The Piano Tuner

The first thing Kenny did after Amira left was call the piano tuner. He found the number on a sign attached to the wall of Hutchison’s Records, the cramped cupboard of a shop where he browsed for second-hand vinyl and sheet music on Saturday afternoons. Scribbling it down in pencil on the sleeve of a Muriel Johnstone record, he paid the fifty-pence asking price and made for home.
Amira had never liked Kenny playing reels and cèilidh music. She would tolerate a soothing sonata or a gently played aria, but the country dance music never failed to bring on a migraine. She would pinch two fingers at the bridge of her nose and sigh out a breath. Plinky-plonk, she whispered, plinky-plinky-plonk. After a while, Kenny had simply stopped playing. Instead, he would sit in the armchair in the spare room with the sheet music, and with slippered feet, tap out the beat on the carpet.
Now, though, he was free to play a full set. If he chose to, he could put his own notice up and invite all-comers to congregate in his stripped-out living room for an Eightsome Reel or a Dashing White Sergeant. There was certainly the space for it. Amira had left only the piano and the darker rectangles on the carpet where the furniture once stood. Sun angled in at the uncurtained windows and caught the disturbed dust whirling and looping in the air. Kenny would play for it.
First, though, he needed to let the piano tuner bring the upright back to health. It had been neglected so long that some of the high notes struck with the sourness of lemon, and the low-notes had echoes of themselves. 
The tuner arrived in the afternoon. Kenny watched as he unfolded himself from his small red car. He was surprisingly young — clarinet-thin, with silver-framed spectacles that glinted in the light as he turned to the house. He carried a black case, like a doctor’s, which he swung gently as he walked up the drive.
Kenny showed him into the living room and watched as he performed his first examination. A long index finger pressed to middle-C, a frown, and then a left-hand scale. Kenny offered him a cup of tea, but the tuner only considered for a second — placing that same index finger against his lips — before shaking his head. It was just as well; Amira had taken the biscuit tin and all but a handful of teabags.  
Kenny left the tuner to it. In the hallway of the bungalow, the yellow wallpaper showed the shadows of the photo frames that had hung there. The spare room, though, was untouched. It had once been earmarked as a nursery, but it had quickly become Kenny’s domain. The faded-green armchair, by the slatted blinds of the window, and the white shelves across one wall. The shelves on the left were filled with vinyl records — always kept vertical — and those on the right were stacked with sheet music. On the carpet in front sat the dehumidifier. Kenny had kept it running non-stop these last few days. Amira hadn’t liked the drone of it, had complained about the draining of electricity. So, for years, it had only run in short fifteen- or twenty-minute cycles, when she went to the shops or while she deadheaded the clematis in the garden.
Kenny trailed a finger across the spines of the records on the shelves. On the floor at his feet was a cardboard box. He’d scrawled “rare/collectable” on the side of it in marker pen. Every so often, he’d pluck a record from the shelf and add it to the box: the album signed by Jimmy Shand, that Ronald Anderson Band recording with the limited pressing. Over the years, he’d developed a finely tuned sense of what Tommy Hutchison, down at the shop, would pay decent money for, what other collectors might be keen to get their hands on.
The boxes were left over from Amira’s packing. Dozens of them had been filled with the dreadful flowery harem-style trousers she’d taken to wearing; with the vanilla-scented candles she burned when she had a headache; with the historical romance novels that she abandoned once the two main characters met. There was nothing left in the master bedroom at all except for Kenny’s blow-up mattress folded over the pump in the corner. The kitchen had only enough crockery and pans to fill the sink once-over, and the bathroom had only a squeezing of shampoo and a final sliver of soap.
With the money from Tommy Hutchison, Kenny was going to buy the essentials: a mattress that didn’t hiss when he lay on it; a small telly that he could set beside his record player. Slowly, he’d scour the charity shops and cobble together enough on which to get by. He’d part with as little of his collection as he could, leave as few gaps on the shelves as possible, but he’d memorized his favorites over the years anyway. He knew that, when he sat down at the piano, he’d be able to play them without the music, without reference to the recordings.   
Kenny selected a few more records, with the accompaniment of the piano tuner sharpening note after note — ping, ping, pause, ping, ping. If Amira were there, the noise would have sent her straight to her bed with a cold flannel folded over her eyes and the radio tuned, quietly, to Radio Four. 
Lifting the box, Kenny took it through to set it with the others by the front door. There were four in total. It wouldn’t be thousands of pounds worth, but it would certainly be hundreds. There were things in there that might even fetch that on their own: the sheet music annotated by The Occasionals, those production notes from Robbie Shepherd. 
Kenny began to think about what he could buy with the excess. Amira had never liked the idea of a microwave, had vetoed the DVD player. If he could get himself a second-hand laptop and an internet connection, then Kenny would be able to find records from every far-flung corner of the world. Maybe he’d even be able to sell parts of his collection for more than Tommy Hutchison was willing to pay…
Still daydreaming, Kenny wandered through to the living room and watched the piano tuner at work. He had the top of the piano flung open, wedge mutes jammed between the strings. He sounded a note an octave or so higher than middle-C, and with his arm resting on the piano, gently tightened the lever on the pin. With the innards of the piano exposed — the wire of the strings and the metal and rubber bristling from it — he looked more like a dentist than a doctor, diligently twisting and tightening some complicated orthodontic contraption.
Amira had kept Kenny’s life ordered, he knew that. She did the food shopping and kept the calendar by the phone neatly marked with the upcoming birthdays of their nieces and nephews. It was she who filed away the phone bills and mortgage statements — although the money came from the joint account — and she who ran the hoover weekly and turned the mattress every fortnight. But she was also the one who tsk’ed at the idea of ordering a curry on a Friday evening, who put the kibosh on visiting Kenny’s sister out in Canada last February, who had shuddered when Kenny gifted her tickets for Celtic Connections concerts for her birthday. 
The piano tuner moved on to the next note. He carefully placed his wedge mute and then eased the lever to drop the note flat. It sounded out, once then twice. And in the pause that followed, it was answered by a higher, shriller note. Kenny blinked, unable to place the noise. The tuner turned on his stool and looked levelly at him.
“Doorbell,” he said.
“What?” 
“I believe that’s your doorbell.”
Of course. Kenny gave the tuner a nod, then went out to the hallway. He had to side-shuffle past the gathered boxes. Opening the door, he found a young lad with a fringe gelled into stalactites and a grin that was a semi-quaver from a sneer. Kenny breathed out, long and slow, and tried to return the smile. 
“Can I help you?” he said. 
“Hink yer roof’s on fire, auld yin.”
“Pardon?”
“Yer roof, roon the back.”
The lad stepped away from the doorstep, and with a jerk of his head, indicated around the side of the bungalow. Kenny paused. Was this some kind of scam? Maybe the lad was waiting for Kenny to come outside, and then he was going to dart in and ransack the rooms. So what if he was?  He’d find little more than drifting dust bunnies and a startled piano tuner.
Kenny stepped out, in his slippers, onto the pathway. He felt the chill of the concrete through the soles. He padded after the lad and looked where he was pointing. Sure enough, at the back of the bungalow, there were wisps of smoke rising from the roof above the spare room. He stared for a moment, trying to convince himself that it was smoke from the chimney of a house behind or a bonfire in a neighboring garden. But, no, as he watched, one of the slates slid down from the roof and landed with a crack. Then another followed, and another. In the gap they’d left, orange flames licked upward, like a tongue circling lips, and the opening widened.
“Christ alive,” Kenny hissed, hurrying back toward the door. Halfway inside, he remembered the young lad and turned back to him. “Thank you!” he shouted. 
“Welcome,” the lad replied and sauntered off down the street.
Kenny stood, undecided, in the hallway. Amira had taken the house phone with her and she’d never seen the need for him to have a mobile. Maybe the tuner would have one though. And he certainly needed to be alerted. The crackle-spit of the fire could be heard now, underneath the ding, ding of the piano tuner tapping away at the keyboard. Tendrils of smoke drifted up the hallway toward Kenny.
Stirring himself into action, Kenny barreled into the living room. He intended to clear his throat, but it became a coughing fit. He bent to his knees and looked up at the piano tuner, who had turned on his stool to face him.
“Terribly sorry,” Kenny said, “but you’ll have to finish another day.” 
“Oh,” the tuner said. 
“Yes, the house is on fire.”
The tuner didn’t waste a second. He wrenched his lever from one of the pins on the piano and swept the rest of his toolkit into his bag. The stool tumbled as he set off at a skipping half-run. As he passed, Kenny caught at his arm.
“Do you —” Kenny began, “— could you call the fire brigade?’
“No phone with me,” the tuner said.
Kenny pushed past him, into the smoke-filled hallway, and side-shuffled past the cardboard boxes again. He hadn’t run in years, but he managed a kind of trot to the next house along. His neighbor, Louise, was standing out on her lawn looking back at his bungalow. Her lips were set thin and straight — just another deep wrinkle — and she gave a single shake of her head as he approached. Kenny knew what it meant: Amira would never have let such a thing happen.
“I’ve already called them,” she said as Kenny puffed nearer.
“You have?” he gasped. “Thanks.”
Crouched over, with his hands on his knees, he turned back to look. His breath came in rasps and gulps. Metallic-tasting saliva filled his mouth. He blinked and tried to focus. The piano tuner was coming out from the open front door, his tall frame bent over two cardboard boxes. Smoke curled out from behind him. All the vinyl and the sheet music in the spare room would be, at this very moment, melting and curling in the heat of the flames, but this good Samaritan was at least rescuing the boxes that Kenny had piled up for Hutchison.
Except, the tuner wasn’t stopping. He didn’t set those “rare/collectible” boxes down on the path or step over to place them carefully on the lawn. Instead, he carried on to his small red car parked at the side of the road. 
Kenny dragged in his breaths. He wanted to believe that the tuner was moving them farther from the fire, out of reach of any falling timbers or leaping embers. As the tuner reached the car, though, he opened the boot and began lifting the boxes inside.
“Hey!” Kenny shouted. “Hey, stop!”
He set off again. This time his trot was more like an exaggerated limp. It didn’t carry him fast enough, and the tuner had flung himself into the driver’s seat before Kenny closed even half the distance. Kenny tried to sprint and found himself stumbling. He wheeled his arms, managing to go down slowly with his arms braced in front. There was a dull pain in his knee, but nothing more. He watched as the car juddered into life, as it pulled away from the curb. He turned to Louise, who stood watching impassively. 
“Call the police!” he shouted.
From the distance came the sound of sirens. Louise looked off down the street, to where the red car was disappearing around the corner, and folded her arms.
“One emergency service at a time, Kenneth,” she said. “Let’s keep our heads.”
The police, when they eventually came, seemed to share her pragmatism. The fire was out by that stage. The spare room was shut away behind its scorched door. The crumbling, charcoaled rafters were open to the sky; the charred wisps of carpet that remained floated in puddles of ashy water; the shelves of records were congealed into one molten lump, like fat you might find clogged in a drain. The acrid smell of it all caught at the back of Kenny’s throat every time he opened his mouth to answer the policeman’s questions. They stood in the empty living room, beside the piano with its exposed strings.
“And this piano tuner stole your furniture?” the policeman said, frowning at his notebook.
“No, not the furniture. My wife took that.”
“Your valuables, then?”
“Yes, yes.”
The policeman began writing. His partner, who had been inspecting the rest of the house, came wandering back through.
“He cleaned you out while the fire was burning, did he?” she asked.
“No,” Kenny sighed, “just two of the boxes by the door.”
“Boxes.” The policeman paused in his writing. “What was in them then?”
“Vinyl records and sheet music.”
“That all?’
“Several-hundred-pounds worth.”
The policeman closed the notebook. The two officers looked at one another. 
“Listen,” the policewoman said, “we can call the number you’ve given us and speak to this piano tuner, all right, but if he denies it, then it’ll be difficult to follow up. And it might be a waste of your time, if we’re honest. Better just to claim on the insurance, yes?”
“Insurance?” Kenny repeated.
“You do have house insurance, don’t you?”
Kenny shrugged. That was the kind of thing Amira would have handled.  
Like the piano tuner, the police officers refused a cup of tea. They left him with a promise that they would call the number from the sign attached to the wall at Hutchison’s Music, but it was obvious that they would be doing no more legwork than that. The tuner wouldn’t find himself under a bright light in an interrogation room — good cop, bad cop — until he cracked and told them what he’d done with the Ian Powrie live recording or the collection of programs from the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society annual ball. 
Kenny opened the door to the spare room and watched, through the yawning chasm of collapsed ceiling, as the color bled out of the sky: blue, to orange, to red, to black. From somewhere nearby came the shout of a mother calling her children in for dinner. There was a chill in the air, and Kenny wondered if the central heating would click on as usual, or if the hot water would reach the mangled radiator in the spare room and send out a spray like the fireman’s hoses.
Closing the door, Kenny padded down the hallway. The yellow wallpaper closest to the spare room had lifted in curls, had blackened in streaks. The color was a deeper mustard there, but you could still see the original sunflower yellow closer to the front door. It was Amira who’d chosen the shade.
Turning into the living room, Kenny sat himself down on the piano stool. It was now his only seat, he realized, his only place to rest until he blew up his mattress for the night. The worn armchair, the armchair he’d had before his marriage, was gone now.
He knew he’d need to call her. He would need to walk to the payphone on the High Street and feed in coins to dial the number that used to belong to this bungalow. He’d have to apologize for what he said, for the weeks of silence he’d subjected her to afterward. She would want him to admit that there was truth in her belief that he wouldn’t manage on his own, that he didn’t know how to function without her. 
For now, though, Kenny smoothed his hands over the keyboard of the piano. He closed his eyes and allowed his fingers to find their places. He breathed in the new scent of his house. Then, on that half-tuned piano, he began. The reel started out softly, tentatively, but it strengthened as he went on — a mixture of notes that were perfectly in tune and those that weren’t. He didn’t pause on the notes that fell flat or sharp, though, or loop back to play it again an octave higher. Instead, with flying fingers, he kept playing the tunes he loved.        

ξ

Liam Bell is based in Scotland and teaches at the University of Stirling. His most recent novel is Man at Sea, released Summer 2022, and he has two previous books and various critical and creative pieces published in the UK. He was born in Orkney and grew up in Glasgow, but now lives in Stirling with his wife and two young daughters. More information at www.liammurraybell.com or @liammurraybell.