‘Only if you spell it right,’ he said. Mitch was good with us, but I’d seen him dispense with people ruthlessly. ‘Off you go,’ he’d said to a girl who’d refused to leave our drummer’s room the night before. He said it as he propelled her down the corridor, not caring that she stumbled in her one high-heeled shoe. And when the support band stole a bottle of vodka from our rider and Rose threatened to call the police, Mitch simply walked into their dressing room and held the guitarist’s semi-acoustic by the neck like a baseball bat until they gave the rest of it back. He was firm but fair.
In the hotel bar that last night we ran into Benny, the legendary singer from Steel Girders, who was up for a chat. Mitch knew him from way back and it turned out he’d worked with John Villiers as well. Benny and I started talking about John Villiers like we were all old friends.
‘Such a sweetheart. He really got the best out of us whenever we worked with him. Great bloke.’
‘I know,’ I brushed his arm. ‘There’s a lot of love in the room when we record. You can really feel it.’
‘He’s great.’
‘He really is.’
‘So fantastic that you girls got to work with him too. Give him my love . . . sorry, what was your name, darling?’
‘Nina. I will, I will. Look up The Dolls on Facebook, you’ll love it, I promise.’
Once upon a time Benny would have invited me and Rose up to his hotel room for a bubble bath, or so I’d read, but tonight it looked like it was way past his bedtime. I kept staring at John Villiers’ number in my phone, but I wasn’t leathered enough to do it. Instead I went to the toilets with the girl behind the bar to do a line, and we swapped clothes to surprise everyone.
Next morning at the lobby call I tried hard not to be sick. I had a vague memory of Rose and me stripping our guitar tech, Paul, and wedging a long tail of toilet paper into his arse crack before shoving him out into the corridor.
‘Youth of today: no stamina,’ said Mitch cheerfully as I laid my head on the concierge desk.
•
The Please No More Tour amounted to some of the funniest days of my life, but when we got back to suburbia I cried alone for three days in Dad’s flat with the blinds closed—in the bath; into tins of tuna; under a doona on the couch. In between crying I turned the stereo up to the max and danced till I sweated out all the toxins. For the next month I moped around in a post-tour comedown, wondering what to do with myself. I had to pull myself together eventually, because our publicist, Carmel, had lined up some appearances for us.
More and more frequently we had a driver at our disposal, which was a relief because lately I’d had the eerie feeling that death was stalking me. I couldn’t walk down a street without picturing a CCTV camera whirring around and tracking my last steps. I’d get a flash-forward to the cops studying my retreating figure in its distinctive tortoiseshell fake-fur coat: a dolled-up barfly from any era, walking down the road, unsteady on her heels. I imagined them pointing out the coat in the grainy footage on Crimewatch and then holding up a replica in the studio. Although, good luck with that—I’d bought it on eBay three years earlier.
On this night we were being driven to a kids’ TV awards show in the Entertainment Quarter. There were no real kids receiving awards—it was all about the presenters and celebrities. Having not even had an album out yet, those sort of heady accolades were yet to come to us. Rose and I were merely there to be seen and to get people turning over cards in their minds like the memory game. Platinum blonde. Where did I last see a platinum blonde? Ah, that’s right: the ARIAs.
I wore: Greta Garbo-style loose pantsuit—a Salvos score—ruffled green shirt, Alannah’s amber necklace. It was my lucky necklace, until I’d have a bad night, at which point it would be dropped like a curse.
Rose wore: red cocktail dress, little velvet hat perched on her head at an angle.
As we sat at our table, Rose insisted on showing me the entire SMS conversation she’d had with Jimmy earlier. ‘Scroll down. Scroll down,’ she ordered every now and then. Jimmy and Rose were on the skids, although this text chain was so long and overwrought I couldn’t actually tell why. Meanwhile, she was checking Facebook on my phone. Every time someone came over to greet us, Carmel gave us a nudge and we put our phones on our laps and smiled, then resumed.
The evening was a boring conveyor belt of effervescent, chipmunk-cheeked twenty-somethings giving and receiving baubles. I noticed that the bigger stars only took their seats in the commercial break before their category was about to be announced. ‘They already know they’ve won,’ Carmel confirmed confidently. ‘You watch. They’ll be out of here as soon as they get their award. The car engine will still be running.’
The night was to wind up with a dimpled boy band called Brando playing their new single, so at the MC’s request we all shuffled over to the stage to watch. I could sense someone by my side looking across at me, but it wasn’t my custom to give such people the satisfaction of making eye contact, so I ignored him.
‘Here we are again,’ John Villiers said after a while.
I grabbed his arm instinctively and we went in for the awkward kiss. It was such a relief to see his face after having the spectre of Strider at the end of my bed whenever I was trying to fall asleep. He was looking good, a bit tipsy. We grinned shyly at each other.
‘From one awards show to another. You’ll be getting a big head.’
‘Still not winning anything though.’
‘Not yet.’
‘Did you get my email about Benny?’
‘I did,’ he said. ‘Nice that you met him.’
‘Nothing happened,’ I said automatically. He looked at me funny, but I knew to drop it. ‘Wait.’
I disappeared back to our table, where I topped up my white wine, drank a bit, topped it up again and poured him a glass to the rim. When I delivered it to him I had the remainder of the bottle tucked under my arm.
We watched Brando crisscross the stage. The one at the front doing an apologetic rap over the middle-eight. I was smiling like a loon into the lights, but John Villiers couldn’t see—although he must have been able to feel me, standing that little bit too close. My arm touching his felt like a lead weight. My clit was throbbing on beat with Brando’s rendition of ‘Angels’.
It was on.
When John Villiers neared the bottom of his glass, I poured him another. I playfully thudded the bottle against his stomach to speed him along, but really I was as keenly focused as a circling hawk. When the lights came on I had to hustle him outside as quickly as possible before the spell was broken, away from any cock-blocker wanting to ask him how he’d been and casting me strange looks. It was still warm out, even though it was eleven at night. John Villiers looked up at the sky, relaying some anecdote about an engineer who’d worked with Brando. I could tell he was a bit pissed.
In the cloying park, lined with birds-of-paradise bushes, conversation dropped off. I pulled him gently off course, away from the hordes heading for the main road, and he staggered a bit. When I pulled him closer by his jacket as if I was completely entitled to my moment, he looked down at me, bemused. I could smell his aftershave or deodorant, or something.
‘Let’s make out,’ I suggested, my eyes like strobes. ‘You’re not going to remember anyway.’
I moved in, but he pulled away.
‘Nina,’ he said, more sober than I’d thought. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend.’ A bat flapped like an ellipsis overhead, three beats and gone.
Returning the sides of his jacket to him, I searched his eyes. I detected a note of triumph.
‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to see if you’d do it.’
And I walked away like the power didn’t just leach out of me.
•
I figured I owed Helen a visit. Staying over hadn’t been an option since she’d moved some artist called Fabian into my room, but I’d been promising to go through all my junk. I lugged the boxes through the house, scoping Fabian’s mi
sshapen nudes dotted around. Thankfully, the old perve wasn’t home.
I’d dropped a few Valium to help me handle Helen, although already Valium seemed passé. Today’s prescription drugs were all about the painkillers, not the sedatives. The Osbourne siblings were both on OxyContin, which I hadn’t tried yet.
I was seeing the house with new eyes; pointing out bits to my as-yet-fictional biographer: This is where Rose and I first had our singing lessons. That’s the bush where we used to spy on the neighbours. This is where I felt the headstock of my first guitar, all wrapped up and hidden under their bed. This is the mirror where I cut off all my hair when I was seven . . .
We heaved the boxes into the kitchen and I sat at the table to go through them. Helen was in an unusually good mood, citing a second wind on the never-ending composition of her novel, which I suspected was about a woman quite like herself with a daughter much like me. Certainly, it was rare to see her cooking. I wandered over to the stove and cranked the oven door, squinting at the heat. ‘Ah, McCain,’ I observed, ‘you’ve done it again.’
Over at the kitchen table I cut through the packing tape in which I’d bound my old diaries. The handwriting was barely legible—panicked scrawls like drunken spiders across the pages. A litany of late nights and bad thoughts come back to haunt me.
Fishing into other boxes, I found tiny pink rubber Barbie doll shoes, button badges for The Who and Chisel that I’d picked up in op shops, a collection of rocks, ornate containers for losing things in, expired felt tips and empty bottles of old-lady perfume from garage sales that exhumed sad chintzy sighs when I pumped the tops.
I pocketed some badges I made for the spy club Rose and I had started, and shoved everything else into bin bags. Helen had put aside some childhood photos for me and when she wasn’t looking I chucked them in a bin bag, too.
When I was done, I stared at Facebook on my phone with a cup of tea while Helen talked.
‘I wish you’d stop smoking,’ she said, getting the defensive tone ready for my knee-jerk reaction. ‘It killed your nanna. Not that there’s much left of you anyway. You’re like one of those lollipop girls.’
‘Helen,’ I said, with enough warning to let her know I’d be out of here if she carried on down that route.
‘I’m joking! Joke!’
I could have started a cool conversation with Helen. I could have asked if she’d been painting with Fabian, or how that hippy retreat went. I could, but I didn’t, because why should I?
Abandoning the chilli on the hob, she brought over one last photo. It was of her and Alannah in the seventies. She was about twelve and Alannah must have been sixteen.
‘Wow,’ I said, taking it. ‘Look at her hair. So frizzy.’
‘Boys used to call her “ferret face”,’ Helen said. ‘I was actually considered the pretty one, you know.’
I grunted. It was true, though. Helen might cut and dye her own hair and embarrass me with her collection of kaftans, but her face was more delicate than her sister’s, when she wasn’t winching it into a frown.
‘Not long after this was taken she left home. She left me and Dee to handle Mum and Dad on our own.’
‘I know.’
‘I know you know; I’m just telling you.’
‘What do you expect from a sixteen-year-old, though?’
‘Oh, nothing really. I expected more later, though,’ she sniffed.
Somehow, an attack on Alannah felt like an attack on me.
‘You could have got out of here,’ I countered. ‘Why are you still in Parramatta? Alannah got as far away as possible.’
‘Alannah could afford it,’ she snapped. ‘She was doing very well for money, before she blew the lot and started leeching off your father.’
She stopped herself. I didn’t point out the obvious: that if Helen had helped her sister out Alannah wouldn’t have had to go to Dad, which must have been awkward.
‘In her book she said you were her rock,’ I said instead.
‘Ah yes, the infamous memoir,’ said Helen. ‘In which history was gleefully rewritten. She didn’t even mention our band.’
I paused, cup of tea halfway up to my mouth.
‘What band?’ I grumbled.
Helen looked grimly triumphant.
‘More of a duo, really, but it wasn’t to last. We’d played all the city clubs before I was even old enough to drink.’
I stared at my mother, trying to strip back the years and mousse up her hair. It would never have worked.
‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘What were you called, then?’
‘Hot Groove.’
I crowed with laughter, rocking on my chair. ‘No way. Sing us a song!’
‘Don’t be silly. Anyway, before we’d even released anything our new manager decided your aunt would be more commercially viable as a solo artist, so I was relegated to minion—or personal assistant, as they called it. The rest, as they say,’ she noted in her most aggrieved voice, ‘is history.’
We stayed silent a moment. I took in the patchwork effect of the kitchen: no designer appliances and matching condiments like the ones at Rose’s house. How different a kitchen we might have had, if Helen had stuck to her funk-pop dream. Then again, Alannah’s kitchen was a disappointment.
‘Hot groove . . .’ I crooned, ‘in the air . . .’ I wanted to see photographic evidence—to prove to myself that I would have been Alannah and Rose would have been Helen—but my mother suddenly tired of the conversation.
‘I don’t want you to hate your aunt,’ she said, clanking the lid down on the pot with a touch too much force. ‘She’s making amends of sorts by helping you. Just be smart. And for god’s sake, don’t lend her any money.’
Helen went back to serving up dinner and I ransacked my brain for clues, trying to slide snippets of family conversation around like a Rubik’s Cube. I hated being in the dark all the time. Around here you were either having stuff kept from you, or someone like Dad was telling you things you could never repeat. All these secrets made me feel like I had amnesia; just like all the Tony stuff. The details there were blurry, the way they were when I was drunk. People tell you the past is the past, but to have any kind of closure you need evidence, like a pile of bones picked clean, or your mind wanders the moors in distress.
On the way back to Dad’s I stopped at an Officeworks and hunched over the paper shredder for an hour, feeding in the pages of my diaries, one by one, before stuffing the stiff covers in a bin.
•
I couldn’t choose my favourite Alannah Dall video, because each had its own distinct personality. She was actually the aggressor in ‘Beam Me Up (Tie Me Down)’, but you’d take her more seriously if she wasn’t wearing a silver space dress. In ‘Make Him Wait’ she was manic and alone, but for a chair, a smoke machine and a skewed plywood set that shook whenever she set down a high-heeled boot. The French maid outfit she wore in ‘Favourite Pet’ made her curse now if you mentioned it, but it was in a display case in the Arts Centre Melbourne along with other classic costumes through the ages. Then there was the low-buttoned safari dress and thick brown belt that spawned a million fantasies in ‘Fantastic Voyage’—the clip that reclaimed exotic locales from playboys like Duran Duran. Up until this point, women in videos were just brightly coloured birds while men ran around sweating in the undergrowth pinching bums, but Alannah was never anything less than the villain.
Growing up embroiled in all this, I had a whole folder full of ideas and sketches I’d been working on since I was twelve, but Jenner told me to leave them at home. I was to forget about the yacht idea as well, as video budgets had dropped from twenty grand to five if you were lucky.
We’d met at his office at around eleven in the morning. I walked around it, one hand trailing the wall.
‘Why don’t you get a pinball machine, Jenner?’ I asked, stopping to peer into a silver frame on the mantelpiece. It was Jenner looking really young with his arm around Danger Michaels. They were both gurning at the camera.
‘Ha,’ said Rose. ‘Twenty per cent of all these platinum albums . . . you must be rolling in it.’
‘I’m about to be rolling in it,’ he corrected her, in a speech that would go down in the annals of Dolls history. ‘I’ve got the masters of your album back from the States. You’ll have to find someone else to manage you after this, because I’m going to be able to retire.’
I flumped down onto the sofa as he played the beginning of ‘Cotton Candy’ through his computer, out of a speaker in every corner of the room. It was usually Jenner’s role to exercise caution—the devil’s advocate to Mickiewicz’s grand promises of number ones—but he was right. We sounded bigger and shinier than I’d ever heard us. It kind of didn’t sound like us at all.
‘Holy shit,’ said Rose, her eyes tearing up. ‘We sound hectic. I so want to put this all over YouTube right now.’
Halfway through the third song, Jenner had to cut it short. We were off to have lunch with Mason—the director of our first video. Over noodles on Oxford Street, he explained the concept for ‘Fight Like a Girl’. Rose and I were to go at each other in a boxing ring, before realising this was crazy and turning on the camera. The camera, we could assume, was some douchebag who’d done us wrong.
‘You are freaking joking,’ Rose said, meeting my eyes, but it was more like a vocal tic than a genuine protest. I was already planning my moves and I knew she was too. This shoot would really suit my hair, being blonde and choppy as it was now. Eyes: green kohl.
I’m thrown down on to the canvas and looking up on all fours through the wet fronds of my fringe, panting and mean. Maybe we’re outside and you can see my breath coming in bursts. Now I’m back on my feet, sparring, eyeing the camera and mouthing, ‘You know what I mean.’ Close-up on my sneer. Yeah, motherfucker.
‘Is it a bit Aguilera?’ said Jenner’s PA, Sam. I willed her silent.
‘Everything in music has been done before,’ said Jenner, not taking his eyes off the storyboard. ‘It’s all derivative. If anyone thinks they can lay claim to their image, they’re dreaming.’
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