Amy Bird - Hide And Seek (Part 2)

“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 to 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.