‘How do you feel about that part of your life now, John? It was a long time ago.’
‘Yeah I know but … ’
Kant waited. He suspected there was more to the story. There must be. How could anyone remember such details after half a century? Just then a text came through on Kant’s iPhone. Ignoring it, he looked at John with a reassuring smile.
‘It’s hard, isn’t it? So much from our past can get lost, or hidden,’ Kant said, not realising how prophetic his statement would become.
‘It’s not that; it’s hard ’cos some things just don’t go away and … ’ John heaved a sigh.
‘It’s okay, mate, your story’s safe with me. And if you don’t want to go ahead, everything you’ve told me will remain completely confidential.’
John looked around the walls at the artworks, his eyes remaining for several seconds on each piece before moving to the next.
‘You have some nice things ’ere, Mr Kant.’
‘Thanks, but call me Barry, please. I collected them all over a lifetime really. They’re like a chart of my travels with my wife.’
‘I like that.’
John breathed in and filled his lungs. He allowed the air to smooth out a clench that seemed to have constricted his chest. ‘See … like … like there was this other time … I spent in Dominic; you know, the Catholic school.’
‘Here in Hobart?’
‘Yeah. I spent some time there, only a few months. Me older sister Elsie, who lived down Primrose Sands, said it would be a good safe place to go and … like … get better, be cared for, but … ’
A fearful realisation began to churn in the pit of Kant’s stomach. Oh God, here it comes, I should have guessed.
After a few minutes Kant wound up the interview and booked John Sturges into the show. He had to remind himself this was not a counselling session as he watched the old man trudge heavily from the room. His was a big story, even for BKS, and Kant, already feeling the enormity of the responsibility, needed time to assimilate the dreadful nature of a crime that had been perpetrated on this gentle old man so many years ago and was still poisoning him like a rusty spike driven deep into his soul.
Already, Kant’s first day back had given him more than he was ready for, so he postponed the afternoon interview with the African lad for a later date, to be confirmed, and fixed a strong coffee for himself. While the coffee machine was doing its thing he opened up the message on his iPhone. It read: your fulla shit fagot.
Kant stared at the message for several seconds. It was his turn to sigh. ‘Is that a fact?’ he said, pressing the delete button. Boiling brown liquid began to splutter into his cup.
*
At the top of the wooden stairs, rising directly from the street to the first floor landing, Mungo flicked a light switch that activated several low wattage globes in the dim passageway and in the largest room to the left, which had become the main studio. There was no light switch in the room. Random, dodgy modifications over the years had presented such anomalies to the workings of this character space but suited the nature of their experimental work. The three men had all made various forays into the Art School as well as completing degrees at the Conservatorium of Music. A solid grounding in formal techniques was essential before the true creativity of bending all the rules could take place.
Below on the street frontage was a Moroccan rug shop next to a milk bar. To the lads, Moroccan food in a Kasbah would have been preferable.
Elizabeth Street was the main artery connecting the city’s heart, several blocks down the road, with the fashionable North Hobart nucleus of cosmopolitan activity a few blocks up, with its restaurants and trendy cafés, wine sales, pubs, alternative cinema, art galleries and music venues. Not with a Lygon Street sort of Melbourne ethnicity or with a Kings Cross Sydney exuberance, but in a ‘ there’s no one around after ten in Hobart’ sort of graveyard way, as Sammy, the band’s twenty four year old percussionist often complained about it.
At night, Hobart’s CBD, several blocks down the street, was a desolate and windy place where the homeless hunkered down and the crime intent scuttled around ‘ like underfed crocodiles in a caravan park’, another of Sammy’s little lyrical triumphs, particularly when he was on the weed.
The band, Global Synthesis Trio, a purposely pretentious mouthful, (and sick of the tax the genuinely penniless still had to cough up), had set up the studio with the banks of second hand keyboards in two rows facing each other, giving easy access to all the wires, cables and connections in the middle. To one side the drum kit and associated percussion instruments had been set up on a higher plinth, giving Paul elevation to see Sammy and Mungo at their respective keyboards.
Paul Leonard, solid build, head insulated with black curly hair had been brought up in Cairo in his early years. He was often mistaken for being Greek but his parents, archeologists, were actually English. Much of their research was based on hieroglyphics, deciphering the secrets of the past. Paul had met Lena, a Tasmanian who had been visiting the pyramids. Not long after their meeting under the Sphinx she had tempted him with her beauty and the lifestyle of Hobart. To his parents’ disappointment, Paul flew back to Australia with Lena, but they went their own ways a year later. Paul’s brief emotional vacuum became occupied again after teaming up with Mungo and Sammy, drinking buddies only at first until they all realised they shared the same passion for eccentric music.
Whenever another musician ventured into the space a jam session would ensue, injecting a different sound into their music, twisting it even further. Electronic sampling was an important aspect to the finished product, as Mungo explained to Melinda when they first started. ‘You start with something that is basic, unadulterated like a baby at the beginning of life. You take its pure nature and manipulate it through recording it and redesigning it electronically, the denaturing of innocence. In our case we end up with a multi facetted soundscape. An amalgam, representative of all the urban sounds we take for granted and have stopped hearing, but are at the very core of our lives,’ Mungo continued earnestly.
‘I love it when you talk dirty,’ she’d replied.
Littered around the remaining spaces were extraneous objects, junk retrieved from a disused machine factory that tantalised their uninhibited musical impulses, to strike, shake or rotate. PVC plumbing pipes of various dimensions hung from the rafters; the longer they were the lower the note that emanated from them when hit with a rubber thong. Two dismembered piano frames were suspended too, to be plucked, hammered or ruffled. As well, there were sheets of steel, hub caps, even an old vacuum cleaner with the pipe connected to the outflow opening and the other end inserted into a large plastic drum filled with table tennis balls. It was within the process of unconstrained play where the magic was found, recorded then merged with conventional percussion beats and scale structures.
Sammy arrived eating a cold slab of what looked like two layers of last night’s pizza. Paul, the same age as Sammy, breezed in seconds behind, coke in hand, grin on face. The smug expression, cultivated to a fine degree, needed no explanation. Apart from being a reliably accurate barometer for some recent carnal interaction with the opposite sex, he was hopeful it conveyed an alpha male image, suiting his reputation for being unattached and therefore, in his mind, irresistible to all women.
Mungo, who was several years older than the others, had taken on the role of Godfather in the band, ostensibly because he had a kid and lived with a regular partner. This seemed to allow him the unique status of responsible adult which the others were not yet ready to accept for themselves. Sammy and Paul liked to play the single, we have lustful sex every night you poor married bastard game with Mungo, who played along with it because he knew it patently wasn’t true. The lads spent most days and evenings playing music until their bodies were so tired they couldn’t raise the flag even if they’d wanted to.
Mungo