Guitar Lessons by Otto Alexander

Sometimes I feel sick remembering how I talked to him. I want to go back and shake myself – No, Robert! No! Cut it out! But I did and I can’t undo it. Besides, he only ever mentions it in passing and when he does I sort myself out. I suppose he thinks I might shout again, but I don’t want to. I hated that I did.

He loved guitar even before he could speak. There was this book, this birthday present from my sister, a big hardback with buttons on the side. You were supposed to press the buttons in the order of the story, to immerse yourself, or indeed the child, so they could feel, rather than just hear the words. These were the standard things: farm animals, trains, waves, wind, but at the end there was a guitar and it was all he pressed. I don’t remember the sound exactly but it was sort of bluesy, maybe a scale or a half scale. He pressed it again and again when we read and Millie, my wife, commented on it. 

‘He wants to be a musician.’

‘Does he?’

‘Look how he presses it.’

She leaned over and pressed the button, releasing the solo. Harry laughed but then batted her hand away. He didn’t let her press it again. ‘See,’ she said. ‘He loves it.’

We played lots of games on the floor. My wife had wrecked her back in labour and couldn’t walk properly so much of the time we sat in one place. Around us were jigsaws and books, toy kitchens and plastic food that each evening I would pile into a mesh box, only to get them out again the next day.

Harry attended Montessori from the age of ten months. We had wanted him home but with my wife injured, and as we later found out, permanently, it became too much for her to keep him busy. Absurdly, I’d spend hours at the office doing nothing and it was only a few years later and much too late for us that they allowed us to work from home. We could have used it then. God, how we could have used it.

Nursery blurred so that he became four far too quickly. We panicked a lot about Millie not walking. When he was about two, we made use of a wheelchair which got us out and about without the risk of Millie tripping and hurting herself. Harry sat on her knee and enjoyed the outings in a way only a toddler can without any self-consciousness. We learned from him and though he grew out of that confidence, we were able to use the lesson he taught us and support him as he got older.

He began playing guitar in the autumn of his sixth year. He had reminded us how much he loved guitar when on a holiday to the Isle of Wight, he manically played a three-hundred-year-old mandolin in a museum. The curator had found the instrument himself in some Caribbean wreck and feeling casual, I think, had allowed Harry to hold it. We’d watched him cringe and leap forward, only to have Harry spin away strumming like some excited spaniel. We stopped him but when my wife thanked the curator all he could do was gulp.

We convinced the school to let him play. We even spoke to the headmaster, which now seems needlessly forceful. What was the rush? But we got them on our side and whether by placating us or agreeing, they set up time with a peripatetic teacher called Mrs Gillian Cross. The proviso was he had to have a taster session so one morning before school, feeling nervous, I took him in to see her and went home. I gnawed all day about it but Millie seemed relaxed knitting an enormous, multi-coloured blanket.

‘How do you think he’s got on?’

‘He’ll be fine. I think he’ll have fun.’

‘Do you think she’ll teach him?’

‘Yes, of course.’

I didn’t understand Millie’s logic and so put it down to stupidity. It was easier to think that way. In some weird reasoning, I could believe that only I knew the correct components of a decision: what Harry was capable of, who the teacher was and how she thought. A comfortable fallacy, of course. And if Millie had turned around that day and agreed with me – my God, Robert, I’m a wreck. He’s done badly, for sure – I’d have spiralled. I needed her confidence even though I rejected it.

Mrs Cross complimented his playing but her hippy-like vibe that made me feel as if it wasn’t quite true. Her “Sure, he plays alight. We can do something.” Made me question what wasn’t ‘alright’. Alright was not good.

At home, playing on a pouf, with his sheet music balanced on the arm of a sofa, he looked rigid. His fingers cut deep and became sticky, resulting in abrupt twangs as the notes ended. I sat watching, trying to understand the purple book Mrs Cross had given him. The notes jumbled on the page, all half scales, all curiously similar.

‘Are you playing this?’ I said, pointing.

‘Yes, that.’

I looked at the page and tried to follow the notes. The nylon strings screeched but Millie smiled and congratulated Harry how well he’d played. He played again, and to my ears, badly.

‘That’s wonderful, Harry. You play so well.’

Harry became serious and repeated the bars, his hands shuddering from the excitement of Millie’s praise. When he finished, Millie clapped fast, smiling, her hands close to her chest and Harry’s face went red and he looked to the floor.

‘You’re a great player,’ she said. ‘Really lovely.’

I rested my hand on his back. ‘Great playing.’ Millie nudged me so I hugged Harry tight and kissed him. ‘So proud of you,’ I said.

Almost by accident, and because it was something to do, Harry practiced guitar every day. I sat next to him in the room looking out onto the garden. I can still see the hedges and the silver trees, the grass and the swings that I built for him.

Millie was right about Harry. He loved guitar, and it was easy to encourage him. At first, we didn’t care about the grades but Harry wanted to do it, so under the direction of Mrs Cross, he began grade one, completing it in four months. Grade two came almost as quick, in six. After that, covid locked us in and his lessons switched to screens. I got a taste of Mrs Cross and saw how unfriendly she was. Her feedback on those calls stuck me like knives as I listened through the crack of the door, Harry fumbling in silence as she barked instructions louder and louder until finally and I supposed satisfied, she stopped and moved on.

‘Do you like your lessons?’ I asked one day as he came out of his room. Evening was coming but I hadn’t yet turned on the lights so it felt dusty.

‘Yes.’ He looked nervous.

‘Really?’

‘Should I not?’

‘No, you should if you do. Do you?’

‘Yes, I like them.’

Possibly, seeing her technique, I married toughness with success and transferred this bastard approach to Harry’s practices. Half hour sessions became an hour and even ramped up to ninety minutes close to the exam. He perched on a small black stool, ruined from being home-schooled in the kitchen (all screens), and replayed the pieces until the notes fell off the page. There was no joy anymore and when he lagged, I shouted for him to start again.

‘Play the fucking music!’

‘Stop shouting!’

‘Fucking play it. Your hands in the wrong position; your guitar needs to be further in; don’t put your fingers too deep!’

I’d become an expert and a fool; an aggressive fool. During those covid grades, Harry would often rush out of the room and fall onto Millie, who was knitting on the sofa. She’d kiss his head and pull him in.

‘Stop shouting!’

I’d see her face, her watery, dark blue eyes and her hair falling over her cheeks and his head and feel ashamed. Yet, I didn’t stop. The shouting carried on until he’d done the exam, aged eight. He got a distinction and I hated myself and he felt afraid of me.

We forgot exams for a while after that. He learned Back In Black, Sweet Child O’ Mine and Sweet Home Alabama on the classical guitar and it was fun. We loved it. I loved watching him love it.

After all the lockdowns we started going out more and planned to move up to Liverpool, which was where my mother was from. We took trips from Northampton to look at houses; an easy journey, and if we were feeling fruitful we would take a toll road around Birmingham to eat Indian food at the fancy service station. We jumbled ourselves into our seats, each holding a takeout box and a useless cardboard fork as we ate in silence, pushing away the dog who would leave a wet patch of salvia wherever he his head was resting. After the meal, we would give the dog the leftover chicken, which he would chew greedily then act unsatisfied. I would have to walk him before we set off again and he took his time sniffing each post and tree, irritated that I didn’t have more.

We couldn’t sell our house in time and because we wanted to move before the school year started we rented a wheelchair, dog friendly flat on the main road into the city. Before our move, we visited Harry’s school and hung around as he spent the day meeting people and learning. Millie contracted a strain of covid that on our return to Northampton and on Harry’s birthday put her in a resus ward. I remember thinking about guitar lessons that day as Millie gasped for breath unseen in the clutches of covid-safe halls. We came home to an empty house and sat in stunned silence as the TV nattered on in the background. I thought hard about grade five, about the pieces Harry would do and what damage missing practices would deliver. I felt nothing else but my mother scolded me on the phone and told me to take Harry to the cinema. So, we went and became distracted and through that lack of focus Harry became unburdened on his birthday afternoon. We watched the Iron Giant on TV that evening and Millie did too on her phone in hospital, trapped in a windowless room, hot and parched, without any decent food.

On the second evening we watched Paul McCartney at Glastonbury and talked about how incredible he still was.

Millie came back weaker and quieter the next day. Harry practiced his guitar next to her on the sofa, surrounded by boxes as I packed the essentials for the move. Millie, grey and sloped, smiled whenever Harry looked up from his playing and I saw within him the same excitement he felt that day she’d first praised him coming from a lesson. He played well and fully, often for an hour at a time, in silence with her as I disappeared into other rooms.

Our move to Liverpool coincided with glorious sunshine and we spent the weeks exploring. Guitar felt easy. Harry worked on the grades but with a deeper maturity on what he needed. I didn’t shout. I didn’t want to but doing so would have been useless. He would have told me to “fuck off” and “get out.”

The two-bed on the north road was small but comfortable. It was the place my mother told us she was dying from cancer, one FaceTime call on a September evening. Harry was practicing in his room and when he came out for supper we had to pretend something sad had come up on TV. We smiled as we ate our sandwiches and talked about a new Spanish piece Harry was learning called Romanza.

One of the last times we saw my mother was in the autumn after we had driven down without the dog to arrive after lunch. It was cold, as was normal for my parents’ house, so we bundled in one room and waited, drinking tea and eating biscuits. We could only stay for a couple of hours as anything longer was too much for her, so we sat in the lounge as my mother came down the stairlift and shuffled onto her chair. Harry had learned In My Life for her, which was her favourite song, and he played, crouched low on a sofa as we listened silently. My body fizzed up and I felt like I would faint as I looked across at her. She lay with her eyes closed, hands folded under her stomach. As Harry finished she looked over at me and I covered my face and wept.

Otto Alexander

Image from Pixabay – Guitar with music emanating from the body.