'Every Good Boy Deserves Favour' by Anne Howkins

Guide your mother to the riverside.

She stands, always the maestro, white-stick conducting the riverbank’s soundtrack four/four time—grasshopper violinist, trumpeting frogs, piccolo-piping reed warblers and the whispered bass notes of willows. A soloist cormorant, takes her cue, silently darts into the river. She mouths something that might once have been a melody, flops exhausted to the bench.

 

The medics can’t do anything. The thing in her skull, missed ten years ago, was treatable then, but now it’s too late.

 

The water ripples around a second bird’s dive; a moorhen squawks at its brood of red-beaked hatchlings.

 

Mother’s fingers move, pressing keys on an imagined keyboard. Her wiring’s awry, sight and sound all mixed up into a synthesist morass of sheet music only she can play.

 

The frogs shift to a faster beat as a blue streak zings upstream through the willows. She taps her feet. You remember her hands racing across the piano, magically interpreting a language you never understood, no matter how easy the lesson, how simple the tune. 

A cormorant surfaces, a silver flash twitching in its beak, then the second, grabbing for the fish. The flapping birds paddle-chase across the water, scattering moorhen chicks, and a crescendo of staccato honking erupts across the water. 

Mother’s shouting incomprehensible sounds at the birds as if they were a stupid boy hitting the wrong notes, his clumsy fingers just asking for the whiplash of a correcting baton. You did try, you did. All those hours willing your woolly head to interpret black dots on a clef, send the correct message to your fingers.

Later, when mother’s in a drugged sleep, you’ll sit at her piano, open Chester’s Easiest Piano Course and become a river, let its song guide your fingers.