He said he wasn’t very good and he’d filled in the crease where his nose met his cheek with the felt tip pen he was using to annotate his sheet music but this kid could play. St Pancras International. A humid Saturday. Arrivals dotted with the peculiar mix of expectation and love that marks it out as my favourite theatre. The train from Paris delayed. A piano and a boy. It took me three goes to find his parent. First I asked the fella nearby who’d been smiling possessively. He’s with us I thought his curls and hat said, the lilt of his hips. But when I asked he was non-plussed with a French accent even while a woman near by agreed, you have to get permission. Some pointing, a mother eating a soft baguette sandwich in the enclave of the Arrivals doors, the doors still shut, beside a father, tall and bellied and a smaller child; all this my supposition as I made my request, would it be okay to take his picture? They looked at me blankly. A chorus from the crowd, No, her; she who sat alone on a chair pulled from a cafe, also in the uncrowded enclave that soon would stream with Eurostar passengers fresh off the morning train from Gare du Nord. And still the boy played.
His mother said I’d have to ask him, and if he was okay with it, so was she which was exactly what I’d expect from a childrearing that produced a boy in a train station playing like a champ with his sheet music annotated and felt tip in the crevice of his nose.
I’m not very good
Yes you are and it’s photo not a film, no sound.
The woman who’d agreed permission was needed smiled and I smiled back.
All this as I waited for the doors to open, the 13:30 from Paris delayed but only by minutes. Not hours or months, not since April when my own boy who is not mine, who is his own man but made of my flesh, left on his adventures. I hadn’t said I’d be there but he’d texted a screen grab of his ticket and even though the last four months have brought the argument of individuation to my 3am door, the worry of not knowing after 19 years of knowing most things about him relegated to the bucket of deal with it, you have to deal with it I reckoned the little boy in him would be pleased. Mamma. This dance of letting go and getting on with our own lives is a sheet music annotated in felt tips. Trust them, but never forget I’m your mother. You’re an adult now but remember I have feelings. Checking in isn’t smothering it’s love. We’ll have to disagree on that last point. In an almost identical conversation with B on the phone yesterday, in Ireland wandering free, I don’t want to have to be thinking about telling you where I am. There is beauty in this and there is pain. There is trust and there is fear which cold sweats 3am into sleepless dawn. There is the inevitability of this hour in our lives. This is exactly as it’s supposed to be.
And when the doors open, the soft baguette-eating family moved aside or be drowned in the river of expectant faces, tired bags, and hugs, there is my own. I knew you’d be here to which I replied, I couldn’t help it.
Eleanor
I so remember that piano when we passed through Pancreas some years ago. Not that I can play, or the wife, but there was a band playing there and they were amazing. I love those kind of places where they put pianos out for people to play just because they can...and the kids leaving and not getting in touch with you...? I look at the wife and say to her, it's payback for what we did to our parents. And life goes on, Mamma.
Eyes got a bit wet there. If you want to be checked in with, get a daughter. They do it a lot.