Читать книгу Hide And Seek - Amy Bird - Страница 13

Chapter Three

-Sophie-

I try to focus on the children. I try to focus on their scales. I try to give a shit – or even notice – if they are playing sharps or flats or anything at all. But since the call, I cannot. I cannot focus on anything except the thought that maybe, today is the day. The day that everything crumbles.

I am being ridiculous, I tell myself, as I sink into a chair. She won’t come here, English Ellie. All the way to Paris. To speak to a woman who hangs up during phone calls. Who hasn’t even admitted to being the mother of Guillaume, of this ‘Will’. But that isn’t what really frightens me, the Ellie part. It is that he knows. Because if she knows, he must. You can’t keep that kind of thing a secret. And so what could really happen, is that he could come looking. That’s the thought that makes fear grip my stomach. Just like it gripped my stomach that day. When I came into the kitchen and saw him. With the hammer.

Because that’s the other thing. I can’t stop seeing him now. Everywhere there is that horrible horrible child, that Will, with the hammer, hitting his father over the head. There is me, walking into the room, seeing my Max prostrate under the sink, seeing the hammer at his head. And I’m shouting, shouting at Will to stop being so naughty. Of course, he just screams at me, in the middle of a tantrum, and he hits Max another time, then another. So I do all I can do – I run over and I smack Guillaume and I grab the hammer from his hand. He cries and cries and cries, while I lean down and check whether Max is OK.

And Max, the idiot, the silly genius idiot, tells me I’m making a fuss over nothing.

“He’s just playing,” says Max.

And because I have seen what Max has not seen – that red angry face filled with the rage of a thousand men older and angrier than a little four-year-old should ever be – this maddens me. So I shout, I shout at the man who my son has just attacked.

“Imbecile! You refuse to understand he needs attention. You sit at that stupid piano, all day every day and you expect our son to be well-adjusted? You know so little about being a parent that you think this, this hitting you on the head with a hammer is normal?”

And then he shouts back. Rubbing his head, where the hammer has hit, he says “Well, I’m not at the piano now, am I? I’m mending the sink, like you told me to!”

“Asked, Max, asked. And I wouldn’t have had to ask if…”

And so it went on. The argument. While I didn’t know that my husband, my Max was dying. There he was, lying in a pool of water on the floor, while in his brain a pool of blood was accumulating. He went off to the studio in a flurry of slammed doors and foul tempers.

Then two hours later, they called me. They called me to tell me he was dead.

My son had killed him. I explained about the hammer. My son had killed him. They told me I was hysterical. Of course I was fucking hysterical. This little four-year-old, this horrible, horrible ogre of a four-year-old had just destroyed my husband.

And so tell me, how how how was I supposed to look at him again? How was I supposed to raise him, to nurture him, to want him to live? And how, now this Ellie person has called me, am I supposed to feel anything other than terror at the thought of seeing that face again? The face that murdered my husband?

That’s all I can think. At least I wish it was all I could think. Because that, in itself, would be enough, wouldn’t it? But there’s more. There’s that guilt. The mother guilt, that you can’t get away from. The voice that says, ‘but he’s yours. And he was a child. He didn’t know what he was doing, you can’t blame him. You were self-indulgent.’ And that’s the voice I’ve been repressing for almost three decades. Not just that guilt, though. The other guilt. The guilt that says: if you hadn’t made Max fix the sink, that wouldn’t have happened. If you’d let Max stay in his lair, rehearsing or just relaxing for his important recording this wouldn’t have happened. If you hadn’t chosen that day to insist that he as the man did the DIY job that you could so easily do, to decide you were sick of being a sacrifice at the altar of his genius, then he would still be alive. And worse, had you not shouted after the hammer-blow, had you insisted that he go to see a doctor because everyone knows head injuries are tricky bastards, then again, still, he would be alive. Guilt fear and horror. Guilt fear and horror. My personal chord of destruction.

There’s a tug on my skirt from one of the schoolchildren. I hate her for being a child, for being hardly older than Guillaume was. For my knowledge that, given the right circumstances, the right equipment, she too could be a killer. Right now, she just wants to know about what notes she should play.

“Pas de dièses,” I mumble at her. I can only mumble, because this is the beginning of the disintegration. I have journeyed so far into my painful past that I have begun to hallucinate. My fevered mind has created the image of a grown-up Guillaume. And in my hallucinations, he is standing outside the window of the classroom, staring in.