Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

When she arrived one Tuesday night she knew something was wrong. She entered Freddie’s basement and saw the guitar was lying face down on the concrete floor with several of its strings broken. She couldn’t see Freddie at first but that was because he was flat on his back on one of the many sofas. Eventually he realized she was there and made a bold attempt to stand up, but he wasn’t very convincing. His legs swayed like palm trees in a hurricane and the bottle of vodka in his hand swung in counterpoint. There was a dull but dangerous expression in his eyes and there was a pile of tape cassettes at his feet, the ones he’d made of their duets, and as he walked towards her he trod on several of them. Jenny heard the brittle crack of plastic, of cassettes being split open. But Freddie never quite made it over to where she was standing. On the way there his legs gave out and he let gravity lay him out on a long lime-green sofa.

‘What’s up?’ Jenny asked.

Freddie shook his head theatrically, as though he didn’t want to talk about it, yet it was obvious that he did, obvious too that Jenny would have to go through the performance of pretending to drag it out of him against his will. When this had been gone through he pointed at the tapes on the floor.

‘I did a daft thing,’ he said. ‘I played them to an A&R guy I know. I thought we had the makings of a decent album.’

‘I take it he didn’t like them,’ Jenny said.

Freddie Terrano swigged the vodka. ‘That’s right. He reckoned they were OK but they were a bit boring. He said I needed a gimmick.’

Terrano laughed so loud, so hard, so bitterly, that Jenny found herself joining in his derision.

‘Having one arm wasn’t gimmick enough. So I’m drinking again,’ he said. ‘Drinking being one of those things you can do on your own with only one hand.’

Jenny sat down on the edge of the sofa and said she’d be happy to help him drown his sorrows. He handed her the bottle and the next couple of hours passed rapidly as she and Freddie discussed the various evils of the music biz and all its personnel.

As the alcohol kicked in, Jenny’s feelings for Freddie got much warmer. Once she’d thought he was a monster, but now she felt protective towards him. She understood his hurt and disappointment. She felt sympathy, and yes, maybe she was a little curious sexually. She thought this was probably going to be the night she slept with Freddie Terrano. She leaned against him on the sofa. She closed her eyes and the world became a swimming, buzzing, hurtling place. She needed Freddie’s arms around her, to steady her, to steady the room. But Freddie was no longer beside her. She opened her eyes and saw he was standing a few yards away, looking perfectly steady now as though he’d drunk himself back to sobriety. At first she thought he was holding a guitar in his hand, something yellow and black and weirdly shaped.

‘You know what else the A&R man said to me?’ Freddie blustered. ‘He said what would really make for a great act would be if we were both one-armed; two one-armed guitarists playing a single guitar. He said he’d sign up an act like that straight away. The fact that you had two arms was a problem. As far as he was concerned, Jenny, you have one arm too many.’

And then Jenny was in no doubt about what Freddie Terrano had in his hand. It wasn’t a guitar at all. It was a chainsaw.

‘Come on, Jenny,’ he said. ‘We all have to make sacrifices for the sake of our careers.’

‘You’re out of your mind,’ Jenny said.

‘Of course I’m out of my mind,’ Freddie raged. ‘If you’d lost an arm, spent twenty years in the wilderness, finally found a way to make music and then had some record company hack dismiss it like that, you’d be out of your mind too.’

Jenny could see there was a lot of truth in this, but that didn’t make the chainsaw look any less threatening. Freddie Terrano pressed the starter and the machine seethed into life.

‘Like I told you, life with one arm isn’t so bad,’ Freddie insisted. ‘For one thing you’ll have a whole new set of fans. You can start a fan club called the Daughters of Jenny Slade.’

He danced across the floor and slashed at the first thing he saw, a leatherette winged chair, cutting it open in a burst of stuffing and sawdust.

‘But supposing we did both have one arm,’ Jenny said, for one moment considering the terrible prospect, ‘what would we be? Nobody would ever take us seriously. We’d be a novelty act, a freak show.’

‘And what kind of an act am I now?’ he asked.

He brandished the chainsaw again and whacked it against one of the concrete pillars. Sparks flew and he bounced away like a pinball.

‘Look,’ Jenny pleaded, ‘even if, God help us, you succeed in hacking my arm off, how can you possibly think that after that I’d agree to form an act with you?’

‘What other choice would you have?’

‘I’d find some other way to play.’

‘Oh really? Like I did?’

He advanced on her. She looked around for something to defend herself with and the only thing that came to hand was the guitar, the classic Gretsch Astrojet. She grabbed it, held the body towards her, the neck sticking out like a lance. It wasn’t much defence against a chainsaw, but it was such a beautiful piece of work that she hoped Freddie would think twice before destroying it.

He didn’t. He brought the saw round in a big curve and sawed through the neck where it joined the body. He was now within easy striking distance of Jenny. One lucky or highly skilled stroke and he could mutilate her to his preferred design. The smell of petrol from the saw made her nauseous, the noise of the chain filled her head so she couldn’t think, and maybe that was why neither she nor Freddie Terrano heard the approaching footsteps, and why they barely heard the young male voice shout, ‘Put that chainsaw down or I’ll brain you.’

Freddie Terrano turned slowly round to see six young one-armed men standing in a semi-circle by the entrance to the basement. None of them was smiling. Between them they were carrying a huge scaffolding pole and there was no doubt they intended to use it.

‘Put it down, Freddie, it’s all over,’ said the young man again.

Freddie looked at the chainsaw in his hand as though seeing it for the first time, as though it had somehow crawled there unbidden. He turned off the motor and set it down on the floor, and he looked at the young man who’d spoken. It was someone he recognized, Kenny Stevens, the first of his ‘sons’.

‘ Et tu , Kenny?’ he asked.

‘ Moi , above all,’ Kenny replied, and he turned to Jenny and said, ‘I owe you a big thank you, Ms Slade. I was there at the gig in Lowestoft when you spoke out against Freddie Terrano. You wouldn’t have seen me, I was just one more face in the crowd, but you really set me thinking.’

‘Thank God,’ Jenny said.

Kenny Stevens picked up the abandoned chainsaw and cradled it in the bend of his right arm.

‘I called a meeting,’ he continued, ‘and we Sons of Freddie Terrano have done some rapid growing up. I mean, everybody does stupid things when they’re young, but hacking off your left arm, that’s the stupidest of all.’

‘No,’ said Freddie softly, ‘it wasn’t stupid. It was very brave, very moving.’

‘And you encouraged us, Freddie. You egged us on.’

‘Did I? Well, even if I did, I can make stupid mistakes too, can’t I?’

‘We realize, of course, that nothing we do can ever give us our arms back, but we’ve also realized there’s something we could do that would make us all feel a lot better.’

Freddie Terrano’s face became hot and rigid as he watched Kenny Stevens bring the chainsaw back to life. Jenny’s own face, indeed her whole body, became equally inert. She knew she couldn’t interfere. She could only stand by, her head down, her eyes turned away, as Freddie Terrano was reduced from a man with one arm to a man with none.