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It doesn’t come from me. My fingers don’t even touch the keys. No one ever asks why I insist on sitting behind the curtain.
“It’s the music that’s important,” I told Mr Jenkins when I started at the restaurant. “It’s not about me.” He just wanted someone to play the piano. He couldn’t care less whether they were visible or not. He’d recently acquired it from the old theatre. They’re turning it into flats now. I pass it on my rounds.
You’d think it’d be exhausting, focusing all that energy, but the worst thing I ever come away with is a numbness from spending the whole evening on the stool. You can’t even complain about finger cramps when you’re not pressing the keys.
The best nights are the ones when there are people with serious problems: sickness; death; affairs. I feel their energy the strongest, and the piano feeds on it like a mosquito sucking blood, plumping up its abdomen with all that juice. For me it just feels hot and dense – like a muggy summer inside your heart.
I sit behind my curtain and listen to the clink of cutlery; wine pouring from bottles; waiters taking orders with politeness straight out of a mould. I lay my hands under the piano and close my eyes. I’ve tried it with them open – it’s fascinating, the way the keys move like they’re being pressed by invisible fingers – but it doesn’t work. I can’t channel them then. There were complaints about the pianist that night, Mr Jenkins told me.
People leave in tears almost every evening.
“That piano,” someone said once. “It’s like it’s reading what’s in my blood.”
They love it. They feel understood. Less lonely, I suppose. And me, I feel the weight of all the affairs I’ve never had, all the cancers and fights and betrayals. It’s like reading a book: it touches you, but once it’s over you go back to your life like nothing’s changed. If they ever pull back the curtain, it’s over. I’ll stop being their witness and they’ll see me: the man who delivers the milk in the morning, a man who can’t even read music. A man who doesn’t even touch the keys.
About Jenny Adamthwaite
J. Adamthwaite lives in East London where she works as a teaching assistant. She has had short fiction published by Cinnamon Press, Stand Magazine, and in the National Flash Fiction Day anthology, Jawbreakers. She is currently working on a novel.
