On not shooting cuckoos

One of the things Maximilian loved about himself above all else was his impeccable sense of timing. Vital for a professional percussionist, it was also an art he was perfecting elsewhere in his life.

Of late, Maximilian had been refining his entrance to the concert platform, just a little after the rest of the orchestra. Standing at the stage door, Maximilian waited as the rank and file zigzagged through the empty chairs, sat, shuffled, picked up their instruments, played through the tricky phrases in cacophonic disharmony, sucked their reeds, adjusted their tuning pegs, tightened their bows, and aimlessly rifled through the music on the stand. Only once stillness had settled did Maximilian sweep forth, his golden locks glinting in the lights as he ascended to his position behind the gleaming brass kettles of the timpani.

Finding this too easy, Maximilian had upped the challenge by waiting until he glimpsed the conductor hovering in the wings on the other side of the stage. Once he had held his beat so late that the audience had burst into spontaneous applause as he entered.

This night, Maximilian arrived just as the lights dimmed and the rustling and whispering in the audience subsided. Imperious on his swiveling stool, Maximilian regarded the scene before him. There was violist Baxter, still scrabbling with his rosin. And bassoonist Fleming with the wrong music on his stand. Not Saint-Saens’ great Organ Symphony but Frederick Delius’ First Cuckoo of Spring and Summer Night on the River. What an idiot…!

Maximilian’s blood ran cold, and his heart ka-thumped in time with the paradiddle of the conductor’s patent leather shoes, now stepping on to the podium. He was early, a whole work early. The hardware of the percussion section and the organ console were deserted. He alone inhabited the outer reaches of the orchestra.

What to do? Maximilian was caught in the glare of the lights; he could neither slip off stage, nor slide gracefully to a crouch behind his instrument. Could he feign a part, a gentle thrumming on the skins? The baton rose and Maximilian knew that a whisper of timpani in Delius’s pastoral lilt would shoot the gentle cuckoo right out of the sky.

He sat, staring straight ahead in as regal a pose as he could maintain for twelve long minutes, enduring the conductor’s puzzled glare as he stood with the whole orchestra to acknowledge the warm applause.

Maximilian slunk from the stage at the conclusion of the concert, shrugging on his coat and hustling to the foyer so he could pour out the whole sorry story to his wife.

Oh! the shame, the mortification!

She hadn’t even noticed.




Rosemary McBryde