I rolled my used gum uneasily between my finger and thumb. ‘What’s Pru got to do with anything?’
‘We’ve stayed in touch,’ she said in a voice that was far too casual. ‘She’s a cool chick, don’t you think?’
It dawned on me: the past few days that I’d assumed Rose was holed up in a hotel room coming up with new lyrical clichés, that wasn’t what she’d been doing at all.
‘Wait, is Pru gay?’
‘She’s not gay, she’s bisexual. Like me.’
I searched her eyes.
‘You’re not bisexual. Since when?’
‘Since forever,’ she huffed.
I reviewed it. I’d thought Rose wrote ‘Girl Crush’ so that blokes could imagine her pashing on with someone equally hot . . . I hadn’t realised she was stating her intent to the universe again.
‘Remember the night I had with Carly at Dingo’s?’ she reminded me. I could tell she was enjoying the tattooist’s grim determination not to look at her.
‘Yeah, but, Rose, that was just the pills,’ I protested. She shook her head in irritation. It was a familiar gesture. It meant: What would you know?
It was true, I’d never had any Sapphic experiences—unless you counted my seven-year-old self showing Kylie-from-down-the-street some things Tony had showed me. That went on for a while, until Kylie’s mother stopped her playing with me and cemented another layer of shame over my psyche.
Apart from that there was the time I asked the only known gay girl at school if I could talk to her because I was confused about my feelings. I wasn’t confused; I was just curious. Curious about what she’d say, not bi-curious. Maybe I just wanted some attention. ‘I could take you to a bar where gay girls drink if you like,’ she’d said, very cautiously. We never did talk again.
Rose stayed cool and took an Instagram selfie in front of the wall of flash art, as though she were the one here getting something. It made a change from posting pictures of her lunch. The day before, she’d posted one of a croissant to prove she ate carbs, but seconds later she picked out the ham in the middle and dumped the rest. Most of Rose’s Instagram pics were of her face bleached out into a pair of eyes with a fork floating in front of them. It wasn’t exactly like she was being paid to do it, but if she casually tagged the name of the restaurant she wouldn’t end up paying for the meal either.
‘Pru really likes you,’ she said finally. ‘I think you’ll like her too, okay? Just don’t worry about it.’
For the next few days I followed her advice and didn’t worry about it, but when Rose and Pru started ‘are they/aren’t they’ dating in public, I called Clay at Elementary and asked him what he thought, being gay himself.
‘She’s not a “big fat lesbian” lesbian, so it’s okay,’ he assured me. ‘Rose can swing both ways, but just not with someone, like, gay gay.’
TOP 5 CLASSIC CLAY PUTDOWNS
1. ‘What—this is your George-Harrison-meets-the-Maharishi period? Okaaaaay.’
2. ‘Babes, I love your hair today, the regrowth looks flawless.’
3. ‘We can’t. We can’t go out. Even Gaga wouldn’t accept you as one of her children in that dress.’
4. ‘We’ll put you in the studio with Nancy Mancillo. She’s like you in fifty years, with songwriting chops.’
5. ‘Whoa, slow down. You’re not quite at the album-of-Edith-Piaf-covers stage of your career, okay? There’s a lot of development that needs to be done, starting with losing twenty pounds.’
‘Or,’ he said, after more thought, ‘they could be gay gay, but in a Jenny Shimizu way. That’s hot.’
Even though they were being coy about their relationship, Rose had already made a joke on radio saying that lesbians made me nervous, which implied I was homophobic. It was true, they did, but only in the way that straight men made me nervous—because I might wind up drunk and getting into an awkward situation that would require me to say ‘no’. Which, as ‘Can’t Say No’ hinted at, was hard. When I was younger, in Newtown, I’d even write ‘NO’ on my hand in biro so that I’d see it at the end of the evening but, interestingly, even if I did say ‘NO’, I found that I could only say ‘NO’ once. If someone was savvy enough to ask twice, their perseverance paid off.
•
‘It’s important to me that the two main people in my life get on,’ Rose said, and so I agreed to meet her and Pru at Al Fresco that evening. Upon arrival I saw they were both in jeans and singlets. I ordered double whiskies as a bit of a pawn-to-king-four to Pru.
‘That’s so you,’ smiled Pru benevolently, pulling an electronic cigarette out of her purse. She got a slow look.
‘So, Pru was saying that she thinks she can introduce us to a bunch of people from the network while we’re on tour . . .’
‘Pru’s coming on tour?’
‘No, sweetie,’ Pru said, ‘but I can line up the meetings. If you want. If you don’t want, that’s all good too.’
There was already speculation that the ‘Prose’ affair, as it had been dubbed on gossip blogs, was a stunt aimed to boost the sales of our next single. We’d always referenced Courtney Love as an influence, yet now she’d come out on Twitter calling Rose: ‘Not even a lipstick lesbian. A creepy Olsen conjoined twin’ and The Dolls: ‘Cherry Cola with too many suspicious bubbles.’
Pru joined me in a double whisky. I hoped she didn’t fancy me. She picked the lemon out of her salad, shook some salt on her fist and did the thing like a tequila shot. I looked at Rose as her girlfriend jammed the lemon in her wide mouth. I wasn’t sure if she was taking the piss or was a wide-eyed ingénue in the art of drinking. In between wiping her mouth she told us about the sort of people with whom we definitely needed to do lunch.
‘It must suck being a girl in a band,’ Pru wondered out loud. ‘You wouldn’t be able to sleep with any groupies. Well . . . you wouldn’t want to.’
‘No way,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s actually better. Guys in bands only get groupies, so they can’t even really choose. Girls get to sleep with their crew, their support bands, their own band . . . they’re surrounded by cock.’
‘Actually, Nina,’ said Rose, changing the subject abruptly, ‘Pru’s come up with a great song. You should hear it.’
A bus belched by and I craned to look at the sort of people who were riding it, to try to group them into some sort of workable stereotypes based on the movies I’d seen. I hadn’t dared take anything but a cab in LA yet because I hadn’t figured out what I was up against.
‘Nina,’ said Rose.
‘It’s nowhere near as legendary as your songs,’ Pru said.
‘Doll,’ said Rose to me, ‘how many times have I taken one for the team and stopped recording my parts so that you could take a run at our producer? I think you’ll find that “Cheap” actually has fewer harmonies on the last chorus than we’d initially agreed.’
‘Oh please, don’t go through all that again.’
‘I’m just saying.’ She turned to Pru. ‘Nina has lady-wood for our producer, even though he’s about a hundred and four. It requires major sacrifices on my part.’
‘Wow, how old is he actually?’ Pru asked with interest.
‘Like, forty-something, probably.’
‘That’s hot.’
I pulled out my phone. ‘That’s him, actually.’
‘Oh, cute. He looks like someone’s dad.’
‘He is someone’s dad.’
She laughed in appreciation, too loudly, and picked up a wine bottle. Her cheeks were flushed from the grog. ‘Have you tried this on him?’ she said, and slid the neck of the bottle into her mouth. I watched enthralled as she started to deep-throat it, right there at our table on the footpath.
‘Oh my god,’ said Rose, looking around.
Pru pulled out the bottle and said through a mouth thick with spit, ‘Trust me. It works. I know.’
I leaned back as a waiter pointedly started to clear the table. I felt that Pru and I were finally starting to bond. Rose must have been
a bit agitated, though, because she pulled out her phone and battered out a message like it was in Morse code. A-A-A-A-R-G-H probably. From long-held experience I knew it wasn’t a message she was actually going to send to anyone.
‘Hey, you know what?’ asked Pru, punching my shoulder, hard. ‘You’re not as bad as I thought.’
•
‘Her confidence was really hot at first,’ Rose told me when we got in. She moved through the suite, switching the lamps on. ‘I loved that she was such a go-getter, but now I feel like everything she does is actually just a play for attention.’
‘Oh?’ I was tempted to say brightly. ‘I like her.’ But instead I brushed my teeth. I never knew what to say to Rose when she confided in me about relationships. In this case I just let her keep talking.
‘Everything she does is angled at a reaction and she doesn’t seem to care what that reaction is, so long as she gets one,’ my cousin considered, waving the remote control. ‘You can be angry at her, mad at her, in love with her . . . it’s all the same. But if she doesn’t get some kind of stroking she’s like a drowning woman. It’s horrible to watch.’
‘I think you’ve mistaken confidence for desperation,’ I suggested after I’d spat out the toothpaste and walked into my bedroom.
Rose kicked off her heels and joined me in the bed. She’d put Sons of Anarchy on low. I was looking forward to getting stuck in, but she turned her face to me, to show me a tear.
‘She’s like a vortex of need,’ I offered.
‘She’s histrionic,’ Rose said. ‘I’m not sure how to get out of it now.’
‘You wrote yourself into it with “Girl Crush”; write yourself out of it. Or write a song about a guy with a massive cock; that ought to give her the message.’
‘It’s like, everything we write about becomes fact,’ she marvelled. ‘We think we’re writing about things that have already happened, but it’s the other way around. Look at “Chica Rock’n’Roll”—that’s totally about LA and you wrote it in Parramatta.’
‘I’ll write a song called “Two Well-Adjusted Young Men”,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll write “And Now We’re Patching Through to Richard Wilkins on the Red Carpet”. I’ll write “The Day I Passed My Driving Test”.’
Rose went back to her perusal of Pru’s Twitter account. Life dating girls seemed so much more complicated than dating men. My fail-safe line, even when uttered in boredom, was ‘Want to come back to mine and drink the mini-bar?’ That was literally all I needed.
Whenever I thought about John Villiers I felt like I’d been knifed in the heart. So, I didn’t think about him. I didn’t think about anything that was going to hurt that badly. But I couldn’t trust anyone else and nobody else got me the way he did. Men in America just didn’t know how to banter . . . and I always ran the risk of them bragging about raiding that mini-bar.
•
THE DOLLS’ US ITINERARY 2013
THE DOLLS’ TOUR PARTY
Rose Dall Vocals
Nina Dall Vocals/guitar
Ryan Bakker Guitar
Adam Poelker Bass
Daryl Wallace Drums
Mikey ‘Stringer’ Taser Guitar tech
Steve Perkins Drum tech
Jim Lehman Front of house
Shirley Weiss Lighting technician
Karen Bach (East Coast dates) Videographer
Brendan Williams Tour manager
Ken Chinowski Road manager
Danny Maus Promoter
Flight schedule p. 3
Accommodation p. 9
Promoter p. 16
Publicity p. 17
Other personnel p. 18
Area codes/time differences p. 19
Rider requirements p. 20
16
THE AMERICAN TOUR
I understood most of our road crew to be quite damaged souls. Not that we’d ever talk about it, but I recognised in these grotty underdogs something in me. And we’d drink to that, of course.
POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)
‘I give loyalty and I expect complete loyalty in return,’ Rose said into her phone, jangling her keys in her other hand. I could tell she was talking to Pru. If she were talking to Grayson, her voice would be higher. I gestured towards the sliding doors of the airport terminal and she waved me off in irritation.
She was starting to sound more and more like Pru. It started with the odd ‘I know, right?’ and now infiltrated every vowel. She’d even taken to calling Dee ‘Mom’.
Our publicist, Grace, was joining us for the first leg of the tour and had turned up laden with cupcakes, which we needed to bribe the staff at radio stations. Grace said we wouldn’t be going anywhere without cupcakes, and she power-wheeled a suitcase of them into the terminal to prove it. Unwilling to join her and make small talk, I hung around, scuffing my boots on the footpath, waiting for Rose.
‘I know you do. I know. But, doll, I’ve been tweeting about your new show ad nauseam. I’m trying to help you here.’
Sighing, I laced my hands behind my head and looked out at the horizon, raising myself up on tiptoe to stretch my calves. We should have been amping each other up about our first American tour, not worrying about the fact that Rose had thirty thousand more followers on Twitter than Pru did—something she had added to her mental pros/cons ledger. I could almost feel sorry for Pru. I’d got Rose to sign a beer-coaster affidavit that her girlfriend wouldn’t appear in our next video, though.
‘Okay, sweetie, well, we’ll have to talk about that another time, huh? I’ve got a plane to catch.’ She hung up her phone with a snap. ‘Ready?’
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
‘Why can’t we get roadies who only ever say, “Two, two, two’?’ wondered Rose.
There were ten of us on the double-decker bus, but a clique soon dominated the downstairs lounge: me, Rose, and our roadies Stringer and Perko, who had a complex vocabulary of in-jokes and words of the day.
Roadies always had names like that. Turbo, Scooter, Watts, Benzies—anything referencing engines, speed or electricity. People in production always screamed at each other as well: fucking this, fucking that. It was full on: from the production managers down to the runners, everyone screamed abuse at someone lower down.
‘Tell her you’ve got her back,’ Perko advised Stringer. ‘“I got your back.” Girls melt when you say that.’
Stringer was texting some girl who looked like she might have been interested in inviting him back to her place after our first show, but then didn’t. She might next time around, though, so he had to keep her sweet.
One might question the wisdom of putting a girl band on a tour bus with two dead-set spunks, but the suits at Elementary were so out of touch with life on the road that they probably hadn’t considered the ‘any port in a storm’ ethos.
Jenner had hoped we’d get to know our American backing band on the first leg of the tour, but instead we stuck with the stinky roadie boys, who had a knack for diffusing any tension between Rose and me by launching into a game of Would You Rather—plus, we didn’t want to say anything stupid in front of the band and have it repeated back to Good Charlotte. So, the band remained in the purgatory of the upstairs lounge, which got too hot during the day and made Rose nauseous.
Grace was still with us, having jammed up the bar fridge with her cupcakes so that we all had to drink warm beer. She spent most of her time at her laptop, sending emails. She was secretly sickened by having to suck up to journalists all the time, so she embedded subliminal messages in her emails. If you took the first letter of each sentence and wrote them down, you’d read a prim reprimand. In an email telling someone she could not promise them an exclusive she’d add: ‘YOUR REPUTATION PRECEDES YOU.’
It meant her emails tended to be long.
‘Why don’t you put some capital letters in the middle of sentences so you can get the message across quicker?’ Rose asked from the sofa, where she was curled up like a cat.
‘Because that would m
ake me look like a lunatic,’ Grace said crossly.
After the second show in Portland, the daiquiri machine Rose bought for the bus got a work-out . . . until we ended up with strawberry spattered across the kitchenette.
As Bill the driver trundled us on into the night, we took turns running up and down the galley without falling over. The last thing I remembered was laughing at Brendan pretending to urinate in the sink with the goon bag he’d stuffed down his pants.
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS
Hung-over. Watched an entire season of Shameless on my laptop with the bunk curtains drawn. We stopped for dinner at a service-station Burger King and sat with the support band who would play with us for the next couple of dates, Martha’s Cookies. Dev and Leah sang whimsical indie tunes over programmed drums. They were boyfriend and girlfriend, but more like creepy siblings.
Rose wasn’t about to be seen trying to eat a burger in front of the support act, so instead she interrogated them on the industry in America. Martha’s Cookies were signed to an indie offshoot of Elementary, which meant they hadn’t met the big cheeses we had.
‘But how do people see us over here?’ Rose persisted when she realised they could shed little light on the statistical trajectory of a supernova punk band. ‘You first heard of us through “Fight Like a Girl”, right?’
Leah was keen to help. ‘Yeah,’ she lit up. ‘That was, like, all over the radio, and your video was all over VTV; like, seriously all over it.’
She looked at Dev for confirmation. ‘They even had a show where girls had to challenge guys who wanted to hook up with them, like challenge them to netball or cheerleading or whatever, to see if they could keep up. That had the music to “Fight Like a Girl”.’
‘Weird.’
‘I know, right? You’ve been super-hot basically.’
‘Like Gotye hot?’ Rose asked quickly.
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