Page 197 of Playing By Ear

“Hiya,” he said into the microphone, sounding nervous for the first time Perry had ever heard. “I’m Martin’s son, Jamie.” He cleared his throat. “Some of you know me as Jimmy, as that’s what he called me, almost to the end. This song—all the music played today, actually—was Dad’s personal request. It came out the year he and our mum met, when they were just eighteen. They used to sing it to each other, he said—her on-key, him not so much.”

He strummed a few gentle chords, then picked the melody of Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise” at about half the tempo of the original. The pianist joined in after the first few bars.

As Jamie began to sing, Belinda scooted closer to Perry on the pew. “Did Jamie convince the church that this song was about heaven?” she whispered. “Or did they know Dad meant it about Celtic Park?”

Perry shrugged. “Why can’t it be both?”

On the chorus, the choir joined in a stunning counterpoint. Jamie’s novel arrangement of the classic-rock tune gave Perry goosebumps. It blended the lyrics’ yearning optimism with reality’s unfulfilled promise of a long life together. This song was Jamie’s chance to say goodbye to his mum, too, something denied him as a baby.

When the song finished, the congregation rumbled with what sounded like approval and more than a little amusement.

“Just one more,” Jamie said. “I wrote this for Dad in the last month. It’s called ‘Swan Song.’”

Perry sat up straighter. Jamie had been torn about playing this song at the funeral, worried he wouldn’t be able to keep his composure.

Every note of the intro was infused with loss. They tumbled from Jamie’s fingers and wrapped round the people in the church, tying them together with one strand. The notes spoke of love and hate, of connection and distance, of all the things Jamie had feared putting into words.

But no longer.

A swan, you said,

Will kill his own

He’ll drown the weak

To save the strong

And I cried

How I cried

There came a rustling throughout the church, and Perry pictured every last person leaning forward. No doubt most of them had known Jamie only as Martin’s wayward boy, not the man with the soul of a poet and the voice of an archangel.

Thinking of that last breath

That last sight

Of sunlight

Through such shallow water…

Perry’s eyes burned. How many times had Jamie imagined another’s death from their perspective? His mum’s, his cousin’s, even a baby swan’s. All betrayed—by a brain, an uncle, a father.

But you said,

“We’re better than that

We look after our own

The strong, the weak,

The brave, the meek.”

As you held me close

and tucked me in

You sang a song