This is a zone that’s filled with the sweet silver stink from the Gasworks; the gasometer’s great red drum rears above the roofs, together with the brick factory chimney lettered up to date. First of the second-hand shops is Loney’s Used Furniture, where decent men in grey dustcoats move about in the aisles; next comes Mrs Madgewick’s Good Used Clothing, with dead men’s trousers dangling in the doorway; and then we are passing the shop of the Lady Man: a long, narrow hallway, whose walls, from floor to ceiling, seem to consist entirely of paperback books, piled up in hundreds. Among the Westerns and thrillers, there are sunbathing magazines, with nude photographs. In Junior School, these were the most wicked publications that were known to exist, and a group of us once ventured in to look at them. The odd thing was that the shop was always empty: no customer was ever seen inside.
The place had the silence of a paper-lined tomb. Walled in by paper, staring at us from out of his brown gloom, sat the Lady Man: a figure in a green tennis shade and grey dustcoat, with lank, reddish hair and the pallid, hairless-looking flesh that had long ago invited his nickname. One arm rested always on the counter. I opened a copy of Health and Efficiency, taking it from the pile we were all furtively attacking — three of us working in silence, like experts at an unexploded bomb. For a few moments, my stomach dropping as though in a fast lift, I was presented with ineffable disclosures of female nudity, the genitals chastely painted out.
Then the Lady Man’s pale hand, with a signet ring, came into my field of vision and straightened the pile. We all hurried out, and never went in again; the sense of escaping something there had been too strong.
As Brady and I pass now, the Lady Man looks out at us from his cavern, and I’m troubled by him. Still there, after all these years! How does he live, when no customers come? What is he waiting for? His mystery is like the central mystery of all adult wickedness; and I wonder briefly whether he’s damned. I know little about damnation, at seventeen; but I’ve glimpsed the fact that it has something to do with tedium; and the tedium of the Lady Man, fixed like a fungus in his cavern, is something not to be dwelt on.
‘There he is,’ Brady says, as though reading my thoughts. ‘The tennis champ. Never sells a thing — he’s as bad as you, Dick, with all those bloody papers around him.’
I find he’s given to these sudden, cruel thrusts, which show a disconcerting perceptiveness; and I know that he’s remembering the childish episode of the stolen comics.
When I was fourteen, I asked him to visit me at Trent Street. He came only once, on a Saturday, and admired my vast collection of comic books. But when he’d gone, I found that he’d taken two with him: Buck Rogers number 35, and The Phantom number 12. And the rifling of these treasures threw me into a frenzy. Like all collectors, I was obsessed; an obsession that went beyond my love of the comics themselves, and revolved around sequences and sets; and Brady had destroyed two vintage sets. Now, our juvenile voices came back.
‘Those old comics? What are you wetting yourself about? You’ve read ’em, haven’t you? I’ll get you some new ones.’
‘You don’t understand. I don’t want new ones, I want those. They can’t be bought any more.’
Brady stared at me then with incredulous scorn, and laughed openly: a crass raider. And I suspect today that his scorn was justified; is justified still, now that we’re almost men. I’ve long outgrown comics, and my library at Trent Street is filled with good books — certainly no collection of trash like the Lady Man’s. But isn’t Brady right, essentially? Haven’t I built a bunker of paper about myself, to escape from crippledom? Haven’t I too lived inside walls of paper? Aren’t the Lady Man and I perhaps of the same tribe?
No. I reject it.
We talk with animation again, discovering that we both like the new music we listen to at night on the radio: the rock and roll that adults detest, whose messengers, in this year, are Bill Haley and the Comets.
‘I’d like to play rock and roll,’ Brady says. ‘Or maybe Country and Western.’
‘Be a musician?’ The idea is outlandish; apart from his singing in the choir, Brady has no known musical ability.
But he glances at me with warning calm. ‘Why not?’ he says. ‘I can read music. My uncle taught me. Wait and see, Miller.’
Here is Lovejoy’s second-hand shop: the rain is heavier now, and the galvanised iron verandah awning keeps us dry. The green-lettered sign over the open door says, Music, Books & Antiques. A. (Sandy) Lovejoy.
It’s a large, rambling shop, in the ground floor of an old, two-storey terrace house. We peer into the dusty display window, examining Toby jugs, toast racks, and a sepia picture of a bare-shouldered Edwardian matron in evening dress, whose smile is radiantly mad. There’s an array of battered musical instruments; and closest to us, in an open case, is a guitar.
Brady gazes at this, apparently thinking of our recent conversation, his expression distant and serious, while the nineteenth century washes about us like a tide of dirty water. It has cast up in Lovejoy’s window these cracked and yellowed salvages; these wretched personal effects of the dead. I don’t like second-hand shops, they threaten me with the past; and I’m suddenly anxious to be gone, imagining threat in the air, pungent as the stink from the Gasworks.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘What do you want with this old junk?’
But still Brady pauses, his eyes fixed on the guitar as though he’s trying to read some sort of rune lettered on its varnished wood. ‘What’s your big rush? Old things are interesting,’ he says. ‘I’d like to learn to play that thing.’
And now I become conscious that a thin, middle-aged man in a navy-blue belted overcoat is standing beside us, looking into the window too. For a few moments I don’t glance at him directly; but when I do, my stomach hollows. It’s the Man in the Lane.
It’s a long time ago now, and I was young. If I say I felt alarm at the sight of him, I might be allowing hindsight too much influence. But I do know that his sudden reappearance after so many years greatly surprised me. For some moments, nothing happened. All three of us stared at the guitar.
I tried to tell whether it was the same overcoat the man wore; it looked the same, but perhaps he always bought the same sort. He had one hand in his pocket just as before, and his collar was turned up at the back. His quiet tie and grey trousers were pedantically neat — so neat that there was something formal and official about him. He didn’t seem to have changed or aged, unless the creases in his thin cheeks had grown deeper; and perhaps his flat, black hair was streaked with more white at the sides. His sombre, melancholy good looks were those of a widower, or a man with a secret illness.
‘Thinking of buying something, boys?’
He was glancing attentively sideways at us, his head slightly cocked. It was the same hollow, well-spoken voice I remembered. It had the effect of a famous voice; one I felt I should know — from the radio perhaps.
It was Brady who answered him. ‘Just looking at the guitar,’ he said.
I wondered if the man remembered me. But he made no sign that he did so, and his eyes remained fixed on Brady. I still found them different from other eyes, as I’d done at twelve years old: they were bleak as the spring sky, their drooping, yellowish lids elegantly weary. ‘Ah — the guitar,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you try it out?’
‘Do you own the shop?’ Brady asked.
The man was still facing the window, and now the thin, crooked smile travelled up one side of his face. ‘Not exactly,’ he said, ‘but I know the gentleman who does. Sandy Lovejoy’s a friend of mine.’
His expression was agreeable, and I wondered if I’d misjudged him as a child. But it worried me that he wouldn’t look at me. It was as though I’d failed some test, all that time ago, and the man had no further use for me.
‘Come on,’ he said. He jerked his head towards the door, and we followed him.
Inside, the shop was half-dark, without visible limits under a high old ceiling with dirty, decorative mouldings. It was cra
mmed with vast constructions of junk: furniture, and a litter of smaller artefacts like things from a museum, not arranged in any way, but lodged on tables or the floor, or even suspended by wires from hooks in the ceiling. Aisles went off between wardrobes and dressers, and the man’s dark-coated back moved ahead of us down one of these aisles. We followed, and he made a sharp turn to the left to get to the front window, where he picked up the guitar. Holding it very carefully, as though it were alive, he blew on it once to remove the dust, squinting along it, and then held it out to Brady, who cradled it awkwardly, half-smiling. I’d never seen quite this expression on Brian’s face before, and I became aware that something important was happening; something that seemed to have been planned.
Silence extended among the piles of junk; and then Brady asked: ‘What’s this hole for?’
‘That’s the sound-hole,’ the man said quietly.
It was as though he’d indicated a secret entrance; staring at the round, tunnel-like mouth, I felt it to be hypnotic, drawing us in. But Brady was looking at the guitar with deep pleasure; and now he drew his thumb across the strings.
The random sound was surprisingly melodious. Deep and high together, the cluster of notes he had released rang and hummed, climbing to the dim ceiling. He looked up, and asked: ‘Is this guitar good for Country and Western?’
‘It’d be wasted on that. This is a serious guitar,’ the man said. ‘It’s a Ramirez. Spanish.’
‘It’s made in Spain?’
‘That’s right. In Madrid. The Spanish invented the guitar. They still make the best.’ His melancholy voice was very quiet; but we attended to him absolutely. ‘A British sailor brought this in here,’ he said. ‘It’s got quite a reasonable price on it.’
Without taking his eyes from Brady’s, he reached to one side and picked up a kitchen chair which he placed just in front of him. Then, putting one brown shoe on it and resting an elbow on his raised knee, he cradled the guitar expertly and began to screw at the tuning pegs.
‘It’s got a good sound,’ he said, and struck a chord. This was far more beautiful and impressive than the sound Brian had produced; but the man frowned, screwed at the pegs again and struck another chord, while Brady watched him with the eagerness of a gun-dog.
And now the man began to play. What he played was a flamenco piece; probably a malagueña, since recollection tells me there was the hint of a fandango in it. That he played well was quickly beyond doubt; under the authority of his long hands there were no fumbled notes. I had never seen anyone play a Spanish guitar before; and I doubted that Brady had either. We glanced once at each other in delight: we would probably have been equally impressed had the man begun juggling. Brady’s gaze was fixed on the working fingers or else on the man’s face, which was now in profile, its thin nose bent in absolute concentration over the strings, dark brows drawn together.
He didn’t play very fast, and yet the delicate, tripping, fandango sound seemed to be fast, like a dance. The strange, broken gypsy rhythms and the halts and changes in direction kept us in a state of tension, half pleasurable and half not. The rhythm was compulsive, making us tap our feet; and the music should have been gay. Yet it wasn’t quite gay; there was an opposite seriousness and perhaps despair under it, throbbing in the bass strings. Every so often the man’s fingers would leave the strings to drum on the tap-plate; and just when we were entering into the ease and light-heartedness of this little Spanish dance — picked out on the treble strings, high and seductive — there would be a change again, like those alarming changes in the man himself. His fingers, with a speed that blurred them, would attack the guitar to produce a passionate, almost fearsome thundering, while his face remained expressionless, coldly controlled. Then, with some final raps on the soundboard, it was over.
He leaned the instrument against a wardrobe, thrusting his hands into his raincoat pockets and looking at us, eyebrows raised.
Brady’s tangled curls looked startled; his blue eyes were dark with surprise. ‘You can really play,’ he said.
‘You liked it, did you?’
‘I’d like to play like that,’ Brady said.
‘Would you? Well we might work something out,’ the man said. ‘Can you read music?’
When Brady said he could, the man stared at him for a moment, as though checking the truth of this statement. Then he said: ‘We’ll talk to Sandy.’ And once again, giving us a look over his shoulder, he moved off down an alleyway between the cliffs of furniture. He had opened his overcoat, and it floated out behind him like a cloak.
Dubiously, I brought up the rear. We were being taken deeper into the shop; I touched an old feather boa on a table as we passed, and sniffed my fingers; it left what I thought of as a grave smell. Emerging into an open area of floor at the back, we came upon a plump old man in a brown felt hat, seated in a big armchair with a grimy floral cover and nursing a miserable-looking Australian terrier which began to yap as we appeared. On all sides were musical instruments, lying on trestle tables and on shelves against the wall. In the weak electric light from a bulb with a white china shade hanging from the ceiling, these looked like the corpses of instruments, never to be played again. Near the old man’s chair stood a drum-kit, the bass drum inscribed with the legend SANDY’S BANJO BAND, in 1930s lettering.
The dog yapped twice more, and the man in the chair shouted: ‘Sarah! Be quiet! Be-have!’ Then he smiled at us winningly, with a set of orange-gummed false teeth. ‘Who have we got here?’ he asked. ‘Who are these young gentlemen?’ His voice was loud and high.
‘What we’ve got here,’ said the man in the overcoat, ‘is a young chap who wants to be a guitarist.’ He jerked his head at Brian. ‘So you’ll have to sell him that guitar, Sandy, won’t you?’
‘Always willing to do that,’ Sandy said. This time his voice was quieter, and he stroked the dog’s head, his worn grey eyes examining us as though to memorise every detail of our dress and appearance. ‘But these are St Augustine’s boys, aren’t they? Yes — I know the tie. Don’t get them in here very often. I’m not keen on the black-beetles.’ He was referring to the cassocks of the Brothers.
Now I became aware that a lanky youth of about eighteen in a grey dustcoat had sidled from behind a dressing-table to move beside Sandy’s armchair. He stood smiling there like an attendant, watching us. Thin and pasty-faced, with pimples on his chin and large, projecting ears, he looked as though he’d never gone out of the junk-shop into the air. Blades of his long black hair, stuck together with too much hair-oil, hung across his forehead.
‘Here’s my nephew, Darcy Burr,’ Sandy said. ‘He doesn’t have to put up with bloody schoolteachers any more, do you, Darcy? He works for me. And he’s a real good guitarist, what’s more.’ He looked from Brady to me. ‘So which of you boys is it wants to learn?’
‘I do,’ Brady said.
The nephew grinned, and I began to see that his looks were not as unfortunate as they’d seemed at first; his thin, white nose was beak-like, but his bony features were otherwise regular, and not unpleasing. His eyes were amber and slanting, like those of a feral cat; and their feline intentness somehow prevented his lop ears from being comical.
‘I’m sure this young chap would pay you each week,’ the man in the overcoat was saying. He jerked his head at Brian. ‘I know you like to help boys, Sandy.’
‘And will you teach him, Brod? The way you do Darcy, here?’
‘I might think about it.’
‘Well then,’ Sandy said to Brian, ‘you’re a very lucky young feller. Mr Broderick’s the best teacher you could find. Not many can teach guitar.’
‘But I couldn’t pay,’ Brady said. ‘Unless I can get some money from home. How much would a lesson cost?’
‘I’ll see what you’re like,’ said the man Broderick, ignoring the question. ‘If you have the aptitude like Darcy here, I’ll give you lessons. We’ll talk about money later. I’ll be able to tell very quickly whether you have the talent. It has to be alre
ady in you. If it’s not, I won’t bother teaching you. How’s that?’ His cold, weary stare rested on Brady with what looked like contempt, and Brady flushed. ‘But my guess is you’ll have the talent,’ Broderick said. ‘Come in Monday of next week.’
When Brady thanked him, Broderick stared at him patiently; and Sandy Lovejoy did the same. Realising that we must go, we turned awkwardly, making our farewells, and edged away down one of the alleyways towards the front.
I glanced back; the nephew was watching us go, but Broderick, talking to old Sandy Lovejoy, was not. At no time during the conversation had he looked at me; I might have been invisible to him.
3
Both our lives were now transformed. Both were now dominated by the guitar: Brady’s directly, mine at second-hand.
The old Ramirez became the first object Brady had truly loved, and music now invited his spirit as no learning offered by the school had ever done; the art belonging to the Muses thrilled and possessed my cousin more powerfully than football. He had previously closed his imagination against all learning; even against books. Now, a different door had opened; he walked through it without hesitation, and his life’s course was set. He gave to the second-hand guitar from Sandy Lovejoy’s shop a devotion as fanatical as mine had been for my toy theatre or my books.
So no one understood his obsession better than I did. Obsession was a condition to which Brian had been a stranger until now, and of which he was at first half-ashamed; it wasn’t a condition that his friends in the football team could be expected to understand. But I understood it perfectly; and this drove Brady further into my company. I was the only one who could share his excitement; more, who understood its secret springs. When I would ask him how his playing was developing, he would make what seemed a special sign between us, raising his hand with index finger and thumb forming a circle and then winking, as though to say: All under control. And another more practical matter now cemented our association: I was able to offer Brady and his guitar a refuge.
The Doubleman Page 5
