For Sera

Katherine’s fingers arched over the piano keys, looping under one another, stiffly and a little forced - but she did it. As the notes guided her into memory, she felt her throat tighten - this part always made her cry. The evening light fell and it was as though with her right hand alone, she was summoning the stars.

The piece sang out like Debussy with a hint of backbeat. It was the composition of an accomplished amateur. It was an emotional archive. And today, it was a test she’d set herself.

One, two, three chords in the left hand, clashing seconds, her favourite interval - her right hand conjured a sweet constellation while the chords underpinned it with longing, a lack of resolution - the impossibility of being able to express how much and how achingly she was in love.

That little love, twenty years previously, had babbled from the rocker by the piano stool. Arms waving, excited legs kicking to the rapid cascades. Sera had already heard the piece, named for her, a hundred times. She’d kicked along to it from the womb.

Katherine reached for an F sharp in the bass and missed. Couldn’t quite stretch far enough. A grinding irritation in her wrist dragged her out of her muscle memory and back to a noisy, conscious mind which knew what was coming, and which didn’t quite work fast enough for -

- a striding bassline - huge leaps from low- to mid-range as the right hand flew in the upper register:

She tensed her arms and leaned forward, preparing for it, allowing herself a little rubato, a slowing down, before it came -

Those double-time chords -

A burning sensation ran from fingertip to elbow. She gritted her teeth -

She neared the crescendo, and searing, she pressed on -

But her fingers, her wrists, her elbows - all ossified. She stopped playing, feeling the hard-to-bear pain surging, along with something far, far worse.

She’d failed the test.

She lifted her arms, looking at them: solid, tools of blunt force rather than careful and delicate interpreters.

Baby Sera vanished. The stars went out. The piece was ash, thrown into the wind.

She screamed. Grabbed the first thing she saw - the metronome - in her useless hands, and hurled it into the far wall. It fractured. Keeping time is useless when you’re turning to stone.

Head in hands, she folded onto the keyboard, sobbing. The dissonant impact of her head on the keys collided with the aftermath of For Sera, its reverberating aura still in the room.

Her cries were convulsive, ungentle, as sound and memory exited her body, gasping in - nothingness. It was gone. For Sera was gone.

A figure appeared in the doorway. A young woman, inquisitive eyes, now wide with alarm, She stood very still, taking in the room. Then she ran to Katherine, easing her up from the piano and into an embrace.

‘Mum,’ she said, the word catching in her throat. She held her close; the two of them, a chord.

Katherine had lost the ability to speak, even to think - she’d tried so hard to protect Sera, keeping for many years an agonised silence. But now, as a young woman, she would be cut deeply and forever, on the jagged and exposed edge of Katherine’s grief.

‘Mum, what is it?’ she asked.

They looked at each other - properly looked - and something passed between them that hadn’t before. They were so alike: the same dark eyes, angular face, breakaway hair. But each reflected something unfamiliar. The frightening desperation of one, which desperately frightened the other.

‘The arthritis,’ Katherine hated even to say the word; inappropriately soft for its real-world cruelties. She held out her hands like they weren’t part of her. ‘I can’t play For Sera any more. It’s taking it all -’

She stopped. It would break her, again - the thought of what she could no longer play. The pieces whose music she had quietly put to the back of the folder: Prelude in G Minor, La Campanella, Clair de Lune, The Heart Asks Pleasure First…. Even her own compositions no longer translated from her mind to her hands, which felt more clumsy and crude by the day.

‘I had no idea, mum,’ said Sera, tears in her eyes. ‘I knew you were in pain, but…’ she trailed off. ‘How did I not realise?’

They sat shoulder to shoulder on the piano stool.

‘I've hidden it from you,’ said Katherine. ‘I always thought as long as I had my improvisation I'd be fine. My pieces. But without them -’ she paused, ‘I don't know how to be.’

She’d lost the power to summon any more emotion. Sera’s frightened eyes could not stir anything within her. Sera’s loving words could not speak into the absence, the noiseless vacuum now occupying her chest. Even the pretence of happiness, which had carried her this far, was gone.

***

As the Easter break drew to a close, Sera was reluctant to leave. ‘It’s an MA in Cultural Studies,’ she’d said. ‘I think the world can live without another commentator on Reddit and communities in the twenty-first century.’ Katherine hadn’t laughed. But she’d managed to do just enough to convince Sera to go; no point putting her life on hold.

She hadn’t dared touch the piano since that day. She couldn’t invite music into her life.

But it was all still there, in her head. The sound wouldn’t turn off.

She took two weeks off work. Then a month. Then two months.

She lost all interest in nourishing herself. Instead, she’d sit in the garden at mealtimes, letting the birds fill her up with noise. And even in her self-imposed semi-silence, she couldn’t help but compose little replies to their tweets; jittering staccato in the mid-range for the magpies, chromatics for the pigeons, a discordant palm to the lower register for the crows, glissando in the very highest notes for the blue tits.

And very occasionally, she’d hear an arpeggio punctuate the dull inertia. A flicker of something hopeful, as though the possibility of laughter still existed. And her fingers, though weakened, would twitch as if they might still be able to dance; a shadow of petrified joy; a ghost of movement.

Then the notes of For Sera would surface, unasked for, and that would be the end of that day.

Music might be a universal language, but she couldn’t speak it any more.

***

When the date for Sera’s final exam came round, and with it her homecoming, Katherine started to hear it - an augmented fifth, playing a jarring, repeated warning in her mind.

Sera had called every day. Sometimes more than once. Her voice had carried the beaming tones of someone on the verge of something, which Katherine had tried to reflect. Fifteen minutes of borrowed brightness. Just enough to get through the call. But she knew she didn’t have the strength to keep it up with them once again living side by side.

Then one day there she was: opening the front door, cradling a shoebox and smiling gently. Her brilliant daughter.

‘Hey, mum,’ she’d said, with a hug so enveloping Katherine felt she was being sheltered under celestial wings. ‘I know I didn’t give you a heads-up, but I have something to show you.’

Katherine was tired - so fragmented from the pain, the nerves, that she could say nothing. She looked at Sera, entrusting the next moment to her.

‘I know it seems overwhelming,’ Sera said, her voice soft but steady. ‘But just try.’

She opened the box to reveal a pair of fingerless gloves: they were white, sparkling and slightly iridescent, like they were covered in fragments of pearl. They held their shape - anticipating hands. At the wrist of each glove was set a small electronic disc. Next to the gloves lay two small devices which Katherine couldn’t identify.

‘These are sensors. They go on your ears like headphones,’ said Sera. ‘They connect to the gloves to help you play.’

‘No, listen -’ Katherine interrupted, heading off further explanation. ‘You know I can’t.’ She began to turn away.

‘You listen. Really listen, mum. This is different,’ said Sera. ‘It’s something new.’

She held her mum’s hands in hers, pulling her back so they were eye to eye.

‘I reached out to my online community to tell them your story. I figured there would be someone out there who would understand. And they came up with this! I thought you could, y’know, just try them?’

Katherine took the box. She regarded the gloves. She reached in and felt them respond to her touch - they were more pliable than they looked. They were beautiful.

“And if they’re no good, we just return them. What is there to lose?”

Katherine had spent so many hours with nothingness that she knew the answer to that question already. Plus, she couldn't say no to Sera - not now or ever. She’d try it once. Just once. That would be enough.

She slipped her hands into the gloves, the material soft against her skin, cooling the heat of her arthritis and supporting her fingers and wrists. Despite their embellished exterior, they were feather-light. As soon as she put them on, Katherine felt lifted. Sera helped her hook the headphones over her ears.

‘It’s a haptic device,’ she said. ‘The gloves interpret the intention from your brain, into your hands, and they do what you want them to.’

As she crossed the threshold to the piano room, Katherine did not hear the ominous chords she’d been accustomed to over the last few months. She held her hand over the keyboard. She’d never seen anything like it before, and had no idea where to begin. Whatever she did - she just needed it to not matter. She needed it to be something so small, so meaningless, that it couldn’t pull her back into the sharp ache of everything she’d lost. No words, no melodies, nothing at all. Begin at the beginning.

She played middle C.

It felt easy. Intuitive. Not at all like she’d expected.

She played a scale in C. She didn’t trip.

‘That’s too easy,’ said Sera. ‘Go on, really put it to the test.’

And so Katherine did. She began to play more freely, the notes tumbling joyfully, easily from her fingers as though they had been waiting to be heard, to return to the world. Without thinking, they formed into an impromptu composition - her replies to the birds, sent out of the open window. She returned their calls as if to say to them, I was listening, the whole time.

She finished on a leaping arpeggio.

She looked at Sera, and for the first time in months, the smile came without any effort. No mask, no forced gesture. And this time, it was Sera who mirrored her.

Katherine beheld her own hands, for once not stiff and discomforting, but glorious and articulate.

‘Sera, this is … what have you found?’ she asked.

Katherine felt it then: the rush of possibility, the ecstasy, ran through her - annihilating the emptiness. The months she had silenced herself fell away. She reached for the keys again and knew what she had to do. Before her mind could catch up, her fingers were already there, forming familiar shapes - but this time with effortless fluency. From a deathly height she leapt into double–time chords, flying right back into familiar phrases, picking up the piece exactly where she left off. She played, and played, and played: with expression, with revival, with endless thanks - and all of this, For Sera.