by Amy Bird
Count to ten. Come on, remember – mother of your child. No arguments causing miscarriages. Retrieve the hammer out of the crib and install it in the toolbox. Go back upstairs, into the nursery, with its ghoulish dead-father crib, and smile at your pregnant wife.
Looking at her, through my smiles, I know she doesn’t feel how I feel about something else too. Doesn’t feel as I feel about a mother who simply thought ‘Hey, this is all too difficult since my husband died. So even though my little son has just been left fatherless, I’m going to make him motherless too, by just giving him unfeelingly away.’ You’d think she would. With her own mother, up on the almighty pedestal she’s now deified on, and with her own impending motherhood, you’d think she would have as little sympathy for Sophie Travers and she does for Gillian.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I test her out again. But no. Same old response. Ellie just goes on about the blood clot again. “There may have been an accident,” she says, seated on that sex-cum-nursing chair like it’s a judge’s bench. “That might be what Gillian was referring to. Or someone attacked him. Imagine how Sophie must have felt. Like she couldn’t be a mother at that moment; just a grieving widow.”
But I don’t want to imagine it. I haven’t got the mental space to imagine it. The only things I have space for are this: the concerto; hatred of my non-parents; sorrow, true horrible devastating sorrow, of my life not lived; Ellie lying to me; and the blood clot. The phrase Ellie heard Gillian use: What happened that day. Because, you see, I haven’t forgotten those words. Or how they link to the blood clot. And there, again, I know more than Ellie. Partly because, you see, I am an expert in this area. So I know these blood clots. I know what they mean. The violence they entail. And I also know because there is now not a single page of the internet that mentions Max Reigate that is unread by me. I know that when he left home, he was fine. I know that when he started to record that album, he was fine. And I know that mid-way through, he died.
And I know what that means.
Talk and die.
I know it’s not just a blood clot, of course, the talk and die phenomenon. Christ, if anyone knows that, I do. But these people who write these Wikipedia entries, they’re not going to be able to differentiate. Say to the average person: there was an epidural haemorrhage, a build-up of blood between the brain and the skull, and they’ll say oh, right. You mean a blood clot. Not getting, in their ignorance, the fatal beauty – sorry father, my dear departed father, but I mean from a scientific point of view – of the pressure of the bleed from damaged blood vessels around the skull trauma just building up, building up, until gradually gradually the pressure on the brain gets too much. An almost perfect murder, it would be, in some regards. If you gloss over the fact you need everyone not to notice you hit the victim on the head, and need to get the pressure just right, plus cross your fingers a lot that they won’t just pass out concussed immediately or, even more disappointingly talk and…talk.
So, what I mean is, Wikipedia saying ‘blood clots’ isn’t going to rule out talk and die, is it? I mean, a mighty coincidence if it was that, what with that being my area of academic specialism and all. Unless that’s what subconsciously got me interested in the area? You might say I could just find Sophie. Ask her. And I will do. In due course. But I’m a scientist. I like to develop my thesis and my research. I like to make my scientific case. And so before I put her to the test, before I get her to confirm my theory, I will get my facts. Then we’ll see what she has to say. About whatever happened that day, with my dad. My dad, Max (still getting used to it). With my background, perhaps I should be the last person to say ‘But healthy pianists don’t just collapse in the middle of recordings!’. But, you know, healthy pianists generally don’t just collapse in the middle of recordings. What perhaps happens is that before the recording, at home, say, like one of those typical domestic epidural haematoma cases, someone –
But part of the protocol, it seems, for my present situation, is if I start to share these theories or appear a little agitated, Ellie pops open the valium. Not for her, in her present condition, but for me. To quieten me. So before I can fully get my head round the theory of the special clot, of who might have caused it, tablets that Ellie has found from goodness knows where are in my hand. And because I still just about trust her – even now, after what she kept from me – it’s only after I’ve taken two in one swallow that I ask her what they are.
“Don’t fight it,” she says, leading me into the bedroom. “Just lie back and succumb,” she says, as she switches off the lights and leaves the room. And so before I know it I’m being raped by the valium, forcibly relaxed into its grasp and my eyelids they’re going going go…
I’m on a piano. Not playing one – on one. But it is not an ordinary piano and it is not an ordinary me. The piano is the size of a large ship. In fact, it is a large ship. It crosses a stormy sea, waves crashing on it and over it. I’m standing on one of the white keys. I’ve shrunk – not just in stature, but in years. I’m a little boy again, wearing shorts. With my small fingers, I’m clutching onto the lip at the edge of the piano keys. The giant hand of an unseen person is pressing down on the keys, one by one, getting closer and closer. Each time a key is pressed down, a huge chasm opens up. It isn’t just a gap between the regular keys and the one being pressed, like it would be on an ordinary piano. As each key is played, it falls, down down into the sea, down to the hammer-like engine pistons of the ship, and below them to the sea, with a great splash. I can see them as they fall, see the gap opening up below me. The sea churns beneath the piano – slam, slam, slam into its great legs that stretch out over the waves. The beat of the sea is not regular though – it has strange riffs and rhythms. Max’s rhythms, of course.
But it’s not Max I call for. “Mummy! Mummy!” I shout as the hand gets ever closer, the sea ever nearer.
There is no sign of Mummy. She doesn’t answer my call. But there is another sign. A sign from above – a clap of thunder. I look up from the piano and see a gap appear in the clouds above the sea. There is a presence there, with eyes and face but they are so indistinct, I cannot tell who they are. The presence, whatever it is, has a hammer. Like a Thor of DIY, the being waves the hammer, and brings it down from the clouds. The hammer fills the whole of the sky between the clouds and the sea. The hammer strikes the piano – crash! But the wood casing of the piano is intact. And the mighty hand continues, progressing closer and closer to me.
“Mummy!” I’m screaming. “Mummy!”
The hammer is raised again up into the sky, but even as the giant piano-hand has revealed another gap into the sea beneath, the hammer is coming down again. And up. And the piano hand is now on the key next to me and in only a moment I will, I must, fall into the sea below, unless I can just jump along to the next key. But no; the hammer is being swung again. If I could just make the presence realise I’m here, make it notice me, then it will stop, won’t it?
“I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!” I shout.
But the presence either ignores me or doesn’t hear because down comes the hammer, and along comes the hand. I try to scale the black key above me in case the hand is not playing the sharps, but the sides of the key are too slippery and besides, I see now that the hand is playing both black and white. And as the hammer from the Thor-presence hits the piano, the hand comes level with me. And the void to the sea opens up, and I’m falling, falling, falling, my face to the sky. I see as the waves close around me that the presence is not unknown, it is very known. It is Mummy, Mummy, Mummy.
And then I’m not in a piano, I’m in a bed, and there’s another Mummy, but a different Mummy, a Mummy-to-be, and it’s saying “Will! Will! Shh, you’re fine, you’re fine.”
I try to tell her, “But I’m not, because the sea will get me, and she, she, and the hammers… What?”
And then I realise it’s my bed, and the sea that’s here is just the sea of my sweat, the waves just me tossing and turning. And I’m here wit
h my Ellie. For a moment there is a swell of relief. But only for a moment. Because then I think back to the other dreams. The pianos. The hammers. The water. What if they’re not just dreams? What if they’re memories?
Chapter Four
-Ellie-
Well, the valium didn’t help much. So it’s on to plan B. The funeral.
“You gained a father so quickly,” I tell Will. “And then lost him again. It’s classic grief you’re experiencing – anger, frustration, interrupted sleep. We need to let you mourn, properly. In the open.”
“You want me to visit his grave?” he asks me, taking a sip of his tea.
Not getting it yet, then.
“You can do that too, of course – and you should. But I mean the whole thing,” I explain. “The whole mourning process. Your own version of a funeral for him. I’ll do a reading. We’ll light a candle. You can cry. We don’t need to tell anyone. But it will be cathartic. Trust me.”
I have the experience here and he knows it. Will doesn’t answer immediately. I take a sip of my peppermint tea to show that this is a chilled out thing, with no pressure. That there’s no competitive mourning, no seasoned orphan one-upmanship going on. Just love. When he still doesn’t respond, I’m thinking of my next move – a bit of a lower lip quiver, bit of a sob about how his disturbed sleep patterns are affecting me, when I’ve only just started sleeping again. A bit manipulative, maybe, but I know best, right? Or I will do, when I’m a mother – which will be soon. So I must be in the early stages of knowing best now. If only Will would acknowledge it.
But then he finally says something useful. “And then we can move on?”
So I nod, with great understanding. “When you’re ready,” I say, mentally adding ‘Please move on soon, I need my sleep.’
“A proper funeral?” he asks.
“A proper funeral,” I confirm.
And then, he like really gets the idea. Before I can stop him, he’s run off for the Yellow Pages and is looking up undertakers and God knows what else. All these conversations on the phone in the next room. Well, I’m not going to intervene. It’s his funeral. I can take a little cat-nap here on the sofa, while he does all his preparations.
The doorbell rings at some point and I’m sure I hear chatter about a coffin. Will sounds upbeat about something. Actually sounds happy. So it must be a dream. I close my eyes again. And I must have slept for a bit, because Will has been really busy. I don’t find out how busy until bedtime, when there’s something stiff on my pillow (lucky me). Except it’s not Will. It’s a formal envelope, addressed to me. Will used to do this with anniversary cards, but this isn’t a special date. I wouldn’t have forgotten. OK, so I did, once, but never again.
“What’s this?” I ask Will, about the envelope, as he slides off his trousers. Oh, hello, not the only stiff thing. Looks like the bump will be getting some action tonight, finally.
“Your plan,” he says.
Inside the envelope, in Will’s best copperplate, black ink on white card, I read:
‘A celebration of the life unknown; a burial of the life not lived.
In remembrance of Max Reigate, father and pianist.
Tomorrow, at dawn.’
Is this some grim attempt at humour? I look up at Will. He’s not smiling. Not a joke, then. He is taking my suggestion seriously. So I need to show I’m proud of his engagement with my idea, like the good little nurturer I am. I climb across the bed and squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. I squeeze him some more. He kisses my lips (top ones). Oh my. Am I out of purdah? I stick my tongue into his mouth. He pulls up my nightdress and he is straight in there. Foreplay, you could at least send me a postcard, wherever you’ve gone. But I’m not so sure I wish you were here. Because Will, he finally wants me again. He needs me, bump or no bump. So he is in, then out, then in then out, then i-i-n at a slower rate and o-u-t for three still slow, then in in in, out out out. It’s a new rhythm, one he’s not used before. When we get to the afterglow – which, um, actually, I’m feeling will be quite glowing – I can tease him that his father’s death has in some ways done him good.
And then I realise. The rhythm he’s using is the one he has been tapping on chairs and tables and drumming in his sleep. It is his father’s rhythm. It is the rhythm of the Max Reigate concerto.
I try to vary the pace. But I can’t: they are his thrusts and I daren’t force myself too much against him, or pull him too much towards me for fear, however unfounded, of damaging the baby. And – ahh – actually – seems like my body is responding. Pretty perfect rhythm, you know. And so I’m kind of locked into it. And Will’s varying his ins and his outs in tempo to the music that must be in his brain. Our breath…it becomes…this ragged…accompaniment. The crescendo, it mounts and Will is in out out, in out out, in out out. In in out. In in out. IN OUT IN, IN OUT IN, IN OUT IN, IN IN IN IIIIIINNN.
Pianorgasm.
Together, we lie silent. Inside me, I can feel Leo doing little somersaults. But this isn’t about him, right now.
I’ll need to say something, acknowledge what just happened.
“I love your father’s music,” I say, putting that tender jokey edge in my voice.
“Me too,” Will says, with no joke in his.
And he rolls away from me. He doesn’t hold me. There is no glory of my bump. I am not even there for him.
So I wonder, as we turn off our bedside lamps, whether he even knew the rhythm he was making love to. Whether he knows just how much Max is inhabiting – inhibiting – him. And whether it really all will be all right in the morning.
Chapter Five
-Sophie-
Crotchets and quavers still remind me of the pall-bearers. Like black-hatted heads above the line of the coffin, they stand out starkly against the staves of the composition book. Whose book is it? I turn to the front. Oh, Emilie Beaumont. All très jolie with her blonde ringlets and big brown eyes, until the tantrums start. Then she turns red and cries and stamps her foot. How I hate children like her. So, yes, young Emilie’s quavers, malformed and straggly and in a major key as they are, do their funereal march across the page. I nearly didn’t even go to Max’s funeral, to see those pall-bearers. Nearly stayed away. Couldn’t face him being lowered into the ground. All those people, staring. Whispering their suspicions. Pointing their black-gloved fingers at us both, me and Guillaume. But it would have been more dangerous not to go. We’d have been conspicuous by our absence. And things might have been said. Things I couldn’t control.
And so I went. And what I remember most is that some awful organist tried to play an extract of Max’s work, but they played it so badly it was almost unrecognisable. I’d been silently weeping before, but I made it my job to sob big loud sobs when that music started, just to cover up the horror of what it meant, for Max actually to be dead, for his genius to be lost, for him never to play his own music ever again, just to be played badly by mediocre hobbyists. And little Guillaume, I think he tried to take my hand, but I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him. So that, besides everything else, gets added to the guilt list.
It’s not just notes, though, that are like death. Pianos, too, have their reminders of the mortality of Max. At first, I was not even able to look at a piano. It was not just their resemblance to coffins. It was that I felt I was looking straight at Max. But not live Max; Max laid out dead on the hospital bed. The keys were like the ribs of a skeleton, topped and tailed not by anything as useful as a head – just black nothingness at the end of the run.
But then when the realisation of his absolute final gone-ness hit me (appropriately, like a blow), I turned to pianos for solace. I liked to press my face against the keys, to hug the shiny wooden body, to run a finger along the red felt that separated the two. I was thrown out of several music stores. At the time, I found it heartless. On reflection, I suppose it may have been my unnaturally dilated pupils, that over-stimulated frenzy, and the fact I talked to the pianos, that meant the security guards were compelled t
o remove me. Little Guillaume would slink out behind me. Half the time, I wasn’t even aware of bringing him with me, but he’d turned up, all the same. It would have been so easy just to leave him in one of those piano shops. Open up one of the lids of a grand piano, stow him inside, then shut it again. Leave his head pressed against all those strings. Hammers coming down at his temples.
Arrête, Sophie – tu te rends folle. And I don’t want to drive myself mad. Madness would not be helpful. Madness doesn’t get you an income. Marking that little bitch Emilie Beaumont’s work would get me an income. Shut off the pain, the guilt, the feeling, like before. When you allowed yourself back into music again. Not to play professionally any more, not like when I met Max. My violin is well and truly shelved. Smashed, in fact. It had seemed like a good idea, at the time. I couldn’t sit in an orchestra again, hear that build-up of sound, the passion that went with it. Max’s piano would always have been centre-stage, in my mind. Like the first time, when I was part of the orchestra that recorded the first concerto. We’d joked, when he’d started his next piece (a quirky piano-only concerto), that he’d only written his earlier concerto with orchestra so that he could snare the first violinist. Now he had one, he could move on to solo work. Not that I was his first violinist. His piano had built up its share of notches.
I toss Emilie’s composition book to one side. It isn’t happening. I’m having a Max moment. If I can just engage in that, maybe I’ll finally get closure, put it all to one side. So, let’s psychoanalyse: did I feel rejected that he didn’t want my violin accompaniment, in that second concerto? Maybe. Maybe that’s why we argued in the run-up to that second recording. Or maybe it was still because of Guillaume, the distance I felt since he was born. Not just from Max, but from everything. The distance I tried to close by shouting. By throwing plates, sometimes. And, yes, make yourself confront it – other things. I would quite literally give anything for us not to have argued that evening. Had I known what the consequences would be.
