rightness & wrongness

There are snippets. So vivid I can almost taste them. Far away doesn’t even get close to the distance, the slippage in time. They pass me, drifting around in the void like little jigsaw bits waiting for the box. Waiting for the picture on the outside of what you are supposed to be. Did you know that you can make a puzzle of your own image, a special present, a surprise, taking form as it gets made? What fresh hell is that! Just like the real thing, groping around in the gloom, trying to work out if the instructions are here somewhere.

Remember that old joke? On top of Old Smoky all covered in grass, a poor little eagle was scratching his… Now don’t get excited and don’t get misled, that poor little eagle was scratching his head. I was made for that joke; sanctimonious and prim, neat and swotty, braces and curly hair, classical music, a ready smile, for goodness’ sake. I mean, what kind of a teenager is that? A giggling group of cooler girls tried that out on me. That joke. The ringleader, small and wiry, with an eye for the perfect target I presented. Detailed visuals are gone but not the toe-curling trying to be more knowing than I ever was, giving the ideal response at the dots, soft underbelly all bared to the thrust, trying to wink at where that rude word should go, trying to show I am not shocked at hearing it used and then Ha! The buzzer sounds, a plum hit to the heart. Joke’s on you, left hanging there in all the exaggeration of your over reaction, never quite quick or canny enough to know how to avoid it next time either. They weren’t even unkind.

‘Curly tops at the back there!’ oh the mortification of Mrs Darke’s favour whilst I am busy trying to be something other than the awkward big girl, trying to be smaller; the buxom wholesome wench wanting nothing more than the Dodger-like ability to disappear, to pick cooler pockets for clues. The die is cast. I am to be Jean Everton’s friend because Mrs Darke sees what I am busy trying to stuff down out of sight. She sees I am kind and can’t bear things to be unfair. Can’t I hide this in my big bag? (How did I already have such a large weight to drag around? When I grow up, I will be strong enough to carry all the heavy things you have to haul around with you to be a grown up.) I am ignominiously hauled out into the corridor and charged with the friendship of Jean. Mrs Darke is large and loud, softly powdered and perfumed, buttoned up in green felt and breathing too near my face. Of course, I promise to be Jean’s friend. She doesn’t get asked if she wants me to be her friend.  Offered the choice, she might have chosen someone less square, less wrong, less awkward to ease her passage through the choppy waters of secondary school. I assume Mrs Darke is happy to have me in the form as she is a music teacher, and she knows I too am a fledgling musician. Usually I know some answers, too, and she thinks nothing of dragging these out of me when I don’t volunteer anything. She is too solid, merry and doubtless to realise that I’m nearly always terrified to reveal the brooding lurking of all the things that I don’t have answers to, which is most things apart from homework.

Mrs Darke played the piano for my Grade 7 flute exam. A piece by John McCabe. I could sing it to you now if you were here. Sort of modern, rhythmic and spiky. The piano part was quite hard but Mrs Darke was absolutely unfazed when she slipped up and couldn’t get back in with me. ‘Don’t mind me, dear, carry on!’ she called out cheerily in the exam. I did. Actually I flew, leaving on that cluttered edge all my lumpen awkwardness, sweaty armpits, my strange new smell, my too large breasts that grew so quickly that I was already ashamed before I ever got to enjoy them. I flew. I was in my element, a glorious swan and the radiance of it sent me streaming breathlessly round the school on fire when I’d finished, and everyone was in lessons, and I was music and joy incarnate for a few minutes before going back to Home Economics, where no-one noticed. Mrs Darke wrote me a report to be careful of too much sedentary study.

I started to go to music places around this time. Other vivid puzzle pieces pop up. I was right, I was wrong, I was alien, I was at home, I hadn’t noticed the difference between me and the others because of my big dumb heart. My sister recalls these places rather differently. Posh is how she describes what I only noticed was beautiful. And I was not. Either of those. Apparently. My baked bean nostrils and wobbly nose tip were a source of strange hilarity for one floppy haired flute player. He would keep wobbling the tip of my nose with his finger in bars rest in orchestra. On one memorable occasion he managed to sit on his flute, leaving it bent like a banana and unable to retire into the case. It had to be escorted to the flute shop in a taxi. I remember the white box studio with cameras wheeling wildly around us at speed as we stormed through In the Hall of the Mountain King with Fred at the helm. Fred, who kept everyone back on another occasion because I couldn’t play the floaty soft melting ending of the second movement of Brahms 1 in tune. Perhaps he though he couldn’t leave it not right, nor finish the rehearsal on that note. I recall that everyone became very tiny and me very big, bulging in the airless space of my failure, the silent haloes of all the tiny orchestral players contrasting with the roaring in my head as I just kept on trying. I didn’t know what else to do, didn’t know the secret something that I’d obviously missed somehow. No one helped. If they had, I couldn’t have heard them from so far away with all that screaming in my ears.

And another vivid fragment. Of course they don’t fit together but the shading suggested they’ll not be far from each other when all the pieces are fit together. After orchestra one day I hide. I hide in the toilets, heart pumping, because a very nice normal friendly boy has spoken to me in a very nice normal friendly way to suggest that if I’m going home, and we all are at the end of the day, we can walk up to the station together. I have no idea how to respond in a natural way to this overture and so I hide.

Puzzle pieces are piling up now. They draw the mind’s eye because of their similar tone. They are making a collection in one corner, ready to be assembled in a logical and ordered way later. For now, they are a pile of partly obscured moments… I’m crying in the toilets downstairs at the Barbican to where I’ve fled after sustaining of a mortal blow from my flute teacher. This remains a mysteriously humiliating encounter about missing a lesson, a forced apology in front of another student, perfectly placed to show exactly what I was not. Later, I’m trying on her jacket in a roaring echo-chamber of inexorable awkwardness ensuring my unfashionably hairy armpits are also damp and sweaty, and I can see I’m disgusting to her. It seems the clothes I’ve chosen to wear for the first round of the soloist competition are quite wrong and drastic measures must be taken. Somehow, I can never fit the wrongness of myself to the fleeting glimpses of rightness, where I transform, like a swan princess, and music flows out of me like it knows what it’s doing, even though I never do.

I don’t manage to assemble the pieces so as to reach a satisfactory picture. Will I be doing this forever? Like the fairy-tale spinner, trying to make gold out of endless flax. Or the ever-seeking Gerda looking for the icy mote that explains Kay. The puzzle persists in looking endlessly like a mystery. Does everyone have a strong sense of their missing piece? How did it get lost? Is it floating along in the current waiting to be found, to be fixed? That’s one hell of a risk. Maybe one can make up the future without plugging the hole, ploughing on with energy, allowing the steady seep of all certainty through that little odd-shaped space, drip by drip by drip. Like water leaking through the wall of a cracked pot, creating nourishment of a kind wherever it drops, and vulnerability and lack as it leaves the illusion of containment.