Half an Hour on a Tuesday

Rav teaches guitar out of the back room of a music shop in Leicester, half-hour slots, twenty-two pounds. Most of his students are kids whose parents wait in the car. Barry is not a kid. Barry is a plumber, fifty-eight, with hands like bags of spanners, and he wants to learn one song. "Just the one," he says on the first Tuesday, taking a battered acoustic out of a case that smells of a loft. "For our fortieth. It's her song. I'm not bothered about anything else." The song has four chords. Rav has taught it to nine-year-olds in a fortnight. He writes the shapes out on a card, G, D, E minor, C, and Barry looks at the card like it's an estimate for a job he doesn't want. G is fine. G comes in week one, slow and buzzing, but it comes. Barry practises in his van at lunch, he says, with the doors shut so the lads don't hear. D is the problem. D is three fingers in a little triangle on three strings, and Barry's fingers do not want to be in a triangle. His first finger goes where it's told and his second finger goes wherever his first finger went. The third finger, meanwhile, has opinions. Week three, Barry says, "I'm too old for this." "You're not." "My fingers are too fat." "Your fingers are fine. It's your brain that's slow. That's not an insult, it's the same for everyone. It's learning to hold a pencil again." Barry looks at his hand. "I've been holding a pencil for fifty years." "And now you're learning a different one." Week five, Rav tries a trick. He tells Barry to put his fingers in the D shape and then just leave them there. Don't strum. Don't move. Talk to me about anything. Barry, hand cramped into position, talks about a boiler he did in a house in Oadby where the previous plumber had used garden hose. He talks about his daughter in Perth. He talks about how his wife, Jan, used to sing this song in the kitchen when the kids were small and how she'd stopped, he didn't know when, some year, it had just stopped happening.

"Strum," says Rav. Barry strums. It's a D. It's a clean, ringing, unmistakable D. Barry stares at it. "Do that again," he says, to his own hand. He doesn't get the changes for another month. G to D still has a gap in it you could park the van in. But on a Tuesday in early June, Barry plays the whole first verse, slowly, the gaps still there but shorter, and sings it under his breath in a voice that Rav will not describe as good. "That'll do," Barry says, and puts the guitar in the loft-smelling case. "You want to keep going? Learn something else?" Barry thinks about it. "No," he says. "That's the one I wanted." He pays his twenty-two pounds and shakes Rav's hand with the bag of spanners, and Rav realises this is the first student he's ever had who knew exactly when to stop.