“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—”
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