Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  Somewhere in the middle of this extended sojourn through the inner-continent we had a school fete coming up. Just the idea of it made us nervous, so nervous, in fact, we turned up a day early. Tony had been on the telephone for weeks, organising all of these gigs with a religious fervour. The thing was, the band had been together nearly four years now and nothing at all had happened. He said, and he was right, that a band that couldn’t get out on the road and take the rough and tumble of the blue highways of this or any other country didn’t deserve to get anywhere. We tried to be full of hope. With the start of the Eighties most of punk and new wave was already gone, moody synth-pop bands were all the rage, and if you made rock music at all you had to have big hair. We didn’t. We still had our straggly Seventies look, but that was our badge of honour. No synthesizers for us, nothing but raw rock-and-roll the way God made it, and certainly no pre-fab image.

  We might as well have shot ourselves.

  For the upcoming kids’ show we hoped there would be more adults than four-to-nine-year-olds, but we all shaved anyway, and pulled our long hair back with elastic bands so that each of us had pretty ponytails. In a laundromat, we used our drinking spare change to wash our clothes. By the time we arrived at the school – a big, government-run place that looked like it had been standing since Settlement – we were behaving so decently and with such respect toward the children, the families, the teachers and the principal, that they all could have been forgiven for mistaking us for some kind of Christian band.

  It was a whole weekend’s fete, and we got there on the Saturday and introduced ourselves, meaning to get ready to play on Sunday. There were going to be three forty-minute shows: at nine and ten in the morning, and one after lunch. We’d never had a booking like it, but the pay was good and we weren’t about to complain. We pictured the entire town turning up; this place was called Thornberry and on our road map it was a half-speck of fly shit in a landscape of Martian red dust. Somehow, though, a river ran through it. Or so the map said.

  Pete Kelley, so solemn and discontented now, was a livewire in those days. In a flash he befriended the maths teacher, seduced her so quickly and easily that they had sex in her car off from the school’s secluded car park even as the principal was putting on ‘meet and greet’ orange cordial and school-made Anzac biscuits for us.

  ‘Is there a lot of money in it?’ the man asked, face as red as a beetroot and his big farmer’s hands serving us our sticky drinks, ‘Playing for the kids? There must be a lot of work in schools for the band, huh?’

  ‘Well, it’s not what we concentrate on,’ Tony replied.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘When do the girls arrive?’

  ‘The girls?’

  ‘The girls in the band.’

  ‘There aren’t any girls in the band.’

  ‘Are you new to this?’ the principal asked him, his scarlet moon-face still friendly and pleasant. ‘The shows are going to be put on by the girls and their dancers.’

  ‘Umm,’ Tony replied, ‘they’re not.’

  ‘What do you mean they’re not?’

  ‘We’re playing.’

  ‘Who? You?’

  ‘Yes – us.’

  ‘Aren’t you the roadies or whatever you guys are supposed to be called? The set-up crew?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re the band?’ Tony nodded. The principal looked at me and at Joe. ‘You bunch of scruffs?’ He sort of coughed, and I think I saw the redness draining from his face. ‘What sort of a band are you supposed to be?’

  ‘A rock band.’

  ‘Old style? Elvis, Roy Orbison?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ll be playing kiddie stuff here.’

  ‘No. Rock music. We don’t know anything for kids.’

  That was the end of the orange juice and biscuits.

  ‘Son, we’ve got about three hundred four-to-nine-year-olds being bussed in tonight from every mining town and regional school and back-of-beyond black stump in the territory. You better know kiddie music and plenty of it by morning, or things’ll get pretty ugly pretty fast. You follow?’

  How this misunderstanding came to be, no one was the wiser. Tony’s protestations fell on deaf ears. He remembered speaking to someone at the school who asked if the band was prepared to put on a good show three times; when he’d said absolutely, that had been it, deal done.

  Stuck in this situation, we sort of started shitting ourselves. Yes, we could haul out of there fast, but the sheer absurdity of the situation – being stuck in the middle of nowhere, about to be drowning in over-excited children – made us want to see what would happen next. We had a quick conference and decided to go ahead with whatever the school had planned. We were there, we needed the money, and none of us – good-hearted rock-and-roller’s that we were – could even imagine disappointing such an abundance of kids.

  Not our biggest audience ever.

  After all, Tony reasoned, how hard could it really be? We were adept musicians, and could drag out all the poppiest tunes we remembered from when we played in our early bands: Elvis and Roy Orbison if need be. Plus the Beatles, the Bee Gees; even the Seekers or Frank Sinatra if we had to. He’d lead the kids in singa-longs, get them up on their feet and show them easy dance steps, crack some jokes and get parents and teachers on stage to join in. It’d be a piece of cake, maybe even fun too. Tony almost had us believing we could do it; he said we’d spend the night boning up on the old tunes: for one day and one day only, Manoeuvres would be a cover band covering a whole misbegotten world of musical kitsch.

  The most important order of business, then, was to set up.

  In the meantime, Pete returned, a contented smile on his face and him constantly licking on his fingers as if he’d just made a cake. Just as he was about to help us put things together, his new paramour returned with buttered pumpkin scones. One each for the rest of us and about a dozen for him. The pair of lovebirds wandered off; we didn’t see him again until nightfall.

  Some dads had to help Tony, Joe and me rig up a stage. We cursed the fact that no one in the school had stopped to wonder where this band they’d hired would actually play, but we were also relieved we had a day’s grace before we had to perform.

  That was nothing; soon we discovered the real problem. No one had considered what power requirements this band might have, and after a few wasted hours looking for extension leads, and switch and junction boxes, as soon as we were able to plug in our instruments the school’s main switchboard exploded, acrid smoke spiralling up into the forty degree heat, threatening to burn the hundred-year-old structure down. Kids whooped with the thrill of it all, but the volunteer fire brigade, already set up in the school grounds to display their proficiency, got an even better chance to do so. They had things under control long before any damage was done.

  One of the teachers called his uncle, who’d been an electrician. Long retired, this old guy with a bulbous nose turned up, blind in one eye and mostly deaf too. Not to mention lame, so that his granddaughter had to come with him as he struggled along with his cane. She carried his dusty electricians’ gunmetal kit and we stared at her as if we’d never seen a female before.

  I noticed that every father stopped what he was doing. They knew her, but none had gotten used to her. Even the schoolboys in the field went a little crazy, and tried acrobatic and aerial gymnastic tricks and stunts that could only go wrong.

  She was introduced to us as Debbie Canova. The young woman sat by her grandfather as he sweated and muttered and tried to remember little things he used to know about official electrical standards and which wire goes where and for what good reason. He set about rewiring the entire school switchboard. Whenever the old man wheezed for a particular tool, bit of tape, cable or certain-sized screwdriver, she dug in that metal box until she found something that approximated what he’d described, then would slap it down into his gnarled, impatiently trembling palm as if she was his nurse a
nd he a great man of medicine conducting a delicate operation. She knew we boys of the band were thoroughly besotted, so she made the whole tool-slapping-down thing a game, always looking our way with a twinkle in her eye. Nothing would have torn us away.

  If Debbie Canova hadn’t looked quite so horny, hadn’t exuded such a fever of sex from her very pores, we would have laughed at how comical the thing was becoming. The switchboard started to resemble an old pair of jeans covered in patches; Debbie Canova’s grandfather looked like he needed some pills and shade. Instead, band members, fathers, some male teachers and not a few pre-pubescent boys, couldn’t do enough to help the old man – and, by happy extension, his granddaughter – in their heroic quest to save the day.

  She was twenty-two, roughly a year or two younger than the rest of us, and despite her age she looked like she had just enough experience of the world and its ways to know her worth and effect on the masculine tribe surrounding her. On the third finger of her left hand, however, were the killers: one diamond engagement ring plus one plain gold wedding band. The old guy turned out to be her grandfather-in-law and we kept looking around for a husband who never appeared.

  Debbie Canova’s hair was long and straight, dyed white-blonde. Dark roots were showing, but somehow this made her look sexier. Blue eyes and high cheekbones. Suede boots with tassels reached nearly to her knees. Her mini skirt – or maybe an item of apparel so small was called a micro-mini, I don’t know – revealed an entire universe of exquisite legs. Her panties were pink; we kept getting glimpses, and these glimpses froze us in our places. We learned more about electricity in forty-five minutes than any of us had ever known in our lives. Debbie had a loose-fitting, nosleeves sort of cheesecloth shirt on. About a half dozen strings of shiny, coloured beads hung around her neck, and she favoured bright red lipstick and heavy mascara. Pete might have been off with a homely, pot-bellied woman pushing forty, but this Debbie Canova, well, she was something else entirely. Your heart, mind and body ached simply to know you could never have her.

  Finally, the old man was finished, and with a success that verged on the miraculous not only did the reconfigured switchboard work, but it accommodated the needs of the school, the fete, and our instruments, amps and mixing desk, without blowing up again. The weekend’s acknowledged saviour, the school principal took the octogenarian to a tent especially set up for the adults and, over the next few hours, got him as drunk as a lord.

  Debbie Canova had gone to talk to some of the young mothers and older ladies, but as soon as there was a break in the traffic Tony conveniently found himself beside her.

  ‘What do you do for fun around here?’ he asked.

  ‘This is just about it.’

  ‘But what about you?’

  She smiled through long, darkened eyelashes that made butterflies in his belly. He wanted to simply stare past those lashes into her blue, blue eyes, and, if it made her happy, not utter another word.

  ‘Well, I make my own clothes. This whole outfit, including the boots. Sometimes I sell stuff in town, but what I sew a lot of the ladies won’t wear.’ Her eyes travelled over a group of her local sisters clothed in tent dresses. A couple were in overalls. ‘But I’m a musician too, sort of. Self-taught. Out of books but mostly by ear.’

  ‘What’s your instrument?’

  ‘The violin. It got left to me by my aunt. I like composing too.’

  If Tony had ever prayed for the one young woman in this universe whom he wanted to meet, not to mention marry instantaneously, he was beginning to understand that this was her.

  ‘Did you learn properly?’ she asked him. ‘Get your music letters? I’m always jealous of people like that.’

  ‘No, I’m self-taught too. In fact, in this band, I don’t think there’s been a proper lesson between us. Except maybe for Max. He had a stepfather who was a drummer.’

  Her eyes travelled toward me. I was having a cup of black tea with Joe. We were standing in the shade of an elm watching Tony with this country girl who seemed designed for better circumstances than these. Somehow she knew I was the drummer Tony had referred to. She flicked a smile; I felt a hand reach down into my belly and squeeze hard.

  Debbie Canova told Tony that she couldn’t play anything she hadn’t sat down and deciphered bit by bit from some classical record also left by her musical aunt – or that she hadn’t made up herself. She showed him her left hand, how the nails were clipped down to the quick in order to help her play more smoothly, and her right, where in feminine contrast she had five very long and exquisitely manicured fingernails painted a startling pink. Tony wanted to know what exactly she could play on her violin. It turned out that Debbie Canova’s song book was her own memory. What she composed and remembered were the things that must have been good. What she composed and forgot was all the better for evaporating into the ether. Her memory was the only arbiter of taste she trusted.

  ‘It’s your – quality – control,’ he managed to say, already tongue-tied, already conscious of the way his stutter was returning, taking over his chest, throat and brain.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, and the happy lilt in her voice was an instant balm to his anxiety. ‘And the best.’

  ‘Let me – hear some,’ he said.

  He saw the momentary frown; now she was aware there was some faltering there, however, he liked the way she seemed to soften some more, as if she understood that he was suffering. She gave him the full effect of her wide, red-lipped smile.

  ‘But my violin’s not here.’

  At that moment, an unexpected burst of afternoon fireworks in the football field by the school, followed by shouts, yells and scrambling activity, covered the details of the unlikely – unlikely, at least to Tony – agreement they made. Across the grass, the fire wagon raced like the wind. Most of the volunteers were, by now, as drunk as Debbie’s grandfather and the principal, but this was yet another potential conflagration quickly brought to heel.

  Debbie’s husband, Phil Canova, a plumber whom she told Tony – for obvious reasons – stood six foot four in his socks, was going to be out tonight at the local progress association’s future-vision presentation to the Thornberry community. It would take place here at the school and was the big annual event the weekend fete was planned around. Phil was treasurer and minute-taker, and when she mentioned that Debbie sort of giggled, and Tony pictured some behemoth with hands like hams, clutching a pencil in his paw and making indecipherable, scrawling marks that resembled the haphazard strokes of a three year old.

  Once the formal meeting was over, Phil would also be official bartender. Tony couldn’t come to the house, she wouldn’t have that, but Debbie might be able to visit the camping grounds where the band’s truck and Tony’s ute were parked. Every year she was exempt from attending what was, to all intents and purposes, an all-night, mostly male piss-up. So – maybe – she’d come at about eight, with her violin.

  We’d planned to camp for the logical reason that we could not have afforded food, drink and a hotel. Often we slept cramped inside our two vehicles. There was always a choice to be made between sustenance and comfort, and the latter never had the chance to win, young men living, above and beyond all things, on their bellies.

  Pete rolled up as the sun went down, that satisfied smile still on his face. He didn’t need dinner, having been fed all day long. So that night the rest of us got to dine on hamburgers and a bag of fresh carrots, plus a glass of beer per person, no other niceties required. We ate and drank our portions, and waited in the lengthening gloom of the world’s red centre for Debbie Canova to arrive.

  XI

  She turned up before seven-thirty, which should have told Tony how she was as keen to see him as he was to see her. Being early, he hadn’t even had much of a chance to become nervous, that rising stutter receiving no opportunity to grab control of him.

  Debbie Canova drove into the camping ground in an overpowered Ford that she said her husband laboured over with unadulterated affection. She’d drop
ped him off at the fete and when he’d asked about the things she had with her – a casserole dish of pork chops and beans, a six pack of beer, an unopened carton of duty-free cigarettes she’d had stashed since some friend returned from an overseas trip, and three-quarters of a bottle of tequila, not to mention her violin – she told him that she and her girlfriends had planned to do the female equivalent of what he was setting out to do, that is, to eat too much and get blind drunk.

  Phil made her promise not to drive back home; husband and wife would catch up over coffee and breakfast in the morning.

  Now, upon seeing all those goodies of Debbie’s, each member of Manoeuvres was ready to swear eternal devotion on the spot. Maybe we did. Her face was like some renaissance artist’s impression of a celestial being, that long, white-blonde hair tonight pulled back in a ponytail. She said that for one evening she wanted to play with the band, and so had adopted our ponytail look. We laughed and laughed that there was someone innocent enough to believe deadbeats like us would waste a second defining a band ‘look’. Not only that but she’d changed into our ‘uniform’: black boots, jeans and a black t-shirt. Until the moment she said it, it hadn’t crossed any of our minds that we all regularly dressed the same way. Funny thing was she really did look the part, a feminine flipside to this scruffy bunch of long hairs in matching clothes.

  She showed us her violin, a Czechoslovakian model handmade in the Thirties. Her aunt’s mother had played it, then her aunt, now her. We were impressed by her left-hand nails and their absence but were even more transfixed by the red patch resembling a love bite that adorned the left side of her neck. She told us that you could tell just how serious a musician a violinist was simply by checking that part of the neck where their instrument pressed into; by this definition she was serious all right.

  Despite our early dinner of hamburgers and carrots, and Pete’s daytime gourmet-fest, we cleaned the casserole dish the way a pack of dogs would have done. Debbie Canova was gorgeous, sexy, she said she was musical, and now we knew that she could cook. We wondered if there were any more like her in Thorn-berry; if there were, maybe we’d settle here for life, men happy to have discovered their Paradise. We imagined ourselves like those mutineers on the Bounty who found their eternal reward amongst the sun-kissed, wild-haired beauties of Tahiti.