A Scratch

The day after the funeral, Mary went back to the house. Despite what people said, it didn’t suddenly feel emptier or lonelier now that he’d died. Her father had been shrivelling away, physically and mentally, in the preceding months, so she barely felt his absence. 

She was meant to be checking the whole place over before the men came to clear the contents, but she made straight for one room, and to one shelf. This was where he kept his crappy record player – he sometimes called it “my gramophone” but that was an affectation to annoy anyone under 70 – and his old records. He’d jettisoned most of them in the past few years, mainly to charity shops, a few to collectors. “Made a few pints’ worth out of those Charley Patton sides,” he used to say. But there were about a dozen he hadn’t been able to part with. “You can flog them when I’m gone, Mary,” he’d said. “They’ll pay for a nice night out.” They both knew there were no nights out, unless she went alone. It was what passed for humour in their relationship.

This was also the room in which she’d found him, of course. He was on his back on the floor, his eyes barely flickering, his chest occasionally heaving. The pillow she’d held over his face had only hastened the inevitable. It was quicker, kinder.

She flipped past LPs by Lead Belly and Son House and Sister Rosetta Tharpe before she found what she was after; a 78 rpm record, thick but fragile, of ‘Jimmy J’s Blues’. She knew who had played on it because her father had told her so many times: Blind James Jones singing, with Little Otis Browning on harmonica and Eldred Moore playing bottleneck guitar. “Bum note in the last few seconds,” he’d say. “But they couldn’t edit it in those days.” 

She slipped the record carefully from its plain cardboard sleeve. She didn’t want to play it; she couldn’t stand her father’s favourite music, all that groaning and complaining. She just knew that a copy like this, the original pressing in pristine condition, was worth £20,000, maybe more. 

In fact, she was pretty sure the old man hadn’t listened to his records much, at least in his later years. He always seemed more in awe of the stories, the hoodoo and the voodoo, the myths that surrounded the music, than the music itself. Robert Johnson, meeting the devil at the crossroads. Bessie Smith, dying because a whites-only hospital wouldn’t treat her after a car crash. Blind James Jones responding to anyone who heckled his performances by whipping off his dark glasses and staring at the offender with his milky, useless eyes – and the strange tales of the horrible fates that befell the targets of his wrath, sometimes years in the future, sometimes that very night.

Wait a minute, though. She held the disc up to the light from the window. Straight across the grooves, from edge to centre, there was a deep scratch. Not the kind that you might accidentally get if you jog the needle; a serious, deliberate scratch, made with a knife or a six-inch nail. Someone had destroyed the record, and she knew exactly who it was.

“Fuck you, old man,” she hissed.

Suddenly she felt the need to play the record. She didn’t even know why - it was almost as if he was leading her to the turntable. The needle landed but, apart from the surface crackle, and the faint clicking caused by the scratch, 78 times a minute, there was nothing. 

And then, suddenly, a voice. But not that of a Mississippi shouter who, three days after ‘Jimmy J’s Blues’ was recorded, on February 29, 1936, was found dead in a ditch, a victim of exposure or booze or drugs or TB or all four and maybe something far nastier as well. Instead, the voice of a retired insurance salesman from Swindon who had died on this floor 10 days previously.

“Hello Mary,” said the voice. “Enjoying your night out?”

She wasn’t found until three days later. The removal men had tried to gain access but had given up and gone back to the depot, not knowing there was a dead woman in the living room. There had to be an inquest, but the coroner was unable to come to any solid conclusion, apart from stating that foul play did not appear to be involved; and then it turned out that unlike her late father, Mary hadn’t written a will. But eventually some distant relatives were found, who agreed to take on the chore of selling the old house and its paltry contents, and splitting the proceeds. 

They weren’t expecting much but, just before the men came to take everything away, Mary’s cousin’s son’s girlfriend looked on her phone for a price guide to old records. 

Later, the auctioneer said that he’d never in his life expected to see an original copy of ‘Jimmy J’s Blues’ by Blind James Jones in such pristine condition. It was as good as new.