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?”