Guitar with music notes and stars

The market was flooding again when I collected your guitar from Mrs Okafor's stall, so I'm writing this under the awning with the tarpaulin drumming overhead. You'll remember she sells everything from clocks to cracked gramophones, and the battered case you left behind was sitting on the bottom shelf between a transistor radio and a box of doorknobs. She wanted eleven pounds. I paid her, tucked the case under my coat, and carried it home through the rain like a sleeping baby.

I opened it on the kitchen table and the smell hit me, that warm varnish smell from the back room at the Crown the night you played the one about the lighthouse keeper. The strings had gone dull and furred with rust at the winding end, and someone had scratched a row of tiny quavers into the scratchplate with a compass point. I tuned it by ear, badly at first and then better. The notes came out sour, like the morning after a bad gig.

Then I found the sheet music folded inside the lid, the one with the staves curling up the page and the little five-pointed stars drawn at either end. You always said they were there to stop the tune falling off the edge of the paper. Across the top, in your pencil, you'd written: play it for Dad when he's awake. I haven't told him yet, and I'm not sure he'd know what it was anyway.

I'm bringing the guitar round to the flat on Thursday. Come and play it yourself, you lazy sod, before the damp gets into the neck again.

Love, Nell