The Stuck Note

Part One · Middle C

The piano in the hall at Kettle Lane School was older than the hall it stood in, and almost certainly older than anybody who had ever played it. It was a tall black upright with brass candle holders folded against its lacquered front, from the days before electric light, and somebody had once carved the initials R.T. into the side of the lid and then, judging by the scratches, regretted it. Lio's mother had tuned it twice a year since before Lio was born. On the Saturday before the spring concert she let him come with her, and he sat on the edge of the stage swinging his feet while she lifted off the front panel, and the whole mechanism of the instrument appeared like the inside of a clock.

There were about two hundred and thirty strings in there, his mother said, though the piano only had eighty-eight keys, because most of the notes had two or three strings each, tuned to exactly the same pitch so they resonated together. When you pressed a key, a small hammer covered in tight wool felt swung up and struck its strings and bounced away again, and when you let go, a soft pad called a damper settled back onto them and stopped the vibration. Lio pressed the key in the very middle of the keyboard. It had a faded gold star stuck on it, peeling slightly at one corner, which the infants' teacher had put there years ago so that the five-year-olds could find middle C.

Lio was going to open the concert. He had been chosen to play the first piece, a slow, unhurried melody that began on middle C and wandered away and came back to middle C at the end, like somebody strolling around a garden and returning to the gate. He had practiced it for two months on the piano at home. But on the Monday after the tuning, the music teacher, Mr. Hartigan, stopped him in the corridor to say that middle C on the hall piano had started sticking. You pressed it, and it went down, and it did not come up again. Mr. Hartigan said that the piano was a hundred years old and had served its purpose, and that he had already asked the head teacher about replacing it.

Part Two · The Wrong Answer

Lio did not want a new piano. He was not sure he could have explained why, except that the old one had a particular sound, warm and slightly woolly in the low notes, like someone speaking with a blanket over their head, and that every child at Kettle Lane for a hundred years had found middle C on it. His mother came in after school on Tuesday, shaking rain off her umbrella. She pressed the key twenty times and it came up every time, smoothly, with no hesitation at all. Mr. Hartigan said that it was always worst in the afternoons, during choir, which was exactly when it was needed. His mother said, in her careful professional voice, that this was very interesting, and that she had a theory.

Her theory was humidity. A piano was mostly made of wood, she explained, and wood absorbs moisture from damp air and swells, and lets it out again in dry air and shrinks. Each key pivoted on a little metal pin, through a hole lined with felt, and if the swollen wood grew even a fraction, the hole could grip the pin and the key would come up slowly or not at all. It had rained for most of March, and the hall was always damp in spring. She used a specialized pair of pliers to squeeze the wood around the hole very slightly, so that the key had more room, and she showed Lio how it now dropped and rose like a feather. Then they went home for tea, feeling triumphant.

On Wednesday afternoon middle C stuck four times during choir. Mr. Hartigan told Lio about it in the corridor the next morning, sounding regretful but also slightly as if he had been vindicated, and he mentioned that the new piano would be an electronic one, much lighter, which never needed tuning at all. Lio went to the library at lunch and sat at a table without reading anything. He thought about the concert, and about pressing a key in front of the entire school and hearing absolutely nothing come out of the instrument. He thought about his mother, who had fixed pianos in cathedrals, standing in the empty hall with her pliers in her hand and looking baffled, which he had never seen before.

That evening at the kitchen table he asked her what she did when she could not find a fault. She said that she stopped guessing and started observing, because a fault always happened for a reason, and the reason was usually in when it happened, not only where. Lio asked whether she thought Mr. Hartigan would let him sit with the piano for a whole day. She said it was an unusual request and that she would phone him. Mr. Hartigan said yes, provided Lio caught up on his math and did not play anything louder than middle C during the reading test in the next room, so on Friday Lio set up a notebook on top of the piano and a pencil on a string, like a scientist.

Part Three · The Sunny Side

Every half hour, from nine in the morning until half past three, he pressed middle C ten times and wrote down how many times it stuck. In between, he did fractions on his knee. At nine it stuck none of the ten times. At ten it stuck none, and at eleven none, and at twelve the dinner trolleys rolled in and the hall filled up with the aroma of gravy, and it still stuck none. Lio began to feel foolish. At half past one he pressed it once and it went down and stayed there, with a dull little thud when he pressed it again, and he looked up from the notebook and noticed, for the first time, that his hands were warm.

The hall had tall windows along one side, facing west, and all morning they had looked out at nothing in particular. Now the sun had come around the corner of the building, and a brilliant stripe of light lay across the keyboard from the low notes to the high ones, right over the middle. The keys in the stripe were warm to the touch. Lio thought about the damp that his mother had blamed, and about the sun that nobody had blamed, and he took the small torch from his mother's toolbag and shone it straight down into the narrow gap between middle C and the black key beside it. Something in the gap glinted back at him, gold, like a coin at the bottom of a pond.

It was the star. Somewhere in the last few weeks it had peeled off the top of the key and slid down into the gap, where it had folded in half, so that one sticky side held on to middle C and the other faced the black key beside it. In the cold morning hall the adhesive was hard and slippery, and the key slid past its neighbor without any trouble. But by half past one the sun had warmed it until it was soft and tacky, like a sweet left in a pocket, and every time middle C went down, it glued itself gently to the black key beside it and stayed there. His mother had pressed it twenty times on Tuesday. It had poured all Tuesday afternoon, Lio remembered, which was why she had blamed the damp, and the keyboard had never once been warm.

His mother came to the school as soon as he phoned. She did not say anything for a moment when she saw the gold glint in the torchlight, and then she began to laugh, very quietly, with her forehead against the side of the piano. She fished the star out of the gap with a long thin hook from her toolbag. Then she cleaned the last of the sticky residue off the side of the key with a cloth and a drop of something that smelled of oranges. Lio pressed it thirty times in the full afternoon sun. It went down and came up every time, and the note rang out, warm and clear, across the empty hall.

Mr. Hartigan came in from choir practice in the classroom next door to investigate the commotion. Lio showed him the notebook, with its column of zeros in the morning and its column of sticks after lunch, and then showed him the star on the cloth. Mr. Hartigan examined it for a long while. Then he said that he supposed he would have to phone the head teacher back, and that in his opinion a piano that had been sabotaged by the infants deserved a second chance. He did not mention the electronic one again. Lio's mother put the star in an envelope, and wrote on the front of it, in pencil, the date and the words faulty middle C.

On the evening of the concert the hall was crammed, and too warm, and smelled of folding chairs and floor polish. Lio sat down at the old piano with his heart going like a moth against a window, and he put his thumb on middle C, where the gold star used to be. The infants' teacher had wanted to stick a new one on. Lio had suggested, very politely, that she put it on the lid instead. He pressed the key, and the first note came out of the old piano, warm and slightly woolly, the sound that a hundred years of children had found there, and it rose, and the key came up under his thumb, and he began.