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We were glad that the rats came. The superstitious village postmistress called our Victorian villa ‘the sinking ship’. Nobody stayed long. A previous occupant was a singer-pianist like me. Music-hall. Punched above his weight — Orphean charm is double-edged. She left. He drank …then declined …then nobody liked to say. Seamus, our Airedale surrogate, avoided the second bedroom. We circumvented the subject, as always. ‘I didn’t recognise that song you played last night.’ ‘No.’ ‘Your hair looked great up.’ ‘Where?’ ‘In the hallway mirror.’
The electricians found it under the floorboards. Yellowing manuscript; sentimental lyrics about unrequited love. I played it on the baby grand. ‘You bind my heart with a golden cord.’ The atmosphere changed imperceptibly, like a cryptic haiku unravelling its meaning. Can the dead exorcise the living? Who knows. We put a rat-trap down. The scan’s OK. Jeannie’s fine. James will love his nursery.
Simon Machin
He heard her from the flat below, belting out ‘O sole mio’. It sounded like an Elvis hit his father used to sing in front of his shaving mirror. What was it? He was very forgetful.
She opened the door to him with faint reluctance. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s just — well, I wanted to say that I heard your song.’
‘“O sole mio”?’
‘Just so. And I was sorry’ — he hesitated, this was too personal — ‘to hear that you were so lonely.’
‘Lonely?’
‘O sole mio — doesn’t that mean you feel on your own, solo?’
‘Your Italian’s not so hot,’ she said, beckoning him in. He felt sheepish.
‘What does it mean, then?’
She was fishing in the refrigerator. ‘It means “My sun”.’
‘It was about me! Mother, how touching, how —’
She closed her eyes. Stupid bambino, she thought.
‘Want an ice cream?’ she asked.
‘Just one cornetto.’
Bill Greenwell
Ping had become Emperor in the traditional way: by ruthless murder and extreme cunning to ensure that the same didn’t happen to him. Now installed in the palace, he got his joiners (who were executed immediately afterwards, and certainly before they could send in their invoices) to install a nightingale floor in his bedroom, so that the slightest footfall on the subtly crafted boards would make them sing out and wake him. The Tangs, Dengs and Hungs all tried their luck, of course, and the instant cacophony got them each time. His surprise was all the greater, then, though admittedly also rather brief, when the sword came up and into his bed (and into him) from the crawl space beneath the nightingale floor, and he was sent to join his ancestors by a small but lithe scion of the family he had forgotten, a Song from under the Floorboards .
Brian Murdoch
The huts for ice-fishing are checked each autumn. All spring and summer they have stood empty on the edge of the village. Now the loose boards are renailed, and the roofs covered in pitch. When it is cold enough, they are towed by dogs out on to the pack-ice in the bay. I shared a hut with Maku, taking it in turns to sit by the hole in the floor, keeping it ice-free, and slowly lifting up and down the hook disguised with gull feathers. One morning as he climbed into the bunk Maku grunted: ‘Whale weather. Listen out for the song under the floorboards.’ I looked at him, puzzled, and he grinned. ‘A trapped whale will try to surface here, to breathe. They sing just before they surface. It is the last sound you will hear, before the hut falls into the sea when the ice shatters.’
William Danes-Volkov
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