Free Mercy by Rebecca Lim

edge to the way he dresses. Dark cords and scuffed workboots, artfully layered poor-boy shirts and a vintage waistcoat hanging open beneath a battered single-breasted jacket, a thin, striped scarf. Steel-framed glasses, electric blue eyes, just a hint of stubble.
    Everything just so. A picture. Vain, then. I know I have come across his type before, somewhere.
    All the girls sit up straighter in their chairs, eyes bright, colour high. ‘This is more like it,’ Tiffany says with satisfaction.
    Paul shoots her a quick look under his extravagant lashes, a lingering smile guaranteed to stop her breathing 92

    — I know, because I hear the catch, the re-engagement
    — then he says brightly, ‘Let’s take it from Figure 1, shall we, soprani?’
    He seats himself at the piano stool, begins to play with his beautiful, long-fingered hands. There is a flutter of movement as the front row — me in its midst —
    congratulates itself on its foresight.
    As Paul runs the general chorus through their paces, I bide my time, learning the music, learning the faces, watching the clock, waiting — reluctant and on edge
    — for Figure 7. Just miming along, because I’m still not sure if what I have in mind is going to work.
    It’s stop and start. There are plenty of hands this morning as Paul patiently answers every stupid question the girls dream up just to get him to look at them. Like,
    ‘Ah, Paul, isn’t that supposed to be a demi semiquaver?’
    (‘No, it isn’t, Mary-Ellen, but you’ve raised a good point there.’)
    For Tiffany, he has extra time and attention, asking her to demonstrate a bar here, a phrase there, over and over, with great charm and the flash of white teeth, until the other girls in the room are openly mutinous. But Tiffany laps it up, shooting me sly glances, playing with the ends of her sleek side pony, blowing us all away with 93

    her big, Italianate voice. Such a standout, such a talent, it’s obvious what Paul thinks. He grins when he hears her putting the rest in the shade, his approval clear.
    There is electricity in the air between them.
    We don’t get to Figure 7, and I’m relieved. Maybe it won’t be today.
    When Paul finally says it’s time to rejoin the rest of the choir, there are audible groans.
    ‘God, I hope we get him again tomorrow,’ Tiffany says fervently. ‘What a total honey .’
    Then she gives me a piercing look. ‘You up to it?’
    Everything a contest. I shrug. ‘I guess. Wait and see.’
    We file back into the main assembly hall and throw ourselves into our chairs. Mr Masson exhorts us feverishly to ‘Take it from the top!’, the orchestra blares back into disembodied life and the whole room rips into it. And though the basses are off, and the altos keep missing their entries, and the tenors can’t keep the time, there’s a growing sense that things may just come together. You can see the amazement in people’s eyes.
    It’s beginning to sound kind of like … music.
    All the smug St Joseph’s girls around me are poised like hawks for Figure 7. I’m packed in tight — Tiffany on one side, Delia on the other, girls at front and back 94

    — like there’s been some secret directive to not let me escape, to block all the exits. Miss Fellows follows me with her dark eyes, ready to breathe fire at a single misstep, a single fluffed demisemiquaver or whatever.
    There is a moment of doubt, a tiny breath of uneasiness in me, a catch in my ribcage — Carmen? Can we do this? We can do anything, right? — as Mr Masson looks straight at me, beats me in, drills the air in front of him with a closed fist so that I can’t miss the entry point.
    Everyone is looking my way. And it’s now, now .
    And then I am singing the words I should have sung yesterday morning, the music I should have known yesterday morning, but committed wholly to memory in one desperate hour before Mrs Daley called out that dinner would shortly be served.
    The room bursts into open speculation, Mr