‘Bit of an own goal, that one,’ Joe laughed, as Lucy ripped off the wrapping paper.
‘I know,’ I told him. ‘I’m crazy.’
‘Can you play?’ he asked me.
I laughed and shook my head. ‘But they’re getting lessons at school next term, and she insists she wants to learn guitar, so maybe she’ll teach me.’
‘I want to be a singer,’ Lucy informed us, striking a sassy pose with her new guitar, and strumming the strings tunelessly. ‘I’m gonna be in a band, like The Aces.’
‘The Aces?’ Joe repeated, turning to me.
‘A girl band . . . youngsters. They’re OK, actually,’ I explained. ‘Quite rocky.’
‘They’re the best group ever, Mummy,’ Lucy said, twanging the strings of the guitar again and starting to sing just as tunelessly.
‘Could be worse,’ Joe said. ‘She could have started singing like Anne-Marie.’
‘Oh, the 2002 girl?’ I said. ‘That song makes my ears bleed.’
‘Mine too!’ Joe said. ‘I have to turn the radio off every time. Absolutely bloody unbearable.’
Lucy was still strumming the guitar tunelessly and Joe pulled a face as if he was in pain and reached out for it. ‘That guitar needs tuning,’ he said. ‘Give it here.’
‘Uh-uh,’ Lucy said.
‘Just for a minute,’ he said. ‘So I can tune it for you.’
‘Do you really know how to tune a guitar?’ I asked, as my daughter reluctantly handed it over.
‘Sure,’ Joe said. ‘I used to play quite a lot. Nowadays, not so much.’
‘He writes songs, too,’ Ben announced proudly. ‘Don’t you, Dad?’
‘Again,’ Joe said, fingering a chord and strumming before starting to fiddle with the tuning keys. ‘Nowadays, not so much.’
I was surprised by this. I’d always taken Joe at face value, accepting the quiet blokey exterior that he appeared so determined to project. But the more I spoke to him, the more hidden depths he seemed to reveal.
Sarah had just opened a package from Ant to find a battery-operated dog that performed tricks, and it seemed to be a hit with all three children. So while they were distracted with the trick-loving pup, Joe bent over the little guitar, forming chords and strumming and tuning until it sounded right.
‘There you go,’ he said, holding out the guitar once he’d finished, but Lucy was no longer interested. She was too busy playing with Sarah’s puppy.
‘That didn’t last long,’ I said. ‘I knew it was a mistake. Quite an expensive one, too.’
‘Oh, she’ll come back to it,’ Joe said, propping the guitar against the sofa. ‘Great gift, by the way. Well done. I wish I’d thought of it for Ben.’
‘Go on, play something then,’ I urged him, laughing.
‘Oh, it’s too small for my big fat fingers,’ he said, grinning.
‘Go on, Dad,’ Ben urged, looking up from one of his presents, a flashing hi-tech gyroscope.
Joe glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. ‘Ben used to love it when I played,’ he said. ‘I don’t really remember when I stopped.’ He shrugged and reached for the guitar and then picked out a few bars of a tune before pausing.
‘Oasis!’ I said, impressed.
‘Well spotted,’ Joe said. ‘But the guitar’s too small. I can only really strum chords.’
‘Then strum something,’ I said.
He sighed deeply and stared into the middle distance for a moment, thinking.
‘Oh, go on,’ I begged. ‘Please?’
He looked back at me, smiled sadly and shrugged, and then finally started to play.
When he started singing, the tears came from nowhere – they were a complete surprise even to me. Even now, I’m not quite sure why I cried so suddenly. It was almost certainly something to do with the lyrics. The song he’d chosen was ‘Yesterday’ by The Beatles, and the notion of a past without troubles was certainly a tear-jerker at this point in both our lives. But more than the words to the song, it was something about having another person sing to me, there in the intimacy of my lounge. Joe’s voice was gorgeous – rounded and warm and soft – and it was a moment of such unexpected beauty, a moment that felt so shockingly personal, that it tapped into something that I’d completely forgotten existed. The beauty of life, perhaps. The beauty of other humans, maybe – the beauty of profound sadness, of life, of love, of all of it . . . As for the singer, I think it was at that moment that I saw him properly for the first time. And that, too, felt like a revelation.
Joe was concentrating so hard positioning his fingers on the tiny frets that he didn’t even notice I was crying until he reached the second chorus and looked up, whereupon he stopped playing immediately. ‘Shit,’ he said, pulling a face. ‘I’m sorry. Bad choice of song?’
I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. I shook my head and swallowed and smiled, and then swiped away the tears with the back of my hand. ‘That was just so . . .’ I said. ‘God, your voice!’
‘Yeah, bad, huh?’ he said.
‘No, no, not at all. You sing beautifully, Joe. I’m in shock.’
The children had stopped playing and were staring at us. Ben was glancing back and forth between his father and me, wide-eyed. ‘You made Heather cry, Dad,’ he said.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Joe replied, frowning at me concernedly. ‘I guess my playing really is that bad.’
Christmas had been a success. With it being the first one since Ant had left, it struck me that was no mean feat. So for a few days afterwards, as Sarah broke her expensive trick puppy by throwing it down the stairs and as Lucy discovered that playing the guitar was ‘just too hard, Mummy’, I continued to surf on the buzz of that success. Lurking on the edge of consciousness was the approaching New Year’s Eve, but I was too scared to look it in the eye.
I’ve never much liked New Year, if truth be told. Oh, maybe
