She’d been the “older woman” in my life for most of the time I spent at the “Con”. We’d both led a double life of sorts, and she was the one person I could always open up to.
We met when she needed an accompanist for one of her exam pieces. To look at her on stage with the band — with her long black hair falling over her face, as she drives her bass-guitar through the middle of a twelve-bar riff like a lethal weapon — seeing her like that, it’s hard to imagine her playing a Haydn chamber-piece, dressed from neck to toe like the picture of innocence, and caressing the cello with the kind of gentle finesse that puts you right at the top of your class.
I know, I do tend to get carried away. Haydn isn’t likely to drive anyone to want to rip your clothes off.
But that was the only kind of music I knew until I met Chrissie.
At first I thought she must have been about fifteen, like me, so when I discovered she was five years older than I was, it came as a bit of a shock. It wasn’t the last one she would ever give me. And I guess at times I might have shocked her, too. But we hit it off. Best friends from day one.
I’d never been comfortable with girls. They were like a strange race, with their own language and their own rules. Chrissie reckoned my main problem was that I’d spent far too much time fingering keyboards, and not nearly enough … you know.
Maybe she was right. It took a long time for her to understand me properly, but from the first moment, she made it her job to save me from myself.
It was never sexual. Even apart from the age difference, I just wasn’t “her type”. Mind you, I never thought Damien was — and I once made the mistake of telling her so. It was one of the few things we ever really fought about. I said she deserved better. She said I deserved a punch in the mouth if I couldn’t mind my own damned business. But she didn’t really mean it.
She knew there was no jealousy there, and I think deep down she probably sensed that something major was wrong, long before things went cold between them.
Anyway, that was later.
At that time, Chrissie’s idea of salvation, at least as far as I was concerned, had absolutely nothing to do with sex. For her, the answer to the problem of Tim Henderson — and just about everything else in life — was musical.
That was how I found out about her “other life”.
“Hell, Tim,” she said once. “If you’re ever going to break out of that glass jar they’ve got you trapped in, you’re going to have to loosen up.” She was leaning across my piano, obscuring the middle two octaves with her hair, and I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
I told her so.
She just smiled and told me to be ready at eight-thirty; that she’d pick me up.
I was. Ready.
At least, I thought I was.
She took one look at me — freshly ironed shirt, jacket and tie — shook her head, pushed me back into the bedroom, undressed me and forced me into a pair of practically unworn jeans, a T-shirt and some old running shoes.
When I asked her where we were going, she just smiled. “To work,” she said.
Torsion played the kind of music you could never use a cello in. And up on stage was a character I had never met. She had the same face as Chrissie, but … Wow! The energy, the way she slammed out the beat on an electric bass that looked bigger than she was. The way she played up to the audience.
I’d always thought she was beautiful, but until that moment I hadn’t realised she was sexy. I’d always known she was talented, but now I realised that she was versatile, too.
Damien was posing and pouting and doing the “lead-singer” thing — that was the first time I ever saw him — but I was watching Chrissie. And so was most of the audience.
Afterwards she sat down beside me. Her hair was wet from exertion and she was breathing heavily.
“Well?” She sipped a drink and looked into my eyes, and I got the idea that my opinion was important. “What did you think?”
What could I say? My pulse was only just slowing down and I could still feel the concussion from the speakers.
“Can we get out of here?” I was under-age and I was sure everybody was looking at me.
She glanced across at Damien, who was busy basking, oblivious to her.
“Sure. Why not?”
A few minutes later, over a coffee, she asked me again. “Well? What did you think?”
By then I’d had the chance to get my breath back.
“I never knew —” I began, but she cut me off.
“Did you like it?”
For a moment I paused. “No,” I began, and watched her face fall. “I loved it!”
I know. It’s the oldest line in the history of lines. 10CC used it once in a song. But it happened to be true. Something inside me had responded. The worm was beginning to turn.
She smiled, confident again.
“Good,” she said. “Because, as of tomorrow, you’re going to take a crash course in Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
I smiled.
“Why wait until tomorrow?”
Two years and a couple of thousand jam sessions later, I got the call from Max Parnell.
He was putting together a “special project”, and Chrissie Tieu had recommended me. Would I be interested in auditioning …?
Is the pope Catholic?
If I’d known all of what was to come, I might have thought twice.
No … I wouldn’t.
6
THE BEST TEACHER …
14 September 1989
The boy looks up from his playing. Something is different.
Ardillo sits on the bed, as he has always done. But this time the music does not move him. He stares at the boy and watches his swift fingers as they move across the strings.
A small, sad smile plays around the corners of a mouth that has, it seems, had little use for smiles.
The music runs down, and in the silence that follows, the boy finally understands.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” He is not yet eleven, and small for his age, and the large guitar dwarfs him as he sits.
Ardillo looks away and says nothing.
“Why? Have I done something wrong? I’ve tried as hard as …” The words dry up, as the boy fights the sudden emptiness that threatens to turn into a show of unaccustomed tears.
This time Ardillo rises.
His touch is cold, as always.
“It was always to be this way.” The boy is shaking his head, though he knows it to be the truth. “It is over. Terminado. You have no more need of me. And I —”
“And you have no more need of me.”
The boy throws the guitar onto the bed, giving in, finally, to the tears.
“Alejandro …” The name is a plea. It goes unheeded. “Alex … It never was that way. But time —”
“I know nothing! And I want to know … all that you know. All that you can teach me.”
“I have taught you all I can, chiquitito. I have taught you the only important thing. To love. Music …” Slowly he moves across to the bed, gazing down as he speaks. “It lives in the heart, not in the fingers. And love is the best teacher. The only teacher. I knew that once, long ago, but then I forgot. You gave me the chance to remember.”
Ardillo reaches out to touch the strings of the old guitar, as he has done in vain so many times. The boy looks away, angry, lost in thoughts of his own.
And it is then that he hears them. Six notes, clear and distinct. From lowest to highest, hanging on the silence like a prayer.
Slowly he turns his gaze; fearful, knowing what he will find, yet needing to confirm his fear.
Ardillo is gone.
Slowly the notes resonate to silence …
ALEX’S STORY
When I was five years old, Ardillo Jesus Moreno, my grandfather’s dead brother, taught me to play the guitar.
When I was ten, he taught me the meaning of loss.
I remember sitting there, looking at the empty bed, and knowing I w
ould never see him again. At that moment I hated him. For leaving me. For taking away the gift he had given. There was an empty space in my life that I knew could never be filled.
I must have sat there for over an hour, just staring. The room was getting dark, and it was cold, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. Then the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall began to chime. Six notes. Six o’clock.
Six notes …
Slowly I stood up. I switched on the light and walked across to the bed. The guitar lay where I had thrown it, shining in the room’s dull light.
I made no move to touch it. I was listening. The room was silent. I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Those six notes, plucked slowly, one string at a time.
In all the time since he had first come into my life, he had never been able to touch those strings. To me, he had been as real as anyone, even if his touch had always been a little cold. But he had never been able to sound a note.
Until that final moment …
Suddenly I understood. My hand reached out, and I ran my fingers over the strings.
“And love is the best teacher …”
At ten years old, I finally realised what a part of me had always known.
I picked up the guitar and began to play. A sad piece in a minor key. But I remember I was smiling.
I never spoke to anyone about Ardillo and what he had given me. There were never any words to explain it, and I knew what they would think. Maybe Abuelito might have understood, but I was ten years old, not a baby any more, and I didn’t want him thinking … whatever it is that normal people think about those who claim they can talk to the dead.
Then, as the years went by, I began questioning the truth of what I remembered.
I was just a kid, filled from my earliest recollections with my grandfather’s stories. Of the war, of Ardillo, of the music and the terrible loss. Maybe it was all nothing more than a combination of the forbidden room, the stories, and that photograph standing on the dressing table. My grandfather ’s brother, never aging, staring out at the world from behind the glass of the photo frame.
Could I have imagined his smile, his clothes, his soft voice? I almost convinced myself I had.
But I didn’t imagine the music.
If it was all imagination, who had taught me to play? Could I have taught myself? Was that what prodigies did?
I had no answers, so I stopped asking the questions. And I accepted the gift — wherever it had come from.
“Late that night,” my grandfather says, “when it is dark and the candles are burning down, they come for us. Francisco is —”
“Tell me about Ardillo.” For once, I interrupt the litany, break the rhythm of the story.
Abuelito looks at me. As if he suddenly doesn’t recognise me.
“Ardillo?”
I nod. “Tell me about him. About the music. What kind of a brother he was.”
“Ardillo was …” he begins, then falters. The ritual is broken and he looks confused. Then he brushes a hand through his sparse hair and sits back in his chair. “He was hermano mayor, my big brother. And his hands were touched by the angels. That was what our mother said. And if you had heard him play you would agree …”
7
THE CHOICE OF THE HEART
12 July 1935
Madrid
JUANA
In the shade of the tree Ardillo senses her watching him, but he does not look up. Instead, he stops playing in mid-bar, pauses for just a moment, then begins a different piece. A tarantella. Designed to impress.
Last week, the first time he saw her, he had Francisco make enquiries. Her father owns the cantina, where he eats the evening meal most nights with Manuel and Francisco, but her family is not from Madrid. Not originally.
With the Depression and the rumblings of discontent, and after the suppression of the miners’ riots, Domingo La Falla left Asturias with his wife and four children and headed for the security of the capital.
Juana is the eldest. Her sister and two brothers are too young to be of much use — or so her father claims, though he seems to push them all pretty hard. He is a humourless man. Not cruel, but lacking the imagination to see the spirit he is squeezing out of them.
All except Juana.
She will never be like the others, nor like her mother. Not for her the endless round of tables and meals and drunken labourers, slopping their wine and talking futile politics in loud whispers. Juana is different.
And for that, he is beginning to love her.
He stops playing and looks up at her. She holds his gaze and a slow smile spreads over her features.
“Don’t stop.” The smile is in her voice, as well, and she brushes her dark hair away from her face. “These days there is too much talk and not enough music.”
He studies her face, looking up at her. The moment is frozen between them. An understanding reached, a future sealed.
A dog crawls on its belly into the shade of the tree, and somewhere in the distance the thunder rumbles like a premonition of something more than rain …
ALEX’S STORY
“When the blood-stained dwarf makes his move, and the war begins, we leave Madrid.” Abuelito uses the hate-name they used six decades before, and it takes me a moment to work out who he is talking about. The dwarf … Franco, El Caudillo, the Generalisimo, the leader of the Nationalists. A tiny, bug-eyed man, who made up in bloody ruthlessness what he lacked in height.
I wait while the old man takes a drag on his foul-smelling cigarette, coughs a little, then continues. “Most people, they move to the city. To be safe. But Ardillo, he says we go back to Consuegra. ‘Nowhere is safe,’ he says. ‘But home is … home.’
“Juana, your abuelita, she comes too. Her mother, she cries. Her father, he curses —Juana, Ardillo, me even. Says her place is at home. But Juana, she is too strong. ‘Madrid is not home to me,’ she says. ‘Asturias is home, and Asturias is lost. Without a fight. Better for the heart to choose a new home than for fear.’ ”
There is pride in my grandfather’s voice as he remembers. He is speaking of the woman who was his wife for thirty-five years.
But then I remember.
When Juana, my grandmother, left Madrid, it was to be with Ardillo, not his younger brother. I recall the picture standing on the dressing-table in his room upstairs. Five smiling faces — Ardillo, Manuel, Francisco, Juana. And …
“Tell me about Conchita.”
I whisper the request, and watch his face close over. For a moment I think he will refuse, but then the tension goes out of him. He stubs his cigarette deliberately in the ashtray and watches the last wisp of smoke curl away into the atmosphere.
“Conchita …” He allows her name to hang in the air like the smoke. Then he stares out beyond the glass of the window, before he continues.
19 August 1936
Consuegra
CONCHITA
She closes the oven door with her heel, as she turns to place the steaming loaf on the table behind her. It is then that she realises she is not alone.
For a moment, shock freezes her throat. He is just a silhouette in the doorway, with the morning sun streaming in behind him, but she knows him.
Suddenly the loaf is falling to the floor and skittering across the stones, as she flings herself into his arms.
“Manuel!” The word is smothered by the crush of his lips. His arms are strong around her, and she is breathing in the smell of him. And the emptiness of the last months is filled.
Slowly their lips part and she steps back to look at him.
“We came back,” he says, and smiles.
“I missed you,” she replies.
And with their words, the world begins to move again …
8
THE FACE
ALEX’S STORY
Chrissie was a musical soul-mate from day one, then with Tim we had the basics of a band.
For someone who only two years before had played nothing but classical piano, Tim
was just amazing.
In my case it had been different. Spanish music was never “classical” — at least not until this century. It was always the music of the people, so I didn’t have such a hard time getting Abuelito and my dad to accept all the different styles I liked to play. As long as I didn’t forget the old stuff completely, they were cool with it. With Tim it was different.
His people were a lot like Claire’s. You know — old money, the right connections. Main difference was they’d stayed together, and Tim didn’t have to use the overseas operator to get in touch with them whenever he had something to tell them. But Tim … well, he’d never learned to say no to them. When he showed potential in the compulsory music lessons they’d paid for, they ploughed in more and put him through the best training a bottomless bank account could buy.
Trouble was, it wasn’t as bottomless as they’d thought. The share-market crash of eighty-seven just about wiped them out, and the long recession did the rest. They weren’t out on the streets or anything, but they couldn’t afford things like they used to. Tim stayed at the Con, but only by working as an accompanist to soloists.
Like Chrissie, for example.
That was how they met, and I think she was the best thing that could have happened to him. She loosened him up. Showed him how the other ninety-nine percent lived. She was part den-mother, part big sister, and I guess part lover—even if they never kissed, except to say goodnight.
And she taught him how to rock. To the horror of his parents, and the delight of Max Parnell.
So there we were: Chrissie, Tim and me. Three musical schizophrenics. A rhythm-section without a drummer, a band without a lead-singer. We could all hold a tune — enough to sing the harmony line and the back-up, at least. But out front?
Say what you like, the lead-singer is the image, and the image is what sells — even if the music is rock-solid. How far would the Stones have got if Jagger had taken up … interior decorating?
And even the right image needs rhythm. With Chrissie we had half our “engine-room”, but she couldn’t drive us on her own.
Asturias Page 4
