A Note of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma Page A

blood was hot in his cheeks, but Dr Ludic seemed prepared to wait this one out.
    ‘Sorry,’ Flynn managed at last.
    ‘It’s OK, some questions are more difficult than others. Take your time.’
    He took a sharp breath. But the answer had been there all the time. ‘Not really,’ he mumbled.
    Dr Ludic raised his eyebrows. ‘Not really?’ he echoed. ‘What makes you think that?’
    Flynn shrugged again and pulled a face in embarrassment. ‘Anyone can play the piano if they practise hard enough,’ he began to explain. ‘I’ve been practising like crazy since I was four. So people think I’m talented. But talent is something solid and permanent, it – it doesn’t vary depending on your mood. I – I can hardly play a thing when the chips are down.’ He stopped and bit down on his tongue. Hearing it said aloud was faintly horrifying. Worse still was finding himself struggling against the urge to cry. He held his breath. Don’t, Flynn, you stupid fool . . .
    ‘Because you find it difficult to play when you’re feeling down, you think you have no talent?’
    He shook his head quickly, frantic with embarrassment, and managed a painful smile. ‘No, you don’t understand,’ he said, all of a sudden inexplicably desperate that he should. ‘I can barely play at all. I don’tpractise because I can’t. I can’t read the notes and I can’t remember the music. It’s all just a con. And the crazy thing is that I haven’t been found out yet.’
    ‘Bye, thanks, I’m off.’ Flynn turned on his heel from the patient’s bed where Rami stood, white-coated and stethoscoped, clipboard in hand.
    ‘Wait!’ He heard Rami’s hurried footsteps in the hallway behind him, trying to catch up. Flynn did not slow down and Rami reached him on the stairs, grabbing his shoulder. ‘Hey, hey, hold on. What’s up? What happened? What went wrong?’
    Flynn half turned, forcing a smile. ‘Nothing, OK? It was fine, he was fine. Turns out you were right. I’m depressed or whatever. I’ve got to take these pills and go back and see him in a fortnight.’ He thrust the prescription towards him.
    Rami looked from the paper to his face. ‘What’s the matter? Why are you upset?’
    ‘I’m not upset!’
    ‘OK, then let’s go to lunch.’
    ‘It’s not even twelve. I’ve got lectures this afternoon.’
    ‘You can miss lectures for another day. I know this great place round the corner. Come on, I know you never eat lunch because you’re always broke. Let’s go and stuff ourselves.’
    Flynn didn’t have the strength to resist and ended up having lunch with Rami, who promptly dived into a medical book, looking up the pills that Flynn had beenprescribed. Flynn felt drained and wrung out. A sense of unreality had set in. He had told that damn psych what the problem was and the psych had started insisting that he was suffering from clinical depression. But he wasn’t ill! He was depressed for a very good reason! Previously, he had not even been able to articulate it properly to himself and then suddenly it was out in the open, but instead of the light bulb going on and everything falling into place, it was this silly diagnosis.
    Then again, perhaps the psych had failed to grasp the full significance of what he had said. Thirteen years of practice, for what? For tricking people into believing he was something he was not? Professor Kaiser, Harry, Jennah, his parents, his brother. All brilliantly fooled. And he was supposed to feel fine. Given pills because if he wasn’t feeling fine then there
had
to be something wrong with the chemicals in his brain. How absurd.

CHAPTER FIVE
    FLYNN THOUGHT IT was possible, it was just possible, that he had somehow, somewhere, sensed a chink in the solid black armour of despair. The urge was to chase after that chink, to rush after it as desperately as he could in order to tear it open so that the chink became a great gaping hole for him to step through, back into the land of the living. But it