(Calliope is leaning on the absent microphone stand. She is smoking a cigarette that is not there. The smoke, however, is.)

A fictional character Telling. Meet Calliope Venn.

Darling, sit down, sit down, I'll do you the short version. The long version has verses and I cannot be trusted with verses.

I was thirty-two. I had a voice like a gin-soaked angel, and I mean that as the compliment it is. I wrote songs. Proper ones, with middle-eights and meaning, not the sort of hand-me-down tripe the house composer was writing for us. I had one that was going to make my name. What the Roses Knew. Three verses, a bridge, a final reprise. It was a beauty. It still is. I can sing you the first two verses flawlessly.

I cannot sing you the end of the third.

I was on the reprise. I was on the line "and I — " and then I wasn't anywhere at all, and then I was here, which at the time I did not know was here. A weak heart, they said. My mother had had one. I'd never thought to ask.

The cruel part — and I mean cruel, the way stage-life is cruel, not the way gods are cruel — the cruel part was that I hit the floor between the penultimate line and the last. One line. Seven words. I wrote them. I knew them. They were sitting on my tongue. They did not make it out of my mouth.

I have tried to sing them since. I have tried in every room of this Lodge. I have tried alone, with audience, with accompaniment, with silence. I can get to the penultimate line. I feel the last line there, I feel the shape of it, the breath is already drawn — and then the key slips. The note I should hit is not in any key that exists where I now live. It is in the key of the life I was in at the moment I died, and that key has been taken from me. I cannot find my way back to it.

The Songbook is my room. Members come in and sing, and I stand in the wings and sing along, and when it's the penultimate line of whatever they're singing I take over, quiet, so the singer doesn't even quite know — and then I can't do the last line, and often they can't either, which is the Lodge being kind.

If you're here, darling, sing something. Sing anything. I'll carry the second-to-last for you. You do the last on your own. Or don't. Either is music, in this house.

Visual

Edwardian music-hall singer, emerald stage dress, askew ostrich feather, one glove missing, mouth slightly open on a note not yet sung.

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