"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it." Steve Jobs

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V. Memory

Noah had never seen a more panicked and stressed woman in his life before seeing Sophie like that, and that observation included his mother on Thanksgiving.

He was raised better than to sit by and watch someone in need, and the least he could do would be to watch the kid while she coloured so that her mom could do whatever was so important.

"I'm Noah," he introduced himself. "What's your name?" he asked, knowing the answer already.

Maddie looked up at him with a curious, but oddly confident expression. "Maddie," she replied.

Noah was still entirely unused to the English accent. The sweet way that Maddie talked seemed completely angelic, but his instincts told him that this kid could be a little hellraiser.

Although, the fact that she was wearing two different flower patterns on her clothes, and a gypsy crown on her head was entirely deceptive.

"Is that short for Madison?" he queried.

Maddie shook her head. "No, Madeleine," she corrected. "But Mummy only calls me that when she's really, really cross."

Noah chuckled. "I bet you never get your mommy really angry, do you?"

Maddie shrugged her shoulders. "You talk funny," she observed nonchalantly.

"So do you," Noah countered.

"No, I don't," Maddie protested.

"You don't sound like any of the kids from where I come from," Noah continued. "But all of those kids are in school right now. Why aren't you?" Before he gave Maddie a chance to answer his question, he turned his back on her, and walked back over to the piano. A quick check over his shoulder saw him notice that Maddie was trotting along after him.

"Because I hate school!" Maddie cried after him. "I don't go to school anymore because I hate it."

Noah knew that all kids hated school at some point. There might have been a hard test coming up, or studying for finals was sucking, or you had your fitness test coming up in gym and you were going to embarrass yourself in front of the entire cohort.

But why would a kid her age hate school? Wasn't school at her age all cutting and colouring and eating paste?

"You've got to go to school, Maddie. It makes you smarter." Noah pulled out a chair next to the table that was closest to the piano.

Maddie immediately settled in it, unzipping her backpack in the process. "They all say I'm dumb," Maddie replied, pulling out the colouring book that she had been doodling in the day before.

Noah knew exactly how that felt. Today, he knew teachers wouldn't use those words. Kids might. Kids could be assholes. But teachers wouldn't.

When he was a kid, teachers did use words like 'dumb', and even worse, 'retarded'. Noah had crapped out on every test there was. He had been the dumb kid that was in all the bottom groups with modified work that even a monkey could do. He had been this close to be held back before anyone had even bothered to ask why he wasn't performing well.

"There are a thousand different ways to be smart, kid," Noah told her. "You've just got to find what you're good at."

Maddie organised her coloured pencils and began to diligently colour in her complex picture of an owl in perfect rainbow.

Noah hopped up onto the stage and sat back down at the piano as Pete waved to him from the door.

"I'll be back in ten minutes," he called out. "Just heading out to get the limes."

Noah nodded.

Shuffling his notes, he found the piece of sheet music that he was currently working with, and that he did not hate in this moment. Using a pencil, he scribbled down some secondary ideas before he began to play, closing his eyes and imagining the movie as he did.

He had the raw footage on his computer. The studio didn't know that, and he would probably be fired if they did. He was supposed to score the film in the studio for legitimate legal reasons, but his reputation allowed him to bend the rules a little.

Or break the whole damn lot and steal an uncut production. Better to ask forgiveness than for permission.

He had been watching it in his hotel room last night. Without a score, movies, in Noah's opinion, had no soul. He could often hear in his mind what the movie needed to sound like when he watched scoreless scenes.

Sometimes, just quietly, he could hear what movies should have sounded like if they had been scored poorly.

The scene in his mind was between mother and child, and tender moment of understanding of the famine, and what that would mean for their family. In his head he could hear a dolcissimo tune, something sweet and soft.

Noah began to play, stopping and scribbling down the notes as he changed his mind. In five minutes, he had managed a full page of music, and he did not think it was total horseshit.

What time was it in LA? Noah checked his watch, wondering when he could call Tally to get her opinion.

"Can you play the song you were doing yesterday?" Maddie suddenly asked.

Noah turned to look at her and frowned. "What song?"

"The song," she repeated. "You know ..." Maddie proceeded to hum the exact melody of one of his discarded ideas from the day before.

Exactly.

How on earth had she managed to recall that? He had probably played it once, before cursing under his breath and chucking it.

"That one was nice," Maddie added wistfully as she selected her orange pencil to colour with.

Noah stared at her, still completely bewildered as to how she'd managed to hum something he'd written and abandoned within two minutes. "This one?" Noah played a bar, deliberately knowing one of the notes was wrong.

Maddie looked up at him and shook her head. "No, that's not right."

Noah played the bar again, this time correctly, and Maddie smiled.

"Yes, I like that."

Noah liked it, too, except it sounded more romantic that dramatic. He might put it in his bottom drawer for a rainy day.

"How did you remember that, Maddie?"

Maddie shrugged. "I heard it yesterday."

She heard it for all of two minutes, and then had probably heard a thousand other things between then and now. That still didn't explain how she was able to recall it perfectly and discern between an incorrect and a correct bar.

"Have you ever had a piano lesson, kid?"

Noah probably was barking up the wrong tree. It was more likely that Maddie has just really liked that tune and had had it stuck in her head for twenty-four hours. That happened to Noah all the time, and more often than not with songs that he hated.

But his curiosity was piqued.

"No," replied Maddie.

"Come up here with me," he encouraged, shuffling over to the left-hand side of the stool so that Maddie could sit on his right.

Maddie sat down excitedly, and immediately reached out her hands to start pressing down keys.

"Wait!" Noah said firmly.

Maddie hesitated.

"This is a holy instrument; do you understand that? This is a Steinway. And one day, you'll see a shi – cheap – keyboard, and think back to when you had the privilege of playing your first lesson on a Steinway."

Maddie blinked, and stared at Noah with an expression of confusion.

Yes, he supposed he did sound like an insane person. Noah's dad had a collection of wine and if he or his sisters so much as disturbed the dust on the holy relics there would have been hell to pay.

"Pretend the keys are like a kitten," he said, changing his approach. "Think of this piano like a kitten, and how softly you would pet it. That's how nicely you will touch the keys. Do you understand?"

Maddie nodded, and gently pressed her fingers down on the keys, eliciting a jumbled collection of sounds. She beamed as soon as she did it. Her reaction made Noah smile.

His mom had organised piano lessons for him when he was five years old. He was in kindergarten, had no friends, and his teachers believed that he was slow.

Cleverly, Joy Bentley had convinced Noah's father, John, that the motor skills he would be learning from taking the lessons would help him in learning to catch a football.

Noah had never picked up a football in his life.

The piano had been the thing to stick.

Kids didn't learn if people assumed they were stupid. Kids went on the assumptions of adults. If you taught a kid with high expectations, you were encouraging them to reach up, not to settle for someone else's opinion.

Noah pressed down on middle C. "This note here is middle C," he began, already having flashbacks to Mrs Novak as she taught him the first note in church. "The piano keys are like an alphabet from A to G. What comes after C?"

"D," Maddie replied.

Noah then pressed down the note to the left of middle C. "Which would make the note before C ...?"

"B."

"That's right," Noah commended. "Do you want to learn an easy song?"

Maddie nodded excitedly.

"This is the first song I learned to play on the piano when I was five years old. It's called "Heart and Soul". Have you ever seen the movie "Big"?"

"No," replied Maddie.

Noah tsked."What the hell is your mother teaching you, kid? Anyway, I'll play it for you, so you know what it is meant to sound like, and then I'll teach you the chords. Watch." He positioned his right hand. "On your right hand it starts, C, C, E, E, A, A, C, C ..."

Noah slowly played "Heart and Soul", and strangely enjoyed going back to his youth in playing something so nostalgic.

Maddie watched mesmerised.

Noah finished after a minute, and then removed his hands from the keys. Just as he was about to position Maddie's hand over the correct keys, she took it upon herself to place her left hand correctly on the notes.

She then started to play the higher section by herself, following the same rhythm that Noah had only just performed. She did not miss a note and played it exactly how Noah had.

Noah's jaw unwillingly dropped as he watched her, and as he did, his suspicions seemed more and more likely. But he could not help but join in, add in the lower bass notes with his left hand to complete the duet.

What was crazy was that it could have easily been him playing. Not a seasoned, professional multi-instrumentalist, and a child who had never even touched a piano up until three minutes ago.

"Maddie, how did you do that?" Noah asked in disbelief as the song finished.

Maddie's brown eyes were innocent, as though she had no real idea of how brilliant she had just been. "Do what?" she asked.

"How did you play that song?"

"I watched you and then I did it," she said simply, as though it was something that any person could do.

Noah quickly played a few bars of something random, this time a discarded melody of his, something that she could have never heard before. It was much more complicated than "Heart and Soul" and would truly test his theory.

Maddie watched, and moments later, she was repeating the same tune note for note.

The reason behind Noah being such a talented multi-instrumentalist was because he had an eidetic memory. In addition to his ability to recall images, he possessed and auditory eidetic memory. Every sound, every song, every conversation that he had ever had was stored in his mind. If he ever had an idea for a melody, it never left him.

These talents had bubbled to the surface when he had taken his first piano lesson with Mrs Novak. He did what Maddie had just done. He had watched, listened, and repeated exactly what Mrs Novak had played, and absorbed the lesson book so quickly that he was teaching her by the next week.

"Maddie, how come you don't like school?" Noah asked quietly.

Maddie's excited expression quickly turned sour, and Noah hated to take that preliminary joy from her. "Because they all think I'm dumb," she stated plainly.

"Do you think you're dumb?" he countered.

"My teacher only gives me dumb people work. I hate it," Maddie complained angrily.

That didn't answer his question, and Noah had suspicions that Maddie didn't honestly know how to answer his question.

Noah had been labelled slow. He had been labelled dumb and stupid and was far behind his peers. Tally had been his only friend and were it not for his twin sister beating the shit out of anyone who picked on him, he might have refused to go to school just like Maddie was.

Only Noah wasn't stupid. He was bored out of his mind. And bored kids did not try.

It took a creative outlet, like learning the piano, to get him to actually want to use his brain academically.

Noah and Maddie continued to play together for the rest of the morning, with Noah abandoning his work in favour of songs that Maddie liked from her favourite Disney movies.

It turned out that Maddie actually had a beautiful, hauntingly innocent singing voice. It reminded him that Sophie would be singing tonight, and he gathered she was the source of Maddie's singing talent.

The door to the bar opened again just after eleven-thirty, and Sophie entered looking absolutely devastated. She looked like someone had just shot her damn cat. What the hell had happened?

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Hope you enjoyed it!! 

It's a lot more common than you think for bright kids to perform poorly academically if they're not inspired ... 

I was one of them! My mum still tells this story of how I suddenly started bombing out in all my reading assessments (I could read perfectly before I went to school and then suddenly in school I couldn't read) and she asked me what was happening, and I replied, "I was bored so I couldn't be bothered trying". I literally didn't try even though I could have read those books blindfolded because I wasn't inspired. 

My teacher finally got me some books that challenged me and hey presto, I was top dog hahahaha

That knowledge has really helped me as a teacher to identify those kids who might not be falling behind because they're struggling. 

Up the top is a video of the scene in Big if you're not familiar with the song/movie I referenced! 

Vote and comment!