Round Eric Clapton's House

‘Round Eric Clapton’s house, I was perched on a pouffe that had this concentric circle design in blue and white – really Seventies. I had a Fender Strat; black body, maple neck. Eric was in the background at the dinner table, thumbs tucked into braces. I was playing, or rather trying to play, a blues lick with a bottleneck. It wasn’t sounding good and the harder I tried the worse it got, until, there was no music – just a vile screeching of glass rubbing against steel strings.
Eric was oblivious. He was eating fish and chips from vinegar-soaked newspaper while a schoolboy in grey cap, blazer and shorts poured tea into a West Bromwich Albion mug – really Fifties. He looked just like Eric would have looked as a nine-year-old schoolboy.’
‘What that is,’ she said, ‘is you must have been listening to him and it was in your mind when you went to sleep.’
‘I never listen to Eric Clapton.’ he protested.

Ambrose Conway remarked his dream would have been much better had it been Jimi Hendrix’s house. All those posh hippy girls dancing starkers round a massive lump of burning dope in the middle of the room. Josie ignored this and went back to her magazine.
Ambrose, restless now, put on the bedroom TV and pulled faces at the phone-in host. He mocked the presenter’s fizzy smile and fizzier delivery, ‘All you have to do is call in and tell me the name of an animal beginning with the letter C.’ Josie jabbed his upper arm disapprovingly. Ambrose continued, ‘The lines are now shut. No winners tonight. And of course the answer we were looking for was … dyslexic CANGAROO!’ Josie took the remote control and within five seconds had switched off the TV and lamp, dragged the duvet over her shoulders and shut her eyes.
Two hours later, Ambrose was still awake. He went to the kitchen to drink from the tap and then into the living room where he got onto the sofa; head on a cushion, legs up over the back. He thought about what they had been saying in the Ox. He ought to sue for the hand. People can get a couple of grand if a gaffer just looks at you in a funny way these days. A buggered-up hand like that would be maybe five or six thousand. And then, if they sacked you – sue for that as well. Jerome had told him half the blokes he knew in heavy industry were just waiting for a minor injury to pay off the mortgage or cover next summer’s holiday.
Ambrose told Jerome and the others about Josie wanting to move again. ‘Already!’ they’d shouted in unison like a punk barbershop quartet. Now she wanted a house with front and back garden; a house with lots of rooms. Jerome said that was because the ‘can’t keep your hands off each other’ phase had gone and now she only wanted him when she wanted something. That was how started. At first they want to see you all day everyday, or, if they can’t see you they’d phone up just to hear the sound of your voice. It started like that and before you know it there’d be confetti and babies, not necessarily in that order, and by the time you wonder what the end product is – you’ve bought it.
Ambrose didn’t take much notice of Jerome’s pub ramblings. His words came down his nostrils in a flattened pitch punctuated by quick sniffles that increased in frequency with the emptying of glasses. It was at home the words settled in his consciousness. They pulled and stretched his mind into unfamiliar shapes that produced unfamiliar thoughts.
On the sofa, Ambrose extended his left arm into the oblique rectangle on the wall made by a bright light in the flat across the concourse. In this patch of dim orange he could see the silhouette of his hand. He could bend and wiggle the forefinger and little finger but not the two middle ones.

It had been a Friday morning. He lowered the twelve-inch diameter aluminium bar onto the bandsaw and set the guide to forty-five millimetres. He switched the saw on, tipped blade-cooling oil into the tray and looked at the big clock on the wall above the girlie calendar. He had a dozen blanks to cut. If they were finished and the saw cleaned by dinnertime he could spend most of the afternoon in the pub. Werewolf, his boss, was good that way. ‘Job and knock’ he called it. There was no point taking two hours to sweep and lock up if it could be done in thirty minutes and the rest of the time spent in the lounge at the Tavern.

Ambrose had done a few blanks. He was on schedule, scooping swarf out of the tray as. the blade rasped and burrowed through the bar. More oil was needed to stop overheating. He reached for the container by his feet but wasn’t quick enough. The saw coughed and spluttered like a drunk’s death rattle and jammed. Dennis, one of the old salts, had shown him a way to get the saw quickly started up again. He’d tap the underside of the trapped blade with a thin metal rod while pressing the start button. It worked a treat and saved all the palaver of the instruction manual – which hadn’t been seen for years anyway. Ambrose discovered it was even quicker not to turn the saw off before tapping the blade.

Matty wanted the bandage removed so they could have a better look at where the blade went into the wrist. Ambrose obliged revealing the line of stitches. He told the group congregated in the flat about the epidermis and dermis being sliced and the tendons chopped. Jerome, flipping the ring-pull on the final can, shook his head. He couldn’t understand that tendons would grow back, but maybe not as before.
‘So, right, your tendon things have lengthened. Well, shouldn’t that mean your fingers will get longer?’
‘Nah, listen. The tendons are supposed to connect your muscle to your bone. If they grow back longer they don’t work anymore,’ said Ambrose.
‘So, those two fingers: kaput?’ enquired Dale.
‘I think so. It’s the muscles.’ said Ambrose.
Jerome finished the last of the cans he’d brought round for Ambrose and suggested he get a second opinion.

Ambrose pulled his arm out of the patch on the wall. His neck was tightening so he stood up in the dark and let the blood flow out of his head down into his body. It must have been about three a.m and still he felt unsettled and not at all sleepy. He took up a new position on the sofa; all curled up in one corner like a foetus. Scattered thoughts rested on his convalescence. After the stitches came out he still didn’t feel ready to go back to work for a couple of months. Werewolf had been good. He’d been round with booze and, unlike Jerome, hadn’t drank it all himself. The job could be done with only a couple of functioning fingers.
Dennis told him the Friday drink had finished for the time being, though he seemed confident it would probably be back before Christmas Ambrose noticed a new bandsaw manual in a plastic sleeve hung on a wall and laminated safety notices scattered about where pin-ups from Zoo and Nuts had once been. The saw sat, as it always had, deceptively benign on the cold stone floor.
‘What have you been up to then?’ asked Dennis.
‘Not much. I got my old guitar out.’
Dennis laughed his rumbling tobacco inflected laugh and slapped Ambrose on his back, ‘Only you could do that, Brose. Lose a couple of fingers and then take up the cowin’ guitar.’
Dennis pressed the green button to start the bandsaw. The blade, now malign whirred and screamed its way through phosphor bronze.

Ambrose had always been useless on guitar. He could make a single chord shape but not hold it down for more than a couple of seconds. He’d pretty much abandoned the thing when he shacked up with Eve. She’d been the one before the one before Josie. It was only the sudden unexpected absence from daily routine that made him realise why he kept the battered old acoustic with worn-down frets and faded stickers. He’d hung onto it because in days without the certainty of routine there wasn’t a whole lot else he could think of to pass time. He was a creature of habit, was Ambrose. Some nights were the pub, some nights weren’t. Some weekends were hanging with mates, some were haranguing relatives. His life was a set of preordained obligations from work to, increasingly so recently, sex. He was interested in Josie, but not as much as he used to be. As for the guitar, it reminded him of an earlier Ambrose. The ‘Twitty’ Conway in the schoolyard, starting with Appetite for Destruction then like a rock and rolling HG Wells travelled back in time, back to Hendrix, to Page, then back
some more to the early steelyard blues. And that was where his taste stayed, in the grooves of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters.
When Josie decided on their current flat, a quieter place not on a main road and definitely not within walking distance of Jerome’s place, Ambrose had dug his guitar out from behind the pile of stuff designated to be skipped. The broken Hoover and old hi-fi could be slung but not the guitar. That would be going with them. He disarmed her exasperation by telling her she ought to be grateful he wasn’t a frustrated grand pianist.
Then the accident and after a few weeks moping about the flat playing the invalid while Josie was at work. He went to the cupboard to get out the guitar and noticed something shining in the murk. He picked up the small piece of copper pipe which must have been left by gas fitters. The copper was about two and a half inches long and just the right thickness to fit snugly over his little finger. He took the guitar into the living room and plucked while gliding the pipe along the strings. He spent the whole afternoon at it, coaxing shrieks that reminded him what a person singing doh-ray-me might sound like - if the person had a heavy cold and a metal tongue. Just about the time he should have been getting meatballs and pasta for two ready, he stumbled on four notes that sounded like one of those old licks from the delta. It didn’t bother him that the guitar hadn’t been tuned or the strings were rusting. He was chuffed.
He didn’t need the middle two fingers of his left hand at all. He could do this with the copper tube over his little finger and the forefinger resting to dampen unplayed strings. House husband chores went right down the Suwannee River. He preferred the Mississippi sliding to the flattened fifth like a century’s worth of hands had done in American fields and porches and shebeens.

It was getting lighter. Now Ambrose could pick out blurred shapes in the living room, the vases on the mantelpiece one for keys the other for money. The clock above on the wall, hands just visible in the diluted black.
Last night in the Ox Jerome said it was all you could expect to leave behind, a few kids and a few quid. With a bit of luck you won’t have started a war or killed anyone.
Ambrose pursed his lips and told the beery assembly what he’d like to leave behind was a tune, a really famous one that everyone knew off my heart and could whistle or hum. But not a pop hit that sells half a million in a month and then gets ridiculed for eternity. He wanted something people would conjure up in moments of ecstasy or desolation. Something called the blues.
None of the others were paying any attention to him. It was seventh pint syndrome - no-one was paying attention to anything.
Jerome had made Ambrose think again; think about doing something to prove he’d walked the earth.
He sat up. Nocturne dissolved into transparency. He picked up the guitar and took the glass slide from the mantelpiece. Quietly, so as not to wake Josie, he began to play. It was a blues with deep resonating, rasping slides on the bass strings. But it wasn’t one of the tunes he’d learnt from books. He thought he recognised the melody but couldn’t place it. It was a tune that had been in his head and was now out. It gently floated around the room, tentatively at first, then acquiring confidence. Ambrose listened and forgot about his hands and forgot he was playing at all. The tune pushed at the walls and the ceiling. It drifted around the sofa and the table. It looked for cracks in the skirting boards and gaps under the door. Then it had gone; escaped from the flats into the fledgling morning.
Ambrose went to the laundry basket to pull out jogging pants and a T-shirt. He slipped on trainers and fired stiff arms into his rain jacket sleeves. Then he was out of the door, down the stairs, over the concourse and into the day. A clutch of scrumpled-up fivers and tenners in his pocket and the guitar in its plastic gig bag slung over his shoulder. He strode out of the grove and into the car park then across the busy road. Except it wasn’t even five a.m and the road wasn’t busy yet. His footsteps were all that broke the quiet apart from a distant lorry’s rumble and the ballads of invisible birds. The tune, danced in and out of the first clouds, crept up and
over garden fences, jigged across lawns and paths and into his head. He sat on a bollard at the precinct.
He would go to Dennis’s. There was a room converted into a self-contained unit where his son used to stay when he was home on leave. Dennis had said he was always welcome. Before, when he’d been there for a week after a row with Eve they went out every night, either to the balti house, the pub, Jerome’s, and at the weekend to watch a firecrew douse a pyre on the wasteland. It was strange because Dennis didn’t usually go out at all.
This time Ambrose had plans. He’d stay for a fortnight. He’d have to tell Josie but he didn’t think she’d mind too much. Later he’d get himself a flat, probably near Jerome’s. Then he’d give up work and play his guitar.
He began to walk down the main road. It was a couple of miles to Dennis’s and the buses hadn’t started yet. He thought he’d better not get there too early. It was Saturday morning and Dennis probably wouldn’t be up until after eight, but the time he was trying to kill wouldn’t lie down and die. Only an hour had gone since he’d taken flight and now he was back at the precinct. The convenience store had opened. He bought a paper and a carton of cherryade. The assistant gave him a funny look when he handed over the money. Not because of his bad fingers, but because the glass slide was still on his little finger and had been since he left the flat. He sat on a discarded pile of old fence panels near the shop delivery entrances.
He unzipped the gig bag and took out his guitar. Resting it on his knees he began to play the tune. The first few notes were nervous but correct. Then - nothing. His hands stopped and the music wasn’t there. He closed his eyes and tried again. He gurned in concentration and played a scale to jog his memory. He played notes slowly and deliberately then quickly and spontaneously. Still, the tune wouldn’t come. It had been there moments ago. It had led him from night into the day and told him to walk out of that flat and not go back. Now it had deserted him. He hummed and whistled but what he hummed and whistled was not the tune.
Steel shutters were pushed up as delivery vans pulled up, two women in Co-op uniforms scurried by, the milkman unloaded crates. The precinct was awakening. More traffic circled the island. Soon the shops, building societies and bookmakers would be open and a crescendo of sound would fill the air. There would be voices and tills, dogs and skateboards, but no tune.
Ambrose put the guitar back in its bag. He cursed himself for not having written the notes down. He was now tired, very tired. He wouldn’t go to Dennis’s; he needed sleep. He dragged himself back under the clouds to the concourse. Maybe the tune would return. He’d try later but for now he would creep silently under the duvet, place his head on the pillow and think about a pouffe with blue and white concentric circles.