by David Cohen
Imagine my surprise, then, when on a bright Saturday morning six months later he phoned up to invite me over, as if only a few days had passed since last we’d met. In the meantime I’d undergone a severance of my own, in the form of a divorce – not physically painful like Duncan’s separation, but more protracted – after which my wife and son had moved to another town, 300 kilometres north of here. Distracted by this personal trauma, I’d quite forgotten about my old friend.
Duncan greeted me, wearing his trademark shorts and thongs, at the door of his weatherboard house. He looked much the same, except that there was now a hook in the place where his right hand had once been, while his left arm terminated in a naked stump. I tried not to look too much at the hook or the stump, but I also tried not to not look at them too much either. We embraced, a bit awkwardly.
‘Dunc,’ I said, ‘it’s been too long.’
‘Let’s go out the back.’ Duncan never wasted words; he measured and cut them as carefully as he had, not so long ago, measured and cut lengths of timber. Carpentry had come far more naturally to him than music, although he’d always wished otherwise.
I followed him through the house, remarking on how tidy everything looked.
‘Someone comes by,’ he said.
We entered the workshop he’d built some years earlier. The neatly compartmentalised tools and paint tins appeared untouched. Everything looked much the same as the last time I’d visited, except the electric saw now sat unplugged and bladeless. I also noticed that Duncan had for some reason moved his portable keyboard in there. It rested on its aluminium frame in the middle of the room, in front of something large and shapeless that was covered with a sheet. I’d made no reference to the accident and neither had he, but its echo was all around us.
Without further ado, Duncan bent down and impaled a corner of the sheet with his hook, tugging at the fabric.
‘Need a hand?’ I immediately regretted the question, or at least the phrasing. If Duncan was offended, he didn’t show it.
‘I’m right.’
He dragged the sheet away, revealing a strange contraption that looked like a dentist’s chair crossbred with a car seat – it actually had a seatbelt. A row of pedals protruded from underneath.
‘What the hell is that?’ I asked.
‘Watch.’
Duncan slipped off his thongs and climbed aboard, steadying himself with his hook. He was quite dextrous with that hook, even using it to strap himself in with the seatbelt. He pumped one of the pedals repeatedly with his foot. The chair, along with Duncan, began to ascend, making a series of clicks as it did so. When he eased up on the pedal, the chair stopped. He pushed the next pedal to the right, explaining that this activated a safety mechanism to keep the chair fixed in place vertically. The pressing of a third pedal caused the chair to slide forwards slightly; a fourth and final pedal locked it on the horizontal plane. Now Duncan’s feet hovered a centimetre or so above the keyboard.
‘I had this made,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Wasn’t easy to come back in here – not just because of the accident, either. There’s not much I can do in here anymore.’ He massaged his head with the curve of the hook. ‘I can still use my brain, though. I designed the chair myself.’
Having delivered this preamble, Duncan took a deep breath and proceeded to play an entire piece of music with his toes, while I looked on astonished. It was a bright, up-tempo tune, slightly marred by an off note in almost every bar, but no less remarkable for that. When he’d finished, he turned, looked at me from on high, and smiled sort of sheepishly. I realised that I had been the first to witness this performance.
We both stared at Duncan’s feet for a while.
‘Amazing!’ I said at last. ‘Absolutely … amazing.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Obviously, I’m still a bit clumsy. And obviously, I can’t use the piano pedals themselves …’ He stared wistfully at his hook and then at his naked stump, which reminded me of nothing so much as a blind and hairless animal.
‘For a while there,’ he went on, addressing the ghosts of his hands, ‘after I got out of hospital, I was angry twenty-four seven. You know what I used to do? I’d sit on my piano stool – the old, normal one – put my feet up on the keyboard and just bang my heels down repeatedly on the keys. I’d do it until the blood ran down my legs.’
He looked at me, as if afraid he’d revealed too much.
‘I can imagine,’ I replied stupidly.
‘Well, doing that didn’t just help me get my frustration out – it also made me pay more attention to my feet. I started looking at them in a different way. I started wondering: is it possible …?’ He laughed. ‘It seemed pretty ridiculous! But then I read this book on the power of the mind, about how if the mind can visualise something with total clarity, the body will fall into line. So I locked myself away in this shed, designed the chair, and started practising six, ten, twelve hours a day.’
‘You must have quite a repertoire, then!’
‘No. I don’t want to play a whole bunch of songs averagely, like before. And no, you don’t have to pretend – I was mediocre, I know it. The point is that now I want to get one song perfect.’
‘That song you just played – what’s it called?’
‘“Look for the Silver Lining”. I’ve always liked Jerome Kern. I’ve done nothing for the last – what’s it been? – four months but practise that song.’
At that point my eyes grew moist. I had to turn my face away, towards the workbench. I said: ‘I find your dedication inspiring.’ I could say no more.
Duncan pretended not to notice. He gestured with his hook towards the now powerless power saw. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not as if I had a very active social life anyway.’
I was so affected by what I’d seen in Duncan’s workshop that I decided on the spot – or very close to the spot – that I must bring his unique talent to the world. The problem was that Duncan, who’d never played in public before, no longer had any interest in doing so. I persisted. I think he realised I was serious when, shortly after our reunion, I took six months’ leave from my job.
‘I’ll handle everything,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is play.’
‘Guess I haven’t got much more to lose.’
Neither had I. I’d been waiting for any small excuse to leap off the treadmill, and I had plenty of money put aside. Even though the entertainment business was for me an unknown quantity, I felt I could do with a bit of the unknown. After all, I was a single man once more; I had few responsibilities but a true sense of purpose.
We would begin in our very own town, which was called Des. I don’t know the origins of that name, nor have I ever looked into them. Perhaps the town was named after someone called Des, perhaps not. Either way, even though it wasn’t a big town, the people of Des showed a keen interest in the arts, and I believed that Duncan’s debut would be the cultural event of the year, if not the century.
We fitted wheels to the base of his chair for greater mobility, and built a small portable wooden platform for both chair and keyboard. Having barely ventured outside his house for so long, Duncan was terrified by the prospect of a public recital, so I organised some unadvertised performances at small and, I hoped, non-threatening venues.
News travels pretty fast in Des. Most people knew about Duncan’s accident, but few attended his first performance, which took place in a little cafe at the top end of Kemp Street, Des’s main drag. Even so, come showtime, nothing could induce my petrified artist to perform, and the handful of patrons were left to speculate about the meaning of the curious apparatus onstage. The second engagement, in a small pub called the Castle, was even worse. Duncan overcame his fear but only two people stayed to watch, and they turned out to be industrial design students – not the least bit interested in music, but fascinated by the chair.
It was a question of finding the right venue. I booked one of the smaller function rooms in the town hall, and, having convinced Duncan that the t
ime had come for a more direct marketing strategy, I distributed hundreds of posters and fliers.
FREE MUSICAL RECITAL FEATURING PIANIST DUNCAN McMATH
‘Duncan McMath?’ Morag Gamble, who ran the Baker’s Delight, saw me pinning one of these ads to the noticeboard outside her shop. ‘I’d all but given up on him. The poor thing won’t even answer his door.’
‘Don’t take it personally. He hasn’t been seeing anyone.’
‘But how on earth can he play the piano after that horrible accident?’
‘All will be revealed,’ I said. ‘Spread the word.’
I would like to describe Duncan’s first official performance in some detail, because it marked a turning point in his personal and professional development. Hoping to build the drama, I’d given him strict instructions not to talk to anyone in the days leading up to the show – not that there was any real danger of that, anyway.
The function room was almost full. My advertisements had attracted the usual ‘culture vultures’, as well as those people who would never usually show up at a music recital but couldn’t contain their curiosity. People drifted about the edges of the room, sipping wine from white plastic cups and trying to appear nonchalant. But there was a palpable nervous tension in the air. I spotted Cameron Blythe, music critic for the Des Herald, on the edge of the crowd. Squeezed into his usual black skivvy, he pretended to study a painting that hung on the wall – an abstract work by one of our local artists – but even he couldn’t help glancing every few minutes at the portable keyboard on the stage. Morag Gamble, wearing her clingiest frock, had already taken her seat in the front row.
I dashed back and forth between front of house and the ‘green room’, a stage-side triangle of space sectioned off by a curtain, where Duncan, pale and sweating, waited in his chair.
‘This will be a triumph – I can feel it,’ I said, listening to the murmurs and the scraping of seats beyond the curtain. Duncan made no reply. His eyes were closed and his skin looked slightly greener than usual. He wore a suit that looked twenty years old, and a freshly polished hook at the end of each arm. I glanced at his bare feet and noticed he was wiggling his toes in a systematic fashion. I realised these were his warm-up exercises. He’d developed the uncanny ability to move each toe in isolation – proof, I thought, of the power of mind over matter.
Eventually, everyone took their seats and the doors to the hall were closed. At my signal, the house lights went down and the stage was illuminated. All murmuring ceased as I solemnly wheeled Duncan out from behind the curtain and pushed him up the low ramp onto the stage, parking his chair in the marked spot in front of the piano, which was positioned at a forty-degree angle to the audience. I activated the handbrake we had installed for safety reasons, left the stage, and sat down.
Duncan sat immobile, silently contemplating the keyboard. His breathing could be heard as if it were amplified. Someone behind me coughed. Somebody further back shifted in their seat. After a tense couple of minutes, Duncan’s hydraulic chair began to ascend. There followed the familiar clicking and grinding as he pressed additional pedals to manoeuvre the chair into exactly the right position. This pre-performance performance was accompanied by whispered exclamations of ‘Bloody hell!’ and ‘Crikey!’ from the audience. In the subdued light, Duncan seemed to float in space above the piano, like some sort of illusionist.
When all was ready, he began to play – tentatively at first, but once he got going his feet seemed to skip over the keys. His unique take on ‘Look for the Silver Lining’ sent a ripple of good cheer – no, a proverbial Mexican wave of optimism – through the audience. He may as well have distributed complimentary pairs of rose-coloured glasses to all present, so thoroughly transformed was the collective outlook. You could see by people’s faces that they were looking at the sunny side of life. Duncan said later that he played the song better that night than he’d ever played it before.
The following day, Cameron Blythe wrote in the Des Herald:
Those of us who know anything about art know that pain is the essence of the truly life-affirming artwork. If there is no suffering, how can we, the audience, hope to be uplifted? Last night, Duncan McMath presented suffering in its most naked form. Last night, Duncan McMath broke down the barrier between music and musician. It was, in short, a sublime performance, a transcendent experience for all present.
We scheduled a series of concerts around Des. This time there was a small cover charge, but the brevity of the shows turned out to be inversely proportional to the enthusiasm with which each was received. Before long, we had to transfer Duncan’s recitals to the largest room in the town hall, the one reserved for major concerts and ceremonies. Many attendees came in from nearby towns. Some were themselves physically challenged, and although they constituted a tiny fraction of the audience, the town hall’s accessible toilets had never been so well patronised, to say nothing of the two disabled-parking bays. When I wheeled Duncan onto the stage, I noticed how, while everyone else whooped and cheered, this latter group watched quietly from their front-row seats. At the conclusion of Duncan’s performance, those of them equipped to applaud did so politely, while the rest of the audience stood up, banging their hands together and crying ‘Encore!’ even though this meant hearing the same song all over again. Duncan played until his toes cramped up and he could play no longer. By the time I wheeled him offstage, his feet were red and twisted.
Although his feet suffered, his self-esteem grew stronger with every show. He seemed not just to have accepted his celebrity status; he actually enjoyed it. Personally, I’d hoped that once the initial amazement of seeing a man play piano with his toes had worn off, people would focus less on the toes and more on the music. Perhaps I had been naive.
‘Maybe it’s time for another tune,’ I suggested one day after a lunchtime show. Duncan, who was soaking his feet in warm soapy water, leaned back, closed his eyes and smiled a blissful smile, as if angels were ministering to each individual toe with heavenly washcloths.
‘This tune’s not perfect yet.’
I knew that nobody minded his playing the same song every time; they’d come to expect it as an integral part of the show. Occasionally an audience member would actually make a special request that he play it, even though there was no possibility of his doing otherwise.
But there was such a thing as artistic development.
‘You do want to expand your repertoire at some point, don’t you?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘In fact, I’ve got a new piece in mind. But it’s a long, difficult process.’ He lifted a foot out of the soapy water and held it in the air, as if this explained all.
‘You used to know so many songs,’ I said. ‘I mean, before ...’
‘Yes, but they were played by the old me, the me with hands. The song I play in my recitals is a foot song; any songs I play from now on will be foot songs too.’
As I contemplated that white, wet foot, I couldn’t help noticing that the toes appeared to have grown longer to accommodate the demands of his performances. His body was compensating for his loss.
‘That’s right,’ Duncan said, noting my fixed stare. ‘Nature will find a way.’
A month or so after Duncan’s triumphant debut, another pianist happened to stop in Des for an unscheduled performance during a national tour. He was born here and, having lived abroad for decades, wanted to play for the citizens of his home town. When I told Duncan about the upcoming concert, I was surprised at his lack of enthusiasm, even though he explained that he still found it stressful to leave the house, and had to conserve his energy for his own performances.
I went alone, expecting an eager crowd – after all, seldom did a musician of this calibre stop in our little corner of the world. But half of the seats in the hall were empty, and after the interval that increased to three-quarters.
‘Not that I want competition,’ I remarked to Morag Gamble in the bakery the day after, ‘but I thought it was a shame. He gave
a great performance, and it was wasted.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s a bit tame by comparison.’
‘By comparison?’
‘To Duncan. I mean, when you’ve seen a man play piano with his feet …’
I didn’t take her opinion too seriously. She’d always fancied Duncan, and she still remained hopeful, despite the fact that he’d never shown the least bit of interest. But Cameron Blythe, one of the few who’d remained for the entire recital, was similarly unimpressed.
‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘I only stayed out of a sense of professional duty. You may not believe this, but I’ve always found it hard to take pianists seriously. There’s something … missing. Now that I’ve witnessed the phenomenon of Duncan McMath, I know what that missing quality is: it’s a depth, a profundity – a weightiness, if you prefer – that you simply can’t achieve when you’re abled.’
‘When you’re what?’
‘That’s what I call musicians who’ve never lost their hands: “abled”.’
‘What have you got against the abled?’
‘Nothing. I just no longer believe they have much credibility as musicians. I think hands make a pianist complacent, and you can hear it in the music.’ He fluttered his fingers in the air. ‘It’s lightweight.’
I’d been planning a tour of the region, but it looked like the region was prepared to come to us. In fact, ‘pilgrims’, as Duncan called them, came not just from surrounding towns but from all over the state. We didn’t have a venue that could comfortably accommodate the crowds. Months earlier, when Duncan had still been shut away in his house, the Des City Council had announced its intention to build a ‘world-class’ concert hall, but as nobody could agree on where it should be situated or what it should look like, the project remained on the back burner. Meanwhile, we attempted to stage an outdoor show on the sports oval, but the sound system was inadequate, and when a strong wind blew up and Duncan’s chair began to sway dangerously, I had to call an end to the proceedings.
