When I got down to the park I saw a stage set up out of the sun’s glare and a crowd gathering. I felt for my aunt—a triple-bill of has-bians wheeled out for the public’s amusement. And then there was that other feeling: jealousy. So far, The Dolls’ only segment with VTV had been:
‘Hi, I’m Nina Dall.’
‘And I’m Rose Dall.’
‘And you’re watching . . . VTV.’
Alannah came out of a demountable dressing room to meet me, peeking through the fence at the gathering crowd before taking me inside. She passed me a root beer from the bar fridge and I accepted it without feeling. I’d have a proper beer the moment she went on.
Alannah wore: black-and-silver Alex Perry dress, Louboutin heels.
I wore: I’d been thinking jeans with my ‘I Liked You More Before You Spoke’ T-shirt and braces so as not to upstage my aunt, but it was too hot so I settled on my grey jersey dress, which was clinging to me in the heat.
‘John Villiers is at the mixing desk working on the next band,’ she said, looking me up and down and reading my mind. ‘He’ll be back soon; he’s just fixing the levels.’
She cranked the door open a notch. ‘We can smoke in here,’ she said like a naughty schoolgirl, and offered me her pack of menthols.
‘How’s the album going?’
‘Good. We’re having to work fast because he’s moving to London. It’s better for him there. He’s acquired almost a cult-like status for his body of work, unlike here, where he’s largely ignored. Which is bloody typical of Australia.’
I felt like the energy had been sapped out of me. ‘He can’t leave,’ I said, trying to raise a jokey smile. ‘We need him here.’
‘I thought you had your hands full,’ Alannah countered. ‘What about the cowboy in Tamworth with the scorpion tattoo?’
I faltered a beat, trying to remember divulging that information, then updated her on Kane’s behaviour. She snorted.
‘You watch,’ she said. ‘He and his wife will have a baby, they’ll buy a new property, he’ll become dad of the year. I’ve been there.’
I fished my phone out of my bag and played Alannah a clip on YouTube of India on daytime TV. She was dramatically confessing to a trip to rehab for unspecified issues, not even thinking to mention she’d been smashing someone else’s husband.
‘Histrionic,’ Alannah diagnosed. ‘She’s on the redemption trail. Everyone’s always got to offer redemption these days, whether it’s a book, a magazine article, an interview. People lap it up. The big “forgive me”. Even if people find out about Kane, it probably won’t do her career any harm.’
Alannah returned my phone before the clip had even finished. ‘Anger is a viable creative energy,’ she said. ‘Use it. Never turn it inwards to fester; let it kick your arse all the way to the top of the charts.’
I did feel like I was making headway with my Kane rage, although just that morning I had tweeted a photo of me wrapping Rose’s birthday present while dressed in undies and a man’s shirt. Every day I’d posted a picture. Me in stack heels with my hands on my hips, staring out at the ocean. Me tinkering on my guitar in an old Chisel T-shirt and short shorts. Me reclining on my side in bed, smiling shyly into the camera. I’d had Rose take that one.
‘I know why you’re really here,’ my aunt said, making me start. With her cigarette still between two fingers, she took my face in her hands. She held it firmly and I was forced to look directly into her kohl-rimmed eyes. For the first time, I noticed they were flecked with amber.
‘You’re here to see John,’ she said. ‘Also, I can tell when you’re on something, Nina. You’re much more personable.’
I was confused by that segue; trying to figure out if the fact that she found me more personable was a green or a red light.
‘I like John,’ I said lamely. I’d noticed Alannah called him just John, so I did too.
‘I like John, too,’ she agreed. ‘He’s a good pal. He’s also sober, Nina. I’m his sponsor. So, have a think about whether that dampens his appeal.’
The door opened, making us both jump guiltily. I leapt to my feet and hugged our producer; he would always be our producer to me. Such was my discomfort at my aunt’s intensity that I wished I never had to pull my face out of his shirt.
John Villiers detached himself and leaned against the cabin wall, checking his phone before putting it in his pocket.
‘What’s going on out there?’ Alannah asked him.
‘Razzle are talking about their point system for groupies,’ he said. ‘Ten points for missing teeth, twenty points for more than four kids, maximum points for anyone weighing over ninety kilos.’
‘So, when are you two going to put this record out?’ I said brightly. I really needed another line so that I could think of interesting stuff to say.
‘Who knows?’ said Alannah, cranking the door open wider so she could light another cigarette. ‘There’s talk of a tour, but we can’t put the record out under my name.’
‘Why not? Your name will always be huge.’
‘That’s right,’ said John Villiers, ‘but Mickiewicz still owns it.’
‘I’m still under contract to him,’ said Alannah. ‘For two more albums. Funny, huh? Obviously that’s not going to happen.’
She exchanged looks with John Villiers. I didn’t think I liked this secret-collusion stuff, but I pushed my feelings aside for the sake of getting the full story.
‘If he even got wind of this TV show,’ she added, ‘he’d probably start threatening injunctions, so it’ll have to be a surprise.’
‘Maybe you could release the album under a different name, then.’
‘Maybe.’
John Villiers said dryly, ‘We won’t call it a comeback, but it should have “back” in the title somewhere.’
‘You can’t release a record without funding, darling,’ my aunt said. ‘Your boss is pocketing all my royalties, so I’m reliant on garish appearances on VTV at the moment.’ She flicked her hair. ‘At least public humiliation pays well.’
‘We can build up your equity again,’ I said. ‘I mean, everything’s free if you know what you’re doing. You can get your album funded by crowdsourcing. We’ll set you up a Facebook page and slip lots of products in the pictures. Reinforce your brand. The free shit will start flooding in again.’
John Villiers surveyed the ceiling.
‘Yes, like these shoes, darling,’ my aunt said, pointing a toe. ‘You’re teaching your grandma how to suck eggs.’
A production manager from VTV came in and ran Alannah through the segment ahead. The host would play a clip of the last known footage of her, and then they’d work the story back from there. It really stuck in my craw that I’d crack the mystery of Alannah’s disappearance at the same time as everybody else.
‘Well,’ I said, when the three of us were alone again. ‘This is the moment you officially rise from the dead, is it?’
‘Apparently so,’ she agreed, giving me a once-over and registering my stiffness. ‘Look, I was effectively dead. My career was dead in the water, thanks to Mickiewicz. You know I didn’t fake my own death, though. That was a Grandiose fabrication.’
‘No, I didn’t know,’ I said shortly. ‘Where were you, then?’
‘Darwin,’ she said, and John Villiers laughed aloud at my expression. I guess I must have looked as stupid as I felt. Rose and I had been convinced she’d been on a yacht in Rio, or in a commune in Goa, or sunning it up in Fiji with Bryan Ferry, not shacked up in the arse-end of Australia.
Alannah clutched John Villiers’ arm, so intense was the hilarity. She leaned her head against his shoulder and I had a vision of them nearly twenty years ago, John Villiers with fluffy blonde highlights and Alannah with her wings of hair scooped back into a casual ponytail. Maybe they’d bashed out a few experimental riffs on a Casio. Maybe they’d slept together, or maybe they were thinking about it. I knew I couldn’t ask, or expect either of them to give me a straight answer, so I waited for
them to compose themselves.
‘I was just finished with Sydney,’ she said when she’d recovered. ‘There was nothing for me there any more. I went to the airport straight from the venue and got on the first flight somewhere warm where nobody would think of looking.’
‘But didn’t people recognise you?’
‘Of course they did, but I was hanging out at the casino most of the time. Nobody cared.’
‘Singing?’ I said blankly.
‘Playing the pokies.’
‘She was schmoozing with marines and old ladies,’ said John Villiers. ‘Wrong demographic.’
I mulled this over, smarting at being kept in the dark over something so pedestrian. ‘Why didn’t this go in your book?’
‘Sweetie, publishing companies are like record companies: they want something sellable.’
‘Was the tax man after you?’
Again with the exchange of looks. ‘Is that what Greg Mickiewicz told you?’ John Villiers asked, through a cloud of smoke.
‘No,’ I said. My heart raced into a gallop. Okay, so I was going to do this. ‘But he did tell us you blew the album budget on drugs and then torched the studio.’
Alannah doubled up with laughter and slapped the wall of the demountable so hard it shook. My stomach loosened a notch in relief.
‘She may as well know,’ Alannah said, and John Villiers shrugged. ‘The first part’s true—sort of. We’d cost him tens of thousands by over-running. He insisted on coming down to the studio towards the end, and when we let him in he went ballistic. It was a strange moral outburst for one well accustomed to over-indulgence.’
‘Remember that sitar player?’ interrupted John Villiers. ‘You insisted on flying him in from New Delhi because he’d been on Krill’s album.’
‘There was a lot of experimentation,’ my aunt acknowledged. ‘We’d brought in orchestras, brass bands, the lot. Plus, of course, one night the engineer was stoned and managed to erase half the album in one go, which meant starting all over again.’
I picked at a nail. ‘So, did you really burn the place down on purpose?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she chided. ‘I burned his jacket. His favourite leather jacket, stupid bloody thing. He wore it all the time and I was sick of the sight of it. He left it in the studio when he stormed out, and I set it on fire for a joke. Only for a joke. By then our liaison was over, so he’d lost his sense of humour.’
So, my aunt had become a high-risk situation for Mickiewicz both personally and professionally. He may have loved hanging out with rock stars, but first and foremost he was a businessman; no wonder he wanted her gone. I imagined Alannah and John Villiers huddled outside the studio, suddenly sober, watching it burn down as a siren came to a crescendo behind them. Maybe they were barefoot. I imagined John Villiers, emotionally wasted from drug abuse, a man at the end of his tether. Desperate.
‘That’s not where the hundred-and-eighty grand comes in, though,’ John Villiers said, catching me staring.
‘No, no,’ Alannah clarified. ‘The studio was covered by insurance. The money came from impossible expenditure on the previous four albums that he was suddenly calling in, without any leeway.’
She sighed. ‘I had to go out on tour for the bastard to try to recoup his losses, with no hope of him actually supporting the record. It was a catch 22. Of course I couldn’t pay the money back without ticket sales and I already owed your mum and dad a stack. So, I declared bankruptcy.’
‘She cost him the last twenty-five grand by running out on the tour,’ John Villiers said.
‘Oh, he was relieved to be rid of me,’ she rejoined, rummaging in her handbag and then pulling a brush vigorously through her hair. ‘He just wouldn’t release me from my contract out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Soon enough, word was going around that I’d lost my mind and tried to kill myself, and he dismissed John from all future projects. That was the point that Darwin seemed a viable option.’
‘So you next spoke to him when you told him to check out The Dolls?’ I guessed.
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘No. He contacted me when he heard I was writing my book, to remind me I still owed him a lot of money. I told him I’d rather go blind than admit to touching him, anyway.’
A runner knocked at the door. ‘You’re due on set, Mrs Dall,’ he said, sticking his head in. Alannah bristled.
Out in the broadcast tent, I took a seat on a beanbag and grabbed an apple out of the fruit bowl on the table next to me, just for something to play with. All the décor was in purple and white, in a stab at looking retro and groovy.
‘I can’t believe Alannah went to Darwin,’ I said in a low voice as John Villiers restlessly skirted the room while Alannah was getting mic-ed up over by a mock-cocktail bar and positioned on a stool.
‘You went to Tamworth,’ he reminded me.
‘That wasn’t doing a runner; that was to find myself.’
‘And here you are.’
He finally sat down and I joined him. ‘All that money gone up your nose,’ I said, nudging him. ‘I might have grown up in Vaucluse if it wasn’t for you two. Instead I grew up in Parramatta.’
‘That’s heartbreaking,’ said John Villiers, watching Alannah, ‘but I’m sure it was a character-building experience.’
It was our old banter, but it felt precarious.
I watched my aunt flirt with the interviewer. He must have been twenty years old, tops, but he expressed a long admiration for her career that lingered just a little too lengthily on his own résumé.
‘Oh, you’re a young fellow,’ she said, tossing her hair. ‘I can’t possibly expect you to remember or care.’
He laughed that off. ‘But there are a lot of stories about you that people still hold dear . . . slapping band members, firing roadies in the middle of songs, kicking dancers on TV appearances—’
‘Well, that,’ she interrupted, waving a finger at him, ‘was because nobody bloody warned me there would be dancers.’
‘Right,’ he chuckled, casting a nervous look at the producer, ‘but is it true that you used to vomit into your handbag on stage, Alannah? I think that’s what we all want to know.’
‘Oh, we were all at it, darling,’ she said smoothly. ‘Our fans used to piss themselves when they waited at the crash barrier, so that they wouldn’t lose their places. Rock’n’roll used to be a lot more unhygienic.’
‘It’s not the sort of behaviour we see from our pop stars these days.’
‘No. Is this a real plant?’ she fiddled with the potted bougainvillea next to her.
‘You missed out on that number-one hit, just,’ the interviewer braved. I held my breath. John Villiers was watching too, stroking his chin. I decided not to chance leaning too close, the way I used to.
‘I missed the boat on a number-one hit,’ she concurred, ‘and I missed the boat on having children. But that didn’t mean I had to just pimp myself around the RSLs forever. I moved somewhere hot and I took my well-earned rest.’
‘And you faked your own death,’ he prompted.
She laughed enigmatically, but he didn’t know what to do with the scoop he could be milking. I swear I’d make a better journalist than most of the ones I’d encountered.
‘Well, Alannah Dall, it’s been incredible; such an honour. I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking to you.’
‘They say you should never meet your heroes,’ she said benevolently, then stood up to smooth her skirt and follow a runner up to the stage.
We could have lent Alannah our blandly handsome band, but instead she’d pulled together her own. They looked like suburban dads, but with glitter detail—like a shiny decal on a shirt pocket, or a sequined flare on their shoes. The effect was wedding band. As they assembled on stage John Villiers moved to the sound desk and I headed out the front. I was feeling some pretty complicated emotions from seeing John and my aunt’s defensiveness. I lit a cigarette to help me cope.
Alannah was on fire from the first note. She didn’
t wrap the microphone cord around her neck like she used to; she didn’t masturbate for real during ‘Can’t Get No Relief’; but she held us in thrall. Wisely, she skipped the songs from My Curse—the album Mickiewicz let bomb, and focused on the hits. I felt tears prick my eyes when the opening chords of ‘Never Said Goodbye’ crashed down. They used to call her the ‘Leather Larynx’. Now that voice had become something both tender and terribly beautiful—she belted out ‘High Maintenance’ with a rawness I could only hope to achieve. Maybe I needed to smoke more drugs.
During the chorus, Alannah came up to the lip of the stage and crouched down, the wind machine fanning out her hair behind her. I hoped she wouldn’t meet my eyes; I wanted to gawp at her uninterrupted. Once upon a time she would have given us an up-skirt shot, but now she was doing the modest one-knee-bend. I made a mental note to talk to Jenner about a wind machine—my hair would be long enough for it by the time we toured the album.
Three songs and she was out of there; and the final VTV footage would probably only be a fraction of that. As the crowd whistled, I flashed my pass at the bouncer standing at the gap in the fence, and made my way backstage.
•
When I pushed open the dressing-room door, Alannah turned around as though she were surprised to see me; as though we hadn’t been smoking her menthols some twenty minutes earlier. Waz, the old bugger who’d come to dinner with Mickiewicz, stood behind her.
‘Waz!’ I said, walking over and burying myself in his leather jacket. He smelled of smokes and old-man hair. I withdrew and asked him with a frown, ‘Was your band on this bill too?’
Alannah barked a laugh, one hand on her hip. ‘“Was your band on this bill too?”,’ she mimicked. ‘His band still draws sell-out crowds, darling, they’ve never been away.’
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