2

"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?"

"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

When our taxi arrives, we are very grateful to find that the driver has his heating up high. He spends most of the journey talking through a neck warmer which he has wrapped up to his nose; long tales of his two daughter's mischief. He smiles through his eyes.

"And now they are able to reach the top cupboards," the driver says, "they are devils. Always taking cash and chocolate. Devils in children's pyjamas, yes."

I nod along absently. "Yes, of course. Devils."

London's icy morning film is soon joined by tumultuous winds.

By the time our taxi arrives at the Royal Academy of Music, all the school's red flags have been rolled up and taken inside to prevent them from blowing away. We shelter in the car for a few minutes and stare around. The rest of the A501 is being uprooted by the gales. Pedestrians are bent double, clothes streaming out behind them. Bits of rubbish fly through the air. All six lanes of traffic are backed up, flanked by trees which seem close to being torn from their recesses in the concrete.

"There's our welcoming committee," Mum says. She points through the taxi window. "We'd better go meet her, I suppose."

I follow her gaze to the arched entrance of the Academy's main building. A girl is standing there by the striped concrete, a hood pulled right over her head to her brow. She's got a yellow folder tucked under one jacketed arm. The wind keeps pulling stray strands of dark hair from under her hood. She keeps tucking them back in. It's a constant cycle.

Mum and I thank the taxi driver and step out into the wind. At once my hair is blown into a mess. My tie flies about the chest of my tuxedo. We hurry over to the girl, who hails us down.

"I'm Nicole," she tells us. "I'm here to take you to your… ah, but isn't this funny?"

Her eyes are upon me.

For a moment I stare blankly back, then I realise who Nicole is. She's the girl from the Japanese takeaway who made me my miso soup. She looks somehow much older standing at this grand brick entrance than she had done over a greasy counter.

"Oh." I shift from foot to foot. "Hello again."

"Small world," Nicole says. She looks at me for a while longer, then shrugs and turns to Mum. "In any case, I think we should use a side entrance. There are a number of younger students making a racket in through this way."

"Yes, please." Mum gestures. She looks keen to escape the wind. "Lead the way."

Nicole walks us along the paved front of the Academy.

"I really do think it's best that we dodge what students we can," she tells us. The wind tears at her voice. "Because they'll want to hear you speak about your interpretation."

I frown. "I don't want to do any speaking."

"No, you're not meant to." Nicole shepherds us to the right, down a gap between two Academy buildings. "Students are supposed to analyse your performance themselves. But they'll want you to give them clues, naturally."

"We'll zip our lips," Mum says

Nicole leads us right around to the rear of the school, through a service door, and along several corridors to a humble studio. The room contains nothing more than a grand piano, several dismantled trestle tables leaned against a wall, and a window overlooking the A501. Black clouds are inching over the city sky now, incongruous to the continued lack of rain.

"You can dine downstairs if you want to," Nicole says. She nods at the trestles. "Or you can bring food up here. That's what I'd do. Management will be in touch in an hour or so."

———

Mum and I heed Nicole's advice and bring our dinner up to the studio to eat at the trestle tables. The meal is a spicy Jerusalem lamb soup, into which we dunk bits of sourdough with floury fingers. The heartiness of the food is perfect on a cold evening such as this.

And the evening is only meant to get colder.

As we Mum and I settle into a final hour of practice, our view of the A501 steadily clouds up with rain. We are distracted by the howling of wind, distant sirens, and the constant horns as traffic rolls by at walking pace. The window rattles in the gales. Droplets of water dance on the glass.

Once or twice, the studio lights flicker.

Then before I know it, I'm buttoning up my tuxedo onstage in the famous Duke's Hall, winded by the speed with which this performance has snuck up on me. I can hear the murmur of the crowd through a draped curtain. Rain pummels a glass oculus in the ceiling.

For a moment I look at my twisted reflection in a gleaming Academy organ at the rear of the stage, then my name is called and the curtain rises. I walk to the edge of the stage and seat myself at the piano. A beat passes, and another. And I begin to play.

———

I am midway through Shibuya's second movement when the lights go out.

There is no warning, no prelude; one moment I am navigating a nasty set of sweeping arpeggios, and the next I've been plunged into darkness. Muscle memory sustains me for several more bars before I hit a wrong note. The misplaced sound rings out into the dark and, as it fades, the audience begins to murmur. Rain lashes the oculus above.

I lower my hands from the piano. So much for the sweat on my neck being scrutinised. Technicians are chattering at the rear of the stage, and there's a number of deans on their feet shouting over the hum of my lost crowd. None of it really matters. I navigate to the edge of the stage in the dark, drop a metre down to the floor, and find Mum in the first row of black chairs.

"Let's get out of here," I tell her. I help her out of her seat. "Come on."

"Oh, but they've assured me it'll be back on in—"

"No. I'm not restarting. Let's go."

We feel our way along the front row of seats to an exit. I catch snippets of students' conversations as we pass them. Everything's superfluous. Raindrops in a storm.

It takes fifteen minutes for Mum and I to find our way back to our studio in the main building. We adjust to the dark in time, but there are dozens of people filing out in all directions around us, so we have to fight our way up stairs and through doorways. Nobody stops to talk to us. Now that we're part of the crowd they don't seem to care.

"Fuck's sake," I say, when finally we reach the studio. "What a mess."

Mum fixes me with a sympathetic smile.

"Can we call the taxi early?" I ask.

"I'll try, honey. I'll try."

But it soon becomes apparent that the taxi will not pick us up early—in fact, as Mum spends twenty minutes pacing the studio and arguing on the phone, it becomes increasingly clear that the taxi isn't prepared to pick us up at all.

"He says it's too dangerous," she tells me. "He says not till the red weather warning passes."

"Which is in how long?"

She shrugs, and sets her phone down on the piano with its torch on. It gives a little light to the room.

I am not optimistic. Even if the taxi felt like picking us up, it'd have to fight through miles of backed up traffic. The A501 is a spectacle of brake lights and window wipers. It stretches in either direction from our window like a dense automobile scrapyard. The gutters are spilling out over the tarmac. A set of traffic lights blink amber. The city skyline is white with rain.

Mum joins me at the window. She embraces me from behind. "I'm sorry it didn't go to plan."

"That's fine."

"Why don't we find some food?" she suggests. A gentle breath in my ear. "Make ourselves comfy while we wait?"

I turn on the spot and kiss her. It is the most natural thing in the world. For a while, the image of her naked body comes back to me, and my arousal of the previous night returns through the city fog. I pull her standing form tight against mine, bowing my face to her lips.

"Okay," I say, when I draw away from her mouth. "Shall we go get that food?"

"Yes. Yes." Mum lowers her hands from my back. She hesitates, then smiles. "Just… in a minute."

"In a minute?"

"Yeah. Just a minute."

And she lifts herself onto her tiptoes to kiss me again. Our noses knock together. Mum's legs entwine with mine where we stand, her breasts printing my chest, her hands playing with the buttons of my tuxedo jacket—and as she leans into me, the hem of her dress slides up above one of my knees.

"Just one minute," she repeats absently. Her tongue slides through my lips.

I let her inside, and savour her taste and texture. Wind drums the nearby window in its frame. I run the lace of her dress beneath my fingertips. Soon Mum has my jacket unbuttoned and on the floor. Her soft fingers move to my shirt next, untucking it from its belt. She touches my abs and stomach.

"Shall we move away from the window?" I whisper to her.

"Ha. Don't want to give the traffic a show?"

"Not particularly. This is our moment."

Mum smiles. Her hands peruse my waist, under the shirt. Though the contact is light that it tickles, it draws the breath from my lungs like a punch. There are goosebumps down my legs. She walks backwards through the studio, pulling me along by my abdomen. Our eyes lock.

"You look wonderful," I tell her.

"Hmm." Mum breaks away from me and picks at a lace shoulder strap. "If there's one thing that does tire me out about all this carry-on, it's the wardrobe."

"More than the travelling?"

"Yeah, I dunno." She smooths the dress down along her stomach. "At least when we're travelling we don't have to look the part. I can cosy up in trackies and a jumper, not these dolls-clothes."

"I suppose so," I say.

Privately, I think she looks beautiful in the blue dress. It catches the feeble light of her phone torch like an ocean in the dark. I've always enjoyed playing the formal part in my career, dressing up as though we were characters in an old film, hurdling into the rich man's world of black tie and champagne.

For a second I frown: there is so much we've never discussed, in all our years performing.

Then Mum goes to the studio door and locks it, and the soft click of the bolt quickens my heart rate. She waits there with her hand on the studio doorknob, watching me. I feel strangely weightless standing here without her in my arms.

"It's a precaution," Mum tells me softly.

"Lovely."

"Isn't it?"

She approaches me where I stand. Her dress flows about her legs. There passes a brief tension before our bodies meet, and I take her in my arms once more. She leads me back to the grand piano.

"Maestro," she says, in a posh voice. "Won't you take a seat?"

I fall back onto the piano stool. Mum follows me, straddling my lap with her legs hooked around me. She bows her head to kiss me, her gentle weight holding me down on the stool. The lace dress bunches over my waist in our embrace.

"I'm really proud of you," Mum says. She runs her hands over my back under my shirt. "For the way you've behaved this trip. You take everything in your stride."

"I try to."

"And you made me feel really comfortable last night," Mum goes on. She straightens up in my lap, looking down at me. "You were a gentleman."

"I had to be," I tell her. "I had a proper lady in bed with me."

"A proper lady?"

"Yes." I run a hand up one of her arms to her shoulder. Skin like silk.

Mum smiles. I watch as she pries her fingers under the straps of her dress and slides them over her shoulders onto her upper arms. My body is alive under her weight.

She raises each arm out of its strap in turn and, inch by inch, she lets the dress fall down her torso to her waist, exposing her gleaming torso and strapless bra. I breathe slowly, taking her in. She reaches back to unclasp the bra. It comes away like paper—and now her top half is completely bare.

My mother's breasts are a foot from my face, closer now than they had been last night. I can make out their minutiae in the weak light: rich skin like summer sand, formed into textured bells with dark areolas and, in their centres, protruding nipples. They are things of perfect contour.

"Do you want to touch them?" Mum asks. She reaches down for my hands. "I'd like you to."

I take her breasts in my hands. The warm flesh fills my palms, soft to the touch, sculpted by my fingers as I adjust and revise my grip. Mum leans in to kiss me. I roll her nipples between my fingers and knot my tongue around hers. Her breaths on my mouth and face are ragged, and soon she is drawing air to the rhythm of my kneading.

She stops kissing me to unbutton my shirt. It falls to the studio floor.

So there we are, both topless. I pull her into me. Our bodies touch, her breasts compressing against my exposed neck and chest. Skin glides over skin. Mum is more petite in my arms when she is bare like this. I slide my arms around her satin back.

"Is this okay?" I ask.

She plants a kiss on my earlobe. "Yes."

I hold her. Don't let go, I tell myself, and I think she hears me.

London is only growing wilder outside the studio window. The screaming wind and tearing rains form a surreal contrast to our silent embrace. Sometimes we kiss, but mostly I just cradle her and feel the beat of her body against my own. She nestles her chin in my hair.

It is my privilege.

"I love you," we say to one another. Once, twice, a third time: "I love you."

On occasion we hear a number of students pass down the corridor, chattering in that heightened sort of pitch which betrays drunkenness or adrenaline. Laughter rings about the Academy. I suppose Mum and I are far from the only ones settling in for the long haul.

"Do you think about home much?" Mum asks me, late into the evening.

"Sometimes. But we haven't been gone long. Do you miss it?"

"I don't know, I forgot how big London really is."

"How so?"

She adjusts herself in my arms.

"When I first came here I was so damn excited," she says. "I still remember getting off that plane and onto a bus. It felt like I'd flown to some new world. Over the horizon. A different planet."

I cling to her scent.

"I was young and stupid and I got my heart broken," Mum goes on. "But after Shibuya rejected me, I went out into the streets and looked at all the London commuters, and you know what I thought?"

"What did you think?"

"I thought oh, it's okay. I wasn't even that sad. Because when I looked around at all these countless people going about their countless days, it just hit me how many options I still had. How much life there was to live. Fuck the piano. I could do anything… then I went home, and we had such a small house. Such a small town. Of course I went back to the piano."

I process her words. "It seems obvious what to do, then."

"Does it?"

"Yes. Once we fly home, we move."

She laughs. "We can't just move."

"Sure we can. Let's go into the city somewhere. Fuck the small town. And the cafe. Let's move to the city and watch the commuters."

Mum looks down at me. Her eyes shine. "But you always loved the country."

"I can learn to love the city."

She smiles at me, nods, and laughs. For a second she looks around the dimly-lit studio as though making sense of the space, then she leans in to kiss me. Her lips roam my chin, cheeks and nose, and across the ridge of my brow.

A moment later she says, "I can feel you, honey."

"You can feel me?"

Mum nods. She moves a hand down my torso to the hem of my tuxedo trousers. My muscles tighten where I sit. Her shadowy hand unclasps my belt and pulls it free from my waist. Its metal buckle gleams. She drops it to the floor.

"I can feel you pressing into me," Mum tells me. "Pressing into my thighs."

And she rises from my lap, extricating herself from my body to stand before the piano stool. As she lifts her weight from me, my trousers swell under the pressure of my rising erection. I sit in place, staring up at my half-naked mother in this small London studio. My face is flushed now. There are hot pits of arousal in my stomach and pelvis.

"Is it any wonder?" I ask her. "I had a proper lady in my lap."

Mum smiles. Then she drops to her knees with a gentle thud and approaches me where I sit, inching across the carpet until she is kneeling right before the piano stool. Her eyes find mine. My whole body is tense as I watch.

Her gaze runs down to my trousers. "May I?"

I wave my hand: go ahead.

Mum leans in, her head a breath away from my crotch. The image is very hard to process. She passes her hands around my bare waist, down past my hips to my tuxedo trousers, and over the fabric of my thighs. She pauses here, teasing me with anticipation, before laying one hand right overtop of my lap. The sudden pressure on my erection makes me shudder.

My head pounds. We are the eye of the city storm.

"I can feel your cock," Mum whispers, almost to herself. There's a note of disbelief in her voice.

She takes off my trousers next, her fingers undoing every button in one fluid motion, and we kiss while I'm in only my underwear.

Then she relieves me of this final garment.

My cock stands up without restraint. There's a sudden chill about my thighs. I clench every muscle in my legs, dazed by this strange world I have found myself inhabiting. My mother has my pants around my ankles. I am throbbing in my arousal, my shaft standing tall with blood and anticipation.

Mum watches me squirm.

"Can I touch you?" she asks.

I give a shaky nod.

She lowers her gaze to my erection, leans an inch closer, and her pianist's fingers are upon me. They encircle my shaft like velvet. Mum leans her face over me, so close that I can feel her breaths on the head of my cock, and she lets a long string of saliva fall down from her lips.

I lean my head back with a soft exhalation. Mum draws her hand down the length of my member and up again, spreading the wet warmth of her saliva everywhere, from the trimmed roots of my pubic hair right up to my tip. She repeats her slow pump once, twice, and a third time; and with each she starts to move her hand faster. The sticky sound of her progress is enough to make me dizzy.

"Fuck…" I shudder where I sit. My hands grip the sides of the piano stool with white knuckles. "Oh, God."

"Look at me, baby."

I meet my mother's eyes. She smiles at me softly, without a hint of embarrassment, as though I had just complimented a homemade dinner. I watch her, and try to imagine this woman back in our little Australian home. I find it almost impossible. Mum is different now than I've ever known her.

All the while I stare at her, she continues pumping my cock with one hand. The image of her is one which I want to hide away and keep forever: topless and open to my intimacy, touching me like a lover in the dull light of a smartphone torch—and all of it in this strange land far from home with a storm raging outside our window.

"You're stunning," I tell her.

She quickens her pace at my erection. "You're beautiful too."

"I don't know how much longer…"

"Whenever you're ready," she says. "Whenever you want, honey."

My body has reached a plateau of pleasure I hadn't thought possible. There are goosebumps down every inch of my skin. The hairs on my neck are standing. My heart is beating in every part of my body at once: thump-thump-thump. I quicken my breaths as I feel my conscious mind tilting, veering off course in the approach of my orgasm.

Mum puts her second hand on my cock too, stroking faster. She leans closer, so that I have to widen my thighs to fit her shoulders, and lets a fresh string of saliva fall onto my cock. My legs twitch. There are sirens outside. I am bound to this piano stool by a complete sensory overload.

I couldn't move if I wanted to.

"Now," I say. My voice breaks. "I'm gonna cum."

"Don't hold it. Don't hold it, baby."

I writhe in place. My fingers splay. Mum angles my member towards her waiting breasts, draws her hands down my length one final time, and I hit my climax with a shudder. A gentle spurt of hot cum oozes from my urethra and runs down to her fingers, then the rest of my orgasm follows with force.

Strings of white semen spatter Mum's chest and breasts where she kneels. Her hands grip the base of my cock as it pulses, again and again, showering her with my arousal. I cannot begin to process the sudden fragility which hits my body, numbing my mind and burning my joints like a hundred shots of cognac. I cry out with the pleasure of it.

"Oh, sweetie."

Mum grips me tight. She runs her hands up the length of my member to draw the last drops of cum from its depths, then she lets go of me at last. My cock twitches. My whole body is fatigued.

"Was that okay?" she asks.

"Yeah… God, Mum."

We both look down at the thick mess on her chest. Semen tracks down her body in dollops, over the shapes of her breasts and onto the plain of her stomach. There is a web across her collarbone. Mum cups her hands by her belly button to prevent anything from trickling too far down her figure.

"Pinch yourself," she says to me.

We use a box of tissues to clean her up as best we can, then she sneaks off to a nearby bathroom for a proper wash. I dress myself in the dark Academy studio, my breaths still ragged, trying to make sense of this life. Last time Mum came to London, she had her heart broken. This time, something sparked between us and she touched me to orgasm.

I have a mental image of myself in twenty years time, returning to this English city to continue the timeline. London has our family in its roots and pavements.

What a rainy day it is.

———

I decide to let Mum rest while I look for something to eat. It's the least I can do.

So I set out from the confines of our studio into the endless black Academy. The lights are still out, with no sign of turning back on. Students line the hallways, sifting through coursework by torchlight, sitting cross-legged with jackets over their laps, chattering with friends about the storm. It seems that the majority of my audience is staying here overnight.

The walls groan in the wind, as though we were at sea.

It's a strangely cosy affair. Something about the collective sleepiness of everyone sheltering inside the school contrasts nicely with the violent outside weather. I am reminded of the natural disasters I see on TV, during which everyone bands together to keep one another safe and fed. There's an air of comradery among all those at the Academy, students and teachers alike.

I source several woollen blankets from a frantic-looking dean on the ground floor. It's a little busier down here. There are a number of stations on trestle tables where people are charging their phones. Cables run outside to several anchored diesel generators.

The dean tells me there's limited food in the store rooms on the east wing of the building.

"It's all canned, though," he says. He wipes his brow. "We're right out of soup."

He waves me away soon enough. I don't think he realises I was the one performing to his students before the power went out. That's fine by me. I head off with my newfound blankets, taking turns down foreign corridors and through lecture halls in the vague direction of east.

I am nearing the store rooms when I hear someone playing the piano. The sound should be at home in this place, but it stops me in my tracks. It's a cheerful tune, the sort which begs for an accompanying vocalist. It comes to me as though through an open summer window.

I shoulder my blankets and follow it to its source: a humble, dirty door off a stray linoleum hallway. I let myself inside. The room I enter is large and dark, lit only by the white glow of a flashlight. It is full of pianos standing in dusty rows like soldiers, yellowed with age and flung by cobwebs. A girl sits at an old R. Lipp & Sohn upright by the far wall.

The girl is Nicole.

She turns to look at me as I enter, stops playing, and drops the fallboard closed.

"What are you doing here?" I ask.

Nicole rotates on her stool to face me. "They call this place the graveyard," she says.

"It looks the part."

"It does."

I walk to her through the rows of pianos. "What's the graveyard, then?"

Nicole watches my approach. She seems poised on the stool, ready to burst into motion at any given second. The last peals of her happy tune are dead in the air, leaving the room very quiet. It's also very dusty, I realise. My nose itches.

"This is where they take the pianos when something breaks," Nicole explains. She taps a finger on the R. Lipp & Sohn. "This one has no sustaining pedal. That one there has a snapped string." She looks around the room. "It's meant to be more of a workshop than a graveyard."

"Why isn't it?"

Nicole shrugs.

I draw up an old stool beside her.

"There used to be a guy who fixed them," Nicole says. She fixes me a stare. "But he went insane, you know. Shouting in the night. Seeing things round corners."

"A Jack Torrance type?"

"Uh-huh." She leans in. Her voice drops to a murmur. "Then one day, we all woke up and he was dead on a piano stool—in this very room. There was a knife in his back and everything. Blood all over the keys. No one's come in here since. They say it's haunted."

"No shit?"

Nicole laughs. "I'm kidding, Aussie. He fucked off somewhere with his rich wife." She folds one leg over the other. "I guess the school can't be arsed fixing them anymore."

"I see."

"Yeah, sorry." She leans back with a yawn. "Still, it's pretty cool down here. Students mostly use it to get drunk, or take gummies, or have sex."

"Or play the piano?" I suggest.

"Yes. Or play the piano."

We listen to the rain. It comes to us through a dozen layers of wall and classroom; the faintest distant static. Nicole takes to a packet of sweets as we sit there. I watch her jaw work. She was pretty, that night I met her when I first arrived in London, and she is pretty now. I dimly wonder whether she enjoyed her night at the lantern festival.

"I like your tendrils," I tell her. "Your hair, I mean."

Nicole tucks them behind her ears. "Dad says they're childish."

"Hm. I think they're nice."

She looks away with a little smile. "All right. Thanks."

It is a strange unreality for me to sit here and talk to someone I hardly know. There's never been any time for such things when Mum and I travel; the slots between practice and performance always existed only for me to sleep. London has been different.

"I used to come down here a lot," Nicole says after a while. "On lonely nights.""Is that right?"

"Uh-huh." She stares at me. Her eyes are sharp. "Do you want to fuck me, maestro?"

I am taken aback. A pause. "I don't think so."

"Good," she says. "Then you won't be too attached to me."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm dying," Nicole tells me. She offers me a sweet.

"You're dying?"

"Yeah. Mesothelioma. Apparently it's really rare, but… well, not rare enough."

I watch her for signs of despair, or even anger, but there are none. Her eyes are set calmly on her hands.

"Just take a sweet," Nicole tells me. "It's okay."

So I do. I choose a wine gum. We pick at the sweets till they're all gone, then Nicole crumples the packet into a ball and puts it in her pocket. The company is like a quiet cup of tea. It warms me. We steep in our own thoughts, side by side.

"You know," I say. "Back home we call them lollies."

"Like the things on sticks?"

"I suppose so."

Nicole smiles. She closes her eyes.

I hesitate. "So why is it good that I'm not attached to you?"

"Because people look at you differently once they know that you're sick. They pity you. They say, Oh that poor Nicole. She dreamt of playing the piano, but she won't live long enough. Oh dear me, the horror!"

"Then why didn't you just not tell me at all?"

She seems to find this question amusing. "You're very perceptive," she tells me.

I stay with her for an hour. We don't have sex, as we agreed we wouldn't—but I draw my stool closer to her as our conversation meanders, and closer again. Soon I am surprised to find that she is in my arms. We share a gentle embrace there among the dusty pianos.

Then Nicole tells me that she's seeing someone.

"That's okay," I say. I hug her tight. "I am too."

"Funny how that happens. Thanks for the cuddle, in any case."

I leave her in the graveyard just before midnight.

———

Mum is grateful for the blankets I bring back to the studio, but less grateful for the food. The east wing store rooms had largely been emptied by the time I reached them, so all I managed to find were a few packets of nori rice crackers. Mum and I eat them standing in the studio, overlooking the congested A501.

The stranded cars have almost all been abandoned now, left dark like the pianos downstairs. There is water up to their mud flaps. The sky has twisted itself into knots of billowing black. Raindrops hit the studio window with palpable thunks.

"I wonder if Shibuya has landed yet," Mum says, as we eat our crackers.

"Hm. No one'll be landing anything in this weather."

She sighs. "No. I guess not."

I imagine the composer stuck in a first-class seat, circling London as his pilot waits for a break in the winds. But no break will come. The turbulence will grow, and the surrounding clouds will reach out for the aeroplane as if to pluck it from the sky. Eventually the pilot will make an announcement: they have to divert south, to France. Or maybe to Ostend in Belgium.

It's odd to think that a man such as Mr. Shibuya has to deal with the same silly problems as the rest of us. He still gets wet when he forgets his umbrella. No doubt he still jams his fingers in doors, and has to stop playing the piano for a few days.

"Maybe his plane will crash," I say. My breath fogs the studio window.

"That's a funny thought."

The conversation I had with Nicole seems to have put me in something of an anarchic mood. I think of my final performance on Friday, the result of numberless hours of practice and sweat, the crown of my young career—and I feel very emotion little at all.

———

That night I touch Mum's body in the dark. We have no mattress, so we lay one woollen blanket out on the floor as a makeshift mattress and rest with the other overtop of us. It is not what I would call comfortable. The blanket beneath us cannot hide the rigidity of the floorboards, and the air is like ice. Our only respite is the soothing sound of the storm outside.

We kiss there on the studio floor. It begins perhaps with our shared desire for heat, but it doesn't take long for the warmth of her body to spur any hint of tiredness from my eyes. I lay hold of her as though to guard her from the storm. Being in this place with no change of clothes, we are both in only our undergarments. The lace of her bra tickles my chest, but that is all: the rest of her supple body entwines into mine without constraint. Our underwear touches.

God only knows when we will leave this place. I'm not even sure that I will ever perform for Mr. Shibuya in this lifetime, or even the next; but I am sure now that I will love this woman regardless. This visit to London has settled that part of my mind. We are on the same burning page.

Mum touches me everywhere. She plays a hand under my underwear and brings my cock to a state of intense, standing arousal. Cold fingers. Her tongue in my mouth. My erection strains in its fabric, then she pulls it free. The hem of my boxers hooks below my testicles.

All the world is slipping away. I stray my own hands down the length of Mum's spine, past the small of her back, onto the lace of her waistband. She tightens up in my grasp.

I stop at once. "No?"

She is quiet, but for the gentle sound of her breathing.

"Tell me no, Mum." I take my hands off of her and say, "Please tell me no. If that's what you want."

"That's not it." She lets go of my cock. "I just…"

Her response trails off into the night. I prop myself up on an elbow and look at her face. It's shrouded by the dark. Her lips are a little apart, still moist by my frequent kisses. Her flesh makes a smooth line to her shoulders. The image is incredibly potent to my mind.

"Baby," she whispers to me. Her voice wavers. "I do want it."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I want you to touch me. I just… well." A tense chuckle. "It's been a while."

"I understand."

"It's been a long while, honey. A long while."

I smile, lie my head down beside hers, and kiss her there on the woollen blanket. My hands find hers. I caress her knuckles with my thumb.

"Talk to me about it," I tell her. I touch my forehead to hers. "Which part of it makes you nervous?"

"It's not something you did."

"That's okay. Is it… the intimacy? The pressure?"

Mum squeezes my fingers. "You're so young."

"I am young."

"But you're so young. Your skin is still smooth. You have that glint to your eyes. You always look charming, you young people. It's so effortless."

"Well I am very honoured that you think so."

She chuckles again. Then sighs and says, "I'm not young."

"I don't care."

"I know you don't. I just…" She steals herself. "I'm sensitive. I have touched myself once or twice since Dad. But I haven't tried it with anyone. Not once."

I choose to stay silent.

"I don't know how my body will react," Mum finishes with a breath. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Here, I'll look at you."

"You'll look at me?"

"I'll stay up here. I'll look into your eyes. You can look into mine. You can see me."

She smiles softly at me. "I can see you."

"You can see me. You can kiss me too, hm?" I peck the tip of her nose. My gaze locks onto hers. "I promise to be gentle."

Mum nods. She breathes an affirmation to me.

So I keep one hand firmly in hers, and run the other back over her bare abdomen. It traces the rim of her belly button, the subtle prominence of her hip bones, and comes to a rest at her waistband once more. I guide myself by touch, not sight. My fingertips glance the lace hem of her underwear.

"Is this okay?" I whisper.

"This is lovely," Mum says. She kisses me. "You know you turn me on."

It's the first time she has told me so out loud. My body aches with the quiet excitement of it all. I am still hard, swept in my pelvis and stomach by arousal—even without being touched. My cock stands up by my stomach.

I murmur, "Are you ready?"

"Yes.

"Tell me when."

"Touch me, sweetie. Do it."

And I touch her. I do it with bated breath and gentle fingers.

My hand slips beneath the hem of her underwear. It is met by the short stems of her pubic hair, damp with sweat. I twine her fur briefly in my fingertips and move on, over the raised hill of her crotch, every millimetre incredibly tense as I approach her sex. It is hotter here than the rest of her body by far.

A fine cleft of flesh tells me I have reached the peak of her mound. I pause for a moment, savouring these final dying seconds of absolute sexual tension—then I run my fingers down the length of my mother's pussy. It is flesh softer than anything I've ever known; a trace of dampness on my fingertips. I feel her labia ease out of their resting shape beneath my gentle pressure.

Mum's response is immediate. A sharp intake of air. She grips my free hand like a vice, her body squirming beneath our blanket, her expression contorting into one of vulnerability. It looks almost like fear. I stare into her eyes.

"Don't stop," she whispers to me.

I splay my hand beneath her underwear. Her body reacts. I massage her thighs with the tips of my fingers, working my way in to the spot where they meet. Her body reacts to this too. She wriggles. Small sounds escape her mouth. They drive me on. I caress her labia to a slow and exact rhythm. Her eyes fog up like the rainy studio window.

I am almost dizzy with arousal. The thing which goes to my head most of all is this: I am not just touching

her vulva, but manipulating it. The folds of her pussy move to my fingers. They change their shape as I change my direction. Her skin compresses under my touch, and expands at my release.

Her sex is my instrument.

Mum lowers her hand back to my cock. Her fingers curl one by one, holding my shaft in place, tipping me back to my full firmness. We stay in this position for a time, rocking each other up a curve of sexual pleasure. Our foreheads rest against one another.

"That feels really nice," Mum says to me. "Can I tell you something?"

"Please."

She smiles, and hesitates. I see the words stall in her mouth. "It sounds so silly."

"Tell me." I smile back at her. "I'm in your underwear. What's there to embarrass you?"

She chuckles. "Goodness, don't say that."

I wait for her to go on. My fingers play closer and closer to her opening. They are slick with moisture now, and sweating in the heat between her thighs. I look her in the eyes, breathe a word of gentle warning, and part her labia with the tip of my index finger. It is soft and warm on all sides. I let myself into her crevice, up to the finger's end joint.

Mum moans. She folds her legs overtop of one another, locking my hand in place. The heat prickles my nerves. Goosebumps ripple up my arm.

"What I meant to tell you," she says, "was that I feel young again."

"Feeling twenty-two?" I suggest. I hum a brief tune.

"Ha. Twenty-two. Eighteen. Nothing."

Her words are raw, nonsensical. I push my index finger deeper into her pussy, up to its second joint. Her opening tightens around me, then loosens again. Her legs knock against mine as she squirms, and gives another breathless moan.

"I feel like…" Mum laughs. Her eyes slide to the ceiling. "I feel like I'm restarting."

Her hand at my cock has picked up a sweat. She slides it up to my tip, and down to my pelvis.

"Honey." Her gaze returns to me. "I'm really glad I could restart with you."

"Hold onto that feeling," I tell her. "It's worth holding."

I slide the rest of my index finger inside her. Mum cries out to the night, not so loud to stir the birds, but certainly loud enough that I'm glad the studio is sound-proofed and the rain noisy. The sound of her pleasure twists something visceral in my gut. My whole body tenses up.

I unite my index finger with a second, my middle; it slides in without friction. The pair of them are encompassed by her pussy on all sides, suspended in the softness of her sex. Mum makes another noise of ascent. She nudges her thighs forward, rocking her pelvis on top of my hand.

So begins a rhythm: my fingers slide out an inch, and back inside in turn. Over and over.

"God…"

"Hold onto that feeling," I tell her again. It seems important.

Mum quickens her idle pace at my shaft. We touch one another for a long while. Sometimes our pace slows and sometimes it quickens, but always it ebbs and flows. The wind rattles the window panes in their recesses. It sounds as though the world is falling apart outside, though neither of us care to look. Let the school flood, I think; none of it matters.

At some point Mum slides her body overtop of mine in a sitting position. Our woollen blanket falls aside. She grinds her vulva over my hand, which is locked beneath her weight. Her hands release my cock. They lie flat on my chest for balance.

"You look incredible," I say.

"Really?"

"Really."

Mum moves back and forth on my fingers for several long minutes. Every so often her body shakes, right from its kneeling legs up to her mouth, where she bites back moans like hiccups. My hand is cramping beneath her, but I leave it in place. My fingers grow wetter as the warmth of her sex deepens, moistens, and softens beyond belief. Soon I feel her liquid running onto my knuckles, and down to my stomach below.

"Fuck. Fuck." Mum freezes up without warning. Her hands pinch my chest, and she takes a second to steady her breathing. "I need a break. God."

She raises herself from my fingers. They are left sparkling in the dark, pointing lamely up towards the ceiling, webbed by her hot, fast-cooling sex. I raise my hand up from my stomach. It leaves a residue on my skin. My fingers are chilled to the bone in their sudden exposure to air.

"That was incredible," Mum says.

She sits cross-legged beside me. Her underwear is wet between her legs, but her whole body is affected: it glistens with a layer of sweat. Her movements are terse, as though wounded.

"Did you…" I bite back the question. "You know?"

She smiles. "I would have if we kept at it."

"Why don't we?"

"Because…" Mum lies back down. She kisses me. "I want to cum with you inside me."

I hardly breathe. Our eyes meet. Clouds colliding.

"You want to go all the way?" I whisper.

"I want to go all the way."

I don't respond. My cock is poking into her leg.

Mum lowers a hand to grasp it. "Is that okay with you?"

"That's fine by me."

"Mm, are you sure?"

"Oh, I'm sure. Thanks very much."

Mum smirks.

"As soon as we're back at the hotel, that's what I want," she says. She starts stroking my shaft with soft fingers. "If we get back at four in the morning, I don't care. I still want it. Okay?"

"I'm not going to argue."

"I'll lock that hotel door, honey, and I'll walk you to the couch. We've nothing to change into, so we'll still be in these clothes we have with us now. And we won't have showered. There won't have been time, you know that. We'll still be dirty from tonight."

"How filthy."

"How filthy indeed." Mum quickens her pace at my cock. Her eyes never leave my face. "So I'll sit you down on the couch and I'll remove your clothes, super slowly, like I'm trying to do it without you noticing. Every piece of clothing till you're naked and hard and oh, so horny."

"Like now?"

"Like now," she agrees. She pauses to kiss me, to penetrate my mouth with her tongue. Then she goes on: "I'll undress myself next. Just as slowly. I'll throw my clothes away and slink up to you—like a cat, only moving when you close your eyes. And I'll straddle you, honey." Her words gain traction. They come very quickly now. "I'll crouch over your lap and kiss you. Your cock will bump my thighs as we kiss. I'll already be wet with lust. Like I am now. So I'll grip your cock with one hand, and I'll hover over it for a moment. Then do you know what I'll do?"

"Tell me."

"I'll lower myself onto you. Just like that. I'll sit down on your cock and feel it slide into me, parting my pussy right down the middle to rub up against my insides." She pauses. Her eyes bore into me. "How did it feel with your fingers inside me?"

"It felt wonderful."

"Now imagine your cock. This cock." And she squeezes it tight, so tight it almost hurts. Her pumps are very fast now. They are greased by precum. "If it feels good with your fingers, imagine what it feels with this thing inside of me. In and out, slow to start, but fast as we both lose control. In-n-n and out!"

The situation is helpless. My cock jerks as I hit my climax all at once—with no delay, and almost no buildup. It's as if my orgasm has been popped with a drawing pin: condensed in its entirety to several fleeting seconds.

I writhe on the studio floor with a gasp, dimly aware of my mother's tight fingers as my cock pulses fast, twitching in her hands. My cum bursts all over the blanket beneath us. It douses her hands and smatters her torso in torrents, hot with the lingering warmth of my body. Pleasure conquers my body in seconds, numbing the reaches of my fingers and toes with its intensity; and for the first time in my life I let it out in a moan that I cannot physically contain.

Then all at once I am finished. Ecstasy subsiding.

Mum lets out a long breath. She releases my cock, which dribbles the last of my cum.

"I'm sorry…" I whisper. My voice is taut.

"Don't be sorry, silly."

Mum sits up beside me, hands glistening. Viscous semen oozes down to her wrists. It sticks to her exposed abdomen in dollops—white pools which start running down her body as she rightens herself. Her belly button collects my sex. A string of sperm reaches the hem of her underwear.

She surveys herself with wonder. "Oh, honey…"

The image is almost enough to bring me back to a full state of arousal. Like the night she first exposed herself to me, I'm not sure I will ever forget it. These moments are stamped into my mind, and like stamps I collect them.

I search for something to say. "Where did we put the tissues?"

"Oh, we don't need them."

"No?"

Mum throws me a look, raises a hand to her mouth, and licks a long string of cum from the flesh of her palm. It comes away with a residue of saliva. I watch as she pushes her fingers into her mouth, cleaning them of their semen with her tongue and lips. The process takes several minutes for each hand, by which time my cock is hard with anticipation once again.

Mum smiles when she sees this, but elects not to touch me. Instead she moves to her stomach to scoop away the mess I've made of her. She feeds herself dollop by dollop, until all that's left is a sticky film over her smooth skin. She even takes my fingers into her mouth, the ones which had been inside her crevice minutes before, her tongue rolling around my flesh and knuckles.

"How do you taste?" I ask her.

She lies back down on the studio floor and says, "Just you wait and see."

The rest of the night passes with very little sleep. Tuesday rolls over into the early hours of Wednesday, and still the rain drums our window. Mum brings me to my climax twice more. She allows my hand to foray back into her underwear, and after my second climax she lets me taste my own steeped fingers. Her sex is metallic and sweet.

For all her dirty talk, we both clean up in the Academy bathrooms once we've finished touching for the night. We take it in turns to remove our undergarments, wrap ourselves in one of the woollen blankets, and skip away down the corridor with the cold biting our ankles. The sink water is like ice. When we are clean, we embrace, naked, and slip into otherworldly dreams.

———

The A501 is a wasteland. We wake to find cars turned on their axes by floodwater, scratched up against one another and washed onto the pavement. Several shop windows have caved in under rising waters. Bits of produce and merchandise float out into the street. The trees have taken a beating too: their bases are submerged, their leaves torn away, and there are branches floating around the road like corpses.The storm has exhausted itself into a windless, misty rainfall. We are still without power.

A raised, snorkelled truck comes rolling into the school in the mid-morning with crates of sealed food. I'm told the driver is a student's parent. Mum and I make cups of instant ramen, with kettles hooked up to the diesel generators. The spice makes my eyes water. It flushes Mum's cheeks.

Then we eat peaches right out of tin cans with our forks.

"We should have a taxi this afternoon," Mum says. She brandishes her fork at me. "And then…"

I raise my eyebrows back at her. "And then?"

"Hm. Nothing…"

"Go on."

She shakes her head.

Our conversation from the previous night hangs with me like the cold that morning. It follows me around the Academy halls, treading my footprints, and stands over my shoulder as I practise Shibuya's sonata in our upstairs studio. I cannot hold my concentration together. Every bar is blurred. All lines of sight lead back to Mum, and her body, and the lingering memory of her taste.

When I close my eyes I can see myself back on my flight to London. How different the world was back then: I had the window seat, and a kilogram worth of assorted confectionery in a big paper bag, and I spent almost all twenty-odd hours absorbed in the sheet music Mum had transcribed for me. I poured over critical reviews and analyses of Shibuya's sonata performances, stopping only for bathroom breaks and a single short nap.

The woman in the seat next to me once asked, "Don't you drive yourself crazy, boy?"

I told her that I'd hit a plateau of craziness.

"If you can't quit studying on a plane, then when can you quit?" she asked.

The answer back then had been never. Touching down in London, I never imagined that the week would unfold as it did. I was ready to practise till my fingers cramped up. I was subconsciously breathing to the tempo of Shibuya's sonata.

Then came the soju, and the park, and the ballroom. My life upturned like a table.

The A501 drains of water over the course of the day. By early evening, the black tarmac and road markings are peeking through puddles of water, and the labyrinth of stranding cars is starting to thin out. Some nearer the edges of congestion are driven away by their owners. Others have to be towed, or lifted onto enormous humming trailers. The rain persists in the form of a blanket of drizzle.

Mum and I bundle into a taxi around 7:00 in the evening. The driver spends the whole trip back to the hotel grumbling about the state of his flooded garage, but we don't really listen. We keep shooting each other looks. As the hotel approaches, our heartbeats quicken. I can't take my eyes off my mother's damp hair, or the arches of her shoulders protruding from her dress, or her waiting lips.

As soon as we get back to the hotel, she told me last night.

I have to adjust my tuxedo trousers to accommodate my rising arousal. By the time we reach the hotel I am completely hard. Mum keeps sliding her gaze down my body. Her eyes have an edge to them, almost as though she is concentrating on an exam.

"All right, here we are," the driver says. He takes our payment and gestures at the hotel. "You've even got a chaperone, how lovely."

"Yeah." I throw open the door. My words catch. "Thanks."

Mum follows me onto the footpath. The taxi rolls away. She looks incredible, I think: cheeks flushed with colour, skin flecked by the falling drizzle, her dress still dazzling after a full day wearing it. I put an arm around her back. We cross the footpath to the hotel entrance, peering up through the drizzle to find this chaperone the driver spoke of.

We stop in our tracks. The blood rushes back to my head.

It's Mr. Shibuya. He waves to us from the shelter of the hotel threshold with long, pale fingers.

———

"Madam." Mr. Shibuya takes Mum into his arms the moment we step into the dry foyer. "Need I introduce myself?"

"Not at all," she says. Her voice sticks. "Sorry. My dress is a little damp."

"Not to worry. Not to worry at all." Shibuya releases her, his hands lingering on her shoulders. "Dear Mr. Canossa invited me for dinner and I thought, well, what better company to dine in than your own? And of course—your son."

The composer turns his gaze upon me now.

I offer him my hand, which he takes at once. His fingers are unduly strong for their slenderness. They are unlike Mum's, which I always find soft and melodic—and unlike Nicole's, which held me in a clumsy, unguarded sort of way. They are precise, almost surgical.

How can fingers as strong as these play such tender notes?

"You are the image of your mother," Mr. Shibuya says. His hand stays locked around mine, frozen in its act of greeting. "I've been keen to meet you for a long time now."

"I could say the very same of you," I tell him. "You are a model to me, sir. I've watched all your performances. Every interview."

Shibuya smiles. "Then that puts you at an advantage, I think. Eh?"

I hesitate. Every noise we make is magnified in the marble foyer.

The composer chuckles, and lets go of my hand at last. "Now. Let's not leave the servers waiting."

I wipe my palm on my trousers. Mum is already walking off ahead, under the arm of the suited Shibuya. They leave me there by the door, and for a second the falling rain outside seems to call me. I think of little pattering feet outside my window back home. How I miss the morning sparrows.

We used to throw them bread crusts and watch them go crazy for it.

I gather myself in the foyer, then follow the others through to the dining room. I am careful to choose a seat between Mum and Mr. Shibuya for dinner.

The hotel staff have prepared great platters of slow-cooked beef and chilli coleslaw, to be scooped up and stirred together in fried tortillas. It's a symphony of flavour: the tang of lemon and cabbage, and the rich umami of the beef, and the punch of salt in the crisp tortilla dough. There are caramelised macadamia nuts in the coleslaw. They bring a sweet crunch to the forefront of every mouthful.

All of it, crafted by some of the finest culinary hands in London—and it tastes like rubber.

I manage only a few bites of my first tortilla before I set it down on my plate. Mr. Shibuya's presence beside me is too much. His every gracious word and gesticulation flushes my cheeks. Here is the man who dissolved my mother's life like sugar into water.

"I'd like to propose a toast," Shibuya is saying now. He stands over us in his suit, eyes like marbles. "If I may? I know I am an intruder to your lovely meal…"

Mr. Canossa is quick to shut this down. He waves a hand. "Please, you are no such thing. If anything I am! Ha. This is a table of musical minds."

"Very well, then. To Mr. Canossa, and all of his staff," Shibuya says. He raises his glass. "I can think of no better meal for a tired mind." He lets his glass glint in the light, then he turns it in my direction. "And to our fine maestro, whose music I eagerly await."

I incline my head.

"There is something beautiful in the way music unites us, isn't there?" Shibuya says. He takes a swig of champagne. His gaze turns to my mother. "I mean, how curious is it that a simple melody on my part should travel across the world and find you, madam? And your son. The continents are nothing to music."

There is silence at the table. Even Canossa, who has calf's eyes for Shibuya, appears unsure of how to respond. He chooses to say nothing at all.

"Of course, music always has been greater than the continents," Mr. Shibuya goes on. "My father and I used to huddle round the fire every Sunday to listen to the pirate radio stations. They had all the overseas hits early." He pauses for a mouthful of food. "Imagine that! Listening to the big American hits from our little house somewhere in Nishiwaga."

I chuckle. There is indeed something beautiful in the image of father and son, listening to music from a faraway land. Perhaps a week ago I would have revelled in this intimate piece of the composer's mind. It's funny how fast the sparrows move on from their bread crusts.

Shibuya smiles at me and nods. "But please—do eat up. I am just talking aloud."

He watches me closely. I pick up my tortilla once more. Oil runs down my hand, over my wrist, and into the sleeve of my jacket. Sticky against my skin. I am struck by the thought that Shibuya's tortillas are a whole lot less greasy than mine. If only I had picked his chair, I could have kept up some guise of dignity.

As it is, oil runs into my sleeve. I take a bite and fight the urge to be sick.

"Yes, eat up," the composer says again. "It's best eaten hot."

So I keep eating. He gives me an affectionate smile and looks away to talk to Mr. Canossa. My foot bounces under the table. There is something deeply humiliating in eating at the composer's request; in the act of forcing food down to an unobliging stomach.

The rest of the meal passes without note. Mr. Shibuya talks about his plans to return to Nishiwaga and open a new school of music. He shakes my hand on his way out to a taxi, just as he had when he greeted me. I find myself apologising for the oily residue on my fingers, at which he laughs.

"Please, this is not your fault at all," he says. He claps my shoulder with a hand. "It has been a pleasure. I look forward to Friday."

———

By the time Mum and I get to our room upstairs, the rain has completely stopped. London glistens outside like a fish plucked fresh from the ocean; a thousand tiny droplets drying in the evening. Umbrellas are lowered, and wipers turned off. Pigeons pick at flood-swept rubbish.

Mum takes the first turn in the shower. I watch the city through the living room window, trying to pick out which taxi belongs to Mr. Shibuya. Soon it is impossible to guess. There are too many red lights and green lights and tail lights for one set of eyes to keep track of. So I go to the kitchen, wash my hands, and settle down at the baby grand to play a few tentative bars of the usual sonata.

Syncopation is a funny thing to include in such a sonata. Ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum. I wonder where Shibuya first thought of the idea. Was it in that small Japanese hometown, or on a turbulent flight such as his one into London this week, or in the back seat of a warm taxi?

Ba-dum-ba-dum. How can half a beat be so destructive?

Mum comes out of the bathroom with a towel around her body, and another in a turban around her head. She sits on the sofa, unravels the turban, and brushes her damp hair free of its knots while I cycle through Shibuya's third movement. At some point she finishes brushing. A little later I bring the music to a close. The hotel room falls quiet.

"Beautiful," Mum says.

"I suppose it is."

"I'm sure he'll enjoy it very much…"

I rotate on the piano stool to face her. She stares at me. Her exposed shoulders and legs are still damp with shower water. The towel around her middle is white. It brings out the soft ivory colour of her body. She wipes her brushed hair from her eyes. Dark at its roots; blonde at its tips. Lips flecked by maturity.

"Maybe you'll go with him to Nishiwaga," she says.

"Maybe."

"I think Nishiwaga is rural," Mum goes on. She passes her hairbrush over and over in her hands. "You'll get your own quarters overlooking the countryside. Maybe nestled in a hill. Knowing Shibuya, it'll be traditional. Fusuma, pirate radio, water wells. Like a slice of the past."

I cross the room and settle beside her on the couch. She drops her head onto my shoulder with a gentle pressure, and upturns her face towards mine. I can smell her shampoo. We watch one another. Mum keeps talking without so much as a blink.

"And you'll have the best pianos in the world. Just a flight of stairs away." She presses her lips onto mine. For a second she brings my mind to the boil with her kiss. Then she whispers, "Pianos so in tune it's like they have souls. Strings of the most expensive copper."

"Don't you think you're romanticising things?" I breathe to her.

"Maybe. Is that such a bad thing?"

"No… I don't know."

She frowns. For a moment, I see in her eyes a Japanese countryside, clear and real as the living room around us. I close my eyes and bring myself to her world. There are birds on my dormitory window sill. She is visiting me at Shibuya's school, and we're walking through fields of vegetables. There isn't a car or traffic light for a hundred miles, any direction.

Then Mum whispers to me, "You should shower, honey."

"I guess so."

I leave her on the couch, retrieve a change of clothes from my suitcase, and go to the shower in the steamy bathroom. It does feel good. A day's sweat comes off as I scrub myself clean—and with it, something more. Perhaps it is the looming fantasy of a life in Nishiwaga, or perhaps it is the spores of an Australian summer. A certain undefined resolve washes down the drain.

It leaves me aerated.

———

When I open the glass shower door and step out onto the cold tiled floor, I find Mum standing before me. She must have crept in under the sound of the cascading water. Her cheeks are flushed by heat. Her features are soft in the bathroom steam. A purple scrunchy holds her hair back in a loose tail.

And she is completely nude.

I stand rooted in place on the fluffy bath mat. Mum's body shines, damp by the moist air, and raw in its nakedness. Her breasts take my eyes. So too does the gentle curve of her hips. Her pubic hair is smoothed down against the flesh of her vulva. I can see her moist sex a little farther inland.

"How was your shower?" she asks me.

"It was fine." I shrug. "But that water pressure… it's like it's trying to kill me."

"I thought that too."

"Yeah. I swear it's bruised me."

"Oh really?" Mum smiles. "Let me see."

She prances over. The bathroom, though well-fitted with tile and expensive black accents, is not large. She reaches me in two or three steps, and wraps her arms tight around my torso. I feel her breasts compress against my bare flesh. My skin is still wet from the shower. Her hands glide over my back, up to my neck.

"I can't feel any bruising," Mum says. She rises onto her tiptoes to kiss me on the mouth. "I think you're all okay, honey."

"I appreciate the diagnosis."

"Uh-huh."

Mum slides one of her knees between my legs and up through the gully of my thighs, until it knocks against my hardening cock. I tense at the warm contact. Mum kisses me again, while my body works itself into an overflow of arousal. I feel the tip of my shaft play up against the flesh of her stomach as it rises to its fullest height.

"Can I tell you something?" she whispers to me.

I look down into her eyes and nod. My arms wrap around her. Our embrace is very hot in the steamy

bathroom. Sweat runs down my neck.

"What you said back at the Academy," Mum says, "about Mr. Shibuya's plane crashing—it got me thinking."

I raise my eyebrows. "Did it now?"

"Yes. It led me to a conclusion."

"What conclusion was that?"

"I realised that I wanted it to happen." Mum frowns. She strays one hand down from my back, and around to my perked cock. "I realised that I wanted him to crash. Somewhere over the English channel, just down like a shot bird. Into the ocean."

I don't respond. She's started to pump my erection with that hand, knocking my tip against her belly button as she sweeps her grip up and down my length. I am still wet from the shower, so her fingers glide with ease. Kernels of arousal are already heating up in my stomach and pelvis.

"Isn't that awful, honey? I wanted him to crash."

"Hm. Down like a shot bird."

"Yes. Do you know why?"

I shake my head. Her hand is pumping me faster now, building a heat up over my flesh. I am hard as the tiles beneath our feet. It is not helped by the knowledge that, mere inches from my quavering tip, the soft coils of her pussy are waiting between her thighs.

Mum laughs. A cold sound. "It's because I don't want to lose you," she says. "Not now. Not to some musical haven in Nishiwaga. I want you to stay mine."

And to my surprise, her hand comes to a stop around my cock. Her grip loosens. Her fingers drop me as though they have forgotten the next notes they ought to play.

"Isn't that selfish?" she finishes quietly.

"That's not selfish. I don't want to lose you either."

"Oh, but it is." Mum takes a step back from me. A cold draft passes between our warm bodies. "I think it might be the most selfish thought I could have. The pick of the bunch."

"Don't say that."

"Because I want you to fail. Fuck. Imagine that."

I look at her. My eyes wander the beautiful complexity of her face and body, and come to a rest on that mouth I now know so well. I hold out my hand, searching for her fingers. My heart is beating fast—too fast. There is a real piece of me which wants Shibuya to invite me to Nishiwaga.

Perhaps that is the sensible part of my soul.

"Just take my hand," I tell her. "Let me show you."

"Show me?"

"Let me show you what I want now. It's not a flight to Japan. Not now."

Mum reaches out and clasps my hand.

I hold her fingers in mine and pull her forward, stepping backwards. I grope for the shower door behind me, pull it open, and lead Mum inside onto the wet floor. The door closes with a gentle plonk behind us. Glass on two sides. Tiled walls on the others. The space is two metres squared.

Our breaths come faintly in the thick humidity.

"What are we doing in here?" Mum asks. Her face is inscrutable.

I look her up and down. "Can I have your scrunchy?"

"What for?"

"Just pass me the scrunchy."

"Take it from me, if you're so keen."

She gives me a mischievous smile. I hesitate, reach out, and pull her body tight against mine. My cock pokes her somewhere in the abdomen, still hard with arousal. My hands slide up her back to her nape, to her ponytail. I take the scrunchy and let her hair fall down.

"What did you want that for?" Mum whispers.

I don't respond.

Instead I gently turn her on the spot, guide her hands behind her back, and press her wrists together. Holding them in place with one hand, I loop the scrunchy around her hands, then twist it and loop it again. When she turns back around to face me, her wrists are bound behind her back. She finds me with her gaze. A moment of observation elapses. We search each other's bodies for imperfection.

"Is this okay?" I ask her.

Mum smiles. A nod.

I take her into my arms and kiss her. Droplets of water cling to the shower walls all around us. I caress her supple breasts for a moment, kneading their shape with my fingers. My thighs and pelvis prickle with arousal. Mum hooks a chin over my shoulder, nibbling at my ear.

I turn her on the spot and push her up against one of the tiled walls. Her hands are locked behind her body. Then slowly, as though we had all the time in the world—as though Friday would never reach us—I lower a hand to her mound and delve my fingertips into the surface of her sex. Mum lets out a breath over my shoulder. Her muscles tighten.

Her short pubic hair bends to my touch. I part her labia. The warmth is intense. Mum squirms where she stands, as I run my fingers into her depths and back out again. Moisture clings to me. I insert my fingers right up to their knuckles. The responsive moan she gives turns me on to my core.

"God…" she whispers. "Oh."

She writhes against the wall as I quicken my pace. Her hands are crushed against the tile. I kiss her, meeting her tongue with my own, probing her sex to the sound of her shaky breaths. Once or twice, she tightens around me with a sharp gasp, but when I pause she whispers for me to go on.