Hide and Seek

by Amy Bird

  In the morning, I go downstairs to find Will already at the breakfast table. He looks up when I come in. There’s a smile. Small, but enough. The anger is gone.

  “Let’s find that letter,” he says.

  Chapter Twelve

  -Will-

  I can see Ellie thinks that she’s convinced me.

  But she hasn’t.

  I just don’t want any more of those dreams. As I walk to the station, I feel like I’ve only slept for twenty minutes. And of course, that could be true. But it must all have been REM phase, otherwise I don’t know how I managed so many nightmares.

  And there’s the counting to ten mentality. In other words, the need to indulge your pregnant wife. I was furious last night, when we got home. Really, I was. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I couldn’t stand to look at her any more that night, to go and sleep on the sofa. But you can’t do that, can you? You can’t run away from the mother of your child, however mad she is. And half of the madness must be hormone-induced. Can’t ever say that of course – I’d be lynched, or divorced, or both. But it’s true, I’m sure. So half the stuff that Ellie comes out with isn’t her at all; she’s just a mouthpiece for raised progesterone. I’ve got to be the strong, stable one in the centre of this. To take responsibility for keeping our marriage on track until that baby’s out. It will all be much better then.

  At first, though, I couldn’t sleep at all. I was just too angry. At myself, just as much as at Ellie, for rising to her bait. I’d put my arms round her to spoon her, like we usually do – she can’t stand it when I sleep with my back to her – but my heart wasn’t in it. Then came the remorse. I shouldn’t be lying in bed projecting anger into the home of my little boy. Ellie, in her own peculiar way, is just looking out for me. She gets these odd ideas. That’s why I love her. She must know I was still angry. In anyone less strong, these arguments might cause mental turmoil, even a miscarriage. In fact perhaps they had. I raised my head from the pillow to listen for signs of distress. No. There she was, snoring gently to herself. Which made me a bit angry again, given she was the one who’d stopped me sleeping.

  So I went downstairs instead, rather than lying next to her, simmering in resentment. And I tried to sleep. But how can you sleep when your wife has decided that your father isn’t your father? How can you not replay all the conversations you remember? And try to find in your memories the ones that you can’t? I tried and I tried to think of Max Reigate being there when I was little. But there’s nothing. Nothing before that eating of the daffodil outside the house in Kingston, captured by Kodak.

  And if your wife is claiming that your real father is in fact an eminent musician, how can you stop yourself from replaying his music as well? So I got out the CD and played it to myself. I really listened this time. To the orchestra all together at the start, quiet, mellow, but expectant. Then in it comes. The third voice. The Reigate voice. Strident, unapologetic, like the voice of some eternal truth. You can almost tell he wrote the concerto himself. It is designed to show off the piano. No little tinkling tunes. Straightaway, there’s this intense mood. All these heavy notes and accents. Every three notes, there’s one really powerful one. Like a war march, or something. Every so often, the orchestra will get a look in. Or the orchestra such as it is – he doesn’t even seem to be using the full one, just strings and woodwind, so there’s nothing to compare with the weight of the piano. In the first movement, there are just two voices – orchestra and piano. But later, in the second and third movements, it’s like a three-way conversation, violins fiddling and oboes whining against the weight of the piano. But they cannot win. Not against all that force, all that violence. You feel like you’re becoming the piano, its music is so far inside you. It’s a wonder they managed to record it live, the way he hammered at the strings of the piano. You’d think they’d split and break. Maybe that’s part of his skill; exerting just enough pressure with the hammers so that the instrument can go on functioning. He gives it a bit of a rest in the second, slower movement – saves himself for that soul-wrenching final cadenza at the end of the third. Then the piano tuners lift the lid and see the real damage.

  The second track, or movement, whatever it’s called, is a bit softer at first. And he’s allowed the string section a bit more of a look in. There are three ingredients then, in an uneasy harmony – him, the violins and the woodwind. Still that brutal and haunting central tune though, carried across the three of them. And even though it’s slower, the second movement, you are constantly in suspense about where the piano will take you next. But it’s nothing to the last movement. The sheer pulsating violence of those runs, the anger, almost, with which the piano answers the violins. It’s like some kind of defiance – yes, yes, YES goes the piano. No, no, NO, say first the strings, then the woodwind. The piano gets the last word though. Heroically, brilliantly, romantically, it comes in with this final flourish. Think of the fingers that play that. The brain that composed it. Think of being fathered by that genius. What it would be to share the same DNA. Pounding away on the keys, Max Reigate makes his final transcendent affirmation, every note accented. HERE I AM, HERE I AM, HERE I AM. AND THIS IS WHAT I DO.

  Then it stops. The piano goes, the piece ends, just like that. As if the music was never there.

  But of course, the silence afterwards is part of the music. It’s the silence that stays with you. The silence that your brain can’t deal with, so it recreates the playing all over again. In your dreams. But in your dreams, there are two keyboards. They’re shaped like staircases, spiralling up and down, in a double helix. And you’re running – or rather I’m running – up and up and up the piano-stairs, trying to find the way to the other staircase. Because on that other staircase, there are these most amazing fingers walking up and down, caressing the notes. And I want to be caressed too, by those fingers. I want to sit on them, allow them to carry me UP UP UP and DOWN DOWN DOWN. But it’s not just that. I need to get away from my keyboard staircase. From the hammers that are pursuing me. It’s like the piano has been inverted, and rather than the hammers being inside, they are all on the outside, bashing the notes. Except they’re not piano hammers – they’re actual hammers, and each key they hit, they smash. Fragments of black and white fly around, filling the air between the two staircases. And the hammer gets closer and closer and closer and I try one last time to jump. I think I can do it, I think I can bridge the gap. But I’m suspended between the two staircases; time stops and I don’t know, I just don’t know, if I’m going to make it. And that terror, that inbetweenness, is what wakes me.

  And it’s what makes me agree we need to find that letter from Max. The letter to Mum. Because I can’t let it go, now, can I? Now Ellie has brought it up, so insistently. I can’t just not know.

  We’ve made a plan. We spent so long making it over breakfast that I had to miss my usual swim at the Rotunda. I think over the plan as I wait on Kingston platform for the train. I think over it as the train takes me to Waterloo. I think over it on the Tube, on the way into Guy’s Campus, on the way up to my office, along from the hospital building. Even, if I’m honest, on the toilet. Because it’s this plan that will tell me if Ellie’s mad, hormone-laced theories are true. And because I can’t stand the idea of my father not being my father – because who would that make me? But nor can I bear being denied a connection with Max Reigate. Max Reigate. There is such an emotional association with that name in my mind now. I can’t just be a fan of his music. There has to be some blood link there, doesn’t there?

  The plan isn’t much of a plan. It’s a creep in when your parents are sleeping using your spare key, then jimmy open your mum’s filing cabinets sort of plan (Ellie is convinced Google will tell her how to pick a lock; she’s going to spend the day practising). It’s based on a hope they don’t set the burglar alarm at night, that Dad (?) won’t suddenly want some Digestive biscuits and milk during the night (like he always used to get me if I couldn’t sleep, when I was a child – oh, Dad
, I love my Dad), that Mum won’t get it in her mind to have a midnight listen to her old flame’s LP. Or come downstairs to creep out into the night to be with him. Oh, listen to yourself! It’s fantastical. I’ve become the victim of Ellie’s over-hormoned imagination.

  I try to focus on the work for my lecture. I just need a few more cases of the ‘talk and die’ phenomenon, make it more real and human to the attendees, then I’ll be fine. It’s my first public lecture and I want it to be accessible and informative. Brilliant but casual. The sign of a bright future and a well-spent past. I leaf through the journals my research student has flagged for me. “There are some great ones here!” he said, enthusiastic to find plenty of trauma victims, poor suckers crept up on from behind with a bat or a hammer. Or even a piece of lead-piping. Classic Cluedo fun. Except these are the odd ones, the almost survivors – they think they’re fine, having fended off attack. They go about their day. Then later on, they’re dead. And I’ve got to teach my students to be alert to that. I’ve got to share these mysteries with the scientifically-minded public and my fellow faculty members. To remind them to look beyond concussion, to keep those observations going overnight. And to know what it means, when the blood starts to form, when the brain starts to swell. How easy it is to miss the signs.

  Have I been missing signs, all these years? Has there been some other secret world going on around me, some intrigue in which John Spears has suspected with each growing year that his loving wife, Gillian Spears, is not so loving after all, and actually had an affair with their good friend Max? Who their son now closely resembles? Has our house, always a loving family home to my eyes and ears, actually held bitter hisses and accusing glances, shot over my head for the last thirty-four years?

  Or has John Spears been completely ignorant of it all? Innocently going about bringing up ‘his son’, while my mother laughs at him and nurtures a secret love affair with my real father? Can a man be that blind? What if it were Ellie, and our son, little Leo, as he will be? What if he weren’t really mine? I would notice, wouldn’t I? Maybe that is why Ellie is so convinced about Gillian, a little voice in my head says. Maybe her female intuition is nothing but a shared female guilt.

  No. I shake my head. I imagine I’m trying to shake those fragments of piano keys from the dream out of my ears, out of my brain. The music has confused me. These are my parents (as Ellie and I will be Leo’s parents). Something has unsettled them, that is all. I get out my phone to call Ellie, to abort the plan, to tell her I trust my parents. But my fingers stop before they unlock the phone. If we don’t see it through, if we don’t read the letter that will undoubtedly be innocent, the idea will be Ellie’s constant refrain, a recurring theme over the years. And so, we will go ahead with the plan. Tonight.

  Chapter Thirteen

  -Will-

  We reach my parents’ house at midnight. I wanted to wait until 2am, but Ellie says they will have been asleep for hours, and if we leave it any later, they’ll probably get up to use the loo. She has a point. She also has a pick and a wrench. So witching hour finds us standing at the end of the drive, looking up, checking the windows are dark. They are. I put a foot out to step on the gravel, but Ellie holds me back.

  “Too noisy,” she whispers. “Use the flowerbeds.”

  I look at the flowerbeds round the edge of the drive up to the front door. They are full of flowers. And soil.

  “You sure?” I ask Ellie. She nods and gives me a little push. I put one foot then the other in the flowerbed and creep towards to the door of the house. It’s a small jump from the flowerbed to the flagstones by the front door. I go first. I land just short of the flagstones, on the gravel. There is a crunch. I hold my breath. No lights go on inside. We are still undetected. I turn back to Ellie and hold out my hand for her to jump towards me. She judges the jump perfectly and lands silently. Critically, she keeps hold of the champagne. It’s our cover story: if caught, we claim we wanted to leave a gift by way of surprise, to say thank you for the crib.

  Next, the key in the lock. I have never heard the lock click so loudly. Then comes the moment of truth. They never used to put on the burglar alarm or chain the door when I lived here. If they do either – or worse, both – our mission will fail. We will have to shut the door and run, hoping we can make it back across the gravel before they turn on the light and open the curtains. Hope that the local police will not bother to take footprints from the flowerbed. I push the door open a fraction, then a little more. Thank God. No chain. And no alarm. But I hadn’t realised that the door scraping over the doormat actually makes a sound. I am about to push the door shut behind us, but Ellie stops me. She very gently edges it towards the frame, but leaves it ever so slightly ajar, so there is no sound of it shutting. She takes off a shoe and wedges it by the door. I take my shoes off too, partly to be quiet, partly so as not to tread soil into the house. That’s how I’ve been brought up.

  At that thought, I wonder what I’m doing; why am I betraying my upbringing to sneak around my parents’ house in the middle of the night? If I was twelve, I could pretend it was a game of spies. Now, aged thirty-four with my five-months-pregnant wife in tow, that will not wash. I am not convinced the champagne really works as a cover either. But better, we decided, than claiming I needed a document urgently. What need could have arisen between the end of sociable hours today and be required before tomorrow morning? Logically, we have our reasons, but emotionally it does not do. My parents know me. They know I do not creep into houses in the middle of the night delivering Taittinger.

  Ellie does not seem to have these concerns, though, because she is ahead of me. On tiptoes, she is heading for our target zone: the study. I follow. The door starts to creak as she opens it. Of course it does; the whole mission is ill-fated. She freezes. I freeze. We look upwards, into the dark of the staircase. Still no lights. Still safe to continue. Ellie manages to slide herself through the gap in the door, with a millimetre to spare – a few weeks later, and we would not be able to do this exercise – and I, thanks to the swimming, make it too, with the champagne.

  It is dark, so I switch on the standard lamp. Ellie flicks it straight off again.

  “Are you mad?” she asks.

  In the darkness, she probably cannot see my expression of incredulity; she has brought me to break into my parents’ house to find out if my dad is my dad, and yet she accuses me of being mad?

  This is not the time for another argument. “If we’re here to bring champagne, we’d put on the lamp,” I say, instead.

  “If we get to having to use the champagne, we’ve failed,” she retorts, flicking on a narrow-beamed torch.

  Ellie lights a path over to the desk area. All the objects I’ve grown up seeing in here acquire a new eeriness in the torchlight. Glass paperweights, their millefiori patterns a source of fascination when I was younger, now become desk boulders that could roll and noisily smash if disturbed. The gold carriage clock becomes a time bomb, whose loud ticks could suddenly awaken the household. Wallpaper rolls and samples propped against the wall until they can cover the walls of Mum’s interior design clients could unfurl and trip us. The photo of the three of us, from when I was about six, could slide and break, loudly and irrevocably.

  “Hurry up,” I say, as though that will help.

  Ellie goes straight to the bureau. She tries to slide up the front, but it is locked. She shoots me a glance, a small smile, as if this is significant. Putting down her handbag, she gets out her tools and kneels next to the bureau.

  “Hold the torch for me,” she whispers.

  So I do. And whatever she’s learnt on the internet seems to work, because after a minute of fiddling round with the wrench, there are a couple of clicks, she inserts the pick and waggles it around, and then she is sliding up the lid of the bureau. I lean over and kiss her.

  “Well done!” I whisper. It should not be sexy that my wife can pick a lock. But it is.

  She takes the torch from me and shines it into the bureau
.

  “No photo album,” she whispers.

  She rifles through the little drawers and inlets of the bureau. Quick and efficient, she goes systematically from left to right.

  “No letter either, by the looks of it,” she says.

  I am about to suggest we should call it off, end the search, crack open the champagne, when there is an intake of breath from Ellie.

  “What?” I whisper.

  “Keys!” she proclaims. “Maybe to the desk.”

  So we scurry over to the desk and insert one of the keys into the lock.

  At the same moment, there is a creak from above us, and the sound of footsteps.

  “Shit!” I whisper. Ellie glares at me and puts her fingers over her lips. She pulls me below the desk.

  “It’s no good,” I say, my lips close to her ear. “Our shoes are by the front door. If whoever it is goes to the top of the stairs, they’ll see.”

  We see a dim light around the edges of the door. More footsteps.

  “We should just abort,” I tell Ellie, beginning to stand up. “Jump out, hold the champagne.”

  Ellie pulls me down again.

  “Do you want to know who your father is or not?” she whispers into my ear.

  “I know who my father is!”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Because you talked me into it, I want to say. Because I’m weak. Because Max Reigate’s music haunts my dreams. But then, I haven’t told her about the dream. About the hammers I found there. So I stay silent.

  A toilet flushes. Then more footsteps. Then the light disappears. More footsteps and then a creak overhead. Then silence.

  We both exhale.

  In a moment, Ellie is back on her hands and knees again, facing the desk drawers.

  “You’re not carrying on!” I whisper, horrified. “We should get out of here – it’s too risky.”