Amy Bird - Hide And Seek

And if your wife is claiming that your real father is in fact an eminent musician, how can you stop yourself from replaying his music as well? So I got out the CD and played it to myself. I really listened this time. To the orchestra all together at the start, quiet, mellow, but expectant. Then in it comes. The third voice. The Reigate voice. Strident, unapologetic, like the voice of some eternal truth. You can almost tell he wrote the concerto himself. It is designed to show off the piano. No little tinkling tunes. Straightaway, there’s this intense mood. All these heavy notes and accents. Every three notes, there’s one really powerful one. Like a war march, or something. Every so often, the orchestra will get a look in. Or the orchestra such as it is – he doesn’t even seem to be using the full one, just strings and woodwind, so there’s nothing to compare with the weight of the piano. In the first movement, there are just two voices – orchestra and piano. But later, in the second and third movements, it’s like a three-way conversation, violins fiddling and oboes whining against the weight of the piano. But they cannot win. Not against all that force, all that violence. You feel like you’re becoming the piano, its music is so far inside you. It’s a wonder they managed to record it live, the way he hammered at the strings of the piano. You’d think they’d split and break. Maybe that’s part of his skill; exerting just enough pressure with the hammers so that the instrument can go on functioning. He gives it a bit of a rest in the second, slower movement – saves himself for that soul-wrenching final cadenza at the end of the third. Then the piano tuners lift the lid and see the real damage.

The second track, or movement, whatever it’s called, is a bit softer at first. And he’s allowed the string section a bit more of a look in. There are three ingredients then, in an uneasy harmony – him, the violins and the woodwind. Still that brutal and haunting central tune though, carried across the three of them. And even though it’s slower, the second movement, you are constantly in suspense about where the piano will take you next. But it’s nothing to the last movement. The sheer pulsating violence of those runs, the anger, almost, with which the piano answers the violins. It’s like some kind of defiance – yes, yes, YES goes the piano. No, no, NO, say first the strings, then the woodwind. The piano gets the last word though. Heroically, brilliantly, romantically, it comes in with this final flourish. Think of the fingers that play that. The brain that composed it. Think of being fathered by that genius. What it would be to share the same DNA. Pounding away on the keys, Max Reigate makes his final transcendent affirmation, every note accented. HERE I AM, HERE I AM, HERE I AM. AND THIS IS WHAT I DO.

Then it stops. The piano goes, the piece ends, just like that. As if the music was never there.

But of course, the silence afterwards is part of the music. It’s the silence that stays with you. The silence that your brain can’t deal with, so it recreates the playing all over again. In your dreams. But in your dreams, there are two keyboards. They’re shaped like staircases, spiralling up and down, in a double helix. And you’re running – or rather I’m running – up and up and up the piano-stairs, trying to find the way to the other staircase. Because on that other staircase, there are these most amazing fingers walking up and down, caressing the notes. And I want to be caressed too, by those fingers. I want to sit on them, allow them to carry me UP UP UP and DOWN DOWN DOWN. But it’s not just that. I need to get away from my keyboard staircase. From the hammers that are pursuing me. It’s like the piano has been inverted, and rather than the hammers being inside, they are all on the outside, bashing the notes. Except they’re not piano hammers – they’re actual hammers, and each key they hit, they smash. Fragments of black and white fly around, filling the air between the two staircases. And the hammer gets closer and closer and closer and I try one last time to jump. I think I can do it, I think I can bridge the gap. But I’m suspended between the two staircases; time stops and I don’t know, I just don’t know, if I’m going to make it. And that terror, that inbetweenness, is what wakes me.

And it’s what makes me agree we need to find that letter from Max. The letter to Mum. Because I can’t let it go, now, can I? Now Ellie has brought it up, so insistently. I can’t just not know.

We’ve made a plan. We spent so long making it over breakfast that I had to miss my usual swim at the Rotunda. I think over the plan as I wait on Kingston platform for the train. I think over it as the train takes me to Waterloo. I think over it on the Tube, on the way into Guy’s Campus, on the way up to my office, along from the hospital building. Even, if I’m honest, on the toilet. Because it’s this plan that will tell me if Ellie’s mad, hormone-laced theories are true. And because I can’t stand the idea of my father not being my father – because who would that make me? But nor can I bear being denied a connection with Max Reigate. Max Reigate. There is such an emotional association with that name in my mind now. I can’t just be a fan of his music. There has to be some blood link there, doesn’t there?

The plan isn’t much of a plan. It’s a creep in when your parents are sleeping using your spare key, then jimmy open your mum’s filing cabinets sort of plan (Ellie is convinced Google will tell her how to pick a lock; she’s going to spend the day practising). It’s based on a hope they don’t set the burglar alarm at night, that Dad (?) won’t suddenly want some Digestive biscuits and milk during the night (like he always used to get me if I couldn’t sleep, when I was a child – oh, Dad, I love my Dad), that Mum won’t get it in her mind to have a midnight listen to her old flame’s LP. Or come downstairs to creep out into the night to be with him. Oh, listen to yourself! It’s fantastical. I’ve become the victim of Ellie’s over-hormoned imagination.

I try to focus on the work for my lecture. I just need a few more cases of the ‘talk and die’ phenomenon, make it more real and human to the attendees, then I’ll be fine. It’s my first public lecture and I want it to be accessible and informative. Brilliant but casual. The sign of a bright future and a well-spent past. I leaf through the journals my research student has flagged for me. “There are some great ones here!” he said, enthusiastic to find plenty of trauma victims, poor suckers crept up on from behind with a bat or a hammer. Or even a piece of lead-piping. Classic Cluedo fun. Except these are the odd ones, the almost survivors – they think they’re fine, having fended off attack. They go about their day. Then later on, they’re dead. And I’ve got to teach my students to be alert to that. I’ve got to share these mysteries with the scientifically-minded public and my fellow faculty members. To remind them to look beyond concussion, to keep those observations going overnight. And to know what it means, when the blood starts to form, when the brain starts to swell. How easy it is to miss the signs.

Have I been missing signs, all these years? Has there been some other secret world going on around me, some intrigue in which John Spears has suspected with each growing year that his loving wife, Gillian Spears, is not so loving after all, and actually had an affair with their good friend Max? Who their son now closely resembles? Has our house, always a loving family home to my eyes and ears, actually held bitter hisses and accusing glances, shot over my head for the last thirty-four years?

Or has John Spears been completely ignorant of it all? Innocently going about bringing up ‘his son’, while my mother laughs at him and nurtures a secret love affair with my real father? Can a man be that blind? What if it were Ellie, and our son, little Leo, as he will be? What if he weren’t really mine? I would notice, wouldn’t I? Maybe that is why Ellie is so convinced about Gillian, a little voice in my head says. Maybe her female intuition is nothing but a shared female guilt.