The woman comes back with her coffee and says, ‘Nice, Dylan. I think that little bruiser likes you more than me. Do you want to hold on to him for a minute while I drink this and read a magazine over there?’
‘Not really,’ Dylan says in a confused, reluctant sort of way. ‘We’ve got stuff to—’
The woman checks me out, her eyes slipping from my face to my stomach and back again. She smiles and says, ‘So you’re …’ but stops herself, glancing at Dylan who is giving her a warning look, and then she just turns away and goes over to the other side of the café and sits down.
Dylan rolls his eyes and puts a teaspoon in the baby’s hand. It starts bashing it on the edge of the table and Dylan is trying not to show that he finds the baby quite funny. It’s like being caught up in some kind of unbearable, complicated trick. Start folding up the newspaper in front of me, and when Dylan notices he says, ‘Hey, did you hear? Turns out he’s my father.’
‘What? Who?’
‘Jed Jordan.’ He smiles and looks embarrassed at the same time.
Ah, it clicks into place. Similar genetic markers. No wonder. Say, ‘Cool’, and straight after start to feel a pang of something that could almost be jealousy.
The baby is now making loud little monkey noises and other people are looking over. One woman with grey hair is smiling at us, at the sight of Dylan holding the baby as if a boy of his age interacting with a baby is some sort of extraordinarily delightful event, but Dylan’s aunt is still across the room, reading a magazine in a snatched, determined sort of way. Every now and then she glances quickly across at us as if she’s just checking that some little plan of hers is actually working.
Dylan says, ‘So if you think about it, that would mean he’s …’ and he points at my stomach.
Look down at the waist that doesn’t even seem to belong to me and for a moment I can’t quite think what he is implying.
Stand up and flee the café, without looking back, without looking at anyone’s face as I walk, just walking, walking within a kind of world-blindness, like I’m moving around inside an invisible shield that has been dropped down over me by some special overseeing force, and which nothing can penetrate, not even thoughts.
After a while I find that my remote-controlled legs have taken me to the green field of the dog park. Fling myself down on the grass, which is a dangerous thing to do in a dog park because you never knew what’s been left there, and spread out in front of the shining sun, and it’s so warm and lovely that for a few moments it feels like I’m on the receiving end of a favour that somebody else is directing, and have a tingling sensation that everybody in the whole world is receiving this same sun, as if there is some kind of previously unseen universal freakiness that is instantly connecting everybody to everybody else in some small but magical way.
The spell is broken when a big dog comes bounding over, excited to find a human lying on the ground, and licks my face with a pink, slobbering tongue. Its owner yells out across the park – Frankieeee – and I laugh and push the dog away from me.
The owner comes running over, beside herself with apologies.
Say: ‘I’m fine.’
Recalibration
Two teenage boys in a stolen car lost control on a corner and crashed into a power pole. The front-seat passenger was thrown from the vehicle and died at the scene. The driver was taken to hospital with severe head injuries. ‘The crash was like a sonic boom,’ a local man said. ‘They must have been going extremely fast.’
To be the mother of a seventeen-year-old boy is to hear such a report on a car radio and have your heart clench with fear, even when you’ve seen him on the couch at home a few minutes ago, bent around the belly of the guitar Jed has given him. To be the mother of a seventeen-year-old boy is also to accept that they’ll do things you’ll have to struggle with, and sometimes the most you can hope for is that you’ll get through it in the end.
The reserve of restless energy that used to be put into prowling around the place is now harnessed into a surprisingly intense desire to excel at playing that thing. It’s as if mastering it would provide some further evidence that his place in the world has some inbred solidity. And I’ve noticed lately that whenever Roma comes over with the baby, Dylan watches them with a covert attentiveness, as if in this shyly detached way he can master something useful about infants too.
‘Stupid little buggers,’ Jonty commented, reaching over to his dash to flick on a CD instead. Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’ filled the interior of his agency car, a Lexus so new it smelt of the assembly line. The real-estate market was being good to Jonty. His body was showing signs of wealth too, a few too many popped corks and client lunches pushing his circumference out to a place just beyond healthy.
‘Do you ever think of Vince?’ I asked him, and as soon as I said it a memory came to me of the day Jonty and Vince teamed up and were the victors in the great mud-ball battle over territorial rights for Cabbage Tree Valley.
‘What on earth made you bring him up on a sunny day like today?’
‘Oh, just that report on the radio just now. Head injuries. It’s just one sentence on the news but it suddenly made me think of … well, what it will really be like.’ It occurred to me that Vince was only a year or two older than Dylan when it happened. Young, dangerous, stupid, but not yet fully formed. And paying a lifetime price that, for any parent, for any person, was unthinkable.
‘Have you seen him lately?’
‘Yes. I visited him.’ It was like I was testing myself, and I realised I could do it – talk about Vince in a way that was almost divested of pain and shame.
‘And how was he?’
‘He’s—’
‘Not much of the old him left, I heard,’ Jonty said, scratching the side of his beard. After a moment he said, ‘God, I feel guilty all of a sudden. I probably should’ve made some time to go see him myself. We used to be pretty good friends back in the day. Remember that summer?’
I looked out the window, remembering that Jonty had mostly been one of the kinder boys back then. Kindness always seemed a muted quality in a teenager, but was very appreciable in a grown man.
‘How’s that boy of yours?’ he asked. ‘Will he be helping you in the new business?’
‘He’s good. Well, sort of coming right anyway.’
These days Dylan was showing more interest in what came out of my kitchen, though not quite for vocational reasons. I’d kept up the habit of making Jed a little something for his morning tea, but now I pretended I needed somebody to deliver it next door, and every day Dylan happened to be hanging around just in case he might be called upon for the purpose. Off he’d go, and we’d behave as if it wasn’t that big a deal, and slowly, casually, he was getting to know his father.
He’d begun helping Jed occasionally too, pulling up the end-of-season plants in two of the glasshouses. He’d come home afterwards stinking of greenery and refreshed with yet more newfound purpose, and sometimes I’d find myself wondering what happened to the cucumeris, the little toiling yellow mite, when the glasshouses were cleared. Did it fly off to some other seasonal gig, or did it just cease to exist when its job was done?
‘My boy’s in London now,’ Jonty offered. ‘Got himself a career in meta-analysis of data, whatever the hell that means. He’s tried to explain it but it’s beyond me. He could be the next Julian Assange for all I know … Ah, here we are.’ He glided his new car to the curb as gracefully as a commodore manoeuvring his super-yacht into an open berth.
‘The old lawnmower shop?’
‘You remember it? It’s been on our books for a while, but as soon as you told me what you were after I thought this might just be the job.’
The front door was reluctant to open and Jonty had to fiddle around, waggling and pushing and pulling the handle, and swearing under his breath, and ultimately laughing at himself as it came free. ‘It could do with a spruce-up, that’s for sure,’ he said of the front room, but I could see immediately that it was a
place that had been waiting for new and unknown novelties. The dusty lino was the same one we’d first had in the kitchen at home, a pattern so familiar it was stamped all over my childhood. Jonty knelt in the corner and peeled some away to show me the matai boards underneath. ‘They’ll polish up beautiful,’ he said.
Appealing future shapes were already beginning to blossom in front of my eyes.
‘You could get a cross beam in through here and knock out this middle wall, I reckon,’ Jonty said, opening the double fire doors to the back area where they used to have the high-spec models on display. I’d once been sent to search for my father and come across him in here, gazing longingly at a self-propelled mulching mower. ‘Electric starter,’ he’d commented. He might think this a fitting place to have his nest-egg spent on.
We walked across to the floor to ceiling windows, and for a moment were speechless, mesmerised by the view across the valley – the patchwork of speckled rooftops, underneath which small domestic dramas were unfolding, and beyond that hills that were splendid with trees. A perfect place to sit for coffee and cake.
‘Good parking hereabouts too,’ Jonty said.
The game of him
When a rhino suddenly comes forging out of the brush, your husband’s instinct is to stand steadfast and natural, and the rhino merely sniffs at him, coughs up a complicated gift and moves on. It is only you that’s left feeling trampled.
Fame has its own mercurial sequence. Inquiries are coming in, the phone is ringing – record companies asking about Jed’s newest recordings, promoters interested to know if he is considering touring. People are downloading songs from his second album. This new movement appears to have arisen from that commentary published in the weekend edition, although it is something to be cautious about. There are still some people out there who choose to believe, will probably always believe, he has some unhealthy ulterior motives.
You are curious now about these unreleased songs you’ve never heard and that people are actively wanting. You wait until Jed is asleep beside you, then slip out of bed, pull an old jersey over your nightie and cross the lawn to his shed. Inside his studio dust motes float across the light from the ceiling bulb, and you breathe in the bitter ion-charged air that the permanently left-on computer equipment creates. All you have to do to make it play is one click of the mouse.
Knowing what I know / and doing what I do / and bluffing if I need to / to stay ahead of you
What? Does he mean you? Is he bluffing you? Is this a song about the state of your marriage? When you’d spat out that accusation in the glasshouse about Jeannie, there’d been that instant when he looked very slightly relieved. Is that the sort of bluff he is referencing? Did he get the better of you in that moment?
Scrolling back through your mind for similar behaviours, it suddenly comes to you where that photo they’d used in the paper was taken. He’d just come off stage, a big outdoor gig, a New Year’s Eve concert at the Mount, his band the last of six acts, playing up to the midnight countdown. ‘Surfin’ again’ was having a seasonal resurgence and had once more become an inescapable beach anthem. Everywhere that day kids with sun-bleached hair would chant lyrics at him and shake his hand and, if anywhere near the shoreline, offer him their boards. That evening there were around five thousand in the audience and a huge roar went around the crowd as soon as he played the first two bars. It seemed like every single person there knew the words and loved the song and, in that moment, loved him.
By the time he came off stage he was bathed in a certain kind of glory, pumped up with golden adrenaline. People were coming up to him: ‘Great gig’, ‘You played a blinder, mate.’ There was a photographer there and Jed had swung you around wildly and kissed you, but had taken you by surprise, knocking you off balance, and you’d grabbed hold of him with that momentary look on your face, and were snapped for posterity just like that. It’s true you were feeling a little envious of the acclaim, and knew that the great roaring flood of admiration had hit him like an infusion of buzzing energy, looking for somewhere to be spent. That kind of energy couldn’t be exhausted with a withdrawal to bed together. You’d stayed up all night, drinking with the band and the some others at a nightclub; at some stage the two of you had a quickie in the club toilets, and later he’d dropped a couple of pills somebody had given him and was spouting a whole lot of madly illogical crap, and people around him were sucking it all up as if his words were beads of great wisdom. You’d begun to suspect you could be pregnant and had secreted the thought away, pretending to drink but actually keeping a single glass going for the whole night. Your sober hyper-awareness in the midst of all that madness made you feel confused by how big he had become – those songs he’d made, jamming together with two mates from school, had grown and grown and taken on life until they hit this – and a feeling started to establish itself that just as his songs took on fame and no longer completely belonged to him, the part of him that was famous belonged more to his fans and no longer completely to you.
It was obvious that being on stage, all eyes on him – his abilities having that power to enthral a seething mass of people – must have its own intoxication. Who could not come away from that without being tempted into a massive, swaggering sense of euphoria? You were included in it that night, but it was dawning on you how much was about to change, and you remember, now, consciously hoping that in the future some well-evolved side of you would have the strength to forgive anything he might do inside the temporary effervescence of one of those post-performance highs.
Why couldn’t you then? Why did you get yourself in such a mess over it?
You think you understand me / but you have no real idea / how my mind is moving / while my body’s standing here
To take these words too literally might be a narrow interpretation, not allowing for inventive licence. This might not be his own voice here. The truth is, he never was a surfer (had to bluff his way out of not accepting those boards all that summer), and there is that other song he wrote about the weightless fall from the perspective of his junkie friend. Maybe it is a song about your marriage, but not from his viewpoint; from yours. You bluffing him? So does he know? Is it paranoid to think this this might be an accusation? You’ll never know what I am going to do. Maybe nothing, maybe something. Ever since that was spoken, those twin emotions of dread and optimism have been competing within you. Only as time passes can you let more light fall on optimism.
The question you probably need answered is: when exactly did Jed write this?
Knowing what I know / and doing what I do / and bluffing if I need to / to stay ahead of you
Perhaps you are coming at this too personally. Try out some detachment. Try to imagine how these lyrics will be received by those who saw that online posting and had their idea of Jed warped and skewered by the word pervert. Even if they followed what came later, the girl’s attempt to repudiate the claims, the publishing of the interview – these words might still dislodge some unsettling residue. With these words, he might come out of it all as a bit of a manipulative beast. Should he be advised against the danger of reigniting a fervour for hating him again? Are you even in a position to advise him now?
Whatever he feels, you’ve come to understand that it is unlikely to be expressed directly. He’s always kept himself aloof, needing some separateness to be creative, a little divisiveness. Who knows, perhaps he thinks he needs a little secret rage too. He ferments his ideas and conflicts into things to be played with here in this studio. You’d had a way of admiring that once. You’d believed that a man who had, at his source, the ability to create a beautiful object out of nothing more than a thought was, for a woman like you, deeply desirable. That fathomless, inaccessible part of him that could conjure up magical surprises used to give you a sort of coquettish thrill, but over the years the mundane trudge of day-to-day existence has dulled your receptors to it. A better you might have enjoyed his specialness instead of constantly registering the faultiness in the way he went about
ordinary life.
leaning in to hear me / looking for what you know / I’m not the man you think I am / and this is just the show
Scoping around on his computer, now, to see when this was first recorded, you find that there are files for lots of other songs, hundreds of them, some just scraps perhaps, recorded ideas. All this time you’ve been half-thinking of him as being in some kind of dead-end stasis, refusing to rise to his talents, squirreling himself away, but really he’s been prodigiously creating work, continuously, unassumingly, and in a way that is so intensely private that it is truly, absolutely free.
You won’t open the files to these songs tonight. You will ask him instead, maybe tomorrow, to play them for you, and somehow you have no doubt that when you listen to these songs they will be good. Because really, even when you’ve been frustrated by it, you’ve always understood Jed’s need for domain over his inner life, his artistic need to feed his core. He was seven when he started writing songs, you once heard him say in an interview. And it had struck you at the time: also seven when his mother died, suspended forever as an idea of perfection. By the time you’d met him, he’d already developed that habit of turning over everything he came across within his songs – making it into something interesting that he could hold up to the light, placing it all in front of the pair of approving eyes that never were.
Somehow you’d let yourself forget what you’ve always known. It wasn’t ever fame that he was after, more that his songwriting was the search for a treasure he knew he would never find. He came up against all the outside forces that told him the only way to legitimise his activity was to put it in front of an audience, and he always approached performing as a simple offer to entertain. If that offer wasn’t received enthusiastically, he wasn’t interested in pushing.
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 23