Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

‘Hey, I’m not stupid, you know,’ Kate protests. ‘I’ve taken on board all the stuff about pickups and magnetic fields.’

He’s impressed. ‘All right. I didn’t mean to insult you. I said before that life is like a guitar solo. But it’s also like an electric guitar itself. That’s because it’s expensive, not necessarily all that pretty, surprisingly fragile and all too likely to go out of tune. It’s also far too easy to fetishize and get over-attached to, and then some bastard is only too likely to take it away from you. You know what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

‘Some people give their guitars names. They call them “Lucille” and silliness like that.’

‘Always women’s names?’

‘Not always, no.’

‘I’m glad. That was quite some guitar Jenny Slade was playing tonight. Even I could tell that.’

‘Yes, it’s special. I can tell you the date and place where she first used it if you like.’

‘No thanks.’

He’s a little disappointed not to be able to further demonstrate his expertise but he lets it go.

‘Like most guitarists,’ he says,‘Jenny tried a lot of different guitars before she found the one that suited her.’

‘Does Jenny Slade have a name for her guitar?’

Bob looks at her mysteriously. It’s a banal question, yet it’s more telling than she realizes.

‘If it had a name,’ he says, ‘it would be called “Greg”. “Greg Wintergreen”.’

‘What kind of name is that?’

He reaches into one of his bags and comes up with another copy of the Journal of Sladean Studies.

‘This will explain everything.’

‘More post-modernism?’

‘Post-modern and almost certainly apocryphal.’

‘I can hardly wait.’

Greg Wintergreen woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into an electric guitar. He was lying on his back, which was of a lacquered hardness, and when he lifted his headstock a little he became aware of his belly with scratch plate and tremolo arm. His strings, of a pitifully light gauge, vibrated ineffectually.

What’s going on? he thought.

This was no dream. His room, a normal human room except perhaps a little too small to allow him to play electric guitar at the volume he would have liked, lay peacefully between the four familiar walls. Above the table, which was littered with guitar tutors, CDs and guitar magazines, hung the picture he had recently cut out of a magazine and stuck to the wall. It showed Bonnie Raitt cradling her trademark blue Stratocaster.

Greg’s attention shifted to the window. Raindrops hit the glass in a loose four-four beat, and he felt as though he finally knew what the blues were all about. Why don’t I go back to sleep and maybe I’ll dream about turning into Stevie Ray Vaughan instead, he thought, but somehow he knew this was going to be impossible.

He heard the voices of his mother, father and sister outside the door of his room, all urging him to get up.

‘Greg, you’ll be late for work. Again,’ his mother shouted. He tried to reply and gave a start when he heard the sound of his own voice; unmistakably his, but blended with it was the sound of a humbucking pickup. Fortunately he was plugged in to a small practice amp. ‘I’ll be right down,’ he said musically.

The strangeness of his voice went unnoticed. Perhaps his family thought he was having an early-morning guitar practice. Such things were not unknown.

In truth he did want to get up, get dressed, go downstairs, and he thought that when he’d done those things he might be able to consider his plight more rationally. But having no arms or legs he could see that these simple tasks were likely to prove impossible. He stayed where he was, silent and immobile, and glad that he’d locked his bedroom door before going to sleep the previous night.

He lay there a long time and heard various comings and goings in the house, and then his sister came to the door and informed him in a whisper, ‘The shop manager’s here.’ Greg worked in a music shop and his manager had agreed to stop by and give him a lift into work this morning since it was stocktaking day and they needed an early start.

‘Greg, it’s Frank here,’ the manager shouted cheerily through the door. ‘Is this a wind-up or what? I know the tills have been short lately, but I never thought you was the culprit. And then there was that bit of bother over the echo unit you took in a part-exchange deal; all right, so it was nicked, but I still thought you was an honest lad. However, now I find you’re taking the piss and you’re making me have second thoughts.’

Greg tried to speak and this time it appeared they could no longer understand him. All they could hear was the sound of a guitar.

‘This is no time to be practising your scales!’ Greg’s father yelled, and he yanked the door handle as hard as he could and succeeded in breaking the flimsy lock.

Father, mother, sister and music-shop manager entered the bedroom.

‘All right, I’ll get up, I’ll come to work, if someone can only give me a hand,’ Greg said plaintively.

But again nobody understood him. They gathered round and stared down at the electric guitar lying there on the duvet, and they were terrified and speechless. True, a guitar lying on a bed was not in itself terrifying, but as they looked at its frets, its machine heads, at the grain of the body, at the general patina of the thing, there could be no doubt that this musical instrument before them was their own Greg Wintergreen.

The shop manager fled the house, saying he mustn’t be late for stocktaking, and Greg’s father too said he had an important meeting that he couldn’t afford to miss. Even Greg’s mother and sister slipped from the room, closing the door hurriedly and firmly behind them. Greg fell into a feverish sleep.

Not until dusk did he wake again. The room had been tidied and was warm, and someone had left a tray of food for him. It was a thoughtful gesture but a futile one. Even if he’d been hungry, which he was not, by what possible means could he have consumed the food?

More helpfully, he was aware that someone had tuned his strings but he had been unplugged from the practice amp. He hummed to himself thinly and very quietly in a lochrian mode, but not for too long. He didn’t want to disturb his family any further. All evening he could hear their voices downstairs and he didn’t doubt that they were talking about him, but they went to bed without coming in to bid him goodnight.

Next morning his sister returned to the bedroom, took away the untouched tray and came back with guitar polish and a cloth and began to buff the surface of Greg’s body. His father and mother refused to come near, although he did overhear a conversation in which his father referred to his son as a layabout and said that things were going to be considerably harder for the family without Greg’s wage coming in. They seemed already resigned to the fact that Greg’s transformation was permanent. It took Greg much longer to accept that.

As the days passed, his sister continued to administer to him but there was a growing reluctance about it and he soon realized that she found the sight of him unbearable, as though she were looking at a corpse or a mummy. Not long after that she arrived carrying a guitar case and placed Greg inside it to spare herself the torment of having to look at him.

His mother and father came at last to see their transformed son. It was traumatic for both of them, and perhaps specially so for his father, who in a fit of grief-stricken rage picked Greg up and yanked at his strings until he’d broken three of them. One of the strings snapped at him, whipped the back of his hand and left him with a long, red cut. It took Greg’s sister a lot of effort to dissuade their father from chopping Greg up there and then for firewood.