The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  He began to practise at my home in Trent Street, since the school offered a boarder nowhere to be alone, nowhere to do anything so eccentric as working on a musical instrument. So he came every weekend, and after he’d practised, we would talk and listen to records in my room: Bill Haley and the Comets, Little Richard, Lonnie Donegan, and stronger meat from the past such as Huddie Ledbetter and Bessie Smith. The great, far voice of the Empress of the Blues, singing of Mississippi floods and violent passion, created in us both a similar ecstasy, while beyond my dark little balcony the lights winking in Newtown became the lights of Louisiana.

  From the first, the entry of the guitar into Brady’s life had been made uncannily easy. He had telephoned his mother to ask her to help him with the payments, and she had offered to send him the full amount, on the condition that he didn’t tell his father how expensive it had been. So the Ramirez was his within a week, kept in his locker in the dormitory. ‘It’s good just knowing it’s there,’ he said to me. ‘It’s great just to handle it, even though I can’t play it properly.’ His eyes shone; he stared past my shoulder as though at a vision, and new rapidity and life had come into his speech.

  The guitar’s face of polished spruce was the last thing Brian looked at before going to bed and the first thing he checked in the morning; the mother-of-pearl decoration around the sound-hole was like some rare jewellery to him: he could scarcely believe he owned such a thing. The only boarder who tried to strum it without permission was laid out on the dormitory floor one night with a right to the jaw. After that, the guitar was never touched by anyone but Brady. In that same week, he had begun his lessons with the man Broderick.

  A few days after the first lesson, I caught up with Brian by the old bicycle shed and began to question him, standing in the sun in the same spot where I had once questioned the Franciscan. What sort of a man was Broderick? What did he do for a living? Where had he given Brian the lesson? I badgered him with intense curiosity; and Brady smiled lazily, making me wait.

  What did I mean, he wanted to know, asking what sort of man Brod was? (I raised my eyebrows at this ‘Brod’.) He was a lot of things, Brady said; a guitar teacher, and also a bookseller: the accountant and buyer at Varley’s Bookshop.

  This was surprising information. Varley’s in Franklin Street, just around the corner from Lovejoy’s, was the best bookshop in Hobart. I often went in there after school and knew bald Mr Varley well by sight; but I had never seen Broderick there, and said so.

  ‘You’re not going to see him serving on the counter,’ Brady said scornfully. ‘He works behind the scenes, in an office down below. And I’ll tell you another thing. I reckon he’s the real owner of Lovejoy’s. I reckon old Sandy just works for him. That Broderick’s a brilliant bloke.’ He nodded, his lips compressed significantly.

  ‘There’s something funny about him,’ I said.

  Brady stared; and there was a hostile light in his stare which gave me warning. ‘Funny? What’s funny about him?’

  Somewhat feebly, I tried to explain, knowing already that any sort of warning was doomed to failure. I told Brian of my juvenile meetings with Broderick in Fiddler’s Lane; I even remarked, without knowing why, that Broderick didn’t seem to have aged very much since then. I began to sound silly, even to myself, and I trailed off, warned more directly than before by Brady’s hard stare.

  ‘You’re talking bullshit, Miller,’ he said.

  I said I supposed I was. Broderick was certainly a marvellous guitarist, I said; and I added with hypocritical enthusiasm that Brian was lucky to be learning from him. Where was he giving the lessons?

  Mollified (he was easily mollified), Brady told me that the lessons were given in the back of Lovejoy’s shop. He had no idea where Broderick lived, or even whether he was a married man or not. There seemed to be only a limited amount of information that could be gained about Broderick, even his first name being unknown at this stage. He came and went; he inhabited different and incongruous locations, and I sensed that Brian didn’t feel confident enough to try and find out more.

  Never very articulate, Brady conveyed things only in carelessly-flung fragments, and I feared to annoy him by conveying any more of my uneasiness; so our conversations were mostly confined to Brady’s enthusiastic reports about progress on the guitar. Glimpses of Broderick came through in enigmatic flashes, telling me little, yet intriguing me more and more. It was as though Broderick wasn’t a man at all, but an abstraction; sometimes, I still childishly thought of him as the Man in the Lane.

  Once I caught a glimpse of Broderick and Brady together, without their knowing; a glimpse that would remain with me. I was going down Harrigan Street late one evening and the two were standing on the corner of Franklin Street not far from the doorway of the Lady Man’s shop, on the other side of the street — so deep in conversation that they didn’t see me. It was almost dark, and overcast, the light like the colour of an old mirror; and I hurried on. I sensed that Brady wouldn’t want me to stop, even if he caught sight of me.

  And the image remained in my mind all the way home in the tram, worrying me: Brady capless, in the grey school suit he managed to make more disreputable-looking than anyone else’s; Broderick in his permanent navy overcoat, hands in pockets, slightly bent to one side, peering at Brady as though some serious question were at stake. They entered my dreams that night with such intensity that I started awake.

  I was at an age when I intuitively grasped many of the enigmas the world contained, but in trying to voice them, could only come up with approximations or metaphors for what was really there. And what I said to myself now was that Brady was sinking into the zone of Second-hand: that menacing past whose relics were washed up in the tomb-dry windows of Harrigan Street.

  The notion was not entirely simplistic. All enthralment is an arrested past: the prolonged, perverse childhood from which some souls never escape.

  4

  Brady’s afternoon lessons at the back of Sandy Lovejoy’s shop were held in the cleared area of floor where Sandy had sat in his armchair, among the second-hand instruments. Brady and Broderick sat facing each other on two hardback chairs pulled from among the stock; it was very formal. All this I extracted bit by bit.

  Broderick began by asking why Brian wanted to learn guitar at all.

  To play rock and roll and Country and Western, Brady told him.

  Country music, American and Australian, beloved by the farming people all over Tasmania, was what Brady had grown up with; his idols were Hank Snow, Kitty Wells and the Australian Reg Lindsay. But the music was regarded by city people as a joke; and Brady waited tensely for Broderick to scorn him.

  Broderick didn’t, however; he merely stared at Brady and nodded, his sober stare unchanging. ‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘All you’ll really need for that is a few basic strums. But is it really all you want? That and rock and roll? You’ve got the aptitude for more, I can see that already.’

  ‘I’d like to play like you,’ Brian said. ‘That Spanish stuff. Can that bloke who works here play it?’

  ‘Darcy? Yes. He’s coming on well. But if you want to play flamenco like Darcy, you’ll have to learn the guitar properly: not just strumming. It’d give you a big advantage in accompanying yourself, too. Would you like that?’

  When Brian agreed, Broderick allowed him a rare, cold smile.

  And so they began in earnest. Brady was shown at first how to hold the guitar against his body; and Broderick told him to feel it, to get to know it with his hands. Self-conscious at first, Brady soon became intent on learning to love by touch the dry, light shape of this magical instrument about which Broderick began to talk, and which he then took from Brady and demonstrated.

  He told how its remote ancestor was the Greek kithara, whose voice had sounded at certain mysterious ceremonies of the ancient world. The modern guitar, Broderick said, came into Spain in the ninth century, in the hands of the Arab singer Ziryab. It was refined, added to; more strings were tried. Perfec
ted, it routed the lute, and had reigned supreme ever since. He looked triumphant; and Brian proudly shared in this triumph, holding his guitar.

  In subsequent lessons, Brady was shown how to pluck the individual strings, and was taught the use of the thumb to produce the rich bass notes: a special action in flamenco known as pulgar. Flamenco players, Broderick said, had a power that classical guitarists couldn’t match. And while Brady patiently plucked the strings, Broderick went on telling him about the nature of the guitar. Occasionally he brought flamenco records to the lessons, some of them old wax 78s, to play them on a massive radiogram of Sandy’s that stood in a corner. Brady was introduced to the hollow, wild majesty of the semi-legendary Ramón Montoya; to Nino Ricardo; to Sabicas, the reigning king. And all the time, sitting with his dark raincoat trailing open, sleepy-lidded eyes expressionless, Broderick talked on about the guitar and its history.

  He was like a teacher, Brady told me, except that he was never boring; and although he had such a quiet, almost monotonous voice, it somehow made you tingle; you wanted to hear everything. He told how this particular, woman-shaped creature of polished spruce and rosewood that Brady held in his arms had come from the workshop of José Ramirez of Madrid, one of a line of great guitar makers who had treated the building of guitars as a problem of physics and mathematics, and had set out to plumb the unplumbable: to discover what it is that makes the perfect guitar.

  The Ramirez family came as close as anyone, Broderick said; but no one would ever solve the mystery completely; there would never be a perfect formula, and magically perfect guitars would always occur by chance, and themselves would have little imperfections that were part of the secret of their beauty.

  ‘No real mystery can be solved,’ Broderick said.

  His cold eyes were fixed on Brian; he sat back in his chair, raincoat flung open, hands in trouser pockets, his legs extended in front of him, casually crossed. ‘That’s why it’s a mystery — like those mysteries of religion your Church talks about.’ He faintly smiled.

  ‘I don’t listen to that stuff any more,’ Brian said.

  Broderick raised his eyebrows. ‘No? Does it bore you?’

  ‘I just don’t believe in it now.’

  Broderick was silent for so long that Brian grew uneasy. Sitting at ease in the same position, legs extended, the man finally spoke again, in a tone which assumed that Brian would be interested, but which was casual at the same time; almost perfunctory. ‘Eventually you may discover mysteries that are less boring,’ he said. ‘They might make you lonely — but if you’re strong enough, they’ll make you master of your life, instead of a victim. The Church sees you as a victim.’

  What had he meant by this?

  I badgered Brady to try and extract a guess; I found his simple-minded casualness maddening. But it was no use; he said he didn’t know; and Broderick hadn’t pursued the matter.

  3. Mrs Dillon

  And once it fell upon a day,

  A cauld day and a snell,

  When we were frae the hunting come,

  That frae my horse I fell;

  The Queen o Fairies she caught me,

  In yon green hill to dwell.

  1

  He came into my room like a marauder, as he’d done when we were children — entering as he always did, by climbing the Himalayan pine and dropping from an overhanging branch on to my balcony. His old black bicycle was left leaning against the tree-trunk below, his guitar and a haversack on the carrier. He wore jeans and a dark pea-jacket, and his eyes shone with the light of some unusual stimulation, half exultant and half despairing; or so it seemed to me. It was six o’clock on a Friday evening, two weeks from the end of final term.

  He lit a cigarette, standing in the middle of my room, and his fingers shook a little.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m out,’ Brady said. ‘Finished. Heading back to the farm tonight, on the bike. Want to join me?’

  When I began to question him, he said: ‘No time to talk, mate. I’ve got into a bit of trouble. Are you coming, or not? You won’t need to bring much.’

  I stared at him. ‘You mean ride up there? Now? It’s eighty miles. And I’m taking the exams, even if you aren’t.’

  ‘You can swot up there; bring your bloody books, if you must. What’s the matter? Too tough a ride for you?’ He almost sneered. ‘Your leg’s good enough to do it, Dick. We’ll sleep by the road tonight. Or are you too cosy here?’ And his eyes went derisively about the room, reducing to an old woman’s clutter my library, my desk, and Pollock’s Toy Theatre on its shelf by the radiogram.

  I hesitated. The ride would be hard, and I wasn’t sure that I could do it; but he was asking me to share, if only at secondhand, the thrilling wind of risk: to give up crippledom.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said.

  Our ride up the winding East Coast Highway comes back to me now like the memory of some initiation by torture. Exultancy mingles with unvoiced pleas for mercy; beauty is seen through pain, its images floating past a dim window of distress, the one serious reality the aching, weakening muscles of my game left leg, whose strength both Brady and I had overestimated.

  On the night of setting out, when we slept after midnight in a barn near the township of Sorell, all went well. I continued to be confident, before sleep — to be filled with jubilation, in fact, as though I’d broken out into the world, never to be confined again. I’d ridden some thirty miles of highway between fields and through sleeping little towns; now, wakeful and shivering under an old overcoat, listening to Brady’s heavy breathing and the sighing of the flatland wind, I was proud of my new strength. I saw myself as a rover like him, in the adult future that waited close at hand; a cripple no more.

  But the next day, I began to be in trouble. The island’s early summer had left us, and as we rode on under a steady drizzle, through sombre, dripping gum-forests empty of towns, my left leg ached and trembled, pleading to be spared. Brady was always out in front, a tireless, powerful, hunched-over figure who never looked back, his guitar case slung across his shoulders; and I began to be tempted to call out to him; to beg him to wait, to rest.

  But I wouldn’t, I’d sworn it to myself. Desperately, I made my quavering leg push and push, my books and haversack growing heavy on the carrier, my useless walking-stick tied to the handlebars. The road moved inland at times, the white East Coast beaches appearing and disappearing like visions. I grew weak and dizzy, but said nothing to Brady. Occasionally we drank water from the creeks we crossed, walking underneath the little bridges where it smelled profoundly of earth and rotting willow leaves. I was too tired to speak, at these stops. I pedalled on, a soaked animal in harness, my breath coming in sobs, wheeling above ancient, sullen gullys that were dense with tall timber. The few cars that passed spattered us with mud.

  Eventually I found that Brady was drawing away on the long, steep hills. Once he looked back and smiled cruelly, and I hated him, deranged by pain and exhaustion. Perhaps he’d always resented my grandfather’s prosperous house, I said; maybe he’d envied me the comforts I enjoyed, while he must endure being a boarder; and this was his revenge. Had he lured me on this ridiculous ride simply to torment me, now that his final exam was thrown away?

  Towards five o’clock, pushing deliriously up yet another hill, I knew I must soon give up. But then my agony ended.

  Clearing the brow of a final rise, we’d come out of the hills and the enclosing gum forests, their metal-green ramparts left behind; we coasted downhill, freewheeling, in a long, splendid arc of relief, where my leg need pump no more. At the bottom, we were out on to a white, straight road that ran above the beaches near Swansea, in open, moor-like, tussock country of she-oaks and tea tree, with no human signs except phone wires, and the dry-stone walls along the paddocks, built by the pioneers. The rain was over, and these sweet, pale spaces lifted my heart.

  I called out wordlessly to the distant Brady, like a young hound barking, and my cousin waved back, sh
owing that he understood. A clean, easterly wind blew in gusts, and the small, deserted beaches and grey ocean, with spray gesturing above East Coast granite, were not forbidding. They were pictures of the wild future: Brady’s future.

  He’d assaulted Brother Kinsella.

  This enormity had taken place yesterday afternoon in the empty dormitory, where he’d gone to practise his guitar. The dormitory was off-limits at that time; but there was nowhere else to practise, he said. He had sat on his bed, tuning; and after a few moments had looked up to find that the Navvy had come in the door at the far end.

  Brother Kinsella had demanded that Brady surrender his guitar; and Brian had refused. The Navvy had insisted, saying that the instrument would be confiscated; and he had then tried to seize it; to lay hands on the sacred Ramirez.

  ‘So I sank my right in that bloody great gut,’ Brady said; and now I had to imagine the unimaginable.

  At first, gasping for breath, holding his belly with both hands, Brother Kinsella had looked studiously at the floor. Then, picking up his glasses, and drawing wheezing breaths, he had shuffled up the aisle towards the door, not once looking back. In three more minutes Brady was away.

  Far ahead again now, on this straight, white road above the sea, he bent low over the handlebars, tangle of hair fluttering, the guitar bumping on his back. He pedalled into the gusty twilight towards home: the farm called Greystones, near Swansea, where a dubious welcome awaited him. Pewter and pink clouds rose ahead of him like portals; dry yellow tussocks bent in the paddocks, and breakers curled and crashed on the latest empty beach. Plover wheeled, urgently calling; everything moved, in this glass-clear, windy landscape that was not like Tasmania at all, but some remote Scottish moorland. He was already riding into territories beyond the island.

  2

  Set well back from the highway, the Brady house was built of the orange, hand-made bricks of the early days, with a slate roof from which two attic windows peered like eyes. Michael Brady had acquired land here in 1852, some years after being granted his pardon; he and his men had built the house, and had piled up the dry-stone walls in the paddocks. I would pick one of these rocks from its place, and wonder if my great-great-grandfather’s hands had touched it.