My dress fluttered around my thighs as I perused the ute photos through my heart-shaped sunnies. Ever since my plane descended over a patchwork of brown fields and touched down at the two-shed, one-horse airport I’d been determined to buy a ute. In music videos girls looked super-hot driving around wearing jeans and singlets with an arm hanging out of a ute window. And I’d fit my belongings—my suitcase and my guitar—in the back.
By the time I’d arrived at the country-music capital of Australia, all the glittering lights from the eleven-day festival had long been switched off and the tickertape swept away. What was left was a big country town, split by a river. The town had shops—such as Target, but it was, like, Target Country. The pubs were four times the size of those in Sydney, and the town was ringed with golden trees.
My two-year hair plan was to grow out this crop into Marilyn-style waves for the album release, then into a graduated bob for my big ‘I’m going solo’ reveal, and from there, long and messy. While I was here in Tamworth I’d have wheat-coloured hair and dark blue eyes, and I’d wear jeans and singlets, or simple 1940s cotton dresses like Lucinda Williams on the cover of Happy Woman Blues. I would keep myself to myself and avoid the local men, in case I wound up being hounded out, femme fatale–style. The chatter had probably started up about this strange city girl already.
The scent of jacaranda trees wafted around and I felt calm and pleasantly rooted to the ground with the sun on my back. Being on my own to explore new terrain charged me with energy. I could rip Rose from me like a conjoined twin so that we stopped draining each other’s life force.
Rose had gone to Byron Bay to find herself, texting me to say she would be staying in a yoga commune in the hinterland. In Tamworth, I decided to slum it in a chintzy hotel chain, with a blue plastic shower in one corner of the main room and a persistant smell of bleach. The aircon rattled like a 747 and the boxy TV was right up near the ceiling, so I had to squint to see any of the three channels. Still, I preferred the novelty of this to the uniform hotel rooms we saw on tour.
Being freed from possessions was incredibly liberating. I started my days at eleven with a pie from the bakery on the corner, and then hopped from shop to shop to stay in the aircon. I bought things I wouldn’t wear in real life in a million years—like dreamcatcher earrings—and they looked exactly right. I found seven pairs of cowboy boots, some tooled leather belts, a couple of silk scarves and a jillaroo hat.
At night I’d start dressing slowly over a bottle of wine at around seven, slotting in those earrings and dancing back and forth between the mirror and the goon box, until it suddenly it was ten. The nearest gigs were at The Stockyards and the Top End; I watched from a stool at the bar, cradling my wine glass and letting a shoe fall to the floor as someone sang about angels and endless summers. I felt like a femme fatale from a dime-store novel in my tight cotton dresses that slipped off my shoulders. For the first week, John Villiers haunted me like a malevolent spirit. I saw him leaning on bus stops, sitting at bars and driving past in utes. I imagined him younger, atrophied by cocaine use, as desperate a man as I had always wanted him to be. I hated him for using us to repay our aunt. Eventually I emailed him, under the guise of asking him to recommend a local studio.
I took his advice a day later—all one sentence of it. Rewind Studios was in West Tamworth, behind the League Club. I phoned ahead and met with the engineer, Andy Scott. It was a sleek, modern joint, more sterile than Glasshouse. I paid for a week’s worth of studio time in which I could bring in the material I’d written since filing the Dolls’ album to Jenner. It was barely cohesive at this stage, but I was determined to bleed this town for every experience it had.
Over my morning coffee in the bakery I found a short-lease apartment in the paper, and I took a cab over to see it. The bathroom smelled of mould, but I had discovered that there was a romance to be found in such things when you were just passing through. A doona and two pillows from Target Country, flower fairy lights from the Sunday market on Peel Street, a kettle, and it was furnished.
•
One evening at the studio I was snapping down the locks of my guitar case when I heard a voice that sounded like the rumble of distant thunder. It was singing a song about ‘last orders at Little Rock’—a ‘godforsaken town, too cruel for someone fresh outta school’—which was quite good, and then a dumb song about ‘Marie from Moree’.
I loitered outside the door of the studio, pretending to check my phone with one hand and holding my guitar case with the other.
‘Are we done? Bewdy,’ the same voice said, and then Kane Sherman came bowling out of the door at me, dressed in a knackered pair of jeans and a black shirt.
It took me a second to place him: the old dog from Woop Woop. The host of Outback with Kane Sherman on Sunday nights, which seemed to be on TV out here seven nights a week. I half-turned to elbow Rose in the ribs, but she wasn’t there. If she had been, she would have looked at me, like, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ and I would have looked at her, like, ‘Shut up.’
Kane stopped dead for a second and looked at me, then continued his way down the corridor. At the end, he paused to take a drink from the water cooler.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ I said as I approached. I set down my guitar case in front of him. ‘I’m in The Dolls. We played at the same Woop Woop a few years ago. I was watching you on the big screen because your eyes were pulling me in.’
I saw his pupils contract in comprehension. ‘Ah,’ he said, scratching his chin. ‘Were you the young ladies who got chastened with bottles of urine?’
‘With bottles of bogan urine, yes.’
‘Didn’t you used to have hair?’
‘I still have hair. It’s a gamine crop.’
‘Oh, I see. It’s very nice,’ he said, leaning over to ruffle it. ‘Kinda . . . fluffy.’
He wanted to touch me—so obvious. Then I realised I’d been rubbing my collarbones and I stopped abruptly.
‘So, what are you doing here?’ he said, picking up the thread. I scanned his worn old jeans, battered leather belt, the blurred eagle tattoo on his forearm.
‘I live here,’ I said, wanting to stake some claim on Tamworth. ‘I’ve moved here while we wait for our producer to stop faffing around.’
Kane’s eyes burrowed into me. ‘You’ve decided to slum it with the locals,’ he chided. ‘Well, we’re honoured. I hope people are making you feel welcome while you kick your heels. Did you come with your boyfriend?’
Corny.
‘Nup. Just me,’ I said, twiddling an earring. ‘I’ve been sorting out some demos here and then amusing myself most evenings.’
We had a lewd conversation with our eyes.
‘Well,’ he said, with a mock swagger. ‘May I come in and hear you sing tomorrow? I promise I won’t be a distraction.’
‘I’ll be here.’
‘Well, then, I’ll be here too.’
I walked on by, trying not to bash my guitar case against the corridor wall. Really, though, I felt like high-fiving myself. Tamworth had just got properly interesting.
•
Was ‘She Cries’ about me? I can neither confirm nor deny, but the next time Kane and I met, the following day, I was weeping in my most delicate cotton dress. It wasn’t some gross ploy to ensnare him; it was because our publicist Carmel had just emailed Rose and me a scan of a page from the street press. The shot they used to announce we would be recording with Noakes had not been approved by us—because of my teeth and Rose’s chin. Carmel assured us in capital letters that Grandiose WOULD get to the bottom of it, but regardless, there were now a hundred and fifty thousand images of The Dolls looking ugly, splattered all across Sydney pubs and shops.
‘Oh, I’ve come at a bad time,’ Kane apologised, after knocking once and opening the studio door.
I snapped my laptop closed and swiped my hand across my nose. ‘No, no, it’s all right. My dog just died.’
‘Oh Jesus, I’m so sorry.’
> ‘A blue heeler. Ralph. He was very old.’
‘That’s too bad. I can come back.’
I smiled grimly. ‘No, no. Have a beer with me, I think I need one.’
Fishing in my guitar case, I handed him one of the bottles I’d just happened to bring.
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ he said, taking a seat on the couch next to me and running a hand through his widow’s peak. ‘Never say no to a beer, right? That’s a very nice dress you’re wearing. It matches my eyes.’
Kane wore the same shirt as last time, but he’d undone a few more buttons, which meant I was talking to his chest fur. The addition of the chest fur was an important point that Kane was making, because overnight I’d spent an interesting few hours googling him and reading up on his wife and three sons. I wasn’t the type to get on my moral high horse and put a downer on someone for flirting with their top buttons open when they were already trapped in a relationship, but I did appreciate someone making their intent clear like this.
I’d thought ahead and had arranged a pile of evening clothes in my guitar case, including a glimpse of skimpy pink undies. I watched Kane watching the undies. There was also a packet of condoms in the plectrum compartment, but that was best kept for my eyes only. As he bent down to set his beer on the floor, I quickly checked my reflection in my phone and wiped a finger under each eye to rub away any smudges.
‘So, I guess I’d better do some work,’ I said after a while, getting up and walking over to the vocal booth. It was a shame the studio didn’t have mood lighting like Glasshouse did. In the control room, Andy stopped reading the paper and readied himself. He cued the music into the cans.
I summoned the energy from deep inside me and let it radiate out in waves. As I sang, I let my fingers slip softly down my dress and lightly brush my bare thighs, or caress my breastbone as though I was lost in the moment. It was just a suggestion, a bit like subliminal advertising, which some feel is fair game and others consider a case for the ombudsman. I suppose I wasn’t behaving any better than the perves I used to encounter on trains, who would move their hands around near their zipper in my peripheral vision to try and get me to look at their crotch. Did I have more of a right, as a dead-set spunk, to be a sexual aggressor than they did?
Kane thought so. I could see him undressing me with his eyes from his spot on the couch. His eyes did not fumble. While I waited for the middle eight to pass, I appraised him in return. He had a sunburned hide for skin, with salt-and-pepper stubble across his jaw and silver streaks winging out in his dark hair. He had a mouth of broken crockery, a torso that widened his shirt with each descending button and sun spots freckled across his broad hands. All this I found attractive.
•
When Andy called time on my last session of the week, Kane ducked his head into the studio as I was packing up and suggested we all go out for a drink. He used a voice seven shades too casual, and I noticed that Andy turned him down in a rote fashion, as though this were some kind of routine performance. I noticed, and I filed it out of sight.
Out in the car park, Kane’s ute was the size of a truck, with roo bars, multiple radio aerials and spotlights all over the place. ‘Have a go,’ he offered, tossing the keys in the palm of his hand.
‘I can’t, it’s too big.’
‘That’s the first time a girl’s said that to me,’ he returned, and got behind the wheel. I hoisted myself up to the passenger seat as he switched on the radio. Kane wanted us to go to a bar on the outskirts of town; one where he knew that he wouldn’t be harassed. ‘Men are always offering me their wives,’ he complained. ‘It’s embarrassing.’
I should have found Kane creepy, but I was willingly playing the game. When he was around the air thickened densely. Atoms crackled and snapped.
Dusk was turning to darkness by the time we arrived at the pub and slammed the ute’s doors behind us. The main room was as golden and glittering as a Christmas bauble. Bartenders buzzed around the large central bar and yelled jibes at the regulars over the general melee. Out in the band room, the lights of the stage melted into wet diamonds through the bottom of my schooner glass as one lonesome troubadour in a western shirt replaced another.
Kane was good company. I found his presence intimidating, and my heart beat too fast no matter how much I tried to sedate it with beer, but he was a funny bastard with an easy charm that warmed me from the inside out. Even out here in the boondocks he garnered loads of greetings from people swaying past with jugs of beer. If it made him jittery, he disguised it well.
We stood at a respectful distance from each other. Under the guise of telling him about a Blaze FM Spring Break Special that Elementary had made us play, I pulled out my phone to show him a photo of me posing with a boy whose muscles looked like they’d been inflated by a bicycle pump. Kane bunched up to me and peered at the screen. ‘I’m jealous,’ he said. When I put my phone away he stayed close.
Over the next few rounds, Kane talked about his life. His guitarist was going through a messy divorce and was facing bankruptcy. His sister was pregnant again, to an ice addict who stole one of Kane’s Golden Guitar awards to buy drugs. He was considering firing his manager for screwing them over with the last few touring contracts.
I couldn’t help but warm to the fact that Kane trusted me as an insider and wanted my opinion based on my own experiences. Part of me felt flattered, but another part knew he’d more than likely try anything to get into my pants, including wheeling out the odd sob story. My Elle Macpherson Intimates were probably flickering behind his eyes like a pink fluorescent light.
Kane and I had got halfway down the cigar we were sharing before I realised he’d only been able to smoke it inside because of who he was. So, they’d all be wondering who I was, too. I was feeling too good to be able to make a judgement call on whether or not that was a bad thing.
I took a last pull on the cigar, dragging some smoke down into my throat, even though I knew I shouldn’t.
‘I’m shickered,’ he remarked after he’d finally ground it out in an ashtray. He skewered me with his eyes. ‘How about you?’
I hesitated. Our arms were still touching, but we weren’t quite at tipping point. There was still the remote possibility that Kane was genuinely beat and would be appalled at a direct come-on. The consequences of sleeping with Kane flashed through my mind but, just like they sang in Happy Days, ‘Feels so wrong, must be right’. Or something like that.
I excused myself to go the bathroom, where I could sluice some soap and water between my legs, even though it would probably jinx me and I’d go home alone. As I pumped soap out of the dispenser on the wall I met my gaze in the mirror. My conscience stepped up its inquiry. Is this the face of a girl who wants to do this?
The worried eyes said no. But we would harden up.
Back in the bar Kane had his back to me and was shiftily downing a whisky in one. With last orders due to be called, we had reached the point where somebody was going to have to say something inappropriate or we’d just end up going our separate ways. I willed some act of God to force us together: a bar-room brawl, violence igniting like a gas leak. Sex and danger: it was a potent combination.
I realised we were going to be here all night if I left this up to Kane.
You’re better than this.
I’m not.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, meeting his eyes. He looked at me for a second to make sure he’d understood correctly, then drained his schooner lightning fast. We pushed our way through the crowd to curious glances and a couple of smirks.
Out in the car, Kane pointed us towards town and turned the radio down low. We drove in silence, watching his headlights pick out the trees at the side of the road, the odd kangaroo making a break for it.
‘So . . . Miss Dall,’ he began. In my experience when a man called you ‘Miss’ he was about to follow up with something explicit. ‘I happened to book a hotel. You know. In case I was tired. Or in case you were tired.’
I laughe
d lightly. ‘Good. I’m ready for bed.’
Fuck, I mouthed to myself, looking out of the passenger window into blackness. It was a line straight out of a chick-lit novel, but Kane overlooked it. Not taking his eyes off the road, he dropped a hand to my bare thigh and ran it upwards. I felt myself finally relax. Once talking was done and touching began, the tough stuff was over.
•
Before the door could even swing shut, we crashed to one wall and bounced off another, hands tearing at each other’s clothes. My cotton dress was rucked up around my waist as I anchored him to me and pushed my tongue in his mouth. I wanted to deconstruct Kane down to his most basic components as quickly as possible.
He dropped into a crouch and I felt his breath, very deliberately, on my Elle Macpherson Intimates. His tongue touched the flimsy silk; the wetness turning from hot to cold on his exhale. It was his signature move, I could tell. He pulled me down to the floor and rolled on top of me with his full weight, grinding his hips into mine. I inhaled the salty smell of his neck.
I flicked open his belt buckle. I loved the sound of heavy metal. His heavy cock had sprung out of his fly and I gripped it tight, giving it a few strokes. He pushed his thigh between my legs and we pashed till we were drenched in sweat and spit. If this hotel room were to become a crime scene there would be forensic evidence everywhere.
‘Click, click,’ I said, looking up at him looking down at me with his cock in my hand. His eyes were recording everything. I sucked him until I could taste pre-cum, and then I dragged him down again.
Kane fucked me, his face inches from mine. Our momentum sent the rug on a frantic voyage across the room. I felt searing stubble across my face, mean pinches of flesh. A tousle later, I sat astride him, knees grazing carpet, tracing the plains and valleys of his face. I put my fingers in his mouth and he sucked. Below my tits I regarded my pubic bone against his secret scorpion tattoo. It would make an interesting Instagram picture with the 1977 filter, but then I was locked into his eyes again.
We took a few more turns. From behind me, Kane held my throat. All the particles in the room thickened like storm clouds and the world slowed down as if we were fucking through treacle.
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