YVETTE’S SWEET VOICE

This little girl can sing!

The day that Yvette was born everyone knew something special had come into the world. But then, don’t parents always believe that when their first child is born? Until they see sense, that is?

Ann and Dicky Prospect were the parents in Yvette’s case. Ann was a mousy blonde and Dicky was a wannabe city gent who never made it past the village where he was born, though he’d harboured many a dream. They met in the local pub, The Hustler’s Arms, it was early winter and without so much as a by your leave Yvette was born nine months to the day later. That was it: no time was wasted, then. Oh, and they fitted a marriage in a few weeks before the birth. It seemed the right thing to do and gave both parents the same surname as little Yvette for the sake of decency.

Humble beginnings don’t always presage greatness, but these did. Alone in the paradise of her family home something forged itself inside Yvette’s baby heart.

In fact, Yvette was hardly any age at all when someone said what a beautiful singing voice she had. A voice of an angel, they said, and when she heard them say it the angel just had to fly a bit higher. Even before she was old enough to go to school she was in a choir of one: herself.

That Christmas when she was four and a quarter she entertained the aged residents of Saint Mingus’ Home for the Elderly, and she went down too well. It was one of those chores the old people had to tolerate, another precocious brat wanting them to coo for Christmas. Hadn’t they been on that road themselves so very long ago that they’d just about forgotten?

It would have been a perfect performance from little Yvette but for the reaction of the ninety-three year old Thomas Richardson. He was apparently hale and hearty and much in love with his memories, especially sweet little Janie Birdstone and her pretty face topped with fragrant hair, little Janie Birdstone who he’d kissed when he was ten. And not just kissed, too. He could remember it when he saw Yvette standing there in the here and now, sweet and innocent and oh, so young. Then she had opened her mouth and the words, a hymn it was, All things Bright and Beautiful, tumbled forth into the world.

Talk about travelling back through a life!

He could smell Janie’s breath as he sat slumped in his wheel chair and watched Yvette. It had been so sweet, and his lips had kissed hers all those years ago. And more. Mischievously, he had rubbed one hand on her dress, nervously by her crotch. Just for a fractured second, but he had done it. He could remember it. They had said he was a dirty, filthy little urchin, had even taken a cane to him and left bruises that lasted a month long. But he had touched Janie’s dress like he wanted to. And Janie had started singing that self-same hymn in the fog of his memory. Her voice joined with Yvette’s which is what it ought to do.

How the years washed away! How his childhood and then his teens into his twenties dissolved until they became nothing more than a backdrop to the here and now. His marriage to Toni became part of the blur, the birth of Anthony and Cleopatra (why had they called the twins by those name?), their little lives as they grew to adulthood, the agony of Toni’s funeral because the actual truth was he had worshipped her for ever and ever. Their lives together had always had their ups and downs, but the ups went higher and the downs hardly ever mattered.

Yes, he had worshipped Toni almost as much as he had worshipped Janie Birdstone for that one huge moment of his childhood.

And Janie, she had kissed him back.

And as he remembered that precious moment a circle was completed. He knew it. He was an old man in a wheelchair and his memories suddenly replaced the present.

Because little Vicky, sweet as anything, made his faltering heart fall silent, and the world around him, the people inside Saint Mingus Home for the Elderly, the staff, a nurse, old Dottie Parkhurst who he’d once told he liked, liked and not loved, he was sure of that, became shadow statues in a world that crumbled into the sort of dust that dreams crumble into when it’s time to wake up.

Yvette smiled when she noticed the way he slumped in his wheelchair. Her eyes shone when they wheeled him away and she suddenly knew that one day she’d move the world.

Like she’d moved an old man’s heart.

With a song.

© Peter Rogerson 28.08.22

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