E

hen I was a boy, my parents had a piano. Nothing spectacular, just a battered old upright with a few dodgy keys and a wealth of family history. We all learnt to love music on that piano, my brothers and I, although I was the only one to go on with it as they succumbed to the lure of the guitar. While I sometimes envied them its portability, I never really cared... the piano was mine.

For years I took lessons, blues first then classical until finally I became bored with the limitations of technique, with the necessity of playing someone else’s music. So, much to my parents’ distress, I gave the lessons away... but I never stopped playing. While still a teenager, I began teaching myself the songs I wanted to play. Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” still runs clear in my head as the first song I successfully conquered on my own.

The next progression, natural I guess, was for me to start writing. The music came first, rough chords that gradually became more complex melodies and movements; then slowly, the words began to appear, sounds to accompany the music that gradually developed a life and personality of their own. After a few years I could play for hours, all my own material, without ever repeating a song or missing a note. Too shy to sing in public, I kept my self-considered ability locked away at home, only letting family and a select few friends in on the secret.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the rot set in. The music became harder to write, the words fewer and lacking in power. I began to feel that I had drained the well of creativity within me, and that feeling grew until I was incapable of anything new. I was back where I had started, playing songs that may as well have come from the soul of someone else, for the means to create anew was lost to me.

It was at this time that I moved out of home, and the piano ceased to be a part of my life. For the next four years I came near a keyboard only occasionally, and never for more than a few moments. The music that had shaped my life was slowly slipping away from me, the notes fading, the words falling silent. I didn’t notice the loss, my life became filled with the trappings of work and play and I never really noticed the void that had crept into a part of me.

Then, a phone call : my parents were moving house and wanted to know if I wanted the piano. They wouldn’t have room for it at the new place and neither of my brothers were interested; if I wanted it, the piano was mine. Of course I said yes! For though time had created a separation between myself and the music of my youth, that piano still symbolised everything that I had treasured about my childhood, my teenage years. So I took the piano, polished up the brass plate that was fixed to the front (the word ‘Concord’ reappearing before my eyes), had the internal workings repaired and the strings re-tuned. And I re-learnt how to play.

A couple of years later I married. We’d known each other for some time, and that had seemed to be the natural progression of things. She wasn’t a musical person, but I still didn’t think I was either. Again, I drifted away from my childhood companion but there were still times, when she was out, that I would sit down and lose myself in the melodies of the past, remembering songs I had written. The piano stool was full of scraps of paper, scribbled verses and chords that described the world I thought I’d lived in back then, and occasionally I’d drag them out and try to go back. So often, the fingers remembered what the mind had forgotten.

We had a child, a boy. We named him Connor. For a time there my life was perfect, and I thought it always would be. We were a family, moving forward in our lives together, and Connor was everything I had always wanted in a child. He, too, loved the piano; I would sit him on the stool, a cushion under his backside, and he would bash away at the keys, gurgling happily. That cacophony still shines like liquid sunlight in my mind.

But as they say, for everything there is a season. A drunken driver claimed the life of my wife when Connor was a month short of two years old.. I’m not ashamed to say that I didn’t handle her death well at all. I collapsed, in every way, and found the only solace I could in the bottle. My parents took custody of Connor for a time, offering me support and waiting for me to ride out the storm. But I couldn’t recover, and eventually I signed the papers giving Connor up for adoption, or placement in a foster family. He was two and a half years old.

Over the next twelve months, I gradually clawed my way back from my personal abyss. By the time I could look at myself in the mirror without flinching, I was living in a two room unit with nothing more than a bed, a bar fridge, a TV and that damned piano, sitting quietly in the corner. Strange to think that while I could give up my son, I couldn’t part with that.

I tried to find my son, to track down where he was living, but that proved impossible. He had been legally adopted by a couple from England and was living there now, and the nature of my agreement meant that I had no right to the information as to where he was. I was alone.

It was shortly after this that the dreams started.

I woke one night to a darkness broken only by the red glow from my digital clock. As I lay there, wondering what had disturbed me, I heard it again : a single note, struck firmly and held, from the piano. A chill crawled down my spine as I flipped back the covers and padded out into the living area. Snapping on the light, I looked around. The room was empty, and the piano lid was closed.

I went back to sleep that night deciding that I’d dreamt the whole thing, but the same scenario played itself out the next night, and the next. On the fourth night I stayed in bed, and listened to that note play over and over again for just under an hour. When it stopped, the silence was shockingly loud and I felt unaccountably upset.

In the morning, I sat down at the piano and unlocked the lid, folding it back to reveal the keyboard. I quickly determined that the single note that was breaking my nights was an E. Not a high E, or and E below middle C; just an E. I tried striking it myself, over and over again, but nothing extraordinary happened, no revelations were made clear to me. I was left feeling as though I’d missed something somewhere.

That night, I decided to take further action. Instead of going to bed, I stayed in the living room, watching late night TV. I intended to be awake when the piano started its nightly monotone concerto, to see what more there was that I could discover about this bizarre situation. My resolve obviously wasn’t too good, though, for I awoke with a start in the early hours with only a static snowstorm on the screen and the echo of a single E ringing in my ears.

Quickly I spun around, but as ever the piano just sat there, the cover locked tight.

Then, as I stared at it, I heard it again. That single E.

From behind me.

Slowly I turned back to the TV. Where moments before there had been only interference, an image was taking shape. As focus crept in, I made out a figure sitting at a large black grand piano. The figure was facing the keyboard, and so away from me, but I could tell it was a young boy, probably eight or nine years old to judge by the size of him.

He reached out to the keyboard, and once more a single E cut through the night.

I was starting to feel quite shaken by this point. I had no idea of what was going on, but I had to know more so I stayed there, glued to the box, waiting for inspiration to strike me.

How I wish I had turned of the TV then and gone back to bed!

But wishing won’t change anything. For it was then that the figure (the boy?) gave a start, as if he’d heard someone yell out to him. He turned, facing the screen, and I was confronted by my son. Five years older than he could possibly be, but still Connor.

I dropped to my knees with a crash, my mouth working soundlessly, unable to look away. Connor continued to look up at someone, seemingly beyond the screen, and he looked scared. Then suddenly there was another figure in the frame, a man, much bigger than Connor, moving angrily towards him. He grabbed my son by the front of his jumper and lifted him up off the stool, shaking him so hard that his head was whipping from side to side in a blur.

Then he punched him. In the face.

No!, I think I cried, but they couldn’t hear me just as I couldn’t hear them. It struck me then, crazily, that though the violence unfolding before me was taking place in perfect silence, I had been able to hear the piano.

Moments later I heard it again, as the man flung Connor down onto the keyboard, striking most of the keys at once with a discordant crash!

And at the same time, the same noise erupted from my own piano. Note for strident note. I spun around to see the lid of the old Concord in splinters, the keys broken, and spots of what looked to be blood flecking the imitation ivory. No!, I cried out again, and turned back to the TV where I could see Connor’s face as he lay across the piano, blood trickling from both nostrils and one of his ears, his cheeks looking distorted and broken. He looked up at the man, his eyes pleading as the bastard grabbed the open lid in both hands and brought it down with a -

The TV snapped off.

And I knelt there until morning, crying for the ghosts of the future.

Crying for us all.