Forever Young Read online

  Epigraph

  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  Corinthians, 13:11

  My heart leaps up when I behold

  A rainbow in the sky:

  So was it when my life began;

  So it is now I am a man;

  So be it when I shall grow old,

  Or let me die!

  The child is father of the man …

  William Wordsworth

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One — October, 1977

  1. To Put Away Childish Things

  2. Chinese Whispers

  3. Mandy is Not in Love

  4. The Trams of One’s Fancy

  5. Art I

  Part Two — November, 1977

  6. The Last New Wave

  7. Frankenstein’s Monster

  8. Mandy’s Silence

  9. If Our Children Should Ever Ask …

  10. Art II

  Part Three — Election Day, Saturday 10th December, 1977

  11. The Shadow Line

  12. The Sword of Damocles

  13. Mandy’s Silence Breaks

  14. Whitlam’s Eyes

  15. A Good Day for Work

  Part Four — France, late December, 1977

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for A World of Other People

  Also by Steven Carroll

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  October, 1977

  1. To Put Away Childish Things

  A spring wind lifts the blossoms from the trees and throws them into the sky. It is violent and comes without warning. White flowers are blasted from their branches and a cool wind carries them in flock-like formation over the park, the playing fields and the government buildings hidden among the trees. Out there the city traffic is building into peak hour, taxis are busy, birds surf the gusts of wind, and office workers, public servants and nurses from the nearby hospital look to the sky, their umbrellas ready, though everyone knows their umbrellas will be useless in this wind and if this sky comes bucketing down. The pace on the footpaths is urgent. Get where you’re going and get there fast. Dead leaves left over from winter, scraps of paper and lives are tossed into the air and scattered.

  The flowers are carried far from the perch of their branches and a mile away a young woman at the university, her afternoon tutorial over, pauses in the street and removes a white blossom from her hair, releasing it back into the sky, like a bird from a net; the same blossom that only moments before sat securely on a branch in a tree in the park opposite Michael’s flat — the same park, currently in uproar, that Michael has been gazing upon these last few minutes.

  Overcoated people scuttle past. Cars, trams and trains make a dash for home. Out there, he imagines, Mandy will have finished her tutorial. Soon, her car will pull up in the street at the front of the flat and she will be at his door. And when she is gone, and he has told her what he has resolved to say (that at some point in the last year they had become a habit), he will sit in his lounge room alone and contemplate what he has done. But not for long. For it is not his way. He will linger on it for a few moments, then find something to do.

  And towards evening, with his amplifier and guitar in the back of his car, he will drive to a flat suburb north of the city, where the land has always been cheap and which the factory owners have always favoured — the flat lands of the flat suburbs, the likes of which nurtured him and made him, with their battered milk bars, scrappy streets and vast, beer-barn hotels that bear such grand names as the International, the Arcadia and the Excelsior — where he will play for the last time with this band that, too, became a habit that has to be broken. It is a day of farewells. He didn’t plan it this way, but it will happen this way. And there is a cold resolve in him that he recognises from childhood, reviving briefly the child he once was, who learnt or simply acquired a way of doing difficult things, such as saying goodbye to the idea of a happy family and realising that one day his parents would part and that it was better to say his goodbye before the blow fell, without too much thought. For the wise child who held his hand and guided him through difficult times is never far away.

  The last gig, the last waltz, the end of something or other, should feel sad, or at least feel like one of those goodbye moments, for something will finish tonight, and the part of him that lived for music and imagined that he always would will have to move on. The old will make way for the new and fade into silence like the last dying bars of a chorus, then bow out. And so, he should feel something. But he doesn’t. He will remember the goodbye to the band, the handshakes and the laughs, but he will not remember which one of those indistinguishable, grandly named beer barns he completed his last song in (or even remember what the song was).

  There is only a sort of acknowledgement, a cold resolve that this inevitable day, and this inevitable night, had to come. And when he switches his amp off for the last time will he hear the sound of his youth shutting down with the click of the switch?

  He turns from the view, from the park in uproar, and eyes his guitar. He has just cleaned the strings and polished it. And it shines: the body, neck, head and tuning keys. It sparkles and shines with all the promise that he doesn’t believe in any more. But he remembers the days when he did. And to look at this guitar is to be touched once again by the promise that came with it. And it will always be like that. Years from now, whenever he passes a music shop and sees one in the window, he will pause and they will both nod to each other: the guitar and Michael, Michael and the guitar. I gave you once my promise, when you were young and such promises mattered. And though you have moved on I remain forever here, calling from the music-shop windows of your memory, with the same promise, fresh as the days in which you still believed.

  For this, Michael knows, is no ordinary guitar. This is no cheap copy to be bought and sold or carelessly lost one careless day with neither regret nor concern. No, this is the guitar, more than all the others (at least, to Michael), that was the very sight and sound of its times. For this is a Rickenbacker. I am the jingle, I am the jangle, I am the effortless song that told you anybody could do this — that was my promise, and you believed me once. And he had. There it is, resting on a stand in Michael’s lounge room. Polished and ready to play for the last time. Michael had waited all his life to buy a Rickenbacker. But, in the end, he waited too long.

  One day, in his teenage years, he was walking along a street in the city. It was a Saturday morning — blue sky, bright sun, spring or autumn, he’s not sure. It was still mid-morning, the street was Saturday-morning busy, and he had come here because the street contained a music shop. Guitars, mostly. But not cheap ones. Not copies. No, here you found the types of guitars that you might only ever have seen in magazines or music shows on the television, strung over the shoulders of smiling bands making the music that was everywhere. The new music, the music that always made you feel as though anybody could do this. Or if not anybody, then you could do this. And so he’d come to this shop just to gaze upon whatever expensive, glittering treasures it might contain. He had stopped short at the window filled with guitars to take in the spectacle, dazzled by it, eyes roving all over the display — and, suddenly, there it was. Like stumbling on the Mona Lisa in a cluttered window of sea-scapes and still lives. On view. Open to the world, but indifferent to the eyes of the world. The Mona Lisa in a city side street. A Mona Lisa whose eyes did not follow you but gazed into the distance, one who suffered to be gazed upon and looked ahead. There it was. A Rickenbacker. Its colours — deep reds, oranges and yellows (which the brochure he’
d seen called ‘sunburst’) — gleaming in the music-shop window like a newly completed painting, sparkling in that spring or autumn morning, fresh and still wet.

  He had never seen one before. How far had it travelled to be there? And where from? The very name of it conjured up images of faraway places. That and the promise of sound. A special sound belonging to it alone. The sound that was everywhere in his youth and that shook things up and rang true. For it is on this guitar that the songs that rang true for the first time were played. Until then the songs on the radio were your parents’ songs, or songs that belonged to older brothers and sisters. Other people’s songs. Theirs, not yours. And then one day he was suddenly hearing (and it was dramatic, like going to bed one night and waking to a whole new world the next morning) his songs. And simply to look at this guitar, as he did that distant morning and as he is right now in his flat overlooking the park in springtime uproar, is to hear those songs all over again, almost all at once, like a vast jingling, jangling symphony of songs weaving in and out of each other — a distinct phrase here, a hint of another there — then merging into the sum of all its parts and forming one magnificent anthem. For the guitar and the years and the songs that it so effortlessly summons up were, and still are, all one.

  And is that where it all began, the artistic life? Is that when the fatal words were first spoken: that’s it, I want to do that? When any thought of simply waking and working and living the way the rest of the world does disappeared, when the promise the guitar offered, that anyone could do this, first entered his life? No, it wasn’t chapel ceilings and swelling orchestras and books that you’d never pick up unless you had to because you were studying them at school that rang true and which, for the first time, made the whole life of art make sense: it was the electric jingle-jangle of this guitar and the songs that found their voice through it.

  And here it is, in his flat, polished and sparkling. Not the guitar he saw that morning, but it may as well be. The same, and yet not the same. Manufactured in the same factory, Santa Ana, California, to the same design, the same specifications. Perhaps even made by the same craftsman. For his guitar, he knows, was made in 1966. And it further occurs to Michael that this is not simply the instrument upon which the songs that rang true were first played, the medium through which they were first conveyed to the likes of Michael; this is a work of art in itself. It may not hang in any of the galleries of the world, but it will not surprise Michael if one day it does. Like a bicycle seat and handle-bars calling themselves a bull’s head. But this guitar doesn’t need to call itself anything, art or otherwise.

  It just is. In fact, it was guitars like this that smashed Art. Art with a capital ‘A’, Art the holy, Art the unreachably distant — except to the elect few. Guitars like this one that, in a few simple chords, dispatched those plummy-voiced custodians of Art who occasionally appeared on serious, arty television (and who spoke of Art and Civilisation as if they owned them) into mimed silence, their speeches and commentaries washed away by this tide of sound — they themselves turned into a comedy sketch, their lips still moving but their words suddenly no longer theirs; their lips suddenly mouthing the tunes that were everywhere and their eyes alight with wonder at the songs they were suddenly singing.

  But, all the same, having smashed Art, this guitar may, one day, wind up in a gallery and become Art. That is the way the world works. That is how the system works — a popular phrase. It is omnivorous. It consumes everything. Nothing stands opposed to it or outside it for long — not if it sells. The shocking becomes fashionable and enters the lounge rooms of the once shocked; dead revolutionaries (and only ever dead ones) become celebrities, their cigars and berets living on long after them on T-shirts and vodka bottles; and the guitars that smashed Art one day become Art. It’s either amusing or sad, depending on the day. Amusing because, well, it has to be. Sad because it means that the age of the guitar, the guitar that shook things up, is dead, or may as well be — and won’t smash anything again. But it will always have, hovering about it, the ghostly chorus of the days when it did. And those who don’t even play might one afternoon enter a gallery and find, alongside famous paintings and sculptures and ancient pots, that famous guitar.

  But although, with care, the guitar will always stay young, he won’t. The Michael who bought the guitar a few years earlier, the Michael who waited years to buy this guitar and who waited too long, is now a different Michael from the one who first looked upon it in that distant shop window and believed utterly in its promise. And because his playing days will finish tonight, and because he will soon travel and needs the money, he will sell this guitar and it will pass into other hands.

  He reaches out and brushes the strings with his fingers and immediately the thing comes to life. Like hearing the Mona Lisa sigh. And just as the ringing sound of the strings dies down, he sees a car pulling up in the street in front of his flat. Mandy. She has her dog with her. A big English sheep-dog that she leaves in the car as she jumps out into a blast of wind and slams the door.

  Mandy. They have been ‘seeing’ each other, as the phrase goes, for the last year. More or less. Seeing each other, but casually. That’s another phrase, for there is ‘casual’ and there is ‘serious’. Michael and Mandy are ‘casual’. More or less. And suddenly he is contemplating the letter ‘M’ — Michael, Mandy, Madeleine. It’s been years since he last saw Madeleine’s face staring back at him from the rear window of a departing taxi. But the image has remained clear. Resolutely so; it will not go. Madeleine was ‘serious’. Though, he remembers, not at first. At first she was a girl he saw from time to time, as she saw him from time to time. But it wasn’t serious. Then one night he looked at her and realised it was. A hand gesture, a raising of the eyebrows, a confidential glance that said this look is for you. It is impossible to pinpoint, but everything, suddenly everything, changed. That was the night he fell in love with Madeleine, knowing full well that he would be the only one to fall in love. And, knowing this, knowing that such things happen and that such moments do suddenly announce themselves, he has waited over the last year, more or less, for ‘casual’ Mandy to become ‘serious’ Mandy. But it hasn’t happened and, he now knows, it won’t. Such moments do come along and announce themselves, but rarely. And not this time. And so he has ceased to wait for it. And as he watches Mandy approach his door, the dog watching her every step too, he realises that he has just looked upon her in the same way that he has just looked upon his guitar.

  Excelsior. The name, like that of the suburbs all around, contains the promise of that which it doesn’t have. Like suburbs whose names ring with images of wide meadows, of eternal sunshine and sylvan valleys — when the reality is scrub and thistles, and warehouses and factories and housing estates wedged in between, crammed into a maze of streets, avenues and boulevards, each, in turn, bearing a grand name that contains the empty promise of that which it doesn’t have.

  Michael is sitting in the vast lounge of the Excelsior Hotel. The term used to describe these places is ‘beer barn’. But even that is too quaint, for it’s more like sitting in a warehouse or on a factory floor, with tables and chairs instead of machinery. The band is taking a break and he is sitting by himself, looking over the expanse of this place (and, at the same time, remembering all the other places like this that he has poured too much of his time and energy into) for the last time. He has counted the people and it didn’t take long. Twenty-three. And they are spread out over the pub as if, perhaps, to give the illusion of a crowd. For a crowd brings with it the sensation of company. However anonymous the crowd might be, it is, all the same, company of a sort. In another place, in another time, those in need of the company of others, even if they didn’t know them or speak to them, would seek out the comfort of a clean, well-lighted place. Be it a bar or a café. Some place small and easy to fill. But no such possibility exists here among the factories, warehouses and estates. This place is a sort of frontier. In the same way that the suburb he grew up in onc
e was. But isn’t any more. For the frontier has moved relentlessly inland — the old frontiers have become history, recorded like the rings in a tree trunk, a reminder of where the limits once were but aren’t any more, because Progress has moved on, creating newer and more distant frontiers of estates and factories and grandly named hotels like the one he is sitting in.

  However much everybody might try to spread themselves about, this is no crowd and the scene is a lonely one. Almost like a lonely city in miniature. There is no hum of talk, no clatter and chatter within, no pleasant whining of a mandolin — only the vista of vacant eyes and lips drinking, inhaling and exhaling smoke and occasionally moving silently in speech that quickly evaporates into the air with the smoke. And, for a moment, there is the vague sensation of having landed on the moon. Playing other people’s songs in other people’s styles to a small gathering on the moon, which may or may not be listening. For Michael plays in a cover band, which is not the way it all started out, but is, nonetheless, the way it all finished up.

  ‘Aren’t you gonna fucking miss all this?’

  It is the drummer speaking. He’s new to the band, but one of those, almost like a repeat offender, who has been in and out of bands all his life. Michael didn’t see him approaching, but turns to him as he sits beside him with a plate of the supper the pub gives to the band. He’s drunk, very drunk. But he’s always drunk and drunkenness has become a sort of normality. So, in a way, you don’t think of him as drunk. His girlfriend is not far away, drunk too, and calling out for him to come back to their table because she has something for him.

  ‘Randy!’

  He hears but completely ignores her. It’s not rude or insensitive, it’s just their way. He drinks, she drinks. She calls out to him, he ignores her. She waits a few minutes, then calls out again. It’s just their way.