But is this what you want? To be tamed, punished, castigated until you can no longer feel yourself? Until you can forget you ever married anybody? You think of the way drunkenness twisted his face last time, the ugliness, the coarseness. Was it there from the beginning? Did you choose not to see it at first – or perhaps that’s what drew you. Perhaps you were on the market for something to rattle your life, to shake the tree and watch all your disciplines and values fall to the ground, just to see if you cared.
When something is finished it begins again, you see?
What kind of trick is that? You don’t know, and the fact of your not knowing is the reason you remove your hand from the inside door handle. If you go to him now, it will be an acceptance of the malice he displayed last time. And next time I will tie you to a chair. Nothing is worth that. Not even Jed saying ‘That explains a lot’, as if this bloody mess is all your fault.
The foyer at work is a long, open corridor, with the reception area along one wall extending into a counter which vends coffee during the day, and wine and ice creams at night. The architectural cladding on the exterior lets through an artfully filtered light that relieves the industrial coldness of the space and makes it a popular area to linger and hold meetings. As you walk through, you aren’t sure if you’re imagining it, but it seems that people’s eyes are sliding away from you.
In your office you log on and check Jed’s page. All mention of it has gone from there, but when you google his name it comes up, numerous times, as a discussion topic. On Twitter a few lone voices are trying to defend him, but the general consensus seems to be that he is definitely a pervert. The word sicko is often used. Somebody is claiming Jed once tried to hit on his young girlfriend after a gig. God. Is this what it all comes down to? You can have a series of chart-toppers, perform up and down the country for years, to audiences that sing along to your lyrics, that bray out the names of their favourite songs, that spend money purchasing your CDs, that enjoy listening to your music on the radio, and then one day some unknown person types out the word PERVERT on their keyboard and suddenly you’re the Rolf Harris of New Zealand rock? How are you ever going to make this go away? Surely Jed can’t go on convincing himself it will simply blow over.
Your diary has a scheduled appointment with the management team for The Magic Flute. You’d been looking forward to seeing them but now you’re not sure if you can concentrate, so you call Floyd into your office to ask him to participate in the meeting. ‘And I think I’m going to take a few days off. Could you reschedule the rest of my appointments?’
Floyd is quiet for a moment, then says tentatively, ‘I’ve seen it.’
‘What?’ Hoping it’s not what you think.
‘The photo. Somebody forwarded it to me. Are you okay?’
‘Of course,’ you say. ‘Forwarded it to you? Jesus Christ. It’s all rubbish, you know.’ That snappiness in your voice. It’s important, you think, to try to be more convincing than this. ‘He wasn’t doing anything with her. Not anything bad. He hardly even knows her, was just helping her out that day. With a school project.’
You began writing a to-do list on the pad in front of you so that you don’t have to look at Floyd’s tidily manicured hands, his round, helpful, annoying face. There is a short silence before he asks, ‘Who did it? Posted the photo. Do you know?’
‘Sally Shadow. I don’t know. How do you find out these things?’
‘I don’t really know, exactly. Maybe contact Facebook as a start? Do you want me ask around? Discreetly, I mean.’
‘No. No. I was just wondering if there was such a thing, do you think, as forensic cleaning up of web data? Can you hire people like that? Can you get it excised as a topic?’
Floyd doesn’t say anything for a moment, seems to be considering this carefully. You keep your eyes averted, fearful of catching any sign of pity. ‘Frankly, Lauren, it might be a bit of a runaway train already. You might be better to tackle this one head on. Maybe come out with a statement? Threaten defamation even. If it’s all rubbish.’
If it’s all rubbish. Out the window you notice that somebody has tagged a crude penis over the word Flute on the poster pasted to the brick wall of the building opposite.
Personal inscrutability – that’s how you’ve managed your authority in this workplace for all this time. Personal inscrutability and, if you have to admit it, well-connected in-laws. You can’t stay here today.
‘Actually on second thoughts,’ you say, ‘could you take this meeting with the Magic Flute lot yourself? You can manage that much, can’t you?’
‘Yes of course,’ Floyd replies, gliding over the acid note in your tone.
‘And…’ you say, pointing out the window at the poster.
You find yourself driving towards the gate of one of the two high schools in the area. You park out front and sit listening to the radio. A host is interviewing a guest about addiction. ‘We’re always hearing about the troubled lives of celebrities. Why do you think so many of them are susceptible?’ the host asks.
‘Well, I do have a theory,’ the guest replies. ‘I believe they often suffer from the dissonance between their high egos and their lower selves.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘Well, it’s like the thing that makes them into artists or performers is sometimes a profound belief in their own specialness, that they have been chosen somehow, blessed with a sort of God-given talent. But at the same time they’re always being undercut by these pervasive self-doubts, sometimes even a deep self-hating, which is ironically maybe the very thing that drove them towards being an expressive person in the first place. High versus low.’
‘All in one body,’ the host adds.
When the bell rings, you watch all the teenagers emerge from the classrooms. All you have to go on is the view from behind. Skinny girl, long blond hair. It’s as much as you can do to stop yourself running into the grounds and shouting, ‘Haley, Haley, does anybody know a little bitch called Haley?’
Not a pervert?
‘And nothing is supposed to have happened with this girl?’ Roma snorted.
‘No. That’s all there was to it. She asked him to do an interview about how he got started in the music business for some school project and from there somebody, he doesn’t know who yet, jumped to conclusions.’
‘But the picture of them walking into the bush together?’
‘He said they went to his old hut to do the interview because it was quieter.’ When Jed had mentioned the hut it had almost felt like he’d broken some sort of long-buried pact by taking somebody who was not in the original gang into the HQ of our childhood fantasies. ‘Maybe not your best idea, taking her there,’ I’d said, and he’d agreed.
‘Quieter?’ Roma said. ‘Yeah right. And you believe him?’
‘Of course I do. He wouldn’t do that.’
‘Wouldn’t he? The captain of the rules is a quality moral force?’
‘You don’t know him like I do.’
‘Come on, Evie. You don’t really know him, do you? He doesn’t really let you. You only know the part of him he chooses to present to you in your little chats.’
‘Yes I do,’ I said, a little too emphatically, and Roma gave me a pitiful look.
A door opened off the hall and Dylan emerged from the high-risk bacterial zone that was his bedroom and sauntered into the kitchen, opening the fridge and removing a can of energy drink. He came across and bent over the baby, who was fast asleep in a car-seat on the floor.
‘Renamed him yet?’ he asked, his hair hanging down in greasy lanks. Roma had called the baby Sebastian which Dylan thought was a handicap.
Roma now seemed doubtful herself. She hadn’t even made it out her own front door when the baby came. The midwife got there just in time to shuffle her back onto some towels and make the delivery. By the time I’d arrived, Aunt Iris was bending down to admire the cleaned-up newborn, a loudly bawling little ball of energy still angry at the jolt of entering t
he world.
‘He’ll be just like you,’ Aunt Iris commented. ‘Loud-mouthed and always in a hurry.’
‘Thanks, Mum, for your lovely compliments,’ Roma said.
‘Well, there would be some justice in that. You’ll get to feel what it was like.’
‘And again, Mum, so nice of you to come straight over.’
It was easy to fall under the baby’s spell. Complete enthralment after the first glimpse. Tender, unbearable love of the purest kind. The power of it was unexpected, and I was always impatient for him to wake up so I could have him in my arms again – although sometimes when I was holding him I felt some sort of post-dated grief, knowing that over time the beautiful innocence would be diminished, then probably completely obliterated by late-adolescent hormones.
‘We’re thinking of calling him Red Bull,’ Roma told Dylan.
‘Cool!’ Dylan stood up and pulled the tab on his can as if declaring his approval, then headed back towards his bedroom, his jeans hanging precariously on his hips. He’d been holed up in there for days now, making designs for tee-shirts to sell at a weekend market with his friend Wolf. After some consideration I’d handed over the seed money he asked for, gambling, as any parent might, that he could impress me with his enterprise.
As he wandered off, Roma rolled her eyes, a gesture I could accept so easily only from a relative, and in this case a slightly over-hyped relative who was still riding high on the adrenaline and shock of having given birth. ‘Aanyway. Yesterday I was at the pharmacy,’ Roma said. ‘And these two old biddies were talking about it. Musicians, they said, you can never trust them. There was that Split Enz fellow, he went nuts over a school girl too, in Australia, one said. Something to do with pony club, that case, she said. It’s cos they never grow up, her friend said.’
‘Jesus.’ Already people are out and about in shops indicting Jed?
That Phil Judd story broke when I was in Melbourne. It was all so gleefully reported – following those three sisters to pony club with a camera, and later coming out of his house in his tight bike-shorts as they passed on their way to school, the ill-advised emails. ‘I was a pop star once, google the Swingers and Split Enz,’ he wrote, sadly. People talked about it a lot at the time. At the restaurant we’d giggled over the news that he had sent a message to the girls, trying to defend himself: ‘I am not a pervert,’ he said. ‘I am an aesthete.’ For a while we’d enjoyed employing that line in the kitchen as a pardon for all sorts of indecorous behaviour. ‘Not pervert, aesthete,’ Glenda would say sweetly as she blasted a new hole in the ozone layer. After a while we didn’t even have to say it, somebody would just hum a few bars from ‘Counting the Beat’ and everybody else thought the words.
‘You know, I did used to meet a lot of musicians coming through the radio station and I used to think the best of them were always a bit mental,’ Roma said.
So if a person couldn’t just come out and say ‘I am not a perv’, what could they do? Sit in their large inherited garden, thickening their skin, and convincing themselves that none of it mattered in the end?
Knowing what I know / and doing what I do
Might be best to keep that in a bottom drawer for now.
But it’s not really fair. It’s just a photo of Jed and a girl in a park. If not for the words, it could mean anything at all. He could be helping her find her lost dog. She could be his niece, for all anybody knows. It’s not on Facebook anymore, but it’s been copied so it’s still possible to find it online. It will probably never go away. He’s been labelled now, in that court of free-flying speculation, no actual proof needed.
‘I don’t want to be some sad bastard worrying about my reputation,’ he said once. But is there a point when it’s necessary?
He’d made that comment the same day he told the story about his drummer having an affair with that girl on tour. When I had said to him, ‘So he was married?’ he’d just shrugged and said, ‘Yeah?’ At the time it had given me some obscure thrill, but on reflection perhaps his response said quite a lot about him. Yeah? It’s like the kind of answer I got out of Dylan these days. I could picture Jed in a courtroom and the prosecutor saying to him, ‘And you took the teenage girl up into the reserve and had sex with her?’
‘Yeah? So?’
Did he? I didn’t really think he did, but then I didn’t know for sure that he hadn’t either.
Developing the pitch
‘You look terrible, Lauren. A savvy? It’s nearly four, after all,’ Genevieve Catt suggests. She has a bar fridge concealed within an antique Tibetan cabinet, into which she’s presumably had a discreet hole drilled to accommodate the power cord. She takes out a bottle, unscrews the cap and pours out two large glasses. You sit at one end of the white leather couch and let the wine’s expensive piquancy sweep some of the unpleasantness out of your mouth. The temptation is to gulp down the entire glass and ask for another, but Genevieve’s company always demands restraint.
Her desk is immaculately bare. iMac, remote mouse, a notepad, a pen. Nothing else. In fact, every single thing in the offices of Hansen, Wholey & Catt PR speaks of power and control – designed to give off a certain impression, as if they are the doorkeepers to a more significant, more workable world.
Genevieve is not exactly a friend. At opening-night functions she shepherds around the firm’s high-value clients, making sure they are meeting the actors and mingling with the right contacts, always with half on eye on the next mutually beneficial sponsorship opportunity. There is a certain distance, a manicured consciousness of quid pro quo to nearly every exchange. Even with close friends there is probably a mentally ordered A list and B list. How would Genevieve weigh up your likely assets? Useful for theatre tickets, gala openings, access to your father-in-law. There is currently some favour on your side of the balance sheet, so you feel you can ask for advice. Although there is perhaps only one conversation, maybe two, before you’ll start to be charged out in fifteen-minute intervals.
‘First step is a lawyer’s letter,’ Genevieve suggests, after you’ve explained about Facebook, Twitter, Jed’s reluctance to acknowledge what’s happening – taking care, though, to signal his innocence. ‘A cease and desist letter is probably enough to shut down this Sally Shadow person.’
‘But who is it? And what about what’s already out there. You should have seen some of those comments online—’
‘I did,’ Genevieve interjects.
For a moment you are taken aback by the reach of this situation, like some sort of polluting vapour is seeping out from computers into even the most immaculate of places. ‘Weird how people seem so willing to believe that he’s a paedophile,’ you continue in as normal a voice as possible, trying not to submit to a sense of collapsing energy. ‘It seems like now it’s maybe no longer a matter of stopping the original accusations, it’s how to stop the whole flow. I was thinking we might be able to take a stand with a defamation case or something.’
‘Well, you’d need some good legal advice on that but … it’s possibly worth it, but, well … as a remedy, taking a case can be expensive and defamation essentially comes down to proving that either the statement or the implication is not true. An action is most often taken when there is also a chance of damages. Do you have a copy of what was originally published on Facebook?’
‘Well, no, it was removed. Jed did it somehow.’
‘There are technicians who could get that back. Nothing ever really goes away these days. But listen, did the person who posted it on Facebook specifically accuse Jed of being a pervert or having sex with the girl?’
You have to think about this. ‘The word pervert was definitely used. And the sex was implied. And other people weighed in as a result.’
‘If they promoted it, they could be held up as defamers too. Was the photo accurate?’
‘I guess so. He didn’t say it wasn’t.’
‘So he did go into the bush with the girl?’
‘Well, yes.’ It has always seemed essential
to maintain a certain level of mutual professional respect with Genevieve. Now you are allowing yourself to be exposed and it suddenly feels socially risky.
‘And what happened?’
‘He says she was interviewing him for a school project.’
Genevieve’s eyes make a professional sweep of your inner soul, ready to hook out any spousal gullibility. ‘Funny place for that,’ she says. ‘So nothing untoward—?’
‘He says no.’ You’re beginning to recognise the totality of your feelings as a state of pure humiliation.
Genevieve sighs, takes a moment to raise her glass to her lips and sips dryly. ‘Lauren,’ she says carefully. ‘Shall I talk to him privately? Make sure …’
You hate all that is implied by this question – can you not be trusted to mine the truth from your own husband? ‘No. Absolutely not. I believe him. I do.’
‘It’s just that we need to be sure, if we’re going to take this on. I don’t like to end up with egg on my face.’
‘Let’s just … I believe him. I do.’ Your voice doesn’t sound as convincing as you’d like.
‘So have you got a good lawyer? Do you want me to have a conversation with some people?’
‘I’m not sure I’m … I’m not sure Jed’s ready.’
Genevieve sighs again. ‘Okay. Then maybe we should consider coming at this from another angle. The girl, perhaps?’ Her finger taps the side of her glass while she mulls over possible tactics. ‘We need to take the heat out of this,’ she says. ‘Head it off.’
She looks at you for affirmation but you can say nothing, your mind is blanked, ready to give itself over to someone else’s detached competence.
‘If we come out too defensive, that could make it worse,’ Genevieve suggests, taking the lid of the bottle again and topping up your wine. Her own is barely touched. ‘Maybe I could pitch a story about online bullying, portray Jed as the victim of some random troll jumping to conclusions over an innocent situation, and the impact on his public reputation. Why the law needs to change and so forth, looking at the issues around harassment and malicious impersonation in the social media environment. This could be topical. A call for increased personal protection, issues of reputation, vexatiousness, etcetera, helps us take the high ground. Input into the legislation, even.’ There is a lift in her demeanour. She appears to be momentarily excited by this idea, turning it away from a matter of defending the indefensible towards more of a jolly public crusade, with her quasi-political self at the head of the cavalcade. ‘It could swing sympathy towards him but, Lauren, we will need to make sure all our ducks are in a row. The crux is the innocence of the situation. There can’t be any comebacks on this. If you’re not completely sure, then we’re taking our foot off the pedal and going on a different tack. More damage limitation.’ She pauses to take a serene sip of her wine, and as she places her glass back on its coaster she says with coiled grace, ‘There are rumours around that he is releasing something new soon. Is that true?’
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 16