she sat at Signora Elias’s instrument she had a voice to express feelings and thoughts it was impossible to in real life, when she was Bruno Fresu’s daughter, the sulky girl who couldn’t control her temper, or get through school without coming from a family that grew in influence each year. That when she played she felt protected by the music and ripped open at the same time. That the music told her things, secret stories, coded messages of what it meant to exist, in all its brutal unfathomable glory. That it lifted her into blissful invisibility. That feeling was what she loved most. Powerful because of what the music fed her. But instead of sharing her tumbling thoughts, Alba felt her expression crinkle into an awkward frown. ‘I love the piano.’ Her voice slipped out plain, without ornamentation, like a starched linen tablecloth before the plates and crystal glasses have been laid.
‘Music is mathematics and heart,’ Celeste replied, ‘it can’t just make sense nor can it be just emotional. It’s a tender, intoxicating balance. That’s why so many people give their lives to it.’
Alba let her words reach her like a longed-for promise.
‘I suspect you ought to, too.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s been a great honour to meet you, Alba.’
‘You too, signora.’
Up till this very moment Alba had no inkling of what she was capable of. Each time Signora Elias encouraged her, she never shook the feeling that it was an act of kindness, that her playing was good in context, for a girl who knew nothing of music, and learned in secret against the wishes of her parents, listening to the recordings on a loop till her body knew the tunes better than anything that had happened to her in real life. Did Signora Elias know that she ate all her meals, attended all her school classes, finished her chores at home with the carousel of pieces and exercises spinning in her mind; weaving incessant patterns, articulations, melodies, countermelodies?
‘You’d better head off to school now, Alba. I would hate for you to be late,’ Signora Elias said.
Alba felt she had overstayed her welcome. Her cheeks flushed in spite of herself.
‘I’ll see myself out, signora. Thank you so much.’
She left feeling that the heat and light scoring her chest as the door closed behind her had little to do with the sun batting down from above.
Alba swung her class door open so fast that the wood banged against the concrete in the same spot as the week prior when she was sent out of class for arguing with Mario.
That morning, her teacher, Signora Campo, was not in a mood to let her inappropriate entrance slide. She slashed through the clatter of students setting out their thick textbooks onto their desks, staccato thuds echoing in the stone-walled room. ‘Why are you late, Fresu?’
Alba twisted back to her teacher’s squawk, answerless.
‘Well?’
‘She’s doing shows at the old witch’s house, signora! Thinks herself quite the little maestro!’ Mario called out from his desk next to hers. The boys around him fell into confused whispers. Alba shot him a look. It made everyone but him avert their eyes.
‘I will speak to your mother if this continues to affect your school day in this way, mark my words.’
Bullseye. Alba sank.
‘Does she make you play for all her cronies?’ Mario whispered out of the corner of his mouth as Alba swung onto her hard chair. His friend on the next desk sniggered. She gave an extra lift of her backpack and it missed Mario’s face by a hair.
‘Go to hell,’ Mario spat.
Alba let her biology textbook thud onto her desk, hoping she wouldn’t be the first one called on.
‘Fresu, you may come up for interrogazione, seeing as you wish everyone to notice you this morning.’ Alba felt her shoulders heave an involuntary defeat. She stood up, ignoring Mario’s smirk. The teacher took a breath, pulled down her light brown sweater over the mounds of her breasts and abdomen, peered over the rim of her glasses, and launched her assault. As Alba returned to her desk, relieved she had memorized the chapter on osmosis better than she had expected – much to the frustration of her teacher, who was looking forward to having an excuse to send her out – she couldn’t ignore the smart of shrapnel left by her threat.
When the bell rang at one o’clock, the concrete building thrummed with the swagger of sweaty adolescence, corridors thick with hormonal bodies pushing for escape. Alba adjusted the strap on her backpack, feeling the weight of her textbooks pull down on her shoulders. The throng was an unbearable cacophony, walls of intersecting discordance pushing in like a vice. A familiar panic bubbled in her abdomen. Her fingers raced up and down her thigh, clinging to Bach like a mast; the quicker they scurried, the louder the music in her head rose above the din like a white light.
The music came to a violent stop as a boy was pushed towards her, falling onto her back. Her knees buckled. The concrete met them with a painful blow. She reared underneath the weight with such force that the teenagers around her pressed back against the corridor walls. Her jet-black hair flung out in all directions, a horse flaying against the stable door. She twisted underneath the boy. He fell beside her, banging his head on the ground.
That’s when she recognized her only friend.
‘O Dio, Raffaele – I’m so sorry.’ They stood up, sniggering teenagers pushing around them.
‘Look at the lovebirds,’ someone shouted.
‘Don’t talk shit!’ Mario yelled from the opposite end of the corridor by the door to the yard. ‘He wouldn’t know where to stick it even if you told him!’
Thunderous laughter now. Alba’s cheeks deepened.
‘Don’t listen to those cretins, Alba,’ Raffaele whispered, scratching his head. Alba watched a few flakes of dandruff tumble down from his scalp over his forehead.
‘Did I break anything?’ Alba asked, feeling the sea of hormones wash behind her, blotting out the crackling voices, loose coins jangling in a pocket. Raffaele looked down at her, his huge black eyes sullen in his white face, small eruptions of acne threatening his cheeks. He launched into typical high-gear chatter. It reminded Alba of the passage she’d practised that morning. As always, he deflected the situation with a long explanation of algebraic logic from his morning’s math class. His familiar patter was reassuring. His rhythm rambled, sprouting shoots of tangential thoughts like weeds, filling the air Alba left bare.
‘So I decided that if I switched my approach, I could actually unpick the correct calculation. I think it just proves that maths is inherently a creative art. Like people always like to split us into artists or scientists, don’t you think? But it’s all bullshit because when I’m asking myself “what if”, it’s just the same as someone dreaming up something. Because that’s what I’m doing. Seeing an imagined list of outcomes and calculating which one is going to get me the result I need. You following?’
Alba watched Raffaele pull a skim of skin from around his nail with his front teeth.
‘Want to walk?’ she asked.
They crossed the forecourt, cutting through the cackles of the young girls and the clattering jeers of the boys. The noise grated, treble, discordant.
‘Hang on a second,’ Raffaele said, swinging his backpack round and reaching inside for a panino. Despite near constant eating, the boy was a spindle. He ripped the bread in two, a flap of prosciutto hung out the side beneath a thin slice of fontina cheese. He reached it out to her. ‘You want?’
Alba took it and sank her teeth in.
‘Mamma won’t stop checking my food. I swear she knows when I throw it away. Which of course I don’t because that’s a waste but what do I do when I’m not hungry? Seriously, feeding you is the only way I can stop Mamma launching into her lecture about the dangers of calorific and vitamin deficiencies in adolescence.’