A gun is the only conclusive answer. You recall the look that had come over Floyd when you’d joked, a while back, about killing the theatre reviewer, as if he really did know people that could do that sort of thing. If not actually kill a person, then perhaps scare them into thinking they could be killed. You know this is nothing more than an idle idea, but the thought causes you to wonder how you would ever explain to Floyd the reason you wanted it done. You try to imagine attempting to explain away the affair. Would he express disappointment in you? Would you describe the circumstances? The delusory cast of the movie? The short-lived impulse that had compelled you? Would he understand that in the broader scheme of it you probably only wanted to try to salve a feeling that had become so overwhelming you were unable to see how wrong-headed your course was? Would you go on and try to justify yourself further, telling him that the deeper reason you did it might have been because you’d always suspected Jed had had affairs and you thought you were harbouring an unexpressed anger about it, and now you don’t think you are angry, but you are scared.
You try to imagine all of Floyd’s responses. You can only picture him telling you to get a grip. And that actually a rock star casually sleeping with somebody on tour seems like much less of a transgression than the rock star’s wife getting entangled with a leery stranger years later as some kind of fucked-up response.
It’s only on the drive back home that you fully connect with the idea that this isn’t something Floyd said, or even thought, but rather something you had him deliver from your own mind.
The Perils …
Music contributor Martin Scollard reveals a personal connection to a controversy surrounding rock musician Jed Jordan
We didn’t know we were waiting for a comeback until there was talk of it. It seemed to be more than a rumour. Some of those Jed Jordan had been occasionally collaborating with in his home studio slipped demos on to their personal players. Like illicit bootlegs, these were jealously guarded and only ever played for the inner circle, friends of friends.
The word around town was that this new work was good. Very good. It’d been more than ten years since he last put anything out, and the long incubation and the lack of pressure had given rise, it was said, to something quite interesting. It appeared an event of some magnitude might have been about to happen in these musically profligate times.
But if he was hesitating, who could blame him? He’d been in the public eye before. First he could do no wrong, and then he could do no right.
He declared himself the Captain of the Rules in that memorable early first single, channelling a droll cockiness, and the song’s defiance took hold, propelling him into popular consciousness. The release of his hit-making album in the late ’90’s gave him a triple-platinum ride into the next decade, and bona fide international success.
But later, when it came to the much-anticipated follow-up, he was in the mood for something mellower, more experimental. Listening to that album now, it’s hard to understand the backlash when it came out. But the critic’s consensus was ‘indulgent’ (and here I should confess that while my own review was not, like some, overwhelmingly negative, I did once employ the term ‘diddly-wankery’ to describe a song on his first album).
Perhaps it was a matter of the claustrophobia we suffer here, so that when something becomes big we begin to feel stifled and have to start bashing that thing into submission. Or maybe it was just that we’d expected another bunch of accessible songs we could shout out the hooks to, and suddenly he had given us a whole different ride. But like a pack of dogs we all started nipping at the heels of his former popularity.
Worse, the new songs’ failure to conform to the three-minute standard of the time lost him the support of his recording company and mainstream radio stations, and the masses that rushed out to buy his first album were left confused. The audiences at his gigs dwindled, he retreated, and it took most of us quite a while to realise that he had effectively withdrawn from public appearances.
So while there may have been some cynics amongst the interested parties (After all this time? Who still cares?), there was also some nostalgia. He’d been a big part of our lives once, and those of us who knew in our hearts that he was capable of an almost accidental genius had begun to wonder what he’d been up to all these years.
Sometimes, like a rhino bursting out at you from the brush, fame (or perhaps we’ll call it infamy here) has its little way of ambushing intention.
Out of nowhere a damning accusation was made. Not a direct one. Not even one that was capable of defending itself. This accusation was as insidious as any accusation could ever be. A photo was posted on his Facebook page, showing him walking into the bush with his hand on the back of a girl. The photo is taken from behind. His face is in side-profile. You cannot see the girl’s face but you guess she might be about 14 or 15. The photo in itself does not prove anything. They are both fully clothed. How do we know it’s not a relative? His own daughter? But the comment underneath reads: ‘She’s just a school girl, and Jed Jordan is a dirty PERVERT’.
Have you seen it? Plenty of people have. It was quickly taken off the official site but not before it was picked up and conveyed to all the other places where such things appear, repeatedly tweeted, and widely discussed.
There are many misdemeanours a musician can come back from – lewdness, severe alcoholism, body-ravaging drug addiction, inappropriate urination, grotesque promiscuousness, getting blowjobs in a public toilet, not going to rehab, drunkenly falling out of a coconut tree onto your head. Some of it even contributes to the myth-making. But the taint of paedophilia is a more difficult thing altogether.
And it’s a by-product of the kind of fame available in this small country that the comments often seemed quite vested, quite personal, as if we all knew him. But did we?
Eventually some postings purporting to be from the girl in the picture (but who would really know?) began appearing online in his defence. Jed Jordan was just being nice, she claimed, helping her with a school project.
This was met with guffawing emoticons. Yeah right, the commentary went. School project? Bet he had fun teaching her a thing or two. And so it went on.
Now comes the strange personal footnote. I thought I recognised the girl. You cannot see her face but I recognised the park where the photo was taken, just down the road from me, and this made me look more closely. I may have seen the girl’s clothes before. I had a leg injury. She answered my ad. I paid her cash to walk my dog, and I don’t think I ever found out her last name. That photo, for all I know, may have been taken on the very day she finally quit.
She was a complex young girl, smart and inquiring. Some might say smart beyond her years. And like all charismatic girls on the verge of maturity, she tended to test her appeal a bit. She definitely had some kind of fascination for Jordan, quizzing me about him more than once, and borrowing a CD. The girl I knew, though, also lacked guile. Not so much a Lolita, more a curious Alice, I would have thought, but like everyone I was wondering.
A turnabout came after she’d taken the step of using Twitter to release the link to the recorded conversation – she and Jordan talking about his recording process, intended for publication in some sort of Careers project. It seemed to legitimise her earlier claims, and it was a pretty good interview (I noticed she’d picked up on a few things we’d talked about). She drew things out that we hadn’t heard him speak of before – his regret, his disillusionment.
‘If you do something that you think is really good, and most people just don’t get it, then who are you really?’ he said. ‘Somebody who just happens to be out of step with the world at that moment? Or is your taste off?’
See, that got me. I tracked the album down. I listened to it again. It was good. Better than I remembered with its confessional, wry, rule-breaking and at times surprisingly affecting qualities. It’s so good, it makes me want to apologise to him for being among those who failed to meet his ambition.
He has declined
interviews but his camp claim the situation was as the girl stated. Add to that the artlessness of that recorded conversation, and the earnestness of the girl’s pleas – He was just being nice. Nothing dirty – then it begins to seem possible. And if you allow that, then you have to wonder about the others in all this. The one with the camera? Could it have been nothing more than a certain kind of opportunism, abetted by all those gleeful accessories who picked up that photo and conveyed it further into the great faceless jungle where truth is not necessarily the point?
Maybe, maybe not. One thing I know for sure – after this I can’t wait to hear the next song Jed Jordan releases.
Reflected fame
Afterwards is a whole other head space. A weird, awful, messy place. Afterwards it’s possible to see where it all went wrong, and to know what led to what, and the dumb things that shouldn’t have happened. Afterwards the world of unexpected connections is clearer, and so is the havoc caused by wrong-conclusion-jumping hags. Afterwards is afterwards, a place where truth doesn’t seem to matter as much as rumour, and where I’m left with something scary growing inside me. And in the afterwards it’s hard to know what to do to get everything right side up again.
So, bad enough, all that stuff people were saying online – but now in the newspaper too? It’s right there on the café counter, with Jed’s photo in a side-column on the front page, along with something about a rhino. I take the paper and a cappuccino to a table by the window.
Not so much a Lolita, more a curious Alice. How dare he! What right does he have to go round writing creepy stuff about how he thinks I am? And people are sitting in their houses reading this. Maybe my mother is reading this, reading all about testing her appeal a bit.
That douche thought I’d done a good interview, though, picked up on a few things we’d talked about. Yuck. Wish I’d never met him. Wish I’d never done that stupid interview. Or met Dylan for that matter. Or Jed, even.
A turnabout came after she’d taken the step of using Twitter to release the link to the recorded conversation. Did it? Have things turned around for Jed now? Wish I could ask him. It would be cool to see him down at the park somewhere or something and just joke around like before and he wouldn’t be mad at me. But it’s like I’ve accidentally kicked over a nest of irrational wasps and I’m trying to get away from them, and just when it seems I have, I look back over my shoulder and there they are, busy creating a new kind of havoc. The best thing of all would be if it turned out I hadn’t actually wrecked Jed Jordan’s life. Even if mine is completely wrecked.
So weird to be written about as if I don’t have any rights over my own existence. Makes me feel scared, that people could put the things you do or say into their own context, and then put it out there. Like people talking about you behind your back, except these are people who don’t even know you.
In a way it feels worse than all that stuff that happened online. This feels bigger and more out of control. At least if people were reading it online it was because they’d gone looking for it, and that meant they were somehow involved, or semi-involved, or semi-interested anyway, but a newspaper just gets randomly delivered to people, or picked up in dairies by people, or read over a coffee in a café. Suddenly there are all of these new eyes, who are not in my circle, or Jed’s circle, or the circles around those circles, who are reading about me and making up their minds about what kind of girl I am. Imagine if they knew I was having a baby.
‘That Gwenyth was pretty pushy,’ Mum said this morning. ‘She seemed to get a real bug up her about that Jordan fellow.’ Almost an apology. It wasn’t enough for that mad, curly-headed bat to post stuff on Facebook. Turns out she phoned the paper too, pretending to be Mum. Sure, Mum had been angry for a while, but that weirdo should be locked up.
At least when those two policemen came they didn’t talk to me in front of her. The tall one kept Mum in the kitchen, while the one without the uniform took me outside. Before he said anything, he took a tin of Tic Tacs out of his pocket and offered me some, shaking a few into my hand, all Dad-like. He was wearing a white shirt rolled up to the elbows, showing his hairy, freckly arms, and I was staring at the ink stain on his breast pocket that made him seem slightly more blundering than he should be. Until he said: ‘Do you know a boy called Dylan Carter?’ Was already nervous, but I could feel the blood drain from my face and that was all he needed for a confirmation. Then he said: ‘And is he likely to be the father of your baby?’ Was so shocked that I didn’t do or say anything. ‘Is he?’ he asked again, and all I could do was nod. ‘Consensual? Or did he … ?’
‘Consensual.’
‘And you and Jed Jordan?’
I shook my head.
‘No? So?’
‘Nothing happened. All we did is talk, but nobody ever believes it. I don’t know why the test came out like that, but I swear he never touched me.’
‘You swear?’ he said, giving me a heavy, truth-taking kind of a look that made me wonder if those Tic Tacs were actually some kind of fast-working anti-lying pill.
Said: ‘Yes, cross my heart.’
‘Cross your heart,’ he said with the sort of indulging smile an adult gives a kid. ‘Well, that will definitely hold up.’ He had a notebook in his hand and he opened it up, took the leaky pen from his pocket and starting writing something down.
‘Right,’ he said, closing the book and tucking the pen back in without noticing the stain. ‘I’m going to go inside and tell your mum that we won’t be proceeding further. I think you should sit down, after we’ve gone, and have a good honest talk with her. Cross your heart?’
‘I will. But … but … the test? Do you know why it came out like that?’
He looked at me for a long moment, as if considering whether he could tell me anything more, then let out a loud, strong sigh and said: ‘Well, it turns out that your boyfriend and Jed Jordan are likely to have very similar genetic markers, so … perhaps your mother is not the only one you should talk to.’
And now he’s right here. Dylan Carter, pulling out a café chair.
‘Hey,’ he says, sitting down. Looks at me with eyes that seem very blue, very intensely blue.
Not sure what to do. Had been expecting him, but just for a second I think about getting up and running right out of here. We should talk, he’d texted.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ he says. ‘I heard about the … about the … I just wanted to say sorry for … being so dumb and everything.’
Unable to speak.
‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot, you know, wondering and stuff.’
What could I do? What did he want me to do? He seems really different from his usual self – lost some of his puffed-upness, maybe. Looks very directly into my face. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Not really.’ Won’t cry in front of him. Won’t give him anything. Pull my jacket around me. The blueness of his eyes – why had I never noticed that about him before? The light in here?
‘My mother told me to ask you that,’ he says as if he’s trying to joke his way out of a too-serious corner. Or maybe he isn’t joking.
Has he read today’s paper too, read that line that says I’m probably not so much a Lolita?
After the police left, Mum said, ‘So if you know who it is, I think you should tell me now.’
‘I do know but I can’t yet,’ I’d replied.
‘But why not?’
‘Because look at the mess you’ve already made of everything.’
‘Oh. Fair enough, I suppose,’ she said, and looked a bit sad about it. Later she came back into my room, saying, ‘Look what I found!’ and holding up a bag of baby clothes she’d kept from when I was little. ‘Funny to think you were once that small.’
Now that everything is changing, it’s like I’m developing some brand-new instincts that make me more attuned to certain things. I notice the breastfeeding in quiet corners, the awkwardness of prams in crowded spaces, the floppy vulnerability of newborns, the equipment, the back
packs and front packs, the nappy bags and the plastic tubes of wetwipes. Before, I probably wouldn’t even have heard the sound of a baby crying outside on the footpath, but now I can tell it’s getting nearer and nearer. The sound of it makes my insides tighten. A woman comes bustling in through the door with a sling tied around her front. She seems to be coming straight over to us and for a second I’m terrified that I’m somehow attracting her towards me, but then she taps Dylan on the shoulder and says, ‘Thank God.’
‘Aunty Roma!’ he says, startled.
‘Here, hold this a minute, would you.’ She undoes a buckle, loosens her arm out of the sling and plops the crying baby into Dylan’s lap. ‘I’m dying here. If I don’t get some coffee down me soon, I might just kill somebody.’
She goes off towards the counter and the baby’s little face is bright red, and it’s crying and arching its back in Dylan’s lap. He jiggles it up and down for a few seconds, self-conscious and uncertain, as if he’s holding a live lobster. The baby starts making an even bigger scene and Dylan’s face is turning red too, and he points at my nearly finished coffee and says, ‘Can I?’ He puts the tip of his little finger into some of the chocolaty milky froth around the inside of the cup and puts it into the baby’s wide open mouth. The baby sucks his fingertip and after a moment lets out a little body-convulsing, half-hearted sob, and Dylan re-loads his little finger and does it again.
‘I hope your hands are clean,’ I say.
‘Possibly not,’ he says, and gives a dumb-cute smile.
I’m trying not to look and at the same time can’t seem to keep my eyes away as one of the baby’s small hands comes up and grabs hold of Dylan’s thumb. It’s like it’s trying to focus on his face while it sucks. ‘Good one, Red Bull,’ Dylan says.
‘Is that its name?’
‘Nah, just what I call him.’
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 22