“Yes.”
I want to believe her, as I want to forgive her.
“I promise,” Mum tells me again.
She closes the gap between us and wraps her arms around my body. Her head rests onto my neck, her hair tickling my chin, her hands finding their place in the small of my back to pull me tight. She cradles me, though I am too big for her these days. She lifts herself on her tiptoes to plant a gentle kiss on my cheek, then my mouth, and we sway where we stand.
She whispers to me, affirmations like honey. Affirmations I want to believe.
Sweet on my tongue.
———
That night Mum comes to my bedroom.
London is quiet outside the hotel windows. The door opens a sliver as Mum slips inside, then closes with a carrying snap. I raise my head where I lie. She is little more than a shadow, slightly paler than the rest of the black room. I hear her cross the floor, then the mattress sinks down by my feet as she sits on its end. The dark consumes us.
I mumble to her. “What’s the time?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Past midnight.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“No.”
Neither can I. My mind is running itself into knots at the thought of my upcoming performance. My hands are aching from their workout on the piano. I’ve been resting with them crushed under my weight, hoping to strain them of their fatigue.
Mum extends herself over my duvet until she’s lying beside me, exposed to the cool night air. Her dressing gown glints like water in the dark. Her features are soft.
“I’ve picked up the rug,” she says.
“You picked up the rug?”
“I’ve been thinking about you.” She nudges me over, and lays her head down on the pillow beside my own. She whispers now. “I’m not avoiding it anymore.”
“What have you been thinking?”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need you to be sorry, Mum.” My eyes stray over her face. “Apologising makes it sound like you’ve wronged me—”
“Which I have. I haven’t been a proper mother.”
“But I don’t want an apology. I just want us to change. Whether Shibuya accepts me or not, I want us to change.”
Mum is quiet for a time, then she props herself onto an elbow to look down at me. Her hair falls down to touch my pillow.
“I enjoyed spending the day with you,” she says. “And getting drunk with you, talking with you—I mean properly talking, like we never do. I enjoyed it all.”
“But you want to forget it and get back to practice.”
“No. I do want you to practise. But that’s only part of it.” She frowns. “Partly I’m just scared.”
“Don’t be scared.”
She laughs. “Scared is good, honey. Sometimes scared is good.”
I shrug.
“If I’d been more scared of losing you and Dad, maybe I wouldn’t have pushed you away.”
My eyes are adjusting to the dark. Her body forms a landscape before me, slung in its dressing gown. I can make out the gentle rise and fall of her chest, the way her lips open and hesitate before she speaks, the way her legs shift restlessly down by my own.
“Anyway, I am scared,” Mum says. “I don’t want to hurt you again.”
I can hear the strain in her voice. A minor chord.
“Those last few months with Dad…” Mum goes on. She sighs. “God, it was terrible. It was like, sometimes I was aware of what I was doing, pushing the two of you away. But I couldn’t stop. Like I was watching myself through a thick glass window, tearing up our family. And I couldn’t break through.”
I have a fleeting image of her ripping a chain of paper people into halves, quarters, and eighths.
“I’m scared to be a mother.”
“I know.”
She lies back down beside me. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
I unfurl an arm from my blanket and find her fingers with my own. I squeeze them. They are chilled from her exposure to the night air, but when I try to guide them into the warmth under my covers, she gives the smallest shake of her head.
“I’m sorry too,” I tell her. “For saying I can’t deal with you breaking down again. That was selfish.”
“Maybe.”
I lace my fingers around hers with another squeeze. She slides herself overtop of me and finds my mouth with hers, and we share a tender warmth between our lips. Her hair falls around my face. It tickles my neck and shoulders.
“I love you,” she whispers to me.
“I love you too.”
I part her lips with my tongue and explore every inch of my mother’s mouth. Her ragged breathing, her muffled noises, her weight overtop of me—all of it is overwhelming, even with the duvet between us. Our embrace is a long one.
Then Mum exposes herself to me, in the early hours of the English morning.
She starts by straddling my middle, a knee on the mattress either side of my stomach, and unwinding her dressing gown cord. Her fingers move so slowly. They tease me with their progress, then she lets go and the two sides of her gown part like curtains.
I can now see a road of smooth flesh from her neck right down to her crotch, marked only by the cleft of her belly button and the hem of her blue underwear. The edges of her breasts are visible where the dressing gown has fallen away in either direction..
“You will be the first man to see me,” Mum says, “for over a decade.”
“I’ll be a gentleman.”
She smiles in a sad sort of way. “I know you will.”
And she shrugs off the rest of the dressing gown. It falls in a heap around her hips, and reveals to me a torso which glints in the darkness as if sculpted from marble. Her breasts are bell-shaped, flecked by faded sun spots at their summits, and crowned in their centres by perked nipples. The line of Mum’s body from shoulder to hip is one of grace and maturity. A concave waist. A silky plain of flesh at her stomach.
There is a fullness to Mum’s figure, not in size but proportion: a balance to her physique that could never exist in younger women. She has grown into her humanity completely.
“You’re really beautiful,” I say.
She guides my hands to her waist. I feel her skin under my fingertips, my pinkies brushing the peaks of her hip bones. She plants her hands on my chest, leans in, and kisses me again. At some point I try to slide my hands farther up her naked torso, but she gently stops them in their tracks.
“Not yet,” she tells me. A smile as she closes her fingers around mine. “It’s late.”
I nod. Her words tantalise more than they disappoint: not yet.
Over the following hour, Mum shows her body to me in its entirety. She sits on my stomach, flexing her every joint, running her hands over her back, nape and abdomen. Muscles and bones move beneath her perfect skin, the ridges of her figure catching bedroom shadows like ornaments. It is sensual. It is delicate. There is a great intimacy to the way her body moves, even in its most mundane areas. Her ears and elbows capture me as much as her nipples.
Then she rises to her feet, pulls her underwear down her legs, and throws the garment aside. My mother straddles me in the nude, guarded only by the thin duvet between us.
She presents her bottom half to me just as she presented her top. Her fingers traverse the geometry of her thighs, over a subtle sweat, and through the short-cut pasture of her pubic hair.
They even part her labia briefly on their journey, presenting to me her most intimate crevice as she spreads her legs apart—but she spends no more time on this area than any other. Her vagina is just another part of her body. She offers it to my gaze with the rest of her flesh.
I am struck by the depth and complexity of her body, and the patience with which she displays it to me. Certainly I find myself aroused as Mum reveals the more evocative corners of her womanhood, but my appreciation runs deeper than that instinct; my erection is second to the wideness of my eyes as my mother opens up to me more personally than she ever has before. It is an eroticism I’ve never known, and one which I never imagined her to possess.
She is showing me something sacred, I realise. She is giving me what words never could.
When at last I have seen every inch of her figure, Mum allows herself to slip naked beneath my covers. Her cold toes brush my legs as she nestles down beside me. We exchange a small smile as we lie there together, like teenagers riding the high of their first kiss.
Mum leans in to plant a kiss on the tip of my nose. “Do you need to relieve yourself?” she asks me.
I don’t quite know how to respond. The honest answer would be yes—there’s a tightness to my muscles, a sensitivity to my flesh and extremities—but I don’t want to make things awkward between us. More important than my arousal is the intimacy I am sharing with her.
“It’s okay,” Mum says. Her breath touches my face. “It’d make me happy.”
“Yeah, it’d make you happy?” I can’t help but give a teasing smile.
“Yes. To know that I helped you.”
I look into my mother’s face, consulting every feature. Her nose is just like mine. Her lips are apart. I have kissed those lips.
“You can do it now, under the covers,” Mum says softly. “Or not. It’s up to you.”
So I reach beneath the duvet to free my erection from my underwear. I cannot see, but I feel in my hand the intensity of my arousal. There are goosebumps on my arms from this slightest touch. I run my hand down the length of my shaft and up again.
Mum keeps her eyes on my face as I touch myself. On occasion she leans in to kiss me like a breath of summer wind. I work myself to orgasm while she lies naked beside me, the shavings of my pleasure fighting to every inch of my body, my shaky breathing exacerbated by the night time silence. When I cum, I do so into a handful of tissues from the bedside table.
Then we close our eyes, lace our fingers, and let sleep take us. I am content with this woman beside me. This woman who I love, who gave me herself in the dark.
I will never forget the way the shadows played on my mother’s naked body.
———
We don’t wake up until almost midday. This leaves us no time to explore our newfound intimacy: once we’re up, we hurry downstairs to fish breakfast from the kitchens, flit about our room in search of our best clothes, and make arrangements with Canossa for an evening taxi home. Our pre-performance frenzy brings my stress back to the boil.
To make matters worse, London has shed half a dozen degrees overnight on account of those forecasted storms. The sky is still cloudless, and the air still dry, but as Mum and I wait for our two o’clock at
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