Music

This one is the beginning, Ed, of the next one, the young man with his gran.

She hadn’t been on a train in what, 50 years? Perhaps. As a young woman she had travelled to the city aboard the express for music lessons that her father would collect her from, and they would glide home silently, cutting their way through the endless stars of the cold night, moonlight picking out shapes in fields just like theirs.

Express was a term that would have made the young women she stood amongst now smile. Their eyes reached down the glinting lines, searching out the silent approach of the sleek electric commuter train that would take them to the suburbs of Auckland. She thought of the steam and smoke and commotion that had met her back then, a young woman with piano music clutched tightly in a leather hold all as the locomotive seemed to all but expire in the effort of gaining the shelter of the tiny country station.

And the city, a town really, a long main street and a café where she would breathlessly order a custard square with the coins mum had put in her hand that morning before school.

She had a large, darkly coloured hold all with her now and checked the clasp absently, ran her hand across the warmth of the folio’s broad face. She thought of the pages within, not music nowadays, rather pages she had kept religiously over time. Some old enough to hold a scattering of large colourful misspellings, and others stapled to hold a group of pages. She had become expert at coaxing the pictures and then the words from her grandson in the hours they had shared in the school holidays, in the big lounge of her home in the country.

The fire would be quietly calling for another log with the two of them ranged around it in armchairs, she reading the paper in spurts and watching the news in others and he scribbling and stopping, watching the images and then scribbling some more.