He was playing his guitar in his bedroom. He had been playing for about an hour now and had finally settled on an arrangement for his latest song. He felt it could be his best yet and was sure it was definitely his most accomplished. He was proud and excited about eventually playing it to his friends. Then he heard the door slam closed and he knew it was time to put the guitar down. He rushed to slide it into its leather home but in his hastiness, he let it drop to the floor creating a loud din that rattled the walls and floors. He knew then what was coming. His father let out a bellow and he could hear his footsteps come crashing across the floor of the cramped 3 room house towards his bedroom that he shared with his two brothers. The door flung open violently knocking a glass of water to the floor. Instantly, the odour of liquor hit his nostrils. He recognised the sweet scent of arguardiente which seemed to be his father`s poison of choice. His father drank nearly every day and mostly came home in a good mood, not talkative, but at least appeased it would seem. However there were many days when this was not the case. He supposed that these were the days when business was not so good or when his father had to deal with some of the local `business` men who would try to extort him for protection. On these days, Bastian would also have to deal with someone who meant business. Today was one of those days. He took the beating and the verbal abuse and never made a sound until his father was finally tired of swinging and stumbled out of the room to go next door and continue the abuse with his mother. She would refuse to accept the abuse quietly and often returned the verbal abuse with equal vigour. Bastian often wished she wouldn`t as it only stoked the fires of his father`s rage and then he would have to hear the inevitable sounds of skin on skin float through the cardboard thin walls.
Bastian dreamed about the day when he and his band would be famous and he could afford to take his mother with him around the world, visiting all the famous sites he had seen in the books that he once found in a house he had broken into. He and his friends had been looking for money to buy cigarettes or sweets but his inquisitive mind was drawn more towards a bookcase that stood in the corner. He had flicked through a few of the leather-bound encyclopaedias and had been mesmerised and captivated by colour images of cowboys herding cattle on the prairies of Argentina, buildings that reached towards the heavens, taller than mountains, Japanese people crammed like sardines onto trains and killer whales breaking the surface of the water at the point of delivering a deadly bite to a seal sitting on an ice sheet. Rather than steal full books, knowing that if his father or mother found them, he would be punished for sure, he had torn several pages and stashed them under his mattress to be reviewed every night. When he pulled those pages out to view in the dim night light, he would be sent flying to distant lands, riding trains in Japan, pushing and shoving his way through the doors of the train, breathing the heavy air fighting for his space within the speeding metal box. He went searching, in those pages, for a place to where he and his brothers and his mother could escape to a life of peace and a life without fear.
When one day his father came home with a guitar that he had found on the street on his way home, battered and beaten, without strings but somehow gleaming and beautiful, Bastian had immediately seized the opportunity with which only he could see had been presented to him. He was going to become the best guitarist in the world and travel as far as he could. From the day he received the guitar, he was in love with it. It was as if he had found the girl of his dreams. He polished it, saved up for new strings, learned how to tune it and began touching the strings to investigate how they make sounds.
For the first year he didn’t play songs. He made sounds. He put his ear to the back of the hollow body of the guitar and would run his finger nail over the strings and listen to the rough rattle. He would strike the string with a coin and listen to the ringing, resonating sound until it slowly died away. He closed his eyes and could visualise the sound waves, pulsing and bouncing around inside the guitar, vibrating the thin wood, amplifying and bursting free through the hole below the strings. Every sound wave had a different colour and a different scent. Some were dark and dangerous while others were carefree and reassuring. Every note had a shape, round and long or thin and sharp. He would lose himself in the minute tonality of each string, dreaming about being inside the sound wave, floating between vibrations of colour, smelling the different aromas.
After a year, he began to put colours together. It happened by accident one day. He had been reading his pages and dreaming of climbing the tallest mountains when he picked up his guitar to play with it. When he did so, he found himself painting a picture of a mountain, dense with forests and bathed in mist. He began by first painting the sky, the background and then the outline of the mountain. Then he began to fill in the details, painting the trees, the birds, the rivers. Then he started to add fragrance. The essence of flowers mixed with the crisp clean scent of running water and the humid bouquet of the mist. Layer upon layer he built the environment around him until he had transformed his bedroom into a feral wilderness. His feet were wet from walking through the damp, clammy forest and his lungs awash with delicate mountain air. He had played his first song and it had been wonderful. Truly wonderful. His heart began beating senselessly at the excitement and realisation that he could play music. He knew it wasn`t a song as most people perceived of songs but he knew it was radiant. He knew that he had touched on something that most people could only dream of. It had only lasted seconds but the magical notes still resonated between his ears, refusing to die until he played more, so he did. He played for hours that day, creating landscapes, cityscapes and personalities. He was pretty sure that what he played made no sense to anyone but himself but he didn`t care. This was his gift and he was going to keep it for himself.
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