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Posted here 16.3.23

The Piano Player Has No Fingers No. 2.

“Can I borrow the use of one of those?” asked the Piano Man. He pointed at Peter’s fingers.

He then proffered a copper ring which was fastened to one end of a thick thread, the thread’s other end leading from a flywheel, a flywheel that spun eccentrically on a large Meccano model – a ring which Peter allowed to be placed on his finger … marrying him, as it were, to childhood’s contraption.

After about five minutes of intense scrutiny of the Meccano model – kneeling down to view its innermost sanctums – the Piano Man told Peter to tug sharply on the ring. Before thinking, Peter jerked the finger and the machine started whirring like a clock about to strike. And Peter became the small boy who used to play with the Meccano set: a small boy in over-large short grey flannel trousers and with a missing finger which he recalled being severed when he foolishly revolved the pedals of an upside-down bicycle and tried to stop the spokes spinning with the said finger.

The Piano Man smiled as he held up his own fingerless fist and faded away. But Peter had already forgotten him, as he stared into the nursery fire, where lines of sparks climbed the back. He thought they were armies marching to a war in the darkness of the chimney. He turned away from the embers, which had been long left untended by the grown-ups. Since his bedtime drew on apace, he looked toward the toys grouped round the cot. His clockwork train remained derailed beside the inattentive teddy-bear. Lead soldiers and their steeds lay about like stage stiffs from Tom Thumb’s Theatre. Remains of a dismantled Meccano model were strewn across the carpet. Many figures were already asleep and one in particular, called Honky Tonk, lay unnoticed near the dying light of the fire. Honky Tonk had indeed accompanied Peter to tea with the grown-ups and had helped him name the fruit-stones around the edge of his pudding-bowl. Honky Tonk had been a tin soldier, before his painted uniform had worn off.

#

“Peter’s alive, isn’t he?” said the woman to the messenger at the door. Tears began to well in her eyes.

“He’s missing…”

“Who’s he missing?”

The question was fired like a gun, with no realisation of the ludicrousness of asking it. Joanna wiped her hands down her apron – for she had been caught cooking. She almost smiled and then wept bitterly. An elderly gentleman came to stand behind her, emerging from the gloom of the hallway. His pipe was in his hand – being prepared for speaking his mind – but all he could do was rest his hand on Joanna’s shoulder in a pitiful attempt both to comfort her and to steady his own wobbly legs.

The messenger thought it best to leave. As he strode down the garden path, the tired couple were still wide-eyed at the doorway, like model people who were tokens of weather to come. He wondered why they had given their tired old eyes the bother of silently counting the silver buttons on his uniform.

#

Peter lay awake.

A depth of overlapping shadows … noiseless movements of nights past and nights future as they sought union in that one night of nights … even the toys – Honky Tonk among them – sank into the deep-pile carpet, for fear of such a night … the fire was a dead eye in the corner … and Peter recalled that the last fruit-stone he had counted was not the Tinker nor the Tailor, but a Soldier on the brink of unutterable pain. Tinker, Tailor, Beggarman, Thief, Ploughboy, Piano Man…

#

Joanna lay awake, too. Peter was surely her only son. The snoring mound by her side was no longer her husband but the faraway hill where her son had died. She had her legs curled up to her chest, as if afraid to lower them to the colder reaches of the bed. Down there would be she knew not what, but what was indeed down there would soon need to come up for air. It was only a matter of time.

#

On the roof, just above Peter’s nursery window, was something else that had wanted air: a shape that numbered the slates to pass the interminability of that night of nights. It curled up on itself, to keep warm, for the house where it had chosen to brood, was at the centre of a frost-hollow. Within the nursery, Peter stared from his bed and listened to the crackling of the window’s pane. The sight of Honky Tonk’s dark blob on the carpet eased his dithering with false dreams … because, quite simply, there was a horse on the roof, if one that was barely alive and now only softly snickering – or a human being tapping the slates with fingers…

If in other bed-ends, and on other roof-trees, there began to quicken the once dead sparks of existence, it was too late, since the red streamers of dawn were just around the corner. Peter finally slept for a few fitful hours. When he awoke he saw that Jack Frost had splattered crazy patterns of pink icing across the bright-seeping rhombus of the window.

He turned on his side and smiled at his waiting toys. Honky Tonk lay beside the fallen ashes of the hearth.

#

The messenger returned. The old couple noticed this time that he didn’t have any fingers on one hand.

Peter had been found, he told them.

Joanna again wiped her hands down her apron and, bewildered, she seemed to check whether the pattern had come off in the process. She stamped her feet, one after the other, as if to warm them up or count time to some built-in music. The elderly gentleman rose up from the dark backdrop of the hall and said: “That’s good news. When will he be home?”

“The body is here now.” The messenger pointed to the van in which he had arrived. “I’m afraid it’s not a pretty sight – identification you see was most difficult. We just need your final confirmation.”

The couple stood and stared, whilst the ugly corpse was frog-marched up and down in front of them. His last parade.

As the weather was exceedingly nippy Joanna and her elderly spouse afterwards went into the kitchen to warm themselves in front of the woodstove. They had toast and wild honey for breakfast and spent the rest of the morning talking to someone they called Peter.

“How about some damsons and custard for tea, Peter. You like that, don’t you?”

Peter never answered.

#

She was a little girl in pigtails – a real dish of a face and knobbly knees fit to tweak the strings of the crabbiest heart. She took the boy by the hand into the woods near the village where they lived – telling him that she would show him the hospice. His imagination was really on overdrive as they tried to reach it. She knew parts of the wood he did not even dream existed, where the translucent golden girders of the early sun twirled like circus spotlights, passing through their bodies as if even real people were ghosts. Before long, she pointed beyond the trees. They skipped and hopped and giggled, holding hands, fingers entwined, her leading, all the way across a meadowy clearing, in full view of the shimmering white sky.

And then they saw more clearly the dark rambling house with large lifted roof. It looked as if it were on stilts. With a striped balcony sticking out – as if the structure’s sole purpose was to support such a shelf-like appendage. People in dark clothes, with the odd glinting button, were going in and out of the front entrance, some always staying in, others out. On the huge balcony, there were a few desultory horses: their long nosebagged heads lowered in grazing. Music sounded faintly.

“That’s the hospice,” she said.

“The hoss-piss?”

The boy merely breathed the reply. He pointed, but his finger seemed to enter another world: fading from its knuckle-root outwards into cold. He tried to point again. And again.

She looked blank – and walked towards the house alone. Her heartstrings a model of tight wires.

#

Joanna woke and turned to the still mound beside her in bed: the once innocent boy turned husband turned old man, now at last dead flesh. A fruitless, if bearable, marriage. Thankfully, he would not need to suffer the institutionalised indignities yet in store for her. Women always lasted longer. The world’s weathering seemed to suit them better. She wove her own hands together in the darkness, recalling days when other fingers – a young soldier’s fingers – had entwined amongst them. Abruptly, she honked her guts, as she felt a cold touch. The fruit of her flesh around a stony heart.

(One of two stories with the same title published in ‘Palace Corbie’ 1996)

THE PIANO PLAYER WITHOUT FINGERS No. 1 — http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2007/03/piano-player-has-no-fingers-no-1.html