‘That’s okay,’ said Florence, ‘I enjoyed it.’
And she had. Curling her hand around the microphone in one of the Furies’ mother’s garages (Florence didn’t think Alecto lived with her mother), she’d felt its silvery curve almost leap into the hollow of her palm.
‘One, two, three, four,’ the drummer had counted in the band and Florence had felt a surge of dizzy joy as she opened her mouth to sing.
She might have overdone it, startling the band with the force of her voice, and the surprising, rolling trill of her contralto.
Christian was right, she was too ‘show-tuney’, years of performing with The Saint Claires had burnished her delivery with all sorts of flourishes she had learnt at her parents’ feet. The slight pause before a beat drop, the casual finger click, the sudden, intense stare deep into the eyes of one audience member who felt the jolt and thought, ‘I am here, I matter.’ And then there was the invitation.
She heard her father’s voice. ‘And now let’s go on a road trip together, let’s go back, Amanda. You coming, Florence? How about you, Isolde? Puck, way at the back, yes? Then let’s go down to Hollow’s Road.’
It was shameless, Florence thought, the way her father had played the crowd, the way they swayed beneath his almost touch, their hands raised in mirror images of whatever Lucas Saint Claire was doing.
But it was also easy, and she could do it too.
They all could, even Puck if he could be coaxed from behind the drum kit, a wave of his dark hair low on his face, a shy grin beneath it.
The Saint Claire children had inherited their parents’ starry threads of DNA, and Florence knew by the end of her first audition with the Furies that she was not a back-up singer.
She was like her father. Too much.
The next time she auditioned, she decided, she would move to the front.
Florence was twenty-five years old, and she had not sung professionally since she was sixteen – almost a decade of biting her own lip.
She was not sure which song had pulled her to her feet that morning and sent her to Christian Altman’s door, but it was not done with her yet.
A month or so later she found herself in a freezing basement bar, its walls patched with peeling band posters, with the two slightly hungover women who would become the Nightshades.
Orla, in a ribbed black and white sweater, was tiny with short blonde hair and eyes ringed in smudged mascara, making her look like a slightly pissed raccoon, and Veronica, in some sort of complicated trench coat and boots, was so beautiful, it made Florence want to laugh out loud.
What must it be like, she wondered, to just walk around like that?
Veronica was tall, with a waterfall of red hair, and she spoke with a slight American lilt, leaning, Florence thought, towards the South by way of Brooklyn. It was a hybrid of an accent, and in all the years Florence knew her, she would never find out exactly which United State Veronica Allen came from. Glamazonia, Orla said.
The Nightshades’ advertisement in High Notes had read: Working Girl Needed. We are a jazz standards/cabaret vocals duo looking for a front woman. Must have professional experience. Must be available for regular rehearsals and gigs. Own car preferable. No Swiggers/Smokers/Shrinking Violets.
Florence liked that it was all business. Whoever wrote the ad was looking for a working girl, not a nightingale, and Florence, despite her name, was never one of those.
Florence guessed Swiggers meant drinkers, and also liked that whoever wrote it went in for a little alliteration. She didn’t smoke, but she supposed some people might consider her a violet of the shrinking variety. But I’m not, Florence thought, not the Viola odorata kind anyway. Odorata were the woodland variety of violets, beloved of poets and forever peeking out coyly from beneath clumps of clover. No, she was much more of a Viola hederacea, the Australian native violet, not as pretty, she thought, but hardy, and given the right conditions, a thriver.
In the freezing basement, Florence looked at Orla and Veronica and decided to thrive.
‘So, wot experience ’ave you ’ad?’ Orla asked.
‘I’ve actually done quite a lot of singing, mostly back-up,’ Florence answered her.
Orla nodded, narrowed her eyes.
‘Done any lead?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘We need someone who can cover all bases. We’re a straight cabaret outfit, with sprinkles of jazz and blues. Let’s hear you then,’ Veronica said crisply. ‘Only one way to find out . . .’
Florence nodded and stepped towards the mic, this time cradling it in her hands as she stood still behind it.
‘“Stars in your eyes, love takes me by surprise . . .”‘ Orla and Veronica sat on bar stools as Florence sang the old jazz standard, Orla’s eyes wet and shiny by the time Florence finished.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that was not wot I was expecting,’ while Veronica stood up and said, ‘The job is yours if you want it, Florence Jones,’ and the way she said Jones, as if there was an underline beneath it, told Florence that Veronica knew it was fake.
But Veronica Allen didn’t care, she was going to insist on all cash payments anyway, paid on the night by the owner, with a deposit up front, just in case.
‘I’ve been burnt before,’ she told Orla and Florence, ‘although the last guy who tried is at the bottom of the Hudson River.’
Florence laughed, but Orla didn’t, and for a moment Florence wondered if it might be true.
Veronica Allen looked like she was capable of anything.
As far as Veronica and Orla were concerned, Florence could call herself anything she liked, the three of them in it together now, this business of make-believe. Orla, she would find out, had learnt it at the foot of her father’s drum kit, her teenage years spent singing with him at jazz clubs around the East End when Carol-Lea was working late and Seamus O’Loan was meant to be babysitting. And Veronica? Somewhere in the Bible Belt of America, Veronica Allen had grown up singing gospel music in a church where her father was a preacher and her mother did the flowers. She had graduated to jazz and blues by way of marriage to a saxophonist she never spoke about, then graduated from him by way of a plane ticket to Australia.
That Veronica Allen was the daughter of a preacher seemed incongruous to Florence, like an azure kingfisher being the progeny of a house sparrow, but Orla swore it was true. As for the husband, the only time Florence asked Veronica about her marriage, Veronica had replied, ‘You know when you buy a new a pair of boots and you love them so much that you wear them out? Well it was like that, Florence,’ and left it at that.
Florence didn’t press her any further. Not doing so was an arrangement that suited them all. It suited her that Veronica and Orla, having both grown up overseas, may never have heard of the Saint Claire Swingers. But if they had, and Florence was fairly sure they would have heard of Lucas at least, they did not prod or push her.
They all left it at that, one way or another.
After that first audition, Florence became Miss Suki easily, just as Orla and Veronica slipped into their roles as the Nightshades as smoothly as their silk dressing gowns slid onto their shoulders.
They began rehearsing at Orla’s flat, watched by the flickering and, Florence felt, slightly judgemental eyes of Orla’s cat Thomas.
Veronica choreographed each song in the set, adding in the hand claps and clicks handed down from one generation of girl group to another, women who wore go-go boots or cropped leather jackets and had eyes that said they could take or leave you, but they would probably leave you.
They rehearsed for several weeks before Veronica booked their first gig as part of a cabaret festival. Applying her makeup in the dressing room beforehand, Florence knew she was overdoing it. But becoming more Miss Suki and less Florence Saint Claire in front of her own eyes calmed her, and she applied thick makeup like lacquer, watching herself disappear beneath it.
‘Jesus, Florence,’ Orla said the first time Florence lifted her head from the mirro
r’s image to meet Orla’s eyes. ‘We’re trying to entertain the punters, not scare them ’alf to death.’
Veronica glided in and said, ‘Oh I didn’t know it was the Day of the Dead,’ and Florence resolved to be a little less heavy-handed in future – less Black Dahlia, more Water Lily.
That first night, when Florence stood with Orla and Veronica on either side of her like bookends, their bodies held in silhouette behind a backlit screen – ‘We look like statues,’ Orla had complained in rehearsal; ‘We look like Greek goddesses,’ Veronica had corrected her – Florence wondered wildly, in the few seconds before the screen opened, if she might choke.
What would it feel like if her limbs took hold of themselves again? If her cheeks flared, or her throat folded in on itself?
Puck flashed into her mind, her little brother sitting at the wheel of a homemade go-cart Amanda – was it really Amanda, surely it was Lucas? – had made with them, Puck’s hands on the rope, his eyes on Florence. ‘Here goes nothing!’ he’d said as the cart edged towards the lip of the hill.
‘Here goes nothing!’ Florence echoed as she lifted her head to sing.
After that it was easy, Florence’s fingers automatically closing around the microphone, her voice opening up like a flower’s throat.
Richard had been right all those years ago, it was like falling off a bike, but only, Florence thought as the Nightshades shimmied off the stage, if you were dressed like a woman who meant business and not a woodland elf.
The three women met once or twice a week to rehearse, and although Veronica and Orla were close friends outside the Nightshades, going to dance classes together and causing havoc every now and again in nightclubs, Florence did not join them. She liked both of them, particularly Orla, who she knew her mother would deem ‘plucky’, but she didn’t want to blur the edges of her two lives. They were so entwined but so far removed from each other, even Florence sometimes didn’t know how she pulled it off.
I am like a superhero, she smiled to herself the second night she performed as Miss Suki, pulling on her midnight-blue, full-length gloves.
I am like one of those characters in a cartoon strip – by day a mild-mannered gardener, occasional children’s storyteller and lover of flowers, by night an exotic lounge singer peeping out from behind lamé curtains.
It was, she reflected, quite the leap.
It was also quite the secret, and Florence had always enjoyed secrets.
The backyard of the family home was probably still riddled with the small earthy spaces she had made herself as a child, furiously digging at the dirt with her spade. If her parents thought there was something peculiar about Florence spending much of her time digging out hidey-holes made of curved earth, they didn’t say.
As an adult, Florence could never quite work out if Lucas and Amanda’s complete refusal to put a name to any of their children’s behaviours, much less address some of the quirkier ones – Florence’s dug-outs, Puck’s vanishing acts, Isolde’s Isoldeness – was wilfully neglectful or the greatest act of parental brilliance she’d heard of.
Lucas would wave cheerfully at her from the music room window as she emerged from yet another clumpy bush, arms streaked with dirt; Amanda would sometimes say over dinner, ‘Did you build any nice holes today, darling?’ and Florence continued behaving, from the ages of about seven to ten, as a very small, very industrious human mole.
It was obvious, she thought, what she had been trying to do – find a small space away from the bigness of her family, although it was more than that.
Florence loved the feeling, when she had squeezed into one of her tiny curved caves, of being of the earth.
She would crouch against the damp wall of it at her back, breathe in the petrichor smell of the rocks and clay, and feel the thrill of concealment.
As an adult, she would also wonder how safe her hand-hewn holes were and what her parents would have done in the event of a cave-in.
‘Don’t be so dramatic, darling,’ Amanda said. ‘They were only about a foot deep, we would have got you out quick smart.’
She was probably right, but as a child it had seemed to Florence that she was deep beneath the earth’s surface – at least past the bedrock and the topsoil – and into the belly of its silence. That this turned out not to be the case didn’t bother Florence at all. She could still smell the sharp scents of her hidey holes every time she stepped into the East Elm section of the Mount Bell forest, or feel the thrill of concealment when Miss Suki shimmered into the spotlight, the tiny sequined discs of her dress sending shots of luminous colour into the light.
She loved the anonymity of Miss Suki, the way that, while the Nightshades flirted their way around the stage, she kept a cool distance, and if anyone in the audience ever raised their fingers to form a letter L on their forehead, Florence wouldn’t know because Miss Suki never deigned to look at them.
Miss Suki never caught and held their eyes. Miss Suki never gave her audience ‘maximum wattage’. Miss Suki didn’t give a stuff.
Florence thought she was wonderful.
But despite her best efforts to keep that same sort of cool distance between herself and the Nightshades off the stage, Veronica and Orla were not, as Orla said ‘’aving it’.
Every now and again they insisted the three of them go out, and tonight it was dinner at an Italian restaurant Orla had heard about and then drinks at East Elm’s rowdiest pub, the Gate House.
Getting ready that night, Florence was just putting on her silver hoop earrings when Isolde surprised her by walking into her room – Florence thought she had a Mercy Jones rehearsal.
‘Going out?’ Isolde asked, stretching her leg against the architrave of the door.
‘Mmm-mmm,’ Florence answered.
‘Who with?’
‘Just some friends . . .’
‘You don’t have any friends,’ Isolde pointed out, not, Florence thought, unfairly.
‘Yes I do, Issy . . . you’ve just never met them.’
‘Well I might come and meet them tonight then.’
Florence knew by Issy’s tone, by the slight lift of her chin and the way she was now leaning into the doorframe, that her sister was in a scrappy mood.
Florence headed her off at the pass. ‘Well you can’t. They’re friends from my course, and we’re meeting up to talk about the next module.’
Issy opened her mouth in an exaggerated yawn.
It had become necessary a few months after their first gig for Florence to invent a reason for her increasingly frequent outings. Mostly Puck and Isolde were out at night gigging with Mercy Jones, but sometimes if they didn’t have a gig and Florence did, it became tricky. So she had invented a part-time hydroponics course at the local TAFE, knowing that her family would accept this readily and certainly not follow it up.
Florence’s interest in growing things was a source of both general indifference and occasional hilarity to her family.
‘What do you do, darling, in that forest all day long?’ Amanda had once asked over dinner.
‘Smokes pot probably,’ Isolde had answered.
Florence had rolled her eyes. ‘Actually,’ she’d said, ‘what we usually do is pick a few magic mushrooms and cook them up for lunch, and then we all run around naked together howling at the trees.’
‘Your father and I had magic mushrooms once,’ Amanda had said, and launched into a tale involving hiking and sea caves and rolling around with Lucas wrapped in seaweed, Florence’s forays into the forest immediately forgotten.
Now Isolde appeared to have lost interest too. ‘Think I’ll give it a miss then, not that I don’t think it would be extremely interesting to have a night out with the plant people – where are you going?’
Florence sometimes saw her life as a Venn diagram. On one side was her family and her work with the Green Team, on the other Miss Suki and the Nightshades, and in between lay a neutral, empty space where no one ventured, which was exactly how she liked it.
She
looked at Isolde and laughed. ‘None of your business, Inspector Poirot,’ she answered lightly, walking out the door.
At La Pinisa, the Italian restaurant Orla had booked, there were a few people waiting at the front entrance to get in, and one middle-aged man was becoming agitated at a waiter, his breath coming out in indignant white puffs in the night air.
When they were smaller, she and Isolde would pretend to smoke on cold days, putting two fingers to their mouths and pursing their lips, sucking in imaginary smoke and then blowing it out in one long stream, pretending to be Amanda.
‘Darling,’ Florence would say, dropping her voice to a throaty thrum, ‘try not to glower so at the audience when you sing, Florence.’
‘And you, Isolde,’ Issy would echo, ‘do try to keep still on stage. I said to your father it’s like having an electric eel up there.’
They would collapse in laughter, the two sisters wrapped up in each other’s skin, sharing a joke only they, and not even Puck, would understand.
Daughter jokes. About mothers. Particularly their mother.
Florence heard her name being called and saw Orla waving her over from inside the restaurant. Florence walked over to a corner table where Veronica sat, a waiter hovering near her like a march fly at the beach.
‘Hi girls!’ Florence said in what she thought was the right tone, the right level of enthusiasm. Ridiculous, she knew, to worry about such things, but she hadn’t had much practice at girls’ nights out.
Here was the other thing about being a child performer: that’s exactly what you were. Timing. Hitting your mark. Maximum wattage. Stage right. Stage left. Do you like singing with your family, Florence? Does your dad ever give you any advice?
All that, Florence knew how to negotiate. She knew where to stand and where to turn, and how to breathe so the microphone didn’t pick it up. She knew how to answer talk show hosts in a way that would make the parents in the audience laugh and wish it was their little girl sitting on the couch in the studio in a pair of adorable denim overalls.
For Florence – and Isolde and Puck – the tricky part was real life.
They had all grown up with adults, and outside of school hours. None of them had – save for Florence’s Year of Living Not Very Dangerously with Amy Burton in her long, white socks – many interactions with people their age. Puck didn’t care, Isolde didn’t notice, but Florence did, she heard it all and saw it all from beneath her sidelong glances. Snatches of conversations about slumber parties and bike rides to the local pool, and later about lipstick shades and boys who pretended they hated you because they liked you, and later still, women would speak of girls’ nights out and weekends away, and to Florence it sounded like they were visiting foreign lands even if they were just going down the coast for a night.
The Best Kind of Beautiful Page 8