A Thousand Perfect Notes(56)

Jan’s eyes are doubtful, but he just nods and farewells in German. Then the car pulls out of the driveway and leaves the streets of broken glass and tired houses. Jan returns to his life of music and good food and expensive watches.

Beck walks towards the front door. He wishes he’d said more than thank you, because those two pathetic words hardly convey how much Jan has done. Beck is a good pianist. He’s a better composer. He has a future.

He has promise.

The house is eerily quiet when Beck opens the door. He shrugs his backpack off his shoulder and checks that the CD is inside. He scrawled a title in black Sharpie and shoved it in an envelope. It’s all he has for August. He leaves his bag at the door, because he expects he’ll have to sneak out. As if the Maestro’s going to grin and wave goodbye as he walks to August’s for her birthday tonight.

The Maestro promised to break his hands.

But she won’t.

Beck won’t let her.

He feels a sharp electric thrill of confidence as he walks down the hall. The TV buzzes softly from the lounge and he heads for it, half thinking of the possibility of taking Joey with him to August’s. She’d love the dogs. She’d love the food.

The lounge is empty.

Bright, perky cartoons dance on the screen and there are half-filled bowls of sultanas and biscuit crumbs where Joey would normally have had her snack.

She never leaves food lying around.

Beck backtracks to the kitchen. His shoes crunch crockery. He looks down.

The floor is covered with shards of smashed plates, ground to white dust in some places. It must be every plate in the house.

How did he not think this would happen?

Beck’s stomach turns over. He treads carefully, plates biting into his shoes, and goes for Joey’s room. Empty. Toys are scattered across the floor, but she always lives in a mess. Doesn’t she? Does she? When was the last time Beck sat down and actually paid attention to Joey? He’s been so swallowed by his own angst.

Don’t go to your room. Go out the door. Go to August’s. Go now.

He pushes his hands deep in his pockets and walks towards his room.

Somehow he knows.

His door is open.

‘Joey?’ Beck says, his voice hollow.

The Maestro sits on his bed, for once not trembling. She’s rigid, wearing her nice pressed work clothes, as if she planned to go out today. Or as if she planned to go somewhere, anywhere – as if she planned to leave.

Joey sits on the piano stool, hunched, sniffling. Red fingerprints mark her cheek.

How dare the Maestro—

Beck takes two steps and he’s at Joey’s side, picking her up. Her short skinny arms go around his neck. But he doesn’t know what to say. Does he ask? Does he walk out?

Jan’s card burns in his pocket.

‘You are not going to Germany?’ the Maestro asks. It’s so calm, so perfectly flat, that a shiver runs up Beck’s spine.

He holds Joey tighter. ‘No.’

‘Then you will never be properly trained,’ the Maestro says. ‘The line of Keverich pianists ends with me.’

Except Beck is a pianist. Except Beck isn’t worthless.

‘Yes,’ Beck says, his voice a hundred years old. ‘I guess it does.’

She stands, unfolding like a stiff puppet with rusted iron strings. Her hands are trembling, Beck sees now. She just had them bunched so tightly in fists that her fingernails have left gouges in her palms.

‘So you do this to spite me?’ she says.

Beck takes a deep breath. He unlatches Joey’s hands from around his neck and, even when she whimpers, he puts her down and says quietly, ‘Go watch TV, Jo.’

She drags her feet to the door and then hugs the wall, not moving.

Beck faces the Maestro. He’s nearly as tall as her. When did that happen?

‘Nein,’ he says, accidentally using German to placate her when he means to stand up for himself for once. Habits are hard to break. ‘I’m not going to do this any more.’ Blood pounds in his ears. ‘And you’re never going to touch Joey again. Or me.’ He feels dizzy with the effort to keep talking, to not back up as she comes closer, to not cower in case of a blow. ‘I don’t belong to you any more.’

You don’t deserve anything from me.

I deserve a life away from you.

‘Is that so?’ the Maestro says, coolly. ‘Yet here you are under my roof, wearing clothes I have bought you. Dummes Kind.’ Stupid child. ‘This is your piano that I spent every cent I owned on.’

But Beck didn’t ask for that. He was too young to even understand her nerve damage after her stroke, how it could have been helped with therapy, medication – but instead she bought a piano. Not his choice. Hers.

She keeps coming towards him and finally he steps back, pressed against the piano and the wall. The piano that built him, that destroyed him.

‘I’m not playing any more,’ Beck says as the piano digs into his back.

He should take Joey and leave, go to August’s, get help – call the police. He wants to. Does he? This is his mother. She just – she just wanted him to be great. She’s messed up and wrong and cruel as a knife, but she wants him to be great.

No. She wants him to be her.

‘You will play the piano,’ the Maestro says, her voice a symphony of darkness. ‘You will play.’