The Grand Piano

“It belonged to Richard Hoelbecq”, she whispers, gesturing towards the piano with a finger thin and blanched, a twig stripped of its bark. “They say that he killed himself whilst he was sitting on that stool right there.”

“No way,” he replies, raising an eyebrow half-heartedly and stopping for a few seconds to gaze at the majestic instrument which sits eerily silent behind reinforced plate glass. “Where did you hear about that?”

    “I read it.” Even after two years of marriage, her voice sounds unfamiliar to him at this low decibel. She speaks at a level just above a whisper; she does not want to disturb the dozen or so other visitors who are standing around the exhibit, regarding its elegance with curious faces. She wants to share her knowledge with only him.
She has always harboured an unhealthy interest in the macabre.

“Why did he do that?” he asks. She is pleased that he has taken the initiative to keep the conversation alight.
 “They say he lost the ability to write music,” she tells him, matter-of-factly.     He stares a moment longer, as if weighing this up in his head. “He was probably just mad,” he declares with a sniff. “You creative types all are.”

He nudges her and smirks. She smiles back at him, and shivers on the inside.

To whoever reads this, please forgive me.
It was a difficult decision to make; and one which, even after I had decided upon this so-called ‘final’ course of action, I refused to accept as fate: instead I constantly reviewed and reconsidered the events leading up to this ultimate act of self-immolation  until my head spun. The conclusion that I reached is that this is simply the only solution left for me. My art is dead. All my life I have suffered for it and now the muse has forsaken me. She has left me dry and wilted, my very reason has faltered and I am forced to act with the utmost selfishness and indignity because of her.

In the car on the way home from the museum, he asks her how it’s going.

  “How’s what going?” She says. She does not shift her eyes from the road, but she tightens her grip on the steering wheel. His voice jars her, the jolt of tin foil on amalgam-filled molars. The sterility that exists between them is punctuated only by the sound of the wipers fending off the rain.

“You know,” he says nonchalantly, turning his head toward her. “The thing, the project, the whatever-you-call-it.”
“You mean the story,” she says, a little too curtly for his taste. She senses him recoil in his seat and softens her tone in compensation for her waspishness. “It’s going OK,” she says. “Thanks for asking.”
She switches the windscreen wipers up a notch.

The blank page is the writer’s worst enemy. Even a page of nonsense is better than a blank page. A page of nonsense contains something, at least; letters, characters, perhaps some punctuation. It is a chaos which can yet be organised. But a blank page is the absence of this chaos, the nothing before its transformation into the something. For the past three days I have stared at a blank page, in the hope of turning it into a manuscript. Time moves in a different way when you are staring at a blank page. It slows down, speeds up. It waxes and it wanes. It morphs as the page begs to be sullied.
And now I am writing this. This is better than a blank page.
   
At home, the screen of her laptop illuminates her face, rendering its soft features iridescent. She scrolls to the end of the page, flicking her eyes across the letters which she herself as typed but which are now indecipherable hieroglyphs. She has too much on her mind. She hears him in the kitchen next door, then a few seconds later comes the crack and fizz of a cold beer being opened and poured into a glass.

He wants to become a father. They have talked about this before, but she is not ready. Neither is he – not financially, at least - but he seems to think that they’ll cope, make allowances, save here and there. He’ll stop drinking. She can get extra hours in her part time job. They can re-mortgage the house. They’ll survive.

But no. He thinks that she isn’t ready, whereas in reality the idea of children doesn’t appeal to her.
It isn’t just that though. It’s because of what he did fourteen months into the marriage, with that girl with red highlights in her hair, at that seedy club which used to be a rock music venue. She will stay with him, for the moment at least, because she craves security and she hopes that the cloud which is covering the sun of their relationship will eventually drift away.
But she can never have his child. She cannot bring herself to do him the honour of donating a chromosome to his.
 
The piano, to me, became a symbol of mockery. It scowled at me, daring me to write something, daring me to make something of myself.
The only reason that I am writing this is because I can’t write anything else. The only reason I am writing this is to escape the blank page. It is more important for me to write this than it is for anyone else to ever read it. This is for me, purely for me.

The wind is blowing outside. She becomes distracted and stares through the window to the left of her.
The computer screen is making her eyes and head ache. She must get her eyes tested soon. She is damaging herself through her obsession.

She turns back to her work-in-progress, opens the drawer to her desk and takes out her packet of painkillers, takes a couple with a swig of the mineral water next to the laptop. She is used to these headaches. They come as a side effect of her neglecting her Trazodone prescription. But she refuses to succumb to the dum-dums. They alter her moods for the worse. She can feel the serotonin in her brain and behind her eyes. It kills her.

She decides to start a new document. Start afresh. Something new. Don’t flog the dead horse when the muse within refuses to kick back at you.
She takes a breath and begins.

The piano. A bridge between the blank page and what lies beyond it.
It has taught me the lesson that I needed to learn.
The lesson that, sometimes, you just know it’s time to give up.
He killed himself because of that piano. Because, despite its beauty and majesty, despite the expertise with which it was crafted, it could not play itself.
My final straw was the Test. When it the test came back positive, I knew this was the only decision left. Some people would have seen a doctor, but not me.
This page is blank no more. But it couldn’t have written itself.
And that is why I wrote this.
The final page.

She stops, stares at the screen, weary tears already carving paths on her cheeks.The words have flowed out of her like blood, and they are hers. All hers. She reads them over and over. She lets them wash over her, lapping her face.

And as she fills her hand with painkillers, and swallows them down ten at a time, she says her final apology to the child that grows inside her.


By Steve Hollyman.