Cherry Bomb

by Jenny Valentish

  ‘I guess it’s not here, Rose,’ Brendan sang back, only pulling out one earphone to indicate he wasn’t committing to this conversation. ‘I did ask the promoter for one.’

  ‘Brendan, I can’t sing properly if my voice is fucked,’ she said, her voice setting like concrete. ‘Our fans deserve a first-class set from us, so what are you going to do about it?’

  I propelled myself off the sofa so that I could be spared this familiar operetta, but as I stepped into the hallway I saw John Villiers coming up the stairs. I ducked back into the dressing room and vaulted into a reclining position. As John Villiers stopped to greet Brendan, I picked up my new guitar and started strumming it.

  ‘What are you engrossed in?’ John Villiers said, coming over and sitting on the arm of the sofa. He looked good in his jeans and flight jacket and hint of wariness.

  ‘This,’ I said, tilting the guitar at him. ‘I’ve had a new one custom-made for me, actually.’

  ‘Have you?’ he said.

  ‘Look, they’ve put my name on it.’

  I showed him the ‘NINA *’ inlayed into the first five frets.

  ‘Will they teach you to play it?’ Rose asked from the corner, where she was texting Jimmy.

  ‘When you write a hit song, you can take the piss,’ I told her.

  John Villiers held out his hand and I swung over the guitar to him. He started picking out a country tune, using most of his fingers. I usually liked to play ‘who’s the better guitarist’ with my boyfriends, but there was no point getting competitive around John.

  ‘Townes Van Zandt?’ asked Jenner. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Is he from Nashville?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said John Villiers. ‘Texas.’

  ‘Oh. I’ve always wanted to go to Nashville and record.’

  Rose looked up sharply, but didn’t contradict me.

  ‘You should go to Tamworth,’ Jenner said. ‘It’s nearer.’

  ‘Will you fly me?’

  ‘I don’t want to play favourites.’

  John Villiers laughed through his nose. ‘You can fly Rose business class and Nina cattle class. Nothing like some creative conflict.’

  I felt John Villiers was mocking me, but still, there was an electric charge in the air. I could tell that Jenner felt it too, because he was leaning against the wall watching us.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. I knew that John Villiers must be curious about what I urgently needed to talk about, but I also knew he wouldn’t ask while people were in earshot, so I pulled out my make-up bag and swiped some gloss over my lips.

  ‘Be my mirror,’ I said, pressing my lips together and parting them.

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ he said, looking away. I handed him Alannah’s amber necklace and knelt on the sofa to offer him the nape of my neck. With my big stack heels I looked like an upturned colt. I always put the necklace on just moments before we went on because I was terrified of losing it—like it was my good-luck talisman. As John Villiers did up the clasp, one warm knuckle brushed the nape of my neck.

  ‘Girls?’ Brendan said, snapping his laptop closed. ‘It’s showtime.’

  John Villiers released the necklace and the beads stroked against my skin.

  ‘Off you go,’ he said abruptly, but it was, like, abrupt-hot, as though he were in inner turmoil.

  I eyeballed him, then followed Rose out, fixing the strap to my guitar as we walked. Brendan guided us to the side of the stage with his torch. We weren’t yet at the level where we could have some kind of mechanised riser lifting us, phoenix-like, through the centre of the stage between the billows of a smoke machine, so we had to wait for the last few chords of The Ramones’ ‘We Want the Airwaves’ to skip on.

  ‘John,’ I called out, just before I followed Rose into the wormhole of flashing lights. When he came out of the gloom I fished my chewing gum out of my mouth and put it in his hand. ‘Thanks.’

  The scream that went up when we walked on stage hit us like we were being dumped by a wave. To me, the kids in the front rows always looked as though they were terrified. Damp and pink-cheeked, they’d squeal like little piggies, eyes round and wide. As I scissored the first few barre chords of ‘Can’t Say No’ I could see lots of hair braids and feathers going on, as a nod to the squaw look we were trying to live down.

  It was fairly unusual to have a female guitarist, so all eyes were on me for the first song. Women usually played bass, accepting their role in life as the four-string serving wench to the boys’ lead-guitarist club. This was because back in those very first bedroom bands, women heard themselves and were ashamed. Boys, by contrast, believed they sounded like the shit, even as their fingers spasmed randomly over the upper frets, making as much sense as algebra. Eventually the unflappable self-belief of those boys might propel them on to become as technically good as they had always considered themselves to be. Women, if they continued, often played like an apology. They would grimace through a hesitant dual-fingered solo and telegraph their commiserations to the front rows. How often did you see a woman playing with a righteous grin, or shredding behind her head? Arrogance when playing electric guitar was a beautiful thing. I did what I could.

  A few times during the first song I had to break mid-yodel and tell the kids in the middle of the crush to ease up their pushing, but really it was nothing they shouldn’t be able to handle. I’d been in a ton of circle pits and mosh pits by the time I was fourteen.

  The lights were right in my eyes. They were making me so hot that when the guitar tech came to take my Telecaster and hand me my new guitar, I ripped off my ‘Youth is Wasted’ T-shirt too, slinging it at the audience so that I was just in my bra.

  We launched into ‘Girl Crush’ and everyone in the audience sighed at the part where the music stopped and Rose exhaled. She always held the mic out so that they knew to do it. That sort of pantomime wasn’t really my thing, but it was good that someone was taking care of it. By the time we got to ‘Fight Like a Girl’—at which point even the boyfriends in the crowd suddenly knew the words—we had a teenage feeding frenzy upon our hands. I ordered, ‘Put your hands up!’ and everyone obeyed. We did the double-clap for a bit while Rose finished off the chorus.

  I chugged away on a chord at the front of the stage and stared into the light above me until I went blind. I could hear the new boy on guitar doing a solo with every effect in his digital effects pod. When I blinked the room back into focus I saw a township of little lights beneath me—camera phones, capturing the moment for YouTube. Usually that gave us the pip, but I didn’t mind it when I was going to do something funny, like give our guitarist an almighty shove when he wasn’t expecting it. That was the sort of thing Alannah would have done.

  Before the encore we only had time to be patted down with powder and take a swig of water. We returned with a cover of The Runaways’ ‘Cherry Bomb’, and Rose skipped over so we could do some back-to-back singing during the ‘hello Daddy, hello Mom’ bit. For a joke I jerked away so she did a little stumble in her heels.

  The trouble began in the middle-eight of ‘Painted Lady’, which was a quieter number than, say, ‘Fight Like a Girl’. I took a swig from the bottle of vodka Brendan had put on the drum riser for me, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Rose dropping into the splits, like we were back in the courtyard of Dingo’s in 2010. This was an unscheduled manoeuvre. In the spirit of competition, I wheeled around in circles with my arms stretched, then let go of the bottle.

  The idea, obviously, was that it would explode on my speaker stack. Instead, it connected with the back of a bouncer’s head and sent him staggering forwards into the barricade. I saw the first three rows of sweaty teenagers lunge out and grab him, then he went down. A hundred and eighty degrees out, I was.

  Brendan told me later that the head of security shoved past him in a fury to rush the stage, but John Villiers got there first. I laughed with delight as he scooped me up like I was weightless, knocking the strap of my new guitar so that it nosedived to the ground. The stag
e lights blurred above me. I dangled my head back and saw a thousand little mouths hanging open, then the stage lights again. For a second I just took in the vibe of the drama, but then he skittled me to my feet in the wings, abruptly ending our Bodyguard moment.

  ‘You stupid twat,’ he spat, over the deafening feedback of my new guitar. It was howling like an abandoned puppy. I looked at him in disbelief, then down at my foot, which had lost its shoe.

  ‘What?’ I said incredulously. ‘John, I’ve got to get back out there.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ said Jenner with finality.

  ‘When are you going to fucking grow up?’ John Villiers said, pointing at the security pit. ‘That guy’s got his own problems. I’ve got my own problems. You are not my problem, so stop trying to be.’

  I could see the guitar tech and Brendan watching in the shadows, and humiliation back-burned through my brain. I wanted to raze this theatre to the ground. I wanted to smash the lot of them in the teeth. On stage, I could hear Rose holding the fort in show-must-go-on mode. She’d be sneakily reinserting her scat rap back into ‘Cheap’ any moment now.

  ‘Hello?’ John Villiers snapped, coming right up to my face and waving his hand. ‘Is anybody there?’

  ‘When am I going to grow up?’ I repeated viciously, balling up and shoving his chest. ‘I’m a teenager if you remember, John. I’m enabled to do whatever the hell I want, and anyone on the payroll should just shut the fuck up and support me.’

  Too late I realised I meant ‘entitled’.

  ‘And you,’ I said, stabbing a finger at him, ‘have a duty of care.’

  The look on John Villiers’ face . . . if I’d had another drink I would have thrown it.

  He shrugged on his jacket.

  ‘If you want someone to save you, darling, it isn’t me,’ he said. ‘Find some other stooge to produce your records.’

  Jenner looked down at his feet as John Villiers passed him. I watched him go, amazed. This was insane. I could still feel his arms around me as he carried me off stage, out of harm’s way. I’d only ever wanted John Villiers’ approval, and I never seemed to go about it the right way. He didn’t even know what I needed to see him urgently about, which was my new lingerie from La Perla—although, as fate would have it, he wound up seeing half of it, along with the rest of the Enmore. I always jinxed things when I bought new undies.

  ‘We love you so much, Sydney,’ I heard Rose yell from the stage. ‘You’re so very special to us and always will be. We love you.’

  The adulation she received in return was sincere.

  •

  The after-party was at a new club in Chinatown, done up like a Chinese laundry with sheets and candles everywhere. Brendan had a car waiting around the back of the venue for us but all the journalists and hangers-on could walk the distance easily enough.

  ‘I came here one night after seeing The Dummies,’ Rose said during the short drive, ‘and Nina turned up with her cab driver. It was so funny. He couldn’t speak a word of English, so we just bought him shots.’

  I didn’t laugh. John Villiers was nowhere to be seen and I knew I’d really done it this time. Jenner mistook my malaise for concern about the vodka-bottle incident and assured me that it meant we’d put on a show that would be remembered.

  Brendan chuckled as he slid open the door of the people-mover and jumped out.

  ‘I can’t believe John Villiers snapped like that,’ Rose said, stepping down onto the kerb in her heels. She steadied herself on Brendan. ‘What was with him? Totally mental.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He just blows hot and cold.’

  Brendan slung the door shut and the van beeped twice with an orange pulse from the indicators.

  ‘We need our own security, Brendan,’ Rose decided, breezing past the bouncer on the door. ‘If a venue’s security is going to get out of control like that we need to be protected.’

  ‘They could double-up with another job,’ complied Brendan, who sometimes found it best to play along. ‘Like mopping you down with towels between songs.’

  ‘They could.’ She saw my face. ‘Oh, come on, doll, get over it. We’ll be out of here soon and he can go back to producing old has-bians.’

  I didn’t answer. In my head I was playing a tape loop of John Villiers snarling, ‘If you want someone to save you, darling, it isn’t me.’ I was winding myself up into a proper rage; the sort from which there was no turning back.

  I didn’t want anyone to save me. People didn’t race in to protect you in real life, ever; certainly not in mine. I could only really count my English teacher in Year Eight, and he only tried once. Old Smithy. Old Smithy, I still remembered him. He was actually younger than the others—twenty-five, thirty-five maybe. He wore mismatched jackets and pants, and always had a bit of hair sticking up from running his hand through it when he got excited about a metaphor.

  I despised him for trying to be down with the kids, getting us to call him Stephen and sitting edgily on his desk. I had more respect for the bitter old fossils who just got on with it. I let him know it every day through my facial expression. I had boredom down to a fine art. My grades slipped from an A to a C, because I was applying myself no further than slumping my head on my arm, inhaling my skin and inspecting every fine blonde hair from the perspective of an ant. Sometimes I’d wiggle an achy tooth. Every morning I’d wake up and my teeth would be aching from grinding. It felt like they were going to shatter into a million little pieces.

  I remember the day when the rest of the class had been talking about haikus, as if I needed to fumble through something so elementary. It was

  like a winter that

  never seemed to end and yet

  spring would be the same.

  I ran my thumbnail back and forth across a groove in the desk, wilfully tearing a fissure in time. When the bell rang, Mr Smith asked me to wait. We stood like sentries while everyone else filed out.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked when they’d gone. He kept his voice reasonable. ‘You should be into this. I’ve read the reports from your last school. You should be top of the class. You should be enjoying it.’

  ‘I’m not really bothered.’ I stared at a point on his forehead.

  ‘Is it something I’m doing wrong?’ he asked, waiting a beat. ‘Or is there something that’s on your mind?’

  I went for a dead-eyed smirk but it came out a sneer. ‘Don’t worry about it, sir. None of your business.’ He’d shown weakness and not even guessed at the depth of my contempt.

  He looked at me for a second and then dropped his gaze. He hadn’t smiled like he was my mate once the whole time. ‘All right,’ he said quietly. It was a dismissal, but it looked like personal disappointment.

  Triumph—short lived. Oh!

  The bittersweet victory

  of walking away

  After that I’d always notice him on the way home. He lived somewhere near me. I’d see him haring down Cowper Street, shirt untucked on one side, keen to get home to somebody. I’d hang back two-hundred metres, hugging my ring-binder to my chest. Ever since then I’d been window-shopping adults to open up to, always fantasising, but never buying.

  He took me by surprise. He should have asked again. Instead, I had to add it to the shame reel.

  As Rose started air kissing some low-ranking personnel from Grandiose, I went to the toilet for a cry. When I returned, I stood at the bar for a bird’s-eye view of the door. Jenner was supposed to have had final approval of Carmel’s guest list, yet we hadn’t been at the club ten minutes when Lance Lobotomy showed up, his name checked off by the girl in the door booth.

  I nudged Rose. Lance was the journalist to whom Rose had said a month earlier, ‘Music saved our lives.’ She literally said that, as well as ‘LA is our spiritual home’ and ‘We’ll always have a special place in our hearts for Australia.’ He’d sat across from us nodding and smiling, goading us on with more questions, and then wrote that we were ‘plastic punk wit
h all the depth of a puddle’ and complained about ‘seventy-five minutes of my life I’ll never get back’. It was Lance’s fault the #PaidMyDues tag took off.

  Rose stopped her conversation and looked down her nose at him, then shrugged and turned back to her Bellini. I stared at her. Surely she wasn’t going to just leave it? When I was mad about something, my mind snapped down on it like a bear trap.

  After thirty minutes of tracking Lance across the room over the rim of my wine glass and ignoring people trying to talk to me over the thumping bass, I made my move. Rose was too busy settling the score on the dance floor to notice and Jenner had his back turned. I pushed through the crowd to where Lance sat in a booth with our support band, Brando, his dictaphone out.

  ‘Hello, Nina,’ the Brando boys said, the toothy optimists.

  ‘Bless you,’ I said. I was so wasted I was seeing more of them than could possibly be seated there. I knocked over someone’s glass shunting my way into the booth, and the smiles faltered. Relax, Brando, it’s just rock’n’roll.

  I turned to Lance, who was avoiding eye contact. ‘Why’d you do it?’ I asked him. ‘Huh? Just tell me, why’d you do it? I really want to know.’

  ‘I don’t know, Nina,’ he said in a tetchy whine. ‘That’s just how the business is, sometimes.’

  ‘Is it? You’re in your fucking thirties; this record isn’t for you.’

  ‘Look, it’s just the way it works.’

  ‘Seriously, if my career revolved around writing about other people’s talent, I would be humiliated.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ He grimaced, but he was also grinding his jaw. I must have been ruining his coke high. We volleyed the topic back and forth some more until I suddenly noticed that Brando had been led away from the scene—my scene—leaving just us. Some girls at the next table were taking pictures of me on their phones. I fiddled with my bra strap under my T-shirt.

  ‘Can I go now?’ Lance asked. ‘My friends are over there.’