Kenneth

While he was alive my Father was a very talented man. Although he excelled at many things he was particularly proud of his ability to play the piano. He was no composer and not as good as some of the concert pianists you see on TV, but it was still amazing to hear him play. I was always impressed by his ability to sight-read and I spent hours entertaining the thought that one day I would be able to play anything I wanted, just like him.

I once asked him how he got to be so good. He told me that it came down to three things: Practice, Practice and Practice. After the usual childish arguments about how this was one thing, not three, he told me that it was a mantra taught to him by his old piano teacher. He went on to tell me that his teacher, a strict old man named Kenneth Jones, had such a fierce temper that his students were guaranteed to practice lest they invoked his wrath.

By all accounts Kenneth was a fairly amicable person in his youth, he merely became more and more bitter as he grew older. The reason for this dramatic change in personality was, perhaps unsurprisingly, music. Kenneth was a classically trained musician, brought up to believe that if it was not Bach, Beethoven or something of that ilk then it simply was not music. He had carried this chip on his shoulder through the end of the jazz era, through rock and pop, metal, disco and the beginnings of the electronica movement; how could he be anything other than furious at what the people around him called music?

Still, in spite of his temper Kenneth was the most popular music teacher among the townsfolk. His popularity was due to the fact that his teaching methods, while harsh and unorthodox, garnered results. There was also the fact that Kenneth was the only music teacher we had, but people tended to gloss over this fact and pretend his popularity was entirely due to his results.

Over the course of his career Mr. Jones had taught hundreds, possibly thousands of students. Many of these students showed themselves to be talented musicians in their own right, but only a handful of them went on to gain some modicum of fame or success. Of that handful, there was only one student who went on to become known nationwide.

The student in question is a young man who lived in a fairly affluent area of town. While he was a popular individual about town, nobody outside of his family could tell you his name, since he was colloquially referred to as Smiler.

Physically speaking, Smiler was around eighteen to twenty-one, but mentally he was closer to a six year old. It was this mental stunting that earned him his nickname, since he always wore a big, cheerful, somewhat goofy-looking smile.

Smiler had expressed no interest in learning to play the piano, but his parents had decided it was for the best. His parents believed that if he could learn to play then he would be able to jump-start his brain, helping him on the path towards becoming an intelligent, productive member of the community. Conversely they believed that if he could not learn to play then his easily distracted mind would be somebody else’s problem for a few hours a week.

Smiler was scheduled to take his lessons in the slot immediately before my Father, so he was able to hear how the challenged boy was doing. It did not go well. Father said that Smiler had a whale of a time pounding away on the keys at random, but that he resisted any and all attempts to get him to learn to play properly.

As you can imagine, Mr. Jones’ temper did not fare well. Father told me that he could hear his teacher getting more and more furious at Smiler’s lack of practice and inability to concentrate. While Kenneth was always an unpleasant man he displayed a particularly mean streak when teaching Smiler, more often than not using language that, even back in the non-PC age of the late 70’s, was shockingly offensive.

One day my Father turned up for his lesson particularly early. Kenneth taught his students in his study and insisted that he be left alone during lessons, so Father waited patiently outside. He heard the familiar sound of fists hammering against ivories as he waited and, when the sounds ceased, braced himself for the inevitable stream of abuse that would be levelled at the would-be musician. Nothing came. Father sat in silence for a few long, agonising minutes before sheepishly knocking on the study door.

Kenneth’s voice came from within. He said that he and Smiler were doing a little extra studying and that Father should go home and practice, practice, practice. Being a child he simply did what he was told and went home to study his finger work, giving no thought as to the reason why.

It is perhaps for the best that Father left when he was told. When Smiler failed to return home after his lesson, his parents alerted the police. The first port of call for the constabulary was Mr. Jones’ house. Incidentally this was their only port of call, since they found Smiler almost immediately.

It seems that the Smiler’s ineptitude has pushed Kenneth to breaking point. All of the older mans pent up frustrations had been unleashed and he had hit the boy round the head with a hammer, likely killing him outright. Kenneth had proceeded to sit Smiler at the piano and drive two three-inch nails through his left hand and one through his right, making sure the boys hands would never leave the keys.

It did not take a criminal psychologist to see that Mr. Jones had lost his mind so he was committed to the Hexagon almost immediately. He died some months later after apparently falling onto a knife in the dining room. Twenty-seven times.

Father told me that the ordeal shocked him but did not deter him from playing the piano. Indeed he went as far as to say the sequence of events inspired him to work even harder to become a great pianist.

His newfound enthusiasm was not due to kinship or respect for Smiler. Rather, it was driven by fear that the next time someone told him he could not carry a tune to save his life they, too, would turn out to be telling the truth.