Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

Jenny was driven to the prison, accompanied by motorcycle outriders. The hastily built stage outside the prison was small, but the surrounding structure of amplifiers and speakers was overwhelming. It looked like the ruined gateway to some futuristic city. Parts of it were recognizable as standard stage rig, but whole chunks were quite unlike anything she’d ever seen before. There were clusters of ominous, curling tubes, and vast metal plates and crude square horns and cones mounted on scaffolding towers. Much of it looked like debris from a scrapyard and Jenny hoped that was all it was, junk sculpture, but there was something forbidding and brutal about it, that suggested more than just decoration. And there, at the centre, dressed in camouflage gear, directing operations, climbing over the structure and snarling instructions through a surprisingly crude-looking megaphone, was Tubby Moran.

‘Hi kid,’ he said, when he saw Jenny.

‘So this is what you’re into now, is it?’ Jenny asked. ‘No more drugs, no more Bliss, no more production deal?’

‘I’m still into all those things,’ he said, ‘but this is the future.’

He waved grandly at the equipment.

‘Music isn’t just about leisure and pleasure,’ he said. ‘It’s more elemental than that. Plug into the right frequencies and it’s the very stuff of the universe.’

Ignoring this high-falutin’ tone, Jenny asked, ‘What is all this gear? It looks like a war zone.’

‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about that,’ Moran replied. ‘You just play. Leave the hardware to me. You just be the software.’

Once again Jenny felt she had no choice. She took her guitar, plugged in and strummed. The sound was nice, surprisingly clean and conventional considering the outland-ishness of the set up. It sounded like an old classic tube amp. The bass was particularly thick and rich.

This was not the kind of show where there would be a support act, not even a master of ceremonies. All around the stage there were soundmen, police, reporters, plenty of people watching, even some soldiers, but when she began to play a version of ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon’ she knew she was doing it mostly for an invisible and incarcerated audience.

She had been playing no more than a minute and a half when she saw that one or two of the policemen were looking very unsteady on their feet, then one of them gripped his stomach and started to retch. Before long she could see that everyone within hearing distance of the stage seemed to be having breathing difficulties, falling to their knees, collapsing in pain.

Tubby Moran was on stage beside her, looking horribly pleased with himself.

‘Ah, the potency of cheap music,’ he said.

‘What’s going on?’ Jenny demanded.

‘Infrasound,’ he said. ‘Sound waves below twenty hertz, very low frequency, below what the human ear can hear. But the fact you can’t hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Mild exposure causes giddiness and nausea. At high density it cracks walls.’

Jenny stared at him in horror and she suddenly began to understand. ‘Of course, you can’t just walk up to a prison wall with an infrasound generator,’ Moran continued. ‘So the challenge was to find a way of combining the infrasound with the notes of an electric guitar. We also had to devise a way of shielding the stage from the infrasound so that the guitar player didn’t suffer the same effects and could carry on playing. I think I can say that today we’ve solved those problems.’

Jenny stopped playing, wanting to put an end to the sound, but Moran signalled to one of his back-stage crew who threw some switches. A squall of feedback grew and swelled from Jenny’s guitar, regardless of anything she did to it. She had heard louder guitar noise, had indeed played it herself, but never with such results. Suddenly it was as though the towering stone walls of the prison had been turned to cardboard. A rip appeared from top to bottom, at first just a few inches wide, but stretching all the time until it was wide enough to let a man pass through it, at which point various prisoners did just that.

They straggled out in single file holding a tattered, bruised Tom Scorn in front of them as a shield. They started piling into the trucks that had delivered the sound equipment, ready to make a getaway, and the police and military just sat back, too sick to do anything about it.

The guitar howl played on, the gap continued to widen and prisoners continued to pour out. What happened next was inevitable; at least Jenny could see it coming all too clearly. She couldn’t bear to look, yet she couldn’t turn away as the gap finally got so wide that the whole wall of the prison quaked and then collapsed.

In the panic that followed, Jenny was able to silence her guitar. That was when the forces of law and order moved in. There were smoke bombs and semi-automatic fire, water cannons, crack teams of SAS boys scampering up and down the crumbling masonry of the prison, grenade explosions, clouds of tear gas. When the fog of war had thinned, it was apparent that the vans full of prisoners had gone, along with Tubby Moran and his crew. It was apparent too that quite a few men had died in the collapse of the prison, both guards and inmates, and Tom Scorn was found trussed, his throat cut with a guitar string, his every orifice having been used for acts both conventional and experimental.

Months later the official inquiry asserted that mistakes had been made at the San Germano Correctional Facility. The regime at the prison, it was declared, had been too harsh in certain areas, too soft in others. There were lessons to be learned. The practice of allowing live entertainment in prison was immediately halted, and easy-listening programmes were piped into every cell in every gaol in the country, to soothe and sedate the captive population. The question of how and why Tubby Moran had been able to use infrasound to enact the gaolbreak was regarded as too sensitive and secret to be publicly discussed. However, an appendix to the report argued that there was a case for licensing the electric guitar, like a gun or a Rottweiler, and that unlicensed or dangerous users should be heavily fined.

The report exonerated Tom Scorn, easy enough since he was now something of a martyr, but was rather less forgiving of Jenny Slade. While she was clearly not the prime mover in the gaolbreak she was certainly in some sense the cause. And although she appeared not to have committed any indictable offence, in the absence of the actual culprit, she was a very convenient scapegoat and a certain amount of the mud thrown at her was bound to stick.

For her part, Jenny felt thoroughly, desperately guilty. Yes, she knew Tubby Moran was the real villain but that didn’t make her feel any better. Men had died when the walls came tumbling down, and even among survivors the after-effects of infrasound were grisly and long lasting. It wasn’t an event you could just shrug off.

Jenny was much written and talked about. Other stories about her started to make the papers. Most of them were pretty old and careworn, stories about the ruination of the Hormone Twins, about the deaths of Captain Ahab and Jon Churchill. There were even fabricated stories about the Daughters of Jenny Slade, who supposedly cut off a hand in honour of their heroine. In more perverse reports the hand had been transformed into a breast.

At first Jenny read the stories as though they referred to someone else, someone foul and vicious, someone she wouldn’t choose to be in the same room with, much less choose to be. She knew it was rumours and lies and stories they’d made up, but before long, perversely, she couldn’t help believing there must be some truth in them. Late in the day she began to believe her own press. A fathomless and unshakeable melancholy enfolded her like a poncho.