A Broken Piano by Jacs Guderley
In a little space in Bethnal Green, on paint-splattered, faded wooden chairs and tables - furniture flanked by shelves bursting with dried out paintbrushes, clay figurines, and random felt dolls. I lay down my writer’s tools, ready to get you out for all to see. The shop front window is dusty and smeared, and sometimes my memory feels hazy, like the greyed out night light that filters through that tarnished glass. But I'm here all the same.
Shoulder to shoulder with the sort that want to “Write to explore the self,” midweek and after a long day’s work (mostly women and queer boys, of course), I undressed for us. Clothes stripped from my own ego’s back, I derobed you and laid you out flat; my gorey operating table, to dissect, prod, poke and pull apart. You, my now naked artist’s muse, the ever-constant patient going under the knife in this overused theatre. The surgeon’s lights are always lit and I am here working away on you, forehead sweat beading, burning the 4am oil, my magnum opus; you are my life's work, it seems, and I have little but the hospital bill to prove it.
I sit so close to strangers that I can feel the fabric of their sleeves, the way that the air feels different in the space they occupy, hear the saliva as they move their lips, and we make written art that explores ‘fear’. We are together, but, now I'm here, I want to be apart. The page, our conjoined therapy room; biro scrawls, our sticky trail of attempted group catharsis.
No one exposes their fear fully anywhere but in that liminal space; of lined whiteness and thought, of jerking hand and inky inner world, turned out. Words meet air, as Irish Alice next to me and beautiful Henry down the other end, share their lyrical art - but no one names their fear. A practised professional by now, my patient confidentiality remains watertight. I don't utter a word aloud for my audience, because I am ashamed that I cannot leave you alone. They’d call me ‘unfit to practise’, if they knew. Meanwhile, I'm the one that's signed their life away on a greasy waiver of your making: you are absolved of blame and in my outstretched hand I hold the bloody guilt that my scalpel prised from the centre of your chest. My greatest fear; I don't know if you made me lay my mark on your contractual dotted line, or I asked to, because relenting feels easiest.
My clothes lie next to me in an unattended heap, and I feel embarrassed. We continue. Rita paints haphazard circles in the air with her delicate, Italian fingertips, as she compares jellyfish to heartbreak, and Leyla chews her misshapen pencil end, as she wonders aloud if her fear might be best encapsulated in a soggy bowl of shreddies (skimmed milk). Our workshop facilitator nods profoundly.
I imagine you as a broken piano. Odd keys torn out, a pedal jammed at a painful angle, a lid that doesn't close and screams as you try, and a sound, so discordant, it disguises pain as pleasure - and I keep going back for more. This obsession is shameful; you’re dead and buried in the ground - at least for now, because it's been thirteen months since the ten I spent depressed. Yet, I desperately search out spaces where I get to bring you back to life and perform you for others, like a possessed circus clown on a piano, bashing out a sick tune. Smile wide. I resuscitated you when they thought it impossible. Our workshop facilitator applaudes me.
A master of my craft, I expertly breathe life into you on the page. I write of a house I built: four walls that play back that circus piano tune in a suffocating wave of sound, where my ugly thoughts seem somehow beautiful when washed in by melody, flecked silver like the crest of a wave that drowns without discrimination, yet with easy grace. I fill the spaces in my home with you, till your sound swells and consumes, and I feel accomplished, as though you are classical music that curls and pirouettes through the air and makes me elegant. Though, this is not me, and I am simply disguising my tastelessness. I wouldn't have ever chosen you, but you have played non-stop and your dogged persistence has taught me of your beauty and your allure. So I keep you on repeat.
I suppose that's what we do with fear. We replay it until pain becomes well-worn grooves, carved out, negotiated, well-trodden. It is a summer’s day and I walk along that path. The air is gently warmed, and yellow hawthorn flowers line the way, shimmying slightly in a breeze that carries a sweet smell.
Fear can be quietly beautiful, too. And there will always be a day when broken pianos play their final, broken note.
