THE PIANO

On the evening of his twenty-first birthday Rosa hoisted Augustus onto a stool beside the piano so that he might be seen to better advantage while he sang. Being just thirty seven inches tall, as he was swept upward he caught a glance (somewhat askew, since he was so unceremoniously whooshed) of that shadowy space between the keyboard and the yellow pine of the floor. This space had formed the architecture of his childhood; the underside of the keyboard his ceiling, the piano legs pillars, the whole a secluded vault where he might crouch unseen (as had D.H. Lawrence before him), ‘in the boom of the tingling strings’, observing the miracle of his mother’s feet as she crushed the papery soles of her black velvet slippers (winking with diamantes) against the pedals.

But unlike the wretched Lawrence who deplored his maternal loss in both prose and poem, Augustus did not mourn for long. His mother did not mourn at all.  Not since the day (Augustus believed he was four years old) when Mrs Trump, having learnt from her physician that her son was indeed a dwarf (A midget? she gagged, incredulous, into her hankie. A damned midget?), handed him over to the circus mob passing through town. Which allowed her to return to her piano, striking the ivories with even greater appassionato, as Lawrence would have liked.

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