Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  ‘Why do I have to stay?’ Debbie bit the inside of her cheek hard. Now the tears wanted to come; now she wanted to cry like a frightened four year old. Please, let me out, she wanted to plead. Please set me free. Instead: ‘What more do you want to say to me?’

  He hadn’t left his fly unzipped by accident. He reached in and tenderly pulled out his lump of cock.

  ‘Well, the other thing left to tell you is that just by looking at you, I’m getting hard again.’

  XXVI

  What sins did I commit when I was alive? I did plenty of bad things and if I did anything good there should have been more. The worst bad thing – this. I listened to Debbie Canova and didn’t call the police.

  I knew something had happened. The Xodus inductees had gone and Debbie was dropped off by a taxi, something we couldn’t afford. She came in shaking. Her mascara had run and though it looked like she’d tried to clean it up some was still smeared across a white cheek. She didn’t fall into my arms, but went straight for the shower. Soon, steam filled the bathroom. That water must have been about as hot as a human body could take it. I watched her through the steam, washing endlessly, scrubbing hard as if to censure her own skin. She emerged pale and shaky. It took a lot to get the story out of her, but as she made herself do it she stopped trembling. Colour returned to her flesh. Coldly and dispassionately, she explained what Iron John did to her. Her words were like slow footsteps that you had to follow: we start here and we end there, and it’s a place like Hell. There was nothing cold and dispassionate in me. My eyes, my skin were on fire.

  She took me in. ‘Max, I don’t need another animal in my face.’

  Her voice was quiet, but her gaze pierced me. I pulled myself together, though I wanted to hurl things across the room. She huddled in on herself, but even so she kept talking, thinking it through – and the reasoning in what she had to say was clinical in its analysis and as cruel as a needle in a vein.

  How was it a rape? she asked. After the smoke and drink, she’d let him do it to her again, in the normal place. She’d made him withdraw just as he came; he shot into her wispy pubic hair. Finally that was enough even for Iron John’s long-withheld passion. He was done; he gave her the taxi fare home.

  I was listening hard, but despite my act I hadn’t calmed down. I hid the fact of my burning blood. I wanted to look after her and make her better, but most of all I wanted to see Iron John suffering agonies that I made for him. The robotic cool of Debbie Canova’s voice, the way she told me the thing was finished and over, and I’d better make myself forget about it, well these were things that just shredded my insides.

  She said, ‘Don’t try to make it worse, Max. I’m begging, please. Let it be through. Just hold me. What will make me feel better is to go to sleep, then one day soon we’ll talk about where we’re going to go and what we’re going to do, because I’m not staying here, and there is no more band and maybe no more music, okay, do you understand that?’

  Then that icy resolve was cut by a single hot tear that ran down from her right eye.

  ‘This isn’t going to haunt me. There’s always a new life waiting when the old one’s over. And this one’s over and everything about it is done. All right, Max? All right?’

  I nodded, but it wasn’t. Nothing was over, nothing was done. I was listening to her, but only heard the voice in my heart that wanted hate and more hate. We drank some whisky and she fell asleep. That was the moment a sensible man would have rung the police. Let the law handle such matters. No. I drank another shot, then drained the bottle while Debbie Canova’s body trembled against me. I’d seen three circles of bruising in her abdomen. Iron John’s fist. Thanks to the bottle sometime later I lost consciousness too, but my last thought was, I’m gonna get Iron John, that bastard – you bastard.

  Because here you are.

  The speechifying and the eulogising haven’t started yet, so he’s not late, not technically, but who would blame him if he was a little tardy, because he moves slow as a snail, gasping, stuttering along with a walking frame and his eldest son to help him. So many years later and he’s remembered me, of course he has, who wouldn’t remember the one who put you into premature old age? His pastime these days is checking newspaper obituary columns. How nice for him to have finally found my name there, ahead of his.

  I stayed with Debbie Canova, John. I stayed with her day-in, day-out for two weeks. No doctor, no medicines, no outside help at all. She went into a rage whenever I suggested any of these things. Quiet was what she wanted. To be left alone. I imagined sexual disease and her insides ruined. I watched those bruises grow darker as if they were getting black all the way through her. I wiped blood from her anus, not sleeping at night for worrying about what you tore inside her and how would she ever be the same? When she wanted to be held I held her and when she couldn’t stand human contact I sat in the next room, in case I was called back again.

  One day she was a little less inclined to keep staring into the dark corners of the house. That was good. That was the day I could make an excuse. Told Debbie a half-truth: I needed to go out and rehearse with a band I was soon meant to play a few dates with. It was strictly fill-in work, a chance for some cash in the hand. The band’s drummer was in hospital getting bone spurs taken off his knees, and I hated their style of bullshit synth-pop-rock anyway. 1981, that’s what it was all about. The rehearsal would take a few hours, but I told her I’d need to be away most of the day.

  With plenty of time to think about it, I’d already found what I was going to bring with me. Amongst the dusty tools and garden paraphernalia left under the house there was a mattock with a broken head. Just right for you, Iron John. I used a hammer to separate the tool head from the handle, which was a little splintered in the middle, but still good enough. The swing of it was true, close to what the swing of a baseball bat must be like.

  Debbie didn’t see me drive away. She was at the kitchen table looking at road maps, planning by which route her new life would start. Maybe it would be our new life, but I wasn’t so sure; a distance had grown between us as vast as a desert. Whenever I tried to speak with her she seemed even more absent. It was as if she was withdrawing into her own world where she was safe. On the outside she was almost totally inert, but on the inside the rape, violence and fear ate at her; I know that. If I’d understood the first thing about matters people take for granted today, like support groups, say, or therapy, I would have gone looking for them – but in those days I knew just about nothing about anything. I was a drummer. A useless drummer. You were a man of the world, Mr Iron John, but the wider world outside of my life was a mystery to me.

  What wasn’t a mystery was this: what you inflicted on Debbie tore her apart, but what made the emotional wound so deep was the way she’d been betrayed by her twin. Or her hope of a twin. That was you, you old fool. You were the person she’d been looking for all her life, not me, not Tony, not Phil or any other man. You were the perfect other side of her coin, the one who could free both her and her music. Didn’t you understand that? Couldn’t you have lived with that? Why wasn’t it enough?

  Let me watch you suffer a little, old man.

  Iron John comes down the centre aisle with the heavy clump and thump of a new septuagenarian who has already endured three hip operations, each of variable success. His son, Tom, a fortysomething who couldn’t care less about music in any form, wishes his father hadn’t chosen to come to another old fart’s funeral. There have been plenty he’s had to escort his dad to, each occasion more mind-numbing than the last. Tom helps him get to an available pew. It’s Tony Lester who slides over and makes room. Neither man so much as glances at the other; even if they had, there wouldn’t have been much opportunity for recognition. Iron John doesn’t look anything like Iron John, and the inconsequential singer of Manoeuvres is less than a memory in the old man’s head; added to which, of course, Tony never even had the chance to know about what this ancient and legendary figure from rock music’s antediluvian
times did to Debbie Canova.

  Once Thomas Tempest has Iron John’s brittle and bony backside down, he parks the walking frame beside the pew and goes to stand at the back of the chapel. There, he sighs at the thought of having to endure Pink Floyd all over again.

  Meanwhile, Iron John stares at my coffin with eyes made hard and small by age. His face is deeply lined, it’s a worsted leather, and there’s no sign anywhere of the untamed grey hair that used to be his trademark. Even his eyebrows are gone. He is wizened and full of hate, as if he has eaten himself up from the inside. He can’t look at anything, but the polished finish of my coffin.

  He sees that day one more time and as I tighten my grip on his odious thoughts so do I.

  It went like this: yet again, Sammy, this seventeen-year-old, lead-fingered guitarist out of a band Iron John was recording, called Devil’s Tail or something like it, had fluffed the lead guitar break of the last track they were working on. Iron John’s temper exploded and he threw the band into the alleyway where they could smoke their joints and be out of his plentiful hair. While they were gone he told the engineer to roll the master tape. Iron John sealed himself behind the sound-proof doors of the studio, plugged little Sammy’s hand-me-down Gibson into the bass player’s amp so the SG could get a little more throaty bottom, perched himself in a stool by the microphones, and, on cue, nailed the wailing, growling, twenty-three-second lead break that had been driving Sammy and everyone else crazy.

  Through the glass, the engineer gave him a grin and a double thumb’s-up. Perfectly done. Iron John unsealed the door, returned to the desk, and mixed volumes, mixed instrument positions, then sent Jimmy into the alley to call the boys in.

  ‘We managed to splice three of Sam’s solos,’ he lied. ‘I think I might have got the effect you’ve been wanting.’

  The engineer rolled the new master of the song while Iron John went into the alley to smoke.

  I shut the door behind me, he thinks now. I didn’t want to hear that fucking song one more time. That was my mistake.

  Iron John brings a trembling hand to his hard little eyes. In his hand is a white handkerchief, the type he always has to carry. He has to carry it because, just as his lower plumbing is not what it used to be, his eyes leak incessantly. There’s nothing any doctor can do to help him. While what’s left of Iron John curses my corpse – ‘I hope the worms eat your eyes first, your hateful fucking eyes’ – others in the chapel are tremendously moved to see this old man openly grieving the loss of someone who must have been a great friend.

  Fuck it, he remembers, I shut that door. Stupid me. I leaned outside and wondered if I really wanted to ever record another miserable little band like this again. One more bad group of so-called musicians blowing one more otherwise good recording session would just drive me nuts. So long since I made a hit. Time to sell the business, the studio, that’s what I was thinking. Since the girl, Debbie Canova, nothing had much taste left, anyway. Nothing had any sizzle or spice. My life went cold the moment I let her leave my office. And in my office, when I was on the rug with her and saw that soft pussy, and rammed into it with my iron cock, I wonder, did she come? Then the other way. Did she? She must have. DC, I must have made you come. You remember that little fact, wherever you are now.

  Then, in the polish of mahogany, the old man Iron John sees how the younger Iron John lit his cigarette, took a drag, looked up to the corner of the alley where it met with the next, and saw his avenging angel coming.

  He was on me in a flash. I fell under the blows. What was it, an axe handle or something? I don’t exactly remember the pain, but I’ll never forget the crunching and cracking sounds my own bones made. He worked on my arms and my legs, but the worst of it was on my hips, both of them. He attacked them like a madman. With those big arms he really did some damage. Fucking drummer.

  I remember I asked for mercy. His mercy, if he had any, was that he didn’t bring that thing he was swinging down on my head. That would have killed me, but what he did to me, mostly that killed me anyway.

  Then, fast as the cunt arrived he was gone, and the band fell into the alley grinning like loons because they loved the magic I made in their recording, and so they loved me, Iron John, yet another rock band’s hero and guru. Little Sammy was grinning to split his spleen: he thought he’d actually made the leap from bum to rock-God guitarist – but the kid looked up the alley and he saw a crumpled heap of a man and that broken thing was me.

  They all rushed over. What happened? Who did this to you?

  I don’t know, I told them, pain whistling through my teeth. Some crazy, never saw him before. Black like the ace of spades. A boong after my money. What else could I have said? That drummer, boyfriend of Debbie’s, he would have told the police exactly why he decided to do this. So I stuck to my story. I went away to recover, but I never really did.

  Now Iron John addresses himself directly to my coffin: ‘I never really did recover, Max, except for one thing. I’m still here on Earth and there you are in Hell.’

  Then Iron John stops himself as the Pink Floyd music fades and a bearded man I’ve never seen before emerges from the back room. This man makes a small production of coming reverentially to the side of my coffin, where he bows his head over the lid. I look up at him. He closes his green eyes in what everyone will think is silent prayer, but is really the well-practised move of a thorough professional. The eulogy he’s prepared for me, a complete stranger, is folded in his coat.

  I turn my attention back to Iron John. Seeing nothing of the present but everything of the past, bent and frail in his pew, he says inwardly, I raped her.

  It’s the first time these words have ever coalesced and meant something. For a moment he’s as injured as if he stepped on a nail. A moment of clarity. But, but why am I thinking like this, he wonders. Another fucking funeral and this one for the cunt who half-killed me, and instead of feeling good I feel like the eye of God is looking into me. The eye of God, or the eye of—

  No, no, no. I’m crazy. The eye of nothing. There’s fuck-all out there. You die and you’re dust and everything you were stops like a dog dead in a ditch. The only eye is my eye. Max is gone. That drummer is dead.

  But why do I feel like he’s still watching me?

  XXVII

  My celebrant’s name is Buddy. His eyes remain closed in impersonation of prayer, but what this man is thinking is what will he say in ninety minutes or so when he faces the headmistress of his teenager daughter’s Christian-values school? The headmistress will ask him to explain why Kelley has been selling marijuana to her fellow students. He knows he will bow his head as reverentially as he is doing now, but he also knows that, inside, he will be fuming.

  I say to him, Come on, tell that headmistress the reason your sixteen-year-old daughter has been selling MJ is because she’s ferociously alive and utterly bored by the tight-assed aesthetic of your tight-assed school. And add, if it feels good, You stupid bitch.

  A flicker of a smile crosses Buddy’s lips and he has to try hard to suppress it. This thought that just crossed his mind, courtesy of me, is deeply rewarding. He’d love to say all of it. Indeed, why not? The divorce agreement might have established that he doesn’t have a voice in what school Kelley attends, but nowhere does it say he can’t tell that school what he thinks of it.

  If we lived in a free and loving society, he rehearses, you wouldn’t get your knickers all sweaty because of something every kid does. And anyway, it’s my fault. The girl found my stash and decided to make some money.

  He doesn’t quite know why, but this does happen sometimes; sometimes he leans over the coffin of a stranger, as he’s doing now, in preparation for delivering the eulogy, and a warm wave of love grows inside him for this person about to be buried.

  They’re talking to you, that’s why, Buddy.

  He waits another moment so that the congregation will see that he’s not rushing. Buddy Bettridge has been in this burying game a long time. Even his ex-wife now works f
or a rival firm. Ah well. He gives a nod over the coffin lid, nose close to the flowers, and as he walks to the podium he reaches into his coat for his notes. However, always a true professional, he’s memorised what to say to the bereaved about me. In front of a mirror at home, for an hour before bed, that’s his way. To not be prepared would be to not care, and he does care, this burying business keeps his debts paid.

  Buddy has a neat, full beard. I hate neat full beards, but he seems a decent-enough guy. He turns his head away from the microphone, politely clears his throat, and leans in.

  Buddy speaks, but I hear Debbie Canova’s voice as she says, ‘I know it was you, Max. What is it with men? To destroy, only to destroy. Did you think I’d thank you? Did you think I’d be proud of you?’

  XXVIII

  Debbie Canova found out about what happened to Iron John two days later when it made the six p.m. news.

  She was waiting for me on the couch, curled in on herself. I’d been stacking shelves in the supermarket, starting at eleven p.m. It was now four-fifteen a.m. No suppers prepared any more, no fresh sheets on the bed and the coverlet turned back, no love falling like rain. I expected her to be fast asleep, but there she was in the living room. An ominous weight settled on my shoulders as soon as I entered the house. That day all those years back when he’d been in his worst rage at me, Conny San Filippo had been waiting in just the same way.

  Her hair was no longer white, no longer honey-blonde, no longer even the mousy brown it became when her colouring started fading. It was dyed inky black, like fake raven’s feathers. The texture of a night sky when there’s no moon to see. I crouched in front of her, took her hand and with the other brushed away lank strands of that unfamiliar hair. It was like looking at someone who wasn’t quite Debbie Canova. Her face was pasty and her breath was sour. The blue seemed to have washed out of her eyes.