In the Neighbourhood of Fame

by Bridget van der Zijpp

  Say: ‘Just curious. I see him around sometimes. In the park. I talk to him sometimes.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Dylan says. ‘What about?’

  What can I say? We talk about dog stuff, just like everybody else.

  ‘Some of his shit is online. I can probably find it,’ Dylan says.

  Goes to YouTube and finds the song ‘Captain of the Rules’. We all gather in to watch it. Tune is familiar in a common way, you hear it around without even thinking about it, but also it’s so catchy you can’t stop yourself getting caught up in the music, and in the break in the middle he does a move with his legs that’s pretty cool. Dylan finds another where the band is mucking around in a skate park with some kids. Wolf, who hardly ever goes anywhere without his board, starts laughing at it and says, ‘Oh man, they’re so lame. Their moves are so lame.’ Can’t believe how badly he’s missing the point. I like the look on Jed’s face, sort of ironic but also pretending to be really serious about it. Also that song is about surfing, and finding the biggest wave in the world and riding it, and there they are mucking around in a skate park, going over jumps so slowly they fall off their boards. It all makes me want to know him more.

  We play ‘Captain of the Rules’ again, and again, and we try to do the move he does and get all twisted up. Play it so many times we get to know all the words and sing-shout them into each other’s faces … all you get is deadset defiance / masquerading as cool-head compliance … Wolf gets carried away and starts doing over-the-top sexy moves, circling his own nipples through his shirt, looking at Sas while he does it. It’s too weird and we don’t play it again after that, but Sas gets on the computer and finds Jed Jordan’s Facebook profile and likes it.

  Later get a text from Dylan: U got nice hair.

  Reply thks and there is nothing else. But at midnight my phone beeps again. Sup? Wanna hang?

  Don’t know what do to. Am in bed in my pjs. Don’t want to say can’t because I have school tomorrow. Don’t want to say am too scared to anyway. Just don’t reply.

  Think about how today at the park a big boisterous dog chasing a badly thrown tennis ball came crashing into me and knocked me to the ground. Jed picked me up, and helped brush the dirt and grass off the back of my skirt. Almost want it to happen again some other day. Have a fantasy-dream about him hugging me, not really in any sexy way, just the way someone who is looking out for you would. Maybe like a dad would.

  Evie

  The obvious effort in the offerings I took over to Jed each morning slightly shamed me, and I always rushed out some excuse. ‘I just made this yesterday for a friend’s afternoon tea.’ ‘There was some of this left over.’ ‘These are Dylan’s favourites.’ ‘I was experimenting with a recipe.’

  In his garden, a particularly lovely tree planted near the shed was just beginning to turn its colours from green to golden, from one beautiful thing to another. It provided a dappled shelter from the sun’s hounding rays as we sat together on the bench seat, chatting. Even as we talked, even as Jed ate what I’d crossed the lawns to deliver him, work was being done – nearby the peppers, which Jed would soon get up to tend, were hungrily taking in the morning’s heat and creeping into being.

  Whenever he inquired about my life in Australia I made it sound as if I’d really amounted to something. Owned a minor share in the restaurant, I told him. Had managed to buy a nice flat in a converted warehouse near the markets. Yes, Melbourne’s a cool city. No, haven’t travelled much. Dylan. But will soon get on to it. Oh, a relationship … ? Not wanting to admit to a dismal bypass of the usual forces that brought people together, I said vaguely, ‘Well, there was somebody in Melbourne, but not serious at all.’

  Any compliments about my baking were deflected with chatty tales from our kitchen … about how our head chef had collapsed recently after one too many sneaky draughts of the peach schnapps we kept in the freezer for desserts; and how this had brought on a revival for the rest of us as Marcello, the great enthusiast, took his place; and how on his first night he’d come and stood beside me as I removed a Tarte Tatin from the under the grill. It was one of my best, zesty and buttery, the apples perfectly caramelised, and all he said was a long, rumbly ‘Mmmmm’ which felt like the greatest compliment of my career. And how he’d told me he was reminded of some giant water lily from Brazil. ‘It opens its petals at dusk and then releases this powerful perfume to attract the beetles from all around, and then it closes up again and heats the inside so the beetles will go down to the inner chamber and hang out in this private nightclub. And then it opens up again and the beetles tumble out, all happy and covered in pollen. Kind of like what we do, don’t you think?’

  I tried to convey to Jed how this idea had made my entire night delightful, as if instead of operating in a hot, noisy, clanging kitchen, I was at the centre of beauty.

  ‘The centre of beauty!’ Jed repeated, in the manner of someone who had placed something under consideration and was idly running his finger around the rim of it just to hear what note might ring out.

  Encouraged, I told Jed about the nickname Marcello had given me, Tarte Tatin, which then got shortened to Tarte, and how I’d cultivated an acid wit to go along with it. I fared better with my nickname, I told him, than Glenda who became known as Tootsy for her habit of letting rip all through service, claiming it was the standing that caused it. Donaldo the kitchen hand, who had mostly been addressed as Deadshit by Chef, became The Don for a day, and after that The Kneecapper, and took to cracking corny Mafioso jokes in a bad Italian accent, his self-esteem noticeably on the up.

  Of course, I checked for signs of a struggle to stay interested, but Jed did seem to enjoy this talk. My confidence grew as the days passed, and he still seemed pleased to see me. A little more density began to enter into our friendship, but the mad gabby loquaciousness that sometimes came over me when I was with him also had its swampy concealment below. Whenever I could I tried to drop a light mention of Dylan into our conversations. ‘Yesterday I picked up Dylan’s iPhone off the coffee table, and handing it back to him I absentmindedly said, “Here’s your iPod.” He rolled his eyes and groaned out the words “Try to keep up”, and you know, he did manage to make me feel quite fossilised.’ And deserted. When he was younger, Dylan and I would’ve laughed together at that kind of slip.

  ‘You should keep it up just to give him the shits,’ Jed said. ‘Maybe next time you could call it his telephone.’

  ‘Or worse, ask him to download something from youtunes.’

  ‘Or get him to instasnap something.’

  … almost like conspiring together, just like a pair of real parents, to rile our difficult maybe-son.

  ‘It’s all moving so fast for them,’ I said. ‘He used to wear this tee-shirt all the time that said Sometimes when I’m on my own I google myself, but even the drollery of that has quickly become passé.’

  ‘I’ve been known to do that.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘Google myself.’

  ‘Do you? What do you find?’

  Having googled him quite recently, I knew exactly what he would find. Dylan had come up behind me while I was watching the video of ‘Captain of the Rules’ performed live. I could feel my breathing shallow out at the thought of the connection between the two of them narrowing. When it got to the bit in the middle when Jed does a brief, inspired, loose-legged strut, a move he completely pulls off – the surprise contained in the grin on his face revealing that even he was amazed by it – Dylan said, ‘Seen that before. Sly move, huh.’ He directed me to another clip for ‘Surfin’ again’ filmed in a skateboard park with the inept efforts of the band being outdone by a bunch of ten-year-olds.

  ‘One day I’ll do it,’ Jed said, ‘and Google will come up with There are no matches for Jed Jordan.’ He took a large bite of the Linzer Torte I’d brought over, and some glimpses of his skin were visible through the moth-holes in his raggedy old tee-shirt. I averted my eyes quickly, because if he turned his head and found me staring
there could be an instant when he might catch sight of something I didn’t want him to see. These lazy mornings hanging around in his garden, while perhaps only incidental to him, were the highlight of my days, and I didn’t want him to know that my casualness was actually worked upon.

  ‘Would that please or disappoint you? I can’t really tell.’

  ‘I’m not sure myself. That’s the conflict of the tortured artistic soul,’ he said, with a mock earnestness. ‘You both love and loathe the attention.’

  ‘That’s actually true, though, isn’t it? I can see that.’ There was such a raw energy about those videos that I’d wondered what Jed felt when he saw them. It must be difficult not to be in love with that former self, that ingenious kid with the world at his feet. And perhaps it was a little dispiriting, too, that all that unfettered dynamism was now lost to time, a magic relic of his earlier life.

  ‘So what happened to your band?’ I asked lightly.

  ‘Fell apart.’

  I’d only ever seen him play live once. On one of my much earlier visits home, he happened to be doing a gig at the Powerstation and Roma had got some comps from the radio station she was working for back then. We watched as he commanded attention on stage, as he sang his songs of audacious egoism but also worked in lines about slippery desire, and wanting a pure connection, and weightless falls, and being reckless, and being lucky, and sneaking in through half-open doors. It was as if his songs sucked the energy of everybody in the room right into him and he gave off the feeling that he was appealing to the audience to save him from himself, and they were alert to it, willing. But he also projected a playful knowingness, and in those interludes when the band worked themselves up into their faster, frenzied songs, there was a united virtuosity, a beautiful fusion which was wholly dependent on Jed’s form. He drew the eye. The words of those songs were odes to youthful stupidity and foolish pleasures and the band strived to get the crowd worked up, but just in case their fervour was interpreted as raw ambition, or determination, Jed fronted up to the mic between songs to crack self-deprecating jokes. With him on stage in front of you, it seemed like a perfect idea to let him captain you off, and you knew you were not the only one thinking it.

  But now, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture the faces of the other two band members.

  ‘So what actually happened?’

  ‘It’s funny now, I guess,’ he said. ‘We were touring with this Scottish band and our drummer Stuart was sleeping with their guitarist, Jeannie. He was mad for her, but one day she got pissed off with him and confessed that she had also been mucking around with Greg, our bass player, behind his back. The next day Stuart waited just inside the practice room and slammed Greg’s head against the door jamb and knocked him unconscious. Stuart runs a coffee franchise now.’

  ‘And Greg?’

  ‘Yeah, he was good. Formed a new group and went off to London. Couldn’t break through, though. He drives a tour bus through Europe these days.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  Jed shrugged. ‘Think Stuart just went back to his wife.’

  ‘So he was married at the time?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jed said, but it was as if he was saying ‘So?’, and there was something in me that was murkily thrilled to register it.

  ‘That’s all quite rock and roll legend isn’t it? That’s what should be on Wikipedia, instead of just saying the band split after some internal friction.’ Realising I’d just revealed myself, I reddened and looked at the grass directly in front of me. I could feel him turn his head to look at me. I felt his amusement.

  ‘Did you google yourself while you were at it?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘Not so much on me.’ Tagged in a couple of photographs with customers who’d liked their meal so much they had taken the time to come through to meet us.

  ‘There’s so much shit about us on the internet that sometimes I have to sit on my hands to stop myself getting in there and correcting it all,’ Jed said.

  ‘What would be wrong with doing that though?’

  ‘I dunno. It’s uncool. I don’t want to be some sad bastard worrying about my reputation.’

  ‘So let’s think. Do you buy all that?’ Roma said later. She’d developed a habit of coming over most afternoons, killing time as she journeyed through her third trimester. I always had some treat ready on a plate for her, which she consumed as if she hadn’t eaten for a month. The impetus to create something sweet and lovely in anticipation of her appetite gave me pleasure, and also allowed me the illusion that it wasn’t specifically Jed that I was toiling in the kitchen for. As soon as she’d finished eating, she placed her plate back on the coffee table, unzipped her black leather boots, swivelled her legs up so her feet were elevated by a cushion, and rested her hands across her growing stomach. Comfortable, she’d simply wave one hand in a lazy Come on gesture, and wait. She didn’t need to say what she was waiting for. Her family had gone off on an extended school holiday on the Gold Coast the summer I became part of Jed Jordan’s gang, and she’d always had a sense of having missed out on something.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘That stuff about the band breaking up?’

  Sometimes I found myself experiencing a queasy feeling that I was somehow cheating on Jed by reporting our conversations – which he could reasonably expect to be nothing more than an inclusive exchange between friends – in such detail. I’d proved to be unable to resist blabbing it all out, if only to give myself the frivolous pleasure of repeating it, and to give my cousin the entertainment of playing accessory, and to give both of us the diverting enjoyment of rolling around in his words again and again, like two under-occupied dogs that had found something irresistible on the beach.

  ‘Interpersonal violence seems like a pretty reasonable reason for a band to break up,’ I responded.

  ‘Maybe …’

  Roma had claimed before that there was a bit of a buzz around a new release from Jed. She thought it was probably a good thing he’d gone underground for so long, because if he’d been popping back every few years, doing a revival tour, putting out album after album that never quite lived up to his earlier work, everybody might have grown bored with him by now. But instead there was that feeling around that if he was coming back again, it was only because he had something fresh.

  She leaned forward and spooned a worrying amount of sugar into her tea, which after the load of pie she’d just taken down made me worry about the triggers for gestational diabetes. For a moment there was only the sound of her teaspoon clinking against the inside of her cup.

  ‘Maybe it’s just easier for him to say it was because somebody fucked somebody else’s girlfriend,’ she mused. ‘Maybe that was the final act, but that’s not the real reason, is it? The truth might be more that they self-destructed because they couldn’t take it.’

  ‘Take what?’

  ‘The shitty reviews they were getting back then.’

  ‘But it must be devastating to get shitty reviews, especially if everybody has always loved you before. Isn’t it reasonable human behaviour to retreat from it?’

  Roma didn’t say anything for a moment. She didn’t seem prepared to concede this. Perhaps it was just that reasonable human behaviour was a disappointingly low bar to expect from somebody like Jed.

  ‘Maybe if you’re that kind of guy,’ she said eventually.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh you know, Evie. The kind of guy that everything has always come easy for. That kind of life doesn’t equip you well when you encounter failure for the first time.’

  It had always seemed to me extraordinary, a little divine even, to be able to place a set of fingers on an instrument and voice a cascade of artfully arranged words, and from that sober combination – fingers + instrument + voice + words – generate something that was so much more than the sum of parts. Trying to learn the piano as a child, I could never quite transcend the plodding consciousness of reading the notes and translating them into a
specific action. There were occasional times, though, when a kind of magic would descend and suddenly you’d be playing better than you ever had before – but as soon as you started to wonder at what that magic was, it would evaporate. A person who knows they don’t have innate talent also knows that the person who does must have some sort of superior evolvement in the parts of their brain that hear and feel and connect and create. It was easy, I supposed, for those who had that quality to take it for granted, and for those who didn’t to resent it a little.

  Haley

  Marty’s in the middle of one of his raves: ‘This is the limited edition Eldorado EP.’ He’s been on Neil Young for quite a while. ‘He calls it his abrasive record. All this stuff happened to him. He had two kids born with severe disabilities, and he’d fallen out with his record company and they sued him. So he made this really angry EP and only pressed five thousand of them, and only released them in Australasia and Japan as a complicated sort of fuck you to everybody. This song that’s playing now, “Don’t Cry”, is a tribute to his hero Roy Orbison. He reckoned when he was a teenager he used to go to as many of his gigs as he could. He liked his aloofness. Anyway, outside of one of those gigs he got to talk to old Roy and he reckoned that was the moment he decided to become a professional musician. So now he likes to put some Roy in every record he does.’

  Abrasive is a good word for Eldorado, I decide. Can’t say why anybody would listen to it for pleasure. Stifling a yawn, I go over to the back wall and feign interest in his collection, and that’s when I notice, for the first time, a Jed Jordan CD. Must have been there all along but now it’s as if I’m tuned in to anything about him, even when his name is in tiny lettering on the spine of a CD that’s nestling in a collection of thousands.

  Don’t ever touch Marty’s CDs because they’re in some sort of special order which is unknowable to ordinary mortals. Point to it: ‘Can we put this on?’

  ‘Jed Jordan? What makes you interested in that?’