Where new writing finds its voice
Short Story

Mrs Lesser

Miriam Lessar

Illustration

Hannah Lesser’s house always smelt of potatoes. As a child I equated Mrs Lesser with only two things: pianos and potatoes. Every Wednesday at half-past five my mother would tear me away from Grange Hill and drop me off at Mrs Lesser’s house, leaving me sitting on a creaky stool in a potato palace with a lady I was wrongly convinced was the blood-relative link between myself and Neil Diamond. We had the same surname spelt differently, which always left me slightly confused. I called her Mrs Lesser and not Auntie. 

Whilst she was away picking up and putting down pots and pans in the kitchen, I would tilt my head and stare quizzically down at the face of Neil Diamond who always looked up at me from a record sleeve tucked in by the foot of the piano, and wonder how Mrs Lesser knew this man who had the same surname as my grandma and grandpa, and how he’d got to have his face printed on a big piece of cardboard. Then Mrs Lesser would come back in from the kitchen and sit down next to me with a sigh, the smell of boiling potatoes now working its way wearily from the kitchen to the living room. 

She had curly hair that looked as soft as a feather duster. She would peer through her spectacles at my hopeless attempts at theory, then scribble out my mistakes with a heavy pencil, never quite explaining what I had done wrong. All the while I would grip the sides of the piano stool and try desperately hard not to look past her feather-duster hair at the photos of her sons on the wall, because my mother had told me that one of them had killed himself at university and that it was very sad. And I would get goosebumps because I knew I was looking at the smiling freckly face of someone who was wasn’t here any more, but unsure which one of the freckled faces it was who had felt so unhappy that he hadn’t wanted to come home again.

Then Mrs Lesser would turn the page, and steam would pour out through the kitchen door, and Neil Diamond would look up at me from the floor, knowing that I hadn’t practised this piece at all that week, not even once.