David Nicholls The Guardian, Friday 22 July 2011 23.01 BST Photograph: Charlie Surbey

Every Good Boy

"It's a piano!"
The black lacquered monster loomed in the doorway, my father and Uncle Tony grinning from behind its immense bulk, red-faced from exertion and lunchtime pints. "They were going to throw it away so I said we'd have it."
My mother looked as if she might cry. "Take it back, please, I'm begging you."
"But it's free! It's a completely free piano!"
"What are we going to do with a piano, Michael? You can't play it, I can't play it – "
"The kid's going to play it. You're going to learn, aren't you, maestro?"
At the age of nine I was remarkable for being entirely without ability. My sister was a gifted and influential majorette, my older brother could dismantle things, but at that time of my life I could – and this really is no exaggeration – do nothing well. Graceless, charmless, physically and socially inept, I lacked even the traditional intelligence of the nerdy. "But there must be something you can do," my father would sigh as I fumbled the ball, fell from the tree, bounced clear of the trampoline. "Everybody can do something."
And what if this piano was the answer? Mozart was composing concertos at nine, and surely the only reason that I hadn't followed suit was because I didn't have access to the same tools. With the piano still on the doorstep, I lifted the lid and pressed a key. It boomed, doomy and industrial, like a sledgehammer striking a girder. I smiled and decided that I would become a prodigy.
The monster was installed in our tiny lounge, looming oppressively over the settee like an angry drunk, smelling of bitter and Benson & Hedges. If a piano isn't good enough for a pub, then it's unlikely to delight the domestic listener, and this really was a terrible machine. The keys were chipped and discoloured like fungal toenails. Someone had written A to G on them in red felt-tip, but pressing middle C caused B and D to sound, too. E and F were interchangeable and the keys beyond this were pure percussion, triangle and bass drum. Even with the lid down, the machine oozed malevolence, thrumming along to the TV as if possessed. Two treacherous candle-holders sprouted from the black lacquer like horns, snagging my mother's cardies and adding to the air of menace. "I keep thinking there's a corpse in there," she murmured, glancing over her shoulder as if the piano might hurl itself at her. "That's why the pedals don't work."
Unperturbed, I set to devising soundscapes. Notes to my right I found could be used to suggest falling snowflakes or dropped saucepans, whilst a whole forearm brought down repeatedly on the lower keys conjured up a storm at sea. I worked on compositions – using only the fiercely dissonant black keys, I wrote what I called my "Chinese Tune". There were familiar melodies, too, but the theme to Jaws will only enchant for so long, and soon it was decided that I'd need some professional instruction if I were to widen the repertoire and prevent my mother from "tearing her own ears off".
The solution lived across the street. Mrs Patricia Chin occupied the handsome semi-detached house opposite us and on summer evenings her piano could be heard through lace-curtained windows – delicate and precise renditions of popular classics, hymns, old Noël Coward numbers above the general clamour of TVs and revving mopeds and bawling. In rare encounters with my mother, she was polite but sour, struggling to conceal her resentment at the new estate on which we lived and which continued to expand into the fields and woodland around what had once been a nice, respectable residential street. Widowed, with a shrinking number of pink-cheeked middle-class pupils at her door, Mrs Chin could not afford to be a snob. She was local, cheap and needy and therefore the ideal teacher for me. Would she take me on? my mother asked. She looked me up and down and exhaled deeply. That Thursday night I was sent across the street to the dim and lonely house that smelled of cat food and air-freshener, to torment Mrs Chin for 50p an hour.
"So, young man – have you had any lessons before?"
"I'm entirely self-taught," I piped proudly.
"Self. Taught," said Mrs Chin, sceptical. "Then play me something."
I played the theme from Jaws. She reached across and carefully removed my hand from the keyboard, as if taking a knife from a psychopath.
"Right. Let's start again shall we?"
Things began amicably enough. I was an aggressively polite and obedient boy, and enjoyed the order and discipline of our lessons. For Mrs Patricia Chin, teaching music had nothing to do with art or self-expression. Piano keys were buttons, and if you pressed the right buttons in the right order, you might get a passable tune. Lessons were methodical and repetitive, so much so that she often contrived to sleep, quite deeply, head lolling backwards in a hard-back chair as I lumbered through Hot Cross Buns, first the right hand, then the left hand, then both together. Then I'd stop and sit and wait, watching her snore.
She was, I suppose, in her early seventies, though this counted for more at that time than it does now. A photograph on the piano showed Mrs Chin and her deceased husband, a tall, long-faced handsome man, on a veranda in what might have been India or Sri Lanka, which perhaps accounted for her deeply-lined complexion now, her thin, shiny skin like crumpled brown paper. Chalky powder clumped in the crevasses. She wore a large curly wig that made no attempt to pass itself off as real hair and might just as well have been a hat. Most remarkably, on her cheek was a large mole from which sprouted a long filament of hair to which my eye was helplessly drawn. I liked to imagine setting it alight, like a fuse. Then she'd start awake, and I'd galumph through some scales, and it would all be over until next Thursday.
I think we both began with good intentions. I had a vision of my future self, taken from a Warner Brothers cartoon, as some sort of virtuoso, flamboyant and romantic, fingers a blur, delighting and entertaining in vast concert halls, enchanting all that heard me. And I'd lead jolly family sing-songs too, and perhaps even join a pop group. I studied the pianists on Top Of The Pops, the way they hunched and swayed and stomped, and tried to bring some of that swagger and showmanship to pieces called In A Country Garden or A Bonny Lass or Peck Peck Peck, driving my family into the far corners of our small house, sometimes forcing them to seek refuge in the garden or even nearby fields as I clanged and thumped and spasmed through Dancing Bluebells on that monstrous piano, waiting for that breakthrough, the moment where everything would fall into place and talent would reveal itself.
But as the months went by little changed, little improved. It seemed that I had reached the limit of my abilities, still some way below Grade One. Some connection had come loose between hand and brain, my fingers felt fat, slow and stiff, as if there were sand in the joints. Trills? Arpeggios? Inconceivable. I was barely uni-dextrous. More than one sharp or flat and I became hopelessly dazed.
"I don't understand why you can't just play the right notes." Mrs Chin would sigh. Because the notes came at me too quickly, there were just too many of them, a bombardment of black dots flung repeatedly into my eyes. Even on safe ground, the white keys immediately either side of middle C, the simplest tunes sounded twisted and avant-garde, so that a child-like Mozart minuet sounded like Alban Berg. My family suffered, of course they suffered, but it was Mrs Chin who felt the most pain. This woman had given her life to music, was a talented musician herself, I'd heard her play, and yet, week after week, I'd arrive with my 50-pence piece in my hand and torment her for 60 infinite minutes.
A kind of genteel war broke out between us, and she no longer dozed now. In the pauses between wrong notes, I'd glance down at her small strong hands and see them clenching and unclenching, knuckles white as if clutching an imaginary claw hammer as I tripped and stumbled through a simplified piece of butchered Haydn, slaughtered Brahms, disfigured Beethoven. Sharps were flat, flats were sharp, naturals were unnatural. Chords weren't just broken, they were destroyed. Mrs Chin's cat, walking across the keyboard would have struck more correct notes, no, a dog, a sheepdog in boots. Sometimes her patience and resolve would crack, and she would bustle me off the stool to show me how it should be done, pushing back her wig with her forefinger like a cowboy settling his Stetson and endowing this nursery music with precision and beauty, ornamental grace notes and flourishes whilst all the time her face remained grim with rage at the injustice of having to sit here, week-after-week, listening to this unctuous, glove-fisted idiot-boy-child murder the music that she loved.
"Do you ever wonder," Mrs Chin asked, pleadingly, as she took the money, "if you might want to possibly… give-up?" But I was a stubborn child, proud and possibly a little spiteful, and not yet ready to surrender my dreams of virtuosity. "I think I'm getting somewhere," I replied. "Same time next week?" Photograph: Charlie Surbey
In the spring of 77, Moonlight Sonata became our battlefield. I'd plonk and jab my way through as Mrs Chin snapped, "Sharp! It's A-sharp! Can't you see it's an A-sharp?" Played competently, Moonlight Sonata lasts for about six minutes. I might get through it in 20, pumping at the sustain pedal as if inflating a dinghy, and when it was over Mrs Chin would stand wearily and sigh the saddest four words in all the world.
"Same time next week?"
"Yep, same time next week."
In retaliation, she imposed economic sanctions, raising the fee to 75 pence, then a pound. My mother, who bore the brunt of my nightly practice sessions, also wondered if it might be time to call it a day. Her ears, she said, were bleeding. It was, she said, like having her head slammed in a car door over and over again. I was, she said, doing her head in. I was killing her. For the first time in all of history a parent was pleading with a child to practise less.
But it was The Entertainer that finally did it. Perhaps I wasn't cut out for the classics, Mrs Chin suggested in despair. Perhaps something more "pop" would free me up. So through that long, famous summer, we laboured through The Entertainer, each bodged and fumbled chord turning Scott Joplin's lilting, whimsical rag into a lolloping, peg-legged dirge, music from a speakeasy in hell. Mrs Chin no longer bothered to correct my errors, sitting there instead with her eyes closed tight, taking the wrong notes like a defeated boxer takes punches.
"Same time next week?"
And then, one Thursday evening in August, while making my assault on the C major to F major modulation, I heard a low groan and then the crash of a furious treble chord.
Mrs Chin lay face down on the piano, her forehead spanning an octave. For a moment I thought she had finally snapped and let loose all her frustration by head-butting the keyboard. But as I looked more closely, I could see her eyes were open and unblinking, her small teeth bared, her arms dangling by her side and I knew that she was dead and that this was my fault and that I had killed her with Scott Joplin's The Entertainer. I had stopped her heart.
I sat very still and let Mrs Chin's final chord die away. I was, as I've mentioned, a pathologically obedient and conventional child, and of course I knew that I should call an ambulance. But I also had no doubt about the permanence of her condition. Besides, what if the police got involved? Yes, the room was hot and stuffy, yes, she was old and unwell, but even if the case would not stand in a court of law, even if I escaped prison, even if the charge was manslaughter, I knew deep in my heart that Mrs Chin would still be alive that night if I hadn't played The Entertainer. This walnut Yamaha upright was my blunt instrument and it was vital that no one, not my parents or the police or Mrs Chin's family, should ever discover my terrible crime.
Her cat was scratching at the door suspiciously now and with a dexterity and speed that had previously escaped me, I begin to take action, half-lifting, half-nudging Mrs Chin to the floor, breaking her fall with my body, rearranging her arms into what I thought was a natural, dignified pose. I lowered the piano stool, removed the second chair, folded my sheet music, replacing Joplin with Liszt, opening the yellowing volume to a page dense with black notes, something with enough sharps and flats, arpeggios and 10-note chords to plausibly prove fatal. I took one last look at the scene of the crime and squeezed carefully out of the room, taking care not to let the cat in.
At the front door I stood and waited for a passerby, Mr Nottingham, out walking his dog in the summer evening. I called theatrically back into the house, "Goodnight Mrs Chin! Same time next week!" I pulled the front door closed with a bang. "Hiya, Mr Nottingham," I called brightly across the street, and then headed home.
"How's Mrs Chin today?" said my mother.
"Oh, she was fine. She is fine. She says she thinks I'm finally getting better."
"Really?" said my mother, and laughed a bitter laugh.
Later, from the living room window we watched the ambulance arrive, my father's hands heavy on my shoulders. The 7.30 appointment had found her, peering through the lace curtains and raising the alarm. As the last person to see her alive, a policewoman came to visit me, ruffling my hair, speaking in a low, sympathetic voice as if I'd been the victim rather than the culprit. Did she seem unwell when I said goodbye? No, she seemed very cheerful, I said, wadding the damp pound note in my pocket, the fee that I should have given to Mrs Chin for that last, cruel lesson. Before she left, the policewoman let me try on her handcuffs.
For a while I kept the stolen note tucked inside my World Atlas, resolving to donate it to children in Africa but eventually spending it on sweets. We sent flowers to the funeral, and as the days passed I began to rationalise what had happened. I was sorry that Mrs Chin hadn't grown to like me more, or indeed at all, but it was absurd to imagine that my playing was bad enough to prove fatal. I told myself, over and over – ragtime does not kill, no matter how you play it – and after a while I came to believe it.
As for the satanic piano in the living room, I never touched it again, a reaction that my parents put down to some kind of trauma but which really lay in my fear of a power over which I had no control. After some persuading, the monster was successfully passed on to a nephew, and then almost immediately to the local dump and, presumably, the flames of a municipal incinerator. I imagined it screaming as it shattered and burned. Peace returned to our house.
Six months later, I started violin lessons, but that's a whole other story...