Murdering Mozart

The unlucky people on whom we vent our anger aren’t necessarily the ones who deserve it…

- ​​​​Paula Williams

If Mozart wasn’t already dead, Sam Brown would cheerfully have murdered him that Monday afternoon.

As he walked up the path towards his front door, he reflected that there were a lot of things in his life that he hated. He hated maths. He hated Mondays. He hated Ollie Marsh for sucking up to Mr Chant, the games teacher, so much that Mr Chant picked him to play left back in the under 14s football team and relegated Sam to the subs bench.

But at the very top of his hate list was Mozart. Way, way up there, even above maths and Ollie Marsh.

Because what he hated even more than sitting on the subs bench with all the other losers was coming home and hearing someone playing the piano. 

In particular, playing the piece he was hearing right now. The piece he’d been hearing almost every day for the last couple of weeks. By this Mozart guy. Over and over and over again. It was doing his head in.

And it was all his mum’s fault. Although he didn't hate his mum, he hated the way she filled their house with Mozart-mad, piano-playing kids. A steady stream of them made their way to their door, day in, day out… and it was doing his head in.

Why couldn’t she get a job in a supermarket or in an office like everyone else’s mum? Why did she have to be a flippin’ piano teacher? Dad said it wasn’t even really a proper job but she said it meant she could work from home and be there for Sam when he got in from school.

Like he was six years old, instead of thirteen. Or he would be, in three weeks and four days’ time.

She treated him like a little kid whereas Dad treated him like an almost grown-up. That’s what he’d called him last weekend. Said that now he was “an almost grown-up” it was time they had a proper man-to-man talk.

Man to man. Sam liked that. They’d sat in the pub garden, Dad with his beer and Sam with his cola, and had their talk.