“Pinch yourself,” she says to me.
We use a box of tissues to clean her up as best we can, then she sneaks off to a nearby bathroom for a proper wash. I dress myself in the dark Academy studio, my breaths still ragged, trying to make sense of this life. Last time Mum came to London, she had her heart broken. This time, something sparked between us and she touched me to orgasm.
I have a mental image of myself in twenty years time, returning to this English city to continue the timeline. London has our family in its roots and pavements.
What a rainy day it is.
———
I decide to let Mum rest while I look for something to eat. It’s the least I can do.
So I set out from the confines of our studio into the endless black Academy. The lights are still out, with no sign of turning back on. Students line the hallways, sifting through coursework by torchlight, sitting cross-legged with jackets over their laps, chattering with friends about the storm. It seems that the majority of my audience is staying here overnight.
The walls groan in the wind, as though we were at sea.
It’s a strangely cosy affair. Something about the collective sleepiness of everyone sheltering inside the school contrasts nicely with the violent outside weather. I am reminded of the natural disasters I see on TV, during which everyone bands together to keep one another safe and fed. There’s an air of comradery among all those at the Academy, students and teachers alike.
I source several woollen blankets from a frantic-looking dean on the ground floor. It’s a little busier down here. There are a number of stations on trestle tables where people are charging their phones. Cables run outside to several anchored diesel generators.
The dean tells me there’s limited food in the store rooms on the east wing of the building.
“It’s all canned, though,” he says. He wipes his brow. “We’re right out of soup.”
He waves me away soon enough. I don’t think he realises I was the one performing to his students before the power went out. That’s fine by me. I head off with my newfound blankets, taking turns down foreign corridors and through lecture halls in the vague direction of east.
I am nearing the store rooms when I hear someone playing the piano. The sound should be at home in this place, but it stops me in my tracks. It’s a cheerful tune, the sort which begs for an accompanying vocalist. It comes to me as though through an open summer window.
I shoulder my blankets and follow it to its source: a humble, dirty door off a stray linoleum hallway. I let myself inside. The room I enter is large and dark, lit only by the white glow of a flashlight. It is full of pianos standing in dusty rows like soldiers, yellowed with age and flung by cobwebs. A girl sits at an old R. Lipp & Sohn upright by the far wall.
The girl is Nicole.
She turns to look at me as I enter, stops playing, and drops the fallboard closed.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
Nicole rotates on her stool to face me. “They call this place the graveyard,” she says.
“It looks the part.”
“It does.”
I walk to her through the rows of pianos. “What’s the graveyard, then?”
Nicole watches my approach. She seems poised on the stool, ready to burst into motion at any given second. The last peals of her happy tune are dead in the air, leaving the room very quiet. It’s also very dusty, I realise. My nose itches.
“This is where they take the pianos when something breaks,” Nicole explains. She taps a finger on the R. Lipp & Sohn. “This one has no sustaining pedal. That one there has a snapped string.” She looks around the room. “It’s meant to be more of a workshop than a graveyard.”
“Why isn’t it?”
Nicole shrugs.
I draw up an old stool beside her.
“There used to be a guy who fixed them,” Nicole says. She fixes me a stare. “But he went insane, you know. Shouting in the night. Seeing things round corners.”
“A Jack Torrance type?”
“Uh-huh.” She leans in. Her voice drops to a murmur. “Then one day, we all woke up and he was dead on a piano stool—in this very room. There was a knife in his back and everything. Blood all over the keys. No one’s come in here since. They say it’s haunted.”
“No shit?”
Nicole laughs. “I’m kidding, Aussie. He fucked off somewhere with his rich wife.” She folds one leg over the other. “I guess the school can’t be arsed fixing them anymore.”
“I see.”
“Yeah, sorry.” She leans back with a yawn. “Still, it’s pretty cool down here. Students mostly use it to get drunk, or take gummies, or have sex.”
“Or play the piano?” I suggest.
“Yes. Or play the piano.”
We listen to the rain. It comes to us through a dozen layers of wall and classroom; the faintest distant static. Nicole takes to a packet of sweets as we sit there. I watch her jaw work. She was pretty, that night I met her when I first arrived in London, and she is pretty now. I dimly wonder whether she enjoyed her night at the lantern festival.
“I like your tendrils,” I tell her. “Your hair, I mean.”
Nicole tucks them behind her ears. “Dad says they’re childish.”
“Hm. I think they’re nice.”
She looks away with a little smile. “All right. Thanks.”
It is a strange unreality for me to sit here and talk to someone I hardly know. There’s never been any time for such things when Mum and I travel; the slots between practice and performance always existed only for me to sleep. London has been different.
“I used to come down here a lot,” Nicole says after a while. “On lonely nights.”
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