Grace

Chapter 6

House prayers had been led by Mr. Clarke and had been a heartfelt well wishing for our futures, a hope that we would all integrate well and enjoy our time here. He'd called it 'a new era'. I'd wanted to finish the line with a dramatic 'in which lion and hyena come together'. It was more of a speech to all of us though as 'prayers' really meant 'announcements'.

Music practice had been rocky to start off with and ended not quite so bad. For saying this was an even half of our year in our house, I thought we did pretty well with only two musical people in the group. Everyone else had at least four. One table had a band on it and some choir singers. They were sorted.

We all gathered back in the dining room, Ben still looking a bit dejected at not hearing my trumpet because it had become clear we didn't have time for that two minutes in to practice.

"Ok," Mrs. Clarke said. "We'll do this at your tables I think. If any groups are particularly bad we'll cut the embarrassment short. The idea is to quickly see who all the musical ones are amongst you and get ideas and then we can put our heads together and come up with something that will knock College out of the water."

The guys all cheered. We girls just watched on a little confused.

"Ok. Let's start with... the middle table."

Oh great. That was my table again.

"We're doing the Skyfall theme, but we've got the intro bar and then cut to about the last minute since that's the really good bit," Clara explained and tucked some light brown hair behind her ear. Meanwhile someone whispered, "They butchered Adele!"

Clara looked at me and I began to play. A moment later she came in with "Where you go I go, what you see I see". Her voice was rich and resonated in the room really well. Everyone seemed to be really enjoying it, but then the guys joined in with Chi. Chi was pretty good for someone who only really sang along to the radio, her voice a clear, sweet soprano when she tried. The guys let us down a bit but Mrs. Clarke let us carry on passed them and let Clara do the big ending bit.

It had been months since I did a performance and whilst this barely registered on the scale of performances I felt the thrill of the experience. The excitement that it brought coupled with a little nervousness that I channelled into focus. When we finished we got an enthusiastic applause and Mrs. Clarke made a note of our names on a piece of paper.

"Definitely in somehow," Mr. Wagnerite said. "But why hasn't that trumpet got valves and why is it reminiscent of a trombone? Play it for us."

"Ha!" Ben exclaimed.

For a moment all was silent as all eyes turned to him. Then he realised what he'd done, clamped his hands over his mouth and sunk in his chair. Everyone burst into laughter that was throaty and hearty, even Ben, and it took a few minutes for us all to recover.

"Someone care to explain?" Mrs. Clarke asked.

"Ben's been whinging all day –"

"I don't whinge," Ben said.

"Yeah you do," Tarq continued. "He's been whinging all day for Grace to play her "not-trumpet". Now she has to."

"Do the Doll Song from Olympia," Clara suggested.

I put my violin down and picked up my trumpet. I hadn't played for a couple of day as I'd been so busy making sure I was ready to come here, but I wasn't out of practice. I'd been playing since I was four. This was more like a five minute break.

"Isn't that the old Durex play advert song?" Ben whispered not so quietly.

"No. But I so hope this makes the show and your dad sees this," I said.