In Marie Claire, Pru referred to the fall-out after the New York hotel fire as an ‘intervention’, but in that case it was the worst intervention ever, because I had simply been Skyped by Clay and Diana in my fresh new hotel room with its clean towels and neatly made bed that always felt like a mother’s love. They’d asked very nicely if I’d go home to Parramatta to ‘rest’ and I’d agreed. Then we’d take on the next leg of the tour, a little later than scheduled, nice and refreshed. And I agreed. Also, what kind of intervention left the drinks cabinet unlocked?
About that fire. I maintain that things weren’t nearly as bad as were made out and it had nothing to do with candles. For one, I never did the whole atmospheric candles thing, so unless a cigarette butt managed to ignite an entire hotel room, which I sincerely doubt, there must have been faulty wiring. Anyway, the hotel was insured and nobody was hurt, and all my clothes survived to smell of bonfires, which I found comforting. It wasn’t exactly Lisa Left Eye from TLC setting fire to her boyfriend’s trainers and burning down his mansion. It wasn’t Edie Sedgwick immolating her room at the Chelsea Hotel as she put on her eyelashes by candlelight. As I told the Telegraph, I was more than likely spiked anyway, because when I popped down to the hotel bar that night I was stone-cold sober.
That month’s prize for worst headline? ‘Herstory repeating itself’, in which comparisons were drawn between my modest Brooklyn blaze and that of Aunty Alannah, who completely gutted a Sydney studio back in 1989.
People really crawled out of the woodwork at times like these. My old buddy Hank, midway through his ‘Live the Dream or Die’ tour, responded to Diana Etie’s official statement about an electrical incident with the musing: ‘No, seriously though, it’s absolutely fair enough. It could happen to anybody. I’ve passed out with “electrical incidents” lit plenty of times.’
I replayed the quip on YouTube over and over, the audience laughter crashing down like a wave each time the clip abruptly started.
That was cool; we all had our embarrassments. Hank, for example, never went under his real name of Niall Mulroney, because he wouldn’t want people to know he was heir to the Mulroney Fish Finger dynasty back in County Cork. Which was just strange, because imagine the repertoire of material he could build around ‘fish finger’.
TOP 5 OFFICIAL CAUSES OF CELEBRITY INCIDENTS
1. Food poisoning
2. Stomach virus
3. Exhaustion
4. Jetlag
5. Reaction to medication
And so I was released into the care of my mother, back where it all began. Parramatta. Where, in some strange time loop, the only thing to do to kill time was conduct photo shoots in the bathroom and smoke out of the window. This time around I practised my celebrity mug shot: head down, eyes up. Troubled.
Mealtimes at Helen’s were always courtesy of Uncle Toby and Uncle Ben, so the kitchen was only good for one thing. Keeping an ear out, I wandered in and dragged a stool over to the cupboards. I peered into the top one and saw old-lady drinks like Stone’s Ginger Wine, so I made myself a whisky mac by adding Scotch from my own supply. It tasted like Christmas . . . and it nearly was Christmas. I would be stationed here for the entire period, convalescing. This meant I would need to keep coming back to this cupboard for both festive and medicinal purposes.
Alannah had flown down from the Gold Coast to settle in the spare room during my stay—part ally, part oracle—and intermittently I heard her talking to Helen over the TV in the next room.
‘Everyone’s mentally ill at that age,’ I heard my aunt say in a pacifying voice. ‘You grow out of it, usually.’
‘She’s only doing it for attention,’ Helen said as the audience cheers died down again. ‘And yet she’s rejecting me. She’s rejecting everything about me. I didn’t raise a child with an American accent.’
‘Don’t take it too personally,’ Alannah murmured. ‘I had an English accent for a good five years.’
Knocking back my golden gingery elixir, I joined them in the lounge room.
I wore: Monkees T-shirt, daggy jeans, odd socks, both of which I’ve had since I was about twelve. They looked up guiltily.
‘Hello, darling,’ Helen said, sitting back in her battered old armchair. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Fine.’
They were watching The X Factor, and before too long all three of us were reluctantly compelled by the high-stakes drama the hopefuls went through. It was like gladiators, but the winner had to kill off the other #dreamchasers for a record deal. Alannah and I were secretly hooked on the Country Music Channel. Neither of us would be seen dead watching it in public, but really, who couldn’t love lyrics like ‘that pig-nosed little possum that’ll keep you up all night’? Nobody did a euphemism like a country artist. Rose would probably even like it—it looked like they had far bigger hair budgets for their videos than we did; even the Australian artists, who all came from Tamworth. I looked up Tamworth on Google Maps and saw that it was just left of nowhere, between Sydney and the Gold Coast.
‘Your aunt was just telling me about her salad days on top of the UK charts,’ said Helen. ‘You should listen to some of her tales. Some of the outfits even you and Rose would baulk at. I can’t imagine how much they must have cost.’
When Alannah and Helen were both running full tilt it was like stags clashing antlers. For the most part, though, Alannah was determined not to let Helen needle her. I watched her deflection tactics with some fascination.
‘If I had any royalties they’d go on clothes, Helen,’ she confirmed in answer to the latest dig. ‘As I don’t, I need to cram myself into the salad day outfits and top it up with some couture from Target.’
‘You’re a compulsive eater, Alannah, you always were,’ said Helen, in a pretence at fondness.
‘Helen,’ I warned.
‘And you’re too thin, you,’ said Helen. ‘Look at you.’
‘No, I’m always like this,’ I said in a perfectly normal voice.
‘I’m eating paleo, more protein, and I just find my metabolism has sped up with all the stress.’
‘One answer would have sufficed,’ she said.
She gave a non-specific sigh, left the room and came back with a box of wrapping paper. ‘I thought we could get in early and wrap our Christmas presents,’ she said.
‘I haven’t got any,’ I said dumbly, as she peered at the old lump of a stereo and then wheezed a CD in. ‘We’re getting a bit of rum pum pum pum, are we? A bit of Christmas cheer.’
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘You can help me wrap mine.’
Sitting cross-legged with my old socks slouching off the end of my feet, I accepted a roll of paper and a book. The Magic by Rhonda Byrne. That would be for Rose.
My phone was in my pocket, so I dug it out and selected the camera, moving it around my head to get a dinky shot of Nina Dall amid cute Christmas paper. Expression: perplexed.
‘Let’s have a look,’ said Helen, reaching for her glasses. I handed her the camera and she peered at it, then held it in front of her and pouted. I heard the shutter click.
‘Oh, hang on. Why does my face look like that?’
Alannah leaned over on the creaky sofa and examined the screen.
‘Is there an age limit for selfies?’ frowned Helen. ‘I look like I’m either laying an egg or hatching a plot.’
‘You’re not supposed to hold the phone dead-on or you’ll get arms like a linebacker’s,’ I told her.
‘Like what?’
‘It’s American. Just give it here.’ I put Rose’s book down. ‘You have to jut your arm out above you and frame yourself in the bottom corner so that you can crop your shoulder out afterwards.’
I walked Helen through the paces of elementary selfie-taking. You’d never find a photo of me—professionally taken or otherwise—with my face at anything but forty-five degrees, left side on to the camera. That’s because this angle makes my cheekbone more pronounced and emphasises the arch of the eyebrow. It also necess
itates a sideways glance that has been described as ‘come hither’.
Alannah was up on her feet, flushed with magnanimity. ‘Lighting from the side,’ she exclaimed, ‘that’s the secret. It gives you great shadows. In the eighties we’d always slim our bodies by bringing in our arms. You’d lift a hand up to suck a lollypop, perhaps.’ She demonstrated with her finger. ‘Like so.’
‘Remember when you dragged me along to a shoot with Mental As Anything?’ Helen enquired. ‘In Darlinghurst. You were still drunk from the night before. You said some shocking things; I was so embarrassed. And it was my job to apologise to everyone.’
‘In vino veritas, darling,’ Alannah shrugged good-naturedly. ‘Whatever it was, I’m sure it was the truth.’
Helen studied the picture I’d taken of her and put through the filter-wringer. ‘It’s weird,’ she complained. ‘That doesn’t even look real.’
‘It’s hyper-real,’ I tell her. ‘It’s ironic. It’s the Auto-Tune of photography.’
‘Well, you never used to need filters and you always looked fine.’
I fiddled with my old op-shop earring: a Turkish evil eye on a hoop. The other earring had been lost years ago.
‘Do you remember when you were a little girl and you kept insisting on posing with Father Christmas? We had to do six takes and the line was getting longer and longer.’
‘No.’
‘Yes you do. You were about six, such a beautiful little thing. Never any trouble.’
‘Not like now.’
‘Well . . .’ she indicated the room, as though it would back her up. The mood had changed and Alannah sat back down, but I stayed silent so that Helen would eventually blurt something out.
‘If you’re trying to make a point with all this behaviour, Nina,’ she said at last, her voice pitched in defensiveness, ‘at least know what it is.’
My resentment was a hornet’s nest, but there was only the sound of wrapping and a man on TV yelling about a warehouse sale.
I went to my room and called Rose for a moan. She was back home in Sydney too, drumming her fingers with impatience. We both worried that we were losing ground while I was holed up here, but Jenner said I must be seen to be resting in the bosom of my family. I was starting to get paranoid that he just wanted me out of the way.
‘Here, I’ve just emailed you a link,’ Rose said. ‘Look at the Facebook page. Yanni could be our new bassist.’
Our old bassist, Adam, had walked. He reckoned he had a former engagement with another band, but if I was a betting girl I’d wager it was because Rose screamed in his face. Rose believed in pecking order, yet I was the one mistaken for arrogant.
‘I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line-up,’ I noted dismissively. ‘Can’t we find anyone cooler looking?’
‘Nobody’s really going to see them anyway,’ she pointed out.
‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘Anyway,” she said. ‘We’ve got months to waste before then. I’m going to have to be getting on with other things, I suppose.’
We floated a silence back and forth. I’d be damned if I’d ask her what she meant by that. My black heart withered some more at the idea of her having private meetings with Mickiewicz.
‘So I guess I’d better get going,’ she said.
Rose’s voice was distant, which meant she had me on speaker, which meant she was IM-ing Grayson at the same time.
‘How’s it all going with Grayson?’ I asked, trying to end on a nice note.
‘Good,’ she brightened. ‘He can’t come over right now because he’s filming, but he’s going to join me for Christmas.’
‘Oh . . . good.’
‘So. I gotta go, okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.’
She hung up and I threw the phone at the wall. I wanted to break free of Rose as much as she wanted to break free of me, but every time disaster struck I was flooded with need and couldn’t even think of letting her go. Maybe when I got through this convalescence, I told myself, I’d be strong enough.
•
Since I was supposed to be lying low as some kind of public penance, Rose was sent to the ARIAs without me. I watched it on telly with Helen and Alannah, who were good enough to ignore the tears washing down my cheeks. It was only because of the whisky macs I’d drunk behind my bedroom door, as though the smell of Scotch didn’t trail after me into the lounge room like a kid sister.
My aunt had given up on looking like Alannah Dall now that she had been here a few weeks. She curled up on the couch in her dressing-gown and pyjamas, her eyes crouching naked behind her glasses. Completely batty.
‘Parramatta is a great leveller,’ Helen had remarked sagely a few days earlier, when just she and I were in the house.
The ceremony and back-slapping dragged on. When the camera panned to Rose’s table for the nominations for best album, I saw her sitting bolt upright alongside Jenner, Carmel and Mickiewicz, and Mickiewicz’s wife, Dora. Jenner was right about critical opinion bearing no mark on album sales. Our album had gone gold, our single multi-platinum, and tonight we would clean up, without me. At twenty, I was practically past it now anyway.
Helen tittered as Rose walked up to collect the award over a blast of ‘Fight Like a Girl’. I was impressed by how poised she looked.
Rose wore: Marimekko silk print dress; Scanlan & Theodore white toeless over-knee boots.
‘A few years ago, my cousin and I came to this show as guests,’ she beamed, transmitting smiles like satellite signals.
‘You’d never know she was bisexual, to look at her,’ Helen marvelled, frowning in contemplation. ‘It just seems to boil down to your sambuca count and who’s watching, these days.’
Alannah rolled her eyes at me, munching a mouthful of nuts. She had a bit of cashew on her bottom lip, moving up and down.
Rose was saying, ‘So we’re completely honoured to be invited here tonight and . . .’ She broke off to look at the bauble. ‘I can’t tell you how much it means to us. We feel so humbled that our fans have spoken and that you guys have recognised just how hard we’ve worked. On behalf of me, our team and my beautiful cousin Nina, who I know was dying to be here tonight, thank you so much.’
Applause, applause.
‘Very gracious,’ said Helen.
After the ARIAs Helen fell asleep with her chin on her chest and Alannah and I watched the news. I googled my name on my phone, to see the most popular searches.
Nina Dall twitter
Nina Dall boyfriend
Nina Dall drugs Nina Dall Hank Black
Nina Dall hair
Nina Dall hotel
I typed in John Villiers and got:
John Villiers Weeping Brides
John Villiers Alannah Dall
John Villiers Nixon
John Villiers producer
John Villiers Danger Michaels
I knew that if I clicked on any of those I’d read some crazy story from back in the day, of John Villiers recording in the hull of a ship off the shore of Tasmania or getting banged up in Tangier for a week. We should have been getting up to stuff like that with him, instead of turning up to the studio forty-five minutes late because of Rose’s hair. I toyed with the idea of adding our ARIAs pash to his Wikipedia page.
The main story on the news was about Jimmy Savile, the kids’ TV host in England who’d abused children for decades. He looked about as creepy a child-catcher as you can get; I couldn’t get how people didn’t realise.
‘Incredible,’ Alannah said, shaking her head. ‘They were all like that in the music industry, though.’
‘How did people not know?’
‘Oh, everybody knew.’
‘If everybody knew, why didn’t somebody do anything?’
She was at a loss, scrabbling helplessly in the peanut bowl. ‘It was a more permissive time,’ she said eventually. ‘People are starting to talk about it now, but back then nobody did. Or about domestic violence. I’m afraid sometimes the older generation simply thought, “W
ell, I had to put up with it . . .” And so it’s perpetuated.’
When the financial report came on I turned my attention back to my phone, catching up on Rose’s tweets of the past twenty-four hours. She’d posted a bodysurfing selfie taken on Coogee Beach. It must have taken her ages to get a good angle down her stomach and legs. I pictured her skin turning pink in the sun and the waves sparkling for nothing as she scrolled the wheel on the camera through two-hundred torso shots.
I held out my phone. ‘Thinks she’s Rihanna!’ I observed to Alannah, who was on her way out to put the kettle on. I searched back a whole week, finding pictures she’d taken in Melbourne with radio-station hosts and various boys in bands. Seemed like someone was on a one-woman promo tour while I rotted in the ’Matta.
The news credits rolled and I padded out to the kitchen in my socks to fetch more peanuts. Alannah was shrouded in a plume of cigarette smoke, weeping into a near-empty wine glass while talking to the macraméd cat on the kitchen wall.
When she heard me and turned around to laugh it off, I could tell by her eyes she had refilled her glass a few times. She batted away the smoke and threw the butt out of the window.
‘He’s looking good,’ she sniffed, smiling. ‘I haven’t seen him for so many years, it’s all a bit of a shock. I was hoping he’d be a fat old bastard by now.’
‘Who?’ I said, unsure.
‘Your boss,’ she tittered. ‘The one who signed you at my request.’
‘Did you and he . . .?’ I asked with furrowed brow. ‘But I thought you were with Alain?’
Alain had been Alannah’s boyfriend and manager throughout a decade of insanity. In Pour Me Another, she described him as her inspiration and credited him with keeping her on the straight and narrow, always painstakingly organised enough for a potential zombie apocalypse. But she never did explain why he left.
‘Alain was a darling,’ she said, switching into maudlin mode. ‘Without him I was completely lost. Literally lost. I couldn’t even find my way back to my hotel room without him.’
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