Read Online Broken Music: A Memoir by Sting - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Sting
Tags: General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, England, music, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Biography, Genres & Styles, Musicians, Rock Musicians, Composers & Musicians, Singers, Rock
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the affair or whether he has had an intuition that something was going on and found some expedient reason to fire him but Alan is no longer with us. Nothing is said by anyone, nothing at all. Whatever the politics, I am relieved that perhaps now our lives can return to some sort of normality, but I am still in an emotionally disturbedstate and becoming increasingly introverted and uncommunicative. I wonder if I am to blame, and I have no one to confide in or to reassure me that I’m not.
I do begin to spend more time at my grandparents’ home, and while I don’t feel I could share my secret with Agnes or Tom, I feel more secure within the stability of their cozy house and of all their years together. I also like to hammer away at the piano in the front room, which sits beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart, a portrait of Jesus with his organ of compassion glowing luridly and exposed within his chest and surrounded by cruel thorns. I’ve begun to miss our piano since they took it away, and Agnes’s upright seems a perfect sounding board for my unspoken confusion and anger. This is the same room and the same piano where my mother accompanied my father in happier times, and the memory of “Goodnight Irene” lingers like a faded perfume. I close the sitting room door and draw the curtains across the window. With both pedals hard to the floor I attack the keys with a decidedly unmusical ferocity. Sweet harmony may be what I am seeking in my damaged world, but that is not what my unschooled hands are producing. It sounds like hell and strangely gives me some comfort.
Without the piano as an outlet for my aggression, I may well have become delinquent, vandalizing bus shelters, stealing junk from Woolworth’s, and other petty crimes. God knows I had the contacts. This might have been some consolation for Agnes and Tom, who have to listen to this cacophony, if they only knew what was wrong with me, but they don’t. No one does.
I can see my grandmother now, slowly opening the door to the front room. She is peering nervously over her tortoiseshell reading glasses. I stop midcadenza, as if I’ve been caught at something shameful.
“Eh, son, can’t you play something nicer than that—” she struggles to find a word to describe my efforts—“that …that broken music?”
I lower my head, afraid now to look at her. “Yes, Gran, I’ll try”
In spring the weather improved, so a replacement for Alan has been easier to find. Matters at home have reached a kind of détente. My parents are at least civil to each other, if not overly warm. The porch is no longer a safe place for my mother’s assignations with Alan, and my mother has seemingly limited her social life to visiting Nancy at her house on Thursday nights, or at least that’s what she tells us. She takes the car and my dad stays at home with us, sullen and silent. My mother may well have tried to end this clandestine relationship with Alan at various times, but her emotional needs and her romantic bond with him would have been too strong. She had found the love of her life, and she would be torn tragically between this love and the bonds of her family until she died.
It is Easter of 1962 and I have won a scholarship to the grammar school in Newcastle. There are forty other eleven-year-olds in my class, but only four boys and ten girls have sufficient percentages to qualify for a place in what is considered the top echelon of the school system of the time, the grammar school. My friend Tommy Thompson is not one of the chosen ones, although to my mind he’s smarter than all of us.
My dad is never willing to spend money on anything frivolous, but my mother has convinced him that I should have some kind of reward for my academic efforts—I secretly think she feels guilty about Alan and wants somehow to make it up to me, without of course mentioning any of it. I have been hinting that I’ve seen a new bike in the bike shop—it’s red with drop
I do begin to spend more time at my grandparents’ home, and while I don’t feel I could share my secret with Agnes or Tom, I feel more secure within the stability of their cozy house and of all their years together. I also like to hammer away at the piano in the front room, which sits beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart, a portrait of Jesus with his organ of compassion glowing luridly and exposed within his chest and surrounded by cruel thorns. I’ve begun to miss our piano since they took it away, and Agnes’s upright seems a perfect sounding board for my unspoken confusion and anger. This is the same room and the same piano where my mother accompanied my father in happier times, and the memory of “Goodnight Irene” lingers like a faded perfume. I close the sitting room door and draw the curtains across the window. With both pedals hard to the floor I attack the keys with a decidedly unmusical ferocity. Sweet harmony may be what I am seeking in my damaged world, but that is not what my unschooled hands are producing. It sounds like hell and strangely gives me some comfort.
Without the piano as an outlet for my aggression, I may well have become delinquent, vandalizing bus shelters, stealing junk from Woolworth’s, and other petty crimes. God knows I had the contacts. This might have been some consolation for Agnes and Tom, who have to listen to this cacophony, if they only knew what was wrong with me, but they don’t. No one does.
I can see my grandmother now, slowly opening the door to the front room. She is peering nervously over her tortoiseshell reading glasses. I stop midcadenza, as if I’ve been caught at something shameful.
“Eh, son, can’t you play something nicer than that—” she struggles to find a word to describe my efforts—“that …that broken music?”
I lower my head, afraid now to look at her. “Yes, Gran, I’ll try”
In spring the weather improved, so a replacement for Alan has been easier to find. Matters at home have reached a kind of détente. My parents are at least civil to each other, if not overly warm. The porch is no longer a safe place for my mother’s assignations with Alan, and my mother has seemingly limited her social life to visiting Nancy at her house on Thursday nights, or at least that’s what she tells us. She takes the car and my dad stays at home with us, sullen and silent. My mother may well have tried to end this clandestine relationship with Alan at various times, but her emotional needs and her romantic bond with him would have been too strong. She had found the love of her life, and she would be torn tragically between this love and the bonds of her family until she died.
It is Easter of 1962 and I have won a scholarship to the grammar school in Newcastle. There are forty other eleven-year-olds in my class, but only four boys and ten girls have sufficient percentages to qualify for a place in what is considered the top echelon of the school system of the time, the grammar school. My friend Tommy Thompson is not one of the chosen ones, although to my mind he’s smarter than all of us.
My dad is never willing to spend money on anything frivolous, but my mother has convinced him that I should have some kind of reward for my academic efforts—I secretly think she feels guilty about Alan and wants somehow to make it up to me, without of course mentioning any of it. I have been hinting that I’ve seen a new bike in the bike shop—it’s red with drop
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