working light, the one Wren had been standing under, pulsed.

The piece in your notebook, she said. The one you won't finish. Play that.

Wren's hands went cold.

She had never shown anyone the notebook. She had never played the composition anywhere. It was in the bedsit, in the notebook, on the shelf, a mile away behind a locked door. No one knew it existed. No one could know.

You should go home, Wren said, and she did not know if she meant the woman or herself.

The woman tilted her head. The light pulsed again, faster, and the second light down the tunnel, the one that had been dead for years, came on. It came on with a colour lights did not come on with, a green that was too green, a green like the inside of a wave, like light seen through water, like something drowned. Wren felt the underpass answer under her feet before she had played a note, felt the concrete hum up through her soles, felt the whole long tube of the place take a breath the way a singer takes a breath. She knew, the way she had always known and refused, that the strange thing was real and it was hers and it was also, now, looking back at her, and there were more of them than the one.

She saw, past the woman, more shapes. Still. Listening at the door. Three. Five. More, further back, where the dark was.

Wren ran.

She ran the way out, the north entrance, the violin case banging her hip, and she did not look back. The night air hit her like a slap of cold water and the street behind her was empty and ordinary and lit the right colour and full of people who could not, she understood now, hear a single thing that mattered.

She walked three blocks before her legs would let her stop. She stood under a shop light and shook. A couple walked past and did not look at her. A bus went by with an advert for something she would never buy. A man asked her for change and she apologised and said she didn't have any, which was true, and he called her something and walked on. The world was the world, exactly the world, and under it, all her life, the whole time, there had been a sound.

She got home and locked the door and sat on the bed with the violin case across her knees and the viola case against the wall behind her and the notebook on the shelf where she had not touched it since March. She did not open the notebook and did not sleep for a long time. When she did she dreamed of a woman's voice singing a single low note that did not stop, that went on and on, that she could feel in the bones of her throat like a collar she was already wearing.