Exactly one year ago

The lights dropped to almost nothing. Barely more than a torch beam hovered over my hands and the eighty-eight keys spread out in front of me. A muted cough and the rustle of clothing were the only evidence of the six-hundred-strong audience lurking in the blackness to my right. The biggest audience I’d ever played to. A year ago, facts like that excited me.

My right hand landed on the keys. The first phrase rang through the playhouse. Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’.

‘Birds flyin’ high, you know how I feel.’

And it was just me now, just me and a piano. Not a thought of anyone watching to distract me, no suggestion in my mind that I might play the piece wrong. It was like talking, like breathing. Just something you do.

My left hand still relaxed against my knee, the second line rolled off my fingers. A couple of crush notes in the mix, a little run on the blues scale. I’d never play it quite the same way twice.

And in came the left hand, building it with each phrase, building it until it was teetering over everyone and had to come crashing down.

‘And I’m feeling good.’

The lights exploded over the stage. There was a thunderous fill-in from the drummer behind me. The band of sixth-formers from local schools came in. The three minutes that followed were a blur, some phone footage later revealing that I’d played it better, bolder, tighter than I’d ever done in rehearsal.

I fed on the applause, never wanting to leave the stage, longing to sit back down at the piano and do it over again. The standing ovation had to follow, of course, everyone who’s ever seen a TV talent show knowing it’s plain rude not to.

And there she was. Halfway up the auditorium, too late to have landed a seat but standing next to Gramps’s row. As the applause began to fade, we stared straight at each other. Slowly she raised her arms, grinning at me through the heart shape she made with her hands. Her appearance was not expected, but that was her. Aunty Kaye was someone who would just turn up.

Aunty Kaye was not actually my aunty at all. She and Mum had lived together as students, when Aunty Kaye had been at med school and Mum had been training at a performing arts college. They’d been best friends ever since. And that made her better than a real aunty because when she invited me to stay in Brighton every summer, and when she came over at Christmas and got outrageously pissed, I knew she was doing it because she wanted to.