Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

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.

Ah well, Jenny thought, a man who is moved by your art, a man who cries when you play for him, can’t be all bad. As she carefully put down the guitar she was aware that Freddie was rapidly trying to pull himself together.

‘Forgive me,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing to forgive,’Jenny said, but then she wasn’t sure that she really meant it.‘Now about these boys,’ she added brusquely.

‘Not again,’ said Terrano.

‘Yes, again,’ she insisted. ‘Don’t you think you have a duty to stop these young men ruining their lives?’

‘How are their lives ruined?’

‘Well, they can’t play the guitar for one thing.’

‘The fewer people play the guitar, the better,’ he said. ‘Guitar playing has never brought me anything other than pain and despair.’

‘Well, for some people it’s a joy.’

‘Only very shallow people,’ Freddie insisted.

‘And anyway, it’s not just guitar playing. Having only one arm must make plenty of other things more difficult too; things like eating, getting dressed, driving, sex.’

He laughed at her viciously.

‘What would you know about it?’ he asked. ‘The fact is, my sex life got about five hundred per cent better the moment I lost my arm. There are a million reasons why women have sex with men, but sympathy and curiosity are very high on the list, and a one-armed man rates high on both those items.’

‘I never thought about it that way,’ Jenny admitted.

‘Maybe you never thought about it at all,’ Freddie said.

That quietened her. She accepted a beer as a sort of peace offering, but she was not accepting defeat.

‘I didn’t bring you here to argue. I actually have something to ask you,’ Terrano said, sounding unusually hesitant. ‘There’s something I’d like you to try for me on guitar.’

‘All right, what do you want me to play?’

He looked infinitely sheepish and said, ‘A duet.’

Jenny was puzzled and felt very stupid. She had no idea what he could be wanting.

‘Let me explain,’ he said. ‘We’ll play a duet on the same guitar. I want you to play the neck with your left hand, and I’ll pluck the strings with my right. We’ll just improvise, see what comes out.’

She felt moved and she agreed readily enough. It didn’t seem so very much to ask. The playing was awkward at first. Simply finding a position from which they could both reach the guitar was difficult enough, the business of co-ordinating the fretting and the picking was harder still. But after fifteen minutes or so they began to get used to each other’s technique. He could anticipate when she was about to make a chord change, while she in turn began to respond to the different picking styles he used. The music came slowly, it was sometimes tentative and it was always a little edgy, but it wasn’t at all bad.

‘Yes,’ Freddie said. ‘Yes, I thought it would work. I heard some of your records, I really admired your left-hand technique. I knew we could do something together.’

It was tiring to play in this odd manner, and before long they’d both had enough. The guitar was put aside and they began to talk. Freddie Terrano wasn’t at all the ogre that Jenny had first expected, and she found it almost impossible to believe he was willing to let young men slice themselves up in his name.

A week later Jenny Slade returned for more of the same, and before long it had turned into a regular weekly gig. If she didn’t have a booking then Tuesday nights would always find her down in Freddie Terrano’s underground car-park, moving her left hand up and down the neck of the Gretsch, while Freddie plucked or picked or strummed. Before long they became extremely skilled at reacting quickly and intuitively to each other’s musical ideas. They sounded good. If someone had simply heard the music without seeing the physical circumstances of how the music was made, it would have been easy to believe there was only one person playing. However, a more experienced listener, one who’d heard enough of both Jenny Slade and Freddie Terrano, would have been amazed, and perhaps delighted, to find that the newly improvised music sounded simultaneously like both guitarists, and not simply a combination of both player’s quirks or trademarks, but a true amalgam that contained all their best qualities.

Each Tuesday they played, and afterwards they talked and drank and sometimes smoked a few spliffs, and a little after midnight Jenny would go home. It became one of her favourite dates. Playing for no money to no audience was more satisfying than many of her paying gigs. After a while, however, Freddie insisted on recording their sessions, nothing fancy, just a single mike hooked up to a slightly decrepit cassette machine. Jenny wasn’t sure that was in the true spirit of their improvisations but she didn’t argue. Freddie joked that he only wanted the recordings so he could listen to his own mistakes, but in truth there were very few of those. Jenny recognized that she and Freddie Terrano had something special, a true empathy, a genuine musical connection. She didn’t know where it was going or whether it had a future, but she recognized that much of the best music leads nowhere and exists only in the present.