Miranda Dickinson - When I Fall In Love

Elsie watched as he raced off, ducking into a doorway about fifty yards down the street. Taken aback, Elsie remained obediently outside the shop, pulling her thin cardigan around her shoulders to ward off the evening chill. For a full five minutes, she waited, peering in the direction Olly had disappeared for any sign of his return. Finally, just as the tips of her fingers were beginning to numb, a shaft of light flooded into the street from the doorway and Olly stepped out, accompanied by five others. Elsie could hear their excited conversation as the group approached.

‘Here you are: choir volunteers!’ he announced happily.

‘But how did you …? Where …?’

Olly dismissed her questions. ‘Doesn’t matter. You can buy me coffee when we meet on Saturday.’

Elsie frowned. ‘Which Saturday?’

‘Whichever Saturday you like. As long as it’s soon . Not saying you owe me or anything but …’ he indicated the small group of people around him. ‘Deal?’

It was impossible not to smile at his brazen cheek. ‘Fine, deal.’

‘Excellent. I’ll call you. Now, don’t you have a rehearsal to run?’ With a grin so wide it would make the Cheshire Cat envious, he left Elsie on the street surrounded by the volunteers. She watched him leave, the surprise of this new development tingling through her, before bringing herself back to the present and ushering the group inside.

Daisy and Woody’s faces were a picture when she appeared with the new choir members and they sprang into action, shaking hands, taking names and contact details and arranging the chairs into a circle in the middle of the room. The first members of the choir were a diverse group of people indeed: nineteen-year-old Danny Alden and his bird-like girlfriend Aoife McVey; self-assured twenty-nine-year-old Sasha Mitchell; fifty-something taxi driver Stan Goodson and quiet pensioner Irene Quinn. It transpired that they had all been drinking in the pub at the end of the street when Olly had burst in and silenced the patrons with an impassioned appeal for choir members. Whether he had offered anything in return was unclear, although Elsie suspected money might have been placed behind the bar to quench the thirst of potential volunteers. But it didn’t matter – whatever his modus operandi, Elsie was immensely thankful for Olly’s assistance and, she had to admit, more than a little thrilled by it.

Once the group had assembled and had been furnished with coffee by Cher, Elsie motioned for the meeting to begin.

‘Thank you all, so much, for being here this evening. I know that none of you were expecting to join a choir today.’

A ripple of laughter passed around the room.

‘But let me explain why I think this project will work. Firstly, there are no auditions, no prerequisites for joining and no charge for being a choir member. We’ll all decide the songs we want to sing and try to include something for everyone. The most important thing for me is to create something we can all be a part of and enjoy. All I need from you, if you’re interested, is enthusiasm. Everything else will come along the way.’

Woody coughed loudly, causing all eyes to turn towards him.

Elsie took the hint. ‘I won’t be doing this alone. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Woody Jensen …’

The assembled group murmured their hellos as Woody stood, his Matrix-style leather coat and skull T-shirt beneath giving him what he hoped was a suitably imposing appearance. Silver chains jangled at his wrists as he raised both hands in a red carpet greeting. ‘Greetings. You may remember me from the hit Eighties rock band, Hellfinger?’

Daisy stifled a giggle at the uniformly blank looks that met this question.

‘No bother, you can Google me later. I’m proud to say this choir was my idea and the universe itself sent me this wonderful woman to be a minstrel to my musical wizardry. Together, friends, we can shake the very foundations of this town, infuse the collective psyches of the people with mystical tunes and bring power back to the proletariat through the medium of music …’

‘… Or just have a lot of fun making music,’ Elsie added quickly, noting the relief on several of the group’s faces.

Woody nodded. ‘Well, yeah, that too.’

‘Does that sound good?’

Danny raised his hand. ‘Could we do some up-to-date stuff? I was part of The DreamTeam for six months and the most modern thing we did was “Mr Postman” by The Carpenters.’

Sasha sniggered. ‘Talk about lame. I vote we do Gaga.’

‘Gaga is great , man! We can mash her up with Led Zep or Hendrix …’ Woody’s grey eyes were alive as a million musical possibilities flashed before him.

‘We can do whatever you want,’ Elsie said, trying her best to rein Woody in. ‘It’s important that we find music we all like and have fun performing it.’

Stan raised his hand. ‘Well, you can count me in, girl. I love a bit of warbling, me.’ He nudged Irene, who was sitting beside him. ‘What d’ya reckon, Reenie? Up for showing these whippersnappers how it’s done?’

Irene smiled but said nothing, her downy cheeks turning the tiniest bit pink.

‘Don’t let her fool you,’ Stan said. ‘Irene used to be on the stage, back in the day. One of Brighton’s finest, she was. Sang with Vera Lynn on a concert tour for the troops in Canada at the end of the war when she was just seventeen.’ He patted her knee. ‘Bit of a hoofer in your day, weren’t you, girl?’

‘Stop it, Stanley,’ she replied, and Elsie noticed how bright her eyes shone as she smiled. ‘I haven’t sung for years.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It’ll be good to have another Brighton great in our ranks,’ Daisy remarked, pointedly nodding at Woody.

‘So what happens now?’ Aoife asked, the sudden arrival of her voice surprising everyone in the room.

Elsie shrugged. ‘It’s really up to you all. I suppose the first thing is to find an evening to meet that suits everybody and then we start work proper next week.’

After much discussion – and several random veerings off-course with Woody’s Hellfinger references – Wednesday evenings were deemed to be perfect for choir rehearsals, and the inaugural meeting of the choir came to an end.

Elsie thanked them as they began to leave, wondering how many would return the following week.

‘It sounds like a bit of a laugh,’ Sasha said at the door, long false eyelashes fluttering beneath her razor-sharp, bleached-blonde fringe. ‘Will we be able to do solos and stuff? Only people say I have a bit of a solo voice.’

Elsie shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not. This choir can be whatever we want it to be.’

‘Sweet. See you next Wednesday.’

Stan and Irene shook Elsie’s hand. ‘Lovely evening,’ Irene smiled. ‘Most unexpected, but lovely.’

‘I hope you’re ready for our vocal delights, girl,’ chuckled Stan.

‘I’m looking forward to experiencing them.’

Daisy joined Elsie by the door as the last of the choir members filed out into the chilly night. ‘Do you think that went well?’ she asked, clearly not all that convinced that it had.

‘I think so. I suppose we’ll find out next week.’

Walking home, Elsie took a deep breath and looked up at the starlit sky. The night might not have taken the course she was expecting, but it felt good nevertheless. Positivity seemed to sparkle around her as she walked: the lights from the homes she passed were brighter, the night sky was a beautiful midnight blue and her heart felt lighter than it had for years.

‘This choir could well be the making of you, Elsie Maynard,’ she said to herself.

It was still dark when Elsie awoke next morning, pools of light from the streetlights outside her windows pooling in through the half-closed curtains in the bedroom of her Victorian terraced house. The dream from which she had stirred was the same that had brought her to daylight many times before: not a nightmare as such, more a captured moment of time playing on a perennial loop in her subconscious. She had dreamed it so often that it was strangely comforting now, almost reassuring in its reliability. There were never any words, only sensations. Oddly enough, the locations regularly changed, but the essence of the dream remained constant: the touch of a hand on hers followed by a tiny squeeze – barely perceptible to the naked eye but as powerful as a one-hundred-thousand-volt shock. And then, nothing but the feeling of being suspended in a pitch-black void, as if hanging above the earth before the lights of morning appeared. At first, Elsie had been unnerved by the dream but now it was an accepted part of her new life: a last vestige of the past to remind her of how far she had come.