Cherry Bomb

by Jenny Valentish

  John Villiers stepped aside at the door to the studio so that I could pass through to the hall, which had fallen into darkness. It must have been late. Too late to suggest a beer?

  ‘You know, you really shouldn’t go out dressed like that,’ he grinned as he locked up Studio A without looking at what he was doing.

  ‘You reckon?’ I said, smoothing the hem of my dress.

  ‘I do.’

  I fixed him with the sort of penetrating gaze Tony used to give me when I was younger. Now I had made it a weapon of my own. I was about to come out with something outrageous, when John Villiers said in a voice feathery with wonder, ‘I remember what you were wearing when I first clapped eyes on you, Nina. You made me wonder what you were playing at.’

  And even though I concede that it was a soft jersey dress designed to inspire arousal, a huge chunk of desire crumbled off me like a rockslide. He’d revealed himself to be weak and tender. I was supposed to be tearing John Villiers against his will to the dark side of his desires until he emerged a desperate, broken man—not going skipping through the primroses with him. We should be on the floor, bruised and battered and helpless, or nothing.

  I did try to recover. This was what you wanted, this situation here, I reminded myself. I played myself a split-second show reel of John Villiers’ greatest hits: doing smack with the Weeping Brides in the nineties; retreating to the Himalayas with Nixon to record the multi-platinum Master and Keeper; appearing in the social pages walking the red carpet with his stunning ex-wife who once desired him. I built him back up to his rightful status. John Villiers interrupted my train of thought as his hands softly encircled my waist. ‘Can I kiss you?’

  With those four little words, the remains of my lust toppled into the abyss. Anger bloomed like deadly nightshade inside me. For fuck’s sake, John Villiers, I thought. Just do it or don’t.

  Poor John. I couldn’t put my finger on what he’d done, but he’d done it wrong. I ducked out of his grip and slowly picked up my bag. Slowly, to let him grasp the fact that I was leaving. His expression suddenly irritated me and made me long for the safety and immaturity of Hank, with whom nothing would ever be meaningful and expectations were low.

  ‘Did I say something wrong, Nina?’

  God, stop saying my name.

  ‘I’m too young,’ I reprimanded with a tight smile. ‘You’re our producer. What would my aunt say?’

  The light went out in John Villiers’ eyes and for a moment I felt a stab of remorse. I got us here. It was me.

  I recovered again. I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked to the door.

  8

  THE GOLD COAST

  Over the years I had become this calcified version of who I used to be: hardened and mean. I couldn’t stand the thought that other girls used me as a yardstick for their behaviour. ‘Oh, I’m not quite Alannah Dall yet. Therefore I may proceed . . .’ I hadn’t actually done half the things people said I had, but I was leaving myself open to all kinds of speculation.

  POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

  ‘If you’re going to get into trouble, do it before you turn eighteen,’ Alannah told me when I confessed how mad I felt all the time. I felt like machine-gunning everyone as I walked down the street.

  I knew I was probably abusing our friendship but I’d taken to treating Alannah’s number like the Batphone: every call was an emergency. Often I was drunk. I hoped I hadn’t told her about John Villiers. I hoped John Villiers hadn’t told her about John Villiers. Doubtful.

  That morning I’d woken up half-dressed, on the floor. I reached for my phone and checked the last calls I’d made. John Villiers. Hank. Jimmy. Rose. Rose. Rose. I checked the last Google searches for clues.

  Prairie oysters

  How old is Dannii Minogue

  Bukkake

  I had a flashback to a bar in Newtown, to Jimmy’s face hovering close as I beckoned him in. I’d shown him porn on my phone, that was it. Hardcore porn, as if it made any difference. That was one for the shame reel in my head and one not to tell Rose under any circumstances. Luckily she hadn’t picked up at 2.54 a.m., 2.56 a.m. or 3.04 a.m. Jimmy wouldn’t tell her; he was too nice. And then there was the hunt for cigarettes that embroiled everyone in the courtyard, their faces smudged out by my memory’s clumsy thumbs. I couldn’t even sketch in bricks and mortar around them. Some things were better blacked out.

  If I went by Alannah’s rule I only had two weeks in which to violently vent my spleen, because then I would turn eighteen and magically become an adult. While my friends were studying for their HSC I would be able to legally order a beer in the venues we’d been playing for years. For now, at least, having John Villiers as our super producer had come to a not-so-sticky end, with Rose adopting the expression ‘doing a John Villiers’ for every occasion I did something that stuffed up our plans, right down to ordering her the wrong sort of frappe. I couldn’t explain myself. Maybe I just chickened out.

  Fortunately, Aunty Alannah came to the rescue. Google ‘The Dolls’ and ‘nepotism’ and you’ll find much discussion of this, everywhere from the Daily Telegraph to Wikipedia. Careful—it’s easy to get lost in a Wiki wormhole following the trails of Alannah Dall into gambling and disappearance and Scientology and conspiracy theories. Don’t bother, though—you’ll get no answers, only conjecture. No one in our family can be relied on to be upfront about their lives and Alannah only told the half of it in her memoir.

  In the previous month, Ian Essence had booked us to play a ute muster, a General Pants store and a high-school formal. He’d be getting us on the bill for a schoolies next. I snitched to Alannah on the Batphone every few nights, and just like with the letters I’d written to her a few years earlier, his stupidity finally provoked her into a response. She invited us to the Gold Coast, without our manager, to talk. This was the moment we’d been waiting for all our lives: an invitation into Alannah’s universe. Rose cleared the entire music library off her new iPhone to be able to record every second of it.

  I’d once gone to the Gold Coast, when I was six or so. I remembered it by the things I ate: a Flake-and-raspberry-ripple ice cream on a wall by the beach; a hot dog in a bun sitting outside a pink stucco hotel; a plate of spaghetti next to a wall of lobsters in fish tanks. This time we were here to visit a mystical kingdom of shagpile carpets, heavy-framed platinum discs and cream soft furnishings. Perhaps a billiards table and a swimming pool. We packed our cossies.

  In good spirits, we played Ten Things in the departure lounge—a game I invented, in which you pick a person to spy on and come up with ten likely facts about their life.

  ‘Lives with his mother,’ said Rose under her breath of the man at the snack bar. ‘Listens to power ballads. Always orders calamari.’

  ‘Likely to buy our debut album and send teddy bears to our parents’ houses,’ I added.

  Alannah greeted us in Arrivals with a tinkling of bangles and a waft of expensive-smelling perfume. Rose probably knew exactly what it was. The famous feathered hair prevented our cheeks from touching, so we all swivelled in from the hips and said, ‘Mwah’. The airport was nothing much, but the Gold Coast itself would be better.

  Out in the car park I saw with a sinking heart that we were picking a path towards a Toyota Cressida, but then, I reassured myself, not everybody was a car person. Alannah apologised for the mess as we looped our way out onto the highway, Rose and I picking parking tickets and chip packets out from under us and dispensing them on the floor, and then she drove north. She drove north, but she kept going past all the good bits.

  As the high-rises of Surfers Paradise shrank in the rear-view mirror, we ploughed a desolate path, past truck wreckers, quarries, a sprawling industrial park and finally a lone pie shop like the last bastion of consumerism. We were in a place called Yatala.

  Rose typed something into her phone and nudged me. ‘Strictly speaking I suppose it’s the Gold Coast,’ it said on her screen.

  After half an hour we pul
led up to a block of units and wrangled our suitcases out of the boot in silence. As Rose lugged her case past Alannah at the door and gazed around the cramped lounge room, heaving with records, photographs and awards that looked like shiny souvenir tat in these tatty surroundings, she blurted out, ‘So, where’s all the royalties?’

  Close. I was thinking, ‘So, where’s the shagpile carpet?’ Alannah Dall was on Top of the Pops eight times over in London. How could she have messed it up so badly?

  Our aunt tossed her keys on the kitchen bench, not flinching at the line of inquiry. I guess that after being in the Guinness World Records for most orgasmic noises in one song (in 1986, ‘Fits and Spurts’ thrashed both ‘Je t’aime . . . Moi Non-Plus’ and ‘Love to Love You, Baby’) she was used to impertinent questions. ‘Law suits.’ She paused. ‘Lifestyle. Stuff. Plenty of time to fill you in on all the gory details.’

  Rose and I exchanged looks as Alannah shuffled over to the sink to switch on the kettle. Her advice to live like a camera was following you obviously didn’t apply inside her own apartment. There was a background smell of cigarettes. I knew without looking that there wouldn’t be any drinks cabinet to raid, because she completely quit the booze in the final chapter of Pour Me Another. I’d packed a few miniatures in my suitcase, but sooner or later we were going to have to find a pub.

  ‘Pull that out,’ she indicated towards the sofa. ‘You two are sleeping there.’

  A wave of fatigue washed over me at the prompt of sleep combined with the effort of staying cool around Alannah—and hoping she would stay cool with us. Rose and I levered out the sofa-bed and I sprawled on my front with my head on my arms, watching Alannah move about the kitchen. She was a bit like Rose in that the kitchen was the centre point of her sphere, with the table and its beautifully ornate tablecloth as the altar. Everything in my room at Dad’s gravitated around my mattress, which lay as a raft on the floor so that I could reach whatever useful detritus was bobbing around it. Some rough mornings I’d swipe at a cigarette packet that had caught in its wake, or fish out a half-eaten packet of Doritos.

  Alannah set three bone-china teacups and a teapot on the table and we each scraped up a chair. She had plenty of nice gear like the tea set, I noted. Just nowhere nice to put it all.

  ‘What are we doing tomorrow?’ Rose said, trying to keep the note of anxiety out of her voice. She always needed to know what was going on well in advance. In that respect, she was a tour manager’s dream.

  Alannah moved to a cupboard and pulled out teabags from a jumble of boxes. ‘I thought you could tell me where you’re up to,’ she suggested. ‘We’ll see what we can do about getting you a manager. A proper manager.’

  Rose eyeballed me. Like me, she would have felt the need blooming inside her. Whenever something that could launch our career was dangled in front of us, it hurt like heartache. We needed this, and now it had been suggested, it must not be taken away.

  ‘Can we watch some of your old videos?’ Rose pleaded in a girly voice. What a suck, I thought, watching her try to pull ahead in Alannah’s affections.

  ‘You really want to?’ Alannah asked her dryly.

  ‘Oh, please. I bet you’ve got some clips we haven’t even seen.’

  I pitched my voice in accordance. ‘We really have seen everything that we could possibly find. Can you dig out some more?’

  Alannah flicked a bit of fringe out of her eyes and looked embarrassed; a look I’d not seen in the scrapbook we made of her as kids. ‘Well, I suppose I could find something.’

  Rose leaned over to high-five me. ‘Yes!’ She took the plum spot on the sofa-bed, pedalling her legs until they were under the blanket and grabbing a cushion to hug. I joined her and it started to feel quite exciting, like one of our old sleepovers.

  When Alannah turned to peruse the labels of her VHS collection, I took the opportunity to study her. She’d put on some red-rimmed glasses, the rectangular kind that groovy mums like. It was jarring to see her in thongs rather than her trademark Victorian-style boots, but I noted that her toenails were painted a deep cerise and she’d levered herself into a tight black dress. She fed a tape into the player and on the screen a camera spiralled down over a colourful studio audience. It was twenty years ago and yet those flushed, hopeful faces still looked the same to me.

  •

  The next morning I hit redial again on my phone, trying to reach Hank. I hadn’t seen him since Dingo’s a few nights back and I couldn’t remember who left first, but my anger had abated and clicked over into anxiety. Who had he been off with while I’d been doing a John Villiers? I shouldn’t have bragged that record companies were paying for all our lunches these days, especially when he had just given me an amethyst necklace. He was right in thinking that was my birthstone, although I’d noticed another girl’s hair snarled in the clasp.

  ‘He’s jealous of your success. Don’t expect him to be happy for you; people generally aren’t that big,’ was Alannah’s advice as she stood at the barbecue on the balcony with a menthol in her mouth. I made a mental note to get into smoking those.

  I leaned over the balcony and looked at the galahs stalking about on the grass below. Inside, Rose had stuck the new Ladyhawke album on the stereo so we could analyse it. She sat pointedly at the table with a notebook, breaking down each song layer by layer; such was her dedication to the craft.

  ‘So, tell me what happened at your last record-label wining and dining,’ Alannah said, peering over the top of her glasses at the prawns. ‘Or I should hope it was just dining, at your age.’

  ‘It sucked,’ I yawned. ‘They wanted us to go more pop-rock and co-write the whole album with some guitarist.’

  ‘Oh, amateurs,’ she wailed. ‘You’d put that out and that would be the end of you. It’s a shame. Nobody’s in it for the long haul any more; nobody’s prepared to take a risk and develop a songwriting talent. Can you imagine the response at EMI back in seventy-seven after they first listened to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Of course they didn’t want to release it, but she insisted it be her debut single and in the end they took a risk. Imagine if they’d ignored her talent and made her sit down with some bloated old guitarist instead.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘At least with Grandiose they signed me for who I was. I started my career in Greg Mickiewicz’s office, working the phones—did you know that? He’s one of the few people I know whose audacity never trips them up,’ she said with grudging admiration. ‘And I’ll tell you, he gave me free rein to be the artist he knew I could be, instead of trying to shoehorn me into being the next Olivia Newton-John. You don’t get that these days.’

  I could see that Rose was listening from inside the apartment. We knew exactly who Greg Mickiewicz was—there were entire chapters of Pour Me Another dedicated to him: the time he threw her out of his limo; the time she tried to sue him for breach of contract; the time he hired a plane and got Alannah and Lyrebird to play to five journalists twenty-thousand feet over Wodonga.

  ‘So, why did you run away?’

  Alannah set her jaw and slammed down the tongs. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, disappearing through the balcony doors and into her room.

  ‘Oh my god,’ I heard Rose hiss from the lounge-room table when it was safe to speak. ‘Stupid.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve upset her. You can’t ask her that.’ She came over to the sliding doors and pulled her pained face.

  ‘Why not?’ I said, taking up the tongs. ‘You wanted to know too.’

  ‘But you can’t ask her.’

  In an interview in 2013 with GQ, Rose would describe this very morning as ‘a blessing’ and ‘serendipitous’, but in reality she wedged her tongue in her chin at me and gave an exasperated scream.

  I waved her quiet. I could hear Alannah on the phone in her room. I hoped she wasn’t arranging our passage back to Sydney. I tried calling Hank again, miserable, but got his voicemail.
‘You know what to do.’

  I’d been peevishly thumbing redial on my phone for twenty minutes by the time Alannah burst back in, looking flushed. ‘You’re meeting Greg Mickiewicz,’ she said. ‘Thursday, in Sydney. You need to be ready. Are you ready?’

  She braced herself on the kitchen counter and exhaled, then reached for her smokes.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, looking at Rose. Rose had her pen poised, as though frightened that the slightest movement would make Alannah change her mind.

  ‘It’s a good idea; it’s a good idea,’ Alannah said distractedly, checking her reflection in a framed Lichtenstein print on the wall. ‘You won’t make the same mistakes I did, I can promise you that. I won’t let it happen.’

  ‘Get out,’ Rose said finally. ‘This is huge.’ We knew a few bands who had used crowdsourcing to fund their albums and cut out the record company, but we would literally die if that was us. You couldn’t crowdsource yourself a seat in business class. It was much better having someone like Grandiose to pay for you. Alannah wheeled around and leaned back on the counter. I’d never seen her so fired up.

  ‘He folded quicker than I thought,’ she said, though I didn’t see why he should be folding so much as opening up. ‘He’d been watching you anyway, trust me. There’s a buzz about you girls and it’s big. The very fact that you’re working with John Villiers.’

  She threw her lighter down on the kitchen table. ‘You need to play me what you’ve been working on with John and the others. Bring your laptop into my room. We’re going to get you kitted out.’

  I fished in my suitcase and pulled out my laptop, then followed her in. Alannah had a picture of herself over her bed, just like I used to. Hers was beautifully framed and given Warhol’s Marilyn treatment instead of ripped out of an old copy of Duke, but still. On one bedside table was a vase full of expensive-looking flowers. On the other, a chintzy lamp and a copy of the Kama Sutra. A modest chandelier hung from the ceiling. It wasn’t Vogue Living, but it was an improvement on the rest of the place.