22
‘HELLO, RICHARD, COME ON IN,’ I said to the head of fair hair bent over his satchel at my front door. He gripped the leather bag to his chest as if it were a Homeric shield. I couldn’t imagine what he carried inside it. To get to my house, he had only to descend the driveway from his own home, which perched on the steep hill on the north side of sleepy George Street, and cross to its south side. An odyssey of less than one minute.
‘Hello,’ Richard mumbled, his eyes darting in every direction except my face. He stood with his shoulders hunched, as if expecting someone more important to sneak up behind him at any minute. My first task would be trying to get him to relax. I closed the door behind him and set off up the stairs to the piano room, which was still Sitting Quietly after all these years.
Richard looked so grown up. Though it had been two or three years since I had been this close to him in person, we’d been neighbours all our lives. Most of our recent communication had been conducted in sedan semaphore, hands waving inside the windows of passing cars. He was taller than I’d expected: I was used to seeing him sitting inside a car rather than standing up, and he was only thirteen. Even so, he already dressed like a suburban dad. His sports jacket was ubiquitous among men who looked as though their only relation to physical activity had been to observe it from distant sidelines—men like his father, one of the wealthiest property developers in Sydney. I was unsure whether our mothers’ agreement that I would teach Richard in half-hour increments once a week reflected my mother’s marketing chops, his mother’s faith in my untested teaching ability, or the serendipitous intersection of frugality and geographical convenience.
Although I had drawn the obvious conclusion that teaching beginners from the comfort of my home was better than any other part-time paying job I could get, Richard was my first student. Like my father, I had a knack for mining endless seams of volunteer work. During high school there had been my work experience stints at two different radio stations and one local newspaper. During the first year of my degree, in the fullest phase of my anxiousness to be useful in the world, I rose willingly at four in the morning in order to drive to the headquarters of a community radio station, where I paraphrased items from the local paper and read them on air every half an hour between 5 and 9 a.m. I had scored this dubious work experience myself. Among my father’s Rotary coterie there were no contacts in the world of magazines and newspapers, where I sometimes fancied myself a budding Lois Lane.
My mobility at that moonlit hour had been due to my parents’ generous gift of a second-hand Nissan Pulsar hatchback. Having to pay for my own petrol, insurance and registration was a key factor in my capitulation to the idea of teaching beginners. So was my mother’s insistence that I pay her a weekly board now that I had left school. She was unapologetic in viewing my continuing to live under her roof, as she had begun referring to the house I’d grown up in, as an economic transaction. Like the women in the novels I was reading, my mother did not generate an income. Despite advocating my financial independence, she never seemed concerned that she depended entirely on the man she married, as Earth does the sun. The economic exchange they had entered upon marriage was the crucial but invisible element of their ecosystem, rather like oxygen to the survival of the species. My mother’s insistence on my financial contribution to the household—which I thought fair enough—meant I’d have to rustle up a few piano students. That wouldn’t mean that I was, you know, becoming a piano teacher.
Richard slumped at the piano stool and looked directly ahead, as if waiting for take-off. I sat down behind him and to his right like a copilot. It then occurred to me that I had placed my chair in relation to the piano exactly where Mr McFarlane used to sit in relation to me. It was uncanny to be sitting in the teacher’s seat, watching someone else—my student, no less—play my own piano. Instead of a mirror, it was like a window on an earlier self.
It was difficult to believe that Mr McFarlane made a satisfying life’s work out of staring at the backs of adolescents, and unimaginable that my stint as a teacher was anything other than temporary. I hadn’t a clue about what I’d eventually do for a living, but the thought of repeating myself was intolerable. Despite my observations of Mrs Dalton’s older ballet students, the idea of doing the same thing year in year out—which is how I thought about everything from gaining a Law degree to raising children—still induced paralysis. If I chose not to think about the future, then it might just fail to show up.
‘It might be a bit easier for you to play if you sat up straight, Richard.’
He pulled himself upright but kept his hands hanging at his sides like levers waiting to be pulled.
‘Now, take your right hand and press this note here with your thumb.’
Richard touched the white note gently, as if it might set off an alarm.
‘Do you see how that note is in the middle of the keyboard? We call that note Middle C.’
He remained silent.
‘Try placing your second finger on the note to the right of Middle C—yes, good—and your third finger on the note to its right. Great!’
Richard stretched his fingers over the notes so tautly that the tips were almost raised off the tarmac,
