Overpractice · The Long Way Down to Morning · Pulse Beat
It began, as such things do, with diligence. When the third finger started to slip, Anika's answer was to practise the passage more. Two hours on four bars. Then three. She set a metronome at half…
It began, as such things do, with diligence.
When the third finger started to slip, Anika's answer was to practise the passage more. Two hours on four bars. Then three. She set a metronome at half speed and played each note forty times, watching the finger, willing it. The finger did what she asked, in the slow, watched way, and betrayed her again the moment she stopped watching.
She did not tell Lindqvist. She did not tell Mira. In the practice room, with the window painted shut, she began to hold her breath without noticing, and to clench the jaw, and to press the neck against the chin-rest until a bruise bloomed there like a thumbprint.
By the winter the hand ached all the time. A deep, crawling ache from the wrist to the fingertips that was there when she woke and when she lay down, and she took it for what hard work feels like. Mr D'Souza had told her once that pain was the body's way of saying more.
He had been a drunk. She was only now beginning to wonder what else he had been wrong about.