Hide and Seek

by Amy Bird

  ‘And because she the bitch, the bitch Sophie, hit him with the hammer, all the blood began to build up on his brain. And there was so much pressure, SO MUCH PRESSURE, that his brain, even that special beautiful artistic brain for which I will weep and weep and weep and AVENGE, could not survive. And although he went off to record his piece, he died. My father, died. Murdered, by my mother. And do you know what this teaches us, class, members of the public, jury? It teaches us (a) the majority of epidural haematomas are caused by a blunt instrument head trauma (b) that this is just trade jargon for murder (c) so that murdering, thieving, destructive so-called mothers like Sophie Travers think that they can get away with it, just because there’s a bit of talking first, but they devastate lives these people and so (d) they deserve to feel first-hand what it’s like, that hammer-blow to the head, how the blood builds up, how their feeble non-genius brain cannot cope, how it can’t even talk and die, how they go straight to die.’

  And on it goes. On goes the polemic against Sophie Travers. Will, how did you get so ill? How did I not notice, you were not only declining from me, but from the world?

  But what really chills me is the final sentence, under a heading ‘Update’.

  ‘The original lecture was due to be given today but as my researcher has found new material I will instead be proving point (d) above to Sophie Travers immediately. À bientôt.’

  And at that point, my waters break.

  PART THREE

  RECAPITULATION

  Chapter One

  -Will-

  I do my best to blag taking the hammer on the Eurostar. ‘DIY on my home in Paris.’ ‘You just can’t get good tools over there.’ But they don’t buy it. The hammer is confiscated. Never mind. What I said about decent tools in Paris is a lie. I’m sure I’ll be able to buy a hammer. Before I get to the school.

  I board the train. As we are waiting to depart, I think about the lecture. There will be disapproval at me postponing it again. But it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t be complete without this, this extra bit of research. I have my darling wife to thank for this, for finding and revealing the school Sophie teaches at. Thinking of Ellie, I look at my phone. Nothing from her. That’s a surprise. I thought my darling wife would want to talk. Would want to know why the lecture I claimed to be leaving the house for has been postponed. Soon enough, I will tell her. But not yet. Not until Sophie is dead.

  Do I feel advance remorse for what I’m going to do? No. Because this is the woman who has stolen my life. I know everything now, thanks to the memories, thanks to Ellie. That my mother used to have a temper. That she used to beat me. That she used to shout at my father. My Max. And that one time, while we were in the black-and-white-tiled kitchen, she took a hammer and she hit him over the head. And that while he was in the middle of recording what I’m sure was a beautiful, haunting, life-changing concerto, his life ended. And my life ended then too. My real life. The life of the boy of a genius father. The life of sitting under the piano, gazing up. The life of concert halls and artists and excitement. She murdered the both of us. And then she abandoned me. To Gillian and her lies, to John and his non-communicative, non-artistic, non-interesting parenting. To suburban ordinariness. To a non-identity. But I’m going to have my revenge now. My revenge and Max’s vengeance. All my expertise, it is for this. My study of the skull, the brain, the blood. All of it is my calling, to smash in Sophie’s cranium with a hammer and return home in glory. I will wet my son’s head in the first blood of family triumph. He will be a Reigate then, not a Spears. As will we all. Me, Ellie, and Leo. Reigates.

  As the train moves towards Sophie’s death, I am pleased to hear it play Max’s concerto. Du-du-dum, du-du-dum, du-du-dum, it goes. If I press my head against the window, I can hear not just the piano, but the undertones of the strings, and the whine of the woodwind. I lift my head back off the window. I am not interested in the strings and the woodwind. I just want to hear the piano. Du-du-dum, du-du-dum, du-du-dum. The train hasn’t learnt all of the concerto like I have. It misses the variance in rhythm. Makes everything too uniform, too methodical. At least it moves at a fast tempo. I can teach it the rest. I become the train’s conductor, waving my hands to show the beats, humming the little cadences that the train does not know. When the ticket conductor comes round, he pauses only briefly to inspect my ticket. He knows I am dealing with a higher art form than him. The main theme comes round again, and I play it on the table in front of me. Because I’ve learnt that bit now. I can play it along with Max, the both of us together. Like when I play on my piano in the office – I have the piano so shiny now, that when I play there is an extra pair of hands reflected back at me from the wood of the piano. They are disembodied hands, up to wrist only, and they closely resemble my own. Except really, they are Max’s hands, from beyond his piano-grave, playing his music with me. A father-son duet.

  And maybe, just maybe, in her flat Sophie will have some kind of shrine to Max’s genius. In fact, how could she not? Even if she thinks of it as a shrine to herself, to the evil she is capable of, it will be there. And in that shrine will be the piano. Max’s piano. I will finally caress the very keys that expressed his genius. Our hands will touch across the years, across the notes, across the pain. Plus there’ll be pictures of me and Max. She will have kept them, too, out of the same pride that has made her keep the piano. I will find them and I will take them – I will restore the childhood I have lost. The thought of this enables me and the train to tackle the smoother passages of the second movement with more legato than I have managed previously – we are at one with the slow flow of the music.

  By the time the train arrives in Paris, we have almost played the full concerto three times. We had just reached the start of the third movement – fast, still with that underlying beat of three, accelerating in pace until the final glorious whirling cadenza. I continue as I disembark, stepping swiftly onto the platform. I don’t need the train’s help. I don’t need anyone’s help. I just need to kill Sophie.

  As I stand on the concourse at Gare du Nord I suddenly feel like weeping. Here I am, in this beautiful city. I’ve been brought here by beautiful music. I’m going to become a father in a couple of months. It should be the happiest happiest time. Imagine what it would be like if I’d never heard about Max. Never heard about Sophie. If I was just in Paris, waiting to be a dad. But no. Never think that. Because to unthink Max is to do what Sophie has done – to uninvent him, to delete him, to try to eradicate him from the earth. That is why Sophie is so bad. And it is why if I remove Sophie, I will in a way be bringing back Max. There’ll be closure. I can move on, proudly.

  It is simple enough buying a replacement hammer. I suppose if I was a murderer, I would buy lots of other tools too, to throw the tool-shop owner off the scent. I suppose I would have learnt the French for hammer. Or got out some Euros. As it is, he’s pretty likely to remember the mumbling Englishman buying a hammer and paying with a credit card. The credit card company will remember me too. Good job, then, that I’m not a murderer, but an avenger.

  And so on to the school. I get the Métro. My hammer sits snug inside my jacket, waiting to come out. Nobody on the Métro knows what I am about to do. But they would understand, if I told them. They value artistry, here. They know that genius must be savoured or, if that cannot be, then avenged. The Métro is of course playing Max’s tunes. It has a better grasp of them than the train. As we lurch about, speeding up, slowing down, never constant, I feel that Max is on the train somewhere, playing to us. I feel the familiar pulse of blood in my head as I hear the masterful crescendo, his virtuosic solo passages, his unapologetic crashing over the woodwind and the strings. I know he wrote their pieces too. But they were only straw musicians, put there to serve his genius. He is the real star of the show.

  Before the tune can finish I arrive at my station. I climb the steps, up to the light, up to the air, up to the green waving trees. And there it is. L’école Sainte-Thérèse. With Sophie inside it.
r />   Chapter Two

  -Ellie-

  And suddenly everything is happening very quickly.

  “Gillian!” I shout. “Gillian, come in here, my waters have broken. You need to call an ambulance!”

  While her footsteps clatter towards me from the hallway I pull out my own phone. I’m just about to call Will when my esteemed non-mother-in-law appears in the doorway.

  “What, Ellie?” Gillian says. “It sounded like you said your waters had broken but that can’t be right, you’re only – ”

  “Yes, I know it’s two months early, you need to call an ambulance!”

  And I carry on pressing at my phone, trying to get it to unlock. She must phone an ambulance; only I can speak to Will. There isn’t time for two calls. The ambulance must come, and I must speak to Will. But my fingers, I can hardly make them do anything. They are shaking and shaking and shaking. Two months early! This is bad, this is so bad. And the pains, down below, they are bad too. But they must be contractions, I suppose. So I breathe – 1, 2, 3 – through them. And I get the phone unlocked.

  “If I’m calling an ambulance, who are you calling?” Gillian asks me.

  “Will!” I half-breathe, half-shout at her. “I’m obviously phoning Will!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m about to give birth, or death, or something to our first attempt at a child, obviously!” I wheeze. “And oh, to tell him not to kill Sophie!”

  “What?”

  Gillian puts her own phone down.

  “Don’t put down the phone, Gillian! Call an ambulance. Or a porter! We’re right next to a bloody hospital, aren’t we? Please. I can’t do both!”

  Gillian is silent. She doesn’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation. How can she not? How can she just be standing glaring at me rather than calling an ambulance. 1-2-3 breathe!

  “What’s this about Will killing Sophie?”

  “He’s written it in his lecture notes, the idiot. He’s gone to Paris to kill her. He thinks she murdered Max. So I’ve got to call him, tell him the truth.”

  Gillian comes closer to me.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” she says.

  “What?” 1-2-3 breathe! Come on, come on, where’s that ambulance – can’t they just be summoned by my pain?

  “You are not going to tell Will the truth!”

  Oh fuck it, she’s talking nonsense. I don’t need nonsense. I need a medic. And probably an epidural.

  “Of course I’ve got to tell him the truth. He’s about to kill someone! He’s about to become a murderer. A real murderer – an adult one!” I prod at my phone again, managing to unlock it.

  Gillian snatches it from my hand.

  I look up.

  “What are you doing, Gillian? I need to speak to – ” Another pain. Come on, come on, breathe it through. 1-2-3. “I need to speak to Will. And you, we, somebody needs to call an ambulance!”

  “You are not telling Will that he killed his father. You promised, remember? We have to protect him.” There’s a fierceness in her eyes.

  “Oh, Jesus, what, Gillian? You want him to murder his mother and spend the rest of his life in prison?”

  “At least then he’ll have closure,” Gillian says. “He won’t be satisfied unless he does this.”

  “Only because he thinks Sophie is a murderer! If he knew what had really happened, he wouldn’t want to kill her. Himself, maybe, but not her.”

  “Exactly. It would destroy him. So he mustn’t know. Just like he should never have known he was adopted.”

  God, there’s this horrible mad glint in her eye. Like the sort people get in films when they suddenly develop superhuman strength and resolve. I think I need to be frightened, but the pains, they are coming so quickly that I’m not sure I can spare the emotion for extra Gillian-caused fear.

  “He’d find out, Gillian. In his murder trial for God’s sake, all the past would come out. And that will devastate him even more.”

  Gillian shakes her head. She still hasn’t called the ambulance, or the porter, or whatever, and I need it, we need it, me and Leo – now!

  “They won’t look that far, the French courts,” says Gillian. “They’ll just see an injured national and a crime scene and a perpetrator.”

  I shake my head at her, trying to focus on what she is saying, what I need to say. But it’s so difficult, because I’m shaking and sweating and panting and this shouldn’t be happening. This shouldn’t be happening now.

  “Gillian, listen to me. Listen to yourself. I get that you want to protect Will. But you’re making him into a murderer. He’s just all fucked up now, really fucked up.” Christ, that’s an understatement. “He needs us to intervene, get him home, set him right. See his son, if you will get me a fucking ambulance so that there is some small chance that our poor premature Leo gets into the world alive and doesn’t kill me with him.”

  Gillian comes closer to me. She’s actually standing in the watery goo at my feet. But she doesn’t stop there. She leans in towards me and wraps her hands around my wrists. Tight. OK, so I was wrong. I do have room for fear.

  She speaks to me, very softly, but very firmly.

  “You are not leaving this room until you swear on Leo’s life that you will not tell Will the truth.”

  I protest, because this is ridiculous. Her whole motherhood notion, her failed conception of what it means to protect someone. Her horrible horrible desire to blight my future life, Will’s life, Leo’s life, if he has one.

  “Ellie, unless you swear that, I am not calling an ambulance. And I am not giving you back your phone. No one will come. You will stay in this room until whatever happens, happens. I will protect Will, like I have always done.”

  And I look into her eyes, and she looks into mine, and I know that she means it.

  The pain comes sharp. The world starts to cut out a little. I need medical attention, and I need it now. So I do it. I sell out on Will. I commit him to murder. And I barter the life of my son.

  “I swear,” I say. “On Leo’s life. Now call me an ambulance.”

  Chapter Three

  -Sophie-

  I try to focus on the children. I try to focus on their scales. I try to give a shit – or even notice – if they are playing sharps or flats or anything at all. But since the call, I cannot. I cannot focus on anything except the thought that maybe, today is the day. The day that everything crumbles.

  I am being ridiculous, I tell myself, as I sink into a chair. She won’t come here, English Ellie. All the way to Paris. To speak to a woman who hangs up during phone calls. Who hasn’t even admitted to being the mother of Guillaume, of this ‘Will’. But that isn’t what really frightens me, the Ellie part. It is that he knows. Because if she knows, he must. You can’t keep that kind of thing a secret. And so what could really happen, is that he could come looking. That’s the thought that makes fear grip my stomach. Just like it gripped my stomach that day. When I came into the kitchen and saw him. With the hammer.

  Because that’s the other thing. I can’t stop seeing him now. Everywhere there is that horrible horrible child, that Will, with the hammer, hitting his father over the head. There is me, walking into the room, seeing my Max prostrate under the sink, seeing the hammer at his head. And I’m shouting, shouting at Will to stop being so naughty. Of course, he just screams at me, in the middle of a tantrum, and he hits Max another time, then another. So I do all I can do – I run over and I smack Guillaume and I grab the hammer from his hand. He cries and cries and cries, while I lean down and check whether Max is OK.

  And Max, the idiot, the silly genius idiot, tells me I’m making a fuss over nothing.

  “He’s just playing,” says Max.

  And because I have seen what Max has not seen – that red angry face filled with the rage of a thousand men older and angrier than a little four-year-old should ever be – this maddens me. So I shout, I shout at the man who my son has just attacked.

  “Imbecile! You refus
e to understand he needs attention. You sit at that stupid piano, all day every day and you expect our son to be well-adjusted? You know so little about being a parent that you think this, this hitting you on the head with a hammer is normal?”

  And then he shouts back. Rubbing his head, where the hammer has hit, he says “Well, I’m not at the piano now, am I? I’m mending the sink, like you told me to!”

  “Asked, Max, asked. And I wouldn’t have had to ask if…”

  And so it went on. The argument. While I didn’t know that my husband, my Max was dying. There he was, lying in a pool of water on the floor, while in his brain a pool of blood was accumulating. He went off to the studio in a flurry of slammed doors and foul tempers.

  Then two hours later, they called me. They called me to tell me he was dead.

  My son had killed him. I explained about the hammer. My son had killed him. They told me I was hysterical. Of course I was fucking hysterical. This little four-year-old, this horrible, horrible ogre of a four-year-old had just destroyed my husband.

  And so tell me, how how how was I supposed to look at him again? How was I supposed to raise him, to nurture him, to want him to live? And how, now this Ellie person has called me, am I supposed to feel anything other than terror at the thought of seeing that face again? The face that murdered my husband?

  That’s all I can think. At least I wish it was all I could think. Because that, in itself, would be enough, wouldn’t it? But there’s more. There’s that guilt. The mother guilt, that you can’t get away from. The voice that says, ‘but he’s yours. And he was a child. He didn’t know what he was doing, you can’t blame him. You were self-indulgent.’ And that’s the voice I’ve been repressing for almost three decades. Not just that guilt, though. The other guilt. The guilt that says: if you hadn’t made Max fix the sink, that wouldn’t have happened. If you’d let Max stay in his lair, rehearsing or just relaxing for his important recording this wouldn’t have happened. If you hadn’t chosen that day to insist that he as the man did the DIY job that you could so easily do, to decide you were sick of being a sacrifice at the altar of his genius, then he would still be alive. And worse, had you not shouted after the hammer-blow, had you insisted that he go to see a doctor because everyone knows head injuries are tricky bastards, then again, still, he would be alive. Guilt fear and horror. Guilt fear and horror. My personal chord of destruction.