The Orphan Choir by Sophie Hannah

different, in a good way. Last time I went, I had sweet potato and cottage cheese salad – it was delicious.’
    ‘If you say so. Sounds gross to me. You’re making me like the look of those chicken legs a whole lot more.’ She laughs, picks one up with a paper napkin and starts to nibble at it.
    I ought to drop the subject, but I can’t resist saying, ‘The Botanics café also does soup, pork pie, lovely cakes – do you like any of those? And you can sit and eat with a fantastic view of beautiful gardens. You like gardens, don’t you?’
    ‘I can look at my own garden for free, thank you very much. Four quid a time, just to get through the gates, when it used to be free? No, thanks.’
    Alexis is as predictable as Saviour’s buffets. She can’t admit that the Botanic Gardens have anything worthwhile to offer because they’re in Cambridge. Also counting against them is their proximity to my house and to my office, which reminds Alexis, presumably, that she’s stuck out in Orwell, miles from where she and her husband work, at KPMG. Coincidentally, that’s also very close to the Botanic Gardens: just across Hills Road.
    ‘She’d be a lot happier if she just admitted she’d love to live in Cambridge but can’t afford to,’ Stuart has said more than once. ‘You should tell her.’
    ‘Here are the boys!’ a female voice calls out, and then they flood in, running towards their parents. All over the room, small arms fling themselves round waists. Not Joseph’s; he’s heading for the buffet, shouting, ‘Hi, Mum! Hi, Dad!’ with his eyes on the cocktail sausages. I walk over to him and give him a big hug, hardly able to bear the joy and pain that spring up inside me: the way each recoils like the head of a snake as it senses the presence of the other and prepares to fight to the death, having forgotten that this always ends the same way; the winner is always the same – less deserving but stronger.
    Does it ever get any easier? I could ask some of the older choristers’ mothers, but I’m afraid to, in case they look puzzled and say, ‘Why, are you finding it difficult?’ and make me feel like a freak.
    Perhaps Stuart’s right. Perhaps I’m too invested in Joseph, too dependent on him. Except, in my defence, I’m sure I wouldn’t be if only I had the standard eighteen years in which to learn to let go. No one warned me I’d have to do it in seven.
    ‘You were brilliant, darling,’ I say, holding on to him. He wriggles free. I never used to do this: crush him against my body at every opportunity and keephim there too long, so that he feels he has to escape. Saviour College School has created the problem of my clinginess; this time last year, it didn’t exist.
    ‘You always say I’m brilliant, Mum. Because you’re my mum.’ He seems fine. Happy. Exactly as he used to be. No harm has come to him. That’s good; I can use it to console myself later, when he’s gone.
    ‘You’re always brilliant, that’s why,’ I say. All around me, I hear parents saying the same thing to their sons. I wonder how many of them have wished for sudden tone-deafness to put an end to the brilliance. None as acutely as I have, I’m sure.
    ‘Mum, you know you said I wasn’t allowed to have high-tops?’
    ‘What?’
    Joseph grabs a handful of small sausages and tries to put them all in his mouth at once. One falls to the floor. I cover it with my foot and crush it into the carpet.
    ‘Mum!’ Joseph chastises me, looking left and right to check no one noticed. ‘And you and Dad were talking during the service! I saw you.’
    ‘Sorry,’ I say.
    ‘I’ll let you off if you buy me some high-tops,’ he says hopefully.
    ‘What are they?’
    ‘You know, those trainers I wanted from SportsDirect – you said you’d read somewhere that they’re bad for your feet or your ankles? Well, they’re not. Louis wears high-tops all the time and he says it’s not true. I’ve seen his feet and ankles and there’s nothing