The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch Read Free Book Online

a day, and while my brother didn’t do an hour’s practice, I’d occasionally play for more than an hour and was caught practising by my father in the evening. Such excessive practising aroused his anger and spoiled his mood; in my defence I argued that you couldn’t become a pianist with just an hour’s practice a day, but my father had an allergic reaction to my playing, it turned his stomach; in a flash I had to jump off the stool, gather my music and shut the piano lid – my father even became allergic to the traces of my practising – and eventually I stopped, after which I spent all day and all night reading. I often fell asleep in front of the TV and had to be carried to bed, where I’d wake again and start reading the moment the door was closed. I was permanently pale from staying up all night. The child doesn’t look healthy, my father said; that comes from reading. I secretly borrowed books from our municipal library and hid them, always scared that my father might find them; in a proper family, my father said, there’s no need for secrets, and each one of us was terrified of being caught committing a secret crime. Only now were we able to cast off our fears and worries, because it was getting later and later, and we had drunk a bottle of
Spätlese
and all three of us were tiddly. A mere residue of anxiety prevented us from looking at the clock. And we didn’t look at the clock until later; before then we said, he must have been in an accident, but an accident can be any number of things, there are accidents and then there are accidents, we said; at this stage we’d ruled out the possibility of a breakdown, because he would have called, it was late after all. After an accident, you go to hospital at least, my brother said, and I said, at least. My mother changed the subject, saying, well, wouldn’t it be nice for once to have a Sunday without that Verdi racket, eh; in our house, you see, a Verdi record – at least one – was played every Sunday morning, and my father would whistle along to it; we had to be as quiet as church mice, as quiet as during the sports programme, and we had to stay in the living room and listen to my father whistling along to
Rigoletto
or
Aida
while Mum was cooking the roast, and this lasted until lunchtime; my mother couldn’t stand this endless Verdi, as she called it, this substitute for music, she said, this banal growling of the basses. She would close the kitchen door, refusing to come out again until Verdi was finished in the living room, then she’d open the window, albeit inconspicuously, to let out what remained of
Il Trovatore
; after all, my father always said with great satisfaction, Verdi’s the only music worth listening to, while my mother tried desperately to avoid the repulsive ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’. For many years the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ tormented my mother, Verdi in general tormented her, and the torment I suffered was especially cruel, because my father whistled along to it while the record was playing and we weren’t ever allowed to leave the living room. On rare occasions we struck lucky and my father would play Mozart, but only
The Magic Flute
, an opera he was able to whistle in its entirety from start to finish without stopping, which gave him a huge appetite for the Sunday roast. My mother couldn’t bear Verdi or Sunday roasts, as all week long she had to work and cook and clean and bring up her children; she didn’t enjoy spending her Sunday mornings in the kitchen, she said, but my father was never away on Sundays, his business trips lasted from Monday to Friday, so Mum was never once spared Verdi, that musical vermin plaguing our living room, as she put it several times that evening when already quite tiddly, that musical vermin plaguing our living room. And I said, at least you’re out of the room, you can hardly hear it, but she said, if that’s the choice – Verdi or roast veal – then no thank you, protesting