Authors: Amy Bird
Hide and Seek (22 page)
“The reason he shouldn’t go looking for her is that she won’t be able to bear to see him. Would you be able to look at your son if he’d murdered your husband? Wouldn’t you give him away?”
My brain is whirling and my pelvis is cramping, but somewhere in the swirl and the pain, what she says makes a horrible kind of sense. Sophie Travers had made the family friends look after her child, because the child had killed the father. And she could no longer look upon his face. But, come on, no, he was four. Max was thirty. How could that happen?
“If, if, what you’re saying is true, how does a four-year-old boy kill a thirty-year-old man?”
“With a hammer,” Gillian says. “With a hammer, in a tantrum. While daddy is fixing the sink.”
I gag. It sounds horribly plausible. I stroke Leo, despite the pain he is giving me.
“Gillian, I – Look, how can I believe this is true? And why the hell are you telling me? You hate me!”
“I’m telling you because you need to understand why Will shouldn’t try to find his mother. Which I believe is what you were helping him do in Dartington. I don’t want to imagine how she will react when she sees him. What if she tells him? It will destroy him.”
It would make sense, Sophie hanging up as soon as I called, as she had done. Sophie not wanting to be found.
“And as for whether what I say is true, it’s all in there.” Gillian gestures at the glove compartment. I stare at it. What could possibly be in there? A bloodied hammer, with Will’s infant fingerprints on it?
“The transcript of the inquest. Never released publicly. To protect Will.”
I fumble to open the glove compartment. My fingers don’t seem to be working properly. The catch keeps slipping beneath my grasp. Finally, I get in there. I see a sheaf of paper in a plastic covering. With shivering hands I take it out.
Gillian drives silently as I read. As I take it all in. Because it’s all there. How Will murdered his father.
-Ellie-
By the time I’ve finished reading, two things have happened. First, we have arrived at the university. Second, my heart is broken.
“See?” says Gillian, turning towards me as she puts on the handbrake.
I nod. “I see.” I see how a little boy can, with three swings of a hammer, give pain that seems like no more than an annoyance. I see how that annoyance can, hours later, become a fatal build-up of blood on the brain. I see how a mother must spend her life in horror and in grief. I see that my husband remembers nothing of this at all. I see that I’m going to have to sit through a whole lecture with him opining on ‘talk and die’ while I keep quiet about him causing just that effect in his father. I see that I am going to have to lie to him forever.
“We’d better go in,” I say.
But when we get to the auditorium, it is dark. There is a note on the door saying that the lecture is postponed.
“I don’t understand,” I tell Gillian. “He left for the lecture this morning. He can’t have postponed it again, at such short notice?” Part of me is relieved, relieved I won’t have to sit through the horror of his specialist subject being – unbeknownst to him – about what killed his father. Or at least, he may suspect the ‘talk and die’ nature of his father’s death, if his sleep mutterings are any clue. But he doesn’t know it is him who did it. He’s probably got some mad theory somewhere in his brain. Like that one he first dreamt up, that Sophie killed Max. I shiver. A mad theory. One he’s over now. Otherwise why would he be so pleased to know that I’d found her? I shiver again, and rub my hands against my arms to keep warm. There’s another pain in my pelvis. I’m going to have to start paying attention to them soon.
Only part of me is relieved the lecture isn’t on. The other part of me is concerned that I’m now going to have to face Will and lie, lie like I’ll be lying to him for the rest of my life.
“He must have gone to his office,” I tell Gillian. “We’d better look for him.”
So we go to the information desk, and explain who we are. No one is going to argue with a seven-month pregnant woman. We’re pointed in the right direction and walk along the tiled corridor and up the stairs towards Will’s office. Or at least, I assume it’s Will’s. Because I see he has put a post-it over the doorplate, replacing the name with ‘Dr Reigate’.
“You’d better wait outside,” I tell Gillian. “I’ll have to explain why you’re here. That you gave me a lift. That it’s OK, with you.”
“But you can’t – ” she says.
I shake my head. “I won’t tell him,” I say. “I promise.”
I go into his room. It’s empty. Or rather, it doesn’t contain him. It does contain a piano. He’s actually got himself a piano. He must be the only medical academic with a piano in his room. But then, he’s probably the only one fixated on a dead piano-genius father. A dead father that he killed. And there are piles and piles of manuscript notes, littering the floor. No sign of order. This is not the office a healthy man. It is not the office of the Will that I know, the Will that I married, the Will with whom I conceived my child. My insides feel like they are sliding. The zebras in the nursery are nothing to do with zebras. They are pianos. My husband is obsessed with pianos. With his father. With the father he killed. I still can’t quite get my mind around it; it keeps repeating in my head, like my subconscious is trying to make sense of it. But how can it? It is too odd, too other-worldly. Yet real.
I move to the piano. There’s a sheaf of handwritten notes on that too, held together with treasury tags. ‘Talk and die lecture’ he’s written on it. Not in his usual handwriting though. These are scrawled capitals. Another shiver. Another pain. Hand on my pelvis, I move round to the other side of the piano to sit at the stool. On the music rack I see sheet music. And Will’s childhood crayon drawing of ‘Daddy’ that I saved from the funeral pyre. Will has been savouring his legacy, then. I sit down on the stool and flick through the lecture. Then I stop flicking and start reading. In horror.
‘And because she the bitch, the bitch Sophie, hit him with the hammer, all the blood began to build up on his brain. And there was so much pressure, SO MUCH PRESSURE, that his brain, even that special beautiful artistic brain for which I will weep and weep and weep and AVENGE, could not survive. And although he went off to record his piece, he died. My father, died. Murdered, by my mother. And do you know what this teaches us, class, members of the public, jury? It teaches us (a) the majority of epidural haematomas are caused by a blunt instrument head trauma (b) that this is just trade jargon for murder (c) so that murdering, thieving, destructive so-called mothers like Sophie Travers think that they can get away with it, just because there’s a bit of talking first, but they devastate lives these people and so (d) they deserve to feel first-hand what it’s like, that hammer-blow to the head, how the blood builds up, how their feeble non-genius brain cannot cope, how it can’t even talk and die, how they go straight to die.’
And on it goes. On goes the polemic against Sophie Travers. Will, how did you get so ill? How did I not notice, you were not only declining from me, but from the world?
But what really chills me is the final sentence, under a heading ‘Update’.
‘The original lecture was due to be given today but as my researcher has found new material I will instead be proving point (d) above to Sophie Travers immediately. À bientôt.’
And at that point, my waters break.
-Will-
I do my best to blag taking the hammer on the Eurostar. ‘DIY on my home in Paris.’ ‘You just can’t get good tools over there.’ But they don’t buy it. The hammer is confiscated. Never mind. What I said about decent tools in Paris is a lie. I’m sure I’ll be able to buy a hammer. Before I get to the school.
I board the train. As we are waiting to depart, I think about the lecture. There will be disapproval at me postponing it again. But it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t be complete without this, this extra bit of research. I have my darling wife to thank for this, for finding and revealing the school Sophie teaches at. Thinking of Ellie, I look at my phone. Nothing from her. That’s a surprise. I thought my darling wife would want to talk. Would want to know why the lecture I claimed to be leaving the house for has been postponed. Soon enough, I will tell her. But not yet. Not until Sophie is dead.
Do I feel advance remorse for what I’m going to do? No. Because this is the woman who has stolen my life. I know everything now, thanks to the memories, thanks to Ellie. That my mother used to have a temper. That she used to beat me. That she used to shout at my father. My Max. And that one time, while we were in the black-and-white-tiled kitchen, she took a hammer and she hit him over the head. And that while he was in the middle of recording what I’m sure was a beautiful, haunting, life-changing concerto, his life ended. And my life ended then too. My real life. The life of the boy of a genius father. The life of sitting under the piano, gazing up. The life of concert halls and artists and excitement. She murdered the both of us. And then she abandoned me. To Gillian and her lies, to John and his non-communicative, non-artistic, non-interesting parenting. To suburban ordinariness. To a non-identity. But I’m going to have my revenge now. My revenge and Max’s vengeance. All my expertise, it is for this. My study of the skull, the brain, the blood. All of it is my calling, to smash in Sophie’s cranium with a hammer and return home in glory. I will wet my son’s head in the first blood of family triumph. He will be a Reigate then, not a Spears. As will we all. Me, Ellie, and Leo. Reigates.
As the train moves towards Sophie’s death, I am pleased to hear it play Max’s concerto. Du-du-dum, du-du-dum, du-du-dum, it goes. If I press my head against the window, I can hear not just the piano, but the undertones of the strings, and the whine of the woodwind. I lift my head back off the window. I am not interested in the strings and the woodwind. I just want to hear the piano. Du-du-dum, du-du-dum, du-du-dum. The train hasn’t learnt all of the concerto like I have. It misses the variance in rhythm. Makes everything too uniform, too methodical. At least it moves at a fast tempo. I can teach it the rest. I become the train’s conductor, waving my hands to show the beats, humming the little cadences that the train does not know. When the ticket conductor comes round, he pauses only briefly to inspect my ticket. He knows I am dealing with a higher art form than him. The main theme comes round again, and I play it on the table in front of me. Because I’ve learnt that bit now. I can play it along with Max, the both of us together. Like when I play on my piano in the office – I have the piano so shiny now, that when I play there is an extra pair of hands reflected back at me from the wood of the piano. They are disembodied hands, up to wrist only, and they closely resemble my own. Except really, they are Max’s hands, from beyond his piano-grave, playing his music with me. A father-son duet.
And maybe, just maybe, in her flat Sophie will have some kind of shrine to Max’s genius. In fact, how could she not? Even if she thinks of it as a shrine to herself, to the evil she is capable of, it will be there. And in that shrine will be the piano. Max’s piano. I will finally caress the very keys that expressed his genius. Our hands will touch across the years, across the notes, across the pain. Plus there’ll be pictures of me and Max. She will have kept them, too, out of the same pride that has made her keep the piano. I will find them and I will take them – I will restore the childhood I have lost. The thought of this enables me and the train to tackle the smoother passages of the second movement with more legato than I have managed previously – we are at one with the slow flow of the music.
By the time the train arrives in Paris, we have almost played the full concerto three times. We had just reached the start of the third movement – fast, still with that underlying beat of three, accelerating in pace until the final glorious whirling cadenza. I continue as I disembark, stepping swiftly onto the platform. I don’t need the train’s help. I don’t need anyone’s help. I just need to kill Sophie.
As I stand on the concourse at Gare du Nord I suddenly feel like weeping. Here I am, in this beautiful city. I’ve been brought here by beautiful music. I’m going to become a father in a couple of months. It should be the happiest happiest time. Imagine what it would be like if I’d never heard about Max. Never heard about Sophie. If I was just in Paris, waiting to be a dad. But no. Never think that. Because to unthink Max is to do what Sophie has done – to uninvent him, to delete him, to try to eradicate him from the earth. That is why Sophie is so bad. And it is why if I remove Sophie, I will in a way be bringing back Max. There’ll be closure. I can move on, proudly.
It is simple enough buying a replacement hammer. I suppose if I was a murderer, I would buy lots of other tools too, to throw the tool-shop owner off the scent. I suppose I would have learnt the French for hammer. Or got out some Euros. As it is, he’s pretty likely to remember the mumbling Englishman buying a hammer and paying with a credit card. The credit card company will remember me too. Good job, then, that I’m not a murderer, but an avenger.
And so on to the school. I get the Métro. My hammer sits snug inside my jacket, waiting to come out. Nobody on the Métro knows what I am about to do. But they would understand, if I told them. They value artistry, here. They know that genius must be savoured or, if that cannot be, then avenged. The Métro is of course playing Max’s tunes. It has a better grasp of them than the train. As we lurch about, speeding up, slowing down, never constant, I feel that Max is on the train somewhere, playing to us. I feel the familiar pulse of blood in my head as I hear the masterful crescendo, his virtuosic solo passages, his unapologetic crashing over the woodwind and the strings. I know he wrote their pieces too. But they were only straw musicians, put there to serve his genius. He is the real star of the show.
Before the tune can finish I arrive at my station. I climb the steps, up to the light, up to the air, up to the green waving trees. And there it is. L’école Sainte-Thérèse. With Sophie inside it.