He rinses out beer glasses and serves the handful of customers that come in as he talks to me at the counter. ‘Mandy … Mandy … The name doesn’t ring a bell. I might recognise her though. What does she look like?’
‘Dark brown hair and dark brown eyes and a cute face,’ I begin, and realise I don’t have the vocabulary to describe that thing about Mandy that was so attractive. Or, more accurately, that I’m too embarrassed to drop words like ‘luminous’ and ‘sad-eyed’ or phrases like ‘dreamy, girlish beauty’ into a conversation at a bar as I eat chips and gravy out of a plastic bowl.
‘She had red clips in her hair on one side,’ I say instead. ‘Skinny arms. She was wearing a Replacements T-shirt and tights, she had her nails painted black. She was with this girl who looks kind of like Joanna Newsom.’
James rubs his hand across his stubbly face, thinking. He’s one of those guys who always seems to need to shave, even after he’s just shaved. ‘I don’t know, mate, maybe … A lot of people come in and out. Hundreds and hundreds … it’s not like I can remember all of them.’
‘Yeah, but not like this girl!’
‘Well, she has got good taste in band T-shirts. Has she got big boobs?’
‘I don’t know, I just remember her face … Hang on, if you’ve got no idea who she is, how is that relevant?’
‘I’m just trying to paint a picture.’
‘What kind of picture?’
‘Look, I’d help if I could, bro.’
‘I know.’
I pick at my food, mopping up pools of gravy with fat chips, watching old men shuffle back and forth from the bar to the pokies and the TV screens showing horse racing.
‘How’s the band going?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, not bad, mate, been rehearsing a lot. We’re playing the Union in a couple of weeks. A Sunday afternoon gig. You should come.’
‘Done.’
‘How’s your stuff going? You should have won the other night.’
‘Thanks. Yeah, still going at it.’
‘That guy with the pencil beard — wasn’t into it.’
‘Yeah, me neither. How come you never play in the comp — too small-time?’
‘Not really too small, just the wrong crowd.’
It’s a story you hear over and over when you talk to people in bands. Wrong crowd, wrong venue, wrong people, bad luck, missed connections. When you find something that works, you know how rare it is.
Mandy
There’s a homeless guy outside the shopping centre wearing layers of scarves and rags, and with dirt caked deep into his skin. I sometimes make up sandwiches for him from whatever we have left over at the end of the day. I’d like to give him some kind of deep-cleansing moisturiser, but I wonder if maybe he’d be offended by that. Maybe he’d think it was a good idea, who knows. When I give him sandwiches, he sometimes smiles and talks to me about the people he sees coming through the car park and that’s cool. Sometimes he just looks blankly at me and takes the food and I guess that’s cool too. He often asks whether I’ve seen his cat, which he says is somewhere around here. I’ve never seen him with a cat.
Thora’s waiting for me to give me a lift home, and she’s not at all interested in the mystery of the homeless man’s cat. She’s a bit annoyed that I’m late and even more annoyed when I tell her I can’t go with her to see Death On A Sunday tonight.
She tells me again how she’s set to meet the incredibly hot, super talented and prolifically pierced lead singer of the band and how amazing it’s going to be and how she needs me there for moral support to land her man. ‘Moral support’ is perhaps a strange choice of words for someone whose last conquest was the quite-a-bit-older and very-much-married manager of the supermarket in our shopping centre, but I let it slide.
She tells me I’d better have a good excuse for bailing on her, and I don’t really want to tell her I’m basically going to stalk some singer I barely know, even though that seems suspiciously similar to what she’s doing, so I tell her instead that Alice is having a bad time and needs me at the moment. That’s actually true, though I can’t pretend my motives for going tonight have anything to do with her.
I make a mental note that I owe Alice. Sometime I’ll get the chance to pay her back, but this moment is mine to seize.
Tim
I don’t know what I was expecting it to be like, but this wasn’t it. Ned and I sign some papers, hand over our passports and birth certificates and everything, then someone behind a counter stamps the papers and types some details into a computer. Ned is now my legal guardian. The whole thing is done in a matter of minutes in a boring building full of beige filing cabinets and old computers. It feels like it should have taken longer somehow.
We stand around in the street outside the registry for a short moment, not knowing what to do. Ned is wearing a lilac-coloured silk shirt that isn’t quite ironed and a suit that he borrowed from a mate. It looks strange and definitely doesn’t suit him. There’s something about Ned that means even when he’s formally dressed, he looks like he just woke up from a rough night’s sleep.
‘Why don’t we go down to the club for a feed, celebrate properly?’ he says.
Is this what you do when your uncle becomes your legal guardian? I’ve got no idea what people are supposed to say to you, and judging by the reactions (or non-reactions) from friends I’ve told, neither does anyone else. But sitting here eating schnitty and chips and waiting for the next race to come on so Ned can have a punt seems the right way to mark the moment.
Seb texts me, something about wanting to meet me in the fair-trade café tomorrow morning with a business proposal he has for me. No idea what he’s talking about, but I agree to have a quick coffee with him before school.
‘I’m sorry you had to miss your band night to hang out with an old bloke like me,’ Ned says.
‘Not a problem,’ I say. ‘I’ll be back there soon enough.’
Mandy
So we go to the Old Canterbury again and there’s no sign of Tim, but we do run into the god-awful guy who’s friends with someone who works at the bookstore with Alice.
‘Good to see youse girls again. You can buy us a drink if you want.’
We don’t want.
Instead, we go to play pinball, but find they’ve taken the machine out to make room for another pokie machine.
We leave and start randomly driving through the backstreets of the Inner West instead, trying out new tunes to see if they’re good driving music and talking aimlessly about what I might do at university next year. I enrolled in an animal bioscience course and deferred, and am doubting my choice without even doing a single day of it. I toss up a few ideas: languages, arts, psychology. I studied hard at school and did OK in the exams but I never really had a real favourite subject. My best subject would change every term depending on the teacher and who was in the class. I like bits and pieces from a lot of subjects, but I don’t know if there’s anything I really want to study and do for the rest of my life.
I toss up a couple of ideas and Alice gives me a few suggestions but nothing seems to fit. Nothing jumps out at me. I like the idea of being an artist, but I never seem to get round to doing any art. I came first in English at school, but I don’t know if that’s something that would be useful to do at university. Being a writer sounds terrible. I like animals, but apart from the goldfish we’ve never been allowed to have pets, so maybe I just like them from a distance, and anyway I would hardly want to be a vet and have to put down poor kittens. Architecture might be cool, or it might not. I don’t know.
It’s a bit of a frustrating night, really. None of the new music we’re playing really grabs us. We’re such nannas. I already feel like I could never get into that stuff teenagers are meant to be into, like video games, or raves, which just strike me as being some sort of weird mass celebration of nothing. I give it about two years before I get a bunch of cats and start to talk about how kids these days have become awful strange.
We end
up playing a mixtape we put together of music only from the year 1987, a musical year I would have loved to live through as a teenager. People say the eighties had no good music, but what about The Pixies, The Field Mice, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure? God, The Smiths! Alice and I were the only ones in our school who even knew The Smiths, that’s how bad our school was. But the fact that their music is so amazing and full of surprises and comes from such an apparently grim time is one of the reasons I love it so much. It proves to me that there’s always great stuff around if you listen hard enough. Plus, tons of people who are totally embarrassing now were young and cool and full of promise then. Even Bono was cool then. Well, kind of, back when he was writing great, powerful, anthemic songs without a hint of irony and not ruining every music documentary ever by turning up in it and spouting pretentious gibberish.
We can’t drive forever, so we end up looping back towards my place. Alice doesn’t want to do her assignment or sit in her bedroom thinking about her ex-boyfriend. I don’t want to go home and face Heather or sit in my bedroom thinking about my non-boyfriend. I don’t know where we go from here.
Tim
I get to the café and see Seb sitting there in the one suit he owns, sipping an espresso. I immediately crack up laughing. The dude does not wear a suit well, and in the middle of all the Glebe hippies and scruffy students he looks downright ridiculous.
‘What?’ he asks, standing up formally and getting all offended at my laughter. ‘This is a classic Italian suit and chicks dig the young-entrepreneur look.’
‘You know you’re meant to put a pocket square in your breast pocket and not just some old hanky? It kind of spoils the effect.’
‘Oh, shut up, Tim. You wear girls’ jeans everywhere, you can hardly start giving me fashion advice.’
‘I’m going to get a coffee.’
‘Already ordered one for you. Park your ass and let’s talk business.’
‘Why are you wearing a suit?’
‘Because people know you mean business when you wear a suit.’
I sit down and stash my bag under the table. The waiter brings me a cappuccino with my usual three sugars. I’m still finding it hard to take Seb’s new look seriously.
‘Well, if you’ve stopped snickering, I think you’ll find I have quite an interesting proposal for your music career,’ he says.
‘If this is about me playing your cousin’s mate’s neighbour’s bar mitzvah, I’ve already said I’ll do it, but I’m not playing “Love Is In The Air”, not even ironically.’
‘No, I’m actually proposing that you get yourself a manager.’
‘But I don’t make any money. Who would do that?’
‘Me.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, me. I study business and accounting at university if you haven’t noticed, I’ve almost done a full semester and, if I do say so myself, I’ve been totally dominating in class, Tim. Dominating. You wouldn’t believe it was me if you walked in on a class. Plus being in the entertainment industry is what I want to do.’
‘OK, sure.’
‘What do you mean? That’s it?’
‘Yep, that’s it. I’m your first client.’
‘This is outstanding.’
‘Be warned though, I reserve the right to ignore your ideas if they’re stupid.’
‘I was thinking of calling my company Epic Management.’
‘You’re not off to a good start.’
‘Well, do you want to hear some of my ideas for you right now?’
‘Yeah, just quickly though. I’ve got to be in class by nine.’
‘Oh man, how I do not miss high school.’
‘Cheers, Seb.’
‘Many hotties at your school?’
‘I haven’t noticed.’
‘Sure.’
He pulls a piece of lined A4 paper from a notebook in his bag. It’s filled with dot points and arrows and numbers and things marked in yellow and orange highlighter and the phrase EVERY SHOW IS A SALES PITCH underlined and with asterisks all around it.
‘Are you serious?’ I say.
‘Yeah, I’ve written up an action plan. That’s what every successful business does. First thing we need to do is improve your demo. Maybe make two demos, one of covers for places that only book cover bands and another one of original stuff for what you call proper music venues. And cut the length of the demo in half but record it better. Three songs is industry standard, we don’t need to send out what are basically full albums like we did before. Plus we need to present you better, put a photo or some professional artwork on the front, and have a proper social media presence for people to contact us.’
‘Wow, you’ve been busy.’
‘But it sounds good, right?’
‘There’s something about the phrase “industry standard” that I don’t like.’
‘You need to be smart about this, Tim. You can’t just be good, that isn’t enough. My strategy will get you way more gigs. Not just more gigs, but better gigs. You won’t lose so much money. We’ll target the demo tapes better this time. Remember last time we just made, like, twenty and sent them out to the first twenty places we thought of? That was totally amateur. We’ll send them to the places you’re most suited to this time.’
‘Well, that all makes sense, but I’ve got to run.’
‘And play the same songs every set, give people a chance to get to know them.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘OK, that one is negotiable, but I’m taking you to the top, baby.’
‘Sure. I’ll just worry about writing the songs, you do the business junk. And you have to wear that suit to gigs — it’ll be hilarious.’
‘Anything for my top client.’
‘You’re a flip.’
‘Enjoy your day at school.’
Ah yes, school. As I walk back along Glebe Point Road I realise that I haven’t done my English homework, I haven’t started the maths problem that I was meant to start, and I haven’t read the chapters we were meant to read for art. The past few days I’ve been preoccupied with getting the guardianship papers signed with Ned and trying to figure out the chords for the new MGMT album so I’ve barely looked at my work. If only I went to a rock ’n’ roll school.
I spend half of orientation plotting out what a rock ’n’ roll high school would look like, with kids practising guitar in every room and another bunch of kids playing drum kits on the roof like the drummer in Joy Division. When the bell rings for first class, I give my plan for the school to the girl sitting next to me. She looks at it like it’s the map to some lost treasure and not the childish fantasy I know it is.
Mandy
Thursday night has come around again, and apart from a couple of nights of watching bands at the Rose with Alice, it’s hard to say where the week has gone. I did watch Juno again, and apart from her controversial comments on Sonic Youth, that girl is totally boss. Nothing much else comes to mind. Neesha added me as a friend on Facebook and I accepted, just to momentarily foster some illusion we’re anything more than forced acquaintances. What else? Heather had more temper tantrums. Dad and his lady love got back from their holiday, both looking like lobsters. June has a new collection of spoons, which she showed off to us over dinner. She then offered to take me her to ballroom dancing class and I politely declined. She also offered to take me to buy some ‘nice clothes’ and I declined less than politely.
There’ve been some pretty outlandish episodes of Dr. Phil, and I’ve started to realise what I like about him: he’s carved out this little niche all of his own. It’s like he was offered a TV show, and he agreed only on the condition that everyone who comes on the show has an issue with an extremely obvious solution. He specialises in telling people who can’t stop running up credit card debt to stop spending, feuding couples to quit yelling at each other. Dumb as it is, the man has a little territory all to himself.
When you start coming up with theories about how Dr. Phil works, it’s probably a good si
gn that you need to get out more, and thankfully a night at the Old Canterbury beckons. I have a last-minute wardrobe crisis, which is ludicrous since I pretty much think people who have wardrobe crises are frivolous and stupid and generally the kind of high-maintenance people I like to make fun of. But after settling on a white shirt and tartan skirt, I find myself debating whether to wear my black stockings, which I’ve just found out are ripped (and risk looking like some try-hard, old-school punk kid), or not and have everyone (well, not everyone, but …) see what I can only presume is some heinous insect bite just above my left knee. Everything else is in the wash, a situation I have admittedly created myself by not bothering to do any laundry for two weeks.
I stand around helplessly in my room, posing sarcastically in front of my mirror and listening to my usual going-out music, Iggy Pop. Alice, normally my best advisor on what to wear, isn’t answering her phone. I decide I’m stressing too much about it and chuck on the stockings.
I look at myself in the mirror. I realise it’s just two weeks since I stood here before the first band night. So much seems to have changed yet almost nothing has.
There is a fine line between hopeful and desperate, between wanting to recapture some magic moment you had and mooning around pathetically and scheming to accidentally-on-purpose run into an almost-stranger. Tonight is it. If I don’t see Tim tonight, I’ll have to forget about him, forget about all this. Last chance.
I have a shot of Jack Daniels, which I kind of assume is the most rock ’n’ roll drink imaginable, and head out into the night.
You’re the Kind of Girl I Write Songs About Page 5