Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  I know all this because you’re sitting in this chapel, aren’t you, Concetto San Filippo, sitting in the third row amongst these mourners. I’m so happy to see you again, and, but for the music of Pink Floyd, I know you’re just as happy to be here too.

  Salvi, old friend. That’s what you taught me to say. Ciao, bel’amico, it’s so good to see you.

  XVII

  We hadn’t forgotten her, but we never expected to see Debbie Canova again. Despite this, she re-entered our lives before 1980 was out, nearly ten months after we’d abandoned our tour.

  Christmas was coming and things were going downhill. Pete Kelley had re-enrolled at university to finish a science degree and wasn’t inclined to practise or turn up to gigs that didn’t pay good money. No one paid good money. Our bass player, Joe Whitehead, shaved his head and went to live in a small Baha’i commune on the New South Wales coast. We barely played outside the practice room any more and sometimes Manoeuvres was just Tony and me under my house, him now on electric guitar as we tried out his new songs.

  Do you remember all this? I ask as he sits waiting like everyone else for the music to fade down. Any moment the celebrant will tell them what a good man has been lost, but if we will hold him in our hearts, and remember him and his times, he will never really be gone.

  Tony shifts in his seat. My question pricks at him. At that time, we were in a pit of despair all right, but one day Tony opened the front door of his little rented workers’ cottage and who should be there but Debbie Canova, violin and bow in hand.

  ‘Have you got fifty dollars?’ she murmured, her head lost in another world. ‘If you’ve got fifty dollars you can treat me like a whore, I’ll let you do anything you want to me.’

  Then she fainted.

  XVIII

  I’ve been inside two brothels in my time. The first visit occurred when I was eighteen and with Tony Lester, the next time I was alone.

  My aunt was gone, but Conny was still alive. Tony hadn’t joined the band yet. I don’t know why the eighteen-year-old me got it into his head to go out and pay for sex. The good year before had mostly been about Maree Kilmister and after she dumped me I wasn’t heartbroken enough to avoid a few very nice dalliances with other girls. Everything should have been okay, but it wasn’t. This night was a bad night and I was out with Tony, and the two of us were in a mood, the sort of half-foul, half-confused mood that afflicts boys when they’re on the town and don’t know what to do or who to do it with. My three-piece band was playing heavy rock standards in pubs, but by day we’d started dallying with the idea of going progressive – and we tried out tunes by The Nice, Tangerine Dream and, yes, Pink Floyd, all in the hope of discovering some real spark in ourselves, some absolute direction forward. I couldn’t have imagined that direction was standing right next to me.

  Tony and I blew what little cash we had on drinks in a big club where three live bands a night played. No one danced to any of them. Between their sets a DJ spun the sort of sugary tunes that were featuring on the ‘Countdown’ TV show and in pop magazines: here John Paul Young, Sherbert and ABBA reigned supreme. Whenever any of them or their ilk came through the PA the crowd went wild. It must have driven those poor musicians nuts to see their audience sticking to the bar or their tables until some over-produced gloss had everyone up and dancing.

  The place was a pseudo-trendy hole and its patrons a bunch of jerks, and to piss people off and get ourselves drunk we whisked away the expensive mixed drinks left at tables while people danced. A big group of guys cottoned on to what we were doing and wanted to smash our faces. Tony always had a gift for soothing tempers. We got away, but didn’t have a single dollar left in our pockets. Even if ATM machines had been invented then, there wouldn’t have been any money in either of our accounts. There was nowhere to go that didn’t involve a cover charge, then, just like that, as we were walking through a darkened car park I spotted a crumpled note lying next to a crumpled handkerchief.

  Fifty dollars.

  Someone’s too drunk, sneezes, reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief, but his nerveless hands won’t work. The result; a loss becomes a gift. The pseudo-trendy bar had put us in foul spirits. A red light across the way flashed everything we needed to know. The woman who opened the door was short and dumpy, but had a pretty face and a cute lisp. She managed to make the Bill of Fare sound more attractive than it was. Something like fifteen dollars for topless hand relief, eighteen dollars for topless oral relief, and twenty-five dollars for a bit of both plus a ride in the missionary position. Other positions escalated in price but we told her to stop there.

  Tony picked her. I don’t recall choosing, but a tall woman in a wrap-around skirt soon entered the cubicle I was waiting in and pulled off her blouse. She finished smoking a cigarette as I got out of my clothes.

  ‘Bad night about to get better, Honey?’ she asked.

  I felt like she was talking to the wall. She would have spoken that line a thousand times. When I asked her how her evening was, she didn’t answer. When I told her she had nice breasts, she was opening a bottle of baby oil and didn’t do much more than nod.

  ‘Are your hands cold?’ she asked. I told her I didn’t think they were, and she said, ‘All right, you can touch my tits while I jerk you a bit. If you come straightaway, you don’t get any money back.’

  She poured some oil onto me and got to work. Her labour was as automatic as her speech. She wanted me to come fast, so she could have the full amount of pay without having to do the rest. That woman tugged away as if my prick was a root in the ground that needed to be torn out of the earth. I wouldn’t let myself come; I watched the way she worked with increasingly grim determination. Her breasts swayed to the firm movement of her arm. I think I started to feel sorry for her.

  ‘Do you mind your job?’ I asked. She was surprised that I’d ask something like that, instead of the more usual, Use your mouth, or, Open your legs now.

  She eased off a little, started to caress me with a gentleness that years of work had not completely extinguished. ‘I like some of the older men who come in,’ she said, thinking it over. ‘They always smell a bit funny, like something wet and musty, but with them I guess I feel like I’m doing something sort of worthwhile. That makes me feel good.’

  I wondered if my mother had ever felt that way. That she was doing good for others. I almost wanted to ask this woman if she’d known her.

  She was careful now, using the tips of her fingers, running them up and down like a flower opening and closing. She wasn’t resorting to brute force any more. The oil was okay. That was when I really did feel sorry for her, felt like I wanted to save her a little trouble.

  ‘I’m going to come now,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Sure you want to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I could hear voices in the adjoining room. A bunch of guys waiting after about as bad a night as Tony and I had had. Ready to switch their night from fucked to doing some fucking. Their leering bravado seeped into the cubicle.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But when you blow don’t make too much noise.’

  I said, ‘Do old men make much noise?’

  She sort of laughed, but was half-serious when she whispered, ‘They do, especially if they’re a little deaf. Then it’s like you’re killing them.’

  I did as she asked, was silent as a dying sparrow. She said, ‘You’re a nice kid,’ and left me with tissues, a towel and a key to the shower room at the back.

  Later, Tony caught up with me in the street. We both smelled of rose-scented soap. He’d done just about the same: paid for the full treatment but in the end had been happy to spurt into his woman’s fist. Waste of money, we agreed, both surprised at our lack of enthusiasm for getting our money’s worth. Well, it was someone else’s money anyway. I felt okay. I thought, One day when I’m old and I smell like wet rugs and blankets, maybe there’ll be a woman somewhere who’ll feel good to make my life easier too.

  I hoped I’d be
deaf by then. It’d be good to be like a grizzled lion, still roaring.

  XIX

  So, I don’t know what came over Debbie Canova to make her stand at Tony’s door and tell him something like that.

  Tony can see her now just as she was that day. He’s staring at my coffin and in the wood-panelled gloss there’s the full picture of her: Debbie in a cheesecloth shirt she should have changed three days ago, and a dirty gypsy skirt frayed around the edges, and her feet bare and black with broken toenails, remnants of pink polish on them. He remembers Debbie’s small weight as he caught her in just the way some Thirties movie hero might have caught a fainting starlet. No real hero this boy, he looked up and down the street, not to see if the neighbours were sizing the situation up, but to see whether the husband was ten paces behind. Because if Debbie Canova had been Tony’s escaping wife, ten paces behind would be exactly where you’d find him.

  He carries her inside and he places her onto his couch. She opens her eyes.

  ‘Do you remember me?’

  ‘Sure,’ he tells her. ‘Nice of you to drop by.’

  ‘Good to see you again too.’

  ‘How did you find me?

  ‘Telephone book.’

  ‘And how did you get here?’ Trucks, she tells him. Despite the warnings police gave, it was still the days of easy hitch-hiking, when you could get wherever you wanted to go by power of your thumb alone. ‘So what’s this about some money I’m supposed to give you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answers, and though he looks for it there’s no subterfuge that Tony can detect.

  Debbie Canova is filthy and pallid. She looks like a road rat, a truckie’s wet dream, a biker’s moll or a rock band groupie thrown out of some travelling van to make her own way home. What worries Tony is how vague she seems, how starved. Should he give her a bite to eat or call a doctor? What also bothers him is the husband, because despite the fact that so much time has passed since he first met her, who would forget hearing about a very large plumber with two giant hands? Ten paces behind, or ten thousand kilometres, sooner or later Phil Canova could be at the door – and the one thing Tony learned in stir to fear most is the personal violence of other men.

  ‘When did you last eat?’ In reply she shakes her head as if there’s no such thing as food, nutrition or consumption. ‘Water maybe?’ He gets her a small glass half-filled, thinking of the word ‘thimble’. When lost sailors were dragged out of the sea, crazy with heat, hunger and above all else thirst, didn’t the captain or the ship’s doctor always only allow a thimble-full of water? What Boy’s Own volume had he read that in – and who carries a thimble with them anyway?

  Debbie sits up, drinks and wants more. He brings her another. She wants more again so he brings her a carafe, unsure if he’s killing her. So then something to eat is what she wants and he makes her a white bread ham-and-cheese sandwich. When he gives it to her on a cracked plate handed down from his late grandmother’s English crockery collection, she turns up her nose and pushes it away. One, she would not eat white bread on pain of death, and, two, she will never again consume something that has known the pain of death. In her new incarnation as a free woman she can finally be who she’s always wanted to be. Now, first and foremost, she is an animal lover, so naturally enough, she’s a herbivore, a vegetarian.

  She stretches out on the couch and closes her eyes. Tony goes to make her something more palatable. He thinks of mung beans and green tea, and in his mind mixes up alfalfa sprouts with brussels sprouts, legumes he knows only tangentially. When he returns with crackers, cheese and milk – cow’s milk – he wonders if she will have a reason to find these offensive. She’s asleep anyway. He carefully closes the curtains. It’s ten in the morning and the sun is already eating up the lawns, applying a blow torch to the tin roof and the sides of the house. He sets up the electric fan from his bedroom and turns it low so that its breeze travels very lightly over Debbie Canova’s face and torso. Her clothes ripple; he would love to get her out of them.

  Now at least he can relax a little and get a good look at her. Stretched out on his couch, he sees she’s as he remembers her, slender but strong, and not exactly a stick figure because there’s some good meat on her bones – even for the new non-carnivore she says she is. In repose her hands rest lightly on her belly, the fingers sinewy. Her violin has attended to that. He can’t help looking at the fingernails of her hands; the one with the nails cut back to the quick and the other with nails as strong and elegant as a courtesan’s. Then there’s that pinkish love-bite on her throat, courtesy of her violin. More than anything he would love to press his lips to that spot.

  Debbie’s face is relaxed, but is as dirty as a potato. So are her arms, not to mention her feet, which really don’t reveal any white skin. Her neck is sticky with grime and perspiration. Tony eases closer to inspect the smoothness of her cheeks and the fullness of her breasts under her filthy peasant blouse. Her lips are parted, as sensual and red as the first time he met her. He thinks that even asleep, in exhaustion, she exudes the same fever of sex that aroused every male in Thornberry. Tony would like to slide his hand up between her thighs, feel the coolness of her skin before what he imagines will be the warm pulsing of her pussy. His prick is becoming very hard. He’d like to wash her clean all over, would like to do it with the application of soap, a cloth and his tongue.

  If you’ve got fifty dollars you can treat me like a whore, I’ll let you do anything you want to me.

  How does a girl come up with a line like that? Tony has to go lock himself into the toilet. He jerks himself hard and fast, coming into wadded toilet paper while thinking of Debbie’s sleeping face. He leans with his forehead against the wall, catching his breath, barely able to clean himself up.

  He’s got no answer for why she’s here. He assumes she’s run away from Phil the plumber, has left her home in Thornberry, but why did she decide to come to him? They had a few hours together, an interlude on a mossy bank by a river, and now ten months have passed and here she is. Debbie must have realised that she could have found him at home with a girlfriend or a wife by now, even a kid on the way. So what’s this about? Is this a sidetrack along the route of some longer journey or does she think his home is her actual destination? Tony shakes his head and can’t figure it out. That night he did ask her to leave everything behind and come with him. But it took her this long to decide she would? The fact is she’s dirty, broke and alone. Tony wonders if maybe she just needs money. Fifty dollars could only be the start. If so, he knows he’ll give her every cent she wants.

  Shit, to be such a sucker, he tells himself.

  He checks on her. Her slumber is so heavy he can see it would take something like an earthquake to wake her. So after twenty minutes of staring he drags himself away. He sits at the kitchen table and composes three short poems that he knows would be badly written for a fifteen year old; he searches for one or two lines that might be worth using in a song. Nothing. There’s even a moon—June rhyme. Since returning from our country trip it’s been exactly like this; he knows he’s as empty as a witch’s teats.

  He flushes the toilet and checks on his guest, willing her to wake up. She doesn’t so he goes and sits in the shade of the back step, where he tunes his guitar and tries to create something that might be the romantic musical equivalent of Debbie Canova. There’s no rush, she’s out like a light and it’s probably better that she gets some sleep. The hot day shimmers and the inflated Santas and reindeer on the roofs of his neighbours’ houses all look wilted and tired. What a fucking summer, he thinks, but within an hour he’s forgotten the heat that keeps de-tuning his strings and has found a chord progression he likes. Against a doorstep his foot taps the beat. There are seven chords that he intermixes, sometimes reconfiguring them into a backward progression. A nice little bit of linking lead guitar here and here, not bad. There’s an obvious melody line so he hums it, then starts pushing and stretching it, looking for the really unique melody inside this music,
something that will make it memorable. He likes what he’s doing so much he doesn’t hear Debbie Canova behind him.

  She listens, then returns to the living room for her violin. With several expert plucks she checks its tuning, makes adjustments and returns.

  The violin’s scratchy tones catch Tony by surprise. Debbie has picked up the melody he’s been half-humming, half-whistling and she’s sticking with her instrument’s deep, thick strings, giving the music real resonance; Tony could almost call it profundity. She accompanies his playing for a while then takes over.

  ‘Drop that chord there, I don’t know what it’s called. And that one. Add something like it here, but sweeter. Then this nice turnaround here, can you do that?’

  Tony tries and soon gets the hang of it.

  ‘Good, now keep this rhythm,’ she says, marking the new beat with her bare, black foot. ‘No, like this.’ Her foot stamps more urgently. Tony gives it his best and even warbles a few of those bad couplets he composed at the kitchen table, but what Debbie Canova wants for the part and expects out of him is more than he can handle. His compositions might be idiosyncratic, but when he meets someone musically his better he just doesn’t know how to follow. His guitar playing falls apart and he feels like he’s a threelegged dog trying to keep up with a greyhound.

  Tony gives up while Debbie Canova’s bow flies on its own wings. The bassy notes pour out, more Shostakovich than Tony Lester. It’s nothing like what he’d started out with. Debbie Canova brings it all to a peak, but the magic’s gone and that’s it. She smiles at him anyway. It’ll be better next time around, huh?

  XX

  He’s kneeling beside the bath and while he soaps her back and takes in how good she looks naked and wet, she tells him she hitched for three days, maybe four. In fact, it could even have been five or six. The route to here hadn’t been particularly direct. Bruno, the long-distance truck driver who took her most of the way, gave her two blue pills a few hours after he picked her up. They made her lose count of more than just days. He took a few every time he ate. She started joining in, also every time she ate. Or maybe it was more often than that. The world, she says, went funny from there.