Flesh Guitar

CONDUCT UNBECOMING

Jenny Slade was staying in a tourist hotel in Haiti when she first met Tom Scorn. She was lying out by the pool, eyes closed, gently working on her tan, slowly working off a queen-size hangover, when she became aware of someone casting a shadow over her face. She opened her eyes, looked up and saw a scrawny, thick-lipped young guy standing there, apparently trying to summon the courage to speak. He was tall, had spiked hair and big eyes, and now that she was actually looking at him, his first reaction was to run away, but he steeled himself, swallowed and said, perhaps a little too loudly, as though he had been rehearsing it, ‘Miss Slade, I’d like to say how much I’ve always enjoyed your music.’

Jenny was not entirely unused to receiving such compliments, nor to dealing with them efficiently, and she handled it as gracefully as she could. ‘You’re very kind,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Sometimes this exchange would be enough, but more usually it would be followed by a request for an autograph, which she usually agreed to, or by an attempt to involve her in a muso conversation about guitars and guitarists, which she was skilled at avoiding. But this particular boy did none of the usual things. He wouldn’t go away but neither would he say anything more.

When the situation had become unbearable Jenny said, ‘Is there something else I can do for you?’

‘Well maybe,’ he said. ‘I’m a music student.’

Jenny was unimpressed.

‘Actually I’m studying piano, saxophone and composition, with particular reference to Stockhausen, Cardew, Wally Stott. And yourself.’

‘That’s very nice,’ Jenny said, though she wasn’t really sure it was nice at all.

She saw that he was carrying a tan leather music case and he now held it up in front of him like a breastplate.

‘I have some of my compositions in here,’ he said, sounding simultaneously proud and diffident. ‘Maybe you’d like to take a look at one or two of them.’

Jenny had a firm rule about not accepting things that strangers shoved into her hands. If she was handed a demo tape she knew it would be dreadful and incompetent and unlistenable, but nevertheless the makers of the tape were all too likely to sue her for plagiarism at a later date. If she was handed a note, a piece of ‘creative writing’ perhaps, it would inevitably be somebody’s sick little sex fantasy. If somebody gave her drugs they would always be tainted. So she made it a rule not to accept gifts from strangers and she was on the point of saying a firm no, when the boy began to fiddle with the case and it fell open so that sheets of manuscript paper spilled out and scurried across the pool-side tiles towards the water. Jenny put out a hand and lazily caught one sheet while the boy headed off to catch the more fugitive pages.

She intended to hand the page straight back without looking at it, but she couldn’t help noticing that the paper in her hand was a cover sheet, a title page that read ‘Forty Guitar Solos for Jenny Slade by Tom Scorn’. She liked guitar solos and couldn’t help being intrigued.

‘You’re Tom Scorn?’ she said.

‘Yes. It’s my composition.’

‘Show me the rest of it,’ she said.

He dipped into the case and fiddled again. She hoped the music wasn’t too complex. Like all the best guitarists her sight-reading was pretty rudimentary.

‘Here you are,’ he said, handing over a bundle of paper, some of it creased, some of it damp around the edges.

She saw that she needn’t have worried. The pages contained words rather than musical notes, quite a lot of words she noticed, rather too many to absorb all at once.

‘OK if I take this away with me?’ she asked.

Tom Scorn sighed as though all his dreams had come true.

‘What if you need to get in touch with me?’ he asked.

‘I’ll find a way,’ she said, and she waved him away, not with contempt but with finality, and once he was out of sight she began to read his compositions.