A Thousand Perfect Notes

by C. G. Drews

  ‘Did I say you could leave?’ the Maestro screams.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He has nothing else to say.

  ‘SORRY IS NOT ENOUGH ANY MORE.’ The Maestro is gone, gone, deep into the agony of ruined hands and abandonment and frothing hate. But she can still hit.

  She grabs Beck by the throat of his shirt and rams him into the wall. He’s not a plate. He doesn’t shatter. But the wind goes out of him in a whoosh.

  Her fist connects with his jaw.

  It’s OK, Beck, just go away, go somewhere else in your head. Where’s your music? Find your music. Better you than Joey, right? Right.

  Or stand up –

  fight?

  Beck shoves the Maestro away. Hard.

  The surprise on her face is matched by the catastrophic pounding of his heart. He’s going to regret that. Her eyes are too white, her face discoloured, her hands trembling violently.

  ‘She’s not playing the piano,’ Beck says, ragged. ‘If you try, I’ll smash the piano. I swear I’ll smash that gottverdammte piano.’

  But his voice trembles, and how can you take a wavering threat seriously?

  ‘I sacrificed everything for that piano,’ the Maestro shouts. ‘Everything, you ungrateful brat. The thousands I needed for therapy on my hands, I spent on you. Thousands!’ She slaps him for emphasis. ‘So you would have a future. You will play, you will—’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to.’ What is he doing? He’s bitten his tongue and his mouth is full of blood. Stop. Stop talking. But there is a crack across his soul and something red and vicious and desperate crawls out. ‘Maybe I hate the piano too. But you never ask. You never care. You hate me because I’m not like you. Well, guess what? I’ll never be like you.’

  The Maestro’s hands wrap into his shirt, shaking so hard, so hard, so hard. ‘You will.’ Her voice is a hiss.

  ‘I hate music,’ he says, soft as heartbreak and goodbyes and a thousand kilometres beneath the quiet earth.

  And he hates that he doesn’t quite mean it. He hates her music – he’s in love with his own.

  He’s ready for the next slap, but not how she then falls to her knees in a sob, in a scream, and her hand wraps around a jagged shard of plate. Potato drips off it in a pink cloud.

  The crockery cuts into her hands, deep, deep, as she squeezes the plate. Her lips move and it takes him a moment to realise the buzzing in his head drowns out her words.

  Her whispers are in German. If only I had no son.

  A sob chokes Beck’s throat. Would she try to kill him? ‘Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.’

  Her eyes fix on the shard, on the blood oozing as it cuts through her flesh and hits bone. She’s destroying her hand. She’s lost. She’s not coming back.

  Carefully, his mouth bloody, cheek bruised from the slaps, Beck drops to the floor and crawls towards her. He hesitates. She’s on her knees, shoulders heaving, blood dripping steadily to the floor. He touches her arm. She doesn’t move. So his hands close around her massive wrist and he pries her fingers open one by one until the shard of plate is free and clatters to the tiles.

  ‘J-J-Joey,’ Beck says. ‘You have to call an ambulance.’

  He’s not sure if he could without losing himself.

  He grabs a tea towel and wraps it around the Maestro’s hands. She lets him. She’s so blank, so terrifyingly blank. Where is his mother? Beck’s eyes blur.

  Her lips part, terrified. ‘Nein. No one can see this.’

  Everyone should see this.

  ‘You need stitches,’ he says.

  Why? Why not just leave her on the floor and let her bleed?

  Slowly, she’s returning – holding the tea towel to her hands herself, straightening, surveying, brain so obviously ticking.

  ‘I can explain this to them.’ She licks her lips. ‘But not you. Not you.’

  Because his face bears the red handprint of her tantrum. They’d call the police.

  Does he want that?

  ‘Go.’ The Maestro’s voice is harsh. ‘Go now. I will say I had a fit, I lost my medication. I will explain this away.’

  Behind him, he hears Joey on the phone, her voice a trembling squeak. ‘My mama is hurt and sad. Oh. OK. Danke.’ She tiptoes over and holds it carefully towards the Maestro.

  The Maestro takes it and hangs up. ‘They’ll still come,’ she growls. ‘But if you are not here I can do this. I can do this.’

  Does he want to be found? Does he? Does he?

  ‘Get out.’ Her voice rises to a thunderclap. ‘Get outside, Schwachkopf, or I will tell them you did this to me.’ She points a bloodied finger towards Joey. ‘And I will do worse to her.’

  Why is he so pathetic?

  Why?

  Cold air touches his bleeding face, soothing like an ice pack. His cheek is swollen, lip broken, and he’s cut half a hole in his tongue. It’s been worse. One bruise and a bloody mouth is just a warning from the Maestro. Yet it’d be bliss to swallow the winter wind right now and be numb. He wants so badly to be numb.

  To forget.

  To not think.

  He could’ve stayed – fought for himself, for Joey, told the truth when the ambulance arrived. But the Maestro has always been convincing and he’s never had a backbone and he’s too scared she’d hurt Joey. Maybe if he stayed the truth would come out. Maybe the world would pluck him and Joey from their life of piano keys and acidic shouts and hard slaps. Maybe he’d lose Joey. Maybe he’d be taken away, far from here, and lose August too.

  August.

  He runs from his house as the ambulance’s red and blue lights appear at the top of the street. He never runs, so it’s hard work, but good. The ground races away beneath him, dark and uneven, and he stumbles several times, but keeps going. He has no jacket. He has no idea what he should do.

  The music in his head has stopped completely. Don’t think about that now. Don’t think.

  Linger until the ambulance is gone and then sneak inside? Clean up the Maestro’s blood and sweep the smashed dishes and put a Band-Aid over the gangrenous gash in their family?

  He’s crying. Stupid. He needs to collect himself, not fall into a trembling heap.

  Where’s he going?

  He takes a left down an avenue he’s thought about countless times. August’s street. What’s her number? Nine? No, eleven. And there’s a veterinary beside it, or something, or – whatever. He’s not going in.

  He slows to a jog, legs aching at the stretch of unused muscles. The houses look sleepy, peaceful, with only the occasional front yard a weedy heap. One house has their garage open, a girl swinging a spanner and plunging her face under a car hood. She looks up as he passes, but he walks faster. Head low. He must look wild.

  His body throbs to the beat of the Maestro’s metronome slaps. His legs ache from running. The icy night has frozen his split lip. He can’t show up on August’s doorstep like this. He can’t show up at all.

  It was his decision to tuck tail between legs and run instead of fighting for help. His decision. His.

  August does not exist to save him, not when he can screw his spineless whimpers and save himself.

  He’ll just see where she lives. Then he’ll go home.

  Number eleven Gully Avenue is a squat house with an adjoining veterinary practice in a spruced-up shed. The front yard is crammed with a massive tree, a walled garden and a paved path with pansies in buckets growing around a big sign that reads ‘FREY VET AND ANIMAL SHELTER. WE HELP. WE SAVE’.

  Beck feels so stupid looking at it.

  A light glows by the front door, an invitation, a lure. Beck is a moth to it. His feet crunch the sea of buffalo grass and clover as he creeps towards the old Victorian house with its rippled glass door speckled with the warmth of a thousand colours. Faint barking sounds behind the glass, then laughter.

  August lives here? Warm and happy and safe?

  If he knocks, he’ll unleash a legion of pathetic awkwardness. He’s never asked for help in his life. He doesn’t want i
t. What does he want?

  A family.

  An occasional hug.

  To know his sister is safe.

  A friend.

  Something more than a friend?

  A safe place to write his music. Which is gone gone gone … Don’t think about that right now.

  He just wants to talk. That’s not pitiful, right? Friend to friend, asking for a second to talk about – anything. Like how dumb his name is, or how he actually adores Twice Burgundy, or how August’s crazy healthy food tastes downright delicious no matter how much he mocks it. She’d laugh at him. It’d be normal. He could go home and clean the mess and breathe.

  His feet betray him and cross the cold wet grass. His hand rises to the door, hesitates. How bad is his face? Is he going to scare her?

  Yes.

  This is so wrong, so stupid, so needy, so—

  He knocks.

  Dogs explode into howls and scrabbling paws behind the glass. If August doesn’t answer, he’ll split because there’s no way he’s facing her parents with a face like this to ask to see their daughter. But as the seconds tick past, the resolve in his chest caves until he’s suffocated with the need to stay.

  August answers the door.

  She’s in red Aztec leggings and a huge cream jumper that comes to her thighs and gapes at the neck. Her fingers barely poke out the ends. Her feet are bare despite her breath frosting as her mouth opens.

  ‘Beck?’ Her eyes couldn’t get any rounder.

  He can smell tomato and rosemary sauce and wine and warmth.

  ‘Who is it, honey?’ someone calls.

  ‘My friend from school!’ August yells over her shoulder.

  She blocks a yapping dog trying to throw itself out the door, which leaves her wedged awkwardly before Beck. ‘Shut up, Bo! You too, Gunther.’

  With a groan, she gives up and slips fully outside, shutting the front door in the barking faces. She wraps her arms around herself and shivers and Beck feels guilty. Yes. He feels guilty about the cold air.

  ‘You’re not OK.’ It’s not a question. ‘What happened? Who did this? Can I do something?’

  ‘Petition for world peace?’ His nose runs and he has nothing to wipe it with, which is a crippling embarrassment.

  August doesn’t smile. Beck feels worse.

  ‘I’m s-s-sorry.’ His teeth won’t stop chattering. ‘I shouldn’t have—’

  ‘Yes, you should have.’ She touches his arm, not quite holding him but somehow pinning him from taking flight. ‘This is what friends are for. To help in time of strife and stuff chocolate down your throat when you’re miserable. That sort of fun stuff.’ Her fingers tighten slightly around his arm. ‘You have to come in.’

  ‘No.’ He’s a knot of panic and horror. ‘Your parents – they can’t—’

  ‘I’m not letting you freeze on my lawn,’ August says. ‘You can lie if you want … and they won’t make a fuss. They’re totally reasonable folks, trust me.’ Her eyes sparkle. ‘I’ll invent a gloriously distracting reason for your facial features. You wrestle polar bears as an after-school job!’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘You’re right. Way too unrealistic. You’re a back-alley street fighter.’

  ‘Because that’s so much better.’

  This is why he came. This is what he needs – a moment under the spell of her smile.

  ‘But seriously,’ she says, the joke fading, ‘are you hurt bad? Do you want to call emergency?’

  ‘No.’ He doesn’t know what he wants. His brain has drowned and he can’t make a decision. He can barely breathe.

  August nods and yanks the door back open. ‘Don’t mind the dogs. Most of them won’t kill you.’

  The heat, the smells, the cheery warbles of happy conversation – he’s going to ruin it. He’ll wreck August’s evening and what if her parents tell the police anyway? His family are the jagged teeth of a saw, but they’re all he has and he can’t lose that right now.

  ‘I can’t, August, I can’t—’

  But he lets himself be pulled inside.

  The dogs hit first, warm and strong, knocking against his legs and leaping all over with wet, rough tongues. Then he’s enveloped in warmth, light, the mouthwatering smells of something in the oven. August hauls a few dogs off him and calls uselessly for quiet. She has to pluck one from the chaos, frothing with rage, and shove it in a bedroom with the door shut.

  There are animals absolutely everywhere.

  He’s in a lounge with a hammock full of cats in one corner next to a wall of windows, and the remaining walls are covered in handmade shelves. A woven rug is on the floor and a battered coffee table sports a bonsai tree, a mess of magazines and an unmoving turtle. The ugliest dog Beck’s ever seen nestles on a sofa. It looks like something’s chewed off its nose and glued it back on.

  ‘That,’ August says, noticing his stare, ‘is Stuart. Excuse his face. He’s been beaten half to death by a disgusting human. We rescued him and while he loves me, he hates men. Don’t pet him.’

  Beck takes a step back as Stuart snarls.

  ‘And this is Tortle.’ August picks up the turtle and strokes its shell. ‘We didn’t know if he was a tortoise or a turtle when we found him, so we covered both bases.’

  ‘Clever,’ says Beck.

  ‘Exceptionally.’ August sets it back down. ‘Plus, with a free-spirited name like Tortle, he won’t conform to stereotypes. Look at him now! He’s embracing his life with no stereotypical box!’

  ‘Does he own a box?’

  ‘Actually, no.’ August beams. ‘He’s always free. I’m so proud.’

  ‘Question.’ Beck squints at the unmoving shell. ‘Is it alive?’

  ‘Oh stop it.’ She gives his shoulder a gentle, playful nudge. ‘You’re just jealous of my divergent pet.’ She twirls, her gargantuan jumper billowing, and dances down the hallway. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘I already ate.’ He feels like he’s never eaten in his life.

  ‘Does that stop you eating again?’ August says.

  Unless he wants to stay and get licked by two or nine dogs, Beck has to follow. Every inch of the hallway wall is covered in mismatched photo frames, most starring August pulling faces or cuddling a frog or with green goo mushed over her baby face or her arms draped over her dad’s shoulders while she kisses his cheek.

  ‘But first – the bathroom.’ August takes Beck’s hand and gently pulls him into it. ‘Don’t even protest. I am excellent at first aid.’

  He wants to do more than protest. He wants to run. But he finds himself perching on the edge of a bathtub while August cracks a cupboard door and pulls out a battered first aid kit. This is ridiculous. He’s being needy, he—

  She rests a hand under his chin and tilts his head upwards. A frown creases her eyebrows. He wishes he wasn’t causing that.

  ‘Your cheek isn’t too bad,’ she says, voice serious, soft. ‘Bruising, and a small cut.’ She’s got a small cloth and she dips it in antiseptic and wipes it across his cheekbone. It stings like fresh hell but he doesn’t flinch. He refuses to flinch.

  ‘I can do this myself,’ he says.

  Her concentrating frown remains. ‘I know. But I’m taking care of you for just a hot second, Beck. Let me.’

  He does.

  Never mind that he can’t breathe because her hand is cupped under his chin. Never mind that her skin sets his alight in a way that has nothing to do with stinging cuts.

  Please don’t stop.

  Please don’t let go.

  Please hold on to me.

  She steps back, her brow smoothing. ‘Less blood. Still battered.’

  She’s still holding his hand. He’s still letting her.

  Her voice drops to a whisper. ‘Beck, are you sure I can’t—’

  ‘I can handle it. It’s not that bad.’

  Her smile is very small and very sad. ‘Well, I’d better introduce you to my parents before they wonder if we fell down the bathtub plughole.’

  She releas
es his hand and it is a relief – no, no it’s not. It is the worst thing.

  August leads him to a tiny kitchen, smothered in pot plants and ripe with the juicy odour of lasagne. Music hums softly in the background.

  Her dad, an older man than Beck originally guessed from glimpsing him in the car the day August busted her foot, stands at the bench and chops lettuce in an apron proclaiming ‘QUEEN OF THE GRILL’. His hair, longer than August’s, is looped back with rawhide and the edges of tattoos peek from the collar of his shirt. With a smile, he sets down the knife.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ he says, with the kind of voice that would calm an anxious pitbull. ‘To whom do I owe this pleasure?’ There’s a flicker of concern as he looks Beck up and down, and Beck wishes he could dissolve.

  ‘This is Beck,’ August says grandly. ‘Beck-from-school. You know, the one I gab about all the time.’ She winks at Beck. ‘Just kidding. I don’t talk about you that much. He’s here for dinner and you absolutely are not allowed to ask questions. He wrestles crocodiles.’

  Her dad’s eyebrows quirk, a gesture Beck knows well from August. And then he just shrugs and keeps chopping lettuce.

  ‘Crocodiles, eh?’ her dad says.

  ‘I get into these fights sometimes,’ Beck says in a rush. ‘It’s stupid. I’m stupid.’

  Her dad pauses his chopping. ‘Really? Doesn’t seem like you fought back, son. Did this happen at home?’ His voice softens slightly. ‘Because I am more than willing to—’

  ‘Those are questions,’ August says. ‘Please don’t scare him off, Dad. Please? He’s like a delicate, rare flower.’

  A woman waltzes into the kitchen then, literally waltzes with an imaginary partner. The soft background music is Dvorak – Beck recognises it. Like August’s dad, her mother is older, with streaks of grey in honey hair, and she wears fisherman pants and a shirt that looks like it’s been woven from moss. When she catches sight of Beck, she pauses the waltz and blinks.

  ‘You look cold, darling,’ she says.

  Beck has exactly nothing to say.

  August says, ‘This is Beck and yes, he’s cold.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Beck resists rubbing the goosebumps growing up his arms.