The world rolls by like old film: hazy in the rain, flecked by urban grit, lit by shop windows and looming offices. I have the impression that my taxi driver once dreamt of being a racer. He has a knack and an apparent enthusiasm for finding impossible gaps in the evening traffic. Lane to lane, alley to alley. The GPS can't keep up.
When a composer asks for legatissimo, they are asking me to play as smoothly as I possibly can. That's how the taxi driver operates, on and off the accelerator like a peach.
I lean my forehead on the window and sigh. "Is it always this bloody congested?"
"Listen to yourself, lad. Is it always this bloody congested?" The driver laughs. His wrinkled eyes find me in the rear-view mirror. "This is London, son. Built for horses, not steel boxes."
"Yeah, well… This steel box is your livelihood."
"Ha, I'm not so guilty." The driver runs his hand over the dashboard. "She's an old beaut, this one. It's the modern vehicles that cause the fuss. Twice my size."
"Yes. Aren't they?"
We come to a stop at a set of lights. Raindrops accumulate on the windscreen. I wind my window down an inch in search of the smell of rain, but all I find is petrol and the distant earthiness of a cigarette. A pity. The scent of morning rain gets me going when I'm back home. It sounds like tiny feet on the awning outside my bedroom window, and smells like the fresh springs up the hill. I'm a small-town boy, through to my bones.
"You've had her a long time, then?" I ask the driver. The car is indeed very small. My head almost brushes its roof. "Leather's in good knick. She's well kept."
"She's royalty, son. Fucking royalty. She was Pa's before me, bless his ugly soul… Hotel somewhere up here, was it?"
"Oh, yes. Somewhere up here. Just pull over wherever's easiest."
He drops me on the curb by a Japanese takeaway, under the shelter of a covered bus stop. I thank him and hand my change through the passenger window, a few pounds extra for the company. Then he's off to his next passenger and the amity dies as though played in staccato. I retreat to the seat of my bus stop and look around the street. Traffic flows on through the drizzle. Strangers pass with their hoods up, paper cups and newspapers fluttering by their feet in the wind.
I am struck there in the rain like a piano string: I am alone. Through to my bones.
It's no use finding the hotel just yet. That'd mean practice, and it'd be tough to hit a respectable tempo with my hands this cold. So I shoulder my backpack and scurry from the bus stop through the rain, to the cover of the takeaway place. Linoleum floor, white walls and roof. Overexposed posters are peeling from the walls, advertising deals long since expired. The girl at the counter raises her eyebrows as I drip onto her floor. LEDs buzz overhead as though wounded.
I order a cup of miso soup.
The girl eyes me from between tendrils of dark hair. "What size?"
"I dunno. Whatever."
"It's your soup. Pick a size."
"I don't care. I just need something to warm my hands."
"All right, then. Large." She plucks a paper cup from its stack with a smile. "Most expensive."
That's fine by me. Mum will be paying.
The girl turns away to prepare my order. A hiss of steam, the bubble of boiling kombu.
I lean against a tiled wall, as far from the open door as I can get without jumping the counter. Still the wind finds its way in to bite at my trousers. At least the heartbeat of a kitchen is reassuring. It reminds me of home: all the right sounds and smells. We live in a flat above Dad's cafe.
The girl returns to the countertop. She cocks her head. "So, then. Cold hands?"
"It's a cold day."
"Yeah it is." She smiles. "It's meant to clear up, though. They've got the lantern festival in Pimlico tonight…" A pause. "I need a date."
I look up from my fingernails to this girl behind the counter. The slightest of hesitations before I say what I must: "I hope you find someone."
"Ouch." She folds her arms with a laugh, apparently unfazed. "What's that accent? Australian?"
"Uh-huh."
"The cold must be a shock to the system, I suppose."
I tip an invisible hat in her direction.
She slinks off to finish my soup, and brings it back with steam billowing from its cup. I scrounge up some cash from my jacket pockets, but she slides the cup over the counter before I can offer anything.
"It's on me," she says. She tucks her tendrils away from her eyes. "Stay warm, then."
The miso soup comforts me all the way to the hotel. It's only halfway down the street that I realise the girl's written her phone number around the cup in permanent marker. I run my thumb over the inky digits. Steam in my nostrils. Maybe the lanterns will be visible from my hotel window.
Even if they are, I won't see them. My head will be bowed to the piano as though it is my god.
———
The hotel manager is set to give us a tour of the premises. His tuxedo clings to his body as though it's his skin, tight to every limb. I don't pay much attention. Mum is looking very European, in a padded swing style coat and ushanka hat. She rises to her tiptoes to kiss me on both cheeks when I first arrive.
"My dear boy." She brushes my soaked jacket down. "We were beginning to worry."
"Sorry. Heathrow was packed. Slow through security."
We were meant to be in England three days ago. That would have given me ample time to settle and prepare for my first performance. But our flight from Australia was grounded in a storm, and we spent three days in Bangkok. It was a nightmare finding alternate routes to London. Mum put us on different airlines in the end.
The manager isn't impressed with our pleasantries. He leans close with an oily voice. "Madam, I am touched by the bond you share with your son. But my schedule now, it really is quite strict…
"Yes. Yes." Mum lays a hand on my shoulder. "Let's go, then."
The manager walks us around the marble reception, listing off every painted portrait on the walls; he guides us through the halls to the kitchen, dining rooms and offices, to the rear deck and out into the sodden gardens. Here, I breathe deep. This is better for my country nose. Red brick paths snake around towering plumes of bush and thicket, underneath overgrown pergolas and floral arbours. The rain is still heavy, so we don't stray far, but I fantasise about hiding in these gardens come my performance tomorrow. Let all the guests sit and wait for me while I smell the flowers.
"Best for last," the manager says. He leads us back inside. "The ballroom."
Mum ushers me on after him. "Good, good. The ballroom. I was beginning to worry…"
The manager stops outside a set of looming mahogany doors. "Before we enter, I must make myself clear." He looks very proud of himself. "This room is not to be used for practice by your prodigy. You will find a baby grand in your room. That will be perfectly sufficient."
I am starting to dislike him quite a lot.
"I'm the prodigy?" I ask, and laugh. My eyes flit to Mum. "I'm the prodigy, Mum."
"Mm. You're well on your way, darling."
The manager opens the doors to the ballroom and strides in like a showman, arms held wide. Mum follows him through a jungle of ornate white chairs and circular tables, but I stay at the threshold. I've never liked performance halls without audiences; the barren space seems too vast to fill with only my music. So I just watch as Mum checks the condition of the piano and acoustics of the room.
When she returns she gives me a smile. "You'd better get dry, love. Then we'll eat. Mr. Canossa here has invited us to dine with him.
"My pleasure, of course." The manager closes and locks his precious ballroom. "Now. We'll have the piano tuned in the morning. Your performance is at ten, I think?"
"Yes," I say. "But I'd like the tuner out by eight. I need to get a feel for the piano."
"Oh… but this just isn't possible. We are very busy, my young friend."
I look up at him. His neck is bent to look back down at me. This world is full of difficult men; but difficult men could never scare me like a complex polyrhythm or tremolo.
"I will be here at eight," I tell him. "If the tuner's not gone I'll practise from right beneath his hammer."
Canossa chuckles. "I hope you are this assertive in your playing, boy."
I shrug. Maybe I will be. Maybe I won't be, and the ballroom will collapse around me as my throat closes up and my fingers drown in sweat. The audience will throw champagne glasses as the final bar of my devilish song comes to its end. Splinters of glass in my hair.
———
My performance tomorrow is the first of three I have ahead of me in London, and by every metric it's the smallest: a hundred rich guests, for whom such a show is customary at the hotel. To the wealthy folk I am just one more nameless musician.
The second is on Tuesday, at the Royal Academy of Music. My audience will be twice as large, but this causes me less stress than the fact that I must perform for truly musical folk: experts, scholars, students. I am told my concert will be integrated into the semester's coursework. The sweat on my neck will be scrutinised.
The third performance is the crescendo of my stay, and the devil in my mind. It is the creature which keeps me up at night and hollows out my cheekbones. This performance will take place on Friday at the Royal Albert Hall. Thousands of waiting red seats will be filled, a great dome of glass above me. It will be the highest or lowest point of my young career, and nothing in between.
I am told the brilliant Mr. Shibuya will be present. Mum says if I play well, he will take me on as his latest prospect and give me a springboard to musical sensation. I am not so sure. Shibuya was the man who crushed Mum's own dreams on the piano stool when she was just twenty-two—barely older than I am now. That's far too young to have your heart broken.
By many accounts, my trip to London is a repetition of Mum's own visit before me.
Mum performed to him those years ago his very own solo piano sonata: his first and most famous composition. The sonata was never transcribed from Shibuya's gifted mind, so Mum spent years of her youth working out all three movements by ear. She poured over dozens of performances to catch every note and nuance, and even went to Sydney to watch Shibuya live
All of it, for Shibuya to find her in the dining room after her performance and tell her of her failure.
"Madam. A word." He put his hand on her shoulder and guided her away from the tables, to a quiet spot by a window. He smiled. "My sonata, well done. Very bold." A pause, in which he let her keep hoping. Then: "But I'm afraid I cannot take you on at this time. I don't see that there is any fit space at my side…"
So Mum came back to Australia. She fell pregnant with me some months after her return, and though she always said I was the best thing to happen to her, I sometimes wondered whether she wished she had stayed childless. There was no time for her to mend the sails and rebound as a musician once she had a young boy crawling around her heels.
Things were skint in our little house above the cafe. We hung our clothes out of the windows on flagpoles. We rented a small plot of land on the edge of the village to plant our vegetables. Dad just about lived downstairs as I grew up, among the Kenwood mixers and cast iron pans. By the time I was five I could make crêpes and waffles, and waddle them out on plates to waiting customers. Dad taught me how to make a new item from the menu each week. He taught me to haggle with the market folk on fresh milk prices; he showed me how to fix the awning on the front door whenever the wind broke its bracket, and how to grow free-standing tomatoes.
Had it been Dad's decision, I never would have gone to school.
"He's quite happy here in the cafe," Dad said. He waved a wooden spoon at Mum. "It's all practical, all life skills. I won't have him swamped by kinematics and run-on sentences and all the rest of the fluff."
But Mum had her way in the end. Once I turned seven I was taking the bus into school each dreary morning. We settled into a rhythm. Dad's cafe got a bit of a following around the village. I kept helping in the kitchen on weekends, or on the odd teacher-only day. One of my newfound school friends even told me we should stop renting a veggie patch.
"My family owns more paddocks than we can count," she told me. "Dad'll give your family one for sure. He likes visitors. You can grow stuff at our place."
It was a meandering life like the tide. I was a happy child.
Mum pretended to be happy too: she was all smiles as I ran to her from the school gates, always laughing at the little things in life, and telling my favourite stories before bed. Sometimes she read them from books, but often she made them up herself while we both closed our eyes. Mum never gave up on the piano. She was always tinkering away, giving the odd performance for the retirement homes in town. It was good enough for her, she told me.
The older I grew, the less I believed her—for there was one song she played more than any other.
Shibuya's sonata. One two three movements one two three again. Start to finish, and back. She played it till her forearms cramped up. When she was finished she would sit there on the stool and stare into space, as though trying to move back through time to a stage in London.
Sometimes I wonder whether Shibuya broke something more fundamental in my mother than her piano aspirations that day she performed to him. I wonder if the same will happen to me.
———
After dinner with Canossa and his greasy colleagues, Mum and I retreat to our room. She makes herself scarce so I can practise each of Shibuya's movements without distraction. The baby grand is a fine instrument indeed; if it weren't for the constant turn of the clock which draws my performances closer I think I'd be quite enjoying myself.
When I've rehearsed the sonata twice over, Mum returns from her bedroom and draws up a stool. Together we iron out the imperfections in my interpretation as best we can, till the hour is late and the other hotel guests are trying to sleep. We have to stop. Next time I play it will be in the ballroom.
"You'll do wonderfully," Mum says. She leans to my stool and squeezes me tight. "I know you will."
She feels small in my arms. I remember a time when we could fit on the same stool together to play a duet, when my hands could hardly stretch an octave. I'm taller than her now. My fingernails are bitten down. I notice the sharp ridges of her shoulders as I never used to.
Mum breaks away and gets to her feet. "Hot chocolate before bed?"
"Mm." I clap my hands. "That sounds nice."
But the moment she leaves for the kitchen I drop my hands to my lap. A hum of tinnitus. The room is very quiet without the sound of the piano. The baby grand sits by a window, commanding the living space. There's a couch, a coffee table, several green plants; black acoustic panels on the white walls and ceiling. It feels more like a studio than the living room of a luxurious hotel quarter. Our bags and coats are strewn on the sofa.
My hands ache. I close my eyes against the light and lean forward, lowering my forehead till it rests on the piano keys with a soft chime. The girl from the takeaway place comes to mind. Her cup is still in my backpack. Lanterns and phone numbers. Ha.
"Fuck off," I say to my feet. The piano keys press into my brow. "Fuck right off."
Mum returns then, and I sit bolt upright as though on strings. She pauses in the middle of the room, an enormous mug of hot chocolate teetering in each hand. Her hair is out at angles from wearing the fur hat all day, bleached at its surface and dark at its roots. Gentle sun spots on her nose.
She gives a gentle frown. "Still stressed? Honey, you know you'll do great."
"It's not the performance."
She puts the hot chocolates down on the coffee table. "What's up, then?"
I drop the piano fallboard closed. Thud. The city outside the hotel window never truly goes dark, but tonight I feel the blackness in my chest. The streets are foreign. The buildings are grand. The only thing which anchors me to this strange country is the familiarity of my instrument: 88 keys, arranged in perfect semitones. Ivory or plastic, Auckland or Sydney or London—none of it matters. I play the same songs with the same nervous fingers.
"There's a lantern festival tonight," I say absently. "Well… there was."
"Oh?"
"Yeah."
"Remember we used to go to those back home?" she asks. "Dragon robes, kites, all the costumes."
Of course I remember. Mum speaks like it was in another lifetime altogether.
I cross the room to retrieve my hot chocolate and fall onto the couch. Mum sinks into an armchair across from me. We drink, slowly. The rain has indeed eased off now. I hope the girl from the takeaway is enjoying herself down in Pimlico.
"Don't you ever get jet lagged?" I ask. "I mean, you work even harder than I do—"
"Don't say that."
"No, it's true! You do everything. I'm just the one on the piano stool. You're the one with the meetings and phone calls and… and all of it. Aren't you tired?"
"Of course I'm tired. But baby…" Mum lowers her voice with a smile, as though we are sharing a great secret and shouldn't be overheard. "Soon you are performing for Mr. Shibuya. I mean, Mr. fucking Shibuya! That's pretty cool."
"Yeah. Mr. fucking Shibuya."
The hot chocolates are very rich. They've been a tradition since I started learning the piano at seven years old. After a long afternoon practising, Mum always brewed them for us to share outside on a park bench while we watched the birds play on the power lines.
"I know it's tiring," Mum says to me eventually. She runs her finger around her cup to pick up the dregs of foam. "But I'm really proud of you, honey."
"Sometimes I just think that I've missed out on being young. Young and stupid."
She laughs. "You are young. You're still just new to this strange rainy world."
"This world we call England?"
Another laugh. "Yes, that world too. But you know what I meant."
"Whatever. Thanks for the hot chocolate, Mum."
There is so much pride in her eyes. If her gaze didn't touch me so warmly like sunlight, I think I might never open that fallboard again. Shibuya be damned.
Mum heads off to bed soon after. I stay for a little longer, turning my empty takeaway cup over and over in my hands. I never really consider calling the girl's number. That path leads nowhere. I don't even know how I'd introduce myself; I'm just the guy who ordered miso soup. My name doesn't matter, unless it's spoken into a microphone.
Before bed I open the window by the piano and drop my miso soup cup down countless storeys to the street below. It'll get picked up by the wind, thrown into gutters and drains. So, that's that. Tomorrow I perform. I sleep in a single bed next to Mum's. We both toss and turn.
I go down to the ballroom in the morning with an upset stomach. The piano is tuned to perfection, black as tar and without a spot of dust. Its keys are heavier than those I am used to, but I adjust as I practise. Soon enough the guests flock in to their tables. Mimosas are served in tall, skinny glasses. I see Mum waving from the back of the hall.
Someone announces my name to a round of polite applause, and I begin Shibuya's sonata as I have a thousand times before. Here we go: my small say in a rich man's world.
The acoustics of the ballroom are fantastic. I've always had a proclivity to flatten my interpretations when I perform them—to overplay quiet notes and underplay loud ones—but now, with every note ringing out through the hall as sharply as a blade to my wrist, I grow into the music. It is my privilege to play.
Key change. Second movement. Fingers dance like fireflies.
I've always wondered what would happen if I simply stopped playing between movements and never started again. How long would it take the audience to grow restless, to start whispering, to throw me offstage? I don't know. It's a funny thought.
Movements two and three bypass my conscious mind, straight to my fingertips. I sway on my stool to the very last coda, at which I let the last chord ring out with the damper pedal down until it comes to its natural conclusion. Beautiful. The audience stands to applaud.
The moment I've stepped down from my stage, chatter breaks out. The wait staff pile into the room with fresh drinks and breakfast on platters, and I'm left to prowl the tables, collecting compliments like stamps. Mum always tells me it's good form to interact with my audience after a performance. It makes them feel important, which means they will remember me.
The clatter of cutlery, the murmur of voices. Someone is already scrubbing my sweat from the piano up on the stage. That's funny. Soon it will be like I never existed.
I am intrigued by a solitary woman sitting at a table near the ballroom exit. She has no silver plate before her; no mimosa, tea or coffee. Only a single glass of water. She must be in her late forties or early fifties. A high bun of red hair tugs at her scalp. Her eyes follow me as I approach.
"You play well," she tells me. A sip of water. "Very well for someone so young."
I stop on the other side of her table. "Thank you. I enjoy it."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. Hadn't you heard, I'm the prodigy?"
The woman nods once, then twice. Her eyes are scrunched at their corners. She takes a long swig of water, sets the glass down, and slides it slowly across the table cloth towards me. I expected her fingers to be skeletal, but they're not. They are well-built, their nails long.
"Have a drink, son," she says.
"I'm not thirsty."
"I'm a pharmacist. I'm prescribing you a drink."
I pick up the glass and rotate it to find an area untouched by her mouth. The woman's hands snake back to her body as though they're her offspring. She waits. I put the glass to my lips and take a swig, and feel fire in my throat. Goosebumps down my arms.
I cough. "Fucking—"
"Yes. Vodka." The woman takes the glass back and drains the rest of the liquor in one. "Good for the soul at the best of times. A necessity when that soul is artistic."
I stare at her.
"Just…" The woman leans in. A thick silver necklace hangs from her neck. "Don't tell the staff, eh? Mr. Canossa would have a fit, but his hotel liquor is priced like fucking diamonds."
She takes the empty glass in one hand and hides it under the table. I hear the clink of a bottle, then she puts the glass back on the table, full to the brim with more transparent liquid. She takes a swig.
I am still recovering from the unexpected alcohol. Vodka takes me back to my teenage years, when necessity lay not in whatever artistic souls wanted, but in whatever gave me the most alcohol for the best price. When I was stressed over a performance, spirits guided me to sunrise.
The woman offers the glass to me again, and to my own surprise, I take it with a mumble of thanks. I have a draft of the vodka, and another. My fingers leave prints on the glass. The woman refills it again.
"Now—your performance," she says. Her jaw works as though she's chewing the words. "Shibuya's sonata, eh? That's brave. It takes guts to perform Shibuya's sonata."
"Thank you."
"Yes, movements one and two—superb, of course. But it was the third, son. Oh, the third." The woman's mouth quivers. She throws her head back and stares at the ceiling. "Such a raw, simple little ballad, the third is. And yet your interpretation took my breath away."
I find myself hanging on to this woman's praise. Why her off all people? My audience is always keen to catch my eye after a performance, to offer compliments, but I never seem to care very much. This strange woman is different. Bizarre as it is, I feel as though her praise or disdain will mark the difference between my ultimate success or failure as a musician.
"You truly respect the third movement's identity," she goes on. "You respect its… well, its—"
"Simplicity?"
"Yes, simplicity. Some would call the third movement easiest, for its slow and simple tempo. But we know that's bullshit. The musician is tasked with elevating what an amateur could play. That's not easy."
"No, it's not." I drink some more as I consider this. There's a pleasant hum to the ballroom now. "Though in some ways it's easier, or at least more interesting. Shibuya leaves so much empty in the third movement. So much for me to interpret compared to the others."
The woman refills the vodka again. We are burning through it like oil on an ocean surface. The rich guests are throwing us curious looks from all their tables. I imagine what it looks like to them: the two of us, one young and one oldr, passing a singular glass back and forth as though in ritual.
"You play like an angel. And yet you called yourself a prodigy."
"Should those things be mutually exclusive?"
"No real prodigy refers to themself as a prodigy unless they are sarcastic." The woman sloshes the vodka around in her glass. "And no real prodigy can afford to be sarcastic about their work."
"Canossa called me a prodigy."
"Canossa is a skunk." The woman inhales deep through her nose, and shudders. "I was a prodigy once too, you know?"
"Of what sort?"
"I was a prostitute."
I stare. My teeth feel fragile from all the alcohol.
"That's right. Look at me now. I'm getting old. The world won't jump into bed with me these days." She leans over the table, dangling that necklace again. "We all get spat out in the end, son. Will you perform till arthritis takes your fingers? One by one, like frostbite."
I'm starting to feel a little sick. The woman bends her fingers back one after the other, pretending to snap them off like twigs. She never blinks. I excuse myself and hurry out of the ballroom to the snaking hotel halls, my stomach churning with her curdled words. The bathroom is just down the hall. It seems to grow farther away the longer I walk towards it, until all at once I stumble through the door and keel over a sink and throw up. My knuckles are white on the sink.
When I return to the ballroom, the woman is gone. I look around for her to no avail. In fact, I feel now that the charm I weaved with my music broke the moment I left for the bathroom, and now nobody even remembers who I am. None of the guests make eye contact. No one offers their compliments. A waiter passes me by as though I'm a vacant chair.
The woman's glass still sits half-empty on the tablecloth. I raise it to my lips and down the liquid in one, but I find that it's no longer vodka at all. It's just water.
———
Mr. Shibuya's third movement is slow and melancholic. It brings all the complexity and spectacle of the first two movements to a boil, concentrating the essence of the composition down into a sparse chord progression and melody. A note, a pause, a breath… another note. Shibuya's third movement creeps forward with such delicacy that I can sometimes hear the damper pedal creaking underneath my foot as I play.
It was Mum's interpretation of the third movement which failed to impress Shibuya all those years ago. Her third movement sealed her fate as nothing more than an almost-prospect. This was presented to me during my childhood as a fact, as sure as two plus two equals four.
"It had to be the third movement," Mum always said. Often she said it to herself as she sat vacantly on the piano stool, while other times she would frighten guests or customers with random interjections: "It just had to be the third."
"I beg your pardon?" said old Mrs. Kember, on a particularly cold morning. All she wanted was to order her usual eggs on toast. "The third?"
"Yes," Mum said. "It had to be. 'Cause I never put a note wrong through all the chaos of the first two. Not one fucking note, I'd bet my life and my child on it."
One day she dropped any pretence of enjoying our quaint family life.
Shibuya's third movement became her second, badly-behaved child. It got all the attention. It could not be ignored, for it would keep her up at night with its constant presence, or lure her from the cafe up to the piano with its drawn cries. Mum took up the unfortunate habit of erupting into her sonata at every hour of the night, as if two in the morning would be more illuminating than one, and three more illuminating than two. Shibuya's third movement ran through our walls like asbestos.
Dad suggested we get rid of the piano. He suggested we ban anything with Shibuya's brilliant name on it from being played. Mum reacted as though he'd tried to have her child put down. I'd never heard her scream like that before, and never have since. It was scary. School became my refuge. I'd come home to find the boxy TV beside the piano, the floor strewn with Shibuya's every documented performance in every form she could find: VHS tapes, DVDs, old newspaper clippings from when the sonata first released.
Piece by piece, my mother hollowed herself out.
Her portions became smaller at dinnertime, and she stopped having breakfast all together. She bit her fingernails down to their roots. We started finding loose hair in the shower plug and blood on the piano keys. The ridges of bones jutted against her skin. I spent longer and longer away from home each day, at school or at a friend's or wandering the empty streets of my small hometown till the sun dipped behind the hills. I'd dread the moment I had to go home and hear that sonata drifting from the windows. It was a vulture circling my corpse. Waiting for me to teeter.
Dad shouldered every responsibility at work and at home. He died shortly after, when I was eight years old. He'd been battling something sinister for years, but I think it was the stress that killed him in the end. In his final days he was like a percussionist, one hand stirring a pot and the other flipping a pan, one hand helping me with my homework while the other cleaned the dishes.
I found him slouched against a wall with his head bowed, as though he were tying his laces.
That night Mum played louder than ever before, so violently that she spurred herself into tears on the piano stool. Her shirt clung to her sweaty back. When she quietened she was left shaking. Then she spaced out so completely I thought she might have died too. Hours passed and she never left the stool. Her eyes were marbles.
I didn't know what to say except, "Mum. What will we have for dinner now?"
The answer to my question turned out to be jam sandwiches. Mum was in no fit state so I made them myself. I tried to make some for her too, but in the end I left her a plate on the piano lid and retreated to my room. Rain pattered on the awning outside my window.
If some part of my child self had hoped Dad's death would spur a protective spirit in my mother, I was disappointed. She folded under the black weight of it all. My school uniform stopped being washed, so I stopped going. I watched letters from the education board flutter through the slot in the cafe door like autumn leaves. Sun turned to sleet which turned to snow, so I had to fight my way through sludge to reach the market to buy us food. I kept haggling, just as Dad taught me.
An internal state of wartime descended on the house. While the world went on around us, we looked in to our narrow halls and dusty cabinets for dregs of life. It was as though we were sheltering from bombing raids, steering clear of the windows, keeping the world outside at all times. One day I had my last play date, and I didn't even know it. Sometime later I received my last friendly call on the landline. Months passed in the clouds. I took to lying on the floor and pretending I was a wooden soldier. Same difference.
But wooden soldiers can be burned and snapped in two, and they don't feel any pain.
I still remember the day the pain got too much for my child's body and mind; the day I sold my life away. It was a sharp spring morning. My window was a frosty white. A thin line of ants were crawling along my ceiling. I woke as though to the gallows, and I felt in my limbs an enormous weight beyond anything I'd experienced. I couldn't get up for breakfast. I couldn't even sit. Eyelids made of stone. Sweat thick between myself and the bed sheet.
I had no choice but to shed my old life like an insect shedding its skin. I got out of bed and left the weight in my childhood bed. Something instinctual drove me out into the hallway where Shibuya's sonata was already playing. Heartbeats, the splitting of my soul. I walked down the hall and submitted myself to the very thing which brought about the blackness in my mind. I came to the thing which killed my father and moulded my mother into a husk, and I devoted myself to it.
"Mum," I said. "I want to learn the piano like you."
———
I think of that ancient childhood while I sit out in the hotel gardens. It's started to rain again, the sort of drizzle which is so soft it's almost invisible, unless you look at the surface of puddles or rain-flecked windows. The world has a sheen to it. I've picked out a spot near the rear of the gardens on a wooden bench. It hangs on chains from an overgrown arbour above, and I gently rock myself with one foot on the red brick ground. My hair slowly straightens in the rain to pester my eyes.
I hang my head over the back of the seat to stare up at the glistening arbour vines, violent green and breathing life. My entire hometown is thick with untended gardens and moss and evergreen; flowers and weeds growing on the edge of tarmac as though they were guardians of the road. How funny it is that I've come across the world to this seething urban metropolis, and I shelter by the only plants I can find.
Mum comes out to meet me sometime after lunch. I didn't eat. I hear her calling my name as she wanders the maze of tall gardens, closer and closer till she rounds the corner and there she is. She holds an umbrella overhead, and a plate of food in her other hand. There's a thermos tucked under her arm.
"Why didn't you answer?" she asks me. She comes to sit beside me. "I brought you some lunch."
"Sorry."
"The serving lady thought I was real piggy, knocking on the kitchen door asking for another portion."
I take the plate from her. She holds the umbrella over us both as we sit on the softly-rocking bench. The chains are thin, sparkling with raindrops. There are a number of birds taking refuge in a nearby hedge; the foliage gives a sudden flutter every so often, as though of its own accord. Chirrups and caws.
"Do you want to talk about the performance?" Mum asks.
"Not particularly, no."
I pick at my food. It's nice enough: a steak cooked to a perfect medium-rare with a mushroom sear, a parsnip puree silky and flavourful underneath. It's a summer dish that reminds me of farms back home.
"Mum. What if Shibuya rejects me?"
She doesn't answer. I wonder what cold memories the question has stirred beneath her skin. We sit there in silence for a time, then Mum unscrews the lid of her thermos and draws two plastic cups from her coat pocket. She pours hot chocolate into each. Steam billows into our noses.
I take my cup and give her a grateful smile. "Thanks."
She fishes through her jacket again for a packet of powdery marshmallows, and gives me one.
"Cheers," she says.
"Cheers," I say.
We touch marshmallows, then dunk them in our cups.
I can still taste the vodka in my throat, but I don't feel at all drunk. If anything, the alcohol brought me down from a self-conscious high to something more apathetic. I came straight out to these gardens once that woman disappeared from the ballroom. Several guests have passed me since I've been sitting here, and not one of them mentioned my performance. I don't care. I glared at them till they passed.
"If Shibuya does reject you," Mum says slowly, "will you keep playing the piano?"
The question takes me by surprise. I look at her. "Do you think he will reject me?"
"I don't know, honey. There's a few areas we still need to polish…"
"Well, yeah. There always are. But I didn't think not playing anymore was an option."
The darkness in our house above the cafe all but vanished once I started learning the piano. It gave me a means by which to be praised and noticed by a parent, and it gave Mum a means to extend her own failed dream beyond her limits; a promise that her failure did not make her a failure. For both of us, the piano meant purpose. It was our merciful god. The question of stopping was not one we ever discussed, and we never have since.
I relieve her arm by taking a turn holding the umbrella. The patter of rain on the bushes and brick pavement is a lullaby. Mum leans against me, our jackets rustling.
She doesn't leave much weight on my shoulder. I'm not sure she ever truly rebounded from that depression in my childhood. Even once she started eating her body stayed slim, as though she had grown up during famine and suffered some permanent damage.
"I'm not sure what I would do if you stopped playing," Mum says now. She licks marshmallow powder from her fingers. "I… well. I dunno."
A moment of tension passes in the air. My throat is dry. Neither of us want to say it, but I know she is thinking of those terrible months in my childhood when she slaved over her own failure till she lost the will to be my mother. That first time Shibuya rejected her, it killed Dad, and it almost killed her too. It unravelled our family like yarn.
If Shibuya rejects me this time, I don't know how we will survive.
I swish around the dregs of my hot chocolate. "Mum?"
"Yes."
I hesitate. "Why did you marry Dad?"
"Well… it was the obvious thing to do." She sits up beside me. Her hands slide into her pockets. "We had you, and the cafe to worry about. We shared our whole lives. It was just obvious."
"You jumped into it so fast," I say. "I mean, only months after you came back from London."
Mum chuckles. It's a very cold sound, the sort that a child might make when they see something too confronting to process. We watch the rain dance on the brick paving stones. There is no wind. The sound of city traffic doesn't exist back here.
"I won't pretend it was sensible," Mum whispers. "But I did really like your father. He brought me a lot of joy and a lot of hope and… I thought I could keep it together with his help, turn a page on the piano and Shibuya and London."
I don't speak, I just watch the clouds. They are so still they could be painted onto the sky. It feels strange to talk about Dad, and even stranger to do so in this land so far away from our little cafe. By the time I was old enough to dwell on the question of why my mother started a family when her pain and musical career was still so fresh, Dad had been dead. Then it became important to avoid such sad questions.
Mum pours us each another cup of hot chocolate. She runs the toes of her winter boots around and around on the ground.
"I guess I was selfish," she says. "You have no idea what that flight back from London was like. I'd close my ears and hear my performance over and over and over, and Shibuya telling me he didn't want me. It was like tinnitus. Then once I was home it went on, during work and sleep and whenever I tried to have some time to myself. On and on, that fucking noise. Nothing anyone did could help. I was sinking.
"When I met your dad… it all stopped. I was working at this cinema that showed old movies—you know the one by the library back home. Serving popcorn and ice creams for kids, stamping tickets. I guess it gave me baby fever. And when your father came through those theatre doors, he was so kind. It was a late night, an empty theatre. We flirted like birds over the counter. Ha."
I sip my hot chocolate. It doesn't bring me much joy to hold this conversation.
"I abandoned my post at the counter to see the movie with him," Mum tells me. "And there was no going back after that. He made everything so easy for me, so quiet."
"But it didn't work forever."
"No." Her voice is hardly a breath now. Her posture is very tense. "No, it didn't."
"God." I grapple with something hot in my chest, then draw my legs up onto the bench so that my knees touch my chin. "And you knew you wouldn't be able to turn that page, didn't you?"
"Maybe."
I close my eyes. Blackness.
"I hope you don't blame me, love. I blame myself enough all on my own." Mum tilts sideways to lean against me once more. I don't know if she's crying, or if it's the rain on her face. "I really do. Your father deserved more. He deserved to be loved like he would love me."
"Your first and only love was the piano," I say.
It hadn't meant to sound so scathing, but as the sentence settles between us like the rain I know it to be true. She doesn't deny it. As I sit on that garden bench in London, I realise my entire childhood had been transient. That life above the cafe had always been set to unravel, from the moment my mother and father watched their first movie together.
———
I don't know quite how it comes to happen, but I find myself cherishing the time I spend on that hanging wooden bench with my mother, and I think I always will. We listen to the birds sheltering in the hedges, the call of rustling leaves, and she tells me about my father as she never has before. I fold my feet underneath myself for warmth. Mum recounts everything from a distance: their first dates, their wedding, their favourite hobbies and silliest arguments. In the end, I come to the conclusion that my parents' spark had burned bright and fast, and ended shortly after I was born. Like striking a match.
When we are quite out of hot chocolate, and the rain has breathed a cold damp into every inch of our clothing, we head back inside and take the lift upstairs to our room. There, we take turns in the shower. I brush my teeth to rid my mouth of the vodka taste. I wash my face in the sink, scrutinise the mirror, and try to see any shadow of a child behind my reflection's eyes. All I find are shadows under my eyes.
We go about my afternoon practice with a strange formality, as though we are extra keen to put a line under the conversation in the garden and mark our musical relationship as Professional. Mum keeps catching her more affectionate words as though they're slurs.
"You're still rushing bar fifty," she tells me. "Fermata, darli—Fermata. Hold it. Let it breathe."
I keep stumbling over the twisted notes. My mind is at a great disconnect with my fingers.
Isn't it ironic that at the very height of my musical career, during this most critical period, I should be preoccupied with the past? I've had years to dwell on my beggared childhood, and I've chosen to do so now. How woefully inconvenient.
I pass my thoughts back through the weekend's events: the pretty girl at the takeaway, the miso soup, my performance, the old prostitute with her vodka… the hotel garden, and the strange emptiness it brought me. Time runs through my mind like a dream.
Eventually I stop playing and drop the piano fallboard. I'm at a loss for motivation.
"Can we go for a walk?" I ask. "Or a drink? Something."
Mum bites at a fingernail.
"Please," I say. "It'd do us both some good."
"All right," she says. "Let's get out."
So we lock up the room, tie our boot laces, and go out into the rain with our umbrella. Mum tucks her ears under her ushanka hat, and sticks close to my arm so that we're both under cover. The rain flecks the toes of our boots. She asks where I had in mind.
"I don't know. Let's just walk."
We wander as though we are lost, without direction or destination, through alleys and under bridges and around the perimeters of muddy parks. Maybe if we take enough turns in the road, the thought of my looming performances will lose our trail and we will be free.
"The weather here is a joke," Mum says, tiptoeing around puddles on the pavement. "It's not so different from home in that sense."
We pass cafe eaves which run like waterfalls, above the clink of cutlery and grinding of coffee beans. Double-decker buses kick water up onto the pavement as they roll by. This is a world of a thousand passing umbrellas. Eventually we come to a nice park with a perimeter of trees, rolling grass and a deep shamrock pond in its centre. The surface of the water is shimmering in the rain, so faintly and frequently that it could be from the bass of nearby speakers. It's serene. The trees block out the city, if you don't look at the skyline above them.
"Let's feed the ducks," I say.
We buy a cheap loaf of bread from a nearby foodmart, and a bottle of soju from an adjacent liquor store. The ducks are highly receptive to our offerings. At first we throw chunks of bread into the water, but it doesn't take long for the birds to clamber out onto the grass and form a throng around our feet. Mum gives them bread while I hold the umbrella. Then we find a park bench under a jacaranda tree which shelters us from the worst of the rain, and I rip off the soju lid to reach the alcohol inside.
"Mm. This is the stuff," Mum says. We take turns having swigs of liquor. "Takes me back a time."
"Dangerous stuff. Tastes like fruit juice."
"Yeah." Mum chuckles and leans on to me. "We went through it like water in my day. That was before they lowered the drinking age, though. We had to find adult, or older siblings to buy it for us." She takes a draft and hands the bottle over. "Wild nights."
I watch the ducks milling around the last of our bread chunks by the water's edge, and feel remorse for a life I never even lived. I rarely went out as a teenager, and the few parties I did go to were generally lonely affairs; open-host functions full of students, which I wandered into during my darkest nights to numb my stress in booze and tawdry drugs.
"It was all a bit tacky," Mum says, with a laugh. She gestures vaguely out into the air with a hand. "I mean, everything a bit of a mess. No grace to it. No dignity. But the music, the booze, the deviance and sex. It was certainly something."
I fill my mouth with soju and say, "I never had much taste for the sex."
"No. It wasn't exactly romantic, was it?"
"It was extortionate," I say. "You had guys staying sober to get with the drunk girls. And nobody was ever aware enough to think things through. God knows how many regretted it."
The ducks are wading back into their pond now. Mum turns her eyes to meet my gaze. There is a hazy film across them, like the rainy skyline of the city before us. She smiles and taps my nose with a fingertip.
"What?"
"You're a kind soul," she says. "A proper gentleman." She nuzzles back into my shoulder and stretches her legs out sideways along the bench. "I'm proud of you for that."
"Yeah. All right."
It would be a lie to say I never engaged in the drunkenness of teenage parties. Those open-hosts did provide their share of substances and sex, enough for me to distract myself from the stress of my musical career. But it wasn't a happy time. I don't remember every girl I slept with, though I know the number is not large—and that fact is enough to shame me. If I am able to wake up to the warmth of another body, and not know their name or face, I cannot claim to be a gentleman.
"It's all just bullshit," I say quietly. I have another swig of soju.
"The parties?"
"Just all of it. The drunk sex, but the romantic sex too. It's all idealised. I don't believe in it."
She turns the soju bottle over in her hands. After a long while she says, "I suppose so."
"I mean… I don't know."
"No, I understand." Mum swivels her head against my shoulder to look up at me. "You're not alone in feeling that way."
"I haven't given it much thought," I say.
She smiles sadly, her expression slightly askew in light of the alcohol. "You're still young."
"For now."
"You have time."
I think of the woman in the ballroom, who threw back vodka like it was water. I imagine a life where Mr. Shibuya accepts me, even adores me: concert after concert, practising till my fingers seize up, cheers and admiration from every seat in the hall.
"You shouldn't mourn what you don't have," Mum tells me. She sighs and looks back over the park, rubbing her fingernails together. "I don't think anyone believes in true love, really. Even if they want to."
"Did you believe in it when you were with Dad?"
"For a while. A little while, then I didn't. That's how it always goes."
The rain picks up around us, but our tree provides some shelter. The leaves above us catch droplets, tilt under the weight, and release small torrents of water—a cycle which repeats over and over. We drink till all the soju is gone from its bottle, and the afternoon has a pleasant warmth about it. I find myself very fond of the ducks over in their pond, and the dazzling city lights which stretch above the clouds, and even the distant sound of city traffic.
Oftentimes my loneliest times are when the hum of human activity is distant to my ears, but not now. The gentle pressure of Mum against my shoulder is enough. We talk a little, but mostly we just sit there and let the world go on around us. It's the sort of comfortable companionship which we've scarcely shared since I was very young. We are always looking ahead, to the next movement, the next performance.
For once, we cling to the present like a blanket.
———
Mr. Canossa invites Mum and I to dinner again, but doesn't seem at all impressed when we show up damp with rain, tipsy with soju, and hot with appetite. Perhaps he intended to show me off to rich colleagues like a fancy new wristwatch. If so, he must be disappointed, because Mum and I largely ignore the expensive men and women at our dinner table. We each have three glasses of champagne, and polish off four portions of mushroom ravioli between us. In the end, Mr. Canossa seems rather keen to see us off upstairs. He doesn't invite us to dessert.
"Rum-tum-tum." Mum claps a beat as the elevator doors close. "What do you think? Shibuya's third."
"Bloody brilliant," I tell her. The looming threat of my two remaining performances seems dainty after our numberless drinks. "A lovely, lovely song.
"Mm. Do you think you'll be sober enough in a few hours to practise it through? I still don't think you're quite feeling the syncopation—"
"What?" I pause with my finger over our floor's circular button. "No, Mum. I won't be sober."
She looks at me from across the elevator. The walls around us are made of reflective glass, so that a dozen of our doppelgangers watch us from every direction. It's disorienting. Mum slowly removes her hat, rearranges her hair, and pulls it on again. Her ears disappear under the wool.
"I can't tonight," I say. "This is my evening off."
Mum scrutinises me with folded arms. "It's not like we're black-out drunk. You'll sober up fast."
"No."
"How come?"
"Because…" I hesitate. The coming night stretches out before me like blank parchment, and in that moment with the damp in my hair I decide that this afternoon of connection with my mother is too precious to end so soon. I say, "Because we're gonna go buy more drinks. Come."
"What?"
"Yep. Come."
I lead her by the hand back through the marble foyer, under the hotel canopy where the valets stare, and into the rainy city street. I put up the umbrella. Headlights glare, horns and petrol permeating through the air. Passersby have their hoods low and their backs hunched. I see a number of pigeons pecking about the steel struts of a skyscraper. A desperate busker continues under the shelter of a bus stop, hands shivering on his wet guitar, murmuring thanks when coins drop into his hat.
Somewhere Mr. Shibuya will be waiting for me—and yet here we are, Mum and I, damning practice to the back-burner to amble drunkenly down the street. Isn't that funny?
We find a small liquor store sandwiched between two restaurants. It's very long and narrow inside, as though we've mistakenly stepped into a carriage on the Underground. Something lame plays from a tinny speaker in the ceiling. Mum and I sweep the store, choosing a litre of cognac, several smaller bottles of soju, and a motley of non-alcoholic chasers. Mum muses for a while over some expensive wooden shot glasses that look like egg-cups.
"I couldn't," she says. She eyes the price tag. "It's a robbery. A robbery…"
In the end, I buy her the cups.
We hit a snag when the cashier says he can't serve anyone who's already intoxicated, but I slip him an extra tenner to let it slide. He then becomes quite hospitable, and finds us an old wine box from behind the counter in which to carry everything. Over the course of the interaction, Mum's vague comments about his service shift from "nasty boy," to "overworked, no doubt," to "lovely indeed."
"He's got a heart like an elephant," she tells me as we step back out into the street. She clutches her new shot glasses to her chest. "I wish him all the best. Really."
"Let's have a shot," I say. It's cold outside.
I carry our box to the nearest covered seat we can find: the bus stop where the busker is still playing his guitar. Mum prances on beside me, humming something vague. I sit down and pause, trying to place the busker's song.
"Come on, then," Mum says. She drops beside me and rifles through our wine box for the cognac. "Let's test out these cute little things."
She pours us each a shot into one of her new wooden cups, and once we've thrown them back she pours another. The brandy is rich, its sweetness flattened out by an aftertaste of spice. Mum and I watch red buses plough through the rain. I wonder where all the people are going.
I notice the busker has stopped playing, and look over at him. "All right, mate?"
He gives a shrug, fishes a cigarette from his pocket, and lights up.
"You play well," Mum tells him. She leans around me on the bench. "That was Pulp, right? Such a delightful chord progression."
The man nods. He drags deep, then exhales. "I saw them at Glastonbury," he says. His eyes trace our alcohol, our rain-washed faces, and come to a stop on my mother. "You play, then?"
"Oh. Once upon a time—the piano, that is." She taps me on the shoulder. "This one's the musician in our family. A real peach, or what have you."
I shrug at the busker, who shrugs back at me. Even in the absence of song, his free hand plucks tirelessly at the strings of his guitar. Plick. Plick. I eye him. He has a big tangled beard, but he doesn't look homeless; he's wearing Doc Martens, baggy denim jeans, and an enormous puffer jacket which fissles at his every movement.
"Tell me, mister." I waggle my finger at him. "You're no vagrant, are you?"
The busker laughs. "No." He lights up a fresh cigarette.
"No. So what brings you to this sad lonely bus stop to play in such weather?"
"Music. It's romantic in the rain."
"Oh yeah." Mum beams at him, and raises her shot glass. "To romance, my friend."
He gives his cigarette a little waver. Cheers.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I say with a tut. "Romance, romance, and all that. But here, mister. Get a load of this, it's cold out."
I fill my own wooden egg-cup with cognac and hand it over to the busker, who stops picking at his guitar to take the cup in hand. He downs the shot, so I pour him a second one. The three of us sit there for a time, drinking and rambling on about our favourite bands. I count three buses by. They stop with a hiss, let off passengers and a brief stint of warmth, then go on into the evening.
It's an odd moment of comradery, but I feel the day has come full circle: the woman in the ballroom fed me liquor, and now I feed this busker liquor, and soon he will go on and find some Londoner to continue the ritual with. It'll be a chain, right through the city.
"I come here to perform," the busker tells us. He passes around a cigarette. "If I get someone to stop and miss their train to listen, I've done my job. It means I got through to them."
"That's nice," Mum says. "We stopped to listen, so you've done your job. Don't go home too late."
"You stopped to take shots. There's a difference."
"Yeah, well." She shrugs and folds stray bits of hair back under her ushanka hat. "It's still cold."
"Well, I don't mind," the busker says. "I love to perform."
"Mm." I wave a nonchalant hand. "I never had the nerve to perform for an audience."
Mum gives a chuckle beside me.
After several rounds of brandy, the busker slots his guitar into a black case. He stubs out his final cigarette, shakes both of our hands in turn, then gets onto the next bus bound for Northolt. By this time the electric departure sign reads 21:42. Mum and I stay to watch the rain.
———
By the time we enter the hotel foyer, we are really quite drunk. Mum gives a tired-looking security guard a little salute with two fingers on our way in. He looks up from a newspaper for a moment, then returns to his article without a word. Our footsteps fall unevenly on the marble. I feel the evening rubber-banding out behind me in my drunkenness; time behaving a little oddly, everything a little hazy. When we reach the elevator, Mum tugs my arm and shakes her head.
"Let's go to the ballroom," she whispers. "Have a snoop around."
"Mr. Canossa said we weren't allowed."
"Who cares what Mr. Canossa said? Come on, it'll be fun."
So we skirt the edge of the foyer to the grand ballroom doors. I catch the security guard's eye as we slip inside, but he doesn't seem to care. We're not worth his trouble.
The space is vast and empty. The tables and chairs have all been cleared away, leaving a single open plain of polished wood before us. I spread my arms as though to fly. We cross the hall and sit on the edge of the stage for a while, taking sips of soju and dangling our feet. Then I stand, announce my name to the nonexistent audience, and sit down at the grand piano to play through Taylor Swift's Paper Rings. Mum hangs by my shoulder, singing along with a slightly whispery voice. The song comes to me in bits and pieces from the fetches of my memory, and whatever I can't remember I make up on the spot.
Afterwards we lie under the piano and look up at the black wood.
"Good old Taylor," Mum says. "She's got her shit together."
"Uh-huh."
We are still flecked by rain, dampening the stage floor, our heads alive with the delirium of alcohol. The quiet of the hotel is absolute. There must be countless guests above us, all in their rooms. I try to picture their various activities: showering, brushing their teeth, wrestling their duvets into a comfortable shape, reading or watching TV or having sex before they sleep.
Mum takes a swig of cognac straight from the bottle, and passes it on to me. I take a draft.
"Mm. Danger levels," I say, and put down the bottle. A laugh. "It tastes like water now."
"All right, enough for now. Let's just lie here."
I tilt my head sideways to look at her form sprawled beside me. She's still humming Paper Rings. In the quiet, low space beneath the piano it is an oddly chilling sound. Her lips barely move. Her hat has half slipped off her head onto the floor, among a cascade of hair.
"Mum," I say, turning onto my side to speak. "I'm sorry about what I said earlier."
She drags out a lyric—I like shiny things—until it dies on her tongue. A moment's silence passes, then she rolls onto her side, props herself on her elbow, and her eyes find mine in the half-light. It looks as though she's been drawn from a dream.
"What did you say earlier?" she asks.
"I said your first and only love was the piano. That wasn't true."
"Oh. Well, you know… I don't blame you."
"But it's not true at all," I say. "Maybe you were wrong to start a family when you were still hurt, when you knew you were hardly holding yourself together." A sigh. "But you still made me feel loved, right till the moment you fell apart. I know that was hard."
"I loved you both. I always loved you both."
"I know. I know that now."
"How do you know?"
"I just do."
"Tell me," she says. Her eyes are obscured in the dark. Pits of black. "Please tell me. I need to hear it from you, that I haven't failed as a mother."
I realise now that I've brought her to the edge of tears. I can hear them in her voice.
"I can tell," I say slowly, "by the way your voice breaks when you talk about Dad. By the way you came on my walk with me today even though I'm meant to be practising." I say the words I know she needs to hear, and I still don't know whether I believe them. "I know because you always lose sleep managing my career all by yourself, all the trips and accommodation and legal bullshit—all of it. I know because you give me the bigger half when you break a biscuit in two, and you give me the window seat on every flight, and you wake up early on performance days to bring me breakfast in bed."
"Do you mean it?"
I am struck then by a funny thought: I am not so much younger now than Mum was when she met my father and gave birth to me. It seems incredible. I always thought of my mother's youth in relation to her musical career—she was one year older than I am now when she performed to Shibuya—but now I see everything anew. She was one year older than I am now when she gave birth to me.
I imagine eighty-eight futures before me, all presented like piano keys, and in none of them could I ever see myself settling down with a family in just one year's time.
Mum sniffs. "Do you mean it?" she asks again, a note of pleading in her voice.
The truth is that I don't know. I don't know if she failed as a mother, and I don't know if I can forgive her for it. I cannot untangle my thoughts. Maybe some knots are just too hard to untie. Isn't it easier to go to sleep, rise like a marionette, and keep practising the piano till arthritis takes my fingers and I'm spat out, just as that old woman predicted?
"I'm…" Mum chokes back a sob. She falls down from her elbow and onto her back, staring up at the underside of the piano. "I'm so sorry, honey. I really am, truly, so sorry." She raises a hand and clutches it to her chest, fingers splayed. "I just wish you knew."
"I know you're sorry."
"I am."
"Don't cry, Mum."
She lets out a sad little laugh. I see the tears sparkle as they run in neat lines from her eyes, down her upturned face to her ears and into her hair. It's the first time I've seen her cry since the day we buried Dad, in a country field with a dozen curious cows watching over us.
I shuffle over to Mum's side, lay my head on her shoulder, and close my eyes. Neither of us speak for a time; for a hundred teardrops. I feel her chest rise and fall beneath me as her breathing steadies, then a gentle tug at my scalp as she starts winding my hair in her gentle fingers. Words come to me there under the piano, but they are impossible to articulate—padlocks without keys—so I stay quiet, an arm resting across her collarbone, and hold her. The physical contact is enough.
When Mum next speaks, her voice has returned to calm: "Are you sure you don't want to get your hair cut before Friday? A first impression does wonders."
I chuckle. "No, thanks."
When I open my eyes and tilt my head up towards her, I find her eyes upon me. They are still wet from her grief, rimmed red by irritation, but it's as though the tears have washed away a greasy film from their surface: now they are perfect unclouded windows. I can make out every cobalt-blue paint stroke in her irises, and every standing black eyelash. In that moment as I embrace her, she looks at me with the focus she has only ever given my sheet music.
I slide my head up her shoulder to plant a kiss on her lips.
It isn't a conscious decision. Not really. I can't work back through my thoughts to analyse them as I can with a composition, so I don't know what brought me to do it. Maybe I never will. I know only that I can't count the days since I last felt my mother's unguarded embrace like this.
A kiss is easy. It's so obvious. My way to tell her what I can't with words: that she is my mother, and forgiveness is separate from love. I will always love her, even if I never forgive her.
The contact lasts no more than a second. I get only the briefest hint of her lips' warmth before I break away, and a breath passes between us. Mum watches me, her eyes dancing as her gaze sweeps my face. One of her hands is still in my hair.
"I don't want a haircut," I tell her again.
It's something silly to break the silence between us. She laughs.
"You don't need one," she says. A smile. "You will charm them anyway. You always have."
The idea of performing to an audience seems far away now, as we lie here in this empty ballroom. I can smell the alcohol on her breath. I can feel the damp of her clothing under my embrace. If performing a sonata to an audience is an activity of high society, then lying cramped as we are under a piano is quite the opposite—but I wouldn't trade it for a standing ovation of any length.
"I'm really glad we could hang out today," Mum whispers. Her eyes flit to our box of alcohol. "You know, without the piano. As a family."
"Me too."
Another silence comes over us, heightening the sounds of our breathing. We stare at one another. Then Mum drops her hand from my hair to my face, and slides a thumb over my nose and cheek. Her touch is so soft it tickles. Pianissimo.
"You're getting so grown up," she says, with a small frown. "I need to look at you more. Days pass and I barely see you."
"That's both of our faults."
"Maybe."
"It is," I tell her. I close a hand around hers, lowering it from my face. "We can both do better."
"We will…"
I hesitate, then gently prop myself up on my elbows and slide my body overtop of hers. She closes her arms around me and pulls me tight. Our eyes lock, our foreheads meet. I let my weight down, my hands on the ground either side of her, our legs trailing out behind us in one tangled mass. How many years have passed since she held my weight and nurtured me?
"Too heavy?" I ask.
Mum shakes her head. A whisper: "Uh-uh."
This time she kisses me. Her hands caress my back over my jacket, rustling like autumn leaves in the wind, and she presses her lips against mine for one second, two three four. Our eyes close. The tender heat of her mouth drains me of any sobriety I had left. I want to stay here till the birds rise from their urban dens and the guests come to their breakfasts in the ballroom.
We take short breaths between kisses.
It is different from those times in my teenage years in which I found girls at house parties. Those had been affairs of hot, uncomfortable adrenaline. This embrace is slow. It is not as explosive; but where those nights with strangers emptied me of all the energy I had, this moment under the piano seems to fill me with life. I belong here.
I belong here.
Mum parts my lips with her tongue. It is a closeness I have never known. I feel her body beneath me, the body of a woman, not a girl, accentuated in her age by a fuller and more complete figure. She fits into my arms perfectly. Her rounded breasts press into my chest, her legs around mine, the curve from her waist to hips a thing of perfect geometry. There is a completeness to her body.
We go upstairs long after midnight, still clad in our thick jackets and teetering with our box of assorted alcohol. It takes a while to remember which room is ours, which I put partly down to the drinks and partly to the state of contentment we have worked ourselves up into. Our intimacy has cleared our minds of stress like perfect spring water. We are drunk, but we are also sharper than we have ever been sober.
We don't bother going to our separate rooms that night. Instead, Mum brews us more hot chocolate to drink under duvets on the couch. We dial up the TV and cling to each other in the dark, half-watching, half-talking. The threat of Mr. Shibuya's judgement, wherever the man may be sleeping now, has been swept from our minds.
"Hold me," I say.
She holds me. Her body wraps around mine. We are both pyjama-clad, but briefly my imagination strays to her flesh.
"Kiss me," I say.
And she does, gently, so gently on my lips and forehead that I might be imagining it; so gently that I have to keep telling myself this tender moment is real.
It will fall apart if I stop believing. It will fall apart if I ever lose focus of her beautiful scent.
Sleep takes me, and my heart beats to her rhythm.
———
I expect a hangover, but when I wake I am pleasantly surprised to find myself let off easy, other than the faintest of headaches. Mum is still asleep on the couch beside me. Her face is half burrowed into a pillow, the other half draped by her hair. I take care not to wake her as I get up. Where's the remote? I turn off the buzzing TV.
The cognac has fermented in my sinuses overnight. Everything tastes and smells of brandy, even my tea, which I drink silently in the kitchen. The clock over the oven reads 11:23. The time crunch hits hard now that I'm sober and rested: it's almost midday, and my performance at the Royal Academy of Music is tomorrow evening. That gives me just over a day to practise.
A moment passes in which I sit in the kitchen and, with the efficacy of someone cupping a handful of water, try to recall the events of the previous day in detail. I run a timeline through my mind: the garden, the park, the bus stop… the ballroom. Tears, and lips, and the dance of her tongue around mine. It had been a closeness, an intimacy I hadn't felt before. For a little while as we lay under the ballroom piano, I felt loved. And I loved.
Now I stare into space, waiting for reality to hit me. That closeness had extended beyond the bounds of a mother-son relationship. I know that. I know that—and yet I do not recoil. I can only breathe, my heart beating, the recollection of her touch like fine brandy all over again.
How funny it is where that little kiss led us.
I make another cup of tea, retrieve my sheet music from my suitcase, and settle down at the dining table. Mum is still sleeping, so I won't play for now. Instead I work through Shibuya's third movement in my mind, scrutinising every crotchet and quaver. A pencil hovers in my fingers.
I still remember the day Mum figured out where she went wrong in the third movement. It was five years into my own career on the piano, in the gloom of our little hall back in Australia. I was practising with Mum at my shoulder when it hit her.
"Fuck," Mum said, on that day all those years ago. Out of the blue.
I stopped playing and turned my face up to her.
Her whole body had slackened. For a second she was a taxidermy, then: "Motherfucker!"
I stared at her.
"That slimy, sleazy Japanese bastard."
My hands fell into my lap. I said, "Mum?"
"I figured it out."
"You figured it out?"
"The third movement. The third movement." She took a step back, covered her mouth with a hand, and looked set to faint. When she spoke, her voice broke. "The third movement. It's syncopated!"
"It… it is?"
"Yes! Fucking yes." Mum jumped—she jumped on the spot. Her energy returned in magnitude, her cheeks flushing, her every muscle unsure of what to do with itself. She paced on the spot. "It's syncopated. No wonder Shibuya rejected me, I got it all wrong. All wrong."
It took five minutes for her to calm down enough to address me clearly. In this time, I made us both cups of tea, and seated her in an old booth in the cafe downstairs. The sparrows fluttered outside the cafe window. Mum's hands trembled on her mug.
"It's syncopated, of course. The third movement is syncopated. It's not a ballad at all, it's a dance track!" Her tea sloshed onto the table in her excitement. "The world's saddest dance track! An eighth note forward. Ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum."
I took a quiet sip of tea.
"I knew something was off all along," Mum went on, "because when I saw Shibuya in Sydney he lost count. At the start of the third movement he messed up, he had to restart." She laughed. "Imagine that! How could a composer, a genius of Shibuya's calibre lose the beat on such a simple song? It's sixty BPM. Chords on the beat. The simplest rhythm of all time, how did he lose it? How did he lose count?"
She clicked her fingers at me, and I realised the question was not rhetorical.
"I dunno," I said. "Enlighten me. How?"
"For the same reason he always swayed around when he played movement three."
This I had seen. Mum had shown me countless of Mr. Shibuya's performances, and every time the composer reached his third movement he would start swaying on his stool as he played, rocking back and forth as though he were performing heavy metal. It was a strange contradiction—swaying so fast while performing such a slow song—but I had always taken it as just that: the eccentricity of a genius.
Mum laughed again. She continued, "He sways like that because he counts the song twice as fast. It's been 120 BPM all along. A dance track! A sad, slow, fucking syncopated dance track!"
And so when she taught me Shibuya's sonata, she taught me the third movement syncopated. I can't remember exactly how, but it became fact that I would perform Mr. Shibuya's sonata to him as she had before me. This time it would be played correctly—syncopated, stressing the silence between chords—and I would redeem the family name.
So my teenage years passed me by like drops of rain. With Mum there to guide me, I won competition after competition. No composition was too difficult. They called me a prodigy.
———
Mum is still asleep when the hotel serves lunch, so I eat alone, and bring a plate wrapped with tin foil back upstairs to keep warm for her. Back to my seat in the kitchen. The sun inches over the floor. Though I know I'm performing tomorrow, and though there is panic stewing at the back of my throat, I make almost no progress with Shibuya's third movement. I cannot bring myself to consult the sheet music.
Something inside me has broken.
Eventually I give up and turn to an old newspaper for entertainment. There are storms set to roll over London and much of southern England tomorrow night. The Manchester derby ended in a brawl, and twelve arrests. All right. Fine. I scan a dozen articles, my mind scattered. It takes me a moment to register that Mum is awake and standing at the kitchen threshold.
I look up. "Oh. Hi."
"Hey. Morning."
"Nice sleep in?" I ask.
"Huh, you know." Mum waves a hand. She doesn't quite meet my eye. "Alcohol always makes me sleep like a baby."
"I brought you up some lunch."
She murmurs her thanks.
I watch her heat her plate back up in the oven. She's dressed in her cotton dressing gown. The robe clings close to her body as she moves, accentuating the thinness of her figure and pronouncing those curves which do protrude: her shoulders, hips and breasts. The gentle arc of her nape. I look back to my newspaper. Soon I hear her sit down opposite me.
"The Royal Academy has us a taxi for tomorrow afternoon," Mum says. I hear the scrape of cutlery. "They'll pick us up at two. You perform at seven."
"Yeah. Fine."
"Thanks for bringing me lunch, honey."
"That's okay."
She hasn't commented on the hour, or my lack of practice. This is unusual. Ordinarily the day before a performance is one of such aggressive rehearsal that we forget about lunch, and go to sleep with aching eyeballs. Today we are very still. Like fawns too close to the highway.
"What did you tell Mr. Canossa?" Mum asks. "Re: my absence at breakfast."
"I didn't say anything to Canossa." I don't take my eyes off the newspaper. "But I'm sure he deduced where you were."
"Meaning?"
I glance up at her. "Hungover," I say. A shrug. "Like a rabid teenager. I'm sure he knew."
She meets my eye with a small smile. There passes a moment of amusement between us, in which we both recall the previous night's dinner with Canossa's rich guests. From this side of sobriety our drunken antics seem comical. God knows what we looked like, stumbling through the expensive hotel with rain in our hair, downing twice as much champagne as anyone else.
Mum laughs, then frowns. "But… did we see him in the lift? On our way up from the ballroom?"
"No… Did we?"
"We saw him at dinner," she says.
"We definitely saw him at dinner."
"But I think we saw him after that too," Mum says. She sets down her fork in the middle of her plate and laughs again. "I think we saw him after the ballroom on our way up."
"God, I don't even remember."
We spend the rest of her breakfast discussing whether or not we should apologise to the manager. I'm firm enough on the idea that Canossa can suck it up; that a gentle pegging back of his dignity could do him some good. Mum reminds me we're staying here for at least five more nights.
"And we don't want to piss him off too badly," she says. "The food is excellent. I'd like it to stay that way, myself."
"Canossa isn't going to tamper with our food. This isn't one of your detective books."
"It's always the staff, honey. It's always the staff." Mum waggles a finger at me. She takes her plate to the kitchen sink, and goes on in a raised voice, "In any case, Mr. Canossa strikes me as the kind of man who'd sacrifice a bit of business to save face. He could have us thrown out."
In the end, we agree to keep the alcohol behind closed doors for the rest of our stay.
Then my glorious day of non-compliance comes to its end, and Mum sits me down at the piano to get back to my practice. This is my life, I tell myself. 88 tactile keys. We wrestle Shibuya's sonata into shape that afternoon, stopping only for snacks or cups of tea, or to step away from the instrument and discuss my interpretation of the music.
"You're still not feeling the syncopation," Mum tells me, in regards to the third movement. "You're counting it but you're not feeling it. You need to live to the offbeat."
We have become so well-versed in our method of practice over the years that we are mechanical. Sometimes in the space between notes I listen to my fingers for the gentle ticking of clockwork.
It is second nature for me to sit here with Mum and discuss my interpretation of a piece. When we are practising we don't discuss what happened last night in the ballroom. We don't discuss the contentment that had overcome me as I held my mother in my arms like a lover, taking her scent to my nose and heart.