AT 29

by D. P. Macbeth

  Jimmy watched the clock, too. The plain truth was the band was hot. The second set, Button’s Back and Blue, would be entirely different. The heavy blues-rock, so well played and well received, would be replaced by the gentle acoustics of his hit album. Could the same high be reached? Can the rapport between band and audience be captured again? It would have been better if they never took these thirty minutes, agonizingly dragging on second by second. He didn’t want to wait.

  “Let’s go,” he said, rising from his chair.

  Clapping, chants and whistling greeted their reappearance. Peg was shouted above the applause, but the band would hold Jimmy’s signature song for last, just like on the album so, when all was done, the satisfaction of a memorable night would linger.

  “Back and Blue, ladies and gentleman!” It’s all he needed to say as he mounted the stool and strummed the opening chords of ‘Been There’, the album’s first song.

  In the moment, Jimmy reminded himself as the second set began, as good as we can be, as good as I can be. His hastily assembled team of backups had never reached this level and it was uncertain they would reach it again. The anticipation on the faces of the crowd was mirrored in the faces of the band as well. He saw it when he turned to look at them. The next and last concert would be in a smaller Melbourne venue. Tonight was the highpoint, here at this moment in front of their largest Australian audience. He wanted to reach the zenith.

  On impulse, he slid from the stool and nudged it to the side. Then he stepped back until he was positioned with the other four who were barely visible in the low-lit semi-darkness. The technicians had no choice, but to raise the spotlights so all five players could be seen equally. It was a small gesture, marking only a slight change from how Button’s Back and Blue had been performed in the other cities, but the four knew what it meant. Their leader was acknowledging them as equals, inviting them to share the glory that had so far been reserved for him alone.

  With the lights shining on the whole group, their play took on a special quality, brilliantly beautiful beyond any of the past performances. Been There wafted through the speakers led by Jimmy’s voice and guitar, but not apart from the other instruments supporting it. A unique oneness emanated from the band. The sophisticated listener could distinguish among the guitars, keyboard and drums, but it required effort. No one in the audience wanted to make that effort because the whole was better than any of its parts. This was not like the first set or other concerts they had done.

  Each song was better than the one before. Once again, the audience was compelled to stand, this time not to dance, but to concentrate every eye and ear on the stage. The people in the bay stood on their boats, craning their heads to hear. No horns blared out. The balconies became still while families and couples leaned against the railings. The lights of their rooms were darkened so no glare could interfere. If the thousand plus fans knew something special was meeting their ears, they were powerless to show it. All they could do was look and listen. The applause between each song was muted and short, not because they appreciated the performance less, but because it was appreciated more. No one wanted to miss a single pluck on the strings or a single word.

  Jimmy no longer thought about where he was. He burrowed deep inside his music, gradually losing awareness of the crowd, the moonlight or the others playing at his side. His mind was carried away while his voice and fingers did their work automatically, mystically. The time between songs, heralded with clapping, seemed distant, part of a dream. The music was all that mattered, controlling the night.

  As if hypnotized, colors flashed before his eyes, leaf greens, sun yellows, sky blues and sea grays each invoking its own emotion. He found himself carried off to scenes of the ocean beneath cliffs where swirling waters pressed against falling rocks and sand. Trees appeared, bordering fields of grain, swaying in the breeze. He saw ships at sea, not modern liners, but wooden vessels like the whaler in his dream, with tall spires and men clambering among the rigging. A village appeared for just an instant, then a dusty path leading to a white cottage. Finally, a girl’s face flashed before his eyes, fading quickly into a woman’s with flowing red hair, but the same person, filling his heart with contentment. He opened his eyes and turned them to the balconies, searching among the silhouetted figures. Something or someone was calling him home. Through it all he played the Gibson and sang his songs, adrift on a cloud of euphoria.

  For one hour and twenty minutes the visions captivated his heart while his music captivated everyone else. Then the time came to usher the concert to a close. Sensing that Peg was coming, the crowd came alive, issuing a crescendo that rocked the grounds, shaking Jimmy back to the present. His signature song had been anticipated from the moment the concert began.

  With the ovation still at its peak, Jimmy stepped forward to the edge of the stage. The spotlight followed his hands as he strummed Peg’s opening chords. The applause died just as he raised his face and voiced the first words. Smoothly, the backups added their voices, bringing a tender blend of vocals and instrumentation into the night. As the song worked its magic, a special bond between musician and audience emerged. A few in the crowd began to sing, hesitant, at first, but their voices soon grew, unwilling to keep silent as the end of the special night neared. Others joined in and then more until everyone was singing in a heartfelt tribute to a happy time. Peg, for this one play, was transformed to an anthem. And, as anthems sometimes do, went long, much longer than its six minute album cut. At times, the men onstage let their voices go silent, playing only their instruments while the audience continued to sing. Then, Jimmy waved his hand to follow his lead, starting it all over again, but in a higher key. Emotions welled up among some who could not contain themselves, a mixture of happy tears and smiling rapture. It’s just a song, Jimmy told himself as he looked at their faces. Yet, they displayed an emotion he had never seen in an audience before.

  As if on cue, the voices in the crowd drifted down, eventually going quiet as the last chorus began. Jimmy lifted the pitch again as he signaled the song’s end to the men sharing the stage. One by one, the backups exited, first letting their voices trail off and then quieting their instruments, until there was only Jimmy’s voice, the Gibson and a ghostly backbeat on the drums. He let his voice linger over the words, summoning Peggy’s face only to see it replaced by another’s, more lovely, but somehow familiar. Then he reconnected with the audience. The drums, too, were silenced as he strummed the last plaintive chords. Finally, he dropped his hands from the Gibson and gripped the microphone, bringing it to his lips. Then he let the last words soar into the night.

  ***

  The final performance in Melbourne did not reach the level of Surfers Paradise, but it was still good. The smaller venue, in a downtown club, was packed. As in the other cities, Jimmy found himself doing interviews for the newspapers and on several radio stations eager to capture the attention his growing notoriety afforded. Button’s Back and Blue continued to sell, finally reaching the top of Australia’s pop charts. Miles left a message with the sales figures each day. He also made note that the English groups were having success in the UK.

  “Ellis is bringing them back. I’m arranging a tour. Start in Maine and run down to Miami, now to Christmas. You headline.”

  “You want me to find some singer over here, remember?”

  “That’s still on. Bring him back with you if he’s as good as we think.”

  “Tell me again, how do I to find him?”

  “His name is Nigel Whitehurst. The checks were going to a bank in a place called Airey’s Inlet. I stopped them six weeks ago and thought I’d hear from him but, so far, not a word. I also talked to the other name on the contract, a nun there in Melbourne at Saint Malachy’s Boys Orphanage, Sister Marie Bonaventuri. Start with her, she’s expecting you.”

  Thirty-Five

  At the insistence of Sister Marie, Nigel enrolled at the University of Melbourne with the aim of earning a degree in music. This, because he could
think of nothing else that interested him. Within six months, he tired of the same restraints he encountered at the hands of Saint Malachy’s choir director. Somewhere deep he felt the need to do it his way. Thus, he shifted his attention to liberal arts where he excelled, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in three years. Sister Marie was delighted, but she was not finished steering the young man she had grown to love as a son.

  “You must continue,” she urged. “You are only twenty-one years old and you have no idea what to do with your life.”

  “I want to go to Sydney.” It was all he could muster with no reference to a job. In truth, he hoped to rekindle his relationship with Reina who was now an alternate violinist with the Sydney Orchestra.

  “To do what?”

  “I’ll find work.”

  Laboring in some office?” she scoffed.

  “I’ll be no priest.”

  Sister Marie raised her eyebrows. “A priest?”

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “I want you to find purpose in your life, whatever it may be.”

  Nigel shrugged, uncomfortably. “You found your purpose here?”

  “Yes, in you and all of the others.”

  “I can’t do what you do.”

  “You have your own destiny. You must continue your studies until the right choice appears.”

  “Choice is good?”

  “Yes.” She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out a thick envelope, the one Aaron gave her the day he left his son behind. She had not touched it, knowing she would one day give it to Nigel. He eyed the money as she placed it on the desk. “It’s from your father.”

  Shortly after enrolling at the University of Sydney’s prestigious School of Law, Nigel camped on the steps of the Opera House with his law books to woo the love of his life. Reina met his charms with feigned disinterest that lasted a brief few days before she succumbed completely and moved into his apartment on Phillip Street.

  As demanding as the study of law could be for most, it was intuitive to Nigel. His professors were amazed at his easy grasp of complicated concepts and logical discourse. The young student carried a heavy load, often adding classes and clerking nights and weekends. Within two speedy years, his application to become a Barrister was approved by The Supreme Court of New South Wales.

  Many offers came his way, spurred by recommendations from his well-connected professors. Despite the lure of lucrative corporate practice, Nigel found himself swayed by Sister Marie who implored him to use his education to seek justice for the less fortunate. Thus, when the New South Wales Director of Prosecutions invited him to join Sydney’s domestic violence unit, it struck a chord. He was an instant success.

  The incidence of family violence in Australia, no higher than elsewhere in the world, was nevertheless, distinguished by the same brutality. Social scientists argued that the viciousness with which Australian wives and offspring sometimes met injury and death was the result of the convict ‘System’. Historians knew different. From 1788 to 1868 one hundred and sixty thousand so-called felons were transported by ship to Australia. The vast majority faced lengthy incarceration and even death back home for crimes as petty as forgery or minor theft. Many were Irish insurrectionists who sought to throw off the English yolk. To avoid the specter of riotous hangings or expensive imprisonment and to rid its nation of this societal vermin, the authorities piously commuted their sentences to transportation and seven to fourteen years of servitude in its most distant colony. Few ever returned.

  It was true that many of these convicts grew violent. Eight months shackled in the hold of a creaking ship, followed by years of forced labor in an unforgiving land, drove men and women to insanity. Yet, most fulfilled their unfair sentences resolutely while later becoming productive ‘emancipists’ when their debts were paid. Their offspring, cursed by the tainted heritage of their parents, were not the wild lawbreakers that their ‘exclusive’ former masters wrote home about. Rather, they proved to be model citizens so devoted to the land of their birth that they quickly and forever transformed its vast resources to their own purposes bereft of the semi-feudal social order of distant England. But, like other cultures, Australian society reflected all manner of individual from upright to cowardly. Nigel knew his contributions to justice were no different than those of his colleagues engaged in the same pursuits everywhere in the world, to face down bullies in the dock and make them pay for their crimes.

  This, he did with more fervor than his superiors thought possible. Nigel worked the Sydney detectives hard. He held weekly meetings demanding progress and threatening repercussions that were taken seriously due to his imposing size and intense demeanor. Few doubted that he could not win the judicial results he sought. And, when the detectives occasionally came up empty, he impatiently turned away from the rigid ethics instilled by Saint Malachy’s Orphanage.

  The docket, so cluttered with unresolved cases when he arrived, was cleared to only a few of the most sensational within three years. Convictions mounted even as he saved the last despicable crimes for closer attention, unwilling to expediently bargain away the most severe punishment. In the absence of capital penalties, which New South Wales no longer invoked, he was determined to win long sentences. Whether due to subconscious memory or wanton idealism, his drive for unremitting justice was personal, something within sought vengeance.

  Simi Zingold, the leader of the Trues, a Sydney drug gang, was released from prison just as Nigel stood for promotion to chief assistant prosecutor. The career criminal, who was also suspected of pedophilia, had escaped prosecution when two youngsters turned up dead just before they were to testify against him. Within days of his release he became a police informant, mostly because he needed the authorities to look the other way while he got his old drug business going again. His handlers knew of his violent propensities, but that did not stop them from trusting his information, especially on drug gangs in Sydney where their goals and his coincided. One by one Simi saw to it that his competitors were put away. Everybody was happy.

  Simi had a jealous streak. He promiscuously loved many men and boys, but once his sexual interest was ignited, he demanded and violently enforced sole fidelity. He, of course, played the field, using sex as a right of passage into his gang and the lucrative rewards it promised. Sometimes, the retribution for a wayward lover went too far. Bodies turned up in the Hawkesbury River. It was the mother of one of these dead who came to Nigel for justice. She had information about Simi and his gang. She feared for her own safety, but trusted that swift action from the hard-nosed prosecutor would get the killer and his cohorts off the street before they had a chance to send her to the same fate as her son. Although Nigel spent most of his time on domestic violence, he occasionally lobbied for other cases that caught his interest. Given his successful record, he was never refused. He listened intently as she divulged everything she knew.

  There was considerable consternation in the detective bureau when the prosecutor ordered the pickup of Simi and his three closest henchmen. It’s not that bureau cared for the drug dealer, but he was a reliable source. It would be a long time before a better one would come along. Once again, the detectives were harangued for evidence backed by threats and humiliation. The brash barrister was proving to be an intolerable irritant.

  Back in jail, Simi clammed up and immediately called for his lawyer. Nigel expected protraction. He never planned on cooperation from the man he intended to put behind bars for good. Instead, he concentrated his interrogations on the gang leader’s three cohorts. Each had dozens of crimes to his name. One more conviction and they’d be put away for a very long time. The mother’s information was detailed. Nigel used it to perfection, starting with the youngest and weakest of the three. It didn’t take long.

  “You’ll be dead within a month if Simi even thinks you talked.”

  “Who says I’m talkin’?”

  “I’ll put the word out.”

&nbs
p; “You can’t do that.”

  “I can and I will, but if you cooperate I’ll see that Simi can’t get to you.”

  In a few days the other two men confessed as well. They were kept isolated, and while they never asked to see a defense lawyer, Nigel made sure no offer was made.

  In time, Nigel took his accusations to Simi. He confronted the drug king with the information his three partners provided, making sure that he knew they would be safely hidden away until it was time to testify in court. The goal was to get Simi to confess. The carrot was something less than life in prison, but not much less.

  Simi was smarter than his followers. He knew his best course was to say nothing while he waited for his friends in the police department to come to his aid. He expected some kind of incarceration, but he still had plenty of information at his disposal, information that the police could depend upon for more arrests, information that Simi could depend upon for easy time.

  The wild card that ended Nigel’s prosecutorial career came in the form of Simi’s defense lawyer, a high-powered solicitor with a record for success until several of his clients had been given long sentences at the able insistence of the uncompromising prosecutor. He was suspicious of Nigel’s marginal tactics and filed several ethics complaints against him, all to no avail. His irritation was still raw.

  He sat passively beside his notorious client as Nigel ticked off the charges he intended to file, supporting each one with snippets of the confessions he’d garnered from Simi’s three followers. As he described the sordid details, neither man seemed fazed, but when Nigel stated that the mother of the man Simi murdered would corroborate everything, Simi looked hard at his accuser.

  “She knows nothin’!” The defense lawyer quickly grabbed his client’s arm.

  “More shenanigans, Mr. Whitehurst?” he accused.

  Nigel knew what his opponent meant. He ignored the comment and went on with his list of charges. After thirty minutes the meeting was over. Nigel left fully confident that he would win another case. Simi and his defense lawyer stayed behind.