Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

When Jon Churchill suddenly stopped, threw down his sticks and walked out through the french doors, she felt nothing but relief. She followed him, hoping that he might at last have something to say to her, some comment to make on what they’d been creating. In the event she was disappointed. He ran off down the beach and she was far too weary to chase after him. Dan, one of the engineers, offered her a beer and a bacon sandwich and that more than absorbed her attention. The crew turned off the recording gear and took a desperately needed break.

It was then that Jenny Slade spoke briefly to Beth. It had been a tough few days for everyone, but Beth looked particularly shattered and demented by it all.

‘This is not what I wanted,’ Beth said, and she wandered off, amazed that silence had finally fallen on her house, and walked into the living room as though to savour the peace and quiet there, but she didn’t stay long.

Jenny didn’t know whether the session was over or not. If Jon Churchill had come back from the beach and taken up his place behind the drums she would certainly have joined him. But he was away a long time and on his return he entered the house through a side door, thus avoiding everyone, and he went into the living room, to the makeshift studio and picked up Jenny’s guitar, slung it round his neck and turned on the power to the amp.

The electric shock must have come immediately, since nobody heard him play any notes or chords. Instead he received a bolt of electric current that threw him across the room and dumped him on top of his drum kit.

The noise from the amp, followed by the sudden crash, the noise of colliding drums and guitar was truly terrible, and it was immediately obvious that something bad had happened, and even though Beth raced into the room, turned off the power and began immediate first aid, somehow everyone knew it was a futile exercise. Jon Churchill was killed by electricity in his own living room having played the most extraordinary music of his life.

There are those who say it was a merciful death, a quick, clean release from the lingering horrors of Alzheimer’s, and there are those who say he engineered the death himself. Perhaps he had deliberately got his hands wet on the beach. Perhaps he had interfered with the power supply, certainly some of the cables were frayed and worn, and Dan the engineer swore they hadn’t been like that when he’d first connected them. Jenny examined her guitar and amp and was all too aware that Jon’s death might very easily have been hers. The fatal shock had been there waiting for whoever picked up the guitar.

Beth was inconsolable, hysterical, half out of her mind with grief and exhaustion. She would scream at Jenny, blaming her for the death, saying it was all her fault, and then she would crumple with misery and say it was all her own fault. Everyone assured her that she mustn’t blame herself, but it did little good.

After the ambulance and the doctor and the police had gone there was nothing left for Jenny and the crew to do but pack up and go home. Dan the engineer was unusually quiet and broody. The death seemed to have affected him profoundly despite his never have met Jon Churchill until the beginning of the session. Jenny tried to console him but he didn’t want to be consoled.

‘I have no right to call myself an engineer,’ he berated himself. ‘The first rule of recording is to always keep the tape running. And I didn’t. That noise, the sound from the guitar when it electrocuted him, that drum crash, if only I could have got that on tape, I’d have made a fucking fortune.’

Jenny slapped him hard across the face with a bundle of twisted guitar leads and made her own way home.

Tom Scorn drove himself to the San Germano Correctional Facility; a high-tech, high-security prison, thick, high Victorian walls, built in the middle of swamp and wasteland, where he was booked to do a solo gig, part of a rehabilitation scheme. He pulled up at the electronic gate and showed the necessary documents to a guard in a black uniform spattered with red fringes and braid, and was waved through to a central courtyard. Two more uniformed men took his equipment out of the van for him and he was conducted through a sort of portcullis into a metal chamber where he found yet another guard. This one was apparently higher ranking, the uniform more ornate.

‘Ready for the strip search?’ the guard asked nonchalantly.

‘Actually, no,’ Scorn replied.

‘It’s just a formality,’ said the guard. ‘We know what musicians are like.’

‘You really think I’m going to come in here carrying drugs?’

‘Drugs is the least of it,’ the guard said, still cheery.

Scorn saw no point fighting. If you wanted to play to a gaol full of dangerous criminals then you had to make some compromises. Having nothing to hide, he started to undo the buttons of his shirt.

‘Hey, I’ll do that,’ the guard shouted, and he made Scorn remain motionless as the clothes were peeled from him.

The guard was brisk, without being rough, thorough without being invasive. He found plenty of opportunity to lay his hands on Scorn’s body and the red fringing of his uniform brushed repeatedly against Scorn’s bare flesh.

‘What sort of music do you play exactly?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ said Scorn thoughtfully, ‘it’s certainly not easy music. It’s challenging, thought-provoking. It makes the listener reassess his own position with regard to the world, as does all art, of course.’

‘A bit like that Jenny Slade, then.’

‘Not entirely unlike her, I suppose,’ Scorn said drily.

‘We tried to get her to come here but the governor thought it was asking for trouble bringing a woman to play in a men’s prison.’

Scorn grunted.

‘Well, good luck,’ the guard said. ‘You might need it.’ He peered inquisitively into Scorn’s holes and crevices and said, ‘OK, you’re clean.’

‘I know,’ Scorn replied.

He put his clothes on. The guard dusted him down, slapped him on the buttock and accompanied him through an electronic door into a featureless corridor beyond.

‘You’ll be playing in the Beckett Theatre,’ the guard said.

Scorn had already been told this, although he didn’t know and couldn’t quite imagine what kind of theatre they were likely to have in a high-security prison. Maybe the talk of fierce discipline was exaggerated. Maybe in reality it was all concert parties and amateur dramatics.

‘There have been some spectacular acts performed in the Beckett Theatre,’ the guard remarked. ‘The place has quite a history. It dates back to the time when the San Germano was a hospital and madhouse.’

‘Hospital?’ Scorn repeated, light suddenly dawning. ‘It’s not an operating theatre is it?’

The guard laughed at the very idea. ‘Of course it’s not,’ he said brightly. ‘It’s a former dissection theatre.’

Before Scorn could express surprise they had arrived. Two wooden swing doors were set in the steel-lined corridor and the guard pushed him through into the theatre. It was reminiscent of a bear pit. The space was circular, not large, with steeply rising banks of seats on all sides. The ‘stage’ where the dissections would once have taken place was in the centre, the performances here would always be ‘in the round’. The dissection table had gone but there was a distinctly medical air to what had been left behind: white tiles, a sluice and overhead illumination as fierce as searchlights. There was not going to be much of an atmosphere, Scorn thought, and the acoustics were bound to be horrible.

‘Nervous?’ the guard asked.

‘A little,’ Scorn confessed. ‘I think a few nerves help improve a performance.’