Taking Down Evelyn Tait by Poppy Nwosu

Author:Poppy Nwosu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, YFN, YAF011000
ISBN: 9781743057308
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2020-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

The next couple of days pass in a blur of study and guitar practice. Of quiet smiles across classrooms from Sebastian and some very strategic avoidance of Evelyn, both at home and at school. Grace ditches school on Friday to work on my costume and suddenly I’m the responsible one, because when she asks me to join her I say no.

Instead I’m sitting in the music room at school with Mr Smith in the late afternoon, and he’s watching me play the piece he’s chosen for the audition video, some old-timey classical guitar thing that requires a lot of fiddly fingers and picking. My fingernails ache from tugging at the strings and my hands are growing thick callouses from pressing hard against the fretboard. The whole thing is super painful and the song must be about a thousand years old, the kind of thing some old dude with a powdered face and a white curly wig would’ve played.

And yet …

I guess it’s growing on me.

The music.

It’s so different to metal and yet every day I find new correlations, new commonalities, and when I go home and listen to my favourite albums I wonder about those guitar players. Were they classically trained? Do they understand the theory behind the riffs they play? Are the technical melodies directly influenced by some old crusty song like the one Mr Smith has me playing over and over again?

He sits now in the thick afternoon sunlight at the piano, an upright thing that creaks when he opens the wooden lid. He’s bathed in a cloud of dust motes floating in the air-conditioning and his fingers play scales across the black and white keys. He asks me to imitate, using only my ears and no written music to copy the sounds, to pick the notes of the scales on my guitar strings and follow what he does, just a few beats after. And I can do it. If I concentrate hard enough. Little by little, I can do it.

He’s a strict teacher and rarely smiles through his enormous bushy beard. I’m pretty sure he misses the old days, when he would’ve been allowed to rap me on the knuckles with a ruler every time I bunged up a note, but still … I’d never admit it to anyone, not even Jude, but I kind of like the music we play in that room. And I like the way Mr Smith’s mouth twitches at the corner, almost imperceptible through his wiry beard, whenever I copy the scales correctly, or play the old-timey song just a little bit better than I played it the day before.

When the scheduled hour is over, Mr Smith offers to stay with me a little longer if I want, to run through some more pieces. He doesn’t face me when he asks, but I know what it means.

Evelyn always stays back after music class, her and this other random dude who plays drums. And what do they have in common?

They’re both really good.

I stare at Mr Smith’s back as I stumble over my words, agreeing to stay.

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