The strings of a harpsichord are plucked, not hit, or strummed and that is what makes each note separate from the others, this is why there is no diminuendo, each note is sliced clean as though by someone shearing copper foil into confetti, hooray, here are those notes you ordered! The thinness, the fineness of the foil allowing the notes to hang bright and shiny in the air a moment before gently settling to the floor underneath the chair. Later when I go to get up to leave I will maybe hear them a second time as the wheels of the chair roll over them, they will make a wincing grinding note like angels sighing, already it hurts my teeth to think of it.

My childhood dentist had a harpsichord; I don’t want to go into why I was there in the one room of the house which held it, it’s a long story and no one comes off well in that one least of all me. In my memory it was just the harpsichord in this room and nothing else though surely the room had other furniture, it must have done. It was smaller than you might have thought it would be, the harpsichord, but me I had never seen one so it just looked perfect, a little white antelope of a thing, how I wanted to touch it so I did.

In this space below you may put whatever you imagine it might have been like to be me, almost alone in that house, certainly alone in that room, touching a little white antelope of a thing:

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I promise I am trying to find you the words for how it was; I am listening to a harpsichord now and trying to think of the words and I keep falling into the spaces between the plucked notes instead. That I did not know the world had this in it, what is the word for this, ignorance? That when I saw it I wanted to touch it, and also I wanted it to touch me and I know the word for this is desire.

In a different story I will now have played a fugue faultlessly, it will have spun out from my delighted little fingers, perhaps one of the dentist’s children or even the dentist himself will have appeared in the doorway to this furnitureless room (of course it must have had furniture but I can’t even remember the colours of the walls) silhouetted and listening raptly but of course this did not happen, I could pick things out by ear but couldn’t play anything really. It is pleasant to think of, perhaps in that one I receive a scholarship, perhaps I become a protegée. Have you stopped to consider the word protegée? I hadn’t but I am now, and my smile is a wincing grinding note, like angels sighing.

What actually happened was I remembered the worst of the boys I knew, the ones who sometimes tore birds’ nests out of trees and threw the eggs within them at each other, just because, and there was part of me that did want to smash the harpsichord, just a bit, just to see.

I did not but I did quite illicitly smoke a menthol cigarette in the parlour of the house which was of course promptly discovered and then I was never invited back again.

This, when I was twelve.