Girl in the Dark Page 6

  “What?” He looks sharply up from his newspaper.

  “Would you be my other student, and let me teach you the piano—just for a few months, for the duration of the course?”

  “What, me—learn the piano?”

  “Er—yes.”

  “But … I can’t even read music.”

  “I’ll teach you. That’d be part of it.”

  “But … what would I have to do?”

  “Well, I’d give you a lesson every week, and in between you’d need to practise.”

  “Practise?”

  “Yes—just a little bit, most days …”

  “I’m not practising if there’s footie on the telly.”

  “No, no, of course not,” I say hastily. “It doesn’t have to be absolutely every day.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t think I’d be any good.”

  “That doesn’t matter, at all. Anyway, you don’t know that, until you try it.”

  And, eventually, he agrees.

  I lean down and put my arms round him, resting my face against his hair.

  “Thank you, my darling,” I say. “I’m sorry everything is so bonkers, and that this is yet another bonkers thing.”

  THE COURSE TAKES place in a large high-ceilinged room, on the third floor of the Royal College of Music’s Victorian building, which looks out through two tall windows on to South Kensington rooftops and sky. I reach a deal with the tutors and the other participants: we will keep the fluorescent lights in the room off, unless it is especially dull or dark outside. However, there are also a number of distinguished visiting lecturers, who blow in to deliver one-off sessions on “Psychology for the Piano Teacher” or “Composition and Musical Form.” They are to make their own decisions about the lights. So if a lecturer bounces in saying breezily, “Now, let’s have some light on the proceedings, shall we?” it is my cue to squirm quietly backwards into the dimmest corner of the room, and put on my hat and mask.

  The small kitchen a couple of floors down where we eat lunch and have coffee is cramped and dark, and needs to be lit. I am in a quandary every time we have a break: do I accompany the others, unmask, eat, drink, be sociable and get pain; accompany the others, not eat or drink, and attempt to be sociable through my mask while they consume coffee and sandwiches (always a slightly odd proceeding); or do I withdraw to some quiet, unlit room, and eat by myself, in the undemanding company of one or two grand pianos, as they stalk across pale carpet on elegantly turned legs?

  I try all of these over the weeks, in combination and succession. My unusual situation places a strange invisible barrier between me and the other participants, a sort of subtle thickening of the air, through which social interactions, in either direction, find it harder to pass.

  It becomes by far the most stressful part of the course.

  February 2006

  Pete has been having piano lessons for five weeks. I have planned each one carefully, and written a report on how it went for my course file.

  Teaching a fully grown mathematical type is indeed different from teaching a ten-year-old girl. When I introduce him to middle C, he says, “Why isn’t it middle A? That would be more logical.” My attempts to answer this question lead to a long discussion about the principles of tonality, the diatonic scale, the development of clefs and the harmonic ratios between notes in terms of oscillations per second. Which is not exactly what I had planned for Lesson 2.

  Pete is quite good about practising. I try to keep out of the way as much as possible, and go for a run when I can. I remember too well what it was like growing up, trying to practise in the same house as my mother who was also my teacher—not always an easy combination. Occasionally, provoked beyond endurance by some continually perpetuated fault, she would burst into the piano room saying, “No, no, you’ve lost the middle line, allow me to demonstrate,” and sweep me from the stool. Alternatively, when I had finished, and come out into the kitchen, she would produce some classic remark such as “You’re doing some jolly good work on that Chopin. I like the way you’re trying to get it in time, too.”

  I did most of my practice in the early morning, with the thick velvet curtains of the garden-facing piano room tightly drawn, and my parents asleep upstairs at the front of the house.

  Now, in Itchingford, it is about eight o’clock in the evening. Pete is practising the piano and I am in the office, trying not to listen as he blunders through the same phrase over and over again. “You are NOT going to go downstairs,” I tell myself firmly, and concentrate hard on The Perfect Wrong Note, a radical book about music learning that I am reading for my course. The botched repetition continues. I grit my teeth. But it does no good. There is something weirdly zombified about what he is doing. He is wasting effort, and probably getting fed up. I have to intervene—it will be better in the longer run.

  So I hurry downstairs and open the living-room door.

  Pete is sitting at the piano, splodging through his piece for the fiftieth time. But there is another noise as well, a sort of mixed humming and buzzing, which at first I cannot identify at all.

  Then I catch sight of a small silver radio perched on top of the piano, its slim shiny aerial extended to maximum length. All at once, what I am hearing makes total sense.

  Pete is practising, but he is also listening to a football match on Radio 5 Live.

  “PETE!” I say loudly. “What on earth are you doing?”

  He stops playing and looks round. “Er … I was sort of multi-tasking,” he replies, sheepishly.

  “Pete,” I say, exasperated. “Honestly, it’s not worth it. You’ll get much more benefit from ten minutes’ practice if you’re really concentrating, than from half an hour going round in circles because you’re listening to the football at the same time. Believe me, it’s not efficient.”

  “Oh all right, point taken,” he says, switching off the radio.

  “Look, you’ve probably done enough for tonight anyway. Why don’t you just stop and listen to the match?”

  So he does.

  As it turns out, when it comes to Pete’s progress on the piano, football is not entirely unhelpful. I find the following written in his piano notebook, as a practice exercise in the notation of rhythm:

  February 2006—Later

  Pete and I set about organising a wedding. The plan is to find a hotel in the vicinity where the civil ceremony can take place, go to Pete’s church for a blessing (he is a Christian, I am not) and then come back to the hotel for the reception.

  We check out various venues, and the one that looks most promising is a hotel called The Manor, a long, rambling, two-storey building, set in pleasant grounds. Tall plane trees line the drive, their sturdy bases sunk in carpets of crocuses sticking out golden tongues to the early spring sun.

  Inside, the hotel has rich brown panelling, a sage-green carpet, faded chintz upholstery and gold-framed paintings on the walls. It even has old-fashioned lighting—modest chandeliers and unpretentious sconces fitted, brilliantly, as far as I am concerned, with incandescent bulbs.

  The whole effect is mellow and relaxing. It even smells right—no discordant notes of new furniture, or industrial detergent, or frying.

  A friendly receptionist, soft and beige and rosy, shows us into a sunny sitting room, and we wait on flowery armchairs, on opposite sides of a low table with carved paw-like feet, smiling at each other, because we know we’ve found the place.

  Then we meet Celia, the wedding co-ordinator.

  Celia has jet-black hair that reaches midway down her back, a bony, angular body and black eyebrows drawn together in a semi-permanent scowl. She is wearing shiny black court shoes with finely pointed toes, and stands before us, arms crossed across a file, legs apart and spiky feet splayed outwards, like daggers. There is a patch of high colour on each of her cheeks.

  We tell her we really like the hotel, and are thinking of getting married in September. “No,” she says. “You can’t do that. You’ll have to go later in the year. September’s
gone.”

  “But—we rang this morning and they told us the ninth is still free.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I don’t know—whoever I spoke to—the receptionist?”

  Celia clicks her tongue and snorts. “Oh. Well, it might be, but if it is, it’ll be the only one.”

  “And we were thinking of ninety guests for a sit-down meal.”

  “You can’t have ninety,” Celia snaps. “You can have forty-five in the Oak Room, or seventy in the Garden Room. Or you can have a fork buffet for one hundred and ten.”

  “Well …” I say, “supposing we used both rooms. There’s quite a wide connecting doorway. We could have close family and friends in the Oak Room, with us, and everyone else in the other one, and keep the doors open.”

  Celia’s eyebrows surge downwards into a savage V, and her eyes flash. “There aren’t enough tables,” she counters. “They would have to be hired in.”

  “But that would be possible, wouldn’t it? We’d pay the extra cost.”

  Grudgingly she admits that tables can be hired, and makes a grim note in her file.

  “Then, we’d like some dancing.”

  It turns out that the hotel has a disco with a small dance floor, and it can be set up at one end of the Garden Room.

  “Actually, we were thinking more of a barn dance or ceilidh, with a caller, and people sort of dancing up and down the whole length of the room—”

  “You can’t do that,” says Celia. “There would be health and safety issues with the carpet.”

  Extensive and subtle cross-questioning is required in order to establish that there will be no health and safety issues if we can track down and hire a dance floor that will cover the whole of the carpet in the Garden Room. Pete thinks such things are of modular construction and can be made bigger or smaller quite easily, to fit.

  This evidence of lateral thinking makes Celia fume. Her pointed toes splay savagely and the spots on her cheeks turn purple.

  Naively, I had assumed that when you entered upon the business of having a wedding, service providers would lay themselves out to meet your requirements, safe in the knowledge that you had clearly decided to spend some money, and that they could therefore charge you hefty fees to make it worth their while. But Celia does not operate on this principle. She believes in the relentless disciplining of dreams.

  In the car afterwards, Pete and I look at each other. “Blimey,” he says, leaning back against the headrest and taking a deep breath.

  “What an extraordinary person,” I say faintly.

  But we persist, because the hotel is so nice, and the lighting is suitable, and everyone else we have dealings with there is lovely and amenable. Celia continues to be erratically obstructive and unpleasant, and proves impossible to get hold of on the phone. When I speak to the bar manager and agree some minor point about the drinks, Celia is furious. “You should not have made any arrangement with her,” she shouts. “She has no supervisory authority.” When we turn up at the hotel for a pre-arranged meeting, we find that Celia has gone home.

  “She’s not really into customer service, is she?” says Pete.

  “I think she’s in the wrong job. She doesn’t seem to like weddings much.”

  “She doesn’t seem to like people much.”

  Gradually we get the details sorted out, but I have disturbing premonitions about the day itself, a recurring vision of Celia striding down the hotel steps, black hair flying, palm upraised, shouting, “No! You can’t come in.”

  IN THE END, the wedding does not happen, but for this, Celia is not to blame. Other, stranger forces wreck our plans; to that extent my premonitions prove correct.

  Games to Play in the Dark 2: Circle of Words

  For this game you need a companion. But it is a relaxed, co-operative sort of game, with no winners or losers.

  Think of a compound word or phrase—like Football, or Flower Power, or Hot Potato. Then, using the second part of the word or phrase, add something on to make a new word or phrase.

  Take it in turns. Keep going until you link back to the original word.

  Active encouragement is given to homonyms, chutzpah, surreal flights of fancy and appalling puns.

  SAS

  I have made an interesting discovery. I really like SAS thrillers.

  Once I had a thrusting Liverpudlian boss, who strode about saying, “Bravo Two Zero—best management textbook ever written.” But that was the limit of my knowledge of the genre, until my book collector procured one from the local library.

  I am hooked. What’s so great about SAS thrillers is the amount of useful, practical, how-to information they contain, about all sorts of things. I have learnt, for example, that SAS members always keep one eye shut when looking at a map at night. It takes forty minutes for the human eye to adjust fully to darkness; keeping one shut ensures you don’t lose all your night vision when you turn on a torch. (I can well believe the forty minutes. Sometimes it’s only after I’ve sat for a while in my room that I start to notice a crack in the curtains or a line at the base of the door.)

  I have learnt how to live in a bush for several days, keeping observation on a target. I have discovered that the necessary equipment includes secateurs, gardening gloves, camouflage netting, cling film, Imodium, a petrol can and food that doesn’t make a noise. I have learnt that breaking someone’s neck requires a screwing action, similar to getting the lid off a jar of jam. I have learnt how to cover my scent when being tracked by dogs, and how to strip off and make a raft to swim a river, so that I have dry clothes to wear on the other side.

  It is all fascinating—and very pleasant and stimulating, especially as I am in a situation where acquiring new skills is pretty near impossible. So I enjoy my theoretical survival lessons; the fact that I am probably, out of the entire human race, the person least qualified to join the SAS, and the person least likely ever to have a use for these skills, doesn’t bother me.

  There is a thought experiment favoured by philosophers who worry about the foundations of human knowledge: if you were a brain in a bucket, and all your sensory experiences were created in you by the sophisticated equipment of a mad scientist, would you be able to tell?

  The technology that stimulates my brain is crude, utilising only one of my sensory channels (the auditory nerves), and strongly dependent on my store of memories and impressions from the life before. But it nonetheless has some effect, as I move stealthily towards my objective, crawling on my belly through earth and undergrowth, a pistol in my hand and a knife in my belt.

  I can, in my darkness, live so many different lives.

  Strangely, there is one thing we have in common, these SAS heroes and I: the degree of effort we direct to the management of risk. Before an operation, the SAS prepare meticulously, researching the objective to the best of their ability. They try to ascertain the timing of guard patrols around the perimeter fence, the position of the exits, the number and the firepower of the enemy. They think through different scenarios, and work out what they will do in each hypothetical situation. Finally, they check and check and recheck their equipment to make sure that it is working, that it can be brought out swiftly, that they know exactly in which pocket each item is stowed. All risks that can be minimised are minimised, before they enter a red sector.

  In the life before, I walked up Scottish mountains without a first-aid kit, and, occasionally, on my own. Sometimes I waded small rivers, if I needed to get to the other side. Once, I visited a friend in Biggleswade, and, wanting to reach the continuation of a footpath, we ran hand in hand across the A1—a wild exhilarating dash over four lanes, with cars zooming at us at seventy miles per hour.

  But these were calculated risks. I exercised my judgement on each set of circumstances, weighed the possible consequences, and decided that I was much more likely to be all right than not.

  Now I have given up such grand gestures. I am in a permanent red sector, and am intensely aware, all the time, of the en
ormity of the downside risk, the abyss that awaits me, should anything go wrong. I select with great care the chair I will stand on to get down a plate from a high shelf in the kitchen, checking and rechecking the wobbliness of its seat. I clean my teeth twice a day, counting up to the recommended two minutes, and floss with dedication, hoping to forestall decay. For some reason I am always getting into difficulties with chicken, frequently phoning my mother to pose some variant of the following: “Mum, Pete cooked some chicken on Saturday lunchtime, and then left it out of the fridge until the evening to cool down, and then it was in the fridge for two days—should I eat it?”

  “Yes, hello,” she says. “This is the Chicken Advisory Service speaking.” The Advisory Service always gives clear and definitive advice.

  At his work, Pete was taught a mantra on a health and safety course: “Think ‘what if,’ not ‘if only,’ ” and I do. Caution infects all my movements now, and all my small decisions in the black and in the gloom.

  And I must not get pregnant.

  Now there is something that does not worry the SAS.

  Telephone Friends

  I have got to know other people in the strange club of the chronically ill. I have friends I talk to on the phone but have never met; friends who are at home during the day, at home, in fact, nearly all of the time. Like me, they had a life before that has been lost; now they wander in the twilight zone where doctors diagnose but cannot cure, and the faint miasma of societal suspicion, never attached to those with cancer, or with heart disease, hangs about them, that somehow it must all be psychosomatic, or that at a deep level they actually want to be ill.

  How did we find each other? Bizarrely, the European Union is mostly responsible: its plan for a compulsory switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs in homes and offices—in fact, everywhere—causes deep concern among people with a range of health conditions who find these bulbs give them painful and severe reactions. (Not everyone with a particular condition is affected this way—nothing so elegant, helpful or uncomplicated—just a subset, in each case.) Trying to find out what is happening, discussing how to influence UK MPs (mostly lovely and supportive) and the European Commission (the equivalent, it will sadly turn out, of smashing your face against granite), and sharing information about possible alternatives that may not be banned, I speak to people with ME and lupus and other conditions, and we put each other in touch with more.