She comes once a month with her weeny plug-in keyboard. A pair of legs are attached to them, taken from a long solid case. Then she sits on a borrowed chair, as battered as her audience, and holds her hands above the three octaves, poised like a concert player, as if the large room were the Albert Hall, as if the old dears with food stains on their mouths and tops were aristocracy in tiaras and gowns.
Ta-ra-ta-tum! The opening notes of I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside, in an electronic tinkle, and she is singing in a pleasant tenor, smiling at the half-ring of armchairs and wheelchairs. Slumped heads lift, minds which exist in a fog have moments of clarity, return to childhood holidays, recall sandcastles, brylcreemed fathers in turned up trousers with braces, and shirts with ties, mothers with fat red legs spread in deckchairs, the sun roasting them stealthily.
Mouths move hesitantly, lyrics not sung or heard in decades tremble on lips like berries in late spring on bushes, miraculously flowering despite winter frost.
She’s a jolly woman, stout, a pillow of a bosom, a butterfly smile winging encouragingly to each creased and absent face, that’s it, yes, sing along, you remember the words, don’t you? Her eyes are little lighthouse beams, illuminating the grubby room with the sunshine of song, yet at the same time elsewhere, conducting a massed choir in Westminster cathedral, her baton waving imperiously, the choristers in thrall to her command.
Hesitancy becomes merriment. Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag, and smile, smile, smile! Features formerly set in stone become animated, feet try to tap, one gnarled figure sways in release, another bobs its ancient head up and down like a kitbag on manoeuvres.
Magic moments, memories we’ve been sharing; I remember you-oo, the tunes blow holes in their forgetfulness, bring a sea of lost boats into harbour for an hour. I’m for ever blowing bubbles. She has them now. The last of the slumbering are awake, their shoulders wobbling with the tinny drum beat, the others singing loudly, inhibitions abandoned.
They are a kindergarten of noise, a baying canine kennel of expression, this is their moment, this is what remains of purpose when hope and insight have perished. In the evening sitting watching Vera with her accountant husband, who reads balances as well as she reads a sheet of music, she will remember this morning during one of the interminable ITV adverts. It will occur to her that all of them have probably already forgotten their splendid singalong. The care-home pays her a tenner, her husband thinks she should ask for more. What nonsense. She’d do it for nothing, if need be. It’s her moment too, when her heart lifts, her voice purrs, her pleasure infects her singers, she comes alive. And after all, should she herself one day be put in a home, she’ll have these musical memories, won’t she?
