A Little Less Conversation

I never got many opportunities to go out. Tammy hated me stepping outside the house at night, just in case I might do something heinous, like enjoy myself. I wasn't completely downtrodden, it was just easier to acquiesce to her demands than to fight against them. She was a terrible sulker and could hold grudges for months. She used them like a cosh to stop me in my tracks during arguments, of which there were plenty. The usual outcome saw me apologising for something I couldn´t remember saying or doing, followed by another sulk to really ram it home how bad a person I was.

It was a toxic relationship to say the least, but I had promised to stick by her through the good times and the bad. I was a prisoner of my own honourable intentions. It was a suffocating situation and turning me into a nervous wreck. I had no control. My life turned into a long, lonely walk along a highway of eggshells. 

As dark and out of control as my life was at the time, there was one bright spot I fought tooth and nail to cling on to. Music. It was a beacon to happiness that was mine and mine alone. It excited parts of me that no sexual encounter could ever hope to reach, and Tammy did´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´n't understand it. Music exists in dusty chambers inside the body. It lays dormant for years until touched by a sound, a frequency or rhythm that brings it to life, igniting every cell with joyous light and love. I knew what it felt like at a visceral level and I craved its presence within me.

I needed to consume music in its rawest, most pure form to maintain my sanity, and I knew where to get it.

Harry and I would get together on a Tuesday night to jam together. He had a granny flat on the side of his house where he stored his collection of musical instruments. His girlfriend wasn't too keen on him going out to play either, but she deigned to allow me to call round once a week to belt out a few songs with him. 

We were a good match. I wrote a few tunes on my battered old guitar. Nothing complicated, I wasn't very good. Harry was a great accompanist, shaking and banging out rhythm with his collection of exotic instruments, harmonising, improvising raps and blasting out solos on the harmonica, when he could find one in the same key that I was trying to sing in.

Every Tuesday after work I would head over to Harry's house in the next village, stopping off at the petrol station to pick up a cheap bottle of wine on the way. We built up quite a repertoire of original songs, peppered with a few jammable cover versions. We'd start off with a few minutes of small talk, share a few spliffs and drink some wine, then play for as long and as loud as we liked. I invariably left with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. The smile lasted all the way home. Some of the songs have stayed in my heart to this day. I could still blast out Thanks For All The Memories, and am sure Harry still remembers the Clever Trevor rap.

Tammy was always sat up waiting for me when I got home. It was like Russian Roulette walking through the door, never sure if she would be nice or angry, or how long it would be until nice changed to angry. I was always on edge inside that house and thoroughly miserable. But after playing, I would be happy for a while, which she couldn'´t comprehend. She asked me every week why I was happier playing my stupid guitar badly with my dickhead mate instead of sat home spending time with her? I couldn't answer, ever. I didn't have the words to tell her how happy music made me. It was my absolute passion. It always had been since I was a kid. It brought to life a dusty corner of my soul, like a prisoner in a concrete cell waiting to be let out to exercise on a summer meadow. She didn't get it. Said I was her passion and why couldn't she be mine. 

Years later I realised her passion wasn't me at all, her passion was being adored. She was like a young girl dragging a puppy around by the neck, trying to make it love her, getting upset and scolding it when it didn’t do what it was told. I was no better than a puppy. A puppy that would have been happier in a pound.  In our life together, every little thing that upset her was my fault. She even got into fights when I wasn't around and blamed me for starting them when I got back. She fell out with my friends, which isolated me even more. The list of approved people I could talk to outside the relationship dwindled away to zero.

Only music had the power to release me from that icy cell, and for a few hours a week, I bathed in its healing glow. 

Then one Tuesday afternoon, around May or June, I got a call from Harry asking if I minded someone else joining us that night. It turned out to be the wife of one of his friends who had just bought a new guitar and wanted to try it out. I welcomed it. People often joined us, bringing a new vibe and some different harmonies and song ideas. That she was a woman would be a problem for Tammy, she was suspicious of every other female on the planet. She even got jealous of the dog jumping on the bed for a belly rub when she got up for work every morning. I know it sounds wrong, but in order to avoid an argument, which would probably lead to me agreeing to not going out to play that night, I didn't tell her someone else was going to be playing with us. It´'s not that I didn'´t want to tell her, I would of course, but only after it was too late for her to stop me from going.

I got to Harry's a little late that evening and bundled into the granny flat with my guitar in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Harry was sat in his usual window seat waiting for me, his instruments spread across the little wooden tabletop in front of him. He stood up when I walked in.

“Alright Matey!” he said in his Devonish drawl. “This is Gemma!”

“Wha…” I turned around and saw a tiny woman sat behind the door clutching a big guitar which dwarfed her. She was wearing a large baggy anorak which exacerbated her diminutive stature even more. She looked like a little doll with big green eyes and a nervous smile.

“Alright.” she said with a nod. Her voice was quiet, deeper than her size would suggest, with a hint of rasp and a soft accent.

“Likewise!” I replied, relieved she hadn't tried to give me the obligatory two kisses on the cheeks which always made me feel uncomfortable. I don't know what I expected, but I didn'´t expect her to be so quiet and dainty. All the women who had previously turned up to play at one of our jam sessions were big and brassy. They'd try and flatten you with personality and bombast from the outset. Gemma didn'´t. She sat there sipping from a bottle of beer and held onto her guitar like it was a life raft in a stormy sea. She was so small she could hardly see over the top of it.

“Nice guitar!” I said, fixing my eyes on the instrument. And it was. A pristine Takamine, full bodied, semi-acoustic, with a honey-coloured matt finish and no scratch board. It was flattened slightly at the shoulders which gave it an unusual shape. It was tastefully plain. It looked expensive. Worth much more than my acoustic guitar which didn'´t even have a name on its head. If truth be told. I couldn'´t tell a Takamine from any other type of named guitar at the time. I played them, I didn'´t study them.

“Yeah, I just got it.” Gemma said. “My brother told me to get this one. He knows what he's talking about when it comes to guitars. Said I should spend a bit of money on a good one if I was serious about playing.”

“How much was that then?” I asked. I know, it´'s not good form to talk about money in polite conversation, but as you've probably worked out, I didn’t have many social situations to practice polite conversation in.

“About five hundred euros.” she answered.

“Wow! I didn'´t know you could get them for that much.” I really didn'´t have a clue.

“Would you like to try it?” she asked, holding it out to me.

“I don't think I should.” I replied, genuinely nervous around an instrument that was worth nearly as much as my car.

Gemma smiled. It was a sweet smile, without malice or guile. Not something I was used to.

I wandered over to my regular seat at the window over the table from Harry and opened the wine. I poured us both a mugful and took a sip. It was drinkable, forgettable. The conversation started slowly as Harry and Gemma began talking about her husband and kids. I wasn'´t really listening too closely. I preferred not to know too many details because of the inevitable grilling I would be in for when I got home. If I knew too much I'd be nailed to the wall for showing interest in a member of the opposite sex. It would only make it more difficult to get out of the house and come for another play the following week. 

Tammy hated Harry enough, without me mentioning he was inviting women along to jam with us. They had history. We used to play at my house all the time until Tammy came along. When she arrived on the scene, she would often hide my guitar if I wasn'´t paying her enough attention. One time, she locked it away in a bedroom and pretended to not know where the key was. Harry had the guts to call her out for playing silly buggers. He was annoyed because on that occasion, he only had a couple of hours free to play. It took a long time for her to pull the key out of her pocket and open the door. She hadn'´t forgiven Harry for daring to talk back to her. Did I mention her ability to cling onto a grudge?

Anyway, all that aside, I was living at my wit´'s end, and nervous enough not to show interest in this strange woman waiting to play with us. So concentrated was I in the act of trying not to pay her any attention that I mistook her Welsh accent for an Irish one. I didn'´t realise until the week later when I asked Harry if the Irish woman would be coming again.

“Do you mean Gemma?” he asked.

“Was that her name?”

“She's Welsh.”

“Oh!” 

I told you, I really wasn'´t listening. 

I drank my wine quickly and we smoked a spliff, carried on with the small talk for a few excruciating minutes before the itch to play overtook me. I took my guitar out of the case and started picking a few notes out while Harry and Gemma talked a little more. I could see Harry’s eyes starting to rove over the array of instruments laid out on the table as the random notes began to form into a structure.

“Go on, let´'s have some words.” he said, picking up a shaky egg which he began to beat on the skin of a little African drum. 

I was uncomfortable singing in front of a complete stranger cold, so I hung onto the intro for a couple more rounds.

“It´'s just D, C and G.” Harry called out across the room to Gemma who had stayed on the seat by the door hidden behind her Takemine. She played as quietly as she talked, but I could hear it. She strummed the strings gently, fitting in with the rhythm I was plucking out on the strings. I began to sing.

“When the sun sets on the rippling water,

And the birds are chasing clouds,

That´s when we can still the rippling water,

That´'s when love can come around.”

I sang the words as I had a hundred times before, only pointedly staring out of the window, determined not to look into the corner where the strange woman sat strumming. 

“Change!” Harry shouted before we launched into the chorus together.

“Love come, call my name,

Love be fearless, be brave,

Carress my soul with your butterfly wings of love,

Come around and stay.”

Harry searched on the table for the harmonica in the right key. He found it and began playing a melody over the next guitar break while still keeping time on the drum with his other hand. It sounded good. It always sounded good. I started to relax.

We played another couple of songs and then Harry turned to Gemma.

“What do you know?” he asked.

“Erm, alright.” Gemma blushed a little, almost as nervous as me, but she was a trooper. She bit her bottom lip to think for a second. “I'll have to stand up for this.” she said getting to her feet.

“What are the chords?” Harry asked.

“Erm. E, then something else, this one and this one.  I'm not sure what they're called.”

“E, G and A.” I said, watching her fingers slide up the neck of her guitar. “Go for it.”

She started strumming a distinct rhythm. Da, Dig a Dig a Dig a Dum Dum… It was great. A rhythm I hadn't heard before at a jam. The usual jamming rhythm was invariably some sort of blues in A for three hours, followed by several rounds of Knocking On Heaven's Door.

“I'm not afraid of too many things,

I know what I know if you know what I mean”

Gemma began to sing. It was fantabulous. Angelic and demonic at the same time. Her sweet little voice hit the middle of the notes perfectly and then drifted to the next one with a throaty, graceful, growl, perfectly weighted to make the phrase flow like raw silk in a breeze. I looked across at Harry with a stupid grin on my face. He raised his eyebrow and continued blowing into his harp. We played along while Gemma stood in the corner, taking us on a journey through a song like someone driving us through a forest late at night, along twisty roads she knew like the back of her hand.

“What I am is what I am

Are you what you are or what?”  

She sang like a rock goddess. Belting out the song with confidence. All sign of nerves banished as she stood tall, her eyes closed, her arm strumming the rhythm like a metronome on acid.

“What I am is what I am

Are you what you are or?”

After finishing that first song, we encouraged her to sing another, and another. She dropped a couple of her own compositions into the mix, and then blew me away with version of one of my favourite songs, Glory Box by Portishead. I had never heard it played on an acoustic guitar before. The original had a very distinct electronic, futuristic sound all of its own. The way she played it that day, gave it a raw freshness . it was electrifying.  She sang with power and emotion, her guitar blended with her voice to create a tapestry of sound which soared through the air and wrapped around me. I couldn't listen to the original for years afterwards because it simply wasn't as good as experiencing its raw essence, expressed so completely by this little woman in an anorak.

About three months later I was driving back home after not finding a guy I owed some money to. The phone rang. I pulled off the road to answer it.

“Hello!”

“Hi. Erm. I got your number from Harry. You might not remember me. I jammed with you guys at his house a couple of months ago. I was wondering if you'd like to maybe get together and try playing a few songs and maybe try to get paid for it somewhere?”

That was twenty years ago. 

We've played every day together since, and I am no longer miserable and living a toxic life. The music that lay locked inside me was coaxed out by Gemma's beautiful voice that night. Either through serendipity or pure coincidence our minds met that night. On that Tuesday evening in May or June in Harry's granny flat, I took my first step on a journey which ultimately led to me realise, that life is good.