Archive of Our Own ^beta

But even he has twenty years worth of stories we’ve never heard and important people we’ve never met.

- Rainbow Rowell, on the stories that sit on the edge of infinity

Here’s to one.

★

There were five other homes before Grimwood Hall. I don’t remember much about the first three. I was too small to do more than hang onto skirts and trouser legs.

“Simon Snow,” the grownups would always say, sounding tired and cross. I haven’t forgotten that. How I would put my thumb in my mouth and try not to cry when they shook me loose from their hems.

Sister Agnes insisted that is why my teeth were so crooked when she checked to see we had been brushing.

For days after I arrived, I wondered why they called her that. Though I suppose the other boys didn’t whisper Sister Agnes behind their hands because she was a saint. If anything, she was the hunched figure of a cathedral gargoyle come to life. She met me on the stair.

I had nothing but my papers when I stepped from the back of a car that took me to the end of a winding country road. Little else to my name but faint memories of the fourth home, where the halls smelled of cabbage—we ate it so often—and nightmares of the fifth. I learned to hit back there. Made a boy bleed from the mouth the first time I did. Cried nearly as much as he did after.

(Is it a wonder, after being taught to lick your own wounds, when you learn to have a taste for blood?)

Grimwood was my first boys’ home. I hardly understood the need when girls could be just as hungry, starved out of the good things long enough to grow thin and sullen. That is the worst thing a boy in care can be.

Sullen boys were knocked about, but I don’t think that did them any good.

The house was rickety and tumbled down with wild gardens unkempt and overgrown into the Lancashire countryside. At ten, I had never known any place to be more beautiful.

There, an older woman stood waiting for me.

“You’re late, Simon Snow,” she said, displeased, like I had been the one driving.

Sister Agnes believed in a great many things, and I would come to understand her views on most of them, but that day she had only one—that young, troubled boys must be taken “in hand.” She did not explain herself, so naturally, I held out my own. She looked at it a long moment before shaking.

“Agnes Grimwood,” she said. “But you shall address me as Miss Agnes, am I understood?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking too late that perhaps I should say something more. “Ma’am.”

“You will need to wash before dinner,” she said sternly. She said everything sternly. “There is dirt under your nails.”

I thought that would be the end of her taking me in hand, but soon found that there was nothing that happened in the house without her knowing. Not a thing in our lives at Grimwood that she didn’t have some say in.

When I looked at her, I found myself thinking of any matter of creatures, the sort you learn about in mythology made up of a sum of other animal parts. Sister Agnes, with the ears of a cat, eyes of a hawk, nose of a hound, shaped by some alchemy into a beast you could hear approaching by the creak of the stair. Something from your nightmares wearing a housedress and wellies, who might appear around any corner. She had a sense for trouble, knowing it when she saw it (and often, even before she did), demanding you turn out your pockets before you could escape. Many stowaway newts were discovered this way.

She knew me to be trouble before I knew it myself, though the other boys must have sensed what everyone seems to, the something like anger I ran feverish with, that made others shy away from me, and others still spiteful, in the ways you come to hate the things you fear.

But Sister Agnes was not afraid of anything.

Our days were filled with little refrains of hers, all having to do with God and the Devil—though now that I think about it, mostly the Devil. Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. Though the Devil is up early, God is up before him. The Devil may tempt some, but an idle man tempts the Devil.

She would not have us idle, taking it upon herself to make sure we had our share in the housework. There was much to be done, any matter of things wrong with the house. The windows let in the worst drafts. I was not there to see a winter, but they proved troublesome enough in the spring before it was properly warm. The roof leaked, and no pot or pan was spared from the duty of catching water as it dripped from the ceiling. The walls were home to mice that would wake me in the early mornings. I remember lying awake in those lonely hours, wondering what kind of business a mouse could have before breakfast.

Sister Agnes was likewise industrious, busying herself with plans for improvements to Grimwood Hall.

“Restorations,” she declared, never without a tape measure and carpenter’s pencil. When she wasn’t making inspections of our sweeping and dusting, Sister Agnes could be found studying the lintels and moulding. The other women did not know what to make of this, but went along, holding a ladder steady for her.

There were a number of ladies who walked up from the village to help look after us, but only two stayed behind with Sister Agnes and had rooms in parts of the house we were not allowed.

Miss Tallulah, with her pretty green eyes and auburn hair, who made me blush with every smile she had for me. We all would go in twos or threes along the old servants’ staircase, in hopes of catching sight of her as she worked in the kitchens, flour dusting her cheeks while she made pasties and the occasional pie. She was a good enough cook and always seemed so sorry for the meager portions she had to offer that I never resented her for my hunger.

Maeve was about her age, perhaps a little younger, with short, mousy brown hair I think she tried to make up for by painting her nails and lips red. We found cigarette butts stained with the colour, from all the times she opened the thick paned windows to smoke when Sister Agnes wasn’t looking. The other boys insisted on calling her Maeve and not Miss Maeve. I don’t think she minded.

Maeve and Miss Tallulah and Sister Agnes were my first picture of witches, maiden and matron and crone, all trying to make somethings out of nothings. The others came and went, but they were always there, with varying degrees of watchfulness.

We were known as the Grimwood boys in the village we walked to most mornings. Crossing through the fields, Maeve walked behind us to make sure we minded the state of our clothes as we hopped the stiles. She let us younger boys go on ahead to the school to make sure the older ones got on the bus to theirs, instead of trying to talk their way into one of the pubs farther up the road in town.

“Miss Agnes will knock you about the ears if she hears about you skulking about again!”

Bennie was the oldest, followed by Peter though you wouldn’t know it the way Trevor had all the ideas. I suspect the nudie magazines he kept beneath his mattress made him worldly. He had the confidence of a boy who knows too much for his age.

Maeve trusted us enough to return to Grimwood Hall without her. We waited for Trevor and the others by the bus stop, walking back together in time for housework. Then dinner. Schoolwork. Then bedtime. They expected lights out by nine o’clock, though the older boys chanced sitting up another hour or two, whispering until they heard footsteps in the hall.

The weather was soon warm enough we could take the rugs out onto the lawn and take to them with wooden carpet beaters, trying not to beat each other in the effort. Sister Agnes always found metaphors in the work, firmly of the mind that in making improvements, it was not only the house that would be restored. We were the rugs to be beaten loose of all dirt, hung out in the sun, and brought back inside.

“And trampled upon,” Trevor muttered under his breath. “I don’t know why we bother.” He wondered what would happen if he pissed on every last one. We begged that he wouldn’t, because as far as we knew, the last boy to cross Sister Agnes and her carpets had disappeared.

“What happened to him?” I asked nervously. My words were halting then, stuttered and small, like I was for my age. I hadn’t yet grown into my shoulders.

“They say she buried him in the garden,” Peter said.

“Lord, don’t be stupid,” Maeve said, looking up from her magazine. “Sam turned sixteen and left care.”

“You can leave?” I asked.

She nodded. There was lipstick on her teeth. “The day you turn sixteen.”

I couldn’t imagine being fifteen, being in any one place long enough to turn sixteen.

“Only three more months in this shitehole,” Bennie said. “Then I’m off to London.”

“To do what?”

“I’m a hard worker,” he said hotly.

“The only thing that you work hard at is skiving off.” Maeve had a way of saying barbed things, but with how she laughed as she said them, nobody ever seemed terribly cut up.

Bennie was not wrong though. For all the afternoons he, Peter, and Trevor stole into the woods to drink ciders they had hidden away, there were many more days spent alongside Arthur, Joseph, Wickie and me, trying to tame the gardens.

The lessons to be had in tending flower beds are a little lost on me—I was too distracted by the handfuls of soil put down my trousers. I suppose I learned never to turn my back on anyone.

Weeding builds character, we were told.

I dreamed of weeds, my hands full, their roots broken off in the earth and run deep into places I couldn’t see. Were we the weeds then? Relentless and unwanted? To be torn up by the roots?

“A little paradise,” Miss Tallulah sighed, looking admiringly out from the windows when we marched back in with our faces smudged with dirt. Sometimes, when she could, she made lemonade.

“Paradise Lost maybe,” Maeve laughed, a bottle of Ribena at her cherry lips.

“Milton’s finest, to be sure,” a voice said behind her. Maeve choked, turning to see the good Sister appearing as she always did. When you least expected her. “Although, I am rather fond of Paradise Regained.”

When she ran out of metaphors, Sister Agnes had us scrub the floors of Grimwood Hall’s professed Hall. I imagined the room might have been very grand once, rather than an infinite stretch of filthy tile. But it was the grout we ministered to, with only toothbrushes.

“Not theirs, I hope?” Miss Tallulah said, peering in, handkerchief tied around her hair, a heavy pot on her hip.

Sister Agnes only winked in answer. That night, I examined my toothbrush for any dirt.

It was the most ambitious of her plans for improvements, to see the Hall restored. Though, as that afternoon became many, cleaning the tile seemed more for our punishment than for her veneration. Beating rugs and pulling weeds were small mercies, for they could be neglected for months at a time, but it seemed there was always dirt to be cleaned out of the grout.

The Chorus boys, as I call them now—for my days in that house were made up of a chorus of their voices, carrying sing-song through the corridors—well, we made a pact not to walk through the Hall if we could help it. The first and last we agreed on anything.

But where there was a will, Sister Agnes found a way.

Her inspections turned up some tile or other that demanded our attention. The boys who had lived there longest seemed well acquainted with the task, for they had their corners and complaints, none that reached any ears but mine. So too, did the music.

Grimwood was different from my other homes, foster and care alike, because there was music. I knew the words to God Save The Queen along with every child in England. But apart from nursery rhymes in school and passing bursts from cars in the street, there was no music in my life before Sister Agnes played her cassettes.

She must have kept the tapes locked in her study, because they only appeared in the Hall. Show tunes playing from an old radio that sat on a table where she drew up blueprints. It was music as I had never heard, full of feeling that echoed to the high ceiling in a way that was so lovely, perhaps the first lovely thing I had known in my life.

I suppose it didn’t hurt that the first song I loved from a musical was about food, glorious food.

When we all close our eyes and imagine—I still remember those first notes thrumming like a heartbeat. Is this what mine sounds like, I wondered?

“Not again,” Peter moaned.

I looked up from the circles I was making with my brush, startled by all of it—a choir of boys that sounded as though they had burst into the Hall, breathing life into a song that seemed to be plucked right out of my hunger. My knees, blotchy and red from the tile, all but groaned as I inched closer to the radio, the better to hear.

The better to witness the sweet lull of sound, stories I was beginning to hear even after the telltale click when Sister Agnes pulled her tapes from the cassette holder. How I came to hate that silence. I would hold my breath hoping it meant that she was turning it over and playing the B-side or better yet, another tape altogether. I went to my bed with orchestral dreams and woke up humming. It scared the mice into silence.

At school, I daydreamed about all the food in that song, teaching myself its rhymes, all the new possibilities in their sounds. Hot sausage and mustard. Cold jelly and custard. I wolfed down the lunches we were given as Grimwood boys and ran off to the library, where I spent the rest of my breaks looking up the words I didn’t know.

“There’s not a crust, not a crumb can we find, can we beg, can we borrow or cadge,” I whispered, trying to decide how cadge was spelled. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could sing the words. Put magic into them before I understand what that meant—what that really meant.

Instead, they filled me when nothing else could. I felt so guilty, imagining food, wonderful food, marvellous food, glorious food. The great big steaks and piled peaches and cream the boys on the cassettes all sing about—when Miss Tallulah worked her witchcraft out of the wilted vegetables and very little meat to be had from the butcher’s. For a week and a half, I did penance by drying the dishes as she washed, my face warm to be standing so close to her.

“You seem flushed, Simon, are you well?” she asked, wiping a hand on her apron and bringing it to my forehead.

“Yes,” I croaked.

Maeve had no such power over me, and so I braved asking her about the music.

“Lord,” she said. “Si—Miss Agnes and her musicals.”

“Musicals?”

“Sort of like a play but they sing and dance all through it, you know.”

I didn’t, but I knew William Shakespeare who, like John Lennon and Winston Churchill, had done well enough by the whole of England to be taught in school. Romeo and Juliet did not have any singing or dancing that I could think of—though maybe I would have liked the tragedy more if it had.

Sitting alone cross-legged on the floor of the library, I began to solve my first mystery. By then, Oliver! (everything I could find on the musical spelled it with a shout) and its songs had become part of a running list that I held in my head, and closer still, in my heart.

Every afternoon in the Hall, every revelation of sound, every word in rhythm, gave me still more clues of what made up a musical. An overture, I came to learn, was the name for the first notes that played from every cassette, instruments I couldn’t yet name coming to life with music that threaded its way into every track. I am an overture, I thought. The beginning of something a little less lonely.

★

Those months in the country were the first that I didn’t have to share a room—a short-lived fate—for the house had too many, and many still that were uninhabitable and ghostly, dust-ridden white drapes pulled over the furniture. The older boys had me persuaded that a closet on the third floor was haunted. Something I realized was not true only after they had locked me into it.

The servants’ quarters in the attics were best preserved, likely because the rooms were small and spare, leaky and drafty and creaky like the rest of Grimwood, and the doors did not lock. But they shut. I could sing as I smoothed the creases out of my bedding for morning inspection, my voice halting as I listened for the approach of one of the older boys. Probably coming around to push me into another wardrobe. It was a rite of passage, Arthur told me miserably, his spectacles forever askew.

I was careful not to let the others hear me. We tried not to have anything that Trevor could take.

In the beginning, I only mumbled, saying the words to myself the way we had to learn the kings and queens of England, who married who and beheaded who, all repeated back. I had no sense for music, when all I had known of it before was sound and time, nothing of harmony or melody, though after the cassettes, I began to hear that everywhere.

I craned my neck to catch the notes, teaching myself how to whistle, trying to make a boy’s birdsong of a tune. Grimwood was full of noise, and there was music in it, in the scrapes of chairs against the woodgrain, in the patter of rain at the bottom of a pail, in the endless shouts you could hear through the floorboards when you were upstairs.

For all the chatter I was surrounded with, I remained a quiet child, unable to make sense of my tongue, the roof of my mouth, lips and teeth, how they were to move together to make sound. I don’t know that I was ever really talked to before Grimwood, except in reprimand.

I didn’t seem to have the words then, and even when I did, they seemed to get tangled on their way out. Still, singing came bursting from me one day like a sob, feeling the way I always do when I cry, like a freeing up.

“Where is love?” I sang softly, listening, I suppose, for any answer. “Does it fall from skies above? Is it underneath the willow tree that I’ve been dreaming of?”

Finally, words that might belong to me. I could feel their magic. Sister Agnes was in an Oliver! spell, and so was I, though from what I could pester out of Maeve, she had many more musicals on tape.

“Does the grout need more cleaning?” I asked one day, perhaps a little too eagerly.

“No, Simon Snow, it does not,” Sister Agnes said, suspicious. She was on to me. I had spent too many evenings humming to myself only to look up from my schoolwork and find her staring.

“What’s that you’re mumbling there under your breath?” she said on one such occasion when the others went to wash up for dinner. (I hadn’t heard Miss Tallalulah calling.) “I’ve told you what happens to boys who mumble.”

Something something God something something Devil.

“I’m not mumbling,” I mumbled.

“What do you call that then?”

There was no arguing that point. “I was trying to remember the words,” I said to her. “In one of the songs from your tapes.”

“How does it go?” she asked sharply, with sudden interest that made me nervous.

I felt my face hot with embarrassment and whispered, “I’d do anything for you, dear, anything, for you mean everything to me.”

“Can you sing it?”

I did, my voice creaking more than the weather vane atop the roof.

She looked at me intently, like I was yet another corner of the house in need of some improvement. “We’ll have to teach you proper breathing.”

I did not know who she meant by we, wondering if she could tell I was holding my breath.

“Do you like the tapes?”

“I do,” I said, my eagerness betraying me. “Very much.”

The corner of her mouth twitched, and for a moment I thought she might smile. “I have just the thing for you then, Simon Snow,” she declared. “Come by the study after dinner, we have work to do.” Then, Sister Agnes did smile, and I hoped that meant I wasn’t to be punished.

She only ever summoned us to her study if we were “in for it”—as Bennie was so fond of saying. It was the only room I hadn’t yet seen the inside of, its heavy, wooden doors closed to us.

“Is that you, Simon Snow?” a voice called in answer to my knock. Sister Agnes was on a first and last name basis with me. “What are you waiting for? Come in.”

My memories construct a palace of dust and dark wood paneling, the sort of room that makes your nose itch standing in it. Her kingdom for a feather duster. I remember the shelves built into the walls, empty but for a few leather-bound tomes, the desk hidden beneath pencil shavings and floor plans, the file boxes stacked high and overflowing with papers—and Sister Agnes, of course, standing at the open windows in stockinged feet, her Wellington boots nowhere in sight.

“There you are.” She turned to me, and I was startled to see a pipe hanging from her lips. She laughed, and I honestly don’t know what startled me more. “I won’t tell Maeve if you won’t.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” I promised.

“Simon Snow, you could put a mouse to shame,” she said. “Do speak up.”

Yes, ma’am I should have answered, but could only stutter out, “I have trouble with words.”

She looked me over, a vulture circling. “That may be,” she said slowly, “but you have a voice I would like to hear more of.”

“When I sing,” I admitted, “it doesn’t feel like trouble at all.”

She took a thoughtful puff from her pipe. “You could be a fine tenor when you grow into your lungs.”

I liked the sound of that, whatever a tenor was.

She heaved a suitcase from underneath her desk. Here was my punishment, I thought, another metaphor in an empty suitcase. Inside, however, were papers, any number of leaflets and handbills, ticket stubs and show programs.

“Sometimes, I think the whole of my life is in here,” she said, so gently I wouldn’t have caught the words if I hadn’t been looking, her face unreadable in rare, soft lines. “I need your help sorting through it.”

I reached for a folded piece of paper, pulling at the corners to find a poster of a beautiful woman in white, her head thrown back, mouth open in a laugh. “A guaranteed get-happy hit!” I read aloud.

“Mamma Mia,” Sister Agnes said sagely.

“Is that another musical?” I asked, though I could see the answer spelled out for me in small print. “Do you have cassettes?”

She smiled around the stem of her pipe. “They’re around here somewhere.”

“What is it like?” I asked her.

She didn’t say anything for a long time, staring at a picture she fished from the bottom of the suitcase. “Magic,” she murmured.

When I came across the polaroid—later—I found more of those soft lines and familiar, watchful eyes in the face of a younger woman sitting at a dressing room table. Her name written carefully on the back. Nes Grimwood, 1976. Without thinking, I took the picture. Kept it under my pillow.

I began looking for some sign of Nes in Miss Agnes. She appeared in the corners of her mouth, with every half smile she wore looking over to see how I was faring. She left the suitcase in my care and turned back to her restorations.

It became a strange ritual of ours, those evenings in the study. Miss Tallulah came by with a tray of tea and biscuits, and after a few days, brought a teacup for me too. I learned to drink tea how Sister Agnes did, with lots of milk and even more sugar. She broke her biscuits in half to share even when Miss Tallulah set out enough for the two of us.

There were no more pictures, and I felt guilty for taking what seemed to be the only one. With every artifact of the cabaret shows and musical theater that made up this secret history of hers, I told myself I would bring it back. But Nes was there, even without other photos, in callback notices and cast lists I wanted to ask her about, but couldn’t find the courage.

After a week and a half, she unearthed a collection of videotapes from the attic, coughing. (From the dust or the tobacco, I couldn’t tell.) “Here we are,” she hummed around her pipe. “The tenth anniversary.”

“Of what?”

“The 1985 London premiere.”As though I ought to know what she meant by that. “Les Miserables,” she said in accented French, an afterthought.

“We’re going to watch a musical?” I asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“In concert,” Sister Agnes said, “but yes, we are going to watch one of the finest musicals in the world.”

She sat me down on the rug in front of a television I hadn’t noticed in all my time in the study.

I held my breath in the wonder of seeing the stage filled with the sort of blue that you see at twilight, the orchestra in its dusky shadow. I thought Oliver! had changed my life, but to hear this overture, and to suddenly find how much beauty there was in the world—on a VHS tape of all places—was like waking after a long sleep.

Sister Agnes noticed my tears before I did. She was watchful that way, every bit the Nes I had come to know so well studying that old photograph. Trying to imagine the life she had far away from this tumbled down house.

“Colm Wilkinson is a dream,” she said, wiping my cheek. “I met him once.”

I stared at the man on the television. Another story must begin, he sang, holding a world inside a note. “Is he a tenor?” I asked.

She laughed as she thumbed away more of my tears. The next evening, I asked if we could watch it again.

We spent a week rewinding through our favorite parts. I began to think perhaps Sister Agnes was a saint after all, with the number of times we listened to Valjean’s Soliloquy. The suitcase was forgotten, my careful work gathering dust around the room in stacks as we worked our way through the other tapes.

I was made new by the punctuated technicolor of Oliver! and Hello Dolly!, turned scholar in Rodgers and Hammerstein classics, taken hostage by the runtimes of The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof. Teachers wrote home that I slept through my lessons and the MGM lion began to appear in my dreams. Every morning, when there was enough light, I looked at the polaroid.

Nes was my friend, I think. My first.

My time shut away with her did not escape the other boys’ notice. I very nearly ran back to Grimwood everyday after school, in the hope of finishing my chores early and to maybe sit with her before dinner as well as after.

“Altar boy,” Bennie called after me, pleased with himself. I was not impressed. “Do you spend the evenings reading the bible together?”

I suppose all the back issues The Stage had become a sort of bible.

“No,” I said, squaring my shoulders. Even then, I could sense the coming of a fight, humming in me as much as the music ever did.

“What do you do?” asked Arthur, his eyes huge behind his glasses.

I shrugged. “Listen to music.”

“What kind?” Peter demanded. “She plays nothing but show tunes when she has me write lines.”

“Cast recordings.”

“You mean to tell me you like that sort of thing?” Trevor said. “Are you gay then?”

“What?”

“It means you like boys and not girls,” said Joseph. This was not helpful.

“I don’t even like girls properly! How would I know if I liked boys?” Which was, perhaps, the wrong thing to say because the others laughed, even Arthur and Wickie, and my neck felt hot with the betrayal. “Besides, what’s any of that have to do with liking Mamma Mia?”

“Is that supposed to mean anything to me?” Trevor sneered.

“It’s a musical.” I had to bite my tongue to keep from adding it was the greatest jukebox musical in the last decade. We had rediscovered the ABBA cassettes that week.

“Only sissy boys like that kind of thing,” Bennie said. There was something ruder on the tip of his tongue, but he seemed to think better of it.

“Well, I’m not and I do,” I said.

“That’s because you are a—”

“You have said quite enough, Trevor.” We were startled to see Sister Agnes in the lane. “We may have to wash out your mouth along with everything else, did you jump in every puddle between here and Clitheroe?”

She took him by the elbow into her study, and the way Trevor looked hatefully back at me, he wasn’t the only one who would be in for it. If my head hadn’t been half full of Barbara Streisand, I might have thought to be afraid.

It wasn’t long before Bennie and the Jets got the jump on me.

“Morning inspection!” Trevor announced while I was half asleep, whacking me over the head with my pillow as the others pulled the bedding from the mattress, cocooning me inside. “What’s this then?”

I untangled myself long enough to see Trevor holding my picture of Nes. “No!”

“Who’s the bird?” asked Bennie.

Peter let out a laugh, peering over their shoulders. “It’s Miss Agnes.”

“Sam always told us she was supposed to be a nun,” Bennie said, “only God didn’t want her.”

“I reckon the Devil didn’t either and now she’s here to make hell on earth.” Trevor reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter. “She can burn then.”

“Don’t!” I yelled at him and Bennie, who had taken up thumping me with the pillow. “Please!” I begged, the last thing I would ask of Trevor, but he looked at me and touched the fire to a corner.

The film caught, a tongue of flames curling the edges black and blistered, and I could feel myself shriveling with it into something ugly.

I attacked, my fingers clawing their school uniforms, teeth closing around the skin I could find until I reached Trevor and began walloping at him, the both of us on the floor yowling like feral cats.

The door banged open and speak of the devil. She stood in the doorway with narrowed eyes. “What in Heaven’s name is the meaning of this?” Sister Agnes hissed.

She and Peter pulled me off Trevor, who lay spitting blood.

“We were only helping Simon make his bed, honest,” Bennie said, holding a hand to his bleeding nose, “and he went berserk.”

Peter didn’t say anything.

“The three of you,” she said, her voice dangerous. “My study, this instant.”

I was left alone in my room with nothing, maybe less than that.

Miss Tallulah came up with an ice pack she had me hold to my hand as Maeve stood in the hall uncertainly, looking at me how all the other carers do in the end, as though I am an animal that might be rabid.

My summons to the study came after a dinner that was sent to my room on a tray.

“How is your hand?” Sister Agnes asked, not looking up from the carpenter’s pencil she sharpened with a knife. “You did quite a number on Trevor and Benjamin. Peter too. One of his eyes will be black and blue.”

Sometime between walking in silence to school and back, going straight up to my room after, and standing here before her, I had lost all manner of speech.

I held my hand out and she took it into hers, studying my bruised knuckles.

“Well?” she asked. “What was this all about?”

How could I tell her that I had taken the only picture of hers from the suitcase and had meant to bring it back, only now, it was gone? More filth to be scrubbed out of the floor? So I said nothing.

She turned her eyes to me, and I couldn’t meet them. “You have a lot of fight in you, Simon Snow,” she said, “but you’re more than that.”

I heard her sigh.

“Although I worry that maybe I’ve filled you up with too much music,” she said softly and let go of my hand. “Set you too much apart.” These words seemed too much a goodbye, or the beginnings of one.

Desperation rose up so suddenly in me, I thought I would be sick.

“The others would not tell me what happened, apart from what I saw,” she admitted. “I hoped you would.”

I swallowed, but still could not make my mouth work.

“I think perhaps,” she said, “your evenings will be better spent with the others from now on.” She took her knife up again. “To bed with you, Simon Snow.”

I went as far as the door but found myself rooted to the spot, wanting more than anything to say I was sorry. For needing to have her close. For taking the picture. For letting her out of my sight. My words didn’t come, but the song did, so simply I had to wonder how long my soul had been singing it.

“I’d do anything for you dear, anything,” I sang softly, my hand on the handle. I took a breath, then turned to her. “For you mean everything to me.”

She blinked.

“I know that I’d go anywhere, for your smile, anywhere,” I went on, unsure, “for your smile’s everywhere I see.”

Sister Agnes gave no sign of encouragement, her mouth a straight edge. My courage abandoned me in the face of her stare. I turned to go when her answering song rang out, “Would you lace my shoe?”

“Anything!”

“Paint your face bright blue?”

“Anything!”

“Catch a kangaroo?”

“Anything!”

“Go to Timbuktu?” she trilled, her voice low and sweet. I thought I would burst with the happiness of hearing her, wondering how I ever held Nes and Sister Agnes apart in my mind.

“And back again,” I sang softly, smiling so fully you could hear it in the notes.

We looked at each other, and she smiled back. If she hadn’t been sitting at her desk and holding a knife, I might have thrown my arms around her. She might have smelled of earl grey and tobacco. She might have held me close.

“One cassette,” she said sternly. “One side of a cassette and then to bed, because you haven’t told me everything. But if you so much as think of biting anyone else, I will not let you watch another movie musical as long as I live.”

“Yes, Miss Agnes,” I said, already trying to decide if I wanted to hear Cats or Evita. To this day, I cannot tell you what Cats is about. I chose Patti LuPone that evening and every day since.

I don’t have many good memories of the first half of my life. Any I do all came out of my months at Grimwood, weeks in that study, days with her.

★

Our evenings were few and far between with the added chores I was given in punishment alongside the others. Bennie, Peter, and Trevor did not give me any more trouble, apart from a muttered “altar boy” whenever I was in earshot. I soon grew brave enough to knock on the study door in the mornings to see if I could be of any help.

“I only got through 1994,” I argued when Sister Agnes put her hands on her hips in protest. A good year. She got tickets to the London Palladium revival of Oliver!.

I loved seeing the names of theatres on the programs, old friends by the time I began to catalogue this century’s playbills, the suitcase nearly empty. I tried not to think of what that meant. Near the bottom, I found more artifacts from this past life of hers. Marked up scripts and sturdy heeled pumps. A red ball she said helped to bounce when she learning her lines, that I could keep if I liked, and I did, hiding it in my sock drawer. I was determined not to lose anything else that belonged to her.

Mostly though, she let me sit in one of the armchairs while she went through her plans. I would sit with my knees pulled up, listening sleepily as she described the improvements to be made to this part of the house and that. The early morning sun came through the windows, warming me through, and I was happy, so happy.

We had any number of conversations I remember now with such fondness my chest hurts. I tried to picture her in the life she told me about in passing, the musicals and plays she had been part of as Nes Grimwood, 1968-1984.

“Why did you stop?” I asked, disappointed to find fewer and fewer casting notices.

She studied the blueprints a while before answering, “My father died and left me the place.

“Couldn’t well run off to London with a country estate to keep up, now could I? Keep from falling down, more like. Besides, he didn’t think acting was a profession for a modest woman.”

The property had been in her family for generations.

“The Grimwoods were grand people once,” she said to me one morning, “With money.”

“What happened?”

She gave a great barking laugh that still startled me, though the sound was as familiar then as the mice in the walls.

“Drank it away.”

Those laughs came punctuated with coughs in the beginning of the summer, so much so that she gave up her pipe and let Maeve make her tea. A family recipe she had sworn by. Sister Agnes made a face bringing the cup to her lips, but sipped dutifully.

“Cheers, Simon Snow.”

“Why don’t I have a middle name?” I wondered after one of these toasts.

I was always the sort of boy everybody calls by all the names they have for him.

“Even Wickie has one,” I said, “and he sounds like he shouldn’t have his first name yet alone his second.”

“What is it?” Sister Agnes asked.

“Reginald,” I said gravely.

She stroked her chin. “Chadwicke Reginald. That is unfortunate.” After a moment, she said, “I suppose we will have to give you one ourselves.”

The possibility had never occurred to me.

“It can be anything you like.”

Oliver, I thought. I loved the way it sounded in my head and aloud when I sang it to myself. Oliver, Oliver, never before has a boy wanted more—and I thought I should like that. More.

“Oliver,” I decided.

I will never forget her eyes, smiling and warm. “Simon Oliver,” she said carefully. “To bed with you then.”

My dreams that night, like they have been for so many years, were full of music I could only faintly recall by morning.

I should have known something was wrong when I woke. The house was too still, like every room was holding its breath. Miss Tallulah stood in the doorway of the empty study, looking as though she lost her way.

“Where is Miss Agnes?”

Once, when I was little and unwatched, I tried to pull up a rose by the stem only to come away bleeding. A thorn of fear prickled at my skin to see Miss Tallulah’s green eyes sad and watery, though I told myself it could be all the dust.

“She took ill last night,” she said, swallowing like the words hurt, “and Maeve brought her to the hospital.”

“Are we to see her then?” I asked. “I can put my coat on straightaway.”

“Simon,” Miss Tallulah said gently, and I remember feeling very small as she knelt in front of me. I didn’t know silence to ever be so loud. “Miss Agnes is gone.”

“Where?” I whispered, though already, she was cradling me into her.

“I am so sorry,” she kept saying as I wept into her hair. “We are going to wake the others,” I heard her tell me. “Mrs. Heathcote will be here from the village, but wait here, will you?”

She rose, and I looked past her into the room, where I could see the morning light on the carpet. See Sister Agnes teaching me the words to “Do-Re-Mi.” See a ray, a drop of golden sun, fall across the desk. Was it only the hours of the night separating us? I couldn’t remember telling her good night. Would she be here if I had? So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, good night.

“I found this in her desk,” Miss Tallulah said, “I was looking for numbers of any family or friends.” She knelt again, but I couldn’t look away from the sun-bright room over her shoulder.

Gently, she placed something into my hands, and I was startled to see my name. Simon Oliver! Snow. Me, a name I call myself in black marker on blue painter’s tape. I held a Walkman older than I was, tracing the letters of a name that was mine. A cassette player that was mine. A woman who was not a mother that, still, was mine.

“She would have wanted you to have this too.” Miss Tallulah opened the cassette holder with a finger tip and tucked a tape inside.

I went to my room, where breakfast, then lunch would be sent and uneaten and where I would lay in bed until dinnertime, and studied the Walkman. Put the headphones over my ears and pressed play. Listened to the first measures of Lionel Bart’s overture before turning it off again.

An Oliver! cast recording that was, unbearably, mine now too.

How much like starving it seemed, to listen to the first track and remember gone, she was gone. To hear the music in my head when all I wanted was to forget, as hard as it was to think of a time when the notes made me feel anything but sadness.

The Walkman disappeared into my sock drawer, and only Miss Tallulah seemed to look for it when she came to take away my untouched trays. Maeve stopped by too, though I pretended to be napping. I began to sleep tightly wound, curled into myself as though that might make the ache less cavernous.

We had beds made up for Mrs. Heathcote and old lady Whitting (for there was a Mrs. Whitting, her daughter-in-law, who also lived in the village). They stayed the week, taking in the funeral clothes that had been donated through the church. One day, though they all seemed an endless muddle, I stood on a chair as Mrs. Heathcote worked with a mouthful of pins at the hem of my black trousers.

Everybody watched me as though I were a building scheduled for demolition, that might go up into dust at any moment. If only they could get close enough to see inside, at crumbling floors and a foundation giving way.

Bennie turned sixteen the day before the funeral. I think even he had forgotten until Miss Tallulah brought out a small cake with a candle. With all the baking she was doing for the wake, I suppose it was no trouble. He waited until we buried Sister Agnes before leaving Grimwood.

I’d never been to a funeral, my own mother and father too long gone and too little remembered to be mourned. Never loved anyone well enough to grieve them, but Nes.

All of Maeve’s hours making calls and searching Facebook unearthed a cousin in Dorset who could not make the burial. Many of the villagers did though. I had seen most of them at church, and they had seen us. Could see us standing together miserably by the graveside and wonder. What was a menagerie of Grimwood boys to do without their keeper? And what was to become of their cage?

I held Miss Tallulah’s hand all throughout. It was only when the funeral goers followed us back to the Hall for the wake that I stopped crying, spent. I found a wingback chair by the window, where Arthur and Joseph brought me a plate of boiled ham. They sat down on a settee by a red-eyed Wickie. He liked Sister Agnes well enough to cry for her even though she insisted on calling him Chadwicke.

I didn’t spare a thought for the others.

Indistinct murmurs reached me and nearby, old lady Whitting gave a hum of approval, her spoon clinking the sides of her teacup. “She would have been glad to know she’d be buried with ham. Always a prideful thing, she was,” I heard her say to Mrs. Whitting the younger. “Agnes held her head up high even when she came back from London browbeaten.”

I stared out into the garden.

“Dear girl thought she would be the one to get away, so did we all. God rest her soul.”

Gardening had readied me for the hands of grief. In them, I was soil turned up. Eyes closed, I dreamt of the flower beds, a wilderness without her.

The house seemed lifeless when I woke, the day nearly gone and Bennie with it. He had packed his things after breakfast and insisted on walking to the bus himself. Trevor and Peter sat at the foot of the staircase, unusually solemn, and stood when they noticed me. I shouldered past, running up the three flights to my attic room. I was determined not to cry anymore, sure I had gone through every tear in my body, my eyes so swollen it hurt to look at anything. There was little comfort to be had in anything but the touch of Miss Tallulah’s hand on my forehead, her voice soft as she murmured how warm I was and did I feel alright and if there was anything she could do and anything I would like to eat.

There was an abundance of food as we had never known in Sister Agnes’s life, Grimwood being a household of economy. We had to make what we had last us. But here finally, was food, glorious food. Brought to the door by people I had no idea thought anything of us. The foil-covered puddings and casseroles, pasties and breads, pies and cakes saved Miss Tallulah the work of cooking, though there was one less mouth to feed. Two, with Bennie gone without a goodbye.

Mrs. Heathcote made plans to stay with us a while longer (after she and old lady Whitting, I heard, had drawn straws). With the summer upon us, we were languid and despondent in the heat of the house, unsure of how much longer we all would be living in it. Only Mrs. Heathcote’s crosswords seemed to break through our stupor as she read clues aloud, carrying newspapers with her all hours of the day, tapping the end of her pen on the table and considering the possibilities.

“Upcoming movie musical starring Meryl Streep,” she muttered.

“Mamma Mia,” I said after a moment, my chest tight with the memory of how Sister Agnes had winked when I asked if we could go to the cinema together and see it soon.

Over and over, I thought about her cassettes, imagined them playing, heard the whir of them humming in the deck. Knew where she kept them, neat and ordered by year, but I couldn’t go in the study. I wouldn’t again. The farthest I did was standing in the doorway that awful morning, looking at the way the motes of dust danced in the sunlight, all of it too much.

I began to clean the grout in the Hall in the waiting, the ceaseless waiting, for this cousin from Dorset, the Local Authority, whoever came first. Wickie seemed glad for the distraction, taking up the brush. Arthur and Joseph too. A sixth stage of grief, scrubbing tile. I looked up one after a time to see Peter in a corner with his own, Trevor sitting in the chair that she used to, his head on his arms on the desk as he watched.

Mrs. Heathcote shooed us out of the house when she discovered us, but we only turned to weeding the garden.

Maeve came out to see for herself, crying. “Lord,” she said, laughing through her tears. “You silly little gooses.”

The cousin from Dorset arrived first, a balding man who appraised the estate with an unsentimental eye. I wandered from room to room to find the drapes had been pulled off furniture in his inspection. In the end, he wanted only the china. The rest was to be sold with the house.

I said my goodbyes to those mysterious, dust-ridden bedrooms and parlours, singing Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, understanding for the first time a grief that can’t be spoken. I didn’t care who heard. Sat in every upholstered chair and unpolished table even though it made my skin itch.

I learned of my new placement after Miss Tallulah found me half-asleep in a four-poster bed, one of the white drapes pulled over me like a shroud.

“Let me help you pack,” she said gently, taking my hands like the strings of a marionette puppet of a boy she was teaching to walk.

“There isn’t much,” I said, shaking my head.

When I returned to my room, I began to gather anything I could call mine. Not the uniform that had been Joseph’s until he started at the high school. No need with end of term and a new care home and school to come. But the shirts and jeans that hung loose on me, that could be dirtied and with their grass and mud stains were as beyond hope as I seemed to be, sure. I put them all into my backpack and started in on the sock drawer. Stared at the red ball, mine, the Walkman, mine, the tape, mine. Into the bottom of the bag they went, where I didn’t have to look at them. Didn’t have to think about whose they were first.

“See, Miss Tallulah?” I said, hearing the door creak open behind me, “I told you I don’t have much.”

But it was Peter, who shrugged. “Still,” he said, pulling something out of his pocket. “I thought you might like this back.”

He held out a polaroid I thought lost to ash, half festered with an open wound of a burn that left only half of Nes Grimwood, 1976 recognizable to me. But that was enough.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“We shouldn’t have,” he faltered, putting his hands in his pockets like he might be able to fish the words out. “It was yours,” he said, “and we shouldn’t have and—I really am sorry.”

After he had gone, I looked at what was left of the photo for a long time.

The days were tedious as we worked through the rest of the boiled ham, and by dinnertime, there was one less boy at the table to help us eat it. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves, taking to Mrs. Heathcote’s crosswords as hungrily as we did everything else.

My chance to sit in the back of another social worker’s car came at last.

“God bless and keep you, Simon Snow,” Miss Tallulah said in goodbye, crying as she had for everyone, even Trevor. From the backseat, I waved back at her, at Arthur and Maeve, at Wickie and Mrs. Heathcote. I looked up Grimwood Hall and its grounds through the rear glass until we reached the end of the drive and the house was gone from my sight.

★

I was left at a nondescript building in a grey-skied city full of sound. There, my world went silent.

No one knew what to make of me. Well, the carers didn't. The other children, however—I didn’t trouble myself with remembering their names, Trevor and Bennie types who called me “crybaby.” Which was better than altar boy. It was true at least.

Every morning, I woke up dry-mouthed and choked, stumbling out of bed to stare teary-eyed into my breakfast.

“Don’t,” one of the carers said helplessly, with one look at my trembling lip. Easy for her to say when she didn’t have to eat any of the porridge. Gruel if ever I’ve tasted it.

Black and white days, they were, as though I had been carried off to Oz only to wake up back in Kansas. I told myself then I would never go to Kansas if it felt like this. I would never go anywhere, it seemed, but another home and then another, in a long succession of places where I was not wanted.

The thought swallowed up every song, every last note in me and I could feel my ribs where, mindlessly, I thought the music must have lived. Must have gone from my lungs, caught with the beginnings of a sob.

“Crybaby,” they chorused, always the boys who make up the chorus. Nothing but noise.

Anger burned in me with every taunt, and in the hollows of my lungs with every breath, there burned a nameless something. Grief seemed too small a word, though that pooled dark beneath the skin too, bruise tender. I began to wonder if Miss Tallulah was right to think me sick, all the times she wondered if I had a fever, my body overheating with something that needed to be broken.

Though I suppose I broke first.

I have been in too many scuffles and fights since to remember how that one began. Only how it ended. With the carers pulling me and one of the older boys apart and wondering did he always have that chipped tooth.

The August evenings were sweltering enough for me to forget my starving when I was sent to bed without dinner. The sort of punishment where they like for you to think about what you’ve done.

I was a boy who was not dangerous, but would be, give it a year or two. No telling how troublesome I would be with a little bit of meat on my bones. Growing boy, always needing more. Hadn’t I named myself after a boy who wanted more? But what more was there for me?

Apart from more teeth and more blood. More of this ache. Wound tight along my spine, the fine turning wheels of a clock.

There was a grandfather clock in one of the dust-ridden bedrooms at Grimwood. I watched its pendulum swing for what seemed like hours on one of my last restless days. The whole of my life tick, tick, ticking towards some inevitable moment.

I was tongueless to the dread, unable to dig out the root. All summer long, I had dreamt of dark places, made from emptiness, waking up afraid, to hunger and that something else waiting beneath. Another sort of hunger, but one that would consume me and I was so afraid would swallow up everything with it.

There are animals made vicious when threatened, helpless to instinct and fear. I would grow to be one of them. I remember sitting on my bed, knuckles swollen and bloody, already halfway there.

I couldn’t help but think of her—breathless still with the loss, holding myself the way you might if you had broken a rib. She could see me, I think, for what I was, and yet she filled me up with music. Too much, she was afraid.

Too little, I was.

Looking over my shoulder to see that I was alone, everybody else at dinner, I dug into the bag hidden between the bedframe and cinder block. Remarkable how even holding the cassette player could quiet the fury of anger and grief.

Her words still rang my in ears. You’re more than that, she’d said. You have a lot of fight in you, Simon Snow, but you’re more than that. For the first time since I saw her last, my name a song and a goodbye and a secret between us, I wanted to believe it.

I would let myself have this. The A side. The overture. More.

Sleep came sure as measure. When I woke, to morning, the music was there with me though my headphones had fallen off in the night. The cassette player disappeared back into its hiding place between the bed and the wall. But by breakfast, I was humming.

Sometimes I think Hope must have hummed from where she lay sleepily at the bottom of the cage Pandora opens in all the myths.

I daydreamed all through the afternoon’s scheduled and chaperoned activities. Dared to think my life a vast and endless sky. I missed the wide openness of the country, how it filled my dreams with blue. In the stark grey of that care home, we were given a pittance of an allowance. Yet still more money than I could ever call my own and perhaps, with a few pounds secreted away, this could be the beginning.

Of more cassettes and more show tunes and more playbills, all mine. Hers. I would live my life one side of a cassette at a time for her.

I forgot though, all the other things that escape in the stories when you open what everything tells you not to.

When I came back to my bed that night, I pulled up the blankets to find the remnants of the cassette player.

“No,” I moaned, cradling the bit of plastic in my hands.

“Touch me again, and that won’t be the last thing I break,” hissed a boy behind me. Chippy, with his tooth and split lip and laughter.

I have always been superstitious of the end of tapes, a childish fear that leaving them too long in static after the last track would pull the ribbon from the spool. Would break it the way my heart seemed to then, something in me tape-held-taut and snapping.

But if he had hoped to see me cry again, he was disappointed with the jut of my chin. Long before I ever lay my hands on steel, there was iron in me, though the heat of it left me when the lights went out for curfew.

I curled around the pieces of my Walkman, as though a forge of my body could meld them back together. The building that I was, unfit to be standing, finally coming down in a billow of dust.

I don’t remember falling asleep or dreaming of flames, but I woke to them, to the taste of smoke and the horror of walls swallowed up by fire. Delirium, I decided, even though the heat seared too close to be a fever dream, the beds I had been surrounded by—moments before, it seemed (when had I fallen asleep?)—lost to smoke. Or ash.

There were screams over the roar of fire, of sirens, though maybe they were mine.

“Please!” I cried, my throat blistering with the word, with the fear bitter to my mouth like bile, with the pain, white-hot and nerveless, that made me wonder if I had caught fire, the heat unbearable as I stumbled to the floor. Not an ember on me, and I was burning.

I have memories of being taught in school to leave everything behind in the event of a fire, and I acted on that learned instinct, halfway to the door when I remembered a polaroid I nearly lost once to flame.

I still had the habit of keeping all I had left of her tucked away in my pillowcase, and the picture was in my hands in a moment.

That was all it took for the roof to collapse. From where the ceiling had been swallowed away by fire, I could see the moon, even as smoke made my eyes water. Help me, I prayed, please.

There came a voice from the darkness in answer.

“Make a wish!”

So I did, closing my eyes to a sudden howl of wind that left me cold. I stood breathlessly in the rubble, hoping I hadn’t imagined the words.

Like another wish granted, the voice called to me.

“Nothing to see here,” it said. (There was everything to see here.)

I opened my eyes to see the fire was gone. From the soot and shadow, a man emerged, and my first impression of him is as an odd spot of color against the blackened and burnt remains of that room. He was dressed head to toe in green. Like Peter Pan had done the impossible. Grown up and come back for another lost boy.

“It’s you,” he said, and I recognized the voice I had heard to be his, harsh with a rasp and what I thought to be accusation.

“I didn’t mean to,” I started, unsure of what I was admitting. Had I done this?

“I know, Simon.” The man’s eyes were bright, as though aflame, but only the smoke could tell of the fire that had blazed. Make a wish, he had said, and I wanted the burning to stop.

“How do you know my name?” I wondered.

He stepped through the debris, one hand at his hip, upon what I would come to know to be a sword. This man would give me one of my own.

“I have been looking everywhere for you,” he told me.

“Who are you?”

He considered me. “I am the Headmaster of Watford School of Magicks,” he began, “but I am known in our world as the Mage.”

Magicks. Watford. Headmaster. Mage.

“Our world?”

He said the words, as though this world were mine too.

“There is a universe of magic,” he went on, “with mages, that is, magicians, who are born with the power to speak with it, and you may be the Greatest of us all.”

This man, this mage, The Mage, he had called himself, the way you might say The Queen. He held himself with a stately enough air, one hand on a scabbard, another behind his back, but everything out of his mouth was Mad Hatter, he was storybook.

“Your magic, Simon,” the Mage said. “Your power.”

“But I’m not,” I began, and even with the words trembling on my lips, there came to me a sudden understanding, the name for that restless heat that you could feel beneath my skin.

It was power.

“You belong to our world,” the Mage said, kneeling before me in the ash, his grasp tight on my shoulders. “I can take you there, home to Watford. There, you will learn to harness your power.”

Belong. Home. Watford.

“Magic isn’t real,” I said, faltering, because already, the man’s words seemed brimming with some enchantment. Besides, wasn’t Sondheim precisely that? “Is it?”

“I can show you,” the Mage said, sitting on the edge of my bed and before I could say anything more, he pulled out a wand. Like Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother. Impossible. He tapped his chin with the end of it, his eyes falling on the broken cassette player on my bed.

“Good as new,” he said, his voice losing some of its edge as he spoke. I gasped to see the Walkman put itself back together, the player and the Oliver! cassette both falling to the bed after, as he promised, good as new. If show tunes were magic, this was something else entirely. It’s possible.

I picked up the cassette, feeling the sting of tears, as I traced a loop of ribbon beneath the clear plastic, tightening the spool to watch the tape wind back, pushing it into the Walkman, nearing dropping the headphones as I raised them to my ear and pressed play to a rush of sound.

“Will it,” I stammered, my mouth dry as I held out the polaroid with a shaking hand, “will it work on this?”

At once, he took the picture from me, studying the image closely. “Of course,” he said, clearing his throat after a moment. “Picture perfect!’

Magic was like rewinding the tape back to watch Colm Wilkinson sing himself into a new life, again and again and again, the polaroid made whole before me, the burn erased from scarred film as though it were a small injury, the lines of the image redeveloping where the scabs had fallen away.

He brought the picture back to his eyes, as though he had been expecting someone else. But it was Nes, in some way, here, back again.

“Well?” the Mage asked at last as I stared hungrily at the bright dressing room table and a girl sitting in its light, who taught me to sing. “Will you come with me, Simon Snow?”

I remember the music that whispered from my headphones, soft with my answer. I’d do anything.

For you dear, anything.