While Mrs. Shimoda sat up in bed
concentrating on Tsushima Yûko's Oma Monogatori, a book of
ghost stories she'd found in the multilingual section of her local
library, Amelia was standing across the street with Hugh looking at
the old-fashioned multi-coloured Christmas lights around their living
room window, large snow flakes falling around her, occasionally
dissolving upon her face with a ticklish sensation, her thoughts
drifting towards her concerns over Duncan who at that moment was
standing on a sidewalk two miles away near Disques Deux Côtés
looking back at his footsteps in the snow thinking they were like
the repetitive solitary imprints of someone stranded upon a desert
island, the shadowgraphs of an invisible man.
As he approached the window of his
friend's secondhand record shop, Duncan heard the muted strains of
She Sells Sanctuary by the Cult, and he paused to look through
the window framed with its cedar garlands and blinking red and blue
Christmas lights at the rather absurd spectacle of two grown men
playing invisible instruments—Tom sitting on a stool drumming the
cluttered counter top with yellow pencils, and Yves facing him,
plying vigorous down strokes to an unseen low slung bass—and he
imagined his brother Gavin strutting about with a microphone and
himself on lead guitar but the shop just wasn't big enough for
Gavin's stage presence and the vision faded. He stood there feeling
like a chess piece that couldn't be moved, paradoxically stuck in the
continuous present like a work of art, while a snow plow with its
revolving orange light, rumbled and scraped the road behind him,
angling the frigid accumulations of his life to the curbside into
inverted furrows towards tomorrow.
“Well if it isn't Dunc the Monk,”
Yves said, as Duncan entered the shop stamping his boots on the
inside mat. “We were starting to get worried.”
“Sorry guys, I just stopped to pick
these up,” and he withdrew a six pack of Maudite from a
black cotton shopping bag. “I think they're already cold.” He
winked.
Tom opened the box and withdrew three
beers and handed them out. “I think the first toast should be to
Dunc, a good friend who made it back from the brink . . . just so he
could ask us to help him pack up his bookstore . . . and have a
drink.”
They laughed and Duncan playfully
tossed his bottle cap towards Tom. “Here, a cymbal for your drum
kit.” He sipped his beer. “I really appreciate you guys helping
me out next week. It shouldn't take too long.”
“Tabernac Dunc, we would have packed
up your bookstore even if you hadn't come back from the brink,”
Yves joked, throwing an arm around Duncan's shoulders and giving him
a squeeze. “That's what friends are for, man. We can't wait to put
your dusty books into the boxes, eh, and carry those heavy suckers
down that narrow staircase!” He gave him another squeeze. “I'm a
mean two handed slinger of packing-tape. I'll bring my own, fully
loaded.”
Duncan laughed. “I should get you a
special box for your tape dispensers, like the ones they have for
duelling pistols.” The subject aroused a flurry of literary
references in Duncan's mind, the duels in Lermontov, Conrad, Thomas
Mann and Pushkin. “Once when Amelia and I rented the film Eugene
Onegin based on the Alexander Pushkin book, which has a major
duel in the story, the young store clerk, who was something right
out of The Sopranos opened the case to check it was the right
tape and confirm the title with us, pronouncing it U Gene One
Gin.”
“Sounds like a gun fighter from the
old west who couldn't hold his liquor,” Tom offered.
“That's good, that's good. I like
that,” Duncan said. “Amelia and I found it amusing and we laughed
on the way home, but mispronunciations are interesting. They open the
words up. You see them afresh. God knows I mispronounced enough names
and words when I was younger.” He remembered embarrassing moments
concerning Aeschylus and Goethe in front of classmates. “So,”
thinking he was losing them, “that was a pretty good rendition of
She Sells Sanctuary.”
Yves was about to say how great it
would have been to have played it on stage, but seeing the song came
out around the same time Duncan's brother died in a car crash and
their band The Splices truly fell apart, he just nodded his head and
said, “The Cult's still playing gigs. . . with every other bloody
band since the creation of rock and roll!”
“When we grew up in the sixties and
seventies,” Tom added, “rock stars died young. Brian Jones,
Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison. I thought you either died young or went on
to get a real job and grow old like the rest of humanity.”
“Mark Bolan,” Yves added. “Keith
Moon, Gram Parsons and those are just a few, eh, colis.”
“Randy Rhoads,” Duncan chimed in.
“I know, I know. Who could have predicted rock music would be a
life-long career without retirement? To stay hip is to have a few hip replacements, a little
tuck here, a bit of hair dye there, and Bob's your Monkey's uncle
still jumping around the stage.”
They shook their heads, drank their
beer and felt like they'd missed the last ship out of port.
Duncan broke the silence. “I've been
busy going through files and papers of Lafcadio & Co., and
Strand Cordage,” he said, as he searched the pockets of his
winter coat, “and I came across some interesting items. Like this,”
and he produced a wrinkled and folded piece of paper. “One of our
set lists from late 1978. This is Gavin's. He used to tape it to the
side of his electric piano.” He handed it to Yves.
“Colin de bin!” Yves said as he
read the list. “Brings back memories, eh.”
“Holy crap,” Tom said, leaning over
to read the list. “More cow bell please! I remember that set
really worked well in the high schools, town halls, church basements
and bars in the boonies. Wakefield, Sherbrooke, Grand Mère, Thetford
Mines, Granby, Magog . . . .”
Yves shook his head with nostalgia.
“And everywhere in between, cris.”
Set
/ October 1978 / Mascouche
- Rock & Roll Hoochie Koo / Derringer
- I Want You to Want Me / Cheap Trick
- Two Tickets to Paradise / Eddie Money
- Suffragette City / David Bowie
- Just What I Needed / The Cars
- My Best Friend's Girl / “ “
- Changes / David Bowie
- Lines On My Face / Peter Frampton
- Show Me The Way / “ “
- Don't Fear the Reaper / Blue Oyster Cult
- Rebel, Rebel / David Bowie
- Surrender / Cheap Trick
“Remember Gavin would use our band
name in the opening song where it mentioned a fictional band named
The Jokers.” Duncan said. “Always worked well.
Personalized it.” Duncan's rhythm section agreed with him, touching
his arm with affection as another silence befell them.
“Your voice was great for Lines On
My Face, softer than Gavin's,” Tom said. “He was great on the
electric piano though, wasn't he?”
“Yeah, good times, good times. Here's
to Gavin,” Yves said, raising his beer. They clinked bottles and
drank to Duncan's twin.
“November 1978 was near the end of
our cover band days though. When Gavin and I went to England during
the summer of 1979 to visit my Mother's side of the family, the
Chadwicks, that was the turning point.”
“Yeah, where was that? Something
'field'? Ecclesfield?”
“Macclesfield,” Duncan corrected.
“You remember Eccles because I came back to Montreal with an Eccles
cake addiction and couldn't find any here, and was always going on
and on about missing Eccles cakes, Eccles cake.”
“Right, right, oh God, don't remind
us.”
“Sorry.”
“That's when Gavin came back with a Joy Division addiction,”
Tom said.
Duncan hesitated to respond. The story
of them having been dragged to Manchester by their second cousin to
see a band they'd never heard of had been a key moment in Gavin's
musical life. “Yes . . . Gavin could have written his name
backwards after seeing that concert. It pulled him inside out.” He
paused, feeling the pressure of an untold story rise up in him with
the nausea of suppressed emotion. “I never told anyone this story
before, but . . . I feel I have to tell it now. It might have died
with me on the floor of my bookshop.” He took a long drink from his
Maudite and continued. “I remember it was a Friday the
thirteenth, July, and I didn't really want to travel with our second
cousin in his Mini, but the three of us piled in and away we went.
You can imagine the three of us smoking cigarettes in that little
thing, God! Anyway, we arrive in Manchester and we buy our tickets
and Duncan and Miles go into the bathroom to smoke weed which I
didn't like to do, so I went outside for fresh air and I wandered
around the building. Miles had warned me to be careful what with my
Canadian accent and healthy tanned skin, I might be a target for
local toughs. So I'm walking around the side of the place and make my
way behind and I see a tall slim guy with shortish hair, dark dress
pants and shirt grinding a cigarette out with the soul of his shoe
and I sort of nod thinking he probably worked there as a stage
manager or something, and he asks me if I have a cigarette. I say
Yeah, sure, and open my pack of Bellevederes”
“You and your
Bellevederes,” Tom said, “always that nice blue pack in you jean
jacket pocket.”
“Yeah, I know, I liked that brand, my
colour. Well, I offer him one and I strike a match for him, he holds
his long fingered hands around mine to protect the flame, and after
the first deep puff, he exhales and says, Bellevedere with a
wistful tone, which was kind of ironic seeing we were standing in an
environment of cracked pavements and brick dust. He asks me if I was
American, and I tell him I was from Montreal, Canada, visiting family
in Macclesfield. His eyes widened at this. They were rather intense
and you felt they were looking through you at the same time they were
looking inwards. At that moment a man came out and called him in. He
looked at me and said thanks and walked away. I checked my watch,
finished my cigarette and made my way back inside.”
“Wait a minute, are you telling us—”
“Yes, you can imagine I was kind of
surprized when the guy who bummed a cigarette off me was standing
there, centre stage, breaking into these dark emotive songs that
seemed to have sprung from industrial wastelands. Their first song
was just a wall of noise to me. I can't remember what it was. Didn't
seem to have any lyrics.”
“Why didn't you tell us?” Yves
asked.
Duncan sighed and rubbed his forehead.
“It's complicated. First of all, there we were, healthy, sun-tanned
twins from leafy, green pleasant Notre Dame-de-Grace, face to face
with Manchester's grim and gritty conditions, the first months of
Thatcherdom, and it all seemed unreal. It wasn't where I wanted to
be, but Gavin, Gavin thought he'd found the motherlode, heard the
music of his soul. He was bouncing up and down and shaking back and
forth, loosing himself in the beat, and I sort of made my way to the
side and watched from afar. It was amazing. When Ian Curtis went into
his trance-like dance moves, it was bizarre. I'd never seen anything
like it. Coming from Canada where the airwaves were awash in Barry
Manilow, Kiss and Sean Cassidy, this new music just severed all the
crap from us, but with Gavin it was like he shed a skin. After the
concert he said he'd wished he'd been born in Manchester rather than
Montreal, and he might have been up there on stage with something to
sing about like that singer.”
“Gavin never mentioned your meeting
Ian Curtis,” Tom said.
“That's just it. I never told him.
That's sort of why I'm getting it off my chest now. He became so
obsessed with the band right after the show, I couldn't tell him I
shared a cigarette with the singer. It would have ruined it between
us. So I let it go. And anyway, the band wasn't on any map we knew
of. When the band became better known and Ian Curtis died, well, I
definitely couldn't tell him. And when Gavin died it was almost like
an unfinished link between us, something we had never shared,
something to hold on to.”
Tom and Yves stood there, open mouthed,
beers in hand. “Jesus Dunc, that's like an unexploded bomb just
went off. Save the pieces as my Italian Mother says, save the
pieces.”
“Our tastes were so different. In the
late 70s I was discovering the great music on the ECM label, all Jan
Gabarek, Ralph Towner, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, meanwhile Gavin
was zeroing in on punk and post punk raunchiness. I remember thinking
The Splices were already splitting as Gavin danced in that
Manchester club.”
Yves went behind the counter and pulled
out a CD, a compilation of Joy Division. “Any
requests,” he asked.
Duncan
thought for a bit. “I always liked Disorder,”
he said.
They
stood around drinking their beers, tapping their feet to the building
momentum of the song as it filled the shop with its black and white palette, as fresh to his ears as a Paul-Emile Borduas composition was to his eyes. It
had been a day of revelations. His life was shifting and spinning in
the shadows towards an unknown future. Only that morning he'd
discovered in the very old Strand Cordage Ltd. business papers that his paternal surname
was not really Strand, but MacAdam. His Great-Grandfather having
changed it when leaving Scotland. Something to do with debts. All
those years he thought, all those years of believing in a mere name.
He felt he was only Duncan now, and even that name he felt was
shifting, as if the “C” in his first name had been reversed and
he was sprawled in the concavity of its shape, stranded in the bottom
of his given name, trying to climb out, dizzy with the beer, and the
sound of Disorder.
© Ralph Patrick Mackay
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.