In the late 1980s researchers discovered that small injections of botox can block the nerve signals causing muscles to contract, and in the case of some musicians can help their muscles relax to a level that allows some to resume playing. The effect is temporary, just as it is for those who receive botox injections to relax the facial muscles that cause crow’s-feet. Fleisher was one of the lucky ones: following injections into his right forearm, he played with both hands in a concert with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1996. It was thirty years since his last two-handed performance. Botox didn’t prevent Leon Fleisher from ageing, but it did help him turn back the clock.
When I left the Sydney Opera House after the Chopin competition, an undeniable relief punctured my humiliation. The experience had forced me to admit to myself that I didn’t love the works I was studying so intensively for my A. Mus. A. diploma; that I strongly preferred playing jazz standards and trying, however poorly, to improvise; and that there was therefore little point in continuing my pursuit of a level of technical perfection that I couldn’t achieve, and which, more importantly, I knew I did not want.
I would not be a classical pianist when I grew up. Not only did I lack the passionate dedication for such a life, but there was a physical limit to my ability to achieve it. And in terms of classical piano prodigies, I was already well over the hill.
My right hand had staged an uprising against the excessive demands I had made of it. Unlike Leon Fleisher, I wasn’t prepared to fight this. It took me twenty years to learn that focal dystonia is a kind of rebellion of the body, but the discovery made perfect sense. As a teenager I had agreed, deep down, with what my body was telling me, but had tried very hard to ignore it. It was the only powerful force in my life that I had refused immediately to obey.
Perhaps at this point other students would have tossed in the piano altogether, but the goal of obtaining my performance diploma remained. It was only a month or three away, I reasoned with myself, constitutionally unable to abandon a goal once set. And so I turned up to my weekly lessons with Mr McFarlane, kept practising at home—where the dystonia disappeared now that we had substituted a Brahms prelude for the Chopin—and dutifully passed my A. Mus. A. exam on 25 November 1989.
‘Memory work is commended. There was a sense of performance but do be careful not to allow the audience to be aware by your “grimaces” of everything you are not pleased with in your playing,’ noted one of the two examiners in her handwritten report.
Recently, my friend Kelsey and I discussed our musical adventures in high school. She is the only person from school I keep in touch with, but not only because we were expat Australians in the USA. As teenagers we’d spent a lot of time together rehearsing pieces for her to sing at school concerts with my accompaniment, from Schubert arias through to Lennon and McCartney.
‘I remember listening to you perform when you first arrived at Wenona,’ she recalled. ‘The headmistress asked you to play for the school, and it sounded amazing. I thought, Who on earth is that?’
It’s funny what you choose to remember. I had no recollection of the performance.
‘But I have to tell you,’ Kelsey said, ‘you never looked happy when you played.’
In This Real Night, Rose Aubrey despairs of a new piano teacher who insists she go back to the fundamentals of study. In her despair, Rose considers the tantalising prospect of abandoning the instrument altogether.
For as I sobbed I was only partly anguished. I also saw a vision of myself walking by the river near the Dog and Duck, as happy as the blessed dead, my mind flowing bright and unconfined and leisured as the Thames I looked on, because I had cast away the burden, so infinitely greater than myself who had to bear it, of my vocation. I would earn a living somehow.
Though I was never going to be a concert pianist, and though I’d never felt convinced beyond doubt that the piano was my vocation, I felt the liberation of having cast away the burden West describes. But it wasn’t until I discontinued lessons with Mr McFarlane and stopped practising my scales and arpeggios, my Mozart K280, my Bach ‘Prelude and Fugue in F minor’, my Brahms ‘Rhapsody’ and my Prokofiev ‘Gavotte’, that I felt how heavy and unreasonable my self-imposed burden of solo piano performance had been. After almost thirteen years, my highwire act riding the tension monocycle was over. Now, like Rose Aubrey, I’d have to think about ways to earn a living. I was studying for an Arts degree. I was still living at home. And, on the cusp of twenty, I was still a virgin.
27
AS THE BERRIMA PLOUGHED ITS WAY through the South Atlantic Ocean, Alice came to enjoy strolling the deck by herself after dinner with nothing but the depthless water below her and the stars above. On deck she avoided the couples who colonised the bow with their linked arms and their two abreast, preferring to stop halfway along the ship where its sooty exhalations were at their thinnest no matter which way the wind blew. She liked to inhale deeply and watch the wind whip the waves into stiff peaks; she found staring into the brilliantly lit nothingness unexpectedly soothing, the whoosh and slap of the water against the ship a reassuring sound of literal progress, even if she felt that she personally was making little.
According to that morning’s announcement during breakfast, they were but a few days from the port of Cape Town. How the crew knew
