The Maestro appears not to have heard. She pauses by a rack of frilly little girl clothes. Glittery stockings and pink tees that say ‘Daddy’s Princess’. Currently, Joey’s wearing clothes from a second-hand sale – red jumper, polka dot leggings and pink glitter gumboots.
‘You do not understand the opportunity.’ The Maestro’s lips curl. ‘To learn from the greatest? To make something of yourself? You could be as great as me – perhaps. I thought you might try, Schwachkopf.’
Beck flushes. ‘I’m your kid. You can’t just sell me—’
The Maestro waves her hand sharply, done with him. ‘Take your sister and wait outside.’
All he can do drag Joey towards the exit while she says, ‘It’s not fair, I didn’t get a present!’ with a five-year-old’s righteous indignation.
‘I know, Joey,’ Beck says, soothing. ‘It’s not fair.’
He doesn’t want to do well at the performance. He doesn’t want to impress Jan.
He doesn’t want to leave.
The air smiles with winter teeth – an official welcome to time-for-your-hands-to-freeze-on-the-piano season. Joy.
Beck stuffs his fingers beneath his armpits as he and August trudge to school. She’s jacketless and shoeless as usual, and mildly blue. She rubs her arms and bounces on the spot while Beck disappears into the noisy chaos of paint and dress-ups to bodily remove his little sister as she shouts at the teacher and stomps her small feet in fury. The teacher’s face is plum, and she’s ready to throw Joey at him. There’s also a letter.
Joey’s been suspended.
The preschooler has been suspended.
Even Beck hasn’t fallen that low yet, though he’s never turned in complete homework in his life. No one expects much from him. But tossing the cherubic, big-eyed five-year-old out? He’s furious.
‘She’s a meanie,’ Joey howls, as Beck drags her out by the hood of her red coat. ‘She didn’t listen. I’m not a liar. I’m not! I’m a good girl.’
Beck stuffs the letter into his backpack, half wishing he could rip it and toss the pieces in that pedantic teacher’s face.
‘What did you even do?’ August seems curious instead of shocked.
‘Who cares? No one should suspend a preschooler,’ Beck says, harsher than he intended.
August commences a round of jumping jacks while Beck buttons Joey’s coat.
‘I got expelled from a preschool once,’ she says. ‘This kid found a bird half drowned in the water tank, so he used a plastic shovel to “put it out of its misery”. Seriously, the bird was not dead. He murdered it and had its blood on his shoes.’
Joey’s eyes went wide. ‘What did you do?’
August pauses and Beck isn’t sure if her cheeks are flushed with cold or embarrassment.
When she doesn’t answer, he nudges her. ‘What did you do?’
‘I might’ve bashed him with the same shovel,’ August confesses. ‘He might’ve had to get nine stitches. Look, I’m not proud of it. I retaliate peacefully now—’
‘Like with the frog,’ Beck reminds her, ‘and that guy you kicked.’
August shrugs. ‘I possibly have a mild violent streak. At least the last dude didn’t have to get stitches. While I, on the other hand, lost a toenail and nearly bled dramatically to death.’
Beck is actually impressed. August’s never going to be bulldozed in her righteous fights. She’ll be the one chained to a tree for three months to stop it being chopped down, or in prison for maiming hunters.
They start off down the footpath, Beck in awed silence, August embarrassed and Joey with her head hung low in dejection.
‘All I did was call Bailey a Scheisskerl,’ Joey mumbles, ‘and then I bit her nose.’
‘You bit her?’ Beck’s jaw drops. ‘You’re not a baby, Joey. What is this?’
‘She said my mummy doesn’t love me because she never brings me to school!’ Joey says. ‘Then she broke my crayons. All of them. Even the glitter crimson. And I’m never, ever, ever going to get new crayons because – because …’ She stops, hiccupping through her tears.
Because the Maestro won’t care enough to buy more. He knows. As much as the Maestro occasionally cares about Joey, she doesn’t lavish affectionate gifts on her. And Beck understands the specialness of glitter crimson since he got kicked for attempting to use it while colouring companionably with her.
Beck is helpless in the face of justified rage. ‘You still shouldn’t have bitten her,’ he manages.
August bounces over a crack in the cement footpath. ‘What would you have done, Beck?’
Is she messing with him? He glances at her, but she looks serious, as if she’s genuinely unsure what the right thing to do in this devastating situation is. Maybe August sides with Joey.
‘Probably nothing.’ Beck isn’t proud of the answer. But what else can he say? He can’t encourage Joey, but he knows full well how incriminating Joey can look. Loud, brash, mouthy and physical? The teacher informed Beck that if his mother wouldn’t come in to talk about Joey’s long list of bad behaviours, then she had no choice but to suspend Joey.
‘EVERYONE IS MEAN TO ME!’ Joey wails. ‘Mama doesn’t love me, and Bailey is just a—’
Beck covers her mouth. ‘Joey, please. August was innocent before we met her.’
August nods. ‘Not any more. Joey’s got quite a tongue.’
Joey tries to bite Beck’s hand, so he retracts.
Beck claws deep inside himself for something encouraging to say, even though his mind is spinning to what the Maestro’s going to do with Joey when she has to work and Beck goes to school. ‘Well, Mama does love you.’ Definitely. A lot more than her son, anyway.
After all, Joey hasn’t been forced on to the piano yet.
She hunches in her coat. ‘Then I want new crayons.’
August laughs. ‘You’re extraordinary, Joey. You really ought to be a superhero or the queen someday.’
Joey considers this. ‘Superhero,’ she says. ‘I want to smash things.’
She breaks into a run, pelting towards the end of the street and into the Keverich hovel, slamming the front door after her. It gives Beck a moment of peace with August. Not that he needs it, of course. It’s just August. She’s just … some random school acquaintance.
August is still smiling to herself, like Joey is the most glorious creation in the world. She rubs her hands together and blows on them. Beck wonders what it’d be like to hold her hand. Sweaty? Frozen? Would their fingers fit or would it be awkward?
‘Have you started writing my song?’ she says.
He has. He’s also abandoned every rubbish attempt. He has to work on it in small sporadic bursts so the Maestro won’t notice it isn’t Chopin.
Nothing he composes will be good enough for August.
‘No way,’ he says. ‘I told you, there is zero possibility of you hearing me play.’
August sticks out her bottom lip – it’s slightly blue. ‘You break my heart, Keverich. How about dinner? Did your mum give the affirmative?’
They haven’t even raised the subject since.
He shrugs.
‘You’re talkative today,’ August says. ‘Something eating your brain?’
Only a few things. Small things. He could be shipped off to Germany in a few weeks to live with an uncle who’s possibly worse than his mother. Or he could be strangled by the Maestro if he messes up. He could lose Joey. He could lose—
He shrugs again.
They pause on the driveway. The curtain flickers – Joey or the Maestro, he doesn’t know – and he can’t linger. But he wants to. Lingering isn’t half so awkward and emptying as saying goodbye.
‘Why do you always run?’ he blurts out suddenly. ‘After you leave here?’
August looks startled. ‘What? Oh. I don’t know.’ She chews her lip. ‘To feel alive, I guess? Don’t you want to run after sitting in stuffy classrooms for six hours? Don’t you want to do something to remember that you are a person, not a test score?’
No.
Never.
He wouldn’t even dare.
‘I guess.’ It doesn’t sound convincing even to him.
He hates how innocent her face is, how her lips are twisted in a quiet smile, how her breath puffs in globes of cold white. He hates it because she is hope and tomorrow and he’s a goodbye and the end.
She leans close, the warmth of her breath on his cheek – yeasty, because she ate sourdough bread for lunch after offering him a piece. He refused. His cornflake sandwich was so much better, obviously.