The Music by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson [James Hamilton-Paterson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571320851
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

Bambi Bar

THE NIGHTCLUB itself was confined to the ground floor but the thud of its music and the singers’ wails permeated the rest of the building. On the floor above were vague areas for the hostesses, performers and the band strewn with elasticated Bambi tails, satiny costumes, make-up boxes, knickers, an electric guitar or two, a chair surrounded by the scattered tufts of an impromptu haircut. Congealing cups of coffee and a row of empty San Miguel beer bottles stood on the window-sill overlooking the gridlocked street. The view outside was of the gimcrack façades of the bars and clubs opposite and the battered tin rectangles of jeepney roofs down below jammed together as higgledy-piggledy as crazy paving. Traffic noise beat up through the glass. Amplified bass notes tingled the floor, sending up spurts of dust from between the boards. A further flight up were the club’s offices as well as a couple of plywood rooms kept for the odd high-rolling patron who had nowhere else to take his Bambi girl. If the police ever happened by, they were told the rooms were where the singers slept in between acts, though no singer would ever dare sleep there and risk being caught by the club’s owner, Mrs Tan.

Even up here the music was audible. To escape it the singers would go right on up to the flat roof where, among the TV antennae and rusty air extractor trunking from the kitchen, lengths of reed matting had been rigged into a shade. Beneath it the girls crawled on to mats and slept, wrapped in cotton blankets against the cockroaches and the soot which rose in clouds from the traffic four floors down. Then they were shaken awake, stumbled downstairs again (quick squirt of breath freshener, thicken up the lashes) and on to the tiny stage, a bit of brain still stranded back home in the provinces where sleep had abandoned them.

‘Dulce! Dulce! Hoy, gising! You’re on in five.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Two-fifteen.’

The bright sunlight of her home village overlaid the strobes and neons of nightbound Manila, fading them to a dreamscape. Still within its radiance, she tripped onstage into the freezing cockpit with its air-conditioned reek, the chilled smoke and beer fumes. Danny Alonzo would wink and give her a riff on his keyboard and she would be off into ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’ even as she half expected to hear her voice launch of its own accord into ‘Mayong pinagpala’ or ‘Santa Elena’ or another of her favourite Flores de Mayo songs.

‘I’m so tired, Danny.’

‘Don’t moan, kid. It’s the same for all of us. You’ll get used to it. All you have to do is sing and waggle your parts. Thank your lucky stars you’re not a hostess.’

‘All they do is waggle. They don’t have to sing as well. And nobody really listens to your voice, do they? It’s just background noise.’

‘They listen. Old Lettie was saying only this morning the word’s getting around, people are coming here on purpose to listen to you.

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