by David Cohen
‘Not The Beatles, obviously,’ I say. ‘No, I was in this Beatles tribute band, Beatles for Sale – named after the title of their fourth album.’
‘Well, what do you know.’ Darren speaks quietly, deliberately so, as if to lead by example because I’m speaking loudly, perhaps unnecessarily so. It’s funny how when you speak unnecessarily loudly to someone on a bus, they think you’re mad. But who’s the mad one? Me, conducting a perfectly rational, if loud, conversation with another person? Or that headphone girl, leaking music into the bus atmosphere? I really should write to TransLink.
‘But this is going back a way, mind you,’ I say.
Our conversation is briefly interrupted when the bus stops at Buranda station and someone squeezes down the aisle between us.
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I was George Harrison.’ I say it as if there’s no question of me not being George Harrison, although to look at me now you could be forgiven for having doubts. Look at my head, for a start: the merest shadow of hair is all that lies between me and utter baldness.
‘I suppose you find it hard to believe, Darren, but back then I really did look a bit like Harrison. Plus I could sing like him, too.’
Darren can’t help scrutinising my face as we speed down the M3. I can hear him thinking: Yes, there it is. Restore the hair, lose the weight, maybe add a moustache, and he can see me as Harrison circa 1967, the year of Sgt Pepper.
‘But we broke up years ago,’ I say. I plan not to say anything more about that, but then I say, ‘Mainly because I left.’
‘Left?’ Darren plays with the badge. ‘Why?’
‘Good question, Darren!’ I didn’t intend to talk about it but since he’s brought it up I feel I must talk about it. I’m about to begin but then we’re interrupted again, this time by someone walking down the aisle between us at Holland Park West. To prevent further disruptions, I get out of my seat, cross the aisle and sit next to Darren. He has to squeeze himself against the side of the bus to accommodate me: I’m a large man, and Darren is relatively large too. It’s funny how, when you cross the aisle to sit next to a complete stranger, they think you’re mad. But now that I’ve crossed the threshold, Darren and I are no longer complete strangers, merely strangers.
He looks a bit uncomfortable but I can tell he’s invested in this story.
‘Well, back then, all I wanted was to be the best George I could possibly be. You can’t approach this sort of thing half-heartedly, Darren. I worked on getting the voice just right and everything.’
It should be noted that I delivered that last sentence in a Scouse accent. I do it very well, very authentically. I could challenge everyone on this bus to a talking-like-George Harrison contest and win hands down, if I felt like it.
Darren nods and adjusts his badge. Doesn’t anyone use the badges with pins anymore? I look out the window at the black steel fence running along the side of the M3; it has a vertical strut every metre or so and when you stare at it from the speeding bus it looks like a strip of film running through a movie camera.
‘So,’ he says. ‘Was your band – ’
‘Successful? I’d have to say we did quite well for a couple of years. We put on the full show, mind you: material from every album from Please Please Me to Let It Be, complete with costume changes. I had George down perfectly: the look, the voice, the accent, the playing style – although I never really mastered the sitar. Ah, Darren, I wish you could’ve seen us … We played up and down Queensland: hundreds of gigs; massive audiences, as a rule. Our shows at the Beenleigh RSL were legendary.’
‘So what happened?’ Darren asks. ‘Why did you break up?’
Well, that’s the crucial question, isn’t it, and it had to be asked sooner or later.
‘Like I said, Darren, my George Harrison was spot-on. There’ve been quite a few Beatles tribute bands and quite a few Georges, but I don’t think any of them went the extra mile like I did. I was giving a hundred per cent, but the other guys in my band were giving about, I don’t know, seventy-five per cent max. That’s bound to cause some internal tension.’
Darren stops playing with his badge. ‘But what were you doing?’ he asks. ‘How were you going the extra mile?’
I look out the window. We pass by the back fence of the Upper Mount Gravatt bus depot, and I think of the rows of inert and empty buses waiting to hit the road once more.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I really lived the part, didn’t I? For a while there I was George: Eastern religion, meditation, all that shit. Well, not shit – not shit at all, actually. But they didn’t like it, did they?’
‘Who didn’t like it?’ Darren asks.
‘Who?’ I say. ‘The other Beatles – I mean, the other guys in the band.’
‘So you were ousted?’ Darren says.
‘You could say I ousted myself,’ I say. ‘The situation had become untenable, as far as I was concerned. We were moving in different directions.’ I look out the window again. I plan not to say anything more about that, but then I say something more. ‘Not that it would have gone on much longer anyway.’
‘And why’s that?’ He’s persistent, this Darren.
I rub what’s left of my hair. ‘Let me ask you this: what’s one of the most important things about being George Harrison in a Beatles tribute band?’
Darren thinks for a moment. But it’s a purely rhetorical question and I answer it for him.
‘One of the most important things is that you look something like George Harrison, isn’t it?’
‘Well, you do,’ he says. ‘A bit.’
‘Not enough, though, Darren,’ I say. ‘You see, there’s what I call the George Harrison Similarity Spectrum, and I used to be at the good end. But by the point we’re talking about, I was approaching the bad end. I don’t know if was the meds I was taking at the time, but I stacked on the weight, plus I lost a lot of hair.’ I plan not to say anything more, but then I say something more. ‘I’ve had some issues, you see.’
It’s funny how when you tell someone you’ve had some issues, they think you’re mad. But I don’t think I’m mad.
I say, ‘It’s one thing for a man who looks like George Harrison to think he’s George Harrison; it’s another thing for a fat, bald man to think he’s George Harrison.
Darren says, ‘But even George Harrison himself probably got fat and bald. He couldn’t stay young and Beatle-like forever.’
‘Take it from me,’ I say, ‘George was never fat and bald. Until the day he died, he remained relatively slim and not bald. But that’s not the point. The point is: we weren’t a life-cycle-of-George Harrison tribute band – we were a Beatles tribute band.’
Darren can’t argue with that; he goes silent and looks out the window as the 77 nears the end of its route.
‘At least you have the memories,’ he says.
‘Do you know, I used to keep everything,’ I say. ‘Photos, flyers, reviews from the local press – all carefully archived. But stuff gets lost along the way, doesn’t it? Then I was in hospital for a while – story for another bus ride, though.’
Now the bus is pulling up alongside Platform 2 at Eight Mile Plains station. It’s a nice station, as stations go: neat green hedges, those palm trees that look like clusters of plastic garden rakes.
As I stand up, Darren leans forward and says, ‘Honestly, you still look like Harrison. A bit.’
I give Darren the thumbs up and, clutching my Go Card, exit via the rear doors. People sit on the aluminium benches along the platform, waiting for their buses. I can hear someone’s headphones leaking.
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON
I awoke one morning to the sound of our neighbour wanking. It was six o’clock. While my wife slept, I lay there in our still-dark room listening to the slow, rhythmic slap … slap … slap. A man, obviously. That made sense: our neighbour was indeed a man, and he lived alone, as far as I knew.
Through our bedroom window, which faced our neighbour’s property, I could see a portion of grey sky and a sl
ice of his corrugated-tin roof. The rain that had poured down most of the night continued to fall, but lightly now. The sound of our neighbour wanking seemed so close. Not surprising, perhaps: if I were to lean out the window and extend my arm over the grey timber fence, I would almost be touching the side of his house. And as far as I could tell, his bedroom was right next to ours. Still, it came as a shock, being privy to such an intimate act – more intimate than sex, really. The mechanics of it were laid bare. And it was oddly mechanical, even for a highly mechanical act, because the pace never varied. You’d expect it to get faster and faster, or maybe slower then faster, or faster then slower – various combinations of fast and slow, accompanied by grunting and moaning, or at least heavy breathing. But the tempo remained consistent, monotonously so. There was something inhuman about it, as if our neighbour were hooked up to a machine that did his wanking for him; as if he’d thought, I’ve already removed the other person from the equation – why not eliminate the hand as well?
What, or whom, I wondered, was he thinking about? Some fantasy woman? Or man? A lover from years past? Something more sordid? I thought, At least he’s having sex, if only – fundamentally – with himself. Overhearing a solitary person arouse himself seemed a mere step away from listening to him think. I wondered if I should leave the room, retire to a place where I’d be out of earshot. Who was intruding on whom?
If asked to describe our neighbour’s face, I’d be at a loss. To me he was little more than a figure in shorts and workboots – a man I’d noticed, from time to time, single-handedly restumping his house. He worked with the grim, solitary obsessiveness you see in old-school handymen, a far cry from the expensively overalled DIY types on television. And yet he seemed no older than I. A few feet away, I thought, but miles apart. He was fixing things, maintaining the home. He was comfortable with power tools.
I lay there, looking through the window at the fence-grey sky. The rain seemed to have stopped altogether, unable to compete, as it were, with the persistent beat of our neighbour’s masturbation – pathetically mundane and yet disturbingly unfamiliar in its pump-like regularity, as if everyone and everything had suddenly fallen silent, only to reveal the thrum of the engine that kept the world turning. I knew that before long, my wife would wake up and hear it too. When she realised what was happening, she’d make me go out there and ‘have a word’ – as she would no doubt phrase it – with the man next door. ‘What if Ella were to hear him?’ she’d say. ‘What then?’ Well, she had a point. She’d also say that having a word with our neighbour would do me good because I needed to be more assertive. That was also true; I’ve never been one for confrontations. But what if this situation was just a one-off, never to occur again? I favoured a wait-and-see approach: if it happened a second time, then yes, do something about it. She’d say that was typical of me, and that choosing to defer action was no choice at all.
I lay there thinking, God, I hope he reaches the finish line before Nat wakes up, before this becomes an issue. But by the sound of it he was just getting into his stride; that is, he’d been in his stride from the outset, only to remain there, like a drill press stuck on one speed.
And supposing I did go out there? What was I meant to say? I didn’t even know our neighbour’s name. ‘Hello. Sorry to knock so early, but I’d like to talk to you about …’ About what? How do you bring up masturbation with a man you’ve never met? Our neighbour was an unknown quantity. Not an imposing man, but he could restump a house. A man of action, definitely. A self-sufficient man, clearly. But perhaps lonely too, underneath it all. Divorced, maybe. Children? I thought yes, although I wasn’t sure why.
By this point, the sound from next door had gone on for so long I was almost getting used to it; it had been absorbed into the soundtrack to another day, along with the magpie larks and the feathery rain that had just started up again. But a voice in my head kept saying: You’d better go out there and deal with this, before your wife wakes up, before your daughter wakes up. Ella was probably too young to understand, but it would save me the trouble of inventing some explanation.
I lay there, trying to motivate myself to take action; that is, either go out and have a word with our neighbour, or conclude that the best course of action was to do nothing, and stand by my decision. My wife always tells me I need to be more decisive. I have to agree that if I were, things might be better between us. But it’s not just a question of making a decision; you’ve got to make the right decision, or the best decision. To be able to decide and to decide well – that’s what it all comes down to.
I worked in sales once – a good example of a bad choice, one made after my own business had officially collapsed. I learned a variety of closing techniques: the Apology Close, the Sharp Angle Close, the Assumptive Close, and all the rest. Nice in theory but not always so easy to pull off when it came to the crunch. The technique I liked most was known as the Duke of Wellington Close, where, when faced with a wavering customer, you suggest that they write a list of the cons of buying the product, while you list the pros, and then you compare your respective lists. You have to make sure your list is longer than theirs – by one item, at least. If the pros outweigh the cons, then it follows – in theory, anyway – that the only reasonable course of action for them is to buy. I don’t know whether the Duke of Wellington, that great military strategist, actually used this balance-sheet method, but I’ve always admired the simplicity of it, so much so that I still use it when I can’t choose between two possible options.
I climbed out of bed, quietly, carefully, so as not to wake my wife, and crept into the kitchen. I sat at the table with a pen and paper and prepared a balance sheet: ‘Pros and Cons of Confronting Neighbour’. I tried hard to be honest and objective; the duke would have expected nothing less.
PROS CONS
Sleep uninterrupted on Sunday morning
Embarrassing
Protect family from offensive behaviour
Neighbour might deny any wrongdoing
Establish boundaries from outset
Permanently sour relationship with neighbour
Practise assertiveness
Risk physical assault
That was all I could come up with; anything else was merely a variation on existing themes. So it was even, a stalemate between me and myself. I returned to the bedroom and lay down, listening. Our shadowy neighbour, abusing, or amusing, himself at my expense, showed no sign of slowing down. I had to admire to him – his approach to wanking reflected his approach to home renovation: humourlessly industrious, slow and steady, never needlessly rushing a job, as if all of life were a DIY project without end.
Some choices simply cannot be made according to the dictates of the balance sheet. But given that life is, essentially, a series of decisions, large and small, sometimes you need a strategy, a system, however flawed. Contrary to what I’d always expected when I was young (when was that?), the older I get, the more difficult it is to decide between one thing and another. Maybe that’s because the less time you have left, the higher the stakes. I’ll admit now that it wasn’t the sound of our neighbour that woke me up. It wasn’t the rain, either. The fact is that I’m often lying awake at this time of morning while everyone else sleeps. I lie there thinking about another decision, the biggest decision of all, one I’ve been wrestling with for longer than I care to admit. That is, stay or leave? When nobody’s particularly happy, and the various small remedies you’ve tried don’t seem to work, you start considering more drastic measures. Some houses are so far gone, there’s no point trying to renovate; you have to find another house. And yet, for all that, I can’t decide.
Since I’m being completely honest … recently I went so far as to compile a list: pros of sticking around, cons of sticking around. When the two columns were neck and neck, I thought of our daughter, and squeezed out another pro and deleted one of the flimsier cons. It wasn’t as if I had any real intention of not staying; I just needed the authorising power of the balance sheet
. But even then I couldn’t help thinking: this hasn’t really decided the matter, the decision’s merely been postponed until next time, when it will no doubt be deferred once again, and so on into the future – unless some new development causes me to see things differently.
Which was what happened in the case of our next-door neighbour. As I lay there, watching the new day grow older by increments, I began to realise that the sound I was currently listening to wasn’t the man next door wanking at all; it was, in fact, the sound of last night’s rainwater falling from the gutter onto the stone path just outside our bedroom. The water hit the path in such a way, slapping against the slabs in a steady rhythm, that a person not quite awake might mistake it for … well, something entirely different. At that moment I felt utterly foolish; how could that sound be anything other than what it was? But at six in the morning, in the semi-darkness, when you’re lying there in a new rental, looking out the window while your wife and child sleep, you imagine all sorts of things. And to think that I might – just might – have gone out there and knocked on the poor bastard’s door.
I smiled as I pictured myself relating this story to my wife when she woke up. Meanwhile, the sound of water hitting stone, with that reliably even tempo, had turned into a sort of music, a comforting if predictable song that would continue until the gutter finally stopped overflowing. No doubt our neighbour had been fast asleep the whole time, dreaming dreams of home renovation. My wife dreamed her own dreams, inhaling, exhaling, just out of step with the falling water. I closed my eyes and did my best to join her, grateful that I’d been spared this decision at least.
LOOK FOR THE SILVER LINING
When Duncan lost his hands to the electric saw, his dream of being a professional pianist seemed more unrealistic than ever. Even before the accident he’d never been an exceptional musician, but at least he could hope. The electric saw put an end to that. Little wonder he shut himself up in his house and, for all I knew, relinquished contact with the world.
