“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!”
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