Utrecht Centraal, Platform Side

There is a piano in Utrecht Centraal, on the concourse near the exit to the bus platforms, and it is painted with flowers and it is slightly out of tune in the upper octaves and I have walked past it every working day for six years. I know it is out of tune because I have listened. Everyone who plays it, I listen. The students who play the same four-chord songs. The old men who do a bit of Chopin and get lost and laugh. Once a woman in a business suit who played something I did not recognise so well that a crowd stopped, and she finished, and closed the lid, and walked to her train without looking at anyone, and I thought about her for a week. I took lessons until I was twenty-two. Then I stopped, for reasons that were about money and a teacher I did not like and are not interesting. That was seventeen years ago. My hands still know things. At home, on the digital piano in the spare room with the headphones on, my hands know quite a lot of things. But the station is not the spare room. The station is a thousand people an hour. Yesterday my train was cancelled. Not delayed. Cancelled, the next one in forty minutes, and the concourse was full of people being angry at the departure board. I bought a coffee. I stood near the piano. Nobody was playing. I want to say I decided. I did not decide. I put the coffee on the floor and I sat down and I played the first thing my hands found, which was a Satie piece, the slow one, the one everyone knows, because the hands are cowards and they choose what is safe. It was fine. The upper octaves were sour. Nobody stopped. A child looked at me and was pulled onward by a parent. I got to the end and my heart was going like I had run up the stairs. Then, because nobody had stopped, I played the thing I actually wanted to play. A Bach prelude I had spent a whole winter on at twenty-one and never played for anyone. Too fast at the start, then I found it. The concourse noise did not go quiet. There was no moment. It was just a man in a coat playing Bach quite well on a bad piano while a thousand people walked to their trains. When I finished, one person clapped. One. A man with a bicycle, near the doors. He nodded and left. I picked up my coffee. It was cold. My train was on the board. I have not told anyone this. I am telling you.