Not All Pianos Have 88 Keys

                                                                                                                        10th March 2025

Dear Jon,  

It has been an age since we spoke way back in the wilderness of Covid.  

I write from a proper desk this time, not some temporary ping pong table. It is one of those Edwardian oak bureaus with a lockable rolltop to hoard all your work in progress. I don’t have anything of note, but my next chapbook will be titled Not All Pianos Have 88 Keys.  

I don’t know if you have ever seen Jane Campion’s The Piano. I hope so – one of those films hard to forget because of the savageness of the landscape.

In the film, the character Ada loses her finger because she has an affair with a man named Baines. Ada’s husband has no sexual or psychological interest in her beyond possession. He severs her finger with an axe because he wants her unable to communicate – even though she is already mute, piano her only means of expression and sound.  

A creative living a life of silence is extraordinary, isn’t it? Silence by choice is powerful, a dedicated resistance, and yet enforced silence can rupture a person. I conditioned myself to speak less and less throughout a 19-year relationship until speaking became a novelty. My voice simply held no value.  

After I left, I became fixated with The Piano. I would sit froggy-legged in the blue dark to watch and it would leave me so emotionally tilted I’d have to run a bath to fill myself back up. In limey water my skin whitened with silt deposits. I liked how the landlady’s rustic tap gave out water in small, erratic squeezes.  

To date, I have moved three times in four years, the first to the country with an allotment and five bedrooms. I did not wish to move there. The second I raced woodlice with the boys whilst passing trains made our terraced walls twitch during a screamingly hot summer. The current has a garden which feels a menace of birdly gobbledygook when winter retreats.  

Hypervigilance is second nature. When I drive, my eyes automatically change number plate letters. Vowels become consonants. I seek out beards with forensic attention. Every car is burnt chocolate even when it is categorically purple sector, mint green, red siren.  

I pull over and call people: I think I’ve just seen him, but I can’t be sure. (1)   

I meet a woman on a slate grey day in March, rain elongating the season. Together, we draw a constellation of relationship harms. A rainbow of pens, glitter and glue. This is not a craft session. It is learning how to identify intimate terrorism. She wears ridiculously oversized hoop earrings hopeful as full moons. When I say he never hurt me though, she says: if every hurt on this page were a paper cut, would you still be alive? I can’t articulate. On the bus, there are still sad faces from her earrings indented on my shoulder blades – she held me that long.  

I pass children well enough to attend school. Parents discussing reading stages, who got the lead role in the play. I want my child to have his art on the class tea towel, pack things he won’t eat in his lunch box.  

I almost forgot: I plan to buy an upright piano. Not to play it, either. I intend to get one with an exquisite burl walnut case simply to press my spine against cold ivory. I will not write covert sentiments of love on any of the keys.  

The closing scene in The Piano sees Ada plunge into the ocean, her foot deliberately tangled in a rope as her beloved instrument is thrown from boat to watery grave. I don’t wish to sound glib, for Ada is indisputably romantic, but what an obscene waste of a piano.  

Wishing you beautiful things this year.  

Rachael 

1. Nottinghamshire Police were granted 69 stalking protection orders between 2020 and 2023, with a further seven granted in 2024. These orders still have loopholes, though.