Piano Lessons

Cal had been practising.

I want to be precise about what that means this time too. He'd found a keyboard in a charity shop on Mill Road, forty pounds, no sustain pedal, and he'd learned the left hand for Für Elise on it and also, for reasons he didn't fully explain, the opening four bars of something he identified as Coldplay. He'd been at it every evening. He told me this on the bus as if it were neutral information, looking out of the window. I filed it under: things Cal does when he's trying not to admit something.

'You're wearing the black tight jeans again,' I said.

'I always wear jeans.'

'Er yeah, but those specific jeans.'

He said nothing. Outside, the river.

---

She opened the door in a white blouse this time, tucked in, and a dark skirt that ended just below the knee, and her hair was up. The glasses were the same. She looked at Cal with a particular attention, the way she looked at something she was revising her assessment of, and stepped back to let us in.

The kitchen was tidy. Coffee already made. The photo on the side table in the hall had been turned slightly, or I'd remembered it wrong. I noticed and said nothing. Filed it in the same place I always filed it. Do not look at directly.

'Four months,' Cal said quietly, behind me.

'Don't,' I said.

He didn't.

---

She put him on the piano first as usual. He played the left hand through without stopping, which was new, and then both hands together, which was also new, and came off it without the partial-credit expression he usually wore. He waited. I could see him trying not to look like he was waiting.

She was quiet for a moment. Then: 'You bought a keyboard.'

'Forty quid. Oxfam.'

She sat beside him. 'The action's wrong on those. You'll have learned the notes but not the weight.' She put his right hand back on the keys. 'Play it again and push down like you mean it. The piano doesn't know you practised.'

He played it again. She didn't correct the left hand at all. She watched his right.

'Better,' she said. One word, same register as always, but Cal's posture changed in a way he didn't notice. I noticed. Filed it. Cal trying not to look pleased. New one for the collection.

She turned to me. 'Finn. The Clementi.'

I played the Clementi. She listened with her arms folded and her head slightly tilted -- the expression that means she's already identified three problems and is deciding which to start with -- and then she sat beside me and put her hand over mine without preamble and said *there* and *again* and *mean it*, and the lesson continued in the way the lessons continued, which was to say it was entirely about the piano and also not at all about the piano. Her leg against mine where she'd crossed her ankle. The skirt. I played bar three wrong and she corrected it and I played it wrong again and she left her hand on mine a beat longer than necessary and said nothing, and that was the lesson in one.

Afterwards she stood and looked at us both and said: 'I want to try something today. Upstairs.'

Cal said: 'What something?'

'You'll see,' she said. 'Come on.'

---

She went up first. We followed. Cal caught my eye on the stairs and I made the face that meant *I don't know either*, which was true. He made the face that meant *mate*. I made the face that meant *I know*. Eighteen years of friendship, very efficient system.

She was standing at the foot of the bed when we got there. In her hand was a length of dark silk, folded flat. She set it on the duvet and looked at it for a second as if she was confirming a decision she'd made earlier, then looked up at us.

'The rule,' she said, 'is that you don't tell me which of you is which. At any point. I'll know, or I won't. Either way.'

The room was quiet.

Cal's breathing did the thing. She was facing him directly and she heard it and her mouth moved at the corner and I thought: she's been waiting for that. She knew exactly what that would do to him. She probably knew before we got on the bus this morning.

'Take your clothes off,' she said.

We did. She watched. I thought about the mirror in her bedroom, the first time, me looking at my own face in it and not looking away. Same principle here. She watched us the way she watched bar three. Finding what was wrong. Finding what wasn't.

When we were both down to nothing she picked up the silk and tied it herself, standing straight. Knotted it properly at the back. Then stood with her hands at her sides and her chin up in the way that meant she'd decided something and wasn't revisiting it.

She looked different without the glasses and with her eyes covered. Not less in charge. Less defended in the face than she usually let herself be. I've thought about this since, how much of what she showed us in that room she'd never have shown us if she could see our faces seeing it.

'Come here,' she said.

---

Four seconds, no words. We've done this long enough. I knew what Cal wanted and he knew I knew, and what he wanted was what I wanted less, so it settled. He sat back on the bed. I stepped back.

She found him by feel, both hands reading his face slowly. He held still and let her. When she pressed his shoulder he lay back and she found him in her mouth and he put both hands flat on the duvet and breathed through his nose and looked at the ceiling. He understood what the rule meant. He held very still and kept his mouth shut. I watched him try. Cal, who talks through films and never shuts up on the bus and once narrated an entire five-a-side match to nobody in particular, not making a sound. File that.

I came up behind her. She heard me and tilted back without breaking off and I pushed her skirt up first and found the suspenders before anything else -- the bare skin above the stocking top, the small metal clip. I went still for a second. She felt that and her hips shifted back, just slightly, which I took as a review. I unclipped one side and she reached back and did the other herself, unhurried, and I pushed the skirt down and she stepped out of it, and the stockings stayed on.

I touched her and she made a short sharp sound she hadn't planned on, and Cal shut his eyes.

She knew which of us was which within about ten seconds of my touching her. I'm certain of it. She knew and said nothing and gave nothing away and kept going, and I thought: this is what self-control actually looks like. Not what they mean at school. This.

---

When it worked she was on her knees between us and I pushed into her from behind, slowly, and she went still in the way she had the first time, taking inventory. Then she made a sound that was new -- less deliberate than the ones I knew, something that came out of her before she'd decided to let it. I felt it before I heard it, the way she went in my hands.

She was still blindfolded. I don't think she'd forgotten. I think forgetting was the opposite of what this was about.

---

I'm eighteen. I know nothing about anything. I could not have told you at that point who the prime minister was because I had not been paying attention to things like that. Three Lions has its limits as a distraction technique and I was well past all of them.

But I knew what I was watching.

No expression to manage. Nothing to arrange or direct outward. Whatever it cost her to be here, in this house, in this room on these Wednesday afternoons, she wasn't paying it right now. Just here, on her knees, between the two of us, making sounds she had no interest in controlling. Her blouse still buttoned. Stockings still on because neither of us had thought to take them off, or had wanted to.

Cal looked at her. His face did the thing I'd seen once before, the softened thing, the thing where his usual arrangement forgot itself.

She came the first time with her head dropped forward and both hands gripping Cal's legs and saying things that weren't instructions, and Cal said her name and she said *yes* and I kept going, and she went straight into the second one the way she had the first time we were all three together, messier than the first, and said *god* and *don't stop* and pushed back hard.

At some point she pulled back from Cal and turned her head and said, to the room, to neither of us particularly: 'I shouldn't want this as much as I do.'

Not looking for anything back. Just saying it out loud, because her eyes were covered and she could.

Then she found Cal again. Cal looked at me over the back of her head. We were both quiet. I had nothing for this one. No filing system. No Three Lions. Just the room and the three of us in it.

---

She said *now* and I pushed in as deep as I could get and held there and she felt what happened -- the long slow exhale, and her hand reaching back to my hip and pressing, keeping me where I was. Cal followed maybe ten seconds later. I watched it move through her. The small shudder, involuntary, and then she said *yes* very quietly, to no one in particular, and stayed still, both of us still inside her, and breathed.

---

She kept the blindfold on. Lay on her back with one arm up and breathed. Cal sat at the foot of the bed doing the thing he does with his hands when he doesn't know what to do with them. I sat beside her and said nothing and did nothing with it because I'm eighteen and I know nothing, but I know when something doesn't need adding to.

After a while she untied it herself, unhurried, and set it on the pillow. She looked at the ceiling. Then at Cal. Then at me. Her hair had come down on one side. The glasses still on the bedside table where she'd put them.

'Tea,' she said.

Cal said: 'I don't actually know how you take it.'

She looked at him. 'Milk. No sugar. I'd have thought that was obvious by now.'

He went downstairs. I heard him finding the mugs, the boiler clicking, the tap. The ordinary sounds of a Wednesday afternoon coming back into the room from the outside world which had apparently been continuing without us.

She reached over and took my hand. Loosely, the way she had once before. Said nothing.

I looked at the photo on the side table. The bloke in the sun. Four months, which she'd said out loud once and neither of us had said since. I lay still and thought about what it cost to be her, specifically, in this house, in this room. I thought about the way she'd said *I shouldn't want this as much as I do*, not to me or Cal, just to herself with her eyes covered, just because she could. Eighteen years old and I knew she meant it. And I knew it wasn't only about us.

She was still holding my hand when Cal came back up with three mugs and no tray, concentrating on not spilling, and she sat up and took hers without ceremony and drank it and said: 'Same time next week.'

Not a question.

'Yeah,' Cal said. He was looking at his ankle where her hands had been, the week before. Then he looked up at her. 'Miss Carver.'

She raised an eyebrow.

He thought about it. Decided against whatever he'd been going to say. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Just. Yeah.'

She held his eye for a moment. Then she nodded once, very slightly, the way she nodded when a passage finally came right.

We got dressed. She walked us to the door. On the step Cal turned back.

'The Coldplay thing,' he said. 'I could learn it properly. For next week.'

She looked at him over the red frames. 'You could not,' she said. 'But bring the keyboard. We'll see what you've actually learned.'

She closed the door.

On the bus Cal sat beside me and said nothing for a while. The river went past. The familiar streets.

'Same time next week,' he said eventually.

'Same time next week,' I said.