Song Of Time Read Online Free

I could make my own contribution on three-quarters violin. I lost the beat as often as I found it at the tempo they played, but the specialness of making music with Blythe and Leo more than compensated. There were even times when, for just a few bars, I would get that tightrope sense of being possessed by the melody. But such moments were short-lived—the very realisation that they were happening was enough to make me fluff my notes—and they didn’t come at all that day.
    Without warning, Leo stopped in mid-phrase on an intended final run-through. Blythe slid to a halt a moment after, her lips jutting in wounded anticipation, but he was already pushing past us, muttering something we didn’t quite catch, although the explanation became clear as we heard the raised latch of the outside toilet which lay beyond the kitchen. The door to this Victorian relic only went three-quarters up, and the sounds of my brother voiding his bowels were unmistakable. Thoughtfully, Blythe drew a few long notes from her cello. I, meanwhile, re-considered the supposed effects of corn chips and dope.
    “Sorry about that,” he said when he returned. “No more sandwiches…” He attempted a laugh. “Anyway. Where were we?”
    But the session never really got started again. Leo, for whom everything had to be perfect, was too distracted and Blythe was far better at being solicitous and sympathetic than I was. Why, she’d been this way herself a week or so before. Summer flu—it was going the rounds. He’d probably even caught it from her…
    The evening thickened. Mum and Dad returned from the teachers’ union conference they’d been attending, and Blythe headed off in her clever little car towards the gates and fences which were then already starting to enclose Edgbaston’s Calthorpe Estate. Forgotten, tired, sticky, I drifted out into the back garden. In those days, in that lost summer of that lost century, scarcely any stars hung above Birmingham, there was so much light and smog. The French windows still hung open, and it seemed for a moment that Leo and Blythe and I could still be playing inside. Not struggling in fits and starts through the Brahms, but making music which shaped itself like the cool flow of a midnight river. I could almost hear that lovely, inexpressible sound over the boom of next door’s television and the drone of evening traffic on the Alcester Road.
    Something clattered as I stooped to pick up the forgotten rug we’d left beneath the cherry tree. It rolled, shining, towards the pale solar lanterns which hung around the borders of the garden like marsh ghosts. I smiled as I picked it up.
    Leo’s bedroom light wasn’t on when I went upstairs, but I knew that he’d still be awake.
    “There.” Sisterly-proud, I plonked the Smith Kendon tin down on the bed where he was lying in semi-darkness. “Saved your bacon.”
    “Yours as well.” Rolling over, he slid out the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet and shoved it into the hidden space beneath.
    “I’d just tell Mum and Dad you made me do it.”
    “And I’d say it was all part of your education, which is exactly right.”
    Leo’s room was at the front of the house, near to a sodium-yellow streetlamp which splattered plane-leaf shadows across his thin curtains, and his face had a sweaty gleam as he lay there. Seeing the stubble of his chin, I remembered the pinprick shadows of the lawn, the different colours and shapes of our hands…
    “Thanks, anyway,” I said.
    “For what?”
    I shrugged.
    “You know, Sis, what I was saying this afternoon—it’s not really true.”
    “You mean dope really can harm you?”
    He gave a chuckling sigh. “I mean, what I said about the future. I was wrong. The future isn’t something waiting ahead of us any longer. We’re living it. It’s with us. It’s everything. It’s here.”
    So this was the future, and the future was Leo seemingly recovering from his stomach upset after a few days, and then me and Dad