The Midnight Piano

The piano came with the flat, and the flat came from her grandmother. Nadia had not asked for either. She had a job in a shop she did not like, and now she had three small rooms above a busy street and an old piano in the corner that nobody had touched for years.

It was not a beautiful thing. The wood was dark and marked. Two of the white keys had gone yellow, and one of them made no sound at all. On her first evening Nadia sat at it with her hands on the keys, not pressing them. Below the window a dozen cars waited at the lights. Next door a television was on.

Her grandmother had taught her to play when she was seven. That was the only part of those years she could describe clearly: the warm room, the old woman's hand flat on her back to keep it straight, and the way the music came from her own fingers as if it had been sitting inside them all along, waiting.

Then her grandmother had become ill, and Nadia had stopped, and ten years had passed.

On Monday there was a letter in the post. A studio on the other side of the city, a modern building with a golden name above the door, ten new students taken each year. An appointment on Friday at four. Her grandmother had written to them months before the end and given them Nadia's name without telling anyone.

Having read it three times, Nadia left it on the table and went to work.

She came home at nine. Standing in the kitchen, she ate soup out of a bowl, and then, because the flat was quiet and she could not think of a reason not to, she sat at the piano and played the first thing her grandmother had ever taught her.

It was terrible. Her fingers were slow and stupid, and the dead key left a hole in every line. She played it again. And again. When she next looked at the clock, it was midnight.

There was a knock at the door. A man in a long coat stood outside with one hand on his chest. He had seen her name on the door, and he had decided that a woman called Nadia could not possibly speak English.

"HARTLEY," he said, slowly, in a very loud voice. "FROM. NEXT. DOOR." He pointed at the wall. "I. CANNOT. SLEEP."

"I am so sorry," said Nadia. "I did not see the time."

"PIANO," said Mr Hartley, and played a few keys in the air. "MIDNIGHT. NO."

"No, of course not. It will not happen again."

He looked very happy that she had understood him, and left.

She played every night that week. Although she stopped at ten now, there was another knock on the third night.

"I. CANNOT. SLEEP," said Mr Hartley, a little slower and a little louder than before.

"But it is only ten," said Nadia.

Mr Hartley held ten fingers in the air, which took both hands and a moment. "TEN," he agreed. "STILL. NO."

So Nadia gave him half a bar of chocolate and said sorry again in her best English, which was the only English she had. After that she stopped as soon as she had played the piece twice.

By the end of the week she could play the piece without stopping. That night, however, she lay awake at three in the morning, certain that she would not go.

She was not clever enough. She was years too late. There was a whole city of people who had never stopped playing, and she worked in a shop.

At dawn she was at the piano again, playing it once more, very slowly, while the sky turned white behind the roofs. It was better in the morning. She did not know why. On the other side of the wall, nobody knocked.

On Friday, wrapped in her grandmother's old jacket, which was too big and smelled of a house that no longer existed, she took a taxi she could not afford across the city.

The studio was all glass and clean floors. A woman with short white hair showed her into a room with a piano in the middle of it, a black one, new, and open.

"When you are ready," the woman said.

Nadia sat. Her hands were cold. She thought about going home. Then she pressed the first key, and every single key made a sound, and the piece filled that big bright room the way it had always sounded in her head and never once in her flat.

She stopped. The room was very quiet.

"Who taught you?" the woman asked.

"My grandmother," Nadia said, and wiped her face with the back of her hand before it could get any worse.

That evening she came home and sat in front of the old piano with the dead key, and did not play. It was not a victory yet. There would be an answer in two weeks, or there would not.

At ten there was a knock at the door.

"I. CANNOT. SLEEP," said Mr Hartley.

Nadia looked at him. "But I am not playing."

"I KNOW," said Mr Hartley.