by Jonathan Coe
‘What do you mean, “he”?’ said Gill. She paused, then started giggling in a discomforting, private way.
‘What are you laughing at?’
‘You,’ she said. ‘You’re so funny.’
She laughed a little more, and then fell silent. I could hear her breathing grow more regular. Outside there was a breeze getting up and the branches of the apple tree were starting to scrape across our window.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Gill?’
‘No,’ she murmured.
‘Aunt Ivy does.’
‘She’s a stupid old woman. That’s what Dad says.’
‘What about that dead man?’ I ventured. ‘He must be ever so cross with Grandma.’
‘Dead men can’t be cross,’ said Gill. ‘Go to sleep.’
But I couldn’t go to sleep. The wind grew fiercer and the whole house seemed to be filled with strange creaks and bangings: to my fevered imagination they were the sounds of doors opening, and heavy footsteps ascending the stairs. I got up and drew back the curtains, but in the moonlight our room was no less sinister, a world of suggestive outlines and thick pools of darkness. I fought against a host of shocking images: Gill pretending to cut her throat at the dinner table; the giant silhouette advancing on me in the cellar; my grandfather shivering at the sight of the midnight churchyard. Above all, I remembered the photograph of the murdered man which I had so recklessly torn from the pages of the local paper, and I was tense with the expectation that he might emerge at any moment, penknife in hand, from the shadows.
In these circumstances I did what any resourceful seven-year-old would have done: namely, I decided to wake up my parents. I had noticed that requests for admission to their bed rarely met with much opposition, and this was clearly an urgent case, because I was in no state to pass the night alone. So I quickly got up, wrapped my dressing gown around me and padded out on to the landing.
There, I saw something that surprised me. Everything was in darkness, except for a shaft of unsteady light visible from beneath the door of my grandparents’ room. I’d assumed that all my family had gone to bed long ago, but it seemed inconsiderate to rouse my mother and father if it turned out that my grandparents were still awake. I altered my course, then, in the direction of their room, and after pausing outside for a few seconds, during which I heard not a sound, I pushed the door wordlessly open.
The flickering light must have been coming from a candle, because it was almost blown out as soon as I opened the door, letting in a draught of cold air. What happened next happened very quickly. The side of the bed that faced the door was my grandmother’s, and I could make out her sleeping form as she lay quite still on her back. Sitting on the bed beside her was a man. His face was hidden in shadow at first: all I could see was the glint of a knife blade in his upraised hand. He jerked round as soon as I came in, and for a sudden, stretched moment we were staring at one another. His sunken eyes burned into mine: they were hollow and threatening at one and the same time. Then I turned and fled, back towards my parents’ room where I flung open the door and had soon managed to rouse the entire house. Even Gill came running to see what was going on. And so, cradled by my mother as she sat bleary-eyed on the edge of her bed, I explained that I had just seen a ghost trying to kill Grandma.
‘A ghost?’
‘A man. He was sitting on the bed, right next to her.’
My grandfather arrived, still in his pyjamas.
‘What’s up?’ he said.
‘He saw you,’ my mother whispered.
My grandfather put a finger to his lips and shook his head at her. To me he said: ‘Sounds as though you’ve been having a nasty dream.’
‘It wasn’t a dream. It was the man. The man from the newspaper.’
Sensing that any attempt to resolve this situation by rational argument was doomed to failure, my mother sent everyone back to their beds; but for the time being she allowed me to stay in her room, where, cocooned between my parents’ bodies, I must finally have drifted into a half-sleep. I can dimly remember being lifted by my father some time later, and carried back to my own room. The closing of the door as he left must have wakened me completely; and then I could see Gill’s eyes sparkling in the dark.
‘You are a chump,’ she said.
‘Why am I?’
‘That was Grandpa you saw. He was wrapping our presents.’
As soon as I registered these words, a new and difficult question started to form.
‘How do you mean?’ I said, slowly.
And this was how it came about that Gill – very much, I’m sure, to her own inexpressible triumph and delight – found herself in a position to tell me the less than magical truth about where our Christmas presents had been coming from all these years.
‘So the knife …’ I began.
‘It was my present, of course. I told you I was going to get one.’ She yawned and burrowed further into her tangle of sheets and blankets. ‘Goodnight, chump.’
Stung by this parting insult, I answered, ‘Goodnight – idiot,’ by way of riposte, and lay awake for some time wondering whether Gill was really so clever after all. In the silence of that night I turned her explanation over again and again in my mind, and found it wanting.
Christmas Day dawned at last, revealing the countryside shrouded beneath a new layer of deep virgin snow. The ploughed fields at the foot of the garden sent out ripples of undulating white, and the air that morning was so clear that if you stood on the terrace wall and looked towards the Wrekin, you could easily make out the Needle’s Eye. Sunlight flooded the sitting room as we opened our presents after breakfast. Everyone was in high spirits; the alarms of the night were forgotten.
For once it was Gill’s turn to be disappointed. My football boots were a perfect fit, as indeed was the coat my parents had bought for her. There were toys, books and board games in abundance. But there was no penknife. Apparently they had decided that it wouldn’t make a suitable present for a young girl.
Later Gill tracked me down to the pantry – stuffing my pockets with mince pies in preparation for our morning walk – and got me up against the wall.
‘You told me there was a penknife,’ she said. ‘You told me.’
‘There was,’ I protested.
‘You lied to me.’
‘I didn’t. There was a knife. But it wasn’t Grandpa I saw. I told you that.’
She relaxed her grip and stood back, regarding me fiercely.
‘You’re mad, you are,’ she said. ‘You’re completely bats.’
That was her theory, anyway. But as soon as we returned from the walk and I had a moment to myself, it felt like an act of perfect sanity to run upstairs, fetch the newspaper photograph from my drawer and throw it on to the sitting-room fire. Watching his face burn, blacken and vanish, I made a prayer to my newly acquired God that he would never visit us again.
Pentatonic
The other passengers are staring at me in amazement; and I can’t say that I blame them. The man on my left is looking at me as if I’d just calmly taken a bomb out of my hand luggage. The woman on my right is reacting as though I’d booted up my laptop and now I’m using it to watch hardcore pornography. But what have I done, in reality, to provoke all this astonishment? Nothing. I’ve simply taken out a Sony Walkman, and inserted a cassette.
I have to turn the volume up to the very highest setting in order to hear what I want to hear, above the drone of the aircraft engines. Because what I want to hear is something that you never hear, in this age of digitized music. I want to hear the sound that takes me back, more than any other, to the days of my childhood. The sound that is, for me, what the madeleine was for Proust. I’m referring, of course, to the sound of hiss on a cassette tape.
This particular recording provides it in abundance: that is one of its glories. Because this is a second- or third-generation copy. A tape of a tape of a tape, each reproduction growing more and more evocatively unfaithful, each one acquiring a new and mo
re satisfying layer of hiss. So much so, in fact, that after a few seconds you might start to think that the hiss itself is the recording, and the entry of the piano comes almost as a shock. The piano feels incidental, somehow, to the hiss on the tape: almost an afterthought. But no, the piano was what my mother wanted to record. Where had she placed the microphone, though? In another room? It doesn’t really matter. She may not have been a great sound engineer, but she achieved what she wanted, which was to make a recording of her prodigal son, David, performing his first piano composition. And here he is – here I am – more than forty years later, sitting on a plane from London to Melbourne, still listening to that tape. Still listening to that artless, primitive tune.
All the notes in this tune come from the pentatonic scale. There is a modulation, somewhere in the middle, from C minor to D minor, but I wouldn’t have understood that at the time. I was just playing what came naturally. The recording was made at my grandparents’ house, in Shropshire, in the late 1960s. This was the only place I could play the piano, as a child. We didn’t have a piano at home. It was my father who bought the portable cassette recorder – made by Sanyo, I believe – but it never got used much. It was one of those gimmicks. Everybody had to have one at the time.
Sometimes I think that all my memories – every single road in my mind – lead back to that house in Shropshire, where my grandparents lived and where we would go almost every weekend, and every school holiday. The ageing upright piano, impossible to tune, where my grandmother would sit and carefully plod her way through favourite hymns, echoes of her own early years. The bedroom under the eaves, with the twin beds, which I would share with my sister, Gill. This little tune, struggling bravely to make itself heard beneath the layers of hiss, always takes me back there, no matter how often I hear it.
But that’s not the only association it has for me, nowadays. It also brought about, in a way, the end of my marriage.
It happened four years ago. Summer, 2008. Our daughter, Amy, was getting on for twelve years old and as proud, dutiful parents we were attending the prize-giving day at her new secondary school. It was a private school and we both felt self-consciously scruffy and ordinary beside the other parents. I wasn’t exactly happy to be sending her there, but it had been Jennifer’s choice and the fees were being paid out of some sort of trust fund left by her mother for this purpose. Anyway, I had gone along with it.
It was a rather stultifying occasion, for the most part. There was a speech from the headmistress, which went on for about twenty minutes, and a speech from an old girl, which went on for even longer. This sort of thing is traditional in these quarters, I suspect. Jennifer and I were seated towards the front of the assembly hall. Amy and her classmates were just a few rows ahead of us. When the speeches were over, at last, they were called up on to the stage, and they had to sing a song for the parents. I don’t remember anything about the song itself; I only remember watching my daughter and thinking … well, oddly, I was thinking how unfamiliar she looked to me. Of course I had seen her in this uniform many times over the last year, so it can’t have been the uniform that did it, or the fact that her hair was tied back more neatly than she wore it around the house. I think the shock came from being made to see that she had another life, now, a life outside the small one we had built for her at home, that it was populated by new friends, new people, and she felt comfortable there. There was nothing threatening about this new version of my daughter, nothing disturbing, except for precisely that – that it was new. I suppose in my head I had been trying to preserve another version of her: younger, more dependent, more in thrall to me. The realization that this was no longer possible came to me very suddenly, during that song, and hit me hard. I knew then that I had lost something – someone – a friend, a companion, someone who had become, in a sense, essential to me, someone upon whom I had come to depend, paradoxically enough; and the fact that this loss was inevitable did not make it any the less painful.
The song ended, and then all the girls, and all the parents, stood up and began to sing ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’. The tune comes from ‘Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity’, by Holst, which seems peculiar, because it has always struck me as one of the saddest melodies ever written. And that day, for the first time, I noticed something about it. It must have been that glimpse of Amy – the realization that her childhood was passing – that triggered it, because now I was reminded of that tune: the tune I had composed myself when I was just a child, and which my mother had been so proud of that she’d made a recording of it, a recording which she had kept, and copied, and passed on to me, even though I had not listened to it or thought about it for many years. The two tunes were very similar. They began with the same phrase, the same four notes, and neither of them deviated far from the pentatonic scale. It struck me, at once, as more than a coincidence: the end of Amy’s childhood, commemorated by a melody so closely related to another one, another melody born out of my own childish attempts at composition. I stopped singing, could no longer bring myself to mouth the words, and felt something resembling a sob begin to rise in my throat. I turned to Jennifer, and caught her eye. She was not singing, either. She looked distraught, pounded, like me, by waves of unexpected emotion. She could not know the significance of this music – it could not mean, to her, the specific thing that it meant to me – but I could feel, at this moment, that we were in the grip of something similar, that there was a ragged, dissonant harmony between us. I clutched her hand.
Afterwards, we were supposed to have tea with the other parents. It was the last thing I felt like doing. I collected Amy and took her out to the car park.
‘Where’s Mum?’ she asked.
I didn’t know. ‘She’ll be wanting to talk to people, I expect. And then she was going into town. She said not to wait.’
Jennifer had a lot of things on her mind at the time, I knew that. Her elderly father, who lived in Australia, had been suffering from bad problems with his health – his mental health, I mean – and she had been getting phone calls from his care home in the middle of the night. She hadn’t discussed it with me much, but I could see it was weighing her down. When she still hadn’t appeared after ten or fifteen minutes, Amy and I left alone.
Once we got home, my daughter flopped down in front of the TV. I took one last look at her – this beautiful stranger who was no longer a child, who had begun turning into a woman without my even noticing it – and then went upstairs to the spare room. I was looking for a box full of photographs, and a box full of tapes.
Neither Jennifer nor I slept well that night. Or perhaps it was just me, keeping her awake, with my restless stirring and squirming beneath the duvet. Eventually I got up, and stood for a while at the window, staring out at our pale expanse of back lawn.
‘What’s the matter, love?’ Jennifer asked, raising herself up to look at me.
‘I’ve been thinking, that’s all,’ I said. ‘It would take too long to explain.’
‘I’m wide awake now. You might as well tell me. What were you thinking about?’
I wondered where I should begin telling her about all the things that had been running through my mind since we’d come back from the school.
And finally I said, ‘I was thinking about a record sleeve. When I was growing up, in the 1960s, there was a record label called Classics for Pleasure. They did these cheap but good-quality recordings of classical pieces. My father became a bit of a collector. He used to pick one up every couple of weeks. Just the standard stuff, really: Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky. Nothing too adventurous.
‘But in the middle of this very ordinary collection – the kind of thing that loads of middle-class families would have had in the 1960s – there was one record that stood out. My father used to travel a lot, in those days, and one year he went on a business trip to Czechoslovakia. And when he came back he had this record with him. It was on a Czech label called Supraphon and all the pieces on it were by Arthur Honegger – a composer nobody
had ever heard of, and certainly not me or my mother. It had one of his symphonies, I remember, and also a nice little orchestral piece called Pastorale d’été. And I never found out why, but my father was incredibly pleased to have got this record. He said that he’d been looking for it for years. And because of that, because he seemed to regard it as a sort of Holy Grail of record collecting, it became almost a … magical object to me. I used to stare for hours at the sleeve, which showed the rooftops of some strange, exotic city. Prague, I suppose it was. But to me it looked like a city from a fairy tale. And I even read the sleeve notes on the back. Read them until I knew them almost by heart. A lot of the words didn’t mean anything to me, but they became part of my vocabulary anyway. “Allegretto”. “Motif”. “Glissandi”. “Pentatonic”. That one especially fascinated me, for some reason.
‘We had a music teacher at school called Miss Parry and I had quite a crush on her, so one day I decided to impress her by asking a question after class, and I asked her what “pentatonic” meant. And she told me that the pentatonic scale was the same as the ordinary Western scale but with two of the notes taken out – the second and the sixth. Or, another way of looking at it, all the black notes on a piano keyboard. She was very happy that I’d asked this question, and after the next class she gave me a little drawing she’d done of the piano keyboard with all the pentatonic notes marked, in the A minor scale: A, C, D, E and G.
‘We didn’t have a piano at home, but there was a piano at my grandparents’ house in Shropshire, and we used to go there most weekends. The next time we went, I took Miss Parry’s drawing with me, and I used it to make up this little tune. Singing that hymn today – the one with the tune by Holst – was what reminded me of it, because the first few notes are the same. But apart from that, it was all my own work. Once it was finished I played it to the whole family. Gill wasn’t too complimentary, but Mum was really proud. She even made a recording of it on this little tape recorder my dad had bought.
