Constance Read Online Free PDF

of dogs barked at the occasional motorbike out on the road, and sometimes she could hear a squeak of voices from Wayan Tupereme’s house, but mostly there were only the close, intimate rustlings of wildlife in the vegetation and the conversation of frogs. Damp, warm air pressed on her bare skin. Connie was never afraid to be alone in this house.
    She ticked off a mental list.
    After tomorrow, there were two more linked commercials to shoot.
    It was going to be a hard week’s work, but now it was under way her apprehension had faded and she felt stimulated. It was good to have a surge of adrenalin. And then when it was all over the agency people and the crew and Angela would disperse, back to the cities, and she would still be here quietly making gamelan music with Ketut and his friends and looking out at her view.
    At the same time the Boom music started running through her head, and obstinately stayed there.
    Damn Simon Sheringham and Marcus Atkins.
    It wasn’t just the bank clients, though. It was the disorientating effect of finding London in Bali. It was being made to feel alive, and the way that that stirred her memories and brought them freely floating to the surface of her mind.
    Connie’s thoughts tracked backwards, all the way down the years to when she was a little girl, to the day after they moved into the new house in Echo Street, London.
    She was six, and her sister Jeanette was almost twelve.
    On their first night she had had a terrible nightmare. A faceless man came gliding out of the wardrobe in her unfamiliar bedroom and tried to suffocate her. Her mother rushed in wearing her nightdress, with her hair wound on spiny mesh rollers. Connie was shouting for her father but Hilda told her that her dad needed his sleep, he had to openthe shop at eight o’clock in the morning, like he did every day.
    ‘I don’t like this bedroom. It’s frightening,’ Connie sobbed.
    ‘I’ve heard quite enough about that.’
    Connie had had a fight with Jeanette over who was to get which bedroom. Jeanette had won, as she always did.
    Hilda scolded her. ‘It’s a lovely room, you’re a lucky little girl. Now go to sleep and let’s have no more of this nonsense.’
    In the morning, Connie had decided to put the spectres of the night behind her. She would impress herself on Echo Street, somehow or other.
    She marched through the house, past Hilda who was clattering the breakfast dishes, out into the garden and past the puffy blooms of hydrangeas and hazy billows of catmint, all the way to the garden shed at the far end.
    She climbed the garden wall and made the daring leap to the shed roof, and then perched on the sooty ridge. From that vantage point, with its view of the neighbouring gardens, she had launched into a long, loud song that she had made up herself. She stood on the shed roof and bawled out her song to the backs of the houses and the railway line beyond the fence until Hilda shouted through the kitchen window that she was disturbing the whole neighbourhood.
    Almost forty years later, what Connie recollected most clearly about that day was the singing itself, and the complicated song, and the importance that both had assumed – like a reef in the turbulent currents of daily life. Music was already becoming her resort, in a family with a mother and father who would have had difficulty in distinguishing between Handel and Cliff Richard, and a sister who could not hear a note of music. Or any other sound.
    In the new front room at Echo Street there was the upright piano that had come with them from their old flat. No one else in the family ever played it and it was badly out of tune,but the instrument had belonged to Connie’s father’s mother and Tony always insisted that it was a good one, worth a bit of money. Hilda kept it well dusted and used the top as a display shelf for the wedding photograph (Tony Brylcreemed in a wide-shouldered suit, Hilda in a ruched bodice, a hat like the top off a mince pie, and