Tragedy's Adverb

"You always smile but in your eyes your sorrow shows...
Can't live if living is withou you"

Harry Nilsson 







Content Warning:
Strong language, sex references, violence references

Transcript

Tragedy’s Adverb

Adverbs don’t always end in “ly”. L, Y. “Almost” is an adverb for example. “Almost” is perhaps the most tragic word in the language. If an adverb is an adjective lit to motion by its suffix so that it becomes the word that describes a verb, the how of doing, how this that or the other was done, in what manner achieved or effected: is a Story, perhaps, an enormous adverb? Tragedy befell Wallace Accidental. It befell. But how did it befall? What is the adverb of this tragedy’s befalling? If I jump, I might do so enthusiastically, rather than aloofly. If I lie, I might do so expertly. I choose my words, carefully. I jumped, I lied, I chose: they happened. But how did they happen? Here is how this tragedy happened…        

Efficiently, Wallace Accidental released his viola from its velvet case, and applied rosin generously, swiping the small healing block of apricot along the entire length of the bow, from frog to tip and back again repeatedly: until the voice was readied. He and his viola-voice were alone in the practice room. Faroff sounds of muffled musical agony from all the other practice rooms reached him, unintelligibly for the most part. The surrounding struggles registered, with impotent intangibility. The glaucous morning half-glow stood at the window incuriously, hardly looking in. Wallace Accidental tuned the viola hastily. He masterfully ran up and down the three-octave height of an F minor scale, the most tragic of all the keys in his opinion. The voice was readied. 

Surely, as if in defiance of some deadening thing that might hinder him, he summoned the opening bars of the Hindemith sonata, the most wonderful sonata in all the world to Wallace Accidental. He had a recital tomorrow as part of the main hall series. He had met with Kenneth Quiet the accompanist yesterday and had been satisfied with the gelling of viola and piano. What work he could do with his accompanist was now done, he had learned early on that he could not be responsible for musicians that were not himself, he could not suffer for them, change them, alter their hearts. His aspiration was purely for his own playing, and, indeed, he felt that there was more to be done alone. The composer of the sonata was a violist, one who knew the instrument well and loved its qualities. Like Mozart, who also played it. He worked for an hour, he had often worked for far more than a single hour and would again, but today was about restraint, of a kind. Still, naturally, he worked tirelessly for the entirety of that hour, effecting honing after honing, strengthening moment after moment of ecstatic communion between human being and viola, trying to make immortal that, beautiful, which lived, died, and would not necessarily be renewed tomorrow. Glowing moments, difficult vaulting corners of mastered intonation, athletic leaps off precipices to perfect landings on further precipices had to be worked unshakeably into his hands, into his pregnant fingertips, so nothing could assuage the wonderfulness of that most precious happening: great music. It is so mournful, he thought, so intelligently mournful. His eyes drank the notes before him and his ear imagined the churning voice of the absent piano beneath his own: so many chances, so many almosts: and then: Mud. Tragedy. Hurt. He thought of his teacher, Florence Flat, who had been granted a compassionate leave of absence from the academy. Her daughter had died a few days after her twenty first birthday from a stroke. This can be better, Wallace resolved. He thought of his teacher, a reverse orphan, a parent-orphan, he felt her mourning in the music, he found himself touched by a song that was pure bereavement. The mordents in the second variation of the theme and variations seemed to weep. This can be better, he purposed as much as believed. And he practiced another three hours. Why not? He had no friends or girlfriends, he was tragic: as the artless morons he went to grammarschool with always used to remind him in their lexicon of the dim.    

Beautifully, in the hall the next day before the gathered watchers, the Fantasie was begun, full of turbulent weather and rainstorms in the piano. But the three hours Wallace Accidental had gone on practicing had tired his instrument. The G string tensed and then snapped about thirteen bars into the second movement with a dissonant percussive blow, a profane pizzicato. That a G string should be snapped, ripped so brutally was like a rape to Wallace Accidental. Once he would have raged, fallen to his knees weeping and pounded the ground beneath him. But he thought of his teacher’s daughter and kept close to his heart the lesson in proportion that her tragedy had taught him. Calmly, he changed the G string. The broken twain of the first G string was a tragedy. But he went on in spite of it. He was rapturous and wrathful at the sonata’s end, magnificent in the blows that all the adorers before him and all the blooming walls of the hall were visited by, the closing bars: their indignant, stern strength. And there the sonata was!

Victoriously, he and Kenneth Quiet gave a unanimous nod and pouting of the lip to one another, a facial expression that meant not bad, and then they took a bow together before the cacophonous applause. There it was. And, much to Wallace Accidental’s awe, there She was: the girl with huge eyes. She clapped but it was a tenderer- a more tender less mob-like act, a kiss she sent to Wallace Accidental with her two hands. Yet there was still strength, a kind of mutiny in her gentleness. 

Appreciatively, Wallace Accidental sought the girl after the recital, when the performers and audience were all standing around and talking and having glasses of chardonnay. The girl was very alone, lonelily she courted the tray of canapes, the small parcels of salmon and dill and cream-cheese and brie and crackers. She looked up. She glowed. She was found. It was an inevitability: they talked for a while mostly about the music. In talking about the sonata, in speaking in musical terms of longing, hope, sadness, victory, all safely depersonalised and confined to the impersonal space of the musical score, their words rang with something genuine they were not often permitted to express, their souls spoke: a dead composer, his surviving music: it was an avenue of dual and genuine ipseity: two striking ipseities, courting one another in forces calm and meaningful beneath their words. It was an inevitability: they exchanged numbers and went for coffee the next day. She was called Lucy.

Carefully, ahead of their first dinner date, now that they were both quite sure they could bear one another strengthened only by coffee, Wallace Accidental washed and shaved himself. He accidentally dropped his razor into the toilet. How furious he once would have been, with himself principally, for leaving the toilet bowl exposed. But he patiently bent down and extracted the razor from the water and sterilised it, lovingly.

Quickly, he re-entered his bedroom and collected up his necessary effects, ready as soon as he had done this to head straight for the Korean place where he and Lucy had agreed to dine. But something rather unlikely had occurred. Of its own accord, his viola had quit its case where it usually slumbered quite content, and was standing in the middle of the room, in front of the bed: the viola had grown a leg. It was a human leg, a small leg with a sockless foot at the end of it, small like a child’s leg but adult in texture and it had hairs. It was a male leg. 

“What the fuck…” Wallace Accidental couldn’t help saying aloud.

Cordially, the viola seemed to acknowledge Wallace Accidental’s surprise, and jumped up and down a short height, three times, enthusiastically. Wallace Accidental hadn’t been on a date in about a year and hadn’t been laid in longer. He became impatient with the viola. He opted for incredulity as an initial approach and decided that his viola’s new leg was a hallucination, caused he figured, given the phallic suggestibility of the image, by sexual repression. He strode over to where the viola stood, as though to attention, to put it away, but the viola hopped away from him. While his purpose was not music, the viola seemed to disobey Wallace Accidental, while the viola was not the centre of attention it chose mischief rather than compliance. And now it was legged: it had an actual leg to aid it in its misbehaviour. So: Wallace Accidental tried to grab hold of the viola to stow it away in safety inside its case, but the viola fled each lunge he made, hopping away, winsomely. It had no face, nor anything capable of conveying emotion, and yet the legged viola emitted what could only be described as personality, a strong, spirited personality in the bounce and the alacrity of its mischievous movements. Wallace Accidental didn’t know what to do.

Ultimately, the legged viola attended the dinner as a third party. The viola stood, to its dutiful, erect attention, a bodyguard, self-appointed, to Wallace Accidental. Sometimes the viola motioned as if cocking his head, suddenly alert or offended, in curious judgement at Wallace Accidental’s choice of wine, or the fact that he didn’t get up in the right way when Lucy went to the toilet (and didn’t receive her in the right way when she came back to the table), or that he changed the subject back to himself too quickly when she was talking about her previous relationships. But she forgave him all these things because there was a spark that she couldn’t deny. Even the attendance of the legged viola, though she pretended not to notice it, enthused her and engendered in her a greater curiosity about Wallace Accidental. In her more contemplative moments (enriched by wine) she wondered if Wallace’s musical talent, the thing which had first captured her attention and through which they had come together, hadn’t personified itself in the form of a legged viola; was it a sign, labouring to tell her that she loved his talent but not him? No, there was a perfectly sensible explanation as to why Wallace Accidental’s viola had grown a human leg, she thought. Then again, she didn’t like the surname Accidental much. She would come away from a marriage with him: Lucy Accidental. And her children would be Accidental: Accidentals. Billy Accidental; Sheona Accidental: like a cruel nickname. For herself, she would keep her maiden name, a small matriarchal protest- even her mother did that, old as she was. 

Wallace Accidental had been a little disappointed to discover at their first encounter that she was not at the academy, nor was she a musician of any ability. Luckily, though, she was friendly towards the artist’s temperament: Lucy was a reasonably talented art student, who had a number of friends in the classical music and conservatoire world (and had consequently gained some singular musical knowledge), but who preferred tennis as an extra-curricular pursuit. Her other preferred extra-curricular pursuit was the universal one: incidentally, at art school she was flourishing, while on dating apps she was not. But there was fresh hope now in the form of Wallace Accidental. Her little bit of…whatever he was. Accompanied by the viola, Wallce Accidental walked her to the tube and that was where they parted for the night. Wallace Accidental waved to Lucy as the tube raced into darkness. She waved back. Then Wallace Accidental noticed, much to his chagrin, that the viola had grown an arm, a small male human arm, quite suddenly, and which was in motion: waving. This begged the question: who had Lucy been waving at?

Naturally, the legged and armed viola followed Wallace Accidental back to his flat. There was no dividing the two of them. Wallace Accidental slept only with difficulty. The viola refused to lie down, and stood beside the bed, eyelessly surveying him, all night. Before he went to sleep, Wallace Accidental wished rather fervently to himself, and with a burst of trepidation quite new to him, that his viola would not acquire a pair of beautiful, sad eyes.    

Glady, Wallace Accidental met up with Lucy for lunch the next day. He practiced in the morning, and the viola was naturally obliged to be used for its designed purpose, folding away its new limbs so they wouldn’t interfere with the playing. He had a rehearsal with the symphony orchestra later that day, had to lead the violas in Mahler’s Sixth symphony, the “Tragic”, so lunch was the best time to meet. The viola hopped at Wallace Accidental’s side, all the way to Le Pain Quotidien. The two entered the café and found Lucy already seated. She stood up and she embraced Wallace Accidental. Viola took a seat and started moving around the cutlery and napkins and table number and salt and pepper casters. Lucy had patches of ugly dark under her eyes because she’d been up all night. 

“I have something new,” she said. She could be a little intense when she got the right idea: an idea deserving of such nocturnal intensities.

“Please, show…” Wallace Accidental answered. His curiosity was genuine, although he wasn’t terribly interested in art, and even less so in the Margrittian surreal to which she was unswervingly loyal in her own work. 

Shyly, she elicited the fruit of her nightly labours. What she took out from her tote bag was a sketch, coloured in water colours. Though you wouldn’t have known that it wasn’t a violin from her image, it was a viola, a viola with two arms and two legs. Wallace Accidental studied the painting and was repelled by it. Then he looked at his viola. The one arm and one leg was now partnered by a second of each. Life had imitated art, and he was furious about it. And so swiftly, so readily, too!

“Why have you done this?” Wallace Accidental said.

“I think I can turn it into a beautiful oil and canvas. I think I can make something splendid. You’re not the only one with aspirations you know. I could win the Turner Prize with an image this compelling” and then she said, indicating towards the viola who had just discovered the pepper shaker’s contents, sneezy black flakes falling from the holes, “he could attend the press conference.”

Wallace Accidental handed back the watercoloured sketch and Lucy put it away, saying, a little nonchalantly: 

“My family’s Jewish, you know. I infer themes of genocide, holocaust, state sponsored murder from this image. The humanity of the abstract, the reason for music, the objectification of the artist, the suffering of the rainforest and the wildlife in the rainforest…”

Wallace Accidental had had enough of this virtue signalling. He stood up rather crossly and said very emphatically: “This is a betrayal”. 

Hastily, he turned around and began the walk back to his flat. The viola embraced Lucy before leaving and Lucy seemed to receive the embrace of the small armed and legged thing rather keenly. Walking back the way they had come, Wallace Accidental taking fast troubled, truculent steps, the viola just behind striding now rather than hopping, Wallace Accidental hoped the viola would be hit by a car. But then he realised, waking from the stupor of female company: this is my viola! he thought. This was his viola, his everything. How could he forsake it? How could he curse it? It was as though his talent had now become personified, it had become a being, like the Jungian shadow almost, and his talent wanted its reward for being, like Wallace Accidental it too seemed to desire its own fun, and its own acknowledgment. It got it from Lucy.

Subsequently, Wallace Accidental and Lucy stopped seeing each other. The armed and legged viola began deserting Wallace Accidental at nights and spending time with Lucy. She and the viola would pass long wordless whiles together, serious hours in one another’s company, in deep communion. Wallace Accidental watched them through the windows of good restaurants, together, embracing, close, their contrasting bodies unafraid of each, each to each. It drove Wallace Accidental mad. He couldn’t even admit to himself- or even ascertain- which he pined after the most, whose absence and rejection stung him the most. He even had to hire a viola from the department to make progress with his training- which lightened his wallet each week a little more than he would have liked. At least he got to keep his bow, the humanised viola seemed to have no presidency over it.  But he felt no love for the hired instrument. There is no moderation, there is no sensibly cool regard. There is only adoration and hatred. So Wallace Accidental chose to hate. He hated his hired “prostitute” viola as he called it. And he hated not only Lucy, but It.

Consequently, “it” no longer: Wallace Accidental’s hatred of both Lucy and viola seemed to strengthen the refuge, the passion each found with the other; for the other. Wallace Accidental wasn’t there when it happened but the viola grew a penis. And in need of a bed, and as though the viola had a preference in which bed it took place, Lucy and the viola appeared at the door of Wallace Accidental’s flat for sexual intercourse; someone exiting the building had buzzed them both into the groundfloor and told them which room number belonged to a fellow called Accidental. 

Desperately, Wallace Accidental tried to get rid of them but they were unassuageable. They were unejectable. He sat in his chair, his “reading chair” as he called it, reading nothing however, and watched as Lucy and the viola (his viola he had to keep reminding himself) clambered onto the bed, the springs complaining with their combined weight. Violas do not have rights, I enslave with impunity, Wallace Accidental told himself. The gobshite’s obviously discovered social justice, he muttered angrily to himself with energetic bile, the kike wants reparations! Reparations, reparations he wants! A few eternal moments later, Wallace Accidental was surprised to discover that he felt intrigued; and then mesmerized, as well as nauseous, as Lucy and the viola made out, Lucy adoringly kissing his strings, and his scroll, and his fingerboard, and his curved shoulders, he was very marmalade. Strangely, Wallace Accidental almost wished she’d take more interest in the new penis (which showed every sign of being post-pubescent) rather than coating every non-human part of his one beloved viola with her smell. Wallace Accidental wondered if all this was about the G string that had broken during the recital- he considered that perhaps the viola had discovered vengefulness and was now exacting revenge for his over-practicing and causing the snap. Wallace Accidental may even have cried out or started to cry out an anguished apology, that he was sorry- ever so sorry! about the G string. But the viola hadn’t yet grown ears and so remained oblivious to him, just as Lucy did, too listlessly involved to care, or even hear.  

Eventually, the penis did erect itself and the viola knew what to do with it, how to utilise his four ordinary limbs to the benefit of this one special middle limb, calling upon and awakening its genital facilities. It was at that point, seeing Lucy mounted by his viola with a cock and limbs in his own bed that he could stand it no longer, and too repelled to approach them, found himself virtually flung out of his flat, where he hurried into the off-licence and proceeded to weepily abuse a 330 ml bottle of Jameson’s on a wall outside a pub.

Reluctantly Wallace Accidental returned to the flat. He hadn’t been able to hold down that affordable Irish whiskey and vomited outside the flatblock. Palely, he climbed the stairs to his room with great slighted hesitation. He found Lucy asleep on the bed, rose faced, red cheeked, contented, her glistening forehead beginning to dry. The peace that was dropped upon her seemed the weight of lead, the chaste peace of love made. Her lover did not slumber with her: his shadow lay upon her, cast by the bedside lamp: he stood on his two legs, his two arms on his sides, and the penis retreated and laid down to more modest and floppy protrusion. Wallace Accidental collapsed into miserable, fitful sleep on the floor, the ache punishing behind his eyes, and the last thing he saw was the viola, his master, stood over him, a faceless enslaver. 

Perfervidly, Lucy began work on her great oil and canvas. In her own room, she sought with great fervency for the right blend of colour that would portray, as she had glimpsed it, the evening marmalade of the viola, the play of low light on his body. She mixed colours furiously for whole mornings. The forms in the painting were not difficult to sketch out, the dimensions, proportions, weight, position of the two arms, two legs, and phallus. But she did grow curious as to the connective tissue, where human flesh ended and viola began or vice versa. In her own conception of him, did she first encounter his human extremities? or was her sense primarily of his middle being, the wooded torso of viola from which his limbs extended… When she tried to render him more viola than person he became more person, and when she tried to render him more person than viola the reverse occurred. She was unsure how to render believably the very beginning of each limb in the body of the viola. She tried, she went on, she began laying colours, but the result seemed fantastical, an impossible notion, something that had come from her imagination not her experience. But he had been so real, her viola lover, with his hands, his legs, his big willy. Though she could not work the spark of realness, this tang of the penile actual into her painting, she finished it, and she titled the painting, or at least resolved that it would be titled in any showing that would accept it, “The Lover”. 

Morosely, Wallace Accidental turned over in his bed and found his sickly face swamped in a white, gelid light. It was 1.43 pm. So late in the day, and he had not risen. What there had been between Lucy and the viola did not seem to endure beyond their strange coitus. The viola grew faithful again to his old partner in the crime of artmaking, morose, depressed, emotionally invalid Wallace Accidental. To rouse Wallace Accidental, the viola picked up the bow in his right hand from the violacase, and with his left hand adroitly fingering, his right arm supremely bowing, all of a sudden, out of silence, there was music in Wallace Accidental’s sombre room. The Hindemith, the Fantasie. Those tugging, memorial, richly real notes blew like healing balm around Wallace Accidental’s head. He stirred, his eyes twitched open. He listened. Mournfully, he thought. Mournfully. His teacher often gave him adverbs. He plays wonderfully, he thought. Wonderfully mournfully. He was resurrected and he reclaimed the viola and the viola received him graciously. Wallace Accidental was recaptured by his art. The viola put the bow in his hands and inspired them to capability again. 

Similarly, Lucy was captured by hers. She painted, Wallace Accidental played and they never even stopped for a second to think of each other. They were quite content, lost in private worlds of which they were the sole population. Lucy attended the big performance of the Mahler sixth symphony, not because she gave a monkey’s bollock about Wallace, leading the viola’s with his stupid, intent, music-face, she had girlfriends in the orchestra. Wallace Accidental led the violas with furious aplomb for the whole humid hour and twenty-minute symphony. He felt washed clean by the red waters of the music, he felt reborn, reinstated to kingly office, this was his vocation, he had grown apart from it for a while, but now he recognised it in all its radiancy, its glory, its noble primordiality, and was in love and thrall again.  

Finally, the last cry of the symphony, the final grand death sob died its tragic death and silence reigned in the hall. Once that silence had been allowed to sit, the applause was gargantuan, the audience were on their feet, their appreciation was raucous. The viola had behaved itself all throughout the symphony’s duration as well as the preceding rehearsal, quite impeccably. Standing for bows, Wallace Accidental didn’t need to hold the instrument, it just stood up on its legs next to him, and even clapped its hands in self-congratulation. Then, instead of following Wallace Accidental off-stage, the viola walked off into the audience. Wallace Accidental followed the viola’s purposeful strides with his eyes, still holding the bow. He couldn’t help but feel forsaken. He followed the viola, pacing after it where it went, just about able to keep up with it through the people. Lucy! Lucy was in the audience, he hadn’t known. She wants to see me, Wallace thought, she wants to get back together with me and watch films and fuck me. But the viola went right up to her, and they embraced. She whispered in the viola’s ear- or where an ear might be. Not again, Wallace Accidental thought. Not again! Sensing abandonment he rushed at Lucy and the viola and he collapsed to the floor at their feet:

“Please! Please don’t do this to me again! Please don’t leave me!”

Lucy looked at Wallace Accidental from on high, with a perverse serenity: “I’m pregnant”.

Her belly was a little round.

“Goodbye,” she said.

And as much as he protested, as much as he complained, Lucy and the viola walked away into the night, and Wallace Accidental could do no more than stumble and plead in slow, failing pursuit as once again the two eluded him: their starward journey left him behind and sobbing.

***

Prematurely, the baby arrived. Wallace Accidental refused to be broken by the tragedy. Florence Flat had returned to work after her absence, a period of leave which had been readily granted on compassionate grounds after her daughter’s death. She and Wallace Accidental worked ferociously with the hire viola. They both had a new resolve about them, a defiance. She was curious about the old beautiful viola’s absence but didn’t mourn it. She had other things to mourn. Wallace Accidental told Florence Flat that the viola had grown arms and legs and a penis and abandoned him and stolen his girl and impregnated her but the tale did not move Florence Flat. Courageously they went on with their work, and warmed to it.

Eventually, Wallace Accidental found himself at a student gallery in his spare time, on one of his day’s off. He moved slowly along a line of melancholy images: an old withered hand reaching for a ripe, fertile piece of fruit called “Age”; a toaster with a purple stole burning on top of it called “Hell”; a plastic-bag-fish swimming underwater with all the other fish called “A Species”; a torso with no arms or legs or head sitting on a sheep called “Pastoral”; and a viola with two arms, two legs, and a penis called “The Lover”. Wallace Accidental’s mind heaved huge images, huge sheets of feeling through his inwardness. Memory moved like fog in his eyes: the bed, the arm, the leg, the wave, the cock, the painting, the bed, the cock, the bed, the weeping, the Jameson bottle: all that was contained there in the terrible image, all those impressions glimpsed in anguish, so much moved in the shadows of this piece of work: the three of them, their shadowed menage: Wallace Accidental, Lucy, the viola. Suddenly, she appeared behind him. She tapped him on the shoulder and Wallace Accidental swivelled around with a fright. There she was: 

“Hello,” Lucy said.

“Hello,” said Wallace Accidental.

Silence.

“What do you think?” said she.

“Very fine,” Wallace Accidental said.

“My baby,” she said, with an ironical darkness Wallace Accidental did not understand.

“Thanks for reminding me about that,” Wallace Accidental said: the betrayal, her pregnancy, the baby.

“Oh, he died,” Lucy said.

“What?”

“Our baby. He died,” Lucy said.

“What of?” Wallace Accidental enquired.

“SIDS”

“What’s that?”

“Sudden infant death syndrome”. 

“What a tragedy”.

“It was so sudden. It happened so suddenly”.

“The tragedy’s adverb,” Wallace Accidental said. “I mean one couldn’t die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome gradually, right?”

“Well, if you were the one to die, suddenly or gradually, then it wouldn’t be Infant Death Syndrome, would it”.

“No.” Wallace Accidental felt pensive. “It would just be death”.

“Lots of things happen suddenly,” said Lucy. She pointed to the painting: “Are you still fond of me? Can you imagine a future?”

Wallace Accidental looked at her: “Possibly. Yes”.

Lucy said: “He’s no longer around, you know”.

Wallace Accidental was startled. “Pardon?”

“He’s gone,” Lucy said.

“Who?”

“Him,” Lucy said, indicating to the painting, “The Lover”: the limbed viola.

“How is he gone… how…”

“Because I killed him. I took an axe to him. I destroyed him.”

Wallace Accidental was tranced, numbed:

“Why?”

“I thought he might leave me. I thought he might leave me for you one day. You’re the musician after all.”

Wallace Accidental cried out: “He wasn’t yours to do that to!” Some people in the gallery turned at the sound of his raised voice.

Wallace Accidental was paralyzed, toxic with fright and rage. He couldn’t master his breath, his breath ran away from him. He needed some air, he was imprisoned, and he needed release. Wallace Accidental ran outside into the street. He stood on the kerb, bowed, supporting himself on his knees, his head hung as if with nausea. There was a presence behind him. Lucy followed him and put her arm around him. The limb was serpentine, what fine wire, what snare curling around his throat:

“You’re mine now. And I am yours” she said “…you can have me now”.

Wallace Accidental looked at her. He looked into her big eyes and sadly recognised the person who had first enthralled him that day at the recital. Threnody, ferocity, the snapping G string, mordents, wailing intensities, Hindemith: the viola sounds roared in his ear, in his mind. His mind was the hall, and a viola sang inside the hall, song ricocheted off many walls and sounded like ten songs. He couldn’t bear it. He was defiant. He refused to succumb to her. He motioned in her direction, she came, he looped his arms around her, he took her shoulders in his arms, he roundly grasped her form, he had her, and, with her levered in his grasp, he pushed her into the road. She sprang forwards, downwards into the marked asphalt and a car slammed into her and her body was torn into several parts. The car leapt upwards with the force of the impact and rolled to the right while airborne, before smashing into the ground on its side. Wallace Accidental ran. Furiously he ran, fervently he ran, he ran fast, he ran swiftly, he ran fearfully, he ran tremblingly. He ran away.

Late into the night, there was a knock on his door. Wallace Accidental rose, and he opened the door. It didn’t sound like a punitive or imposing knock, a policeman’s knock. He opened the door:

It was “The Lover”. The painting, of an armed and legged and sexed viola, had grown a leg from the base of its frame. It was a lady’s leg. The legged painting followed Wallace Accidental into bed.      

The next morning Wallace Accidental quickly had coffee and was off to his lesson with the greatest alacrity. He couldn’t feel more fresh and clear-headed and unburdened. The painting grew an arm in the night and followed him to the lesson, hopping in an ungainly motion through the door which Florence Flat opened. Florence Flat studied the painting through knitted brows. The painting parked herself on a spot and was still so Florence Flat could take it in:

“That’s a funny painting,” she said. She said: “Is it about the holocaust? Or a genocide? There’s something tragic about it” reading the line and stretch of the viola’s limbs as though they were inches of obituary in a paper.

“Someone I used to date did it,” Wallace Accidental replied.

“Let you down, did she?” Florence Flat asked.

Wallace Accidental thought about this, briefly: “No, actually. She was very intense. She cared ever so much about art. This was her baby. She said that to me.”

Silence. “Shall we get on?” said Florence Flat. Her voice sounded shaken, shaky: she was thinking about her daughter but refused to let the pain overcome her and stop her from doing her job. 

“Yes,” said Wallace Accidental. He was starting to warm to the hire viola. It wasn’t so bad, if he was honest.

Wallace Accidental took out the viola, and the bow, to which he applied rosin generously, and proceeded to liberate a few scores from an upper compartment in the case. The morning was glaucous, blue-grey in the window, mist coloured without being misty. Out came the Telemann concerto, the Hindemith, books of studies and caprices.

“Play the Telemann,” said Florence Flat.

“Really?” Wallace Accidental thought he’d done it to death under her tutelage. But there was more work to be done.

“Yes,” said Florence Flat. “I love it. It is so wonderful.”

“From the beginning?” Wallace Accidental asked.

“Where else?” replied Florence Flat.

He played from the start of the Largo, and what he played was very good indeed. He swooned in the Largo. It was simple but so intelligent. The viola sang, and the viola played its part well in Wallace Accidental’s hands, it became that part, that poet-speaker, that singer who might break down in tears, who might not be able to keep on hoping for a kinder, gentler world, a world richer in love and poorer in brutality. But he went on singing, how could he lose that lilt? Not even murder could stop that lilt! He played tenderly, forbearingly, hopefully, beautifully. “The Lover” seemed to listen all the while, pacing slowly around the room, somehow exuding a pensive character, a mood of solitary contemplation. Wallace Accidental stopped upon reaching the allegro. He was perturbed by his teacher’s stillness, her silence, her spell of introversion.

“Are you alright?” Wallace Accidental asked.

She took a while to respond. But she did: “Could I have that painting?”

Wallace Accidental thought he heard correctly but wasn’t sure: “Hmm?”

She repeated herself, no louder: “Could I have that painting? I want it. I want to keep it.”

Wallace Accidental pondered the proposition briefly and replied: “I’d give it to you in a heartbeat.” And then, after a breath: “…but it’s just not up to me. She has a will of her own.”

“She?”

“Yes, I’m convinced it’s a She. You see, the viola in this painting is a He. I believe the painting itself is a She, or will be.”

There was a lull in the room, a hectoring disappointment. “My daughter was a She”.

“May I go on?” Wallace Accidental asked, already lifting up his bow, primed.

“Yes, yes, go on…” Florence Flat answered, a little dazed.

“How should I go on?”

“How?”

“What adverb…with what adverb embodied should I go on?”

“Don’t go on. Try the beginning again. More softly.” A pause. “Softly,” she said, softly. 

He did. He sang a song that would not wake a sleeping baby: the song of one who has something to hide, a man who wished to sing his tragedy, and for it to pass unheard.