Early in the evening a car comes up the driveway. I hear talking in the kitchen and open my door and put my head around to make sure they are going to leave. A woman is helping Mum down the back steps, and she turns her head on hearing the squeak of the bedroom door handle. I recognise the poodle lady. Our eyes meet and I can tell from the time it takes the woman to look away again that I have been recognised too. It gives me a bad feeling.
Straight after I text Sas and ask her to come over.
Cant. Mum court me&W at it. Says sending me away to boarding skool. Sux.
So I do it alone. Walk to the late-night pharmacy and buy a test. Read the instructions and then go into the toilet. Waiting for the result, I begin to have a horrible feeling. Oh God. OhGodOhGodOhGod. This is it. This could be my life changing forever. I’m not stupid, yet how frickin dumb have I been?
The line I don’t want to see is there. Walk back to the pharmacy and buy another one. Same result. Now what? A lot of drama is coming my way. Wish I’d thought to lie. Then I could just deal with it myself. Sixteen now. Instead of all the parental crap. Wish I’d just thought to say, ‘No, Mum, I couldn’t be. It’s just that you brought the wrong size.’ Blink, blink.
Hide the two tests deep down in the bin and go to bed.
It’s later that night, the night of the worst birthday ever, that I discover a whole world of things have gone down already. Phone beeps. Sas.
Sumthg happng, Facebook Jed Jordan. You?
A hangover doesn’t help
‘But you have to be on there,’ Floyd said back when he first joined the team. ‘How can you exclude yourself from this huge phenomenon? Saying you don’t want to be on Facebook these days is like saying you don’t want to be on email.’
Once a person has nosed their vehicle out onto that road, they have little choice but to flow along with the rest of the traffic. Over the last couple of years there have been friend invitations from nearly 150 people. Most wouldn’t actually make the classification in real life – an assistant in the booking office, the manager of a poster distribution company, Miriam Maclean from the board, even Jed’s stepmother. ‘Just accept,’ Floyd had advised. ‘You’ve got to get over thinking that a friend request actually means a request to be friends. It’s unfortunate terminology, in a way. Just think of it like an “associate” request, and weigh it up that way. If one comes in from somebody who you would never associate with, and don’t care if they’re offended, then don’t accept.’ While you know you need to be part of this faster, more involved world, this more reactive life, you are also repelled by the frequent crowingness of it and the feeling of comparative deflation it sometimes arouses, and are only ever reluctantly present.
A profile page or fan page, you’ve since discovered, is another thing again. Jed didn’t even establish it. A girl from his rights agency did it for him. She loaded up all the photos and the sample tracks, the band description and the links, and then set it up so Jed could provide comments or information on the wall – but he never does. The posts on there have been quite sporadic. There is never any official band news, so until that post about the girl the contributions mostly amounted to Jed-spotting. ‘I saw him buying some milk in my local dairy today. His tee-shirt was full of little holes, but he lives!’ or sometimes things like ‘Played Surfin’ again all day today. Reminded me of this great Whangamata summer we had back in ’02’. And there were the pleas. ‘Hey Jed, I love you, when are you going to tour again’, ‘It would be so amazing if you could come and play at my fortieth birthday party in Oamaru.’
Relating to fan behaviour is difficult. You understand admiration, but not actual fans, especially not the stares, the calls, the over-familiarity in awkward situations, the occasional slipping of pills or joints into hands, the requests. Sometimes women still hand him their phone number in front of you, even now. And apparently, and surprisingly, people have still been acknowledging him online. Almost as if his absence had acquired a legendary quality.
Fans don’t friend a fan page, you’ve learnt. They follow it, or they like it. And if an individual thing is posted that they want to acknowledge, then they can like that too. So now you’ve come to fully appreciate the other terminology misnomer of Facebook. Like doesn’t actually mean they like something, more that they ratify it and want to spread it around. Like bloody wildfire.
You’ve woken with a banging headache and a sense of dread after the dinner party, but the sensation of a major hemispheric shift comes when the phone rings. It’s a journalist from one of the music magazines, his gravelly voice suggesting he’s been up all night drinking and smoking, divulging and slandering. ‘Seen that photo,’ he says. ‘Does Jed want to put his side of the story?’
‘There is no story,’ you say, and hang up.
He rings back and tries again, his tone more gently persuasive. ‘You don’t want to leave that hanging out there. He’s a pervert? I’m not the only one that’s seen it,’ he says. ‘The best thing—’
‘Don’t try and tell me what the best thing is,’ you say, before hanging up again.
There are moments in any life when a person needs to be high-functioning, and you’re dreadfully aware that you aren’t handling this well. Bad sleep. That guy, at least, was from a monthly magazine so there might still be time to try to think this through properly. But then again, what are you thinking? Of course they put their news up on their website too, as soon as it occurs. You’re too scared to look.
You have a motto at work. Shit happens, it’s just how you deal with it on the night. The loud drunk guy in the audience, the essential cast member who’s had an accident on the way to the theatre, the sound operator who is so stoned he can barely locate the desk, the flimsy set that tumbles over at spooky moments, costume malfunctions, sweaty wandering-handed promoters, panicking hissy-fitting actors. You’ve dealt with it all. It’s possible to manage this.
The photo is of a girl called Haley, Jed said last night, who he used to chat to at the dog park. She’d asked him to do an interview for a school project, and they’d gone into the bush to find some old hut of his for a quiet place to sit down together.
Examining his face in a way you hadn’t needed to for years, you said, ‘And you expect me to believe that?’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘So nothing went on with this girl?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t do anything with her?’
‘Of course not. What do you take me for?’
‘But Jed. You must see how it looks. You and a young girl alone in the bush together. What the hell were you thinking?’
He shrugged. ‘I guess I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Is that it? You’re just going to stand in front of me, shrugging and saying Silly me, I wasn’t thinking?’
Jed didn’t say anything, just stared at the ground with the demeanour, you thought, of a chastened teenager.
‘And that hand on her back. What was that about?’
‘Nothing. Steadying her. Just for a second. I promise you, I wasn’t doing anything with her. We just talked.’
‘It looks bad.’
‘I know,’ he said with such quiet resignation it was difficult to doubt this was anything but the truth. Right at that moment, though, you were hostage to such an acute sense of exasperation that all you could do was press down on the accelerator once more.
‘Were you flirting with her?’
‘What?’
‘You know, turning some of your famous charm on her?’
Jed furrowed his brow as if he didn’t know what you were on about. Men who have charm always pretend they don’t know what you’re suggesting when you accuse them of employing it. Your father had responded like this to your mother, too.
‘Christ,’ you said. ‘You bloody fool. You’re going to have to sit down in this chair here and work out how to get that bloody comment off your page. We can do that much at least. Who is this bloody Sally Shadow that posted it anyway?’
; ‘I don’t know, do I?’
‘Sounds made up.’
‘I know.’
‘Can you do that? Just make a name and put yourself on Facebook?’
‘I don’t know. Seems plausible.’
‘Think, Jed. This photo was taken up at the reserve. Who was there that day? Could it have been a friend of hers? Somebody who knew you?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t think.’
‘Well, bloody try.’
‘Stop hassling me in that tone of voice then.’
After that conversation he’d slept the night on the big sofa downstairs and you’d tossed and turned, alone in the king-size, trying to work out the truth of it all. What was he doing hanging out with a young girl like that? Even if something didn’t happen, did he want it to happen? Did it cross his mind? Or was it as simple as him embracing a chance to be admired again. This girl asking him questions, him reminiscing on his heroic younger self?
And, if it turns out there are some grounds for the accusation, is this it? The offence of the highest order? The marriage-crushing moment?
With your head on the pillow, and your eyes closed against the world, you could picture yourself packing up some bags and piling them into the car, strapping a confused and hurting Jaspar into the back seat. You could see yourself doing all that – your determined and strong self, certain in your rightness – and in your imagination the car moved slowly down the long, tree-lined driveway but you couldn’t actually make it go out through the front gate. It just wouldn’t go through. Because of Jaspar. The thought of separating Jaspar from Jed wrenched so hard at your heart that it took you all the way back to honestly wondering what degree of perversion you could bear.
You knew you didn’t have enough information to really decide anything, but your mind was travelling the whole distance towards a kind of fantasy unhappy ending.
As you tried to reason his behaviour it began to bother you, like it had never bothered you before, that you’d let yourself believe he’d been content enough, whistling his days away out amidst his plants. Had you been wilfully complicit in allowing him to bury his ambitions out in those glasshouses, happy that he stopped touring? You’d never done anything to stop him going on the road again, but you’d never encouraged it either. Should you have expected something like this? Is this what happens? The lust for recognition refuses to be buried, and comes erupting out of the earth in unexpected ways. In little weaknesses. Stupid self-indulgences.
Downstairs Jed is tidying away the bedding, stuffing the spare duvet’s billowy bulk into a corner of the hall cupboard, leaving no evidence for the junior investigator. He has dark lines under his eyes, and a greyness to his pallor. He has not slept either.
You try to keep your voice even, reasonable.
‘Jed, the calls have started already. Journalists wanting to do stories.’
‘Did you tell them to piss off?’
‘Jed. Maybe this isn’t just something that’s going to go away. Maybe we should think about it.’
‘But nothing happened. The whole thing is innocent.’
‘Is it?’
He stares at you. He doesn’t speak, but many things pass over his face. Anger. Frustration. Dislike.
‘Innocence isn’t everything, Jed. An accusation has been levelled at you. People are jumping on it. Aren’t you worried about your reputation?’
‘I’ve never worried about my reputation. This is stupid.’
‘Pervert, Jed. That’s what people are saying about you. At the very least you don’t want people thinking Jaspar’s dad is a pervert, do you?’
‘I’m going out to check on the watering system.’
Last night’s dirty dishes are all over the kitchen but you sit at the table for a while, too exhausted to move, just staring at your hands, feeling something noxious, something like poison, racing through your heart. When you first got together, you used to congratulate yourselves on not living by the rules. We will not, you told each other, allow ourselves to be dragged down by convention. Over the years ‘Don’t worry about it’ has been frequent counsel from Jed. You’ve tried. God knows.
Jaspar wanders into the kitchen in his pyjamas, rubbing at his eyes. ‘Where’s Dad?’
‘Out there.’ You nod.
He puts his head to one side and looks at you, alerted by the weariness in your voice. He knows he started something big last night, but he doesn’t quite have all the facts he needs.
‘Why did that lady say Dad’s a pervert?’ he asks.
‘Because some people like to play mean games.’
‘But who was that girl in the photo?’
‘Just somebody he says he was helping that day.’
‘Like a fan or something?’
‘Yes. Maybe something like that.’
‘But what’s so mean about that?’
How much to try to explain? ‘Nothing. It’s all just a big misunderstanding.’
‘A mis-under-standing,’ he repeats slowly, weighing the idea, his eyes directed towards the glasshouses. He’s old enough now to begin to have some doubts about the veracity of the things his parents tell him.
Jaspar doesn’t usually kiss you goodbye these days, but he gives you both a kiss and a hug before he runs off to collect Kylie on the way to school. You try to retain the imprint of his firm little kiss on your cheek, that feeling of family alliance drawing in closer. You stand at the kitchen window, looking out at the yard, at this view that has been your daily pleasure nearly every morning since you were married. Your eyes always alight on certain things – the way the cedar on the shed has aged so pleasingly, the contrast of the corrugated iron on the rooftops, the fat-head dahlias that sometimes flop against the fence for support, the lovely architecture of the cabbage trees over by the creek, the sideways extending branch of the liquidambar tree that is a favourite surveying perch of a fat little kingfisher.
Today your ability to find loveliness in such things splits and splutters and ultimately fails. You walk over to the glasshouses where Jed is pruning the plants, and you can see there must be solace in such a methodical, peaceful distraction. A calculated snip here, and here, and there, the plant’s burdens are lightened, and the pruner moves further into his sanctuary.
‘Jed?’
He turns, holding the shears in his hand. You aren’t sure what you intended to say, but what comes out is: ‘How can you do this? Just expect to carry on with your day as if nothing has happened?’
‘Nothing has happened.’
‘What do you mean? There are people out there right now speculating about whether you’re doing school girls.’
‘What do you expect me to do? I worked out how to get the photo taken off, and if I see her again then I’ll try and figure out why it happened.’
‘If you see her again?’
‘I mean if I see her around. She’s just some kid I used to bump into at the park. I don’t know her full name. I don’t know where she lives. What else am I supposed to do?’
The moisture-laden air in the glasshouses feels too heavy to take in, a suffocating weight bearing down on your lungs.
‘Why were you even talking to her? A girl like that?’
He sighs. ‘Oh, am I not supposed to talk to any female now? Or is it just the young ones you mind?’
‘Even if nothing happened, you wanted it to, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Jed says. He turns his back and starts walking away down the central aisle, but then he changes his mind and turns back. ‘Even if nothing happened?’ he repeats. ‘Why are you finding it so hard to believe me?’
Your hand reaches out and picks one of the bell peppers. You wrap your fingers over its lovely shape. It reminds you of a smooth, hard heart. ‘Because of the others,’ you say quietly.
He looks confused now. ‘The others?’
‘The others. The others,’ you say, your voice rising in volume. ‘The affairs.’
‘The affairs? What affairs are we talking about?�
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You hesitate for a moment and then find yourself blurting out: ‘That Scottish girl on your last tour, for one. The bass player.’
‘Jeannie?’ he says. ‘You thought I was shagging Jeannie?’ He seems taken aback for a moment and asks carefully, ‘Where did you even get that from?’
‘I just knew it! It was the way you were behaving at the time. I knew it must be her.’
‘So you jumped to that conclusion, did you?’ A look almost like relief passes over his face. Somehow you’ve let him off a hook. ‘Are you out of your mind? All this time you thought I was shagging Jeannie during that tour?’
‘Well, you did, didn’t you?’
‘I doubt it. Jeannie was Stuart’s girlfriend. He was mad for her at the time. Ask him if you want. Ask him if they were together during that tour.’
‘Stuart’s girlfriend?’ you hear yourself say weakly, thinking you might very well be out of your mind. ‘But …’
‘I can’t believe this,’ he says, with a new, slightly victorious energy. ‘All this time you’ve been suspecting that I was shagging Jeannie and you never said a thing. Not a thing. Just let the idea exist like an evil manifestation in the back of your mind, affecting your whole attitude, your whole approach to everything. That explains a lot, you know.’
‘We’re not talking about me here. You’re the one who …’
‘Aren’t we?’
Overcome, you turn and flee the glasshouse. Your car is in the driveway and the keys are in your pocket, so you get in and speed off the property. Your foot feels heavy on the accelerator. You want to fly away from him, away from your own existence. You drive without thinking. That look of relief that had passed over Jed’s face keeps coming at you. So if not Jeannie, then who? Your mind is flipping though all the years, through all the faces, all the girls, all the gigs, all the chances. It’s a parade, a parade of opportunities. How many could there have been? You pull up without thinking. And when you look up, there you are parked in front of his apartment building.
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 15