Four Hands

by Ruth Folorunso

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“Miss, there’s something I’d like to show you.” 

Miss Ogbemudia turned – a sharp movement of her upper body that cut her tailored shirt into creases. The winter sun was sinking, filling the room with its last light and with her face towards the windows, she glowed like an icon. Lola took in the image of light caught in the stray coils of her hair and held it deep within herself. 

“What is it?” Miss spoke like she couldn’t dare to shake the air. In that inflexion, she had once explained tones and semitones while Lola watched her little finger fall and rise with the chromatic scale on the page. With remembering came words, rising from inside her, pushing into her throat like bile. Miss, do you – Lola swallowed. Instead – 

“A piece I’ve been learning for a while. I think you’ll like it – well, you might not and that’s fine, but I want to show you that I’ve not been a waste of your time.” 

Miss Ogbemudia smiled. 

“You’re not a waste of time, Lola.” 

Lola shook her head and did not wait for Miss’s polite objections, pushing herself off the windowsill and weaving through the desks, past her teacher, who followed. They met in the shadow of the vast grand piano. Lola pulled out the music sheets from her blazer’s breast pocket, unfolding and pressing the worn pages upright against the music desk. She knew her teacher was watching her, and her hands shook. She began to speak, but her mouth was dry and her words shook. 

“It’s sophisticated music,” she managed. “I learnt it myself, but I couldn’t have done it without you. I wanted to surprise you, on this day.” 

She was close enough to Miss Ogbemudia to see the faded mole on the left side of her neck. Half her face was still caught in the dying light – her right eye was a circle of gold. In Lola’s mind, the melody was already striking up, illuminating the figure of a woman whose body burned like precious ores. 

“This seems personal, Lola,” Miss was saying. She looked concerned. “Are you sure you want to give this to me?” 

“Who else?” Lola replied, and she bit the inside of her cheeks before more could spill out, pathetically. 

It was seven years ago when she had been eleven and lost in a world that was dissolving even as it attempted to rearrange itself into something new. Every face had grown strange, even her own – she did not recognise herself when she spoke to the children who were meant to be her friends. She could no longer trust the words coming out of her mouth. What to do then, except

give her a new voice – the piano, the polite language of good middle-class children, had seemed a way to refashion her back into something human. The school’s new music teacher taught lessons at a steal – £15, half an hour lessons each term – and the woman’s face and manners were as polite as her instrument. So Lola’s parents offered their daughter into her hands and hoped to see the girl again soon. But this Lola knew: Miss Ogbemudia had come to her as an act of grace and Lola, from the first instance, had clung to every part of her that she let within reach. It was grace so potent that it would overwhelm her – in lessons, Miss Ogbemudia’s presence, endlessly sweet, would overwhelm her, driving away all sense until all she could do was move her hands up and down against the keys like an automaton, trying to be gentle with her fragile happiness. Happiness that was breathless, dizzying, like terror. 

In the music room, she was happy and scared; outside, she didn’t know what she was, didn’t care either. She never returned to whatever she had been before eleven, and her parents might’ve mourned, but she didn’t– things were changing again because she was leaving. University was all the way in Edinburgh, the head of this island. Miss was down here in Exeter, at its foot. 

So Lola smiled at her as broadly as she dared, lips trembling, and the tight line of her teacher’s shoulders relaxed. 

“In that case, I’m honoured. A goodbye gift from my favourite student.” 

Lola turned her face away. Her heart was a fist banging against its cage. She dropped clumsily on the piano stool and waved a vague hand at the music room. 

“Make yourself comfortable, Miss. I’ll try not to take too much of your time.” 

She pretended to study the sheet music whilst listening to Miss’s block-heeled footsteps tread the linoleum floor. She rubbed her sweating palms on her lap. 

“I’m ready, Lola.” 

The room was suddenly still. Lola looked over her shoulder, blinked against the sunset, and was stunned to see Miss sat at her pupils’ desks. Her back now faced the light. Her body had become a curving shape held by warm shadows, but even in the dark, Lola knew her eyes were kind. 

Lola nodded and returned to the keys. Her hands trembled in her lap, but she pressed them together and held herself still. Once she could hear her thoughts above the noise of her heavy pulse, she raised her hands and studied them. They were steady. So she let them fall. 

So began Four Hands, by Lee Namyeon. The music was immediate – without warning, it dropped you into its gentle sadness. This arrangement was a shadow of itself – the original was a duet, two players sharing the melancholy between themselves. But here she was, carrying that weight alone, before the woman whose hands she had memorised. Lola stretched her left ring finger towards a black key and remembered Miss’ own ring finger as it had once lingered on a white key. On that ring finger had been a band, a slash of gold against her skin. She had been Mrs Smith then, with two kids, anecdotes of whom she carried around like sweets in her pocket, ready to hand out to whoever would listen. Mrs Smith was 23, and seven years on, Lola 

still could not understand sharing oneself with so many wanting bodies before the age of 23. In class, Miss would twist the ring as she spoke; in their lessons, it would glint in the overhead lights as she stretched towards the farthermost key. Mrs Smith, Mrs Smith, four soft syllables on the tongue, soft like the lady who wore wigs with visible fronts, who hand-painted polka-dots onto her nails and who had lined her face early, with smiles. 

Lola’s eyes fluttered shut. The melody clung to her, leaden. Under the skin of her hands, her tendons tensed and pulled. 

There was a moment in the music where it tried to rise above its melancholy – the tempo rising, the melody growing light – only to return, and fall much deeper and more intimately. In this moment, the ring disappeared – an omission, an empty space between words. Then the space revealed itself as a strike through the name Smith. Miss Ogbemudia did not wear wigs and her smiles were rare, though her eyes never lost their kindness. The others kept their Smith because they only knew disrespect. But Lola could wrap her tongue around the syllabic nuances of her names and in turn, Miss Ogbemudia said her name as it was meant – lo-la, two punches of the tongue against the mouth’s hard palate. Lola, Ogbemudia, in their shared, secret language. Here, in this room, for the last seven years. 

It was coming faster now, all of it. The music was leaping away from her, insistent on something she would never put into words. Memories that she had calcified into hard certainties so she could return to them. Here was one, piercing her with urgency: Miss in lessons, with long black braids swinging over her shoulders. In their music room, she’d run her hands through them whilst her eyes smiled over Lola’s braids. You inspired me, she’d said. And another: an evening like this, the sun long sunk, the cold seeping in under the doors and Miss with her back against the radiator, her eyes closed and her head tilted towards the radio as they listened to an interpretation of Andante Sostenuto, a piece whose name she’d remembered only for the look it had put on her teacher’s face. Faster and faster, rushing through her – no, stay, never end, but the music would not listen even as she tried to hold it down with all her might, to make it live longer than all its scant minutes. 

And here it was – the final note. She drew it out, letting it hang tremulously in the air like a wish. Her skin was bursting at its seams with seven years of memory. It was the tangible pressure of the keys against her fingers that kept her grounded – otherwise, she would dissolve into pure thought, unspoken words. 

Miss Ogbemudia, this is Four Hands played by two. I see your contours in its melody. Please – I want to return to you and play it by your side. I want to watch your hands move across the ivories again, next to mine. I want to see your ring finger reach across mine to pick at the penultimate note before the music ends…

It was done. An echo of the last note clung palely to the air before it too had to end. Its finality filled the room, denser than silence. 

Lola lay her hands to rest against the keys. Her fingers, always slightly too short, ached. Her skin was burning. She waited. 

Behind her, Miss Ogbemudia wept.