Flesh Guitar (13 page)

Ah well, Jenny thought, a man who is moved by your art, a man who cries when you play for him, can't be all bad. As she carefully put down the guitar she was aware that Freddie was rapidly trying to pull himself together.

‘Forgive me,' he said.

‘There's
nothing to forgive,'Jenny said, but then she wasn't sure that she really meant it.‘Now about these boys,' she added brusquely.

‘Not again,' said Terrano.

‘Yes, again,' she insisted. ‘Don't you think you have a duty to stop these young men ruining their lives?'

‘How are their lives ruined?'

‘Well, they can't play the guitar for one thing.'

‘The fewer people play the guitar, the better,' he said. ‘Guitar playing has never brought me anything other than pain and despair.'

‘Well, for some people it's a joy.'

‘Only very shallow people,' Freddie insisted.

‘And anyway, it's not just guitar playing. Having only one arm must make plenty of other things more difficult too; things like eating, getting dressed, driving, sex.'

He laughed at her viciously.

‘What would you know about it?' he asked. ‘The fact is, my sex life got about five hundred per cent better the moment I lost my arm. There are a million reasons why women have sex with men, but sympathy and curiosity are very high on the list, and a one-armed man rates high on both those items.'

‘I never thought about it that way,' Jenny admitted.

‘Maybe you never thought about it at all,' Freddie said.

That quietened her. She accepted a beer as a sort of peace offering, but she was not accepting defeat.

‘I didn't bring you here to argue. I actually have something to ask you,' Terrano said, sounding unusually hesitant. ‘There's something I'd like you to try for me on guitar.'

‘All right, what do you want me to play?'

He looked infinitely
sheepish and said, ‘A duet.'

Jenny was puzzled and felt very stupid. She had no idea what he could be wanting.

‘Let me explain,' he said. ‘We'll play a duet on the same guitar. I want you to play the neck with your left hand, and I'll pluck the strings with my right. We'll just improvise, see what comes out.'

She felt moved and she agreed readily enough. It didn't seem so very much to ask. The playing was awkward at first. Simply finding a position from which they could both reach the guitar was difficult enough, the business of co-ordinating the fretting and the picking was harder still. But after fifteen minutes or so they began to get used to each other's technique. He could anticipate when she was about to make a chord change, while she in turn began to respond to the different picking styles he used. The music came slowly, it was sometimes tentative and it was always a little edgy, but it wasn't at all bad.

‘Yes,' Freddie said. ‘Yes, I thought it would work. I heard some of your records, I really admired your left-hand technique. I knew we could do something together.'

It was tiring to play in this odd manner, and before long they'd both had enough. The guitar was put aside and they began to talk. Freddie Terrano wasn't at all the ogre that Jenny had first expected, and she found it almost impossible to believe he was willing to let young men slice themselves up in his name.

A week later Jenny Slade returned for more of the same, and before long it had turned into a regular weekly gig. If she didn't have a booking then Tuesday nights would always find her down in Freddie Terrano's underground car-park, moving her left hand up and down the neck of the Gretsch, while Freddie plucked or picked or strummed. Before long they became extremely skilled at reacting quickly and intuitively to each other's musical ideas. They sounded good. If someone had simply heard the music without seeing the physical circumstances of how the music was made, it would have been easy to believe there was only one person playing. However, a more experienced listener, one who'd heard enough of both Jenny Slade and Freddie Terrano, would have been amazed, and perhaps delighted, to find that the newly improvised music sounded simultaneously like both guitarists, and not simply a combination of both player's quirks or trademarks, but a true amalgam that contained all their best qualities.

Each Tuesday they played,
and afterwards they talked and drank and sometimes smoked a few spliffs, and a little after midnight Jenny would go home. It became one of her favourite dates. Playing for no money to no audience was more satisfying than many of her paying gigs. After a while, however, Freddie insisted on recording their sessions, nothing fancy, just a single mike hooked up to a slightly decrepit cassette machine. Jenny wasn't sure that was in the true spirit of their improvisations but she didn't argue. Freddie joked that he only wanted the recordings so he could listen to his own mistakes, but in truth there were very few of those. Jenny recognized that she and Freddie Terrano had something special, a true empathy, a genuine musical connection. She didn't know where it was going or whether it had a future, but she recognized that much of the best music leads nowhere and exists only in the present.

When she arrived one Tuesday
night she knew something was wrong. She entered Freddie's basement and saw the guitar was lying face down on the concrete floor with several of its strings broken. She couldn't see Freddie at first but that was because he was flat on his back on one of the many sofas. Eventually he realized she was there and made a bold attempt to stand up, but he wasn't very convincing. His legs swayed like palm trees in a hurricane and the bottle of vodka in his hand swung in counterpoint. There was a dull but dangerous expression in his eyes and there was a pile of tape cassettes at his feet, the ones he'd made of their duets, and as he walked towards her he trod on several of them. Jenny heard the brittle crack of plastic, of cassettes being split open. But Freddie never quite made it over to where she was standing. On the way there his legs gave out and he let gravity lay him out on a long lime-green sofa.

‘What's up?' Jenny asked.

Freddie shook his head theatrically, as though he didn't want to talk about it, yet it was obvious that he did, obvious too that Jenny would have to go through the performance of pretending to drag it out of him against his will. When this had been gone through he pointed at the tapes on the floor.

‘I did a daft thing,' he said. ‘I played them to an A&R guy I know. I thought we had the makings of a decent album.'

‘I take it he didn't like them,' Jenny said.

Freddie Terrano swigged the vodka. ‘That's right. He reckoned they were OK but they were a bit boring. He said I needed a gimmick.'

Terrano laughed so loud,
so hard, so bitterly, that Jenny found herself joining in his derision.

‘Having one arm wasn't gimmick enough. So I'm drinking again,' he said. ‘Drinking being one of those things you can do on your own with only one hand.'

Jenny sat down on the edge of the sofa and said she'd be happy to help him drown his sorrows. He handed her the bottle and the next couple of hours passed rapidly as she and Freddie discussed the various evils of the music biz and all its personnel.

As the alcohol kicked in, Jenny's feelings for Freddie got much warmer. Once she'd thought he was a monster, but now she felt protective towards him. She understood his hurt and disappointment. She felt sympathy, and yes, maybe she was a little curious sexually. She thought this was probably going to be the night she slept with Freddie Terrano. She leaned against him on the sofa. She closed her eyes and the world became a swimming, buzzing, hurtling place. She needed Freddie's arms around her, to steady her, to steady the room. But Freddie was no longer beside her. She opened her eyes and saw he was standing a few yards away, looking perfectly steady now as though he'd drunk himself back to sobriety. At first she thought he was holding a guitar in his hand, something yellow and black and weirdly shaped.

‘You know what else the A&R man said to me?' Freddie blustered. ‘He said what would really make for a great act would be if we were
both
one-armed; two one-armed guitarists playing a single guitar. He said he'd sign up an act like that straight away. The fact that you had two arms was a problem. As far as he was concerned, Jenny, you have one arm too many.'

And then Jenny was in no
doubt about what Freddie Terrano had in his hand. It wasn't a guitar at all. It was a chainsaw.

‘Come on, Jenny,' he said. ‘We all have to make sacrifices for the sake of our careers.'

‘You're out of your mind,' Jenny said.

‘Of course I'm out of my mind,' Freddie raged. ‘If you'd lost an arm, spent twenty years in the wilderness, finally found a way to make music and then had some record company hack dismiss it like that, you'd be out of your mind too.'

Jenny could see there was a lot of truth in this, but that didn't make the chainsaw look any less threatening. Freddie Terrano pressed the starter and the machine seethed into life.

‘Like I told you, life with one arm isn't so bad,' Freddie insisted. ‘For one thing you'll have a whole new set of fans. You can start a fan club called the Daughters of Jenny Slade.'

He danced across the floor and slashed at the first thing he saw, a leatherette winged chair, cutting it open in a burst of stuffing and sawdust.

‘But supposing we did both have one arm,' Jenny said, for one moment considering the terrible prospect, ‘what would we be? Nobody would ever take us seriously. We'd be a novelty act, a freak show.'

‘And what kind of an act am I now?' he asked.

He brandished the chainsaw again and whacked it against one of the concrete pillars. Sparks flew and he bounced away like a pinball.

‘Look,' Jenny
pleaded, ‘even if, God help us, you succeed in hacking my arm off, how can you possibly think that after that I'd agree to form an act with you?'

‘What other choice would you have?'

‘I'd find some other way to play.'

‘Oh really? Like I did?'

He advanced on her. She looked around for something to defend herself with and the only thing that came to hand was the guitar, the classic Gretsch Astrojet. She grabbed it, held the body towards her, the neck sticking out like a lance. It wasn't much defence against a chainsaw, but it was such a beautiful piece of work that she hoped Freddie would think twice before destroying it.

He didn't. He brought the saw round in a big curve and sawed through the neck where it joined the body. He was now within easy striking distance of Jenny. One lucky or highly skilled stroke and he could mutilate her to his preferred design. The smell of petrol from the saw made her nauseous, the noise of the chain filled her head so she couldn't think, and maybe that was why neither she nor Freddie Terrano heard the approaching footsteps, and why they barely heard the young male voice shout, ‘Put that chainsaw down or I'll brain you.'

Freddie Terrano turned slowly round to see six young one-armed men standing in a semi-circle by the entrance to the basement. None of them was smiling. Between them they were carrying a huge scaffolding pole and there was no doubt they intended to use it.

‘Put it down, Freddie, it's all over,' said the young man again.

Freddie looked at the
chainsaw in his hand as though seeing it for the first time, as though it had somehow crawled there unbidden. He turned off the motor and set it down on the floor, and he looked at the young man who'd spoken. It was someone he recognized, Kenny Stevens, the first of his ‘sons'.

‘
Et tu
, Kenny?' he asked.

‘
Moi
, above all,' Kenny replied, and he turned to Jenny and said, ‘I owe you a big thank you, Ms Slade. I was there at the gig in Lowestoft when you spoke out against Freddie Terrano. You wouldn't have seen me, I was just one more face in the crowd, but you really set me thinking.'

‘Thank God,' Jenny said.

Kenny Stevens picked up the abandoned chainsaw and cradled it in the bend of his right arm.

‘I called a meeting,' he continued, ‘and we Sons of Freddie Terrano have done some rapid growing up. I mean, everybody does stupid things when they're young, but hacking off your left arm, that's the stupidest of all.'

‘No,' said Freddie softly, ‘it wasn't stupid. It was very brave, very moving.'

‘And you encouraged us, Freddie. You egged us on.'

‘Did I? Well, even if I did, I can make stupid mistakes too, can't I?'

‘We realize, of course, that nothing we do can ever give us our arms back, but we've also realized there's something we could do that would make us all feel a lot better.'

Freddie Terrano's face became hot and rigid as he watched Kenny Stevens bring the chainsaw back to life. Jenny's own face, indeed her whole body, became equally inert. She knew she couldn't interfere. She could only stand by, her head down, her eyes turned away, as Freddie Terrano was reduced from a man with one arm to a man with none.

‘Don't worry, Ms
Slade,' Stevens said. ‘You were never here. You never saw or heard anything. The name Freddie Terrano, the initials SOFT, they mean nothing to you, right?'

‘Right,' Jenny agreed and she hurried away, all her senses gone horribly dead.

Later she worried about the tapes she and Freddie had made, that had been played to the A&R man, then trampled underfoot. Were they enough to connect her to the scene of the crime? If Freddie Terrano decided to squeal, she was anything but an innocent party. But time went by and the police never came knocking on her door, no investigative journalist ever came snooping around. The episode was closed. However, perhaps as a consequence of that night, one-armed boys stopped attending her gigs. She looked for them, she almost wanted to see them again, but they never reappeared.

Years later she did hear that bootlegs of the Slade/Terrano collaborations were obtainable if you were prepared to go to a little trouble. Generally it involved meeting a one-armed man in some weird and dangerous location, late at night, and handing over a lot of cash. Jenny didn't mind too much. How else were the poor Sons of Freddie Terrano supposed to make a living? And as for Freddie Terrano himself, one rumour said that he was alive and well and had started a new career in Egypt working as a glitter-clad novelty tap dancer on Nile cruises. It might have been true but Jenny preferred not to believe it.