“It… it is?”
“Yes! Fucking yes.” Mum jumped—she jumped on the spot. Her energy returned in magnitude, her cheeks flushing, her every muscle unsure of what to do with itself. She paced on the spot. “It’s syncopated. No wonder Shibuya rejected me, I got it all wrong. All wrong.”
It took five minutes for her to calm down enough to address me clearly. In this time, I made us both cups of tea, and seated her in an old booth in the cafe downstairs. The sparrows fluttered outside the cafe window. Mum’s hands trembled on her mug.
“It’s syncopated, of course. The third movement is syncopated. It’s not a ballad at all, it’s a dance track!” Her tea sloshed onto the table in her excitement. “The world’s saddest dance track! An eighth note forward. Ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum.”
I took a quiet sip of tea.
“I knew something was off all along,” Mum went on, “because when I saw Shibuya in Sydney he lost count. At the start of the third movement he messed up, he had to restart.” She laughed. “Imagine that! How could a composer, a genius of Shibuya’s calibre lose the beat on such a simple song? It’s sixty BPM. Chords on the beat. The simplest rhythm of all time, how did he lose it? How did he lose count?”
She clicked her fingers at me, and I realised the question was not rhetorical.
“I dunno,” I said. “Enlighten me. How?”
“For the same reason he always swayed around when he played movement three.”
This I had seen. Mum had shown me countless of Mr. Shibuya’s performances, and every time the composer reached his third movement he would start swaying on his stool as he played, rocking back and forth as though he were performing heavy metal. It was a strange contradiction—swaying so fast while performing such a slow song—but I had always taken it as just that: the eccentricity of a genius.
Mum laughed again. She continued, “He sways like that because he counts the song twice as fast. It’s been 120 BPM all along. A dance track! A sad, slow, fucking syncopated dance track!”
And so when she taught me Shibuya’s sonata, she taught me the third movement syncopated. I can’t remember exactly how, but it became fact that I would perform Mr. Shibuya’s sonata to him as she had before me. This time it would be played correctly—syncopated, stressing the silence between chords—and I would redeem the family name.
So my teenage years passed me by like drops of rain. With Mum there to guide me, I won competition after competition. No composition was too difficult. They called me a prodigy.
———
Mum is still asleep when the hotel serves lunch, so I eat alone, and bring a plate wrapped with tin foil back upstairs to keep warm for her. Back to my seat in the kitchen. The sun inches over the floor. Though I know I’m performing tomorrow, and though there is panic stewing at the back of my throat, I make almost no progress with Shibuya’s third movement. I cannot bring myself to consult the sheet music.
Something inside me has broken.
Eventually I give up and turn to an old newspaper for entertainment. There are storms set to roll over London and much of southern England tomorrow night. The Manchester derby ended in a brawl, and twelve arrests. All right. Fine. I scan a dozen articles, my mind scattered. It takes me a moment to register that Mum is awake and standing at the kitchen threshold.
I look up. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hey. Morning.”
“Nice sleep in?” I ask.
“Huh, you know.” Mum waves a hand. She doesn’t quite meet my eye. “Alcohol always makes me sleep like a baby.”
“I brought you up some lunch.”
She murmurs her thanks.
I watch her heat her plate back up in the oven. She’s dressed in her cotton dressing gown. The robe clings close to her body as she moves, accentuating the thinness of her figure and pronouncing those curves which do protrude: her shoulders, hips and breasts. The gentle arc of her nape. I look back to my newspaper. Soon I hear her sit down opposite me.
“The Royal Academy has us a taxi for tomorrow afternoon,” Mum says. I hear the scrape of cutlery. “They’ll pick us up at two. You perform at seven.”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Thanks for bringing me lunch, honey.”
“That’s okay.”
She hasn’t commented on the hour, or my lack of practice. This is unusual. Ordinarily the day before a performance is one of such aggressive rehearsal that we forget about lunch, and go to sleep with aching eyeballs. Today we are very still. Like fawns too close to the highway.
“What did you tell Mr. Canossa?” Mum asks. “Re: my absence at breakfast.”
“I didn’t say anything to Canossa.” I don’t take my eyes off the newspaper. “But I’m sure he deduced where you were.”
“Meaning?”
I glance up at her. “Hungover,” I say. A shrug. “Like a rabid teenager. I’m sure he knew.”
She meets my eye with a small smile. There passes a moment of amusement between us, in which we both recall the previous night’s dinner with Canossa’s rich guests. From this side of sobriety our drunken antics seem comical. God knows what we looked like, stumbling through the expensive hotel with rain in our hair, downing twice as much champagne as anyone else.
Mum laughs, then frowns. “But… did we see him in the lift? On our way up from the ballroom?”
“No… Did we?”
“We saw him at dinner,” she says.
“We definitely saw him at dinner.”
“But I think we saw him after that too,” Mum says. She sets down her fork in the middle of her plate and laughs again. “I think we saw him after the ballroom on our way up.”
“God, I don’t even remember.”
We spend the rest of her breakfast discussing whether or not we should apologise to the manager. I’m firm enough on the idea that Canossa can suck it up; that a gentle pegging back of his dignity could do him some good. Mum reminds me we’re staying here for at least five more nights.
“And we don’t want to piss him off too badly,” she says. “The food is excellent. I’d like it to stay that way, myself.”
“Canossa isn’t going to tamper with our food. This isn’t one of your detective books.”
“It’s always the staff, honey. It’s always the staff.” Mum waggles a finger at me. She takes her plate to the kitchen sink, and goes on in a raised voice, “In any case, Mr. Canossa strikes me as the kind of man who’d sacrifice a bit of business to save face. He could have us thrown out.”
In the end, we agree to keep the alcohol behind closed doors for the rest of our stay.
Then my glorious day of non-compliance comes to its end, and Mum sits me down at the piano to get back to my practice. This is my life, I tell myself. 88 tactile keys. We wrestle Shibuya’s sonata into shape that afternoon, stopping only for snacks or cups of tea, or to step away from the instrument and discuss my interpretation of the music.
“You’re still not feeling the syncopation,” Mum tells me, in regards to the third movement. “You’re counting it but you’re not feeling it. You need to live to the offbeat.”
We have become so well-versed in our method of practice over the years that we are mechanical. Sometimes in the space between notes I listen to my fingers for the gentle ticking of clockwork.
It is second nature for me to sit here with Mum and discuss my interpretation of a piece. When we are practising we don’t discuss what happened last night in the ballroom. We don’t discuss the contentment that had overcome me as I held my mother in my arms like a lover, taking her scent to my nose and heart.
“Feel the syncopation,” Mum keeps telling me. Afternoon drags into evening. “Feel it. It needs to be perfect for Shibuya. Stress the silence.”
“Right,” I say. “Fine.”
Soon she starts tapping the beat with the sole of her foot. The sound is hardly audible over the chime of my rehearsal, so she stands and starts drumming the tempo on the raised piano lid instead. Her hand rises, falls and pauses, then rises again. It helps for a while, but soon I find myself focusing on her fingers more than the music. The cliffs of her knuckles. The shape of her fingers like arching tree branches.
Eventually I stop playing altogether.
“What?” Mum asks. Her hand comes to a rest on the piano lid. “What is it? That bar was good.”
My hands drop from the keys. I glare at her where she stands.
“What is it?” she repeats
I hesitate. “Are we really doing this?”
“You have a performance tomorrow.”
“I know that. But, I mean—come on.”
I stand and slink off to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I return, Mum is standing exactly as I left her, one hand resting on the piano lid, her gaze lingering on the stool I vacated. I am reminded of those street performers who paint themselves grey and pretend to be made of stone.
“Did you forget anything else about last night?” I ask her.
She looks at me. A pause. “I remember.”
“So how are you okay with this?” I gesture around at the hotel room. “All this practising? Just going about our day like you’re just a tutor and I’m just a student.”
“You’re performing for Shibuya on Friday.”
“I know that, but we haven’t even talked. About what happened.”
Mum suddenly takes her hand away from the piano, as though it is very hot. I fold my arms, refusing to speak before she does.
“I don’t mean to ignore it,” she says. Every word is considered. “But I thought we could put it aside and focus on your performances, then next week—”
“You want to sweep it under the rug?”
“No. Put it in a safe drawer for later.”
“Say it how it is: you want to sweep it under the rug.”
Mum frowns. “I don’t want to.”
There is a sinking in my stomach like burning hunger. My palms are hot with sweat. I wipe them on my legs, and exhale slowly. There might be tears on my cheeks, or there might not be. I can’t bring myself to raise my fingertips to check.
“I can’t practise,” I tell her, “till I know that you’ll love me even if I fail.”
“Don’t say that. You know I love you.”
“You said last night that you didn’t want to fail as a mother.”
“I don’t.”
“Then don’t,” I tell her. “Just fucking don’t.” I blink. “Because… if Shibuya rejects me and you fall apart again, I won’t be able to deal with it. Not again.”
Mum nods. A fleeting smile passes her lips like a ripple, then it is gone. “I won’t.”
I draw a knuckle under each of my eyes to dry them. “You promise?”
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