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.
No. I shake my head. I imagine I’m trying to shake those fragments of piano keys from the dream out of my ears, out of my brain. The music has confused me. These are my parents (as Ellie and I will be Leo’s parents). Something has unsettled them, that is all. I get out my phone to call Ellie, to abort the plan, to tell her I trust my parents. But my fingers stop before they unlock the phone. If we don’t see it through, if we don’t read the letter that will undoubtedly be innocent, the idea will be Ellie’s constant refrain, a recurring theme over the years. And so, we will go ahead with the plan. Tonight.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
