Two grand pianos stand in the music room covered in dust. Geoffrey pulled the blanket over his knees. His pyjamas draw string had broken so he stayed seated on the old sofa.

Cars passing down Elsternwick road on a wet Saturday morning sounded like a G note sustained in a large, empty concert hall.

“I’ll give you $8000 for both of them,” Dubcheck said. “They’re old and I’ll need to replace the strings.”

Dubcheck hoisted his trousers over his belly, sniffed the stale air and saw salt damp rising above the skirting boards.

“There’s key damage on the Bosendorfer. Someone has been smoking while playing.”

The winter sun poured in to the room but Geoffrey was cold. The gas had been cut off. How much had the Bechstein cost? He wondered. More than $100,000 but that was many years ago. He’d bought it from an American woman who had seen him play in Berlin.

“Is that the best you can do?” Geoffrey said. He withdrew a nicotine stained finger from his left ear, sniffed it and then twirled it around a grey lock of greasy hair. “They really are superb. The Bechstein is more than 100 years old. I could get much more on the open market but …”

The telephone was disconnected and amongst the pile of letters in the passageway, lay the landlord’s final notice. There was no ‘open market’. He’d take what he could get.

“Mr Hawkshore, you must understand my position,” Dubcheck said. “I buy and sell musical instruments. It will cost me a lot of money to repair these pianos before they go on sale. The piano is not such a popular instrument now. They take up so much space.”

Geoffrey remembered when he was nine, he played Bach’s Concerto in F Major with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. It was televised nationally. He was called a ‘prodigy’. He looked at the empty brandy and cough mixture bottles lying on the floor. Half a pizza had grown fur on the settee.

At 14, he was a semi-finalist at the Leeds International Piano Competition. The next year he made his European debut at the Albert Hall. The English newspapers said his recitals of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Liszt were ‘exceptional’. He toured Europe, Japan and Australia. Then the troubles started.

“Exceptional” he muttered.

“What did you say Mr Hawkshore? I’m sorry. I cannot give you more than $8000 for both pianos. You will, as they say, have to take it or leave it.”

Geoffrey paused to consider the offer. Dubcheck was his last chance. A loathsome little man who knew nothing about music.

“Do you see that black and white picture on the mantel piece, Mr Dubcheck? It’s me and my mother taken in the early 1970s. We are walking along the Rue St Germaine in Paris. I had just won the Grand Prix prize. I played a piece by Bartok on a Bechstein.”

“The price stands at $8000”

“Only 24 hours after that picture was taken, I fell sick. I was 19. It was the queerest thing. When I looked at people’s faces, I saw animals. The psychiatrist was a gorilla and the nurses were hyenas. I remember playing the Sydney Opera House and looking out from the stage and the entire audience were horses, parrots and tigers. I was petrified the whole time. And they talked Mr Dubcheck. They talked!”

Dubcheck had heard Geoffrey was mad. He’d seen him shuffle along the street in his dressing gown, talking to himself. He’d once come in to his second hand musical instruments store and asked to play one of the pianos but was shown the door. Loonies scared people, Dubcheck thought. The kitchen smells of mice, grease and shit. How did this idiot ever get these pianos? I had better humour him.

“My family came from Warsaw to Australia more than 60 years ago,” Dubcheck said. “We lived near the zoo. As a child, I would play a game with my sister and match the faces of the animals with those of our family and teachers. My mother was a piano player and wrote reviews for a newspaper in Melbourne. She knew Rachmaninov or so she said. I play a little but I am more interested in business now.

Geoffrey bent down and picked up a black folder containing sketches. He handed them to Dubcheck.

“These were drawn by my mother when I was very young. She had an affair with a British army officer when we lived in northern India. The first sketch is of me sitting at the piano in a nappy. The next one – I was four – I am learning to read Beethoven, to write notation and count the time signatures.”

Dubcheck held the sketches up to the light. They were good. Pencil and charcoal. They might be worth something in the right frames.

“I am sorry if I talk so much,” Geoffrey said. “I don’t get visitors often. It’s the medication. I ran out last week and I ramble. Am I rambling? You are very patient with me. My mind gets so full, I can’t tell if they are memories or whether I am improvising. That was my downfall. Improvising. People were jealous of my talent. They wanted to lop the tall poppy. I am now lopped.”

“You improvised – on what?”

“On Mozart. Mozart would have approved. But the conductors in Sydney and Melbourne wouldn’t hire me. I became ‘difficult’, they said. I like a drink, I will admit that but it never affected my playing. Never! I am sorry. I must control myself. They say I must control myself. I am alone but my pianos keep me company.”

Dubcheck walked over to the Bosendorfer and picked up a pile of yellowed news clippings. They were reviews of Geoffrey. He had won the Diapason D’Or – the world’s highest prize for classical music. Dubcheck felt envy rise. This drunk on the couch used to be someone, he thought. Now look at him. On the bottom of the pile he found Australian reviews. He read one aloud.

“While Geoffrey Hawkshore has incredible gifts, he is unable to suppress his improvisational tendencies. He takes liberties adding extra ‘twiddles’ to Schubert and improvising on Beethoven. Many may applaud this ability but in a world of plenty, when it comes to pianists, it is no surprise that the conductors of the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras prefer to be on stage with someone who is more predictable.”

Dubcheck looked at the byline, saw his mother’s name, checked his watch and put the review down.

“My mother died just after that review came out,” Geoffrey said. “She was my star. I got lost after that. I fell in love with a man who said he worshipped my playing. What he really worshipped was my money. I would come home and find the house full of young men. It was a nightmare. He spent my money on drugs. By the time he died I was too far gone to rebuild my career. The curtain had closed on me.”

Geoffrey hadn’t talked so much in months. He rose slowly to his feet clutching his pyjama bottoms and shuffled to the bureau, pulled open the drawer and pulled out a man’s black leather wallet.

“Can you give me the money in cash Mr Dubcheck? I have no bank account.”

Mr Dubcheck’s mouth dropped and he sat down carefully on the worn felt piano stool.

“Mr Hawkshore, it will take me a week to get you the money and it will come in a cheque. Then it will take you a week before you can draw against it. But there might be another solution. It is unusual but as we are both musicians, it is something I am prepared to do. I can get you $6000 now in cash for both pianos. I can have it for you this afternoon. Are you agreeable?”

Geoffrey returned to the sofa. He needed to pee but clamped down on the thought. He drew a copy of the Herald Sun across his lap.

“I’m sorry Mr Dubcheck, what did you say?”

“I can get you cash this afternoon. We will come for the pianos tomorrow.”

“Of course, you are most kind.”

“Do you have anything else you would like to sell? Those sketches for example?”

“I have some sheet music but it is not worth much. I have sold pretty much everything I had. The prizes and awards have all gone but of course the real prize is up here.”

Geoffrey tapped his skull, smiled and made to stand up.

“Do not trouble yourself, please.”

Dubcheck walked down the corridor over the pile of unopened mail and let himself out without saying goodbye.

Geoffrey felt a sharp pain in his liver. The doctors said it would get worse. He sat on the felt piano stool and opened the Bechstein keyboard. He stretched his fingers and waited for the conductor, who looked like Mr Dubcheck. The conductor tapped his baton.

Thunder rumbled in the north and then the room fell silent. Geoffrey bent his head and started to play the first notes of the Bist Du Bei Mur, the music Bach wrote for his wife as she lay dying. He carried the melody line on his right hand as if caressing his mother’s face. He was a small boy and his mother was smiling at him from her bed as he practiced his scales. He sang the first line in English:

“If you are with me, then I will go gladly

unto death and to my rest…”

Over his shoulder, a large chestnut horse shook her mane in his face. On the floor lay a tiger who stared at his fingers as if they were sausages. A baboon sat on the couch reading The Age. Its eyes were so close together, the baboon reminded Geoffrey of his first piano teacher.

The melody rose across the Melbourne rooftops, across the chimneys and antennas. It rose above the clouds, past the passenger planes, past satellites. Geoffrey saw the notes curve out in to infinite space and beyond. He finished and the animals disappeared except the baboon.

“That was very good, Geoffrey,” the baboon said. “You are coming along nicely.”

The baboon took a bow by the door and left.

Rain started to fall as he closed the piano lid. He rolled a cigarette and went outside. Amongst the weeds and long grass were empty pots and pans of all sizes. He leant against the splintered door frame. Each pot resonated to a different sound as the rain hit it. The large thin tin pots beat like a timpani. The smaller milk saucepans were triangles. Geoffrey laughed with delight.