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.
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