—
It had actually been known for years that we’d learned, even if we weren’t much good. None of that really mattered, though, given that childhoods latch on to things at different times. You can be left alone for a decade, only to be hung out to dry in your teens. You could collect stamps and have it labeled interesting in first grade, and have it haunt you in ninth.
For me, as I said, it was sixth grade.
All it took was a kid a few inches shorter, but a lot more powerful, who actually was a juvenile boxer—a kid named Jimmy Hartnell. His father, Jimmy Hartnell Sr., owned the Tri-Colors Boxing Gym, over on Poseidon Road.
And Jimmy, what a kid.
He was built like a very small supermarket: Compact; expensive if you crossed him.
His hair was a ginger fringe.
In terms of how it started, there were boys and girls in the corridor, and angles of dust and sun. There were uniforms and callings-out, and countless moving bodies. It was beautiful in that off-putting way, how the light came streaking in; those perfect, long-lit beams.
Jimmy Hartnell strode the hallway, freckly, confident, toward me. White-shirted, grey-shorted. The look he wore was pleased. He was perfect schoolish thuggery; his smell the smell of breakfast, his arms all blood and meat.
“Hey,” he said, “isn’t that that Dunbar kid? The one who plays the piano?” He rolled a shoulder, givingly, into me. “What a fucking poofter!”
That kid was made for italics.
* * *
—
It went on like that for weeks, maybe a month, and always a little bit further. The shoulder became an elbow, the elbow a punch in the balls (although not nearly as lethal as old Bread Rolls), which soon became standard favorites—nipple cripples in the boys’ toilets, here and there a headlock; choker holds in the hall.
In so many ways, looking back, it was just the spoils of childhood, to be twisted and rightfully ruled. It’s not unlike that dust in the sun, being tumbled through the room.
But that didn’t mean I enjoyed it.
Or even more, that I wouldn’t react.
For me, like so many in that situation, I didn’t face the problem directly, or at least I didn’t yet. No, that would have been pure stupidity, so I fought back where I could.
In short I blamed Penelope.
I railed against the piano.
* * *
—
Of course, there are problems and there are problems, and my problem now was this: Next to Penelope, Jimmy Hartnell was a Goddamn softy.
Even if she could never quite tame us at the piano, she always made us practice. She clung to an edge of Europe, or a city, at least, in the East. By then there was even a mantra she had (and by God we had it too): “You can quit if you want by high school.”
But that didn’t help me now.
We were halfway through first term, which meant most of the year to survive.
* * *
—
My attempts had started lamely:
Going to the toilet midpractice.
Arriving late.
Playing poorly on purpose.
Soon I was outright defying her; not playing certain pieces, and then not playing at all. She had all the patience in the world for those troubled and troublesome Hyperno kids, but they hadn’t prepared her for this.
At first she tried talking to me; she’d say, “What’s gotten into you lately?” and “Come on, Matthew, you’re better than that.”
Of course I told her nothing.
I had a bruise in the middle of my back.
For a good week or so, we sat, me on the right, Penny on the left, and I’d look at the language of music; the quavers, the rhythm of crotchets. I remember the look on my dad’s face, too, when he came in from the torture chamber, and found us both at war.
“Again?” he’d say.
“Again,” she’d say, and looked not at him, but ahead.
“You want a coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Some tea?”
“No.”
She sat with a face like a statue.
* * *
—
There were words now and then, in clenches, and most of them coming from me. When Penelope spoke, it was calmly.
“You don’t want to play?” she’d say. “Okay. We’ll sit here.” Her stillness became infuriating. “We’ll sit here each day till you break.”
“But I won’t break.”
“You will.”
Now I look back and see me there, at the written-on keys of the piano. Messy dark hair and gangly, eyes gleaming—and they were definitely a sort of color back then, they were blue and pale like his. I see me taut and miserable, as I assure her again, “I won’t.”
“The boredom,” she countered, “will beat you—it’ll be easier to play than not.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Sorry?” She hadn’t heard me. “What did you say?”
“I said,” I said, and turned to her, “that’s what you fucking think.”
And she stood.
She wanted to explode beside me, but she’d channeled him so well by then, and gave nothing, not a spark, away. She sat back down and watched me. “Okay,” she said, “we’ll stay then. We’ll stay here and we’ll wait.”
“I hate the piano,” I whispered. “I hate the piano and I hate you.”
It was Michael Dunbar who heard me.
He was over on the couch, and now he became America, he entered the war with force; he leapt across the lounge room, and dragged me out the back, and he could have been Jimmy Hartnell, pushing me past the clothesline, and hauling me under its pegs. There were great big shrugs of breaths of him; my hands against the fence.
“Don’t you—ever—talk to your mum like that,” as he pushed me, harder, again.
Do it, I thought. Hit me.
But Penny was near at arms.
She looked at me, she studied me.
“Hey,” she said, “hey, Matthew?”
I looked back, I couldn’t help myself.
The weapon of unexpectedness:
“Get up and get back in there—we’ve got ten fucking minutes left.”
* * *
—
Inside again, I was wrong.
I knew it was wrong to admit it—to buckle—but I did.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
She was staring straight ahead.
“You know. Fucking.”
Still, she stared forward, that music-language, unblinking. “And?”
“Saying I hate you.”
She made the slightest of moves toward me.
A move with no movement at all.
“You can swear all day, and hate me all day, if only you would play.”
* * *
—
But I didn’t play, not that night, or the next.
I didn’t play the piano for weeks, then months, and if only Jimmy Hartnell could have seen. If only he knew the pains I was going to, to free myself from him: Damn her in those slim-cut jeans, and the smoothness of her feet; and damn the sound of her breathing. Damn those murmurs in the kitchen—with Michael, my father, who backed her to the hilt—and while we’re at it, damn him too, that groveler, and his sticking up for Penelope. About the only thing he did right in that period was giving Rory and Henry a clip on the ear when they refused it, too. It was my war, not theirs, not yet. And they could come up with their own shit, of which, believe me, they were capable.
No, for me, those months were endless.
The days shortened into winter, then lengthened into spring, and still Jimmy Hartnell went for me; he never got bored or impatient. He nippled me in those toilets, and his punches bruised my groin; he was good at boxing’s low blows, all right, as both he and Penelope waited; I was there to be pushed, and broken.
How I wanted her to erupt!
How I wanted her to slap her thigh, or tear at her shampooed hair.
But no, oh no, she did him justice this time, that monument of communist silence. She’d even changed the rules on me—the practice hours were extended. She would wait in the chair beside me, and my father would bring her coffee, and toast with jam, and tea. He’d bring her biscuits, and fruit, and chocolates. The lessons were journeys of backache.