Brothers of the Head Read Online Free Page B

Bang-Bang in the media, when Zak’s plans were maturing. I let Zak get on with it and returned to my African lawsuit. He was running the freak-show, not I.
    The tale of corruption in high places which I was investigating was not then public knowledge. A few newspapers had begun to leak circumspect stories dealing with one aspect or another of the scandal: some charges facing a British Cabinet Minister, the dismissal of the head of an international contracting firm, the disappearance of a well-known architect. The trial still lay some months ahead when I was flown out to the West African state of Kanzani on behalf of Beauchamp-Fielding Associates. I was able to question some Kanzani politicians. The Minister of Health himself drove me out secretly to the chief item of evidence in the case.
    Fifty kilometres from the nearest river, two hundred and fifty kilometres from any township worthy of the name, we arrived at our destination in the bush. There stood a great disconsolate white building, its tiers of windows shuttered like closed eyes, its portico already in a state of collapse. This was the multimillion dollar hospital built merely to line the pockets of a few avaricious men. The main structure had been completed. Nearby, the foundations of an X-ray unit lay open to the sky. Goats wandered about the builders’ rubble.
    I walked through room after room, ward after ward, all deathly quiet. No healing would ever take place here. There was no way in which one penny of the investment could be retrieved. Only the termites would benefit.
    When I flew back from Nairobi, it was to find that the Bang-Bang had taken off and their first single was already in the charts.
    I walk left, I walk right,
    I waste no sleeping on the night –
    It’s two by two, the light the dark
    Just like animals in the Ark
    Because I’ll tell ya
    Tell ya
    I’m a Two-Way Romeo
    Hatched right under that Gemini sign
    Magic number Sixty-Nine
    We’re two in one and all in all
    Shoot double-barrelled wherewithal …
    Girls cumma my house, I let ’em in,
    I say Wait, I say Begin –
    At first it’s strange but then it lives
    They grow to love the alternatives
    â€™N’ then they’ll tell ya
    Tell ya
    I’m a Two-Way Romeo
    Bang-Bang
    A Two-Way Thru-Way New-Way Romeo
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    Looking back, one is astonished to recall the fury which accompanied the success of this execrable song. On their first Northern tour, the Howe twins appeared as support to another of Zak’s groups. Their gig, as I understand the term to be, was closed down in Sunderland for reasons of indecency; with Zak’s financial backing, the manager of the Sunderland club contested this decision in the courts, and the affair was given some publicity. From then on, a trail of accusations of indecency and innuendo followed like exhaust fumes in the wake of the Bang-Bang’s speeding career.
    A question was soon raised in the Houses of Parliament. National debate followed, to the strains of that tuneless song. Should the physiologically deprived make capital of their deprivation? Was it fair to themselves and their public?
    We can see now why the Bang-Bang was difficult to take. At the time, much of the discussion centred on whether their songs and performances were good or bad; in fact, the question of art hardly entered into the matter. The question of morality was a good deal more pressing (but the British public is well accustomed to confusing art with morality).
    Two overlapping areas of morality served to make the Bang-Bang hot news. The Bang-Bang were Siamese twins and therefore represented a deformity (for libel reasons, the word ‘freak’ was rarely used in public); should deformity be exploited in this way – indeed,
was
it being exploited?
    And – this was the more painful area – should deformed people be allowed to flaunt their sexuality? The deformed, the handicapped, were supposed to keep quiet about their natural