Read Online The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me by Lucy Robinson - Free Book Online

child of no more than seven.
    ‘Hullow,’ I said to him. I tried to sound jolly. ‘I’m from Stourbridge too, actually.’
    ‘She’s a liar,’ he reported confidently to his friends. ‘Probably a slag too.’
    I carried on, capable of neither amusement nor outrage. It was as if I was being propelled a few inches above the pavement; the momentum of my body coming from somewhere else. But this was not a blissful floaty sensation: it was one of pure, out-of-body terror.
    A girl dressed as a giant coffee cup handed me a free flapjack and I tore it open gratefully, only to find myself unable to eat.
    God, this really
was
an emergency. I lived to eat. Yet I hadn’t done so in more than twenty-four hours. Last night’s pork belly would never have made it into my tummy even if my unwelcome visitor hadn’t turned up. And this morning’s cereal had gone hard in its bowl. Now a flapjack. A slice of happiness! Not only was I incapable of eating it but, oh, Christ, I’d dropped it.
It had simply fallen out of my hands
.
    No food, especially food containing syrup, fell out ofmy hands. I looked round for a stray dog, but stray dogs, I realized, were probably few and far between in SW7.
    Stately, ostentatious red-brick buildings rose high above me. People walked purposefully and with aggression. A man shouted into his mobile about how it was time to fucking well do something about Marta. And I couldn’t eat. I felt insane. I twiddled my completely OTT ring around my finger and considered throwing up in a dustbin.
    Fiona had been singularly unhelpful when we’d spoken last night. No matter how I’d pleaded with her she’d just reminded me, five times, ten times, a thousand times, that I’d promised her I’d go to opera school. I’d given her my word. ‘Seize the day, remember?’ she’d said. ‘You promised me in New York, Sal!’
    ‘Seize the day,’ I’d repeated hollowly.
    And now here I was, my heart in my mouth, a chasm of terror cleaving down my middle.
    There were signs everywhere for the Royal College of Music, the Royal Albert Hall, the Skempton Building, the Science Library. I ignored all of them and stared fixedly at the map on my phone, perhaps in the hope that it would direct me to a different Royal College of Music. Ideally the one situated in my wardrobe in Bevan Street, Islington. Although I didn’t particularly want to go home either. I was terrified that last night’s visitor might come back. And if that happened I didn’t know what I’d –
    ‘STOP IT,’ I snapped at myself. Today was bad enough as it was; I had no mental space for him. I just had to trust that he’d taken note of the high-speed pork belly and would not come back. Ever. The
scumbag
. The bullshit-peddling, weak, spineless
scumbag
.
    ‘WILL YOU JUST
STOP IT
!’ I told myself, louder. I meant it this time. The college was drawing closer and I needed to start pretending to be calm.
Seize the day. Seize the day. Seize the day
.
    And there, resplendent opposite the Albert Hall, it was. The Royal College of Music. A terrifyingly grand, turreted red-brick Gothic affair with a Union flag flying above its fussy glass portico. Grand steps leading up to heavy ornate doors through which I had not been bred to pass.
    This building had been designed with great people in mind. ‘For more than 125 years our students have gone on to international stardom,’ the brochure had said. I swallowed. I didn’t want
any
stardom, let alone that of the international variety. Any more than I wanted to study at a place that was so posh it needed a French name. For this, I had been told by a worryingly trendy undergrad who was helping at the auditions, was a
conservatoire
. I hadn’t looked up the word but I knew that its definition would have something to do with
exceptional and talented
people who did not speak with Black Country accents. In fact, it was probably designed for people who hadn’t even
heard
of the Black Country.
    I felt fat as I