Prelude to Pearls

 Chopin wrote 24 Preludes, one for each hour of the day, but I always played them when there was a full moon. There was something plaintive about them, methodical, as if all was right, bright or even rightly, brightly dark about the world. When there was a misty ghostly moon of any size, I played his Nocturnes that then seemed appropriate. But a clear new moon made something spring or jump inside my spirit, and I played new music, atonal, some might say a load of noise, but I always found something musical in it, something secret, something classical, something that normal melodic music couldn’t reach. 

But when there was a clear gibbous moon, I couldn’t play any music at all. I knew I couldn’t, so why did I try to do so and fail? When there was no moon at all, I thought the Chopin Mazurkas or Waltzes would be perfect, but as I sat down to play them in such circumstances out came a single unknown Chopin Prelude. The notes seemed to play themselves, even more beautiful than the official accepted canon of Preludes. It was almost as if I were sitting at a piano with a piano-roll that was cut into by the finger strokes of Chopin himself. They were my own fingers that followed the keys as they indented one by one, as if the music played me and not vice versa. The perfect Prelude. I stared into the starless, moonless sky as I followed the notes or the notes followed me. I guessed it was so utterly black because of cloud cover. But at heart I knew it was the perfect blackness. The perfect prelude to death. But then my mansion’s silence, following the unknown prelude, broke out with an unknown voice…

“I wonder if an utterly  black oyster can culture a black pearl rather than the more usually clouded pearl, its pitch black outer shell hinged to another such shell, and tightly contained within them are its slimy innards and a now bullet-hard pellet shaped into a tiny sphere whereupon all the seas and lands mapped upon it are as black as each other…” The male-sounding voice took a few moments to catch breath, before continuing… “That was my dream, to cultivate and market black pearls, thus to provide necklaces for everyone’s sweethearts to show up on their fair-skinned necks. But then one day they told me I could not do this as it would be seen to conflict with the social norms of tolerance and inclusivity. Everything needed to be available to everyone, to show up on every skin colour.”

I nodded knowingly, having glimpsed his face was facing my face. Before I played Chopin, I had been an oyster-catcher of the first water and he was here as a half-breeder open for my stock of such wares. I poked a finger into my purse and brought out for his inspection the most perfect pearl I had as a lucky keepsake. One I had not been able to sell. It was no colour at all, yes, a colourless pearl like a drop of water. I offered it to him with my own voice the sound of which was unknown even to me …

“This is the only pearl of its kind but I now have the methodology to re-create it, given your investment to catch other oysters the same colour as water. Think of it, a necklace of pearls like beads of sweat, or gentle perspiration — each pearl fused to the skin without the need for a thread or string. Such pearls have the attractiveness of glowing upon the skin and no laws are contravened. Even mermaids can wear them, say, like a belly-dancing delight just above where their skin ends and the tails begin.”

He looked at me as if I were mad, but decided to trust me. I had helped him before to discover dust that did not need dusting, food that did not need excreting, see-through hats, clothes that made one thinner than one’s body otherwise made possible, and false moustaches for women.

“Ah ha,” he had then said, “aren’t you contravening the rules of universal availability by offering false moustaches for women? They need to be available to men, too.”

We had always come to an agreement – always a compromise. 

“Black pearls,” I said, “have always been a difficult choice, both to cultivate and to fulfil social justice strictures. Normally, I found, black oysters produced pearl-coloured pearls just as pearl-coloured oysters did, too, each producing a pearl that I see as a rich pinky white that glows like Heaven’s light, and with an imagined soul of utter perfection emanating from within. But others see that colour and soul differently. And none of us can really know what the others see.”

I matched my poetics with his. I knew the business pearls had helped me live in this mansion, idly playing Chopin Preludes on the black and white keys of a grand piano! I smiled, before continuing…

“After all, God is colourless, see-through, and sometimes comes down as a certain kind of rain, and is neither man nor woman.”

We were now speechless, the whiteness of our eyes a faint Botticelli pink. Silent together, at least before that moment when he left the mansion hand in hand with whoever he thought he had been talking to.

“We’ll need a belt as well as some braces,” I said, to myself, retuning my fingers to the piano.

I was not fearful but I looked askance at where an unknown woman seemed to be sitting. What did she know about a man’s need for a belt and braces? Seventy-six years of life and I still thought that anxiety was a word you set in spelling tests. 

If one thing fails, then you have the other to hang on to, I always tried to explain, the belt and the braces of self and unself amid the shifting shadows of precarious time. So imagine my surprise when she suggested holding up my Chopin music score stretched-out in front of the grate for inducing the flames of a fire into the banked-up coal and wood in the hearth, just like the help of the up-draught of a similarly stretched-wide newspaper in front of the start of smouldering flames, just as I watched this happen in my childhood. Dangerously flammable, looking back on such ancient domestic fire-making practices. I could never keep up with conversations nowadays, because I had to remember what someone had said at least a a minute or so before I tried to remember it — and that was becoming more and more difficult.

What had happened, was that the electricity had gone out, and all the mansion-lights with it. And by belt and braces, she meant a torch and a candle. We had to climb the stairs to bed, a veritable challenge more characteristic of Everest these days. Especially in an unexpected darkness. I imagined those shifting shadows of my life now transposed to the landing, especially if lit with a candle.

“No, not a candle,” I said. “A torch will do.”

“We need one to find the other,” this woman counter-claimed. “Otherwise we will find neither.”

I nodded as if I understood. Understood that she was the ghost of my wife or indeed my still living wife, Except it was too dark for her to see me nodding. This was a rum do, I thought. Both of us sitting in the darkness, thinking the other one would go to find a candle. Or a torch. Whichever was more readily to hand. 

Needless to say, our preparation for such an eventuality had turned out to be pitiful. As we realised at the same precise moment that the belt had failed and so had the braces. But having just thought that, I’ll probably forget it later. My own flickering inner light was blighted with shifting shadows. And I mused as I watched them for a while or imagined watching them as we continued sitting in silence. Good job I would again recognise her voice as I had no other evidence about with whom I was sitting in the sitting-room. Sitting side by side or opposite each other, I could not remember. I stretched out my hand in all directions and fumbled with a vertical elasticated strap over someone’s chest. Didn’t feel like my wife’s chest. Must be mine, then. Though the waist and its threaded belt felt far too huge to be anyone’s at all. Must be a giant, I thought. I resisted feeling beyond the clothes, if only to find the pearls under the neckline above the bosom, pearls that I had once given her. The light would be back soon.

And it was then I heard a movement in the corner of the room, a shuffly, shambly friction. And the sudden blooming of candleflame amid new shifting shadows, and a face lit up. I squinted to see if it was my wife’s. I was sure it was her face, the one that had been lived in for longer than anyone would care to think. My own face was weathered, too. I wonder if she could see it from where she now stood, with that relatively distant candleflame. If it was her at all. Which it must be. It would be an intruder otherwise. An intruder wearing braces. 

I laughed to myself. Strange what shifting shadows can do to the mind. And I thought of my own trusty torch that I thought I carried about with me at all times — for just such an eventuality. Its pinprick beam ever primed. But all I’d feel would be my mobile phone which I had never been able to use properly ever since someone gave it to me and showed me how to work it. It might even have its own torch beam, I now suddenly remembered. Strange what one remembers, and what one forgets. I believe I forget more than I remember, but I am never sure.

I suddenly stood up with a creaking of pain, without apparent volition, to feel better about my person and to seek whatever double security of well-being I could re-establish. And my trousers immediately collapsed around my ankles with a silence from which any friction had already escaped. I picked them up and held them in front of the dead fire instead of the Chopin score.

“The light is coming on.” The unknown woman’s voice. But I didn’t hear it. The light was coming out, instead! The root of the light fitment had come away from the sudden strange white glow of the flat ceiling. And the rest of the lightshade was precariously hanging beneath. The visibility had become its own shifting shadows out of my sight up there, risen there automatically like swathes of bright heat and smoke. I couldn’t even remember, meanwhile, whether I was still alive. Only the feeling of someone’s fingers loosening the pinions of my clothes. So I could escape through them. Then loosening the sinewy belt and braces holding all the baggy skin to the bones. I was to be cared for by my better half to the very end, I thought — even as I remembered the sensation of it all ending but not quite ending yet. “How do you spell anxiety?” asked the giant, before the mobile phone broke into light, having already started to vibrate. I had come to the final state of sieving the 24 pearls by shape rather than by colour. Just as I hoped soon to hear the sweetly atonal notes from Heaven itself, not Hell.