Dirty Beat

by Venero Armanno

  So what would a man like that have made of someone like me, a gone-to-seed remnant of his very generation, now after his daughter?

  Say I was hale and hearty, and that night while the boys of Dirtybeat had a beer and cigarette break, what if I’d taken Ash to the bar and she didn’t mind suffering the glowering stares of handsome, jealous boys? Say for whatever romantic notion in her head she really was interested in the piss and vinegar of, to her, an old, old man. And, even further, say she laughed at my jokes, and listened to two or three stories about what happened back in the day, the good day when someone like me could produce an album that would survive decades in her pa’s record collection.

  What if coming home with me was okay by Ash, and, even more fancifully, she woke in the morning wrapped in my meaty arms, her face against my beefy chest and didn’t run for the hills screaming never – not ever, ever! – again to drink, but did in fact like being there, and found my morning coffee, toast and jam, and glass of orange juice, agreeable, and me even more agreeable, and we listened to old records and went at it again, and eventually decided, ‘Hey, this is good,’ so made the pact of togetherness beer garden strangers sometimes find themselves happily and inexplicably making in the headachy glow of the morning after.

  Then, if more time passed and my pump still didn’t blow, even with the eye-crossing exertion I was putting into Ash, my Ash, I might have become something of a fixture in her household, an old man able to meet on level terms with her old man.

  What would he have thought, what would he have said, especially on the day I couldn’t bottle things up any more and blurted out the fact of the love for his daughter in this crazy diamond of a diseased heart?

  ‘You know, tonight I’m asking Ash to come live with me. Actually, what I really mean is that I want the kid (your kid!) to marry me.’

  Would he have asked, ‘Hmmm – have you been married before? Any previous children?’ and to my ‘Nope’ then said, ‘Well you’re not starting now, arsehole.’

  Or would he have stared and stared until that gaze became an unyielding glare, or, by contrast, maybe even a softening, an understanding, an acquiescence to the strange magic at the core of all human relationships, that self-same magic all we one-time rockers never believed in but always hoped for?

  Yes, her pa to be my pa, his paternal love transformed into my physical love. Who can say; it could all have happened. It would have driven him crazy. I might have been happy.

  Right now, sitting in his pew, he knows that and is thinking about it. He’s not a bad man, but I can hear him saying inside himself, his words echoing over and over, ‘Thank God, thank God the bastard’s dead,’ yet on the outside he’s calm, sombre, a perfect member of this congregation. Well, who’s to blame him his secret thoughts?

  Ash is up out of her pew and moving down the aisle to the door, where the congealed crowd parts to let her through. She’s on her way somewhere, I don’t know, maybe the funeral of a complete stranger isn’t enough to keep her in one place or from needing to go to the toilet. As she disappears into the sunlight her strapless dress reveals her shoulders and arms. She’s like Bradbury’s tattooed man, only not as completely of course, though her pictures are filled with stories almost as good and bad as his. I can’t stop myself from getting up out of this thing that I will for a moment pretend is a soft day bed, and I can’t stop myself from following her.

  All of a sudden this sexy kid is as interesting to me as she was the night I died at her feet, and a whole lot more attractive than any funeral.

  I let myself follow her into the warm summer breeze.

  Ladies lavatory around the side, and there’s a flush then she’s out and straightening her dress and her hair. Washes her hands in the sink and when she’s in the direct sunlight the decision in her eyes is clear, at least to me. She doesn’t want to go back into the chapel and endure more psychedelia. Ash reaches into her bag and picks out a pack of cigarettes the brand of supermodels all over the world, and lights one up. Drags, exhales, and walks along into the cemetery proper. The sea of headstones is neat and orderly, like bleached skulls arranged in the sun.

  I’m a friendly wraith in this glorious sunshine, tagging after her. A bead of sweat is forming at her temple and I’d like to lick it away with the tongue I had when I was alive. Ash continues down the little necropolis avenues and reads the names and the dates, and looks at the flowers that have dried and fallen over, or that remain neatly arranged from some recent visit. She can bring flowers and fruit and wine to my graveside if it amuses her; it would certainly amuse me. I’d like to see her from time to time, would like to watch the smooth skin of her legs as she sits by the stone that says my name. She can smoke a cigarette or two. I’ll bask in her light.

  I remember reading about a type of gravestone you can get that’s shaped like a flute, and when the wind is up it whistles through the sound chamber and makes a ghostly ooh, ooh, ooh. I wish they would give me something like that. Ash, my only regular visitor maybe, could smoke and tell me the story of her days and nights or weeks and months since her last visit. In reply I’d make my lovely ooh, ooh, oohs, and in that way we’d talk more meaningfully than most people do their entire lives through. I’d terrorise kids and vandals too, and maybe I’d cry my lonely oohs to all the lonely others in this boneyard. We’ll be together forever, or at least until this place is redeveloped into apartments, or a swimming pool and sports complex, or whatever future generations of City Fathers and fat business-types deem fit – but the only way any of us buried here will ever talk together is through the wind. God’s got our voices now, and bastard that He is, I know he’ll hold them silent.

  Trees at the end of this avenue. Ash runs fingers down her long hair, pushes some straight strands away from her eyes, and looks back toward the chapel. She is thinking she can skip the eulogy and the well-intentioned music program, and will rejoin the crowd when they follow the hearse down here. She’s got plenty of time.

  There’s a breeze rising through the leaves and branches of a thick knot of trees up the end of the way. Not another living soul along here, so Ash walks to a bench in a clearing beside those trees, but guess what, I’m already in there, and just before she sits down to light another cigarette and stretch out her legs, and cast her gaze over this ocean of stone and marble mementos of men, women and children no longer in this world, she senses me, and puts her packet of cigarettes and lighter back into her shoulder bag, and without a shred of fear comes into the trees to find me.

  She isn’t at all surprised that she does find me, and so smiles and drops her bag at her feet the way girls will do on a nightclub floor. Her hands touch my ghostly face and my hands reach in and push her heart. In a moment, in that sort of half-dreamy way that things like kissing and touching between two people can go, we find ourselves spread out on the grass, protected by the thick tree trunks. It’s as if she knows that someone like me will need a little extra care, or maybe you could call it extra understanding, or just simple help, and she does do enough to help me, and more, and even more after that, and so in the freshest tattoo on her shoulder I come to see the story she’s had inscribed there. It’s about a man who fell down and who in her dreams she’s raised up into consummation. It’s something she’s longed for without understanding, something that she hasn’t been able to make head nor tail of, the fact that she should long to touch and make love to an old man who died at her feet.

  The colour rises in her cheeks, becomes a raw redness spreading down the skin of her throat and chest, and when Ash cries out no one but me hears, and she’s sitting by her father and no grass stains mark her skirt.

  The lingering effects of so vivid a daydream make her bring a crumpled tissue to her eyes. Her father puts his arm around her heavily tattooed shoulder, holding his good-hearted daughter to him, and I’m back where I started, up on one elbow in my permanent bed, looking at these people, these friends, acquaintances and no blood-family. All of them will tell me their goodbyes, in t
heir own way, just as Ash has done, and worse, much worse, I will have to say goodbye to them as well, and so the descent into the pit of God’s eternal forgetting will really begin.

  VII

  Maybe there are some things even a pit of forgetting won’t let you lose. Ash is just a kid, but Patti was forty-six when we first crossed paths. I turned nineteen, Maree Kilmister was long gone, and I wasn’t playing in other people’s bands any more. I had my own, a raw rock-and-roll three-piece.

  Patti was on the large side and she was gruff, but you wouldn’t have called her matronly. She was a free spirit in her way, more than enough for a young man to handle. It was my stacking-of-supermarket-shelves stage, which was probably more a decades-long lifestyle than a stage. This middle-aged woman looked at me over a mountain of baked bean cartons and said, ‘You, kid, how old do you think I am?’

  I liked the weird free-ranging conversations you had with people at one or two in the morning, the fluoros beaming down so that everyone looks like a cross between an angel and a zombie. Some of those work colleagues you’d know maybe two nights or two weeks, then they’d disappear never to be seen again. Some would be there forever, like fixtures.

  So this question was no great shakes really, just an ice-breaker that might lead to a conversation or nothing. I thought about it, about the answer, me already old enough to know that if a woman asks you a question like that, you subtract five to seven to ten from what you guess is the truth. That makes you two things: a wise man and a potential playmate. By then I already liked women young, old and anywhere in the range. I never saw any reason to discriminate and would use flattery, charm or a simple forthright stare to let someone know what I was after. These were still innocent days in my hot city, when words like chauvinism had no teeth and political correctness hadn’t even been dreamed up.

  Still, fluorescent lights, pasty faces and echoey aisles make you do strange things, and one of those things is to tell the truth. So I weighed a can of baked beans in one hand and scratched the side of my nose with the other, looked her over and said, ‘Forty-five, forty-six?’

  She sort of blinked. ‘Forty-six. As of yesterday.’

  ‘Huh,’ I replied.

  She said, ‘What are you? Twenty, twenty-one?’ It was 1975 and two weeks to Christmas. I was nineteen by a month. ‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘So what did you do for your nineteenth?’ and I replied, ‘Nothing,’ which was God’s truth.

  ‘How about you?’ I countered. ‘How’d you spend the big one?’

  She squinted with lots of lines around her eyes and the sort of stained, crooked teeth that a person with money would get fixed as their number one priority. Not her. She was a shelf-stacker like me and probably had a second job like me too. Waitress somewhere maybe, or dishwasher, probably all to look after some no-good kids. Still, her teeth were stained and crooked in a way that wasn’t really all that bad, and she was stocky and strong-looking without being dumpy or frumpy. I could easily imagine her as the one-time lead singer of some all-girl rock band, now fifteen to twenty years post her career. Her voice was low and gravelly enough that it could have been true.

  I’d come to like women like that, tough on the outside, but on the inside – if you give them enough thigh massages and back rubs – you discover they’re like syrup. For the most part they’re still the girls they were at eighteen, it’s just that no bastard will take the time to find that kid any more.

  Maree’s gift was to teach me to not to be afraid of women or sex, not to treat it like some holy taboo or unmentionable offence. Sometimes women seemed to sense that in me, and like it too.

  So this co-worker has considered my question long enough, and she decides to answer. ‘I got myself a takeaway Mexican dinner and a bottle of tequila. The bottle shops have got a kind of margarita mix now, and I got some of that.’

  ‘Salt and limes?’ I ask.

  ‘Yep. And then I sat in the dark and ate and watched TV, and drank until I could get to sleep. But you know what? At my age, sometimes the more you drink the less you can sleep, there’s nothing you can do about it. I was up till dawn. Just drank the tequila straight while the sun rose. Isn’t that the crappiest thing you ever heard?’

  ‘No,’ I told her, ‘some people would kill to have a birthday like that. I liked my nineteenth – it was the best birthday I ever had.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You bet’

  What I didn’t tell her was the reason. I’d spent the first half of the year in a prison farm, put away after a week-long binge turned nasty. The best freedom now was to just be alone without gorillas and broken mummy’s boys breathing down my neck.

  ‘There was no one around,’ I went on. ‘I had some beer. Didn’t watch TV, but I played records and drummed with them. No one told me to shut up either. If they would’ve tried I would’ve told them where to stick it.’

  ‘You’re a real drummer?’

  ‘Real enough. I just formed a new band and we’re really good.’

  ‘That’s why you stack shelves?’

  ‘That’s why I stack shelves.’

  ‘If you ever make a record I’ll make sure to get it.’

  ‘Just play it loud.’

  For some reason that made the two of us laugh so hard the shift superintendent came and told us to get on with our work. A couple of minutes later, when he heard us laughing some more, he came and separated us. Patti got exiled to the laundry and kitchen products lane to help some dowdy girl with the longest, most depressed-looking horse face I’ve ever seen. I got some kid with knock-you-down bad breath, a hero-worship sort of gaze, and a tendency to pick his pimples so that the scabs stayed stuck under his chewed-up fingernails. I couldn’t stop watching the way the blood and juice just oozed out of his face.

  My forty-six-year-old friend wandered by at the end of the shift. ‘Did I tell you my name’s Patti?’

  It was three-thirty in the morning. We went and stood on the footpath outside the supermarket, me to take my usual walk home, which I always liked at that time of day, her to get her Kingswood out of the car park and drive to wherever she lived.

  ‘Want to come?’ she asked.

  I said, ‘Why not?’

  In the car, maybe just in case she wanted to make sure I was clear on what was going on, Patti turned the ignition and slipped her hand down around my legs. So, to let her know I was no ignoramus, I got up on my knees on the bench seat and leaned in and bit her neck a little, which tasted of perspiration and some fragrant soap. I cupped her ample breasts, feeling how fast her breath was coming.

  She didn’t want any oily small-talk or dancing around the subject. It was all just sort of plain and clear. So to what’s plain and clear take plain and clear action. My stepfather always said, ‘Shoot straight or you do not shoot at all, you understand this?’

  Later, past midday, when I was ready to leave her flat, I slipped out of her bed and took a long shower. I thought it’d be good to get home and sleep a quiet four or five hours while the suckers of the world went on with their everyday jobs.

  It was funny that Patti’s flat was so small. My home was palatial by comparison, a nice house in a good street. It used to belong to my Aunt Emma’s first husband’s parents. Now there’s a mouthful, but it’s the truth. When they died, he inherited it. When he died, my aunt got it. Then she married Conny San Filippo and they became my step-parents. She passed away and the house went to Conny. Conny died and I got it. So shoot me for being lucky.

  My place was all lazy and green and leafy, quiet except for the cacophony of my drumming, as safe as a girl’s convent. Patti’s flat was clean, but it was cheap. One bedroom, a sitting room that was half kitchen, and a bathroom you couldn’t swing your arms in. It was an open invitation to anyone looking for an easy break and enter. When I came out of the shower, Patti was up and had poached some eggs and made some toast. Instant coffee, but hand-squeezed orange juice. ‘You live alone, too?’ she asked.

  I was sitting at her table, munchin
g on breakfast. It was good. Still wet from the shower, my long hair was in ringlets and I didn’t have a stitch on. She took the towel off the back of a chair and started rubbing my shoulders with it, like polishing a mirror, gently buffing me up to a good shine for the world.

  She wanted to know why I was alone and how I lived, but really I think she wanted to know why a decent-enough kid like me had no qualms about going home with a middle-aged woman, and even seemed to like it. That was something I couldn’t really answer, so I told her the cut-down version of a story that would have run a hundred pages. My ma the God-fearing sex-worker; my aunt the dissolute drunk; and the sheer accident of Concetto San Filippo. I didn’t tell her about the bitter tears I wept when he died and the mad drinking binge it sent me on, just said, ‘So, I’m pretty lucky. Got a nice house of my own and all I need’s enough money to pay the bills and feed myself.’

  ‘Don’t you want anything else?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Maybe an education? A career? You know, a future.’

  ‘The future’s over-rated.’

  She laughed, ‘Come on.’

  ‘No, I’m happy. I’m a drummer. And I like night-shifts in the supermarket, you never know what’s going to happen.’

  She grinned, but said, ‘Maybe that all sounds good for now, but things change.’

  ‘When they do, I’ll be the first to know, right?’

  ‘So at least answer this for me. Why live alone? Why not get someone in to help you pay the bills, get some company too?’

  I shook my head. ‘Hell is other people. I read that somewhere.’ The way she was rubbing my back was as attentive as what the trained touch of a geisha must be like. And it was getting me pretty excited again. I said, ‘Really, I don’t want the company. I like it better when I’m alone,’ and it was the plain truth.

  My house seemed enough to me and, as it turned out, I ended up staying there the rest of my life. Didn’t need too much else except for the occasional company of women.