-Will-
I do my best to blag taking the hammer on the Eurostar. ‘DIY on my home in Paris.’ ‘You just can’t get good tools over there.’ But they don’t buy it. The hammer is confiscated. Never mind. What I said about decent tools in Paris is a lie. I’m sure I’ll be able to buy a hammer. Before I get to the school.
I board the train. As we are waiting to depart, I think about the lecture. There will be disapproval at me postponing it again. But it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t be complete without this, this extra bit of research. I have my darling wife to thank for this, for finding and revealing the school Sophie teaches at. Thinking of Ellie, I look at my phone. Nothing from her. That’s a surprise. I thought my darling wife would want to talk. Would want to know why the lecture I claimed to be leaving the house for has been postponed. Soon enough, I will tell her. But not yet. Not until Sophie is dead.
Do I feel advance remorse for what I’m going to do? No. Because this is the woman who has stolen my life. I know everything now, thanks to the memories, thanks to Ellie. That my mother used to have a temper. That she used to beat me. That she used to shout at my father. My Max. And that one time, while we were in the black-and-white-tiled kitchen, she took a hammer and she hit him over the head. And that while he was in the middle of recording what I’m sure was a beautiful, haunting, life-changing concerto, his life ended. And my life ended then too. My real life. The life of the boy of a genius father. The life of sitting under the piano, gazing up. The life of concert halls and artists and excitement. She murdered the both of us. And then she abandoned me. To Gillian and her lies, to John and his non-communicative, non-artistic, non-interesting parenting. To suburban ordinariness. To a non-identity. But I’m going to have my revenge now. My revenge and Max’s vengeance. All my expertise, it is for this. My study of the skull, the brain, the blood. All of it is my calling, to smash in Sophie’s cranium with a hammer and return home in glory. I will wet my son’s head in the first blood of family triumph. He will be a Reigate then, not a Spears. As will we all. Me, Ellie, and Leo. Reigates.
As the train moves towards Sophie’s death, I am pleased to hear it play Max’s concerto. Du-du-dum, du-du-dum, du-du-dum, it goes. If I press my head against the window, I can hear not just the piano, but the undertones of the strings, and the whine of the woodwind. I lift my head back off the window. I am not interested in the strings and the woodwind. I just want to hear the piano. Du-du-dum, du-du-dum, du-du-dum. The train hasn’t learnt all of the concerto like I have. It misses the variance in rhythm. Makes everything too uniform, too methodical. At least it moves at a fast tempo. I can teach it the rest. I become the train’s conductor, waving my hands to show the beats, humming the little cadences that the train does not know. When the ticket conductor comes round, he pauses only briefly to inspect my ticket. He knows I am dealing with a higher art form than him. The main theme comes round again, and I play it on the table in front of me. Because I’ve learnt that bit now. I can play it along with Max, the both of us together. Like when I play on my piano in the office – I have the piano so shiny now, that when I play there is an extra pair of hands reflected back at me from the wood of the piano. They are disembodied hands, up to wrist only, and they closely resemble my own. Except really, they are Max’s hands, from beyond his piano-grave, playing his music with me. A father-son duet.
And maybe, just maybe, in her flat Sophie will have some kind of shrine to Max’s genius. In fact, how could she not? Even if she thinks of it as a shrine to herself, to the evil she is capable of, it will be there. And in that shrine will be the piano. Max’s piano. I will finally caress the very keys that expressed his genius. Our hands will touch across the years, across the notes, across the pain. Plus there’ll be pictures of me and Max. She will have kept them, too, out of the same pride that has made her keep the piano. I will find them and I will take them – I will restore the childhood I have lost. The thought of this enables me and the train to tackle the smoother passages of the second movement with more legato than I have managed previously – we are at one with the slow flow of the music.
By the time the train arrives in Paris, we have almost played the full concerto three times. We had just reached the start of the third movement – fast, still with that underlying beat of three, accelerating in pace until the final glorious whirling cadenza. I continue as I disembark, stepping swiftly onto the platform. I don’t need the train’s help. I don’t need anyone’s help. I just need to kill Sophie.
As I stand on the concourse at Gare du Nord I suddenly feel like weeping. Here I am, in this beautiful city. I’ve been brought here by beautiful music. I’m going to become a father in a couple of months. It should be the happiest happiest time. Imagine what it would be like if I’d never heard about Max. Never heard about Sophie. If I was just in Paris, waiting to be a dad. But no. Never think that. Because to unthink Max is to do what Sophie has done – to uninvent him, to delete him, to try to eradicate him from the earth. That is why Sophie is so bad. And it is why if I remove Sophie, I will in a way be bringing back Max. There’ll be closure. I can move on, proudly.
It is simple enough buying a replacement hammer. I suppose if I was a murderer, I would buy lots of other tools too, to throw the tool-shop owner off the scent. I suppose I would have learnt the French for hammer. Or got out some Euros. As it is, he’s pretty likely to remember the mumbling Englishman buying a hammer and paying with a credit card. The credit card company will remember me too. Good job, then, that I’m not a murderer, but an avenger.
And so on to the school. I get the Métro. My hammer sits snug inside my jacket, waiting to come out. Nobody on the Métro knows what I am about to do. But they would understand, if I told them. They value artistry, here. They know that genius must be savoured or, if that cannot be, then avenged. The Métro is of course playing Max’s tunes. It has a better grasp of them than the train. As we lurch about, speeding up, slowing down, never constant, I feel that Max is on the train somewhere, playing to us. I feel the familiar pulse of blood in my head as I hear the masterful crescendo, his virtuosic solo passages, his unapologetic crashing over the woodwind and the strings. I know he wrote their pieces too. But they were only straw musicians, put there to serve his genius. He is the real star of the show.
Before the tune can finish I arrive at my station. I climb the steps, up to the light, up to the air, up to the green waving trees. And there it is. L’école Sainte-Thérèse. With Sophie inside it.