Fergus McPhail

by David McRobbie

  ‘And what about my drumming, Fergus McPhaii?’ She waits. I imitate Dad’s it-just-came-apart-in-my-hands routine. I sigh and shake my head slowly, make a sad not-my-fault whistle. Sophie drops her eyes and examines her shoes. I have really hurt the girls.

  Angela dismisses me with a ‘tchah’ and shake of her head. She turns away to open Sally. Having sunk this low, I decide to finish myself altogether. I’ll become a legend; in future years, they’ll talk about plain-speaking Fergus McPhail.

  When his wife asked: ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ you know what he said?

  Tell me.

  He said: ‘Huge’.

  ‘And your brother’s big drum’s not what we want either!’ I say. ‘I mean it’s not -’

  ‘Oh.’ With head down, Sophie makes a dramatic slump of her shoulders. She shakes in silent, injured agony. My young life crumbles and falls on the ground. Angela turns the pages of Sally, grimly speed-reading but not taking any of it in.

  Okay, I’m dead meat, but I’m honest dead meat. They can’t take that away from me.

  ‘So, that’s it, then, goodbye.’ I turn away and march off to school, head high.

  ‘Fergus, wait.’ It is Sophie, still with that little catch in her voice. I turn. She has tears in her eyes. Angela has stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth and is going red.

  ‘We’ll come too,’ Angela says, her voice muffled. Then I see that they’re both laughing. Not just a giggle, this is the full belly job. They take my arm, one on each side and we go to school together and people in the street wonder what is this cool guy’s secret that he can keep two beautiful girls amused at the same time.

  ‘You should have seen your face,’ Sophie tells me when she recovers from her amusement. ‘When you saw the big drum.’ Angela sings a bit of Sophie’s duff song:

  When I’m this close to you,

  I don’t know what to do.

  I laugh all the way to school with the girls. I’ll never understand them and don’t think anyone ever will but it’s fun trying to work it all out. The mystery of womanhood.

  At the end of the day, Sophie has made it plain that (a) she can’t play the drums, never could and doesn’t want to and (b) she never intended to be part of our band. But the clincher is (c) - which she tells me as we walk home alone together after school. She likes guys who tell the truth, who speak plainly and don’t varnish the facts. Straight-talking bean-spillers are number one in her book. Give Sophie an earnest, genuine and sincere guy who looks you in the eye and says what’s what, and she’ll purr like a kitten.

  ‘Even if the truth hurts?’ I ask.

  ‘Even if the truth hurts.’ She nods firmly. We walk on. She has Angela’s Sally under her arm. Like a newly emerged butterfly, I try out my truthful wings.

  ‘I reckon that magazine’s crap,’ I say then bend to kiss her but at the last millisecond she turns her cheek, making me miss her lips. Then she’s off up the garden path and slams the front door without looking back. And there wasn’t a purr out of her.

  Bummer!

  There’s more to this story, the tale is not told. I catch up with Lambert and let him know that we are off the hook as far as the crappy songs and Sophie being the drummer are concerned. It was all some sort of female joke-test-assessment thing.

  ‘They were having us on?’ Lambert demands. ‘The dogs!’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I say. ‘But the thing is, they’re dead keen on guys who are honest.’

  With plain-speaking our watch-word, we go to make peace with Mitch. He’s really good on the drums, as we can tell when we approach his place which is a few streets away and across the tram line. It’s an older house, a real home with a front garden, driveway at the side and the garage doors wide open, which is how we can hear Mitch on the drums.

  ‘Hi, guys,’ he says. The drums are in top order, skins dry, no sign of water damage.

  ‘Mitch,’ I start to say then pause and realise I was on the point of inventing a reason why we’d tried to sideline him. But no, this is the new, truthful Fergus McPhail. ‘Mitch, I’m sorry we tried to dump you.’

  ‘We’re sorry,’ Lambert chimes in. ‘Like, really, really sorry.’

  ‘I’m more sorry than Lambert.’

  ‘But I was sorry first.’

  Mitch lets us grovel then beats out a drum roll and ends with a cymbal clash.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he says. He forgives us sidelining him and thinking he’d be uncool, image-wise. It all comes out. We get our guitars, sort out some song ideas and we’re off.

  For the next two weeks, the three of us rehearse every chance we get, working out ideas, trying different approaches. After all our hard work, we end up with two numbers: ‘The Honesty Thing’ and ‘Would I Lie to You!’ Not enough for a night on the dance floor so we’ll have to go for a bit of repetition. We can play them fast for the head-bangers or slow and dreamy for cheek-to-cheek dancing in a low-light situation. We are going to be a two-song hit. Mitch’s dad, who is some sort of technical hi-fi genius, makes a cassette recording of us then produces our two numbers on a CD in living wall-to-wall stereo. I try it out on Jennifer and Senga, without telling them it’s us. My sisters approve.

  ‘Who are they?’ Senga asks.

  ‘A group called The Stainless Steels,’ I tell her. The name was Lambert’s brainchild. I take the CD from the machine and go off whistling, keen to let Sophie hear how good we sound.

  The year ten dance approaches - and so too does summer with its long balmy days which will be full of promise. I hope. The dance is to be on a Friday so there’s no school the next day. We raise the idea of providing live music for the affair. Mr Boddie and Ms Crombie, who are on the organising committee, tell us we’ll need to be auditioned. We’ll be in that, so we set a date and time.

  Then comes a double downer in the shape of Richmond, with Donald not far behind. We’re in class waiting for Mr Boddie to turn up when Richmond announces to everyone that he’s heard we’re hoping to provide live music for the dance.

  ‘And guess what they’re calling themselves?’ he trumpets to anyone who’ll listen. ‘The Chinless Dills.’ Everyone laughs.

  ‘That’s Stainless Steels,’ Lambert corrects. I make a sign with my eyes for him to let it go. The Richmonds of this world can have their chuckles. But a few other guys and some of the girls side with Richmond and think it’s a crazy idea that we should be the music.

  ‘What’s wrong with CDs?’ a girl asks.

  ‘Or a DJ?’ A boy puts in.

  ‘Yeah, who wants amateurs?’ another voice calls out. I look to Sophie for support but she has her head down. Angela is fussing with something in her desk, Richmond senses he has some support. He gets on his feet.

  ‘I reckon we should put it to the vote.’

  ‘Yeah, vote.’ Donald starts waving both arms in the air.

  ‘Show of hands.’ Richmond puts up his own hand and looks around the room. ‘This is to vote for CDs or a DJ. No live music from the Brainless Shrills.’ Other hands go up but Sophie and Angela keep theirs down, joining me and Lambert. It’s a clean sweep, w'e’re voted out. ‘There’s your answer, McPhail,’ Richmond sneers.

  Mr Boddie enters and finds us seething with discontent. He wants to know what’s been going on. We tell him we’ve been voted out.

  ‘Ah, well,’ Mr Boddie says. ‘That’s democracy for you.’ Richmond is smug beyond belief. More than that, he’s decided that he’ll be the DJ for the dance, using CDs.

  ‘They voted for me,’ Richmond goes on. A few kids protest, saying they voted for CDs but Richmond brushes them aside.

  ‘To be fair then,’ Mr Boddie goes on. ‘I think you should audition, Richmond. I mean, The Stainless Steels were willing to face one.’ Richmond huffs and puffs. Audition CDs? We don’t need to. But other students say they’d like to hear what kind of music they’ll be dancing to - and how he’ll present it.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Richmond agrees. ‘I’ll be in it.’ So our
school day starts with Lambert and me fuming at the injustice of the world. I manage to catch Sophie’s eye - after all, she supported us, so that’s something.

  The audition is to be in the gymnasium after school. Lambert and I are all for giving it a swerve but Sophie and Angela are going and want us to be there. We hum and haw, making excuses that we’ve got important stuff to do, like in my case, lying on my bed, hands behind my head, looking at the ceiling and hating the world. I don’t tell her that bit.

  ‘What important things?’ Sophie asks.

  ‘An assignment,’ I lie.

  ‘We haven’t got an assignment.’ She gives me a hard look that can see right through me. She smiles. ‘Don’t be a bad loser, Fergus.’ Okay, so I join the other year tens and show up in the gymnasium. Richmond is already there, cool in a red, spangled jacket and bowler hat. I reckon in that get-up he looks a bit yesterday - but if I said anything it would make me appear bitter and resentful. Richmond has a five-stack CD-player set up with a microphone and flashing lights. He’s already playing a throbbing CD, that has the coloured lights shimmering in time. It’s very professional-looking, I’ll give him that. His mate Donald lurks in the background.

  Mr Boddie and Ms Crombie enter and Richmond turns up the volume. The lights flare in sympathy. A couple of girls start to dance.

  ‘Let’s have it then,’ Ms Crombie says. Richmond gives a nod and tips his bowler hat to her.

  ‘Hi there, nose-pickers,’ he says in a dark brown voice with fake American accent. ‘Here’s some groovy toons to rock your liddle sox off. Yeah!’ He presses a button and the music plays. Richmond chews pretend gum and grooves along but the dancing girls have stopped.

  ‘Nose-pickers?’ one of them says. ‘Who’s he talking to?’

  ‘Yeah, and why the Yank accent?’ But worse than that, the stuff is crap, with a muzak feel to it. You can tell by the frowning faces it’s not going down. The sound is ancient, then some. At least two years’ old.

  ‘Where’d you get that crap?’ a boy demands.

  ‘My folks like it,’ Donald comes from behind to support his mate.

  ‘There you go then,’ the boy says. Everyone starts to slow handclap. Mr Boddie and Ms Crombie hide smiles. Richmond hits the button, the CD changes. This one is even worse. Richmond becomes frantic. He hits the button again and snarls at Donald, but doesn’t realise his microphone is open.

  ‘This music is garbage! What are you doing to me?’ Richmond stops the CD and gets up to have a tense debate with Donald. Sophie goes to the CD-player and fiddles briefly then retreats before Richmond sits again. ‘It’s not all crap,’ he tells us then hits the play button and music tills the gymnasium, a cool sound.

  It’s the Stainless Steels, only no one knows it’s us. ‘Yeah! More like it!’ one of the dancing girls cries and she and her partner take the floor again. Mr Boddie and Ms Crombie nod; they’ve misjudged Richmond. He can sense the changed atmosphere. Sophie has an innocent look on her face and Angela gives me a wink. Lambert is the only one to raise a protest about the music.

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’ he demands.

  ‘This is great stuff,’ Richmond sneers. ‘Just look at them.’’ He points to the dancing girls, to Mr Boddie and Ms Crombie who approve of the music. ‘This is the sound we want. Right guys?’

  ‘Yeah, give it to us!’ people yell.

  I seek out Lambert who now has a happy smile on his face. ‘Lam-bam, will you tell him, or will I?’

  ‘Tell them what?’ Lambert asks. ‘Tell them it’s our music, or tell them we only know two tunes?’

  In the midst of triumph, he can be so defeatist, Lambert.

  A Rare Song to Hear

  As the saying goes, we got the gig; it’ll soon be summer and my first year here is almost over. We’re playing for the year ten dance - now only two weeks away. Going home that afternoon after the audition, Sophie is by my side, congratulating herself on how she slipped our CD into the hi-fi. Angela claims it was really her idea, so we laugh about it, especially the look on Richmond’s face when he found out it was the Stainless Steels he was praising. In a way, it’s almost as if Sophie and Angela feel they own the band. They’re part of us, we’re part of them. But Lambert, who is glooming along with us, doesn’t share the fun. He looks downright miserable.

  ‘Cheer up, Lam-Bam,’ I tell him. ‘We’re gonna be famous.’ At this point, we reach Sophie’s house where we have to part from the girls; Angela’s been invited in for what she calls some girlie stuff. Wish I could be invited in to do some girlie stuff, but that’s how it goes. Lambert and I say ciao and walk on. Thinking he’s doleful about still not getting anywhere with Angela, I try to cheer him up. ‘Lambert, at least she notices you now, not like the old days when you were invisible.’

  ‘So how come she never uses my name?’ he demands. ‘I’m just there, like part of the furniture.’ He walks on for a few paces then kicks at a cola can and misses. ‘But that’s not why I’m depressed.’

  ‘Okay, tell Uncle Fergus.’

  ‘Two songs,’ he says tragically. ‘That’s all we’ve got. Ten minutes, tops. What do we do for the rest of the time?’ I am about to interject when Lambert is off again. ‘Secondly, if we’re playing, when do we get a chance to - you know - dance and stuff?’

  He has a point. There’s a highly secret and confidential check-list in my head showing the things Sophie and I still haven’t done together. It includes not having danced.

  ‘It’s the price all artists pay,’ I tell Lambert. ‘Look at Van Gogh. He gave up an ear for his art.’

  ‘Nobody asked him to,’ Lambert points out. ‘I mean, some art dealer didn’t come along and say: “Vincent, mon ami, whack off un ear and watch your prices skyrocket.”’

  The truth is I hadn’t thought far ahead to realise we wouldn’t be able to dance and play music for the other guys. It was all too exciting, getting the band together and winning the gig, plus

  the hassle of scoring the drum kit. ‘And another thing,’ Lambert growls. ‘That Richmond isn’t gonna take that stuff lying down. Him and Duncan. We’re marked men.’

  ‘So what can they do?’ I scoff.

  ‘Well, for a start they can dance with Sophie and Angela.’ Thud! My face drops. Now it’s my turn to be miserable. So dragging our twin long faces behind us, we trudge home. But on the way Mitch catches up with us.

  ‘Guys, guys, we got the gig!’ His eyes shine with excitement. ‘I heard the news.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Lambert and I agree mechanically.

  ‘And I got more ideas for stuff we can play,’ Mitch goes on. We pounce on him. This is just what we need. Lambert cheers up.

  ‘Where’d you find them?’

  ‘Got them from my gran,’ Mitch tells us. His gran, eh? That is something we didn’t want to hear. I am doubtful and don’t like to use the word, ‘wrinkly’. I search for another.

  ‘She’s like, elderly, right?’

  ‘Seventy-seven plus,’ Mitch tells me. ‘Still going strong.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lambert says. But he manages to hide his heartfelt sigh.

  Mitch takes up his violin, nods to the old woman at the piano and she plays a rippling intro. Mitch? On the violin? This kid has hidden talents. All around us there are old men and women - which is fair enough since this is the retirement home where Mitch’s gran resides. She’s the one on the piano, up there on the small stage with Mitch.

  When Lambert and I got our faces up off the pavement again, Mitch told us about this gran of his. It seems she was a music teacher, gave Mitch his introduction to the violin, as well as teaching scores of other musicians how to play. Every year she gets Christmas cards from people who play in symphony orchestras. So now we’re waiting to hear about these musical ideas she has for us. Mitch starts to play and all at once, around the room, I’m conscious of nods of approval from the old folk. Mitch is good; even I can tell that, although I’m not much into classical music. But after a few bars of this stuff, I feel myse
lf becoming proud of being his mate.

  ‘They’re fantastic together,’ Lambert whispers. ‘Like a team.’

  ‘Shh,’ frowns an old person. And when Mitch and his gran finish, we join in the applause then a nurse type person comes in and says there’s tea served in the conservatory so there’s a general shuffle in that direction, with many of the old folk pausing to say a word or two in praise of Mitch and his gran.

  ‘Come and have tea, boys,’ Mitch’s gran says. For one so old, she’s brisk and sharp, full of good humour. ‘Then I’ll get my note book and we’ll see what’s what.’ Okay, I take it all back, the doubts and the downcast feelings about getting musical ideas from gran. She can tell what we’ve been thinking - that no good ideas come from the aged. She soon convinces us how wrong we’ve been. With tea and biscuits by our side, Gran sits at the piano. Mitch hands out sheets of paper with chords and words for some tunes we can play.

  ‘I take it you boys don’t read music?’ Gran says. Lambert and I shake our heads. ‘My grandson does, of course,’ Gran goes on. ‘Mitchell only took up the drums to help with his rhythm.’

  ‘Gran’s idea,’ Mitch tells us. Gran goes on, still in that super-active, no-problem, she’ll-be-right manner she has.

  ‘I’ll give you the chords and the words and we can work them out here and now.’ We’ve got our guitars with us, so for an hour and a half, Gran tirelessly takes us through these ideas of hers, which is to recycle some old melodies from the bygone era. The first one is, I will make you brooches, words by Robert Louis Stevenson, who died in 1894.

  I will make you brooches,

  Toys for your delight,

  Of bird-song at morning,

  Star-shine at night.

  At first we’re doubtful all over again, especially when Gran plays it on the piano, old-style, but then she gives a wink. ‘Or you could hit it like this.’ She lets fly with her fingers and we can hear the song working for us. A couple of old guys come in from the conservatory.