Idol Fingers

You choose to scream, it’s an entirely voluntary reaction.

I did not make a sound. I couldn’t. This was my masterpiece, and it got easier to play with every severed digit.

Father was a failed concert pianist. He had gone after his dream with everything he had and found himself short. His life ambition was to play the greats to an enraptured audience. To gently tickle out a subtle tierce de Picardie, fingering his way across the piano, drawing the whole crowd to a climax. To be the catalyst for one of those magic moments when you can hear a pin drop in a sold-out auditorium. He insisted the problem was he started too late, as good as he got he never had ‘it’. He never had that inbuilt affinity you only get from playing the piano from a very young age. A mistake he was sure would not afflict me. From four years old I was sat at a piano and was forced to practice until father was pleased enough with my progress.

I rigourously played my scales and arpeggios. Every day I did a study in a different key. By six I could sight read music perfectly but could not read a word of written English. The standard schooling system was a waste of my time and talent. When I wasn’t playing piano Father taught me English, and any other core skills he deemed completely essential.

Father had many different piano tutors over whilst he was out at work, it was nice to meet new faces and I used to question them endlessly, but he didn’t totally trust that they could teach as well as him or perhaps all my interruptions slowed our progress so he’d always want a recap of what they might have done wrong before taking over the teaching when he got home.

By ten years of age, I had already experienced countless magic moments, I had heard whole orchestras of pin-drops and I had sold out very large auditoriums. I was a prodigy. The golden child of the keys.

Skin, tendons, and flesh, the knife went through these like butter. Bone, however, that was a different story. Bone took real perseverance, bone took commitment, bone took every ounce of drive you could muster.

My whole life was practice and performance, I was disciplined. I practiced all week and then performed every weekend. We travelled all over the world. Sometimes for the really faraway places, we would lose a day or two of practice in travel, these were my first taste of freedom. Although all they entailed was me sitting, normally in silence, doing nothing. You have no idea how exhilarating it was, not staring at my piano keys. Some days, at home, I could see the keys in the darkside of my eyelids when I blinked. But when we travelled we did so alone, Beethoven, Debussy and Tchaikovsky all markedly absent on the road. Conversation was not something that came easily between me and my Father, so solitude was normally my travelling companion. Many miles were covered with silence the song title. The gentle hum of the car engine, the slow intake and exhalation of my father’s breathing, the sweeping whoosh of air as cars sped past, the to and the fro of the air freshener as it swings from side to side, the electric feeling of the air conditioning standing the hairs at the back of your neck to attention, the orchestra of the road trip was the first time I really fell in love with music.

There’s a very real epiphany when you realise that once you’re through the bone, that finger is irreparably lost to you and then there is the horrible grit your teeth, nail down chalkboard reality of grinding your way through that bone. But I wouldn’t quit, I couldn’t.

At around eighteen I really started to rebel, or so my Father says. I don’t know what happened, but he said I deliberately sabotaged my shows. ‘I stopped playing the music and just played the notes’, I played less and less shows, and so we practiced more and more, it was at the height of this renewed and bolstered practice regime, without even the road trips to grant me the rest that I coveted, Father broke my fingers. It was my fault really, I wasn’t paying attention whilst playing my triplets, I was slurring them when I should have joined and vice versa. My Father grew increasingly agitated by this and slammed the open casing closed with my hands still in the piano. At the hospital, I was told there were a couple of fractures and I wouldn’t be able to use my fingers for at least a month. A month, of no practice. It was my interlude, and I cherished every second.

It’s a very strange place that your brain inhabits staring at the newly detached part of you. For that short moment when the knife still connects the two now separate entities you don’t realize. You try to move the finger; your body doesn’t understand that it’s no longer part of you. You stand staring, trying to bend it. But all that moves is the stump, and the growing puddle of blood ripples, and if you listen very close, you can hear the soft squelch of freshly exposed tendons flailing against wet metal.

I had to cripple myself completely to fully be free. Problem was that it is no easy task to slice through the fingers of your left hand when your right is now just a palpitating stump. How had I not considered this? I stare at my lithe, perfectly toned fingers lying disconnected on the countertop, if I wasn’t so isolated I might imagine all the things I had touched with those fingers, all the things we had done. But apart from my month-long jailbreak all they had ever done was slave away at the piano. I don’t know how long it is that I stand there, trying to re-attach at least a couple fingers so I can cut off the remaining digits from my other hand. I beg my Father to finish the job when he get’s home but he doesn’t seem to hear me. I wonder if it was me, or my five pretty little piano-playing fingers that he rushes to the hospital.

The orchestral arrangement of this act was never lost on me, in fact, a solitary tear rolled down my cheek when ‘my thumb’ became ‘a thumb’. Not from the overwhelming agony, not from the loss of my hand, but from the hypnotizing sound of my final symphony.

Every crescendo’ing thump of the knife connecting with the chopping board, every sickeningly silent slice as it carves through flesh, every pause in between notes, the little ‘tock’ when it connected with bone and then the beautiful screeching serenade as it grates through it. The music of freedom sounds very different to every pair of ears.