FIVE HUNDRED PEOPLE SETTLED INTO THEIR seats inside the Hunters Hill Town Hall and waited for the lights to dim. The philanthropically minded folk of the neighbourhood had gathered for a concert to celebrate the opening night of the Rotary Club charity art show, which my father had been coordinating, in addition to the charity golf day, for ten years. He specialised in thankless annual events. My participation as a featured soloist tonight was voluntary too. My specialty was playing the piano in public, an activity I was no longer sure I enjoyed.
While I sat at one side of the front row waiting to walk on stage, my clammy palms felt as porous as the honey-coloured sandstone from which the hall had been built in 1866. With several minutes still to go before I was due to perform, I was trying to visualise the opening bars of the piece I was about to play from memory: it was in Book Four of the Mikrokosmos, a work that Béla Bartók composed from 1926 to 1939. Recalling pieces note for note had always been a point of pride for me. I could play a Mozart or Beethoven sonata of ten minutes’ duration without forgetting a thing. Usually I summoned the score instantly in my mind’s eye, but tonight, for the first time in my junior performance career, I couldn’t remember how the piece began. Which was ironic given that Bartók felt no shame about performing his own music in public with the score.48
You’ll be fine, you’ll remember how it begins when you get up there, I told myself, calling my own bluff as I walked on stage to generous applause. Many of those clapping enthusiastically had watched me grow up at the piano. Just beyond the stage lights I could make out Mr and Mrs Kovacek, whose son went to school with my brother; they had announced their separation years earlier but never went through with it due to the expense of divorce. In front of them sat the Bickersons, a codename my brother and I used for a Rotarian and his wife who argued constantly in front of others. Closer to the front the mayor’s glamorous wife sat beside her husband wearing makeup applied like a coat of armour. Her look was all blonde streaks and sequins, an Australian translation of the hit television series Dynasty. Her razor-sharp shoulderblades threatened the spaghetti straps of her sleeveless shift.
I nodded and smiled into the constellation of faces, then sat in front of the huge Kawai grand piano I had rehearsed on earlier that afternoon. My hair, cut in a long bob that fell over half my face, hid the evidence plainly written on it. For once I had defied my mother, who still insisted I pull it back into a ponytail. ‘So everyone can see your face,’ she’d said. Again.
Through the unconscious knowledge of trained muscles, the opening of the Bartók miraculously came to me. On stage I exhaled slowly, recognising that this was yet another occasion when there had been no need for me to fret as much as I had. I’d been foolish to let my imagination run away with catastrophic scenarios.
I was about two-thirds of the way through when I became aware of my hands hovering over the keys. It took me less than half a second to realise that I didn’t know what came next. My mind’s eye, which had always automatically scrolled through the printed music, had failed to turn the page.
I shook my wrists slightly as if this would jump-start my memory, but nothing changed. I couldn’t recall what followed all the notes I had just played, nor could I experiment while hundreds of ears were tuned in my direction. In life I was often at a loss for words, but at the piano I had never lost the next note. My hands paused in midair, I heard the silence emanating from the hundreds of people watching me.
As there was no apparent way forward, the only thing I could do was to go back. To the beginning. I started all over again, part of me wondering how many in the audience even noticed I had done so in their relief that I had broken the spell of my silence.
I was grateful for the curtain of hair that fell across my face. I couldn’t see anyone, not least my mother. She might not have picked up on what was happening musically but would still be wishing I’d at least worn a barrette.
Working my way towards the part where I had lost all sense of direction minutes earlier, I felt an unexpected rush at having given over to my fingers the responsibility of getting me home—as if, after being paralysed in combat, the only available course of action was to trust my comrades to carry me to safety. Whether muscle memory would kick in this time, I would simply have to wait and see.
Before I knew it I was playing the last third, flying toward the final bars knowing freedom lay immediately beyond them. For long seconds, my heart in my mouth, I’d considered my options if memory had failed me again. There were none. Like Houdini I had survived a situation in which I’d had no option other than to escape, or to die on stage.
When my hands finally came to a stop I paused over the keys to emphasise that both performer and audience had reached the end of the sorry saga. I stood up to rapturous applause in which I heard the vibrato of relief.
After the concert, by the trestle tables laden with self-serve tea and coffee and Arnott’s Assorted biscuits, I smiled and shrugged at a succession of well-meaning people as they congratulated me on my death-defying performance. I responded on autopilot to the whos, hows, whys and whats from old women and older men. Why was Rotarianese so easy for me to speak, I wondered, when I struggled to talk about anything interesting with most girls my age? Because of my intensive piano study and furtive improvisations I often felt older than my peers, but I was too young to be so comfortable with the people who surrounded me now, who really were old. At fifteen I still hadn’t had a period or a boyfriend. Old could wait.