A Note of Madness

  ‘We all have our off days. Working on anything special?’

  ‘The Rach Three and “La Camp”, still.’

  Rami grinned. ‘No longer punching the piano over it, I hope.’

  Flynn smiled slightly in reply. He remembered the endless practising of ‘La Campanella’ in his early teens. One day he had got so frustrated with the piece that he had punched the piano, fracturing his little finger. Their mother had come back from the shops to find his hand swollen huge. There had been a big concert coming up the following week and she was aghast. So instead of admitting what he had done, Flynn had told her that the piano lid had fallen on his hand while he was playing. It was only when she had finished dismantling the lid that he finally admitted the truth.

  Rami elbowed him in the side. ‘Come on, let’s go and order pizza.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Well I am!’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE WAITING ROOM of the Watford General Mental Health Unit was about as appealing as a cold shower on a winter’s day. It consisted simply of the end section of a badly lit hallway, with a few plastic chairs and a coffee machine. Flynn sat on one of the chairs, elbows on knees, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. There was a Gothic-looking woman on one side of the room and an unshaven old man on the other. People drifted in and out. He glanced up occasionally to try to guess whether they were staff or patients and struggled hard against the urge to flee. He entwined his fingers, squeezing them until they hurt, battling the urge to gnaw at his nails. He desperately wished he hadn’t let Rami talk him into this.

  Hospitals were awful. Although Ear, Nose and Throat was slightly more cheerful than this, he didn’t know how Rami could bear to work there every day. He remembered how miserable he had been the time he had broken his collarbone after falling off his bike and had been kept in for observation. The nights were the worst – the strange smells, the moans and groans, the endless sound of footsteps and the exhausting lights that never went out. He would have escaped this if Rami hadn’t gone and stayed the night, at Harry’s suggestion. Rami had slept on the sofa bed and was up cooking Harry bacon and eggs by the time Flynn headed for the bathroom. He had refused to let Flynn go back to bed.

  ‘I spoke to Dario last night and made you an appointment for first thing this morning,’ Rami had said. ‘Don’t start arguing – he’s a friend and has put himself out to make time to see you.’

  Flynn hadn’t said a word to him in the car, despite Rami’s attempts at idle chit-chat. It was drizzling and the steady swish of the wipers made him want to scream. They sat head-to-tail in traffic all the way up Watford Road and then Rami had brought him here.

  ‘I’ll wait with you,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t wait with me,’ Flynn had whispered between clenched teeth. ‘I’m not a child!’

  ‘OK then. Come and find me when you’re done?’

  Flynn had nodded, desperate to get rid of him, and had now spent the last fifteen minutes anguishing about whether to stay or go. If he left, Rami would probably never speak to him again, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, yet a certain kind of loyalty entrapped him and, with a mounting sense of dread, he found himself watching the minutes tick by. I can’t believe I’m here. A psychiatrist? Christ. This is a complete joke.

  He started when a voice called his name. A dark-haired man in a stiff blue suit with a non-descript face hovered nearby. Flynn got up, feeling as if he were moving in slow motion, and followed the man down a long corridor and then another, through several fire doors and finally into a messy office. Once inside, the man turned and shook Flynn’s hand, shooting him a brief smile.

  ‘I’m Dario Ludic. You must be Rami’s brother.’

  Flynn nodded wordlessly, unable to articulate the slightest sound. He could not believe this was happening. At the doctor’s without so much as a cold. What on earth was he going to say – oh, I’m here because I sometimes feel a bit fed up?

  Dr Ludic indicated a seat opposite his desk and Flynn sat, too close for comfort, staring at the piles of folders strewn across his desk. Dr Ludic took out some paper, spent several seconds hunting around his desk for a pen and then asked for Flynn’s details – name, date of birth, nationality, family background, schooling . . . The list went on. Flynn answered robotically, chewing his thumbnail and staring at the stained, beige carpet.

  Dr Ludic didn’t look up as he wrote. Minutes passed. The doctor continued to write into the silence. Then he looked up and started talking about data protection acts and patient confidentiality, and Flynn continued to nod and wondered how soon he could politely leave. But, unlike the GPs, Dr Ludic seemed in no particular hurry. And there was a box of tissues on the coffee table that separated the two chairs. For some reason that box of tissues was asking to be picked up and hurled out of the window.

  ‘So tell me a bit about what’s brought you here,’ Dr Ludic asked eventually.

  Flynn looked across at the doctor. He looked straight back. Flynn averted his gaze and pulled a face. There was a long silence. He could feel his cheeks reddening. There was only so long he could keep examining the carpet for.

  ‘Rami mentioned you seemed depressed. Would you agree with that?’

  Flynn chewed the corner of his lip. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled finally.

  Dr Ludic wrote something down. Was he going to take down his every word? Uncommunicative, he would hazard. Monosyllabic.

  ‘Can you try to describe how you’ve been feeling recently?’

  Flynn opened his mouth to say ‘crap’ and stopped. ‘Down,’ he substituted.

  ‘Describe what feeling “down” consists of.’

  They were going around in circles. Flynn fleetingly thought back to the agony of the past few days and knew there was no way of putting it into words. He couldn’t describe his innermost feelings to a perfect stranger, especially when those feelings revolved around fear and torment and morbidity.

  Finally, Dr Ludic asked him a series of one-word-answer questions relating mainly to his sleeping habits, daily routine and social interaction. As Flynn replied, he started scribbling again.

  ‘So when did this all start?’

  ‘A few days ago.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Have you felt like this before?’

  A shrug. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘When was the last time?’

  ‘Mm – maybe a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘And is there ever any trigger?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You said you were at the Royal College of Music.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘That’s a competitive place. I imagine it’s quite a high-pressured environment.’

  Another shrug.

  ‘What do you play?’

  ‘Piano.’

  ‘You must be very talented.’

  He managed a polite smile. Silence.

  ‘Would you say you were talented, Flynn?’

  The question startled him and for a moment his eyes met the doctor’s, caught in surprise. He felt the heat rise to his face. Surely Dr Ludic couldn’t expect him to answer that? But his prolonged silence and unwavering gaze strongly suggested that he did. Searching for an answer just led Flynn to a series of blanks.

  ‘I suppose other people do,’ he mumbled eventually, looking away.

  ‘And do you agree with them?’

  Flynn thought about it. If I say yes I sound boastful, if I say no I sound as if I’m lying. And the truth? Maybe it’s worth focusing on that. Seconds ticked by, the blood was hot in his cheeks, but Dr Ludic seemed prepared to wait this one out.

  ‘Sorry,’ Flynn managed at last.

  ‘It’s OK, some questions are more difficult than others. Take your time.’

  He took a sharp breath. But the answer had been there all the time. ‘Not really,’ he mumbled.

  Dr Ludic raised his eyebrows. ‘Not really?’ he echoed. ‘What makes you think that?’

  Flynn shrugged again and pulled a face in
embarrassment. ‘Anyone can play the piano if they practise hard enough,’ he began to explain. ‘I’ve been practising like crazy since I was four. So people think I’m talented. But talent is something solid and permanent, it – it doesn’t vary depending on your mood. I – I can hardly play a thing when the chips are down.’ He stopped and bit down on his tongue. Hearing it said aloud was faintly horrifying. Worse still was finding himself struggling against the urge to cry. He held his breath. Don’t, Flynn, you stupid fool . . .

  ‘Because you find it difficult to play when you’re feeling down, you think you have no talent?’

  He shook his head quickly, frantic with embarrassment, and managed a painful smile. ‘No, you don’t understand,’ he said, all of a sudden inexplicably desperate that he should. ‘I can barely play at all. I don’t practise because I can’t. I can’t read the notes and I can’t remember the music. It’s all just a con. And the crazy thing is that I haven’t been found out yet.’

  ‘Bye, thanks, I’m off.’ Flynn turned on his heel from the patient’s bed where Rami stood, white-coated and stethoscoped, clipboard in hand.

  ‘Wait!’ He heard Rami’s hurried footsteps in the hallway behind him, trying to catch up. Flynn did not slow down and Rami reached him on the stairs, grabbing his shoulder. ‘Hey, hey, hold on. What’s up? What happened? What went wrong?’

  Flynn half turned, forcing a smile. ‘Nothing, OK? It was fine, he was fine. Turns out you were right. I’m depressed or whatever. I’ve got to take these pills and go back and see him in a fortnight.’ He thrust the prescription towards him.

  Rami looked from the paper to his face. ‘What’s the matter? Why are you upset?’

  ‘I’m not upset!’

  ‘OK, then let’s go to lunch.’

  ‘It’s not even twelve. I’ve got lectures this afternoon.’

  ‘You can miss lectures for another day. I know this great place round the corner. Come on, I know you never eat lunch because you’re always broke. Let’s go and stuff ourselves.’

  Flynn didn’t have the strength to resist and ended up having lunch with Rami, who promptly dived into a medical book, looking up the pills that Flynn had been prescribed. Flynn felt drained and wrung out. A sense of unreality had set in. He had told that damn psych what the problem was and the psych had started insisting that he was suffering from clinical depression. But he wasn’t ill! He was depressed for a very good reason! Previously, he had not even been able to articulate it properly to himself and then suddenly it was out in the open, but instead of the light bulb going on and everything falling into place, it was this silly diagnosis.

  Then again, perhaps the psych had failed to grasp the full significance of what he had said. Thirteen years of practice, for what? For tricking people into believing he was something he was not? Professor Kaiser, Harry, Jennah, his parents, his brother. All brilliantly fooled. And he was supposed to feel fine. Given pills because if he wasn’t feeling fine then there had to be something wrong with the chemicals in his brain. How absurd.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FLYNN THOUGHT IT was possible, it was just possible, that he had somehow, somewhere, sensed a chink in the solid black armour of despair. The urge was to chase after that chink, to rush after it as desperately as he could in order to tear it open so that the chink became a great gaping hole for him to step through, back into the land of the living. But it was such a small chink, so subtle, in fact, that he wondered if he might not have imagined it. Terror flooded through him that if he chased it, or even sought it out in any way, then it would disappear or reveal itself to have been nothing but an illusion and he would be left, encased in this black armour of steel, without hope that any glimmer of escape would ever appear in it again. Sometimes the chink would appear in the form of a moment of instinctive laughter at something on TV. Sometimes it would be nothing more than a brief moment of respite caused by the swaying branches of a tree outside a window. Sometimes it would be a sudden thought – lucid and remarkable by its lack of pain – flitting into his mind. But whichever form it took it brought with it, in those moments of bitter anguish, such a desperate surge of hope that it was almost untouchable, and flitted away like a golden butterfly into the bright blue sky – beautiful, unreachable and completely transient.

  He decided not to go back and see Dr Ludic again. There was really no point. He wasn’t down any more. He was fine. Everything was back to normal. There was absolutely nothing wrong. When Rami called him to bend his ear about the cancelled appointment, Flynn told him that he was feeling fine, that they had all made a mistake, that he wasn’t suffering from depression after all. On several occasions he was tempted to stop taking the pills, but something – perhaps a small knot of fear that the nightmare might return – prevented him.

  Neither he nor Harry mentioned what had happened – it was easier not to. It was easier to blot out his hungover conversation with Harry, Harry’s phone call to Rami, the two of them behaving like concerned parents of a wayward child. It was far, far easier to pretend it had never happened, to go back to what they had been, and so life returned to relative normality.

  As usual there was no shortage of work to be handed in; together he and Harry polished their duo for piano and cello and handed it in as a joint Musicianship assignment. Spring continued to blossom and the park began to smell of early summer. Jennah played in a chamber-music recital at St John Smith’s Square. Charles was conspicuous by his absence. The vast oak trees in Hyde Park were heavy with green. Daisies speckled the long grass. Flynn started running again. Don Giovanni was slowly buried under a mounting pile of CDs, to be replaced by Rossini and Puccini. They continued rehearsing the trio. He conducted ‘The Montagues and the Capulets’ at the Royal College’s charity concert. Life was tolerable rather than sweet, but he could manage, he could manage.

  Professor Kaiser began to smile again. There was a showcase of young musicians coming up at the Royal Albert Hall next month. ‘I would like you to take part, Flynn,’ he said.

  It was at the end of a particularly gruelling two-hour session. Flynn looked down at his hands, splayed over his knees, the fingernails bitten down to the quick. ‘That’s soon.’

  ‘It is a big event. We have been asked to enter just one student for the keyboard category.’

  ‘What about André?’

  ‘We are not talking about André. I am asking you.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Do you think you could do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  This clearly wasn’t the reaction Professor Kaiser had expected. ‘Ach, where is your enthusiasm? This is a huge opportunity! You will have exposure to many important people in the world of music!’

  Flynn gave him a look. ‘The Rach Three?’

  ‘Jawohl! Of course!’

  ‘Next month?’

  ‘It’s there, it’s there,’ Professor Kaiser insisted. ‘It only needs now a bit of polishing. Keep up the hard work and you will be ready.’

  ‘That’s huge,’ Harry said when he told him. ‘Rose King did it last year and she started getting concert bookings after that.’

  ‘Maybe I should say no,’ Flynn suggested.

  Harry looked at him in disbelief. ‘Are you joking? This is the opportunity of a lifetime! You can’t just say no. Professor Kaiser would never let you, anyway.’

  ‘Well, after Rose King I’m bound to be a huge disappointment. And André must have turned it down because he was too busy touring or something.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. André would have jumped at the chance. They asked you because your Rach Three is far more exciting than anything André’s playing at the moment.’

  Flynn shot him a sceptical look. ‘But it’s only a month away, that’s no time at all.’

  ‘Other people would kill to play in that concert. Damn it, I would kill to play in that concert. Important people will be there. You’ll start making a name for yourself before you’ve even left uni. Jesus, Flynn!’

  ‘W
hat if I mess it up?’

  ‘You won’t mess it up.’

  ‘I could.’

  ‘But you won’t. You’re far too good. Your Rach Three sounds fantastic now. Everyone’s talking about it.’

  Flynn was touched by Harry’s encouragement but still unconvinced. However, Harry had one thing right – Professor Kaiser wasn’t going to give him much choice.

  Thanks to Harry, the news didn’t take long to spread. People he barely knew were coming up to congratulate him in the corridors. Flynn was on edge, unsure as to how genuine their congratulations were. No doubt they would all give an arm and a leg, as Harry put it, to play in the concert. They surely wondered what on earth he had done to deserve it. They must suspect that he wasn’t really good enough.

  His lunchtime runs were forced to cease. If Professor Kaiser was in his study then he used the baby grand in the concert hall on the ground floor. Rehearsals would start with the London Philharmonic Orchestra a week on Saturday. The Philharmonic! It was hard to believe.

  He was having trouble with the heavy chords in the third movement, and Professor Kaiser continued to reiterate that they needed more weight. Those chords exhausted him. He played the section through for what felt like the hundredth time that day and stopped, hands on knees, gazing blindly at his distorted reflection in the shiny ebony in front of him.

  The sound of clapping made him jump. He looked up. Jennah was sitting in the third row, feet up on the seat in front.

  ‘It’s sounding amazing, Flynn.’

  Stupidly, he felt himself flush. ‘Hi.’

  She climbed onto the stage and perched on one of the blocks. ‘I haven’t seen you for over a week. Harry told me you no longer believe in lunch breaks.’

  ‘Harry says strange things.’

  Jennah cocked an eyebrow. ‘Yet this is your lunch break and you’re still practising.’

  ‘I need to.’

  ‘You also need a break.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Come to the park with me?’

  He opened his mouth to say no but then she added, ‘I could do with some company.’