Shadows & Tall Trees (13 page)

That night Terry dreamt of the music room. It was full of people, dressed in black, sitting around the piano as if for a recital. Terry walked among them, noticing how still they all sat, their heads cast down. He saw instruments in their laps or at their feet. He tripped over a cello, the strings catching on his trousers, but it didn’t make a sound. Nor did the cellist stoop to pick up the instrument. It was so quiet that even the sound of his footsteps seemed to have been silenced somehow. Terry stamped his foot, trying to make as much noise as he could, and when that failed he knocked over a set of cymbals, expecting the vibrations to shatter the silence. But nothing dented the stillness of the room. He tried to address the gathering but his voice faltered, the people didn’t even look at him. Terry grabbed the nearest man by his lapels and shook him roughly, but the man merely stared back vacantly. Terry tried to scream into the man’s face, pouring all his confusion and rage into one almighty cry, but no sound came and his throat became hoarse with the effort.

In the background he heard the piano.

Dissonant notes at first, but gradually they merged to form the beginnings of a melody. He avoided looking at what was on top of the piano but glanced across at the keyboard. The lid was down. To signify the beginning of the movement, he remembered. But how could that be? The melody began to gain speed, the volume creeping higher and higher, the playing becoming more crazed, more erratic, building toward an inevitable and deafening crescendo—

Terry sat bolt upright in bed.

He breathed deeply, trying to steady himself, fancying he could hear the sound of his racing heartbeat. As it slowed he was conscious of another sound. He strained his ears and thought he heard the same dissonant notes from his dream.

It was the piano.

It echoed through the corridors of the old house, drifting up the stairs, filling the rooms and recesses with its melancholic air.

Ava.

Terry pulled aside the covers and began down the stairs. He pushed his dream to the back of his mind as he followed the melody to the music room, opening the door with a thud.

The music stopped.

“Ava?”

Ava sat at the piano in her nightclothes. Her fingers were stretched out on the polished veneer of the piano lid. Had she closed it suddenly when he entered the room?

Terry walked towards her in the silence. She opened her eyes slowly as if waking up. She looked around dazedly at her surroundings.

“It’s ok,” Terry soothed, placing his arm around her, gently bringing her to her feet. “You’ve had a bad dream. Let’s get you back to bed.”

As he closed the door, he looked one last time at the piano but saw only the urn.

Ava was quieter than normal the next day. She looked tired, as if she hadn’t slept at all. There was no laughter during the piano lesson that evening either. Listening in his workshop, Terry could only hear Philippa’s voice giving instructions between the playing. At the end of the lesson Terry walked Philippa to the door.

“Is everything ok with Ava?” she asked before she left. “She seemed a little subdued.”

Terry shrugged. He wasn’t ready to verbalize his concerns. “Teenagers,” he offered.

Philippa looked at Terry for longer than was necessary before saying her goodbyes.

Walking back inside, Terry couldn’t quieten his qualms. Ava had hardly uttered a word to him all day. Even at dinnertime, when she was usually so chatty. And she’d hardly touched her food. If something was on her mind he wanted her to be able to talk to him about it. He wondered if she could. She’d always had Prue befo . . . 

Shhhhh!

He stopped in his tracks.

He was outside the music room. For a moment he thought he must have been speaking aloud, that Ava overhearing must have shushed him. But listening now, all he could hear was Ava’s playing. He edged closer to the door. For a moment he was sure he heard two voices instead of one. Whispers, muffled by the sound of the piano. And in the background, a soft syllable.
Shhh
.
Shhh
.

Shhhhhhh!

Terry opened the door.

Ava sat at the piano. The lid was closed.

“Who were you talking to, Ava?”

Ava looked at her father bemused.

“Ava?”

Ava shook her head and made her way up the stairs to her bedroom.

The silent treatment continued for the rest of the week. Terry was reminded of Prue’s sullen moods when they’d been together. She could go weeks without speaking to him if she wanted to. It was the worst kind of punishment. Terry hadn’t expected Ava to inherit her mother’s morose temperament; she’d always seemed so much more like him. Terry would have preferred Ava to shout at him, or skulk up to her bedroom and play her abysmal music as loud as her speakers would allow. But the house was as silent as his daughter.

The only exception was her piano lessons, when for a brief hour the house was filled with gentle refrains and familiar melodies. When Philippa left, Ava practised on her own, always the same song; the one he’d heard her play when sleepwalking. A sad, slow air that gradually built, stopping frustratingly short, just before the final crescendo. Terry wished she would play something else but she was as deaf to that request as she was to his pleas to open up.

The only time Ava said anything now, apart from the monosyllabic replies to his questions, was when she was alone at the piano. Listening at the door, Terry was sure he could hear whispers, hushed beneath the dark melody that had come to haunt him.

He resolved to speak to Philippa about it. Maybe she’d noticed something strange during their piano lessons. Seizing the next available opportunity, he took Philippa into his workroom and closed the door.

“Well, she follows instructions,” Philippa assured him, “but she doesn’t say any more than is absolutely necessary. Her playing though . . .”

“Yes, she’s very good,” Terry conceded. “Except that when she practises, she only plays the same tune over and over. It’s driving me mad.”

Philippa asked him if he could identify it. He hummed it instead, feeling a little self-conscious.

Philippa looked away. She shrugged after a few moments. “Sorry, I don’t recognize it. Listen, I’m sure whatever this is will blow over. Ava is adjusting.” She placed her hand on his arm. “She’s been through an awful lot.”

Terry leant in closer, “That’s not all. When you’re gone I hear her talking in the piano room. Talking to . . .”

Philippa nodded. “I don’t think you need to worry about that. She’s obviously not ready to let go of Prue just yet. At least she’s talking.”

“I suppose.” But Terry couldn’t see past how morbid it was.

“Besides, why do you think people visit gravestones?” Philippa continued. “They offload. The dead have no choice but to listen.”

When Ava went to school that day Terry went straight to the piano room. He needed to address the strange influence the urn was having on his daughter. Despite what Philippa said, there was something unnatural about the communication in the piano room.

He didn’t give much credence to the supernatural, but he knew how stubborn Prue had been in life, and if anyone would flout the laws of death it would be her. He’d thought about replacing Prue’s ashes with soil or something, wondering if getting rid of them would somehow restore normality. But it all seemed so underhand. He wanted to resolve this civilly, parent to parent. He’d practiced the words in his workroom but now, in the presence of Prue’s urn, he was at a loss. He stared at the floor.

They’d managed to avoid each other pretty well over the years. When he picked up Ava he usually stayed in the car and honked the horn. But with death, a strange desire to see his ex-wife had overwhelmed him. He wanted to see what she’d become, to look down on the woman who had caused him so much misery. He remembered the last time he’d seen her in the Chapel of Rest; standing over her, he’d felt a strange sense of victory, one which hadn’t involved the courts or social services. He’d won the right to his daughter just by waiting it out.

Prue had looked different, slightly bloated. He wasn’t sure whether she’d put weight on over the years or if it was the effect of death. He’d read somewhere that a corpse had many of its fluids removed, to stop the natural bloating that sets in with rigor mortis and the body was pumped full of embalming fluid. He knew the dead were dressed up like this for the viewing public, a strange kind of charade; an attempt to stop the clock, to avoid the inevitable putrescence. Her face had been painted an unnatural shade, her skin alive with an artificial glow. He’d wanted to touch her cheek to see if it felt the same but he knew it would be cold and he didn’t want to ruin the illusion.

He thought about how her body would have been doused in disinfectant and germicidal solutions. The body he had lain with, made love to in the back of his first car. The embalmer massaging the legs and arms the way he had once caressed them. The eyes posed shut with an eye cap. Worst of all was the mouth. The mouth he’d kissed. The mouth that whispered
I love you
,
I’m having a baby
, the mouth that had screamed at him a hundred times, or closed tightly in disappointment or anger when they’d exhausted words. All the things it had left unsaid, sown shut with ligature and a needle or stuck together with adhesive. He had known then, without any doubt, that Prue was gone. That the body before him was only an echo of her, the undertaker’s artifice. In death the real face crumbles, the mouth rolls open, gawping in a way that Prue herself would have described as uncouth, expelling the soul with its final breath.

Back in his workroom, Terry finally began to relax. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was surrounded by the tools of his trade, the reassuring ticking of the carriage clocks, or the silent narratives of the objects he’d resurrected, whatever it was, he felt consoled. He rummaged through his toolbox, forgetting what he was looking for but enjoying the sound of metal rattling. He wanted to make some noise. He felt like celebrating. He’d finally given Prue a piece of his mind after all these years.

He’d felt ridiculous at first, of course, speaking to the urn, saying the words aloud in the quiet room. It was absurd. But it was better than staying silent on the subject. It became easier when he imagined Prue in the Chapel of Rest. Then the words had poured out of him. They gushed uncensored from his lips, thirteen years’ worth of latent discontent suddenly given voice. He’d shouted and sworn, threatened to scatter her ashes to the corners of the earth unless she left their daughter alone. The dead have no choice but to listen and he left the room feeling as if he’d finally vanquished his demons. That by speaking his mind he’d performed some kind of exorcism, that the house would finally be free of its strange deathly silence.