Harshly Purring by Michael Knox

Author:Michael Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Now or Never Publishing
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Two nights later when I came home Amanda was coming down the stairs with her cello. I dropped my briefcase and made an earnest plea to sit and listen. I hadn’t done this in years but I had a sudden and obscure realization that it was very important to me.

I followed her into the room where Helen was seated, flipping through music sheets like she was giving an expert skim to one of the memos I prepare for the lawyers. She looked up and gave the faintest hint of a smile when she saw me nestle into the armchair in my dishevelled tie and sagging, weary socks, intent. She sat on the piano bench. Neither of them spoke. Amanda set herself up with the cello and bow and the music before her, then suddenly upright and powerful in her chair. They exchanged a glance and began.

The sounds of my daughters at their instruments. Mist of music rising in the room, as silence does. Amanda giving wide, arcane sweeps with the wand, Helen at the piano, hands rummaging. Cracking bursts, silences taut and crisp as sound. A theatre of bodily movements of expression; I see blade thrusts in Shostakovich, woe and mournful twisting in Ravel, the diabolical and possessed in Paganini.

Music can sweep you elsewhere if you let it. I have seen the conniptions of old geniuses percussioning at the piano. Amanda at her cello and catching a flash of her eyes, a gaze that makes you feel like you are caught in a bright light, it becomes obvious what she is: a high priestess of a goddess. Looking alone in dark borderlands, mistressing over Amazons from the deep of night. She holds a torch aloft in each hand. People hardly dare speak her name. This may not be how she sees herself. But then again, it may be.

This was a beginning for me. I did take pains to spend time with the girls. I went out of my way to see them in the morning. Sitting in a bright kitchen lit with strange, American sunlight I’d find them eating cereal with yoghurt. They were too strong for coffee but coffee would find them, it was on its way to them, like success. I’d seek them out when I got home from work and see how their days went, and ideally, find them reading or practising their instruments. We’d talk about whatever they were reading, typically highschool disaster tragedies like Lear or Hamlet, who let their own destructions befall them, or history or politics or economics. Or I’d find them deft and focused at the piano and cello, and I’d come in silently and sit listening, basking really. Yes, basking. And we’d talk when they were through. I knew how Saul thought, I knew I’d probably never fully engage his paradigm of other people, but I wanted at least to be a father to my daughters, and if not in the traditional guiding sense (as their view of guidance was openly contemptuous) but at least in the emotionally supportive sense.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.