Piano Lessons

Right. So. Piano.

Not my idea. I want to establish that before anything else. My mum found out Loughborough's foundation year had a performing arts credit option and decided, without any consultation, that this was an opportunity. I play football. I eat pasta bake. I said this clearly and at some length. She booked the lessons anyway.

Miss Carver. That was the name on the card left on the kitchen counter like a done deal. Private tuition, Wednesday afternoons, Cambridge Road. I googled the address. Normal house. Normal street. I turned up the first week expecting someone's nan.

Miss Carver is not anyone's nan.

She opened the door in a cream halterneck, black skirt, knee-high boots, and glasses with red frames that she was already looking at me over the top of, and I just stood on her doorstep holding a packet of Hobnobs because my mum said bring something and I'd panicked in Tesco Metro.

She looked at the Hobnobs.

'Are those for me?'

'Er. Yeah. My mum said--'

'How old are you?'

'Eighteen.'

She took the Hobnobs. 'Come in then.'

I noticed the ring on the way in. Gold band, plain, worn down a bit. The kind you stop noticing you're wearing. I noticed it and said nothing and filed it somewhere I didn't look at directly.

---

Six weeks later and I'd stopped bringing biscuits. I'd also stopped pretending I was here under protest, though I hadn't told my mum that because she'd be insufferable.

The thing about Miss Carver is she has this way of standing next to you at the piano. Hand on your shoulder, correcting your posture. Leaning across to point at something on the sheet music, close enough that you can smell her perfume. All completely reasonable. All absolutely killing me.

Week three it was the skirt. The particular skirt, black, stops mid-thigh, and does something specific when she sits on the second chair and crosses her legs. Week three I noticed the stockings. Week four I noticed the edge of them where they stopped and the pale skin above. By week five I was deep into Three Lions, the extended version, all the verses, and it wasn't working anymore and we both knew it.

She's not a stupid woman.

---

I was late on the sixth lesson. Bus, I told her.

She gave me the look that meant she knew the bus timetable and had filed it.

We did thirty minutes of Clementi, which is what you play when someone wants you to feel like you've achieved nothing in eighteen years. She sat beside me on the second chair, correcting my right hand and at one point put her hand over mine to slow me down and I stopped playing entirely.

She left her hand there.

'Bar three,' she said.

'Yeah.'

'Again.'

I played bar three. Her hand still on mine. Her leg against my leg where she'd crossed her ankle. Three Lions. Every verse. Every bridge. It wasn't working.

She took her hand away. Made a note on the sheet music. Said, without looking up: 'Finn.'

'Yeah.'

'Are you concentrating?'

'Trying to.'

She took her glasses off, set them on top of the piano, looked at me sideways. 'How long has this been a problem?'

I went with honesty because I had nothing left to lose.

'Week three,' I said. 'The skirt specifically. I know that's--'

'Stop apologizing.'

She stood up, went to the door, and I thought: right, here it is, asked to leave, never to return, my mum is going to be devastated. But she didn't open it. She locked it. Turned round with her back against it.

'Stand up,' she said.

I stood up.

She crossed back, picked her glasses up off the piano on the way, slid them on, and put both hands on my chest, walked me backward until the piano bench caught me behind the legs. I had my hands on her waist before I'd decided to.

She kissed me. Properly, deliberately, like she'd had a plan for it. I kissed her back with absolutely no plan and my hands in her hair inside six seconds which is not how I usually operate but here we are, new information about myself.

She pulled back. Looked at me. Looked down. Said 'well' under her breath.

'Been like that since bar two,' I said.

Low laugh, right in her throat.

She stepped back, reached behind herself, unzipped her skirt, stepped out of it.

Right.

Halterneck still on. Holdups still on. Nothing else. I don't know what to do with that information except file it under: things I will be thinking about for the rest of my natural life.

'Upstairs,' she said. Over the top of them.

---

Her bedroom. Neat, adult, nothing like mine. Photo on the side table, her and a bloke about her age, somewhere sunny. I clocked it and looked away and said nothing because what would I say.

I stood there like someone who'd temporarily forgotten what legs are for and she looked up at me and said 'well come on then' in the exact voice she used for bar three.

I got my mouth on her neck and worked down and pushed her back and she let me. Soft. Fuller than I'd expected, warmer, the kind of body that's been places and stopped apologizing for it. I ran my hands up her thighs, that give in the flesh, and she said 'Don't be shy about it' and I wasn't.

I went down.

The holdups. The band at the top. And above that, a neat little triangle going silver, which I was not prepared for and which did approximately fifteen things to my brain at once. I looked up at her. She was looking back down at me over the glasses with an expression that was doing its best to stay composed and losing.

'Problem?' she said.

'Absolutely not,' I said, and got on with it.

She made a sound immediately, sharp, genuine, hand going straight into my hair. I took my time. She stopped being quiet fairly quickly after that, properly stopped, hips moving, saying things that bore no relation to piano teaching. At one point she said *there, right there, don't you dare stop* and I didn't dare stop and she came with her thighs tight round my head and a noise the neighbours will have formed opinions about.

I surfaced. She was flat on her back, glasses slightly crooked, chest going.

She straightened her glasses.

'Come here,' she said.

I moved up and she got her hand on me and looked at it with an expression of frank appreciation that I will be dining out on privately for years. 'God,' she said. Quietly, to herself. Then she looked up at me. 'How old did you say you were?'

'Eighteen right.'

'Eighteen.' She looked back down. 'Absolute waste,' she said, and pulled me closer.

She got her mouth on me and looked up from that position, glasses still on, and I gripped the headboard and had a very serious word with myself. She took her time, slow and deliberate, and after a while she pulled off and said, completely conversationally: 'you can push, you know. I don't mind.'

So I did. Both hands in her hair, properly, and I pushed deeper and she took it and I thought: the scale is gone. Science cannot measure this.

She pulled off, climbed up, sorted herself from the drawer with the efficient calm of a woman who thinks ahead, and then she was in my lap with one hand on my chest.

That's when I saw the mirror.

Full length, on the wardrobe door opposite the bed. I don't know how I hadn't clocked it before. Her back to it now, facing me, and I could see both of us in it clear as anything. Her in the holdups and the halterneck pushed up, and me underneath her, and she was old enough to be my mum and I was looking at that fact in the mirror and not looking away from it, not even slightly.

She reached down and sank onto me and we both went still.

She felt me looking. Turned her head, saw what I was seeing, looked back at me.

Neither of us said anything.

She started moving. Then she reached across to the drawer again and what came out had a button and a wire and made a low even hum, and she pressed it between us without breaking rhythm or changing expression.

I got my hands on her hips. She didn't need them there. She was doing exactly what she'd decided to do and I was part of the furniture.

After a bit I became aware that she was looking at my face specifically, not the mirror, not me generally. My face. The way you watch a kettle.

The hum. Her weight. The holdups against my legs.

'If you don't stop,' I said, 'I'm going to come.'

She heard me. I know she heard me because something in her expression shifted, and what it shifted into was not concern.

Same rhythm. Same grinding. The hum, closer.

'I mean it.'

She looked at me the way she looked at bar three. Reached up and straightened her glasses. Kept going.

I tried everything I had. Anfield in November. The offside rule in full detail. Every crack in my nan's Formica table. England's World Cup penalty record, every tournament, in order.

She pressed harder.

'I'm going to--'

She leaned down and said right in my ear, quiet and certain: 'I do love a young hard cock.'

And then she sat back up and watched my face with the expression of a woman who has placed a bet and knows she's won it.

I made several noises. None of them is dignified.

She came about thirty seconds later, face in my neck, nails in my back. Said my name. Just that.

---

We lay there.

A dog barked somewhere down the street. Someone's sprinkler is going. Ordinary afternoon outside, no idea.

She reached up and straightened her glasses.

The photo on the side table was still there. Bloke in the sun. I looked at it once and looked away.

'Bar three is still wrong,' she said.

'I know.'

'Same time next week.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'Definitely.'