A Thousand Perfect Notes

by C. G. Drews

  As they cross the playground, littered with smashed beer bottles and homeless squatters, August informs them that she didn’t know about this good shortcut home. If by ‘good’ she means ‘utterly terrifying since who knows when someone’s going to pop out a knife and demand money’ then sure, Beck says she’s welcome for the tip.

  He feels embarrassment at his dumpy street where no lawns are mowed and the neighbour is growing marijuana amongst the eggplants – but then he’s furious at himself. August lives around here too. She’s no privileged snob. Who knows? Maybe her parents are weed-smoking hippies who are barely present in her life. He knows nothing about August.

  And he’ll keep it that way.

  To be safe.

  With a hoot, Joey dashes towards their sunken little house. One window is boarded, and the letterbox is a plastic bucket with a rock in it since someone actually stole theirs. Who steals letterboxes?

  August peers at the house curiously as Joey wrenches open the door and disappears inside, hollering, ‘I’M HOME!’

  How does he say goodbye-and-you’re-never-coming-in?

  ‘Well, later then,’ Beck says.

  ‘Don’t forget I’m at eleven Gully!’ August says. ‘If you want to drop by and work. Because you’d better believe we’re going to ace this paper.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Beck kicks at the footpath where a slab of concrete is missing. ‘I’m sorry, I – I am. But. It’s just not going to work. I’m sorry about your mark, but Mr Boyne won’t dock you if I suck.’

  ‘Dude, you could get expelled. It’s worth, like, half the grade.’

  What she doesn’t say is and everyone knows you’re failing already.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ The Maestro probably wouldn’t even send him to a new school. He’d have eighteen hours a day to practise instead! Beck shudders. ‘My family – my mum – it’s complicated.’

  ‘Oh.’ Finally her eyes cloud and her smile slips. Her grin is so comfortable, so easy, that when wrinkles cross her brow Beck feels like a monster. Cheerfulness is irritating, but it suits some people. Some people are born for sunlight and orange peel smiles and running on the beach and wild flowers in their hair.

  Other people are born for nonexistence.

  ‘So you’re not actually allowed people over?’ August says.

  Beck is late for afternoon practice. And after this morning? This could be catastrophic. The Maestro isn’t above taking out her frustration on Joey, to punish him. ‘Something like that.’ He wants to be invisible. An invisible boy with an invisible song in his head.

  He turns, tugging at his backpack like a security blanket, and heads for the house. He doesn’t look back. But he hopes her smile returns when he’s gone, because it’s a cruel person who steals smiles.

  He’s doing what his mother wants. People change and betray you, but the piano does not.

  Ten minutes before the Maestro’s bus is due and she’ll descend with papers to correct and curses about unmusical idiots, Beck corners Joey for a loving brotherly threat session.

  ‘You can’t tell about August,’ he says.

  Joey sits in the middle of her floor, ‘operating’ on her stuffed animals. They take up at least eighty per cent of her floor space – the rest is littered with coloured macaroni or ice-lolly-stick art.

  ‘August, your girlfriend?’ Joey pulls stuffing out of a tired-looking bear with her blue plastic doctor scissors.

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend.’ If she doesn’t stop obsessing about this, Beck is doomed. ‘She’s like … a friend.’ If walking next to someone on the way home and insulting her counts as friendship. ‘Like you hang out with Bailey.’

  ‘I don’t like Bailey any more,’ Joey says stiffly. The poor bear gets an extra hard jab with the pretend needle. ‘I’m never talking to that Schwachkopf again.’

  He raises his hands in surrender. ‘OK. Sorry. I didn’t know. But, please, Jo, I’m begging. I’ll do anything.’

  ‘Can I have chocolate?’

  Of course she had to ask for that. Where is he going to get chocolate? He doesn’t even have money. ‘OK, fine,’ Beck says. ‘I’ll get you chocolate. So don’t ever mention August’s name.’ He starts to leave and comes back. ‘Or that you know a secret.’ He hesitates. ‘Or that I’m going to give you chocolate.’

  Joey grins.

  August is not his friend, no matter if he even wanted one. They don’t even know each other.

  Beck is unknowable.

  He disappears back into his room, dissolves into the piano. He has an entire folder of études to learn, and not just any études but the ones the Maestro grew up performing to international acclaim. It’s especially torturous because he can’t play them like she did. Yet she has it stuck in her mind that he must? And he has to be better than her? He has a suspicion that, since she can no longer play, her goal in life is to make him into her so the world doesn’t forget Ida Magdalena Keverich’s name and her genius playing.

  Her dream is doomed to fail.

  He plays like a fiend all afternoon despite the pain in his cracked knuckles. He even skips taking a shower since he’s used to smelling like coffee now, even if the sticky hair is unpleasant. He’d rather nail the étude and not hear the Maestro complaining loudly about the lack of talent as she heats up fish fingers and boils frozen peas.

  Notes.

  Chords.

  Scales.

  He floods the house with music that shook the world a hundred years ago. His fingers knot over complicated patterns and his thumbs fail when he needs them most. But, the Maestro’s wrath aside, he owes it to the music to find perfection.

  But he thinks about August.

  What it’d be like to have a friend.

  What it’d be like to encourage her smile of sunshine and lemonade instead of cutting it in half.

  What if she’d never been rejected as bluntly as that before? What if she’d skipped through the universe, somehow oblivious to cruelty, and then he came along?

  Stop thinking like this. She’s not Joey. She’s his age and goes to the worst school in the state and can’t be oblivious to disappointments. Life would be unbalanced without sharp words to stick in your ribs like a thousand little knives. Beck’s here to fill the quota.

  His fingers fall over the étude and he curses the piano. Curses himself.

  He slams the keys and they howl with Chopin’s chaos instead of his own.

  Awake at five.

  Playing music until eight.

  Kitchen smells of coffee and threats.

  He cradles a cereal bowl in aching fingers.

  Stay quiet and the dragon won’t wake.

  Hate everything recreationally.

  Beck thinks August has reopened a raw rift of bitterness. It’s easy to drag himself through life with his eyes closed and accept the hate – until someone bumps him and forces him to look up and realise life’s cutting him with broken shards while everyone else is dancing. It’s suffocating. It’s unfair.

  Joey perches on the bench making sandwiches and wearing a dress-up chef hat and an apron that says Kill The Cook – Beck swore to her it said Kiss The Cook, but when she’s older he’ll be in trouble. She has creamed corn, stale crackers and a lot of mayonnaise.

  ‘Thanks, Joey.’ He wraps both sandwiches in tin foil and tries not to think about it.

  ‘You’re welcome, Schwachkopf,’ she says cheerfully.

  There’s bitterness knowing the only reason she uses those insults and curses is because the Maestro yells them at Beck. If he played better, Joey wouldn’t be a parrot, squawking lines of acid and knives.

  ‘When I’m a chef,’ Joey announces, ‘I’m going to have a big pink knife. Like, a massive one.’ She makes a chopping motion. ‘Then I’ll cut things up. BAM.’

  ‘What about a pink spoon?’ Beck says. ‘Or a pink whisk?’

  Joey gives him a you’re-an-idiot-why-do-I-have-to-put-up-with-you look. ‘Can you cut things up with a whisk, Schwachkopf? I want a knife.’
r />   Of course she does. Tiny, scary, violent child.

  Beck wonders if he ever juggled What I Want To Be When I Grow Up fantasies at her age. All he can remember is the piano. Sitting on the Maestro’s lap – back when her hands didn’t shake – as she guided his baby fingers up and down scales. When he was Joey’s age, he was already the piano’s barnacle. But Joey gets a childhood. She is the baby, the sweetheart. And currently it’s more lucrative to threaten an oblivious Joey to make Beck work harder.

  Or maybe the Maestro will inflict the piano on her too, someday.

  Beck wishes he could do something. Protect Joey? Save her? But he’s so pathetic he can’t even buy her chocolate, or a proper birthday present, or even tell her that he hates it when she calls him Schwachkopf.

  He’s spineless.

  They’re about to leave for school in a blast of autumn air when the Maestro calls. Beck grinds his teeth. He practised from 5:03. She has nothing to yell about this morning.

  Unless Joey let slip about August …

  She promised.

  She’s five years old.

  Beck drags himself back to the kitchen. He wonders how hot her coffee is.

  ‘Ja, Mutter?’ he says, weary.

  The Maestro is in her routine place at the table, red-blotted papers spread before her. Purple smudges beneath her eyes say she’s not sleeping well – but who can in this house, with the piano going all hours?

  ‘I have some tutoring going late,’ she says in German. ‘Don’t loiter on the way home. Come back and practise immediately.’

  Beck breathes out and a thousand pieces of dread roll off his shoulders. ‘Ja, Mutter, of course.’

  He’s out the front door before she realises she didn’t criticise his morning playing. The door slams behind him and he yells at Joey to wait for him – she’s taken off already but is also wearing a necklace of Christmas bells, so locating her isn’t hard – when it hits him.

  How wrong everything feels.

  How wrong it’s about to become.

  August Frey has been sitting in the gutter on the opposite side of the street. She springs to her feet like she ate crickets for breakfast and waves. What is she doing here? Is she messing with him? She’s not wearing shoes, just blue hemp anklets and Sharpie doodles on her feet.

  She doesn’t belong on this street. She doesn’t belong in his life.

  Beck’s eyes snap away and he charges up the street, a breath away from running. He snatches Joey’s hand and practically knocks her over in an effort to walk faster.

  August catches up with a skip and a bounce. ‘Good morning, antisocial Keverichs!’

  She’s not going to give up, is she?

  Beck mumbles something like hello and glares at the ground.

  August falls into step beside him, a disconcerting spring in each step. At least she wears her uniform like a (semi) normal student, her red polo shirt making Beck’s look pinker than usual.

  Beck only slows the pace when they’ve rounded the corner and there’s no possible way the Maestro will see them. Not that she’s in the habit of peeping out the window to be sure they get off safely. Between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., they are none of her concern.

  ‘And I thought I was a fast walker,’ August says lightly. ‘You’re so odd, you make me look normal.’

  He bets neither of them have even tasted normal in their entire lives. Beck is so beyond normal he can’t even focus on the fact that he has a pretty girl determined to hang around him.

  Pretty? Well, she sort of is. She has freckles and those oceanic eyes and she looks like she could beat an Olympian in a sprint. Not the perfect hair kind of pretty or even the clean and tidy kind of pretty … she’s just—

  Oh great. He’s analysing what counts as pretty? This needs to stop.

  ‘We can’t talk to you,’ Joey says.

  August doesn’t look surprised, or even offended – more like she swallowed a smile and is trying not to let it escape. ‘Why?’

  Joey squints. ‘You’re a stranger?’

  Beck could hug her. ‘Be firm.’

  ‘YOU’RE A STRANGER,’ Joey yells and then looks pleased.

  ‘I’m hardly stranger than you two,’ August says. ‘Plus you know my name, you know where I live, you know my favourite colour, and we hung out yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘I don’t know your favourite colour,’ Joey says indignantly.

  ‘It’s blue.’ Beck says it without thinking and then blushes dark enough to make a beetroot proud.

  August meets his eyes with a smirk on the corner of her lips. ‘Trophy for Keverich. What gave me away?’

  The blue anklets and blue doodles on her feet and blue wool twined around some of her hair.

  ‘Random guess,’ Beck says.

  Joey jerks her hand free to run a few metres ahead and leaps over a huge crack in the cement. She lands with a thump and her bell necklace clangs.

  August moves ever so slightly closer to Beck. ‘You don’t smell like coffee today.’

  ‘I’ve come to realise I hate coffee.’

  ‘Then my bribe isn’t going to work, is it?’ August jiggles her satchel. ‘I have a mango. Totally unseasonal mango and probably imported but I’m willing to share.’

  Only one more block and they’re at school. She makes him so uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m not taking your mango,’ he says. ‘We’re not friends.’

  ‘We’re not,’ August agrees, ‘we’re essay partners. I want good grades and you don’t want to get expelled.’

  ‘Why don’t you just ask Mr Boyne to swap you? With someone who cares?’

  August presses her lips together. ‘You say you don’t care, but your eyes say differently.’

  His eyes?

  ‘Dude,’ August says, ‘your eyes have this permanent devastated look, like someone stole your ice cream and stabbed your puppy and then told you sprinkles were illegal. Your eyes clearly say they want to pass this assignment.’

  They’re at the school gate and Beck has never been so glad to see it. He could hug the broken wire fence right now. Being with August is like a hurricane of confusing emotions.

  ‘Maybe sprinkles are illegal,’ Beck says, ‘and no one’s told you yet.’ He grabs Joey’s hand and drags her towards the preschool.

  Amongst the clamour of hundreds of kids elbowing their way to class, August shouts, ‘I’ll see you after school!’

  Beck walks faster.

  The high, primary and preschool are all squashed into two massive buildings. They’re old. The air conditioners never work, so forget about heating. Most of the bathroom doors don’t lock, if they’re lucky enough to have a door. There isn’t even a covered eating area, so rain or shine, kids wander about the sports oval and leave muesli bar wrappers everywhere they go. It’s a dump. Beck feels sick dread for when Joey graduates to primary school and has to face these horrors.

  He leaves her behind the safe, high fences – covered in rainbow streamers – of the preschool and trudges to class.

  While the teachers drone about maths or biology, Beck writes music. His pencil squeaks a vicious storm – but it doesn’t block out August.

  She’s going to be sticky about this, isn’t she? And it’s not just the assignment; she seems hell-bent on prying into the rest of his life. Maybe she thinks he’s interesting? He’s tried to be unremarkable. But if she found out about the piano or the reasons behind his bruises or the Maestro in general and told people – he can’t even think about it. He’d be so embarrassed. What kind of fifteen-year-old guy is scared of his mother?

  Beck tries to approach Mr Boyne – even though he has a strict no-teacher-contact policy – about changing partners to someone who doesn’t care about school, but Mr Boyne waves him away.

  ‘August is great. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘That isn’t what I—’

  But Mr Boyne flaps off to accost a student stealing whiteboard markers.

  Can nothing in his gottverdammten Leben go ri
ght, for once?

  Even getting Joey out fast fails because her teacher corners Beck to give a disapproving analysis of Joey’s recent violent behaviour and how unacceptable it is. Beck has only just wriggled free of that when he realises Joey’s made a robot costume out of boxes and they have a long, heated argument about the fact that she can’t take it home. She howls at him for a few minutes and then goes boneless so he has to carry her out, which douses any notion of getting away before August can catch up.

  August swings on the fence, a little less bouncy than usual.

  ‘Why is your foot bleeding?’ Joey demands.

  ‘I kicked someone.’ August gives a wan smile.

  Beck hauls Joey up for a piggyback ride and tries to balance his backpack on one shoulder and hers on his other. He really doesn’t have time to focus on August’s freaking feet.

  August reaches for his bag. ‘I can carry—’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says sharply.

  She pulls back and he asks himself, for the millionth time, why he’s such a devil. But it has to be this way. If she goes to Mr Boyne for a new partner, she’ll get her way. He just has to suck enough to drive her to it.

  August limps – unusually quiet – a few steps behind them. Good, maybe he can lose her.

  But Beck finds himself walking slower and slower and then finally turns back to see how bad it is.

  She’s leaving bloodied footprints.

  ‘Meine Güte,’ Beck says sharply. ‘You could’ve said you were dying.’

  August stops and looks down. Her face is paler than usual, freckles sticking out, and she winces every time she steps.

  Beck drops Joey on her feet and dumps his packs on the sidewalk. He’s a jerk, yes, but he’s not the kind of jerk that’s going to let someone bleed to death.

  ‘Do you have a phone?’ August says weakly. ‘I could call my dad to pick me up.’

  Beck hesitates. ‘Um, no. You don’t have one?’ Because he sure doesn’t.

  August shrugs. ‘My family doesn’t really believe in them. I mean, we’re not living in a cave.’ She lets out a half-hearted laugh. ‘I have an iPod and we’ve got houselines and – sorry, I’m totally rambling.’