Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  Dream on.

  Soon came the evening’s musical interlude. I had my doubts about how well an untrained violinist would be able to keep up with us. We tuned our acoustic instruments and there wasn’t another soul in these spookily bare camping grounds to hear the music we were about to make. The caretaker had headed off to the school’s activities for the night and there were no campers at all. We had light and power, cold water but not hot, and a toilet and shower block to ourselves.

  Debbie Canova seemed without fear of being alone in a deserted place with a bunch of brutes she didn’t know; instead she took off her boots and planted her feet in the dirt, her white toes curling as if to grip that dirt, and she started to saw delicately at the catgut strings. Within a few bars we knew exactly how good she was. The countryside of wild trees and shrubbery filled with the sort of strange magic you get in European art-house movies but not real life – certainly not your own real life, that’s for sure. Instead of her keeping up with us it was going to be the other way around.

  She said, ‘Listen, this technique is called spiccato, I just love playing like this.’ We listened and watched the way she bounced her bow over multiple strings at a time. ‘This is a double-stop. This one a triple-stop. You like?’

  We liked all right.

  Tony played Pete’s acoustic guitar and Pete went and dug out a half-broken mandolin we used in one of our repertoire’s spacier tunes. Joe had a handmade cardboard box upright bass he used for practice. The neck was a piece of wood from an old kitchen floor, the strings were twine and the tuners were tap spigots. Truly a wonder of invention. I used my fingertips and the heels of my palms to create a shuffle on a snare drum. Without formal training, Debbie Canova’s fingers were as nimble as those of any professional musician I’d ever known, and she wove melody after melody through our quite mundane notes and recycled rock-and-roll chords. The thing was, she was born to be a leader. When Tony had originally taken control of our three-piece we’d been happy to follow and make a new band. Now by virtue of her prowess and the way she assumed command of us, not to mention of the entire moonlit countryside, for one evening at least Debbie Canova created an entirely new musical enterprise. The look in Tony’s face spoke volumes: he was usurped and didn’t mind at all.

  Gradually then, over twenty to thirty minutes, we learned to modulate ourselves and hold back, to not compete against Debbie’s melodies but instead to play counterpoint and the sympathetic backing of them. We learned, really, not to lead – and as soon as she was freed from our rock machine restrictions, Debbie Canova let herself go.

  It was extraordinary, easily the best – even as it seemed the most effortless – music of our careers. By the time we’d exhausted ourselves and Debbie stood dripping with perspiration, but smiling with a light that could have lit that entire camping ground, each of us knew with perfect, painful clarity what we lacked: Tony was good, but he was no genius. Neither were we. Here in Nowhere, though, here we’d stumbled on someone absolutely real.

  Flushed with pleasure, Tony put the six-string aside and said, ‘Let’s go see if we can get some of this down,’ even though he couldn’t write music notation, and, from what she’d told us, neither could she.

  ‘All right,’ Debbie said, ‘I’ll show you our river.’

  So there really was a river through this dirty landscape. That seemed miraculous in itself. Tony took his notepad and there was a blunt pencil behind his ear. Debbie carried what was left of the bottle of tequila. They went off into the night, leaving her violin and bow propped against a chair in the centre of our circle. The rest of us snuffled at the empty casserole dish. We didn’t make any more music. With her gone it was as if our new soul and sound was already out of reach.

  XII

  In the chapel, a minute’s passed, if that. Pink Floyd’s crazy diamond tune is barely part way through. Millionaire developer and finance guru Anthony Lester, in his grey suit and expensive shoes, closes his eyes and nods as he sees himself in his heyday, Debbie Canova telling him, ‘But if you don’t think the band will work, why do you go on with it?’

  Tony was too green to even stammer a worthwhile reply, however, the fifty year old tells her, What was the alternative, Debbie? You had a dream and so did I. Then that’s what you do. The difference was that you had the talent I didn’t. My writing didn’t have the lightness of touch even the heaviest bands need. We had muscle but not sinew. We had heart but not soul. By the end of our tour we knew we were finished too. What’s waiting for boys like us? Office buildings, prefab houses and interminable stories of gonna-be and never-was to tell your kids. The band was as good as it could be, but you, Debbie, couldn’t you have gone on?

  Tony can’t remember it exactly, can’t quite see how the first time with her came to be. The notepad was in the grass and the pencil lost somewhere, and only a few potential lyric-lines had been written down. He saw that the river skirted the camping ground and created moist green glades so unlikely in this wilderness. She led him to a quiet bank. The scent of moss and lichen was very welcome after weeks and weeks of choking in drylands’ dust. In the crescent moon’s gauzy light Tony watched as Debbie Canova took his Levi’s down and started stroking his cock, her touch achingly feminine.

  She didn’t want him to lay a hand on her, not to caress her breasts inside her bra and black t-shirt, or her vulva sweating longingly inside her own pair of jeans. No, she was still too married for that, but she rubbed him smoothly then started to jerk at him with increasingly fierce determination. His prick grew darker and darker in that small fist and her other hand pressed back against his hard lower belly as if she wanted to separate organ from body. And she wouldn’t get any closer, not with her lips, mouth or tongue.

  Tony doesn’t remember the exact sequence of events, though to this day he can still see the intensity of purpose that grew in her blue eyes, and then he was coming, and his shriek was some animal’s that had its heart pierced with an arrow. He spurted again and again into the long grass, great lumps of fear, hurt and pain coming out of him like cancers excised by a surgeon’s knife.

  He managed to gasp these words as his breath returned, Come with me, Debbie, just say to hell with everything and come with me, and she, still at heart a young girl, with enough broken hopes of her own to contend with, answered, Do you mean it? Are you serious?

  Yes. Yes, yes.

  But you don’t know what it’s like to have responsibilities. To be married. How can you ask me something like that?

  They lay back, bodies comfortable in the soft grass even if their souls weren’t. Tony clearly remembers this: he shut his eyes briefly, or so he thought, and when he opened them again she was gone. Alone by a river; a quarter of a moon’s light in his eyes. He trudged back to the campsite, where the rest of us paced disconsolately, unable to sleep. The reason: Debbie Canova had returned long before him. Without a word she’d gathered up her things and driven that hotted-up Ford away at speed. Pete, Joe and I imagined the worst – that somehow Tony had lost control of himself and done something terrible, and we waited, nervous as fish, for him to return from wherever they’d been in the surrounding darkness.

  We saw him coming.

  At first his shape was silhouetted by the crescent moon. He looked like some lumbering monster, then, with a heart-stopping abruptness, he stood out in clear relief. The entire countryside lit up. Headlights flashed, glared and swooped, bringing day to the night of the campsite. I must admit my blood turned cold; the town was arriving to lynch us – what had Tony done to that girl?

  Instead, the brilliant lights came from convoys of buses: it was the audience of four-to-nine-year-olds that the principal had warned us to be musically prepared for. They’d finally arrived from their distant places and they were going to camp in the grounds for the night. Bus after bus after bus; and more buses and more buses and more buses. As they pulled up doors rattled open and children were liberated into the grounds. Over their shrieks and cries were the futile, barked comman
ds of teachers trying to get them into order.

  We hadn’t practised a thing; in the face of these hordes, as one, Pete, Joe and I lost heart. Any misdirected confidence we’d had disappeared in a flash. We turned to our leader.

  In the artificial glaring day, there was a new crease in Tony’s brow. He had his notebook and he stopped in the dirt and tore out the pages, shredding them like a madman. Pieces scattered in the breeze. The pages were almost completely blank anyway. What was left of the book went arcing off into the trees. He had nothing to say; we didn’t even wait till morning. We packed up the truck and the ute and drove out of the camping grounds in our own convoy. Without any of us discussing it, or needing to agree to it, we headed off in the direction of home, more than two thousand kilometres away.

  XIII

  In those days I became haunted by fears I could barely put a finger on. Waking in the dead of night, I’d stumble from room to room asking out loud if anyone was there. Mostly I’d pour myself a drink, sit at the big open picture window and look at the stars floating above the treetops behind my home. Strange things played on my mind, such as, What if my real father suddenly turned up out of the blue and wanted to know me? and, What if this place caught fire in the middle of the night?

  For most of my life, every time some new turn came along that threatened to kick me in the teeth, I moved sideways and simply avoided the blow. I’d never really thought much about that jerk, my progenitor. The idea that there was a man out there, somewhere, who with his prick inside my mother had helped to create me, was an odd but abstract concept. Like knowing there are rings around Saturn, or that the tail of a comet is either Type One or Type Two, and if it’s the former it looks blue and if it’s the latter it’s white or just about pink. If someone told me, Guess what? They made a mistake, there are no rings around Saturn and comets have no tail at all, I would have shrugged and left it at that. If someone said, No, your mother had a divine conception and you have no father other than the Father we all share, I wouldn’t have been too cut.

  So why these small anxieties started to play on me, I never quite put a finger on. I felt it had something to do with the band being on its last legs, the fact that once it was over I’d be useless to anyone, a drummer on his own having to find someone else’s dud band to join. I didn’t have a clue how to write songs or put lyrics together, so I’d be at the behest of others for the rest of my days – and it looked like it was going to be the covers band circuit for me again, plugging into jobs that were as regular and pointless as any nine-to-five grind.

  It wasn’t so much the idea of needing to strike out in a new direction that bothered me, but the fact that failure sat immoveable as a mountain at the end of my road. Years back that co-worker Patti had asked me about my future and I’d shrugged the question off, but now I saw it, the mirage we all start with: everything is limitless and full of potential.

  Loneliness crept inside me. I started fantasising about who my real father was and what he might have been. I started to think about my mother again. I remembered prematurely grey hair that she seldom brushed. It always looked straggly, like dry seaweed. She must rarely have coloured it either because all the grown-up pictures of her in my aunt’s house showed her looking older than her years, which of course she was. Old, stick-thin, grey hair. Hard to imagine anyone willing to pay money to sleep with her, but whenever she hugged me she’d been a woman, a mother, real and dear to me as any ma to any kid.

  Then there were the other photographs.

  In her younger days she was like any child, sort of freckly around the nose, a bit of a gap between the teeth. Big eyes let you know that she believed the world was a good and solid place, full of reliability and achievable dreams. Around the corner there would always be a new glass of lemonade and slice of cake, another nice frock and more days of clean-smelling rain.

  Little kids are so creamy; I looked at mildewed photographs of my mother as a young girl and wondered if I’d ever have children. The signs weren’t good. For all my anxieties about aloneness, for all the little affairs and discreet little fucks I had, most mornings I was in my bed without anyone beside me. Then, more and more, I found myself inviting some of these strangers to stay a little longer, to have coffee and breakfast with me, to talk.

  All that did was make them nervous. So I tried to tell myself that aloneness was what I wanted anyway. It’s something to love, that sort of aloneness – but first you have to love yourself, right?

  Way back, after ma died, on a hot morning maybe a hundred Fahrenheit in the shade, a police car drove me to my aunt’s house. I was an orphan and it was 1965.

  Aunt Emma was waiting at the front door and not too happy about it either. You don’t need to be much more than eight to be able to read the emotions in people’s faces. I barely knew the woman and sort of felt sorry for the way she was getting lumbered with me. Clearly, she would have preferred getting lumbered with a snake, maybe, or a rabid chimpanzee, but I was full of relief. There’d been terrible thoughts in my head, of being sent to a prison or something for not having parents, or to a boys’ home where you slaved on your raw knees scrubbing miles and miles of polished timber floors; then there’d been the more romantic deliberations, such as the possibility of living in the streets like a new super-hero and helping to eradicate all the city’s wild crime even though there wasn’t much around, or escaping to the jungle and living like an animal-boy.

  Instead, there was this safe but mundane option. My auntie. There’d been sixteen years between her and my mother so they’d never been particularly close. That was history now because I was on her doorstep and the thump of a cheap little suitcase said I was ready to stay.

  She showed me a sewing room made into an artificial version of a young boy’s bedroom. Sporting pendants for teams I’d never heard of and would never care for were stuck up on one wall. A leather football that hadn’t been inflated since her own father was a boy sat in a chair. Strangely, a volume about the two great boxing matches between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling was the only book in the small set of white-painted shelves. In my first three months of living there I must have read about the battle between the black man and the Aryan, the American and the German, America versus Germany, fifteen times.

  I didn’t watch much television because auntie didn’t like company spoiling her appreciation of the game shows and laugh-track comedies she consumed liked grapes and cherries. ‘The Lucy Show’ and ‘Theatre Royal’ were her favourites, but Sundays were always for midday’s ‘World Championship Wrestling’, which she watched after coming home from church, her excited frame literally bobbing up and down on the couch as she drank beer and exhorted those muscle-men to kill one another.

  The only times I did get to watch television were when she went out to her local singles club dances, organised by her church and a bunch of spinsters hell-bent on finding suitable husbands for their over-the-hill selves and likewise sisters.

  One night she came home with a Greek named Elias, and I returned to my room, reading yet again about the Nazi being floored by Smokin’ Joe in the very first round, the sweetest revenge any capitalist society ever had over some totalitarian state. In the living room Aunt Emma let herself be wrestled, pawed, manhandled and generally rendered deshabillé by an individual twice her size. He had legs like tree trunks and arms like girders, a head fatter than my now-inflated football and shoulders as square as a concrete wall. I caught her slurping in his lap when I went out for a glass of water, curious, unable to bear the sounds of sighing and groaning any longer.

  Elias looked at me with lazy, dark eyes. Aunt Emma didn’t raise her head; I doubt she even knew I was there. On the coffee table there was a colony of empty bottles of beer. The nights went on like this for three weeks, then he simply was never there again.

  Loneliness followed her the next few years until the night she came home with an Italian, a man whose acquaintance I made over breakfast. He told me his name was ‘Conny’. He gave the rest of it, whi
ch I couldn’t catch because of the thickness of his tongue and the strange lilt he had to his accent. She’d dragged him home sometime after midnight and he sat at the kitchen table nursing what I could see was a massive headache. By then I’d experienced quite a few hangovers myself; only three and a half months earlier my thirteenth birthday passed in a blur of froth-headed drinks taken with my aunt.

  She seemed terribly old, but was a woman only in her midforties. Conny was close to twenty years her senior so seemed thoroughly ancient to me. It was 1970 and he moved in just as autumn’s brown leaves were beginning to fall, bringing with him two ratty suitcases, a broken-down EJ Holden Premier that nonetheless had very swish leather seats, and a drum kit that he put together in the bare open space under the house, by the laundry tubs.

  XIV

  Where Elias the Greek – the only other man I’d seen my aunt with – had been stout as a gnarled hoop pine, Concetto ‘Conny’ San Filippo was slender and elegant, like a lovely sapling. His voice could be so quiet, a whisper that sometimes you had to strain to hear, and often even then you had to think hard in order to decipher his accent and strange word usage. Other times that voice became a real baritone, when he either sang in the bathroom as he shaved and showered or when he raised his voice at Emma or me for transgressions real or imagined. When he shouted his voice didn’t go high, it went deep. In many ways he was a gentleman, a gentle man in an old-world sense, but he had a temper that could make me go hide and Aunt Emma make herself very scarce. He was no visitor in that house either; he took it over like a benevolent lord. She adored having him there.