That was before Darcy Burr reappeared.
6. Thomas and the Rymers
1
He came at around four-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, in May of the following year.
Katrin and I had been married since January, but we were still living on the verandah of Beaumont House, saving to furnish a flat. When he appeared, I was polishing a pair of shoes in what had once been my bachelor bedroom; Katrin was upstairs with her grandfather. Kneeling on the floor, intent over my work, I didn’t hear his footsteps; I recall the sun glinting on the shoe I held, in the way that one remembers unimportant objects seen in the last few moments before an accident.
‘G’day.’
No one else said it like that. The insinuating downward inflection made it both a joke and a password, calling up complicities that only he and I shared.
He leaned sideways through the doorway, grinning down at me — only his top half visible, like a spy in an old British comic paper, the fingers of one hand curled around the frame. The thumb of the other hand was hooked into the strap of a guitar case, which was slung over his shoulder like a rifle. Both of us stayed motionless. I continued to kneel, staring up at him.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing y’,’ he said, and his grin broadened, as though at a piquant joke.
He stepped into the room, divesting himself of the guitar, which he lowered to the floor. Somehow too large for the room, he looked like a vagrant, in frayed, worn-out jeans and a khaki military shirt of the sort sold by disposals stores. His lank black hair was what struck me first; longer than convention would have allowed when I last saw him (seven years ago? Eight?), it was cut in the new, mop-like fashion of the Beatles, and hung to cover his ears, making him somewhat resemble a Red Indian. He looked older; but the feral gleam of his slanting eyes was just as I remembered. He was like no one else, this gleam told me; and his sly plans included me. This notion was entirely irrational; but Burr had brought the irrational through the door with him.
I stood up, finding that my heart was hammering ridiculously. ‘Hello, Darcy,’ I said. ‘How did you find me?’
My abruptness and lack of enthusiasm seemed not to disturb him — or perhaps not to register. He went on grinning, big hands dangling, poised on the balls of his feet, alert for either welcome or dismissal. But this was a joke; either way, his expression said, he would stay. He was back, and I wouldn’t get rid of him; he would always turn up, and my surge of apprehension was mingled with a cold and dubious excitement.
‘How did I find y’?’ he echoed. ‘I can always find y’, Dick — there’s nothing easier than finding people.’
I looked at him for a moment in silence, not answering his smile with one of my own. I didn’t want him to stay; I didn’t even want him here, I thought, but I gestured at the old pink armchair, and told him to sit down.
‘Thanks.’ He lay back at his ease and stretched his legs in front of him, crossing one scuffed, elastic-sided bush-boot over the other, his expression of secret amusement unwavering, the brightness of his beer-coloured eyes reflecting the sun through the door. He reminded me of Clive Broderick, whom I seldom thought about now; it wasn’t just the association, but something to do with the way he sat.
‘Been a long time,’ he said. And then, as though reading my thoughts: ‘Eight years, eh?’
I asked him where he’d come from, and he seemed to consider. ‘Come from a lot of places,’ he said. ‘We got in from Queensland a week ago. We reckon we’re about ready for Sydney.’
‘We? Is Brian with you?’
‘Of course he’s with me. We’ve been working together for years, on and off. We used to do the Country and Western circuit: called ourselves the Brady Brothers. Got quite well known around the back-blocks.’ He straightened in his chair and leaned forward. ‘But that’s all over, mate. Folk music’s what’s in now; and Sydney’s the place to make it.’ He broke off; then peered at me alertly. ‘And how about you, Dick? A big-time producer in ABS! You really got there, eh?’
I showed no answering warmth. Instead, I asked him how he knew I worked for ABS.
‘Easy enough.’ He looked evasive. ‘I just phoned around a bit. Phoned your office yesterday, and they gave me this address.’
‘Did they? They’re not supposed to give out addresses.’
For the first time, my unfriendliness seemed to penetrate, and he frowned. This frown was faintly alarming; it changed his appearance. Things had happened to thin his mouth and to narrow his big white nose; and instinct told me that these things, whatever they were, had been drastic. There were lines in his cheeks and about his eyes that made his face look too old for the youthful Beatle-style hair; and the total effect was one of formidable hardness. It was like a second face, and for some reason I thought of a standover man.
‘Why shouldn’t they give me your home address?’ He had spoken softly, almost in a whisper. ‘What sort of bullshit is that, Dick? Don’t you want to know us? Brian and me?’
I hesitated, looking for a suitable answer. But before I could speak, he said: ‘It’s about Denise. Right?’
His tone had changed to one of perverse gentleness, trying to draw me in. I didn’t reply, since no reply was necessary; eight years no longer existed, we were back in his little room over Sandy’s shop.
‘You don’t want to be worried about that,’ he said. ‘Not after all this time.’
Again I made no answer, and I found that my heart was beating unevenly. Burr now dropped his head and studied his joined hands, as though reading a message on the thumbnails. ‘You shouldn’t hold things against people, Dick. Things that can’t be helped, or aren’t their fault.’ He was speaking almost under his breath. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘you were in it too.’ And he looked up and actually smiled.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I was startled; almost alarmed. But I already knew what he meant, and his stare told me that he was aware of this. I wasn’t guilty; I’d done nothing to harm the child, he knew that. And yet he somehow knew as well that there was a sense in which I’d always been guilty: guilty when I set up my fairy books in the sewing-room; guilty when I played with my toy theatre; guilty when I talked to him in Varley’s basement, dwelling on the Faery Process. I was the one who had understood him, he was saying (but not aloud); I had encouraged him, and we two were the only ones in the world to whom Faery was real. Yes, we were accomplices: this was what his smile had always been trying to tell me.
When he finally answered, his voice was soothing. ‘You wanted the seances, Dick, just as much as she did. Remember? You were interested in the spirits.’ And now his smile of complicity came back; he turned it on me in full strength, and I found it impossible to resist. With shame but also with relief, I reluctantly smiled back; and at this, he gave a little sniggering laugh through his nose. He had offered a diversion, with this talk of the seances, and I knew I’d accept it; he was prepared to admit to me a minor, counterfeit guilt, if the other guilt needn’t ever be acknowledged. That crime had never been committed; we could both pretend so. After all, I’d never known its details, and it was now such a long time ago.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I was interested in the spirits.’
The tension had gone from the room; the sun’s yellow light congealed on the shabby furniture, and we relaxed into a little silence.
‘Nice spot, this,’ he said, and looked about inquisitively, dwelling on Katrin’s dressing-gown with its pattern of roses, hung on a chair. He’d won, and we both knew it. I wouldn’t dismiss him; he was in my life again, and I wasn’t sorry. To tell the truth, I was half glad. How can I defend this, even to myself? Does it explain anything if I say I found him interesting? He was more than interesting; he was like a part of myself, just as Brian was.
I asked why Brian wasn’t with him.
‘He’s not far away. We’ve rented a pad in the Cross — in Victoria Street. You’ll be seeing him soon,’ Darcy said, as though offering me a reward; and his grin hinted no
w at good things to come. ‘That’s one of the reasons I called, mate. We’re doing our first gig in Sydney as a folk group tomorrow night, and we want you to come. It’s at the Grain Loft. We call ourselves The Tinkers. And I’ll tell you what: we’re going to the top here.’
‘You’ll need to be good,’ I said. ‘Folk singers are coming off the walls, at the moment. Anyone who can strum a guitar.’
‘We’re different,’ he said. ‘Wait until you hear us. Will you come, Dick?’
I saw urgency in the corners of his eyes; and suddenly I felt almost sorry for him, in his worn boots and vagrant clothes: twenty-eight, already looking old, and talking about going to the top. What ‘top’ did he imagine they could reach in folk music?
Yes, I told him, I’d come.
He stood up to go, peering delightedly into my face. ‘Good on y’, mate. Brian’s really going to be pleased. Bring your wife.’ And he winked.
I hadn’t yet told him I was married; he’d found this out from somewhere as well.
2
It was always half-dark in the Grain Loft. Orange candles like little pumpkins flickered on rustic wooden tables. No liquor was allowed; our entrance tickets entitled us to one free cup of instant coffee, served by girls in cheesecloth dresses and waist-length hair, whose pale, stricken faces hinted at sorrows worthy of a ballad. The air was spiced with marijuana, as Sydney’s pioneer hippies took their first dangerous inhalations.
Mellow acoustic guitars and banjos began to tune up, strumming and tinkling from hidden points in the dusk to create the little thrills of anticipation we all felt then, no matter how poor the singers — bards who would dredge up memories not our own. It seems remote now, that ancestral excitement; commerce has sucked the ballads dry, since the sixties. But they’ll rise fresh on other lips, as they always do.
I came here quite often with Katrin, who had begun to be fascinated by the folk boom. The British, Australian and American songs were an alien tradition to her, but she now talked about learning them. She’d begun to realise she must join the Anglo-American world, if she wanted to succeed as a singer; the Baltic clubs, with their audiences of exiles, were the past, while places like the Loft, and the many little coffee-shops that had sprung up around the city featuring folk singers, were the future. I was sympathetic to these hopes of hers, but a little dubious about her ability to adapt; I had no premonition at all that night of what might happen.
The Loft was the hub of the Sydney folk scene, and any folkie who wanted to make a name in the city had to perform here. Three stories above the Darling Harbour docks, it really had been a grain loft, years ago. Gordon Cartwright, the middle-aged ex-carnival man who ran it, had leased the top floor of one of the old brick warehouses here to cash in on the folk phenomenon that had arrived from the northern hemisphere — doing little to change the place except to build a stage at one end, and to put up poster-sized pictures of the gods and goddesses: Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, the Clancy Brothers, the Seekers. A heavily symbolic sack of wheat hung near the stage. Nearby, in the western wall, a door opened on to space. Its old loading platform and beam-and-tackle were still suspended three floors above the lane, and an appropriate nineteenth-century portscape glimmered out there, like Doré’s London: the lamps and stone mushrooms of the Pyrmont Bridge; the lights of wharves and ships.
There was no sign of Burr or Brady, although Katrin and I peered about constantly in the gloom, seated over our coffees and our pumpkin candle. The first few singers were uninspiring: a Joan Baez imitator without the voice; a pedestrian, middle-aged clone of Ewan MacColl, who sang unaccompanied with his hand over his ear; a youth with Woody Guthrie material who assumed an Oklahoma accent and played a very rough banjo. But then Gordon Cartwright bounced on to the platform, clutching his list of artists in both hands and exuding the special excitement he manufactured whenever he had new talent to introduce. Wiry and bald in his youthful green T-shirt, gym shoes and jeans, he crouched anxious under the spotlight like a servant, craving his audience’s tolerance, darting quick glances everywhere, hoping the fumes of grass wouldn’t be sniffed by police. The next group was appearing at the Loft for the first time, he said, and he named Brian Brady, Darcy Burr, and their female partner, Rita Carey.
‘The Tinkers are new to folk music,’ Gordon explained. ‘They’ve been playing the country music circuit until now.’
He had to break off, as derisive groans broke out. The folk fans were very puritanical in that year; Country and Western was despised, as was most pop music. The purists who came to the Loft, ranging through all ages, were here to listen to traditional ballads and protest songs — British, American and Australian — performed either unaccompanied, or with the instruments they thought of as traditional: acoustic guitars, banjos, concertinas. Electric instruments were anathema.
Gordon’s grin became even more fixed and placatory; elbows raised to the horizontal, he held his list as though it were a tray. ‘Come on,’ he pleaded. ‘Musos have to earn a living how they can, don’t they? We’re going to hear Brian Brady sing solo, first. Brian’s been abroad a few years. Before he came back to Australia, he worked as a seaman, and he spent some time in the UK, and saw a bit of the folk scene there. Brian Brady.’
Gordon jogged away, clapping, and the crowd soberly joined in. These were excellent references for a folkie, and Brady now had to be given a fair trial.
When he walked into the lemon spotlight, carrying his guitar by the neck as though it were a shovel (still the old Ramirez, I saw), it gave me the same small shock as seeing Burr had done. Like Burr, Brian had aged a lot in eight years; certain lines in his face made him look older than he was. His hair wasn’t as long as Darcy’s, but the tangled curls were certainly more profuse than before, as a gesture to the sixties. His broken nose had become more noticeable, but I saw that he was attractive to women; a little breeze seemed to stir through the row of girls who always sat at the front (groupies of the folk scene, in uniform cheesecloth dresses and beads), causing their heads to nod.
‘That’s your cousin? He looks like a roughneck,’ Katrin said. But when I glanced at her profile, in the dark, I saw that her expression was both inquisitive and indulgent; the look women wear when they are only pretending to disapprove.
Brian went through the same routine as every other folk singer, seated on a wooden stool under the spot: screwing at the tuning-pegs of the guitar; cracking jokes. There was always aggression in the air at the Loft, especially when an untried singer came on. Brady was like a fighter whose opponent was the crowd, and I began to be tense as though I were up there myself. But he projected a cheerful pugnacity that got him through the first few minutes — doing it by sending out signals of warning.
A voice called: ‘Where’s your mates?’ — and Brian’s light blue eyes searched the room, giving the impression that the owner of the voice might be unsafe if he found him. But then he smiled, and said confidingly: ‘I could do a bad thing to Darcy. I could tell his joke, before he gets on.’
This got a laugh; they began to be on his side. And I saw him through Katrin’s eyes: a roughneck. Where most other Grain Loft performers looked like singers dressed as labourers, Brian looked like a labourer attempting to be a singer, his short-sleeved shirt of faded blue towelling displaying biceps enlarged by hard work.
‘I’ll sing you an Australian song,’ he said. ‘We do have a few, besides “Click Go the Shears”.’
He began on the convict ballad ‘Moreton Bay’. Badly sung, its pathos is merely tedious; but Brady sang it well, and the Loft went silent. He was better now than when I’d heard him in the Sir Walter Masterman, his voice rough-edged but true; the lost eight years had given him deep bass notes that went straight to the pit of the stomach. His guitar work was on a different level from anything the average folkie was capable of, lyrical and assured, producing a hush of respect.
The applause was wholehearted, and I had a rush of possessive elation; I peered at Katrin in the dark as we clapped.
‘Well? Is he good?’
She smiled. ‘You’re proud of him, aren’t you? Yes, he’s good.’
Now Darcy Burr came on; there was still no sign of Rita Carey. Dressed just as he’d been yesterday evening, in khaki shirt and jeans, Burr carried an electric bass guitar which he set about plugging into an amplifier at the rear of the platform, going quietly about his work like a tradesman, Indian hair swinging.
Small murmurs had begun at the sight of this forbidden instrument, and now some of the audience actually began to hiss. I quailed inwardly, but Darcy appeared unaffected; he bowed and grinned with cold insolence.
At this, an aggrieved male voice called out: ‘What are you? A bloody rock and roll group?’
Darcy leaned into the microphone as he’d leaned around my door, his eyes glinting in the spotlight. ‘You can make up your mind when you’ve heard us. All right, Sunshine?’ He still grinned, but he gave out a small charge of menace, and nobody else called out, although low mutterings continued. ‘What a strange-looking man,’ Katrin said. ‘He looks like a goat.’
Brian, in the meantime, had been fitting a pickup on to his guitar and had plugged this into a second amplifier; now he looked up at Burr. For a moment, Darcy went on tuning, striking deep, resonant octaves, and the depth of sound after an evening of acoustic instruments was brutal and startling. Then the two of them froze for a moment, catching each other’s eyes like men ready to plunge into dangerous action. Darcy nodded, and they launched into ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’.
Standing up to the two microphones, they sang it at a fast, rocking pace, without the distortion the audience had feared.
Their treatment was entirely traditional, Brian taking the verses, Darcy joining in the choruses; but the accompaniment transformed it. Burr’s bass guitar, throbbing under the electrified Ramirez, gave the song a whole new attack; a dimension unknown at the Loft. The impact was instant, jerking heads up all over the room, kindling amazed smiles, setting feet tapping; and within a few verses, I knew that the objections of the majority were being swept aside. And watching Burr grin and sway cunningly over his bass guitar, I admitted that a good deal of their success was due to him, and his instrument’s subterranean power.
The Doubleman Page 21