Authors: Amy Bird
But it can’t go on, can it? Because what I’d need, if it were little Leo I was looked after, is a solution. That was always Dad’s role. I’d come to him as a teenager, whinging about something, and he would just say: “Look, wipe away the tears, and tell me what you’re going to do about it.” Practical and pragmatic. Shame he didn’t have time to do anything practical when the other car came ploughing head-on, the wrong way down a dual carriageway. But now. Follow Dad’s advice. Don’t cry about it. Be proactive. What am I going to do, about Will, about this sleeplessness?
And I think I have an idea. Yes, there we go. That’s what I can do. It’s in two parts. The first, I can find in my medicine cabinet.
-Will-
Ellie, she thinks she has all the answers. All the explanations for everything. For her own behaviour, for everyone else’s behaviour. But for all her knowledge, all her senses, all her knowing, she doesn’t feel what I feel. If she did, she would never have told me those lies. She would never have let me imagine a life with Max Reigate. Right from the start, right from when she looked him up and found his initials, she should have told me. I don’t know when the rules changed. We always tell each other everything. Or at least, we did. But there are apparently different rules now. Apparently we only have to tell each other everything when it suits us. Full disclosure – but only when convenient. After it actually fucking matters. After you’ve actually emotionally fucking invested in a new future.
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 with 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?
-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.