Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter by Alison Wearing

And it gives them a profession,” my father added with a sort of jolly conviction, dusting his rolling pin with flour and rolling out pastry dough on the counter.
    The Blind
. It was a category I hadn’t yet created in my mind. It sounded a bit like
The Catholics
(a term I had learned from my grandmother, who never spoke about them without letting her eyeballs circumnavigate their sockets) or
The Tories
(a group of bald men, in my imagination, with pot-bellies and hair coming out their noses) or
The Bank
, who sometimes called when my dad was at work.
    â€œThe Bank called,” my mother would say. And I wouldpicture a long line of people in black hats all dialing our telephone number at once.
    â€œCan The Blind hear as well as Ida?” I asked, sitting on the floor with the black Lab’s head in my lap.
    â€œNo, no.” My father laughed, peeling his dough off the counter and explaining the phenomenon of high frequencies.
    My mother sighed and cut in. “It’s not really about hearing anyway. When those guys are tuning the piano, they’re not really hearing so much as
feeling
the sound.”
    â€œYes, that’s true,” said my father, sprinkling more flour onto the counter.
    Now, hearing my father say (or sing) silly things was certainly not a novelty to me, but normally my mother was more sensible. Tuning the piano by
feeling the sound
? I couldn’t find a way to understand that.
    So I decided to investigate.
    Months passed. I was skipping on the front porch when the strange car arrived. A woman with a flowery orange dress that looked like our kitchen wallpaper led the blind man to the front door. I said “Hi” in that robotic way kids do when they know they’re expected to speak, and then I called my mother. Ducked behind the dining room door and peeked through the crack.
    The blind man was tall with waxy grey hair that glistened. It was all brushed back so that it looked like those rippling marks that waves leave on sand. (After his last visit my mother had told me that his hair was probably as curly as mine but that he used something called
Brylcreem
to “tame it down.” Excitedby the phrase
tame it down
, I had gone straight to the bathroom and applied some of my dad’s shaving cream—Brylcreem, shaving cream, what’s the difference?—but to my distress, I created more of a frothy-wave-crashing-on-rocks look than the wave-textured-sand look I was after.)
    My mother settled the ripply-haired blind man at the grand piano and offered him tea, which he softly declined. He sounded the first note. Slowly, I stepped out from behind the dining room door and began to creep into the living room, freezing several times mid-step when it seemed he had heard me. “Hello?” he called once, his lopsided marbles pointing in my direction, a smile on his face. I held my breath. “Hello there,” he said playfully, as though he knew it was me, a child at any rate, not my mother. And for a moment, I wondered if he really was blind; I felt sure he could see me. Maybe he was just
pretending
to be blind so that he could tune pianos.
    But eventually he turned back to the piano. I exhaled. A bit louder than I’d hoped. (I’d developed asthma, so often wheezed when I breathed.) And he returned to his tools, playing octaves over and over again, drawing up the sound from below, adjusting, re-sounding, adjusting. Until he was satisfied. Then he moved on. I watched him carefully but couldn’t find any evidence that he was “feeling the sound.” He just seemed to be listening.
    I decided to get closer. With what I felt to be the stealth of a professional spy, I lowered myself to the ground, crawling along the soft fringe of the oriental carpet until I was directly beneath the soundboard of the piano. I did not have a plan assuch (many professional spies do not), but as I crouched there I became aware of a tingling in my back as the blind