The Music Teacher

By Peter Anderson

A comic literary novel about Aaron, an emotionally repressed Head of Music at an average school. When his wife runs off with the plumber, Aaron and his father set off on a manic road-trip in search of Aaron's mythical ex-lover...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447635901

Book preview

The Music Teacher

The Music Teacher

Peter Anderson

First published in 2007 by Blue-Eyed Books Limited

All rights reserved

© Peter Anderson, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-84753-377-7

The right of Peter Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Intro

1

He had a loud voice, the man my wife fell in love with. The kind of voice that isn’t just irritating, but is like a physical intrusion, a sonic snowball in the eyes each time you pass within fifty feet of him and his industrious bark. It is the kind of voice where, no matter how innocuous the clause, it is an exclamatory one, be it asking for milk in his tea or, no doubt, asking my wife if he is satisfying her sexually.

‘DOES THAT HIT THE SPOT! MARY! DOES IT!’

The man my wife fell in love with is a frustrated army corporal. And since Her Majesty never managed to get hold of the barking fool, he became a plumber. My plumber.

‘AARON! YOU’VE GOT MORE PROBLEMS THAN YOU KNOW HERE, SIR!’

‘Oh yes?’

‘YOUR BOILER’S GONE! I’LL HAVE MILK WITH THAT PLEASE!’

She always liked his politeness, which is fair enough. Sir, madam, please, thank you and all that seem about as fashionable as monogamy these days. If it wasn’t at such a ludicrous volume it would have been more effective – but even so, being an under-appreciated music teacher, I suppose I got off on his deference more than once. As did Mary, obviously.

The man my wife fell in love with was so polite, in fact, that he insisted on being there when she told me. We sat in the living room drinking tea as if he’d just asked for her hand in marriage, and I was the overprotective father; what had been my favourite Shostakovich, ‘Piano Concerto No.2’, was playing on the stereo.

‘SORRY!’

‘You can’t stop what happened between Moses and myself… you can’t stop love, Aaron.’

Moses. My wife fell in love with a man named Moses.

‘SHE’S RIGHT OLD BOY! SORRY!’

‘You can’t stop love, but you could at least stop shouting at me in my own home, you wife-stealing, blue-collar scum!’

This wasn’t my response, of course. Nor was it this:

‘Old boy! I’ll old boy you, you faux-polite, quasi-militaristic walking klaxon!’

Nor even:

‘Shove that in your spanner, foghorn!’

Followed by a sharp, mortal kick to the solar plexus.

Nor, alas, did I get a manservant to enter with a large, ornate porcelain bowl filled with warm water, handing me a soap and towel so I could symbolically wash my hands of the whole affair as they gasped at my sang-froid.

I don’t have any manservants.

What I did do was nod ruminatively and reach for a Digestive, cursing inwardly at the ruination of my favourite Shostakovich. Someone once told me that the French have a name for this social phenomenon: syndrome d’escalier. Essentially, the scenario is this: whilst at a dinner party, someone receives an affront and finds themselves in a situation where they would love to issue a concise putdown, thus putting the offender firmly in their place. Of course, no bon mots are forthcoming and they are humiliated; it is not until they are on the stairs exiting the party at the end of the evening that they are struck by the perfect formulation, the aphorism to end them all. Only it is far, far too late.

As I ate my Digestive that afternoon, I reflected that I seemed to permanently reside on that escalier, plodding ever downwards, moments to act in life’s grand dinner party having long since passed.

I would like to add it was at this point I decided my life needed to change drastically; when my wife had fallen in love with another man; when a magical piece of music had been tarnished by association; and when, again, I had failed to respond to a confrontational situation in a satisfactory manner. Unfortunately I can’t add this. I can’t, because it wouldn’t be true.

I only decided my life needed to change drastically when I started taking solace in the arms of one of my students.

2

Let’s be clear about this from the start: I never went looking for these relationships. It’s a simple occupational hazard, that is all. You see, being a music teacher leads to all sorts of intimacies denied others in the profession. Obviously, there are the glorious productions, the after-school choir rehearsals, the one-on-one piano tuition and a whole host of shared experiences outwith the de rigeur bollockings and harried revision lessons where other teachers might form their more intense bonds.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Lurking below, the other 85% of the insidious pupil-teacher relationship edifice, just waiting to rupture our impregnable hull of respectability, is the very fact of the subject I teach them.

For music is the most sensual of the arts. You feel it. We feel it, together. Drama teachers may pump the emotional oil well dry with their students, but this is all an act. It is, indeed, in the very name of acting. Contrarily, the emotions involved in music are pure and instinctive. If someone has no sense of rhythm, then there is not much that we can do to cover this up: they will probably constantly press the demo button on the keyboard and thus irritate me no end, and I will be happy if they can sing the ‘Awimaweh’ part of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ vaguely in time and in tune by the end of Year 9.

But if someone is a Grade Eight pianist and violinist by the age of thirteen, as Verity Goodhead was; if someone seems to have rhythm, harmony, and musical intuition coursing through their veins rather than platelets; or if they did have platelets they would sail through all those inspirational capillaries in perfect four-four; then there will be a genuine pupil-teacher connection. There will be a bond, indeed, a justification of the little hyphen ostensibly linking us.

Verity was like this. And from the moment I saw her, to the moment I knew I would never see her again, I wanted to drink her musical plasma.

The boys in the staff-room, particularly the PE lads, were always quite harsh with Verity. Not only was she unfortunately named, she was also rather unfortunately endowed. They were big. Not too big, but bigger than Mary’s. Yes, I admit it: I compared them, even before Moses started doing the plumbing for free. Many a humdrum Year 7 rhythm lesson I would sit, pretending to mark, cogitating on the actual physical sensation of nestling between Verity Goodhead’s breasts as she played Debussy’s ‘Arabesque No.1’.

Debussy.

Not simply meandering around the thought, but actually trying to put myself there. I would have to sit inside the piano for this to be possible, but this is less ridiculous than it sounds; there were times, when I was teaching Verity, that I envied her piano to a ridiculous extent. There is an Abba song, on one of their earlier albums, where the crux of the narrative is that Agnetha wants to be her man’s violin. Wish I was dum-dum-diddle, your darling fiddle. Appalling lyrics, but the sentiments ring true, as with a lot of Abba. For four long years of piano tuition, as Verity passed through our school on her inexorable progress to Oxbridge, I longed to be her keys.

Not that she needed it, of course – the tuition, that is. She was better than me, far better. But the thing is, you see: Verity Goodhead liked me. As I say, it is dangerously intimate being a music teacher. She saw what I did, and she respected me. She laughed at my jokes, such as they were. Yes, she was a teenager. But I was a man. A man with a wife, and life, floating ever further away on a sea of ennui.

I was inordinately careful in avoiding situations where I might be compromised. She was picked up on time from my house after tuition, I cancelled Sixth Form lessons when only she turned up (a depressingly frequent occurrence), I never even gave her lifts home alone after musical rehearsals. My eyes stayed forever away, my professionalism remained intact – though this was the exact opposite of what I really wanted. Such is life, full of paradox and contradiction. I had ineluctably made my bed, by growing up and taking on responsibility, and so I had to lie in it, which meant not lying with any of my pupils.

That is not to say, of course, that I did not masturbate to a great extent, nor move beyond sheer physical fantasy to the brazen thought that: yes, if I am simply honest, she will wait for me! We will be together! But these were infinitesimal thoughts, relegated to a subconscious narrative of alternative reality, epic love that is probably being played out under my nose even now.

I let my guard slip only the once, and it was fatal for myself and Verity. We had decided, the drama teacher and I, that the musical production during Verity’s last year in the school was to be ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. It had long been a favoured project of ours, and finally we had a crop of singers we thought could pull it off. Verity was not one of them. Preternaturally musical as she was, her voice was sweet but rather weak, like a deathbed Karen Carpenter. For the school musical she usually played the piano or the violin, or both, and there was a much more suitable candidate whom we had earmarked for the main female part of Mary Magdalene.

There were two things I did not bargain for, though. I was utterly unaware that ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ was Verity Goodhead’s all-time favourite musical. And I was utterly unprepared for the comment she issued forth one piano lesson, after she learnt of our plans:

‘You’re so ambitious, sir!’

Mary frequently chided me for my lack of this very quality. She said I was coasting. I was Head of Music at a comprehensive school which entered ‘The Times’ Top 25 State-Funded League Table three times in the ten years I was there. Three times.

‘What more do you want?’

What more did she want? I was never going to be Head; I would miss the music too much. Was money everything?

‘What if we finally have children? I’m not going back to work – and with your ambition they’ll grow up starving!'

I could go on. Suffice to say, when my wife was packing her things after our cup of tea and Shostakovich, she said that Moses was a far more ambitious man than myself, which is what first attracted her. He was a self-made man, a man with a burgeoning plumbing empire. I was a frustrated musician, with an inferior Hebraic name if truth be told.

That was Mary’s take on things, anyway. But Verity knew different. Verity Goodhead knew that ambition manifests itself in many ways, not just through concert pianism and record contracts. Staging a complex West End rock opera with a bunch of teenagers could be seen as ambitious as it gets. I should have responded to Verity’s comment, of course, with a polite thank you, and issued forth some platitude about how it was an extremely challenging piano part that would be perfect for her (which is true). Buoyed by egotism, though, and flush with the weekly sight of having seen her caress my keys as only Verity could, my escalier opened up once more.

‘Yes. Yes it is ambitious. But we feel we’ve finally got the pupils to make it work.’

‘Really?’

I still had a chance here, but the words were already on my tongue, as you well know, careering out of my mouth with irreversible speed.

‘Yes. I think you’d make a great Mary, Verity.’

Verity Goodhead blushed.

It was only later, when my wife came back from her judo, or whatever the hell she did with herself of an evening, that I realised how true those words were. Verity would indeed make a great Mary. In about five years’ time, with a little more nous and no less bosom, she would probably be the perfect Mary; she could supplant my spouse with consummate ease. But as for playing Mary Magdalene in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, the short answer is: no, she wouldn’t. She would make a crap Mary.

The audition was passable, but the girl we had earmarked for the role was clearly superior. In fact, there were three or four girls better than Verity Goodhead. But I pushed; I had no other choice, for I couldn’t bear to lose face with her. I won out with some spurious argument about the part being more suitable to a weaker voice, playing the part differently to how it is normally interpreted, and so on.

But the drama teacher knew it was a pretext. This was really a kind of emotional blackmail, for after the last production we both got a bit too drunk and he told me about his passionate affair with a Sixth Former some years back. Juliet somebody, I can’t remember her name. Or did she play Juliet? Anyway, it was there, and we both knew Verity Goodhead simply had to play Mary, for better or worse.

She tried, applied herself as only she could, but in the end it was for worse – she was crap. We could barely hear ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’, even with a microphone. And, never having acted, she was like Pinocchio on stage. Simon Peter was going through the wringer denying Jesus, and Verity sang her part like a soap opera extra. In the cocooned world of scholastic dramatics, however, her performance was festooned with ridiculous amounts of praise, from myself included. I felt personally responsible for the new-found confidence which radiated from her every orifice, and waited with trepidation for the professional minefield that is the after-show party. Would we be alone? What would I do? Would she want to thank me for giving her the chance? I even thought about asking the drama teacher for tips, but thought better of it.

In the end this was a wise decision, as she got off with Judas.

I don’t think Jesus was too happy; he kicked over a few plant pots and drank too much cider. I went back to Mary and we made love for what I think was the last time, unless I am mistaken. Shortly afterwards, Verity discontinued her piano lessons, finally, to ‘concentrate on revision’. The last time I saw her alone was when she gave me the final cheque. She was distant, older. Our hands didn’t even touch. She just left the paper on the piano.

A few months later Verity Goodhead secured her Oxbridge A-levels and went off to Cambodia for a year out with Judas. I settled down to the further ebbing of a once fulminating conjugal love in a gentle quagmire of bills, meals and fractious conversation – punctuated by stolen dreams of Debussy and teenage breasts.

And then, just when I needed her, Verity Goodhead’s sister started at our school. For it was Emily, rather than her elder sibling, who was truly the catalyst for my change of direction. It was from Emily’s arms, on her fifteenth birthday, that I ran.

3

Do you know how much you can sell a Fender Stratocaster for on Ebay? It blows the mind. Who are these people? Where are they? The whole concept of the global community is something I will never fully understand.

For instance: wherever you go, how is there always somebody there? An internet café discussing global warming (I was feeling strangely political during the break-up of my marriage), a site where you re-enact the lives of the great composers (nowhere near as fun as it sounds), even an auction for a (quite shabby) vintage electric guitar: there is always somebody there. I know, because on my frequent drifts through the netherworld, I’ve bumped into people in these very places. In all kinds of places. As my life unravelled my brother implored me to take solace in my PC, and I tried to humour him. But I discovered I’d rather play the piano than pour my heart out to a stranger in a website for lonely divorcees; I’d much rather listen to Abba over a glass of red wine than discuss them via email with someone from Kazakhstan:

‘Salutations Aaron, Agnetha has the beautiful. But disagree always Freda with the belter voice! Benny forever!’

It’s a contradiction, as usual. Using a computer is as solitary an interface as you can get – but try as you might you can never be alone. My brother, Mal, would disagree, but he is a virtual cyborg. Walk into his house and you don’t see the usual wallpaper and calendars but an IT mausoleum of RAMs, ROMs, MUDs, PALs, WAVs and, of course, PCs, that would intoxicate Bill Gates himself. Gradually, my brother’s life has become one big acronym – but it makes him H-A-P-P-Y, so who am I to argue. And it also makes him rich. I don’t how many of his techie mates’ dot.com ventures are still afloat, but he had shares in enough start-ups to ensure he can indulge in whatever computer passion he wants to until he joins the hard drive in the sky.

Incidentally, we have recently discussed this, and he wants Kraftwerk’s ‘My Computer’ to accompany the pall-bearers, and he wants ‘Together In Electric Dreams’ to accompany us as we exit. (Who did that again? Heaven 17? No. Shit, I’m getting old… One of mine and Mary’s few shared favourites as well. Bugger.) He is completely comfortable with his computer-geek heritage, which I respect. He in turn respects my relative lack of IT knowledge, and helps me out in this arena whenever he can.

We are not particularly close, however, probably as Mal is a good decade and a half younger than me (my father’s second coming? My mother’s misjudged menopause? It was never fully explained, as usual). Apart from computers, before the events documented herein we only really bonded over the relatively obscure nature of our names. I am Aaron, as you know, and Mal is short for Malachi. My parents were real blood and thunder, Old Testament kind of people: soap-box evangelists of the most fire and brimstone kind. I say were. I think they lost their faith about the time Channel 4 was introduced, testimony to the extraordinary corrupting power of ‘Countdown’ and, later, ‘Fifteen-to-One’. Why spend your retirement at Bible Study or doom-mongering on the High Street when you can increase you word power, listen to Richard Whiteley’s wit and test your knowledge of English counties?

Anyway, when we were born my brother and I had as much chance of being called River or Flower as receiving a traditional apostolic nomenclature, something decent and British like James, John, Peter or Andrew. My parents loved the weird Old Testament alchemy of myth, apocalypse, pedantry and brutality – and its names like Ham, Shem and Japheth, Gideon, Hezekiah and Boaz, and Meshach, whatsisname and Abednegoh. 

(It’s funny how some things stick and some don’t. Who did sing ‘Together in Electric Dreams’? Eurhythmics? No, that was ‘Sweet Dreams’. This is going to really piss me off soon, I can tell.)

There is a school of thought which places great stock in a person’s name, claiming it forms an integral part of their identity; a poor choice could adversely affect their life chances. I’m not sure I fully agree with this, but once I started thinning on top the jibes came thick and fast (unlike my hair).

‘Keep your hair on, Aaron!’

Oh, the Year 7s loved that particular aphorism. But I could live with it. And Malachi never got much stick, either. A witty bully once kept on at him for being ‘maladjusted’ when he was in trouble as a teenager, but I doubt it has overly affected his life chances.

You see, bonding over our names wasn’t really about commiserating with each other per se; it was merely a point of reference which always came up when Mal’s IT talk started soaring over my head (a juncture which arose pitifully quickly). Essentially, it meant we could sit down, have a pint, and talk about how fucked up our parents are. Isn’t that what all siblings are meant to do?

It was not long after Mary left that Mal introduced