Detours

by Tim Rogers

  When one Robert began a tentative relationship with Christine, I saw in him the same heaviness and bewilderment that I was experiencing, but I also noticed them sharing moments of great tenderness and I envied their passion, their complicity. The bullish knucklehead, bred from years of competitive team sport, was forever underneath my skin. As I smouldered with disingenuous resentment towards Terese for the missing sexuality in our relationship, the truth was I resented knowing people so fully formed and alert to the world. Though their faces could look drawn and pained by this unplanned vaulting into the adult world, they also seemed like figures in a painting or couplets in a sonnet. Justified and qualified. I felt like a cartoon.

  I didn’t receive an invitation to a school reunion five years back. Apparently the organisers couldn’t track me down. Terese and I had resumed contact years before, after a decade and a half of estrangement, so I didn’t take the lack of invitation badly. I already had the one school friendship I coveted. She had moved down to Hobart with her husband and two daughters, and I’ve since been to their home for a gorgeous meal and enjoyed the company of her family. I couldn’t help sharing with her then that it was a little amusing that her husband is even taller than me. She confided that my name brought the tiniest of tremors to their marriage, as I was still an ‘other guy’. I would hate for it to ever be more than a little joke between them, and I was embarrassed that I got a little thrill from the recognition.

  The last time I was in Hobart I called their house and left a message asking if they would like to see the show that night, but there was no reply. Though I was hoping to see her and her family, I’m glad she didn’t come. It never feels right among a crowd of people. We spoke two weeks later and she said the same. In between talk of raising girls and future plans, I told her I’d like to write about her one day. There was a pause, then, with a tenderness I recognised, she said, ‘I’d really like to hear your version of what went on.’

  I could not say the same. Thirty years plus after meeting her, she still has all the temerity I lack. We convene once or twice a year to drink beer and talk in much the same way we used to, but now in a loving, open way that I cherish. I think we both want to go back and find those two people we were, embrace them and hold on for a long, long time. Until then, I’ll no doubt always walk to whichever pub we’ve arranged to meet at – if it’s ten kilometres or ten minutes. I’ll open the door and see her in the best corner of the room, one that’s private and quiet, and I’ll stop worrying about my inevitable perspiration and the line I’ve planned to greet her with that goes ‘Look at us crazy kids, huh? We got through it all!’, because the second she looks up and gives me the warmest of smiles, I’ll just say ‘Hello!’

  Though I am to believe her friends and colleagues now refer to her as Tess, she asks me not to. And I comply.

  Yusuf Am I

  The first time I sang solo in public was a small school performance when I was sixteen. I put my hand up to do a song as part of a liturgical service that was put together as an introduction for the school year. Thinking that Cat Stevens had an appropriate catalogue of tunes for something of a vaguely religious and educational bent, I plucked out ‘Where Do the Children Play?’ from Tea for the Tillerman. We were children ourselves, and the song’s lyrics sounded to me, in 1985, kinda righteous and even a little insurgent. And it had very few chords. Practising in my bedroom for two weeks every night after school, I figured out how to effect a little tremolo in my voice to contrive some gravitas and learned the lyrics back to front. I reckoned I had it licked.

  I was summoned to the front of the hall in front of forty kids and begun to strum the simple chord pattern, D to G, back and forth, like rocking a baby to sleep, and as the first verse approached I experienced a feeling as if my body was being filled with warm caramel. I didn’t dare open my eyes, but this sure was some kinda something.

  But by the time I got to jumbo planes, the caramel turned to curdled milk in my gut. I couldn’t find the key if it was stitched to my chest with fishing wire. The melody was a place down low I couldn’t hope to reach. It was like being up in a balloon when you’ve got to be doing something on terra firma. Like hiding.

  Practising in my room was one thing but performing in front of folks, all of that went out the window. The melody went missing, keys dropped to unfathomable new lows as nerves took hold of my throat and strangled all familiarity out of it. I dipped the volume of my voice and strummed louder, hoping to drown myself out, but there was land up ahead, the part where The Cat goes up high and pleads in a beatific register, one that I reckoned I could reach and save a little face. And dammit if I didn’t! I hit that sumfabitch with everything I had. Even went a little higher on the melody and wrenched all the blood out of it. Me and my little gut-string guitar. And when I sang that line, all the caramel flooded back into my veins and my gut.

  On reflection I wished I had chosen ‘Heroin’ by The Velvet Underground. Same chords, I think. Less . . . precision.

  Afterwards, throwing a tennis ball against a wall trying to thrash out the memory of the song, a girl from my year found me, told me she liked my version of ‘Why Do the Children Sing?’ and then walked away. I never found out if she had made a mistake with the title, or if she was my first vocal critic.

  The first time I was told to my face I couldn’t sing for shit was in Canberra. I was eighteen and I was sitting in a circle with a small rabble of guys who lived on the same floor of my uni dorm. A guitar was passed around during the consumption of a slab of Tooheys New. When the guitar got served to me I dug into the opening chords of The Who’s ‘Pinball Wizard’. Not the familiar frantic strumming of the verse pattern, alternating between suspended chords to major – I was going to build to that and stun my four glassy-eyed companions. I began with the less familiar introduction, which lets the listener know, through a tricky amalgam of open chords, that something, definitely, is going to happen.

  A bubble of expectation lifts gently in the middle of our circle over ten bars and then – BLAM! – it gets shot out of the sky and bursts in a phantasmagorical explosion of colour as my right hand pummels the living shit out of a Bsus4 chord and our collective minds are blown by my strumming sorcery, as if I was, well, some kind of freakin’ WIZARD.

  And judging by the simultaneous plumes of beer that erupted from at least two of the mouths around me, it damn well worked. Sailing on a sea of raw delirious emotion I proceeded to sing the tale of a deaf, dumb and blind kid, ballin’ his way to flippin’ immortality. The melody is in a high key, which suited me just fine. All the better to wring the emotion out of the story. It sounded difficult for Roger Daltrey to reach, and we felt for him, the kid whose purpose becomes apparent when he trusts his available senses and gives over to some elemental guiding force.

  I finish with a triumphant E7, holding it while with my right hand grabbing the body of the cheap acoustic to wrangle the guitar in a push-and-pull motion that gives both a tremolo effect and a triumphant physical payoff.

  Apollo! God of music, truth and prophecy. Hand me a beer.

  ‘Noice, Timmy. Noice. But you ain’t much of a singer, are ya?’

  I became the singer for the band because the two other guys – my brother, Jaimme, and my best friend, Nik – said they couldn’t hit a tune, and I was in the boxing ring with one, not really landing blows but at least sparring. And besides, we wanted to do shows, so what the fuck. For thirty years now I’ve ducked and weaved and occasionally tasted caramel – and a lot of times curdled milk. And it’s worth it just to get that caramelised feeling a few times a night.

  It’s not that I can’t sing, I just don’t have the strength and stamina or skill. I’ve had lessons; tried not to smoke; avoided air conditioning and drugs; thought about it, and talked to it; and have spent way too much on lemons and Manuka honey. Just around the time I was making peace with it, a whole new wave of attention came to the wonders of dextrous, muscular singing through television shows, and with it came thousands of c
ritics eager to let anyone with a fragile voice know just what they could do with it. Creamy, sonorous tones were everywhere. Gymnastically fluid phrasing and soaring falsettos. I admire a lot of it, but I’m just not cut out for it. So I listen to Kris Kristofferson records and go where he takes me, with his occasionally wandering melody, and it’s still a voice I’d follow to Hades or Hurstville.

  I was talking to my dad about singing a while back. He’s got a beautiful singing voice and he told me about seeing a show by The Highwaymen years back.

  ‘Oh man, yeah! How was Kristofferson?’

  ‘You know what, Timmo?’ Dad said with a pause that urged his face to angulate. ‘That Kristofferson may be a great songwriter but, geez, he can’t sing for shit.’

  Playing a fiftieth birthday party in Newcastle last week I was a little shocked when a gentleman yelled out, piercing the smattering of faint applause with the subtlety of a flying mallet: ‘Nice voice, mate!’

  I was a little shocked, as I had entered the ballroom full of good cheer and a desire to perform with generosity and charm. It was a birthday, and I was part of a gift. I’d only had two beers, and dressed in a suit that practically bellowed ‘showbiz’. I’d made a note of where the guest of honour was sitting as I approached the stage after being announced. In a golden dress, she looked wonderful, pretty and expectant. Surrounded by loved ones, she was glowing with excitement, or champagne. I tried to ignore the quizzical little crease in between her eyebrows when I caught her eye and blew her a kiss.

  ‘Normally when I walk into a room full of people who are smiling expectantly,’ I began, ‘I presume it’s another intervention. This ain’t one of them, is it?’ (Cue a comically perturbed facial expression.)

  The response was subdued so I began, properly, with a tune of mine I know well. And I was enjoying it; my voice was a little beat up, giving certain notes just the right amount of gristle. Then the birthday girl got up from her chair just twenty feet from the stage, winding through a dozen circular tables to reach the back of the room before opening the doors to get to the outdoor smoking section. My skin shivered with recognition of an irregular but deeply uncomfortable thought – they’ve got the wrong guy. I am the wrong guy. And I’d only started playing.

  Five songs later, I pulled out the big guns. Two songs I thought might be recognised, if the guests really were the fans that my negotiated fee promised they were. Going for a note in a song about a weighty heart, with my eyes closed, that I trusted would stir the heart of the birthday girl, justifying my being there, justifying my being anywhere, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  I opened my eyes and repeated a traditionally transitory A flat chord as I looked down to my left and was surprised to see the golden girl of the night.

  ‘Um . . . do you know any Cat Stevens?’

  Windows

  The view from my desk at home would only be nine metres from the apartments next door but the uninspiring nightly sight of young couples cooking a laksa or arguing over the merits of Netflix is broken up by a tree that at a guess is a gum, at least twelve metres tall. Its bone white trunk is spotted with lacerations that are the size and shape of a giraffe’s eye. They’re either broken or still-born branches, but either way they keep a watch on me in their covert way, shaded by mature branches and their leaves. The tree doesn’t bear fruit or flower but the leaves are thick and plentiful and give my apartment enough cover to keep my movements relatively private. I wonder though, if I were under investigation, what my movements, without sound, would reveal to a sleuth. The PI’s notes might include:

  •

  The male inhabitant stares at photos in the evenings often, particularly those constructed like a shrine above an unused fireplace.

  •

  A middle-aged couple dances wildly to records after careening through the front door after closing time (any night of the week). The records appear to be from the back catalogue of Hall & Oates.

  •

  He disappears for days and weeks at a time, and returns dragging a guitar and what looks like weeks of sleeplessness surrounding his broken frame like bats circling the belfry.

  •

  He doesn’t appear to cook at all. Often eats straight from a can.

  While the tree is a reassuring bulwark, this past year I’ve been joined by a sleeker neighbour in the form of a white cat. My regular attempts to conjure a few chords and corresponding wordplay out of the shallow view from my window are mocked by this little critic/creature glowing in the infrequent sunshine and revelling in a human to chide.

  On hearing it meowing one morning in no small distress, I rushed downstairs to find my white-as-snow avatar of procrastination pleading at the door and realised that our relationship had vaulted into a new dimension of co-dependency. Despite my offers to her to come inside and sup from a crudely constructed milk bowl, she declined, with little movement save for a brief tarantella and a craning of her neck. It was like receiving a polite decline of a dance in the royal court. Showing no obvious signs of physical discomfort, I reasoned that she was warning me of something, or suggesting I ramp up my daily efforts to entertain her.

  I had been inside too long if I was structuring my day by the movements of a cat.

  At the invitation of my dear friend Peter I have taken a desk at an office in the city. I had found a few dry biscuits in the pocket of a faux-silk dressing gown (that I imagined I wore in the style of Noël Coward but in reality more closely resembled Steptoe). The biscuits had been there for weeks judging by their soft green fuzz and it became clear I needed to get out of my apartment for some time each day.

  I met Peter through social football, our shared histories in Western Australia being the opening salvo among a group of two-dozen other men. Possessing sublime skills as a footballer and an easy generous nature, he is – to quote a mutual friend – ‘a man that women love and men would love to be’. His father-in-law once remarked that I look like Peter’s older, uglier brother. The legacy of his nose having been broken a few times makes him look like an Anglo-Saxon Jean-Paul Belmondo, whereas mine makes me more Fagin from Oliver Twist. Still, you’ve got to take a compliment even if you find it hidden underneath a slight.

  The office is on the sixth floor of a building so replete with fading grandeur that it could be a facade: one strong storm could buckle its arch authority. However, in the way that grandparents can withstand boiling water on their hands or can open the most stubborn of all jam jars, the building feels eternally robust once inside. Linoleum covers all floor surfaces in geometric patterns that, together with the tiled walls and the office doors made of wood with mottled glass, evoke a time past. It’s easy to imagine our office in the 1920s being occupied by either the rag trade or aluminium-siding salesmen – a ‘mail chute’ system that once would have shuttled letters from the top floors to the bottom ones etches the image ever stronger. If only I could block out the lugubrious scuffle of TAFE students wandering the corridors in between classes to scour the racks of the popular vintage clothing store that takes over most of the first floor. Quickly I scold myself for being the lugubrious old twit admonishing youth and its dragging heels. Come one, come all, children, and feast on clothing of yore.

  There are nine floors to the building and of particular interest to me is that the office directly above ours was until lately the studio of Vali Myers. It’s now a museum of her art and fully realised life. I relish the fact that the austere interiors of the building housed such a mesmerising, bohemian presence. The walls abound with her fine pen, watercolour, gold leaf and ink drawings of the spirit world, depicting serpents and whales and satyrs. From the accounts of the people who knew and loved her, she was very much a lady ‘of the people’, moving among us and shunning the elitist art world. With her sartorial eccentricity and tattooed hands, face and body, I don’t doubt she scared a few ‘of the people’ too. I listen out for the percussive rhythm of very high heels. Clack, clack . . . silence . . . clack.

  Outside my new window, S
t Paul’s Cathedral is flanked by banners of welcome and support to refugees, and Federation Square forever like lumps of iron ore waiting to be utilised beside the Yarra River, defiantly muddy brown as it winds through the verdant banks. And there, too, is Flinders Street station where I reckon if I squint hard enough I can see my seventeen-year-old mother, smoking a cigarette on her break as an usher at the Regent Theatre, waiting for a friend on the steps under the clocks before sneaking off for a pony of beer, defiant in dark sunglasses even as the sun resigns itself to having bugger-all chance of a special-guest appearance.

  I want to breathe it all in until it sullies my lungs.

  Melbourne: my new editor, warden, muse and heckler. Hello, my love. I have always felt like a slightly intimidated visitor in this burghal, even after seventeen years, even from six floors above. Overdressed perhaps in a woollen three-piece suit and neckerchief, but no mouldy dry biscuits in my pockets, I yearn to have a reciprocal relationship with the town I dreamed of for so long.

  Melbourne is where my parents were born during the 1940s, and where they grew up. Their respective family homes were in Ferntree Gully, on the penumbra of the Dandenong Ranges, and Preston, in the shadows of Pentridge Prison. Maureen, my mum, was held to mild ridicule by Dad and us kids for the rollcall of famous people that she had sat near on the infamous (to our family) West Preston tram en route home. Back then, the number 10 route passed through Fitzroy, Collingwood and Northcote. There had been jazz musicians of note, politicians of disrepute and actors of renown: from jazz trumpeter Vince Jones and Normie Rowe to Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries and ‘someone who could have quite possibly been Billy Thorpe’. It seemed astonishing (to me at least) that famous people caught public transport outside of the CBD, rubbing knees with mere mortals like Maureen. And where were they going? Was it to inner-suburban clandestine locations where les bohémiens and the demi-monde could tarry? It makes me think of the time when I almost got knocked over by football royalty as I stepped out of Pellegrini’s not long after I moved here. ‘Sorry, son!’ John Kennedy Snr shouted, his famous jowls shuddering. This collocation of the venerated and the great unwashed in a city that not only was the home of the sport that consumed my dreams but also a world I had no understanding of thrilled my little heart.