Maestro

by Peter Goldsworthy

  ‘Your wife was Jewish, maestro?’

  ‘My wife had little interest in religion.’

  ‘But she had Jewish ancestry?’

  ‘Is this important? If not, play the Mozart again.’

  I played for a time before continuing, asking the question I had wanted to ask for months:

  ‘I don’t understand why didn’t you leave.’

  ‘Leave where?’

  ‘Vienna. When the Nazis took over. Weren’t you worried?’

  ‘We always hope for the best. These things are always more simple to decide in retrospect.’

  ‘But many Jews did leave. Why didn’t you?’ He glared at me:

  ‘Perhaps for the same reason you ask such a question,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I was too insensitive.’

  I sat beneath the house of Scotty’s absent parents, pretending to enjoy my first beer. I felt immensely content: the sun was shining, the sky was blue, my new friends surrounded me. Rosie lay on her belly at my feet, scribbling simplified arrangements of the latest hits, trying to find the lowest common musical denominator, some crude level at which all the members of the band could participate.

  Rehearsals were now fully portable, piano movers no longer required: two appearances at school fetes, one School Dance, and a street performance at the Darwin Mardi Gras had brought in enough funds for a cheap keyboard organ and amplifier.

  I was beginning to feel more ambitious: the annual Battle of the Sounds was approaching, and anything was possible.

  ‘What’s first prize?’ Scotty, sprawled on his back, naked from the waist, asked.

  ‘A trip South for all of us,’ I told him. ‘And a place in the Adelaide final.’

  ‘And if we win that?’

  ‘Money,’ I promised. ‘Fame. Beautiful groupies.’

  ‘Forget the money and fame,’ he laughed.

  Megan, smocked amidst tubes of paint, and pots of brushes, was stencilling the band’s newly elected name—Rough Stuff—onto the membrane of the bass drum. She turned, feigning anger:

  ‘You want me to do this or not?’

  Rosie echoed her: ‘If you’re not careful you’ll lose the only two groupies you’ve got.’

  In a far corner, behind a low wall of empty beer bottles, Jimmy was going through the motions—largely pointless—of tuning his electric bass. He too had stripped to his waist. His body was covered with black fur, stiff as steel wool.

  ‘We haven’t a chance,’ he said.

  I was ready for doubts: ‘Maybe not in Adelaide. But we can win here. We’re the only rock’n roll band for a thousand miles.’

  ‘This is the bush. Some country and western outfit always wins.’

  ‘Not this year.’

  ‘You know something we don’t?’

  I sipped at my beer, but only for show, allowing none to enter my mouth. I liked the idea of beer, but I loathed the actual taste.

  ‘I know who the judge is.’

  ‘Slim Dusty?’ Reggie, an occasional comedian, put in.

  I waited till the various snorts of amusement stopped: ‘You might not believe it …’

  ‘Save the suspense, Paul.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I smiled.

  ‘Fucking tell us. Or I’ll job you.’

  ‘Rockin’ Rick Whiteley. The Noise of the North himself.’

  The boys were silenced, impressed. A newcomer from the South, Whiteley’s Drive-Time Top 40 on the local radio was followed cultishly by every High School student. Various rumours held that he had fled North for various unspeakable reasons—that he had been tarred and feathered in several Southern cities. Whatever the truth, he seemed far too smooth, too sophisticated for the backwoods.

  Butter-voiced, afro-haired, Whiteley put his life in jeopardy his very first time on Darwin air. Never again, he announced, would the country and western ballads of Slim Dusty get airplay while he was running things.

  ‘Not even as a request,’ he boasted. ‘Not even as a last request.’

  The Hate Mail flooded in, and was jauntily read aloud each day by Whiteley between the new, foreign sounds of Jimi Hendrix and The Stones and The Doors. Letters from irate truckies, aboriginal stockmen, concerned Mothers of Six, Christians for Clean Airwaves …

  The revolution lasted one week. Whiteley suddenly found himself on the graveyard shift, midnight to dawn, a punitive demotion which caused an after school sit-in of school students in the lobby of the radio station, the ringleaders being three of the four members of Rough Stuff.

  The fourth member had a piano lesson.

  A compromise was reached, amid much useful publicity: Whiteley agreed to permit one country and western track per hour if he was returned to afternoon radio. Even then, he refused to suffer in silence. That hourly token track soon became legendary.

  ‘Is it the bushflies?’ he would interrupt. The art in country music is to keep the mouth shut, and sing through the nose.’

  He was always worth hearing on this one subject, a calculated Hate that was capable of lifting his standard discjockey patter into gusts of poetry.

  ‘Send me your letters,’ he would sneer. ‘And I will tell you the angle of your ears to the side of your head.’

  Or he would sing along, his normal syrup-patter stretched into a drawling, elastic monotony. Or the track would be followed by total silence—a horrified silence, we were given to understand.

  ‘Water,’ he would finally croak. ‘Water …’

  ‘They’d never let Whiteley near a judging panel,’ Scotty was certain. ‘The station has been trying to get rid of him since he arrived.’

  I flourished a leaf of paper: ‘One Official Entry Form to the Northern Territory Battle of the Sounds, bearing the name of the sole adjudicator. With whom no correspondence may be entered into …’

  The boys crowded about, bending awkwardly over their guitars.

  ‘He must have bought the station,’ Jimmy declared.

  ‘That’s his problem,’ I said. ‘Ours is this: what do we play on the big night?’

  ‘He’d give us first prize for Jingle Bells,’ Scotty said. ‘He owes us. Did we tell you about the sit-in? Went back to his place afterwards. Got drunk.’

  ‘Whiteley was wandering around in his jocks,’ Jimmy put in. ‘Wanted us to tell dirty stories all night. Then he got weepy …’

  ‘He’s weird,’ Scotty said. ‘Can’t hold his booze. Wanted to know if we’d ever been Boy Scouts for fuck’s sake! I almost decked him. But he’s got some great Chuck Berry tapes.’

  ‘Then we play Chuck Berry,’ I decided. ‘Whoever Chuck Berry is.’

  Scotty shook his head in disbelief: ‘For a famous rock star you are pig ignorant, Paul.’

  ‘So educate me.’

  ‘The King of Rhythm and Blues,’ he said, quoting I guessed from some record jacket he’d once glimpsed. ‘You must have heard his stuff. On Golden Oldies.’

  ‘It’s old stuff?’

  ‘Ten years,’ he guessed. ‘Reelin’ and Rockin’. It’s a classic for Christ’s sake.’

  Jimmy tried to be practical. ‘Where are we going to get the music?’

  ‘Just get me the discs,’ I said. ‘LPs, 45s—whatever. I’ll write out the parts. All I need is a melody line.’

  ‘Why not borrow Whiteley’s tapes?’ Jimmy suggested. ‘Tell him we loved them so much we just gotta hear them again …’

  ‘You’ve got the job,’ I said, more and more at home in the role of decision-maker.

  ‘Borrow a Boy Scout uniform,’ Scotty added. ‘But don’t get too close to him. He spits all over you when he’s talking.’

  The Town Hall was packed on the Big Night. Special Effects had been installed, an approximation of the more sophisticated discotheque decor of the South: strobe lighting, revolving mirror-balls, projectors screening continuously on all four walls and ceiling, coloured lights.

  But despite this, there remained something of a School Dance feel about it: something date
d, amateurish, thrown together by a Volunteer Committee.

  ‘Let’s rock,’ Rockin’ Rick Whiteley yelled. ‘Let’s stomp the night away.’

  As I had missed the sit-in this was my first glimpse of him. Small and animated, with a huge fuzz of hair, there was something cartoonish about him, something bouncy, big-eyed, disproportionate: as if he were an animal character with human traits. If certain of the rumours could be believed, he was in fact a human with animal traits.

  ‘Very nice, boys,’ he was telling our main opposition—a jazz combination from Alice Springs—amid a smattering of ritual applause. ‘Very nice. It was so … well, nice.’

  We waited side-stage, tough and smirking in leather jackets and mirror sunglasses as the older jazz players—their musical skills far beyond ours—filed past in beards, berets, duffel coats.

  ‘And now, groovers …,’ the Noise was rhapsodising, trying to talk the occasion up into something greater than it was, ‘ … Darwin’s very own rock’n roll band: Rough Stuff. Reggie Lim on drums. Let’s hear if for Reggie … Jimmy Papas on bass. On lead—hit it Scotty Mitchell. And on keyboards … Paul Crabbe. Go, Paul …’

  Did we have to play a single note to win? Probably not. Tuning our instruments on stage would have been enough to take first prize. But we played several notes, in various recurring combinations, and several chords, with a lot of backing noise. Reelin’ and Rockin’, Sweet Little Sixteen, Rock’n Roll Music—plus one compulsory ‘original’ track.

  Original at any rate in the sense that a few minor melodic changes, a couple of bass riff surprises were enough to differentiate it from any other twelve bars of rock’n roll ever written, and place it fractionally beyond the reach of the laws of copyright.

  Scotty supplied the lyrics: a poem constructed entirely of monosyllables, as if according to the strict rules of some new, difficult literary form:

  You Gotta Give Me What I Ask You For,

  That’s The Way It’s Gotta Be

  You Gotta Give Me What I Ask You For

  You Just Gotta Set Me Free.

  You Gotta Give Me What I Ask You For

  You’ll Just Love It Just You See

  ‘What a sound,’ the Noise shouted into the din of applause. ‘What a band! And what a song! Roll over Lennon and McCartney, here come Crabbe and Mitchell.’

  I loved it at the time: the driving rhythms, the wall of noise, the carefully cued screams of Rosie and Megan and the rest of our schoolmates. But, afterwards, sitting there in the spotlight, I was unable to take it seriously. For one thing, the sheer hurt of the sound we produced always, absurdly, made me want to use my bowels. The deafening volume seemed to trigger some deep, physiological reflex. Even then I couldn’t help seeing it in those terms: Music to Shit By.

  More serious was another problem: at the post-competition party under Scotty’s house, surrounded by well-wishers, the puritan in me began re-asserting itself. Had I done anything to deserve this fame, this brief moment on the dais?

  I felt strangely empty, deflated. Nothing worthwhile was ever achieved so easily, a small voice—perhaps my father’s, perhaps Keller’s—nagged deeply inside. Rosie also—after all her screaming—seemed subdued. Scotty was upstairs in his bedroom with Megan; Jimmy had been backed into a corner by Rockin’ Rick, who was plying him with Southern Comfort and trying to persuade him of the merits of having his biceps tattooed; Reggie was surrounded by a crowd of smaller Reggies, even the tiniest of which already seemed covered with acne.

  I took Rosie’s hand and we wandered down to the foreshore and along the beach. The party was soon beyond earshot. A thin nail-clipping moon floated high in a dark, empty sky; the only music was the soft hush and crash of the waves, half-silence.

  ‘It’s all a joke,’ she said. ‘But it’s fun.’

  Or perhaps she didn’t say it, perhaps she only thought it. More and more words seemed unimportant between us; or those words at any rate which had to do with feelings. Like twins, we knew each other’s hearts …

  I still have the clipping from the next morning’s paper: a yellowing photograph of three sweat-soaked, beaming musicians, front-stage, their healthy boyishness shining inescapably through their glistening leather jackets and glinting sunglasses and sweat-varnished faces.

  SCHOOLBOY MUSICIANS OFF TO ADELAIDE, AIM FOR BIG TIME.

  Behind them, half-hidden, the keyboard player can be seen, looking pale and confused and in some pain—wanting to shit, perhaps. And yet the sheer inappropriateness of the leather hung on his pale, skinny frame somehow lends an unhealthy, improvised, and—finally—authentic rock muso look.

  A paradox: of the four, only he looks the part.

  Adelaide

  ‘I believe you will be travelling to Adelaide,’ Keller murmured as I sat at the Wertheim the following Tuesday. ‘In the near future.’

  He made no mention of how he had heard the news. Nor did he pass judgement, but I imagined that if I examined closely the smudged white elbows of his linen suit I might have seen my face hidden there, and reversed as if in a mirror.

  ‘I trust,’ he continued, ‘that you will have a pleasant holidaying.’

  A wry smile twitched at the edge of his lips. Of course he had read that newspaper—he read everything. I wondered if the item had been sufficiently curious to snip out and paste … in his ‘textbook’.

  ‘Perhaps while you are holidaying you might kill two birds. The Conservatorium in Adelaide wrote to me some time ago. Your exam results last year …’

  He rose and fossicked in a bunch of papers on top of his fridge, feigning indifference.

  ‘Somewhere here. Ah, yes. There is a competition you might enter. If you have time while you are … holidaying.’

  ‘A Piano Competition?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The smile balanced again at the edge of his lips, then tilted back inside.

  ‘There is not much money involved. And it is unlikely that your photograph will appear in the paper.’

  ‘Do you think I should play?’

  He refused to be drawn:

  ‘That is your decision. If you plan a career in music you must start making a name for yourself. People must feel comfortable with your name. Like a … familiar brand name.’

  His gaze moved to the shelf above his small fridge: ‘Bushells. Heinz. Kraft. Kelloggs …’

  He read slowly, deliberately, mockingly: his accent rendering the familiar names strange and exotic.

  ‘… Bismarck.’ He finished the inventory with the brand name of his usual schnapps, and smiled to himself.

  ‘Do you think I’m good enough?’ I tried again.

  Again he deflected the question. ‘The standard will not be high.’

  ‘I may as well play.’ I tried to match his offhandedness. ‘Since I’ll be there anyway.’

  ‘Then we will talk to your parents.’

  The more thought I gave it, the more the idea grew on me: this extra excuse was exactly what I needed. My mother had not been overjoyed at the success of the band in the Battle of the Sounds, or the planned trip South.

  ‘Where will you be staying?’ she had wanted to know.

  ‘The radio station pays for our hotel.’

  ‘Unchaperoned?’

  ‘Jimmy Papas is sixteen. Nearly seventeen. And the disc jockey might be coming—Rick Whiteley. He wants to manage us. We’ll stick together. What can happen to us?’

  ‘I’m more concerned over what might happen to Adelaide,’ my father said. ‘And this Whiteley fellow. I’m not sure he’s suitable.’

  ‘We hardly know the boys in your ensemble,’ my mother added. ‘Why haven’t they been around more? Why do they always sit out on the fence, waiting? Why don’t they come in?’

  She insisted on calling Rough Stuff an ensemble. Never having heard us play, perhaps she imagined it was some sort of string quartet.

  ‘They’re my friends, Mother.’

  Mother. Was this the first time I had used the word in that way—kee
ping her at a distance, as if with a verbal barge pole. Certainly somewhere in that year she had made the transition from Mum to Mother: the journey of nuances.

  ‘Are they nice boys? That Jimmy Papas—I’ve heard he’s a troublemaker. And Reggie Lim—the boy with the terrible acne …’

  ‘He can’t help his acne.’

  ‘Thank God for his acne,’ my father chimed in. ‘It would make things much harder without it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it. Acne serves a useful purpose. It helps render our children ugly to us. Makes the pain of final separation easier to bear. Imagine having to love Reggie Lim …’

  ‘This is serious, John. We’re talking about the company our son keeps.’

  So the news of the piano competition, a Battle of much more respectable Sounds, changed her attitude in the space of a single evening, although the usual dialectic of jostling and shifting positions continued long after I was in bed.

  ‘He could stay with your parents,’ I heard my mother saying in the lounge.

  ‘Are we giving too much importance to one competition in Adelaide? At this age? What about his schooling?’

  ‘Herr Keller must think it important. Perhaps one of us could travel down with the boys. Keep them under supervision.’

  ‘Impossible for me,’ my father said. ‘But I’ll talk to Keller next Tuesday after the lesson. I can sneak out of the hospital early.’

  Keller had also been giving the trip some thought. He began as soon as I was seated at the piano.

  ‘I know how these judges think,’ he said. ‘They seek athletes, not musicians. They judge a scherzo with a stopwatch …’

  He scrabbled through a heap of yellowing Chopin albums and finally set the B-Flat Minor Scherzo on the stand:

  ‘We will go one better,’ he smiled grimly. ‘For them we pretend to be athletes. For ourselves, we play music—at the same time! We win the race, and we also keep our self-respect.’

  He played the Chopin through from memory. Apart from the Wagner, I had seldom heard him play more than a few bars at a time, or the same phrase over and over again. Certainly I had never been allowed this: a complete performance, uninterrupted, that lifted me onto my feet, exulting, with the first fortissimo response to the bass murmur. I stood at his shoulder, shifting from foot to foot, overcome, bursting inside with song.