Asturias (6 page)

He looked at the sack, hanging across his shoulder, then at my guitar-case. I got the feeling he trusted my music rather than me. I suppose he figured that pushers, sex-fiends and mass-murderers probably wouldn't take the time to learn music. He made a decision.

“I have to be home by ten. I've got homework.”

Homework?

“How old are you?”

He looked a little shifty. “Sixteen.” I held his gaze. “Okay, fourteen. But I'm old for my age.”

He was right about that. I held out a hand.

“I'm Alex.”

He smiled. “Marco. Where are we going?”

“First, we're going to see if my girl-friend is still speaking to me. If we survive that, I'm going to introduce you to a guy called Max …”

MARCO

Ten-fifteen.

The key turns in the lock, and light spills in from the hallway as he pushes open the door. He makes his way inside, dragging the sack behind him.

“Marco?” Her voice drifts out from the bedroom, tired as usual. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, Ma. It's me.”

You were expecting Santa Claus, maybe?

He bites down hard on the thought.

It's not her fault. She can't help any of it …

“
You're late.” She stopped trying to keep the whine out of her voice years ago. Most of the time he hardly notices it. But tonight, it grates. For once, there's a light on the horizon, but he doesn't know how to tell her. He knows the procedure too well.

What's the catch? What do you know about these people? How do you know …?

And on and on until his small ray of hope is lost in the clouds of her depression. He takes a breath, then lets it out again.

Better to wait until there's something more concrete.

He turns on the light in the lounge. Hanging on the wall over the sideboard is an old tourist map of Samoa, printed on a lifeless black velvet, and bordered with faded golden tassels. His mother's home.

They could never afford to take him there. Not even for a week.

He thumbs through one of the schoolbooks on the table. Another two hours, at least.

In the silence he realises she is waiting for a reply. He moves towards the bedroom, then thinks better of it.

“They were doing trackwork. The train was delayed.” It is just an excuse. Sometimes a lie is easier than the truth. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“If you could … Yes …” She sounds distant again. He looks back at the map and pauses for a few seconds. Then he makes his way into the tiny kitchen to fill the kettle.

10

OTHER NIGHTS

ABUELITO

Next door, Alejandro is playing. Rodrigo. “The Concierto”.

He is a good boy. And his hands are touched. By the angels. The old man smiles sadly.

He sits in the chair, facing the window, watching the sun die behind the houses and the trees on the western side of the street.

And as the music from the next room reaches a crescendo, his mind is suddenly far away, and the sun is setting over a different horizon …

15 March 1937
Guadalajara

The sky stains red like blood, behind the plumes of smoke rising from the gutted remains of the Italian advance.

Behind him, the victors sing their triumph, like drunkards in the
cantina.
But there are no drunkards here, only heroes, drunk on victory. Here, the grasping paw of the Nationalist beast has had its claws pulled.

Outside, the rain is easing. For days, as the battle raged, it played as much a part in the victory as the bravery of the Brigades
—
bogging the tanks and lorries of the advancing Italians and grounding their fighter-planes.

In the corner Ardillo plays a wild flamenco, and Juana is dancing to its rhythm, clapping and stamping in true Asturian style, with an uncoordinated French socialist as her enthusiastic partner. Conchita is dancing, too. With Ramón, the young Basque who left the safety of Guernica months ago to help defend the capital and keep alive his region's dream of independence.

Though he is not quite sixteen, Ramon is in love with Conchita and everyone knows it. Everyone except Conchita, of course. Conchita never realises how many men are in love with her. She has only loved one man, ever. Now she turns in her dance and smiles that love across the room towards him.

Manuel watches her and smiles back. He longs to dance with her to the rhythm of his brother's guitar, but his leg is resting on a stool, his twisted knee swollen to almost twice its normal size.

Of all the luck. To survive seven days of the most deadly danger unscathed, only to trip on an uneven cobblestone when the enemy is defeated and it is time for the victors to return and celebrate.

The music crashes to an end and the dancers hold a pose. Ardillo places his instrument against the wall and sits at one of the tables, leaning his chair back, and reaching for his drink. But before he can raise it to his lips, Juana is upon him, sitting on his lap, her arms around his neck. The chair resettles onto four legs, and the drink is forgotten as other priorities take over.

Manuel watches and smiles.

Suddenly Conchita is beside him. She too watches the lovers. Her arm slips around his neck, and she caresses his hair.

“They make a perfect couple.” Her whispered words are barely audible against the noise of the celebration. Juana is just eighteen, a month younger than Conchita, and they have been like sisters since she came with the brothers from Madrid, when they returned to Consuegra.

Ardillo is her life. They will be married when the war is over and the Nationalists are driven back into the sea.

There will be more than one marriage when that day arrives, he thinks.

If
that day arrives.

The sun has slipped below the distant horizon, though traces of its bloody passing cling stubbornly to the clouds. The columns of smoke have all but disappeared against the darkening sky, and the rain is threatening again.

As the thunder rumbles distantly, it reminds him of gunfire.

He turns to Conchita and kisses her. Her smile is the brief moment of sunshine between the storm which has just passed, and the ones which have yet to break.

“Mi corazón?
” she whispers. “Why so quiet? It is a night for celebration. Even if you cannot dance.”

“There will be plenty of other nights for dancing,” he replies, and forces a smile. But a cloud of premonition has settled suddenly on the noisy room.

He wonders if he is the only one who can feel it …

“Abuelito?”

The boy has finished his practising and stands in the doorway watching him.

“Alejandro. I … don't hear you coming in.”

The boy moves across to stand beside him.

“Remembering?”

He nods.

“Happy ones?”

“Yes … No …”

Who can say? The good and the bad. The happy, the sad. How can there be one without the other?

The boy's hand is on his shoulder and he reaches up to touch it with his own.

“How does the practising go?”

For a moment the boy is quiet. Then he replies.

“Early days yet. We're still finding our feet, but we've started writing some stuff, and we're learning to all pull in the same direction. Max says there's no hurry. He wants it right, before we get a launch. It
has
to be right. There's no second chances.”

No,
the old man thinks.
No second chances
…

As he stands to make his way to his room and his grandson takes his arm to lead him, he hears again the sound of his brother's guitar, strumming the rhythms of a flamenco dance. He watches again the movement of her skirt as she stamps out the beat and claps her hands above her head.

And he wishes there had been other nights for dancing …

SECOND MOVEMENT:

ACCELERANDO

… and the hot strings under my trigger hand
shooting an old dance at the evening walls.

Laurie Lee, “Music in a Spanish Town”
Cordoba, 1936

There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold,
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
…

Led Zeppelin, “Stairway to Heaven”, 1971

11

THE YELLOW-BRICK ROAD

MAX'S STORY

“And you think they're ready?” Symonds spoke to me without turning around from the window.

There was no choice. They
had
to be ready. I'd used up every bit of his patience, and then some. But it was the only way to play it.

“Yes. They are.”

“About bloody time.” Now he turned to face me. “How long has it been?”

A typical Symonds question. He knew how long — to the nearest minute. I answered anyway.

“Six months. Give or take. But —”

“And we've been paying them … What? Five hundred a week? Each.”

“It's been worth it, Ken. Believe me. They're ready.” I nearly added,
“I'd stake my career on it”,
but there was no point. I already had. If they failed now, licking stamps at Polygram was the
best
I could hope for.

“For sixty grand, they'd better be.”

“It's a good investment. We should get that back in the first month, once the publicity kicks in. We go into the studio on Thursday. In the next three weeks we'll have four tracks to choose from. We can have the single ready to roll by September first. We'll start the teasers a couple of weeks earlier.” I didn't tell him we'd already chosen the one we wanted to use. He liked to play star-maker.

“Original stuff?” He only asked questions to keep control of the conversation. Symonds never asked anything he didn't already know the answer to. He had his spies everywhere; it was part of his corporate paranoia.

“Three are. We're doing a cover of ‘Stairway to Heaven' as a showcase, and it'll definitely go on the album, maybe even the second single, but I think it's better to run with an original for the initial release.”

He nodded non-committally. With Symonds it paid to lay all the cards on the table. And I was confident of my hand.

We'd gone through maybe a hundred and fifty unrecorded demos from three continents in the early weeks, looking for a vehicle to launch them, but very quickly it had become clear that there would be no need to use any of them. With that much talent, and the enthusiasm the kids had shown, by the end of four or five months we had more than enough original material for two albums.

The kids had more than earned their money.

Six months of heart-breaking schedules. For ten or twelve weeks they had just about lived in the practice studio, learning to think and play as a unit.

Alex, Tim and Chrissie were perfect sight-readers, and their understanding of the musical fine-points was a godsend, and Marco, though he had never had any formal training, was an incredibly gifted natural talent. I'd seen it that first day when Alex brought him in.

He couldn't read a note, but for Marco charts would just have been a waste of paper anyway. One rehearsal and he would have the whole song locked down, with more magic touches than any arranger would be likely to think of. And if he got carried away, there was always the gang of three to pull him back into line.

It was hard to imagine that I'd been ready to strangle Alex for bringing him in that evening, unannounced, out of the rain. There he was, this thin drowned-rat of a kid, carrying his sackful of … garbage, and looking around like a character from
Close Encounters
who'd just been transported into the interior of a UFO.

I watched his eyes as I suggested he use the kit in the studio. They nearly exploded. The kit was state-of-the-art stuff, fully digitised, electronic pads, which were mixed through a special equaliser on the board, Zildjian cymbals; the whole ball of wax.

Alex had warned me to expect some teething problems, as the kid had never owned a kit, and I was prepared for the worst. For maybe fifteen seconds.

After five minutes, I was ready to draw up a contract.

When we called a halt, Alex brought him into the booth. He was speaking as the door opened, and I could sense his pleasure.

“I thought you said you'd never used a full kit. How did you …? You know …”

But Marco just smiled.

“I said I didn't
own
a kit. Do you know how many music stores there are in this city? I've been thrown out of every one of them. At least twice.”

My opening.

“Well, Marco. I don't think you'll have to worry about getting thrown out of anywhere again …”

The next day he played for the others, and got the nod. I took him home and talked to his mother. A week later she signed for him, and he was in. The band was complete.

Marco wasn't the problem.

Tasha was.

It was Tasha who had the most trouble adjusting. And it really wasn't her fault.

All the others had cut their teeth on music. For Tash, the most it had ever been was a hobby. So it was all a new experience, and on top of everything, she was the frontline.

Apart from the rehearsal time with the band, she was putting in extra hours with a singing coach, smoothing out the edges. But the singing lessons, intensive as they were, were no problem. She was a willing student, and she had a great natural voice to start with.

If that was all there was, it would have been no trouble at all.

It's just that her role was so critical. The sound was one thing, but she had to carry the burden of being the “face” too, so it was more a confidence thing.

In some ways it would have been easier if she wasn't such a nice kid. If she was a little more egotistical. But she wasn't, and it just wasn't working. For a while there, I was beginning to think we might have to ditch her, and reopen the auditions. A prospect I didn't relish — for any number of reasons. Most of them beginning with a capital “S”.

I discussed it with Chrissie, who had taken on a role that was somewhere between big sister and union organiser.

She listened, nodded, and stood up.

“Leave it with me,” she said. So I did …

CHRISSIE'S STORY

“Why don't you wake up to yourself and start living in the real world?” I said. I was looking straight into her eyes, and I could hear the hard edge in my voice. Her mouth opened and closed once, but nothing came out.

Then, before she could work out what was going on: “I give you about three days before Max cans you and starts looking for a new damned singer.”

Max was right about one thing. Tasha was too nice. If I was her I'd have slapped me straight in the mouth.

Too
nice …

But then, I couldn't help thinking about Damien. He was an egotistical jerk and a monumental let-down, but I guess I'd always assumed that it was all a part of the personality that made a lead-singer just that — a leader.

Bullshit!

That was exactly what had been wrong with
Torsion
from the very beginning; the reason why Max had never been interested in us, even though he'd seen us at one of our best gigs. A band doesn't need a “leader”, it needs a complete identity. It's a team effort, and everyone has a job to do. Tasha's job just happened to be to stand out front, looking hot, and selling a song.

She had a great voice, and she pretty much knew how to use it. And her body. She just didn't
know
she knew.

Strike that. She
knew
it. She just didn't believe it. It came from being catapulted into a job she'd never even considered as an option.

The other singers who'd tried out had been psyching up for that audition all their lives. They'd believed in themselves and in their ability to do it. Even if some of them were kidding themselves.

Tash knew she could sing and she knew she could sell a song. She'd proved it at the audition. But knowing something in your head just isn't the same as knowing it in your heart. In your soul.

I think she was just plain scared. It was a case of snap her out of it or watch her go under. I knew what Max was contemplating, and I couldn't really blame him, but the kid had potential. It was worth the effort it might take to try and break through.

Besides, I really liked her.

For a moment she looked like she was going to burst into tears.

“What do you mean?” She looked so bloody helpless that I was tempted to put my arms around her and tell her that everything was going to be alright. But it was much too late for that.

It was time for radical surgery.

I bit down on my sympathy and pushed on.

“I mean, ‘Why don't you wake up to yourself?' What do you
think
I mean? You're just not cutting it, kid. You're about
this
close to getting the flick. And you'll probably take the rest of us down with you.”

It was a rotten thing to say, but I had to shock her into some sort of action.

She just looked at me.

“The rest of you..?”

I remained strong. Just.

“Of course. Once Symonds hears about it, he's just as likely to pull the plug. Cut his losses and get out. He wasn't exactly in love with this project in the first place.”

I watched the realisation dawn. Suddenly this wasn't just about her, and settling in. It was the big picture.

The tears welled in her eyes, but she forced them back. Almost. “I didn't think …”

I pushed on.

“Well, it's about time you did. And it's no use crying. Either you learn to do what they're paying you to do, or go back to selling overpriced dresses and quit making a fool of yourself.”

I got the feeling I'd pushed as far as I could get away with. She was ready to break, and the last thing I wanted to do was destroy her confidence completely.

Playing bad-cop and good-cop on your own isn't easy, and I just hoped I could get the balance right.

I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder. She flinched, but didn't pull away. Her eyes were staring right into mine, like she was waiting for the axe to fall.

I had hoped to make her mad enough to fight, but that wasn't going to happen, so I changed tactics. I touched her forehead gently with the tip of my finger.

“What is it, Tash? What's going on in there?”

“I don't know. I just … Chriss, it's like part of me is standing outside myself and looking on, and when I try something, I can feel that other me shaking her head and acting embarrassed.”

“But you seemed so confident on that first night in the studio. It's part of what got you the gig. What happened?” I had my own theories, but I wanted to hear what she had to say.

“I felt … I can't explain it, but it was as if … I don't know. As if that wasn't me. The whole experience of being there, and watching the others, and then Max asking me … I guess I didn't have time to think about it. But these last weeks, I …”

“You've had time to scare yourself.”

She frowned a little. “I suppose …”

“There's no ‘suppose' about it.” I paused, then an idea hit me. A long-shot. “Tell me about your family.”

For the first time in I don't know how long, Tasha smiled slightly.

“Like what? My parents are old. They didn't have my brother until they were in their forties, and he's like … four years older than me. Dad retired last year, and now they spend most of their time speaking Russian with their friends, and reading. Vladimir is my brother. He calls himself Peter, but I call him Vlad. It gets him mad, because he says it makes him sound like a vampire … Mad Vlad … I'm rambling, aren't I?”

I shook my head.

“Not at all. You didn't get out much, did you? As a kid, I mean.”

I watched her face. There was a moment of remembering.

“No, I don't suppose I did. I
did
a lot of stuff. The dancing and the gymnastics. Stuff like that. But …” She shook her head and the words ran out.

“Well,” I said. “I guess it's time to get down and get radical. Grab your coat.”

We picked up Alex on the way. Tim wasn't answering his phone, and Marco's mother was in the hospital again, so Alex was it.

If I'd had my druthers, I really would have liked Marco along. He had the sickest sense of humour and he wasn't a bit self-conscious. If you make as much money as he did busking, you can't afford to have any nerves at all. With his personality and looks, I could see him being the sex-symbol of the band — even if he was just “almost fifteen”.

I guess his home situation had forced him to grow up quickly. His father walked out on them when he was about five, so it had only ever been him and his mother, and when she got sick … Well, let's just say Marco was a bit ripped off in the childhood stakes. But it didn't seem to bother him that much. He got his own back with practical jokes and by just being Marco.

That was why I wished he was coming along. Tasha just needed a bit of a push, and he was exactly the one to do it.

Still, Alex was a pretty good substitute. There wasn't too much he wouldn't have a go at. As long as it wasn't excessively illegal, or fattening.

So there we were, the three of us, heading down George Street to the Quay. I'd parked at the Goulburn Street station, and I really didn't have anything particular in mind. Just to break her of her shyness. There was a rager inside there just waiting to bust out. All we had to do was find the key.

Small beginnings.

I'd made her agree to follow our lead in anything we decided to do. I'd got to her at her weakest, so she was ready to agree with just about anything rather than give up the dream.

Which was exactly the attitude we needed …

ALEX'S STORY

Typical Chrissie. Jump in with both feet, then sort out the details as you go along. You had to love her.

She'd filled me in over the phone before they came to pick me up, so I was ready for just about anything. I just hoped Natassia knew what she was letting herself in for. Though I very much doubted she did.

We started off easy. Halfway along George Street, Chrissie nodded to me behind Tasha's back, then she linked arms with her on one side, and I did the same on the other.