TOM NEEDED A thirty fifth birthday present for Mona.
Clothes were out of the question – she didn’t want anything new, she said, until she got her figure back after having the twins. The make-up department in John Lewis displayed an array of cosmetics so dazzling he panicked and left. He drifted then into an art shop and stared at blank canvasses for a while, picked up and put down calligraphy pens, manipulated a row of wooden mannequins on a shelf until they resembled the evolutionary progression from ape to homo erectus. It struck him humans still had a long way to go; he left the shop with nothing.
Without really knowing why, he found himself in a music shop he hadn’t even known was there. Intending only to describe his quest for a suitable gift, he found himself instead confiding in the manager, a man of about sixty with a white and grey straggly beard and rather dirty rectangular metal-rimmed glasses. Tom told him all about his wife, Mona, and how she used to be and how she was now.
‘She laughs less,’ he said, following the music man’s foam soled shoes into the dark bowels of the store. ‘She never, well, hardly ever wants to go out. She seems happy to watch TV – half the time she doesn’t care what’s on and she’s completely lost any kind of political opinion.’
The music man gave a knowing smile and sat down at a sleek ebony Yamaha keyboard.
‘We’re not even forty yet,’ added Tom as the man played Imagine by John Lennon.
‘She should be getting out more,’ he continued as the music man demonstrated the church organ function. ‘We should be doing stuff, you know, as a couple.’
By now the music man had worked his way through the harpsichord effect, the piccolo flute and the clarinet.
‘It’s amazing how many different instruments these things have hidden inside them,’ he said, glancing up at Tom and leaning back from the electric piano. He spread one loose, bony hand over a chord and, with the smallest pressure, released an entire choir.
‘That’s amazing,’ Tom obliged. ‘But I was thinking I might start with something less ambitious.’
The man switched off the keyboard and wandered over to a wall lined with guitars of different shapes, sizes and colours. He took down a bright pink ukulele from a hook and played a succession of bluesy chords followed by some finger picking which put Tom in mind of cowboys and campfires.
‘That sounds good,’ said Tom. But when he tried, it plinked like a cheap toy so he handed it back. ‘I think I’m in the right ball park. I mean, Mona does a great job looking after the house and the kids but she definitely needs another interest, you know, something to pursue.’ The words galvanised the idea; the idea became an intention.
The man held up a tan wooden guitar.
‘A basic acoustic is easy to get a decent sound out of,’ he explained. ‘A simple C, G and D will cover a lot of songs if she has a musical ear.’ He strummed some chords by way of illustration. ‘She could accompany herself if she likes singing.’
‘She does!’ Tom knew this about her but still, it felt like a revelation. Before they had the kids, Mona used to sing a lot. Sometimes, when she didn’t think anyone was listening, she would really let go, as if she were someone else, somewhere else - on a beach or in a field or somewhere far away. It occurred to him that it had been years now since he’d heard her sing like that but she had a sweet voice, clear like a folk singer, and he remembered how he would surprise her, catch her round the waist and say something like:
‘Hey. You could be in a band. Like a backing singer or something.’
Startled, she would look at him as if he’d just materialised, there, wherever it was they happened to be. ‘Was I singing?’ She would laugh. ‘God, the poor neighbours.’
‘No, carry on,’ he would reply, still, in those days. ‘I didn’t mean to make you stop.’
At first, Mona didn’t appear to be interested in the guitar. Although she said thank you, that she was grateful, he could tell his choice of gift had left her a little bewildered. But one day he got home from work to find the twins in front of the television in the lounge and Mona perched on the edge of the armchair in the corner of the kitchen, the guitar on her lap.
‘Listen to this,’ she said before he’d had time to take off his coat.
Over rasping strings, with long pauses, she persevered through something almost familiar. When she’d finished she smiled up at him.
‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘What was it?’
She shook out her hand, grimaced. ‘My fingers are killing me.’
‘I don’t know that one, who’s it by?’ He joked, to apologise for his failure to recognise her song.
She smiled, to his relief. ‘Very funny.’
That night, Tom helped to cook the meal she usually had ready – she’d lost all track of time trying to fret that bloody F chord – they don’t call it the F chord for nothing! - and after dinner she went to hang out the laundry because she said she hadn’t had a moment that afternoon.
Tom bathed the twins and put them to bed before taking a long shower. It was late by the time he and Mona finished their tasks so they went upstairs without watching any TV.
Mona bought a notebook to jot down chords and words to her favourite songs. When he came home from work, he would find her in the kitchen hunched over her guitar, face knit in concentration, scribbling, strumming, annotating. A few times, they had to go to the chip shop for dinner because not only had she not found time to cook, she had neglected to do the shopping. He agreed he should iron his own shirts at the weekend, ready for the week. Once, he asked her where the milk was and she looked at him as if she didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘I was thinking the twins could go to nursery in the mornings,’ Mona said, sometime later. ‘To socialise them, you know. They’re nearly two years old and I’m worried they’re not getting enough stimulation.’
‘OK. I’m sure we can make some economies.’
Over the following months, the twins went to the Montessori down the road and Mona amassed a collection of songs, some her own composition, which she rehearsed in the evenings. Tom fought against a disappointment he suspected he shouldn’t be feeling. But he really liked to watch television with her in the evenings. It was his way of relaxing. And she’d had all morning to practice, hadn’t she?
Two Thousand Miles by The Pretenders was her favourite – that had been the first song she’d attempted and now she could play it well, even add flourishes here and there, and her voice was still clear and sweet. She bought a Joni Mitchell song book. Sitting in the lounge with his microwaved cottage pie on a tray of an evening, Tom could hear her over the news singing A Case of You at the top of her voice. She ate earlier with the kids now. She just got so hungry, she said, she ended up eating half their dinner anyway. It made more sense.
Her progress impressed him, it did. He had hoped the guitar would break her out of whatever it was that had gripped her since the twins were born, and it had. But … but what? But … sometimes it was as if she was no longer tethered to the earth, like she was floating ever higher like a helium balloon come loose at a fair. He wanted her to be happy, of course he did. It was just that he liked her to talk to him in the evenings, give him more than a glance when he came in from work.
For her next birthday, Mona asked for a music course at the local college. It started at 7pm on Thursday evenings so Tom would have to be home by six thirty on those nights so she could get to college on time. This put Tom under pressure at work but Mona had been better this last year, less prone to crying with her hands pressed white against the sink’s edge, and he knew this improvement had to do with the guitar.
After her second or third lesson, Tom was cleaning his teeth when from the bedroom he heard her begin to sing. Toothbrush halted in his mouth, he listened and knew from the swelling volume of her voice that she was not aware of herself at all. He did not call through to compliment her. He didn’t want to break whatever trance she had entered into; instinct told him she would be annoyed at him if he did. Instead, he waited, mouth stinging with menthol foam he dared not spit.
She was already in bed when he came out of the bathroom. When he climbed in, she pulled his t-shirt over his head and slipped her arms around him.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hello.’
‘Hi.’
What followed reminded him of their first months and years together, before the twins, before lovemaking had become something to be ticked off the to-do list alongside paying the electricity bill or putting out the bins, although that had been her joke, not his.
For the twins’ third birthday, Mona didn’t have time to make a cake so she asked Tom to pick one up from Marks and Spencer’s in his lunch hour.
‘Maybe some sausage rolls too,’ she said. ‘A couple of quiches, crisps, anything you think.’
‘Right.’ He wanted to ask her why she couldn’t do this herself while he was at work but found he could not. The moment for protest had passed though it was unclear to him when exactly this moment had been.
‘Is that OK?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Who’s coming?’
‘Just, you know, us and the grandparents. I’ve got that concert with the other students on Sunday so I can’t face a big party.’
At the party, Mona sang Happy Birthday to the twins and accompanied herself on the guitar. Everyone clapped and agreed that she had become so good in such a short space of time. Once their parents had gone and the twins were in bed, Tom said:
‘I picked up a DVD. Thought we might cosy up and watch it.’
But Mona said she was stressed about the concert and had to rehearse as much as she could.
Tom watched the DVD on his own – a romantic comedy - and on Saturday took the twins to the park while she practised. On Sunday, Mona left after lunch and he ended up looking after the twins for eleven hours because the performance wasn’t suitable for little kids and afterwards she went out with her fellow musicians for a drink.
He went to bed and read the news on his phone until, a little after midnight, the key rattled in the front door. He turned off the light before she came upstairs because the best part of two days on his own with the kids and their constant demands had made him feel tired, irritable and a little down.
‘Are you awake?’ She asked, and turned on her bedside lamp.
‘I am now.’
She sighed. ‘Oh my god, it was amazing.’
He opened his eyes and, in the half-light, saw that hers glittered. She smelled of wine, of cigarette smoke, of the world.
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? I told you we were going for a drink afterwards.’
‘I didn’t mean anything. Sorry, I’m just tired that’s all. I’ve hardly sat down all day. I haven’t had a second to myself.’
Mouth tight, she unbuttoned her shirt and threw it on the floor. ‘Can’t a woman go out for a drink with her friends every once in a while?’
‘I didn’t mean that. I’m pleased for you, of course I am.’ She pulled on the old t-shirt she slept in, wriggled out of her trousers. ‘There’s a week’s workshop coming up in the summer. The others are all going. It’s in Greece.’
‘Can we talk about it in the morning?’
‘Mum and Dad said they’d hold the fort, you know, till you get home from work.’ ‘You’ve already spoken to them?’
‘Text.’
He rolled away from her. The glare from her light was hurting his eyes.
She snuggled into his back, kissed his neck, just below his hairline and, while the touch of her lips soothed him, he didn’t think he could summon up the necessary enthusiasm for anything more.
‘Listen, hon.’ He stopped her hand with his. ‘I’m really tired.’
She unwrapped her arm from him, lay back and sighed. A second later, the light switch clicked and the room fell into darkness and Tom lay awake and thought about the times, years ago, when he would ask her to carry on singing and she never did.