Three talented, bright young things....on clavichord, oboe and viol, playing Bach and Heinichen - soul music of an entirely different kind.
Outside the city is crazily hot, crazily busy - but in here, in the faded glory of the Brussels Conservatoire, the world stops. It just stops. There is nothing but the music. And the three young musicians watching each other, in absolute synergy, catching each others' eyes, smiling, anticipating, teasing. A joy to watch, a privilege to listen - €7 for goodness sake.
They were magnificent. And I wish, as I always do at such events that I had pursued the instruments I played so half-heartedly as a girl - the recorder, the clarinet, the classical guitar, the piano...all cast adrift for easier, more social pleasures.
In one of the auditorium boxes sits a boy with a man I assume is his grandfather. He's about 10, big-eyed, long-limbed, rangy. A fidget before the music began, unable to sit still - scratching, chattering, pointing, arranging and re-arranging himself across the threadbare chair.
My first thought was that his hair was like yours (oh always the unwanted but unconscious ever-sought comparisons Thomas)...those tufts at the crown that would never lie flat despite all the coaxing and combing.
As the musicians walked on to the stage to rousing applause his grandfather turned to him and whispered and the boy stilled. I bet grandad wanted him to be inspired.
I kept glancing his way..and as the minutes passed the yawns got bigger, his head slumped lower, until it dropped. Something about the way he rested it on his long, folded forearms, reminded me of you too.
And as often happens when pressed into a chair, no distraction but the music, it takes just a simple echo, and the mind flees, and plays and replays....
I think I always knew that we wouldn't have you forever. Don't tell me how I knew...I don't think I acknowledged it to myself until afterwards. No doctor ever said your time was limited. You were rarely ill, you were as strong as an ox....yet those blue episodes.....
I remember when we arrived home from Bamburgh without you...and a friend had waited hours and hours for our return and as she took me in her arms, a broken mess, my first words to her were 'I knew, I knew...' So I must have known. I must.
I think of all the times before when, in the quiet of an early morning, I would lie awake, waiting, listening.
This is how it would go: first, as it started to get light, a thud as you negotiated yourself out of the bed and on to the floor. Seconds of silence then a faint shushing as you bottom-shuffled your way across the carpet followed by a real crash-bang-wallop as you started on your toy box, emptying it all, picking out your favourite, and giving it hell for leather.
This until you got bored. Then you'd fumble with the doorknob, find your way round the bedroom door, bottom shuffle along the hallway to the kitchen, dragging along your best toy to the washing machine, throw it inside, and generally just bang it around....
I loved this, that you made the decision what to do and when. That your first port of call was the washer! I loved listening for a few moments to your 'free will' in action, waiting to see what you did next, before getting up to start the day proper...and finding you something more sensible to do.
But sometimes this didn't happen. You would sleep in and I would lie there thinking...not today Thomas, not today. And of course it never was....
And then it was.
Do you know how many times I thought about it how it might happen? Even though all common sense and reason screamed it never would. Do you know how many times it came into my head while sitting at my desk, or in the car...sitting in concerts like this, scenarios of how it might be...and what if I were far away?
Do all parents carry such dark morbid thoughts with them or was it my subconscious preparing me for something it knew would come?
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
I do know that it's a struggle to get through such searing music without a runny nose. I do know that pulling one's self together so you can just get out of your chair at the end sometimes takes a physical effort far greater than anyone can imagine. I do know that even now, it still lands like a left hook far more powerful than any super-heavyweight could muster.
When the concert ends and there is the rumble and roar of several hundred bodies on the move all heading to the same tiny exits, I watch as the boy in the box leaps into life.
I see him again in the corridor and, despite the call of his grandfather, he races past us, bumping and shunting people in his rush to the exit. I want to ruffle his hair as he speeds past.
I feel my arm reaching out, my hand uncurling...and stop as reason and rationality kick in.
Brussels Conservatoire concert, Bach & Heinichen, given by Les Timbres (Benoit Laurent, oboe; Myriam Rignol, viol; Julien Wolfs, clavichord).
http://www.les-timbres.com/
http://www.conservatoire.be/accueil.html
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