The Jazz Lecture (Part 1)

Claire found the notice on a Tuesday, pinned to the board outside the town hall office in Marsden where she had worked for nine years. From October, the old music room on the first floor would be closed and used for storage. Twelve words, and no name at the bottom.

She stood there long enough that the caretaker asked if she was all right.

The music room was the one with the tall windows and the brown piano that nobody tuned any more. Claire had never played an instrument in her life. But she had been in that room once, at six years old, on a hard chair, while a band of four old men played something that went far too fast to follow — and her uncle Brian stood at the front of it with a trumpet.

She drove out to his house that evening.

“They're closing the music room,” she said.

Brian was washing a pan and he didn't turn round. “I know. Somebody rang me last week.”

“You played there.”

“Everybody played there.” He put the pan down. “That's a different thing from anybody going now.”

That was the argument, and Claire knew it was the good one. The council wasn't wrong. Nobody used the room. There was a booking book on the shelf outside it, and it had eleven bookings in it for the whole year.

“So we use it,” Claire said. “Thursdays. You talk about jazz, people come and listen, and it's free. Nobody pays a penny.”

“A lecture.” He said the word as if it belonged to somebody else.

“Call it whatever you like. Call it a workshop. If that book is full, they can't say the room is empty.”

Brian dried his hands slowly. On the wall behind him there was a photograph of the band, and a much younger man in the middle of it who didn't look tired.

“Six weeks,” he said. “And somebody will have to tune that piano.”

“How many people do you think will come?”

“Twenty,” Brian said. “Easily.”