‘Mmm . . . yeah,’ Leah said, looking at Dev.
‘Gotye’s, like, off the scale,’ Dev clarified. ‘People just really want to check you guys out, that’s why we’re so excited to be here.’
I picked cheese off my wrapper. ‘So, do people actually like us, though?’ I said, eyeballing Leah.
She looked at me, slightly panicked. ‘Sure. I think so.’
‘People are very curious,’ cautioned Dev. ‘They want to know if you’ll deliver live and why Elementary have signed you without you having played the States yet.’
I pretended to consider this. ‘Hm,’ I said. ‘I suppose having toured Australia with bands like The Dummies and Bitumen isn’t proof enough, not to mention going to number nine in the ARIA album charts.’
Martha’s Cookies chewed timidly.
‘They’re, like, the big charts in Australia,’ I clarified. ‘Exactly like your Billboard charts.’
Our American road manager, Ken, was eavesdropping from the next table. ‘Girls, relax,’ he said. ‘Ticket sales have been beyond our expectations. Everybody thinks you rock.’
‘Anyway,’ said Rose, folding her napkin and smoothing it flat. ‘We’d better hit the road. You guys should drop into our bus some time and say hi.’
They were all right, Martha’s Cookies—Rose and I agreed on that when we boarded our bus with the remnants of our fries. It made me feel bad later when we had to get Jenner to insist to Elementary that we have a decent support act next time.
‘Like, derrrr,’ Rose said in a Californian accent, pulling her bed socks on under her pyjama bottoms. ‘Like, we’re so excited to be here.’
SEVENTY-TWO HOURS
Within three days of being on tour, Rose had penned a ballad about being away from home too long that she made me work out on an acoustic.
I changed her opening line from:
This hotel is nothing
Nothing like being home with you
to:
Chocolate on my pillow
Ain’t nothing like candy from you
I had to do this with Rose’s songs all the time—behind-the-scenes tweaking that no one would ever know about. That was why she was considered the style icon and I was not—in people’s minds, one Doll needed to balance the other. Yin and yang.
On the sly, I’d been working on some songs that I just couldn’t see fitting in the Dolls catalogue. I was fed up of relay singing, passing the baton to Rose on some of the best lines I’d written.
Lately I’d been getting into tragic, blowzy barflies. I’d been listening to the country-tinged meltdowns of Neko Case and Lucinda Williams, or bluesy stuff like Cat Power: reverberating like a freshly twanged nerve. Lust albums. Break-up albums. Prescription-med albums. They released so many albums they could devote a whole battalion of songs to one mood, instead of trying to tick every box, the way we did with It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns. That was where we went wrong.
More and more frequently I’d been considering ditching the teen image of The Dolls and breaking out on my own, signing a solo deal with Mickiewicz and taking on John Villiers as musical director. I was sure Rose’s entourage of Pru and Clay were goading her to do the same, because lately she’d been veering from Stevie Nicks into Adele and Amy Winehouse, piling up her hair and singing like she was about to sneeze dramatically. Someone was in her ear, I knew it.
By night we played venues a size down from those we’d been accustomed to in Australia, but we were still trying to put on an arena-style show. The lighting rig was cool: we had a few lasers to confuse everybody during the chorus of ‘Fa-fa-fa-fight like a girl’. Even so, Rose had thrown a wobbly with Shirley, our lampy, telling her the band shouldn’t have any spotlights on them at any point.
‘That’s true, hey,’ Stringer piped up from the sofa, where he was checking his balls through his shorts. ‘You should start fining them for mistakes like Prince does.’
‘Rose has always done that,’ I interjected.
‘They’re going to make heaps of mistakes in the dark, though,’ Perko pointed out.
‘Hey, I’m going to tell your guitarist to get an Ego-Rizer,’ said Stringer.
‘What’s an Ego-Rizer?’ I asked, instinctively feeling protective of Ryan. I liked our guitarist, who’d taken time out from his own alt-country band to earn some real money with us. He was one of those sensitive musicians who’d have wound up being sectioned if he couldn’t play like an idiot savant. Although, if he had to continue hiring himself out to Elementary bands to make a living, that could yet happen.
‘It’s a box you stand on at the front of the stage, as if you’re standing on the fold-back wedge. Makes you taller.’
‘Knob box more like,’ Rose said.
‘He needs to do the lead guitarist around you more, though,’ said Perko. ‘He’s becoming emasculated around you, hey?’ He hit a high note and bent an imaginary string.
I don’t want to give the impression that Perko and Stringer just lounged on the sofa all the time and made wisecracks. Once it was time to load or unload, these mules of the road were so focused that you could undress in front of them and they wouldn’t notice.
NINETY-SIX HOURS
Before the show, I wandered over to Rose’s bunk and stuck my head through the purple curtains. She was sitting cross-legged in front of a mirror, tapping a pattern into her cheeks and collarbones.
‘Even though I feel I do not deserve this success, I deeply and completely accept myself,’ she murmured.
‘Did Pru teach you that?’
‘Shh. Or I’ll draw the curtains.’
I waited for Rose to finish so that we could have our favourite conversation about how we’d customise our tour bus, Dolly Parton-style, once we had tons of money. Earlier I’d heard Rose talking to Pru. Her voice was flat. ‘I’d better let you go,’ she said, after about twenty minutes of noncommittal noises. Whenever someone said, ‘I’d better let you go,’ they meant, ‘Let me go.’
We may have been sisters in whisky once, but I’d already lost sympathy for Pru, mainly through reading interviews in which she said things like: ‘I’m teaching my girlfriend not to say “like” all the time.’ And: ‘Her cousin’s just incredibly, incredibly talented. I think Rose feels closer to her now than they’ve ever been.’ And: ‘Nina’s a really great girl when you get to know her.’
I thought Rose should get together with Stringer. Both Stringer and Perko had the cute, dishevelled thing going on and would disappear into the ether after the tour with their pay in their back pockets. She never would, though; she was too much of a snob.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY HOURS
Trying to record on a bus is a bad idea, as previously reported by every band ever.
Whenever she had the headphones on, Rose protested, ‘Oh don’t, John Villiers, don’t!’ as though he were saying stuff into her ears, which, insanely, made me jealous. Everyone laughed, which implied she’d told them things about our non-relationship, in which I no longer had the upper hand.
Rose was just taking cheap swipes at me because we couldn’t agree over the merchandise. We’d persuaded Mickiewicz to let us come up with the cursory designs, but what had started out as a team effort had descended into psychological warfare. I wanted our logo in stripper lights; she wanted Alannah Hill-style flowers—roses, obviously.
Later, Rose screamed at Bill for driving through a town with his foot on the brake when she was trying not to vomit. Ryan was recording my vocals at the time and Perko played back the seven-second recording of her spitting the dummy, again and again. In the end she had to laugh, because you can’t get away with a strop on a tour bus—there’s nowhere to go. Every time Perko leaned over him, Ryan blinked and smiled, but it was a pained smile.
After the show Brendan argued with the promoter for an hour and we all had to wait on the bus for him. The promoter wanted to slap us with a fine for all the spit I’d left on stage. It wasn’t for effect; it was to clear the phlegm. Tour buses were like ger
m incubators.
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR HOURS
TOP 5 WAYS I HAVE WHILED AWAY BUS JOURNEYS
1. Clenching my butt cheeks in reps of fifty.
2. Exercising my pelvic floor.
3. Thinking about John Villiers over the throb of the engine (see point two).
4. Tweeting pictures of Rose asleep.
5. Gaffer-taping Perko’s stuff to the ceiling of the bus.
TOP 5 WAYS ROSE HAS WHILED AWAY BUS JOURNEYS
1. Meditating.
2. Micro-managing our videographer.
3. Shelling pistachio nuts and complaining about the damage to her Shellac manicure.
4. Impersonating Rihanna.
5. IM-ing Grayson.
ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-EIGHT HOURS
I was rarely the indiscreet one on Twitter. This time, though, I put my foot in it because I was bored, because my life had boiled down to ‘hurry up and wait’ and because my phone was infinitely more intriguing than anything going on outside the bus window.
Grayson, Rose’s vampire-actor love interest, had flown out to see us in Chicago, and the Instagram photo I posted of him and Rose cuddled up on the dressing-room sofa set tongues wagging. Because yes, our publicist was denying that romance, but yes, it was totally true.
Now Pru was tweeting things like: I guess people aren’t as courageous as they like to think. #Outandproud
And: Devastated right now. Oh well.
And Rose was tweeting things like: Wow. Not used to my personal life being public. I guess sometimes in life you have to take the higher ground. Smile.
Now the gossip blogs were circulating a photo of Pru taken months before, in which she wore no make-up and frowned at her phone. Poor Pru, was the crux of the captions. She had to find out from us. But I was there when that picture was taken. She was cursing at her phone because she’d just knocked her first soy chai of the day over it and couldn’t get the SIM card out.
Grayson tried to do the right thing by distancing himself from Rose, to allow her and Pru a respectable time to be split up, and to make sure that she didn’t get hate tweets from the children-of-the-night . . . but he failed to understand that Rose didn’t want to be protected. She wanted validation, a new person to hitch her identity to. Welcome to my life, Grayson.
ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO HOURS
Stringer boarded the bus overly excited after a bathroom stop, having picked up Travel Connect 4 from the servo. We played it till we couldn’t stand it anymore, then we used it as a sock dryer.
Our support band for the next few dates, Placebo Effect, griped for an hour in the Japanese restaurant about whether or not their guitarist played the right lead break in a terrible song called ‘Quench’ the night before.
‘Dude,’ one of them said, slamming down his sake so that it spilled over the paper tablecloth. ‘You played doof . . . dff.dff . . . dowdowdow . . . dow. You should have played dow-dow-dowwww-dub-da-da-da-dow.’
Our word of the day was now quench. As in: ‘Get your quench out of my face, man’ and, ‘Gross, there’s quench all over my microphone.’
TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN HOURS
When you’re on tour, yesterday seems like a lifetime ago, so trying to think back to a specific city feels like you have total amnesia. On Facebook we had hangers-on acting like they were in The Dolls’ inner sanctum when they’d actually just met us a few nights before at a meet-and-greet. Some would trade in-jokes from the evening, or refer misty-eyed to the half-hour in question as though talking about time they’d spent serving in the trenches.
The internet was a world of misery. We’d been emailed mp3s by Clay, who was hitting up co-songwriters for demos for our sophomore album, as if they hadn’t ruined the last one enough. I opened the files gingerly, as though they might detonate. It was always a guitar tone as characterless as the scenery around us, workmanlike drumming to a click track and some session singer doing the lead line.
‘Don’t freak out . . .’ Clay always started his emails. ‘We can change whatever you want.’ But we were starting to suspect that this was an insincere promise.
Sadie messaged me to say that John Villiers was single again and had been seen around town looking lonely. Or maybe he’d just spilled his soy chai. But I was stuck over here, with life, once again, carrying on without me in another hemisphere.
TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY HOURS
Rose bleached my hair and managed to get every bit by making me crouch under the light outside the toilet. Perko gave us both manicures.
TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FOUR HOURS
Cabin fever. The bus had become our tomb, and no amount of airing could erase the biting aroma of foot cheese or blow away the strange hairs that clung to the sink. Toothpaste, it was everywhere.
Demoing tracks with Rose into GarageBand on my laptop only made us want to kill each other more. I’d be making some valid point and she’d come back with: ‘It is what it is.’ It was meant to be spiritual, but it basically meant, ‘I have no idea, don’t question me.’
I got sick of Rose constantly pulling her bitch-face whenever I spoke, so I hit the reverse-camera icon and held up my new iPad. ‘See that?’ I said. ‘That’s what your face looks like right now.’
We were physically close, yet so distant. I could tell that Rose was lonely, because she’d been scrolling through banks of old Facebook photographs of herself and posting them on Twitter, tagging herself as though she were her own imaginary friend. I was drinking rider dregs in my bunk most days, festering in my own juices.
TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-EIGHT HOURS
Our old Bain Maries drummer could barely fit behind her kit any more. That was the most positive spin I could come up with when I read Erica Riley’s tell-all story in All About You. She was pictured sitting on the floor with her kick drum, mouth downturned. Her bra strap hung down, Bain Maries-style.
The allegations:
1) We cut her out of the band just as we found success.
2) She co-wrote half the songs on the album.
3) We stole the boxing idea for ‘Fight Like a Girl’ from a dance she choreographed to Britney’s ‘. . . Baby One More Time’ in Year Three.
In a second picture she held up the words to ‘Fight Like a Girl’, which she had written out on a notepad as evidence. We tried to guess what Erica was doing now. The article said she was still chasing her dream, but her expression suggested the job at Hooters hadn’t worked out, just as I predicted.
Stringer and Perko got some good mileage out of Erica’s revelation that I used to get about calling myself Leather Dall while Rose was Baby Dall, but that phase had only lasted about a week.
Inspired by Erica’s betrayal, Rose wrote a new song, ‘Snakes and Ladders’, about social climbers and those snakes in the grass plotting your downfall. We held up a copy of the local newspaper and took a photo of the lyrics next to the date on the paper. Rose tweeted it.
Whenever Rose wrote a song, I felt obliged to write a better song. It was this healthy sense of competition that had got us where we were. Intrigued by all the flapping about Rose on Twitter from Grayson’s vampire rookies, I lay down in my bunk with a bottle of Scotch from the rider and a hotel notepad. I worked my tongue in and out of the bottle lid as I wrote what we now know as ‘Hounded’. I flipped between a clean page and the page containing my notes of satisfying pronunciations. For example, ‘take’ sounds good sung, but ‘take it all’ is even better as it facilitates a yodel. ‘Part of me’ allows you to drop consonants for an urchin-like Martina Topley-Bird effect.
I started off just making noises that sounded good over the tune in my head: ‘Nyeh, nyeh fool, yeah, part of me, rarr,’ but by the time I passed out it had become: ‘See me, feel me, you want a part of me / You slide your way in and refuse to leave.’
THREE HUNDRED AND TWELVE HOURS
The word of the day was ‘smashing’. As in, ‘Smashing, guvnor.’ ‘That’s fucking smashing, that is.’
In Pittsburgh, I shaved of
f my hair down one side with Perko’s clippers, and wore it long and dangly down the other side. When I gave the clippers back I pashed Perko in the alcove behind the fridge and then we went and sat down in the lounge like normal.
THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX HOURS
The noise on Twitter had become a deafening roar, but we couldn’t stop looking. Rose kept insisting she was having a nervous breakdown. She was convinced some crazed Grayson fan was going to jump on the bus and pull her hair or something.
My heartburn from drinking spirits had grown so intense my kidneys constantly grizzled and my bunk was drenched in sweat at night. Despite this, I didn’t mind too much. I saw myself as a science experiment, so I was always testing myself with new stimuli. I couldn’t stomach beer, so I alternated whisky with milk.
As dusk fell, I looked out of the window at the bland fields beyond the freeway. We were four hours from New York, where we’d break for a few nights, and eighteen hours from major meltdown. Often, as I went through life, I felt a strange sense of gravitas, the feeling that the images imprinting on my retinas right now would turn out to have great significance later.
But weirdly, there was none of that.
17
INTERVENTION
I felt that people ought to make allowances for me because I was special. And for as long as I was wearing those wretched thigh-high boots, people seemed to agree. But they were just enabling my behaviour—and I was becoming a monster.
POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)
You should always wear a fine chain around your neck so that people’s eyes are drawn to your collarbones and they start to imagine you naked. You need to have a nice neck, though, or it defeats the purpose.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror in Parramatta, looking up through my lashes with my lips parted, making the light catch on my cheekbones. Then with my head tilted up, down through my lashes. No matter where in the world my fortune took me, somehow I always wound up back here.
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