“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.”
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