Flesh Guitar

ONE HAND TAPPING

Audiences are strange things. Sometimes they can feel like one whole, living organism. Other times they are no more than a loose posse of separate, diverse, isolated individuals, with nothing at all in common, least of all a desire to see the act they happen to be watching.

Jenny Slade always liked to seek out the faces of one or two of her audience. It made the gig personal. It was a place to focus her energies. But usually that was all they were; faces. She didn’t take in much about the owner of each face, couldn’t have told you whether he or she was tall or short, old or young, how they were dressed, whether, for example, they were disabled.

It was November, and she had played a disappointing gig to a small, cold audience in a converted bus garage in South Yorkshire. Early on she’d looked out at the blank faces in search of a friend, someone warm and on her side. Sometimes, if she worked it right, that little centre of warmth could spread itself outwards and include the rest of the audience and bring them over to her, but on this occasion that had failed to happen. She’d found the face all right. It belonged to a young man with a shaved head and a big smile, and the smile had grown wider as the gig had gone on. He was obviously enjoying himself, but just as obviously he was in a minority, possibly a minority of one. By the end it seemed as though the whole gig had been directed solely at him.

Afterwards he was in the bar, on his own, and looking much younger than he had from the stage, barely into his teens, and though Jenny didn’t make a habit of talking to strange young men in bars, especially not at her own gigs, she found herself saying to him, ‘Thank God you were there.’ And she tried to shake him by the hand but he made no attempt to reciprocate. He had a beer in his right hand and, as she suddenly saw, he had no left arm at all, just a jacket with a limp, empty right sleeve.

Jenny was duly embarrassed. She started to apologize, though that too was embarrassing and she knew she really had nothing to apologize for. The guy smiled and shrugged it off.

‘These things happen,’ he said, and he seemed to be referring to all sorts of things: to bad gigs, to the loss of limbs, to being socially embarrassed.

‘They certainly do,’ Jenny agreed, and that was the end of the conversation. But on the way back to her hotel she had a strange sense that there was something familiar about the boy, and though she had only the shakiest sense of there being anything meaningful about it, she got the curious feeling that she’d seen other one-armed boys at her gigs. She wasn’t sure if that was odd or not. One-armed men could enjoy her music as much as anyone else, though clearly their personal knowledge of guitar playing would have to be mostly theoretical.

At the next gig, in a converted distillery in Fife, there was another one-armed boy in the audience, and then another when she played at a jam session in Camden. She didn’t get to speak to either of them, but when she was coming out of a guitar shop in Denmark Street a few days later and saw yet another one-armed boy gazing longingly at the secondhand Strats and Les Pauls in the window, she knew she had to talk. She stood next to him and joined him in looking.

‘Nice guitars,’ she said.

‘I’ll say,’ the boy agreed and he smiled broadly at her, just the way the first guy had. There was something not quite right about that smile. It was a little too serene for Jenny’s tastes.

She noticed that the boy was wearing a lapel badge. The letters SOFT were set in blue enamel against a red background littered with stars. And she remembered the first boy had also been wearing such a badge.

‘Is SOFT the name of a band?’ she asked.

‘No,’ the boy replied. ‘It stands for Sons of Freddie Terrano.’

‘Freddie Terrano?’ she said. It was a name she hadn’t heard in two decades. ‘Whatever happened to him?’

‘Oh, things,’ he said, and he smiled again, shrugged philosophically and slouched off. If he knew what had happened to Freddie Terrano, and since he was wearing the badge she assumed he did, then he certainly wasn’t telling.

Freddie Terrano, almost certainly not his real name, was one of those people who had found the guitar an almost laughably easy instrument to play. He could have been a great jazz player, an authentic bluesman, a classical soloist, just about anything he wanted. But he’d made his reputation as that most peculiar of all phenomena, the lead guitarist in a glam rock band called the Beams. In interviews he’d talked of wanting to write symphonies for guitar orchestras. He quoted Guitar Slim and. Debussy and Adorno; but when he got on stage he played loud, bludgeoning pentatonic rock over a leaden 4/4 beat created by the band’s two drummers.

The Beams made two successful albums and could no doubt have continued forever, playing revival tours and the supper-club circuits, but everybody knew Freddie Terrano was made for something better. He signed a solo deal and the Beams split up in a round of legal actions about who was entitled to use the name.

For a while Freddie Terrano’s solo album was ‘eagerly awaited’ and then it was ‘long delayed’ and shortly after that nobody was waiting for it at all. The moment had been ripe, but the moment passed. The solo album never appeared. Those who still thought about Freddie Terrano at all, and few did, assumed he had blown it by one method or another; too many drugs, too little inspiration, too much fear of putting his money where his mouth was. His continuing silence gave him a certain mystique but Jenny still thought Freddie Terrano was an odd figure to have any badge-wearing ‘sons’.

Not having given Freddie Terrano a moment’s thought in twenty years, she found herself thinking about him all the time. She dug out her old Beams records and it was weird, yes, the guitarist was pretty good, but it seemed as though he was doing his damnedest to hide the fact. The question of Freddie Terrano’s fate became extraordinarily pressing. There were other questions too.

Finally, at a gig in a converted army barracks in Aldershot, she cornered yet another one-armed boy with a SOFT badge on his jacket and demanded, ‘What is it with you guys? Why do you Sons of Freddie Terrano keep turning up at my gigs?’

The boy was terrified to find himself being interrogated by the artist he’d come to see, but he sounded like he was telling the truth when he said, ‘Because Freddie tells us to.’

‘What do you mean, he tells you to?’ Jenny asked.

‘You know, we go to his place and we discuss things and he tells us you’re pretty good.’

‘You go to his place?’

‘Sure. You want me to get you an invitation?’

Jenny found it strange to think that a man she hadn’t given a thought to in twenty years was out there recommending her, gaining her an audience. She could use all the audience she could get, but it was still strange.

‘What happened to your arm?’ she asked the boy bluntly.

‘It’s gone. These things happen.’

‘How do you mean? Where did it go? How? Why? When?’

She could see him struggling with himself; should he tell her or not? He decided he would.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I did it myself.’

‘Yourself?’

‘I did it for Freddie. So I could be like him.’

‘What? You mean Freddie Terrano only has one arm?’

‘You’re really out of touch, aren’t you, Miss Slade?’

‘Apparently.’

‘That was why he never made his solo album.’

‘Yes, well, I can see it would have slowed him down.’

‘We SOFTs, as we like to call ourselves, chop off our arms so we can be in his image. It wasn’t so hard. I like to think of it as body sculpture. Some people have cosmetic surgery; we go for this It’s no different.’

‘Oh, I think it is,’ Jenny said gruffly. ‘I really do think it is. Does Freddie Terrano know what you’ve done in his name?’

‘Sure.’

‘And how does he feel about it?’

‘Well, you know, he’s a cool guy. I guess he’s pleased to have such loyal fans.’

Now she couldn’t think about anything other than Freddie Terrano and his little band of self-mutilated fans. Even when she was sitting at home slouched in front of the TV screen, practising guitar while watching reruns of The Fugitive, she couldn’t get rid of his ugly sinister presence. When the phone call came it was something of a relief.

‘Hello,’ said a deep, slightly American-stained voice. ‘This is Freddie Terrano. It’s time we met.’

He sounded eager and Jenny wanted to meet him at least as much as he wanted to meet her. He said he’d send a car for her, and sure enough a car arrived, but it wasn’t some luxurious stretch limo, just a beat-up old jalopy with a series of spider cracks across the windscreen and a driver who wore a World War One tin hat and favoured an almost horizontal driving position.

The drive was a short one and when the car stopped and the driver made a big number out of opening the door for her, she was standing outside the steps of a small private hotel. A skinhead doorman in a burgundy uniform welcomed her and said that Mr Terrano was waiting for her in the bar, and he pointed her towards a flight of descending stairs.

The bar was small and dark and lit with candles. The walls were decorated with mirror fragments and mosaics. At first the place looked totally empty but then Jenny saw that a corner booth was occupied by a man who had his back to the centre of the room. He didn’t turn even as Jenny approached the table, so that she had to walk right up to him before she could be certain it really was Freddie Terrano.

He looked younger than she’d expected. The last picture she’d seen of him showed him with exotic quiff and sideburns, dressed in metallic dungarees with eighteen-inch epaulets. The man in front of her looked sophisticated, knowing, and yes, as the young fan had said, very, very cool. He motioned for her to sit down and he leaned over, kissed her on the cheek and poured her a glass of something fierce and highly coloured from a pitcher that he’d already started on.

‘Jenny,’ he said. ‘Good to see you at long last. You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake hands.’

And there it was, just as expected, the left sleeve of his jacket hanging empty by his body.

‘How long is “at long last”?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘I mean, I’m surprised that you even know I exist. I was wondering how long you’ve been wanting to meet me, because frankly I’m not that hard to meet.’

‘No need to be spiky,’ he said, and she felt a little guilty, but only a little, and then she found herself staring at the empty sleeve and felt worse, but Freddie Terrano just smiled.

‘I realize you’ll want the full explanation,’ he said. ‘Although, frankly, there are times when I don’t really understand it myself. It was such a long time ago, and sometimes I feel as though I wasn’t even there.’

He recapped on his career with the Beams, right up to the moment when he was due to make his solo album.

‘The studio time was booked, the producer was booked, the other musicians were booked; the only problem was I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do with this studio time and all these great musicians. I didn’t have any songs, any material. Nothing.

‘The record company didn’t give a shit. They said, just turn up at the studio on the appointed day with my guitar and amp. All I had to do was crank up and show off. Whether it was jamming or cover versions or pure improvisation, didn’t matter, they’d do whatever was required to turn it into a record. But it didn’t seem right to me. I wanted some tunes, some melodies, some “proper” compositions. The problem was, I couldn’t write any while I was at home.

‘So I went off to Wales for a couple of weeks with my guitar and a big pad of manuscript paper. I rented a farm cottage and I was all set to get my act together. But I was every bit as uninspired in the country as I had been at home. Oh sure I could play blinding twenty-minute guitar solos, but that was no good, that was far too easy. I spent my days walking round the farm, and my nights getting blitzed on the stash of bad chemicals I’d brought along with me.

‘By the end of the first week I was raging with boredom, but I’d got quite friendly with the farmer who owned the cottage and he suggested that some hard physical effort might be just what was needed to clear out the cobwebs. There was an old orchard that had been damaged by storms, fallen trees that needed sawing and clearing. He asked if I knew how to use a chainsaw, and I said sure.

‘Well, you can probably guess the rest. I was lying to the farmer. I didn’t know one end of a chainsaw from the other. I was hacking away at the trunk of some old apple trees when the chainsaw flew out of control and sawed off my left arm just a couple of inches below the shoulder. It was a mess.

‘We leapt in the farmer’s Land Rover and went to the hospital, me carrying my left arm in my right hand. The farmer was full of confidence that everything would be all right. He’d had a farm labourer a few years back who cut off his foot and they’d been able to sew it back on so you hardly knew it had been missing.

‘But his confidence was misplaced. At the hospital they told me an arm was a very different proposition from a foot. They said they could sew the arm back on but there was no way it would ever be usable. I replied that if it wasn’t going to be usable, then I didn’t want the damn thing at all, and I wouldn’t let them sew it back on. It was an unusual decision maybe, but that was how I felt.

‘We kept it out of the papers. I didn’t want sympathy. I didn’t want to be the legendary one-armed axeman of rock, so I slipped away, abandoned my career, let it all die.

‘For years I used to agonize about it. What if I hadn’t left the Beams? What if I hadn’t taken that holiday? What if I hadn’t gone to help the farmer? What if I’d asked him to show me how to use a chainsaw?

‘I think it was Jon Churchill, the drummer, a guy I’d met doing session work, who first came up with the theory that I’d done it on purpose. He said I’d always been an arrogant, big-headed shit. Everything had always been too easy for me. What most people take years to learn I could accomplish with one hand tied behind my back. I thought any damn fool could play a great guitar solo, whereas obviously it took a special kind of genius to saw off your own fretting arm. Maybe Churchill was right. How can you prove it either way? Or maybe I was just scared of making a lousy solo album.

‘Of course, I wasn’t exactly happy about it. When the initial trauma was over I realized that a large part of me still wanted to play the guitar. So for a while I messed around with prosthetics, and slides and open tunings and Van Halenstyle tapping, but it wasn’t the same. So then I thought about becoming a keyboard player, and I saw that with the use of synthesizers and foot pedals all sorts of things were possible, but frankly I wasn’t good enough. I was a killer guitarist but I was only a very run-of-the-mill synth player. I think I wanted to be somewhere in between. I gave up music completely. That was no good either.

‘Years passed. I didn’t feel good but I felt OK. What was done was done, and then, you know how it is, everything gets recycled. Albums that were virtually impossible to get hold of when they were first released are now on sale in every Megastore. Things get remastered, remixed, repackaged.

Before you know where you are the Beams records are on CD and there’s a brand new generation buying and liking them. Suddenly I started getting fan mail again, for fuck’s sake. And every now and then somebody would track me down, think he was making a big “discovery”, ask me was I still playing. Some of these “fans” would turn out to be A&R men for record companies, who thought maybe I was ripe for a comeback and they’d invite me to lunch where I’d show them my missing arm and they’d decide my comeback might have to be postponed for a while yet.’

‘And then of course there are the boys from SOFT,’Jenny said sternly.

‘SOFT has nothing to do with me,’ Terrano said vehemently. ‘I mean, they took my name, but I never asked them to. It started with a kid called Kenny Stevens. He was a young fan, a talented would-be rock guitarist. He could play every note on the two Beams albums. He worshipped me, perhaps a little too much. He knew nothing about my missing arm, of course, and he turned up on my doorstep one day saying he wanted to have a jam session with me. Then he saw that I only had one arm and he was devastated. He went away and the next thing I knew he’d sawn off his own arm, as a tribute to me. And believe it or not he found some followers, some like-minded Freddie Terrano fans. That’s who the Sons of Freddie Terrano are, a bunch of fans who’ve mutilated themselves in my honour.’

‘And do you feel honoured?’

‘I’m not sure. I certainly feel flattered. You know, imitation is the sincerest form of fandom.’

‘Why don’t you try to stop them?’

‘How can you stop young boys doing what they want to do?’

‘Quite easily if you’re one of their heroes,’Jenny said. ‘You tell them not to do it, and because they want to honour you, they do what you tell them.’

Terrano didn’t reply, but she could see that there was a whole part of him that was really getting off on the fact that young men were mutilating themselves into his image. She was disgusted.

‘You are one sick fuck, Freddie Terrano,’ she said.

‘Hey, it’s only rock and roll.’

‘No, it’s more than that,’ Jenny insisted, and she stood up to leave.

‘Hey, where are you going?’

‘I don’t want to sit here drinking with someone who encourages impressionable young guys to cut their arms off.’

‘Hey, calm down,’ Terrano said. ‘There’s lots I still have to say to you. I have a proposition.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Jenny, and she left the bar. The car was still waiting outside but she headed off in the other direction and she was not followed.

She went home, got on with her life, and tried hard not to think about Freddie Terrano and his followers, but it didn’t work. She kept feeling she ought to do something about it, and she did deliver a small tirade on the subject at a gig in a converted boathouse in Lowestoft, but nobody seemed to know what she was talking about. It was true enough that the boys were free agents, and it was even possibly true that Freddie Terrano would have been powerless to stop them harming themselves, but Jenny thought he had a duty to try. It occurred to her that she should have stayed in the hotel bar that night and tried harder to convince him.

So when Freddie Terrano called again and was full of apologies, saying how sorry he was that they’d ‘misunderstood’ each other, she didn’t immediately hang up. And when he said he wanted to meet again, she felt she had to go along with it, solely in the hope of getting him to change his mind and maybe save the arms of a few potential Freddie Terrano fans.

He sent the car as before, but this time it didn’t take her to the neutral ground of a hotel bar. It took her to a wild, deserted part of town, a place of motorway flyovers and electrical component factories and breakers’ yards, and specifically to an abandoned tower block, forty empty stories of decaying concrete and boarded-up windows. The car found a gap in the metal fence surrounding the base of the tower and went down a ramp into a service area where the building’s innards still seemed to be in working order. There were overhead lights, the sound of running water, plumes of steam escaping from heating pipes.

The driver opened the car door for her as before and she stepped out, shivering not so much with cold as with foreboding. Freddie Terrano appeared from nowhere and beckoned for her to follow him. Having no choice, she did so, and was led into a huge void of what might once have been an underground car-park. There were concrete pillars at regular intervals and no walls subdivided the space. Freddie Terrano, however, had done his best to make the place look homely. Scattered, apparently at random, throughout were dozens, perhaps scores, of old settees and armchairs, no doubt the jetsam that had been left behind when the tower block was emptied. There were a number of coffee tables and side tables set in front of each settee, and beside or on top of each one was a standard or table lamp.

Then, in a not too distant recess of the basement Jenny saw something quite out of place, a beautiful Gretsch Astrojet and an Electromatic Deluxe amp, the one with the bull’s head printed on the speaker cloth. They looked as though they were in fantastic condition, as though they were just begging to be played. And although this wasn’t just a social call, when Freddie Terrano said, ‘Go ahead, play it for me, there’s no way I can play it for myself,’ there was no way she could resist.

She kept it simple, a melancholy tune, half strummed, half picked, an old thing of hers based on a lute composition by John Dowland. She was a little nervous and didn’t play with quite as much heart or feeling as she would have liked, but when she was part-way through the piece she looked up and saw Freddie Terrano wiping tears from his eyes, and by the time she’d finished he was sitting on a beaten-up old sofa, with his head in his hand, his shoulders pulsing with a sadness that was for the world as well as for himself.

Ah well, Jenny thought, a man who is moved by your art, a man who cries when you play for him, can’t be all bad. As she carefully put down the guitar she was aware that Freddie was rapidly trying to pull himself together.

‘Forgive me,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing to forgive,’Jenny said, but then she wasn’t sure that she really meant it.‘Now about these boys,’ she added brusquely.

‘Not again,’ said Terrano.

‘Yes, again,’ she insisted. ‘Don’t you think you have a duty to stop these young men ruining their lives?’

‘How are their lives ruined?’

‘Well, they can’t play the guitar for one thing.’

‘The fewer people play the guitar, the better,’ he said. ‘Guitar playing has never brought me anything other than pain and despair.’

‘Well, for some people it’s a joy.’

‘Only very shallow people,’ Freddie insisted.

‘And anyway, it’s not just guitar playing. Having only one arm must make plenty of other things more difficult too; things like eating, getting dressed, driving, sex.’

He laughed at her viciously.

‘What would you know about it?’ he asked. ‘The fact is, my sex life got about five hundred per cent better the moment I lost my arm. There are a million reasons why women have sex with men, but sympathy and curiosity are very high on the list, and a one-armed man rates high on both those items.’

‘I never thought about it that way,’ Jenny admitted.

‘Maybe you never thought about it at all,’ Freddie said.

That quietened her. She accepted a beer as a sort of peace offering, but she was not accepting defeat.

‘I didn’t bring you here to argue. I actually have something to ask you,’ Terrano said, sounding unusually hesitant. ‘There’s something I’d like you to try for me on guitar.’

‘All right, what do you want me to play?’

He looked infinitely sheepish and said, ‘A duet.’

Jenny was puzzled and felt very stupid. She had no idea what he could be wanting.

‘Let me explain,’ he said. ‘We’ll play a duet on the same guitar. I want you to play the neck with your left hand, and I’ll pluck the strings with my right. We’ll just improvise, see what comes out.’

She felt moved and she agreed readily enough. It didn’t seem so very much to ask. The playing was awkward at first. Simply finding a position from which they could both reach the guitar was difficult enough, the business of co-ordinating the fretting and the picking was harder still. But after fifteen minutes or so they began to get used to each other’s technique. He could anticipate when she was about to make a chord change, while she in turn began to respond to the different picking styles he used. The music came slowly, it was sometimes tentative and it was always a little edgy, but it wasn’t at all bad.

‘Yes,’ Freddie said. ‘Yes, I thought it would work. I heard some of your records, I really admired your left-hand technique. I knew we could do something together.’

It was tiring to play in this odd manner, and before long they’d both had enough. The guitar was put aside and they began to talk. Freddie Terrano wasn’t at all the ogre that Jenny had first expected, and she found it almost impossible to believe he was willing to let young men slice themselves up in his name.

A week later Jenny Slade returned for more of the same, and before long it had turned into a regular weekly gig. If she didn’t have a booking then Tuesday nights would always find her down in Freddie Terrano’s underground car-park, moving her left hand up and down the neck of the Gretsch, while Freddie plucked or picked or strummed. Before long they became extremely skilled at reacting quickly and intuitively to each other’s musical ideas. They sounded good. If someone had simply heard the music without seeing the physical circumstances of how the music was made, it would have been easy to believe there was only one person playing. However, a more experienced listener, one who’d heard enough of both Jenny Slade and Freddie Terrano, would have been amazed, and perhaps delighted, to find that the newly improvised music sounded simultaneously like both guitarists, and not simply a combination of both player’s quirks or trademarks, but a true amalgam that contained all their best qualities.

Each Tuesday they played, and afterwards they talked and drank and sometimes smoked a few spliffs, and a little after midnight Jenny would go home. It became one of her favourite dates. Playing for no money to no audience was more satisfying than many of her paying gigs. After a while, however, Freddie insisted on recording their sessions, nothing fancy, just a single mike hooked up to a slightly decrepit cassette machine. Jenny wasn’t sure that was in the true spirit of their improvisations but she didn’t argue. Freddie joked that he only wanted the recordings so he could listen to his own mistakes, but in truth there were very few of those. Jenny recognized that she and Freddie Terrano had something special, a true empathy, a genuine musical connection. She didn’t know where it was going or whether it had a future, but she recognized that much of the best music leads nowhere and exists only in the present.

When she arrived one Tuesday night she knew something was wrong. She entered Freddie’s basement and saw the guitar was lying face down on the concrete floor with several of its strings broken. She couldn’t see Freddie at first but that was because he was flat on his back on one of the many sofas. Eventually he realized she was there and made a bold attempt to stand up, but he wasn’t very convincing. His legs swayed like palm trees in a hurricane and the bottle of vodka in his hand swung in counterpoint. There was a dull but dangerous expression in his eyes and there was a pile of tape cassettes at his feet, the ones he’d made of their duets, and as he walked towards her he trod on several of them. Jenny heard the brittle crack of plastic, of cassettes being split open. But Freddie never quite made it over to where she was standing. On the way there his legs gave out and he let gravity lay him out on a long lime-green sofa.

‘What’s up?’ Jenny asked.

Freddie shook his head theatrically, as though he didn’t want to talk about it, yet it was obvious that he did, obvious too that Jenny would have to go through the performance of pretending to drag it out of him against his will. When this had been gone through he pointed at the tapes on the floor.

‘I did a daft thing,’ he said. ‘I played them to an A&R guy I know. I thought we had the makings of a decent album.’

‘I take it he didn’t like them,’ Jenny said.

Freddie Terrano swigged the vodka. ‘That’s right. He reckoned they were OK but they were a bit boring. He said I needed a gimmick.’

Terrano laughed so loud, so hard, so bitterly, that Jenny found herself joining in his derision.

‘Having one arm wasn’t gimmick enough. So I’m drinking again,’ he said. ‘Drinking being one of those things you can do on your own with only one hand.’

Jenny sat down on the edge of the sofa and said she’d be happy to help him drown his sorrows. He handed her the bottle and the next couple of hours passed rapidly as she and Freddie discussed the various evils of the music biz and all its personnel.

As the alcohol kicked in, Jenny’s feelings for Freddie got much warmer. Once she’d thought he was a monster, but now she felt protective towards him. She understood his hurt and disappointment. She felt sympathy, and yes, maybe she was a little curious sexually. She thought this was probably going to be the night she slept with Freddie Terrano. She leaned against him on the sofa. She closed her eyes and the world became a swimming, buzzing, hurtling place. She needed Freddie’s arms around her, to steady her, to steady the room. But Freddie was no longer beside her. She opened her eyes and saw he was standing a few yards away, looking perfectly steady now as though he’d drunk himself back to sobriety. At first she thought he was holding a guitar in his hand, something yellow and black and weirdly shaped.

‘You know what else the A&R man said to me?’ Freddie blustered. ‘He said what would really make for a great act would be if we were both one-armed; two one-armed guitarists playing a single guitar. He said he’d sign up an act like that straight away. The fact that you had two arms was a problem. As far as he was concerned, Jenny, you have one arm too many.’

And then Jenny was in no doubt about what Freddie Terrano had in his hand. It wasn’t a guitar at all. It was a chainsaw.

‘Come on, Jenny,’ he said. ‘We all have to make sacrifices for the sake of our careers.’

‘You’re out of your mind,’ Jenny said.

‘Of course I’m out of my mind,’ Freddie raged. ‘If you’d lost an arm, spent twenty years in the wilderness, finally found a way to make music and then had some record company hack dismiss it like that, you’d be out of your mind too.’

Jenny could see there was a lot of truth in this, but that didn’t make the chainsaw look any less threatening. Freddie Terrano pressed the starter and the machine seethed into life.

‘Like I told you, life with one arm isn’t so bad,’ Freddie insisted. ‘For one thing you’ll have a whole new set of fans. You can start a fan club called the Daughters of Jenny Slade.’

He danced across the floor and slashed at the first thing he saw, a leatherette winged chair, cutting it open in a burst of stuffing and sawdust.

‘But supposing we did both have one arm,’ Jenny said, for one moment considering the terrible prospect, ‘what would we be? Nobody would ever take us seriously. We’d be a novelty act, a freak show.’

‘And what kind of an act am I now?’ he asked.

He brandished the chainsaw again and whacked it against one of the concrete pillars. Sparks flew and he bounced away like a pinball.

‘Look,’ Jenny pleaded, ‘even if, God help us, you succeed in hacking my arm off, how can you possibly think that after that I’d agree to form an act with you?’

‘What other choice would you have?’

‘I’d find some other way to play.’

‘Oh really? Like I did?’

He advanced on her. She looked around for something to defend herself with and the only thing that came to hand was the guitar, the classic Gretsch Astrojet. She grabbed it, held the body towards her, the neck sticking out like a lance. It wasn’t much defence against a chainsaw, but it was such a beautiful piece of work that she hoped Freddie would think twice before destroying it.

He didn’t. He brought the saw round in a big curve and sawed through the neck where it joined the body. He was now within easy striking distance of Jenny. One lucky or highly skilled stroke and he could mutilate her to his preferred design. The smell of petrol from the saw made her nauseous, the noise of the chain filled her head so she couldn’t think, and maybe that was why neither she nor Freddie Terrano heard the approaching footsteps, and why they barely heard the young male voice shout, ‘Put that chainsaw down or I’ll brain you.’

Freddie Terrano turned slowly round to see six young one-armed men standing in a semi-circle by the entrance to the basement. None of them was smiling. Between them they were carrying a huge scaffolding pole and there was no doubt they intended to use it.

‘Put it down, Freddie, it’s all over,’ said the young man again.

Freddie looked at the chainsaw in his hand as though seeing it for the first time, as though it had somehow crawled there unbidden. He turned off the motor and set it down on the floor, and he looked at the young man who’d spoken. It was someone he recognized, Kenny Stevens, the first of his ‘sons’.

‘Et tu, Kenny?’ he asked.

‘Moi, above all,’ Kenny replied, and he turned to Jenny and said, ‘I owe you a big thank you, Ms Slade. I was there at the gig in Lowestoft when you spoke out against Freddie Terrano. You wouldn’t have seen me, I was just one more face in the crowd, but you really set me thinking.’

‘Thank God,’ Jenny said.

Kenny Stevens picked up the abandoned chainsaw and cradled it in the bend of his right arm.

‘I called a meeting,’ he continued, ‘and we Sons of Freddie Terrano have done some rapid growing up. I mean, everybody does stupid things when they’re young, but hacking off your left arm, that’s the stupidest of all.’

‘No,’ said Freddie softly, ‘it wasn’t stupid. It was very brave, very moving.’

‘And you encouraged us, Freddie. You egged us on.’

‘Did I? Well, even if I did, I can make stupid mistakes too, can’t I?’

‘We realize, of course, that nothing we do can ever give us our arms back, but we’ve also realized there’s something we could do that would make us all feel a lot better.’

Freddie Terrano’s face became hot and rigid as he watched Kenny Stevens bring the chainsaw back to life. Jenny’s own face, indeed her whole body, became equally inert. She knew she couldn’t interfere. She could only stand by, her head down, her eyes turned away, as Freddie Terrano was reduced from a man with one arm to a man with none.

‘Don’t worry, Ms Slade,’ Stevens said. ‘You were never here. You never saw or heard anything. The name Freddie Terrano, the initials SOFT, they mean nothing to you, right?’

‘Right,’ Jenny agreed and she hurried away, all her senses gone horribly dead.

Later she worried about the tapes she and Freddie had made, that had been played to the A&R man, then trampled underfoot. Were they enough to connect her to the scene of the crime? If Freddie Terrano decided to squeal, she was anything but an innocent party. But time went by and the police never came knocking on her door, no investigative journalist ever came snooping around. The episode was closed. However, perhaps as a consequence of that night, one-armed boys stopped attending her gigs. She looked for them, she almost wanted to see them again, but they never reappeared.

Years later she did hear that bootlegs of the Slade/Terrano collaborations were obtainable if you were prepared to go to a little trouble. Generally it involved meeting a one-armed man in some weird and dangerous location, late at night, and handing over a lot of cash. Jenny didn’t mind too much. How else were the poor Sons of Freddie Terrano supposed to make a living? And as for Freddie Terrano himself, one rumour said that he was alive and well and had started a new career in Egypt working as a glitter-clad novelty tap dancer on Nile cruises. It might have been true but Jenny preferred not to believe it.