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.”
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