At nineteen we promised that if we were both single at sixty we would find each other. I turned sixty on Tuesday, and the old landline rang.
PART 5 — THE HEADSTOCK
Gil Hartigan died on the Sunday. Five days.
I was there for four of them.
His sons have been extraordinary to me and I did not expect that, and Casper has told me that his father told them the whole of it in the January when he got the results, because he had decided he was not going to leave them a version of it.
Marianne knew. That is the thing I keep going back to.
He told her in 1994 and she stayed and they had another twenty-four years, and Casper says she used to ask about me. Not bitterly. She called me the girl with the guitar, and she is the reason it was kept in the loft instead of sold.
I have it in my front room.
The repair on that headstock is exactly where it was and the glue has gone the colour of tea.
I have not had it restrung. I am going to, and I have been going to for four months.
Give me that. We can’t eat a guitar.
My mother said that in her own front room on the day of my father’s funeral, in front of twenty-five people, and clicked the catches shut.
She was not wrong. There was no money in that house and there was less of it coming.
But eight months later a nineteen-year-old boy spent every penny he had buying it back and handed it to her at the same kitchen table where she had asked him to go away for a year.
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