by Mandy Sayer
PRAISE FOR MANDY SAYER
‘Mandy Sayer’s storytelling is unforgettable music.’
Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior
‘Sayer’s prose is lyrical and clean, stripped of any flowery euphemisms . . . The effect has the immediacy and power of a punch in the face.’
Australian Book Review
‘Sayer makes magic from the darkest tune.’
Bulletin
‘Sayer’s control of tone is flawless.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘Sayer’s language and her imagery are as captivating as the stories themselves.’
Nine to Five
‘The writing is lyrical and loopy, like saxophones scaling the blues.’
Australian Way
‘Sayer has crafted a spellbinding story of family mythology and betrayal that delights in the melody of each word rather than in its exotic subject matter.’
Interview on Velocity and Dreamtime Alice
Mandy Sayer has published ten books of fiction and non-fiction. Her awards include the Vogel Literary Award (Mood Indigo), the National Biography Award (Dreamtime Alice: A Memoir), the South Australian Premier’s Award for Non-fiction, the Age Book of the Year for Non-fiction (Velocity: A Memoir) and the Davitt Award for Young Adult Fiction (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes). Sayer is a regular columnist for the Australian newspaper and the Wentworth Courier. She lives in Sydney.
First published in 2011
Copyright © Mandy Sayer 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australian Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Allen & Unwin
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ISBN 978 1 74237 337 9
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Louis
And in memory of my parents, Gerry and Betty,
whose many anecdotes and adventures inspired this story
Prelude
‘Darling boy, if you’re listening to this, I’m either missing or dead. The story I’m about to tell you isn’t, though—yet somehow I can’t bring it to life. I’ve always expressed myself better in music than in words. Not like you. So I want you to play these tapes one by one, and as you listen, write down the story I’m telling you. In writing our story—the story of me and Martin—you’ll also be writing your own.’
Aunty Pearl tried writing her memoirs many times but she never got further than the night she lost her virginity in an amusement park. She scribbled on the backs of electricity bills, scraps of paper, in notebooks filled with half-finished musical compositions, but the sentences and paragraphs didn’t accumulate into much more than a string of anecdotes with too many adjectives and hardly any punctuation.
She died a year ago, two months after my father, Martin, passed away. Pearl and Martin were twins, and both played the saxophone, but it was Pearl who was the better musician. The books on Australian jazz published since the seventies note her contribution to the local music scene, particularly the fact that she introduced the new American style of bebop to our musicians. No one, not even the famous Sydney saxophonist Don Burrows, can figure out how she came to know so much, having had so little experience.
Only last week, the jazz historian Brian Jackson, an old friend of Pearl’s, visited me here at the house. It was an awkward meeting because I’m having the place renovated and that day the floors upstairs were being sanded. Over the roar of the sander, Brian told me that, just before she died, Pearl had instructed him to contact me about some archival tapes she’d left here in the house. For some reason, she wanted him to wait a year after her death before he brought up the subject of these old recordings. Why? I don’t know. And neither does Brian.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m writing another book on Australian jazz and one of the chapters will be devoted to your aunt.’
I began to tell him that I’d already donated her papers and all the copies of her records to the National Archives in Canberra, but Brian cut me off, reminding me that it wasn’t her papers he was after.
‘Everything went into the archives,’ I told him, but Brian wasn’t convinced. He cast his eyes around the parlour and into the dining room, staring for several moments at the small stuffed dog on a stand near the piano. ‘It’s a big house,’ he said. He looked hopeful and a bit desperate, I thought.
‘She told me she’d hidden them. Something about a toy box. Does that ring a bell?’
I thought for a moment. My son once had a toy box when he was little but that was twenty years ago and it’s long since gone.
I shook my head, and then asked Brian who was publishing his book. A couple of decades ago he and I shared the same publisher—Spire—a small press in Melbourne. But after my third crime novel was a modest hit, my agent got me a four-book deal with Allen & Unwin, an independent publisher based in Sydney, and that’s where my career started to take off. I created the Aboriginal detective Herman Djulpajurra, who grew up on a remote mission, learning traditional tracking techniques and how to read the complex syntax of the bush, before attending Sydney University, where he studied cutting-edge forensics. When my first novel about him begins, he’s twenty-six years old and is returning to Central Australia as a gun for hire. Me, I’m only half Aboriginal, from my mother’s side, but over the last fifteen or so years I’ve become known as Australia’s First Indigenous Crime Writer, a title that’s taken me to writers’ festivals all over the world and made me a decent living. So far there are twelve volumes in the series but since the deaths of my father and aunt last year the only words that I’ve written are for funeral notices and epitaphs. I’ve never experienced writers’ block before and, to be frank, I haven’t known what to do with myself. Fixing up the house has helped, and I’ve developed an interest in gardening, but I miss the ongoing flirtation with a blank page, the thrill of making something out of nothing. As I rattle around this big, empty house I often feel so alone in the world, unless you count an ex-wife and a son who has his own life now.
Brian didn’t answer me right away about his publisher—it was too noisy, perhaps—just stood up and began pacing the room. I noticed his moustache was a little greyer and he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. When the sander upstairs abruptly fell silent, though, he said, ‘A University Press is interested in the proposal.’
I crossed my legs and nodded.
‘But there’s one proviso,’ he added.
‘Yeah?’ I asked. ‘What’s that?’
Brian leaned on the mantelpiece, gazing at a photo of Martin and Pearl
as toddlers, dressed in identical white dresses. ‘I’ve got to come up with some new stuff on your aunt.’ Then he turned and stared at me, frowning, as if I were deliberately standing in the way of his research. ‘She used to tape record all her live gigs, you know.’
I felt sorry for him then, he’s an excellent historian but I sensed both his personal and professional lives were stalling, as were mine. I promised him I’d do a thorough search of the house and bundled him out the door, telling him I’d ring if I found them.
I spent days looking for these secret tapes; I didn’t have much else to do, after all. Even though there were no toy boxes in the house, I tried the basement, where Pearl and Martin had always rehearsed; Pearl’s bedroom on the first floor; the linen cupboard; the cartons and tea-chests in the attic. I found one of Pearl’s old band uniforms from the fifties—black pants and jacket with red and white piping. The uniform hadn’t been laundered and when I lifted it to my face I inhaled her familiar scent after all these years—a sweet, peachy odour that flushed back childhood memories: playing duets on the piano; rollerskating hand in hand (one time we ended up skating straight through the door of the local police station), the way she’d make up bedtime stories for me rather than read them from a book. But still no tapes. I felt inside the chimneys, went through my grandmother’s mothballed wardrobes; I even searched my grandfather’s old MG, which is standing up on blocks in the backyard.
In the glove compartment I found an old tin moneybox that had been mine when I was a kid. As I shook out a few pennies and sixpences, I suddenly remembered where I used to hide it, in a hole beneath the floorboards of my father’s room. When I was about six or seven, Pearl and my father showed me the secret space, where, as kids themselves, they’d hidden things from the prying eyes of adults: stolen lollies, matches, money, a pet mouse. No one else knew about it except me, they said. And then I took it over for a few years, stashing in it comic books, my grandmother’s chocolates, a slingshot and a knife I once found.
I dropped the tin box and rushed back into the house. My father’s old room was being renovated. The old rug had been rolled up recently and was leaning against one wall, revealing a few water-damaged floorboards. My eyes flew straight to the right-hand corner, where a tiny round indentation was grooved into one of the boards. I crouched and, for the first time in over fifty years, slipped my finger into it and pulled away a section of the floor, about a foot wide and long, like a trapdoor. In the space between the floor and the ceiling of the cellar I saw what looked like a large metal cash box covered in dust. I opened it and there they were: twenty-three cassette tapes, numbered sequentially. I was about to rush to the phone to call Brian Jackson when curiosity got the better of me. I thought I might have a listen to a few—perhaps even copy them onto CDs. Trouble was, I didn’t own a cassette player. Who does these days?
I left the tradies to work on the upstairs veranda while I scoured Kings Cross for a tape deck. The Happy Hocker stocked second-hand record players, transistor radios, even an old eight track, but not what I needed. The village markets sold scented candles, baby clothes, electric cake mixers, serviette rings, jewellery boxes, and extension cords. Nor did I have any luck at the Wayside Chapel opportunity shop—if only I’d been in the market for baggy dresses and mismatched earrings . . .
It wasn’t until the pawn shop opened at 11 am that I found what I was looking for: a large black and silver boom box from the eighties, for only sixty-five bucks, including batteries.
I paid the guy and turned on the radio, switching it to the local jazz station, and the sound of Duke Ellington playing ‘Take the “A” Train’ burst into the room. I hoisted the box onto my shoulder and left the shop. As I bobbed down the street to Ray Nance’s familiar trumpet solo, I got a few strange looks, and one old lady even threw a coin at me. For such a big system, it was surprisingly light.
Back at the house, I told Omar and the boys they could take an early lunch. I wanted some privacy and silence, and retired to my study. I plugged in the cassette player, poured myself a double whisky and settled in at my desk.
***
Now that everything is quiet, I open the metal box, select tape number one, push it into the plastic slot and press play.
I’m expecting to hear a sound check or maybe musicians tuning up before starting a gig, but after several scratchy seconds I find myself listening to my aunt’s reedy voice, asking me to listen to the tapes and write up her story. ‘Each tape is a chapter in itself, Darling. Write each one up as you go along. No skipping to the end, to the very last tape.’
‘Pretty it up,’ she then demands. ‘Make it sing.’ And when she explains it like this, I begin to understand my responsibilities. After all, I’m a novelist, not a typist. I shape and embellish; I edit and shade. It’s similar to how she would improvise on a piece of music, taking the bones of a song and turning it into something startling and unique.
Yes. I’ll have a crack at it.
1
A rainy day in May. Sydney was alive with swirling leaves and the cries of flying fruit bats. Afternoon showers fell on wilting flowers, sandstone buildings, vegetable stalls, a war bond rally in Martin Place. It dimpled the harbour, slicked the surface of ship decks, flooded gutters littered with condoms and cigarette butts. It sprinkled women queuing for rations, factory workers waiting for cancelled trams, Asian immigrants who’d been interned on the grounds of a mental asylum after Japan had entered the war. In the evening, it fell on American servicemen as they picked up local women, on prostitutes out to score a greenback or two, on Australian soldiers as they brawled with GIs for stealing most of their girls.
Near midnight, it drummed a soft syncopation against the tin roofs of Albion Street. Pearl heard the rhythms as she darted beneath awnings, catching up with her twin brother, Martin, and wondered if he could hear them too; triplets, paradiddles, shuffles, a beating heart. She was nearly eighteen, but that night was the first time she’d heard music in the weather.
‘Hey!’ she cried as Martin, holding his tenor sax case, dodged an overflowing roof gutter and leaped over a puddle. ‘Wait for me!’ She too dodged the waterfall and jumped the puddle, but landed in another one, splattering the side of her dress with muddy water. Martin laughed.
They’d just finished performing at the Trocadero, the biggest and best ballroom in the Southern Hemisphere. Martin played second tenor in the men’s big band; Pearl played second alto in the girls’ big band. The two jazz orchestras alternated sets on a revolving stage backed by an Art Deco glass shell lit by hundreds of coloured lights. The dance floor was sprung; the clientele was posh; and the twins were well aware that it was the best-paid gig in Sydney. On the downside, the Trocadero orchestras performed virtually the same repertoire each night—light dance music to accompany foxtrots and waltzes; certainly no raucous jazz or swinging blues, which was why Pearl was following Martin through the storm that night, she in a white lace gown and high heels streaked with mud, her brother in black tie and tails. Martin was taking her to the only place in town where she’d be allowed to sit in with a band and play hot jazz into the early hours of the morning. At least, she hoped she’d be allowed to sit in. Martin had jammed with this particular band previously but it would be Pearl’s first time.
A few months before, the first black Americans had marched off troop ships and into the streets of Sydney to bolster the country’s defence force in the Pacific. Because of American segregation laws, however, they were banned from most Sydney restaurants, hotels and, of course the high-class Trocadero ballroom. The Booker T. Washington Club was the only entertainment venue in the state for black GIs. Pearl had never even met a black American before, let alone played in a band with them.
As they approached the hall built onto the side of an old mansion, the trill of a clarinet escaped through the open windows and Pearl felt a flutter of anticipation in her stomach. They skipped up the front steps and onto the veranda, saxophone cases banging against their legs. She could hear
the music more clearly now—an up-tempo version of ‘Basin Street Blues’—and couldn’t believe she was about to enter an all-black club and play jazz for the very people who’d created the form. She now felt not just excited, but as if she herself were exciting.
Martin pushed open the door and almost walked into an Aboriginal girl who was serving as the door monitor. The girl’s skin was a pale mahogany colour, Pearl noticed, not the near-ebony of the GIs she’d seen walking the city streets. She was wearing a grey crepe dress that was too big for her and hung off her shoulders in folds.
‘Hi Roma!’ said Martin. ‘This is my sister Pearl.’ Then he added, perhaps unnecessarily, ‘My twin sister.’ The siblings were both tall and skinny, with heart-shaped faces and violet-blue eyes, slightly hooded. Pearl’s ash blonde hair was a little fairer than Martin’s, though, and that night she’d piled it on top of her head and skewered the loose bun with knitting needles. The rain had curled the stray wisps into ringlets.
Roma frowned at Pearl. Technically, white women were banned from the club, but Martin had assured his sister that the ban was rarely enforced.
‘She’s come to sit in with the band, Rome.’
Roma rested a hand on her hip and pursed her lips.
‘Oohh, come on, baby!’ Martin dropped his saxophone, took Roma in his arms and began dancing her over the black and white tiles. Pearl was taken aback by their playfulness.
Roma threw her head back and her black hair fanned around her shoulders to reveal a long graceful neck. She struggled to free herself, but only half-heartedly, and Martin drew her closer and held her tight. It was as if Roma had become Martin’s twin and she, Pearl, were the stranger. As the music ended he led Roma into a dip so low her hair brushed against the floor.
When he righted her and she had regained her balance she giggled and punched him on the chest. Trying to keep a straight face, she then pointed to Pearl. ‘No swearing. No dancing. No fraternising with the boys.’ She glanced at Martin, swallowing a smile. ‘Is that clear?’
