Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

‘Nice guitars,’ she said.

‘I’ll say,’ the boy agreed and he smiled broadly at her, just the way the first guy had. There was something not quite right about that smile. It was a little too serene for Jenny’s tastes.

She noticed that the boy was wearing a lapel badge. The letters SOFT were set in blue enamel against a red background littered with stars. And she remembered the first boy had also been wearing such a badge.

‘Is SOFT the name of a band?’ she asked.

‘No,’ the boy replied. ‘It stands for Sons of Freddie Terrano.’

‘Freddie Terrano?’ she said. It was a name she hadn’t heard in two decades. ‘Whatever happened to him?’

‘Oh, things,’ he said, and he smiled again, shrugged philosophically and slouched off. If he knew what had happened to Freddie Terrano, and since he was wearing the badge she assumed he did, then he certainly wasn’t telling.

Freddie Terrano, almost certainly not his real name, was one of those people who had found the guitar an almost laughably easy instrument to play. He could have been a great jazz player, an authentic bluesman, a classical soloist, just about anything he wanted. But he’d made his reputation as that most peculiar of all phenomena, the lead guitarist in a glam rock band called the Beams. In interviews he’d talked of wanting to write symphonies for guitar orchestras. He quoted Guitar Slim and. Debussy and Adorno; but when he got on stage he played loud, bludgeoning pentatonic rock over a leaden 4/4 beat created by the band’s two drummers.

The Beams made two successful albums and could no doubt have continued forever, playing revival tours and the supper-club circuits, but everybody knew Freddie Terrano was made for something better. He signed a solo deal and the Beams split up in a round of legal actions about who was entitled to use the name.

For a while Freddie Terrano’s solo album was ‘eagerly awaited’ and then it was ‘long delayed’ and shortly after that nobody was waiting for it at all. The moment had been ripe, but the moment passed. The solo album never appeared. Those who still thought about Freddie Terrano at all, and few did, assumed he had blown it by one method or another; too many drugs, too little inspiration, too much fear of putting his money where his mouth was. His continuing silence gave him a certain mystique but Jenny still thought Freddie Terrano was an odd figure to have any badge-wearing ‘sons’.

Not having given Freddie Terrano a moment’s thought in twenty years, she found herself thinking about him all the time. She dug out her old Beams records and it was weird, yes, the guitarist was pretty good, but it seemed as though he was doing his damnedest to hide the fact. The question of Freddie Terrano’s fate became extraordinarily pressing. There were other questions too.

Finally, at a gig in a converted army barracks in Aldershot, she cornered yet another one-armed boy with a SOFT badge on his jacket and demanded, ‘What is it with you guys? Why do you Sons of Freddie Terrano keep turning up at my gigs?’

The boy was terrified to find himself being interrogated by the artist he’d come to see, but he sounded like he was telling the truth when he said, ‘Because Freddie tells us to.’

‘What do you mean, he tells you to?’ Jenny asked.

‘You know, we go to his place and we discuss things and he tells us you’re pretty good.’

‘You go to his place?’

‘Sure. You want me to get you an invitation?’

Jenny found it strange to think that a man she hadn’t given a thought to in twenty years was out there recommending her, gaining her an audience. She could use all the audience she could get, but it was still strange.

‘What happened to your arm?’ she asked the boy bluntly.

‘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.’