One thing I’m sure of: Mahler is definitely not for sightseers. Carmen’s score is dense with her own handwritten notes and symbols I don’t even recognise. I’d way lost interest in it long before I’d even figured out where the choir’s supposed to come in. Proposed course of action? Just pretend to sing for the next two weeks and hope no one notices. I figure it can’t be too hard to lose yourself in a crowd.
And it is a crowd. It’s eight in the morning and there are more people gathered in the assembly hall than I would have expected. Paradise doesn’t look like it could possess fifty reasonably musical offspring, let alone the roughly two hundred teenagers I see here, checking each other out brazenly. It’s like a meat market, and Carmen’s group is giving as good as it gets. The air is practically sizzling.
‘Are you having another mental attack?’ says Rat-face suspiciously when I don’t answer her right away.
I dart a look at the cover of her score, which bears the name Tiffany Lazer in a cloud of hearts and flowers. It suits her. It’s fluffy and deadly, at the same time.
‘Nope,’ I reply casually. ‘Just scoping for, um … hotties, uh, Tiff.’
It’s the right thing to say because Tiffany relaxes immediately. ‘Speaking of which, so how was it? I hear Ryan Daley looks all male-modelly super-gorgeous but is pretty much a psycho, nut-job disaster waiting to happen. I was soooo jealous at first when I found out who you’d got, but now I’m so glad it’s not me! You’re practically in the middle of an ongoing murder investigation—how twisted is that?’
Silently, I thank Carmen for her diary, which lays out the equal parts longing, equal parts hatred she feels for Tiffany Lazer and her snobby circle of friends. From what I can tell, everything between Carmen and Tiffany is some kind of weird contest for supremacy, though they seem to have nothing in common but the singing thing.
I notice a few of the other St Joseph’s girls hanging off every word Tiffany says, giving me the once-over while they’re doing it. I feel a stab of pity for Carmen—why does she care so much about what the others think?
And they say girls don’t like blood sports. My noncommittal, ‘Oh?’ is a little more antagonistic than I intended.
But Tiffany only hears what she wants to hear, and it’s enough to prompt her to spill her guts about how Ryan Daley is this far away from being locked up in a mental institution for turning vigilante and stalking people he thinks might be responsible for his sister’s abduction.
‘She was taken right out of her bedroom,’ Tiffany says as Paradise High’s music director, a tired-looking little man with wild hair and eyeglasses called Mr Masson, taps the podium microphone with his stubby fingers. People wince at the vicious feedback he triggers but they keep right on talking. Two spots of hectic colour appear on his cheekbones.
‘No signs of forced entry or anything,’ Tiffany continues airily.
Which would explain the invisible force-field that seemed to surround Mr Daley in the car park the other day. To most of the citizens of Paradise, it probably looks like an inside job. It also goes some way to explaining why Louisa Daley resembles a walking corpse and is on the brink of implosion, like a dying sun. Such a corrosive thing, doubt.
‘Lauren was a soprano, just like we are,’ Tiffany adds. ‘Blonde, incredibly bright, beautiful, too. The whole package.’ She looks me up and down as if to say, everything you’re not, baby.
I wonder again why Carmen wants this bitch to like her so badly.
‘Everyone at Paradise High gives Ryan a wide berth,’ Tiffany says as Mr Masson tries and fails to get our attention once again. ‘He’s a weirdo loner with a hair-trigger temper and a gun. People have seen him pull one. They say there was blood everywhere.’
The two statements are complete non sequiturs unless you draw an unsavoury line between them.
Carmen wrinkles her brow, me doing it. ‘So people think Ryan might be in on it, too?’ I say. ‘The father did it? Maybe the son? Both involved. Some weird psycho-sexual thing? Maybe the mother knows something?’
Tiffany nods enthusiastically. ‘Better watch your step. Sleep with one eye open.’
She grins at the girl sitting on her other side as if I’m not right there. Like anyone would want to jump your bones. It’s clear to me what they’re thinking.
‘Well, thanks for the info,’ I reply coolly, staring down the other girl who looks away uncomfortably. Bet Carmen’s never given her the evil eye before. It feels good doing it. I stare down a few more of the others for good measure and the St Joseph’s sopranos suddenly look everywhere but at me, their eyes scattering like birds.
‘Consider it a community service,’ Tiffany laughs, oblivious to Carmen’s odd steeliness or its weird effect on her posse. Well, she wouldn’t.
‘And can you believe they roped in extra students from Little Falls and Port Marie for this musical “soirée”?’ she adds. ‘It’s still going to sound like shit.’
Mr Masson makes us all jump by abruptly turning on the assembly hall’s ancient sound system loud enough to split our heads open. The vast swell of a massive pipe organ is followed by the sounds of a giant, pre-recorded orchestra and it’s suddenly a mad, page-turning scramble to get to the opening bars of … uh, oh, yes, Hymnus: Veni, creator spiritus. Know it? I’m right with you. The score looks as unfathomable this morning as it did last night. And where did the choir come in again?
I glance sideways at Tiffany and she’s looking straight ahead at Mr Masson, poised to sing. Always ready, always pulled together. Something Carmen wishes she was every minute of her waking life. People want funny things.
I follow Tiffany’s flying finger to the point where her manicured nail leaves off the page and her voice takes over and suddenly, my eyes narrow in shocked recognition. I have seen what I should have seen last night: Part 1 of Mahler’s Symphony No 8 is not in French, or German, or Italian. Languages that casually litter the margins of the score, with which I have little affinity, knowledge or patience.
I should have focused on the title of the opening hymn.
Like the title, the hymn is in Latin. Untranslated Latin.
As the girls of St Joseph’s Chamber Choir begin to blow away the competition with their incredible singing, I realise that I understand every single word they are saying as if it is the language in which I think, in which I dream.
They sing:
Veni, creator spiritus mentes tuorum visita
Come, Creator Spirit visit the minds of your people
Creator Spirit. The words send a lick of lightning down my spine, the repeating crash of the organ causing little aftershocks in my system.
And the music? It’s like there are seraphim in the room with us. Forget about the hair spray, the injudicious use of mascara, face whitener, concealer, eyeshadow, pout-enhancing lip venom. Shut my eyes and I could be sitting amongst angels. The sound is tearing at my soul. It’s so joyous, so sublime, so incredibly fast, loud, complex. Beautiful. If I’d ever heard this music before