Maestro

by Peter Goldsworthy

  ‘Can we listen?’ I asked.

  Outnumbered, outmuscled, we sat waiting for an answer which didn’t come. Various strange string instruments were connected together, knobs fiddled, and the first few bars of amplified noise strummed.

  There appeared to be three in the band—guitar, bass guitar, drums. The boys I knew only too well: Scotty Mitchell, Reggie Lim, and the notorious Jimmy Papas.

  Papas was a central figure in my fantasy life: since that afternoon when he had waited for me in the bike shed I had spent many sleepless nights planning revenge. I was not alone. All over Darwin the slightly built, the bespectacled, the swots and the Sunday School students would lie in their beds at night, planning revenge on short, squat Jimmy Papas. Bennie Reid especially was full of wonderful schemes. Most recently—he boasted publicly, recklessly—he planned to wrap a fresh dogshit in newspaper, set it alight on Jimmy’s doorstep, ring the bell and watch from safety as Jimmy stamped out the flames.

  My own plan was simpler: I wanted only to bury Papas to the neck in the tidal flats, kick him very hard in the head a few times—nothing extreme, just breaking the nose and front teeth—then leave him to the incoming tide.

  At the same time I often made a token effort to understand his thinking processes, to try to get inside him. Cruelty as a form of revenge, I could understand—this, in fact I planned myself. Likewise cruelty inflicted out of jealousy, or spite, or hatred—these implied a certain respect for, or fear of, the victim. But cruelty fuelled by no emotion at all? Bullying for kicks, arbitrarily dispensed, nothing more than a way of filling in time, a form of impromptu entertainment making use of whatever materials were at hand?

  That was Jimmy Papas.

  ‘Fuck off, Crabbe,’ he advised. ‘Real quick.’

  ‘I have to pack my music.’

  ‘Leave him, Jimmy,’ Scotty Mitchell said. ‘Let him hear some real music.’

  Mitchell was taller, curly haired and good-looking in a squashed-nose sort of way. The local Golden Gloves champion, he would not have liked being labelled a bully. He used his fists just as freely around the school, but his self-image differed from Jimmy’s. Scotty believed in Just Causes—however unjust they appeared to others. Not so much Protecting the Weak, for instance, as Sticking Up For A Mate. If he beat up someone half his size, it was not for pleasure but reluctantly, necessarily, to teach his victim a lesson. Perhaps even to make a man of him.

  The third member of the trio was Reggie Lim: Chinese, diluted slightly with Aboriginal. Dark-skinned, his flat face pocked with the craters of largely extinct acne, Reggie looked fiercer than he was—a follower, not a leader.

  Greek, Chinese-Aboriginal, Australian: the band might have been a statistical paradigm of Darwin’s population, a band put together according to principles of affirmative action and proportional representation. In fact it was put together according to the principles of three young delinquents wanting to make a million bucks, or make a very loud noise, or some mix of the two.

  I listened—packing my music, slowly—as they began picking a difficult path through a basic twelve-bar blues, trying to get by on three simple chords. Restricted in volume—part of the deal struck with school authorities—they were not even able to hide their clumsiness behind a wall of white noise.

  ‘It’s a matter of doing the simple things well,’ I couldn’t resist chiming in.

  ‘You still here?’ Jimmy Papas growled.

  I lifted the piano lid and walked a simple bass riff down into the underworld regions and up again.

  ‘You play rock’n roll?’ Scotty wanted to know.

  ‘I play everything,’ I lied, never having played it before.

  ‘So play,’ Jimmy invited—or perhaps threatened.

  I added the same few chords that they had been playing, staccato, in the right hand: C, F, C; G, F, C.

  ‘Can you play this?’

  Scotty passed over a sheet of music, something called Hound Dog, scored as simply as any Second Grade piano piece: melodic line and bass, with chord changes written above the staff every few bars.

  Rosie moved sideways on the stool, and I played: once through slowly to get the feel, then second time through camping it up, plenty of foot-stomping and keyboard-raking glissandi and shake, rattle and roll.

  ‘Not bad,’ Scotty admitted, reluctantly.

  ‘Why don’t we sound like that?’ Reggie—catching the prevailing mood of tolerance—wanted to know.

  ‘You weren’t in tune,’ I suggested, still uncertain how far I could push my luck. ‘For one thing.’

  Jimmy scowled: ‘You got a guitar?’

  ‘I’ve got an ear.’

  Rosie snickered beside me. Even Megan was smiling, sitting on the floor against a wall in the background, her knees tucked under her chin. Remembering that moment, those brave words, I realise now they were a turning point: a fork in the path of my life, a spinning of the bottle that could have gone any way …

  ‘What’s the bottom string on one of those things?’ I asked Scotty.

  ‘E.’

  ‘Okay—here’s an E. Let’s hear yours … no, too low. Higher. Still higher … You too, Jimmy.’

  Finetunings completed—after some considerable time—I continued:

  ‘Now a chord: C major chord.’

  Scotty’s left hand curled around his fret-board, slowly, clumsily seeking the right combination.

  ‘Look,’ I said, more and more in control, confidence climbing. ‘I know a bit about music. Why not let me join you for a few sessions?’

  Glances were exchanged among the three of them, a quick poll taken by nod or shrug.

  ‘Nothing to lose,’ Scotty tallied the votes.

  ‘What the hell,’ Reggie echoed, as always.

  ‘What I’m going to say,’ I said, ‘might sound crazy. But stick with me. We don’t play today. We begin with the basics: with the hands …’

  I unclasped Jimmy’s left hand from the bass guitar and held it in mine.

  ‘If you wanted to hold hands, Crabbe,’ he said, ‘all you had to do was ask.’

  Stump-fingered, broken-nailed, wire-fuzzed, that hand resembled more the club it often was than anything capable of producing music. But Keller’s delicately podgy hands had taught me the shallowness of such judgements. And besides, I was enjoying the role: the private revenge of taming this wild animal, holding his lame paw, reciting to him a musical version of This little pig went to market …

  ‘First the forefinger,’ I began, almost wishing I had a pince-nez. ‘He is our best pupil …’

  Rosie snickered again, but Jimmy’s uncurled fist lay dead in my palm, as if anaesthetised. A miracle was occurring. In the span of one lunchtime, music, the universal common language, would come to provide me with permanent protection in the schoolyard, and a safe conduct pass into even the darkest corners of the Covered Area.

  ‘Do you still dream of me?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I lied.

  Megan was driving her mother’s car—the ink on her licence still wet, I suspected. We were heading in the wrong direction: past Scotty’s house, our supposed destination, where the band was practising that night, and out along the East Point Road.

  ‘We’re early,’ she said. ‘Let’s drive.’

  It soon became clear that driving was not her intention: she halted the car in the shadow of the first gun emplacement, and turned towards me.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘About the dreams.’

  ‘I can never remember dreams,’ I repeated the standard excuse, uneasily.

  She moved closer, pushed her hand inside my shirt, and ran her fingertips over my bony chest:

  ‘You’ve filled out, Paul.’

  I was still beanstalk-thin, the skin wrapped like tent-canvas across my cage of ribs. Perhaps she was trying to persuade herself, to excite herself in some way. I made myself play the role, reaching over and rubbing gently at her breasts with the back of my hand:

&
nbsp; ‘So have you.’

  She laughed: always a stunning sight, that familiar piano lid, lifted. The sight and sound of that laugh reached into me and turned some deep tap: my pulse stumbled, blood lurched and changed course inside me.

  ‘Would you like to get in the back?’ she suggested.

  ‘I’d rather stay here in the front with you,’ I replied, and burst into nervous laughter at the old joke.

  We sat watching each other.

  ‘There’s a rug in the back,’ she said at length. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  I threw the rug across my shoulder, and followed her into the nearest bunker. The sun was low over the harbour, the late afternoon light leaving the world gilded, flushed, dusty. Inside, in the warm half-darkness, she spread the rug on the sand, and draped herself across it.

  ‘Peel me a grape,’ she smiled.

  It was a disappointment, at least for me. She was too selfish, I realised later. Too used to being desired, to never having to involve herself in any real way. As soon as I touched her she became floppy, inert, like something wanting to be kneaded. She loved to be touched, bitten, licked—but passively, as if on a pedestal, receiving some sort of sexual tithe.

  ‘You’re very good,’ she murmured afterwards. ‘I knew you’d be good.’

  I snorted: ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You can tell.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘It’s in the eyes.’

  She laughed, teasing, but I was too worried to be seduced a second time.

  ‘What if Scotty finds out?’

  ‘I’m not about to tell him. Are you?’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  She stroked the bones of my chest again. I looked at her—the thick cloud of hair, the cheekbones, the eyes, the smooth, soft body I had dreamed of so often—and remained unmoved. The sum of all that beauty was somehow less that its parts.

  ‘You want to do it again?’ she said, meaning here, now.

  ‘No,’ I said, meaning forever.

  We folded the rug, dusted ourselves free of sand, and drove back slowly towards Scotty’s—then on past his house once again.

  ‘Drop me at home,’ I said. ‘Tell the boys I’m crook.’

  We drove on in silence.

  ‘It was too wonderful,’ I lied, as I climbed from the car. ‘I couldn’t concentrate on the band tonight.’

  ‘Tomorrow night?’ she said through the window.

  ‘I’ve got a piano lesson.’

  I watched till she had turned the corner, then climbed onto my bike and pedalled to Rosie’s house. I wasn’t so much guilty, I was terrified. Terrified that I might lose her.

  Rosie was studying in her makeshift bedroom: a caravan dry-docked on bricks beside the house. Her parents were entrenched inside the house in the living room, listening to the radio.

  ‘Paul?’

  I pushed through the wire door, and sat on the tiny bench opposite her.

  ‘I wanted to tell you,’ I blurted out. ‘I love you very much. There will never be anyone else.’

  This was true—at least from that moment, and has been true ever since. She rose and sat herself on my knees, pressing her head hard against mine.

  ‘I can’t bear to be apart from you,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything else.’

  She moved her legs apart, and sat straddling me, face to face. Like me, she had no doubt rehearsed these movements many times in her head beforehand: her passion, her inventiveness only gave the impression of spontaneity. But our act was so good we even fooled ourselves. And after such beginnings, such primings of the sexual pump, anything was possible. ‘You’re all sticky,’ she said, fondling. ‘And gritty.’

  ‘Sweat,’ I improvised. ‘I pedalled flat out. And I was at the beach earlier.’

  I could hardly see her: my head congested with love, or lust, my eyes filming over. She wrapped her podgy, dimpled legs behind my back, and sitting there, facing each other, in that marooned, rocking caravan, her parents only a few feet next to us, we made slow, muffled, reckless love.

  Nothing seemed beyond me during those heady months: even spurning, however tactfully, any further rendezvous with Megan Murray. My body image had finally caught up with its physical envelope; had perhaps, in the case of my head, even swollen beyond it. I felt high, happy, invulnerable …

  My parents were concerned: their son the serious scholar had gone missing, somewhere between May and July. Final school exams were only months away, but each evening I spent with Rosie Zollo.

  ‘She’s a nice girl, Paul … but don’t you think it’s getting a bit serious? A case of too much, too soon?’

  ‘We study together,’ I reassured them.

  This was true, in part. We studied episodically, fitfully, when sensually exhausted. Perhaps we even learnt more that way, the odd scrap of knowledge pressed more deeply into our brains, imprinted by the sheer force of the emotions that filled us at the time.

  ‘We trust your judgement, of course. But you have a whole life in front of you, both of you. Why not wait till after the exams?’

  ‘We complement each other. I help her with maths, she helps me with French.’

  I paused, then added: ‘We help each other with Biology.’

  That I could risk such a joke is a measure of my arrogance at the time. But my parents had other preoccupations: Gilbert and Sullivan rehearsals—The Gondoliers—took up much of their time, leaving me free, unsupervised. I had been excused from opera duties for the first time; study commitments in my final year were felt too pressing. And so my nightly meetings with Rosie continued: our study group of two. I spent each evening with her, and each weekend in band practice, or at the drive-in, or swimming at various waterholes, springs, beaches …

  Transport was no longer a problem: Jimmy’s new panel van had arrived from the South. A sixteenth-birthday gift from doting parents—wealthy beyond their means of commonsense—that panel van was the first of its kind to reach Darwin. I can still recite from memory the strange-sounding Poem of Parts: Mags, Fats, Side-spoilers, Bubble Windows …

  It resembled nothing so much as a giant bush fly: crouched low and road-hugging at the front, jacked up over absurdly wide tyres at the back, its panels spray painted iridescent glitter-blue.

  Inside a kind of Pop Surrealism prevailed: tasselled curtains, sheepskin seat covers, panther pink carpet on the dash, a tiny plastic skeleton dangling and twitching from the rear-vision mirror.

  DON’T LAUGH—YOUR DAUGHTER MAY BE IN HERE proclaimed a sticker on the rear-window.

  Jimmy was full of himself: leaving thick black texta trails of tyre rubber around town, and swaggering about school, being an even bigger hero to all his various smaller apprentice bullies. I was lucky to be counted Friend.

  Others were not so fortunate, Bennie Reid most frequently among them. Jimmy had appointed himself Official Protector of Butterflies.

  ‘Still murdering butterflies, Reid?’

  ‘Let go. You’re hurting me.’

  ‘Why don’t you stick your little pins in something your own size?’

  ‘They only live a few days anyway, you greasy wop. What can it matter?’

  Bennie had decided to do it the hard way. Perhaps he had nothing to lose; certainly no known survival strategy—apology, flattery, even keeping out of Jimmy’s way—made any difference. The pain he suffered was terrible, yes—but pain always passed, and when it passed anger still remained.

  ‘Is it true you shave the palms of your hands, apeman?’

  If he had to suffer, he might as well score points. He might as well go down fighting, even if only with a sharply stropped tongue:

  ‘You could lend the razor to your mother afterwards, wog.’

  I had to admire Bennie’s courage, or his stupidity.

  ‘Leave him alone, Jimmy,’ I tried to defuse things. ‘He’s not worth it.’

  ‘Did you hear what he called me?’

  There was no standing between them. The victim also refuse
d to allow it:

  ‘You didn’t hear what I called him? I’d better say it again. He’s a wog. And you’re a … a greasy crawler.’

  Jimmy had met nothing like it. His victim would limp away in tears, and still turn and throw some last outrageous provocation back across his shoulder. Or brood for days, carefully planning more elaborate revenge.

  ‘Smoke was coming out of the van,’ Jimmy explained, angrily. ‘There was this ball of newspaper burning on the floor under the dash. I stamped it out …’

  ‘It was full of dogshit?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Bennie Reid.’ The name slipped from my mouth, and could not be returned there for safekeeping, no matter how much I regretted it.

  ‘Reid! I knew it!’

  I visited Bennie that night to warn him. His parents were out, and he spoke to me through the locked flyscreen door, without letting me in. A tubby, middle-aged man, aged sixteen.

  ‘I knew you’d tell him,’ he said. ‘You’re that sort of person.’

  I stood at the top of the steps outside his door, in a bright cone of light. A cloud of moths battered themselves against me.

  It just slipped out,’ I said, swatting. ‘I didn’t mean …’

  ‘You don’t understand, do you Paul? I wanted you to tell him. I wanted him to know who did it.’

  ‘He’s going to kill you.’

  He shrugged behind his flyscreen:

  ‘It’s not over yet: the dogshit is just the beginning. But don’t let me keep you from your friends …’

  ‘They’re not my friends. It’s just …’

  He slammed the door in my face, and I was left with no-one to convince except myself: a much easier task, I found as I walked slowly home, than trying to convince him.

  I squirm now remembering my part in this. At the time those excuses seemed entirely reasonable. I couldn’t stop Jimmy—but perhaps I could dilute his rage. And Bennie’s harsh words? Nothing could dent my invulnerability.

  Not even the weekly consultation with Keller at the Swan could subdue me. Reckless with self-confidence, growing ever fonder of the sound of my own voice, I began squeezing him harder for information. For the first time I felt strong, or callous, enough to raise the subject of his wife, to follow the lead of that footnote I had found buried in an Adelaide library the previous summer.