Clavicembalo col piano e forte

When I left, I referred to him as The Iceberg. The ex earned his title because I had a thing about glaciers. Back in primary school I learned all about them and became magnetised by their different shapes and properties; the most cutting one being the wedge - an iceberg with a steep edge on one side and a slope on the opposite. The danger with icebergs is that the hidden ice can easily tear a hole in the base of a ship, even the most long-haul of designs.

 

On a still grey day in March where rain was elongating the season and after nineteen summers in the same relationship, I had viewed fifty-four properties and I packed my life of belongings up and I told the children life might feel smaller and very pointy in the future, and during nights of muddling uncertainty I made myself a promise to buy an upright piano. When I got out. A piano like Ada has in Jane Campion's The Piano. A metaphor, perhaps.

 

 

***

I want an upright piano for the sole purpose of pressing my ribcage against chilled keys.

I want to have unfettered sex across ivory fingers. I want a piano with an exquisite burl walnut case.

My children, like Ada's girl, have already been witness to far too much. I will not write covert sentiments of enduring love on any of my piano keys nor send a child to deliver them to some illicit lover. 

And when I get a piano, I will never slam the lid.

 

***

I see them all the time on Facebook Marketplace, yet I always talk myself out of it. Pianos. Believe I am not worthy. Feeble old me who didn’t grow up around instruments. I can read books but not music. I can read bodies. I can even read minds. But there is something inaccessible about a semibreve, a minim. Piano is the precise sort of soundtrack needed for both arrival and departures. Sweet, round, dark and rich. Whenever I see myself locking the front door for that very last time my heart doing its concertina of loss and fear, I automatically hear Olafur Arnalds.

 

The EMDR therapist tells me I am recovering because I can talk about encounters before the relationship where everything happened underneath The Iceberg. I tell her how I worry that all my memories feel underwater, swimmy. I ask her how to resuscitate the forgotten bits.

 

***

When my eldest was ten months I got him a singing animal keyboard for Christmas. It had animal heads to press down and made crude farmyard noises and nursery rhyme melodies. He would bang on the chunky keys and when the cow gave its deep blarting sound, he would press it again and again and again so that it sounded like a herd were right there, in the kitchen, and he would laugh, his rack of pink gums glistening wetly, two pearly buds of tooth emerging at the bottom. At bedtime he would stand in the cot and fist at the bars whilst shouting pea-nano, pea-nano, pay pea-ano and I’d say not now, time for nan-nights, the animals are in the barn, but he would carry on relentless. I would always have to get the keyboard so he could say good night and give elaborate kisses again and again to the comma-lashed cow’s eyes and the little duck’s bill and the sheep’s head with its bracket-shaped horns. 

When my eldest was six he started slamming doors. It is safer to make noise with a door than lash out in temper, I told his father. If he slams that door again, I won't be responsible for what happens next. 

When the door slammed again, I waited downstairs. Moths jived in my stomach. Breathing too fast. There came no shouting: just the shrill pink of metal against metal: a man hard at work. He had the bedroom door off the hinges within ten minutes.

 

When I was thirty-three, I sometimes hung a towel on the shower door handles to dry off. The reason we have a towel rail, the boy's father said is to fold and hang the towels so that they can dry. Don't let me see a towel on the shower door handle again. There must have been some day of forgetting, probably in some wild rush for work. I was sitting on the toilet panda-eyed from another long day in family court and I realised that the shower door handles were the other way round. The shower handles had been removed. Turned upside down. Screwed back on so that further towels would slide straight off.

 

It took three hours for me to get the bold to make the call to the women who help women see the Emperor in his New Clothes. I made the call on the middle of the stairs: if he had come home, I could see the landing where the boys slept, his point of entrance.

 

The call operator said doors and handles are crucial here. I said nothing. 

 

It wasn’t until recently I realised: there hadn’t been a lock on the bathroom door for eleven years. 

 

***

The therapist tells me that repeated emotional injuries shrink the hippocampus. Hippocampus is Greek for seahorse. Seahorses are the slowest moving of all fish species because of an impossibly tiny fin which is their only propeller for movement. This one fin beats up to fifty times a minute. The human heart, by comparison ranges from 60 - 100 per minute.  

The hippocampus is a paired structure hidden inside each temporal lobe and shaped precisely like a pair of seahorses. It helps to store and release memory. It is vital to short-term memory, the retaining in mind of data for a few moments, after which it either gets transferred to permanent memory or is swiftly forgotten.

When you forget, the therapist tells me, you need to overwrite the trauma with memories. Watch old videos. Dig out birthday cards. Go to nostalgic places where you remember the way you felt before.

I tell the therapist how delighted I am that seahorses govern my brain. I imagine them doing their elaborate mating dance, both brightening in colour. There are two of them right here, I tell her, pointing towards my left temple. Nights, when I am lying awake trying to remember the past, I tell her they twist their tails together and swim circularly for hours on end, and I wake to sea brine trickling from my ears, salt on all the bedding.

***

Crying was a no-no. An act of weakness. A deliberate ploy for sympathy. The children were ordered to stop crying as if their emotions should be isolated by a switch. Stop turning on the tears. I said stop crying now. I said stop crying now. I said stop crying now. With time I conditioned myself not to cry. Pushing my tongue to the roof of my mouth instantly stopped my crying, as well as pinching myself hard on the soft bit between thumb and forefinger. Little Parma violet bruises: my no tears formula.

 

Two summers before my departure The Iceberg went to see a doctor with dry eyes and was given artificial tears because his tear ducts were so unused. 

 

***

 

I go to Norwich after The Iceberg. A man takes me to see Olafur Arnalds live. In the city the buildings tower above like exclamation marks and us two are the end marks. The hotel room has boiler tubes running the length of it and not enough light, but there are expensive white curds of soap with sage leaves in it and we fuck on a velour chair until my insides feel excavated. The sound of the piano at the performance is akin to a fracture. My eyes sluice out hot salt. I am this massive fuck off release, a sob, a reddening. I open up to sound and there are no doors and no hinges, and he has to seize me against his chest because of the fall out the music causes and I cover my ears. On the walk back to the hotel I apologise for whatever the hell happened back in there. This is the first time a woman has ever apologised to me for having basal feelings, he says. 

Imagine if your primal instincts had been ignored for nineteen years.

Reckon you should learn to play the piano, he says.

 

I routinely watch old footage of the boys as babies. It is obsessive this searching for the forgotten me. I watch them bum-shuffle around that first house where I remember some disequilibrium of happy, the sun always out: a cut lemon. Their words are awkward, still unformed. They reach towards the lens with starshaped toddler hands, accept strawberries and milk softened rusks. In the videos I am this lispy voice eliciting their response - never present at the scene. A spectre. I cannot remember at what stage I got erased. I yearn to spool the years back with a Bic pen the way one might rewind a cassette tape. 

 

When a few sessions of therapy are remaining, I vow to reward myself with a piano. I tiptoe around music, still unsure and I wait until purples of dawn hulk in and lie in bed semi-foetal scrolling through marketplaces. Eight-year-old always asleep: head on my right hip. 

 

I google Upright Spinet, Console, Studio, Professional, Grand, Petite, Medium, Parlor, Ballroom Concert. I send a message to a man about a spinet. It is a moderately expensive one. He asks me what I like to play and checks if I will be able to collect within the week. I don't tell him my car is in for an MOT, about the single parent thing.

 

EMDR takes extraordinary strength because of having to retraumatise again. The therapist tells me not to drive after, to nap throughout the panic. She forgets about my childcare responsibilities. She forgets that trauma recovery requires the perpetrator to stop.

 

There was a room with a door handle that could be removed from the outside and if the door closed, the person inside couldn't get out. The person inside was me.

 

I finger-tipped HELP and PRISON on windows sweating with the chill of October mornings. He told me I was embellishing again, wiped the glass down.

 

Hot water turned cold when I was in the shower too long.

 

My breathing became laboured. Stairs a challenge. Ventolin use. Vocal cords strained eternally. I swallowed two respiratory steroids twice a day until the morning he was made to leave. Under his coffee machine: cleaning fluid soaking in my favourite tin mug.

 

The Trauma Centre for Resilience and Growth call to advise that they cannot help me because I am still under surveillance, and I require hypervigilance to survive. It is too dangerous to reduce your fight or flight response, the call operator says, and we are really sorry about that, she says, but when he decides to stop you will be able to access all of our services.

 

 

The child maintenance payment changes date each month. Sometimes by a day, usually three or four, perhaps seven: always unpredictable enough to sabotage the direct debits. For two months: nothing at all. Swimming lessons get cancelled without notice and we stand there at the reception desk with a little boy's goggles already on and his piranha trunks bright blue, a towel rolled up under my arm like a Greggs sausage roll, and I explain to him kindly there has been some sort of confusion, so we have to go. After school club gets cancelled without notice and I explain to my youngest that from tomorrow we won't be able to go back, again, and my job might have to change now, and he kicks a hole in my dashboard because all he wants to do is go back and say goodbye properly, to race Georgie on the mini tractors.

 

The second to last session the therapist says she is proud to see that I am standing upright again. I tell her that strength has nothing to do with getting back up. I tell her I am not a piano. I am no rising metre. I say that strength is about sitting in discomfort day in, day out without ever receiving relief. I tell her I am always metaphorically sat on the pavement, how the very structure of control restricts any sort of movement up. She retracts her statement, thanks me for teaching her how to woo a seahorse. 

 

That night I reply to the piano seller. I say I am fond of playing Bach – Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. He answers to say it is a grand, imposing piece, one of those church organ compositions that few people can play properly. I send him a musical note emoji by way of acknowledgement - a crotchet, perhaps, or a quaver. 

 

Ten minutes later I type: I confess. I can't actually play piano. I want it to pretend I am Holly Hunter's Ada. To stroke the keys. Press bare buttocks against it. Remember that scene where Baines kisses Ada's neck unexpectedly and desire is big and red and pushing, and that beautiful scene where Flora turns cartwheels across vast beach whilst silver ocean comes in to hear Ada play?

 

He replies, I do, I do! I model my solemn face and eyelet boots on Baines. My favourite film!