Alfonso Greene, Suburban Lion Tamer

Learning the piano was harder than I expected, apart from first learning to sight read the sheet music, I had to learn the instructions that went with it that gave the piece character. The most important, and time consuming, part of learning the piano was to establish the muscle memory needed to play the many long pieces without music, and this required playing the piece several times, until my fingers automatically went to the right keys, and in the right sequence. This is not something that can be down loaded at several hundred megabytes per second into my memory like a computer, it had to be learned in real time.

My arms ached and my fingers were sore, but I kept at it, my stamina refuelled by coffee and kisses from my intended. This was another thing that had taken longer than expected, the obtaining of a Marriage Licence so that I could make an honest woman of the love of my life.

In the mean time Grandad had arranged for the modifications to the trailer, so that one side could be lowered to become a part of the concert platform. The piano was moved forward to provide the right acoustic balance, and lighting was installed.

At the first town we stopped at after this work was completed, and to test my muscle memory, I practised with the trailer set up for a concert recital. We had soon drawn a crowd, not all of whom were classical music aficionados. I had several requests to play pieces that were more indicative of the locale; "Play the Pub With no Beer", was one such request. It was then that Kat stepped in. "Maestro Bartholomew is on a mission to bring the classical repertoire to small country towns such as this. Now you may not know the pieces that he is playing, but you will have to concede that the music is pleasant to listen to. At present he is playing Schubert's Nocturne in G minor." She looked at me and I nodded in agreement to let the crowd know that she got it right.

"What's a fucking nocturne?" The male voice came from the middle of the crowd.

"Bruce, you're making a fool of yourself," the female voice came from somewhere close to him, "if you don't shut up, I'll tell your pisspot mates that your real name's Nigel."

This brought laughter from the crowd, resulting in him attempting to slip from the crowd un-noticed. "See ya later Nigel." Someone yelled at his back. "Do ya wanta drop by for a chardy?" Yelled a woman (chardy = chardonnay, looked on as a girly drink by the serious pissheads)

"This is just a small taste of what we will present to you this evening. Maestro Bartholomew has just begun his tour around the backblocks of Australia to bring classical music to the masses, so you people of Yakanbandra (Yeah, I made that name up) are in for a treat tonight. Tonight, and tonight only, we will present a free concert, just for you. From here on in, we will be charging for these concerts, so you would have to feel privileged to get it for nothing. Just bring your chairs and be set up by seven, and look forward to two hours of magnificent music by some of the most famous musical geniuses, played for you by the soon to be famous musical genius of Maestro Bartholomew!"

"I don't know if I'm ready for this." I said to her after I had finished, and the crowd disbursed.

"You're ready, believe me, you are note perfect. I've been following your playing and you've got it down pat. Tonight you're going to knock 'em dead."

Even I have to admit that the concert went better than expected. The word had got around that there was a free show on, and it seems as if the whole town turned out. After the first couple of pieces the crowd forgot about their chairs and pressed forward to get closer to the music. I had begun softly with 'Fur Elise' and worked my way through the more common classical pieces, I even threw in the opening few bars of 'William Tell' until some clown yelled 'Hi ho Silver, away', so I switched to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

After two hours I had to call a halt, I was exhausted, but the crowd weren't about to let me go, so Kat stepped in. "Shove over." She told me, and launched into the Rachmaninoff's Second, a technically difficult piece for even an accomplished pianist, and she nailed it. My bride to be never ceases to surprise me.

"When did you learn the piano? I asked from somewhere near her neck.

"I started a week ago. While you were resting I sat at the keyboard and practised by just touching the keys. Tonight was the first time that I actually hit the keys with any force. Did I do good?"

"You did better than good, you were perfect. If we had two pianos we could play duets."

"We could try some piano four hands pieces until we can find a way to incorporate two pianos."

"We'll discuss it with Grandad tomorrow, but now I need to come down from my adrenalin high."

"And just how do you intend to do that?" She was holding my cock. (Yes I've started to call it that, and her vagina is now her pussy).

"Like this." My finger found her wet pussy and worked on it until she was ready to receive me. Love making with Kat was a sublime experience for me, and from what she whispered in my ear from time to time, it was just so for her. We were growing impatient at the bureaucratic masculine bovine excrement that was delaying our nuptials,

Grandad was beside himself the next morning. He had returned from the Post Office with an official looking envelop. I tore it open, an in my rush tore a little of the form inside, It was my Birth Certificate, and Kat's, necessary documents to enable us to apply for a Marriage Licence. "What is this?" I pointed at Kat's Birth Certificate, and her date of birth in particular. "Does this mean that you were under age when we first made love?"

"Only by a couple of days. Look, before you get angry with me, I had to get away from home before that Friday night, and the only way that I could think of achieving that was to hook up with someone who could help me. Luckily for me, you two came along, and my problem was solved."

"But, what would have happened to us if your mother had kept a copy of this?" I said, pointing at the certificate.

"I knew that she didn't, and I figured that you were smart enough to get a decision from the court before she could get a copy. That's why I had my student ID on me. Her haste to get me to school and out of her hair so that she could entertain men during the day was her downfall. I was so proud of the way that you conducted our defence, it was almost as if you were one of those fictional lawyers who manage to save the innocent with his courtroom pyrotechnics, only you were better."

I have to admit that I was angry at first, but then, hell I loved this chick. I remember reading that line somewhere, and like everything else it stuck in my memory, and this seemed as good a time as any for me to regurgitate it. I kissed her, just to show her that I forgave her and that her deception had caused no hard feelings in my mind.

"Do you forgive me?" She asked as she returned the kiss.

"How could I not?"

"So, there's no hard feelings then?"

"No, none at all."

"Then all that's left is for us to apply for the licence and find a celebrant to perform the ceremony." Grandad said.

It took all morning to apply for the licence. If we were in a city or major town, it would have been simpler and quicker, but in small towns signatures have to be obtained from different people for different forms. Why they can't design forms that one person can sign is beyond me, but then I'm not a public servant working for a department wanting to establish its importance in the overall scheme of these things.

Two days later I had a wife, and not just any wife. Kat was exactly what I wanted in a woman, she was as spontaneously crazy as I was, prone to flights of fancy, to weird ideas that we could spend days developing before realising that they would never have worked and consigning them to the recycle bin.

We still hadn't bought a second piano, the logistics of transporting two grand pianos was something that would require some contemplation. In the mean time it was fun for Kat to come and join me at the piano to play pieces composed especially for piano four hands, and some that we composed ourselves, and that we really had fun with when we played them.

We were nothing like traditional concert pianists, we eschewed the formal garb required, there was no way that I was going to wear a stuffy dinner suit, choosing instead jeans and shirt. Kat was a litle more flamboyant, choosing bright colours and lots of layers of filmy material. We had bought a sewing machine and she made most of her clothes, not to save money, that wasn't necessary, we were doing quite nicely, but because she could not find suitable off the peg clothes, or any dressmaker that could understand what she wanted.

As for the relationship side of marriage, it could not be better, our loving was increasing day by day, and we would often express our love for each other in new and exciting ways, at times getting strange looks for those nearby, not that we made love in public, although the thought was out there.

We ran foul of conservative convention a couple of months after we had begun our concert tour. We had just pulled into a large country town, and went to the town council offices to apply for a permit to perform, and ask after suitable venues, when we noticed that a professional orchestra was also performing in the town. We thought no more about it, we just went ahead as usual and put on our first performance. The crowds were down on the usual first night crowds, we were used to smaller crowds on the first night, but this was small by our standards, given the size of the town.

The local paper had reviews of both our performance and that of the professional orchestra. Given the cultural bias towards the professional orchestra, our review was as good as we could expect, damning with faint praise was a term that sprang to mind, but it wasn't bad. We were not expecting anything more than a modest increase in crowd numbers on the second night, so we were shocked at the crowd that rolled up. We were really going to need the amps and speakers that we had bought to get the sound to the crowd at the back.

The applause at the climax of each piece was, to put it mildly, tumultuous, and we had to play several encores.

The next day it fell apart in a big way. A man arrived with a court injunction preventing us from performing, on the basis that the professional, and government funded, orchestra somehow had priority scheduling. They were quite happy for us to re-schedule for after their season was finished, but, and this was the point of the injunction, not what it said, they were not about to compete with some amateur ivory tinklers.

The upshot of this was a heated exchange between Grandad and the Orchestra management, containing words such as restraint of trade. This resulted in Grandad throwing down a challenge to them, prove that they were better than us, and we would leave them to it and move away. This led to another series of discussions as to how this could happen, before it was decided that I would be involved in a 'blind' playoff against the professional pianist. We would each perform a piece, the same piece, seated behind a screen so that the audience would not know which of us was playing. We were to let them choose the piece, and it came as no surprise that they chose the Rachmaninoff, and the winner would be based on audience acclamation.

The other guy went first and I had to admit that he was good, in a conventional way, his playing was a little stilted. The audience reaction was moderate. It was now my turn. I was, as I had come to expect, note perfect, the difference between us was that my playing was more relaxed, and the notes just seemed to flow from the piano. The audience was much more enthusiastic after my performance had finished. It looked as if we would not be moving on.

Looks can be deceiving. In the early hours of the morning we heard a loud explosion, and woke to find our trailer well alight. We called the fire brigade, but little could be done to save the trailer or piano. This part of our adventures had finished, neither of us felt any enthusiasm for starting over again. We left town with the police investigation into the fire stumbling along. Charges would eventually be laid against the pianist from the orchestra. We learnt from that not to piss off a professional.

Grandad was showing signs that the constant travel was taking its toll on his health, so we decided to head back into town and live in his house that we had left years before.

I loved this place, it reeked of Grandad's personality, nothing was 'normal' in the conventional sense. But then what was normal in the conventional sense would be totally out of place in Grandad's world. The house contained examples of his artwork, paintings whose techniques would rival the masters, sculptures that could not be compared with the traditional masters, because they did not resemble in any way those of the masters. Don't get me wrong, they were brilliant, but in a different way.

"Wow! This place is amazing." Kat said as we walked through the house, earning several hundred additional brownie point from Grandad, not that she needed them, she was already his equal most favourite person in the whole world, me being the other.

One of Grandad's hidden talents was his mastery of the barbeque. We went shopping for food to restock the larder, and Grandad was giving us advice on what to get. "Only buy fresh produce if possible, when buying meat choose the best cuts and resist the cheaper thin cuts. For the barbeque you must have thick slices or else it's too easy to overcook it. When buying chicken the best is often the cheapest. For some reason you can pick up thigh cutlets for about a third of the price of breast fillets. Of the two cuts, the thigh, because it is one the most used muscles, has the best flavour and doesn't dry out like the breast fillets do, it is also very good value for money, the flesh to bone ratio is much better than drumsticks or Maryland pieces that are equally flavoursome. With lamb go for the palest, and therefore youngest, and shop for the best price. With pork go for shoulder of leg roasting pieces and learn how to make crackling."

We moved on to the produce section and he showed us how to select the best fruit. Your nose is the your most important tool, sniff the fruit, find out what variety of the different fruits you prefer and don't just go for the ones that are popular. Take for instance mangos, the most common is the Kensington Pride, but unfortunately many of these are picked much green and have no flavour. Of the other varieties I prefer, in order, R232, Honey Gold and Calypso, all of these have smaller seeds for their size, and if ripe are much sweeter than the others."

"If you must have breakfast cereals, don't go for the fancy processed varieties, they are grossly over-priced and tend to have far too much sugar. I make up my own muesli from plain ordinary rolled oats, cheap as, oat bran, and a mixture of dried fruits and seeds. I know most people will tell you that eating muesli is like chewing on wood shavings, and just as tasty, but I make mine up the night before with home-made yoghurt and milk, and in the morning I slice a banana onto it, yum."

It is lucky that Kat and I could remember all of this, because the lecture continued until we had our trolley filled with what Grandad told us constituted a good, wholesome and most importantly, flavoursome and balanced diet. "Eat this and get regular exercise, although I expect you already get enough of that, given the noises I hear in the night, and you'll stay fit."

I have to admit that his efforts with the barbeque were by far superior to my father's feeble efforts. The meat was tender, seared on the outside and almost raw in the middle, the fresh salad complimented it beautifully, and he broke open a bottle of Shiraz that he told us he had saved for a special occasion. "There is something that has bothered me a little of late Kat."

"What would that be, Grandad?" She has taken to calling him that, him being for her, the closest thing to family.

"You don't eat much, but you seem to be stacking on a little weight, you wouldn't be pregnant, would you now?"

"We were going to tell you, but what with everything that has happened lately, we just didn't seem to get around to it, but yes, you are about to become a great-grandfather."

"This calls for something other than Shiraz, bubbles are in order. Wait here."

He returned with a bottle of champagne and three flutes. Expertly pulling the cork without the usual explosion and stream of wine, he carefully poured us each a glass. "I wish to propose a toast. To Phillip and Kat, the two people that I love most in this world, the two people that have made my life, what I have left of it, worth living, and who have given me hope for the future. You two have that spark in everything that you do, which makes the decision that I will have to make shortly so much easier. Here's to the two of you." We touched glasses and sipped the excellent, I would have expected nothing less, champagne.

Something was bothering me about Grandad, it was the almost fatalistic way that he was going through life at the moment, and that speech confirmed to me that something was worrying him. "Grandad, something is bothering you, what is it?"

"Tomorrow, we'll discuss it tomorrow."

Tomorrow was a long time coming, and when it arrived it changed everything. It began over breakfast. "Have you two given any thought to what you're going to do pre and post baby?"

"Yes, we were discussing it last night. I have not very fond memories of my father sitting on the edge of my bed, attempting, not very successfully I might add, to carry out what he saw as his paternal duties to me, by rushing through a kids' book in record time, before going back to what he enjoyed most, money. By age two I could recite 'the Very Hungry Caterpillar', I couldn't read it, yet, but I knew it by heart, and do you know the saddest part of all of this? When I recited it, it was at the same speed that he read it to me. So, I have it in mind to write kids' stories, among other things."

"And I looked at your collection of art work around this house, and have decided that, because I was good at painting, and even though I haven't done any paintings for a while, that I should launch myself on a career as an artist, but not just any artist, I want to make a statement."

"What did you have in mind?" Grandad asked.

"When I was younger, I was good at copying other artists' works, so," She paused for dramatic effect, "I plan to copy as accurately as possible, famous art works and add something to them. For instance, I could copy, well enough to be considered a forgery, the 'Mona Lisa' and then add a pair of bright red Botox lips, as a comment on the perception of beauty. Or a Constable landscape and insert a large SUV into it."

"That sounds interesting, and I approve. But one request that I will make before you launch your new careers is, that both of you come with me today. You might as well know that I don't have a lot of time left, so I must prepare for the eventuality, the certainty of my death, and that includes ensuring that my son cannot get his sticky fingers on my money, and, believe me he will try."

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"You shall see when we get there." It was all very mysterious.

He ushered us through the front door of a rather unpretentious office where we were greeted deferentially by a Receptionist. "Good morning Sir, they are waiting for you."

"Thank you Nadine." We walked down a corridor to a doorway, through which we entered without knocking, to be greeted by five men who rose to their feet as we came through the door. "Sit down, you know how much I hate that ceremonial bullshit."