Flesh Guitar (12 page)

‘It's gone. These things happen.'

‘How do you mean? Where did it go? How? Why? When?'

She could see him struggling with himself; should he tell her or not? He decided he would.

‘OK,' he said. ‘I did it myself.'

‘Yourself?'

‘I did it for Freddie. So I could be like him.'

‘What? You mean Freddie Terrano only has one arm?'

‘You're really out of touch, aren't you, Miss Slade?'

‘Apparently.'

‘That was why he never made his solo album.'

‘Yes, well, I can see
it would have slowed him down.'

‘We SOFTs, as we like to call ourselves, chop off our arms so we can be in his image. It wasn't so hard. I like to think of it as body sculpture. Some people have cosmetic surgery; we go for this It's no different.'

‘Oh, I think it is,' Jenny said gruffly. ‘I really do think it is. Does Freddie Terrano know what you've done in his name?'

‘Sure.'

‘And how does he feel about it?'

‘Well, you know, he's a cool guy. I guess he's pleased to have such loyal fans.'

Now she couldn't think about anything other than Freddie Terrano and his little band of self-mutilated fans. Even when she was sitting at home slouched in front of the TV screen, practising guitar while watching reruns of The
Fugitive,
she couldn't get rid of his ugly sinister presence. When the phone call came it was something of a relief.

‘Hello,' said a deep, slightly American-stained voice. ‘This is Freddie Terrano. It's time we met.'

He sounded eager and Jenny wanted to meet him at least as much as he wanted to meet her. He said he'd send a car for her, and sure enough a car arrived, but it wasn't some luxurious stretch limo, just a beat-up old jalopy with a series of spider cracks across the windscreen and a driver who wore a World War One tin hat and favoured an almost horizontal driving position.

The drive was a short one and when the car stopped and the driver made a big number out of opening the door for her, she was standing outside the steps of a small private hotel. A skinhead doorman in a burgundy uniform welcomed her and said that Mr Terrano was waiting for her in the bar, and he pointed her towards a flight of descending stairs.

The bar was small and dark and
lit with candles. The walls were decorated with mirror fragments and mosaics. At first the place looked totally empty but then Jenny saw that a corner booth was occupied by a man who had his back to the centre of the room. He didn't turn even as Jenny approached the table, so that she had to walk right up to him before she could be certain it really was Freddie Terrano.

He looked younger than she'd expected. The last picture she'd seen of him showed him with exotic quiff and sideburns, dressed in metallic dungarees with eighteen-inch epaulets. The man in front of her looked sophisticated, knowing, and yes, as the young fan had said, very, very cool. He motioned for her to sit down and he leaned over, kissed her on the cheek and poured her a glass of something fierce and highly coloured from a pitcher that he'd already started on.

‘Jenny,' he said. ‘Good to see you at long last. You'll forgive me if I don't shake hands.'

And there it was, just as expected, the left sleeve of his jacket hanging empty by his body.

‘How long is “at long last”?' she asked.

‘What?'

‘I mean, I'm surprised that you even know I exist. I was wondering how long you've been wanting to meet me, because frankly I'm not that hard to meet.'

‘No need to
be spiky,' he said, and she felt a little guilty, but only a little, and then she found herself staring at the empty sleeve and felt worse, but Freddie Terrano just smiled.

‘I realize you'll want the full explanation,' he said. ‘Although, frankly, there are times when I don't really understand it myself. It was such a long time ago, and sometimes I feel as though I wasn't even there.'

He recapped on his career with the Beams, right up to the moment when he was due to make his solo album.

‘The studio time was booked, the producer was booked, the other musicians were booked; the only problem was I didn't know what the fuck I was going to do with this studio time and all these great musicians. I didn't have any songs, any material. Nothing.

‘The record company didn't give a shit. They said, just turn up at the studio on the appointed day with my guitar and amp. All I had to do was crank up and show off. Whether it was jamming or cover versions or pure improvisation, didn't matter, they'd do whatever was required to turn it into a record. But it didn't seem right to me. I wanted some tunes, some melodies, some “proper” compositions. The problem was, I couldn't write any while I was at home.

‘So I went off to Wales for a couple of weeks with my guitar and a big pad of manuscript paper. I rented a farm cottage and I was all set to get my act together. But I was every bit as uninspired in the country as I had been at home. Oh sure I could play blinding twenty-minute guitar solos, but that was no good, that was far too easy. I spent my days walking round the farm, and my nights getting blitzed on the stash of bad chemicals I'd brought along with me.

‘By the end of
the first week I was raging with boredom, but I'd got quite friendly with the farmer who owned the cottage and he suggested that some hard physical effort might be just what was needed to clear out the cobwebs. There was an old orchard that had been damaged by storms, fallen trees that needed sawing and clearing. He asked if I knew how to use a chainsaw, and I said sure.

‘Well, you can probably guess the rest. I was lying to the farmer. I didn't know one end of a chainsaw from the other. I was hacking away at the trunk of some old apple trees when the chainsaw flew out of control and sawed off my left arm just a couple of inches below the shoulder. It was a mess.

‘We leapt in the farmer's Land Rover and went to the hospital, me carrying my left arm in my right hand. The farmer was full of confidence that everything would be all right. He'd had a farm labourer a few years back who cut off his foot and they'd been able to sew it back on so you hardly knew it had been missing.

‘But his confidence was misplaced. At the hospital they told me an arm was a very different proposition from a foot. They said they could sew the arm back on but there was no way it would ever be usable. I replied that if it wasn't going to be usable, then I didn't want the damn thing at all, and I wouldn't let them sew it back on. It was an unusual decision maybe, but that was how I felt.

‘We kept it out of the papers. I didn't want sympathy. I didn't want to be the legendary one-armed axeman of rock, so I slipped away, abandoned my career, let it all die.

‘For years I used to agonize about it. What if I hadn't left the Beams? What if I hadn't taken that holiday? What if I hadn't gone to help the farmer? What if I'd asked him to show me how to use a chainsaw?

‘I think it was
Jon Churchill, the drummer, a guy I'd met doing session work, who first came up with the theory that I'd done it on purpose. He said I'd always been an arrogant, big-headed shit. Everything had always been too easy for me. What most people take years to learn I could accomplish with one hand tied behind my back. I thought any damn fool could play a great guitar solo, whereas obviously it took a special kind of genius to saw off your own fretting arm. Maybe Churchill was right. How can you prove it either way? Or maybe I was just scared of making a lousy solo album.

‘Of course, I wasn't exactly happy about it. When the initial trauma was over I realized that a large part of me still wanted to play the guitar. So for a while I messed around with prosthetics, and slides and open tunings and Van Halenstyle tapping, but it wasn't the same. So then I thought about becoming a keyboard player, and I saw that with the use of synthesizers and foot pedals all sorts of things were possible, but frankly I wasn't good enough. I was a killer guitarist but I was only a very run-of-the-mill synth player. I think I wanted to be somewhere in between. I gave up music completely. That was no good either.

‘Years passed. I didn't feel good but I felt OK. What was done was done, and then, you know how it is, everything gets recycled. Albums that were virtually impossible to get hold of when they were first released are now on sale in every Megastore.
Things get remastered, remixed, repackaged.

Before you know where you are the Beams records are on CD and there's a brand new generation buying and liking them. Suddenly I started getting fan mail again, for fuck's sake. And every now and then somebody would track me down, think he was making a big “discovery”, ask me was I still playing. Some of these “fans” would turn out to be A&R men for record companies, who thought maybe I was ripe for a comeback and they'd invite me to lunch where I'd show them my missing arm and they'd decide my comeback might have to be postponed for a while yet.'

‘And then of course there are the boys from SOFT,'Jenny said sternly.

‘SOFT has nothing to do with me,' Terrano said vehemently. ‘I mean, they took my name, but I never asked them to. It started with a kid called Kenny Stevens. He was a young fan, a talented would-be rock guitarist. He could play every note on the two Beams albums. He worshipped me, perhaps a little too much. He knew nothing about my missing arm, of course, and he turned up on my doorstep one day saying he wanted to have a jam session with me. Then he saw that I only had one arm and he was devastated. He went away and the next thing I knew he'd sawn off his own arm, as a tribute to me. And believe it or not
he
found some followers, some like-minded Freddie Terrano fans. That's who the Sons of Freddie Terrano are, a bunch of fans who've mutilated themselves in my honour.'

‘And do you feel honoured?'

‘I'm not sure. I certainly feel flattered. You know, imitation is the sincerest form of fandom.'

‘Why don't you try to stop them?'

‘How can you stop young boys doing what they want to do?'

‘Quite easily if you're one of their heroes,'Jenny said. ‘You tell them not
to do it, and because they want to honour you, they do what you tell them.'

Terrano didn't reply, but she could see that there was a whole part of him that was really getting off on the fact that young men were mutilating themselves into his image. She was disgusted.

‘You are one sick fuck, Freddie Terrano,' she said.

‘Hey, it's only rock and roll.'

‘No, it's more than that,' Jenny insisted, and she stood up to leave.

‘Hey, where are you going?'

‘I don't want to sit here drinking with someone who encourages impressionable young guys to cut their arms off.'

‘Hey, calm down,' Terrano said. ‘There's lots I still have to say to you. I have a proposition.'

‘I don't think so,' said Jenny, and she left the bar. The car was still waiting outside but she headed off in the other direction and she was not followed.

She went home, got on with her life, and tried hard not to think about Freddie Terrano and his followers, but it didn't work. She kept feeling she ought to do something about it, and she did deliver a small tirade on the subject at a gig in a converted boathouse in Lowestoft, but nobody seemed to know what she was talking about. It was true enough that the boys were free agents, and it was even possibly true that Freddie Terrano would have been powerless to stop them harming themselves, but Jenny thought he had a duty to try. It occurred to her that she should have stayed in the hotel bar that night and tried harder to convince him.

So when Freddie Terrano
called again and was full of apologies, saying how sorry he was that they'd ‘misunderstood' each other, she didn't immediately hang up. And when he said he wanted to meet again, she felt she had to go along with it, solely in the hope of getting him to change his mind and maybe save the arms of a few potential Freddie Terrano fans.

He sent the car as before, but this time it didn't take her to the neutral ground of a hotel bar. It took her to a wild, deserted part of town, a place of motorway flyovers and electrical component factories and breakers' yards, and specifically to an abandoned tower block, forty empty stories of decaying concrete and boarded-up windows. The car found a gap in the metal fence surrounding the base of the tower and went down a ramp into a service area where the building's innards still seemed to be in working order. There were overhead lights, the sound of running water, plumes of steam escaping from heating pipes.

The driver opened the car door for her as before and she stepped out, shivering not so much with cold as with foreboding. Freddie Terrano appeared from nowhere and beckoned for her to follow him. Having no choice, she did so, and was led into a huge void of what might once have been an underground car-park. There were concrete pillars at regular intervals and no walls subdivided the space. Freddie Terrano, however, had done his best to make the place look homely. Scattered, apparently at random, throughout were dozens, perhaps scores, of old settees and armchairs, no doubt the jetsam that had been left behind when the tower block was emptied. There were a number of coffee tables and side tables set in front of each settee, and beside or on top of each one was a standard or table lamp.

Then, in a not too distant
recess of the basement Jenny saw something quite out of place, a beautiful Gretsch Astrojet and an Electromatic Deluxe amp, the one with the bull's head printed on the speaker cloth. They looked as though they were in fantastic condition, as though they were just begging to be played. And although this wasn't just a social call, when Freddie Terrano said, ‘Go ahead, play it for me, there's no way I can play it for myself,' there was no way she could resist.

She kept it simple, a melancholy tune, half strummed, half picked, an old thing of hers based on a lute composition by John Dowland. She was a little nervous and didn't play with quite as much heart or feeling as she would have liked, but when she was part-way through the piece she looked up and saw Freddie Terrano wiping tears from his eyes, and by the time she'd finished he was sitting on a beaten-up old sofa, with his head in his hand, his shoulders pulsing with a sadness that was for the world as well as for himself.