Cherry Bomb 273s1i

PRAISE FOR CHERRY BOMB

‘Though the coating is rock’n’roll, the tough interior is about the capricious, bewildering whims of adolescence and young adulthood. Nina Dall is as singular and mercurial a character as I’ve ever been charmed and terrified to meet.’

TIM ROGERS

‘Valentish has nailed the desperate, sociopathic scramble to reach the dizzying, depraved heights of rock’n’roll, where if you don’t hate your bandmates on some level, you’re doing it wrong. I laughed, I blushed, I actually guffawed. I couldn’t put it down.’

ABBE MAY

‘Jenny Valentish is hands-down one of my favourite writers in Australia. Her first novel, Cherry Bomb, is full of punch, charm and sleek observations.’

ADALITA

CHERRY BOMB JENNY VALENTISH

Author’s note: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental . . . with the exception of Molly Meldrum.

First published in 2014

Copyright © Jenny Valentish 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that isters it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 1000

Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 76011 081 9

eISBN 978 1 74343 777 3

Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

1 KINGS CROSS SHANGRI-LA

2 ING THE BAIN MARIES

3 MEN

4 BAD MANAGER

5 DUMMY

6 AWARD FOR BEST PASH

7 IT’S ON

8 THE GOLD COAST

9 THE BIG CHEESE

10 THE UTE MUSTER

11 CHEAP TRICK

12 FIGHT LIKE A GIRL

13 LOS ANGELES

14 TALL POPPIES

15 ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME

16 THE AMERICAN TOUR

17 INTERVENTION

18 I TOUCH MYSELF

19 TAMWORTH

20 SOAP SCUM

21 WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

22 BOSS

23 TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP

24 NO NO NO

CHERRY BOMB SOUNDTRACK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PROLOGUE

An hour before the biggest gig of our career, we sent a roadie on stage and instructed him to stretch a silver line of gaffer tape down the centre of it.

Rose and I watched from the wings.

‘That’s my side,’ she said pointing to the left, which was always her side. ‘Do not come over that line.’

Less than forty-five minutes after that I tried to strangle her in the people mover. Then I strapped on my guitar and walked out into the lights.

1

KINGS CROSS SHANGRI-LA

At dusk, I waited for Rose outside Glasshouse Studios and smoked a Marlboro Red. I smoked Marlboro Lights in private and Reds for public appearances.

Kings Cross was lit up like a kids’ party under the Coca-Cola sign. It tugged at something inside me. If we weren’t in the middle of recording a song with John Villiers, I’d beat a path down Darlinghurst Road towards the El Alamein fountain—the scene of many of our early photo shoots—past the sex shops and bars full of dead-eyed groovers, to duck into my favourite twinkling bottle shop. I’d been drinking for three years but I still couldn’t get over the marvel of going into a bottle shop whenever I wanted and knowing there was nothing anybody could do about it; unless they checked my ID too closely.

But no, we were working, working. I squinted down Bayswater Road, along the trails of red tail-lights, towards the bouncers on the strip. Watching them watching me. I shifted my posture. My cousin Rose (vox, bass) always reminded us that we should act sexy at all times, as if a TV camera were constantly following us. The way I rested the sole of my boot against the wall made my skirt fall slyly across my thigh, but if anyone saw the curl of my mouth with my cigarette in it, no hands, they’d realise I was daring them to even try.

Lately I’d started telling everyone that I was from Kings Cross. The western suburbs, where I was really raised, were so boring that you were duty-bound to become an underage binge-drinking statistic. The trick was not to stay there. I was always appraising and eradicating my flaws, from embarrassing lyrics or

eyebrows plucked into apostrophes to being identifiably from Parramatta. I watched the greats on YouTube—your Courtneys, your Gwens, your Stevies— and I learned.

I didn’t know it yet, but one day my Wikipedia entry would begin thus: ‘Nina Dall is one half of Sydney pop-punk band The Dolls. Since forming the group as a sixteen-year-old with her cousin Rose Dall under the guidance of veteran producer John Villiers, she has written and recorded one gold album, It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns (2012), and one platinum album, Tender Hooks (2014), and has taken home six ARIA awards.’

There will be more photographs of me in existence than of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and any visiting dignitaries put together. I will only stay overnight in suburbs with a Park Hyatt.

Rose was still inside Studio A on the leather lounge, trying a new lip gloss that created a chemical reaction with lips to make them swell. I knew she was really snatching extra look-at-me minutes from the band who were loading in, probably asking who their manager was and if they were signed yet.

I was always waiting for Rose, mainly because she was obsessed with her hair and not mindful of other people’s needs. I don’t want you to dislike her, though. A lot of her behaviour was probably due to the meds; specifically the antianxiety pills she’d been on since starting high school. I wasn’t sure if it was her four-bedroom (plus games room) house or the lustrous shine of her inky hair that made her anxious, but those pills could really make you mean.

My hair never kept anybody waiting. I could see it then in the screen of my phone, because I’d set the camera function to reverse. It was home-bleached blonde with black roots, and I parted it in a curtain to one side and messed it

behind my ear on the other. It was waif, but, like, hobo waif. My tits were small, but in the style of Kate Moss.

When Rose finally slunk out the front of Glasshouse with a million bag straps, bra straps and bangles clanking around her elbows, she was holding the lip gloss in front of her, as if to fend off an argument. Her nails were Sportsgirl sea-foam blue.

‘I can feel it tingling, but there’s nothing happening,’ she reported as I pulled myself away from my phone screen. She was blocking me with her sunnies, so I fronted her and pulled a stray hair out of the sticky smear on her mouth. We’d been grooming each other since we could .

I wore: slouch T-shirt over aqua bra, Catholic-schoolgirl skirt (for the record, I went to a mixed public school), baseball boots.

Rose wore: the same, but pink bra and Doc Martens.

We liked to stay at the forefront of developments in cosmetics and fashion, and Rose had cultivated for The Dolls a distinctive look: one coloured bra strap hanging down, plum lips, cruel cat’s eyes, beauty spots. It was a bit retro. A bit Countdown 1985, when everyone else at our school was all about 2010. The eighties and nineties were a more romantic time for music.

Nowadays record companies had exclusive deals with TV shows that fed the winners straight into their mincing machines. Shows such as Australian Idol, the primetime slot in which people were recognised for being special and were airlifted out of their provincial predicaments.

‘I once drank a tequila that made my lips swell up like lilos the next day,’ I told Rose, pushing myself hips-first away from the wall and stubbing my cigarette under the toe of my boot. ‘Or like Li-Lo’s.’

Rose wasn’t listening. She was grimly fluffing her hair in the reflection of the window and popping her lips to ensure even application. She finally shot me a direct look. ‘You don’t have to come on to every guy we work with, you know. There’s going to be a lot of them.’

That was really why we were here. We had come outside specifically to talk about John Villiers—and how we would have to be very careful, vis-a-vis John Villiers and Alannah Dall.

•

There’s some footage of Alannah Dall back in 1986, looking annoyed outside the Parramatta Stadium. Her band shuffles behind her, holding their instruments, out of focus. She’s being interviewed by Molly Meldrum from Countdown. I’ve watched it a million times on YouTube. He says, ‘First the Queen of England opens the stadium, now it’s graced by the princess of Parramatta herself. Does this feel like a special place to you, Alannah?’

Special place, I’d always think at this moment. I’d have made a joke about that.

‘I shouldn’t think so, Molly,’ she says, her eyes scanning his cowboy hat down to his pointy shoes. ‘But no matter how far you run, they’ll always try to drag you

back to where you came from.’

I knew that everyone in the music scene wanted me to it the Dall connection, so I’d just come right out and say it. Mum’s older sister was Alannah Dall. Everyone knew who Alannah Dall was when you started singing one of her songs or pulled out your iPod. Everyone had heard the smash hits about Pink Camaros and High Maintenance, which was actually about drugs. Everyone knew she’d dated the dude in Roxy Music, and was arrested for indecent exposure in Toronto, and flew into Drought Aid in a helicopter with her own wind machine in tow. I could pull out my wallet and show you a family snap to prove it, of Rose and me at just five years old, with our mothers frowsy and tight-lipped next to this exotic bird with the big hair. When we got studio time with someone as hot as John Villiers as young as we did, people wanted an ission of nepotism.

Alannah was a stunner in an era when it was acceptable for a pop star to look like a plumber’s apprentice, or a sequined dinner lady, or a girl next door with a poodle perm and buck teeth. She was flawlessly glamorous, as though she’d risen from the cover of a Dungeons & Dragons manual, the sort of vision spraypainted on the hood of a Valiant Charger. Her dusky-rose pout and blonde wings of hair were given a soft focus for ballads, and she needed nothing more. ‘The Alannah’ was the second-most requested cut after ‘The Princess Di’.

Rose and I grew up studying our aunt’s videos and coveting her safari suits with chunky orange jewellery, her satin jumpsuits, rubber bracelets, lace hair bows and stilettos. Some of it wound up in our dress-up box. That outrageous net outfit she wore to shake the hand of Bob Hawke; there were photographs of us both modelling it, draping ourselves over each other in Rose’s parents’ kitchen with the microwave still in the shot.

TOP 5 HAND-ME-DOWNS FROM AUNT ALANNAH

1. Frame your face in videos by slicing your fingers through the front of your hair. Look sideways through your arm disdainfully. Sing.

2. Tilt your head back and bare your teeth—but only after applying a slick of red lip gloss. Stroke the curve of your throat, down to your chest.

3. Do a double take at the camera at a dramatic point of the song.

4. Live your life like a camera is watching you.

5. Maintain mystery in the press.

Being the blonde, I fancied I should look more like our aunt and searched my stupid face nightly for the evidence. My inner critic had already set up shop in my ear, busily reviewing everything I did, far less forgivingly than any journalist I would come to encounter.

Face: an eclectic collection of detestable features. Zero out of five stars.

Alannah’s peers—TV personalities such as Molly Meldrum, rock stars such as Danger Michaels, production gods such as John Villiers—became as engrained in my psyche as she did. Nobody at school even knew who Molly was, but each night in front of the bathroom mirror—appliquéd in my denim shorts and bra top against Mum’s authentically vintage avocado-green tiles—I imagined being

interviewed by him. He asked me questions that cracked me wide like a coconut; revealed my tender meat to the world.

And at what age did you realise you could rely only on yourself?

Seven.

Seven. Molly scanned the studio audience to make sure they understood the gravity of this. But still you managed not to let on that anything was wrong; not to anyone.

I met my eyes solemnly in the mirror and absorbed his iration.

Not to anyone, Molly. I am a vault.

Since Dad disappeared to be all hard-done-by in a different shit suburb, the focus on me at home had intensified like I was an ant under a microscope. At weekends I removed myself from the gravitational pull of Mum’s grief and spent as much time as possible a few train stops away at Rose’s house, in a part of Westmead the other side of Pazzamazza that real estate agents called ‘leafy’. We prepped our career by writing out Alannah’s lyrics on our ring binders and scouring her 1997 memoir, Pour Me Another. Just as pubescent girls in decades past had read Judy Blume’s Forever, we folded over page corners that signalled cocaine use and sex in radio-station broom cupboards. It was so inspiring. She was our Shangri-La.

It was Aunt Alannah’s lack of interest in us that turned her into even more of a legend in our eyes. We relished the slightest flicker of approval like starving dogs thrown a scrap, never tiring of asking when she would next visit. It had been six years since she’d come to Taronga Zoo with us. She and my mother had a fight while we were watching the falcon display and we were marched out to the car before we could even get to the ice cream. ‘I could only hope to be as frantically busy as Alannah,’ Mum was liable to sneer, ‘but I am just a single parent with a job to hold down.’

The need to stake my claim on Alannah ahead of Rose was intense. After Dad left, Mum and I went back to her maiden name of Dall, and then Rose Rogers started calling herself Dall too, even though she had no legal right.

When I was a little kid I hoped Alannah would adopt me, but upon turning fourteen I decided to be more proactive. I wrote her countless letters in pink curlicue with pictures in the margins and tried everything to get her to write back: queries about what hair product she used in the video for ‘Accidents and Incidents’; wild hypotheses about what Michael Hutchence would have been like, which begged correction; bright observations that I’d better be careful cutting my arms because I once nearly hit an artery; despair about being anchored to my mother’s gloom; witty remarks about Rose’s character compared to the character of those rather less obvious than she.

It was my pondering about ing a local producer named Vince Rice to work on our demos that finally provoked a response. Such was my inability to grasp who Alannah might really be, I read her email in my head as though she were Nigella Lawson.

Nina, she purred. Vis-a-vis your demos. Please don’t go anywhere near that ridiculous cowboy Vince Rice, or ANYBODY ELSE who works out of that studio. They are thieves

and crooks and they WILL rip you off.

You need somebody with a solid reputation and an ear to the ground. I’ve booked you into Glasshouse Studios in Kings Cross for seven days with John Villiers, a producer I’ve worked with a lot. He will take care of you. Don’t worry about $$—he owes me.

I hope you work through your other problems.

A.

•

Vis-a-vis John Villiers and Alannah Dall . . . I could tell that Rose was pained that I went home with the engineer a few days into tracking, even though he was cool and never mentioned it to John Villiers. I was thankful for that, because it turned out John Villiers was exactly my type: much older, steady blue eyes, able forearms, faded flannel shirts, kids, divorce pending. He winked at me when I accidentally dropped my Coke all over the floor and from that moment on he was a marked man. (If you’ve bought our albums you’ll have sung along to my exaltations to John Villiers on ‘Svengali’ and ‘El Capitan’, and been none the wiser as to who they were about.) He was inside the studio right now and I could practically feel the heat through four inches of brick wall.

One acquired a certain studied indifference towards recording studios over time, but at first Rose and I had been cripplingly shy around the moody engineers and mysterious bands ing in and out. We’d head straight for the safety of the couch of Studio A and sit staring at our phones like Tweedledum and

Tweedledee.

‘Bring some things in from home to help you relax,’ Alannah had suggested, down the line from somewhere glittery on the Gold Coast, where she lived these days. Alannah once caused massive fire damage to a studio in Sydney while tripping heavily. Legend had it a tapestry draped on the wall for ambience was ignited by a candle. ‘Make it your space. Candles, incense, wine; whatever it takes.’

John Villiers (no one ever said ‘John’; it was always ‘John Villiers’) had his name on the back of every great Australian album since the late eighties, including my aunt’s last ever release before she mysteriously disappeared from public view. I’d been working on him all week, leaning against the vocal booth with my back arched between takes or folding languidly over the desk next to him, letting my curtain of hair drop like one of the seven veils. Once, I started lisping into the mic like Gossling or Julia Stone, just so I could hear him laugh through the cans. You got a good sense of someone by their laugh. I’d come up with a new, husky one like Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation.

John Villiers was doing incredible things with The Dolls’ songs, preserving their vim while revving them up like a Mack truck. He said it was all about capturing the unbearable urgency of being a teenager; that sense that everything comes in limited supply with a short window of opportunity. He said it revolved around the cause and effect of hormonal impulses and bad decisions. Since the fifties, old songwriter creeps had tried to bottle it, but it came most authentically from the horse’s mouth, he said: ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones, ‘Alright’ by Supergrass, ‘Can’t Say No’ by The Dolls.

John Villiers ed that urgency, and he reckoned we had it locked deep inside us, like a glowing gemstone in our bellies. He actually got us to touch our bellies as we sang, to feel our diaphragms expanding. Between takes of ‘Bad Influence’ he put his hand on my throat and got me to drop my larynx.

THE DOLLS: THE GLASSHOUSE DEMOS

‘Bad Influence’: The first track we recorded, which took approximately eighty-five takes. (Alannah was said to refuse to do more than one.) Rhymes ‘rock’n’roll’ with ‘filled a hole’ and ‘this old town’ with ‘what a let-down’. And that’s after John Villiers tidied it up.

‘Can’t Say No’: Sets the tone, albeit clumsily, for a lot of my later work on the subject of culpability, such as ‘Rue the Day’, ‘My Dark Places’ and ‘(The Way) I’m Wired’. Mixes metaphors a bit, but not bad. You can detect the beginnings of what will become my trademark cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof yowl.

‘Your Street’: Rose puts on a saccharin tone Taylor Swift would baulk at, over a vaguely ska rhythm and hideous synth chords. (Do synth chords have any place in a Dolls song? I would argue not. I’d told Rose nobody ever looked hot playing keys.)

‘Dish Served Cold’: Marking the start of a long career of ive-aggressive revenge songs for Rose Rogers-Dall. (‘It just happened, so you say / And you didn’t mean to hurt me anyway . . .’) Awesome detuned guitar assault from John Villiers.

After John Villiers scratched his chin at all our other suggestions, we decided to call ourselves The Dolls, which he reckoned had more ‘longevity’ than The Bain Maries and was less ‘subversive’. We chose it partly because it was a pun on our surname—my surname—and partly because we called each other ‘doll’, like

gangster molls or gum-snapping waitresses on Route 66. Anyway, it was too late to turn back now, because I’d stencilled it on my guitar case with spray paint and created a Facebook page. Mysteriously, it was also starting to find its way onto the toilet wall of every rock venue in the inner west.

Rose texted her mum to let her know we were done for the day, then turned back to me.

‘It’s all right,’ she said about the engineer, because she knew I couldn’t help it. I had a compulsion to sleep with people; it helped me to get a grip on a situation. She pulled me next to her against the wall and took a photo with her bejazzled phone, pursing her new lips.

‘Just be careful,’ she went, examining the shot. ‘We’ve got to keep John Villiers on side. Just stick to the plan.’

2

ING THE BAIN MARIES

Everybody liked to think they discovered me, as though I simply didn’t exist until they wrote out a cheque. But long before anybody had heard of Alannah Dall, the hallways lined with platinum records and the kidney-shaped swimming pool were as real to me as this book you’re holding now. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

Before we were The Dolls, we were The Bain Maries, and it’s worth acknowledging the impact that cult three-piece had on our career. It was the only time Rose and I took on an additional band member—and it explains why we were reluctant to do so again.

Erica Riley.

One of the Year Ten scene kids. Blue streaks in her fringe, leopard-print stockings under her school skirt, a colourful mouth. The teachers always ragged on her to take off her tiara, which she would place elaborately on her desk and then refurnish in her fluffed hair when the bell rang.

Even more than wanting to be a drummer in our band, it was Erica’s burning ambition to be a Hooters Girl. Parramatta was the first city (it calls itself a city) in Australia to open a Hooters Restaurant, but Erica wasn’t the first girl from our

school to aspire to wear its orange satin shorts. She reckoned you could get all the wings you wanted.

Word got around that in lunch break I’d said they’d never have her, not even if they found some shorts big enough. It was only a joke, but then when I turned up late to double maths after my extra music tuition, she pronounced me a stuck-up bitch in a show-stopping voice. It went ignored by Mrs Thompson, and by me, and so the trolling escalated. Dirty looks in a sweltering demountable classroom would not satisfy her ire.

After school, on the netball court, the boys made monkey noises as the girls crowed in their little packs. All I wanted to do was go home, untie the damp jumper from around my waist and drop it on to the floor on my way to the shower, where I’d raid Helen’s Body Shop supply and soap the day off me—but Erica was rounding me off at the goal circle.

‘Sing us a song!’ some toolbag yelled, bursting into a bit of vintage Alannah and pulling his regulation blue shirt into two points away from his chest.

The injustice of the situation stung more than Erica’s crack across my cheekbone. I fished the hair out of my face and shielded my eyes from the sun.

‘If that had hurt . . .’ I said.

I knew I wasn’t the horse the crowd was backing and I couldn’t understand why. Everyone knew that Erica begged all her mates for money for an abortion and then turned up to school with a new phone. Where was the baby? What baby? It was forgotten almost immediately. Yet, dare to command the spotlight in the

annual school concert and you were marked for life.

The trick to being in a fight if you were a girl was to not fight like a boy. Boys needed to rein their fists in tight and stay boxy. Girls needed to extend their arms and keep their hair tilted out of reach. Whether you had clips or a proper expensive weave, the sight of a raccoon’s tail of synthetic pink hair on rubberised asphalt was a great leveller.

I grabbed hold of the chain around Erica’s neck as she dug her nails into my arms. She was a big unit, but we managed to drag each other in clean arcs, eyes locked. Erica had the unfair advantage, because I’d sprained my ankle jumping out of the bathroom window tipsy a few days earlier. Before I’d even hit double digits I had learned to plot escape routes, wherever I went. Like now: across the oval, into the bushes, over the fence, away. Sometimes I’d do proper dress rehearsals, rolling up clean socks and stuffing them in my pockets, sticking my ATM card down my bra and putting on three pairs of undies. I might sit on the bathroom window ledge, poised, for half an hour, or for as many cigarette stubs as I had to smoke. Then I’d take everything off and put it all back again.

The world funnelled down into Erica’s face—like the freckles on her nose that I’d never noticed before. I gave her one last heave to the left and her chain broke in my hand. I heard the little rip in my pencil skirt as I was skittled. I stood up quickly, like nothing had happened.

The broken necklace gave Erica the opportunity to cry foul and brush the gravel off herself with laboured concern as her friends gathered round. You’ll be paying for the skirt and my necklace both, was the suggestion of that gesture.

‘Bitch,’ she actually said.

‘Whore,’ I countered.

How embarrassing was that on a scale of one to ten? Molly Meldrum asked, as I watched everyone disperse across the oval, dwarfed by their schoolbags.

Ten.

•

Rose had held my coat the whole time and said nothing. We both said nothing until we pushed through her front gate twenty minutes later and she unlocked the front door. Its held stained-glass roses, and when we were little I managed to convince Rose that her parents had named her after the door.

‘I’m starving,’ she announced, slinging her bag down in the hallway under the ornate mirror and coat hooks. I hung mine on a hook so that Rose’s mother, Dee, would be pleased with me.

It would take me years before I realised that everyone has a story, even Rose. This truth would be reiterated to me by a series of professionals whenever the record company packed me off to rehabilitation retreats with names like Dry Cedars to ‘refresh’. I should have been refreshing, but instead I’d wind up festering between stiff sheets that had an unbearable texture beneath my thumbs. Flanked by bottles of expensive mineral water and sentimental cards adorned with cautious floral designs, I would contemplate how intolerably perfect my cousin’s life was.

For example, while I might hang out of the bathroom window and smoke of an evening, planning escape, Rose would be eating dinner in the bosom of her family, at this kitchen table under the low wicker lightshade that threw little rectangles all over the walls. I sat down in one of the chairs, just picturing it. She’d be served proper homemade lasagne, because Dee made decent meals with incredible ingredients like nutmeg and chives. I loved dinner at Rose’s house. I had to put up with visits to church if it was a Sunday, but I could pretend I was their favourite daughter and they’d play along.

SEPARATION BY NINA’S PARENTS

The question on everyone’s lips with this new direction for the beleaguered Dall family is simply: could Separation be too little too late after the epic disappointments of recent years? Hopes waned after Nina’s Parents’ first effort, Your Father and I . . . (2007), failed to ring true with its depressing refrains including ‘You’re just going to spend a few months with your grandparents’, and so this follow-up must quit all the backtracking and forge ahead. I fear we will never again have the halcyon days of, say, Nina’s Fifth Year or Nina’s Favourite Christmas, but already things are sounding more harmonious. Separation could be a bold move in the right direction. 4/5

MOLLY MELDRUM

Dee and Tim weren’t home yet, though. Rose put vintage No Doubt on the stereo and I hopped on the counter and picked gravel out of my palms as she made sandwiches. Gwen Stefani really was the ultimate. It was uncanny how alike we were. She had a mezzo-soprano range; so did I. She paired platinum blonde hair with pink lipstick; so did I. She liked bra tops; I liked bra tops.

In Rose’s bedroom we lay on the bed and ate our sandwiches with the windows cranked open. Rose drew eyes on my arm. She never drew anything but slightly feline eyes, colouring the pupils in blue. She’d Tippexed her nails and then coloured them in black with a Sharpie.

‘Don’t eat the bread,’ she said. ‘Or just eat one slice.’

She wriggled up next to me and slipped a thin arm through mine. Rose was tactile. She’d reach out and touch my hair or pat someone’s thigh, without worrying about whether they thought she was a pervert. And because it was Rose, they didn’t.

‘You’ve got such beautiful eyes,’ she mewed with her mouth full. I could tell she was practising her voice for boys. We had the exact same colour eyes, so I was just a walking mirror to her half the time. Rose was the sort of girl who’d look at a sunset and think, ‘That would look nice on me.’

She had a silky warmth that made me envious, but Rose was the master of the put-down buoyed up like a pom-pom shake.

My mother, who had asked me to call her ‘Helen’ as of this year, reckoned: ‘If Rose were any smarter, she’d be dangerous.’

And also: ‘She’s knows she’s boring. She’s so boring she can’t even bring herself to finish anything she says.’

And: ‘She’s so highly strung you could play “Twinkle Twinkle” on her’—which was unkind, because Rose had been picked on at private school, which was why she’d downgraded to my school. You couldn’t blame her for never daring to have my back.

Helen was more of an unsentimental, pull-your-socks-up sort than most. There was no talking to her: everything you said got filed away and used in future evidence against you, after she was done being defensive about it. I didn’t want to be like her, bunched up with bitterness. Rose and I had spent hours hanging out in Parramatta Park at dusk with just a goon bag and a few possums for company, speculating on what vexed her so much. I knew all about the adultery stuff, because since he moved out Dad used me as his confidante whenever he’d had a few beers—and I’d get a few beers out of it, too. It was just hard-done-by talk as he stared sightlessly at the TV in the corner of whatever pub he’d treated us to. His revelations rarely surprised me. Men always wanted me to bear witness to their sexiness, for some reason; it didn’t matter what their relationship to me was.

Nothing got Helen madder than mentions of Alannah, though. We put it down to jealousy. Helen had been Alannah’s personal assistant back in the early eighties, but it hadn’t lasted more than a year. ‘She was my rock,’ Alannah explained in her memoir. ‘But we were too close, if anything.’

Rose had a careless disdain for her own mother, Dee, but despite Dee’s reproaches about not being a taxi service, they enjoyed spending time together. When she was younger, Rose used to get up at seven in the morning and, unbidden, clean parts of the house for her parents, just for good-girl points. Cleaning brought her peace. Each odd item organised in an orderly fashion satisfied a need in her brain; the same satisfaction she would get from putting people in their place later in life.

‘Project Bain Maries,’ said Rose, emphasising each word as she pushed aside her plate. ‘I’ve been thinking, if you pash the guy in Cash Converters he might loan us a drum kit. Just for a little while.’

Her tone of voice told me she wasn’t serious, but sometimes Rose would recruit me for just such a mission. I knew well the thrill of being able to make someone groan just by using my body, but Rose didn’t understand the power of it all. So she left it to me.

‘No way,’ I said. There was something very wrong about that bloke; more wrong than I could handle, so I didn’t need Rose putting thoughts in my head.

‘It’s either that or a drum machine, so choose,’ she said. ‘Okay, next item on the agenda: what to wear on stage. Don’t freak out, okay, but I got you this.’

She reached under the bed, where she kept her diary, and pulled out a biker jacket that bore the battle scars of a thousand hectic nights. I knew it had cost a hundred and fifty bucks, because I’d checked the tag when we were in Threads and made a sad face.

Every weekend Rose and I made the pilgrimage to Sydney’s inner west. Newtown, with its tattoo parlours and vintage-clothes stores hunkered under coloured tin awnings, was like the Land of Oz to us. We followed the curve of King Street from one end to the other, stopping in at every shop, although it was only Rose who ever had any money. I’m not saying she was spoilt, but her dad did once pick her up from school camp in the Benz instead of the ‘everyday car’, and when she squealed ‘Daddy!’ and took a running jump into his arms, I had to turn away.

Rose knelt on the bed behind me and gently released my hair from its ponytail. A strand fell down my face and I closed my eyes. ‘Now we both have one. Your old coat’s so stinky, I can’t stand it anymore.’

I lifted the jacket off the bed. It was heavy.

‘I got it when you were in the changing room trying on that T-shirt,’ she said, pleased with herself. I thought she might have. I spent ages in there.

Rose was on the money with the jacket. Usually we had very different tastes. I was already starting to realise that there were some clothes that only women thought were adorable, including clogs, culottes, brogues and berets, and so I tried on things with unisex appeal, such as hotpants and tight pedal-pushers, tilting my head for the sideways-on smooth-down. Rose always bought herself variations of the same thing; say, two polka-dot cardigans in minutely different shades. She saw patterns and repetition everywhere; it drove me nuts. And pairs. She was especially interested in pairs.

‘Nina,’ prompted Rose. ‘Try it on.’

‘It doesn’t smell,’ I grumbled of my old coat, but I was already disowning it, pulling this one on and getting to my feet so that I could examine myself in front of her full-length mirror. I’d boil in it, but I looked super hot-hot. Definitely, I looked like I might be in a band.

‘Fits like a glove,’ Rose crowed. It confirmed her long-held belief that she knew

me better than I knew myself.

But she didn’t, that was the thing. I didn’t deserve jackets. I didn’t deserve Rose. I’d done something to my cousin that she’d never forgive me for if she ever found out.

I couldn’t bring myself to think about it, ever.

•

It was my fault that Erica asked to the band. She and I had fallen into a truce whereby we had stopped calling each other skanks in the corridor and would phone each other after school in the spirit of keeping one’s enemies close. I’d sing her some song that was probably going to be a big hit and she’d tell me who she was thinking of bashing. When it came to hanging up we’d both stay silently on the phone, trying not to breathe.

During those calls I’d say things like, ‘Yeah, it probably, like, won’t come to anything, but we’ve got an album’s worth of material now,’ and I’d mention the Telecaster I was saving up for, even though I was still dragging a Strat copy to and from Rose’s house. It was just brags, but then Erica expressed an interest, forcefully. I probably still had some wriggle room if I wanted to escape, if it were not for the fact that her brother had the only known drum kit in Parramatta, other than the ones in Cash Converters.

‘It’s a temporary measure,’ Rose said intensely, when we had a meeting on her bed to discuss it. ‘This band is you and me. And if either of us ever leaves, it’s over.’

TOP 10 ROSE AND NINA BEDROOM BAND NAMES

1. The Bain Maries

2. The Cruella Devilles

3. Las Chicas

4. The Alannahs

5. Hot Tamales

6. The Lesbians

7. The Foundlings

8. Miso Horny

9. Geisha Girls

10. The Vignettes

And so, The Bain Maries began to take solid form in Rose’s bedroom, with Erica wedged behind the kit in shorts so small I preferred not to turn around to face her. Reluctantly, I put her anarcho-vegetarian anthem to three chords.

C So you like a bit of steak to eat from day to day

C You like the taste and you’re prepared to pay

F Money to kill the animals that do you no harm

C And at night you go to sleep safe and warm . . . G

We were, and will always remain, a punk-rock band—although you may variously have read ‘pop’, ‘pop-punk’, ‘punk-rock’ and (terrible) ‘kitty-punk’. From the start, I was the chief songwriter.

Within a week I wrote the vaguely tribal ‘Mud (‘Mud sticks, sticks like glue / How about I throw it at you / Throw it at the wall / Throw it at the wall / Throw it at the wall’, etc.); and ‘Creeps and Perves’, about the men of the western suburbs; and ‘Dead Samantha’, with its unrevealingly ominous plotline (‘She said oh my god / Oh my god / Oh my god’). On this particular night I revealed ‘Dumb Girl’, which was about Erica, who thumped away at her toms none the

wiser. I could always feel Erica’s eyes boring into the back of me when we played, probably judging me for looking too lithe.

‘I’m not being horrible, but I think your guitar is out of tune,’ Erica said, waving ‘Dumb Girl’ to a halt. Rose sighed and drew cherry lip balm on her lips, which I’d come to understand meant: This is your problem.

As soon as Erica left each night, Rose and I spent hours honing our craft in front of her ensuite mirror. Lined up with the light dimmed flatteringly, we practised shimmering. I filmed Rose on my phone as she radiated magickal energy through her eyeballs, then she did me. The model Tyra Banks called it ‘smizing’ and we’d watched all the footage on America’s Next Top Model. Rose had even started to her own tutorials, on hair, make-up and facial expressions.

‘I’m doing it! Get it!’ she’d say.

Rose had a natural propensity to look sour when she was off-guard, so my job was to make sure that she didn’t slip. In return, she coached me on how to give a small, magnanimous sigh whenever a photo was taken, which softened the face.

‘Through the nose,’ she instructed. ‘And think “blessings”. “I bless you.”’

We’d also taken to speaking with American accents, though we hadn’t discussed this as such; it just happened organically. All three of us, Rose decided, needed to wear one bra strap visibly hanging down under our top, even at school. That would be The Bain Maries’ thing.

These are some of my fondest memories of Rose. Anyone we came to work closely with over the years, from stylists to drivers and personal assistants, would comment among themselves—and to the odd journalist—that she and I were scathing about each other. But I needed her. I loved the reward of making her face light up, just as I hated to feel myself blacken inside whenever I compared our lives. So, when The Bain Maries were booked time at Glasshouse —to emerge, with John Villiers’ spit-polish, as The Dolls—I didn’t hesitate at the idea of being locked into a contract with my cousin for an unspecified number of years. We were yin and yang, the perfect foil to each other, I thought.

And anyway, I owed her.

3

MEN

I’ll forever be ed as the scary chick in the thigh-high boots. I made sure that I could drink the male journalists under the table, and I’d screw around, taking my pick of the band and crew. But at the same time, I was propelled by a fury. Ever since I had the realisation as a little girl that I was on the losing team, I’d tried to be one of the boys. But I wasn’t one of them and we all knew it. In truth, this dichotomy wasn’t beneficial to my wellbeing. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

You attracted a certain type of man, being in a band. You had your peers, such as The Dummies, who rehearsed in the next studio and looked at us as little sisters; your collectors, such as John Villiers, who developed us and captured our souls; and your leeches, such as Hank. I met Hank the night we finished up recording at Glasshouse; it was as if he saw my coat-tails fluttering as I exited the door on Bayswater Road and fancied he’d grab himself a ride.

We were on our way to Dingo’s, just a few blocks away, where we were going to see The Dummies play. They made dark psych-pop, like The Byrds on bad acid. They had been rehearsing in the next studio along from us and we started getting to know them when Rose asked if they’d share their beers. We were rarely ID-ed by bottle shops in Kings Cross, but I hadn’t found a job since dropping out of school at the end of Year Ten, so money was tight.

The Dummies were loaded. They had signed to a major and were picked up by

the New Musical Express as the poster boys for the new wave of new-wave Australian music, and they were rarely out of the news. They couldn’t usefully tell us how they managed it, though, because they had no idea about anything. All they did was punch cones, fixate on guitar tones and talk in circles. Still, we watched them keenly, as though they held the keys to our success. We were always assimilating, scavenging, taking shape.

Their sleepy-eyed singer, Gareth, looked like he’d been knocked on the head with a surfboard once too often, but he could talk about music twenty-five hours a day. Occasionally he’d tell me about what ratbags he and guitarist Bruce were at school: egging teachers’ cars, chroming in the toilets until they had two brain cells left between them. Brutally speaking, if The Dummies ever fell out of favour with fans they’d not be good for much but working in a drive-through, and then they’d last about three days.

Gareth was talking his management into letting us them on their next tour.

‘You’ll bring the teenage girls,’ Gareth wheezed through filthy bubbling water, as if he had a deficit of such things. As well as the odd catwalk model with a back catalogue of famous boyfriends, The Dummies attracted women who loved too much. Something about Gareth’s on-stage tantrums and his guileless way in interviews had them weeping on message boards as though he were a puppy mangled at the side of the road.

He’s so fragile!

Everyone leave him alone!

Sometimes they hung around outside the rehearsal studios in their Dummies Tshirts, psychedelic leggings and shorts with knee-high socks, and shot baleful looks at The Dolls. They often carried a stack of pancakes in a Tupperware box, as an ode to that Dummies song ‘Pancakes’. Bruce, The Dummies’ guitarist, called them ‘the sisters of mercy’.

As Rose and I walked the three blocks to Dingo’s we discussed the fact that someone had stolen Bruce’s pedals at their last show. I’d only ever nicked a guitar strap and strings from an open case. Pedals you just didn’t do.

‘They can afford it, though,’ noted Rose as we cut through Orwell Street, past the odd ibis. I loved those bald birds, toppling in bins and tripping over their own legs. They were simply misunderstood.

‘They’ve got way more money than they let on,’ she continued. ‘Sadie told me Gareth gets his hair bleached at Wink but he gets them to leave the roots black.’

Sadie was our friend who was studying hair and make-up at tech, and did ours for our early photo shoots. Sometimes she was a useful buffer between Rose and me, but we were getting on really well tonight without her. I started singing ‘Wasted’—Alannah’s duet with Danger Michaels—and when we came to the chorus, Rose let me be the girl. We sang it lustily as people looked from the creperie across the street.

I wore: pastel pink Mad Max hair with plaits and feathers; silver lamé off-theshoulder dress; motorcycle boots.

Rose wore: lilac fake fur jacket; wet-look black jeans, vest top, beret and

hologram sunnies.

We had our CD to give out around town now, and had written John Villiers’ name on it as large as our own. We were ripe for the picking; we just needed a record label to shake our tree. The most obvious route, Rose said, adjusting the neckline of my dress, would be to maintain the John Villiers link, because everyone in the industry knew his name.

I was doing my best. Earlier in the control room, I’d pressed myself softly into him as I kissed him goodbye on the cheek, so that he’d . He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. Rose took a selfie of the three of us and posted it on Facebook.

We’d taken one of John Villiers’ old drum machines with us, half as hostage, half as replacement for Erica, who’d been going around saying we’d better not show our faces in Parramatta again, now that we’d given her the boot.

‘She’d better not be there tonight,’ I told Rose.

‘She won’t come all the way in. But Jimmy will be there, so don’t embarrass me.’

Rose’s new boyfriend, Jimmy, worked behind the bar at Dingo’s, and now that we’d left school he didn’t mind people meeting her. He’d get us AAA es, which stood for Access All Areas. Usually it was a sticker, but if it was a bigger show, he said, it’d be a laminate—a ‘lammy’—to hang around our necks. It meant we’d get to hang out with people such as the band booker of the venue, but we had to always be on our guard. On a couple of occasions Rose had caught

me crying during laboured sets from boys who knew too many chords. It just happened whenever I’d had a few drinks; like someone had turned on a tap. I figured nobody would notice if we were all facing the same way, but nothing got past Rose. Back in the eighties, no one thought twice if you cried, or pissed yourself on stage, or overdosed in bed. These days it wasn’t cool. Funny how everyone liked a histrionic girl in a video clip but not so much in real life.

We slipped into the cool darkness of Dingo’s, our shoes making leeching noises every time we lifted them from the sticky carpet. My eyes adjusted to the gloom and we cut a course down the centre, heading for the beer garden. Outside Jimmy’s mates were standing around a tall table. Rose immediately leaned into Jimmy—shoulder-length hair, baggy pants, black T-shirt with a sombrerowearing owl printed on it—and kissed him proprietorially.

‘I’m exhausted,’ she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘We’ve been recording for, like, eight hours and the album’s finally in the can. I never want to do another double-tracked overdub.’

They might have taken her more seriously if she wasn’t pulling her hair up into a ponytail at the time, an action intended to show off her stomach and get her rack riding high. Personally I didn’t say much till the third drink kicked in, at which point—like a phoenix rising—I became the centre of attention. Lately I’d taken to challenging everyone to an arm-wrestle; I knew that it embarrassed Rose, but the more uncomfortable people were around me, the more bravado spurred me on. Rose would catch up pretty quickly, though. ‘I’m only little,’ was her catchphrase when drunk, accompanied by a three-tiered laugh.

At gigs—anyone’s—we’d scream, ‘The Dolls!’ and mimic the singer down the front. We were hilarious. Between sets, Rose might drop into the splits or dance on a chair. If a social-pages photographer was around she’d flash the tonguethrough-the-V-fingers or press her tits up against mine. Someone would invariably ask me, ‘And what’s your party trick?’ We were starting to get known

around town, definitely.

‘I hear you take requests,’ Jimmy’s friend said, bored of listening to Rose talk about The Dolls’ live set at the Java Lounge. He nudged his mate, to prep him for the punchline. ‘What about you and your sister together?’

‘She’s not my sister; fuck off,’ I said routinely. Other times, I’d just cut to the chase upon introduction: ‘I’m the mean one. You should meet Rose.’

•

You’re probably wondering what it is Hank Black did that night at Dingo’s to make me fall for him. Did he appear bathed in a celestial glow? Did Cupid himself usher Hank forth and pop his collar? Because all you’ve heard are tabloid stories of him being a , a scrounger, a cheat. But he was all right, you know. Once.

Traditionally, comedians are socially awkward depressives, either nothing to look at or shocking to look at. Hank was from a new breed of filthy young rock’n’roll comics. I don’t want to say ‘bad boy’, because the expression brings to mind suburban dating profiles. Let’s say a ‘loin on legs’. That’s what I whispered to Rose.

Rose had taken to insisting that I run all prospective roots past her for her approval, but she hadn’t learned to use sex as currency like I had. This newfound power had its drawbacks, though. Already my problems from Parramatta were spreading to Kings Cross, like an army of cane toads. I was starting to get the ‘I know you’ from bitches at gigs, and they weren’t talking about seeing me play at

the Java Lounge. Whenever we did play a gig—two defiant girls bashing our instruments in front of a drum machine—I scoped the audience, checking for adversaries.

‘You’re in that band. Aren’t you the horrible one?’ asked Hank, who’d been watching us as he lounged at the bar. Now he was upon us. He spoke with an Irish accent, which immediately made me assume certain things about him, based on my experience of the bars around Bondi. I activated my force fields as he continued, ‘My name’s Hank. Hello, horrible.’

He was negging me; the oldest game in the book. Push a girl down with negative jokes and make her bounce back up wanting approval. Ignoring him, I pulled the silver foil out of my new cigarette packet. The fragrance of virgin tobacco wafted up to my nose.

You Am I came on over the sound system and I was trying to which song it was while lighting my regulation Marlboro Red, but Hank wouldn’t leave me be. ‘I know how to crack your code,’ he said, running a finger down the sleeve of my leather jacket. He had on a plain T-shirt and jeans. His hair was dirty, but it messed up well. When he tilted his head and looked down at me, one of his eyelids flipped shut, like that of a plastic doll I had as a child. I would come to find that it did that a lot, giving him a wasted look even when he was relatively sober. He liked to pretend he was more wasted than he was, anyway.

He pulled out a pack of cards.

‘Oh my god. You’re not actually going to do a card trick,’ I said. Everyone laughed. ‘What are you, a magician or something?’

He turned a falter into a swagger. ‘No, I’m not. I’m a comedian-strokepromoter.’

‘Slash-actor, slash-model,’ Rose cut in, looking pleased with herself. She took a sip of her margarita.

Hank barely paused. ‘Viva la revolución,’ he said, saluting her beret. She looked at him blankly.

I stifled a laugh. I thought Rose might ark up, but she’d decided to ignore him. I could hear her, across the table with her hangers-on, off and running in an American accent: ‘You dreamt of me? Oh my god! What happened? Did we totally make out?’

So, I was safe to continue. Hank and I turned back to each other. He was as shady as shit, but there was something about him. He was like me, damaged goods. I could smell that a mile off. It meant he would be a great root.

‘What kind of a name is “Hank”?’ I demanded, stabbing my straw into the lemon in my gin. ‘Shouldn’t you be called “Paddy” or something?’

‘Hilarious,’ he reed, leaning on the table so I could see down his baggy Tshirt. ‘It’s my stage name. And no, you’re not finding out my real name unless you sleep with me.’

•

‘He’s a groupie, basically,’ was Rose’s take on it during our post-mortem back at her parents’ house, keeping our voices down in the kitchen. ‘Jimmy says Hank’s slept with every woman we’re likely to get a slot with . . . and he has more product in his hair than you do.’ But she was laughing.

I sat on the stool at the breakfast bar, watching her prepare a drink under the big map of America we liked to pore over, listing aloud the states we wanted to visit and delighting at the limitless possibility of their names: Colorado. Kentucky. Georgia. Delaware. One thing I’d always ired about Rose was her attention to detail. If she was making a cold drink she’d mix sparkling water, two kinds of juice, squeeze on ionfruit and cut a slice of lime. The lamps in her room were draped with vintage shawls, while fairy lights trailed her mantle. She put care into everything. I could see the benefit of this, the way she made herself and others feel valued.

Back in her room, we sat across from each other, cross-legged, and meditated on the future that awaited us in LA. ‘Picture us having meetings by the pool of the Chateau Marmont,’ Rose said under her breath, the same way she used to dictate the plots of our Barbie games. To our minds, the Chateau Marmont was the top echelon of Los Angeles accommodation, where celebrities had trysts, conducted poolside interviews and overdosed.

Rose breathed in deeply. ‘Put it out to the universe.’

4

BAD MANAGER

Where to start with the list of Things We Didn’t Want to Do? Things you wouldn’t even believe, like the time we had to play at a sheik’s birthday—an honour that usually has a hefty price tag attached to it, yet I saw none of it. Or the time I was sent to entertain the troops. I was a pacifist if I bothered to think about it, but any publicity is good publicity, apparently. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

It was at one of our early shows at Dingo’s that our manager-to-be introduced himself. He was a benign man wearing black-rimmed glasses and an expensivelooking black V-neck jumper. He looked like the sort of bloke who’d say ‘Ciao,’ and he was.

You’re in the wrong industry, was my first thought as Marcus slid into our booth with his card proffered. It said ‘Marcus Biel Management’, black on cream, but it wasn’t even embossed. Still, I shifted up to make room for him. I was killing time with Hank before we went on and he was pointing out women in the room who were stalking him or had stalked him already. The confidence that attracted me to him that first night had already revealed itself to be a monster, now that his web show had been picked up by a major network. I dreaded to think what kind of loose-hipped prima donna he would become when it actually went on air. He was a worthy drinking partner, though. With his messy hair, filthy jeans and ripped T-shirts, you couldn’t tell if he was in a band or if he was going to ask you for fifty cents. He was also riddled with daddy issues; it was quite sweet. He had that hangdog way some men had when they thought they were worthless. It

meant I could tell him bad things I’d never told anybody else.

Marcus Biel had a reputation within small ponds of taking some indie bands to the next level. Over the music he yelled a spiel about the labels we needed to hit up, spittling our faces with visions of radio-station showcases and high-school tours that wouldn’t be as bad as they sounded. Rose wiped a droplet away with one finger and I clocked she was wearing my Miss Plum nail polish; I’d been searching for it for weeks.

We had to listen to Marcus because our first ever gig, at the Parlour, had gone badly. We’d spent an eternity setting up the stage with baby-doll heads, lace throws and fairy lights, so there was no time left to soundcheck. I’d drawn a diagram on my fist of how to plug in my pedals, but I’d still got the input and output the wrong way around. I had a bad feeling the moment we went on. I was self-conscious because the Parlour had a UV light above the stage that illuminated the bleach in my hair so that I looked like a fluorescent troll doll. Then when I crashed down into the first chord of ‘Bad Influence’, nothing happened.

Yell at the soundman through the mic in a stadium and you’re considered rock’n’roll, but do it in a lounge bar and it’s bad form, according to John Villiers. I’d rung him later that night to check. Basically, solving sound problems was usually just a case of switching on your amp or turning up the volume. A manager would know that sort of thing.

Rose and I shared a look across the table. Okay, Marcus Biel, we were listening.

‘Have you had any success getting bands on TV?’ Rose wanted to know, even though we’d agreed our reputation would be for our live shows.

‘Not as yet,’ Marcus itted, ‘but I’ve got quite a few s at the ABC and I’ve just been waiting for the right band.’

Having spent three months being picked up after our gigs like kids from a party, Rose had to it that her mum managing us for free wasn’t ideal. Her growing irritation at Dee saying, ‘You look really pale,’ when we were waiting to load in our gear, or distractedly brushing at Rose’s fringe, meant I didn’t have to say much to convince her. If I mentioned Mrs Cyrus constantly fangirling around Miley and hovering in her spotlight, it was only in ing. Similarly, Rose’s dad couldn’t stay on as our driver. Instead, he would be persuaded to cut us a loan— with great formality at the kitchen table—to allow us to pay a manager, pay a backing band and pay for taxis. We would reimburse Dee and Tim with our first big royalty cheque. My own parents were otherwise occupied with alimony arrangements, but they would still get a thankyou in the acknowledgements on the sleeve, which Rose and I had compiled way back in The Bain Maries days.

The old folks tended to miss the milestones of my life—such as going on tour with drug-addled drop-outs like The Dummies—even when I left them little clues that I was still here. Including:

Getting dropped home from the pub by the cops

Cutting ‘FU’ into my forearm (I tired before I could get to the ‘CK’)

Borrowing fifty bucks from Dad’s wallet × 3

Coming down to dinner with mascara rivers down my face Sleeping with father figures

Going out dressed like that

It didn’t take us more than four dirty martinis that night to get on board. Marcus bought the drinks, even for Hank, plus he had a driver’s licence. By the time the house lights came on after our set we’d agreed to pay him a hundred dollars a week plus thirty per cent of anything we made—and perhaps now you’ll understand why we garnered a reputation for being ruthless with legal matters later in our career.

Now that he was officially ours we clinked our dirty martinis in celebration and Marcus became the new object of our obnoxiousness. We started by changing his name to Ian Essence, because he started every sentence with ‘In essence . . .’— the perfect bullshit expression.

TOP 10 MEN IN THE RECORD INDUSTRY

1. Manager: The good manager will be a master manipulator, persuading people that they’ve said things they haven’t, threatening to withdraw privileges, stroking egos, playing Mum. In fact, Mother’s favourite saying, ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ applies here.

2. Publicist: Gay. Aquarius.

3. A&R: The stockbroker of the industry, gambling with artists’ careers, but never allowing risk-taking in the studio. Makes friends and influences people with cocaine.

4. House soundman: Despises all artists. Doesn’t appreciate being addressed from the stage when things go wrong. Reacts badly to having his arse slapped when he eventually does come up and bend over something. Always insists things may have been a bit patchy at first but that he found the sweet spot from the third song onwards. This is why big bands take their own soundman on tour.

5. Journalist: There will be certain male lecherous hacks who stake ownership of female musicians and can be found at every show. They’ll hover around afterwards with their beers held high for protection, then violently bash out hatefuck reviews. See also: up-skirt photographer.

6. Radio programmer: Whether it’s a local station or national broadcaster, the radio programmer gets to play god with the tunes they choose to play. Bribing them with gifts and glitter or questioning their judgement will destroy your career. Only seasoned Dungeons & Dragons players are likely to figure out the best way to .

7. Roadie: To the unskilled observer it will seem that roadies only ever say, ‘Check, two, two, two’ into a mic, but in fact their repertoire consists of millions of complex in-jokes—just in a language nobody else understands.

8. Venue booker: Being the bearer of bad news—door sales are low; PA is duff; food and drinks rider is not plentiful—the venue booker will usually skulk behind the scenes after a brief introduction and flurry of excuses. It is the job of the tour manager to weed him out and threaten to break his fingers.

9. Tour manager: Harried, always simultaneously on laptop and phone. Doesn’t have time to respond to questions in more than one syllable. Employs a clique of drug buddies, the most fucked of whom will be assigned to drive you around.

10. Record-company mogul: Insists he’s not out of touch, but spends a lot of time bloodthirstily sizing up his competitors from his bayside mansion. After he’s tired of his latest next big thing and cut off their cash flow, they will be forced to chew off their own legs to escape their contract.

Ian Essence’s first job as manager of The Dolls was to meet Rose’s mother. That’s how we found ourselves gathered in the breakfast nook at Berkley Drive a week later. It was times like this I was grateful that Helen was Helen. She wouldn’t win any mum-of-the-year awards, but she didn’t try to cramp my style, either.

‘They’re barely seventeen,’ Rose’s mum said sharply when he brought up the subject of interstate travel. She violently levered a piece of lasagne on to his plate with a wet slap and dispatched a tongful of salad. ‘Not even old enough to drink. How can they play licensed venues when I’m not there to supervise?’

‘It’s not a problem,’ Ian Essence said in his best-voice-for-mums. Rose and I watched with interest. ‘It just means they can’t drink—and I’ll keep an eye on them. I’ll be there one hundred and ten per cent.’

Dee was in a fix. She was racked with guilt and misgivings about Rose dropping out of school, but in her mind she was probably responsible for all this, from the Doc Martens she bought Rose to help her rebel, to encouraging her to spend more time with her cousin. For all my eye-rolling about Dee, I knew I ranked a

very close second in her affections.

Rising to her feet, Dee put her napkin on the table and went over to the fridge. She came back with a bottle of champagne and some orange juice.

‘Open that, will you?’ she said to Ian Essence, and retraced her path to get some clean glasses from the dishwasher. We were nearly there. I pressed my lips together and looked at Rose across the table. Her eyes were bright.

‘I’ll say yes on the provision that I meet everybody involved in the tour, right down to the roadies.’ Dee cast a look at Rose to make sure she had that word right. ‘And I’ll want everybody’s mobile numbers, for emergencies.’

‘Oh, Mum,’ Rose said.

‘Either that or I’m coming with you.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Ian Essence smoothly. ‘Phone numbers, no worries.’

Dee filled our champagne flutes halfway with juice and gestured to Ian Essence to top them up with bubbles. My glass was still hot from the dishwasher, but I’d drunk worse.

‘Cheers,’ she said, chinking my glass first and giving me a smile. ‘And only

because this is a special occasion.’

•

While he is not ed kindly in the annals of The Dolls’ history, Ian Essence did do one good thing. In his first week on the job he set up auditions for backing musicians, telling them we had a number of deals on the table already and the vested interest of John Villiers. He might as well have printed up black-on-cream cards with John Villiers’ name on them, such was the frequency with which it was being dropped.

These bit players were all in a bunch of bands around town, none of them regarded highly outside the street press. Donny, on bass, had spiky bleached hair that guaranteed he’d get called Billy Idol if he walked into a pub anywhere but Newtown, where they’d get the correct references. He would be relieving Rose of all bass duties. Anna Conda, on keys, was chosen to stand there and look pretty—although, not too pretty. Mark was our moody second guitarist—second, because his digital pedal board and lead breaks came secondary to my songwriting skills. He smoked Marlboro Lights like I did, so I’d often buddy up with him between songs and discuss a way we could jazz up the bridge. Lastly, on drums there was Weird Brian, who’d been in every local band since the midnineties, and suffered the wear and tear of it. Brian stared at us whenever we were taking selfies and he always counted us in when we were trying to talk.

But, for every good thing Ian Essence did, heartache was sure to follow. We were rehearsing at Duckboard Studios one night when he unveiled the first step of his game plan. Our room was laden with overflowing ashtrays and smelled as such. In one corner stood a bass amp like a monolith. The carpet was threadbare with scraps of gaffer tape melted into the fibre, and there were a few old armchairs that held the stale smoke like a shroud. On the walls, people had scrawled in-jokes and messages from one band to another that made us feel inadequate. We only knew The Dummies, so we left messages for them.

Ian Essence entered this scene at around ten-thirty, twenty minutes before we were due to pack up. He looked pleased with himself, I noted, plunking away at my guitar while Rose went over to kiss his cheek. He put his satchel down on one of the armchairs and leaned on the side of it so that he could break his big news.

‘Shh,’ said Rose, waving silent my rhythm part. Ian Essence had booked us an appearance in the biggest shopping centre in western Sydney, that weekend. While we were trying to get signed, he said, crooking his fingers into quotation marks, we needed to maintain a ‘high profile’.

Rose and I stood rooted to the spot; me with my fingers still winched into a Dchord. Our manager insisted a shopping-centre gig was a ‘rite of age’ for contemporary artists. ‘It targets a captive audience,’ he finished in satisfaction. ‘Kids and bored young mums.’

We might have fooled him that first night at Dingo’s with our Ozmerican accents, but Ian Essence knew by now that we were Westies, so this was like a sick joke. We practically grew up in Westfield Shoppingtown. That was where we got our dollar make-up every Saturday, before wasting the afternoon hanging with the wannabe gangsters in the food court. You didn’t work with John Villiers just to play a set outside Macca’s.

‘Just think of it as our sayonara,’ said Rose, coming over and massaging my shoulders. She knew I’d get it worse than she would if we ran into any of the old faces.

I shrugged her silent, not wanting to cause a scene in front of the new band. I didn’t want my baggage from Pazzamazza coming with me to Kings Cross. People in Sydney considered the Cross to be a sleazy strip, but to me it was pristine. I’d run out of options in Parramatta, just because I was a boys’ girl, and girls’ girls didn’t like that, and word got around.

I couldn’t think, because Donny and Mark had taken advantage of the lull to break into Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’. Once Weird Brian decided to pile in and them, which would happen at any second, we’d have lost five minutes of our recording time, which Rose and I were paying for. It was just Rose, strictly speaking, but I’d pay her back one day.

Rose had suggested a fining system, penalising the band for things like lateness and unauthorised haircuts, so maybe we could add Led Zeppelin to the list.

‘We’re paying their wages,’ she said, as we got into Ian Essence’s car after packing up. ‘They’re ours to do what we want with, aren’t they?’

Ian Essence drove a Ford Laser—no good for drum kits, and hard to get into the back of with heels. I made a mental note to tell Rose we had to take turns riding shotgun—that was item one on The Dolls’ agenda. Item two was to find a manager with a nice car and a clue.

•

If we were going to do Parramatta, we were going to do it properly. We were used to being watched, because of our unique fashion sense, and this would only intensify as our reputation grew. Our pictures were starting to be circulated like

trading cards in the street press. There weren’t enough bands whose included hot chicks, so editors started dropping us in whenever they had a space to fill.

We knew we had to get our backing band in step with this, so Rose went to Bunnings especially to get white overalls so that they could have a cool, uniform look.

I wore: ankle boots, a singlet and waistcoat, tiny denim shorts with the pockets flapping down my legs.

Rose wore: rolled-up grey sweat pants, bra top, sun visor, Louboutin knock-offs from Chatswood.

When we pulled into the car park of the shopping centre we saw Ian Essence near the ticket machine, talking to John Villiers: our benevolent sponsor, whose name we had been taking in vain. A finger of electricity goosed me. He had no reason to be here, other than for me to give him a chemical reaction.

‘Please go,’ I hissed to Dee as she rummaged through her handbag to give us some spending money. After an age she drove away and we picked our way carefully across the tarmac in our heels.

‘Ladies,’ Ian Essence beamed.

Our band had just pulled up in a hire van with the gear and John Villiers was

looking at their overalls with an unreadable expression.

‘How you going?’ I asked, to distract him.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m just ing, so I thought I’d stop by and take a look.’ He jangled his car keys in his pocket.

I could feel Rose looking at me, wanting me to close some sort of deal, get him to swear he’d find us a record company with bags of money, but I wasn’t a performing seal. I needed more of a run-up for these things.

‘Cool,’ I muttered. I’d have another go later, because I couldn’t do the eye-sex thing with Ian Essence standing there.

‘Just ing?’ Rose whispered, as we followed them into the shopping centre. I could smell Juicy Fruit on her breath. ‘Bullshit.’

We had rehearsed three songs from our demo CD, the idea being that we would belt through the first and third like a punk-rock band, with the middle track an acoustic number delivered from stools that Ian Essence would bring on stage. I couldn’t abide that ‘let’s bring things down a notch’ thing, but Alannah had told me we had to pick our battles.

Our at the mall, Chris, was a man in his late thirties with an indie-boy hairstyle and a corporate shirt with the top button undone. He was a veteran of a few bands and we heard all about those in the lift down to the food court, but I

was staring at John Villiers in the mirror, holding his gaze with a half-smile.

Hank Black’s efforts to look Australian were getting laughable. As the doors opened onto the ground floor, I saw him leaning casually on the crash barrier in a blue Bonds singlet and dirty jeans, so tight I could make out his bon scotts. I sped up my pace to him, but he ignored me as he kissed Rose’s cheek and shook the hand of Ian Essence. Ordinarily I’d feel a whine crank up inside of me —Where’s my special greeting?—but not today. When John Villiers walked past us I felt that glow inside; the one I got when I knew I held all the cards.

I cast my eyes up to the stage, which had a rig of lights up top and a backdrop from the drinks sponsor. The PA looked cheap; more accustomed to announcing Santa’s arrival in the grotto outside Coles. I didn’t like the idea of standing a metre above the ground and singing to nobody, but when our guitarist Mark wandered on and studiously peered at his pedal board, people started pouring out of the dollar stores. They were probably hoping it was Guy Sebastian.

We weaved past the barrier and up the steps to the stage. I took my spot in front of the band and looked across at Rose, who smiled tightly and gave a minute nod. I always used her as a mirror and I saw we were brightly lit, judging by the thick matte look of her foundation. There wasn’t much that could be done about that now. I looked out at the faces gawking up at us.

Launching into ‘Can’t Say No’ was like flicking a switch. A weird noise went up from the front row. These girls had only heard of us thirty seconds earlier, yet they were wailing and hanging over the barriers like they were awaiting a food drop. It was harder for Rose and me to get into it—every time I hit that righteous note in the bridge I’d open my eyes and find I was pointing at the Big W signage.

With the advent of the chorus, I slammed the mic away and whipped my hair to one side. I had to stay fairly compact or I’d collide with our guitarist. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rose crouch down and tear a note from the sky, before rising unsteadily to her feet and tossing that damned note right to the ground. Song one was YouTube worthy.

Ian Essence stopped filming and came on with a couple of stools, doing a left– right when he got to me, trying to anticipate which way I’d go. I took one from him and sat on it for my verse, but then Rose went and knelt on the edge of the stage for hers, pointing at some boy in the audience. Always single someone out —that’s what Alannah had told us. I’d do that next time.

Less than ten minutes later we left the stage on a high.

‘If that’s what we could do in a shopping centre,’ Rose was gabbling before Ian Essence had even helped us off the bottom step, ‘imagine what we could do in an arena. Seriously, we would kill it.’

I took a swig from the bottle of water Ian Essence handed me and looked around for John Villiers. He’d gone. So had Hank. The night before, we’d had one of our massive rows that were becoming commonplace, this time over me mentioning the forthcoming Dummies tour when he’d been talking about his new show, Hank Black’s Big Break, for an hour. It all flared up again later over nothing—or maybe it was because I was talking about Gareth, who Hank said trying to have a conversation with was like trying to nail down a fart—and then Hank just got up and went to bed.

I should have been the one who was upset, anyway, because of his behaviour lately. Like the time when I came back from the bar with a round and found a girl hanging off him in the beer garden. The thing was, Hank must have been

deliberately winding me up, because he knew what I was like about other girls. I stood talking to Rose by the fence with all the layers of peeling band posters on it, and flicked my lit cigarette butts at the girl’s bare back, until she put down her drink and walked inside. That was always the point I’d suddenly feel bad and wonder what was wrong with me.

As we packed the last of our gear into Ian Essence’s car, to drive away from Parramatta forever, Rose glanced at me and said: ‘Never trust a guy who has to start every statement with, “And this is no word of a lie.”’

Bear in mind, though, this was the girl who gave Jimmy, a guy she’d been dating for four months, a tortoise as a t pet. If you don’t have any idea how long a tortoise lives for, it’s about a hundred years.

5

DUMMY

In truth, there is so much of my story I just can’t . I may be an unreliable witness. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

Packing for tour would become second nature. Even further down the track, I’d get someone else to do it for me. For our maiden voyage with The Dummies, though, neither Rose nor I had the slightest clue. I watched as she sat on top of her case and grimly yanked the zipper beneath her. We’d wound up with two wheely cases each of outfits, electrolyte powders, iPads, UNO, curling irons, cameras, tarot cards, incense, tequila, condoms, swimmers, magazines, Jo Malone candles, flight pillows, eye masks and cartons of cigarettes. We were only away for one weekend. We’d piggybacked on to the east-coast leg of The Dummies’ national jaunt, borrowing their equipment and sleeping on friends’ floors.

From the front door, Rose took one last scan of Helen’s lounge room to make sure I’d picked up everything. On the coffee table sat flowers from Hank with a note: ‘I forgive you.’

Had you ever wanted to psychologically profile a tortured artist, three days on tour with The Dummies would do it. Music blogs hosted debates over the mental health of Gareth—our dumb friend with the sleepy eyes—and whether or not he was faking his strange fits and freak-outs, but we were privy to it up close. I

never saw him eat anything to sustain himself, but the moment he walked on stage it was as though he’d been plugged into the mains. He scissored his legs and jackknifed at the waist as though he had no control over himself.

That first night in Sydney, he cut himself on stage with a razorblade. Who has a razorblade? In the Tarago afterwards, we told him to lick his arms to keep the wounds sterile, and at the next petrol station Rose bought Barbie bandaids to patch him up.

It didn’t put the girls off; it just encouraged them. The girls, the girls. You couldn’t call them groupies, because if Gareth ever felt compelled to try anything I’m sure they’d have just started crying. They cried at anything. They camped out at the airports, waiting for us to through, texting each other updates like they were on a SWAT-team mission. I used to do that myself, when I was young, but on my own. I’d hop the train out to Domestic to haunt the walkways. It was some funny limbo. I’d tune into people’s emotions like I was fiddling with a radio dial, then I’d watch them go through security, leaving me stuck behind to drift.

Rose grabbed the plait of one of them when we were waiting at our gate and started interviewing her with it like it was a mic.

‘What are you doing here?’

Nothing.

‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

Silence.

‘Who taught you to use eyeliner anyway?’

Zip.

Every night we watched The Dummies’ set from the side of the stage, taking notes. They didn’t plan anything. Sometimes Gareth would muck up the set-list order, or break his guitar, or storm off stage . . . but like the bloggers we could never tell if it was by accident or design. We did know that it was the element of surprise that was so powerful, so we vowed to replicate it in our shows. Rose wrote the surprises out in a notebook during our next flight.

Nina: Drop to your knees during the solo of ‘Boy Crazy’.

Nina: Stage dive in ‘Bad Influence’.

Rose: Stop dead and stare at somebody in the third row while raking fingers through hair.

Rose: Ad lib the last line of ‘Not Your Role Model’—‘not your problem any more’—to ‘not your fucking problem any more’.

Dee repeatedly rang Ian Essence over the weekend to check on us and remind him he was our chaperone. Each time she did—when we were in the car park; when we were going through security; when we were at the baggage carousel— we heard him correct her, using the same words every time: ‘In essence I’m their manager.’

‘Careful,’ I’d warn, whenever he took a corner too sharply in the hire car. ‘You have precious cargo on board.’

In reality, Ian Essence was doing a very bad job of managing us. For instance, by day two I had rooted The Dummies’ tour manager and our chaperone had no clue.

It was easy to separate Damien from the pack as we watched The Dummies side of stage. Divide and conquer. It was child’s play to brush up against him, as I made observations in his ear about the sound levels and lightly touched his back. By the time it came to loading the van it was like there was a bungee cord between us that only we could see. When Rose went to the toilet I asked him if he had anything to drink back at the hotel and he said he did.

We made the ride back in silence as Rose held court with the band: ‘Our aunt had affairs with all your favourite musicians. Name one . . . yes.’ She and I were supposed to sleep on the floor of Bruce’s room that night, but I never showed up. Damien’s room, when he opened the door with some kind of look on his face, was corporate chic like Bruce’s would have been. I scanned it as I slung my purse on the bed.

Damien wasted no time. ‘Let’s get you over there too,’ he said in his sex voice, manoeuvring me awkwardly away from the TV. He moved in, his lips hot and rubbery on mine. I’m a good kisser. I go in softly, then press more urgently. Then

I lightly touch my tongue against theirs, two or three times. Then there’s more of a tonguing that might go on for a minute or so, then back to a chaste one again. Then repeat.

But I only kiss men I like.

‘Get us a whisky,’ I said sharply, leaning away. I sat down on the edge of the bed, on its crazy coral-and-mauve cover. Alannah wore coral lipstick in the ‘So Sue Me’ video back in 1987 and that was its last legitimate sighting.

I was wearing my new Ksubi jeans and they took so long to take off I thought I might have to just yank them back up and walk out to save further embarrassment. Damien laughed like it was cute, and flicked aside his fringe as he reclined next to me, holding a tumbler with a trickle in it.

Up top I wore a black silk Japanese shirt with no bra underneath, because I had what the fashion magazines called ‘bee stings’. The shirt did up at the front with poppers under red embroidered swirls. Once in a cafe I’d started to pull my coat off and caught my fingers at the edge of it. It gave Rose’s dad more than he bargained for, and had since been reborn as my good-for-sex shirt. Like stockings, it guaranteed easy access, and I had this hardwired idea that everything should run smoothly for a man during sex, even if I wasn’t into him.

As Damien loomed over me, I looked down at his jeans and cursed inwardly. I knew I was going to fumble over this fly, which looked to be buttons. Fucking 501s; who even wore them any more? And a belt, too. I once yanked off a guy’s belt in one smooth move, but I couldn’t bank on it happening again.

Damien’s fingers dragged on my sternum. To get him to move them, I ripped open the poppers of my shirt and shrugged it off my shoulders. I arched my back and ran my hand down my body as he looked between his legs and prodded his cock at me. My skin felt nice and soft. Not like his, which was already pink and sweaty like a Christmas ham. Once in place, he creaked back and forth like he was testing the stability of an IKEA table. I could see the uncertainty in his face.

What a chump he was. My eye-flashing suggestion that we go back to his room and drink his whisky wasn’t desire. As tour manager of the headline act, he simply held the most collateral. Several times, I stopped his creaking to hoist us both nearer to the bedside table so that I could fling my arm out for the tumbler and take another swig. He laughed, but less so. Eventually he gave up.

I managed four more tumblers and three hours’ sleep before our lobby call. I’d slept twisted like a pretzel, unable to bear the slightest imprint of his skin, then got up as soon as dawn sent a shard of dust through the curtains. I always left first. I didn’t want to hear someone hawk up their morning phlegm behind the bathroom door, or frown into the coffee plunger, absorbed by the day ahead. I didn’t want to see their ordinary body disappearing into yesterday’s clothes.

Watching Damien avoid my eyes at the front desk where the others were waiting, I wondered how he or Ian Essence managed to manage anything.

•

To avoid complications, I spent the next night of the tour in Rose’s room, wondering at how easy it all was to just snuggle down under starched sheets with someone who kept their hands to themselves, turning up the TV every time the kettle boiled, and then back down again. Uncomplicated.

Sex was complicated. Sex was a battle of nerves. Sex dogged me like a shadow, yet by the time I’d turned ten, Tony—who was not my uncle—had nearly lost interest.

Stupid. That was my crystalline thought the morning after Tony first pulled back the covers of my bunk bed in the dark and, to my surprise, got in. It was a week after my seventh birthday, so soon that I was still mourning its ing, and two days after he’d first played incy-wincy spider up my corduroy skirt and under the elastic of my underwear.

Three years and nearly caught so many times, but he always got away with it. When I got older he’d occasionally just offer me a tenner to sit on his lap. That was all I had to do, sit and evade eye ; so I might as well get paid for it. Could we be more obvious? Apparently we could, because nothing was ever said.

Later there came the shame you’ll have read about in women’s magazines— under the photo of the woman sitting on a park bench, her back to the camera— but there was also scorn, at being made someone’s co-conspirator without consultation. It was simply not playing by the rules. People don’t do this, I thought, and if I know that at my age, why don’t you? You’re stupid and weak, and you have dragged me into it.

Yet whenever Tony came over for evening beers with Dad, bored with the company at the Granville Tavern, he volleyed my stony glance as I stewed in front of the TV with his cheerful stares that would not quit. He’d lean against the wall of our new open-plan kitchen he’d helped build, as Dad held court, smiling and not listening to one word. ‘What’s that, Jeff?’ he’d say mildly every now and then, still looking at me. Occasionally he’d jerk the hand with his stubby in it to try to attract my attention from the TV, but I was always, always aware of where

everybody was looking. I mapped out his line of sight, and mine, and Dad’s, like an electric grid between us, all lit up. Eyes in the back of my head. It’s a skill I’ve never lost.

And now, ten years later, I was still marching to the beat of his drum. I only ever went for saviours or scumbags. The saviours, like John Villiers, kept me at arm’s length until I wore them down, or until they let me down. The scumbags, like Damien, were opportunists and didn’t deserve my enthusiasm.

Tony was an opportunist. And Hank reckoned he was a paedophile too. Hank had threatened to kill him, before ing out with a cigarette still burning in the ashtray. I never brought it up again and neither did he.

When Tony moved to Perth I was free from sex, but I’d only thought about it more and more, like it was hammering me into the ground. He’d visited once, for Dad’s fortieth at a surf club. I managed to avoid him the whole evening, except once at the buffet table, when he glided up behind me with a beer in his hand as I was trying to give Dad some quality time. ‘Hello, Nina,’ he said, right by my ear. I stiffened with my eyes glued to Dad. ‘She doesn’t look very pleased to see me, does she, Jeff?’

No one noticed when I disappeared for the rest of the evening, to smash bottles from the overflowing bin in the car park against the sea wall, but they never fucking did, did they? The broken glass was there for weeks.

Beyond that, there were fewer and fewer references to Tony, but if I let him into my mind I would be overwhelmed with confusion, trying to forensically establish culpability and who did what to whom, because I was sure he’d got it all twisted that I started this.

Thinking about it rooted me to the spot, so I’d blot him out by dancing; at a volume so loud it overrode my thoughts. I’d pull the curtains closed and bounce off the walls in the darkness, until I was slick with sweat, my checkered blue school uniform plastered to my skin. Sometimes Rose would come over and me, thinking it all a great hoot. She wasn’t to know.

I didn’t resent Rose for not having experienced the lightning flashes of my childhood, but I resented having to pretend we were still the twins we always fantasised we were. All through primary school we’d measure every part of ourselves with our hands—‘The same!’—and superimpose our likes and dislikes on each other. But we were not the same.

TOP 5 WAYS WE WERE NOT THE SAME

1. Rose didn’t have a family friend always loitering around her bedroom with a Rolodex of reasonable excuses.

2. Rose didn’t listen out for the creak of the stair at night, sleeping fitfully, face down, with her hands clamped between her legs.

3. Rose didn’t viciously beat every soft furnishing in her room and then sorrowfully apologise to each.

4. Rose didn’t deliberately wet herself from time to time.

5. Rose didn’t scream at herself in the mirror until it was flecked with spittle, or rake her skin and scribble on her face with lipstick.

People like me walk among people like you like ghosts. You have no idea.

6

AWARD FOR BEST PASH

Alcohol had become my identity, and losing my identity was a real fear. Who would I be if I sobered up? Perhaps I would be thirteen years old again, stuck in Parramatta, praying for a miracle. But with it, I was constantly kneecapping myself. Sex in a radio-station broom cupboard might make a great headline, but you had to walk out of that radio station afterwards, with security either side of you. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

I’d watched my body change through puberty with a kind of dread. I knew that men dug the lithe Lolita look, and I was losing whatever it was I had. Still, with adolescence came other, more intriguing changes. I’d started to sense a new world opening up in front of me, as outrageously tantalising as a bindi of burning vodka on my bottom lip.

The first time I got drunk, alone after school, it was as though I’d come home. Dad’s whisky seeped like hot molasses through my belly and into my veins. It was like a private romance, but at the same time I wanted to wear it on my sleeve. The ache in my throat disappeared. I had discovered my personality. I was Type A for alcohol.

Helen gave up trying to dictate to me when I underwent that profound change. Alcohol allowed me to seize back control over my body, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. If I wanted to out immovably, halfway up the

stairs, I had the power to do so. Now just the whisper of a Smirnoff lid coaxed from its moorings gave me goosebumps and made my pupils dilate. I could get off on fumes alone. My sleight of hand grew so proficient, I could top myself up during a photo shoot without anybody being any the wiser.

To look at our first promo shoot, the photos from which Ian Essence sent everywhere from the local paper to FHM and Dolly, you’d think we were naïve young waifs.

FYI, there are three postures key to pulling off the waif look.

1. Seated: Thighs together with lower legs splayed out for a knock-kneed childish effect. Let arms fall straight, collecting at the knees. This makes shoulders and upper torso appear slimmer, and accentuates breasts. Face: listless.

2. Draped: Subjects must be draped limply over each other, whether standing, sitting or lying down. It’s equal parts playful puppies (‘Sex puppies,’ said Hank, casting his eye over the proofs) and mild lesbionics. Face: sleepy.

3. Back to back: This is a seated pose. One subject to direct eyes to camera. NB: The ABBA look—with one subject direct on at camera and one side on —is considered to be a howler these days. Face: wistful.

Rose and I practically had Masters degrees in photo manipulation. We took our study as seriously as any academic, because anyone who wanted to excel in their field needed to study. We’d spent hundreds of hours taking turns posing, then scouring the photographs for unsightly creases under our armpits or around our

necks, figuring out precisely how to contort our bodies, and how to cascade our hair like a waterfall down our backs so that the light of a studio soft box caught it. Clothes didn’t just hang perfectly in sleek lines—they had to be angled. Faces didn’t just sit pertly—they were winched into place with just the right engagement of muscles.

I came up with what I called the law of +2/-2: when people see a pretty girl they’ll actively search for flaws and take her down two points; if she’s so-so or ugly, they’ll zone in on her attributes, over-correct and credit her two points. I’d get taken down two points. It was unfair, but just meant I had to work even harder.

I’d ditched the hobo chic for a Mae West look: platinum waves and cupid’s-bow lips in cherry red. My aim was to enable people—the right people—to take one look into my eyes and see the sum of my experiences, without me having to hand them the manual. Smudging green shimmer beneath my lower lashes hastened that effect.

In years to come we’d be criticised for some of our looks. ‘A cynic might wonder if appropriating motifs and tribal markings from Aboriginal culture to market their “Dreaming” make-up range was deliberately coordinated with Sorry Day,’ a columnist would write in 2013, when in fact we were paying homage to the Blondie song ‘Dreaming’.

Not long after that, the Indigenous issue raised its head again when we were pictured wearing Native Indian headdresses at Splendour in the Grass. The same hoo-ha happened to Alannah back in the late eighties over her use of fur, when some activist chucked red paint all over her. Yet at other times, the press completely ignored our outings in bindis and saris. It was like some things were fine and some weren’t, or something.

Helen had begun a graduate diploma in Counselling that required concentration, so she and I had come to the agreement that I could live with Dad, which would be a bit more like a halfway house for wayward young ladies. ‘She needs her independence,’ she told him down the phone as she watered the plants in the lounge room. Helen couldn’t stand talking to Dad and not doing something productive at the same time. I was smearing Nutella and peanut butter on a bit of toast in the kitchen. I hoped Dad had Nutella. I saw him so little, I wouldn’t know.

When I was younger I’d put Dad on a pedestal. I still pored over those Instagram-tinted memories from time to time: his faraway eyes, faded like denim, fixed on the horizon as he drove; the taste of salt and vinegar potato chips while I waited in the Corolla outside the pub; the secret smell of aftershave and cigarettes on my palm after I’d held his hand.

Trying to figure out what he knew about Tony left me confused. Every time I spent time with him I did so with the knowledge that he had betrayed me. Eating the eggs on toast my father cooked for my breakfast felt like my heart was breaking. He showed he loved me every day, so it didn’t make sense that he had known anything was going on, but then he must have seen the hatred in me every time he and Tony came in from the pub. Could a child be too subtle? At any rate, at some point I’d given up on him. Now I was set to mute.

Since Dad would be flying between mining sites, Rose opted to move in half of her stuff from Dee’s, too, so that we could live together like a real band. It was my intention that Hank would be my de facto, but he preferred Newtown to Banksia. His absence left me with plenty of time to panic about what he was up to and with whom.

I liked the bachelor-pad feel, though. It was ultra-modern. Dad had a massive plasma telly, a wine rack he wasn’t precious about, bar paraphernalia, CDs by Rose Tattoo, Tom Petty and INXS, and racing guides all over the place. It even

had central heating and carpets, unlike Helen’s place, with its stripped boards and ancient heaters on squeaky wheels with the wires half-gnawed by cats. He’d taken with him the keys to his age-inappropriate motorbike, which was a symbol of his new-found freedom from me and Helen. It was a good thing he had, or the temptation would have been too great to not have a go.

I hung some beaded curtains outside my room so that we could hear each other coming. Everything else lived in my suitcase.

At night, the alcohol ran molten in my veins and coursed about my body, goading me on. We could all be standing watching the same band at Dingo’s, nodding in time, yet in my head I’d be zeroing in on someone who’d knocked my elbow, shoving them back against the bar, punching them repeatedly and upsetting tables. It happened all the time. No one could tell.

‘Another drink, Nina?’

‘Yes, please.’

But if they looked closely they’d see the muscles working in my jaw. Sometimes I’d get these ideas—visions, I suppose—of being held down, someone’s face pushed up to mine, mimicking my whining in an obscene falsetto, crushing me, the smell of stale beer and cigarettes, persistent kisses that were more like cruel pinches . . . just impressions, like imprints left on my body. So, I’d up-end the contents of the nearest glass into my mouth to calm myself, which only wound me up more.

Eventually I’d just have to do a ghost and leave unannounced. That was just my

thing, though. I’d get agro; Rose would throw up.

•

I’d kept in with John Villiers: small, sporadic strokes to keep him interested. He wasn’t on Instagram, so I had to text him our promo photos, one by one. I wouldn’t always hear back, but when he invited us to the ARIAs I knew I was on the right track.

The ARIAs were the Australian music industry’s night of nights. Everyone who was ever likely to work with us would be there. Garnering a bunch of ARIA baubles was point three on the Dolls game plan that we’d written out and stuck on Dad’s bathroom mirror, sandwiched between ‘Sign with major’ and ‘Tour America’. Artists definitely had to win an ARIA before scoring a Grammy nomination; examples: Kylie, Keith Urban, INXS. If you didn’t win an ARIA, you’d be stuck in Australia, playing in the same old shitholes to the same stupid faces forever, for no money, and nobody would have heard of you in London or LA, even if you’d been on the front cover of The Brag.

The ceremony would be televised, and being seen on the red carpet was vital to our brand. People should hiss, ‘Who’s that?’ out of the corners of their mouths, and presume they should have known. We persuaded Rose’s dad to cough up for a room in a hotel. It’s an investment, we told him. Rose could buy him a house later.

On the forecourt of The Grand, a concierge homed in on Tim’s Benz and opened my door first. I lowered one stack-heeled boot to the ground, all knees. Sadie followed from the middle seat. She was going to attend to us mid-show with her toolbox of make-up, but come six o’clock we’d have to revert back to being a duo. We had to bring a lot of clothing options, because once we were on the red

carpet, women were going to put mics in our faces and yell ‘Tell us about your outfit.’

The aircon in the lobby was set to a gentle freeze, as if to reassure guests that there was no expense spared. I loved the smell of hotels. They smelled of steamcleaned carpet and illicit cigarette smoke. They smelled of cover-ups and subterfuge.

As Rose did dips off the edge of the suitcase rack in our room, Sadie and I lay on the bed and studied the look-book she’d put together. It was full of clippings of Paula Yates and vintage Drew Barrymore, so that we could resurrect the kinderwhore look. She had to start on me first, as I wanted a full head of curls, like Alannah when she famously closed the ARIAs back in 1988. Being the blonde, it would have to be me. It was a tactical manoeuvre for the whole band’s benefit.

When it came to Rose and me, Sadie was like the only child of an embittered marriage, ricocheting between one parent and the other. Rightfully she was mine because I had befriended her a few years earlier when we were both waiting outside the Enmore Theatre’s stage door to spot The Living End, and we were wearing the same Keds. Unfortunately Sadie was one of those people who saw no wrong in anybody, and so sometimes I found her drifting towards Rose’s side of the fence without a thought.

She didn’t seem to hear when we had irreconcilable differences:

‘That’s my lipstick, by the way, Rose.’

‘No, it’s not, it’s mine—I got the same one.’

‘Mine’s gone missing, then. Where do you reckon it’s gone?’

‘I don’t know, Nina, maybe you lost it when you were drunk.

My dad pays for everything around here, anyway, including this room.’

I wasn’t about to force Sadie to choose, but this was not loyalty. Seeing her cooing over Rose’s face with a Stila sparkle liner, I piped up, ‘This carpet’s crazy. Do you when we took acid in the Sando, Sadie? I think I’m having a flashback, man.’

Rose didn’t bother to look up.

‘The hills! The hills!’ cried Sadie, which was an in-joke, but then I left it at that. When I was younger I could overdo the do you re quite a bit. Less was more.

An hour later, Sadie was done with us both. Picture me in a white halter dress, high-heel Edwardian boots, and plum lips, which I drew on last with Sadie’s Yves Saint Laurent lipstick. References: Barrymore, Yates, Courtney Love, Babes in Toyland. Rose, in a fitted black dress with white trim, her hair precise and gleaming (ref: Bettie Page). She had plum lips too. It was the plum lips that rendered it cohesive.

We were now undeniably The Dolls.

Outside, the sun was low enough to shine directly into our eyes. John Villiers met us at the concierge desk with our laminates. He was in a suit, but more like hot-dad than dad.

The three-day growth on his chin suggested he either went to award ceremonies as an afterthought, or planned his re-growth in advance. Either way, I had a powerful urge to inhale his neck and feel that earring clank against my teeth. I sat next to him in the cab; the three of us squashed on the back seat. When he leaned forward to direct the driver, Rose waggled two fingers at me.

We would make damn sure there would be shots of us on the red carpet across all the major news outlets. This was our moment to own it, the one shot. John Villiers hung back with his hands in his pockets, but we stuck close to Delta Goodrem; her phantom entourage. We angled our lean bodies towards the cameras and funnelled our souls through the lenses.

‘Think “blessings”,’ Rose instructed under her breath. At the same time, we watched who got out of each limo pulling up.

A woman paused, then powered towards us, beckoning to her cameraman.

‘Excuse me, can I stop you, girls?’ she asked, aiming a mic at me. I was too startled to even read the logo on it. ‘Who are you hoping wins an ARIA today?’

I panicked and took a step backwards. I’d only prepared the answer ‘Vintage Alex Perry.’

‘We just think it’s fantastic to see so much Aussie talent celebrated tonight,’ Rose said smoothly, unfazed by the blinding light from the camera hoisted on the man’s shoulder. ‘The ARIAs really put Australia on the map.’ Shimmer.

She was right to do that; I could have kicked myself. All Australian award ceremonies centred around affirmations of how mind-blowing it was to be Australian, over bursts of cued music. You wouldn’t get the Oscars banging on about being American, but Alannah always said that Australia was more selfobsessed than a teenage girl.

When the suits with lanyards and walkie-talkies started to close in, I moved over to John Villiers so that I’d be granted immunity. He was talking to a man with all the hallmarks of somebody who was once diabolical: hair a touch too long, a ruffled shirt under his suit jacket, gaunt cheeks. I wished I could Shazam his face. He gave me a beaky look as he was introduced as Stephen. Stephen who, though?

Inside, our table was fifteen metres from the front—second tier of importance. Alannah had prowled that very stage, with everyone gazing up at her over their prawn cocktails. Rose and I could name every one of the guests that night. She had worn a gold tro suit, as if to say, I am the prize. I should have worn gold.

John Villiers took his seat alongside Stephen and some players from his production world, but we stayed standing, our eyes jumping about like eggs on the boil. People were going from table to table to talk before the ceremony

started. Everybody knew each other.

‘Act cool,’ muttered Rose at my elbow. ‘Here’s Martine.’

She put her hand on the arm of a girl we’d ed a few times. The last time, at the Vanguard, Martine had told us she’d slept with [redacted]. He’d told her she looked like a young Reese Witherspoon. I didn’t rate her music; she mixed in cabaret and most of her set was pre-programmed. We only did that at shopping centres. I went to kiss her and my earring got caught in her hair.

‘Awkward,’ Rose said.

The three of us stood and scanned the room.

‘It’s like Geordie Shore in here,’ Martine complained, grooming her ponytail in distaste. ‘So gross. I feel like I’m about to slip over in someone’s wet patch.’

‘It’s totally gross,’ Rose agreed.

‘We’ve only recognised Delta so far,’ I added.

Martine hovered, but didn’t engage. Her eyeballs flickered, mapping out a hierarchy of importance somewhere over our shoulders. She didn’t need to tell us The Dolls were bottom rung.

‘Oh, there’s Manny,’ she said about somebody I couldn’t see. ‘Manny!’ She drifted off.

The opening music rose up like panic from the PA stacks that snaked down from the roof. Over the rim of my wine glass, I noted the cliques cluttering down into their seats, memorising who knew whom. They all looked like they had the right to be there.

I inhaled my pinot for its comforting smell and then drank it. Many of the awards wouldn’t even be televised: Best adult contemporary album. Best comedy album. Best children’s album . . . all stowed away in the commercial breaks. Everyone in those categories took their sweet time thanking their colleagues, the unsung heroes. There were a lot of quiet achievers at these award shows, like John Villiers, who had twiddled the knobs on quite a few of the albums in the important categories, and lent his advice and squeezed a few diaphragms, yet you wouldn’t hear hide nor hair of him on TV.

If I were up there on that stage I’d have plenty to say.

‘Ever since I was a little girl . . .’

‘Couldn’t have done this without our producer . . .’

‘A man who needs no introduction . . .’

‘We couldn’t forget our aunt, our inspiration . . .’

‘Our aunt, Alannah Dall—’

I stopped and did the maths. Yes, it was true: feasibly we could be up on that stage in a year’s time—if we were to get a record deal immediately, and if that record company made us their number one priority. We’d already counted out Stephen, who itted when pressed by Rose that he was neither musician nor mogul, and only worked in distribution. Without conferring, we dropped him from our conversation.

The wine on the tables was free. When we watched the recording a few days later we could clearly see Rose in the background at one point, sitting on the floor with her glass, but we couldn’t for the life of us why she was there. John Villiers laughed a lot, but he stopped introducing us to people halfway through the evening. I’m not blaming John Villiers, but perhaps if he’d given us some of the cocaine I now don’t doubt for a minute that he was packing, we wouldn’t have got quite as drunk as we did.

John Villiers met my eye and pulled a face. I liked that we had this unspoken smirking between us, because in truth our real conversations were pretty boring. In the studio, I’d spin on the swivel chair and listen to him talk about frequencies. Pink noise; Brownian noise; the merits of Neumann mics over Rode mics. He had access to a whole universe that I couldn’t see or hear and he fell willingly into that wormhole every time he flicked on his monitor. I wondered what he’d have done with himself if he’d been born before the age of technology. Maybe he would have been an ornithologist, able to identify thousands of types of birdcall with his ultrasonic ears. Then he’d never have wound up working with our aunt and popping up on my radar.

I slipped sludgily into a favourite John Villiers fantasy with him not two feet away—a ridged forearm sticking out of his suit sleeve and that smattering of hair above the top button of his shirt. I listened to the bendy country burr of his voice as he made a boring console recommendation to someone across the table, and imagined him saying dirty stuff to me with it. I wanted to take him outside.

‘Give us a smoke,’ I’d go, flicking my fringe out of my eyes and staring into the distance. People would watch us with fascination.

He’d go, ‘Not a good look for a pop star,’ and shake one out of the pack. ‘You’re going to have to stop before you go too far.’

I’d cup his hand and lean into the Zippo, the burst of lighter fuel. Our eyes would meet as he snapped down the lid. He’d give me a playful little push away. I’d push him back. We’d wind up standing even closer.

‘Don’t start what you can’t finish,’ he’d warn, looking down at me. I’d look back at him intensely. Then, without speaking, we’d head for the toilets and find a cubicle that wasn’t filled with people doing coke.

Half the time I wasn’t interested in seducing people, really; I was just trying sex on for size, seeing what I could get away with—and sometimes that meant I had to go through with it. With John Villiers it was different. He had always kept his deeper thoughts to himself, and his hands too. It must be killing him. It was killing me.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Rose, as I got up.

‘Nowhere,’ I said, dropping my napkin on my chair. Over in the toilets I sat for a while with my knickers down and gathered myself. Then I weaved my way back to my seat.

‘Where’s Miss American Beauty?’ I heard Stephen ask John Villiers as I pulled back my chair.

•

By the time John Villiers escorted us back to our hotel, we were steaming. Rose tottered down the corridor with her arms outstretched, thumping one wall and then the other with her palms and loudly impersonating Julia Stone’s earlier performance. She was like a child on too much sherbet. Someone shushed her and laughed. They shouldn’t encourage her.

‘Another red carpet! We’re on another red carpet!’ she marvelled, as people melted away into their rooms.

We stopped outside our door and Rose rummaged in her handbag: a bread roll, a fork, a stoved-in packet of Marlboro Lights, a room key. She found the slot in the door and blundered in. As soon as she activated the lights with the key card and gave a crow of satisfaction, I pulled the door shut behind her.

Out in the corridor, I fronted up and kissed John Villiers hard, against the wall.

At first he didn’t respond, but then he kissed me back. Of course he did. For ages. The surge between us pulled me under and fused us at the hips. I touched my fingers to the seamed coarseness of his neck, smelled the faint tang of shaving foam. We broke for a second and grinned at each other in delight.

‘Stupid thing to do,’ he whispered, but I’d dosed him up on dopamine. He came at me again and I locked him in close. I could feel his hard-on pressing against me and I ground into him to double-check. It felt like it had been there all night. His thumb brushed my nipple through my dress. Usually when it came to sex I liked to feel like I was being forced, so that I couldn’t be held responsible for anything. With John Villiers, it was more fun to coerce.

‘Can’t.’ He gave me one last slip of the tongue and pushed my hands gently away from under his shirt, where they’d been roaming.

‘Why not?’

He didn’t answer. The look between us as we parted was like a tendril, thinning and finally breaking. But as I turned and fumbled my key at the door I was smiling. I knew that I would swirl around and around his head all night.

7

IT’S ON

First rule of drinking: always order a triple vodka with a splash of tonic, in a tall glass with a straw. That way, nobody can prove it was anything but lemonade. Wine? Beer? Champagne? Crème de menthe? Sure, behind closed doors. Otherwise, you only drink vodka now. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

Much hoopla has been made about my weird pronunciation over the years. I’ve been called a ‘banshee’, a ‘siren’ and a ‘mental Medusa’ (Rose gets ‘songstress’, ‘songbird’, ‘chanteuse’), but the truth is, I have to turn my ‘ee’ into ‘eh’ and chew on my vowels a bit, or I sound like Julie Andrews. That’s what years of after-school classical training will do.

Seducing John Villiers—who left the hotel the next morning before I could make meaningful eye —was the second-most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, after the ARIAs, but coming in at number three on the list was our first review. Over the years our write-ups would fall into one of two categories—fatherly advice from journo creeps ogling us through the bottom of their beer glasses, or bombastic, superlative-driven rants about our fuckability— but this first review of our live performance confirmed everything we had suspected to be true.

THE DOLLS, DINGO’S SALOON 19/10/07

Word around town is The Dolls are the second coming. They’re the saviours of pop, beamed down to deliver us from ponderous boys with sludgy guitars. They’re also riding high on the coat-tails of their aunt (eighties wild child Alannah Dall) and have even recruited her producer, John ‘The Ears’ Villiers, to work on their forthcoming album, but as yet they’ve managed not to dishonour her fantastically sordid reputation. Certainly Nina and Rose Dall are deliberately provocative—the sort of girls who’d hang upside down from the monkey bars at school with their underwear on show—which is a shot in the arm in an era of simpering pop debutantes and lisping folkies. It’s all thrashing hormones and freewheeling riffs as the teenagers test boundaries and push buttons. Case in point: ‘Flip the Script’, with its tirade against a puppeteer who needs them more than they need him: ‘I made you what you are today / And I can take it away,’ sings Rose, feet firmly planted in the classic rock gait. While you’ll hear all kinds of speculation at the bar at a Dolls show, something people forget to mention is what knockout singers the seventeen-year-olds are. Some of my rather more obvious colleagues here at Score Towers fall firmly into Team Rose—citing her Stevie Nicks sass and the histrionic explorations of a young Kate Bush—but for me it’s Nina Dall who’s got the goods. One moment she’s honking and yelping like the Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett; the next she’s affected the leathery roar of punk wench Brody Dalle. A band such as The Dolls will always have their denouncers (essentially they peddle garage pop in front of a faceless backing band), but I, for one, can’t wait to see what they’re capable of once they come of age. The Bone Doctor, 4/5

THE SCORE

Hank swatted the paper through the air a few times, as if to flick off imaginary drool. ‘I think you got The Bone Doctor’s panties wet,’ he said. I shrugged off his arm. I couldn’t stand it when he smelled like stale beer or smeared his stubble over my face. It brought back the spectre of Tony.

‘Don’t be too surprised,’ was Alannah’s advice when we rang her later to tell her about the review. ‘Women always have to suffer comparisons. They kept comparing me to bloody Bonnie Tyler.’

I didn’t mind those sorts of comparisons, when on toilet walls we were always compared to skanks, whores and puppets. John Villiers was still a way off being the puppet master I fantasised about, but he sent flowers of congratulations. Rose was feeding apples into the juicer when they arrived and when Dad wasn’t looking she poked her tongue in her cheek. But if John Villiers were here I could probably have begged him to take me roughly from behind at the breakfast bar and Dad wouldn’t have noticed.

Whenever I thought of John Villiers at the ARIAs I felt like punching the air in victory. I ed him as a Picasso: one giant eye. I’d been writing reams of masochistic lyrics about older men in his image, trying to come up with things to rhyme with ‘gerontophile’, ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ and ‘captor’, none of which were sexy words in isolation. I’d gone out and bought a bunch of over-the-knee socks and new silk undies for inspiration.

‘There’s no way he could rock a singlet like Hank does,’ Rose said, determined to take the higher moral ground. But Hank and I had a complicated thing going. Neither of us would it to being in a relationship, and we studied each other like chess players to see what strategic move would be made next and how we should counter. I liked the thrill of the chase, and we were as fast as each other.

•

Later that night I lay sprawled with Hank on his bed, his unsheathed doona

beneath us, the bottom sheet tangled around our feet. I waved my cigarette end at the ceiling, which flickered from the light of the TV.

Hank’s favourite movie, which he’d put on and from which he could quote religiously, was Valley of the Dolls. It was about an actress who succumbs to pills and booze. I’d adopted it as my favourite movie too, and we’d quote bits at each other in accents, in bars. Tonight we watched Neely O’Hara stagger from scene to scene. I wondered if that was how Hank liked his women: so scuppered by their issues that they eventually cartwheeled tragically out of his life without any awkward adult conversations. He was proving to be quite the feeder when it came to pouring me red wine.

‘It’s like The Bangles,’ I was trying to explain, spilling claret all over his doona. ‘If you weren’t Susanna Hoffs, you were nobody. In The Dolls, I have to be Susanna Hoffs.’

After a while, Hank fell asleep, so I circled his room for a bit, picking up his things and putting them back in roughly the right place. I scrolled through my phone s looking for someone to talk to, then called Alannah. I enjoyed our occasional late-night conversations, which felt quite thrillingly like I was cheating on Rose.

A moment after Alannah answered I heard the ignition of her lighter, which meant she was going to grant me an audience. ‘How was the weekend?’ she asked.

‘Okay, I guess. It’s such a comedown being back from the ARIAs, though. You know, like being back in the ’burbs.’ I tried to whine, but eliciting sympathy from Alannah was like getting blood out of a stone.

‘There’s no room for victims in this world, Nina,’ she said. ‘If you don’t stand up for yourself in this industry they’ll chew you up and spit you out.’

‘You say in your book you were really shy,’ I said, changing tack. ‘You’ve never seemed that shy.’

I really wanted her to test me on the book.

‘I just decided one day that I was going to be confident,’ she returned. ‘If you show people weakness, they won’t feel sorry for you, they’ll go for you. Sometimes they’ll try to destroy you.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because they can.’

‘But then you’ll be known as a bitch.’

‘Big deal,’ she laughed derisively. ‘Your decisions won’t always make you popular, but people who haven’t been in your shoes won’t understand you anyway.’

I wondered on what day Alannah decided to be confident; if it was the day she signed her deal with Grandiose Records; or the day Bono kicked her off the U2 tour for getting booed off stage three nights in a row. She was only nineteen then, two years older than I was now. Her twenties were like one long act of defiance: shouting ‘Fuck!’ on Hey Hey It’s Saturday in protest at having to mime; forgetting to wear knickers on Top of the Pops; putting her foot up on the monitor at Drought Aid so that every snapper in the pit rushed to take a shot up her skirt. Even though she afforded the tabloids a glimpse of skimpy black panties slicing between her thighs, it was her face above it that drew everyone in: bleary, cheeks smeared with make-up. Had she been crying? Did she just pash someone’s face offstage? You could write your own script.

‘Once you put yourself in that spotlight,’ she expounded, ‘something has to kick in. It has to, in order for you to survive. Call it fight or flight. The problem is, over time your new persona can turn into a monster. People shouldn’t be surprised.’

‘We always live our lives like we’re being watched,’ I said. There was a blank silence.

‘Like you said, in TV Week,’ I prompted, wrapping my toes over the bottom rail of Hank’s balcony and regarding my knees. I could see the late-night stragglers of King Street roaming around between my thighs.

‘Did I say that?’ she wondered. I heard her clanking around in the kitchen. It sounded like the construction of a cup of tea; probably Earl Grey. I couldn’t cope with the idea of Alannah buying Lipton down at Aldi. ‘Well, are you going to live your life worried that people are observing you, or are you going to dance like nobody’s watching?’

I frowned. This was a new Alannah-ism to absorb, and we’d had seventeen years to process the last one. My aunt exhaled noisily—the end of the cigarette.

‘Just watch out for the people watching you,’ she advised. ‘Be careful of releasing too many songs like “Can’t Say No”. And don’t mistake being a victim for a valid art form—it’s not sustainable.’

It’s not an art form, I thought in irritation, it’s the way I’m wired.

‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘the messed-up-little-girl stereotype eventually clicks over into the tragic old lush.’

She gave a raspy laugh that turned into a hacking cough so awful I had to hold the phone away from my ear. When I returned it she was saying, ‘And there’s no need to hurry into that.’

TOP 10 PIECES OF ADVICE FROM ALANNAH

1. Pay your taxes.

2. Don’t screw the crew.

3. Take care of your teeth.

4. Don’t work with anyone from Trunk Backline, Lester & Brown Legal Services, Crunk Records, Persephone Publishing, On the Clock Studios, Decadent or the BBC.

5. Do dust if you must but turn down the brown.

6. Don’t sign anything without independent legal advice.

7. Use a condom. Use two if you do screw the crew.

8. Keep a ledger of journalists that tried to destroy you, and their hobbies and the quotes.

9. It is your job to be a spectacle, not a cog in a well-oiled machine. However, always wear undergarments.

10. If you can’t be nice to the people you on the way up, make sure they’re dead on your way down.

•

It was Alannah’s opinion that now John Villiers had done the legwork with the

basic tracks, we should get some brand-appropriate names on board to add to the cache. Over the next few weeks her publisher, EZO, sent us to work with Tomkat in Sydney and Ben Noakes at his retreat in the Blue Mountains.

Until now it had just been Rose and me writing together, lying on her bedroom floor. Rose wrote in a concise, measured manner, sticking to the paths of big choruses, dramatic key changes and fail-safe couplets. I riffed and roiled all over the page, writing reams and reams, and scratching most of it out to leave just the curious gems that would stick in people’s minds. I was the Robbie Williams to her Gary Barlow. No, the Richards to her Jagger.

Showing the fruits of our labour to these producers was intimidating, particularly when our favourite parts wound up scrapped. On our home demos we’d multitracked our voices to infinity, but Tomkat reckoned less was more. We were already much better at laying down tracks, though. John Villiers had taught us how to cut our vowels short and not sound too singerly, and he’d corrected Rose’s pronunciation so that she stopped singing ‘sh’ for ‘s’ the way the Americans do. ‘That just shounds shtupid,’ he’d said. Tomkat didn’t have any good advice for us, but he did heap reverb on our vocals to make us sound better to our own ears. Then we’d sing better.

I never tired of watching Rose sing; the look of concentration on her face when she had the cans over her ears. When we sang together, for that suspended moment, we were on the same team, invincible.

Tomkat wound up reworking our lavish demo of ‘Can’t Say No’ into a techno killing machine, acknowledging my prodigious talent at barre chords, but then taking them all out. I had to it that it sounded better. Wasn’t it actually rendered more punk-rock by having the punk-rock taken out? We didn’t want to be too obvious.

By the time we were done with Tomkat and Noakes we had seven more songs in demo form for Ian Essence to peddle to record companies. We had a few lunches with label managers, with Alannah on speed dial as our ring-in advisor.

Ian Essence: We’re going to have to take a hard line here. The Dolls are not a disposable commodity. They’re about longevity and product development, one hundred and ten per cent.

Label manager: Of course, of course. How old are you two?

Ian Essence: They’re seventeen.

Label manager: Hm.

Rose Dall: We’ve got more than five thousand friends on Facebook.

Nina Dall: We’ve been reviewed in Rolling Stone.

Label manager: Because we’re definitely looking to develop some new talent. Think Australia’s answer to Duffy and Lily Allen.

Ian Essence: I see where you’re coming from. But Nina and Rose have done the hard work and already have a grassroots live following.

Label manager: Sure. Then, what’s your strategy? They’re already seventeen.

Ian Essence: Well . . . in essence our strategy is to—

Label manager: How do you feel about club music? We’re looking for someone who can get dance floors pumping. A multi-tasker who can deliver DJ sets and sing. We’d get them opening for all the major international acts.

At that point we’d put Alannah on speakerphone like we were laying a Magnum 44 on the table in a Tarantino film. It seemed as though everyone had a different vision for us, but there was one opinion I trusted more than any other. He was under my thumb, right there under ‘J’.

•

Isolated in the vocal booth with the cans clamped snugly over my ears, I could hear myself heavy-breathing like a creep. I was waiting for John Villiers’ voice.

I’d called him after our last meeting with Ovine Records, to tell him about the trouble we were having getting signed. He invited me into Glasshouse to re-track some vocals and talk about it, because he had the rest of the afternoon free. Rose was not invited, so this was code-speak for sex.

I wore: black lace dress with brogues and white ankle socks. A little bit riot grrrl, a little bit schoolgirl, a little bit Manga girl. You wouldn’t want to bend over in it. Or would you?

John Villiers wore: flannel shirt, jeans, aftershave. I was ninety-nine per cent certain he had not worn aftershave up to this point.

At first we kept up the pretence in the low-lit studio—I did a bit of singing; he pushed some buttons—but the inevitable outcome was etched into a smirk on my face. It was on.

I studied him through the control-room window, watching him concentrate on the faders or stroke his chin as he contemplated me contemplating him. I’d dimmed the lights in the booth, so much so that I could hardly see the lyrics tacked up on the wall, but I could see him, lit up by the glow of his computer. When I heard his talkback button crackle, I had a Pavlovian response.

I was seventeen. My brain had yet to develop an impulse-control mechanism, so there was nothing I could do to stop nature from taking its course. John Villiers said go, and I sang a verse—‘Suck it and see / I called it from the other / Side of the street’—but really I was wondering impatiently if this was my moment to go into the control room and trap him against the mixing console, my hand snaking down between us as I held his eye . . . or whether it was this moment now, as he came into the booth yet again to adjust the mic, to urgently pull him up against me, firmly putting his hands on the smooth, warm skin of my back, feeling his cock straining valiantly against his jeans and pushing at the hot groove between my legs—

‘Okay, that’s enough,’ crackled John Villiers in my ears. I trailed off. ‘I think we’ve got it.’

The spell broken, we packed up in silence, dragging it out. We were leaving things dangerously close to the last moment. John Villiers would have to get back to his big house way out in the Shire, and at this rate nothing would happen, again.

John Villiers stepped aside at the door to the studio so that I could through to the hall, which had fallen into darkness. It must have been late. Too late to suggest a beer?

‘You know, you really shouldn’t go out dressed like that,’ he grinned as he locked up Studio A without looking at what he was doing.

‘You reckon?’ I said, smoothing the hem of my dress.

‘I do.’

I fixed him with the sort of penetrating gaze Tony used to give me when I was younger. Now I had made it a weapon of my own. I was about to come out with something outrageous, when John Villiers said in a voice feathery with wonder, ‘I what you were wearing when I first clapped eyes on you, Nina. You made me wonder what you were playing at.’

And even though I concede that it was a soft jersey dress designed to inspire arousal, a huge chunk of desire crumbled off me like a rockslide. He’d revealed himself to be weak and tender. I was supposed to be tearing John Villiers against his will to the dark side of his desires until he emerged a desperate, broken man

—not going skipping through the primroses with him. We should be on the floor, bruised and battered and helpless, or nothing.

I did try to recover. This was what you wanted, this situation here, I reminded myself. I played myself a split-second show reel of John Villiers’ greatest hits: doing smack with the Weeping Brides in the nineties; retreating to the Himalayas with Nixon to record the multi-platinum Master and Keeper; appearing in the social pages walking the red carpet with his stunning ex-wife who once desired him. I built him back up to his rightful status. John Villiers interrupted my train of thought as his hands softly encircled my waist. ‘Can I kiss you?’

With those four little words, the remains of my lust toppled into the abyss. Anger bloomed like deadly nightshade inside me. For fuck’s sake, John Villiers, I thought. Just do it or don’t.

Poor John. I couldn’t put my finger on what he’d done, but he’d done it wrong. I ducked out of his grip and slowly picked up my bag. Slowly, to let him grasp the fact that I was leaving. His expression suddenly irritated me and made me long for the safety and immaturity of Hank, with whom nothing would ever be meaningful and expectations were low.

‘Did I say something wrong, Nina?’

God, stop saying my name.

‘I’m too young,’ I reprimanded with a tight smile. ‘You’re our producer. What would my aunt say?’

The light went out in John Villiers’ eyes and for a moment I felt a stab of remorse. I got us here. It was me.

I recovered again. I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked to the door.

8

THE GOLD COAST

Over the years I had become this calcified version of who I used to be: hardened and mean. I couldn’t stand the thought that other girls used me as a yardstick for their behaviour. ‘Oh, I’m not quite Alannah Dall yet. Therefore I may proceed . . .’ I hadn’t actually done half the things people said I had, but I was leaving myself open to all kinds of speculation. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

‘If you’re going to get into trouble, do it before you turn eighteen,’ Alannah told me when I confessed how mad I felt all the time. I felt like machine-gunning everyone as I walked down the street.

I knew I was probably abusing our friendship but I’d taken to treating Alannah’s number like the Batphone: every call was an emergency. Often I was drunk. I hoped I hadn’t told her about John Villiers. I hoped John Villiers hadn’t told her about John Villiers. Doubtful.

That morning I’d woken up half-dressed, on the floor. I reached for my phone and checked the last calls I’d made. John Villiers. Hank. Jimmy. Rose. Rose. Rose. I checked the last Google searches for clues.

Prairie oysters

How old is Dannii Minogue

Bukkake

I had a flashback to a bar in Newtown, to Jimmy’s face hovering close as I beckoned him in. I’d shown him porn on my phone, that was it. Hardcore porn, as if it made any difference. That was one for the shame reel in my head and one not to tell Rose under any circumstances. Luckily she hadn’t picked up at 2.54 a.m., 2.56 a.m. or 3.04 a.m. Jimmy wouldn’t tell her; he was too nice. And then there was the hunt for cigarettes that embroiled everyone in the courtyard, their faces smudged out by my memory’s clumsy thumbs. I couldn’t even sketch in bricks and mortar around them. Some things were better blacked out.

If I went by Alannah’s rule I only had two weeks in which to violently vent my spleen, because then I would turn eighteen and magically become an adult. While my friends were studying for their HSC I would be able to legally order a beer in the venues we’d been playing for years. For now, at least, having John Villiers as our super producer had come to a not-so-sticky end, with Rose adopting the expression ‘doing a John Villiers’ for every occasion I did something that stuffed up our plans, right down to ordering her the wrong sort of frappe. I couldn’t explain myself. Maybe I just chickened out.

Fortunately, Aunty Alannah came to the rescue. Google ‘The Dolls’ and ‘nepotism’ and you’ll find much discussion of this, everywhere from the Daily Telegraph to Wikipedia. Careful—it’s easy to get lost in a Wiki wormhole following the trails of Alannah Dall into gambling and disappearance and Scientology and conspiracy theories. Don’t bother, though—you’ll get no answers, only conjecture. No one in our family can be relied on to be upfront about their lives and Alannah only told the half of it in her memoir.

In the previous month, Ian Essence had booked us to play a ute muster, a General Pants store and a high-school formal. He’d be getting us on the bill for a schoolies next. I snitched to Alannah on the Batphone every few nights, and just like with the letters I’d written to her a few years earlier, his stupidity finally provoked her into a response. She invited us to the Gold Coast, without our manager, to talk. This was the moment we’d been waiting for all our lives: an invitation into Alannah’s universe. Rose cleared the entire music library off her new iPhone to be able to record every second of it.

I’d once gone to the Gold Coast, when I was six or so. I ed it by the things I ate: a Flake-and-raspberry-ripple ice cream on a wall by the beach; a hot dog in a bun sitting outside a pink stucco hotel; a plate of spaghetti next to a wall of lobsters in fish tanks. This time we were here to visit a mystical kingdom of shagpile carpets, heavy-framed platinum discs and cream soft furnishings. Perhaps a billiards table and a swimming pool. We packed our cossies.

In good spirits, we played Ten Things in the departure lounge—a game I invented, in which you pick a person to spy on and come up with ten likely facts about their life.

‘Lives with his mother,’ said Rose under her breath of the man at the snack bar. ‘Listens to power ballads. Always orders calamari.’

‘Likely to buy our debut album and send teddy bears to our parents’ houses,’ I added.

Alannah greeted us in Arrivals with a tinkling of bangles and a waft of expensive-smelling perfume. Rose probably knew exactly what it was. The

famous feathered hair prevented our cheeks from touching, so we all swivelled in from the hips and said, ‘Mwah’. The airport was nothing much, but the Gold Coast itself would be better.

Out in the car park I saw with a sinking heart that we were picking a path towards a Toyota Cressida, but then, I reassured myself, not everybody was a car person. Alannah apologised for the mess as we looped our way out onto the highway, Rose and I picking parking tickets and chip packets out from under us and dispensing them on the floor, and then she drove north. She drove north, but she kept going past all the good bits.

As the high-rises of Surfers Paradise shrank in the rear-view mirror, we ploughed a desolate path, past truck wreckers, quarries, a sprawling industrial park and finally a lone pie shop like the last bastion of consumerism. We were in a place called Yatala.

Rose typed something into her phone and nudged me. ‘Strictly speaking I suppose it’s the Gold Coast,’ it said on her screen.

After half an hour we pulled up to a block of units and wrangled our suitcases out of the boot in silence. As Rose lugged her case past Alannah at the door and gazed around the cramped lounge room, heaving with records, photographs and awards that looked like shiny souvenir tat in these tatty surroundings, she blurted out, ‘So, where’s all the royalties?’

Close. I was thinking, ‘So, where’s the shagpile carpet?’ Alannah Dall was on Top of the Pops eight times over in London. How could she have messed it up so badly?

Our aunt tossed her keys on the kitchen bench, not flinching at the line of inquiry. I guess that after being in the Guinness World Records for most orgasmic noises in one song (in 1986, ‘Fits and Spurts’ thrashed both ‘Je t’aime . . . Moi Non-Plus’ and ‘Love to Love You, Baby’) she was used to impertinent questions. ‘Law suits.’ She paused. ‘Lifestyle. Stuff. Plenty of time to fill you in on all the gory details.’

Rose and I exchanged looks as Alannah shuffled over to the sink to switch on the kettle. Her advice to live like a camera was following you obviously didn’t apply inside her own apartment. There was a background smell of cigarettes. I knew without looking that there wouldn’t be any drinks cabinet to raid, because she completely quit the booze in the final chapter of Pour Me Another. I’d packed a few miniatures in my suitcase, but sooner or later we were going to have to find a pub.

‘Pull that out,’ she indicated towards the sofa. ‘You two are sleeping there.’

A wave of fatigue washed over me at the prompt of sleep combined with the effort of staying cool around Alannah—and hoping she would stay cool with us. Rose and I levered out the sofa-bed and I sprawled on my front with my head on my arms, watching Alannah move about the kitchen. She was a bit like Rose in that the kitchen was the centre point of her sphere, with the table and its beautifully ornate tablecloth as the altar. Everything in my room at Dad’s gravitated around my mattress, which lay as a raft on the floor so that I could reach whatever useful detritus was bobbing around it. Some rough mornings I’d swipe at a cigarette packet that had caught in its wake, or fish out a half-eaten packet of Doritos.

Alannah set three bone-china teacups and a teapot on the table and we each scraped up a chair. She had plenty of nice gear like the tea set, I noted. Just nowhere nice to put it all.

‘What are we doing tomorrow?’ Rose said, trying to keep the note of anxiety out of her voice. She always needed to know what was going on well in advance. In that respect, she was a tour manager’s dream.

Alannah moved to a cupboard and pulled out teabags from a jumble of boxes. ‘I thought you could tell me where you’re up to,’ she suggested. ‘We’ll see what we can do about getting you a manager. A proper manager.’

Rose eyeballed me. Like me, she would have felt the need blooming inside her. Whenever something that could launch our career was dangled in front of us, it hurt like heartache. We needed this, and now it had been suggested, it must not be taken away.

‘Can we watch some of your old videos?’ Rose pleaded in a girly voice. What a suck, I thought, watching her try to pull ahead in Alannah’s affections.

‘You really want to?’ Alannah asked her dryly.

‘Oh, please. I bet you’ve got some clips we haven’t even seen.’

I pitched my voice in accordance. ‘We really have seen everything that we could possibly find. Can you dig out some more?’

Alannah flicked a bit of fringe out of her eyes and looked embarrassed; a look

I’d not seen in the scrapbook we made of her as kids. ‘Well, I suppose I could find something.’

Rose leaned over to high-five me. ‘Yes!’ She took the plum spot on the sofa-bed, pedalling her legs until they were under the blanket and grabbing a cushion to hug. I ed her and it started to feel quite exciting, like one of our old sleepovers.

When Alannah turned to peruse the labels of her VHS collection, I took the opportunity to study her. She’d put on some red-rimmed glasses, the rectangular kind that groovy mums like. It was jarring to see her in thongs rather than her trademark Victorian-style boots, but I noted that her toenails were painted a deep cerise and she’d levered herself into a tight black dress. She fed a tape into the player and on the screen a camera spiralled down over a colourful studio audience. It was twenty years ago and yet those flushed, hopeful faces still looked the same to me.

•

The next morning I hit redial again on my phone, trying to reach Hank. I hadn’t seen him since Dingo’s a few nights back and I couldn’t who left first, but my anger had abated and clicked over into anxiety. Who had he been off with while I’d been doing a John Villiers? I shouldn’t have bragged that record companies were paying for all our lunches these days, especially when he had just given me an amethyst necklace. He was right in thinking that was my birthstone, although I’d noticed another girl’s hair snarled in the clasp.

‘He’s jealous of your success. Don’t expect him to be happy for you; people generally aren’t that big,’ was Alannah’s advice as she stood at the barbecue on the balcony with a menthol in her mouth. I made a mental note to get into

smoking those.

I leaned over the balcony and looked at the galahs stalking about on the grass below. Inside, Rose had stuck the new Ladyhawke album on the stereo so we could analyse it. She sat pointedly at the table with a notebook, breaking down each song layer by layer; such was her dedication to the craft.

‘So, tell me what happened at your last record-label wining and dining,’ Alannah said, peering over the top of her glasses at the prawns. ‘Or I should hope it was just dining, at your age.’

‘It sucked,’ I yawned. ‘They wanted us to go more pop-rock and co-write the whole album with some guitarist.’

‘Oh, amateurs,’ she wailed. ‘You’d put that out and that would be the end of you. It’s a shame. Nobody’s in it for the long haul any more; nobody’s prepared to take a risk and develop a songwriting talent. Can you imagine the response at EMI back in seventy-seven after they first listened to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”?’

I shook my head.

‘Of course they didn’t want to release it, but she insisted it be her debut single and in the end they took a risk. Imagine if they’d ignored her talent and made her sit down with some bloated old guitarist instead.’

‘I know.’

‘At least with Grandiose they signed me for who I was. I started my career in Greg Mickiewicz’s office, working the phones—did you know that? He’s one of the few people I know whose audacity never trips them up,’ she said with grudging iration. ‘And I’ll tell you, he gave me free rein to be the artist he knew I could be, instead of trying to shoehorn me into being the next Olivia Newton-John. You don’t get that these days.’

I could see that Rose was listening from inside the apartment. We knew exactly who Greg Mickiewicz was—there were entire chapters of Pour Me Another dedicated to him: the time he threw her out of his limo; the time she tried to sue him for breach of contract; the time he hired a plane and got Alannah and Lyrebird to play to five journalists twenty-thousand feet over Wodonga.

‘So, why did you run away?’

Alannah set her jaw and slammed down the tongs. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, disappearing through the balcony doors and into her room.

‘Oh my god,’ I heard Rose hiss from the lounge-room table when it was safe to speak. ‘Stupid.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve upset her. You can’t ask her that.’ She came over to the sliding doors

and pulled her pained face.

‘Why not?’ I said, taking up the tongs. ‘You wanted to know too.’

‘But you can’t ask her.’

In an interview in 2013 with GQ, Rose would describe this very morning as ‘a blessing’ and ‘serendipitous’, but in reality she wedged her tongue in her chin at me and gave an exasperated scream.

I waved her quiet. I could hear Alannah on the phone in her room. I hoped she wasn’t arranging our age back to Sydney. I tried calling Hank again, miserable, but got his voicemail. ‘You know what to do.’

I’d been peevishly thumbing redial on my phone for twenty minutes by the time Alannah burst back in, looking flushed. ‘You’re meeting Greg Mickiewicz,’ she said. ‘Thursday, in Sydney. You need to be ready. Are you ready?’

She braced herself on the kitchen counter and exhaled, then reached for her smokes.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, looking at Rose. Rose had her pen poised, as though frightened that the slightest movement would make Alannah change her mind.

‘It’s a good idea; it’s a good idea,’ Alannah said distractedly, checking her reflection in a framed Lichtenstein print on the wall. ‘You won’t make the same mistakes I did, I can promise you that. I won’t let it happen.’

‘Get out,’ Rose said finally. ‘This is huge.’ We knew a few bands who had used crowdsourcing to fund their albums and cut out the record company, but we would literally die if that was us. You couldn’t crowdsource yourself a seat in business class. It was much better having someone like Grandiose to pay for you. Alannah wheeled around and leaned back on the counter. I’d never seen her so fired up.

‘He folded quicker than I thought,’ she said, though I didn’t see why he should be folding so much as opening up. ‘He’d been watching you anyway, trust me. There’s a buzz about you girls and it’s big. The very fact that you’re working with John Villiers.’

She threw her lighter down on the kitchen table. ‘You need to play me what you’ve been working on with John and the others. Bring your laptop into my room. We’re going to get you kitted out.’

I fished in my suitcase and pulled out my laptop, then followed her in. Alannah had a picture of herself over her bed, just like I used to. Hers was beautifully framed and given Warhol’s Marilyn treatment instead of ripped out of an old copy of Duke, but still. On one bedside table was a vase full of expensivelooking flowers. On the other, a chintzy lamp and a copy of the Kama Sutra. A modest chandelier hung from the ceiling. It wasn’t Vogue Living, but it was an improvement on the rest of the place.

Alannah slid open her wardrobe doors. ‘This is the vintage side,’ she said, analysing the spoils. ‘As in, vintage Dall. You might recognise some of these.’

Rose moaned. ‘Really? Oh my god.’

‘Those that didn’t get ripped to bits,’ said Alannah wistfully. Ditching subtlety, I snaked around the edge of the bed to the wardrobe. I could tell Rose was already mentally cocking her leg over the best bits.

‘This is beautiful,’ Rose cooed, pouncing on a lace hem like a seagull on a chip. ‘You can’t want to loan me this, surely?’

‘That’s Galliano,’ said Alannah. ‘As if I could still fit into that.’

I tugged out an original Katharine Hamnett ‘No War’ T-shirt that our aunt wore on the cover of ID. Rose tutted as the hanger snagged at the black Lycra dress she was stroking.

‘Now—Mickiewicz,’ Alannah said, skittling the hangers to the left. She paused to consider a pair of gold pants. ‘Don’t let him typecast you. No cover versions. No single out without an album behind it—you don’t want them “testing the water” and making fools of you. And no agreeing to anything until you’ve talked to my lawyer.’

She pulled out a black corset dress. ‘Thierry Mugler. Rose, you wear this. He likes this.’

The addition of a leather jacket for me saw Rose and I making peace over our winnings. We took in the region of three-hundred photographs all in all, so that we barely had time to make the trek back to the glittering mirage of the Gold Coast.

Alannah saw us off at the airport early that evening, parking the Toyota under a pandanus tree just a few metres from the terminal. You couldn’t do that in Sydney.

‘Good luck, girls. Give the old bastard my love,’ she said, looking stricken with emotion as she pressed an awkward kiss on each of us. ‘Tell him I’m watching him.’

Walking away from our aunt, I watched the numbers blur on the departure board. I wiped my eyes before Rose could notice. We still didn’t know what had harpooned Alannah’s career and cast her adrift from the family, but she was brushing all that aside for us.

It was Rose’s belief that everything in life happened for a reason. I was less inclined to believe that the universe had a plan for the likes of me, but thanks to Alannah’s confidence in The Dolls I was starting to dream. With the wind behind us and the stars aligning, perhaps we could hook onto an opportunity and be catapulted into the stratosphere.

9

THE BIG CHEESE

My carefully cultivated image was both a mask and a trap. By 1983 I couldn’t afford to be seen looking like anything less than Alannah Dall, ‘Australia’s most successful export’. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

It was my policy to never cross the Harbour Bridge, but the Grandiose offices were in North Sydney. That Thursday I took the train across the water and noted with satisfaction that the neighbourhood indeed lacked soul and any decent boutiques.

I had to sort out a problem first. The problem was I often got stabbing pains in my stomach when I had to perform in any way, which included conversations. I found a sports bar two blocks from the place I was meeting Rose and Ian Essence and sank a couple of house whites, each vinegary gulp pooling hotly in my empty stomach.

Note to self, I thought, twirling the stem of my near-empty wine glass between thumb and forefinger as self-doubt began to dull my brain. Shake hands firmly. Make eye .

Hi, Mr Mitch-ke-vitch. I’m Nina Dall. I am Nina Dall. I am.

I was stressed out because the night before at Dingo’s, Carly pointed out a chick I’d seen around the gig circuit before, chugging on an espresso martini with her friends.

‘That’s John Villiers’ new girlfriend,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you been working with him?’

They didn’t call Carly a door bitch for nothing.

The girl had the cute geek look going on, except she wasn’t that cute. Rose agreed. ‘Hair ear,’ she observed. Hair ear was when a fey-looking girl tucked her hair behind her ear in order to look more feeble.

‘I can’t believe he’s got a girlfriend,’ I fumed to Rose, out of earshot of Carly. ‘What a devious bastard.’

Rose sucked on her straw, making the ice cubes rumble.

‘Where is he then, if they’re supposedly going out?’

Say what you like about my cousin, but she was a good sport sometimes. We scanned the bar again. I saw geek girl chucking me serious shade, then looking away with her mouth set. So he’d told her . What had he told her? About some mad girl in a band he’d been working with, or that we’d totally pashed at

the ARIAS?

But I had to focus on today. The next hour at Grandiose could be the most important of our lives. The stabbing pains in my guts were gone by the time I chanced a third glass, and as I swung through the doors to meet the others I was feeling more peppy.

I wore: fringed gold shirt, leather mini-skirt, knee-high boots. Hair up, peach lipstick. They hadn’t seen anything like that in North Sydney before.

Rose wore: burgundy pencil skirt with thin studded belt, fitted white shirt. Hair up, burgundy lipstick. Nice job: she must have gone to M.A.C especially to match the shade.

Ian Essence had brought along a man in a cheap-looking suit whom he introduced as a lawyer but who looked more like one of his dreary mates. Rose shook her head at me: We’ll deal with this later.

Up in the penthouse office, we were met by Mickiewicz’s PA. Mickiewicz was on the phone, reclining almost prone on a sofa with his feet up on the coffee table. He waved us to the opposite sofa. In the thirty seconds it had taken us to get from the bottom of the building to the top, it seemed he had begun a very important phone call. Rose stroked her hair into a raccoon’s tail.

Mickiewicz was one of those solid men who looked better with age. I watched him idly stroke his chest fuzz as he outlined a game plan to the person at the other end of the line. I could definitely imagine him raising a sound desk over his head and threatening to drop it unless the promoter promised to pay up. That

sort of thing. I looked over at Rose, who I could tell was manifesting furiously as she scanned the discs on the walls. Multi-platinum record. Holidays in St Barts. Stadium tour. Universe, I am ready to receive.

Alannah had warned us that we would have Grandiose’s attention for as long as we remained in favour, but that once we bored them we would be churning out records without any promotional —and be bound to them. Accordingly, she called Ian Essence and gave him strict instructions not to sign to anything above a two-album deal.

‘Let the old bastard compete for you if he wants to keep you,’ she’d ordered so sharply I could hear her words buzz past Ian Essence’s ear like angry wasps. ‘Then you can renegotiate what you’re worth if you want to stay.’

Mickiewicz finally hung up his call and turned his attention to us, but not before looking at his watch. He shook our hands, then resumed his position.

‘Well then,’ he said, folding his arms. He had a smoker’s rasp like Alannah’s and an expanding gut under his T-shirt. ‘I suppose I should go first.’

We rumbled to the affirmative. My eyes kept sliding to the silver Marshall amp under a shelf of ARIA awards and other trinkets. I’d never seen one of those before.

‘When I started out, pop was a very backyard industry.’

Punk, I corrected in my head.

‘It was controversial, it was rebellious and it had a bit of attitude, whereas these days every man and his dog is trying to be in music. I think The Dolls are positioned very well. Some might think I’m mad to say that, but then, people thought I was mad when I signed Wild Whimsy. They were getting pelted off stage by coins and glasses when I discovered them, but I knew that if people hated them that much, other people would love them even more. Why should I be interested in an act nobody cares about one way or the other?’

He jumped to his feet, did a circuit of his office and sat back down.

‘Talent shows are taking the place of artist development and for the most part the result is homogenised shit. You’re different. Let’s use The Dolls to get back to what pop used to be about.’

Punk.

Mickiewicz stretched his arms along the top of the sofa. As a rallying opening statement it was a good one, although I felt a spike of doubt when he mused, ‘People shouldn’t undermine the value of good, honest pop music. It serves a purpose; it’s a release. It’s not there to change the world.’

Was he implying that we were disposable and mustn’t get ideas above our station? I looked across at Ian Essence, who was smiling blandly.

‘Stay in your box at first,’ Mickiewicz continued. ‘We’ll get you a tour slot with the sort of band you want to align yourself with, to show you the ropes. Then, a few months later, your own dates. Start modest. We could easily do an Enmore Theatre, but we’ll put you on at the Factory and then let it sell out, add another date, let it sell out, add another date . . . get the picture? We’ll get you going hard.’

Going hard was what we’d been waiting for. I willed Rose not to kill the moment by asking her father’s question about superannuation.

Mickiewicz outlined his vision of getting us a sync on a TV show and a halftime slot at the State of the Origin, embedding us in people’s psyches. I started to comprehend the way his mind worked. I cruised on feelings, whereas he was a strategic thinker, mapping things out, identifying goals. His words fanned out in front of him like a grid. I saw it all lit up like something out of Tron, layer upon layer of blueprints and flashing targets.

‘Interesting move using John Villiers, the wanker,’ he said, regaining my attention. I made a mental note to google ‘John Villiers + Greg Mickiewicz’ later. ‘He’s got the right pop aesthetic, but now we’ll get his mixes sent to Dean Henmann in the States to master and then that’s another name under your belt.’

Rose looked up and stopped making notes as Mickiewicz instructed his personal assistant to figure out how to work the stereo. He put on ‘Fight Like a Girl’ thrillingly loud and conducted along, surveying the world below his penthouse window. With his back to us, it was our chance to mouth delighted profanities at each other. ‘No, you fucking rock,’ Rose was mouthing when he turned around again.

For the next twenty minutes, Mickiewicz sparred and wore us down with

rhetoric, before delivering his KO: an umbrella deal, in which Grandoise and its subsidiary companies controlled all touring, merchandise and publishing. Alannah hadn’t mentioned this concept and Ian Essence merely nodded obsequiously.

‘Rest assured,’ Mickiewicz concluded, holding aloft an index finger. ‘We’re taking you to number one.’

It wasn’t a long courtship, so I could only assume my aunt had whispered something obscene into Mickiewicz’s ear during that phone call from the Gold Coast. Before too long, the industry papers would learn the size of our deal and suggest we had been the subject of a bidding war between the country’s biggest record companies. Neither Mickiewicz or The Dolls would correct them.

‘We’ll have to stipulate a two-album deal,’ I said, ing our instructions from Alannah.

Mickiewicz tried various looks of disgust and impending regret, and contemplated reconsidering the whole idea, but we held steady. He sighed and scribbled out a clause, using the knee crossed over his leg as a boardroom table. Desired effect: spontaneity and danger.

‘I never do this,’ he said with some pleasure. ‘You’ve got me.’

Our new lawyer stopped leafing through the other contract and put it down on the coffee table.

‘Looks about right,’ he said.

Mickiewicz ignored him.

‘Take it home to your aunt and show her,’ he said to us. The paperwork was for Rose and me alone—the band would be on a retainer.

‘They can look after themselves,’ Mickiewicz said dismissively. ‘You can’t afford to carry people like you used to. These days it’s about seizing the moment and knowing when to get off the bus.’

We accepted the contract and our esteemed manager took a suite of blurred pictures on his camera phone. Great job, Ian Essence—one for the grandchildren.

‘Let me tell you, it never happens like that,’ Ian Essence said as we walked to a bar around the corner. It felt surreal to be under an open sky again, having had our entire future just funnel through a wormhole in Mickiewicz’s office. ‘That was incredibly easy. I can’t really understand it.’

‘You mean Corpsefinger and Stinkfist didn’t get signed straightaway?’ queried Rose innocently. ‘How strange.’ She circled on another coat of lipstick. Shade: jubilation.

•

One thing Mickiewicz was insistent on before the ink had even dried on our contracts was media training. If we didn’t learn how to handle the press, he said, we’d be like lambs to the slaughter. He was probably referring to an interview Rose gave to an industry paper, in which she was deftly talked into ing comment on a few of our competitors and giving away the figure we signed for, which was much higher than a lot of people thought it should be.

The head of publicity at Grandiose took us into her office and ran through some scenarios. ‘Always lightly tease the interviewer like you might a friend,’ Carmel said, critiquing us from across her desk, which was studded with framed pictures of two gap-toothed children. I could never understand why worker ants had to surround themselves with pictures of people they last saw at breakfast. It was turning your kids into status symbols. If I had a desk I’d rather have a picture of a Les Paul or a mansion on Lake Como. I was never going to have a desk, though. Instead, Rose and I were always making vision boards of things we aspired to have, cutting out pictures from magazines. Oprah reckoned if you focused on something hard enough, you’d attract it. That was called the law of attraction.

‘Keep saying their name,’ Carmel instructed. ‘Instil familiarity.

If they’ve interviewed you before, always pretend to and be pleased to see them. If a line of questioning throws you, stop talking. If in doubt, don’t.’

TOP 5 RESPONSES TO AWKWARD QUESTIONS

1. ‘What a good question. I’ll have to come back to that one.’

2. ‘You’ve nailed it.’

3. ‘What’s that accent, (use first name)?’

4. ‘How interesting. What do you mean?’

5. ‘We prefer to maintain an air of mystery on that front.’

Our press photos for Grandiose would be shot at a hotel in the Rocks. Mickiewicz came down to meet us before taking us out to dinner, but he paced around the studio on his phone for the first twenty minutes. I watched him from where I sat on the floor, working a Chupa Chup around my mouth. Idly, I superimposed his figure into scenes with AC/DC and Midnight Oil. I scrapped the rolled-up shirtsleeves and dad jeans and instead put him in high-waisted flares and sneakers, and fluffed out his hair at the back. He saw me staring and nodded.

Mickiewicz had hired a hair-and-make-up girl, and I decided that next time we would get Sadie—partly to reassure Rose that she sang really well, thus taking some of the pressure off me, and partly to do things the way we actually liked it. Make-up artists always tried to convince us to have nude lips and statement eyes, whereas in fact The Dolls were all about the lips and nothing about current trends. It was like trying to communicate in a foreign language sometimes.

Having a stylist was something Rose had meditated on since the days of playing with the dress-up box, so she was all over the rack of clothes like a rash. The

photographer, an old guy, looked at my T-shirt, which said, ‘I Spit On Your Grave’.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ he said.

I shot him an evil look and wandered over to the rack. Rose was picking out a leopard-skin halter-neck. I was thinking crop top, bra, pencil skirt, bangles . . . kind of early Madonna. Concept: B-girl-meets-hooker.

‘We can put you in these shorts,’ said the stylist in a conspiratorial voice. They always spoke like that, to try and coerce us into things, like we were all girls on side here. ‘You can totally get away with those with your arse.’

I took them off her. They were hideous things; green leather.

‘Why?’ I snapped. ‘Is this an Oktoberfest shoot?’

Rose was having rollers put in, and the studio filled with that lovely smell of heated hair and lacquer. The scent acted as a trigger, flicking the freak switch in my brain and amping me up for the night ahead.

Mickiewicz had hung up his call, but I could sense his presence as he scrutinised his phone. A guy with a presence that intense activated a homing device inside me. Right now he was beeping his way over to the window, pretending to check the weather.

The stylist lifted my arm and sprayed antiperspirant under it, then did the same with the other. ‘We’ve got to give these clothes back after,’ she said without apology. Once Rose was done in the chair, I ed her gingerly on the white backdrop in my heels and arranged her hair properly.

Mickiewicz, at five o’clock.

‘Do my girls look okay?’ Rose asked the photographer, fiddling with her bra. She threw her hair over her shoulder and arranged herself languidly on me, chin down. Rose wasn’t helping our reputation for being a pair of deboned sex kittens with a bumbling manager on the leash. We were going to become an industry joke if we weren’t careful, so I hoped Mickiewicz would take her in hand. Mickiewicz was nine parts entertaining bluster and one part genuine danger, I’d already discovered. He’d ring up and bawl us out, then be our best mate again a few minutes later. I got the distinct impression he liked it when we gave it back.

Halfway through our first costume change, the photographer ran out of memory and had to rummage around in his case. ‘Peaked too early,’ piped up Rose. We picked our way off the paper roll and went over to talk to Mickiewicz, who had finished his second call. We had a window of about ten seconds before he started another.

‘We need some attention,’ I said.

•

‘I saw you in the social pages,’ Helen said. It was illegal use of her mobile phone from the writers’ retreat.

I ran a nail over the grain of Dad’s sofa and stared at the TV. I was already irritable because I had a head full of dye that was smearing all over my ear and the phone. I was going pink bob. Sharp pink bob with a fringe that I should have asked Sadie to cut.

I couldn’t having my picture taken. Once ensconced in the high-end restaurant Mickiewicz took us to, things took a psychedelic turn with the introduction of a bottle of rum. There followed a medley of hazy moments: Mickiewicz’s biting refrain about John Villiers trading on his past glories; my trout arriving with its head still on; Rose’s chorus, ‘No, no, no . . . sorry about that, Mr Mickiewicz’; and something really important about Alannah that I made a note to , but didn’t. When Rose responded to Mickiewicz’s interlude about possible TV appearances with ‘We should send Nina to Brat Camp,’ things escalated a notch, building to a crescendo when someone knocked over the remainder of the rum. Outside, a blast of horns.

‘That’s not much of a retreat then, is it?’ I bickered. ‘If they’re letting you read the paper.’

‘Who was the old man?’ Helen asked.

‘Mickiewicz. He’s the head of Grandiose. He’s about your age.’

‘He had his arm around you.’

‘He had his arms around both of us, Helen,’ I frowned, fingering a blister on my heel. ‘It’s good for us—it shows we’re signed to his label.’

‘I see. Well, as long as your young man doesn’t mind.’

Mickiewicz had refused to let me bring Hank to our bonding dinner in Surry Hills. ‘I’m paying and he’s not coming,’ he said with finality. ‘You’re new and exciting. Let people think you’re young, free and single for now.’

I didn’t mind, as I always felt that Hank had the upper hand—to the point that I’d made a tally at the back of my lyrics pad to be sure: hand/no hand. Hank was five hands to my none, because I kept doing things like being the first to text, and then turning my message into a question to try to make him answer. Going to the Ivy without Hank would mean I had hand.

I’d actually been pictured twice in a week. The following night, at Totty, the same photographer recognised me and snapped one of me and Hank leaving. Totty was the sort of place I wouldn’t be seen dead in ordinarily, but this was a strategic move known as ‘building your profile’. The caption referred to Hank as my ‘beau’, which I’d never even heard my nanna say. Gossip journalists always alternated ‘beau’ with ‘love rat’ depending on their mood. If they were in a cryinto-a-family-size-block-of-chocolate mood, it was ‘love rat’.

‘Well, I’m sure you know what you’re doing,’ Helen allowed. ‘And how’s herself?’

‘Who?’

‘Alannah.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘She’s been great, actually. She’s set up a meeting with a manager next week, so we’ll probably be leaving Sydney for good soon.’

I was being mean, but I was also smarting that Helen had converted my bedroom into a reiki room; her latest fad on top of the novelist pretentions and bad poetry readings at open mic nights. At least when I lived at home all she did was mope in the kitchen and slam doors.

‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘I’m in the middle of doing my hair.’ ‘Wait, you’ve got a big birthday coming up,’ she said. ‘What do you want to do?’

‘Eighteen’s not a big deal. I won’t be doing anything I haven’t already been doing for the past five years when you weren’t looking.’

‘No, well, I’d rather not know about that. But you should come over for a special dinner at least.’

I sighed. ‘I’ll give you a call when I figure out what’s going on.’

Right. Ready meals with Helen—I’d be sure to clear my diary. With Mickiewicz

now on board, my life felt thrillingly full-tilt, and I didn’t have time to be maintaining dud relationships.

10

THE UTE MUSTER

Around me, my peers were dropping like flies, expiring in bathtubs and venue toilets all down the Eastern seaboard. Beautiful young men and women, ridiculously talented—it was such a terrible waste. Heroin wasn’t for me. I preferred to set the fashion, not follow it. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

You need to get your facts straight on everything we had to deal with on July third before you judge us on why we’ve said the things we’ve said about Townsville and regional folk.

The Woop Woop Ute Muster was Ian Essence’s last hurrah as manager of The Dolls, although he didn’t know that when he pestered the promoter to get us on the bill. It demonstrated his woeful lack of branding knowledge, that he would consider The Dolls a suitable match for a bunch of bogans doing donuts in souped-up utility vehicles in Far North Queensland.

‘Festival promoters are gamblers,’ he told us iringly, ‘and the hustle of being a gambler means you have to play with a firm hand. They know this will really open The Dolls up to a new audience.’

Our tour manager, Brendan Williams, picked us up from the airport and drove us

to 3YYY, a squat building around the back of a shopping precinct. The receptionist buzzed us in and the producer took us into the ‘Mornings With Lisa and Davo’ studio. The whole t was done up in gleaming red and white and it gave me a bit of a headache the minute I walked in. I was still hung-over from the night before, when I attended a charity benefit at the Sydney Opera House, hosted by Hank. It was a big gig for him, and it was also a good opportunity to be papped.

I had expected him to be pleased that his newly signed girlfriend had made the effort to dress up in sass & bide, but instead I sat in the front row with Sadie with my back very straight as he made a succession of jokes at my expense.

‘I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a living soul,’ he told us, pacing the stage. ‘My girlfriend’s in a band. Yeah. True. They’ve just been signed.’

He made quotation marks in the air. ‘A “punk” band.’ Hank exhaled malevolently into the mic, regarding the audience from under his brow. He’d stolen that shtick from Bill Hicks, but still people laughed.

‘I call them Alco Pops. Now that they’re sucking the corporate cock, you should be seeing them around a lot more. Like, in bargain basement bins: buy one, get one free.’ He mimicked a blowjob. ‘Or maybe they’ll just be marked down as sloppy seconds.’

The audience made that ‘ooh’ sound the boys in school used to do, because they loved it. Ooh, you are awful. And he was awful. He didn’t mind The Dolls when I introduced him to famous Sydney bands he could name-drop. I looked over at Sadie and saw that her eyebrows were in her hairline. I stopped tweeting pictures of Hank, picked up my bag and we headed for the EXIT sign.

I knew that Hank would protest as usual that it was all rock’n’roll, but I wished I’d never invited him to Woop Woop. Somewhere along the way, Hank and I had turned from a potential power couple into that couple—the one always brawling in public while everyone exchanged looks.

I put on my sunglasses and sat silently in the corridor with Rose and Brendan. During a commercial break we were ushered into the studio and handed our headphones. We put them on like we were facing a firing squad. It was a few years before we’d learn to make journalists cry with our mind games. Carmel from Grandiose had warned us that we wouldn’t be on home turf, and so the hosts would have no emotional investment in us. The producer counted us in from behind her window.

‘Welcome back, and as promised we have The Dolls with us in the studio, two cousins all the way from Sydney, here for the Woop Woop Ute Muster. Welcome, Nina and Rose Dall,’ said Davo.

‘G’day,’ we chorused. Rose reached over and straightened my silk scarf. She was always adjusting me in public.

‘So, how are you feeling about your performance at one of our state’s finest bogan bashes?’ Davo asked, as Lisa let rip a you are awful laugh. ‘Everybody knows Queenslanders know how to party, so how are you planning to win over the crowd?’

We hesitated. Davo was inviting us to agree with him that the crowd were feral roo-botherers, but that felt like a bit of a no-go area.

‘What about the Facebook page that’s been set up by Woop Woop fans?’ Lisa prompted, alarmed at the split-second of dead-air time. ‘There’s one here called “Let’s kill The Dolls at Woop Woop”.’

‘Oh my god, really?’ said Rose. ‘O-kay, well I guess we’ll have to take them on.’

‘Well, you’ve got a single coming out soon called “Fight Like a Girl”,’ said Davo, consulting the notes Brendan had given him. ‘Do you have any fighting tips?’

‘Girls fight best,’ Rose asserted. ‘They play dirty. Use your nails and go for the earrings, that’s my tip.’

They both laughed, pleased. ‘And what about this rumoured million-dollar deal you’ve signed, Nina?’ Davo turned to me. ‘What are you going to spend all that on?’

I ransacked my mind for Carmel’s tips, but all I could think of was: ‘How interesting. Can you explain what you mean a bit more?’

‘I’m going to learn to drive,’ I blurted, heart thumping again. ‘Can you recommend any good cars?’

Rose’s eyes widened, but Lisa and Davo good-humouredly tossed up a few

options. A Diddy-style Hummer, perhaps, or a Volkswagen Bug. ‘Well, let’s not forget they’re only just eighteen,’ Lisa clucked to Davo. ‘We mustn’t encourage too much excessive behaviour at this point. They’ve got to pace themselves.’

•

Although the interview wasn’t a disaster—not even the a cappella rendition of ‘Fight Like a Girl’ we were put on the spot to do—it did feel like a minefield, and we were rattled by both that and by the news of the Facebook hate page. It was times like these we tended to take things out on each other.

On the drive out to Woop Woop, we just phased Brendan’s presence out of the van so we could talk without censoring ourselves—it was something we had to learn to do all the time on tour, because we were never alone. Ommmmm: you’re gone.

When she was done reading out comments being killed at Woop Woop, Rose brought up Jimmy’s Facebook page to look for traces of his ex-girlfriend. She’d already deleted Clara’s number from his phone and made him remove any pictures of her from his photo albums.

‘I’m going to text her and say that Jimmy needs to concentrate on his family now,’ she said, gnawing a thumbnail. ‘What do you think?’

‘Why does he?’

‘He doesn’t,’ she huffed, ‘but then she’ll think I’m pregnant. But I won’t have actually said I’m pregnant, so if she asks him he’ll just say I must have meant his mum and dad.’

‘What?’

‘What? Wouldn’t you do that?’ she said sharply.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I wouldn’t want to look like a crazy bitch.’

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh! Now we have it. Come on, Nina, why don’t you say what you really mean?’

‘You can’t just text his ex-girlfriend.’

‘Why not? You nag Hank about girls all the time, he’s sick of it.’

‘How would you know?’

‘I know you better than you know yourself. Imagine what I have to put up with; you’re always embarrassing me.’ Her voice was getting thin and reedy, and I was fighting like a ninja to control mine. This was already worse than the fight we had over which promo photo to go with.

‘Have you taken your pills today, dear?’ I asked.

Rose shoved me. ‘What do you think it’s like for me, having to be the one representing us all the time, while you sit and stare at people like a retard?’

I shoved her back twice as hard and her sunglasses fell between her feet. We’d been warned by Carmel to drop words like ‘retard’ from our vocabulary.

‘Whoa,’ said Brendan.

‘You’re our driver, so just drive,’ Rose said tightly, cheeks burning, and he shut up after that.

Rose and I brooded in silence and I mentally flipped through my notebook of grudges. Actually, they were all in a Word doc on my laptop.

TOP 10 GRUDGES AGAINST ROSE

1. Has to give a running commentary on everything.

2. Doesn’t brush her teeth till after her second cup of coffee.

3. Is rude to waitstaff and other underlings.

4. Reads her runes in hotel bathrooms with the door shut.

5. Does everyone else’s tarot but never mine.

6. Starts most sentences with ‘Um . . .’ or ‘Ouch’ or ‘For your information . . .’

7. Lip balm.

8. Turns up ten minutes late to every single lobby call.

9. Has never itted to ripping my Topshop dress.

10. Doesn’t respect me.

I was more than a hundred per cent certain that Rose was keeping a similar

document on me. Hers would probably say:

TOP 10 GRUDGES AGAINST NINA

1. Makes me work twice as hard at winning people over.

2. Poor personal hygiene when going through a phase.

3. Sleeps with everybody, rarely conveniently.

4. Looks better in jeans than I do.

5. Thinks she invented suffering.

6. Always has to try and act mysterious. Is not, though.

7. Creeps out my friends.

8. Snoops around.

9. Eats instant noodles out of the packet.

10. Probably read my diary that time.

As Brendan escorted me to the beer tent at the site, I felt my mood gathering like storm clouds. A sea of muddy cowboy boots parted in front of me as I kept my head down, my eyes hidden behind mirror shades.

Brendan spotted Hank at the bar and gave me the word. I looked up to see him with a short girl who had a shaved head. Hank had a shaved head, too.

‘Herro!’ he chirruped as I glided up blackly like Darth Vader. ‘This is Marni; she wanted to see what the Woop Woop Ute Muster would be like.’

‘Hello,’ the girl said, sticking out a hand awkwardly, then dropping it. I was looking at his hair, or lack thereof.

Marni cringed. ‘I did ask him if his girlfriend would mind another girl shaving his head.’

Ignoring her, I opened my handbag and moved stuff around as I made a mental list of all my grievances about Hank:

Always smelled of dirty scalp.

Never bought a round.

Always bagged out my male friends.

Never said hello to everybody, the way Jimmy did.

Always kept his phone in his pocket; never on the table like a man with nothing to hide.

Turned up to my shows with weird hairless women.

First and foremost on Hank’s to-do list at Woop Woop was to ride backstage in one of the golf buggies that festivals used for transport. He threaded his AAA laminate through his belt loop—so that it looked cooler than it did hanging around his neck in an obvious fashion—and flagged down a buggy. He jumped in the front next to the driver while Marni perched gingerly in the back with Brendan and me as we trundled the short cut to the dressing room, and when I lapsed into silence they made awkward conversation.

•

‘We’re very humbled to be asked to play here today,’ Rose announced into her mic when we took to the stage amid jeers. Mainly men jeering, I noticed. Maybe the female countryfolk secretly wanted to hear some cosmopolitan punk-rock

direct from Sydney. They must buy magazines out here, surely?

Rose sounded confident, but I could see her skinny legs trembling atop the gigantic cowboy boots she’d bought for the occasion, along with a denim dress. It was from the same shop I’d got my nudie shirt. I chanced a look out at the crowd and saw a flare of blue singlets, akubra hats and folded arms. Already a girl was on a bloke’s shoulders and we hadn’t played a note. I focused on her and smiled.

We’d flatly turned down the promoter’s request to open with a punked-up ‘Advance Australia Fair’, preferring to unleash ‘Fight Like a Girl’. The band cranked it up behind us and I started to move. They say a moving target is harder to hit.

Glass was banned at Woop Woop, so it was plastic bottles of piss that rained down on us from the first note. Plastic bottles with the lids taken off. Harrowing doesn’t come close to describing the next twenty-five minutes, but Donny and our new guitarist, Glen, shielded us from any actual blows. They didn’t exactly sign up for this—we just chose to keep crisscrossing the stage behind them, skipping in our weighted boots. Between belting out my lines I pulled the mic away from my mouth and let out little whimpers.

By the time we were halfway through the set, the assault had dropped off and I finally started to enjoy myself. There was a feeling of disconnect between us and the audience across the four-foot jump that was the photographers’ pit, so I opted to counter it by putting my foot up on the monitor so that my denim skirt rode up. This got an easy cheer.

I was leaning the mic stand over the edge of the stage and stroking my thigh when I noticed Rose using the middle-eight to dance over. She’d be pissed off

that I wasn’t writhing up against the speaker cab in sync with her as discussed. For a moment, her hasty slink stage-left was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, and I fluffed my words trying to keep from exploding. Ever the multi-tasker, she belted out my line, ‘Go on and hurt me’, while slipping a hand in mine. To the layman punter, staring at us from the field behind his plastic schooner glass, it was just the usual girl-on-girl tease. Only I could feel Rose’s nails digging into the web of my thumb. While she was over on my side of the stage, she tugged my skirt down at the back to cover my arse, in true Rose style.

‘Goodnight, Woop Woop!’ Rose screamed at the end of ‘Blame’. It was force of habit—in actual fact the sun was only beginning to set. I ran to the back of the stage and hurled myself into Brian’s drum kit, diving for it the way I used to bomb onto my bed in my bedroom. I sent everything flying, but I was on such a high I didn’t feel it.

Backstage, we decompressed and examined the footage on Brendan’s phone.

‘I’m sorry,’ I yelled across at Mark, our guitarist, who was packing away his new digital effects pod. ‘I totally dicked up my part in “Chica”.’

‘That’s okay,’ he said shortly. ‘I played well enough for both of us.’

On replay in the backstage portable, we saw the whoops of approval my drum plummet drew as my legs scissored above my head. As we watched, Brian held a towel to his face and glowered because his hi-hat had sliced him across the bridge of his nose. He deliberately avoided my eyes so I couldn’t flash him a warm, apologetic smile.

He doesn’t see you sulking, I thought, as I held out my arms in front of me to examine the bruises.

‘Come on, Brian, chicks dig scars,’ Hank said from a chair in the corner, where he was rolling a bottle of beer between his hands. ‘Rock’n’roll, eh?’

Something was up with Hank, I could tell—it wasn’t like him to leap to my defence. My suspicions were confirmed when he asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. He wasn’t a big walker either.

Brendan held open the cabin door and I took the steps down to the mud carefully in my boots.

‘So, well done tonight,’ Hank said in a chipper tone. We trudged in time with each other, past the platoons of monster utes that glowed in the evening gloom. ‘You did really well. I was proud of you.’

‘I wasn’t sure if you were watching,’ I said, my new boots making sucking noises in the mud. ‘Because of your friend.’

‘She’s just a friend,’ he bristled, as though he’d been expecting me to say that. ‘But you’re right. You’re right, you’re right. I’m being awful to you.’

The speed at which I played devil’s advocate annoyed me. ‘No you’re not,’ I said, stepping across a puddle and steadying myself on a bin overflowing with polystyrene burger boxes. ‘You’ve got the stress of the gig coming up, that’s all.’

We ed a group of guys in oilskins and akubras, but they were too drunk to recognise me.

‘No, I’m a horrible person,’ he reflected, finally pulling the pin out of this grenade with his teeth. ‘You deserve someone better. You shouldn’t be around me.’

I stopped and looked at him. ‘What have you done?’

He shifted from one foot to the other. ‘It’s like, my life’s all about to change,’ he said, pulling a pained face. ‘And so’s yours. Yours already has, for god’s sake. You’re going to be off on tour constantly, jetsetting around meeting exciting people . . .’

‘What have you done?’

He took a deep breath, but ran out of it immediately. ‘There’s a girl at Dingo’s, isn’t there? . . . Yeah, but I wanted you to hear it from me . . . Nina! Please, come on, I wanted you to hear it from me, to give you that respect. Because it’s just going to happen more and more, isn’t it? To both of us, like. There’s a couple of girls, maybe, who are basically just friends, but you know.’ He waved his arms expansively. ‘Like, we’re all friends; you and me as well. We should all just keep it quite casual-like, like we have been.’

The silence was like a knife reverberating off a board between us.

I was no hypocrite. If I’d slept with John Villiers, I’d have been the first to it it.

As I looked at him through the red mist, my mind started to re-sketch him as he stood in front of me—his jaw, his pupils, his nose—crosshatched and fleshed out. The end likeness was a stranger.

‘Can I go now?’ I said, looking away and staring fixedly at the nearest muddy bull bar. My lungs were sore from cigarettes and campfires. I needed to lie down.

He gave a cynical laugh. ‘Don’t you want to shout at me?’ he said, sounding put out that I wasn’t playing by the rules. ‘Nina. I really do think this will make us better friends in the long run.’

‘You can find your own way back to Townsville,’ I said, over my shoulder.

•

Nestled in the corner of the backstage portable, Rose whispered consoling things like ‘bastard’ and rubbed my back. Marni appeared at the door, all smiles. She was holding out her phone with its photos of her riding a mechanical bull, but then she saw my face and ducked back out again. Under different circumstances, I noted vaguely through my blocked-up face, Marni and I might have been friends. We had similar tastes.

‘We’ll leave him here,’ Rose said. ‘He’ll be buggered and you’ll be asleep in your nice warm hotel room, three-hundred dollars richer and having successfully dodged eighty bottles of steaming bogan urine.’

A band came on the stage behind our cabin and Rose got up and did a onewoman hoedown to try to make me laugh. The rest of our band looked up briefly and then went back to studying their feet.

‘Let’s go back out and explore,’ she said, getting the nod from Brendan and taking my hand. ‘Screw Hank.’

It was dark out, and mental. There were no toothy suburban kids in animal onesies here. We pushed past guys in blue singlets cracking whips and swigging Bundy-and-Coke. Boys gathered in hordes and carried ‘show us your tits’ signs made from XXXX Gold boxes. Police on horseback circled the scene and the thick smoke of campfires agitated the air. It was like the world was ending. ‘This will be hilarious,’ Rose said, dragging me over to the main stage.

A guy named Kane Sherman had just come on with his band, the Old Dogs. The band were past it—grizzled guys with speculum grins and fancy cowboy boots trying to put on an arena spectacular. They could do all the ostentatious guitar wrangling and dynamic lurches they wanted, but my eyes were on Kane. He was in the Woop Woop uniform of blue jeans, hand-tooled belt and smart shirt, but he had a prowling energy that transcended it all.

My phone vibrated in my hand as we got closer and I flicked it open, lightning fast. ‘Sorry,’ the message said.

‘Do I know them?’ I typed back.

‘No.’

‘You lied about our future,’ I returned, before I could stop myself. Really, this wasn’t my style. If something was over it was over—I knew I shouldn’t demean myself by stretching it out.

‘Wasn’t lying,’ his message eventually came back. ‘Meant it at the time.’

I snapped my phone shut and rage flared in my head. Why did he even tell me? He was as bad as Dad. Why did men always assume I was in cahoots with them and try to make me their accomplice?

‘What the hell is wrong with you people?’ I felt like screaming, but I kept my jaw set and my eyes fixed on the stage. I am a vault.

Kane rumbled through a song about knowing you were trouble from the start, wearing his Gibson guitar low and fronting up, this way and that, to the mic. Nice technique, I observed despite myself.

‘That guy’s a walking cock,’ Rose drawled in my ear. Ogling Kane up there, I ed Madonna saying of first meeting Guy Ritchie, ‘My head didn’t just turn. My head spun around on my body.’ Of course, Guy eventually went on to

say that being in bed with Madonna was like sleeping with a bit of gristle, but for a while, at least, they had something compelling.

I checked my phone. Nothing from Hank. I turned it off.

Up on the big screen, Kane’s face took up the whole screen, the pixels lighting up my own . . . and now I saw that his eyes were so dark they were bottomless pits. His voice rolled like cigar smoke.

•

In the people-mover on the way back to Townsville, bumping down endless dark roads, Rose stroked my hair and kissed my head. I was thinking about exboyfriends’ houses, and how I always missed those dives more than I ever missed the boys.

I’ll never see that street again, I mourned of Hank’s place in Newtown. For the first time, I thought fondly of his pretentiously witty room-mates, their postagestamp yard filled with milk crates fashioned as furniture, and their shocking kitchen that I always felt moved to clean. I knew that whenever I smelled Oporto chicken, I’d think of Hank. Instead I let my thoughts move on to Kane; imagining being introduced to him at some festival a bit like this one and what we’d both say.

Back at our hotel in Townsville I had a room to myself, because Hank was supposed to be staying with me. I switched the telly on and lay on the perfectly smooth top sheet. Then I scrambled back up to my knees, levered the headboard back and wrote my name on the wall with the complimentary ballpoint pen. I

liked to leave my name in every hotel. The Dummies always did it, too.

From the position of the suitcase stand, I took a photo of the sheets looking stark and sad. Then I took a batch of photos in the mirror of me lying rumpled in the sheets and posted the best one on Twitter with no message. It’s not the picture you see on the cover of our EP ‘The Dark Triad’—we re-created that in a proper studio.

I couldn’t sleep until it reached ten retweets.

11

CHEAP TRICK

Reports of our band breaking up were frequent enough, but the rumours of my infidelities were feasted on far more greedily. This was the beginning of the era of door-stepping by paparazzi, and my poor mother suffered the most. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

Groupies had become shape shifters. They didn’t shark around stage doors in their knickers any more; they found jobs as publicists, as make-up artists, in catering, in wardrobe and as runners. That was called progress. They didn’t trouble Rose and me, but I had to step over them to get our band to lobby call. And they took Hank.

Back in the sixties there was a super-groupie whose candour I ired. She put in the hard yards to ensnare Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. Like, turned up to every show on Sunset Strip wearing only her most outrageous underwear and then let him ruin it with the whips that coiled in his suitcase like snakes. She really had to fight off those other bitches, too. Women with names like The Grand Canyon.

I read her memoir in one sitting as we travelled back from Woop Woop, from airport lounge to taxi. When she lamented that if someone famous breaks your heart you have to endure seeing his face everywhere—on every TV station, on every under—I knew exactly what she meant.

It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Hank became a single man the moment Hank Black’s Big Break was broadcast into the nation’s lounge rooms. But if I had to see him everywhere, so too he would have to see me.

I was starting to learn how to transform trauma into collateral. Mickiewicz’s advice to us about Woop Woop—‘Turn it into an advantage’—also applied to Hank. In the case of Woop Woop, Rose and I did a hilarious interview with HitsFM in Sydney, in which the hosts sent up our country cousins and we played ourselves. In the case of Hank, I wrote a song. As soon as I turned him into a bunch of rhyming couplets I felt better.

I ed my former English teacher telling the class that metaphors light up those parts of the brain that indicate a sensory experience. When we hear lyrics like ‘texture like sun’, ‘smooth operator’ or ‘cold as ice’, we get a more multidimensional experience. With Hank, I tried comparing him to a drug, a runaway horse, a mountain and a bull in a china shop, before settling on a bad penny I once picked up.

The weekend after Woop Woop I took the train to the Blue Mountains with Rose and my laptop, to see what sounds Ben Noakes had come up with. Noakesy was a low talker, so you had to crane in to hear him. There was no frisson between us. He was a baggy cargo pants and polo shirt kind of guy. Sleazy, but like, normal sleazy—which was the creepiest kind.

Saw you in the hot tub

Screwed your way

Through the yacht club

Having your fun

On another rung

Baby, give us all your pitch

Doing lines like the boss’s bitch

But what are you worth now?

Tell me, baby, was it worth it?

Was it unkind of me to immortalise Hank in ‘Cheap’? I don’t think so. Having a song written about you is better than not having a song written about you. Oscar Wilde said that.

I had no time to mope, because Alannah had set up a meeting with Charlie Jenner, who managed Day of Inquiry. He was top rung, by Australia’s standards; certainly by our standards with Ian Essence. Throughout the nineties and noughties he’d gained a reputation for being a troubleshooter, with an instinct for

timing. It was Jenner who steered Solar Rockets to safety through Martin Aston’s underage-fan scandal, and he rebranded country pageant twins Harmony as $ista $ista, who still sucked but were now, like, next-level sucking.

Jenner’s office was in a terrace house behind Oxford Street with a glimpse of Sydney Harbour and, unlike Mickiewicz, he met us at the door. He was late thirties with sandy hair and, apparently, a taste for mod shirts and sports jackets. He greeted us in a low-key, deadpan way that I found calming; although Alannah promised us he could slingshot into apocalyptic rage when it suited him. I took furtive glimpses at his office whenever I brushed my hair out of my eyes. There were ARIA awards neatly spaced on a shelf behind his desk, a comfy blue couch, stacks of magazines and a fish tank in the corner. I abandoned my cool and went over to have a look.

Thank god I didn’t want to tap Jenner, but immediately he was the sort of person whose approval was of high importance to me. Jenner never gave anything away. Trying to read his face made me feel like I was missing important data.

Our new manager laid down the law like Ian Essence never had. From then on, he said, there would be no stopping at bottle shops en route anywhere; we would always meet half an hour before any appointment to have a ‘powwow’; we must schedule in time with our friends between tours—and, more importantly, schedule time away from each other; and all royalties were to be split fifty–fifty between Rose and me after Jenner took his twenty per cent, no matter who wrote the songs. To us, ‘royalties’ sounded like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow —a magical, never-ending resource bestowed upon us by benevolent recordcompany parents just for being good kids. Jenner gave us both a Visa debit card, with which we could withdraw the money he put into our every month, and no more.

We called these Jenner’s Laws and we would collect hundreds of them over the next five years. It was nice, though. I liked his sense of order.

When Mickiewicz gave the tick of approval and Jenner officially came into our lives, he dismissed Ian Essence without explanation; without so much as a ‘Ciao’. So, while I don’t approve of Ian Essence’s tactics in court and all that stuff about Rose’s obsessive-compulsive disorder coming out, the massive lawsuit that tied us in red tape for a couple of years shouldn’t entirely paint him as the bad guy. A bad manager, sure.

•

In the annals of rock history there have been some disastrously mismatched and headline acts that should never, ever have been booked. Such as:

Har Mar Superstar ing Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Mercury Rev ing Coldplay.

Powderfinger ing Pantera.

Bumblebeez ing Radiohead.

The Sunnyboys ing The Go-Go’s.

Tinie Tempah ing The Script.

Machine Gun Fellatio ing Robbie Williams.

We had been champing at the bit to get a proper tour; the sort of tour we could write a whole album about; and a trip to Austin, to the South by Southwest expo, to represent the country at schmoozing. These were our basic rights. Instead, Ian Essence had us playing endless radio-station showcases and all-ages shows; and then came Jenner, who was biding his time for the ‘right moment’. It felt like we were stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for something to happen.

‘The advantage is, you’re women,’ Jenner said one day in his office. ‘Guaranteed, in every editorial meeting in every music publication in the country, someone is wailing right now, “We need to include a girl in this issue somewhere.”’

The flipside was that a magazine might already have its quota of women. And, of course, we needed to be taken seriously, which meant finding a bunch of old men—or, as Jenner put it, a ‘well-respected live act’—to give us their seal of approval.

It was our booking agent who came up with English stalwarts Bitumen for the Australian leg of their world tour; the same booking agent who would ghost into the dressing room after a show, slap us on the back and then wander off to talk to our manager. With the luxury of hindsight we’d have complained about the coupling, instead of planning a retro, post-punk tour wardrobe.

Two decades into their career, Bitumen had reached the status of ‘living

legends’, releasing albums that were always hopefully tagged a ‘return to form’. Even though each new record failed to chart anywhere significant, Bitumen still sold out venues like the Hordern Pavilion.

Jenner took us out to a Foo Fighters gig to meet them a few days before the tour started. I spotted them hunched at the bar, like vultures.

I wore: white T-shirt dress with Jayne Mansfield’s head on it, army boots, army jacket.

Rose wore: polka-dot fifties skirt, black cardigan, black fake-fur-trimmed coat, black-and-white ribbons in her backcombed hair.

As Jenner and the band swapped yarns in low, prowling tones, Rose and I held our plastic cups of white wine and watched Dave Grohl on stage like he was the most compelling thing ever. Jenner’s PA, Samantha, came up beside me, her fists thrust into the pockets of her blue leather jacket. I had one a bit like it in red. She leaned into me.

‘They’re arseholes,’ she yelled over the music, making my eardrum buzz. ‘They’ve insisted on only having female drivers the whole tour.’

I nodded and dropped my empty cup at my feet. Samantha was suffering me only because she wanted someone to validate her outrage. She couldn’t have known that I respected people who understood that life was a sexual power struggle. Laying your cards on the table like Bitumen did got a lot of timewasting out of the way.

‘High achievers,’ I overheard the guitarist, Strider, say to Jenner as he regarded us acidly, presumably while discussing the Grandiose deal we landed only a whisker into our nineteenth year. ‘I don’t like bright people.’

Jenner finally made the introductions.

‘You’ll be fine, we’ll look after you,’ Jameson assured us glibly. He was a frontman renowned for his demonic eyes and interest in the occult. Now I was up close I could see he skilfully accentuated his nooks and crannies with a whisper of dark eye shadow; possibly M.A.C Shadowy Lady, which I had in my purse right at that moment. ‘Just don’t let them see any fear or they’ll eat you alive.’

Jenner smiled, but he was watching us for our response.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Rose flounced back over her shoulder, so that her earrings clacked against her necklace. ‘We know what we’re doing.’ Clack. ‘One day you’ll be opening for us.’

Jameson roared in approval, but Strider took a pull on his cigarette, one eye squeezing shut. ‘They couldn’t make you up,’ he finally exhaled, giving Rose the once-over. ‘You’re like a fairy on a cake.’

I didn’t like the way this was going. Straight off the bat I could see that Strider was the sort of scumbag I usually wound up with, so to see him intrigued by Rose was intolerable. I turned around and shot him a haughty look, ing

his surprise, which surprised me too. So, good; now he’d noticed me.

‘I feel like a giddy teenager,’ Strider declared as they left.

•

At what point did you realise your sleeping around was proving a problem for those around you?

I prefer to retain an air of mystery on that front, Molly.

‘Look at her now,’ Strider crowed, even though we were the only ones in the hotel room. The room looked like it wanted to tug its skirt down over the shameful detritus of abandoned tequila bottles, cigarette butts, clothes and CD cases; the latter were mostly of Bitumen’s back catalogue, which we had been playing.

Strider sat on the sofa with his surprisingly soft white belly rolling over the top of his cargo pants. He lit another smoke and kept it hanging out of his mouth for the duration of the stirring song he picked out of his guitar. I wondered how something so lovely could come out of somebody so corrupt.

The first night in Adelaide was rough going with Bitumen’s crowd, which meant the second night I got drunk with Strider beforehand while Rose did an interview with Dolly. I could argue it was actually a good career move to accept a bottle of Jose Cuervo from the headline act.

I couldn’t face Rose after the show, so I bunked up in Strider’s room on our day off, in a nicer hotel than ours. I would answer my phone when I sobered up, which wouldn’t be for a while, unfortunately.

‘Do you want kids? I could give you a blue-eyed boy,’ Strider said, eyeing me as his fingers journeyed in cosmic patterns around the fretboard. He already had three sons to three women. I didn’t know why he’d tell me that. At some point, Strider’s friend Liam was there, but now it seemed he’d gone again. Pity. Liam acted as Strider’s third-party conscience, making it clear when his behaviour was beyond the pale and suggesting reasonable alternatives.

Like: ‘You can’t go back into that pub and demand a bottle of vodka—look what happened last time. Why don’t you drink this beer and wait until morning?’

Or: ‘Stop inviting her around and then not answering your door; you’re doing her head in.’

Being around Strider was thrilling, because he was so awful. Whenever we went out to eat near the venue, earnest fanboys hovered and bobbed with nervous, shit-eating grins on their faces. If they happened to recognise me, the shit-eating grins spread wider. Good onya, Strider, they seemed to say. But then he was awful to them and the power swung back to me.

As youngsters, Bitumen had an appetite for groupies, and now the message board on their website was awash with presumptions that they’d brought The Dolls on tour for more of the same. Occasionally I got a spike of paranoia that he and I were just a publicity stunt he’d cooked up with the others, but really I didn’t think he had the gumption left in him. The whole band were as hardened

as old arteries, morally bankrupt and creatively spent, their ex-wives stationed in far-flung countries to suck them dry. That was the problem with jonesing for older men: you always came to the party too late.

Strider set down his glass; he wanted my opinion. He had publicly pilloried Blink-182 for thieving a riff, and now he’d set his sights on Jay-Z. He played me the evidence on a big red guitar the fanboys would faint at touching.

‘It’s one chord,’ I said.

‘It’s two chords,’ he huffed. ‘They’re a semitone apart.’

‘I don’t think it would stand up in court.’

He looked at me, gimlet-eyed. We’d had the heated conversation once before about who was likely to know better, and neither of us really wanted a repeat performance. I scoped back his crumbling façade. He had suffered some structural damage since the beginning of the tour: cracks at either side of his mouth, a touch of trench foot, mysterious bruises that he insisted were from wrestling Jameson.

That first night in his dressing room, buzzing with hangers-on, he’d merrily slagged off the band’s formidable frontman to anyone hanging around the rider, before dragging the entourage back to his hotel room. One of Strider’s gophers called him ‘chief’, and then everybody did. Strider corrected them. He was a Sagittarius with Pisces rising: a drunken general.

‘You must meet Cave,’ he’d told me, pouring me vodka into a plastic cup that tipped over under the sheer weight of beverage. He was always saying stuff like that. ‘You must meet Duff.’ ‘You must meet the Oz.’ I knew I never would.

I was the last to leave, staying into the next afternoon after he left for soundcheck. I charged my dinner to his room and wrote my own room number inside the port on top of his suitcase. His real name was Colin. One for me to know and the fanboys to find out.

•

‘You know I’m supposed to vet men before you sleep with them,’ Rose reprimanded me when I updated her in our dressing room in Newcastle. It took her the entire trip up the Pacific Highway to forgive me for going AWOL in Adelaide, and it was only the loan of my new Wheels & Dollbaby dress that precipitated the thaw. Jenner said that once we got to the States we’d have a massive tour bus, but they were illegal in Australia, so we had to travel in convoys of people-movers.

‘I can’t stand it,’ she said, when I emulated the weird little scream Strider did when he came.

‘He says guitars aren’t phallic,’ I said, egging her on. ‘He says they’re like vaginas.’

‘Oh my god, he’s gross!’ she cried, ripping some grapes off their stalks. From the kitchen down the hall, Bitumen’s catering team was creating some enticing smells, but they were not for the likes of us. Not unless I wanted to go public

with Strider.

I dug through the clothes in my bag. The top I’d planned to wear was splotched with lube. ‘Can’t I have a golden ticket just for this tour?’

She giggled, pleased with herself. ‘Yes. You can have a golden-oldie ticket.’

I felt a shard of guilt in my black heart. Strider and I had privately mocked Rose’s epic spiritual journey—she was rarely photographed at an airport without a copy of The Secret in her hand, and meditation combined with the prescription medication meant she slept through all the arguments we might have had on long journeys. Strider referred to her as ‘Nickers’, as in Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac, the original witchy woman. To her credit, Rose refused to be bothered enough to ask what the nickname meant.

‘Let’s hope he doesn’t tell Mickiewicz about this the next time they’re playing a round of golf, eh?’ she said with a soupçon of satisfaction, and turned back to her text conversation with Jimmy.

In front of the dressing-room mirror I turned my head one way and then the other, threading my hoop earrings through my ears. But the currency of Strider is worth it, I told myself. I am elevated a notch, not dropped. But then, I might go down in Mickiewicz’s estimation . . .

My life was a snarled knot that I could never quite unpick, of who knew what and who might tell whom and why. It was like a Venn diagram of shame. This latest worry should add at least half an hour to my nightly staring at the ceiling.

TOP 10 MOST INCONVENIENT COUPLINGS BY NINA DALL (2008–2014)

1. The man at closing time one New Year’s Eve at the Parramatta Hotel (mainly regrettable because Rose wouldn’t let me forget that his name was ‘Trog’).

2. Second engineer on the demos (still scope for John Villiers to find out).

3. Hank.

4. Soundman on our first headline tour. What goes on tour stays on tour, but it did cause friction when he always had me higher in the mix than Rose.

5. Guitarist from an arena band my lawyers advise me not to name.

6. Features editor of White Out (although, we did get 4.5/5 not long after).

7. Photographer in Brisbane (unsure of name/publication and so who to avoid).

8. Hank’s friend Barney (this may come as a surprise to Hank, but since he’d never it to reading this book, we’re cool).

9. Strider.

10. Kane.

•

In Sydney, we had two days off. Bitumen’s tour manager took some of them to a koala sanctuary and to Bondi, but The Dolls had to work.

We’d been booked for a shoot with His Style magazine on the North Shore. In their top-floor studio we picked through the salads a gopher had brought us. ‘Be a sweet and get me some coconut water,’ Rose beseeched. The only things available on tour were cheese and bread, both of which we were intolerant of, so apart from the odd desultory bit of fruit from Bitumen’s rider, we’d been surviving on vodka and pretzels.

I’d been drawing on my reserves of willpower. I prided myself on always going one harder than anyone else, whether it be grimly forcing down one more drink or abstaining from food. Rose was throwing up regularly and would only eat food with natural lubricant, like pasta in sauce, or something with a bit of structure, like pork chops, which wouldn’t block her pipes. Whenever she came back from the bathroom and resumed her conversation, I imagined her fingers dripping.

TOP 5 DIET TIPS BY THE DOLLS

1. Breakfast: one small serve of porridge with soy milk, and a banana to boost serotonin levels. (Other fruits are banned on of their sugar content.) Or pretzels.

2. Lunch: one cup of brown rice with vegies, fish or skinless chicken breast. Or pretzels.

3. Dinner: vodka, no mixer.

4. Vitamin B for beating depression and to replenish the body after alcohol (the body does not absorb vitamin B when drinking).

5. Distractions from eating: chewie, teeth-cleaning, fresh coat of lipstick, Marlboros (Lights or Reds).

It was pointless. I was never going to be called a ‘pint-sized pop star’ and neither was Rose; we’d grown too tall.

The His Style shoot was a thoroughly strange experience. Picture us, dressed as sexy squaws, with a bunch of people who didn’t need to be there buzzing around the room. Then, the moment we started posing, the room went silent. The only sound to be heard was the camera’s shutter, and the air was thick, like when you were about to have sex. It was like being on a porn set.

Between set-ups, I flumped down on the sofa as far away from the perves as possible and read a copy of Drum Media. John Villiers’ name jumped out at me,

but it was just a ing mention. There was a concert coming up to acknowledge the twentieth anniversary of Danger Michaels’ death. The article listed all the big names that would play in tribute and it mentioned John Villiers’ work on Danger’s final album. Too cool. ‘Seminal album,’ it said. Danger had told friends he had a feeling he was going to die, months before he did, of an overdose.

‘Miss Nina,’ the photographer called. I sighed and went back over to the set.

The photographer asked me to stand behind Rose and sling an arm over her shoulder, you know, so that my hand casually dropped onto her chest. A journalist hovered just out of shot and asked us questions like, ‘Who was your first kiss?’

I was weirded out that we were supposed to look lustful. I mean, they did know we were related, right? Did that not pose an ethical problem for the His Style readers? It clearly wasn’t a problem for Rose, who planted kisses on my cheek and let her fingers drag limply down the front of my suede top.

With the entire art and editorial team on set dreaming up puns, the headline was always going to be ‘Kissing Cousins’—but I quite liked the way they wound up rendering that with a finger in a steamed-up mirror.

As we split for five to apply red tribal marks to our cheeks, I plugged my phone into the studio’s stereo and put on some Elvis Costello that Strider had played me.

‘You can tell that every band you’re into is because some bloke’s educated you

on it,’ said Rose. ‘It’s kind of cute. You’re like a sponge.’

I didn’t get riled into responding, because Strider had also educated me in the ways of Valium, including a module on which doctors around the country were willing to show sympathy to the touring artist. I liked the way it fuzzed my edges, although it didn’t romance me the way alcohol did.

Sleeping with somebody who was once part of a pivotal scene, as Bitumen were in their day, was like immersing myself in a textbook. Education was key. In the whorls of Strider’s calloused fingers I saw the fallen women and famous scenesters; the Michael Hutchences, the Nick Caves, the Chrissy Amphletts. It was sexual osmosis. One day, girls would root Hank purely to absorb my essence.

Sex for a crash course in history was a fair swap. And if you played ‘once removed’, it meant I’d slept with Kylie. I knew that Rose could sympathise with that.

•

The rest of the tour was a riot of lost evenings, reckless cigarette-waving and bruising as I struggled to keep it together. Rose and I turned into maniacs, hurling ourselves around the impossibly big stages and winding up Bitumen’s fans. Alannah had coached us on how to make every single person in a threethousand-strong crowd think we were looking at them. We fixed, very purposefully, on a different section of the venue at a time, and made our faces suddenly glimmer, as though in recognition. Every so often, we’d point, or laugh, or raise our middle fingers.

Strider occasionally watched from the wings—just an orange glow of a cigarette end, like one evil eye. I avoided Jameson, though; I didn’t want to see in his gaze how little he thought of me. I wanted to tell them how writing was going on our hotly anticipated debut and about our own headline tour we’d signed up to do. I might pretend to pick Jameson’s brain about something technical and remind him of my exact value, because my self-respect levels had dipped so low I was about to lose a life. It was unbearable to have spent so many years trying to earn people’s respect, to then see it stripped away in a new set of circumstances.

‘He asked me if I’d had you up the arse,’ itted Strider, ‘but I told him you were a lady.’

Strider never mentioned the world tour he was off on next and where that left us, but it loomed larger every day. When I was in the bath I heard him telling roadies in the hotel room about the reinforced drinking tros he’d ordered specially and the fancy shoes he wanted to pick up in New York.

One day, perched on a road case as the rest of the band soundchecked, I tried casually: ‘Where are you going first—Prague or Berlin?’

‘Oh, rah rah rah,’ he said irritably, restringing his guitar with a cigarette stuck to his lip. Then: ‘Come?’

‘You know I can’t, I’ve got to record the album.’

He shrugged.

The tour was a car crash, so the reviews said. I was barely lucid enough to notice. Luckily the critics only threw The Dolls a disparaging remark in ing and mainly aimed their cannons at Bitumen as the grand old has-beens.

When the tour ended and Strider disappeared with it, I scoured photos on my phone between laying down vocal takes for our album at Tomkat’s. I lingered on the fluffy-haired shots of Strider of decades gone by. I imagined being his girlfriend then. I wouldn’t have been, though. He would’ve been with Tottie Goldsmith or Fiona Horne or some such.

On the Bitumen message board, fans one-upped each other with reports of backstage hijinks across Europe. Band were vomiting behind amps and stumbling around on stage. I read and reread the posts about Prague, where fans hinted about backstage goings on. If you can hear a note of treacherous anger in ‘Chica Rock’n’Roll’, that is why.

12

FIGHT LIKE A GIRL

Sometimes it felt like my lyrics were wilfully misinterpreted, whether by deranged fans or scathing journalists. They all twisted my own words to try to get a handle on me. Eventually I wound up destroying my own innocence on stage and in real life, almost because I didn’t want to disappoint. That’s what people expected of me and I gave it to them in the ugliest way. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

It was the last night of our Fight Like a Girl EP tour, which had become known as the Please No More Tour, and we were being even bigger arseholes than usual.

During soundcheck we promised a fanboy a laminate if he’d go and get us a Fanta from the petrol station. Then when he came back we sent him off again to get us a warm one. When he returned once more I pulled off his baseball cap and fanged it across the empty dance floor. I was hung-over, but drunk hung-over, which was dangerous.

I wore: denim shorts over fishnet stockings, singlet with dog tags. I’d had some ink done in Brisbane on my right arm: a wild-eyed panther eating its own tail.

Rose wore: black maxi-dress, sandals. She’d had the same extensions in for the

entire tour and one of them was making a break for it over her ear. We didn’t care any more, though—one night in New Zealand we’d done the gig in dressing-gowns and hotel slippers.

We were both in the same sort of mood. After the show, Rose booted the dressing-room door shut on a group of fans waiting outside with their Sharpies. The gold paint we’d smeared across our faces was now all over her arms from where she’d wiped the sweat away.

‘Do you reckon someone will get a tattoo of my signature?’ she asked Mitch with her mouth full of chocolate. Mitch was our tour manager. He wore red vinyl pants with bovver boots every single day and could roll cigarettes with one hand. We wanted to take him overseas with us, because he’d regaled us with tales of wearing bullet belts through customs just to get a reaction, and carrying bondage porn so that border police would stop him and let the band and their drugs through. Brendan was good, but not that good.

‘Only if you spell it right,’ he said. Mitch was good with us, but I’d seen him dispense with people ruthlessly. ‘Off you go,’ he’d said to a girl who’d refused to leave our drummer’s room the night before. He said it as he propelled her down the corridor, not caring that she stumbled in her one high-heeled shoe. And when the band stole a bottle of vodka from our rider and Rose threatened to call the police, Mitch simply walked into their dressing room and held the guitarist’s semi-acoustic by the neck like a baseball bat until they gave the rest of it back. He was firm but fair.

In the hotel bar that last night we ran into Benny, the legendary singer from Steel Girders, who was up for a chat. Mitch knew him from way back and it turned out he’d worked with John Villiers as well. Benny and I started talking about John Villiers like we were all old friends.

‘Such a sweetheart. He really got the best out of us whenever we worked with him. Great bloke.’

‘I know,’ I brushed his arm. ‘There’s a lot of love in the room when we record. You can really feel it.’

‘He’s great.’

‘He really is.’

‘So fantastic that you girls got to work with him too. Give him my love . . . sorry, what was your name, darling?’

‘Nina. I will, I will. Look up The Dolls on Facebook, you’ll love it, I promise.’

Once upon a time Benny would have invited me and Rose up to his hotel room for a bubble bath, or so I’d read, but tonight it looked like it was way past his bedtime. I kept staring at John Villiers’ number in my phone, but I wasn’t leathered enough to do it. Instead I went to the toilets with the girl behind the bar to do a line, and we swapped clothes to surprise everyone.

Next morning at the lobby call I tried hard not to be sick. I had a vague memory of Rose and me stripping our guitar tech, Paul, and wedging a long tail of toilet paper into his arse crack before shoving him out into the corridor.

‘Youth of today: no stamina,’ said Mitch cheerfully as I laid my head on the concierge desk.

•

The Please No More Tour amounted to some of the funniest days of my life, but when we got back to suburbia I cried alone for three days in Dad’s flat with the blinds closed—in the bath; into tins of tuna; under a doona on the couch. In between crying I turned the stereo up to the max and danced till I sweated out all the toxins. For the next month I moped around in a post-tour comedown, wondering what to do with myself. I had to pull myself together eventually, because our publicist, Carmel, had lined up some appearances for us.

More and more frequently we had a driver at our disposal, which was a relief because lately I’d had the eerie feeling that death was stalking me. I couldn’t walk down a street without picturing a CCTV camera whirring around and tracking my last steps. I’d get a flash-forward to the cops studying my retreating figure in its distinctive tortoiseshell fake-fur coat: a dolled-up barfly from any era, walking down the road, unsteady on her heels. I imagined them pointing out the coat in the grainy footage on Crimewatch and then holding up a replica in the studio. Although, good luck with that—I’d bought it on eBay three years earlier.

On this night we were being driven to a kids’ TV awards show in the Entertainment Quarter. There were no real kids receiving awards—it was all about the presenters and celebrities. Having not even had an album out yet, those sort of heady accolades were yet to come to us. Rose and I were merely there to be seen and to get people turning over cards in their minds like the memory game. Platinum blonde. Where did I last see a platinum blonde? Ah, that’s right: the ARIAs.

I wore: Greta Garbo-style loose pantsuit—a Salvos score—ruffled green shirt, Alannah’s amber necklace. It was my lucky necklace, until I’d have a bad night, at which point it would be dropped like a curse.

Rose wore: red cocktail dress, little velvet hat perched on her head at an angle.

As we sat at our table, Rose insisted on showing me the entire SMS conversation she’d had with Jimmy earlier. ‘Scroll down. Scroll down,’ she ordered every now and then. Jimmy and Rose were on the skids, although this text chain was so long and overwrought I couldn’t actually tell why. Meanwhile, she was checking Facebook on my phone. Every time someone came over to greet us, Carmel gave us a nudge and we put our phones on our laps and smiled, then resumed.

The evening was a boring conveyor belt of effervescent, chipmunk-cheeked twenty-somethings giving and receiving baubles. I noticed that the bigger stars only took their seats in the commercial break before their category was about to be announced. ‘They already know they’ve won,’ Carmel confirmed confidently. ‘You watch. They’ll be out of here as soon as they get their award. The car engine will still be running.’

The night was to wind up with a dimpled boy band called Brando playing their new single, so at the MC’s request we all shuffled over to the stage to watch. I could sense someone by my side looking across at me, but it wasn’t my custom to give such people the satisfaction of making eye , so I ignored him.

‘Here we are again,’ John Villiers said after a while.

I grabbed his arm instinctively and we went in for the awkward kiss. It was such

a relief to see his face after having the spectre of Strider at the end of my bed whenever I was trying to fall asleep. He was looking good, a bit tipsy. We grinned shyly at each other.

‘From one awards show to another. You’ll be getting a big head.’

‘Still not winning anything though.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Did you get my email about Benny?’

‘I did,’ he said. ‘Nice that you met him.’

‘Nothing happened,’ I said automatically. He looked at me funny, but I knew to drop it. ‘Wait.’

I disappeared back to our table, where I topped up my white wine, drank a bit, topped it up again and poured him a glass to the rim. When I delivered it to him I had the remainder of the bottle tucked under my arm.

We watched Brando crisscross the stage. The one at the front doing an apologetic rap over the middle-eight. I was smiling like a loon into the lights, but John Villiers couldn’t see—although he must have been able to feel me, standing

that little bit too close. My arm touching his felt like a lead weight. My clit was throbbing on beat with Brando’s rendition of ‘Angels’.

It was on.

When John Villiers neared the bottom of his glass, I poured him another. I playfully thudded the bottle against his stomach to speed him along, but really I was as keenly focused as a circling hawk. When the lights came on I had to hustle him outside as quickly as possible before the spell was broken, away from any cock-blocker wanting to ask him how he’d been and casting me strange looks. It was still warm out, even though it was eleven at night. John Villiers looked up at the sky, relaying some anecdote about an engineer who’d worked with Brando. I could tell he was a bit pissed.

In the cloying park, lined with birds-of-paradise bushes, conversation dropped off. I pulled him gently off course, away from the hordes heading for the main road, and he staggered a bit. When I pulled him closer by his jacket as if I was completely entitled to my moment, he looked down at me, bemused. I could smell his aftershave or deodorant, or something.

‘Let’s make out,’ I suggested, my eyes like strobes. ‘You’re not going to anyway.’

I moved in, but he pulled away.

‘Nina,’ he said, more sober than I’d thought. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend.’ A bat flapped like an ellipsis overhead, three beats and gone.

Returning the sides of his jacket to him, I searched his eyes. I detected a note of triumph.

‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to see if you’d do it.’

And I walked away like the power didn’t just leach out of me.

•

I figured I owed Helen a visit. Staying over hadn’t been an option since she’d moved some artist called Fabian into my room, but I’d been promising to go through all my junk. I lugged the boxes through the house, scoping Fabian’s misshapen nudes dotted around. Thankfully, the old perve wasn’t home.

I’d dropped a few Valium to help me handle Helen, although already Valium seemed é. Today’s prescription drugs were all about the painkillers, not the sedatives. The Osbourne siblings were both on OxyContin, which I hadn’t tried yet.

I was seeing the house with new eyes; pointing out bits to my as-yet-fictional biographer: This is where Rose and I first had our singing lessons. That’s the bush where we used to spy on the neighbours. This is where I felt the headstock of my first guitar, all wrapped up and hidden under their bed. This is the mirror where I cut off all my hair when I was seven . . .

We heaved the boxes into the kitchen and I sat at the table to go through them. Helen was in an unusually good mood, citing a second wind on the never-ending composition of her novel, which I suspected was about a woman quite like herself with a daughter much like me. Certainly, it was rare to see her cooking. I wandered over to the stove and cranked the oven door, squinting at the heat. ‘Ah, McCain,’ I observed, ‘you’ve done it again.’

Over at the kitchen table I cut through the packing tape in which I’d bound my old diaries. The handwriting was barely legible—panicked scrawls like drunken spiders across the pages. A litany of late nights and bad thoughts come back to haunt me.

Fishing into other boxes, I found tiny pink rubber Barbie doll shoes, button badges for The Who and Chisel that I’d picked up in op shops, a collection of rocks, ornate containers for losing things in, expired felt tips and empty bottles of old-lady perfume from garage sales that exhumed sad chintzy sighs when I pumped the tops.

I pocketed some badges I made for the spy club Rose and I had started, and shoved everything else into bin bags. Helen had put aside some childhood photos for me and when she wasn’t looking I chucked them in a bin bag, too.

When I was done, I stared at Facebook on my phone with a cup of tea while Helen talked.

‘I wish you’d stop smoking,’ she said, getting the defensive tone ready for my knee-jerk reaction. ‘It killed your nanna. Not that there’s much left of you anyway. You’re like one of those lollipop girls.’

‘Helen,’ I said, with enough warning to let her know I’d be out of here if she carried on down that route.

‘I’m joking! Joke!’

I could have started a cool conversation with Helen. I could have asked if she’d been painting with Fabian, or how that hippy retreat went. I could, but I didn’t, because why should I?

Abandoning the chilli on the hob, she brought over one last photo. It was of her and Alannah in the seventies. She was about twelve and Alannah must have been sixteen.

‘Wow,’ I said, taking it. ‘Look at her hair. So frizzy.’

‘Boys used to call her “ferret face”,’ Helen said. ‘I was actually considered the pretty one, you know.’

I grunted. It was true, though. Helen might cut and dye her own hair and embarrass me with her collection of kaftans, but her face was more delicate than her sister’s, when she wasn’t winching it into a frown.

‘Not long after this was taken she left home. She left me and Dee to handle Mum and Dad on our own.’

‘I know.’

‘I know you know; I’m just telling you.’

‘What do you expect from a sixteen-year-old, though?’

‘Oh, nothing really. I expected more later, though,’ she sniffed.

Somehow, an attack on Alannah felt like an attack on me.

‘You could have got out of here,’ I countered. ‘Why are you still in Parramatta? Alannah got as far away as possible.’

‘Alannah could afford it,’ she snapped. ‘She was doing very well for money, before she blew the lot and started leeching off your father.’

She stopped herself. I didn’t point out the obvious: that if Helen had helped her sister out Alannah wouldn’t have had to go to Dad, which must have been awkward.

‘In her book she said you were her rock,’ I said instead.

‘Ah yes, the infamous memoir,’ said Helen. ‘In which history was gleefully

rewritten. She didn’t even mention our band.’

I paused, cup of tea halfway up to my mouth.

‘What band?’ I grumbled.

Helen looked grimly triumphant.

‘More of a duo, really, but it wasn’t to last. We’d played all the city clubs before I was even old enough to drink.’

I stared at my mother, trying to strip back the years and mousse up her hair. It would never have worked.

‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘What were you called, then?’

‘Hot Groove.’

I crowed with laughter, rocking on my chair. ‘No way. Sing us a song!’

‘Don’t be silly. Anyway, before we’d even released anything our new manager decided your aunt would be more commercially viable as a solo artist, so I was relegated to minion—or personal assistant, as they called it. The rest, as they

say,’ she noted in her most aggrieved voice, ‘is history.’

We stayed silent a moment. I took in the patchwork effect of the kitchen: no designer appliances and matching condiments like the ones at Rose’s house. How different a kitchen we might have had, if Helen had stuck to her funk-pop dream. Then again, Alannah’s kitchen was a disappointment.

‘Hot groove . . .’ I crooned, ‘in the air . . .’ I wanted to see photographic evidence —to prove to myself that I would have been Alannah and Rose would have been Helen—but my mother suddenly tired of the conversation.

‘I don’t want you to hate your aunt,’ she said, clanking the lid down on the pot with a touch too much force. ‘She’s making amends of sorts by helping you. Just be smart. And for god’s sake, don’t lend her any money.’

Helen went back to serving up dinner and I ransacked my brain for clues, trying to slide snippets of family conversation around like a Rubik’s Cube. I hated being in the dark all the time. Around here you were either having stuff kept from you, or someone like Dad was telling you things you could never repeat. All these secrets made me feel like I had amnesia; just like all the Tony stuff. The details there were blurry, the way they were when I was drunk. People tell you the past is the past, but to have any kind of closure you need evidence, like a pile of bones picked clean, or your mind wanders the moors in distress.

On the way back to Dad’s I stopped at an Officeworks and hunched over the paper shredder for an hour, feeding in the pages of my diaries, one by one, before stuffing the stiff covers in a bin.

•

I couldn’t choose my favourite Alannah Dall video, because each had its own distinct personality. She was actually the aggressor in ‘Beam Me Up (Tie Me Down)’, but you’d take her more seriously if she wasn’t wearing a silver space dress. In ‘Make Him Wait’ she was manic and alone, but for a chair, a smoke machine and a skewed plywood set that shook whenever she set down a highheeled boot. The French maid outfit she wore in ‘Favourite Pet’ made her curse now if you mentioned it, but it was in a display case in the Arts Centre Melbourne along with other classic costumes through the ages. Then there was the low-buttoned safari dress and thick brown belt that spawned a million fantasies in ‘Fantastic Voyage’—the clip that reclaimed exotic locales from playboys like Duran Duran. Up until this point, women in videos were just brightly coloured birds while men ran around sweating in the undergrowth pinching bums, but Alannah was never anything less than the villain.

Growing up embroiled in all this, I had a whole folder full of ideas and sketches I’d been working on since I was twelve, but Jenner told me to leave them at home. I was to forget about the yacht idea as well, as video budgets had dropped from twenty grand to five if you were lucky.

We’d met at his office at around eleven in the morning. I walked around it, one hand trailing the wall.

‘Why don’t you get a pinball machine, Jenner?’ I asked, stopping to peer into a silver frame on the mantelpiece. It was Jenner looking really young with his arm around Danger Michaels. They were both gurning at the camera.

‘No one’s ever earned me enough money,’ he said from behind his desk. ‘It’s a thankless job.’

‘Ha,’ said Rose. ‘Twenty per cent of all these platinum albums . . . you must be rolling in it.’

‘I’m about to be rolling in it,’ he corrected her, in a speech that would go down in the annals of Dolls history. ‘I’ve got the masters of your album back from the States. You’ll have to find someone else to manage you after this, because I’m going to be able to retire.’

I flumped down onto the sofa as he played the beginning of ‘Cotton Candy’ through his computer, out of a speaker in every corner of the room. It was usually Jenner’s role to exercise caution—the devil’s advocate to Mickiewicz’s grand promises of number ones—but he was right. We sounded bigger and shinier than I’d ever heard us. It kind of didn’t sound like us at all.

‘Holy shit,’ said Rose, her eyes tearing up. ‘We sound hectic. I so want to put this all over YouTube right now.’

Halfway through the third song, Jenner had to cut it short. We were off to have lunch with Mason—the director of our first video. Over noodles on Oxford Street, he explained the concept for ‘Fight Like a Girl’. Rose and I were to go at each other in a boxing ring, before realising this was crazy and turning on the camera. The camera, we could assume, was some douchebag who’d done us wrong.

‘You are freaking joking,’ Rose said, meeting my eyes, but it was more like a vocal tic than a genuine protest. I was already planning my moves and I knew she was too. This shoot would really suit my hair, being blonde and choppy as it was now. Eyes: green kohl.

I’m thrown down on to the canvas and looking up on all fours through the wet fronds of my fringe, panting and mean. Maybe we’re outside and you can see my breath coming in bursts. Now I’m back on my feet, sparring, eyeing the camera and mouthing, ‘You know what I mean.’ Close-up on my sneer. Yeah, motherfucker.

‘Is it a bit Aguilera?’ said Jenner’s PA, Sam. I willed her silent.

‘Everything in music has been done before,’ said Jenner, not taking his eyes off the storyboard. ‘It’s all derivative. If anyone thinks they can lay claim to their image, they’re dreaming.’

Jenner told Sam to book us in with the local boxing gym to get some moves down pat. ‘I can picture the reviews now,’ he smiled lazily. ‘“Fight Like a Girl” really packs a punch,’ blah blah blah.’

‘What a pair of knockouts,’ Mason replied, barely concealing a sneer. ‘Get in the ring.’

Rose and I exchanged eye rolls over our noodles. If he’d listened to the song properly, he’d know I’d already used ‘get in the ring’, anyway.

•

YOUNG FEATHERWEIGHTS HIT HARD

It’s almost embarrassing how quickly the ‘Fight Like a Girl’ phenomenon has catapulted Sydney band The Dolls into the ring, writes Andy Carmichael.

Not since the Temper Trap’s ‘Sweet Disposition’ has the first swoop into a chorus triggered the adrenal glands so readily. Becoming the earworm theme to reality shows and ringtones alike, (‘Fa-fa-fa-fa’) ‘Fight Like a Girl’ is guaranteed to live on for all eternity in karaoke dens across both the East and West. The first single from The Dolls’ hotly anticipated debut album has enjoyed the full might of Grandiose’s hype machine. While the video clip couldn’t be called progressive, the skimpy boxing bout is a natural hit on both early-morning pop shows with kids high on frooty-loopz, and on late-night music marathons with highs of a different nature. It also cunningly disguises the fact that neither Dall is likely to win Dancing with the Stars anytime soon. The king hit, of course, came when Prince Harry was spotted throwing punches to ‘Fight Like a Girl’ at Mirabelle’s in London’s West End. While some dismiss ‘Fight Like a Girl’ as being aimed at the Bieber demographic, it cannot be denied that many credible rock journalists are salivating over the idea that we have the next t.A.T.u-style one-hit wonder on our hands—with Greg Mickiewicz as the cunning pimp. Will the rest of It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns live up to the hype? Who knows? But right now you couldn’t blame The Dolls for thinking they can punch above their weight.

INDUSTRY EYE

13

LOS ANGELES

After Wayward was released we were guilty of believing our own press. As a disaffected young woman, I’d always dragged my ego after me in the mud, but suddenly I was being told I was the saviour of rock’n’roll and the centre of the universe. And why wouldn’t I want to listen to that? POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

America. The word was buzzing with opportunity—and we would feel that buzz, once the Valium had worn off. We’d played a guest DJ set the night before our flight, which was a big mistake. You had to knock back a lot of vodka to feel comfortable taking turns leaning over a laptop or dancing in the booth with your hands in the air. The rest of the night was lightning flashes of incidents. Rose, doing a ‘do you know who I am?’ to the bartender. A bloke, all tilted chin and arrogance, pretending he’d never heard of The Dolls when he was blatantly there to perve at us. Me, saying something to this effect. Rose, skittling his phone across the floor when he tried to take a photo. The guy’s girlfriend, yowling in protest. The guy, in my face, calling us fucking puppets. The girl, calling us fucking whores. Us, out on the pavement. Jenner, gone. Jimmy’s face, unreadable, as we wait for the cab. Cab. Dad’s place. No room service. Airport wake-up call. Fade to hangover.

We shuffled towards the sliding doors of LAX, feeling the vulnerability of the travel weary. Rose hugged a pillow, oversized sunglasses dwarfing her face. In every shiny surface we ed in Duty Free, I checked my reflection to see if my skin was still as shithouse as it was a minute earlier. I needed to moisturise, stat.

We were here to meet our new American record company. Elementary Music had a licensing deal with Grandiose and so had first dibs at releasing our album. They were keen to ride the hype surrounding ‘Fight Like a Girl’, and so It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns would be released in the States a couple of months later than in Australia, to give us time to clear our schedules for our first American tour. Clearing schedules meant dispensing with Australia as fast as possible.

Surprisingly the airport was ghetto. At customs we’d been singled out and pulled aside by armed officers who made us unpack everything in front of them, even our make-up cases. Rose cried when her tweezers were confiscated but it was only because of the stress of meeting our American record company. It felt like first-day-at-school nerves. Then I broke out in a sweat with the sudden certainty that Hank had left some drug residue imperceptible to the naked eye on my suitcase.

At the luggage carousel, taxi touts boxed us into the wall as they spruiked their rides to the city.

‘Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa . . .’ one of them said. I looked again. A young guy holding up a cardboard sign with ‘The Dolls’ on it was snapping it taut to get our attention. ‘Fa-fa-fight like a girl . . .’

He wore: white Gap T-shirt, tight grey Wranglers, cap worn flipped up at the front, soft leather satchel. He was no tout.

The moment we followed Clay out of LAX into the soft heat, we felt the stress seeping from our bodies. There were palm trees. There were white taxis. Everyone looked like a hustler.

Clay was our A&R guy from Elementary, the man who held our American future in his manicured hands. It was the job of your A&R to soothe and berate you, and order you back into the studio if necessary. They were tastemakers who discovered and developed artists. They liked to think of themselves as mentors, but they were really those Year Twelves who thought they were cooler than you back then and were unwilling to relinquish the advantage as adults. They had the power to hold your record up for months, or even years, if they felt they hadn’t tampered with it enough, or if—heaven forbid—they left the label and you got a new A&R who thought you sucked. We immediately liked Clay, though, and his equally stylish boyfriend, Matthew, behind the wheel.

Clay had our album masters on the Jeep’s stereo. ‘Aussie invasion,’ he said, turning it up as Matthew navigated his way onto the freeway and thumped the wheel in time. ‘You guys and The Dummies and Gotye are knocking it out of the ballpark. Everyone’s so excited right now.’

This was just the kind of bullshit we needed to hear. It had been two years since we first laid down demos with John Villiers and we were through with waiting for Grandiose’s wheels of industry to creak into motion. The hype behind ‘Fight Like a Girl’ was like cortisol, straining the adrenal glands of our fans. If we didn’t release this album now they’d burn themselves out, and then where would we be?

Los Angeles stretched squatly for miles, and Rose held my hand as we drove past endless blocks of Dunkin’ Donuts and Taco Bells to the syncopated beat of ‘Chica Rock’n’Roll’. Clay kept up his spiel about the steep trajectory and world domination of The Dolls. The exhaustion hurt, but we were finally here.

‘Oh my god, you two are unbelievably cute,’ he said.

‘Aw, you’re so sweet!’ Rose returned automatically, looking out of the window.

‘No, really,’ he insisted, ‘I love listening to your Aussie accents.’ He said ‘Ossie’ instead of ‘Ozzie’.

‘I can’t wait to introduce you to the team and get you playing some showcases. You’re going to love the Viper Room, we put all our international artists on there.’

‘River Phoenix,’ Rose said automatically. We knew all about the club River ODed outside, but The Dummies had warned us that in reality it was just as stinky as Dingo’s. That was okay—it was still on The Dolls’ to-do list; another stripe to earn.

We fell into a reflective silence, taking in the suburbs and picturing ourselves walking among them. Or driving, more like. Nobody walked in LA, so I had better get my licence. Rose and I saw LA as a new dawn, but for different reasons. Rose was ushering in phase two of her dream-chasing; I wanted a clean slate with nobody talking about what the hell I’d been up to. A new beginning.

•

Looking back, the precise moment I threw myself on to the back foot with Elementary’s senior publicist, Diana Etie, was my opening gambit in the lift but, to be fair, I didn’t know who she was at that point. I blame Jenner for staying in Australia when he should have been with us.

Elementary were licensed by Grandiose to put out our highly anticipated album in the States, which was funny because their offices were forty times the size of Grandiose’s. Once we’d received our es at reception, a junior publicist named Grace came down to meet us, dressed a lot more expensively than Grandiose’s junior publicists.

I wore: leather jacket that jangled as I walked, bustier, wet-look pants and wedge heels, like teenage jailbait from the seventies. I was going Whisky A Go Go. Sable Starr or Lori Lightning.

Rose wore: Audrey-from-Twin Peaks-style plaid skirt—or was it Tai-fromClueless?—and tight sweater, ballet flats.

After exiting the lift on the thirty-fifth floor, Grace led us smoothly down a wide carpeted corridor. I smiled at a woman hastening along her little girl. The child had ‘NAOMI’ embroidered in large purple letters on the back of her cardigan under an appliqué of flowers.

‘Great ment for paedophiles,’ I thought out loud, swivelling my head as we ed. Grace turned around and shot me a look not befitting a junior publicist.

‘Fortunately not everyone thinks that way,’ the woman said icily. I flushed, but I didn’t get it. It was a wry observation, not a cheer turn for perverts.

‘That was Diana Etie,’ Grace hissed to us as she speed-walked us away from the

scene. ‘You don’t want to be on the wrong side of her.’

And so already the junior publicist was on a downer with me and Rose was on a downer with me and Diana Etie was on a downer with me, and we hadn’t even begun negotiating what we wanted from Elementary, which Rose had written down on a neat list. I didn’t know how everyone had managed to misunderstand me already.

We waited mutely in Diana Etie’s office for her to dispatch Naomi to the crèche and click in on her heels. Rose trained her eyes on me but I stared out at the view of the city.

‘Good morning,’ Diana said, throwing her coat over the back of her chair. ‘Now we can be introduced properly.’

As I shook her hand I noticed her well-arched brows and one of those smiles that turns down at the corners, like it was battening down the hatches. Jenner had warned us record companies weren’t actually creative hubs interested in nurturing talent. ‘They’re moneylenders,’ he’d said, ‘and in reality it’s the worst loan you can take out—you have to go into all this understanding that. Recordindustry people are basically all capitalists.’

Clay came in and I latched onto him, a friendly face, as Grace distributed the filter coffee and muffins.

‘They’re gluten-free,’ said Diana. ‘Mickey, come in here and meet Rose and Nina.’

At the door there appeared a guy in his forties, dressed smart-casual like he was trying to get into a Jupiter’s casino back at home.

‘This is Mickey E, our marketing manager, and you’ve met Clay. We’re all extremely excited to have you on this journey with us.’

Subtext: It’s our journey and we’ve dibbed front seat.

Diana punctuated her opening gambit by straightening the papers on her desk like a newsreader. ‘Some key points to go over today: how we’ll be panning this campaign out across the territory and what you can expect to be covering on the promo trail. In layman’s , that means we’ll be coaching you on how to play nice with the American media—who are very different to the Australian media, I’m sure.’

Subtext: You’re not in Kansas now, Westies.

I looked over and saw Rose folding her list of demands into a very small square on her lap. We had felt powerful knowing that we were a top priority at Grandiose. Everyone there, from reception up to the penthouse, flattered us about specific moments in our songs, which they’d listened to, and congratulated us when they excelled their targets. The feeling in the Elementary meeting was very different, like we were lucky to be getting any attention at all.

Jenner had already warned us that the terrain of American music was very different to that of Australia. Sometimes I missed being an Aussie. In Australia

you had to sell thirty-five thousand records to go gold, and we were about to hit that. But over here it was five hundred thousand. It was like you cleared one hurdle and another came along.

Diana talked us through the tactics of hitting up radio, which was split up into hundreds of college stations, instead of a few networks having their grubby fingers in every pie.

Mickey cracked open his portfolio and laid out the artwork proofs on the desk. ‘These are some options we came up with for the album cover,’ he said. ‘You can see there are a few to choose from.’

We’d decided to call the album It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns to emphasise the fact that we were disaffected youth. And thus I’d suggested a collage of a unicorn spewing glitter while a pony rolled in the hay behind it, but I couldn’t see that option here. No gatefold sleeves either, although there was a little lyric book.

We leafed through the options, as imagined by some demented Elementary designer.

1) Artist’s impression of Nina and Rose in a shower, panting and dripping. ‘The Dolls’ embossed top left in gold.

2) Artist’s impression of Nina and Rose with bronzed, oiled skin, wrapped in an Australian flag against a backdrop of LA. Top right, ‘The Dolls’ rendered in gold.

3) An outtake of our promo photo shoot showing us leaning against a white wall. Above us, ‘The Dolls’, printed black on gold.

‘Well, I like this one,’ Rose said, spinning the latter across the desk to me.

Subtext: I’ll say anything if it helps me get on Glee.

‘Gold is very now,’ Mickey rewarded her.

I preferred to stay noncommittal, with the idea of ringing Jenner immediately afterwards and getting him to fix it all.

‘Okay, well, that’s certainly something we’ll consider,’ Diana said, after giving me a moment to react. She produced the reverse side of that design, with the track listing on it.

It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns track listing

Cotton Candy (Rose Dall 2012)

Chica Rock’n’Roll (Rose Dall 2012)

Fight Like a Girl (Nina Dall 2012)

Daddy May I (Nina Dall 2012)

Charm Offensive (Rose Dall 2012)

Boy Crazy Girl Crazy Boy (Rose Dall 2012)

Who’s Sorry Now (Rose Dall 2012)

Cheap (Nina Dall 2012)

El Capitan (Nina Dall 2012)

Girl Crush (Rose Dall 2012)

I Will Take the Blame (Nina Dall 2012)

Can’t Say No (Nina Dall 2012)

‘Fight Like a Girl’ was track three. I’d noticed since I was about ten and started

studying the craft that the biggest single always fell on track three.

‘Yay,’ Rose said and clapped her hands. Diana rewarded her with a benevolent smile. Rose fell in step with the superficial positivity of a certain breed of American and was, in her own words, a ‘people pleaser’. Meanwhile, my mind was clawed with selfish worries. Like, how we would ever face Australia again once Elementary had finished turning us into the Pussycat Dolls.

‘We could bring your band over here for the tour,’ said Clay, after a look ed between him and Diana, ‘but we’re thinking we may have some seriously kickass session players you’d want to meet. They’re perfect for your genre. They’ve worked with Good Charlotte and Fall Out Boy.’

Rose kicked me. ‘Too easy,’ she said.

‘And we’ll want to try another take on that single,’ he pressed forth. ‘The American territory’s a very different market. We need to get you remixed by a name producer over here—somebody people have heard of. Let’s do “Fight” and, say, “Cheap”?’ He looked to the others for confirmation as though he’d just thought of it, and they nodded on cue. ‘We’ll consider changing the album name to something more catchy as well, but that’s another meeting.’

Rose’s eyes bugged at that sly backhander, but I was buzzing over the revelation that I’d have sole songwriter credit on both singles. Jenner had warned us that our American A&R would want to cock his leg over something to make him feel like he’d been involved, so we’d expected some surprises. I hoped this meant we could do another video. One with a super-sized budget.

‘Good,’ concluded Diana, even though we hadn’t spoken.

•

If a meeting didn’t go the way she had foretold it, or a schedule changed minutely, Rose would completely lose it the moment we were alone.

‘Oh my god, what a bitch,’ she spat, as soon as we were out in the car park. She scrolled through her address book until she had Jenner’s number poised under her thumb, as though she had a bomb strapped to her body and was prepared to detonate. ‘I’m totally ready to go home already.’

‘My unicorn’s gone,’ I said.

‘They’re ditching our band,’ she elaborated. ‘And you were no help at all. What the hell was that paedo stuff about? And what if they get rid of my scat part on “Cheap”?’

I wasn’t getting ruffled. It was in my nature to suspect a trap, but Rose couldn’t handle any aberrations from her plans: they were all painstakingly laid out in vision boards, in Excel documents and on slivers of paper, to be burned over candles. Within a few days she might realise that taking on Fall Out Boy’s sloppy seconds would provide a whole new address book of people to namedrop, but for now she was taking it out on me.

I’d been warned that in America you had to tip the bartender heavily every

single time you ordered a drink, or else they’d chuck it when you went outside to smoke. On the plus side, they would free-pour your spirit to the top of the tumbler, so sometimes it was hard to tell whether you’d been spiked or not.

I directed our cab to a bar that Clay had, totally off the record, told us wouldn’t bother carding us. Brunelli’s was full of immaculate pin-up chicks with identikit tattoos and rueful-looking rockabilly guys. For all their tough exteriors, the girls were babyishly brash and some of them had to be in their thirties. I spun a paper coaster towards me across the bar and scribbled down ‘Damaged goods do it better.’ There was a hit song in this neighbourhood or I was an amateur.

For once, Rose was silent, taking in everything around us as the greaser bartender free-poured her a massive sambuca. My treat.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, steering her back on to a path of comfort. ‘Soon the record will come out and we’ll be drinking cocktails at the Chateau Marmont and doing satellite hook-ups with Richard Wilkins.’

She managed a small smile.

‘Will he be wearing a shiny suit?’ she snuffled.

‘Yes he will, and he’ll have had his hair highlighted especially for the occasion.’

Rose settled down on her bar stool with a misty look. Los Angeles was very good for my cousin’s constitution. Over the next month of our stay here she

would visit all number of psychics, astrologers, healers and numerologists to the stars. She would get a mystical wrist tattoo and refuse to tell me its meaning. She would be given a secret word to chant while meditating that she must not tell me either.

We would buy alfalfa shakes and soccer socks and vintage white roller skates to live the dream on Venice Beach, a photographer from Elementary in tow. We would tweet pictures of each other doing snow angels on the Hollywood stars, cropping tourists’ legs out of shot. We would spot Ke$ha at the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax and follow her three blocks, coughing her name behind our hands. Rose would write ‘Count Your Blessings’ about the period, which was about making gratitude lists—although her own gratitude lists were worded so ive-aggressively as to urge the universe to do better next time.

ROSE’S TOP 5 TWEET TYPES

1. The magnanimous: ‘Sending energy and blessings out to the world.’

2. The cryptic: ‘No telling what I’ll do.’

3. The spiritual retweet: ‘You Must Be the Change You Want to See in the World —Gandhi’

4. The feisty: ‘Mess with my family and you mess with me.’

5. The lazy:

LA didn’t feel the need to self-reference and backslap all the time—it had no need to. In Sydney, at every award ceremony or industry bash, each speaker always waxed on about how the city had the richest music heritage in the country. Same in Melbourne, which was said to be the musical capital of the Southern Hemisphere. Clap, clap, clap. Yet Australia’s record companies were smaller, no one had heard of their bands or moguls outside of the country, and their A&R men couldn’t promise the world.

Away from Australia, we looked better: clothes worked, our eyes were dewy, our faces more animated. I might get the urge to wear pastels or bling; sometimes both. Whenever my personality threatened to return to its default settings, I reminded myself: WE ARE IN AMERICA. Anything could happen. As we walked to bars with Clay in the evenings I transmitted my pleasure up to the stars.

Clay was always on hand to take us clothes shopping and bar hopping, chalking up such trips with ‘my girls’ as business meetings. We perved on the street names that had infiltrated our childhood—Melrose Avenue, Rodeo Drive, Santa Monica Boulevard—and in such glamorous surrounds, it wasn’t hard to obey Jenner’s Law #257: no more dressing like demented children.

While much would be made of my future jaunts in rehab, addiction comes in many forms. If we wandered into a gallery, Rose would drop $1800 on a table in a heartbeat. She physically could not go into a shop without buying something, even if it was an extra toothbrush at the servo. Her purchases started to pile up in a corner of our hotel suite, as though the Department of Immigration would have to let us stay if they saw how much junk she’d accrued.

The law of attraction clearly decreed that if an attractive person obsessed enough on their own selfish dreams, the rewards would flock to them like migrating

birds. Working to this same ethos, Rose dropped Jimmy like a hot potato, by text. It wasn’t that she was into anyone else; it was just that she was now married to #dreamchasing. She was like a bride of Christ.

•

It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns

Press clippings: Australia and New Zealand

‘Behold, the much anticipated, glittering debut from The Dolls. As a plinth on which to set your teenage nostalgia, it’s solid; yet the spark of those crazy live shows has been dulled by over-production. It’s not the Dalls’ fault that ‘Fight Like a Girl’ hyped them up beyond reasonable expectation, but their essence has been criminally diluted by the use of predictable co-writers—familiar names found on the back of practically every album you bought last year. Surely what we loved most about The Dolls was their unpredictability?’

—Alt-Z

‘Can we really address the subject of The Dolls’ hotly anticipated debut without acknowledging Greg Mickiewicz’s undoubted desire to get publicly embroiled with another generation of Dalls? Could this be the most expensive industry prank ever?’

—The Modern Collector

‘It’s a shame The Dolls couldn’t have used their family connections to just jump the queues at Darlinghurst clubs. Whoever told them it would be a good idea to try and outdo Alannah “the lungs” Dall should be strung up by the balls and used as a piñata.’

—Elf Wrangler

‘The sort of try-hard girl-posturing the Spice Girls annoyed us with fifteen years ago, and some drivel about Chiko Rolls.’

—Pulverizer

‘Shiny, fun pop perfection from the two beauties said to be the next big thing. If you loved Kristen Stewart in The Runaways, you’ll love this.’

—All About You

‘A grotesque display of self-adoration and the sort of offensive faux-lesbian routine you’ll see in any club around the country after a few Jäger shots.’

—KiTTy LiTTer

‘Relax, it’s not nearly as bad as you’ve heard. . . . Ponies and Unicorns is a gluttonous feast of pop culture for those who enjoy picking out reference points, it’s just that Rose and Nina are yet to have their musical epiphany.’

—NZ Times

‘Is this the sound of hormonal lust? If so, it’s uncannily similar to The Vines played at 45RPM.’

—Beat Goes On

‘One hit wonder, one hopes.’

—Zeitgeist

14

TALL POPPIES

Beyond the touring, beyond the waiting, beyond the breakdown of relationships, the most frustrating thing about being an artist was being misrepresented. More often than not the finished album, into which you had poured two years of Greek tragedy, had been interfered with to the point of being unrecognisable. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

‘Well, I would actually want to hear that album,’ was Jenner’s response to the litany of quotes from reviews that Rose presented him with. He made a show of looking at the printout to appease us, but it was like it didn’t even with him.

‘It’s just tall-poppy syndrome,’ he said. ‘A two-million deal isn’t unlikely to go uncommented on by the critics. But the sales are telling the real story and everybody’s already stoked with those results.’

‘We weren’t true to ourselves,’ I raged. I wanted someone to blame, but I knew better than to tell Rose her insistence on synths diluted our agenda, or to tell John Villiers that he should have scrapped the Tomkat tracks, or to tell Jenner that as our manager he was supposed to make sure things like duff albums didn’t happen. So, I blamed Elementary for keeping us in LA when we could have been getting creative in the studio at home. Around Grandiose I would blame Elementary and around Elementary I would blame Grandiose.

Looking through the press clippings Carmel had put together, I could see a bunch of familiar names. There was the stammering reporter we’d met after a show in Melbourne, who’d sat quietly as Rose rewrote his questions for him and I headbutted the table in boredom. Not so quiet now.

Then there was the ‘gonzo’ hack with a bad pseudonym, whose claim to fame was that Rose Dall had told him to fuck off. And here was the girl who asked if we were feminists and now complained in her assessment: ‘They have little understanding of the third-wave paradigm and yet they ask us to believe they are the guardians of this post–Girl Power wasteland. I’d sooner believe in a unicorn.’

One thing was clear: everybody thought they could do better than that.

‘We were savaged,’ Rose said, throttling her latte. Rose could quote any one of those reviews. Picture her stricken like Blanche DuBois at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, with one-liners echoing dramatically around her as she cowered in a Hervé Léger bandage dress.

‘They build you up to knock you down,’ Jenner soothed. ‘It’s like modern-day gladiators. The critics in the States will love it, I guarantee. And once an Australian band makes it big overseas, the media back home suddenly takes an interest again.’

‘Can you release a statement pointing out we write all our own songs?’ Rose wanted to know.

‘We could,’ Jenner said, ‘but I don’t think that’s a good idea. Save the press releases for the sex scandals when you need to appeal for privacy.’

Jenner sent us home to cool our jets before the evening’s show. Our last duty in Australia was a token show in Sydney to prove to the Aussie fans that they came first—before we disappeared to the States, hopefully never to return.

I couldn’t hack sitting in a cab with Rose with her in that kind of mood, so I took the train out to Dad’s. As the wheels beneath me beat a double pulse on the rails, I took out my laptop and re-read the bio that Carmel had sent out to the national media.

We’d approved the line: ‘The Dolls have really paid their dues’—insisted on it, actually—but it seemed our two years spent trawling around the likes of Dingo’s were being dismissed by certain sectors of the music press as not enough. It also seemed to have become a quote other Australian bands were fond of tweeting. Like: ‘I was thinking of going to rehearsal this evening, but I reckon I’ll stay in and crimp my moustache instead. #PaidMyDues.’ Even The Dummies were at it.

‘Are you working on an essay?’ the bloke next to me said, which I could tell he’d been working up to saying for about five minutes just by the way he was sitting.

‘No.’

‘Homework?’

‘I’m nineteen,’ I said, heaving him a look. I didn’t tell him I had a two milliondollar record deal as it could be construed as a conversation opener. ‘Did you forget to bring something to do? There’s a newspaper over there.’

That was a conversation closer. You could also try tapping your face in disgust: ‘You’ve got something there.’

My bag vibrated at my feet as the bloke sat in silence apart from a whistling through his nose. I read an email from John Villiers with the phone screen angled towards the window.

‘You should have been more honest and marketed it as a pop record,’ was his response to the email Rose sent him about the reviews.

My phone buzzed again.

‘Don’t ever sleep with him again. xo,’ Rose texted. I pictured her brow knitted into a V in the back of a cab.

‘I haven’t slept with him at all yet,’ I reminded her.

‘Good, then don’t. xo.’

I would have quite liked Rose to titillate me more about John Villiers, the way

we used to drag out fantasies about boys when we were kids. On the way home we’d take turns to thrill the other by constructing a soft-porn plot about some older boy at school galloping through the surf on a black stallion, or a fireman kicking down a burning door to save us. But when I followed up with a winky face I didn’t hear back.

Over the last few stops I mourned the record that never was. What happened to our early visions for It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns, of tribal rhythms, steel drums and jangly guitars? What became of my grand plan with John Villiers to bring back the fade-out? All our fade-outs had been removed during mixing by one of Mickiewicz’s celebrity knob-twiddlers who we never even met.

Mickiewicz had interfered with it so much it didn’t even sound like us any more. The last time we’d heard from him, when ‘Fight Like a Girl’ came out, he’d rung to say, ‘How does it feel to be number one?’ That was three months ago.

We had been encouraged to take the path of least resistance and our penance would be a tour playing to teenagers who thought Taylor Swift was the height of sophistication. Little girls these days, jumping up and down in their lounge rooms, wanted to be the big nobody with the big hair on the talent shows. In one ear, out the other. Once upon a time a little girl would have wanted to be me, just like I’d wanted to be Alannah.

TOP 5 WAYS IN WHICH FAME HAS FAILED US

1. Spending video shoots dancing in front of a green screen as everyone in the room scrolls down their Facebook news feed.

2. Not having an entourage so much as a junior publicist eavesdropping on everything you say. Private conversations and lines have to be conducted in the toilet.

3. Not being consulted about anything, for our own good.

4. Having to answer the question ‘What’s it like having your cousin in the band? Are there lots of fights?’ in every single interview.

5. Discovering it’s only thirteen-year-old girls and fifty-year-old men who come up and say hello in the street. The stylish, witty people you fantasise about have no idea who you are.

•

Here they came, clutching their posters.

At the venue, Jenner had lined up a meet-and-greet, which we had discovered was the bane of any band’s existence. Top artists would pocket up to fivehundred dollars per fan for a quick autograph and a grope around a table of sandwiches, but in our case Jenner had accepted a group of winners from a radio-station competition, which meant we got nothing but airtime out of it.

‘It’s to give the fans a feeling of ownership,’ Jenner had explained. ‘You’ll get higher return-on-investment if you personalise an experience—give them a hug and they’ll snap up all the merch for you to sign and be your friend for life.’

‘And, Nina, every time it’s been mentioned on air they’ve played our song,’ Rose reminded me.

‘And each time they play it . . . ker-ching!’ Jenner said, fixing his cool eyes on me. ‘Get those hugging arms ready.’

I was appalled to be around such mercenary characters.

By the time the fans arrived, I was in a major funk. They came bearing gifts: drawings of us; T-shirts that they’d designed themselves; cuddly toys; presents for our parents. There were ten of them—five winners and their plus ones—all looking ravenously at us as though they hadn’t eaten in days. Most had smoothed their backstage- stickers onto their chests, unaware that no one worth knowing would be so obvious.

They swallowed us up like quicksand. Fans always wanted to tell you their experience of you, to try to emblazon themselves upon your memory. They first listened to you when they were thirteen. They are on the street team. They once met you that time in the queue at McDonald’s. They shook your hand outside a stage door. I nodded along, but one girl was just staring like her eyeballs were molesting me and I thought I’d scream if I had to stand there another second.

More than once I’d told Jenner we should be doing meet-and-greets with sick kids instead, but he reckoned the public were too cynical to buy into all that. On the instruction of their agents, every star aligned themselves with a cause these days, so normal folk got charity fatigue just watching from their couches.

The girl with the molesty eyes was crowding Rose into the wall as she tried to hold court about how proud we were of the album. ‘Rose. Rose. Rose.’

‘Hang on, darling, I’ll get to you again in a minute,’ Rose said in her schoolmarm tone. Rose actually didn’t mind all this. She saw the fans as her little choir, to conduct into some sort of orderly tunefulness and send them off singing more sweetly. My mind just wanted to float off like a balloon until they were craning uselessly after a little speck.

I went to the toilet to top up my levels with the miniatures of vodka I’d secured in the waistband of my skirt. Jenner had advised us to adopt coping strategies to help us deal with fame, and my favourite was Smirnoff.

Rose’s coping strategy was lovely things. She’d requested pink drapes, soft lighting, incense and chilled strawberries for this backstage room, although that was nothing compared with the extravagancies she’d would go on to demand from US promoters, spurred on by tales of Mariah Carey’s puppy requests. Worse, Rose was always rude to people she dealt with, particularly in hospitality and anyone hired to drive us around. That was my pet hate, I mused, pulling my stockings straight in the mirror and going back out to the backstage room. I was rude to grabby people, not people paid sod all to help us. They were the ones who could get the drugs, for god’s sake.

Jenner called time, to give us a breather before going on stage. As soon as I was out in the corridor, I shuddered and brushed down my hugging arms. In the dressing room I headed straight for the rider table to check the cheese. More often than not we got cheddar instead of Swiss, but this time they had it right.

Before a show Rose and I always ran through a few songs with our guitarist— whoever they were—while Brendan sat on his laptop and kept the evening

running smoothly, but tonight I couldn’t relax. I kept checking the stage times tacked up on the wall, and then looking over at the door.

I was convinced John Villiers wasn’t coming. I’d texted him and told him I needed to talk to him about something, urgently. The last time I’d seen him was at the kids’ awards when he got the upper hand, and this was my last chance before we left for the States to stop this foolishness once and for all, and root him. I’d been driving myself to distraction imagining his hand in my hair and the sound of a zipper being pulled down. That was pretty urgent.

‘Brendan,’ Rose called out. ‘I can’t see the atomiser in here. Where is it?’

‘I guess it’s not here, Rose,’ Brendan sang back, only pulling out one earphone to indicate he wasn’t committing to this conversation. ‘I did ask the promoter for one.’

‘Brendan, I can’t sing properly if my voice is fucked,’ she said, her voice setting like concrete. ‘Our fans deserve a first-class set from us, so what are you going to do about it?’

I propelled myself off the sofa so that I could be spared this familiar operetta, but as I stepped into the hallway I saw John Villiers coming up the stairs. I ducked back into the dressing room and vaulted into a reclining position. As John Villiers stopped to greet Brendan, I picked up my new guitar and started strumming it.

‘What are you engrossed in?’ John Villiers said, coming over and sitting on the arm of the sofa. He looked good in his jeans and flight jacket and hint of

wariness.

‘This,’ I said, tilting the guitar at him. ‘I’ve had a new one custom-made for me, actually.’

‘Have you?’ he said.

‘Look, they’ve put my name on it.’

I showed him the ‘NINA *’ inlayed into the first five frets.

‘Will they teach you to play it?’ Rose asked from the corner, where she was texting Jimmy.

‘When you write a hit song, you can take the piss,’ I told her.

John Villiers held out his hand and I swung over the guitar to him. He started picking out a country tune, using most of his fingers. I usually liked to play ‘who’s the better guitarist’ with my boyfriends, but there was no point getting competitive around John.

‘Townes Van Zandt?’ asked Jenner. ‘Nice.’

‘Is he from Nashville?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said John Villiers. ‘Texas.’

‘Oh. I’ve always wanted to go to Nashville and record.’

Rose looked up sharply, but didn’t contradict me.

‘You should go to Tamworth,’ Jenner said. ‘It’s nearer.’

‘Will you fly me?’

‘I don’t want to play favourites.’

John Villiers laughed through his nose. ‘You can fly Rose business class and Nina cattle class. Nothing like some creative conflict.’

I felt John Villiers was mocking me, but still, there was an electric charge in the air. I could tell that Jenner felt it too, because he was leaning against the wall watching us.

‘Fair enough,’ I said. I knew that John Villiers must be curious about what I urgently needed to talk about, but I also knew he wouldn’t ask while people were

in earshot, so I pulled out my make-up bag and swiped some gloss over my lips.

‘Be my mirror,’ I said, pressing my lips together and parting them.

‘Yeah, fine,’ he said, looking away. I handed him Alannah’s amber necklace and knelt on the sofa to offer him the nape of my neck. With my big stack heels I looked like an upturned colt. I always put the necklace on just moments before we went on because I was terrified of losing it—like it was my good-luck talisman. As John Villiers did up the clasp, one warm knuckle brushed the nape of my neck.

‘Girls?’ Brendan said, snapping his laptop closed. ‘It’s showtime.’

John Villiers released the necklace and the beads stroked against my skin.

‘Off you go,’ he said abruptly, but it was, like, abrupt-hot, as though he were in inner turmoil.

I eyeballed him, then followed Rose out, fixing the strap to my guitar as we walked. Brendan guided us to the side of the stage with his torch. We weren’t yet at the level where we could have some kind of mechanised riser lifting us, phoenix-like, through the centre of the stage between the billows of a smoke machine, so we had to wait for the last few chords of The Ramones’ ‘We Want the Airwaves’ to skip on.

‘John,’ I called out, just before I followed Rose into the wormhole of flashing

lights. When he came out of the gloom I fished my chewing gum out of my mouth and put it in his hand. ‘Thanks.’

The scream that went up when we walked on stage hit us like we were being dumped by a wave. To me, the kids in the front rows always looked as though they were terrified. Damp and pink-cheeked, they’d squeal like little piggies, eyes round and wide. As I scissored the first few barre chords of ‘Can’t Say No’ I could see lots of hair braids and feathers going on, as a nod to the squaw look we were trying to live down.

It was fairly unusual to have a female guitarist, so all eyes were on me for the first song. Women usually played bass, accepting their role in life as the fourstring serving wench to the boys’ lead-guitarist club. This was because back in those very first bedroom bands, women heard themselves and were ashamed. Boys, by contrast, believed they sounded like the shit, even as their fingers spasmed randomly over the upper frets, making as much sense as algebra. Eventually the unflappable self-belief of those boys might propel them on to become as technically good as they had always considered themselves to be. Women, if they continued, often played like an apology. They would grimace through a hesitant dual-fingered solo and telegraph their commiserations to the front rows. How often did you see a woman playing with a righteous grin, or shredding behind her head? Arrogance when playing electric guitar was a beautiful thing. I did what I could.

A few times during the first song I had to break mid-yodel and tell the kids in the middle of the crush to ease up their pushing, but really it was nothing they shouldn’t be able to handle. I’d been in a ton of circle pits and mosh pits by the time I was fourteen.

The lights were right in my eyes. They were making me so hot that when the guitar tech came to take my Telecaster and hand me my new guitar, I ripped off my ‘Youth is Wasted’ T-shirt too, slinging it at the audience so that I was just in

my bra.

We launched into ‘Girl Crush’ and everyone in the audience sighed at the part where the music stopped and Rose exhaled. She always held the mic out so that they knew to do it. That sort of pantomime wasn’t really my thing, but it was good that someone was taking care of it. By the time we got to ‘Fight Like a Girl’—at which point even the boyfriends in the crowd suddenly knew the words —we had a teenage feeding frenzy upon our hands. I ordered, ‘Put your hands up!’ and everyone obeyed. We did the double-clap for a bit while Rose finished off the chorus.

I chugged away on a chord at the front of the stage and stared into the light above me until I went blind. I could hear the new boy on guitar doing a solo with every effect in his digital effects pod. When I blinked the room back into focus I saw a township of little lights beneath me—camera phones, capturing the moment for YouTube. Usually that gave us the pip, but I didn’t mind it when I was going to do something funny, like give our guitarist an almighty shove when he wasn’t expecting it. That was the sort of thing Alannah would have done.

Before the encore we only had time to be patted down with powder and take a swig of water. We returned with a cover of The Runaways’ ‘Cherry Bomb’, and Rose skipped over so we could do some back-to-back singing during the ‘hello Daddy, hello Mom’ bit. For a joke I jerked away so she did a little stumble in her heels.

The trouble began in the middle-eight of ‘Painted Lady’, which was a quieter number than, say, ‘Fight Like a Girl’. I took a swig from the bottle of vodka Brendan had put on the drum riser for me, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Rose dropping into the splits, like we were back in the courtyard of Dingo’s in 2010. This was an unscheduled manoeuvre. In the spirit of competition, I wheeled around in circles with my arms stretched, then let go of the bottle.

The idea, obviously, was that it would explode on my speaker stack. Instead, it connected with the back of a bouncer’s head and sent him staggering forwards into the barricade. I saw the first three rows of sweaty teenagers lunge out and grab him, then he went down. A hundred and eighty degrees out, I was.

Brendan told me later that the head of security shoved past him in a fury to rush the stage, but John Villiers got there first. I laughed with delight as he scooped me up like I was weightless, knocking the strap of my new guitar so that it nosedived to the ground. The stage lights blurred above me. I dangled my head back and saw a thousand little mouths hanging open, then the stage lights again. For a second I just took in the vibe of the drama, but then he skittled me to my feet in the wings, abruptly ending our Bodyguard moment.

‘You stupid twat,’ he spat, over the deafening of my new guitar. It was howling like an abandoned puppy. I looked at him in disbelief, then down at my foot, which had lost its shoe.

‘What?’ I said incredulously. ‘John, I’ve got to get back out there.’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ said Jenner with finality.

‘When are you going to fucking grow up?’ John Villiers said, pointing at the security pit. ‘That guy’s got his own problems. I’ve got my own problems. You are not my problem, so stop trying to be.’

I could see the guitar tech and Brendan watching in the shadows, and

humiliation back-burned through my brain. I wanted to raze this theatre to the ground. I wanted to smash the lot of them in the teeth. On stage, I could hear Rose holding the fort in show-must-go-on mode. She’d be sneakily reinserting her scat rap back into ‘Cheap’ any moment now.

‘Hello?’ John Villiers snapped, coming right up to my face and waving his hand. ‘Is anybody there?’

‘When am I going to grow up?’ I repeated viciously, balling up and shoving his chest. ‘I’m a teenager if you , John. I’m enabled to do whatever the hell I want, and anyone on the payroll should just shut the fuck up and me.’

Too late I realised I meant ‘entitled’.

‘And you,’ I said, stabbing a finger at him, ‘have a duty of care.’

The look on John Villiers’ face . . . if I’d had another drink I would have thrown it.

He shrugged on his jacket.

‘If you want someone to save you, darling, it isn’t me,’ he said. ‘Find some other stooge to produce your records.’

Jenner looked down at his feet as John Villiers ed him. I watched him go, amazed. This was insane. I could still feel his arms around me as he carried me off stage, out of harm’s way. I’d only ever wanted John Villiers’ approval, and I never seemed to go about it the right way. He didn’t even know what I needed to see him urgently about, which was my new lingerie from La Perla—although, as fate would have it, he wound up seeing half of it, along with the rest of the Enmore. I always jinxed things when I bought new undies.

‘We love you so much, Sydney,’ I heard Rose yell from the stage. ‘You’re so very special to us and always will be. We love you.’

The adulation she received in return was sincere.

•

The after-party was at a new club in Chinatown, done up like a Chinese laundry with sheets and candles everywhere. Brendan had a car waiting around the back of the venue for us but all the journalists and hangers-on could walk the distance easily enough.

‘I came here one night after seeing The Dummies,’ Rose said during the short drive, ‘and Nina turned up with her cab driver. It was so funny. He couldn’t speak a word of English, so we just bought him shots.’

I didn’t laugh. John Villiers was nowhere to be seen and I knew I’d really done it this time. Jenner mistook my malaise for concern about the vodka-bottle incident and assured me that it meant we’d put on a show that would be ed.

Brendan chuckled as he slid open the door of the people-mover and jumped out.

‘I can’t believe John Villiers snapped like that,’ Rose said, stepping down onto the kerb in her heels. She steadied herself on Brendan. ‘What was with him? Totally mental.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He just blows hot and cold.’

Brendan slung the door shut and the van beeped twice with an orange pulse from the indicators.

‘We need our own security, Brendan,’ Rose decided, breezing past the bouncer on the door. ‘If a venue’s security is going to get out of control like that we need to be protected.’

‘They could double-up with another job,’ complied Brendan, who sometimes found it best to play along. ‘Like mopping you down with towels between songs.’

‘They could.’ She saw my face. ‘Oh, come on, doll, get over it. We’ll be out of here soon and he can go back to producing old has-bians.’

I didn’t answer. In my head I was playing a tape loop of John Villiers snarling, ‘If you want someone to save you, darling, it isn’t me.’ I was winding myself up

into a proper rage; the sort from which there was no turning back.

I didn’t want anyone to save me. People didn’t race in to protect you in real life, ever; certainly not in mine. I could only really count my English teacher in Year Eight, and he only tried once. Old Smithy. Old Smithy, I still ed him. He was actually younger than the others—twenty-five, thirty-five maybe. He wore mismatched jackets and pants, and always had a bit of hair sticking up from running his hand through it when he got excited about a metaphor.

I despised him for trying to be down with the kids, getting us to call him Stephen and sitting edgily on his desk. I had more respect for the bitter old fossils who just got on with it. I let him know it every day through my facial expression. I had boredom down to a fine art. My grades slipped from an A to a C, because I was applying myself no further than slumping my head on my arm, inhaling my skin and inspecting every fine blonde hair from the perspective of an ant. Sometimes I’d wiggle an achy tooth. Every morning I’d wake up and my teeth would be aching from grinding. It felt like they were going to shatter into a million little pieces.

I the day when the rest of the class had been talking about haikus, as if I needed to fumble through something so elementary. It was

like a winter that

never seemed to end and yet

spring would be the same.

I ran my thumbnail back and forth across a groove in the desk, wilfully tearing a fissure in time. When the bell rang, Mr Smith asked me to wait. We stood like sentries while everyone else filed out.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked when they’d gone. He kept his voice reasonable. ‘You should be into this. I’ve read the reports from your last school. You should be top of the class. You should be enjoying it.’

‘I’m not really bothered.’ I stared at a point on his forehead.

‘Is it something I’m doing wrong?’ he asked, waiting a beat. ‘Or is there something that’s on your mind?’

I went for a dead-eyed smirk but it came out a sneer. ‘Don’t worry about it, sir. None of your business.’ He’d shown weakness and not even guessed at the depth of my contempt.

He looked at me for a second and then dropped his gaze. He hadn’t smiled like he was my mate once the whole time. ‘All right,’ he said quietly. It was a dismissal, but it looked like personal disappointment.

Triumph—short lived. Oh!

The bittersweet victory

of walking away

After that I’d always notice him on the way home. He lived somewhere near me. I’d see him haring down Cowper Street, shirt untucked on one side, keen to get home to somebody. I’d hang back two-hundred metres, hugging my ring-binder to my chest. Ever since then I’d been window-shopping adults to open up to, always fantasising, but never buying.

He took me by surprise. He should have asked again. Instead, I had to add it to the shame reel.

As Rose started air kissing some low-ranking personnel from Grandiose, I went to the toilet for a cry. When I returned, I stood at the bar for a bird’s-eye view of the door. Jenner was supposed to have had final approval of Carmel’s guest list, yet we hadn’t been at the club ten minutes when Lance Lobotomy showed up, his name checked off by the girl in the door booth.

I nudged Rose. Lance was the journalist to whom Rose had said a month earlier, ‘Music saved our lives.’ She literally said that, as well as ‘LA is our spiritual home’ and ‘We’ll always have a special place in our hearts for Australia.’ He’d sat across from us nodding and smiling, goading us on with more questions, and then wrote that we were ‘plastic punk with all the depth of a puddle’ and complained about ‘seventy-five minutes of my life I’ll never get back’. It was Lance’s fault the #PaidMyDues tag took off.

Rose stopped her conversation and looked down her nose at him, then shrugged and turned back to her Bellini. I stared at her. Surely she wasn’t going to just leave it? When I was mad about something, my mind snapped down on it like a

bear trap.

After thirty minutes of tracking Lance across the room over the rim of my wine glass and ignoring people trying to talk to me over the thumping bass, I made my move. Rose was too busy settling the score on the dance floor to notice and Jenner had his back turned. I pushed through the crowd to where Lance sat in a booth with our band, Brando, his dictaphone out.

‘Hello, Nina,’ the Brando boys said, the toothy optimists.

‘Bless you,’ I said. I was so wasted I was seeing more of them than could possibly be seated there. I knocked over someone’s glass shunting my way into the booth, and the smiles faltered. Relax, Brando, it’s just rock’n’roll.

I turned to Lance, who was avoiding eye . ‘Why’d you do it?’ I asked him. ‘Huh? Just tell me, why’d you do it? I really want to know.’

‘I don’t know, Nina,’ he said in a tetchy whine. ‘That’s just how the business is, sometimes.’

‘Is it? You’re in your fucking thirties; this record isn’t for you.’

‘Look, it’s just the way it works.’

‘Seriously, if my career revolved around writing about other people’s talent, I would be humiliated.’

‘Oh, okay.’ He grimaced, but he was also grinding his jaw. I must have been ruining his coke high. We volleyed the topic back and forth some more until I suddenly noticed that Brando had been led away from the scene—my scene— leaving just us. Some girls at the next table were taking pictures of me on their phones. I fiddled with my bra strap under my T-shirt.

‘Can I go now?’ Lance asked. ‘My friends are over there.’

I let him out and stayed in the booth for a bit, contemplating the revellers of my grand after-show. It was fast turning into one of those evenings where I could conceivably lose my friends, my shoes and the contents of my handbag.

It was the walk back to the bar that nearly did for me, because I wasn’t expecting to stumble into one of the Chinese laundry sheets hanging down. I executed a crazy sideways lurch into a group of girls, who laughed, and one of them barged me back on course. I picked up someone’s drink from a ing table and skolled it, at which I heard a high-pitched protest.

‘Nina!’ Jenner darted over and guided me by the elbow, squeezing hard. It was the first time I’d seen him fired up about anything. I looked down and saw that I was brandishing the empty glass.

‘I wasn’t going to do anything,’ I protested.

‘Let’s just call it a night,’ he said. ‘Rose is busy freaking out over Brando being here anyway. The pair of you are getting on my tits.’

‘It’s our party,’ I could hear Rose yelling at somebody, probably Brendan. ‘It’s our party. Everyone is here because of us. It’s our money behind the bar.’ One thing about Rose and me: if one went a bit loopy, the other soon followed in empathy. Or maybe it was in competition.

By now, this half of the room was spectating with interest, so Jenner led me into an empty bar upstairs that I would never be able to find again, despite subsequent visits to the club. I pulled out my phone and checked my reflection in the screen. My nose was shiny from crying earlier, so basically there were going to be pictures of me all over Twitter, shouting, with a shiny nose. At least John Villiers wasn’t on Twitter.

Rose stomped upstairs to the empty dining-room with Brendan, ready to receive Jenner’s pep talk. We’d heard it before. It was delivered in a soothing voice and went along the lines of it having been an amazing show with everyone saying how great it was. I caught myself in a micro-nod and yanked at my hair to try to snap out of it. Like Jenner said, only a potential two hundred of the twothousand-strong audience could have caught our little après-show meltdown, and that would soon be forgotten anyway.

In our minds, though, we had already written off Australia, as though it were an ex-lover that had crossed us. It was unive of those with ambition. It was a small pond for big fish. We didn’t need it any more.

15

ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME

There’s little I can about making my third studio album, but it didn’t suffer any for that. The friction between me, the band and the record company was expertly committed to tape and climbed to the top of the charts. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

Pru Yoshida had ‘Only God can judge me’ tattooed on her forearm in fancy script. We saw it when she came in to our dressing room to say g’day. Pru was co-host of a music chat show in Los Angeles, but she was more notorious for dating cute guys in bands.

‘I beg to differ,’ I said as soon as she had gone, ‘I judge you tremendously.’

Rose spat out her juice, laughing. ‘Oh, she’s cute,’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘Perfect skin. Did you see her tush? So Brazilian. I would.’

‘I don’t think she’s Brazilian, Rose.’

‘Whatever, she’s hot.’

Everyone in LA was hot, and until Pru walked in the room in the Burbank studios, Rose was most taken by the actor Grayson Matthews, with whom she was locked in a Twitter flirtation. A week earlier we’d played a set as ourselves in a vampire movie, in which Grayson was the lead vampire: nineteen going on nine hundred.

‘I think he’s gay, Rose,’ I’d whispered, over the mini quiches in the catering truck at one corner of the hangar.

‘He’s not.’

‘Serious, he is. He looked at me and there was no flicker of yes or no, nothing. Completely blank.’

‘Oh my god, why should there be anything? I don’t look at someone and decide instantly whether I want to tap them or not.’

‘But Rose, you’re asexual. I’m not saying I’ve got tickets on myself, I’m saying there should have been something going on behind his eyes.’

I piped down, though. It was about time Rose hooked up with someone, even if it was a slightly camp child of the night.

As it happened, the three-minute scene panned out exactly the same as any band

scene in a movie over the past thirty years: mean-looking people in leather and chains at a blue-lit bar; somebody with a mohawk walking past the camera, a circle pit of punks punching on in front of us. It took about four hours to set up, thanks to the complicated rig of lights that were needed to bathe Grayson in an ethereal glow amid the extras.

‘He’s so flawless he’s, like, triple-filtered,’ Rose reckoned. ‘I looked at him close up; he doesn’t even need those lights.’

Rose and I double- or triple-filtered all our selfies through Instagram and then a couple of apps. And we always used a decent camera, not just our phones. The best camera for selfies is a Canon G12, because it has a flip-out viewfinder. They’re expensive but totally worth it, and won’t distort at arm’s length.

We tried to monitor our selfie count, but realistically I didn’t take any more photos of myself than any other girl my age; they were just retweeted more. Plus, we could guarantee a minimum of twenty fawning fan responses on Twitter per selfie, as opposed to anywhere between two and ten for a comment alone. So, that was our rationale.

A runner knocked at the dressing-room door to take us to the set of the music chat show. We were seated opposite Pru, who was getting a last-minute powdering. As soon as the lights were turned on I could feel myself starting to gleam; it was like sitting under a million suns. Translucent rice powder was the trick of the trade because it didn’t build up layers of colour on your skin.

I wore: silver vest dress with pink bra, neon blue slingbacks, silver razor-blade on a chain, aviator mirror shades, pink gel nails.

Rose wore: fitted yellow sundress with bows on the shoulders, thin string of pearls, strappy leather sandals, sparkle blush.

Pru wore: pink metallic-look peasant shirt, tight grey jeans, pink wedges, silver hoop earrings.

I could see the nub of vertebrae at the nape of Pru’s neck under her silky dark hair as she and Rose made small talk about which celebrities they’d seen in Pablo’s Bar & Grill on Vermont Avenue. I amused myself by slicing Pru down to size in my head. Like, she wouldn’t say ‘thank you’ to the runner bringing her coffee; she’d sing-song ‘ninkquew . . .’

The news anchor cut to us and Pru engaged her smile. She was like the Dannii Minogue of LA. ‘Rose and Nina from The Dolls, charming to have you with us here today. Can you tell us a bit about your new album, It’s Not All—’ she checked the notes on her lap ‘—Ponies and Unicorns. Why did you decide to call it that?’

Next she’d be asking how we met.

Rose answered politely as I nodded and smiled. Nod, smile. Nod, smile. It took all my willpower in these situations not to examine my nails, so instead I focused on Rose and Pru, imagining them lighting up like a pinball machine as the conversation ricocheted back and forth. They looked like hair twins. Rose fielded a question on whether we had pet kangaroos and I tried to what I’d read about Pru in the LA Review that weekend. Was she was trying for a baby, or was she a home-wrecker?

‘How do you keep sane on tour?’ Pru was saying. ‘I mean, you’re cousins. You must drive each other cray-cray, right?’

‘We have playdates,’ Rose lied. ‘We hang out, play records, wrestle, talk about boys . . .’ That was cute.

When Pru wound things up and we were back in the green room, I wasn’t surprised she was all over Rose like a rash—I’d given her nothing and people always mistook me for being stuck-up anyway. As I checked out the coffee corner—only filter coffee, surprise—I saw the two of them pull out their phones and exchange numbers.

I was curious about how sad I suddenly felt. Rose and I were like yin and yang, I knew that. She needed me to temper her enthusiasm, which could get unrealistic, but I wished sometimes that I could be bothered to do the sort of things that Rose did to make people warm to her. Times like this, Rose told me she was carrying me.

•

We had a month of US promo before the tour started. While we were in LA, Elementary had us on an endless treill of radio-station phoners, feeding us only Starbucks muffins and coffee.

I wished we could hand journalists a list of meaningful questions. It would save them the five minutes of Wiki research they did, or from sticking a question mark at the end of each paragraph of our album bio. See Example A.

Example A

Album bio: The Dolls are the first to it the recording of It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns was an unsettling time.

Journo: Did you find the recording of It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns unsettling in any way?

The first wave of shysters were trundled in and presented to us, all alike with their record bags, the recorders they always had to fiddle with and the notepads held protectively out of reach on their laps. Lazier journalists had ten minutes on the phone. This was how ten-minute interviews panned out.

– Journalist sympathises that we must be doing a lot of press.

– We report that it’s quite exhausting, but that we’re so excited to be here.

– Journalist acknowledges we must get sick of answering the same questions all the time.

– We laugh.

– Journalist starts with something safe, like our experience of working with John Villiers.

– Rose cuts in before I can answer and responds with something equally safe.

– Journalist wonders what we think of other journalists comparing us to .

– We respond that this is a new one to us but we grew up listening to ’s music and certainly respect them as an artist.

– Journalist hypothesises we must be tired of people bringing up the Alannah Dall connection.

– We protest that no, Alannah has been and remains a huge influence on our work and we have learned so much from her.

– Operator cuts in on the line to tell us we have one minute remaining.

– Journalist asks something really personal that might potentially make us hang up. Possibly: a) how do we respond to criticism that we are using shock tactics to sell our record, b) is it true that our former manager is suing us for unfair dismissal, or, c) are we likely to play the Woop Woop Ute Muster again.

– One of us laughs benevolently and replies: ‘What a good question; we’ll have

to come back to that one, [insert name here].’ Call ends.

These journos were smiling assassins. Some bitches would make out we were the worst thing to happen to women since Tony Abbott, while the men would go home and bash out meaningless clichés like ‘and therein lies the rub’ on their grimy laptops, just so they could hear themselves say it. They’d describe us as bruised, ruined, fallen, wasted and damaged, or they’d review our show like it was a hate fuck. For the rest of my adult life, every time I’d see someone with a laptop in a Starbucks I’d have to fight the urge to dump my caramel latte on their keyboard.

‘What do you say to those who accuse you of being a bad role model?’ the journalist on the line said, cutting through my reverie. She gave a little laugh as though we were in on it together.

I’m just a young girl myself, was the answer Mickiewicz had programmed into us, which sounded obscene coming from his mouth. I’m still learning about life and I’m always striving to be the best person I can be.

I was especially careful with phoners, because if my timing misfired with the other person it got super awkward and then I said things I regretted.

Don’t fill the gap.

Wait two seconds, to make sure they’re done.

Say this sentence and nothing more.

Nothing more.

Don’t say, ‘This is off the record’ when you could say nothing at all.

‘I aim to please,’ I said to the journalist.

My last call, after a five-second break, was a hook-up with . As we did our dance, I scoured YouTube on my laptop for evidence of Hank Black being a bastard. The interviewer asked his questions precisely, as though he were carrying out a series of checks. Europeans were more predictable, thanks to the language barrier. I preferred them.

I found a clip and clicked on it.

The German wrapped up by politely telling me he was looking forward to our Frankfurt show.

‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Be sure to come backstage and say hello.’ We didn’t even have a European tour booked yet, but if Boris the bratwurst ever turned up backstage I’d have my security chuck him out quick-smart anyway.

I hung up and pumped the volume on my laptop, frowning into the screen. ‘You

are blacker than black,’ Hank was laughing riotously, pointing his finger at his co-host.

‘No, you are blacker than black,’ the idiot chided back.

I felt an urge to call Hank, but I quickly squashed it. It was just that I was in limbo; missing something without even knowing what. Maybe I was missing home even though I’d been glad to leave. It was that awful feeling of powerlessness, of knowing that some other place was happening without me, that the world there continued to turn, and every day that ed, I became more irrelevant to it.

Could everything just . . . freeze? We’d be back.

•

By morning we fielded questions about whether we liked The Veronicas and whether our aggressive sound was due to the harsh Australian Outback, and in the afternoons we rehearsed with our new band. We thought we’d have to run them through it all, but they came fully prepared and played more smoothly than our band in Australia ever did. They were embarrassing, though, and old. The guitarist couldn’t hit a chord without acting like he’d just spoofed in his pants, the drummer looked like a bloated Billy Idol, and the bass player thought he was backing Alannah Dall in 1985. Jenner said we were not to call them session musicians . . . but we weren’t to bother mentioning them in interviews, either. I made him promise he’d get Elementary to ditch the guitarist and come up with someone not called Spike.

Jenner was right about one thing: the American press liked us much better than the Australian press. They were less afraid of a melody and more partial to girls with guitars, particularly if they got to compare us to their classic girl bands: The Runaways, The Go-Go’s, The Bangles. Radio was its own beast. Being picked up by college radio stations was like watching a presidential race, as state by state they added us to their rotation.

Scrolling through Twitter during interviews always hypnotised me into a sense of calm. Twitter was like a full-time job in itself. We were supposed to tease fans but not fully engage. When they were good, we rewarded them with new photos of ourselves. In return, they were at pains to be bright and happy and delightful in our presence.

I’m in love with your smile, you’re so flawlessly beautiful

I have the prettiest best friend

What would happen if you followed me back?

How do I be as skinny as you?

Bounteous blessings to you, dear, dear girl

They were no different from the men on Twitter who wanted to cut off our heads and rape the bloody aperture; they just wanted a bit of attention. Even though I understood most of them to be living with their parents in Buttsville and working

at Subway, their Twitter bio would read like:

The Real Brianna

Recording Artist/Actress/Dancer/#DreamChaser

It’s all about living the dream!

For Bookings: [email protected]

Vimeo.com/TheRealBrianna

Some had my photo up, or Rose’s, instead of their own and, like Rose, had borrowed the Dall surname. The bolshier ones opened fake Twitter s in our names if we blocked them for being obscene. That was on top of the slash fiction that was starting to appear on forums. Rose would read it out on her phone, reams of it, creepy stuff about the two of us getting it on.

‘W-w-what do you mean?’ Rose said tensely.

‘I’ve always felt this way about you,’ Nina retorted sharply.

She looked up shyly through her lashes and took in the vision of her cousin, her

own flesh and blood, standing there on the tour bus in her neglishey. She shivered.

I knew that our fans thought our life was one big pyjama party and they would probably leave us bleeding in a gutter for a shot at taking our place, but they didn’t understand that we remained the same people we had always been. Who had I taken on this magical journey? Me.

There were times I wished I could restore myself to my factory settings, back to before any of the rot set in. You were supposed to love yourself before other people could love you, the women’s magazines always said, but they never explained how. They never came up with one of their crazy personality quizzes to ascertain whether you were a) so fucked you were likely to wind up in prison, b) suffering from a personality disorder, or c) dead inside. Those were never the options. Magazines were not for the likes of me. Or our fans.

•

Rose came to meet me in a tattoo studio on Melrose. I was getting Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-head god, on my inner arm—but with a woman’s body. The job of Anubis was to weigh the hearts of the deceased and decide whether they were innocent or guilty.

‘That’s rad,’ said Rose. She’d gone whiter still with her teeth. She sat down in a spare chair and sucked on the straw of her iced coffee. I was concerned that the tattooist might be annoyed, but he just ignored her.

‘Nice teeth,’ I said. ‘They’re very you.’

‘You should get yours fixed properly,’ she said from under her wide-brimmed hat and shades. Rose was on a mission to keep her skin porcelain, even when indoors. There was a definite trend for porcelain in LA, even though people thought of it as a tanned place. All the burlesque clubs had seen to that. ‘It’ll be too hard once we’re on tour. You can get proper veneers put on. And go a few shades lighter. Doctor Carson does the $ista $ista girls and all of Bro-Town; Pru recommended him.’

I rolled my used gum uneasily between my finger and thumb. ‘What’s Pru got to do with anything?’

‘We’ve stayed in touch,’ she said in a voice that was far too casual. ‘She’s a cool chick, don’t you think?’

It dawned on me: the past few days that I’d assumed Rose was holed up in a hotel room coming up with new lyrical clichés, that wasn’t what she’d been doing at all.

‘Wait, is Pru gay?’

‘She’s not gay, she’s bisexual. Like me.’

I searched her eyes.

‘You’re not bisexual. Since when?’

‘Since forever,’ she huffed.

I reviewed it. I’d thought Rose wrote ‘Girl Crush’ so that blokes could imagine her pashing on with someone equally hot . . . I hadn’t realised she was stating her intent to the universe again.

‘ the night I had with Carly at Dingo’s?’ she reminded me. I could tell she was enjoying the tattooist’s grim determination not to look at her.

‘Yeah, but, Rose, that was just the pills,’ I protested. She shook her head in irritation. It was a familiar gesture. It meant: What would you know?

It was true, I’d never had any Sapphic experiences—unless you counted my seven-year-old self showing Kylie-from-down-the-street some things Tony had showed me. That went on for a while, until Kylie’s mother stopped her playing with me and cemented another layer of shame over my psyche.

Apart from that there was the time I asked the only known gay girl at school if I could talk to her because I was confused about my feelings. I wasn’t confused; I was just curious. Curious about what she’d say, not bi-curious. Maybe I just wanted some attention. ‘I could take you to a bar where gay girls drink if you like,’ she’d said, very cautiously. We never did talk again.

Rose stayed cool and took an Instagram selfie in front of the wall of flash art, as

though she were the one here getting something. It made a change from posting pictures of her lunch. The day before, she’d posted one of a croissant to prove she ate carbs, but seconds later she picked out the ham in the middle and dumped the rest. Most of Rose’s Instagram pics were of her face bleached out into a pair of eyes with a fork floating in front of them. It wasn’t exactly like she was being paid to do it, but if she casually tagged the name of the restaurant she wouldn’t end up paying for the meal either.

‘Pru really likes you,’ she said finally. ‘I think you’ll like her too, okay? Just don’t worry about it.’

For the next few days I followed her advice and didn’t worry about it, but when Rose and Pru started ‘are they/aren’t they’ dating in public, I called Clay at Elementary and asked him what he thought, being gay himself.

‘She’s not a “big fat lesbian” lesbian, so it’s okay,’ he assured me. ‘Rose can swing both ways, but just not with someone, like, gay gay.’

TOP 5 CLASSIC CLAY PUTDOWNS

1. ‘What—this is your George-Harrison-meets-the-Maharishi period? Okaaaaay.’

2. ‘Babes, I love your hair today, the regrowth looks flawless.’

3. ‘We can’t. We can’t go out. Even Gaga wouldn’t accept you as one of her

children in that dress.’

4. ‘We’ll put you in the studio with Nancy Mancillo. She’s like you in fifty years, with songwriting chops.’

5. ‘Whoa, slow down. You’re not quite at the album-of-Edith-Piaf-covers stage of your career, okay? There’s a lot of development that needs to be done, starting with losing twenty pounds.’

‘Or,’ he said, after more thought, ‘they could be gay gay, but in a Jenny Shimizu way. That’s hot.’

Even though they were being coy about their relationship, Rose had already made a joke on radio saying that lesbians made me nervous, which implied I was homophobic. It was true, they did, but only in the way that straight men made me nervous—because I might wind up drunk and getting into an awkward situation that would require me to say ‘no’. Which, as ‘Can’t Say No’ hinted at, was hard. When I was younger, in Newtown, I’d even write ‘NO’ on my hand in biro so that I’d see it at the end of the evening but, interestingly, even if I did say ‘NO’, I found that I could only say ‘NO’ once. If someone was savvy enough to ask twice, their perseverance paid off.

•

‘It’s important to me that the two main people in my life get on,’ Rose said, and so I agreed to meet her and Pru at Al Fresco that evening. Upon arrival I saw they were both in jeans and singlets. I ordered double whiskies as a bit of a pawn-to-king-four to Pru.

‘That’s so you,’ smiled Pru benevolently, pulling an electronic cigarette out of her purse. She got a slow look.

‘So, Pru was saying that she thinks she can introduce us to a bunch of people from the network while we’re on tour . . .’

‘Pru’s coming on tour?’

‘No, sweetie,’ Pru said, ‘but I can line up the meetings. If you want. If you don’t want, that’s all good too.’

There was already speculation that the ‘Prose’ affair, as it had been dubbed on gossip blogs, was a stunt aimed to boost the sales of our next single. We’d always referenced Courtney Love as an influence, yet now she’d come out on Twitter calling Rose: ‘Not even a lipstick lesbian. A creepy Olsen coned twin’ and The Dolls: ‘Cherry Cola with too many suspicious bubbles.’

Pru ed me in a double whisky. I hoped she didn’t fancy me. She picked the lemon out of her salad, shook some salt on her fist and did the thing like a tequila shot. I looked at Rose as her girlfriend jammed the lemon in her wide mouth. I wasn’t sure if she was taking the piss or was a wide-eyed ingénue in the art of drinking. In between wiping her mouth she told us about the sort of people with whom we definitely needed to do lunch.

‘It must suck being a girl in a band,’ Pru wondered out loud. ‘You wouldn’t be able to sleep with any groupies. Well . . . you wouldn’t want to.’

‘No way,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s actually better. Guys in bands only get groupies, so they can’t even really choose. Girls get to sleep with their crew, their bands, their own band . . . they’re surrounded by cock.’

‘Actually, Nina,’ said Rose, changing the subject abruptly, ‘Pru’s come up with a great song. You should hear it.’

A bus belched by and I craned to look at the sort of people who were riding it, to try to group them into some sort of workable stereotypes based on the movies I’d seen. I hadn’t dared take anything but a cab in LA yet because I hadn’t figured out what I was up against.

‘Nina,’ said Rose.

‘It’s nowhere near as legendary as your songs,’ Pru said.

‘Doll,’ said Rose to me, ‘how many times have I taken one for the team and stopped recording my parts so that you could take a run at our producer? I think you’ll find that “Cheap” actually has fewer harmonies on the last chorus than we’d initially agreed.’

‘Oh please, don’t go through all that again.’

‘I’m just saying.’ She turned to Pru. ‘Nina has lady-wood for our producer, even

though he’s about a hundred and four. It requires major sacrifices on my part.’

‘Wow, how old is he actually?’ Pru asked with interest.

‘Like, forty-something, probably.’

‘That’s hot.’

I pulled out my phone. ‘That’s him, actually.’

‘Oh, cute. He looks like someone’s dad.’

‘He is someone’s dad.’

She laughed in appreciation, too loudly, and picked up a wine bottle. Her cheeks were flushed from the grog. ‘Have you tried this on him?’ she said, and slid the neck of the bottle into her mouth. I watched enthralled as she started to deepthroat it, right there at our table on the footpath.

‘Oh my god,’ said Rose, looking around.

Pru pulled out the bottle and said through a mouth thick with spit, ‘Trust me. It works. I know.’

I leaned back as a waiter pointedly started to clear the table. I felt that Pru and I were finally starting to bond. Rose must have been a bit agitated, though, because she pulled out her phone and battered out a message like it was in Morse code. A-A-A-A-R-G-H probably. From long-held experience I knew it wasn’t a message she was actually going to send to anyone.

‘Hey, you know what?’ asked Pru, punching my shoulder, hard. ‘You’re not as bad as I thought.’

•

‘Her confidence was really hot at first,’ Rose told me when we got in. She moved through the suite, switching the lamps on. ‘I loved that she was such a go-getter, but now I feel like everything she does is actually just a play for attention.’

‘Oh?’ I was tempted to say brightly. ‘I like her.’ But instead I brushed my teeth. I never knew what to say to Rose when she confided in me about relationships. In this case I just let her keep talking.

‘Everything she does is angled at a reaction and she doesn’t seem to care what that reaction is, so long as she gets one,’ my cousin considered, waving the remote control. ‘You can be angry at her, mad at her, in love with her . . . it’s all the same. But if she doesn’t get some kind of stroking she’s like a drowning woman. It’s horrible to watch.’

‘I think you’ve mistaken confidence for desperation,’ I suggested after I’d spat out the toothpaste and walked into my bedroom.

Rose kicked off her heels and ed me in the bed. She’d put Sons of Anarchy on low. I was looking forward to getting stuck in, but she turned her face to me, to show me a tear.

‘She’s like a vortex of need,’ I offered.

‘She’s histrionic,’ Rose said. ‘I’m not sure how to get out of it now.’

‘You wrote yourself into it with “Girl Crush”; write yourself out of it. Or write a song about a guy with a massive cock; that ought to give her the message.’

‘It’s like, everything we write about becomes fact,’ she marvelled. ‘We think we’re writing about things that have already happened, but it’s the other way around. Look at “Chica Rock’n’Roll”—that’s totally about LA and you wrote it in Parramatta.’

‘I’ll write a song called “Two Well-Adjusted Young Men”,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll write “And Now We’re Patching Through to Richard Wilkins on the Red Carpet”. I’ll write “The Day I ed My Driving Test”.’

Rose went back to her perusal of Pru’s Twitter . Life dating girls seemed so much more complicated than dating men. My fail-safe line, even when uttered in boredom, was ‘Want to come back to mine and drink the mini-bar?’ That was

literally all I needed.

Whenever I thought about John Villiers I felt like I’d been knifed in the heart. So, I didn’t think about him. I didn’t think about anything that was going to hurt that badly. But I couldn’t trust anyone else and nobody else got me the way he did. Men in America just didn’t know how to banter . . . and I always ran the risk of them bragging about raiding that mini-bar.

•

16

THE AMERICAN TOUR

I understood most of our road crew to be quite damaged souls. Not that we’d ever talk about it, but I recognised in these grotty underdogs something in me. And we’d drink to that, of course. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

‘I give loyalty and I expect complete loyalty in return,’ Rose said into her phone, jangling her keys in her other hand. I could tell she was talking to Pru. If she were talking to Grayson, her voice would be higher. I gestured towards the sliding doors of the airport terminal and she waved me off in irritation.

She was starting to sound more and more like Pru. It started with the odd ‘I know, right?’ and now infiltrated every vowel. She’d even taken to calling Dee ‘Mom’.

Our publicist, Grace, was ing us for the first leg of the tour and had turned up laden with cupcakes, which we needed to bribe the staff at radio stations. Grace said we wouldn’t be going anywhere without cupcakes, and she power-wheeled a suitcase of them into the terminal to prove it. Unwilling to her and make small talk, I hung around, scuffing my boots on the footpath, waiting for Rose.

‘I know you do. I know. But, doll, I’ve been tweeting about your new show ad

nauseam. I’m trying to help you here.’

Sighing, I laced my hands behind my head and looked out at the horizon, raising myself up on tiptoe to stretch my calves. We should have been amping each other up about our first American tour, not worrying about the fact that Rose had thirty thousand more followers on Twitter than Pru did—something she had added to her mental pros/cons ledger. I could almost feel sorry for Pru. I’d got Rose to sign a beer-coaster affidavit that her girlfriend wouldn’t appear in our next video, though.

‘Okay, sweetie, well, we’ll have to talk about that another time, huh? I’ve got a plane to catch.’ She hung up her phone with a snap. ‘Ready?’

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

‘Why can’t we get roadies who only ever say, “Two, two, two’?’ wondered Rose.

There were ten of us on the double-decker bus, but a clique soon dominated the downstairs lounge: me, Rose, and our roadies Stringer and Perko, who had a complex vocabulary of in-jokes and words of the day.

Roadies always had names like that. Turbo, Scooter, Watts, Benzies—anything referencing engines, speed or electricity. People in production always screamed at each other as well: fucking this, fucking that. It was full on: from the production managers down to the runners, everyone screamed abuse at someone lower down.

‘Tell her you’ve got her back,’ Perko advised Stringer. ‘“I got your back.” Girls melt when you say that.’

Stringer was texting some girl who looked like she might have been interested in inviting him back to her place after our first show, but then didn’t. She might next time around, though, so he had to keep her sweet.

One might question the wisdom of putting a girl band on a tour bus with two dead-set spunks, but the suits at Elementary were so out of touch with life on the road that they probably hadn’t considered the ‘any port in a storm’ ethos.

Jenner had hoped we’d get to know our American backing band on the first leg of the tour, but instead we stuck with the stinky roadie boys, who had a knack for diffusing any tension between Rose and me by launching into a game of Would You Rather—plus, we didn’t want to say anything stupid in front of the band and have it repeated back to Good Charlotte. So, the band remained in the purgatory of the upstairs lounge, which got too hot during the day and made Rose nauseous.

Grace was still with us, having jammed up the bar fridge with her cupcakes so that we all had to drink warm beer. She spent most of her time at her laptop, sending emails. She was secretly sickened by having to suck up to journalists all the time, so she embedded subliminal messages in her emails. If you took the first letter of each sentence and wrote them down, you’d read a prim reprimand. In an email telling someone she could not promise them an exclusive she’d add: ‘YOUR REPUTATION PRECEDES YOU.’

It meant her emails tended to be long.

‘Why don’t you put some capital letters in the middle of sentences so you can get the message across quicker?’ Rose asked from the sofa, where she was curled up like a cat.

‘Because that would make me look like a lunatic,’ Grace said crossly.

After the second show in Portland, the daiquiri machine Rose bought for the bus got a work-out . . . until we ended up with strawberry spattered across the kitchenette.

As Bill the driver trundled us on into the night, we took turns running up and down the galley without falling over. The last thing I ed was laughing at Brendan pretending to urinate in the sink with the goon bag he’d stuffed down his pants.

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS

Hung-over. Watched an entire season of Shameless on my laptop with the bunk curtains drawn. We stopped for dinner at a service-station Burger King and sat with the band who would play with us for the next couple of dates, Martha’s Cookies. Dev and Leah sang whimsical indie tunes over programmed drums. They were boyfriend and girlfriend, but more like creepy siblings.

Rose wasn’t about to be seen trying to eat a burger in front of the act, so instead she interrogated them on the industry in America. Martha’s Cookies were signed to an indie offshoot of Elementary, which meant they hadn’t met the big cheeses we had.

‘But how do people see us over here?’ Rose persisted when she realised they could shed little light on the statistical trajectory of a supernova punk band. ‘You first heard of us through “Fight Like a Girl”, right?’

Leah was keen to help. ‘Yeah,’ she lit up. ‘That was, like, all over the radio, and your video was all over VTV; like, seriously all over it.’

She looked at Dev for confirmation. ‘They even had a show where girls had to challenge guys who wanted to hook up with them, like challenge them to netball or cheerleading or whatever, to see if they could keep up. That had the music to “Fight Like a Girl”.’

‘Weird.’

‘I know, right? You’ve been super-hot basically.’

‘Like Gotye hot?’ Rose asked quickly.

‘Mmm . . . yeah,’ Leah said, looking at Dev.

‘Gotye’s, like, off the scale,’ Dev clarified. ‘People just really want to check you guys out, that’s why we’re so excited to be here.’

I picked cheese off my wrapper. ‘So, do people actually like us, though?’ I said, eyeballing Leah.

She looked at me, slightly panicked. ‘Sure. I think so.’

‘People are very curious,’ cautioned Dev. ‘They want to know if you’ll deliver live and why Elementary have signed you without you having played the States yet.’

I pretended to consider this. ‘Hm,’ I said. ‘I suppose having toured Australia with bands like The Dummies and Bitumen isn’t proof enough, not to mention going to number nine in the ARIA album charts.’

Martha’s Cookies chewed timidly.

‘They’re, like, the big charts in Australia,’ I clarified. ‘Exactly like your Billboard charts.’

Our American road manager, Ken, was eavesdropping from the next table. ‘Girls, relax,’ he said. ‘Ticket sales have been beyond our expectations. Everybody thinks you rock.’

‘Anyway,’ said Rose, folding her napkin and smoothing it flat. ‘We’d better hit the road. You guys should drop into our bus some time and say hi.’

They were all right, Martha’s Cookies—Rose and I agreed on that when we boarded our bus with the remnants of our fries. It made me feel bad later when we had to get Jenner to insist to Elementary that we have a decent act next time.

‘Like, derrrr,’ Rose said in a Californian accent, pulling her bed socks on under her pyjama bottoms. ‘Like, we’re so excited to be here.’

SEVENTY-TWO HOURS

Within three days of being on tour, Rose had penned a ballad about being away from home too long that she made me work out on an acoustic.

I changed her opening line from:

This hotel is nothing

Nothing like being home with you

to:

Chocolate on my pillow

Ain’t nothing like candy from you

I had to do this with Rose’s songs all the time—behind-the-scenes tweaking that no one would ever know about. That was why she was considered the style icon and I was not—in people’s minds, one Doll needed to balance the other. Yin and yang.

On the sly, I’d been working on some songs that I just couldn’t see fitting in the Dolls catalogue. I was fed up of relay singing, ing the baton to Rose on some of the best lines I’d written.

Lately I’d been getting into tragic, blowzy barflies. I’d been listening to the country-tinged meltdowns of Neko Case and Lucinda Williams, or bluesy stuff like Cat Power: reverberating like a freshly twanged nerve. Lust albums. Breakup albums. Prescription-med albums. They released so many albums they could devote a whole battalion of songs to one mood, instead of trying to tick every box, the way we did with It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns. That was where we went wrong.

More and more frequently I’d been considering ditching the teen image of The Dolls and breaking out on my own, g a solo deal with Mickiewicz and taking on John Villiers as musical director. I was sure Rose’s entourage of Pru and Clay were goading her to do the same, because lately she’d been veering from Stevie Nicks into Adele and Amy Winehouse, piling up her hair and singing like she was about to sneeze dramatically. Someone was in her ear, I knew it.

By night we played venues a size down from those we’d been accustomed to in Australia, but we were still trying to put on an arena-style show. The lighting rig was cool: we had a few lasers to confuse everybody during the chorus of ‘Fa-fa-

fa-fight like a girl’. Even so, Rose had thrown a wobbly with Shirley, our lampy, telling her the band shouldn’t have any spotlights on them at any point.

‘That’s true, hey,’ Stringer piped up from the sofa, where he was checking his balls through his shorts. ‘You should start fining them for mistakes like Prince does.’

‘Rose has always done that,’ I interjected.

‘They’re going to make heaps of mistakes in the dark, though,’ Perko pointed out.

‘Hey, I’m going to tell your guitarist to get an Ego-Rizer,’ said Stringer.

‘What’s an Ego-Rizer?’ I asked, instinctively feeling protective of Ryan. I liked our guitarist, who’d taken time out from his own alt-country band to earn some real money with us. He was one of those sensitive musicians who’d have wound up being sectioned if he couldn’t play like an idiot savant. Although, if he had to continue hiring himself out to Elementary bands to make a living, that could yet happen.

‘It’s a box you stand on at the front of the stage, as if you’re standing on the fold-back wedge. Makes you taller.’

‘Knob box more like,’ Rose said.

‘He needs to do the lead guitarist around you more, though,’ said Perko. ‘He’s becoming emasculated around you, hey?’ He hit a high note and bent an imaginary string.

I don’t want to give the impression that Perko and Stringer just lounged on the sofa all the time and made wisecracks. Once it was time to load or unload, these mules of the road were so focused that you could undress in front of them and they wouldn’t notice.

NINETY-SIX HOURS

Before the show, I wandered over to Rose’s bunk and stuck my head through the purple curtains. She was sitting cross-legged in front of a mirror, tapping a pattern into her cheeks and collarbones.

‘Even though I feel I do not deserve this success, I deeply and completely accept myself,’ she murmured.

‘Did Pru teach you that?’

‘Shh. Or I’ll draw the curtains.’

I waited for Rose to finish so that we could have our favourite conversation about how we’d customise our tour bus, Dolly Parton-style, once we had tons of

money. Earlier I’d heard Rose talking to Pru. Her voice was flat. ‘I’d better let you go,’ she said, after about twenty minutes of noncommittal noises. Whenever someone said, ‘I’d better let you go,’ they meant, ‘Let me go.’

We may have been sisters in whisky once, but I’d already lost sympathy for Pru, mainly through reading interviews in which she said things like: ‘I’m teaching my girlfriend not to say “like” all the time.’ And: ‘Her cousin’s just incredibly, incredibly talented. I think Rose feels closer to her now than they’ve ever been.’ And: ‘Nina’s a really great girl when you get to know her.’

I thought Rose should get together with Stringer. Both Stringer and Perko had the cute, dishevelled thing going on and would disappear into the ether after the tour with their pay in their back pockets. She never would, though; she was too much of a snob.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY HOURS

Trying to record on a bus is a bad idea, as previously reported by every band ever.

Whenever she had the headphones on, Rose protested, ‘Oh don’t, John Villiers, don’t!’ as though he were saying stuff into her ears, which, insanely, made me jealous. Everyone laughed, which implied she’d told them things about our nonrelationship, in which I no longer had the upper hand.

Rose was just taking cheap swipes at me because we couldn’t agree over the merchandise. We’d persuaded Mickiewicz to let us come up with the cursory designs, but what had started out as a team effort had descended into

psychological warfare. I wanted our logo in stripper lights; she wanted Alannah Hill-style flowers—roses, obviously.

Later, Rose screamed at Bill for driving through a town with his foot on the brake when she was trying not to vomit. Ryan was recording my vocals at the time and Perko played back the seven-second recording of her spitting the dummy, again and again. In the end she had to laugh, because you can’t get away with a strop on a tour bus—there’s nowhere to go. Every time Perko leaned over him, Ryan blinked and smiled, but it was a pained smile.

After the show Brendan argued with the promoter for an hour and we all had to wait on the bus for him. The promoter wanted to slap us with a fine for all the spit I’d left on stage. It wasn’t for effect; it was to clear the phlegm. Tour buses were like germ incubators.

ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR HOURS

TOP 5 WAYS I HAVE WHILED AWAY BUS JOURNEYS

1. Clenching my butt cheeks in reps of fifty.

2. Exercising my pelvic floor.

3. Thinking about John Villiers over the throb of the engine (see point two).

4. Tweeting pictures of Rose asleep.

5. Gaffer-taping Perko’s stuff to the ceiling of the bus.

TOP 5 WAYS ROSE HAS WHILED AWAY BUS JOURNEYS

1. Meditating.

2. Micro-managing our videographer.

3. Shelling pistachio nuts and complaining about the damage to her Shellac manicure.

4. Impersonating Rihanna.

5. IM-ing Grayson.

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-EIGHT HOURS

I was rarely the indiscreet one on Twitter. This time, though, I put my foot in it

because I was bored, because my life had boiled down to ‘hurry up and wait’ and because my phone was infinitely more intriguing than anything going on outside the bus window.

Grayson, Rose’s vampire-actor love interest, had flown out to see us in Chicago, and the Instagram photo I posted of him and Rose cuddled up on the dressingroom sofa set tongues wagging. Because yes, our publicist was denying that romance, but yes, it was totally true.

Now Pru was tweeting things like: I guess people aren’t as courageous as they like to think. #Outandproud

And: Devastated right now. Oh well.

And Rose was tweeting things like: Wow. Not used to my personal life being public. I guess sometimes in life you have to take the higher ground. Smile.

Now the gossip blogs were circulating a photo of Pru taken months before, in which she wore no make-up and frowned at her phone. Poor Pru, was the crux of the captions. She had to find out from us. But I was there when that picture was taken. She was cursing at her phone because she’d just knocked her first soy chai of the day over it and couldn’t get the SIM card out.

Grayson tried to do the right thing by distancing himself from Rose, to allow her and Pru a respectable time to be split up, and to make sure that she didn’t get hate tweets from the children-of-the-night . . . but he failed to understand that Rose didn’t want to be protected. She wanted validation, a new person to hitch her identity to. Welcome to my life, Grayson.

ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO HOURS

Stringer boarded the bus overly excited after a bathroom stop, having picked up Travel Connect 4 from the servo. We played it till we couldn’t stand it anymore, then we used it as a sock dryer.

Our band for the next few dates, Placebo Effect, griped for an hour in the Japanese restaurant about whether or not their guitarist played the right lead break in a terrible song called ‘Quench’ the night before.

‘Dude,’ one of them said, slamming down his sake so that it spilled over the paper tablecloth. ‘You played doof . . . dff.dff . . . dowdowdow . . . dow. You should have played dow-dow-dowwww-dub-da-da-da-dow.’

Our word of the day was now quench. As in: ‘Get your quench out of my face, man’ and, ‘Gross, there’s quench all over my microphone.’

TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN HOURS

When you’re on tour, yesterday seems like a lifetime ago, so trying to think back to a specific city feels like you have total amnesia. On Facebook we had hangers-on acting like they were in The Dolls’ inner sanctum when they’d actually just met us a few nights before at a meet-and-greet. Some would trade in-jokes from the evening, or refer misty-eyed to the half-hour in question as though talking about time they’d spent serving in the trenches.

The internet was a world of misery. We’d been emailed mp3s by Clay, who was hitting up co-songwriters for demos for our sophomore album, as if they hadn’t ruined the last one enough. I opened the files gingerly, as though they might detonate. It was always a guitar tone as characterless as the scenery around us, workmanlike drumming to a click track and some session singer doing the lead line.

‘Don’t freak out . . .’ Clay always started his emails. ‘We can change whatever you want.’ But we were starting to suspect that this was an insincere promise.

Sadie messaged me to say that John Villiers was single again and had been seen around town looking lonely. Or maybe he’d just spilled his soy chai. But I was stuck over here, with life, once again, carrying on without me in another hemisphere.

TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY HOURS

Rose bleached my hair and managed to get every bit by making me crouch under the light outside the toilet. Perko gave us both manicures.

TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FOUR HOURS

Cabin fever. The bus had become our tomb, and no amount of airing could erase the biting aroma of foot cheese or blow away the strange hairs that clung to the sink. Toothpaste, it was everywhere.

Demoing tracks with Rose into GarageBand on my laptop only made us want to kill each other more. I’d be making some valid point and she’d come back with: ‘It is what it is.’ It was meant to be spiritual, but it basically meant, ‘I have no idea, don’t question me.’

I got sick of Rose constantly pulling her bitch-face whenever I spoke, so I hit the reverse-camera icon and held up my new iPad. ‘See that?’ I said. ‘That’s what your face looks like right now.’

We were physically close, yet so distant. I could tell that Rose was lonely, because she’d been scrolling through banks of old Facebook photographs of herself and posting them on Twitter, tagging herself as though she were her own imaginary friend. I was drinking rider dregs in my bunk most days, festering in my own juices.

TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-EIGHT HOURS

Our old Bain Maries drummer could barely fit behind her kit any more. That was the most positive spin I could come up with when I read Erica Riley’s tell-all story in All About You. She was pictured sitting on the floor with her kick drum, mouth downturned. Her bra strap hung down, Bain Maries-style.

The allegations:

1) We cut her out of the band just as we found success.

2) She co-wrote half the songs on the album.

3) We stole the boxing idea for ‘Fight Like a Girl’ from a dance she choreographed to Britney’s ‘. . . Baby One More Time’ in Year Three.

In a second picture she held up the words to ‘Fight Like a Girl’, which she had written out on a notepad as evidence. We tried to guess what Erica was doing now. The article said she was still chasing her dream, but her expression suggested the job at Hooters hadn’t worked out, just as I predicted.

Stringer and Perko got some good mileage out of Erica’s revelation that I used to get about calling myself Leather Dall while Rose was Baby Dall, but that phase had only lasted about a week.

Inspired by Erica’s betrayal, Rose wrote a new song, ‘Snakes and Ladders’, about social climbers and those snakes in the grass plotting your downfall. We held up a copy of the local newspaper and took a photo of the lyrics next to the date on the paper. Rose tweeted it.

Whenever Rose wrote a song, I felt obliged to write a better song. It was this healthy sense of competition that had got us where we were. Intrigued by all the flapping about Rose on Twitter from Grayson’s vampire rookies, I lay down in my bunk with a bottle of Scotch from the rider and a hotel notepad. I worked my tongue in and out of the bottle lid as I wrote what we now know as ‘Hounded’. I flipped between a clean page and the page containing my notes of satisfying pronunciations. For example, ‘take’ sounds good sung, but ‘take it all’ is even better as it facilitates a yodel. ‘Part of me’ allows you to drop consonants for an urchin-like Martina Topley-Bird effect.

I started off just making noises that sounded good over the tune in my head: ‘Nyeh, nyeh fool, yeah, part of me, rarr,’ but by the time I ed out it had become: ‘See me, feel me, you want a part of me / You slide your way in and refuse to leave.’

THREE HUNDRED AND TWELVE HOURS

The word of the day was ‘smashing’. As in, ‘Smashing, guvnor.’ ‘That’s fucking smashing, that is.’

In Pittsburgh, I shaved off my hair down one side with Perko’s clippers, and wore it long and dangly down the other side. When I gave the clippers back I pashed Perko in the alcove behind the fridge and then we went and sat down in the lounge like normal.

THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX HOURS

The noise on Twitter had become a deafening roar, but we couldn’t stop looking. Rose kept insisting she was having a nervous breakdown. She was convinced some crazed Grayson fan was going to jump on the bus and pull her hair or something.

My heartburn from drinking spirits had grown so intense my kidneys constantly grizzled and my bunk was drenched in sweat at night. Despite this, I didn’t mind too much. I saw myself as a science experiment, so I was always testing myself

with new stimuli. I couldn’t stomach beer, so I alternated whisky with milk.

As dusk fell, I looked out of the window at the bland fields beyond the freeway. We were four hours from New York, where we’d break for a few nights, and eighteen hours from major meltdown. Often, as I went through life, I felt a strange sense of gravitas, the feeling that the images imprinting on my retinas right now would turn out to have great significance later.

But weirdly, there was none of that.

17

INTERVENTION

I felt that people ought to make allowances for me because I was special. And for as long as I was wearing those wretched thigh-high boots, people seemed to agree. But they were just enabling my behaviour—and I was becoming a monster. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

You should always wear a fine chain around your neck so that people’s eyes are drawn to your collarbones and they start to imagine you naked. You need to have a nice neck, though, or it defeats the purpose.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror in Parramatta, looking up through my lashes with my lips parted, making the light catch on my cheekbones. Then with my head tilted up, down through my lashes. No matter where in the world my fortune took me, somehow I always wound up back here.

In Marie Claire, Pru referred to the fall-out after the New York hotel fire as an ‘intervention’, but in that case it was the worst intervention ever, because I had simply been Skyped by Clay and Diana in my fresh new hotel room with its clean towels and neatly made bed that always felt like a mother’s love. They’d asked very nicely if I’d go home to Parramatta to ‘rest’ and I’d agreed. Then we’d take on the next leg of the tour, a little later than scheduled, nice and refreshed. And I agreed. Also, what kind of intervention left the drinks cabinet unlocked?

About that fire. I maintain that things weren’t nearly as bad as were made out and it had nothing to do with candles. For one, I never did the whole atmospheric candles thing, so unless a cigarette butt managed to ignite an entire hotel room, which I sincerely doubt, there must have been faulty wiring. Anyway, the hotel was insured and nobody was hurt, and all my clothes survived to smell of bonfires, which I found comforting. It wasn’t exactly Lisa Left Eye from TLC setting fire to her boyfriend’s trainers and burning down his mansion. It wasn’t Edie Sedgwick immolating her room at the Chelsea Hotel as she put on her eyelashes by candlelight. As I told the Telegraph, I was more than likely spiked anyway, because when I popped down to the hotel bar that night I was stone-cold sober.

That month’s prize for worst headline? ‘Herstory repeating itself’, in which comparisons were drawn between my modest Brooklyn blaze and that of Aunty Alannah, who completely gutted a Sydney studio back in 1989.

People really crawled out of the woodwork at times like these. My old buddy Hank, midway through his ‘Live the Dream or Die’ tour, responded to Diana Etie’s official statement about an electrical incident with the musing: ‘No, seriously though, it’s absolutely fair enough. It could happen to anybody. I’ve ed out with “electrical incidents” lit plenty of times.’

I replayed the quip on YouTube over and over, the audience laughter crashing down like a wave each time the clip abruptly started.

That was cool; we all had our embarrassments. Hank, for example, never went under his real name of Niall Mulroney, because he wouldn’t want people to know he was heir to the Mulroney Fish Finger dynasty back in County Cork. Which was just strange, because imagine the repertoire of material he could build around ‘fish finger’.

TOP 5 OFFICIAL CAUSES OF CELEBRITY INCIDENTS

1. Food poisoning

2. Stomach virus

3. Exhaustion

4. Jetlag

5. Reaction to medication

And so I was released into the care of my mother, back where it all began. Parramatta. Where, in some strange time loop, the only thing to do to kill time was conduct photo shoots in the bathroom and smoke out of the window. This time around I practised my celebrity mug shot: head down, eyes up. Troubled.

Mealtimes at Helen’s were always courtesy of Uncle Toby and Uncle Ben, so the kitchen was only good for one thing. Keeping an ear out, I wandered in and dragged a stool over to the cupboards. I peered into the top one and saw old-lady drinks like Stone’s Ginger Wine, so I made myself a whisky mac by adding Scotch from my own supply. It tasted like Christmas . . . and it nearly was Christmas. I would be stationed here for the entire period, convalescing. This meant I would need to keep coming back to this cupboard for both festive and

medicinal purposes.

Alannah had flown down from the Gold Coast to settle in the spare room during my stay—part ally, part oracle—and intermittently I heard her talking to Helen over the TV in the next room.

‘Everyone’s mentally ill at that age,’ I heard my aunt say in a pacifying voice. ‘You grow out of it, usually.’

‘She’s only doing it for attention,’ Helen said as the audience cheers died down again. ‘And yet she’s rejecting me. She’s rejecting everything about me. I didn’t raise a child with an American accent.’

‘Don’t take it too personally,’ Alannah murmured. ‘I had an English accent for a good five years.’

Knocking back my golden gingery elixir, I ed them in the lounge room.

I wore: Monkees T-shirt, daggy jeans, odd socks, both of which I’ve had since I was about twelve. They looked up guiltily.

‘Hello, darling,’ Helen said, sitting back in her battered old armchair. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine.’

They were watching The X Factor, and before too long all three of us were reluctantly compelled by the high-stakes drama the hopefuls went through. It was like gladiators, but the winner had to kill off the other #dreamchasers for a record deal. Alannah and I were secretly hooked on the Country Music Channel. Neither of us would be seen dead watching it in public, but really, who couldn’t love lyrics like ‘that pig-nosed little possum that’ll keep you up all night’? Nobody did a euphemism like a country artist. Rose would probably even like it —it looked like they had far bigger hair budgets for their videos than we did; even the Australian artists, who all came from Tamworth. I looked up Tamworth on Google Maps and saw that it was just left of nowhere, between Sydney and the Gold Coast.

‘Your aunt was just telling me about her salad days on top of the UK charts,’ said Helen. ‘You should listen to some of her tales. Some of the outfits even you and Rose would baulk at. I can’t imagine how much they must have cost.’

When Alannah and Helen were both running full tilt it was like stags clashing antlers. For the most part, though, Alannah was determined not to let Helen needle her. I watched her deflection tactics with some fascination.

‘If I had any royalties they’d go on clothes, Helen,’ she confirmed in answer to the latest dig. ‘As I don’t, I need to cram myself into the salad day outfits and top it up with some couture from Target.’

‘You’re a compulsive eater, Alannah, you always were,’ said Helen, in a pretence at fondness.

‘Helen,’ I warned.

‘And you’re too thin, you,’ said Helen. ‘Look at you.’

‘No, I’m always like this,’ I said in a perfectly normal voice.

‘I’m eating paleo, more protein, and I just find my metabolism has sped up with all the stress.’

‘One answer would have sufficed,’ she said.

She gave a non-specific sigh, left the room and came back with a box of wrapping paper. ‘I thought we could get in early and wrap our Christmas presents,’ she said.

‘I haven’t got any,’ I said dumbly, as she peered at the old lump of a stereo and then wheezed a CD in. ‘We’re getting a bit of rum pum pum pum, are we? A bit of Christmas cheer.’

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘You can help me wrap mine.’

Sitting cross-legged with my old socks slouching off the end of my feet, I accepted a roll of paper and a book. The Magic by Rhonda Byrne. That would be for Rose.

My phone was in my pocket, so I dug it out and selected the camera, moving it around my head to get a dinky shot of Nina Dall amid cute Christmas paper. Expression: perplexed.

‘Let’s have a look,’ said Helen, reaching for her glasses. I handed her the camera and she peered at it, then held it in front of her and pouted. I heard the shutter click.

‘Oh, hang on. Why does my face look like that?’

Alannah leaned over on the creaky sofa and examined the screen.

‘Is there an age limit for selfies?’ frowned Helen. ‘I look like I’m either laying an egg or hatching a plot.’

‘You’re not supposed to hold the phone dead-on or you’ll get arms like a linebacker’s,’ I told her.

‘Like what?’

‘It’s American. Just give it here.’ I put Rose’s book down. ‘You have to jut your arm out above you and frame yourself in the bottom corner so that you can crop your shoulder out afterwards.’

I walked Helen through the paces of elementary selfie-taking. You’d never find a photo of me—professionally taken or otherwise—with my face at anything but forty-five degrees, left side on to the camera. That’s because this angle makes my cheekbone more pronounced and emphasises the arch of the eyebrow. It also necessitates a sideways glance that has been described as ‘come hither’.

Alannah was up on her feet, flushed with magnanimity. ‘Lighting from the side,’ she exclaimed, ‘that’s the secret. It gives you great shadows. In the eighties we’d always slim our bodies by bringing in our arms. You’d lift a hand up to suck a lollypop, perhaps.’ She demonstrated with her finger. ‘Like so.’

‘ when you dragged me along to a shoot with Mental As Anything?’ Helen enquired. ‘In Darlinghurst. You were still drunk from the night before. You said some shocking things; I was so embarrassed. And it was my job to apologise to everyone.’

‘In vino veritas, darling,’ Alannah shrugged good-naturedly. ‘Whatever it was, I’m sure it was the truth.’

Helen studied the picture I’d taken of her and put through the filter-wringer. ‘It’s weird,’ she complained. ‘That doesn’t even look real.’

‘It’s hyper-real,’ I tell her. ‘It’s ironic. It’s the Auto-Tune of photography.’

‘Well, you never used to need filters and you always looked fine.’

I fiddled with my old op-shop earring: a Turkish evil eye on a hoop. The other earring had been lost years ago.

‘Do you when you were a little girl and you kept insisting on posing with Father Christmas? We had to do six takes and the line was getting longer and longer.’

‘No.’

‘Yes you do. You were about six, such a beautiful little thing. Never any trouble.’

‘Not like now.’

‘Well . . .’ she indicated the room, as though it would back her up. The mood had changed and Alannah sat back down, but I stayed silent so that Helen would eventually blurt something out.

‘If you’re trying to make a point with all this behaviour, Nina,’ she said at last, her voice pitched in defensiveness, ‘at least know what it is.’

My resentment was a hornet’s nest, but there was only the sound of wrapping and a man on TV yelling about a warehouse sale.

I went to my room and called Rose for a moan. She was back home in Sydney too, drumming her fingers with impatience. We both worried that we were losing ground while I was holed up here, but Jenner said I must be seen to be resting in the bosom of my family. I was starting to get paranoid that he just wanted me out of the way.

‘Here, I’ve just emailed you a link,’ Rose said. ‘Look at the Facebook page. Yanni could be our new bassist.’

Our old bassist, Adam, had walked. He reckoned he had a former engagement with another band, but if I was a betting girl I’d wager it was because Rose screamed in his face. Rose believed in pecking order, yet I was the one mistaken for arrogant.

‘I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line-up,’ I noted dismissively. ‘Can’t we find anyone cooler looking?’

‘Nobody’s really going to see them anyway,’ she pointed out.

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘Anyway,” she said. ‘We’ve got months to waste before then. I’m going to have to be getting on with other things, I suppose.’

We floated a silence back and forth. I’d be damned if I’d ask her what she meant by that. My black heart withered some more at the idea of her having private meetings with Mickiewicz.

‘So I guess I’d better get going,’ she said.

Rose’s voice was distant, which meant she had me on speaker, which meant she was IM-ing Grayson at the same time.

‘How’s it all going with Grayson?’ I asked, trying to end on a nice note.

‘Good,’ she brightened. ‘He can’t come over right now because he’s filming, but he’s going to me for Christmas.’

‘Oh . . . good.’

‘So. I gotta go, okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.’

She hung up and I threw the phone at the wall. I wanted to break free of Rose as much as she wanted to break free of me, but every time disaster struck I was flooded with need and couldn’t even think of letting her go. Maybe when I got through this convalescence, I told myself, I’d be strong enough.

•

Since I was supposed to be lying low as some kind of public penance, Rose was sent to the ARIAs without me. I watched it on telly with Helen and Alannah, who were good enough to ignore the tears washing down my cheeks. It was only because of the whisky macs I’d drunk behind my bedroom door, as though the smell of Scotch didn’t trail after me into the lounge room like a kid sister.

My aunt had given up on looking like Alannah Dall now that she had been here a few weeks. She curled up on the couch in her dressing-gown and pyjamas, her eyes crouching naked behind her glasses. Completely batty.

‘Parramatta is a great leveller,’ Helen had remarked sagely a few days earlier, when just she and I were in the house.

The ceremony and back-slapping dragged on. When the camera panned to Rose’s table for the nominations for best album, I saw her sitting bolt upright alongside Jenner, Carmel and Mickiewicz, and Mickiewicz’s wife, Dora. Jenner was right about critical opinion bearing no mark on album sales. Our album had gone gold, our single multi-platinum, and tonight we would clean up, without me. At twenty, I was practically past it now anyway.

Helen tittered as Rose walked up to collect the award over a blast of ‘Fight Like a Girl’. I was impressed by how poised she looked.

Rose wore: Marimekko silk print dress; Scanlan & Theodore white toeless overknee boots.

‘A few years ago, my cousin and I came to this show as guests,’ she beamed, transmitting smiles like satellite signals.

‘You’d never know she was bisexual, to look at her,’ Helen marvelled, frowning in contemplation. ‘It just seems to boil down to your sambuca count and who’s watching, these days.’

Alannah rolled her eyes at me, munching a mouthful of nuts. She had a bit of cashew on her bottom lip, moving up and down.

Rose was saying, ‘So we’re completely honoured to be invited here tonight and . . .’ She broke off to look at the bauble. ‘I can’t tell you how much it means to us. We feel so humbled that our fans have spoken and that you guys have recognised just how hard we’ve worked. On behalf of me, our team and my beautiful cousin Nina, who I know was dying to be here tonight, thank you so much.’

Applause, applause.

‘Very gracious,’ said Helen.

After the ARIAs Helen fell asleep with her chin on her chest and Alannah and I watched the news. I googled my name on my phone, to see the most popular searches.

Nina Dall twitter

Nina Dall boyfriend

Nina Dall drugs Nina Dall Hank Black

Nina Dall hair

Nina Dall hotel

I typed in John Villiers and got:

John Villiers Weeping Brides

John Villiers Alannah Dall

John Villiers Nixon

John Villiers producer

John Villiers Danger Michaels

I knew that if I clicked on any of those I’d read some crazy story from back in the day, of John Villiers recording in the hull of a ship off the shore of Tasmania or getting banged up in Tangier for a week. We should have been getting up to stuff like that with him, instead of turning up to the studio forty-five minutes late because of Rose’s hair. I toyed with the idea of adding our ARIAs pash to his Wikipedia page.

The main story on the news was about Jimmy Savile, the kids’ TV host in England who’d abused children for decades. He looked about as creepy a childcatcher as you can get; I couldn’t get how people didn’t realise.

‘Incredible,’ Alannah said, shaking her head. ‘They were all like that in the music industry, though.’

‘How did people not know?’

‘Oh, everybody knew.’

‘If everybody knew, why didn’t somebody do anything?’

She was at a loss, scrabbling helplessly in the peanut bowl. ‘It was a more permissive time,’ she said eventually. ‘People are starting to talk about it now, but back then nobody did. Or about domestic violence. I’m afraid sometimes the older generation simply thought, “Well, I had to put up with it . . .” And so it’s perpetuated.’

When the financial report came on I turned my attention back to my phone, catching up on Rose’s tweets of the past twenty-four hours. She’d posted a bodysurfing selfie taken on Coogee Beach. It must have taken her ages to get a good angle down her stomach and legs. I pictured her skin turning pink in the sun and the waves sparkling for nothing as she scrolled the wheel on the camera through two-hundred torso shots.

I held out my phone. ‘Thinks she’s Rihanna!’ I observed to Alannah, who was on her way out to put the kettle on. I searched back a whole week, finding pictures she’d taken in Melbourne with radio-station hosts and various boys in bands. Seemed like someone was on a one-woman promo tour while I rotted in the ’Matta.

The news credits rolled and I padded out to the kitchen in my socks to fetch more peanuts. Alannah was shrouded in a plume of cigarette smoke, weeping into a near-empty wine glass while talking to the macraméd cat on the kitchen wall.

When she heard me and turned around to laugh it off, I could tell by her eyes she had refilled her glass a few times. She batted away the smoke and threw the butt out of the window.

‘He’s looking good,’ she sniffed, smiling. ‘I haven’t seen him for so many years, it’s all a bit of a shock. I was hoping he’d be a fat old bastard by now.’

‘Who?’ I said, unsure.

‘Your boss,’ she tittered. ‘The one who signed you at my request.’

‘Did you and he . . .?’ I asked with furrowed brow. ‘But I thought you were with Alain?’

Alain had been Alannah’s boyfriend and manager throughout a decade of insanity. In Pour Me Another, she described him as her inspiration and credited him with keeping her on the straight and narrow, always painstakingly organised enough for a potential zombie apocalypse. But she never did explain why he left.

‘Alain was a darling,’ she said, switching into maudlin mode. ‘Without him I was completely lost. Literally lost. I couldn’t even find my way back to my hotel room without him.’

I noticed her pyjama top was buttoned out of sync. That was something I’d come to observe about Alannah: her skirt would be twisted around back to front, or she’d have a leaf in her hair, or a blob of jam on her shoe . . . it seemed that without a stylist taking care of business, the hopeless artist in her gave up on living on this plane altogether. Alain would have had his work cut out.

‘What happened?’

She braced herself heroically on the sink and gazed out into the gloom.

‘Somebody told Alain about me and Greg Mickiewicz. I don’t know who. Of course, he felt like I’d betrayed him, but I hadn’t meant him to find out, and I thought it might pay off our debts . . . and I just wanted to get Greg out of my system.’

One answer would have sufficed.

‘Well, it happens to the best of us, doesn’t it?’ I said, wanting to play the grownup. ‘Everyone’s at it, Alannah, especially in this business.’

‘They hated each other,’ she cut in, setting her glass down too hard on the bench. ‘Alain ran himself ragged dealing with my shit and he didn’t deserve it. You should have seen Greg when I first met him, Nina; such a big spunk.’

She flourished her arms at me and I murmured assent. I was trying to picture a young Mickiewicz out on the prowl. He was so tactical in everything he did, I wondered if he slept with Alannah just to prove that he could.

‘We didn’t made a sound, the first time. Greg came up to the penthouse of the Orion. It was wonderful. He left hours later and we still hadn’t said a word. It was as though by not speaking we could pretend it had been some sort of blameless dream.’

‘And you’ve kept your silence all this time,’ I said encouragingly. I poured myself a sloppy wine from the bottle on the counter and topped up hers. ‘Then what happened?’

She looked at me in surprise, flickered in recognition, then dismissively waved a hand. ‘And then he married his wife, the good girl. Alain left me to go and start a hydroponics business on the Mornington Peninsula.’

My aunt put out an arm to steady herself and knocked Helen’s cat calendar off its nail.

‘Oops,’ I said brightly, picking it up.

‘Told me he was in for the long haul,’ she said, picking up her glass. She hadn’t specified which man she meant. With a dignified gait, she retired from the room, her dressing-gown cord trailing behind her.

By the time I went to bed, the house was silent, the radiators ticking cold. Back in my childhood bedroom I cried facedown into the pillow until I was lying in a wet patch. It was just like old times, only now I had two ARIAs.

I was a write-off. People were saying I was one thing when I was another. I’d spent far longer labouring on the hell in my head than on my songs. In the past few years I’d reinforced every hateful belief I’d ever had about myself with layer upon layer of shitty behaviour, just to confirm my suspicions. Now I was set in stone.

I jumped out of bed and headed into the bathroom. Rummaging around in the cupboard, I pulled out the clippers. I plugged them in next to the basin and then studied myself in the mirror. My eyes were a vivid blue from crying. If I zeroed in on them I could almost be any age again, standing here, looking in the mirror. The same old spot.

Thumbing the lever on the clippers, I touched them to the side of my head that

I’d shaved on tour. The blades sizzled as they lifted off the fine fluff and sprinkled it on the floor. Then I took the clippers to the rest of it. Long strands lifted cleanly away until I was left with a rough blonde mohawk. The whole thing took twenty minutes to get right, but nobody got up to see what was going on. When I turned the clippers off, the smell of warm hair and metal remained.

I could tell I had always disgusted Helen, and looking at myself in the mirror now I couldn’t blame her. When I was young and clingy, she’d stiffen near me as I tried to wind around her legs. On the nights I invented a worry so that I could trail into her room and stay close, she’d briskly dismiss me. At eleven, I confided I couldn’t stop thinking about sex. ‘It’s perfectly natural,’ she grimaced. I went back to bed.

I would never confront her now. If she dismissed me this time, over Tony, I would have to walk out of the front door and keep going.

I was the protector of this family.

Take Rose. There would have been no Dolls if it had not been for my burning desire to get as far the fuck out of Parramatta as possible. No living-of-the-dream for my cousin, no inspiration for our wide-eyed young fans.

Take Dad. No blissful ignorance and immunity for him.

Take Helen. She would lose me if she let me down, so I would not let her let me down.

There was something else. I was skilled at convincing others that there was something unspeakable swirling around me, some tragic je ne sais quoi that we would all just let slide. I had become as sly as a fox and as slippery as an eel. I had made it work when it suited me. I convinced myself that every drunken root, every falling-out, every embarrassment to The Dolls was the fault of Tony: simple cause and effect.

If my experience had come to define me, who would I be without it?

No one.

Dog tired, I scooped up most of the hair clippings from the tiles and dropped them down the toilet.

18

I TOUCH MYSELF

Mickiewicz once observed that it was artists like me who kicked in the glass ceiling and let out our aggression on stage. And didn’t we get crucified for it? Somehow that daring has been mistranslated by subsequent generations into gyrating like gibbons. Where is the art? POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

It was only thirty-six hours after the press release went out to say that I was in rude health and back on tour that the rude video went viral. I found out when I woke up in Cleveland and fired up Facebook. Now Cleveland was forever tarnished in my brain as that city where the shit went down. Cleveland and New York and Woop Woop. But at the end of the day, it was just fifty seconds of grainy footage of me touching myself in a hotel bedroom. I was barely recognisable—if it wasn’t for the tattoo by Bimbo’s of West Hollywood, you could assume it was somebody ordinary.

I’d lost my phone somewhere in Chicago, which sounded like a Gene Pitney song but was much worse. I ed, somewhere between the gig and the bus, via the after-show and a few clubs, emptying my bag out on to the footpath, over and over, convinced I’d lost my wallet, and Grayson yelling, ‘It’s in there, for god’s sake. Put it all back and don’t take it out again,’ sounding much higher pitched than he did in his films.

At first the loss of the cigarettes was the greater concern, because we got our

phones for free anyway, along with stockings, laptops, speaker stacks, guitars, shoes, headphones, watches, baseball boots, luggage, dermal filler and tequila. In fact, a new phone was FedExed to me two days later.

But then a horrible feeling started to grow inside me. If whoever found my phone didn’t immediately whip out my SIM card and slot in their own, they’d find the spoils quite interesting. My nervous system disintegrated into white noise every time I thought about all the files I’d saved—The Dolls’ demos, audio snippets of me singing, ‘Nyeh, nyeh fool, yeah, part of me, rarr’, hundreds of selfie rejects in which my teeth were visible, and a video clip of me tending to myself that I’d filmed for a few gentlemen of the road. It was just the one video —I planned to re-gift it as necessary because it was hard to look good at that angle.

So, after all that worry it was almost a relief now it was out there. I quit pacing around my hotel room and poured myself another large gin with a splash of tonic, as comforting as a mother’s hug. Then I took a seat at my laptop and hit play again. The clip had wound up on TZI.com before going viral, and I’ll it that at first I thought it was funny. I actually laughed, watching the loop of me lying languorously in bed, surveying the camera through my lashes and taking two fingers to myself. The resolution was low enough to retain some modesty and at least my tits looked cute.

And then, halfway down that gin, I realised that whoever found my phone might be able to get into iCloud and find the demos of our unreleased album. All of them. And while my role as everyone’s favourite scapegoat was important to the natural order of things, I wasn’t about to willingly it something like that.

‘It was Strider,’ I told Rose later, anxiously plaiting the back of my mohawk. We were sitting on the bus in the gloom, neither of us in any mood to get up and turn on the light. ‘It was one video, sent when he was in Europe. He promised me he’d deleted it.’

‘I thought he told you what goes on tour stays on tour?’ she demanded. I shrugged.

After soundcheck, when we were ordering sushi in town, she wondered: ‘Why did you send him the picture of me with the breadsticks up my nose?’

A day later, at six in the morning, she wanted to know: ‘How can it have been Strider when you didn’t have that tattoo when you were seeing him?’

Lying in my bunk with mascara spiders all over the pillow, I drew the curtains closer together.

‘Okay,’ I said after a deep breath. ‘It wasn’t Strider. I just made the video because the lighting was nice and I thought it might come in handy one day, okay? I didn’t know I was going to go and lose my phone. Please help me out here, Rose. I’d do the same for you.’

There was silence, but I could hear her breathing. If she didn’t start mulling over what else was on my phone we might get through this.

‘Rose?’

‘God help you if you ever have to actually lie, Nina,’ she said.

•

The papers called me ‘troubled’. You’d think I’d changed my name by deed poll to Troubled Nina Dall. It sounded like such a gentle appraisal, but in media , Pete Doherty was ‘troubled’ and he’d been arrested multiple times and linked to a few deaths. Amy Winehouse had been ‘troubled’ and she was dead herself. Worse, they called me ‘the Lindsay Lohan of pop’. Not punk, but pop.

I scrolled through the email marked ‘Crisis management’ that Diana Etie had sent everyone. I could tell this incident had gone down on my permanent record.

The worst of it so far:

– 50 reasons N-Bomb is better than your girlfriend (Hombre)

– Oh no, not again. The Dolls hit an all-time low (Celebrity)

– Nina Dall’s two-fingered salute (Jezebel)

– Watch out, Kristin: Rose Dall is after your man (All About You)

I’m sorry you seem to be involved here, Rose. Perhaps All About You has taken a

‘guilt by association’ stance.

D.

Rose, to her credit, held steady and blamed my troublesome ex—although we couldn’t reveal him to be Strider, because that would raise further questions about whether we should be allowed on tour with bands like Bitumen.

‘She’s too trusting,’ Rose said at the damage-control meeting Elementary called when we arrived back in LA. I had to swallow my laughter at that.

Since Ninagate, Elementary’s siege mentality had gone into overdrive, with a series of conversations between the US and Grandiose that were not to concern us. Instead, we were invited to suggest some positive moves forward, with some new faces from the Business Affairs department present in case we made any foul moves. Clay floated the idea of an upbeat single with Christian-pop producer Anton Ruck, and Mickey contemplated a fan cruise from LA to San Diego, but it was vetoed on the grounds of budget. We were already eating into other bands’ publicity time, apparently.

‘Jenner says it’s not really a big deal,’ I argued, just before the meeting wrapped. ‘All the big names have done it and it’s not even a new thing. In Australia a singer called Debra Byrne had a sex tape leaked, back when it was VHS. And she was TV Week’s Queen of Pop.’

I should have ed that name-dropping Australians didn’t hold any weight here. If your dad wasn’t Crocodile Dundee, they weren’t interested.

‘She was discovered on Young Talent Time,’ I clarified. ‘Never mind.’

Later, I played At Least I’m Not That Bad with Rose, scribbling out the celebrity names on a napkin at a roadhouse near Tucson: Miley, Charlie, Sky, Schapelle. My psychiatrist thought this was a dangerous game to play.

The US tour had resumed only on the caveat that I saw a shrink twice a week, via Skype. She was Helen’s age, but receptive. Melanie talked about things like values, core beliefs, arrested development, the critical mind and how to breathe properly. She told me about schemas, which were like your internal programming. My schema would be ‘I don’t deserve . . .’ Rose’s would be ‘Make it seem as though . . .’ I told her that being a manic-depressive narcissist was just part of my job description.

Melanie also reckoned ‘We are not our thoughts’, which we had an argument about that I managed to make last a whole session. I quite liked Melanie, but there was a lot I didn’t tell her, like the resentment I held for Rose that I just couldn’t shake even though I wanted to. Using Rose’s laptop to Skype Melanie didn’t help. It meant that when I clicked on Safari and typed in ‘sex nina dall’, old searches of Rose’s would appear, including ‘solicitors’, ‘Sydney management’ and ‘singers going solo’. That sort of thing, if I talked about it, would just open up a whole other can of worms.

•

The moment the seatbelt sign went off, Rose fished out her headphones from the seat pocket and clamped them over her ears. Clearly she was going to ignore me all the way back to Australia. As the cabin crew began their trolley patrol, she

stabbed at her handset. Once she’d found the air-traffic-control channel—so she could make sure nothing was going wrong—she pulled the thin blue blanket up to her chin.

The second leg of the tour had gone well. I noticed more people battling to be on my side of the stage. Phones were trained on me, flowers were thrown at me and I received marriage proposals whenever there was the slightest lull in the set. ‘The cult of Nina,’ Jenner called it. It must have been shitting Rose to tears, because all over Twitter people were declaring themselves Team Rose or Team Nina, and Team Nina was trending.

It was Mickiewicz’s announcement that we were to return home at the end of the tour and go on Human Interest that really did it for Rose. The current-affairs program was doing a special on whether modern music was eroding the moral fibre of this country, and we were being offered the opportunity to apologise away my pornographic debut, while plugging the forthcoming album. ‘Both of you,’ Mickiewicz had said firmly. ‘A united front.’

The Five Network studios were in Alexandria and the morning after we landed back in Australia, Mickiewicz sent a car to pick us up from Rose’s apartment, where I’d crashed on the sofa bed. I’d had to ask nicely for a doona. The atmosphere in the cab was frosty, and then it dropped us off at the wrong place so we had to hurriedly stalk the last few blocks in our heels. It was winter here, I suddenly realised. It was a Sydney devoid of colour, with the gum trees as clean as chalk against a sky opaque with clouds. The effect was oppressive.

I wore: my army coat with deep pockets. I had a quarter bottle of vodka to combat nervousness in one pocket and a tube of Rennies to combat heartburn in the other.

Rose wore: the big furry black coat she used for incognito engagements.

As we got ready that morning I thought about trying to persuade Rose that we should be naked under our coats, like we did once during a newspaper interview in Chicago, but I could tell she wasn’t in the mood. The lights would be too hot to keep our coats on anyway. That was something we’d learned over time in this business: the suffocating heat of TV studios and the sort of outfits that necessitated.

Jenner met Rose and me at the front desk, where we had to sign in. Seeing him was like being reunited with old pyjamas, in a good way.

‘Come on, Rose,’ he wheedled, as she slammed about. ‘An embarrassment shared is an embarrassment halved.’ Jenner actually enjoyed stuff like this.

‘I’ve just got to use the facilities,’ I told them, and scooted across the foyer to the ladies room before they could stop me. Locking the cubicle door, I pulled a plastic miniature out of my pocket. Smirnoff—a lucky draw. It caved in on itself as I sucked out the contents, then released with a pop. My tongue sought out the sweet burning spot it had left on my lip.

‘Just be yourself,’ Jenner was saying to Rose when I got back. He looked like a real manager, I thought, his hands shoved into the pockets of his camel-hair coat and that Mona Lisa smile on his face.

‘I can’t be myself,’ she snapped, glaring at me. ‘I feel like a fraud.’

Sighing, I raised an eyebrow at Jenner to let him know it was down to me to hold this one together.

Up on the eighth floor a young runner met us as the doors opened. ‘It’s just down the hall here,’ he said brightly, clasping a clipboard as he hared along in front of us. ‘Not far now.’

He wasn’t long for a place like this, I decided. He was a pup in the woods. Or maybe they all started out bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, before they became cynical old hacks. We followed him, single file, until we were led into a room: two walls were decked out like a drawing room, and the other half was swallowed by lighting rigs, cameras and thick ropes of wires. A carpenter was doing a spot of sawing in one corner.

‘This is Jeanette,’ the runner said nervously, thrusting a damp hand at our host and then backing away. Jeanette Bateman had been presenting this show ever since I could . In person she was bird-like—all sharp features and immaculately groomed. Her eye held a keen glint, undoing all the good work of her smile.

Jeanette transferred her coffee to her left hand and offered me her right. ‘Aha! It’s The Dolls in the flesh,’ she said brightly, as though addressing children. She wasn’t a child-friendly person, though—that was evident by the tautness of her jaw. ‘How super to meet you. Just take a seat there and relax. We have some muffins for you . . . Jimmy?’

There was an awkward volley of smiles and deflected glances as we waited for Jimmy to bring a plate of muffins we couldn’t possibly ruin our lipstick with. ‘Yum,’ Rose said politely, pretending to check out each one.

As I gnawed on my nail an on-set make-up artist set about my T-zone with powder. ‘I think you’ve got enough on already,’ she observed critically, screwing her face up so close to mine that I had to blink to uncross my eyes. ‘I’ll just declump your lashes.’

Jeanette handed Jimmy her coffee cup without looking at him and took the armchair opposite us. She consulted a sheaf of papers that contained our certain annihilation. I knew that it would be difficult doing this sort of interview with a woman. If it was a bloke, I’d stare at him that little bit too long, or smile unnervingly as he fumbled through his questions, then wink at him before answering. I’d see him wonder . . . Did I just imagine that? It was just boredom on my part, half the time.

‘What should I do about her hair?’ the make-up artist asked Jeanette. ‘We might have a hat in wardrobe.’

Jeanette raised her head as though she hadn’t noticed my hair until now. ‘I think Nina’s hair is indicative of this story,’ she said. ‘Leave it.’

‘Is it supposed to be standing upright?’ the girl asked me now. ‘Because I don’t think I’ve got enough hairspray. What do you usually use?’

‘It’s fine,’ I said shortly. ‘Just leave it floppy.’ Rose was crayoning lip balm back and forth over her lips like a mantra. Her eyes roamed the lights, seeking out the Pro-Mist filter Pru had said we should always insist on. ‘Do I look at you or the camera?’ I asked Jeanette, mainly for something to say.

‘Just at me,’ Jeanette said, flashing an efficient smile. ‘Act completely natural as though you and I—and Rose—are having a normal conversation. Just the three of us.’

The lighting rig clunked into action and instantly we were framed like deer in headlights. ‘We’ll have already intro-ed the clip,’ said Jeanette from somewhere in front of us, ‘so we’re just going to jump right in, okay?’

‘When you’re ready,’ the soundman spoke up, getting some kind of nod. ‘Three, two, one.’

‘So, Nina,’ Jeanette said, making my adrenaline spike unpleasantly. ‘Can you tell us what were you thinking when news reached you that a pornographic film had been leaked?’

For a second I was confused. Was she asking me, ‘What were you thinking?!’ or literally, ‘What were you thinking?’

‘I don’t even doing it,’ I blurted. ‘I was as surprised as everyone else.’

‘It must have been quite a shock,’ she agreed, without pause. ‘Who do you think leaked the film and the breadstick pictures?’

Rose cut in hastily. ‘On the advice of our lawyers, we can’t comment on that, Jeanette.’

‘Was it someone you’d had a relationship with?’ Jeanette asked me with concern.

‘Yeah, little bit,’ I said, and looked over at Jenner. A muscle flexed in his jaw but he maintained his enigmatic smile. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, what do you have to say to parents who may be concerned that their teenage daughter or son now thinks it’s “cool” to share the video with their friends—given the appeal that The Dolls already has to young teenagers?’

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Rose twitch, so I let her go. ‘It’s always been very important to us, Jeanette, to be very positive in all areas of our lives, and we hope that message spreads to our fans,’ she said evenly, her hands folded in her lap. ‘At the end of the day, we’re young girls ourselves and—’

‘Although, at age twenty, some might say you’ve inherited more of a responsibility by now,’ Jeanette countered.

‘True, Jeanette,’ Rose said, ‘but we can only live our lives the best we can from day to day with all the craziness that goes on around us.’ She gave a tinkling laugh and Jenner nodded almost imperceptibly. I was impressed. It was like some people just came out of the box knowing how to act in these situations.

‘The life of a pop star can be quite a strange one,’ Jeanette conceded. ‘I mean, you’ve essentially never had a proper job like the rest of us.’ Jenner tilted his head up at the ceiling as she lined up her next serve. ‘Is that something that concerns you?’

What’s the view like up there on your high horse?

‘We’ve got a very strong work ethic,’ I said suddenly. ‘We’re always writing, always recording, always touring, always. And we’ve made more money than all of our parents put together.’

‘And what do your parents at home in Parramatta make of The Dolls phenomenon?’ Jeanette volleyed back.

‘They’re very proud,’ I said automatically. And I realised for the first time this was true. Helen had cut out and filed every story , which had felt like an accusation but probably wasn’t. I looked straight at the camera and then quickly away. God, god, god.

‘We’ve never been a band to embarrass ourselves,’ Rose said, then turned to look at me fondly, ‘but I guess every kid with the best intentions is going to have their moments.’

After Jeanette wrapped things up, she was briskly pleasant before leaving us to our own devices.

‘Well, that didn’t go too badly,’ Jenner said, selecting a muffin as I pulled a compact out of my bag to check my face. Rose was halfway across the room, away, her heels clacking under her incognito furry coat.

•

Mickiewicz wanted to take us to dinner, but this didn’t give me the same sense of foreboding as when our American record company asked us on a date. I knew that our CEO got me. Nina Dall harked back to an era when rock stars really were rock stars. When Mickiewicz was first starting out, people understood that talent equated to trouble. If you wanted professionalism then you deserved the homogenised music you got.

He’d invited some of his mates from those good old days to dinner, which I suspected was an opportunity to show off. I didn’t mind—I lapped up Mickiewicz’s yarns. Rose and I were late arriving at the Japanese restaurant in Sydney’s fashionable Surry Hills. Of course we were. Rose made us late for everything because her make-up took thirty minutes longer than mine and she always had to stick a photo of it up on Instagram before leaving so that no one would worry she’d gone missing.

As we walked in, I heard Mickiewicz’s guttural tones before I saw him. He put down his napkin and stood up. We were introduced to a grizzled tour manager called Biff and the guitarist from Rizzler, Warren Sharkey. As Rose and I arranged our legs on the floor cushions without our skirts riding up too much, the three of them sat back down and resumed their conversation about Danger Michaels.

I surreptitiously punched Warren’s name into my phone so I could read his Wiki entry in my lap. I could tell just from the way he was sitting that, with this guy, forewarned was forearmed.

Warren ‘Waz’ Sharkey was the guitarist in Australian post-punk band Rizzler, formed in Sydney in 1987. The band dissolved in 1995 following

creative differences and Sharkey’s ongoing health issues . . .

Rose nudged me and frowned.

‘I’ll tell you something incredible,’ Biff was saying. ‘Danger used to get the roadies to bring his mic stand into the dressing room so he could do his stretches and run through some moves. It was like he was a martial artist practising with his nunchucks. It needed to move in his hand without thought, and it did. It was like an extension of him.’

‘Like a fencer,’ Warren acknowledged. ‘He was a true artist.’

Mickiewicz had a wheeze at this. ‘, Waz,’ he said, pointing a chopstick. ‘You rebuffed him once at the football. Essendon. He came up and did a bow and scrape in front of you and you told him to rack off out of the way.’

‘I thought he wanted my autograph,’ reed Waz. His eyes slid to me and Rose for a reaction.

A waiter came over and tried to wrangle some plates down over the shoulders of Mickiewicz and Waz, who didn’t try to make things any easier. I looked at the menu. I’d gone to a Japanese restaurant once before with John Villiers and he’d told me what sort of thing to order. Edamame, for a start. We’d both really enjoyed that.

‘So, Nina,’ said Waz. ‘I hear you’ve got a lot of naked ambition.’

Mickiewicz groaned in disappointment, as if they hadn’t discussed the sex video before Rose and I arrived. ‘Cut it out,’ he said. ‘She’s got a lot to learn and that was an excellent first mistake.’

‘I agree,’ Waz protested. ‘I wish I’d done the same thing. It’s too late for me now —you’ve got to have the form for it.’ He cast a look at my rack.

I wore: ‘Like You, But Harder’ T-shirt, denim mini-skirt. I had my legs casually pulled up under me, to show off my pedicure in my thongs. I wasn’t sure if Mickiewicz had a foot fetish, but he might do.

Waz wore: Denim shirt tucked into jeans. Phone in holster.

‘That’s enough,’ repeated Mickiewicz. ‘Anyway, no harm done. Nina now has the press in the palm of her hand.’

Everyone sniggered. I had to laugh too.

‘It’s not funny,’ Rose said, aghast.

‘Of course it’s funny,’ said Waz. ‘And it was very noble of your sister to take one for the team and get you all that free publicity.’

‘Cousin,’ Rose sighed, pressing her fingers to her temple. ‘We’re not that related.’

A bottle of wine materialised and the waiter stood back as Mickiewicz tasted it, then gave it the nod.

‘I’ve been hearing the new material from Jenner,’ he said. I fiddled with my mohawk, ing my last phone call to him, telling him the new songs would give him a boner. I’d woken up next morning with the phone still next to my head. ‘You can scrap “Hot in Dots”, that’s never going on.’

That was Rose’s.

‘And you can forget about “Jailbait” as well. The rest is promising, but it’s all over the place stylistically—’

‘I know,’ Rose cut in. ‘Half of it was written on tour, the other half we had to write separately while Nina was in apology rehab.’

‘While I what?’

‘Apology rehab,’ she said, rapping her nails against her wine glass. ‘That’s what Jenner calls it.’

‘I was at home,’ I protested, looking to Mickiewicz for back-up. Waz and Biff stopped chewing.

‘Yeah,’ she said coolly, folding a sliver of raw tuna around her fork. ‘And while we had to wait for you to get your shit together, everybody else’s world had to stop too. Not only did I have to write a bunch of songs on my own, but the band were screwed. It’s not like they could go and work on a building site or something—they don’t know how to do anything else.’

All hail Rose, the patron saint of band .

Mickiewicz interrupted. ‘Never you mind the band—that’s not your concern. Every songwriting team has time apart, and it’s not a bad thing. The point is, you’re going to need a good producer to pull it all together.’

I looked at him with alarm. ‘We’ve got one,’ I said. ‘John Villiers.’

Biff scoffed and folded his arms.

‘Not John Villiers,’ our boss said firmly. ‘He’s a bitter fuck who’s lost the Midas touch. You’ll be working with Noakesy.’

I felt like I’d had the air punched out of me. I’d been relying on Mickiewicz to reunite me with John Villiers, like a sort of phlegmatic fairy godmother. Ben Noakes, I found superficial. Surely this was just a strategic move to associate us with his name, which seemed to be on every one of Grandiose’s records lately.

Name-dropping the right producer was like a box that had to be ticked.

‘Touched a nerve,’ laughed Waz as he appraised Mickiewicz. ‘Have you been calculating the interest on the money John Villiers owes you?’

‘Ah, he doesn’t owe me anything,’ Mickiewicz growled.

My edamame arrived, but suddenly I wasn’t hungry. ‘What’s this about?’ I asked.

‘Your producer burned down a studio and this mug here had to pick up the bill,’ said Waz jovially, nodding at our CEO. Biff was shaking his head, darkly. He was getting on my nerves.

‘No, that was Alannah,’ I corrected him.

‘It was both of them,’ said Mickiewicz. ‘That’s what happens when you smoke highly flammable drugs when you’re supposed to be recording an album . . . that I’m paying for.’

Rose interrupted. ‘The studio in Sydney? That was a candle that fell over.’

As they all laughed and Mickiewicz wiped a tear from his eye, I felt my stomach tighten into a knot of humiliation at once again being kept in the dark. Our

esteemed CEO had broken my aunt’s heart and assumed I didn’t know. Now he was casually dropping the bombshell that John Villiers was a great big joke.

‘He’s talented enough, but he’s lost all respect,’ conceded Waz. ‘He’s had to accept any job going to work himself out of debt. He’s lost his value in this industry.’

‘Well, he didn’t do that with us,’ Rose pointed out. ‘We didn’t even pay him.’

‘No,’ Mickiewicz agreed. ‘He worked with you because your aunty had to post bail for him for drug charges and he owed her that much.’

Rose snorted and pushed her fingers into her eyelids. ‘Oh my god, Nina,’ she whispered.

‘Shut up,’ I hissed. I wasn’t about to let these old farts laugh at me, and I wasn’t about to let Rose Dall criticise my taste when I’d had to tolerate Pru Yoshida. It would be just like Rose to suddenly decide his production sucked, after everything he’d done for us.

We ate mechanically through the remaining two courses, speaking only when spoken to. I avoided Rose’s eye as I wavered between wanting to kill John Villiers for pashing me under false pretences, and trying to stop my heart from convulsing every time I thought of him. I resolved to get our producer out of my system, hard.

‘You’ve got a couple of months to play with before Noakesy is free,’ concluded Mickiewicz as the waiter brought over our coats. ‘Don’t touch the songs, give them a breather. That way you’ll hear anything that needs changing when you hit the studio.’

Rose looked blank. ‘What are we supposed to do in the meantime?’

‘You’re free,’ Mickiewicz declared, chucking his napkin on the table. ‘Take off somewhere nice, because after that the hard work’s really going to start.’

Waz gave us a big smile. ‘Use the time to write for the third album,’ he advised. ‘Some of the best albums ever made have come out of leaving town and meeting new people. Immersion.’

‘Do you when Danger insisted on taking his Rolls to Tasmania?’ said Biff, off down memory lane again. ‘The idea was he’d lie low, but no one had ever seen a car like that before.’

They filed their way to the door. ‘Typical Danger,’ Mickiewicz guffawed, but he was growing sad around the eyes. ‘Tragic loss.’

•

In the car on the way home we sat in silence but for Rose breathing into a paper bag that deflated with an accusatory snap every time she inhaled. I stared out of the window.

My decision to become autonomous had just been made so much easier by John Villiers being removed from the equation. One more album and The Dolls were through. Rose may have relied on higher powers to guide her life, but I was one to take the bull by the horns myself. I was going to Tamworth, the town immortalised all over the Country Music Channel, to get a head start on my solo career.

Two months of rubbing shoulders with broken-toothed pedal-steel players who knew a thing or two about minor chords would strengthen my reputation. I would find a producer who would be the Mark Ronson to my Amy Winehouse. The Phil Spector to my Tina Turner. Some of my new songs were floundering, but there was nothing a slide guitar and fiddle couldn’t fix.

Two months to toughen up and learn to love myself enough to not care what people said about the new Dolls album. Why the hell did we call ourselves The Dolls anyway? Even the name was unworkable now. The fact that we were seventeen when we came up with it was no excuse. Lorde became the timelessly cool Lorde at sixteen. Every time we released a record we invited criticism, that pigeon from hell, into our house—and calling that house a dollhouse wasn’t helping.

Back at Dad’s, I booked my flights and wrote him a note, telling him I’d call him from Tamworth. Tammy. Tammo. Looking around my room, at all the dumb mementos I’d collected over the past few years, I decided it was time to have a ceremonial cutting loose. I left Dad the balding old koala he’d bought me when I was three, now with a red tequila hat plonked on its head.

It took me till four in the morning to stuff everything in bin bags, and it was still dark outside when I lugged the haul down the steps and dumped it on the street like a stash of dead bodies. After my accident, my neighbour would pose for the

Banksia Argus holding a tiara and a bottle of The Dolls’ prototype perfume that she found after a good rummage. To which I would say, knock yourself out, sister.

I called a cab.

•

Dr Melanie Urquhart PhD, Clinical Psychologist

Nina Dall DOB 18/3/93

Bill to: Grandiose

Co-dependent relationship with cousin.

Mother uses sarcasm as a defence mechanism—why?

Permissive father seems absolved of all blame.

No .

Denies eating disorder. Denies feeling anxious.

Advised on coping strategy for intrusive thoughts.

Recommend dual diagnosis going forward.

19

TAMWORTH

When my third album, Audacious, failed to set the charts alight, I retired to Ibiza to lick my wounds. And that really was the sole reason I went, but of course I found that Ibiza had its distractions. As they say, you can take the girl out of Parramatta, but you can’t take Parramatta out of the girl. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL, 1997 (SABRE BOOKS)

A country-town noticeboard was a matrix of weird. The one I was standing in front of in Peel Street in my new cowboy boots offered roosters for the pot, firedancing ceremonies, fiddle players, dirt bikes, blacksmithing, sheep shearing and a bunch of roughed-up utes. Fear bloomed briefly inside of me at the strangeness of it all; then I got back to the mission at hand.

My dress fluttered around my thighs as I perused the ute photos through my heart-shaped sunnies. Ever since my plane descended over a patchwork of brown fields and touched down at the two-shed, one-horse airport I’d been determined to buy a ute. In music videos girls looked super-hot driving around wearing jeans and singlets with an arm hanging out of a ute window. And I’d fit my belongings —my suitcase and my guitar—in the back.

By the time I’d arrived at the country-music capital of Australia, all the glittering lights from the eleven-day festival had long been switched off and the tickertape swept away. What was left was a big country town, split by a river. The town had shops—such as Target, but it was, like, Target Country. The pubs were four

times the size of those in Sydney, and the town was ringed with golden trees.

My two-year hair plan was to grow out this crop into Marilyn-style waves for the album release, then into a graduated bob for my big ‘I’m going solo’ reveal, and from there, long and messy. While I was here in Tamworth I’d have wheatcoloured hair and dark blue eyes, and I’d wear jeans and singlets, or simple 1940s cotton dresses like Lucinda Williams on the cover of Happy Woman Blues. I would keep myself to myself and avoid the local men, in case I wound up being hounded out, femme fatale–style. The chatter had probably started up about this strange city girl already.

The scent of jacaranda trees wafted around and I felt calm and pleasantly rooted to the ground with the sun on my back. Being on my own to explore new terrain charged me with energy. I could rip Rose from me like a coned twin so that we stopped draining each other’s life force.

Rose had gone to Byron Bay to find herself, texting me to say she would be staying in a yoga commune in the hinterland. In Tamworth, I decided to slum it in a chintzy hotel chain, with a blue plastic shower in one corner of the main room and a persistant smell of bleach. The aircon rattled like a 747 and the boxy TV was right up near the ceiling, so I had to squint to see any of the three channels. Still, I preferred the novelty of this to the uniform hotel rooms we saw on tour.

Being freed from possessions was incredibly liberating. I started my days at eleven with a pie from the bakery on the corner, and then hopped from shop to shop to stay in the aircon. I bought things I wouldn’t wear in real life in a million years—like dreamcatcher earrings—and they looked exactly right. I found seven pairs of cowboy boots, some tooled leather belts, a couple of silk scarves and a jillaroo hat.

At night I’d start dressing slowly over a bottle of wine at around seven, slotting in those earrings and dancing back and forth between the mirror and the goon box, until it suddenly it was ten. The nearest gigs were at The Stockyards and the Top End; I watched from a stool at the bar, cradling my wine glass and letting a shoe fall to the floor as someone sang about angels and endless summers. I felt like a femme fatale from a dime-store novel in my tight cotton dresses that slipped off my shoulders. For the first week, John Villiers haunted me like a malevolent spirit. I saw him leaning on bus stops, sitting at bars and driving past in utes. I imagined him younger, atrophied by cocaine use, as desperate a man as I had always wanted him to be. I hated him for using us to repay our aunt. Eventually I emailed him, under the guise of asking him to recommend a local studio.

I took his advice a day later—all one sentence of it. Rewind Studios was in West Tamworth, behind the League Club. I phoned ahead and met with the engineer, Andy Scott. It was a sleek, modern t, more sterile than Glasshouse. I paid for a week’s worth of studio time in which I could bring in the material I’d written since filing the Dolls’ album to Jenner. It was barely cohesive at this stage, but I was determined to bleed this town for every experience it had.

Over my morning coffee in the bakery I found a short-lease apartment in the paper, and I took a cab over to see it. The bathroom smelled of mould, but I had discovered that there was a romance to be found in such things when you were just ing through. A doona and two pillows from Target Country, flower fairy lights from the Sunday market on Peel Street, a kettle, and it was furnished.

•

One evening at the studio I was snapping down the locks of my guitar case when I heard a voice that sounded like the rumble of distant thunder. It was singing a song about ‘last orders at Little Rock’—a ‘godforsaken town, too cruel for someone fresh outta school’—which was quite good, and then a dumb song

about ‘Marie from Moree’.

I loitered outside the door of the studio, pretending to check my phone with one hand and holding my guitar case with the other.

‘Are we done? Bewdy,’ the same voice said, and then Kane Sherman came bowling out of the door at me, dressed in a knackered pair of jeans and a black shirt.

It took me a second to place him: the old dog from Woop Woop. The host of Outback with Kane Sherman on Sunday nights, which seemed to be on TV out here seven nights a week. I half-turned to elbow Rose in the ribs, but she wasn’t there. If she had been, she would have looked at me, like, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ and I would have looked at her, like, ‘Shut up.’

Kane stopped dead for a second and looked at me, then continued his way down the corridor. At the end, he paused to take a drink from the water cooler.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ I said as I approached. I set down my guitar case in front of him. ‘I’m in The Dolls. We played at the same Woop Woop a few years ago. I was watching you on the big screen because your eyes were pulling me in.’

I saw his pupils contract in comprehension. ‘Ah,’ he said, scratching his chin. ‘Were you the young ladies who got chastened with bottles of urine?’

‘With bottles of bogan urine, yes.’

‘Didn’t you used to have hair?’

‘I still have hair. It’s a gamine crop.’

‘Oh, I see. It’s very nice,’ he said, leaning over to ruffle it. ‘Kinda . . . fluffy.’

He wanted to touch me—so obvious. Then I realised I’d been rubbing my collarbones and I stopped abruptly.

‘So, what are you doing here?’ he said, picking up the thread. I scanned his worn old jeans, battered leather belt, the blurred eagle tattoo on his forearm.

‘I live here,’ I said, wanting to stake some claim on Tamworth. ‘I’ve moved here while we wait for our producer to stop faffing around.’

Kane’s eyes burrowed into me. ‘You’ve decided to slum it with the locals,’ he chided. ‘Well, we’re honoured. I hope people are making you feel welcome while you kick your heels. Did you come with your boyfriend?’

Corny.

‘Nup. Just me,’ I said, twiddling an earring. ‘I’ve been sorting out some demos

here and then amusing myself most evenings.’

We had a lewd conversation with our eyes.

‘Well,’ he said, with a mock swagger. ‘May I come in and hear you sing tomorrow? I promise I won’t be a distraction.’

‘I’ll be here.’

‘Well, then, I’ll be here too.’

I walked on by, trying not to bash my guitar case against the corridor wall. Really, though, I felt like high-fiving myself. Tamworth had just got properly interesting.

•

Was ‘She Cries’ about me? I can neither confirm nor deny, but the next time Kane and I met, the following day, I was weeping in my most delicate cotton dress. It wasn’t some gross ploy to ensnare him; it was because our publicist Carmel had just emailed Rose and me a scan of a page from the street press. The shot they used to announce we would be recording with Noakes had not been approved by us—because of my teeth and Rose’s chin. Carmel assured us in capital letters that Grandiose WOULD get to the bottom of it, but regardless, there were now a hundred and fifty thousand images of The Dolls looking ugly, splattered all across Sydney pubs and shops.

‘Oh, I’ve come at a bad time,’ Kane apologised, after knocking once and opening the studio door.

I snapped my laptop closed and swiped my hand across my nose. ‘No, no, it’s all right. My dog just died.’

‘Oh Jesus, I’m so sorry.’

‘A blue heeler. Ralph. He was very old.’

‘That’s too bad. I can come back.’

I smiled grimly. ‘No, no. Have a beer with me, I think I need one.’

Fishing in my guitar case, I handed him one of the bottles I’d just happened to bring.

‘Well, if you’re sure,’ he said, taking a seat on the couch next to me and running a hand through his widow’s peak. ‘Never say no to a beer, right? That’s a very nice dress you’re wearing. It matches my eyes.’

Kane wore the same shirt as last time, but he’d undone a few more buttons,

which meant I was talking to his chest fur. The addition of the chest fur was an important point that Kane was making, because overnight I’d spent an interesting few hours googling him and reading up on his wife and three sons. I wasn’t the type to get on my moral high horse and put a downer on someone for flirting with their top buttons open when they were already trapped in a relationship, but I did appreciate someone making their intent clear like this.

I’d thought ahead and had arranged a pile of evening clothes in my guitar case, including a glimpse of skimpy pink undies. I watched Kane watching the undies. There was also a packet of condoms in the plectrum compartment, but that was best kept for my eyes only. As he bent down to set his beer on the floor, I quickly checked my reflection in my phone and wiped a finger under each eye to rub away any smudges.

‘So, I guess I’d better do some work,’ I said after a while, getting up and walking over to the vocal booth. It was a shame the studio didn’t have mood lighting like Glasshouse did. In the control room, Andy stopped reading the paper and readied himself. He cued the music into the cans.

I summoned the energy from deep inside me and let it radiate out in waves. As I sang, I let my fingers slip softly down my dress and lightly brush my bare thighs, or caress my breastbone as though I was lost in the moment. It was just a suggestion, a bit like subliminal advertising, which some feel is fair game and others consider a case for the ombudsman. I suppose I wasn’t behaving any better than the perves I used to encounter on trains, who would move their hands around near their zipper in my peripheral vision to try and get me to look at their crotch. Did I have more of a right, as a dead-set spunk, to be a sexual aggressor than they did?

Kane thought so. I could see him undressing me with his eyes from his spot on the couch. His eyes did not fumble. While I waited for the middle eight to , I appraised him in return. He had a sunburned hide for skin, with salt-and-pepper

stubble across his jaw and silver streaks winging out in his dark hair. He had a mouth of broken crockery, a torso that widened his shirt with each descending button and sun spots freckled across his broad hands. All this I found attractive.

•

When Andy called time on my last session of the week, Kane ducked his head into the studio as I was packing up and suggested we all go out for a drink. He used a voice seven shades too casual, and I noticed that Andy turned him down in a rote fashion, as though this were some kind of routine performance. I noticed, and I filed it out of sight.

Out in the car park, Kane’s ute was the size of a truck, with roo bars, multiple radio aerials and spotlights all over the place. ‘Have a go,’ he offered, tossing the keys in the palm of his hand.

‘I can’t, it’s too big.’

‘That’s the first time a girl’s said that to me,’ he returned, and got behind the wheel. I hoisted myself up to the enger seat as he switched on the radio. Kane wanted us to go to a bar on the outskirts of town; one where he knew that he wouldn’t be harassed. ‘Men are always offering me their wives,’ he complained. ‘It’s embarrassing.’

I should have found Kane creepy, but I was willingly playing the game. When he was around the air thickened densely. Atoms crackled and snapped.

Dusk was turning to darkness by the time we arrived at the pub and slammed the ute’s doors behind us. The main room was as golden and glittering as a Christmas bauble. Bartenders buzzed around the large central bar and yelled jibes at the regulars over the general melee. Out in the band room, the lights of the stage melted into wet diamonds through the bottom of my schooner glass as one lonesome troubadour in a western shirt replaced another.

Kane was good company. I found his presence intimidating, and my heart beat too fast no matter how much I tried to sedate it with beer, but he was a funny bastard with an easy charm that warmed me from the inside out. Even out here in the boondocks he garnered loads of greetings from people swaying past with jugs of beer. If it made him jittery, he disguised it well.

We stood at a respectful distance from each other. Under the guise of telling him about a Blaze FM Spring Break Special that Elementary had made us play, I pulled out my phone to show him a photo of me posing with a boy whose muscles looked like they’d been inflated by a bicycle pump. Kane bunched up to me and peered at the screen. ‘I’m jealous,’ he said. When I put my phone away he stayed close.

Over the next few rounds, Kane talked about his life. His guitarist was going through a messy divorce and was facing bankruptcy. His sister was pregnant again, to an ice addict who stole one of Kane’s Golden Guitar awards to buy drugs. He was considering firing his manager for screwing them over with the last few touring contracts.

I couldn’t help but warm to the fact that Kane trusted me as an insider and wanted my opinion based on my own experiences. Part of me felt flattered, but another part knew he’d more than likely try anything to get into my pants, including wheeling out the odd sob story. My Elle Maherson Intimates were probably flickering behind his eyes like a pink fluorescent light.

Kane and I had got halfway down the cigar we were sharing before I realised he’d only been able to smoke it inside because of who he was. So, they’d all be wondering who I was, too. I was feeling too good to be able to make a judgement call on whether or not that was a bad thing.

I took a last pull on the cigar, dragging some smoke down into my throat, even though I knew I shouldn’t.

‘I’m shickered,’ he remarked after he’d finally ground it out in an ashtray. He skewered me with his eyes. ‘How about you?’

I hesitated. Our arms were still touching, but we weren’t quite at tipping point. There was still the remote possibility that Kane was genuinely beat and would be appalled at a direct come-on. The consequences of sleeping with Kane flashed through my mind but, just like they sang in Happy Days, ‘Feels so wrong, must be right’. Or something like that.

I excused myself to go the bathroom, where I could sluice some soap and water between my legs, even though it would probably jinx me and I’d go home alone. As I pumped soap out of the dispenser on the wall I met my gaze in the mirror. My conscience stepped up its inquiry. Is this the face of a girl who wants to do this?

The worried eyes said no. But we would harden up.

Back in the bar Kane had his back to me and was shiftily downing a whisky in

one. With last orders due to be called, we had reached the point where somebody was going to have to say something inappropriate or we’d just end up going our separate ways. I willed some act of God to force us together: a bar-room brawl, violence igniting like a gas leak. Sex and danger: it was a potent combination.

I realised we were going to be here all night if I left this up to Kane.

You’re better than this.

I’m not.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, meeting his eyes. He looked at me for a second to make sure he’d understood correctly, then drained his schooner lightning fast. We pushed our way through the crowd to curious glances and a couple of smirks.

Out in the car, Kane pointed us towards town and turned the radio down low. We drove in silence, watching his headlights pick out the trees at the side of the road, the odd kangaroo making a break for it.

‘So . . . Miss Dall,’ he began. In my experience when a man called you ‘Miss’ he was about to follow up with something explicit. ‘I happened to book a hotel. You know. In case I was tired. Or in case you were tired.’

I laughed lightly. ‘Good. I’m ready for bed.’

Fuck, I mouthed to myself, looking out of the enger window into blackness. It was a line straight out of a chick-lit novel, but Kane overlooked it. Not taking his eyes off the road, he dropped a hand to my bare thigh and ran it upwards. I felt myself finally relax. Once talking was done and touching began, the tough stuff was over.

•

Before the door could even swing shut, we crashed to one wall and bounced off another, hands tearing at each other’s clothes. My cotton dress was rucked up around my waist as I anchored him to me and pushed my tongue in his mouth. I wanted to deconstruct Kane down to his most basic components as quickly as possible.

He dropped into a crouch and I felt his breath, very deliberately, on my Elle Maherson Intimates. His tongue touched the flimsy silk; the wetness turning from hot to cold on his exhale. It was his signature move, I could tell. He pulled me down to the floor and rolled on top of me with his full weight, grinding his hips into mine. I inhaled the salty smell of his neck.

I flicked open his belt buckle. I loved the sound of heavy metal. His heavy cock had sprung out of his fly and I gripped it tight, giving it a few strokes. He pushed his thigh between my legs and we pashed till we were drenched in sweat and spit. If this hotel room were to become a crime scene there would be forensic evidence everywhere.

‘Click, click,’ I said, looking up at him looking down at me with his cock in my hand. His eyes were recording everything. I sucked him until I could taste precum, and then I dragged him down again.

Kane fucked me, his face inches from mine. Our momentum sent the rug on a frantic voyage across the room. I felt searing stubble across my face, mean pinches of flesh. A tousle later, I sat astride him, knees grazing carpet, tracing the plains and valleys of his face. I put my fingers in his mouth and he sucked. Below my tits I regarded my pubic bone against his secret scorpion tattoo. It would make an interesting Instagram picture with the 1977 filter, but then I was locked into his eyes again.

We took a few more turns. From behind me, Kane held my throat. All the particles in the room thickened like storm clouds and the world slowed down as if we were fucking through treacle.

•

The next morning, Kane said, ‘I’m glad this happened,’ and stroked my hair. ‘I was going to keep asking you to come in and record backing vocals or give me some decorating tips for my studio in the hope that you’d eventually get fed up and throw me a pity root. Although . . . you still can, if you want.’

My shyness was back, a little, but I found I could keep it at bay by sexing Kane again. Every time it inched back, I knew what to do. Eventually we went out for coffee and smiled over our mugs on a table out the back of the cafe, like conspirators. When Kane went in to settle the bill I subtly checked my reflection in my teaspoon.

I decided not to mention this to Rose.

‘They were giving me dirty looks in there,’ Kane said when he came out, stuffing his wallet in his back pocket. ‘I looked pretty wasted, and then they looked out of the window and saw with you your forehead to the table.’

We headed for his ute. ‘I’ll give you the official tour of the town,’ he said, pulling on to the main street. ‘That’s Bicentennial Park. If you go there after dark you’ll find some dodgier dudes than me. Just mention my name and they’ll give you an access-all-areas . That’s The Grand . . . I started out playing in their back room. That’s where I shot the clip for “Dusty Roads”, believe it or not . . . Oh, have you been there yet?’

‘Where?’

‘There.’ He pointed out Centrelink.

‘Ha ha.’

He laughed too, and as we drove I couldn’t get Juice Newton’s country classic ‘Angel of the Morning’, about creeping home ively, blinded by the light, out of my head. Wasn’t that what I should be doing, instead of riding around in the enger seat of Kane Sherman’s ute? His wife was the elephant in the room.

Over the next few weeks, as our affair blossomed, I spent a lot of time speculating about this. With Kane, a spade was a spade. He was honest about his dishonesty, and that came as a huge relief to me. Kane’s moral com just couldn’t find due north—it swung wildly, like mine. It was actually quite tragic that we were expected to play by the rules of an antiquated monogamous society, dictated by organised religion, when we were not wired that way. We were like

outlaws.

Moreover, I came to recognise that this was a healthy situation for me. Having sex without hang-ups—beautiful, messy, unadulterated adultery sex, not ive sex, or fist-clenched sex—could only mean spiritual progress. With Hank I had made a list of things I wanted to try. Teenage stuff, really—bondage, spanking, dres in my old school uniform. We worked through them in a rote fashion, more like a couple of kids playing doctors and nurses. Since then, my other encounters had been fumbles I could barely , or sex so one-sided that I might as well have charged them for it.

With Kane it was different. There were no weird noises, unfamiliar smells, nervous laughs, awkward collisions and messes no one wanted to claim. We were so hot, we should have been televised. We had discovered the New World of sex. We were planting a flag and claiming it.

By day I strutted down the main street fuzzy with lust, my phone buzzing lewd affirmations every five minutes. My sex chakra molested everyone I walked past. Rose had been right about all that cosmic-energy stuff.

•

Kane’s wife made him go to SLAA meetings—Sex and Love Addicts’ Anonymous. He told me this up at Oxley Lookout, where we had come to make out in his ute, like in the country songs.

‘Is it wise, sending your husband to SLAA?’ I asked, tracing my finger through his chest fur.

‘Total pickup t,’ he confirmed, which gave me the usual jolt of jealousy. He had a way of saying stuff like: ‘This fan I had a thing with once . . .’ and: ‘This one girl who gave me a blowjob in the wings before I went back on for the encore . . .’ that I found a bit inappropriate. Another time he let slip he used to have a thing with the tattooed sound engineer chick at his studio: ‘the work contingent’. The word ‘contingent’ jarred me, so I’d mentally smeared it like Vaseline on a lens.

‘She had serious daddy issues,’ Kane had persisted through the smear. ‘She wanted me to cure them somehow.’

He’d morosely pondered the daddy issues for a bit. I got the feeling he considered himself a scholar of human behaviour, having conducted social experiments with enough lowlifes and unfortunates to understand them well. He was like a 1970s cop, a bad lieutenant, with a curious combination of swagger and self-loathing.

I liked to lie with my ear on Kane’s chest and hear him rumble. He told me tales about the women at SLAA, the borderline personality ones, who cracked on to everybody, spreading lies and causing havoc. Under the strip lights of some dreary church hall they’d make their hand meet yours over the plate of lamingtons and within a week one of you was guaranteed to be hospitalised. Kane described one of them, a young girl, as ‘the perfect storm’. I would like to be described as a perfect storm one day. Maybe on my headstone: Nina Dall. She was a perfect storm.

‘I think I might have been borderline personality when I was younger,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said confidently. ‘You wouldn’t have been.’

Sometimes he turned his attention to me and alluded that he understood there were troubled waters beneath the surface.

‘I could ask you what’s going on,’ he conceded, ‘but I prefer you to be a mystery.’

Kane was forever suggesting hot songs we should cover. We named our secret side project ‘The Stirrups’ and he emailed me endless YouTube clips of sordid old songs ripe for the rendering. I told him I only played my own songs and he requested that he be cast as something rugged, like a salty sailor, so I could preserve his anonymity. ‘I’ll write one about a naughty mermaid,’ he promised.

‘Let’s both write a song about each other right now,’ I suggested, as we kicked about the hotel room one weekend. I left out the obvious: and see whose is better. I already had the advantage: insane / pain / again and again. He only had stuff like leaner, wiener and spirulina.

Sometimes I fantasised all being polyamorous: me, Kane and his wife. I didn’t mind sharing Kane with Fiona. I didn’t want to wind up with one man tied to my tail. This could have been the perfect solution, if we could all just be cool.

•

I went on a lot of secret dates with Kane that became less and less secretive.

Sometimes I wondered if he deluded himself that we were a legit couple, as though he were simply a guy who operated in a few parallel universes.

In their studio his band were racing through a breakneck version of Johnny Cash’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’, which meant they were done with serious rehearsing, which meant I was sitting in the lounge like a twat for no reason. I picked up a copy of the Independent Country Music Bulletin and flipped through it, mentally assimilating all the girls’ outfits, putting my head on their bodies.

‘They’re done in there,’ Andy said as he ed through the lounge, keeping his face impartial.

The band traipsed past me. ‘Night, Tank,’ one of them called back to Kane. His band called him ‘Tank’, as in Sherman tank, so I called him Kane. His band might ignore me, or give the odd titter, but I had one over them. Even as I stood back to let them —my face a mask—I was having a flashback to their frontman in the Motel Grande, kicking my legs apart, his hand on my back. I had a power over him they did not.

Room 37.

I’d say it to myself until our next meeting, to sustain me.

Room 37.

Finally, Kane walked up with his guitar case. ‘Thank fuck they’re gone,’ he said

in his most appeasing tone.

At the rodeo out in South Tamworth, we pashed in the ute and then went in to the lines for beer and hot chips. We took our portions to the seats at the back of the stands.

The first round was kids as young as six sitting atop irritable weaners, gripping on grimly in their cowboy hats and ornate chaps. Little girls in plaits gave as good as they got, then teenage girls and boys, then adults on full-sized bulls. Rodeo clowns distracted the bulls when a rider fell off, dancing into the line of sight and then scaling the fences to evade the horns. Every rider’s name was Caleb, Clay or Troy.

‘You’re not worried?’ I asked Kane, as we ate our chips, but Kane simply let his eyes glaze over.

Coming to the Saturday-night rodeo was riskier than our usual date: lying in the back of his ute under the flight path, watching planes land. Could the engers of the inbound Qantas flight from Sydney see the arse of the ‘Ned Kelly of New Country’ piston up and down as their thoughts turned to powering up their phones again? Maybe. Maybe not. Here, though, all eyes were on us.

Looking around at the generations of families, all dressed in the local custom, I wondered what it would be like to grow up different around here. My guess was that anyone who didn’t fit the mould would move to Sydney as soon as they could. I didn’t belong here either, I understood that. I was a tourist. A sex tourist. I knew as well as Kane did that in a few weeks I’d be gone, and Kane would be a weird blip on my résumé, like the summer I handed out flyers dressed as a giant hotdog.

In my ear, Kane rumbled about how the country scene was different from that of Sydney or Melbourne, because you could walk into any bar in Tamworth, pick up a guitar and just in with anyone who was playing.

‘I don’t like playing Melbourne either,’ I told him. ‘Everyone always stands with their arms crossed.’

He agreed, then pointed out a handsome bloke sitting with his family. ‘That’s Brett Matthews. He’s a good guy. He’s a lifer, like me. You can tell immediately when you meet artists on the road who’s a lifer and who isn’t. I’ll die on the road probably, and that’s fine.’

Kane hadn’t explicitly said that I wasn’t a lifer, but he hadn’t said ‘like us’, either. I felt the anger build in me, but I remained silent. Kane wasn’t a lifer; he was a dinosaur. He didn’t get how it was actually part of the job these days to be photographed partying with your sponsors, or with fashion PRs, or arts ministers, or with bar owners bearing giant bottles of champagne when all you wanted to drink was vodka. It was soul destroying, but that was the gig.

As we drained our beers, Kane pointed out a few other characters with interesting back stories, most of which were filed straight into my ‘don’t want to know’ drawer. I was in no mood now to hear Kane describe Brett Matthews’ exgirlfriend Danielle as an amazing singer who’d really, really lived. Another woman, working behind the bar, he’d dated in high school, before she discovered smack and wound up turning tricks. Now she was clean again.

‘She hasn’t told her husband about her old life,’ he chuckled. ‘If only he knew, eh?’

Butting in sharply, I said, ‘You don’t think people can change?’ I banged the toes of my cowboy boots together in irritation.

He looked at me, sensing a WRONG WAY GO BACK sign. ‘Sure they can,’ he said, squeezing my knee. I pulled it away. ‘Some of the best people were crazy once.’

That night, Kane drove us into the bush, his high beams picking out the kangaroos jumping away. He had a second home there, surrounded by paddocks on one side and forest on the other. Inside, the lights glowed warmly, in opposition to the chill moon through the window. I absorbed each homely room, as though I might set down roots here. His kids were too old for toys to be left around, but I scanned the place for evidence of family. I was impressed by how well set up Kane was. He played the stock market as well as he played the guitar.

‘Make yourself at home,’ he called from the kitchen. ‘What’s mine is yours.’

I crouched on a worn, patterned rug and slotted a George Jones album onto the record player. The needle skidded and settled, and that lonesome baritone crackled forth. My yodelling always pissed Kane off, so he insisted on educating me in old-school country music, which was funny because Kane played new country . . . but only because it was the one way he could hope to make a buck or win any awards.

‘Let me complete your education,’ he said authoritatively. ‘If you want to explore the women, you need to listen to Wanda Jackson, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Tammy Wynette; Dolly, if you need some light relief.’ He played me country songs dripping in booze and sorrow. He played me filthy country

with words I didn’t even realise people knew back then. He played me the desperate heartbreak blues of Hank Williams and the old-style Australiana of John Williamson. Then he got sidetracked and played Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ three times in a row. He squashed me against the verandah rail and sang in my ear until I squirmed to get away.

‘Is that you?’ I said, darting a glance at a framed photo in the hallway of some old-timers with beards and banjos at the Grand Ole Opry.

‘No,’ he said patiently, leading me along the hall to another picture. ‘But this is me. In my old band, Mortimer Jack.’

‘You look so young.’

He grunted.

‘Look at those stonewash jeans, oh my god. You were ironic before your time.’ I caught myself. That was the sort of comment that was supposed to be cute, but it was also the reason I’d overheard Kane’s guitarist saying stuff like, ‘Babysitting again tonight, Tank?’

I swirled my whisky in my tumbler and felt Kane come up behind me, till I was pressed with my hands against the wall, grinning with my cheek against the cold picture frame. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever given a man a boner like that before,’ I said, feeling wanted again.

‘Let’s put out a press release,’ he said. ‘I’ll get my people to talk to your people and make it happen.’

•

As we lay in bed the next morning with The Love Boat turned down low on the TV, I started to tell Kane stories about myself. I needed to impress upon him who I was so that when I eventually left he would something about me.

‘That’s kind of cool,’ he chuckled about the hotel fire in New York. ‘You burned your mansion to the ground. Like in the Tom Waits song.’

He liked the stories about fighting with Rose, too, but he thought I should cut her some slack. I strained to detect a hint of sexual interest in his casual tone, but he covered himself well. ‘It’s obvious she loves you,’ he said. ‘When people love you they can act kind of a drag.’

‘She can start a fight in an empty room,’ I said.

‘Let her. She’ll wear herself out eventually. You wait until ten years from now, when you really can’t stand the sight of each other but the only thing you can do is keep re-forming the band every time you break up, because none of you know how to do anything else, and your girlfriends are all sick of ing you, or just sick of having you around the house.’

Kane agreed that I should go solo, with just a very experienced road manager to

look after me. ‘You’ll make a lot more money,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you a few more tricks on the guitar and you can leave your band behind, too.’ We could plan our tours, he said, so that we hit some of the same towns at the same time. We could rendezvous at Melbourne’s Rendezvous Hotel and stop in at Dingo’s in Sydney, where they’d never seen anything like Kane before: six-foot-three in a cowboy hat and the complexion of beef jerky.

On my laptop, I brought up the clip of The Dolls at Woop Woop and we laughed. ‘I shouldn’t be aroused by someone so young,’ Kane said. ‘But I don’t care.’ Tangled in the sheets, we embarked on a YouTube safari of each other’s favourite music, singing along to the clips while Kane ran me a bath.

I dragged myself away from the bed and slipped a foot in the water. The mirrors were steamed up and the bathroom was pleasantly fogged. I sank into the bubbles until they were up to my chin and read the back of Fiona’s toiletry bottles.

My hand slid between my legs, making an oily path through the bubbles. I thought about Kane and the note I found in the pocket of his jeans when he showered. It might have been a hot scenario if it weren’t so laughable. ‘We’ve never met, but you can come around any time you want,’ it said in a rounded hand. ‘I’m not joking. I will always be ready.’

Kane ought to be more careful: Fiona might have found that note instead of me. It would only take a fan like that snapping a selfie with him in a hotel bed, and he’d be in so much trouble.

Wrapped in a towel, I padded wetly back into the bedroom. Kane was making the bed and inspecting it for telltale signs. He’d also moisturise his cock, to minimise chafing. I wasn’t spiteful enough to leave lipstick on any coffee cups,

even though occasionally I thought that one of the three of us—me, Kane or the elephant—should probably just throw the cards up in the air and see where they landed.

‘You know, I’m playing next weekend,’ he said. ‘It’s a radio benefit. In Port Macquarie. I’d really like you to come and hang out—there will be no home contingent.’

I surveyed him as we leaned against opposite kitchen benches. His other words for the ‘home contingent’ were ‘et al’ and ‘etcetera’.

‘I did have my concerns about all this,’ I started, and in response he raised his tumbler of whisky, a safety barrier between us. I closed the gap and raised my mouth to his so I could taste the burning liquid on his tongue. ‘But I feel like this is really therapeutic for me.’

Almost imperceptibly, his lips twitched into a smirk.

•

I only had non-judgemental friends. I myself was about the most nonjudgemental person you could meet. Despite this, apart from Sadie, none of my friends responded when I told them about Kane and the silence was deafening. My parameters were different to theirs, though. Different laws applied. When it came to being a sneak, I was a lifer.

‘His wife must know,’ I pointed out, before dropping it. ‘They must have some kind of unofficial arrangement.’ After all, this was the same guy who joked about groupies in interviews, wrote ‘Sample the Goods’ and whose most famous video was of girls jelly wrestling in a ute tray. I mean, come on, right?

‘What sort of a wife sends her man to a sex addicts’ club instead of divorcing him?’ Sadie wondered, intrigued, when I updated her down the phone from my usual table outside the cafe near my apartment. I’d wondered that, too. I pictured Kane’s wife as nagging him frequently, in a dithery voice. She’d be wearing one of those satiny dresses that women buy in provincial boutiques, with the pattern of a seventies casino carpet. Thin blonde hair, spindly wrists, dreary. You couldn’t even hate her.

‘If you were going to leave your wife it may as well be for one of The Dolls,’ Sadie contemplated.

‘I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with him,’ I protested. ‘He’d be a terrible partner. You wouldn’t even trust him if he said he was going down the shops.’

I realised my voice had climbed to a roar, so when I hung up I studied the local paper intently, as though there was nothing to hear here. Did I just yell ‘Kane Sherman’? I wondered.

My phone vibrated on cue. He and I sex-texted each other every moment we were apart—great, lustful long outpourings that plumbed the depths of our imagination. We had the ion of poets. From Kane’s feverish brain, sash windows would materialise in his hotel room for me to half hang out of—against all hotel industry standards—while I’d sketch out the very vague interior of a semi-trailer cab that he picked me up in, wearing the black shirt with half the buttons undone. If Kane ever sensed my interest waning, he’d drip-feed me

attention and reel me back in. Stroke, stroke, stroke.

One afternoon while I was tooling around on my guitar in my apartment, Rose rang. She wanted to tell me all about Grayson’s new film, in which she’d got a bit part as a punky hooker. It made me instantly jealous even though I couldn’t act for toffee, as evidenced in the 1999 Parramatta eisteddfod. ‘I’m flying back to LA for a few weeks to be on set,’ she said. ‘It’ll be weird without you there.’

I was trying not to feel unfairly disdainful about Grayson. He was a nice-enough boy, and the pair of them seemed happy, in their healthy relationship. They had just done an Alice in Wonderland–themed photo shoot with a magazine; most blokes might baulk at this, but this was the man who introduced himself by kissing Rose’s hand and saying, ‘A rose by name, a rose by nature.’ I’d been more appalled by a shoot Rose had done for Runway without telling me, in which she posed in Alannah’s famous net dress, as though she were the rightful heir. Rose confessed she’d had to delete a few emails to Grayson from his agent so that he would be free to return to Australia with her.

‘Nina, I just wish you could be as happy as I am right now,’ my cousin crooned down the line. ‘That’s what I wish for you.’

The temptation to tell Rose that I was as happy as she was and that my sex life was one hundred per cent hotter was enormous, but I knew I’d have to keep Kane my dirty little secret. Rose wouldn’t tell anyone, but she’d think it was just the sort of thing I’d do, and I hated being predictable.

‘Things are pretty good,’ I said, then added to wind her up, ‘John Villiers put me in touch with a studio here, so I’ve been getting quite a lot of new work done with this amazing engineer.’

‘John Villiers told me you were being pretentious,’ she said.

I met this with silence, but my rage began to inflate in my skull like a hot-air balloon with nowhere to go. Was it possible Rose had been having tete-a-tetes with everyone I had ownership of?

After a few seconds, Rose exhaled and turned it into an affectionate chuckle of which Helen would have been proud. ‘I’m joking! For someone with a massive ego, Nina Dall, you’ve got very low self-esteem.’ She sounded awkward. ‘Just take care of yourself, okay? Come back to me a rockin’ country cowgirl, but please come back.’

And I realised with satisfaction that the tables had been turned.

•

What’s your philosophy on love?

I’ve never been in love, Molly. I prefer to keep things cut and dried.

Kane’s wife was getting suspicious, he said, so we had to cool it for a while. ‘We can still have phone sex, though,’ he said. Kane had written a whole song about phone sex—called ‘Off the Dial’—but I found it awkward.

He’d go: ‘What are you doing right now?’

I’d go: ‘Lying on my bed . . . talking to you.’

He’d go: ‘Yeah?’

I’d go: ‘Yeah.’

He’d go: ‘Yeah. Mmm . . . Are you on top of me right now?’

And I’d sigh inwardly, because that was not my favourite position, but I was a good sport, so I’d go: ‘Yeah.’

And he’d go: ‘Are you fingering yourself?’

And so it went. Eventually I’d blurt out something physically impossible, and I’d hear a pause as he digested this and tried to make it fit.

After a few days we figured out it was best to switch to future tense: what we were going to do.

‘I don’t want you to say a word when I open the door,’ I told him. ‘I’ll keep the lights off, then you come in. Don’t say anything.’

‘Yeah,’ he rumbled in his sex voice. ‘Yeah. But it probably won’t work. I’ll probably feel awkward and say hello, and then you’ll say hello.’

When he hung up, I brought myself to the boil. It was too distracting while he was there.

At first, being torn apart by fate was fun. I sent him a clip of myself coming. Only my face—I wasn’t going to be that reckless twice. Then I sent him photos of my naked legs. Then I wound up doing an entire shoot in front of the mirror, with little mounds of bed sheets hiding anything likely to make the six o’clock news. It whiled away the whole night and I sent him the best shots when the sun came up. In return he texted me the dimensions of his erection throughout his morning meeting with his ant.

As the time ed, Kane jacked up the intensity of his communications and daringly made them more public on Twitter. We were becoming increasingly Bollywood, ripping our hearts, still beating, from our chests, but it was also starting to irritate me. I knew which latest ache of the heart or groin Kane was going to complain of before he even had the chance.

The more my malaise bloomed, the more late-night googling I did, to prove myself right. I was shocked to discover that Kane’s gracious wife was a ‘ravenhaired beauty with generous curves’ . . . what kind of an amateur was I not to discover that on page forty-five of Google Images first time around? Then I discovered through Woman’s Day that the reason for the big gap in ages between Kane’s children was not because their marriage was on the rocks, but because Fiona suffered a series of miscarriages. The photo shoot of the pair of them

arranged on an expensive peach sofa in their beautiful home confirmed their inseparable bond through adversity.

Meanwhile, Kane kept the drip-feed of attention going. Whenever he let up, my fever abated and the lust delirium I’d been suffering under started to lift. But then, knowingly, he’d be back.

Kane did arrange for me to come to see him play at the radio benefit in Port Macquarie. He wanted me to travel up with him and hang with the band properly, but I preferred to take the coach. We were both labouring under the pretence that he was protecting my identity, that he was not giving his band salacious updates about the time we left fingerprints all over the console window at Rewind, or the time we got caught by the concierge in the walk-in closet at our hotel. It was a constant source of frustration to me, the gulf between how deep I knew myself to be and how seriously people like Kane’s band took me.

While Kane soundchecked, I waited in the VIP beer tent and hunched over my phone. Another drama had bowled out of nowhere, this time over a tweet of Rose’s about Syria. There was a massive crisis going on over there and people weren’t allowed access to social media, so Rose sent them ‘love from the universe’. It was a typical Rose tweet, yet somehow this one made the grade with the tabloids, and they were dragging us both through the mud.

As a distraction, I took a selfie in VIP with the Country Strong banner in the background. Once upon a time I lived to hang out in the VIP tent of a festival the entire weekend. Now it was only interesting if I got to goad on the tabloid journalists following my Twitter ; get them guessing where I was and why. And with whom. I worked my way through a flat beer in a plastic glass and typed some conversation starters into my phone for when Kane arrived, because when we weren’t talking sex I could never think of anything spontaneous.

– It’s funny that radio DJs have faces just like they sound.

– Why do country songs always have to bang on about being country songs in the lyrics?

– How about those 4 a.m. alarm calls for TV appearances? (Work in an anecdote.)

– He should get R.M. Williams to give him free boots.

‘Do you have the time?’ a bloke asked as I typed. I shook my head without looking up, but he kept going. ‘I know you, don’t I?’

I heaved up my eyes. ‘Doubt it.’

‘No, I do. You’re the one in that boxing video. “Fa-fa-fa . . .” Do you fuck like a girl?’

Lowering my phone, I checked him out. He was my age, was wearing a rugby shirt—probably his favourite rugby shirt—and had a drinker’s nose. If Rose were here she’d dispatch with him immediately.

‘Nice ink,’ he added, and stroked my arm.

I withdrew it. ‘Better than yours,’ I agreed. Across the tent I saw Kane walk in, but upon scoping the scene he proceeded to the bar, which he leaned against as he arranged his face into an expression of concern.

My new friend raked up the grass with a plastic chair and sat at my table.

‘So, have you met Delta Goodrem?’ he said. ‘How many albums have you sold?’

‘Why does that matter? How much money do you make?’

‘But I’m not famous,’ he reasoned. ‘So, you haven’t sold any, then. Not like Delta.’

‘Our album went gold, actually.’

Usually my filthy looks could wither springtime, but somehow this bloke was impervious.

‘Leave her alone,’ a voice said, and of course it wasn’t Kane. I’d been saved by a no-nonsense mum—the sort you’d find in a Ford ad extolling the virtues of the ergonomic dashboard. She had a young daughter in tow, who latched her solemn eyes onto my hair.

‘We’re just talking,’ he protested, gesticulating at me and knocking over my plastic glass so that the contents spilled everywhere. He looked annoyed, but I was pleased. Beer spillage always helped in these situations—there was no arguing with it.

‘No, you’re being a nuisance,’ the woman responded. ‘Go and listen to some music.’

When the bloke traipsed off I clicked into gracious mode and readily signed a programme for her daughter. Young Kaysie wanted to know what it was like being in a band, too, and this time I was more verbose. It was the best. The best thing ever. I was so grateful to have this opportunity. If Kaysie kept on practising her guitar, there was no reason she shouldn’t become famous, too. That she was already performing in talent pageants with her sister was a wonderful start.

Kane made his approach once the coast was clear. ‘Your fans are the worst,’ he said. ‘You really need to do a hip drive for some prettier ones.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I think if I’d come over he’d have hit on me and then things would have got awkward. I know how jealous you get.’

‘I’m having the worst morning,’ I said shortly. ‘We’re splattered all over the internet again—this time it’s Rose’s doing. Look.’

I showed him my phone. ‘But you look very hot in that picture,’ he countered. ‘I think I might have to take you back to my dressing room. Right now.’

‘Really?’ I said. His grin faltered. ‘Really? This is serious, Kane. Don’t switch this back to sex.’

He looked at me from under his brows, unused to this. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, repentant. ‘You’re right. I wish there was some way I could protect you.’

I could tell that Kane was wishing we were being mindless in our fuck fortress right now, which was what we’d dubbed our hotel room. I wished he was there too, and that it would collapse in on him. Watching him pretend to care was terrible, but not quite as terrible as having to pretend to believe it. It was like a double dacking in public. For this very reason, whenever I had a full-blown panic attack that my solo work wasn’t up to scratch yet, I didn’t tell Kane. I’d been cool. I’d been so cool.

‘Do you think I’m too demanding, Kane?’ I enquired, arching my brow.

‘No, I think you’re a crazy-beautiful textbook narcissist,’ he said soothingly. ‘That’s why we love you. We do love you. It’s okay.’

‘What do the textbooks say about the men who go for crazy-beautiful?’ I asked icily, but I accepted his big, warm hand as we headed for the entrance. Before we hit the main arena, he let go again.

On stage the act was underway: a tanned, blonde Taylor Swift-alike. She had a stunned look, as though she’d been hit on the head by a low-hanging PA system.

She looked lonely up there. I could see how hard she was having to work, filling the stage on her own. That had been preying on my mind lately. I thought of all the successful bands that busted up when their singers got sick of all the bullshit and split to go solo—never to better their earlier work: Savage Garden, Take That, Silverchair, Wolfmother, Van Halen, Echo and the Bunnymen, the bloody Bangles. Would I find myself galloping across a vast stage alone, with nobody to jump in when I fluffed my line? I’d be exhausted with double the clicks to clock up.

‘She’s had a hard life,’ said Kane out of the corner of his mouth. I braced myself for the usual anecdote involving an unfortunate incident he’d had with her. ‘Apparently her dog ran away, the bank took her house and her no-good woman left her for another man.’

I laughed and we stood close, enjoying the proximity of each other. I understood that Kane was as much a sex tourist as I was, adding a pop star to his collection, but I did get a kick out of people casting us glances and doing the maths. I didn’t mind being associated with the ‘voice of the badlands’ for a bit, in the same way I might try on an interesting hat. Whenever we spotted a camera phone coming out, we drifted apart ever so slightly and stared smugly ahead.

When reject Taylor wound up her set, Kane led me backstage, to some seats erected stage left. I didn’t make eye with any of the wives and hangerson but I kept watch for roadies; anyone in black Dickies. Once I’d been watching a big international band side of stage and the tour manager mistook me for a fan. ‘Hi, I’m Nina Dall,’ I said when he stopped in front of me and stared. ‘Hi, I’m Greg,’ he said. ‘Get off my stage.’

Today I could only spot their powder monkey, who would be engrossed in triggering a pyrotechnic every time Kane leapt in the air, and a roadie called Snacks, who knew me. He was leaning over Kane’s guitar rack with a torch in his mouth, dripping drool on to a nice Gibson.

When the Old Dogs took to the stage, I battled the feeling of ownership I had over Kane and tried to appraise him in a professional way. It was his technique I needed to observe, not how hot he looked in a trucker cap. At first my ego had been tethered to Kane, but in the past week I’d been reconsidering. The Dolls were easily as exciting live as the Old Dogs, and ten times better looking. Kane’s first album didn’t go platinum like ours did, and I’d already had as many column inches as he had in his much-longer career. Probably just on my hair alone.

I only had a week left in Tamworth and there was still so much he could teach me, without even having to know it.

TOP 5 PYROTECHNIC EFFECTS USED BY THE OLD DOGS (1992– PRESENT)

1. Airburst to accompany Kane’s jump from the drum riser.

3. Forty-foot gerb fountains.

3. Flame pots, timed with closing cymbals in ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’.

4. Concussion mortar (final chord of final number).

5. Silver jet for the chorus of ‘Winter’s Gone’.

The Old Dogs launched into the introduction of ‘Going Bush’. Kane was skilled at making a performance look impulsive when it was actually something more calculated. In a sea around him, even in the inverted V between his legs, women with hair awry sang along to every word. Kane preached to the choir, pointing, hectoring and sermonising. His band had the prowling, wide-legged last-gangin-town thing going on, and even though Kane was as sick of the Old Dogs as Rose and I were of each other, no one would guess it to watch him. I snickered to myself as he slung an arm around the bassist, whose name I hadn’t even needed to learn.

Pantomime-style call-and-response had always been a bugbear of mine, but Kane did it well. He traded in the tired old ‘I can’t hear you!’ for ‘Did I say we were done?’ Slinging his guitar behind his back, he jumped down into the photographers’ pit, shaking hands the length of the front row. One woman streamed tears. Would his fans be troubled if they knew that their hero hated his band, hated his music and worried about his receding hair? Probably not. They’d never know, though.

A roadie down in the photographer pit was handed the Gibson as Kane vaulted on to the barrier, swayed upright for one perilous second, and then let himself fall backwards into the crowd. I was on my feet with the rest of the VIPs, craning to see if he’d hurt himself, but after some solid groping and ripping of his shirt, he was ed back to the pit and regained his guitar.

‘Shit,’ a guy said appreciatively to me, presumably a journalist. We locked eyes.

Whatever.

Kane was wrong about me going solo. People didn’t want just one of us; they wanted Rose and me both. With boys, they enjoyed the double-up—which one was your favourite? With girls, best friends liked to figure out who was like Rose and who was like me. Other people probably just enjoyed the symmetry.

We wrote about our desperate lives—real lives, not some bullshit spoon-fed by the record label—and people appreciated that. I knew in that moment it was time to take it to the next level. We could pepper in subliminal messages to all the Kaysies out there. We could make the streets of Sydney, Los Angeles, London and Tokyo ring out with our intent. We could be a revolution.

Coming off stage, Kane kissed me quickly and the guitarist laughed, throwing me a look that didn’t even reach my eyes. I didn’t care. I’d just stolen all their moves like a jewel thief.

•

I was standing on the hotel fire escape having a smoke when Dad called. I turned down the Fleetwood Mac CD and answered.

‘What is it, old man?’

He took a breath. ‘Tony’s dead, love.’

There was silence. Just hearing that name was like the flare-up of a tumour when you thought you’d had the all clear. So, you couldn’t run away from yourself, after all.

Dad had a few beers in him. He sounded all teary and sentimental. ‘A ruptured stomach,’ he said. ‘He drank himself to death.’

‘Okay . . . Sorry for your loss.’

‘He was a good mate.’ I listened as Dad told the story once more of Tony saving my parents’ marriage—for a while—by reasoning with Helen. Here came the old joke he always wheeled out: ‘It was like hostage negotiation.’

I ed that period. Everybody was distracted, it was fair to say. I spent it shrouded in secrecy. When I wasn’t inserting Lego men into my vagina in the bath, I was acting out sickening tableaus with my dolls and then demanding to know which of them was responsible so that I could mete out the punishment. So that justice would be served.

‘The funeral’s next week, if you can make it,’ said Dad now. ‘And I’ll let Rose know.’

‘Why would Rose want to come? She hasn’t seen him for years.’

‘He’s still her godfather,’ Dad said, peeved.

Was, I thought. He was.

Wait . . . was he? Yes, he was. I’d forgotten. I considered who would likely turn up at his funeral, not knowing how much of a vile hypocrite he was. And the rest.

I’d been to many fantasy funerals, but never a real one. When I was a kid I’d while away long car journeys imagining my parents’ services. I’d lie prone on the back seat, face pressed into my arms so that neither of the deceased would look from the front seat and wonder why I was crying. I channelled my anguish into these neat graveside scenarios, because all the mourners would understand unequivocally what was going on, and why. Funerals worked in that people could cope with.

Nowadays, I wondered what people would say about me at my funeral. There’d be a full obituary and career highlights in the paper, obviously, but I was thinking about the little adverts friends and family took out, in which they said things like:

‘Beloved mother and aunty, an angel in our lives. Gave herself selflessly to others . . .’

The best they could come up with for me would be:

‘She vaguely tried to be nice sometimes . . .’

‘She was a lovely little girl once . . .’

‘. . .’

‘Dad,’ I said. ‘I can’t make it, I’m sorry. I wish I could be there for you, but I can’t.’

There was another long silence.

‘Okay.’ Dad sounded old and sad, but he didn’t question me. That was our unspoken deal. He didn’t try to stake a claim on my life, and in return I held him able for nothing.

•

I did go back to Sydney, as soon as the funeral was safely out of the way. My bond on the Tamworth apartment was a write-off because of the mess I’d made in my blackout, but like I told the real-estate guy, it didn’t need to be a big deal. The gashes on the wall were made by a belt buckle, but to all intents and purposes they could have just as easily been from a chest of drawers being moved around. Same with the boot hole in the wardrobe, with a bit of imagination.

‘It must have been slung around a fair bit,’ he said dubiously, pen hovering above his checklist.

‘Look,’ I said, pushing the wardrobe door so that it wobbled in its frame. ‘It’s actually MDF. There’s nothing to it.’ But I ended up paying, of course. Realestate agents were notorious crooks, whether you were in Sydney’s inner west or Tamworth.

‘I’m used to being the one who leaves on a plane,’ marvelled Kane when I called him to let him know I was leaving a few days early. I was anxious to get back to Rose and talk through the songs before we hit the studio for what could be the most important album of our lives. I listened for a sign of sorrow from Kane, but it was with an almost detached interest.

We vowed to keep our plans and coordinate our dates just as soon as The Dolls’ album tour was announced. ‘The Wet Spots’ was Kane’s suggested name for it. I was feeling good about it, and about going back on tour; I felt that our vigour would likely be renewed on the road, around all those crazy teenage hormones. At present it was all starting to feel like duty, before we’d even got to execute any of our grand plans: the acid trip in the mountains, the secret weekend in Byron Bay, the peepshow date in Kings Cross, the breaking of each other’s hearts. One minute you had the power to bring someone to their knees, the next you were nagging your friends to read your runes and wondering if this arrangement was as progressive as you thought.

After we hung up, Kane tweeted, ‘Don’t call it goodbye, baby,’ which got a flurry of retweets and the usual weird responses from the diehard fans who believed he spoke to them alone—like paranoid schizophrenics getting instructions from the six o’clock news.

As the plane climbed over Tamworth and the seatbelt sign pinged off, I cranked up my laptop and put in my earphones to play the long-promised song Kane had recorded for me. I listened to it three times.

I’d never ‘drank for two, thinking about threes’. In his dreams, maybe. I didn’t have ‘calico curls’, either.

It was not me. The girl in the song was not me.

20

SOAP SCUM

Forbidden love is a fine thing for lyricists and poets—that’s uncontestable. But can we call it destiny? Can we cry helplessness? No, we cannot. We must own it for what it is—a lowdown, dirty, selfish thing to do, which feels really good. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

The last time I saw Rose she was hyperventilating into a paper bag. This time she’d brought someone along for moral .

We exchanged awkward hugs in the restaurant near our rehearsal studio. I looked at her hair, but didn’t comment. Apparently we were both going to be blondes now.

‘This is Andrea, my PA,’ Rose said of the sour-looking brunette positioned between us like a human shield. Immediately I wondered who was footing the bill for this PA, but Rose was clearly making some kind of strategic challenge, and the new Tamworth-inspired Nina Dall timed her moves more carefully, so I simply took a seat. I was also working on my warmth, so as Rose ordered a pot of green tea I tried to meet Andrea’s eyes so I could smile pleasantly at her. In the end it just looked like I was staring, so I stopped.

I wasn’t pleased that I’d have to convey my enlightenment about the power of

The Dolls in front of an audience, but at least we had good news with which to kick off our reunion lunch. Immediately after hitting the studio to record album number two, we’d play Flood Aid at the Music Bowl on a bill full of Australian and international greats. It would be our biggest gig by several tens of thousands. Mickiewicz had called and bawled me out on the importance of not fucking it up, before softening and reminiscing about that last time he brought The Pogues over. Last time I’d seen him I’d done a commando roll out of his car by accident, so he was right to be concerned.

‘So traumatic about Tony,’ Rose was saying, touching a hand to her face. ‘You missed his funeral by just a few days, by the way. He was a really special guy,’ she explained to Andrea. ‘He was my only godfather.’

‘I had shit to take care of in Tamworth,’ I said, distracted. I’d just noticed Rose’s lips. They were bigger, and not just lip-liner bigger. Noticeably, expensively bigger. It was probably good we had a point of difference, though—otherwise we were going to look like Parramatta mallrats with the same hair dye.

I wore: Scotch & Soda jeans with a leather net top; vintage Chanel heels.

Rose wore: Colette Dinnigan cream lace frock; Loriblu calfskin ankle boots.

Andrea wore: sass & bide T-shirt, denim skirt, sandals. She caught me giving her the once-over.

‘You can’t get your laptop out here,’ Rose said, dropping her voice and looking askance.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not the look the restaurant wants. They want people looking like they’re enjoying themselves and concentrating on the food.’

I reflected on this. ‘What if I was an ugly moll? Would that ruin everything for them as well?’

‘Oh my god,’ she said. ‘Forget it.’

A waitress came over and I ordered raisin toast with feta. Rose was on a glutenand dairy-free diet, and this would smell amazing.

‘Raisin toast and wine?’ she queried. ‘Okay.’

‘So, how’s it going with Grayson?’ I asked, ignoring her. I could see myself in her mirror shades, hunched and hostile, so I straightened my back.

‘Good,’ she enthused, looking at Andrea for confirmation. ‘He’s coming over this week to hang out. You two really should hang out again, too.’

Her bangle clanked on the table as she gesticulated, again and again. Take it off,

I willed her silently.

‘Sure.’

I was ing a silly argument we had once about which colour hairs were grosser to leave on a pillow—black or blonde. She’d insisted blonde, so she must have forgotten about that.

‘You know Flood Aid is being filmed?’ she asked. ‘The whole concert’s going to be live on prime time, so let’s figure out what we’re going to wear. I was thinking we could both wear black in of the victims, what do you think?’

‘Or blue,’ suggested Andrea, ‘for water. Isn’t the AIDS ribbon thingy white?’

‘No, that’s yellow, I think,’ said Rose, before showing her irritation. ‘Anyway, we’re not going to wear blue or yellow. I just thought if we both wore black, the boys behind us could too and then they won’t stick out too much. Are you going to fix your hair before then, Nina? I can put you in touch with my stylist. I’ve got a new Lover dress I want to wear and maybe you could go Lisa Ho if you had some extensions.’

‘That reminds me, sweetie,’ she said to Andrea. ‘We’d better hit M.A.C up for a new palette to go with my hair.’

‘So long as we get our priorities right,’ I said, which was supposed to be funny but didn’t come out with enough finesse.

Rose and Andrea sized me up as a team.

‘Why is hair so important?’ I protested, even though I knew it was. ‘The Dolls are bigger than that.’

Rose pressed a hand to her forehead and sighed. She asked sadly after a moment, ‘Were we ever really friends, Nina? Or just thrown together? You’ve never humoured me, even as kids.’

She rubbed her nose in a gesture that was all Rose, a gesture I’d known all my life, and my heart inflated like an airbag. I was about to tell her that it wasn’t true —that as a kid I’d always envied her poise, and that I’d never felt good enough, when she added, ‘Anyway, I finally realised you’re the one with the issues, not me.’

At this, even Andrea had the good grace to look embarrassed.

As Rose pourned her tea a myna bird attacked its reflection in the hub cap of a nearby SUV; I imagined it head-butting itself into a bloody pulp. A coffee grinder went full tilt behind us, adding to my irritation.

‘This hasn’t gone the way I wanted it to go,’ I itted after a pause.

She smiled weakly. ‘Me neither.’

I forced myself to go on, even though Andrea was listening with interest. ‘It’s like we’re locked in some stupid dance and we just keep doing it.’

‘Families,’ she half-laughed and half-sniffed. ‘Let’s try something new, eh?’

‘Eh.’ I looked her dead in the eyes for what felt like the first time in years. I saw the old Rose; the one who had double-dared me into outrageous confessions in our teenage bedrooms over loose-lipped quantities of alcohol, and yet had never repeated a thing. I’d been able to trust her when I couldn’t even trust myself. ‘Let’s talk about the album. I can’t wait to get in there. This is going to be fucking massive, Rose, even if Noakes produces.’

‘If he can stop programming “modular sequences” for long enough.’

I barked a laugh. ‘I know!’ I was enjoying Andrea’s blank look and I suspected Rose was as well. We were excluding people like the good old Bain Maries days.

She grinned. ‘He hadn’t even heard of the guitar player we’re getting in.’

‘Really?’ I queried. ‘Who are we getting in?’

‘Ryan Bakker—he’s flying in from the States tomorrow to work on my songs.’

‘How come I wasn’t told about that, then?’

Rose tucked her hair behind her ear and sawed a French bean in half. ‘It was on a need-to-know basis.’

I felt my mouth drop open, with my raisin toast only halfway up to it. Let it go. After all, we needed to work with someone with integrity, and they didn’t come more authentic than Ryan. He was uninterested in fashions, credits or glowing reviews. He didn’t have to dismiss them; he was authentically unaware of them. I would barricade him on my side of the studio soon enough. I was the one with the songs.

‘Did you hear about John Villiers?’ Rose asked, completing her one-two attack as she tended to her teapot.

‘No, what?’

‘He’s working with Alannah on a comeback record.’ She waited for me to stop choking on my wine. ‘I don’t know. Could be a good thing, right? If it’s not too embarrassing.’

‘Where?’ I said plaintively.

‘I don’t know. They’ve gone bush somewhere.’

I felt a slice of panic. I’d completely lost my grip on John Villiers. Rose rested her sunnies on top of her head, so I could finally see her eyes. She looked tired as she gave my hand a sympathetic squeeze. ‘Don’t worry, doll. There’s no wrongdoing, they’re just trying out a few ideas. I’m sure he’ll return to The Dolls, if you just say the word, eh?’

‘Eh.’ I squeezed her hand back.

‘Just stay cool,’ she said. ‘You’ve practically written half an album about him— name me a time that hasn’t worked.’

Andrea offered to run me back into town. Lost in my thoughts, I sat in the back with the window cranked open, as she and Rose murmured in the front like Mum and Dad. Before we were even out of Kings Cross, Andrea had whirred my window up again.

•

In the end, it wasn’t even through party A that I found out about Kane’s other affair. It was through party B: India Arbuckle herself. Sadie had been working as a hair and make-up assistant on Northern Beaches, the soap that had produced more beefcake than any other. It was like a rendering plant, sending prepackaged Aussie meat off to Hollywood. Sadie was halfway through bronzing India’s freckles when the actress started winding up the assembled girls about Kane Sherman’s scorpion tattoo.

All this Sadie told me as we hovered in the cosmetics section in Myer, where I nearly threw up on my shopping bags. I immediately Wiki-ed India, right there

at the Napoleon Perdis counter. In a heartbeat, my connection with Kane went from life-affirming to worthless. He’d been cheating on me. Whatever happened to honour among thieves?

Long, sinewy India Arbuckle came to Northern Beaches as troubled teen Bianca Blake, and five years later was one of the show’s best-loved blondes. She enjoys yoga, meditation and surfing, and studied at the Sydney Dance Company.

Google Images loved India, particularly in a bikini. From her untroubled brow to the rings on her long, brown toes, India was a cool fucking breeze. India was oceans of fucking, fucking calm. The whole time I thought I was the exciting contingent, Kane was seeing an ex-private-school girl with tawny limbs, languid looks and the ability to cross her ankles behind her head. I was just the skanky punk chick from Parramatta; in fact, I must have been a real chore.

I turned to India’s Twitter page, where their entire dalliance was charted out in clear code words in front of a hundred thousand excitable fans for whom the penny was yet to drop. ‘How can she afford to have an affair with a married man and be so brazen about it?’ I demanded of Sadie as she guided me by the elbow into the cafe. ‘She’s meant to be an earth goddess, not a scheming cow.’

Saide guided me by the elbow as we walked into the cafe, so that I didn’t upset any fucking tables. Kane had recommended India a bunch of familiar songs on Twitter. He’d quoted her bits of Hank Williams and sent her Neil Young clips. She was getting about like she was the first girl to discover Bob Dylan.

‘Jeez, Kane, get some new material,’ I joked, but I thumped the table so hard our neighbours’ teacups jumped in their saucers.

Sadie tried to pacify me but my universe had funnelled down into the black hole of my iPhone screen. Scrolling back a few weeks, I saw Kane tweeting enthusiastically about the Logies and bigging up all the bands he hated. They must have been India’s friends, since she was g to Natalie Imbruglia’s management and launching a goddamn recording career. She was the sort of person Kane would ordinarily laugh at. I was embarrassed for him, sincerely. That was all.

‘I can’t believe he’d be so stupidly blatant,’ I erupted again. I was outraged on Fiona’s behalf. I made a mental note to scrap the country song I wrote in Tamworth: ‘I wouldn’t be so crass as to say / He wasn’t yours to keep anyway / Isn’t that what they tell you? / You shoulda done what you oughta do / You can call me Jolene / Honey, he don’t call you anything . . .’

In my mind, Fiona and I had an unspoken, agreeable arrangement. I wouldn’t intrude on their marriage, nor embarrass her in public, and she would focus on her second holiday home and turn a blind eye to his occasional absences. This new, very public development was not one I had factored into the equation. And it was ridiculous. We all knew he’d clean up at the next Country Music Awards and walk the red carpet with his wife and sons no matter what, so what was the deal with the inappropriate lovelorn outpourings?

Just as sickness gets worse at night, once I was back home at Dad’s, I found that my anger grew more virulent the later the hour. By two in the morning I’d refreshed India’s Twitter page so many times for further enraging updates that I was furious with her for her neglect of her fans. I’d even examined our hotel on Google Maps, but no Googlemobile had gone by and caught them in a clinch in the past twenty-four hours. Eventually, impulse got the better of me. After hovering my finger I bashed the send button, emailing Kane a link to India’s Twitter , with a question mark.

The next morning I was wandering around Dad’s with my phone in one hand and

the kettle in the other when Kane started prodding me via FaceTime. I let it ring a few times while I pencilled in my eyebrows and got my hair sorted, then I picked up.

He arranged his face into contrition when I sliced through the niceties.

‘Did you want something, Kane?’

‘So . . . I told you India came up to be in my video . . .’ he began cautiously.

‘No. You didn’t tell me, actually.’

He gave the impression of one who was getting old and befuddled. ‘Ah. Well, she did, and there was a bit of a thing,’ he said, ‘but it’s over already.’

I had his Twitter feed open on my laptop; I was sitting there, at the kitchen bench, staring at it. Kane had me over a barrel, though—he knew I couldn’t raise too loud a fuss, not with a record coming out, and he knew that it wasn’t my style anyway.

He tried a rueful laugh. ‘I’ve reached a new low. Things have been really bad, actually. If you knew what I’d been going through, you’d probably feel sorry for me.’

I suddenly understood: Kane loved the drama. Faithless Kane, who jacked into my masochistic side and had me ready to risk my reputation, just wanted to feel a bit shocking. The inevitable sorrow and regret was all part of the package.

‘I’ve written a new song about you,’ he said, in an attempt to lift the mood.

‘Yeah? What’s it called, “Sucker”?’

He tried to control his face, but there was a frisson of irritation from him, the front dropping already. Already. Kane, I thought, I would have let you ruin me.

‘I’d better go,’ I said.

‘Look . . . okay,’ he said, regaining composure. ‘Can we please talk again? Please? It’s really important to me. This has been my worst-case scenario, having this conversation with you.’

‘It’s okay, Kane, I’m not that bothered,’ I said. ‘This can be a practice run for when your wife finds out.’

And I decided, as we disconnected, that I wasn’t going to write a better song about Kane than the song that he’d written about me. I just wasn’t going to write a song at all. He and India could continue to embarrass themselves on Twitter; I was going to take the higher ground.

TOP 5 TAKING-THE-HIGHER-GROUND POSTS ON TWITTER

1. YouTube: Carly Simon, ‘You’re So Vain’

2. YouTube: Martha Wainwright, ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’

3. YouTube: Kelis, ‘I Hate You So Much Right Now’

4. Twitpic: Poolside at the Park Hyatt with band of handsomes and an espresso martini

5. YouTube: Red Hot Chili Peppers, ‘Higher Ground’

•

Back at the rehearsal studio, the band we were auditioning for Flood Aid seemed to come as a package. It was like Jenner ordered them from IKEA in flat-pack form. Once assembled they looked like the sort of blandly handsome types who slipped rowies into girls’ drinks in wine bars. As we walked in, barricaded behind our sunglasses, they were trying to bash out ‘Cheap’.

A choreographer stood facing them, a frown on his face. Mickiewicz had hired him to get them moving in a V-formation behind us. Rose and I stood and watched, forcing smiles. I had to feel a bit sorry for them—choreography was a

humiliating experience. Jenner once got us stagecraft lessons from a performance coach, who lectured us on everything from how to stand while we were waiting for the breakfast TV host to walk over and thank us, to how to punch the air in a middle-eight. We’d had to laugh at that last one—we’d been busting those moves since high school.

‘What’ll we call them?’ Rose whispered to me, breaking away from Andrea for a moment. ‘I’m never going to their names.’

We were starting to gain a reputation for being unable to retain band in either hemisphere. They were always leaving in huffs, from the bassist who lost his rat’s tail when he dared Rose to cut it off, to the keyboard player who was accidentally left in the hotel when the rest of us were driven to the airport. It wasn’t our job to notice.

‘Rose?’ said Jenner, into the mic in the middle of the room, where he’d been talking in a low voice to the stooges. He put on a deep, doomy voice. ‘Rose Dall. Would you care to us for this number?’

The stooges cranked up ‘Fight Like a Girl’ and when they hit their stride Rose stepped up to the mic, sunglasses still on.

Straightaway I sensed something different. She’d had singing lessons. Actually, there were all sorts of thing going on: not just the improved vocal control, but also the character details, such as the new rolling of the ‘r’s and the tough sexiness. Rose was going for a shtick. Amy Winehouse had her querulous contralto, Alannah Dall had her cheese-grater rasp, Lindsey Troy from Deap Vally did her Jack-White-on-an-empty-stomach. Rose was going for foxy French chanteuse, or something. Was this because of the time I told her she’d never be Stevie Nicks?

Andrea was watching Rose intently, hugging a folder to her chest. I sighed as Jenner came over and put a companionable arm around my shoulder.

‘You’re both sounding phenomenal,’ he said, always knowing what to say at the right time, at the right dosage. ‘The songs are fitting together like light and shade. You should be very proud of this record, Nina Dall.’

‘I am,’ I conceded. ‘We are.’

As Rose ran the band through ‘Ermine Queen’, I made for a stack of magazines in the kitchen. Cosmo had a quote from me in it: ‘If you’re having a bad hair day, always make sure your lipstick is louder than your hair.’

They always made me sound stupid.

Five minutes into flipping through The Score, I found a story that made my heart contort. It was confirmed: John Villiers was ‘on the comeback trail’ with Alannah Dall. The new music was reported to be ‘bold and compelling’. Moreover, John Villiers was quoted as saying he found it refreshing working with an old friend who knew the ropes and didn’t need nannying. [Laughter.] There was no mention of what he thought of my sex video.

•

When Grayson flew over from LA, I fully expected my cousin to disappear from view, but instead she invited me out with them.

Rose was in the middle of arranging one of her songs with Noakes in the studio. ‘Gilded Cage’ was a strong tune—a single. Lyrically, it was her masochistic Britney fantasy of being so famous that nobody would let her out of their sight. Whole teams of men would write those songs for Britney, but Rose had written this one by herself.

I wasn’t enjoying being back in Noakes’ sphere, but Rose wasn’t bothered. She reckoned his studio was better than Glasshouse because it had table football and a juice bar. When the session overran, I offered to pick up Grayson from her apartment in a cab. Rose’s place was in leafy Glebe, overlooking the lights of the city across Blackwattle Bay. It was a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar reminder that I should have the meeting with our ant that I’d been putting off all year. I ought to be investing my money in things other than beer, hotel rooms and cowboy boots.

Grayson was waiting outside in a duffel coat with a man-bag at his feet when the cab pulled up. I popped the door.

‘G’day,’ I said.

He climbed in and kissed both my cheeks. ‘So good to see you,’ he said. ‘I love your hair.’

He wasn’t wrong. I’d reached a good four inches now and it was blonde again. I ran a hand through it and fluffed it up as the cab pulled out onto Glebe Point

Road.

‘Whoops,’ he said, as a Mazda driver sounded her horn. ‘So, what’s going on in the studio today? Is the album sounding amazing?’

‘Oh, we haven’t started yet,’ I told him. ‘It’s pre-production. That’s when you sort out the arrangements and tempos, maybe bash out a rough version with the band. When it comes to recording properly we’ll be laying down our parts one by one and going into lockdown mode—no hangers-on.’

‘I can’t wait to hear it,’ he said. ‘Rose says your new songs are going to kill it.’

I braced my hand against the door as the driver weaved into the oncoming lane to overtake. ‘We sound so different on this album,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what people are going to think—it’s like two different bands.’

‘That could work,’ he said amiably. ‘It brings more texture.’

Such a Rose word, texture. See also: rich tapestry, embroider, fabric. Her sense of fashion was always spilling over into her music.

‘She’s worried people take your songs more seriously than hers,’ he continued. ‘I mean, I love Rose’s songs, but she can’t write without your input. She’s found getting her material ready this past month a real struggle.’

‘It sounds great,’ I said, surprised.

‘I know, that’s what I said. But she values your judgement. She loves you, man, what can I say?’

I chewed on that. ‘You’ve probably noticed we have our issues,’ I said.

‘Songwriters aren’t necessarily supposed to get along,’ he reasoned. ‘Look at the classic partnerships. But you’re family. You know you want the best for each other at the end of the day. That’s all that matters.’

We slowed down into the traffic jam on George Street. Normally I’d be frustrated by the wait, but being with Grayson was like reading The Little Book of Calm. I was beginning to understand what Rose saw in him.

I hung my arm out of the window and turned my head away. A ton of frozen yoghurt places had sprung up. What was that all about?

‘With all the attention you get, she’s probably worried she’s just seen as your plus-one,’ he ventured.

‘I hate the headlines,’ I said. ‘I don’t want the attention; I lie awake worrying about it all the time.’ I told him about the website listing all the men I’d slept with, which wasn’t even accurate, and the interview that electro artist Martine did, in which she alledged John Villiers wrote all our lyrics.

Grayson laughed. ‘I get called an emo vampire and compared to ageing lesbians. There’s a whole Tumblr full of photos of me to prove their point. It’s the hair— they can’t handle it.’

I laughed too. ‘You’re not an ageing lesbian, you’re a spunkrat,’ I said. ‘You turned Rose straight, didn’t you?’

When we got to Noakes’ studio our crew were loading the gear for our recording stint the following week. Grayson and I slipped past them and into the control room, where Noakes was sitting with Rose.

‘Listen to this,’ she said, kissing Grayson and returning to her swivel chair. ‘Ben was just playing me what he’s been working on lately.’

The look she shot me was loaded with meaning. Fuck this, it said.

Noakes hit play and blasted out a slick electro number with a female singer squalling about pink sunshine over his trademarked synth sounds. It was way too cute.

Fuck no, I telegraphed to Rose.

‘Awesome,’ I said to Noakes.

Rose held out her hand and Noakes ed her his wallet. Since Mickiewicz had approved cocaine under ‘catering’ expenses at Noakes’ request, Rose would partake on the grounds that it was officially sanctioned. We weren’t allowed to have any while we were laying down vocals because it constricted the throat muscles, but after we’d wrapped up was fine. Noakes glided over in his chair when she was done. I watched Grayson with interest, but he took his turn, too.

The four of us headed out for drinks in Darlinghurst. Noakes peeled off at about midnight and the rest of us kept going. At some point, Rose invited me back to her apartment. ‘You can stay in the spare room,’ she said. ‘It’s cool.’

Back in Glebe, after she and Grayson removed themselves to her bedroom, I wandered around her warmly lit lounge, picking up stuff and having a nosearound, like I used to when we were kids. Shopping bags of unpacked clothes lined the length of one wall. She’d hung Chinese lanterns from the ceiling and stuck sprays of roses in over-sized test tubes on the mantel. There was a framed print of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s next to a framed photo of The Dolls, aged eighteen—our first poster in Popstars, blown up. They were hung perfectly symmetrically, so when Rose and Grayson came back in I tilted one frame fractionally out of line to make him laugh, but he didn’t see.

I poked through Rose’s kitchen and found hot pink, silicon-handled implements that were either cooking utensils or sex toys, and a Le Creuset casserole dish that cost a ton—I knew this because Kane’s wife had one. It hadn’t occurred to me to own something like a casserole dish, but then I was still living out of my suitcase at Dad’s.

Rose came in and pulled a box of Cornflakes out of a cupboard. ‘Mm?’ she said, angling it at me. I shook my head and she reed Grayson in the lounge room. If she was eating in front of him it must be serious.

‘So, Grayson, how did Rose do on the set of your film?’ I asked as I wandered back into the lounge room and riffled through her vinyl collection.

‘Incredible,’ he said from the couch, crossing one leg over the other. ‘She excelled. She’s a natural actress.’

‘Nina, don’t put on a record,’ Rose ordered. ‘We’re listening to this.’ She slotted in the demo of the album, and the first bars of ‘Fall From Grace’ cranked up.

Coming down

To my side of town

But when you’re happy

You can’t be with me

‘That’s me,’ yelled Rose over the verse. ‘This is Nina.’

Where are you tonight if not here?

I’m up on the roof, I feel no fear

The west is covered in little lights

But where are you tonight?

‘And both!’ she conducted.

Meet me at 150 Grace Street, baby

Meet me where the sky meets the sea

‘Awesome,’ bellowed Grayson, tapping a beat on his leg. It was, too. With our demo sounding this good, the real thing was going to blow minds. Even in its raw form, Ryan’s guitar whipped the song along like a mad jockey. We’d had a clutch of string players at our bidding, responding to my every calculatedly cracked vowel with flurries of excitement, backing up my scheming with stabs of approval. The power! They’d follow me off a cliff if I let them.

As long as Noakes didn’t stuff things up with his hipster production, we had something I couldn’t wait to unleash on the world. I was feeling warm inside, crisscrossing Rose’s lounge from the stereo to the red wine to the stereo, turning it up a notch each time. Grayson was even singing along to ‘Call Off Your Dogs’ by the third verse.

Call off your dogs and return to me

Endlessly, endlessly

I only run away for the chase

Because it all falls into place

I settled at their feet and we listened to the recordings over a bottle of wine, by which time I was pleasantly drunk enough to tell them about Tamworth.

I showed them pictures of India on my phone.

‘Ugh, her NAME,’ shuddered Grayson when I showed them pictures of India on my phone.

‘It’s like a porn star name,’ I said.

‘It’s like try-hard oh I’m so spiritual skank.’

‘It’s like a continent,’ Rose said, looking at us like were arseholes. She took the phone, though, and started to investigate for herself. The first page she pulled up made her snort. Love, India told the Weekend Woman, had to be transcendent, or

it wasn’t worth having at all.

‘Mate, don’t be a hypocrite,’ she said at last. ‘It’s for the best. It’s really bad karma messing with a married man. He’s like the Bill Clinton of country music.’

‘His wife must know,’ I protested. ‘He even wrote a song called “(You Knew What I Was Like) When You Met Me”.’

‘Oh my god,’ said Rose, holding up a hand. ‘Feminism just rewound a couple of decades. So you’re happy to just accept sex in a relationship, and she’s happy to just accept money? Maybe both of you are aiming a little low.’

Actually, I wasn’t looking for advice; I was looking for outrage on my behalf. Luckily Grayson was on side. ‘I can’t believe him,’ he said. ‘You’re so much hotter than she is and he should be desperate to be with someone like you. His career needs it.’

‘I’m not criticising, doll,’ Rose said hastily, ‘I’m just saying your idea of how it was might be distorted.’

‘The sex was hot,’ said Grayson firmly. ‘That counts for something important.’

He leaned forwards to where I was sprawled on the floor. ‘It’s important,’ he whispered, nodding conspiratorially, and the wine ripped a laugh from deep in my guts. I was really starting to warm to Grayson and, finally, it felt like Rose and I were on track after so many years of conflict. As long as these two bozos

didn’t do anything stupid, like get pregnant or get too doped up on domestic bliss, everything would be okay.

21

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

As the pages of magazines filled up with new young starlets trading under single names, I started to feel less and less like I had a right to be there any more. Not just in the public eye. Anywhere. Young girls stopped ing me. Young men would surely follow. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

The weekend before we started recording our album, I decided I had to see John Villiers. I wanted to give him the chance to explain whether he was responsible for my aunt’s downfall or not, the way Mickiewicz had told it. He would be present at a segment Alannah was filming for VTV’s Where Are They Now? at Darling Harbour. Great idea, John Villiers—a where-the-fuck-are-they-now slot. That was the sort of numbnut idea Ian Essence would have come up with.

Alannah had told me to come along to Tumbalong Park at one o’clock if I wanted to see her set, so on that listlessly hot afternoon, I shuffled down from Town Hall station with a beanie jammed on my head. I still managed to wind up with a gaggle of teenage girls shadowing me, but I lost them by ducking into a pub for twenty minutes. Noakes had given me some coke, so I had a little line in the toilets while I was at it.

When I got down to the park I saw a stage set up out of the sun’s glare and a crowd gathering. I felt for my aunt—a triple-bill of has-bians wheeled out for the public’s amusement. And then there was that other feeling: jealousy. So far, The

Dolls’ only segment with VTV had been:

‘Hi, I’m Nina Dall.’

‘And I’m Rose Dall.’

‘And you’re watching . . . VTV.’

Alannah came out of a demountable dressing room to meet me, peeking through the fence at the gathering crowd before taking me inside. She ed me a root beer from the bar fridge and I accepted it without feeling. I’d have a proper beer the moment she went on.

Alannah wore: black-and-silver Alex Perry dress, Louboutin heels.

I wore: I’d been thinking jeans with my ‘I Liked You More Before You Spoke’ T-shirt and braces so as not to upstage my aunt, but it was too hot so I settled on my grey jersey dress, which was clinging to me in the heat.

‘John Villiers is at the mixing desk working on the next band,’ she said, looking me up and down and reading my mind. ‘He’ll be back soon; he’s just fixing the levels.’

She cranked the door open a notch. ‘We can smoke in here,’ she said like a

naughty schoolgirl, and offered me her pack of menthols.

‘How’s the album going?’

‘Good. We’re having to work fast because he’s moving to London. It’s better for him there. He’s acquired almost a cult-like status for his body of work, unlike here, where he’s largely ignored. Which is bloody typical of Australia.’

I felt like the energy had been sapped out of me. ‘He can’t leave,’ I said, trying to raise a jokey smile. ‘We need him here.’

‘I thought you had your hands full,’ Alannah countered. ‘What about the cowboy in Tamworth with the scorpion tattoo?’

I faltered a beat, trying to divulging that information, then updated her on Kane’s behaviour. She snorted.

‘You watch,’ she said. ‘He and his wife will have a baby, they’ll buy a new property, he’ll become dad of the year. I’ve been there.’

I fished my phone out of my bag and played Alannah a clip on YouTube of India on daytime TV. She was dramatically confessing to a trip to rehab for unspecified issues, not even thinking to mention she’d been smashing someone else’s husband.

‘Histrionic,’ Alannah diagnosed. ‘She’s on the redemption trail. Everyone’s always got to offer redemption these days, whether it’s a book, a magazine article, an interview. People lap it up. The big “forgive me”. Even if people find out about Kane, it probably won’t do her career any harm.’

Alannah returned my phone before the clip had even finished. ‘Anger is a viable creative energy,’ she said. ‘Use it. Never turn it inwards to fester; let it kick your arse all the way to the top of the charts.’

I did feel like I was making headway with my Kane rage, although just that morning I had tweeted a photo of me wrapping Rose’s birthday present while dressed in undies and a man’s shirt. Every day I’d posted a picture. Me in stack heels with my hands on my hips, staring out at the ocean. Me tinkering on my guitar in an old Chisel T-shirt and short shorts. Me reclining on my side in bed, smiling shyly into the camera. I’d had Rose take that one.

‘I know why you’re really here,’ my aunt said, making me start. With her cigarette still between two fingers, she took my face in her hands. She held it firmly and I was forced to look directly into her kohl-rimmed eyes. For the first time, I noticed they were flecked with amber.

‘You’re here to see John,’ she said. ‘Also, I can tell when you’re on something, Nina. You’re much more personable.’

I was confused by that segue; trying to figure out if the fact that she found me more personable was a green or a red light.

‘I like John,’ I said lamely. I’d noticed Alannah called him just John, so I did too.

‘I like John, too,’ she agreed. ‘He’s a good pal. He’s also sober, Nina. I’m his sponsor. So, have a think about whether that dampens his appeal.’

The door opened, making us both jump guiltily. I leapt to my feet and hugged our producer; he would always be our producer to me. Such was my discomfort at my aunt’s intensity that I wished I never had to pull my face out of his shirt.

John Villiers detached himself and leaned against the cabin wall, checking his phone before putting it in his pocket.

‘What’s going on out there?’ Alannah asked him.

‘Razzle are talking about their point system for groupies,’ he said. ‘Ten points for missing teeth, twenty points for more than four kids, maximum points for anyone weighing over ninety kilos.’

‘So, when are you two going to put this record out?’ I said brightly. I really needed another line so that I could think of interesting stuff to say.

‘Who knows?’ said Alannah, cranking the door open wider so she could light another cigarette. ‘There’s talk of a tour, but we can’t put the record out under my name.’

‘Why not? Your name will always be huge.’

‘That’s right,’ said John Villiers, ‘but Mickiewicz still owns it.’

‘I’m still under contract to him,’ said Alannah. ‘For two more albums. Funny, huh? Obviously that’s not going to happen.’

She exchanged looks with John Villiers. I didn’t think I liked this secretcollusion stuff, but I pushed my feelings aside for the sake of getting the full story.

‘If he even got wind of this TV show,’ she added, ‘he’d probably start threatening injunctions, so it’ll have to be a surprise.’

‘Maybe you could release the album under a different name, then.’

‘Maybe.’

John Villiers said dryly, ‘We won’t call it a comeback, but it should have “back” in the title somewhere.’

‘You can’t release a record without funding, darling,’ my aunt said. ‘Your boss is pocketing all my royalties, so I’m reliant on garish appearances on VTV at the moment.’ She flicked her hair. ‘At least public humiliation pays well.’

‘We can build up your equity again,’ I said. ‘I mean, everything’s free if you know what you’re doing. You can get your album funded by crowdsourcing. We’ll set you up a Facebook page and slip lots of products in the pictures. Reinforce your brand. The free shit will start flooding in again.’

John Villiers surveyed the ceiling.

‘Yes, like these shoes, darling,’ my aunt said, pointing a toe. ‘You’re teaching your grandma how to suck eggs.’

A production manager from VTV came in and ran Alannah through the segment ahead. The host would play a clip of the last known footage of her, and then they’d work the story back from there. It really stuck in my craw that I’d crack the mystery of Alannah’s disappearance at the same time as everybody else.

‘Well,’ I said, when the three of us were alone again. ‘This is the moment you officially rise from the dead, is it?’

‘Apparently so,’ she agreed, giving me a once-over and ing my stiffness. ‘Look, I was effectively dead. My career was dead in the water, thanks to Mickiewicz. You know I didn’t fake my own death, though. That was a Grandiose fabrication.’

‘No, I didn’t know,’ I said shortly. ‘Where were you, then?’

‘Darwin,’ she said, and John Villiers laughed aloud at my expression. I guess I

must have looked as stupid as I felt. Rose and I had been convinced she’d been on a yacht in Rio, or in a commune in Goa, or sunning it up in Fiji with Bryan Ferry, not shacked up in the arse-end of Australia.

Alannah clutched John Villiers’ arm, so intense was the hilarity. She leaned her head against his shoulder and I had a vision of them nearly twenty years ago, John Villiers with fluffy blonde highlights and Alannah with her wings of hair scooped back into a casual ponytail. Maybe they’d bashed out a few experimental riffs on a Casio. Maybe they’d slept together, or maybe they were thinking about it. I knew I couldn’t ask, or expect either of them to give me a straight answer, so I waited for them to compose themselves.

‘I was just finished with Sydney,’ she said when she’d recovered. ‘There was nothing for me there any more. I went to the airport straight from the venue and got on the first flight somewhere warm where nobody would think of looking.’

‘But didn’t people recognise you?’

‘Of course they did, but I was hanging out at the casino most of the time. Nobody cared.’

‘Singing?’ I said blankly.

‘Playing the pokies.’

‘She was schmoozing with marines and old ladies,’ said John Villiers. ‘Wrong

demographic.’

I mulled this over, smarting at being kept in the dark over something so pedestrian. ‘Why didn’t this go in your book?’

‘Sweetie, publishing companies are like record companies: they want something sellable.’

‘Was the tax man after you?’

Again with the exchange of looks. ‘Is that what Greg Mickiewicz told you?’ John Villiers asked, through a cloud of smoke.

‘No,’ I said. My heart raced into a gallop. Okay, so I was going to do this. ‘But he did tell us you blew the album budget on drugs and then torched the studio.’

Alannah doubled up with laughter and slapped the wall of the demountable so hard it shook. My stomach loosened a notch in relief.

‘She may as well know,’ Alannah said, and John Villiers shrugged. ‘The first part’s true—sort of. We’d cost him tens of thousands by over-running. He insisted on coming down to the studio towards the end, and when we let him in he went ballistic. It was a strange moral outburst for one well accustomed to over-indulgence.’

‘ that sitar player?’ interrupted John Villiers. ‘You insisted on flying him in from New Delhi because he’d been on Krill’s album.’

‘There was a lot of experimentation,’ my aunt acknowledged. ‘We’d brought in orchestras, brass bands, the lot. Plus, of course, one night the engineer was stoned and managed to erase half the album in one go, which meant starting all over again.’

I picked at a nail. ‘So, did you really burn the place down on purpose?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she chided. ‘I burned his jacket. His favourite leather jacket, stupid bloody thing. He wore it all the time and I was sick of the sight of it. He left it in the studio when he stormed out, and I set it on fire for a joke. Only for a joke. By then our liaison was over, so he’d lost his sense of humour.’

So, my aunt had become a high-risk situation for Mickiewicz both personally and professionally. He may have loved hanging out with rock stars, but first and foremost he was a businessman; no wonder he wanted her gone. I imagined Alannah and John Villiers huddled outside the studio, suddenly sober, watching it burn down as a siren came to a crescendo behind them. Maybe they were barefoot. I imagined John Villiers, emotionally wasted from drug abuse, a man at the end of his tether. Desperate.

‘That’s not where the hundred-and-eighty grand comes in, though,’ John Villiers said, catching me staring.

‘No, no,’ Alannah clarified. ‘The studio was covered by insurance. The money came from impossible expenditure on the previous four albums that he was

suddenly calling in, without any leeway.’

She sighed. ‘I had to go out on tour for the bastard to try to recoup his losses, with no hope of him actually ing the record. It was a catch 22. Of course I couldn’t pay the money back without ticket sales and I already owed your mum and dad a stack. So, I declared bankruptcy.’

‘She cost him the last twenty-five grand by running out on the tour,’ John Villiers said.

‘Oh, he was relieved to be rid of me,’ she reed, rummaging in her handbag and then pulling a brush vigorously through her hair. ‘He just wouldn’t release me from my contract out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Soon enough, word was going around that I’d lost my mind and tried to kill myself, and he dismissed John from all future projects. That was the point that Darwin seemed a viable option.’

‘So you next spoke to him when you told him to check out The Dolls?’ I guessed.

‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘No. He ed me when he heard I was writing my book, to remind me I still owed him a lot of money. I told him I’d rather go blind than it to touching him, anyway.’

A runner knocked at the door. ‘You’re due on set, Mrs Dall,’ he said, sticking his head in. Alannah bristled.

Out in the broadcast tent, I took a seat on a beanbag and grabbed an apple out of the fruit bowl on the table next to me, just for something to play with. All the décor was in purple and white, in a stab at looking retro and groovy.

‘I can’t believe Alannah went to Darwin,’ I said in a low voice as John Villiers restlessly skirted the room while Alannah was getting mic-ed up over by a mock-cocktail bar and positioned on a stool.

‘You went to Tamworth,’ he reminded me.

‘That wasn’t doing a runner; that was to find myself.’

‘And here you are.’

He finally sat down and I ed him. ‘All that money gone up your nose,’ I said, nudging him. ‘I might have grown up in Vaucluse if it wasn’t for you two. Instead I grew up in Parramatta.’

‘That’s heartbreaking,’ said John Villiers, watching Alannah, ‘but I’m sure it was a character-building experience.’

It was our old banter, but it felt precarious.

I watched my aunt flirt with the interviewer. He must have been twenty years

old, tops, but he expressed a long iration for her career that lingered just a little too lengthily on his own résumé.

‘Oh, you’re a young fellow,’ she said, tossing her hair. ‘I can’t possibly expect you to or care.’

He laughed that off. ‘But there are a lot of stories about you that people still hold dear . . . slapping band , firing roadies in the middle of songs, kicking dancers on TV appearances—’

‘Well, that,’ she interrupted, waving a finger at him, ‘was because nobody bloody warned me there would be dancers.’

‘Right,’ he chuckled, casting a nervous look at the producer, ‘but is it true that you used to vomit into your handbag on stage, Alannah? I think that’s what we all want to know.’

‘Oh, we were all at it, darling,’ she said smoothly. ‘Our fans used to piss themselves when they waited at the crash barrier, so that they wouldn’t lose their places. Rock’n’roll used to be a lot more unhygienic.’

‘It’s not the sort of behaviour we see from our pop stars these days.’

‘No. Is this a real plant?’ she fiddled with the potted bougainvillea next to her.

‘You missed out on that number-one hit, just,’ the interviewer braved. I held my breath. John Villiers was watching too, stroking his chin. I decided not to chance leaning too close, the way I used to.

‘I missed the boat on a number-one hit,’ she concurred, ‘and I missed the boat on having children. But that didn’t mean I had to just pimp myself around the RSLs forever. I moved somewhere hot and I took my well-earned rest.’

‘And you faked your own death,’ he prompted.

She laughed enigmatically, but he didn’t know what to do with the scoop he could be milking. I swear I’d make a better journalist than most of the ones I’d encountered.

‘Well, Alannah Dall, it’s been incredible; such an honour. I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking to you.’

‘They say you should never meet your heroes,’ she said benevolently, then stood up to smooth her skirt and follow a runner up to the stage.

We could have lent Alannah our blandly handsome band, but instead she’d pulled together her own. They looked like suburban dads, but with glitter detail —like a shiny decal on a shirt pocket, or a sequined flare on their shoes. The effect was wedding band. As they assembled on stage John Villiers moved to the sound desk and I headed out the front. I was feeling some pretty complicated emotions from seeing John and my aunt’s defensiveness. I lit a cigarette to help me cope.

Alannah was on fire from the first note. She didn’t wrap the microphone cord around her neck like she used to; she didn’t masturbate for real during ‘Can’t Get No Relief’; but she held us in thrall. Wisely, she skipped the songs from My Curse—the album Mickiewicz let bomb, and focused on the hits. I felt tears prick my eyes when the opening chords of ‘Never Said Goodbye’ crashed down. They used to call her the ‘Leather Larynx’. Now that voice had become something both tender and terribly beautiful—she belted out ‘High Maintenance’ with a rawness I could only hope to achieve. Maybe I needed to smoke more drugs.

During the chorus, Alannah came up to the lip of the stage and crouched down, the wind machine fanning out her hair behind her. I hoped she wouldn’t meet my eyes; I wanted to gawp at her uninterrupted. Once upon a time she would have given us an up-skirt shot, but now she was doing the modest one-knee-bend. I made a mental note to talk to Jenner about a wind machine—my hair would be long enough for it by the time we toured the album.

Three songs and she was out of there; and the final VTV footage would probably only be a fraction of that. As the crowd whistled, I flashed my at the bouncer standing at the gap in the fence, and made my way backstage.

•

When I pushed open the dressing-room door, Alannah turned around as though she were surprised to see me; as though we hadn’t been smoking her menthols some twenty minutes earlier. Waz, the old bugger who’d come to dinner with Mickiewicz, stood behind her.

‘Waz!’ I said, walking over and burying myself in his leather jacket. He smelled of smokes and old-man hair. I withdrew and asked him with a frown, ‘Was your band on this bill too?’

Alannah barked a laugh, one hand on her hip. ‘“Was your band on this bill too?”,’ she mimicked. ‘His band still draws sell-out crowds, darling, they’ve never been away.’

I flushed.

‘Woodford, last year,’ she went. ‘Queenscliff, Echuca . . .’

‘Not your vintage,’ Waz said to me amiably.

‘Well, that was amazing anyway,’ I said to my aunt, for want of a bigger word. ‘I can’t believe how amazing that sounded.’

‘Thanks, sweetie,’ she said, a touch offhand. She assessed herself in her compact mirror and then snapped it shut. ‘We’re off to celebrate. Do you want to come with us to one of these awful establishments on the water?’

I hesitated. ‘Is John coming?’

She adjusted her handbag on her shoulder and examined me. ‘He’s working,

sweetie,’ she said. ‘He’s here for the long haul. I’m sure Waz will be entertainment enough.’

‘Tall order,’ Waz said, ‘but I’ll try.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I just thought . . .’

But they were off, down the steps of the demountable.

Once we’d cleared the adventure playground and the carousel I could see the lights from the restaurants sparkling on the water, past the odd bobbing water taxi. It wasn’t fashionable to say so, but I quite liked Darling Harbour.

‘This one will do,’ said my aunt, putting her hand through Waz’s arm as she took the steps. ‘They’re all the same.’

We took a table inside for some privacy and I settled my bag at my feet. I had the cocaine in my shoe if I wanted a top-up . . . I didn’t know how I was going to eat anything.

‘San Pellegrino, please, sparkling,’ said my aunt as the waitress came around. ‘Actually, make that champagne. What do you have?’

‘Veuve, Dom Pérignon, Cristal . . .’

Alannah arched her brows and rounded her lips at Waz. ‘Ooh, shall we be naughty? Let’s have a little bottle of Dom. It is a special occasion.’

‘Champagne doesn’t count—not as long as it’s champagne with a capital C,’ confirmed Waz.

I sat in silence as the waitress removed their wine glasses. My aunt was sober again, wasn’t she? She couldn’t sponsor John Villiers and drink champagne. On the other hand, I couldn’t believe I was drinking champagne with Alannah Dall and Waz Sharkey from Rizzler. That was one to piss off Rose, all right. I felt like I’d risen from the pages of Juice magazine, in some decadent scene in which everyone wound up drunk, the journalist included.

‘I’ll have the same,’ I said, when it was my turn.

‘So, how are things going, young lady?’ Waz said. ‘Last time I saw you, you were the toast of Grandiose’s town.’

‘Mickiewicz is making us his chief priority this year,’ I confirmed. It sounded like a boast after I’d said it, so I tried to soften it with something more humble. ‘We’ve always been very inspired by Alannah’s career, though, so we’re aware of how things can change, like that.’

And then, it was like the click of my fingers ignited a flame in my aunt, so violently I could swear I heard the whoosh.

‘You’re not quite at the stage yet where things can take a downturn,’ she pounced, flicking her napkin into submission on her lap. ‘You need an upturn first.’

‘I didn’t mean—’ I stuttered.

‘Leave the grand industry overviews to the big girls, darling,’ she said, picking up her menu.

The waitress came over with the Dom and took our food order.

‘Cheers,’ Alannah said when she’d gone, and raised her glass to Waz.

‘Cheers,’ I mumbled, last.

‘Here’s to front-page scandals, forgotten knickers and Saturday Night Live,’ Waz said. We clinked glasses in turn. Alannah had taught me and Rose to always maintain eye through a cheers, and Waz already knew.

‘Oh my goodness,’ Alannah said. ‘How about that ghastly Lana du Wotsit on Saturday Night Live. Completely out of tune; no technique.’

‘Del Rey,’ I said, shifting in my seat. ‘Her name’s Lana Del Rey.’

‘I think she’s gorgeous,’ said Waz.

‘Oh, please,’ Alannah scoffed. ‘It’s all persona. She’s appropriating Nabokov and Nancy Sinatra without a shred of originality, for the sake of shock value. Where’s the heart?’

‘Ah,’ he shrugged.

‘I like it,’ I argued. ‘It’s the most real thing about my generation I’ve heard in a pop song. She’s singing about my life.’

‘I can’t see the fuss about the allure of teenage girls. I mean, can you, Warren?’ Alannah queried, lifting her glass for a refill. ‘I’m sure they think they’re fabulously sophisticated and sexy, but the reality is a lot of stupid questions and ive squeaks.’

I worked my jaw. I’d always fancied myself as a teenage temptress, like Drew Barrymore in Poison Ivy. Or The Amy Fisher Story. Or Doppelganger. I raised my glass and tipped it so violently that champagne flowed down my chin and I had to wipe my mouth.

‘Let’s change the subject,’ Waz suggested as I choked discreetly.

‘Drink some water,’ said Alannah.

I was about to lose my shit. I wasn’t the one who needed water. The champagne wasn’t even affecting me, thanks to the cocaine. Maybe if I dumped some in her drink when she wasn’t looking she would sober up. Instead I got out my phone and started texting. MENTAL BITCH I typed, then deleted it.

I was forgetting to breathe. I took a breath. My breathing was too shallow.

‘It’s not important,’ my aunt allowed, pouring a last drop into her glass and upending the bottle in the ice bucket. ‘I just think it’s terribly dated, that’s all.’

I looked up from my phone. ‘I think Lana is probably influenced by you, actually. People are really into dredging up the old stuff these days.’

The waiter cut me off by sliding a plate in front of me. A small mound of gnocchi sat in the centre with a drizzle of something green around it. Pea purée, probably.

‘You know what it’s like now, Waz,’ I finished. Then I frowned, leaned over and tucked his shirt label in at the nape of his neck.

‘Excuse me,’ Alannah said, drawing herself up. She stood above us for a moment, then left the table.

When she’d reached the door to the restrooms I said to Waz, adult to adult. ‘She’s drinking.’

He took a drink himself. ‘I know, not ideal,’ he itted. ‘But she’s celebrating. Often it’s when people are on a high that they slip up, not when they’re down.’

‘What should we do?’

He looked less receptive. ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said distantly. ‘Tomorrow’s a new day.’

We talked a bit about sound levels and John Villiers’ skill as a live engineer, until Alannah came back.

‘Oh, we’re talking about Jo-Jo,’ she observed, taking her seat heavily. ‘Nina’s got a big, fat crush on John.’

‘Haven’t we all,’ said Waz.

‘But I’m afraid she doesn’t even know him.’

I chewed my tasteless gnocchi and forced myself to swallow. ‘I prefer it that way,’ I said.

Waz nodded.

‘I just trust him.’

‘You don’t even know him,’ she repeated.

‘That’s why she trusts him,’ Waz said.

I could feel the table next to us watching. They’d stopped talking when they picked up the tone in Alannah’s voice.

‘Ignorance is bliss, my dear,’ my aunt sniped. ‘You may have a vivid imagination, but the reality, I’m afraid, is rather unpalatable.’

As she spoke I was carefully dicing a bit of gnocchi, but inside I was raging. She clearly didn’t know I’d had my tongue down his imaginary throat, just as I’d pushed up against his imaginary hard-on, the dimensions of which I could relive with devastating realism.

The waiter came over and topped up Alannah’s glass from a new bottle; the Dom Pérignon wasn’t even touching the sides. I excused myself and went to the bathroom. My shoe was off my foot before the door had even shut behind me and I fished out the little packet of coke. In a cubicle I shook out a messy line onto the cistern and pulled a ready-rolled note out of my bra.

Out at the basin I gave a few taut sniffs and looked at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t see Alannah in my face. I never really could. I checked my nostrils and went back out.

‘So, how are you two related?’ Waz said as I took my seat again. ‘On whose side?’

‘This one’s Jeff’s daughter,’ Alannah said, giving him a meaningful look.

‘Alannah and Mum are sisters,’ I said, frowning. I speared a bit of gnocchi and put it down again.

‘Oh, your old PA? What was her name?’ Waz asked.

‘Helen.’

‘I can’t believe you and Mum were in a band,’ I said automatically. Then I shut up, feeling strangely protective. I didn’t want Alannah talking about my mother.

‘She was a great singer,’ Alannah acknowledged, ‘but too shy. She seems to hold me responsible, as if I sapped her confidence. But your mother was always the favourite. She got all of your nanna’s attention.’

‘She says the same about you,’ I said. But Nanna was a hard old bat. ‘Maybe there just wasn’t enough attention to go around.’

Waz was staring fixedly out at the harbour, as though his usefulness had been defused by this girl talk. He snapped to when my aunt said, ‘She’s got every right to hate me, anyway.’

I sensed a warning look even though I was too slow to catch it.

‘She doesn’t hate you,’ I said.

‘Oh, she does, darling. She credits me with stealing her husband.’

Waz clanked his fork loudly against his plate.

‘Did you?’ I said, trying to laugh.

‘Oh, you don’t know our relationship,’ she said. ‘He was always there, Jeff—he understood me well. We understood each other.’

‘Shall we get the bill?’ Waz said.

‘Really?’ I tackled her. ‘I can’t imagine that. Dad’s not the sharpest tool in the

box.’

She took a sip and looked across the harbour with a pained expression, the broken heroine.

‘When?’ I persisted, my throat tightening to choke me.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘Around the time you were born. With Alain gone and my career all over the place, I needed something stable—’

‘My dad, stable?’ I laughed harshly. ‘Funny. He’s rooted everyone, you know. Probably even while he was seeing you.’

‘Probably,’ she said mildly.

I went quiet, trying to find evidence that would reveal this to all be a lie. My aunt wore a sorrowful expression as she attended to her Atlantic salmon. The black sesame crust glistened malevolently.

I met her eyes. ‘I hate you,’ I said.

‘Look, darling, it’s the champagne talking,’ Alannah said quickly, patting my wrist. ‘We’re all getting a bit emotional. There’s no need to get too dramatic about it. You live and learn. Your forties and fifties are a time of atonement;

you’ll discover that eventually.’

She squeezed my hand warmly and smiled at Waz. ‘Nina takes after me, Waz. God help her.’

That was the first time she’d ever said such a thing.

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, getting up and kicking back my chair. ‘I take after my mother.’

•

I walked, head down, across Darling Harbour with my champagne glass in my hand, booting any rubbish that crossed my path.

I’m nothing like you.

In the playground I sat on a swing to drain my glass. Hooking my arms around the chains, I pulled out a scrunched-up cigarette packet from my leather jacket. I’d been dying for a smoke for the past hour but instead I’d sat and listened to that pair of bastards.

My lighter was running low on fuel and by the time I’d lit my cigarette I’d burned my thumb on the metal. A few ibises were having a scrag fight in the

palms overhead, sending a lone dirty white feather spiralling down. I gripped onto the chains and swung myself horizontal so that I could watch them. Soon the Saturday-night fireworks would start up, hopefully at the moment I cornered John Villiers. I probably had champagne breath now though. I hated champagne.

Do you feel totally betrayed by your aunt at this moment? asked Molly.

But screw him. Molly was Alannah’s friend, or was once. After this VTV show came out, he probably would be again. I’d always adhered to a Rule of Plausibility with my fantasies so that I wouldn’t end up breaking my own heart, so I had to face it: Molly wasn’t mine anymore.

I needed to find out where John Villiers’ loyalties lay, and if they were with my aunt, so be it—he would never hear from me again. I swung myself to my feet and dropped the champagne glass in the nearest bin, enjoying the smash. The stage was still lit up across the way, and I didn’t take my eyes off it as I cut diagonally across the grass. I touched my finger to the side of my neck. My pulse was jumping painfully.

At the sound desk, John Villiers was packing up his condenser mic and decibel meter when I crossed the now-empty VTV compound.

‘You still here?’ he said, straightening up and running a hand through his hair.

I took that on the chin. ‘Are you done?’ I asked. ‘I was really hoping you could play me some of Alannah’s album.’

He pulled out his hands to show me they were empty. ‘I don’t have it on me.’

I sighed and held his gaze. ‘Back at yours?’

Was it on? I couldn’t tell, but I could see the tug-of-war going on behind his eyes. I stared at him, willing him to take me home. If he turned me down tonight, I didn’t know what I’d do.

‘I’m staying here tonight, in the city,’ he said, gazing at the skyscrapers. ‘I do all right, contrary to what you might have heard.’

I shifted and he hesitated. ‘Well, I might have some of it on my laptop,’ he itted.

‘Good,’ I said.

‘You okay?’

‘Yep,’ I grimaced.

‘The car’s over there.’

He picked up his case of sound gear and called goodbye to the guitarist of Pink

Fizz, who was watching with interest. Nosy guitarists were starting to be the bane of my existence.

John Villiers and I walked in silence. He unlocked his old Land Rover and I hopped in. Grief was a fist in my throat, but I felt a calmness too, now that I was enclosed in a darkened vehicle that smelled of John.

‘Sorry about Ben Noakes,’ I said as he gunned the engine.

‘Noakes will do a great job,’ John Villiers said, looking past me and pulling out onto the street. ‘He’s what you need right now. Don’t worry about all that Mickiewicz stuff. He’s gone soft in his old age and Alannah got the right lawyer on the case when you signed.’

‘I’m not worried,’ I said, not liking including Alannah in the conversation. ‘I’ve got him on side.’

He grunted. I watched him change gears without stalling, the engine making a wonderful racket.

‘How are you and Rose going?’

‘Okay. Rose is dating a vampire. He’s nice.’

‘A vampire lesbian?’

‘That’s finished. She’s getting loads of gay-boy love, though. She’s even used on posters for gay clubs when she’s not even playing there. How is she somehow more kitsch than me?’

‘She’s got better hair,’ he suggested.

‘Do you like it?’ I demanded, swivelling around and fluffing the back.

‘It’s reasonably cute,’ he said. ‘You’d have to make a real effort to look terrible.’ He threw me that smile despite himself; the one he gave me all those years ago when I first went into Glasshouse and spilt my Coke everywhere. We sat in silence for a bit, listening to the whir of the heater. I didn’t want this journey to end. As long as we were on our way to a destination, it delayed his rejection when I made my move.

‘So, the drugs,’ I said, pausing for him to exhale and get over it. ‘Is that why you split with your wife? The gak?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about that another time.’

He shook a cigarette out of a soft pack on the dash. So we were going to talk about it sometime. That meant we would have to see each other again. I smiled to myself and stroked my face in the dark. ‘If this were an article in a women’s magazine,’ I said, ‘that would be known as a “red flag”.’

He scoffed. ‘You’ve got a few red flags yourself. And they’re just the ones I know about.’

‘You know everything about me. You’ve had the advantage of already seeing me naked on the internet.’

‘I didn’t look.’

‘You missed out.’

We lapsed into silence again. I stole looks at him. His profile changed under each streetlight; a different mystery to his face every two beats. Now darkness had fallen, George Street was a shimmer of lights that seemed to surround us with promise. Car horns serenaded us and the smell of footpath pizza seeped through the vents. My heart vibrated like a hummingbird’s wing. Like a ruler off a desk. Like Belinda Carlisle’s top E.

I supposed that this was what it felt like, being in love—like your borders were dissolving and everything could just flood in unchecked.

John Villiers was staying in a hotel in Kings Cross, so he took a sharp left off the main drag to barrel down into the underground car park. As he looked up I thought of all the times I’d watched him at Glasshouse—just two streets from us now—and willed him to make a move. Up in the foyer, I followed him through a maze of softly lit corridors, my pulse quickening at the heavy silence between us.

Inside the studio suite, he tossed his wallet on to the kitchen bench and wandered into the bedroom. I bent to check my face in the reflection of the microwave, but I would need to get to the bathroom at some point to see if my bikini line was still in order. If not, he’d probably have a razor in there somewhere.

John Villiers came out with his laptop lead and leaned over the lounge-room table to set it up.

Hopefully not an electric razor.

Once he’d teed up the first track, he sat down on the sofa to listen. I wandered the room, automatically peering into the suitcases along one wall and then catching myself.

The song he put on wasn’t the middle-of-the-road rock I’d expected, nor the sort of classic pop that press blurbs liked to call ‘timeless’. John Villiers had kept the production pared back, orbited around the new quality of my aunt’s voice. She was still rhyming stuff like ‘masquerade’ with ‘charade’, but the affected sass of her eighties albums had been replaced by a depth of sadness that made it infinitely more beautiful. I felt an unbearable loss, listening to it. My throat ached, but I wiped a tear from my eye as quickly as it appeared.

‘That’s all I have here,’ he said, when the faintest echo of the last note had died away. ‘The rest is in the mastering stage.’

I sat down next to John Villiers at the laptop. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

All I could think about were the things I didn’t know, that other people knew about, and Alannah reckoning I didn’t know him at all.

‘Let’s go outside,’ I suggested, desperate for a smoke.

We went and sat on rickety plastic chairs on the balcony. It overlooked the pool, which was lit either end by an orange lozenge. If we were down there, I could slowly walk to the edge, pull my dress over my head and dive in. Make it Hollywood. Make the dive good. Make it rain, hard.

John Villiers lit us both a cigarette and closed his eyes. I’d never felt awkward with him like this before, and I didn’t like it. It felt like something was ending. I leaned forwards with my forearms resting on my knees, watching the water ripple. After what seemed an age, the tap of his ash broke the silence.

‘Shall we go in?’ I said, looking around at him. Then I took out my gum and stuck it under the lounger, because I intended to defer to the path of least resistance and kiss him.

John Villiers opened his eyes. He reached out his hand and put it on my head. I felt like I was being blessed. We stayed like that for a few minutes, completely still, then he got to his feet and led me inside, my hair still tingling.

Once we’d done away with words, everything was fine. John Villiers pulled me close, then hotly closer, moving almost imperceptibly to some music in his head. He kissed me and the pressure of his lips on mine smudged my edges. Under his shirt, I felt the heat of his skin on my palms and the shocking solidity of his body after so much ghostly fucking. I ran my hands from his shoulder blades down to

his jeans. Yes, it was on.

Sex with a sober John Villiers should have been something to get over quickly, but we spun it out. I’d always thought sex had to equal sensory obliteration, but there was no thrashing in the pool, no thundering guitars, no bar-room brawl, no blackout—just one long, real, strung-out moment. It felt more daring. He fucked me so deeply in the dark, it felt like he was rewriting my genetic code.

In the morning, he would realise I had left him. He would leap out of bed and check his pockets for his car keys, which would still be there.

I had something important to do.

22

BOSS

I started to alienate everybody I ran into with my tantrums. I put it down to the way I was wired, which always wound up overruling intellect. Either I was taking my rage out on some hapless roadie, or on Mickiewicz, who gave it back just as hard. I should have known his amusement would eventually run out. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

We were staring at the finish line: the final touches to the record, followed by Flood Aid and, finally, the big album reveal. I just wanted to have one thing in my life to be proud of.

First cab off the rank would be ‘The Last Laugh’, which was the final song we recorded in the studio with Noakes. When a song really resounded through you, when you were all locked in to its cosmic groove, something weird happened. Thoughts were conveyed like gamma rays. The air throbbed, your revolutionsper-minute slowed almost to a halt and it was like you were smearing your scent glands all over each other in slow-mo. With Ryan shaking death throes out of his pedal steel, Noakes playing a spooky old pianola, and a cellist and harpist roped in for the evening, we looped the final refrain into infinity, sending it squalling into the sky like a tornado, unwilling to let it fall. When you really, really got it right, it was like everybody was having sex, including the audience.

There was no audience in the studio that night, but love was definitely in the air. The feeling of John Villiers inside me still resonated like a tuning fork. It was

beautiful, like we were all on eccy.

‘Wait, I can’t swallow,’ said Rose into the mic, waving us to a halt and bunching her hair in one fist. We were on eccies, but that was beside the point.

Mickiewicz had been looming in the control room all afternoon, even contributing handclaps to ‘Gilded Cage’. We all wanted to get out of there, but Rose kept stuffing up the last verse, by laughing when she was supposed to be vengeful. Noakes pressed the talkback button in the control room.

‘What do you think of The Lindas?’ we heard Mickiewicz ask Noakes. ‘I’m thinking of g a new young girl duo. Something fresh.’

‘Good plan,’ Noakes agreed. ‘They’ve really nailed that Melbourne sound.’

‘I’ve heard they’re very professional, always on time.’

It was a lame attempt at winding up Rose, but it showed Mickiewicz was in a good mood. He’d been typically offhand about the impending honour of being nominated as an Australian National Living Treasure. Mickiewicz was about business, not glory: he claimed never to have read rock memoirs that namedropped him—Alannah’s included—nor scan the interviews he’d given to newspapers. The day before he was due to receive the award at the National Trust, here he was, turning up like clockwork to the studio and bunkering down at the console next to his mate Noakes.

As I re-strung my guitar I watched Mickiewicz and Noakes laugh with Rose in the control booth. She was off her tits. They looked at me and laughed again. As far as I was concerned, conspiring with Noakes was like sleeping with the enemy —I’d heard he’d been going around saying he was The Dolls; yet he barely talked to us. It wasn’t like he never had a laugh. He did laugh, but it wasn’t a very nice one.

I was starting to suspect that Mickiewicz didn’t always have our best interests at heart, quite apart from making us work with his golden boy. Sometimes he tried, in seemingly small ways, to pit Rose and me against each other to increase the artistic tension—such as letting Rose do photo shoots without me, or getting me to play her keyboard parts on the record; or just excluding one for the other, like now. I’d casually mentioned to him the likelihood of Rose wanting to get pregnant and how we must make the most of her while we had her, but all he said to that was, ‘That’s good. Will she or won’t she? We can perpetuate that uncertainty.’

When I finally nailed the overdub to my satisfaction I ed the others. As ever, there was a waft of heat and a stale smell when I opened the door. I high-fived Rose, but Mickiewicz remained in a reclining position on the couch, his feet up on the armrest.

‘Come on, Granddad,’ I said, holding out my hand, unsmiling. ‘We’re going to take you out for a drink.’

‘I should be taking you out for a drink,’ he said.

‘We can buy each other one. You need a celebratory champers to go with that shiny trinket you’re going to get tomorrow.’

Mickiewicz had his chauffeur pick us up in the Holden Caprice and he called dibs on the front seat. Rose pumped up the volume of ‘The Last Laugh’ on the stereo, cranking down one of the tinted windows so she could sing it at ersby.

Rose and I settled at a table outside the Beach Road Hotel while our CEO ordered a round. He brought the wine back in a fine mood and wedged himself into the table. He was wearing his favourite old-man denim shirt and jeans; smart casual. All Rose and I were required to do, apparently, was listen as he outlined the game plan for the next few months and gulls swooped on discarded chips around us. When Rose went to the bathroom I acted quickly.

‘Once we get Flood Aid out of the way we’ll get you doing promo for the album release,’ Mickiewicz was saying.

‘About that,’ I cut in. ‘We want pyrotechnics at Flood Aid. We’ve been asking for ages.’

‘Ask away,’ he scoffed. ‘It’s not happening.’

‘I went to see Alannah yesterday,’ I told him, as clean and efficient as a surgeon. ‘She filled me in on that last tour. She lost your baby doing that, you know. You not only abandoned your artist, but you abandoned a woman who was pregnant with your child.’

It was plausible, so therefore it wasn’t necessarily a lie.

‘I’d hate for the papers to find out tomorrow, of all days, what with your award ceremony and all,’ I added, almost running out of breath. I took a neat sip of my wine. It was all I could do not to vomit it back up again.

Mickiewicz looked rattled. ‘Bullshit.’ He held my eye, trying to gauge what I knew. It was a dangerous bluff on so many levels—I could only imagine the elements of this story I still hadn’t been told—but I looked steadily back at him. The tension between us felt like sex, but it was probably closer to violence.

‘Is it?’ I queried. ‘Pyrotechnics—gerb fountains, flame pots and silver jets. And you’ll release Alannah from her contract.’

He choked on his wine, about to go off like a concussion mortar. ‘What the hell difference does it make to her anyway?’

It made a difference to me. Alannah had been the making of The Dolls, that’s what people said. And now I’d return the favour and we’d be even. I’d owe her nothing.

‘She’s recording with John Villiers right now. Right now, at Glasshouse.’

Mickiewicz laughed like a toilet flushing. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘that I would love to hear.’

‘You will,’ I said. ‘Once they put it out.’

There was a menacing pause. The sun was in my eyes but I kept them trained on him. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Good luck to them.’

‘And the pyrotechnics. That’s all I ask.’

‘Is this a Dall trait?’ he erupted. ‘That bitch blackmailed me into g you in the first place, for better or for worse, and now I’m being blackmailed to un-sign her. I wish you women would make up your minds.’

I reached over and put my hand over his. ‘Please.’

He lifted his glass abruptly and the wine slapped against the side. ‘No one else on the bill will have pyrotechnics. It’s not a fucking fairground. I’m not asking the promoter that.’

‘You can sort it. Then I’ll leave you be,’ I promised, mentally sacrificing the wind machine. ‘Our record will pay you back in dividends.’

Mickiewicz tilted his head back and sucked in air through his teeth. Then he looked at me square on. ‘You’re selling your soul at the crossroads, Nina,’ he said with a hard edge to his voice. ‘I hope it’s worth it.’

‘I know,’ I muttered, as Rose returned to her seat. ‘But I have to.’

•

Dad was back in town from Western Australia, so he invited me around. I dressed incognito and took the train in order to glean some perverse enjoyment out of the oppressive scenery: industrial parks, cranes, shipping containers. From Banksia station I walked the three blocks to home as the sky turned blood red. I’d brought him a bag of merchandise, including a T-shirt that said ‘Bounce for me’. It was a reference to the bouncer incident in Sydney, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to kill the joke by having to explain it to him. He could wear it to the pub and field questions about his daughter.

I wouldn’t be mentioning his affair with Alannah, which would just be another shitbrick for my load. The unspoken turn-a-blind-eye deal I had with the old man forbade us from judging each other. I was sure he had let my mother think I was home, sober, way more than I had been, and if he’d ever found powder residue on his coffee table, he’d never mentioned it. The old man saved me a lot of hassle. It was very adult.

‘G’day, stranger!’ Dad said at the door and clapped me on the shoulder. He was wearing his favourite white Chisel shirt, which meant he’d been down the RSL. ‘Doug’s here. Want a beer?’

Doug was one of Dad’s old friends. He was okay, but he’d avoided me ever since we were watching TV once when I was twelve. You have to laugh. When Dad left the room to check dinner, I’d stretched out my legs in front of me, pointing the toes and raising them long and lean like I was in an exercise video. I’d ired their smooth tautness, the way the ceiling light illuminated the sleek line of my thigh muscles. When Dad came back in I’d stopped winding Doug up.

‘Nina,’ he said in greeting, meeting my eyes for only the briefest of moments.

I prowled around the kitchen so I didn’t have to sit opposite him and make us both feel iffy. ‘Ooh, you have a package,’ I said, seeing a stack of mail addressed to Jeff Dall. ‘Can I open it?’

‘Open your own,’ Dad said, tossing over an envelope addressed to me. I ripped it open, but it was just a letter from the Government. They reckoned they wanted to fine me for not voting in the last general election, as if the running of this country meant anything to my lifestyle.

‘So what have you been up to, Dad?’ I asked companionably.

‘Your father was just telling me about the latest jaunt to WA,’ said Doug, lifting his beer.

‘I don’t want to know,’ I warned. ‘It’s bound to be unsuitable for children. You should come to LA and visit, Dad. It’s great over there.’

‘Nah,’ he said, tilting his chin. ‘There’s too much to see in Australia. We don’t need to go overseas when we’ve got everything here.’

Doug was in agreement.

‘Oh Father,’ I said, wandering over to the fridge and rummaging around in the junk he stacked on top. ‘Oh look! You kept the little tequila hat.’

I dropped it and it went bouncing under the table. Doug shifted uncomfortably when I followed it under.

‘That’s all my daughter left me when she buggered off to Tamworth,’ Dad told him. ‘A bloody stuffed koala and a tequila hat.’

‘Yeah, but she’s doing it for her career, Jeff, look at her,’ Doug protested. I noticed he was slurring a bit, which pricked my irritation. I hated drunks.

‘I know, I’m very proud of her,’ Dad said, slinging an arm around me. ‘My daughter, the rock star. My daughter.’

‘We’re on TV in a few days, Dad,’ I said. ‘Playing with Crowded House, Jessica Mauboy and all sorts.’

‘Good one, Nina,’ Doug said.

‘My daughter,’ Dad said again.

Later that night, after Doug had gone home, I tidied my paltry possessions up a bit so that Dad could free up the spare room when I was on tour. He brought in a stack of mail and some photographs.

‘What are these?’ I asked with sinking heart.

‘Just some old snaps I dug up. You can have these ones if you want.’

Why did my parents both insist on labouring over the past this way? Was I going to have to trawl through photo albums until they fell off their perches? Or were they just as aware as I was, on some level, that things weren’t quite done right the first time around?

I looked at a photograph of us at the Gold Coast, back when I was six. ‘Ha,’ I said. As I peered closer, I had a fatalistic feeling, a sort of sad premonition.

‘If anything happens to me, Dad,’ I said, ‘you can have my Telecaster. I’m telling you that now.’

‘Nothing’s going to happen to you, love,’ he said, dropping a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re as tough as nails. Look at that,’ he continued, holding up another photo. ‘You could have gone either way there.’

He was ruminating over one of me at sixteen with blue hair.

‘Why?’

‘Your mental health.’

There was a photo of Tony, among the stack of family snaps. It was taken around the last time I saw him—so, I would have been eleven or twelve. Already his eyes were swimming like soft-boiled eggs in his ham-hock face, but I’d never questioned his health.

It might start with a touch of your hair. You might him in the hallway, where he might happen to find himself at the same time as you, on your route from bathroom to bedroom. A light stroke, and then another that tranced you, until you were hypnotised like a rabbit. This made you complicit.

‘I can’t help myself,’ he might explain. ‘You’re just too tempting.’

Later, he might grow more daring, stroking your leg affectionately with one finger as you sat on the sofa with your family. Ironically, he might be the only one paying you any attention.

Children have a fiercely held concept of what’s right and wrong, because it’s drilled into them daily. There’s no grey area or taking into of variables. If you were involved in wrongdoing, you were a bad kid. As a teacher, Tony knew that well.

While Dad made us both a Scotch, I took a stud out of my ear and used the pin to

scratch out Tony’s eyes. He would never be dead enough for me.

23

TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP

While there may have been unexpected challenges along my journey, I’ve always felt in charge of my own destiny. I wasn’t about to be dropped by my label like a dummy, to twiddle my thumbs. And so, there was always going to be a last hurrah. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

By the time the shit hit the fan with Kane, I didn’t even care. I was in our room at the Casino Royale in Melbourne, tooling away on my guitar, trying to get the riff to ‘The Last Laugh’ locked in my head before the Flood Aid show that afternoon. I knew I knew it, but I wanted to know it without knowing it.

I was also trying not to think about John Villiers and how many hours in total had ed since I left his hotel room. It was funny. When I was in a room with a guy, I was completely laid-back about it. It was when he left that my yearning became monstrous.

Rose was keeping up a spiel about Grayson, who’d flown back to LA for an audition the night before the most important performance of her life. This, despite Rose’s usually efficient efforts to delete every email from his agent.

Then she said with a frisson of excitement, ‘Wait. Is that him?’

‘Who?’

‘Bill Clinton. Your boyfriend.’

I looked up from the fretboard as Rose pumped up the volume on the remote. Kane was in the middle of a press conference with a telephone number running along the bottom of his chin. A disembodied reporter was asking him, ‘What do you say to rumours of an affair with India Arbuckle, Kane?’

‘Turn it up!’

Kane’s brow darkened. ‘If we could stick to the topic of raising the profile of our flying doctors,’ he said, in the same voice people used on the news to protest they weren’t heroes and that anyone would have done the same. ‘I think you’ll find they’re much more deserving of the spotlight than I am.’

When Kane addressed the camera I fancied he looked right at me and it gave me a thrill despite myself. It was the same look he gave me when he was blackly complaining about his manager or explaining the royalty rates of Spotify. Either way, we’d have been having sex within about thirty seconds.

‘I’ve seen that shirt,’ I said. ‘He wore that all the time.’

Rose waved me down. ‘Oh god, he’s in damage-control mode. This is so

entertaining.’

The program cut to footage of India looking harried, scurrying out of a yoga class with her head down.

‘Look at her,’ I had time to say. ‘She’s so Boohoo.com.’

Then it flicked abruptly to a story about bikies shooting each other on a picturesque stretch of coastline. That was the moment Rose’s phone beeped.

‘It’s India,’ she mock-gasped, rolling her eyes, but it wasn’t. It was Jenner. I assumed our manager was calling to tell us not to bother about the press call we were supposed to do at a wildlife park on the biggest day of our career, where we would pose with the sort of native animals affected by floods. I expected he would announce that it was a fucking stupid idea in the first place. But instead he told Rose to check out the Sunday Mail website and not to worry about it too much.

My cousin’s face was already pained in preparation as she pinwheeled my laptop across the bed towards her and stabbed in the web address. ‘A Rose in name only?’ the headline said when the page loaded.

‘Oh dear,’ I murmured.

A ‘friend’ had sold Rose out—a story in the fluff section. It was much worse than Erica Riley’s big sook about being kicked out of The Bain Maries. This new

exposé suggested punk-rock princess Rose Dall was a social climber who had set her sights on Hollywood A-lister Grayson Bryson. This made Grayson Bryson a love rat, because he was still involved with a delicately beautiful actress at the time that he was ensnared by the feisty Dolls singer. The story noted that Rose had dumped handsome young Sydney bartender James Jones the moment he was no longer of any use to her career.

Rose, it observed, had changed.

‘It’s Carly,’ Rose pronounced in fury, twirling her hair into a dreadlock at the thought of the door bitch at Dingo’s. ‘It must be. Sadie said she’s been going around slagging me off all the time.’

‘How much did they pay her?’ I wondered, peering over Rose’s shoulder at the screen.

‘Oh, who cares?’ she said. I knew she was distressed at being faced with her shadow self from Westmead. I sympathised, but it wasn’t like I was freaking out over the obligatory paragraph halfway down about hotel fires and sex clips, which was guaranteed to provide Hank with even more comedy material. My shadow selves trailed me like stalkers.

By the time Brendan knocked on our door with Sadie to take us to the photo op, Rose was inconsolable. ‘What’s Grayson’s agent going to say if he sees it?’ she moaned, clutching her throat. ‘You need to get them to take it down. I mean it, Brendan. Take. It. Down.’

‘Okay,’ he said opaquely. He checked the time on his phone. ‘You two are

supposed to be ready. Nina, you go in the car with Sadie and get a head start. Rose, you can come with me and we’ll stop by the chemist and get you some Rescue Remedy.’

‘It’s going to take more than Rescue Remedy,’ I observed, pausing in the middle of yanking off my jeans. Brendan had seen everything over the years, so I headed out into the hall in my undies and heels, and finished levering myself into my dress in the lift.

I could see Rose’s brow creping behind her giant sunglasses. ‘We’re so much bigger than Dingo’s now,’ she complained, ignoring the couple who got in at the next floor. They stared at the breakfast special on the lift wall until we reached the lobby and they got out. Beyond the gleaming marble floor of the foyer lay Desperation Quarter: the shantytown of pokie machines where cologne had to be pumped in to disguise the smell of poverty. The doors slid closed again like the Wizard of Oz’s curtain.

‘That part of my life is completely irrelevant. What don’t they understand about that?’

‘It’s sour grapes,’ Brendan said levelly.

‘But what if she keeps bringing old shit up about me to whoever asks?’

I stopped plaiting Sadie’s hair. ‘She better not,’ I said, with a surge of fierceness. ‘I’ll kick her in the clacker. Do you want me to call her, Rose?’

‘No thanks,’ she snapped, as the doors opened into the car park. Her massive handbag slid down into the crook of her arm as she gesticulated. ‘It’s not fair that I get this story when I’m the one who keeps my head down and works hard.’

The last two words dissolved into sludgy self-pity. Part of me observed interestedly as something uncontrollable flared in my brain.

‘You have changed, though, Rose.’

‘Get in the car,’ Brendan said.

‘But she has,’ I said. ‘We used to be punk-rock. We used to mean it. What’s next? Separate tour buses? Backing dancers?’

I’d ed to say ‘we’ instead of ‘you’—the shrink had told me it was less hostile.

‘Oh, please,’ Rose urged, her voice teetering. ‘Why don’t you have a go too? Everyone’s bullying me, so you may as well.’

I saw Brendan’s shoulders sag as he unlocked his car. I couldn’t agree with him more. ‘Bullied’ had to be the most over-used word of the year. Politicians, shock jocks, celebs . . . everyone was being bullied, apparently. Whatever happened to ‘heckled’?

Secretly, though, I knew Rose had a point. She’d gone to a private school before she moved to mine, and she was just too fragrant for us; a flower among the paving slabs. Within a week of her settling in, someone had whispered to the rest of the year that she’d made the switch because she’d been picked on at her previous school—and then they were all on to her. Once you’d had that sort of experience, people could detect it in you. For the rest of your life you’d have to keep up the delicate construct; the balance of being not too fragrant, but fragrant enough.

Whoever snitched on her had had to bear the guilt of it ever since, though, so don’t judge them too harshly.

‘Fucking hell,’ I breathed, when it was just Sadie and me in her little Fiat.

‘Crazy,’ she countered, pulling the rear-view mirror back towards her. ‘Poor Rose.’

‘I know, right?’ I cracked the lid of a vodka bottle from its moorings and her head swung around.

‘Before Flood Aid?’ she asked, swerving the wheel.

‘Careful,’ I said, indicating the exit coming up. ‘The barrier.’

‘You be careful,’ she retorted. ‘I’m not being held responsible by management on my first-ever job for you.’

I shushed her and riffled through the CDs in the glove box. ‘Can I plug in my iPod?’ I asked. ‘I’ll play you the Old Dogs song that’s supposedly about me, but definitely isn’t. Well . . . you can tell me what you think.’

•

Forty minutes and a loop of ‘Calico Girl’ later we were in the Yarra Valley, using my phone GPS to find the wildlife park. The elephant’s name was Barry and he was waiting to meet us, catastrophe or not. Elephants weren’t particularly under threat in Victoria, which had been worst hit by floods, but Rose had insisted that we fit one in among the koalas and echidnas. Elephants were her totem animal, apparently. She certainly never forgot a grudge.

When Sadie’s car crunched on to the gravel car park, a man in a khaki shirt hared towards us. In a deft movement I dropped the vodka bottle between my thighs and put my cardigan over my lap.

‘You must be Nina Dall, judging by the hair. I’m Mike. G’day,’ he said, leaning through the window and pumping my hand vigorously. ‘The Herald’s here already and we’ve arranged for some of the local press to be here to meet you.’

I exchanged looks with Sadie. The local press were not on my priority list, and Jenner should have been there to fix this anomaly.

‘We’ve laid on a bit of a brunch,’ Mike continued, unabashed. ‘Champagne, strawberries, sandwiches. It will give you a chance to meet Sheryl and the team.’

‘Sorry,’ I interrupted. ‘Who’s Sheryl?’

He laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘Sheryl’s my wife and my partner in crime. We’ll take you to meet Barry first, shall we? He’s very excited to say g’day.’ Mike withdrew his head from the window.

‘Um, Mike?’ I called out. ‘This is my hair and make-up artist. Is there somewhere she can set up?’

He trudged the few steps back to the car. ‘Sure,’ he said, sounding less certain. ‘I’ll show you where the ladies’ room is.’

‘Oh my god,’ I muttered to Sadie as she pulled on the park brake. ‘Okay, follow me in a sec with your things.’

After one last lightning-fast slug, I rolled the bottle under the enger seat, tugged down on my dress and followed Mike up the hill. Near the entrance, I stumbled and tipped on to my hands, but I was lagging behind Mike, so he didn’t notice. Over at a table laden with snacks I recognised the Herald photographer, and he gave me a wave.

‘Where’s your cousin?’ he asked with his mouth full of my sandwich.

‘Coming. She’s got the shits because of a story in the Mail,’ I called back.

‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘All publicity’s good publicity though, innit?’

‘That’s what I think.’

I put down my handbag and accepted the baby wallaby Mike was handing me. ‘Oh, cute.’

‘This is Sheryl,’ said Mike, introducing us to a keeper dressed in khakis identical to his.

‘Nice outfit,’ I noted and we exchanged sisterly smiles.

As Mike briefed the photographers, I let go of the wallaby that was vibrating in my lap and checked my phone for an India update. I was disappointed when there was nothing to see. ‘Mike,’ I said, putting it back in my pocket. ‘I’m going into make-up.’

By the time I came out of the toilet block with my face on, Rose had arrived with Brendan. The body language between the pair of them didn’t look great, but Rose had pasted on a ‘show must go on’ expression.

As my cousin disappeared into Sadie’s makeshift dressing room, Mike invited me up to the elephant enclosure for a shot with the star of the show. I sidled over to one side of Barry so that I could see where he was at all times. He regarded

me as I patted his trunk, which he snatched away.

Click. Click. Click.

‘Don’t be scared,’ said Mike. ‘Barry’s a sweetheart.’

I sidled closer and pointed at Barry with my painted lips forming an O.

‘What about a sexy pose?’ one of the local photographers piped up.

‘What do you think I’m doing?’ I said, making them laugh. I crouched on the ground, with my knee awkwardly lowered in front of me to cover my knickers, and did a porn-star glower at the cameras through my lashes. Barry’s trunk writhed angrily in my hand.

‘Any questions for Nina?’ Mike asked, flitting around and playing the hostess.

‘It must feel good to be releasing another album and have some positive news at last for Dolls fans,’ one reporter mused, the first stinking cab off the rank. I sighed inwardly.

‘Any news is good news,’ I said. ‘We’d hate to be boring.’

I watched Rose pick her way across the enclosure in her heels, holding on to Brendan for balance.

‘Animal rights!’ she said, flashing the peace sign. Japanese pop stars always did that and Rose was obsessed with Japan, where fashion was ditzy and gifts from fans were plentiful. Clay had shown us pictures of plastic lunchboxes you could get over there with the Dolls logo and our picture on it. They came in red and white or black and white. They were so ready for us.

By contrast, Barry was getting the shits, jerking his great head around. With a storm approaching from the northeast and a long hour of sequins ahead of him, he cast me a look that said it all. I knew how he felt. Rose wanted to hug him and so he was manoeuvred forward a few metres so she could crouch on the wall of the enclosure.

Do you think too much attention has been paid to your image? Molly queried, as I retreated out of the line of sight and lit a cigarette. Strangely, it was a relief to hear from him again.

Undoubtedly, Molly. It was only when our sophomore album, Tender Hooks, came out, that we were really taken seriously.

And some critics have suggested that in reality it was a Nina Dall album. I don’t know how you respond to that?

I gave a gracious laugh, just as Barry shook his head so vigorously that the Herald photographer had to dart forwards and steady Rose. Her face was suddenly a picture of uncertainty and I was struck by a vision of Barry taking an

almighty swing with his trunk, unaware that he was around star quality.

I snuck my phone out of my pocket so I could send a photo to John Villiers, who would appreciate this: ‘And then it hit her . . .’

And then it hit me.

John Villiers wasn’t there. Nobody needed two whole suitcases and all their sound equipment in their hotel room for an overnight stay. He had finished Alannah’s album and seen her safely through Where Are They Now?, so he was done in Australia. Done with it. Of course it was safe for him to fuck me, the night before he left the country.

Striding out of the enclosure and away across the grass, I dialled his number. It went straight to voicemail. I stared at my phone, helpless.

The bastard had shot through to London, I knew it. The pair of them had betrayed me. I took a loud suck on my cigger and exhaled with a grizzle.

From across the way I heard Barry trumpet and Rose wail. I couldn’t even raise a smile. Anxiety was riding me bareback.

‘Oh my god, it’s totally an omen,’ Rose was saying, trotting out of the enclosure with a claw hooked onto Brendan’s arm. ‘Seriously. That elephant’s fucking mental.’

I stubbed my cigarette out and saw Brendan my face but decide to leave it. His phone rang and he flicked it up to his ear.

‘What is it?’ Rose whispered to me, while Brendan was distracted. She said it like an accusation.

‘John Villiers,’ I said shortly.

‘Oh, fuck John Villiers,’ she spat. She looked at Sadie and back to me. ‘Well, seriously! Alannah called last night. She didn’t want me to say anything, but she’s worried about you. She said you were upset about something last time she saw you and then you went home with him. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I don’t tell you everything, Rose,’ I shot back. But it wasn’t that. It was because my hold on John Villiers now felt more fragile than ever. I’d already felt him slipping away, before I’d even realised he’d gone.

‘Noakes told me all about him, Nina,’ Rose was saying. ‘I presume you already know.’

It pained me to ask, it really did. ‘What?’

‘His old smack problem.’

‘So? Everyone took smack back then, Rose,’ I scoffed. ‘It was like us taking eccies; it was creative. What do you think Nick Cave’s “From Her to Eternity” is about? What about the Choirboys’ “Run to Paradise”? What about Paul Kelly’s “Careless”?’

She screwed up her face in irritation. ‘Yes, I know, Nina, but he bought the smack Danger Michaels OD-ed on. No wonder he’s working with us for nothing —we’re doing him a favour.’

I had to hold onto my guts. ‘The Danger Michaels?’ I checked. I couldn’t picture Danger Michaels without him being shirtless in leather pants, which was a weird idea when he was sharing a needle with John Villiers.

They would have just finished recording Daybreakers, thought to be Danger’s best work yet—although it was irresistible claiming such a thing when someone had died immediately after. I imagined the pair of them in the top suite at the Berkshire, maybe a few scarves flung over the lamps, John Villiers rolling up his shirtsleeve on the four-poster to reveal a strong, tanned forearm.

‘John . . .’ Danger would just have time to croak, raising himself feebly from a pillow.

‘Nina,’ Rose scowled. ‘We could have been working with Danger by now. Do you get it? Alannah could have made the introductions.’

I thought of the old Juice interview with Alannah that I used to have on my

bedroom wall. She’d called John Villiers a chameleon: at various times playing psychologist, nanny, ally, antagonist or drug buddy, depending on what role the band needed filling. But whatever he’d ordered in under ‘catering’ that day hadn’t been very productive.

‘How come we didn’t know?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t know. It’s an incestuous scene; it probably got kept quiet. How come he didn’t tell you, if you’re so close?’

I shoved past her, heading for the car.

‘Ow,’ she protested, although if I’d wanted it to hurt, it would have. She rubbed her arm. ‘I hope it was worth it, Nina. He’s ruining our career now just like he ruined hers. Poor Alannah.’

And that’s when I wheeled around and properly smacked her.

•

The Sidney Myer Music Bowl was no Hollywood Bowl, but it was pretty good. After I’d changed back at the hotel room, our roadie, Turbo, came to pick me up. He drove us around the back of the Bowl, through catering, downstairs to the dressing rooms, where Jenner would be waiting with the band. As I stepped down out of the Tarago a group of bleach-blonde girls wailed ‘Nina!’ from behind a fence.

‘Ninalikes,’ observed Turbo as we hurried past. ‘Cool.’

Rose had fired our new bassist for taking a picture down his pants with her phone during rehearsals, so we now had a stand-in whom I literally got to shake by the hand and meet for the first time in the dressing room. Jenner and Brendan turned to look at us.

‘Where’s Rose?’ Brendan said, hanging up his phone.

‘I thought she was with you?’

He flicked out his hand in frustration. ‘I dropped her at the hotel and she was going to go up and get changed.’

‘Nuh. Didn’t come to my room.’

‘Shit.’ Brendan had got a right bollocking from Mickiewicz after I set my hotel room on fire and I suspected he wasn’t off the hook yet. I could see why he was worried.

Jenner ran a hand through his hair, but I didn’t have time for this. Every time I thought of the word ‘London’, it twinged like a filament burning in my gut. I needed a drink.

‘Here she is!’ I was halfway through pouring a large vodka when Brendan called from the dressing-room door. Rose walked in stiffly. Behind her, Andrea shot me a filthy look.

I wore: Tim Ryan fringe jacket in pink, red and white; gold lurex dress; white cowboy boots.

Rose wore: Strawberry Shortcake dress with petticoats; big hair bow; legwarmers; pink Chucks; frosted pink lipstick. The Japanese ‘fairy kei’ influence was getting ridiculous, but it, too, would .

‘Nice face,’ I said in reference to the make-up. ‘You look like Nicki Minaj, doll.’

Usually any Minaj reference was our idea of a good time, but not now. Rose looked like she was spoiling for a fight. She stood with her back to me, violently cleaving pistachios, which would ruin her gel nails. The handsomes were furtively kicking around at the other end of the room and she yelled at one to put his cigarette out.

‘Where have you been?’ asked Brendan.

‘At Andrea’s,’ she said shortly. She made a show of gingerly dabbing her cheekbone with her fingers. ‘She had some designer samples for me to try.’

Andrea unzipped a cooler bag and set out a tray of Manuka honey and tippy jugs. She plugged in an atomiser. We all watched, but we knew better than to start. Outside, the Nina brigade set up wailing my name again as though one had decided to count them all in.

‘Can somebody shut them up?’ Rose snapped. She looked over at Brendan and Jenner. ‘Is there a frigging door we can shut or something?’

‘Oh, come on, usually the cheer squad’s for you,’ I said.

‘Rose is having issues right now with some of Grayson’s fans,’ said Andrea, as if she were speaking to an idiot; she didn’t rouse herself to look at me. ‘It’s possible some of them are out there now.’

Brendan heaved himself up from his armchair. ‘I’ll go and have a look,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, Rose. This place is stuffed with security.’

We still had a couple of hours to kill before we went on, so Rose and I ran through the songs with me scratching away on an unplugged guitar. Halfway through ‘Firewater’ she fished an ice cube out of her vodka and held it to her cheek.

‘Oh, fucking please,’ I said.

She sniffed. Our drummer was soundchecking out on the stage; you could feel it right through the wall. The vibration of each snap on the snare confirmed my

rage in increments. When he reached the toms I was going to do something I’d regret.

‘Don’t start wheeling into my side during “Fight” tonight,’ she said, hardly moving her mouth. ‘I mean it.’

‘Don’t you come over to my side, then,’ I said.

‘Fine. How about we just divide up the stage?’

‘Fine.’

Turbo came back with the fishnet stockings I’d sent him to get. Then we went to the side of the stage and stood with crossed arms as we watched him divvy it up with gaffer tape while the crowd looked on curiously. Rose walked back into the corridor.

After a moment, I followed her.

•

One hour till show time. Brando were on, and with Rose locked in the toilet for ages, I went to stand in the wings and watch them with Brendan. Their stylist had ditched the homie look for something more rockabilly. They had two quiffs,

four leather jackets and five Bonds tees between them.

‘Rose’s really got the hump,’ I reported as we stood shoulder to shoulder. ‘I hope she doesn’t mess up the show.’

Brendan sighed. ‘I told Jenner not to tell her about the Sunday Mail until tomorrow. Ridiculous, warning her on the day of the show.’

We watched Billy Brando’s imioned knee-slide. The audience couldn’t see, but a roadie had laid down a sheet of masonite board and the seamstress backstage had sewn padding into Billy’s pants.

‘It’s been going on for a while,’ I said. ‘There’s a picture of her and Noakes that keeps doing the rounds. They’re just having lunch in the middle of recording, but the gossip mags made out it was a romantic dinner. Now it’s all over Grayson’s fan pages in the States.’

‘They’re saying she’s a great big sluzza,’ he concluded, nodding. Brendan still found it hard to get his head around The Dolls’ lifestyle sometimes. He was used to dealing with hardcore bands whose biggest problem on the road was finding a vegan restaurant.

‘And she’s so not,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘As if she’d sleep with our producer,’ I added, just to give myself a John Villiers thrill.

Brendan’s phone buzzed with a text from Jenner summoning him to the dressing room, so we exited stage right and made our way back through the corridors.

Jenner was standing over Andrea, who was sniffling.

‘Drama,’ our manager said flatly. ‘Rose has locked herself in the car and won’t come out.’ Andrea wouldn’t meet my eye. I guessed the cushy PA job had suddenly all got a bit much.

‘I’ll go,’ I said to Jenner. Pulling on my coat, I barrelled up the stairs and past the bouncer. For a moment I couldn’t figure out where Turbo had parked—it wasn’t the sort of thing I was expected to —but then I spotted the Tarago up on the grass. Inside, Rose was staring straight ahead, rocking back and forth. When I rapped on the window, she turned her head slowly and then unlocked the doors.

‘I was going to leave,’ she said in a flat voice as I climbed in the enger side. ‘But I can’t work this car.’ She wiped her nose like an accusation.

I stared at her, wishing I’d had the presence of mind to bring a bottle of wine to make her feel better, but then she reached for a bottle of vodka I hadn’t noticed from between her thighs and lifted it up for a slug.

Rose Dall was getting pissed. Before a show. I looked around for a witness.

‘I’m leaving The Dolls,’ she said, as though we were in the middle of a conversation about it. I was bunched around in my seat towards her, but she gazed fixedly at the windscreen. ‘It’s time. I can’t do the album tour, Nina.’

I fired the lighter in my hand with my thumb, sparking it to the pulse of my rage. Shick.

She turned to me and clawed my wrist in panic. ‘I can’t do it. Something bad’s going to happen.’

Shick. Shick. Shick.

‘Rose, you’ve never had stage fright,’ I said finally. ‘Never. It’s just Melbourne doing it to you.’

It wouldn’t pay to it it now, but I knew what she meant. We’d all pictured a smack in the chops every now and then, from some deranged fan or outraged parent. Alannah wrote about imagining her stalker rushing the stage. I had visions of someone sucker-punching me for being a fraud every time I came out of a stage door. It was life in the public eye. You just dealt with it.

My cousin took another squeaky suck on the bottle and started to cry; a long,

keening whine. Her eyes were glazed.

‘Shit, Rose. You’ve got to pull it together.’

‘I’m leaving the band,’ she said, trying to set her jaw, but it was wobbling. ‘It’s decided. I’ve already rung Mickiewicz.’

‘Ha,’ I barked, flicking the Bic right out of my hand and down to the floor. ‘And how did that go?’

She wiped her nose again. ‘He understands I need to be with Grayson right now. He’s my family.’

Bullshit. This was such bullshit. She wasn’t the only one who’d maybe just lost the love of her life. And what was she going to do, cite musical differences? The difference was I was the one writing all the hits.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said as patiently as I could. ‘We’re about to go to Japan.’

‘I’m not going to Japan.’

At that moment it was like a switch had been flicked. I’d just had enough.

‘What about the merch?’ I heard myself scream. ‘What about the fucking merch? We just got it the way we wanted it. What am I supposed to do? Cut you out of every fucking shirt? Am I supposed to put “The Doll” on it?’

‘There won’t be any merch,’ she said, unflinching. ‘I’ve had advice. The Dolls are over, and the name equally belongs to me. I’m dismantling the band.’

‘But, Rose,’ I said, without even knowing I was going to. ‘If you do that I’ll have to tell people about the emails you deleted from Grayson’s . I don’t want to do that. I’m doing this for us, doll.’

I put my hand on her shoulder and it was as though the touch of it broke a spell.

‘I’ve got no one on my team,’ she screamed, looming into my face. Her eyelashes had come loose on one side so that her right eye flapped like a bird with a broken wing. ‘You have to hog everybody. Alannah, Mickiewicz, John Villiers . . . They all have to revolve around you, don’t they? But if they knew you like I did, they’d see through the attention-seeking. No wonder John left.’

I lunged for her, wrapping my hand clumsily around her neck. She slapped my face like a windmill, then scrambled for the door handle. I grabbed at her, but she pulled out of my grip, slammed the car door and was gone.

‘But, Rose, you’ve got me,’ I laughed, to no one.

My heart was thumping and I concentrated on quieting it by humming a note

under my breath. I hummed the feeling away until it just drifted off like a balloon on the breeze, smaller and smaller until I couldn’t see it any more. I’d been able to do that ever since I was a kid. After a while I started to feel a strange new sense of peace seeping in. I sat very still in the enger seat with the heater on until I was completely toasty and calm.

I must have been sitting there for a while, because eventually Jenner rapped on the window. He opened the door. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, fine,’ I smiled spacily.

He looked worried. ‘I thought you might need some help getting past the Ninalikes.’ He held out his hand, and I took it, but I stopped at the fence and signed some blurry arms and faces, still humming to myself.

Upstairs, in the maze of rooms and shower stalls, the fluoro lights and chaos quickly popped my zen bubble. I headed for the rider table and cracked open the Scotch, whether Jenner was watching or not. Intrusive thoughts. Coping strategy.

‘Who are these people in our fucking dressing room?’ I heard Rose snap from the other side of the wall, to some mumbled reinforcement from Andrea. It was a good sign. The bitch was back.

•

Those pissed girls in the front row triggered a flood of memories. Eight at night,

and they lolled over the barrier vacant-eyed, squalling at the security guards like baby birds in a nest, lost coats trampled underfoot. The Music Bowl was an outdoor venue, so I’d really have to stare into the stage lights to blot them out.

But as I jogged on the spot for the intro of ‘The Last Laugh’, I realised: it was just a part of growing up, this stuff. Everybody was somewhere on the shame spectrum. Some people just did their shameful things when they thought no one could see, or they covered so well that they even fooled themselves. With me, it was what people paid to see. It had value.

‘This one’s the first single from our new album,’ I yelled into the mic. I wasn’t one for greeting cities—they knew who they were. ‘It’s called “The Last Laugh”.’

Rose took the first line, and I telegraphed my thanks to the gods of vodka that she was together enough to come in. ‘Speeding away,’ she sang, ‘drop out of space and time’. I flung out my arm and pointed at her until it was my go.

Crouching, I tore a hand through my hair. ‘Telling me no, but you don’t know how far I’ll go.’ I jumped back up into rock-out position and head-banged the lead-up to the chorus so that my hair would be all dishevelled when I stopped —‘You don’t know the lengths I’ll go.’ The drummer looked quizzically at me as I made my approach, yet still flinched when I lassoed out the mic lead and smashed the cymbal. He recovered quickly.

On her side of the stage, Rose clutched at her dress and bent knock-kneed as though she needed a wee. That was her signature move and the crowd loved it. She dropped to a squat in front of Craig, the guitarist, and watched him jerk out a solo. I knew without bothering to look that she was shaking her head as though overcome. When she skipped across the gaffer tape line to me I put my arm

around her so that we could sing the final verse into the same mic. I could smell a rubbery tang of sweat; the panicky kind. We got a big cheer when we hugged for about fifteen seconds. She tried to break, but I held her close.

‘This one’s called “Hounded”,’ Rose said, haring off across the stage. ‘It’s about wanting to break free from someone who won’t let you.’

‘Seek me in your search engine, stake me out behind stage doors . . .’

‘Hunt me in arena grounds, chase me through the corridors . . .’

‘Pin me up against the wall . . .’

‘Set me up just to see me fall . . .’

I gave Rose a sharp look as she emoted her bit, doubling over and grabbing her chest. I’d written ‘Hounded’ about John Villiers, yet somehow it always seemed to become all about her. She forgot the next line and gave a desperate little laugh. I could hear her panting in my in-ear monitor because our sound engineer had stuffed up the levels again. It was really off-putting. I finished off the verse for her, then took a seat on the edge of the stage to belt out the chorus.

The last song was a crowd-pleaser: ‘Chica Rock’n’Roll’. I knew it would be the one that made the televised concert. At the front of the stage I stopped to survey the crowd. There were a few home-cobbled banners for other bands further back, but the front rows were full of faces looking at me expectantly. They all knew I

liked to zag when people thought I would zig.

As the glam-rock stomp cranked up, Rose flicked the hem of her dress like a little girl and marched her feet to the beat. When she fronted up to take the first verse, all tits and hips, I ducked out of my guitar strap, took a running jump and pelted myself into the crowd. I’d stage-dived before at The Dummies’ shows, but never at my own. My job was to stay as stiff as a board and keep hold of the mic, blind with adrenaline, before being ed back towards the photographers’ pit. The camera crane followed me for the up-skirt shot.

I fell on to a security guard and accepted a leg-up back on to the stage. It was exhilarating. Turbo ran out and handed me my guitar, and beyond him I vaguely noticed Jenner, hovering at my speaker stack. I laughed my way through the next verse with the crowd helping me along, before the sound of someone screaming, ‘We love you, Nina!’ reminded me to check on Rose.

She was right there, eyes blazing, when I turned around, and her mic echoed on my chest when she shoved me backwards. I couldn’t hear what she said. Taking the chorus, I sang raggedly, trying to catch my breath. I didn’t dare risk the high note. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rose heading back over the gaffer tape to her side. I watched her trip over a teleprompter and stumble forward. She went over like a newborn colt.

Then she walked off stage.

I closed my eyes, only now ing the spittle of fine rain that was making it past the lip of the roof. The stupid cow, I thought, as the band played on.

The stupid cow.

Everything was still to come. Not just the rest of the set; everything. We hadn’t had the choppers, the TV series, the wind machine, the wardrobes, the personal chef, the on-tour masseuse, the backstage mini-golf for the roadies, the fasttracking through customs with an airport concierge—we’d barely scratched the surface.

That was her dream, all that stuff, but she’d slowly eroded away at my punkrock ethos until it had become mine, too. I wanted to be huge enough to have to run all our hits into medleys at shows like this. I wanted a big-name guitarist from some dinosaur stadium rock band to play a solo through all my costume changes. I wanted to live in such a bubble of free rides and drivers on retainers that I would forget how to sign my own name. I wanted to go missing and miss my flights. I wanted people to scream, ‘Sell out!’ at us on King Street as we ducked through the rear door of our Holden Caprice. I wanted to program rage.

People didn’t get the stars aligning for them twice. The Dolls was our one shot and she knew it—but coming from privilege in the first place, it didn’t matter to her.

I ran into the wings after my cousin, shoving past Brendan. Turning on her heel, Rose screamed in my face. Just that: a scream. We boxed punches at each other, barging sideways into the monitor desk so that the sound guy had to brace himself against it.

‘How much do you want it, Nina?’ she challenged, as we hoisted each other by the collars. I could see lipstick on her teeth. Once upon a time I’d have warned her. ‘Are you choosing The Dolls over me?’

She clawed at me and ripped out my in-ear monitor. I thumped her in the face with a closed fist, but I was too close to do any damage.

‘Break it up!’ Brendan barked, pulling at my arm, but I kept my grip on the frilled collar of Rose’s dress. On stage, I heard Craig launching into a solo, all pinched harmonics and pick slides. I turned back to Rose, whose face was contorted with exertion.

‘We promised,’ I said, grinding my forehead into hers. I could feel the blood pumping into my arm muscles, fight or flight. ‘It’s both of us or nothing. That was your idea.’

Rose pulled away and I made a grab at her arm, but she yanked it free. I pegged it on stage after her. It was raining hard out there now, almost giving the insulating impression that we were alone. Thinking on their feet, the band wound up their bizarre funk jam to segue clumsily back into the last chorus of ‘Chica Rock’n’Roll’. We’d already missed our cue three times.

Automatically, Rose and I wound up back to back in the middle of the stage. We always did it, and it had been prearranged with the camera operator, who was still hanging in there. I stuck one hand in the air like a flamenco dancer, my chest heaving and falling. Vaguely, I ed that my lip was bleeding.

‘This is the last time you’ll see us!’ Rose yelled unscripted, her shoulder blades digging into my back. There was a cry of crowd confusion and my brain seared red, white and black with fury. I lobbed my mic hard towards the wings, where it landed with a deafening thud, but a roadie trotted on with it again a few seconds later. It was hopeless, like trying to dispose of a stick with a labrador around.

It was all over.

The band went into one of those bombastic endings, with the guitar, drum and bass all crashing down repeatedly until I gave the cue. I didn’t even have my guitar on like I was supposed to, so instead I jumped on to Craig’s back and rode him across the stage. Like our previous guitarist, he probably fancied he played well enough for both of us anyway. Craig hooned blindly forwards, past the gerbs, which exploded in sync with the final bass-drum kick. Our promised pyrotechnics. I’d forgotten about them, but Craig hadn’t even known they existed. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time—the story of my life.

My fractured rib punctured my left lung and one kneecap orbited my leg. Craig broke my fall, but still, the photographers’ pit was a good two-metre drop. And in the split second that I hurtled towards it, when I accepted my fate and stopped struggling, it was the most blessed moment of relief of my entire life.

•

TENDER HOOKS BY THE DOLLS (2014, GRANDIOSE)

I am literally the only journalist in our office who agreed to review this album. Everyone else ed up on it because they go out drinking with The Dolls and didn’t want to upset them. Well, more fool them, because Tender Hooks is nothing short of brilliant. The parental advisory label on the front of this album declares ‘explicit content’, but relax—The Dolls are done with the deliberate shock tactics and

have emerged with something way more real. Tender Hooks is the twelve-song journal of a band that has braved some rough terrain amid the dizzying highs— and with the chalk-and-cheese vantage points of Nina and Rose Dall, it’s compelling listening. ‘Ermine Queen’ is Rose’s tip of the hat to her cousin’s pluck and bad luck, and a surprisingly moving one at that. ‘The Last Laugh’ could only be about Aunty Alannah’s dramatic farewell from the music industry back in 1989, and it’s delivered with a menace that Dall Snr would be proud of. Equally brooding is ‘Svengali’, in which Nina intones, ‘Set the controls / Locked in your room / Pulling the strings / Making us sing . . .’ over a rustling snare, before hitting those jaw-dropping high notes—‘Captured . . . Raptured . . . Tape me up’—with a fervour that would make Phil Spector blush. Full marks also to album closer ‘Gilded Cage’, which reveals an unusually contemplative side to Rose Dall. The message of being too frightened to take off a mask is a deliberate tear-jerker, but it’s also an insight into the brave new world that this humble band from Dingo’s have found themselves charting. Encore, Dolls, encore. Lance Lobotomy, 5/5

THE SCORE

24

NO NO NO

With the benefit of hindsight, my songs were getting increasingly instructional: ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself / Won’t learn from nobody else’. But do you think I was taking my own advice? At war with the band, the label and myself, I should have known it could only end in surrender. POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

Visitors’ day was the last Tuesday of the month, but I didn’t plan on sticking around for more than one.

For the first three weeks at Dry Cedars I’d quite enjoyed regressing to childhood, throwing fits at the staff and refusing to do as I was told. There was plenty of time to think and too much time to smoke, out in the grounds of the old whitewashed building. It used to be a nunnery; now every patient had a nun’s cell to sleep in and a patch of garden to tend.

Some people here took sobriety far too seriously, like they’d had all the humour sucked out of them through a five-dollar note. With them it was all about the rhymes: ‘Recovery is a lifestyle, not a turnstyle,’ ‘Practise an attitude of gratitude,’ ‘Fake it till you make it.’ These were painfully rudimentary couplets for a songwriter. I avoided those people in the kitchen and sat across the room from them at movie time, biting my nails on my favourite beanbag.

I was looking forward to seeing Rose after the morning sharing session, because my efforts to make amends to her had gone well. That was part of your karma work during your stay at Dry Cedars. You were supposed to just ‘take care of your side of the street’—say sorry to the people you had wronged, without explanation or justification. I wasn’t keen on that idea, because I had plenty of solid-gold excuses to back me up, but it was no time to play who-had-it-worse.

‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ I said, the last time she rang, just as she was about to hang up. ‘I guess I’ve always been jealous of you and you haven’t deserved it.’

Which wasn’t as hard as I thought, but then, I hadn’t ed for people’s natural need to play devil’s advocate. If I’d said, ‘. . . but it’s not like I had a four-bedroom house and a dad with a Benz or anything,’ Rose would have come back with, ‘Oh my god, Nina, as if that’s an excuse. I have problems too, you know.’

But because I didn’t, she actually said, ‘Oh my god, Nina, it’s not your fault. I’ve always felt so sorry for you, but it’s hard to show you sometimes . . .’ (Big sniffle) ‘I need to step up and be someone who’s actually there for you.’

It was a useful tactic for future reference. I might try it on Alannah and see what she blurted out.

Rose couldn’t be seen to be deserting me now, anyway. Every news outlet had run footage of me being carried out of Flood Aid on a gurney, busted up and broken. Even Grayson insisted Rose stay—he’d given up his latest role to her in Australia as her personal roadie. And besides, as I told her from my bed when the nurse brought the phone in, we had Japan to look forward to.

‘You’ve fucked Japan,’ was Mickiewicz’s take on it, but he also sent me a giant bunch of orchids, and was presumably footing the Dry Cedars bill, because at twenty-five grand a month, I sure wasn’t.

We hadn’t fucked Japan—he was always coming out with foreboding statements like that. As soon as I’d done my thirty days, we’d be back on track with the promo schedule. Our guitarist Craig, on the other hand, was fucked and still in traction. I had written to him as part of my amends, but I hadn’t heard back yet.

By week three I was able-bodied enough to roam around the retreat without my wheelchair. There was a blanket ban on internet, but via Jenner I knew that my friends in the press had turned the accident into speculation. Would I or wouldn’t I make it to twenty-seven, the age rock stars were supposed to die? Of course I would; it was six years off, plenty of time to get my shit together. Rehab was just a gesture these days, made by the record companies. Kane had very publicly been packed off three times around an album release and came back with new songs about troubled girls with low self-esteem—and I was a way heavier drinker than him.

I was already writing a few conceptual songs: ‘Checking Out’ would be a classic revenge fantasy, which meant trench coats, machine guns, lashing rain and diaphanous blouses getting ever more diaphanous. I was thinking Wheels & Dollbaby, if they’d sign up for another year.

We were encouraged to write our feelings in a regulation notebook, so I used mine to scratch out these lyrics. It had been my life’s mission to adequately express my psychic pain in a three-minute burst. When you considered that a chorus must be repeated a minimum of twice and a middle-eight must portentously be inserted halfway through, the lyricist was left an average of fifty-six seconds in which to explain themselves. That wasn’t including any possible refrains or faffing around with ‘fa fa fa’, ‘oochie coochie’ or ‘ram-alama-ding-dong’. This should give you some idea of why absolute articulation

still eluded me.

I quickly discovered that P!nk had already used the obvious stuff—‘nurse’, ‘pill’, ‘fix’, ‘high’, ‘bad trip’—but kept my ears open in the sharing sessions anyway, just to see if there were any interesting turns of phrase. Right now I hoped Kane was crying into his beer and still trying to come up with something cool to rhyme with ‘Nina’.

•

The morning session was at nine sharp, to try to get us back into the swing of life and all its timetables. That was a joke, though, because few people at Dry Cedars had the sort of proletarian job that required leaving the house before noon. At breakfast I always sat with a couple of soapie actors, who would probably have some incredible information about India Arbuckle if I could be bothered asking, and some heirs to various fortunes, from the very leafiest suburbs. I’d done a recce on the first day and there was no one I found attractive.

The main lounge room was painted a cool green so as not to enrage anyone, and the couches were the sort you struggled to get up from again. I headed towards what was my favourite seat by the water cooler, because it was nearest the door, but Shawna got there first. Shawna was always hanging shit on me for bludging cigarettes off everyone when I was a platinum-selling artist. But no one got per diems in rehab—all people were equal. The clinicians were all recovering addicts, even the nurses. It made it more enthralling; any of them could lose it at any minute. Today’s group leader was Richard, who was really into deep-andmeaningfuls. I preferred Dean, who sang the Ride of the Valkries theme whenever he saw me.

At the kitchen hatch, I accepted my mug of coffee pleasantly. I had to be careful

or they’d wind up putting me on the same pills as Rose. In my head, Molly Meldrum had switched from asking me interesting questions about myself to shouting inappropriate words at bad times. Like FAT NONCE when I was talking to Richard, who wasn’t even, and OLD CRONE whenever the nurse took my blood pressure. It was all I could do to keep my face steady.

As Richard started the session, I sat cross-legged on the floor. In my experience, people had little tolerance for childhood hard-luck stories. It was like talking about drug experiences or dreams—everyone reckoned they could go one worse. Yet in here, we were encouraged to talk about all three. Even so, my fellow inmates were unwilling to give up their own medals for endurance. I could practically hear everybody’s choruses and refrains buzzing through the frequencies:

Who hasn’t done that?

You think that’s bad?

I nearly died.

One leg going like the clappers, on all of them.

Today’s word was ‘acceptance’, and we were all to riff on that in turn. It was about accepting your powerlessness and handing over your life to a higher power, as though you hadn’t employed every ounce of your own grit to not drink for the past twenty-two days. It was about ‘letting go, and letting God’ (this could be a ‘god of your own description’).

Giving up, then.

These people didn’t understand that artistic drive was all about struggle. Nick Cave kicked against the pricks. Iggy drew blood. Fleetwood Mac torched their memories. Alannah Dall crowed about ‘Kinetic Energy’, even when it took her in a downward spiral. At least she was moving. That’s what I told the group, when it was my turn to share.

‘Isn’t Alannah Dall dead?’ Shawna asked, addressing her question to the group rather than to me. She needed to familiarise herself with Google. I’d already googled her based on the bits and pieces she’d given away and discovered she was the daughter of a rock star herself. My aunt had probably slept with him.

But somewhere in my share I’d taken a wrong turn. Now we were arguing about John Villiers and I was wishing I hadn’t said anything.

‘He didn’t take advantage of me,’ I clarified. ‘He was taken advantage of. He’s the good guy. What’s wrong with you people?’

‘You were seventeen, when you first “pashed” him?’ repeated Richard. Richard was American, so he didn’t get half the stuff I said.

‘Exactly,’ I said coldly. ‘I was of age.’

‘It’s just that you’ve been calling everyone else a paedophile, Nina. It’s a word that comes up a lot in your script.’

‘Well, I won’t say that again, then.’

Progress, not perfection.

‘But, it’s an interesting point,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s something to think about; self-sabotaging behaviour and the fact that all the men you are drawn to are middle aged and emotionally distant.’

I sighed. My approach in group sessions was to never give anything away and just talk in circles about nothing, but on this day they needled me. That was how I wound up sharing about the night of recording alone with John Villiers, and what happened after I left Glasshouse, after I’d joked that he shouldn’t try to kiss me while he was our producer.

It was more of a ramble than a share. And we wouldn’t call it a rape, we’d call it a blackout.

After I’d walked away from John, wondering what the hell I was doing, I’d gone to Dingo’s to get hammered. I suddenly needed the familiarity of Hank, but Hank wouldn’t come out and meet me, even though it was only around tenthirty. I knew he was up to something with somebody, or if not that, he was letting me think he was. So, I stayed out and I outlasted his mates, who didn’t mind drinking with me at all. After they went home I went on somewhere else, probably to the Roundhouse. Somewhere with a courtyard.

I wore: black lace dress with brogues and white ankle socks. It was slut, but, like Manga slut. The switched-on rapist—we’ll say attacker—should have known the difference.

There was a gap between me inviting the bloke with the Marlboros to walk me home to Hank’s, and me sitting in the alley with him silhouetted at the end of it, casting one last look back. It was like I’d been beamed down from some malevolent mothership, into that puddle. My fishnets were strewn linearly after him as though imploring him to stay.

I’d always thought that any experience was an experience worth having. I prided myself on rolling with the punches. But every time I got back up I was madder than before.

My more pressing concern was the coverage The Dolls were starting to get in all the music magazines. This man would see pictures of me and laugh with his mates. He might have already known who I was. He would have been your garden-variety opportunist who only happened across a punk-rock star drinking alone in white ankle socks—not someone who left the house that morning with a roll of gaffer tape and a balaclava in his backpack. I mean, he probably listened to Coldplay and made love to his girlfriend, the creep.

I sat back in my chair.

‘Please continue, if you would like to,’ said Richard after a moment.

I pulled my calf up across one knee and hung onto my foot. Plenty of people had it worse, I told them. I’d feel like a fraud, seeing a counsellor. Imagine, sitting there, like I was desperate for attention. It wasn’t like I was dragged into the bushes and beaten with a crowbar. Nobody abducted me and kept me locked in a windowless room. And the kid stuff . . . it was abuse, not incest, and by Tony, not a Catholic priest. And the cops were never even called and there was so much of it I couldn’t . Nobody ever broke the distinctive Dall nose anyway, right?

People shouldn’t think it didn’t affect me, though, because it did. And yet still I kept on getting drunk, going out, acting up. I went straight out to the pub that next morning like I was running into a fist.

All my life I’ve wanted to say to people, ‘I’m not really like this.’ But I am like this. All the time.

It hurt to laugh. My busted rib.

Everyone stared at their coffee mugs, keeping their faces non-judgemental. You drank a lot of coffee in rehab.

‘Thank you, Nina,’ a couple of them mumbled.

‘Thank you, Nina,’ said Richard, nodding at me in appreciation. ‘We’ll wind up for today, but —it works if you work it.’

He didn’t even have to conduct them in. ‘So, work it, you’re worth it.’

•

Seeing Rose felt like being reunited with your mum after your first day at school. There was a rush of emotion and gratitude—and old-school excitement —that pulled the rug from under me. After we broke from our hug I had to turn away to hide my face.

‘How’s that nurse at the front desk?’ she said, scanning my cell, which they called a guest room. She was all crackling, gum-snapping energy, but I could tell she was nervous. ‘What a bitch.’

I put away my Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book in the top drawer and sat on the bed. ‘Her thing is always, “I think you’re being a bit self-righteous”,’ I mimicked. ‘I’m like, “I’m not self-righteous, I’m right.” There’s a difference.’

‘So stupid.’

‘How can you be in the wrong when you’re talking about things like . . .’—I hesitated—‘sex?’

‘That’s really irresponsible of them,’ Rose said, tracing a finger down the doorjamb. It came away dusty.

‘They’re always on about taking personal responsibility,’ I told her. ‘Like, “Have you really never manipulated someone sexually yourself?” I’m like, “Yeah, where we come from it’s called a hand-job.”’

‘You’re a girl. You can’t manipulate someone sexually,’ Rose scoffed, turning around.

I agreed. ‘I’m many things, but I’m not a manipulative person.’

‘Who are these from?’ Rose asked, stopping her circuit of my room to stroke the flowers on my nightstand.

‘Mickiewicz.’

‘Get well or get off,’ Rose read from the card. ‘What does that even mean?’

I wasn’t sure myself, but I was hoping it meant last chance, rather than I’ll get you back, twice as hard.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but they’re expensive, and he paid for my holiday here as well.’

‘He’d want to,’ she retorted. ‘We’ve entered the charts at number three.’

She checked my reaction, but I already knew, and it was in no small part down to my spectacular swan dive. Jenner had told me that the commercial stations had picked up on ‘The Last Laugh’. They’d probably back off again once they found out how dark the rest of the album was, but it was a great start. The TV syncs were doing well, too: the chorus to ‘The Last Laugh’ was the sort of breakneck riff that stations just couldn’t leave alone, matching it to video blooper shows and sporting segments alike. The fact that my ride off stage had been turned into an animated gif was a small price to pay.

‘Awesome,’ I said.

‘How are you going without the booze?’

‘I’m smoking heaps.’

She nodded.

‘What’s going on with Alannah?’ I asked. ‘She called once but I was out on day release.’

Actually, she’d called a lot, but I’d decided to let her wait.

Rose sat cross-legged on the floor. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You’ll like this. She’s releasing the album through Quartz.’

Andrew Quartz was Mickiewicz’s biggest rival—so our CEO had stayed true to his word and let Alannah go. He got to become a National Living Treasure, so it was a fair trade.

‘What did Mickiewicz say when you told him you were staying in The Dolls after all?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t tell him I was leaving in the first place,’ she said. ‘Are you kidding me?’

I killed a smile before she saw it. So she had called my bluff in the car at the Music Bowl. . . but it wouldn’t pay to appear smug right now. I had come to understand that Rose needed to worry about me so that she didn’t have to worry about failing on her own, but it was still a delicate ecosystem that we needed to maintain.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

I looked down at her on the floor. She was in her Buddha pose but her eyes looked panicked.

‘What for?’ I said cautiously.

‘I just liked the apology you gave me,’ she said, referring to my Dry Cedars homework. ‘Maybe we should make it a thing, once a week, saying sorry.’

Just like Rose, to coordinate our emotional outbursts.

‘Go on, then,’ I said, ‘you go first.’

She pressed her middle fingers to her thumbs and closed her eyes, her back ramrod straight.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been more understanding about your sleeping around.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry you had such a hard time at school.’

Her eyes flickered behind their lids. ‘I’m sorry you misunderstood that I was angry at the Sunday Mail, not you,’ she countered.

I looked at her in mild disbelief. ‘I’m sorry your assistant was such a twat.’

After a beat we both laughed. ‘I know,’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘Sorry. Anyway, Andrea walked after Flood Aid and never took my calls.’

She got up and opened the wardrobe doors, taking a raptor-like look at the contents. Then she pulled my suitcase out and unzipped it.

‘Start packing,’ she instructed. ‘We’ve got shit to do and they’ll be kicking visitors out of here in ten minutes.’

‘Rose,’ I said, from the bed, ‘I’m not leaving. I’ve got a week left and it’s paid for. They’ve got a pool.’

‘Ah yes,’ she said, wheeling around triumphantly, ‘but do they have an entire series commissioned on The Dolls?’

She paused for effect. ‘No,’ she said, answering her own question, ‘but VTV do, and they need to start filming this week if it’s going to tie in with the tour.’

‘Rose,’ I said.

‘It’s about time,’ she interrupted, then reached over and lifted up my T-shirt. ‘Good, you still have those bruises—the EP was asking about those. You’ll have to limp a bit, too.’

‘EP?’ I asked, yanking my shirt down and folding my arms.

‘Executive Producer. You’ll love her. Nina, I’ve already signed the contract for both of us.’

I really wanted to get my thirty-day recovery chip. It was a big red coin with ‘To

Thine Own Self Be True’ stamped on it, and it would be mine in seven days’ time. But my life wasn’t all about me; it was about me and Rose, and I needed to consider what was best for us both. As long as this TV series had plenty of live footage of us killing it, I could cope with the clips of Rose talking about how humble she felt.

It only took me a minute to throw all the clothes Helen had packed me into my suitcase. I left the book she sent me, Getting Over It, in the bottom drawer for the next sad sack, although I had a romantic notion that they’d derive more comfort from the ‘FIGHT LIKE A GIRL’ I’d scratched into the wood.

Rose took one last look around—which was why she never wound up leaving important things at hotels—then pushed past me into the corridor and grabbed the wheelchair. I stood back as she manoeuvred it awkwardly through the doorframe, taking off some paint.

‘Get in,’ she ordered. ‘This is a jailbreak.’

I sat down with my bag on my knees and let her trundle me down the corridor and past the front desk. The nurse didn’t even look up from her computer screen.

Once we were outside, Rose broke into a run down the drive, with the wheelchair going thunka thunka thunk over the paving slabs. I knew that the staff couldn’t actually stop me leaving, but I didn’t want to spoil her fun. I hadn’t laughed like this with Rose for years.

She skidded me to a halt in front of a powder-blue convertible and I raised myself out of the chair, clutching my ribs. My kneecap twinged peevishly.

‘Nice wheels,’ I said.

‘Thank Uncle Mickiewicz,’ she said, over the double beep of the central-locking system.

The car smelled like it had just been taken out of shrink-wrap and the door made a pleasing clunk when I pulled it to. I settled my bag at my feet. John Villiers’ postcard was burning a hole in my hoodie pocket, but I didn’t have to look at it to know every detail: the Beefeater outside the Tower of London, the guard outside Buckingham Palace, the double-decker bus driving past the Houses of Parliament, the gurning punk rockers sitting on a wall—all divided into neat quarters.

On the other side: Settled in . . . all good . . . pretty interesting scene . . . you’d like it . . . blah blah blah . . .

And an address.

Japan would still happen, I mused as Rose reversed out of the car park, the back wheels spitting gravel, but not till we’d been to London. It would be better for Rose in the long run, because we’d have a bigger profile by the time we got to Tokyo and would get more gifts from the fans. The best approach would probably be to have a quiet chat with Mickiewicz about the VTV series only going ahead if filming started in the UK. London was actually a sensible base for a band like The Dolls, because we had long outgrown Australia. Press-wise, there was no way you could top falling off stage at Flood Aid.

I pulled out a notebook from my bag so I could jot a few notes about how to persuade Mickiewicz.

– Suggest that Elementary thought it would be a good idea.

– It would be nice for Rose, who is very embarrassed about Flood Aid.

– Convince him you and he are cut from the same cloth and have an understanding.

‘Did Jenner tell you?’ Rose said, nudging my arm. I angled my notebook away from her. ‘The Mayor of Parramatta wants to give us the keys to the city. We’ve made it.’

I laughed so much my ribs hurt. ‘Come on, Rose. It’s dead to me.’

‘Where shall we go?’ she persisted. ‘To Macca’s? Church Street Mall?’

‘To Hooters,’ I suggested, then added in seriousness, ‘but to Helen’s first.’

She looked at me curiously and I crossed my arms.

‘I just thought we should talk,’ I said. ‘She’s had it tough, and Alannah and Dad

have never been any help.’

‘We can stop there today if you like,’ Rose said. ‘Filming doesn’t start till tomorrow. Or maybe we should wait till we have the cameras with us—we can do a tour of all the old haunts and see if we bump into all the people you want to avoid.’

Rose took the road to the freeway, heading for the west. ‘The Last Laugh’ came on the radio and she scrambled for the volume control.

‘Oh, great song,’ she roared in approval.

I leaned back against the headrest and looked over, at her full, bright lips pursed in pleasure and her dark hair whipping around pastel-blue sunnies. I felt a flush of love for her—the fierce, possessive kind from back when we were twinsies and other people tried to encroach. We were inseparable back then, but then as we grew older other people started to get in the way—and neither of us could abide the company the other kept. It was too late by then, anyway. We were friends in title only.

What happened to tear the two of you apart?

Molly.

Do yourself a favour. Come clean.

Shut up, Molly.

I when Molly first showed up. Rose and I were eight years old, and the only person to come between us had been Tony. By singling me out, he had poisoned our friendship as slowly and surely as drilling into a tree. I was exhausted from the effort of pretending she and I were still the same, so it was down to me to fix it.

Perhaps I could have told her about what he was doing, but instead I said, ‘I dare you to kiss him’—and after I’d done that, I couldn’t say anything.

‘I dare you to kiss him.’ I said it behind the shed, as we watched him turn the chops on the barbecue. We’d stopped there in the middle of our game, to spy on him. She giggled at the naughtiness of it.

My cousin Rose was always the bossy one, and I knew she would want to show me how it was done. I wanted to bring us back together. I just hadn’t thought it through. When Rose threw her shoulders back and flounced out of our hiding place towards the patio, I ran away. I knew what would happen. It would start with the searching look, the hand in her hair, then the pet name, the elicited promise of secrecy. He would tell her she had started it. And in Rosie Rabbit’s case, perhaps she did.

But he didn’t follow through, I’m sure of it. He wouldn’t have wanted to, because I was the special one.

But he could have.

Nobody could ever hate me as much as I hated myself.

Sitting there, in the powder-blue convertible with the radio on, a pain sliced through my skull so intensely that I couldn’t open my eyes. I never allowed myself to think about that day, and this was why. I couldn’t feel it. It felt like grief. When it let go of me a minute later, I gasped for air and doubled up.

My kingdom for a vodka.

Rose looked around and I turned my face into the slipstream at the enger window.

‘The wind’s in my eyes,’ I said with a weak smile, waving a hand at myself. The velocity of it was sending the tears streaming down my face, pushing air into my lungs. I wished it would obliterate all the bad thoughts inside me and let me start again.

For a second Rose cast me a look like the one she gave when she caught me blubbing back at Dingo’s, then she focused back on the road.

‘Is this part of your twelve steps?’ she asked. ‘I’ll let you cry this once, but if you do it again I’ll report you to the recovery police at Dry Cedars and they’ll come and get you.’

She pulled down a pack of smokes from behind the sun visor and offered me one. I leaned forward and pushed in the cigarette lighter, thankful for a distraction.

‘I’m writing a hit song, Rose,’ I said, indicating the notepad on my knees. ‘It’s emotional.’

‘Good. Make sure I get the first verse,’ she said. ‘You owe me.’

Booze, my muse. We were both reliant on it—me in order to write and Rose in order to capitalise on my writing. She was like a kept woman, really.

When the lighter popped I touched it to the cigger and inhaled with a judder. I drew the smoke down to the source of the pain and let it work its magic. So many sorries.

‘Blow the smoke away from my hair,’ she instructed. ‘I don’t want it going yellow.’

I forced a smile, feeling my body unfurl as the nicotine hit. More relief would be good. Maybe if we stopped at the next town I could suggest a toilet stop in the shopping centre, and from there it would only be a quick hop, skip and jump to the nearest alcohol emporium. All done and dusted before anyone was any the wiser.

I was unapologetic, like Rihanna.

‘It’ll get us back to number one, I swear. It’ll pay for all your dental bills, Rose,’ I promised. ‘It’ll pay for blonder hair, a new PA, whatever you need.’

‘It had better pay for a Grammy.’

We ed a KFC, a Bunnings, a Petbarn, a Dick Smith’s . . . away from crisp sheets and new beginnings and back into familiar Westie terrain. Rose sang along to herself on the radio, thumping the wheel. I put my feet up on the dash and watched the white lines blur into one as they raced past us. I knew I’d pay for that day behind the shed for the rest of my life, unless, some way down the track, I decided to let myself off the hook. Not yet, though. Whoever won a Grammy about feeling fine? There was no currency in inner peace, and I had debts to pay.

I was the protector of The Dolls.

I turned up the chorus of ‘The Last Laugh’ and sang the ‘la la la la’ along with Rose, until it was all I could hear.

CHERRY BOMB SOUNDTRACK

CHAPTER 1: KINGS CROSS SHANGRI-LA

THE RUNAWAYS: ‘CHERRY BOMB’

RAMONES: ‘SHEENA IS A PUNK ROCKER’

CHERRY GLAZERR: ‘TEENAGE GIRL’

CHAPTER 2: ING THE BAIN MARIES

YEAH YEAH YEAHS: ‘PIN’

KENICKIE: ‘COME OUT 2NITE’

KILLING HEIDI: ‘MASCARA’

CHAPTER 3: MEN

DIVINYLS: ‘BOYS IN TOWN’

THE UNDERTONES: ‘TEENAGE KICKS’

THE BELLE STARS: ‘SIGN OF THE TIMES’

CHAPTER 4: BAD MANAGER

THE LONG BLONDES: ‘ONCE AND NEVER AGAIN’

TONI BRAXTON: ‘HE WASN’T MAN ENOUGH’

THE DISTILLERS: ‘DRAIN THE BLOOD’

CHAPTER 5: DUMMY

LYKKE LI: ‘YOUTH KNOWS NO PAIN’

SKY FERREIRA: ‘NOBODY ASKED ME (IF I WAS OKAY)’

BABES IN TOYLAND: ‘WON’T TELL’

CHAPTER 6: AWARD FOR BEST PASH

L7: ‘CAN I RUN’

ABBE MAY: ‘SEX TOURETTE’S’

HOLE: ‘BOYS ON THE RADIO’

CHAPTER 7: IT’S ON

THE RAVEONETTES: ‘SLEEPWALKING’

PJ HARVEY: ‘YOU SAID SOMETHING’

THE PRETENDERS: ‘NIGHT IN MY VEINS’

CHAPTER 8: THE GOLD COAST

WANDA JACKSON: ‘FUJIYAMA MAMA’

STEVIE NICKS: ‘EDGE OF SEVENTEEN’

JANE WIEDLIN: ‘RUSH HOUR’

CHAPTER 9: THE BIG CHEESE

DANIELLE DAX: ‘CATHOUSE’

DAISY CHAINSAW: ‘LOVE YOUR MONEY’

EMA: ‘SO BLONDE’

CHAPTER 10: THE UTE MUSTER

DAPHNE & CELESTE: ‘U.G.L.Y.’

CAT POWER: ‘LOST SOMEONE’

MARTHA WAINWRIGHT: ‘BLOODY MOTHER FUCKING ASSHOLE’

CHAPTER 11: CHEAP TRICK

ALTERED IMAGES: ‘I COULD BE HAPPY’

BANGLES: ‘WALKING DOWN YOUR STREET’

ROBYN: ‘DANCING ON MY OWN’

CHAPTER 12: FIGHT LIKE A GIRL

LANA DEL REY: ‘THIS IS WHAT MAKES US GIRLS’

BEACH HOUSE: ‘MYTH’

CHEETAH: ‘SPEND THE NIGHT’

CHAPTER 13: LOS ANGELES

THE RUNAWAYS: ‘QUEENS OF NOISE’

THE GO-GO’S: ‘THIS TOWN’

CYNDI LAUPER: ‘HEADING WEST’

CHAPTER 14: TALL POPPIES

JACK OFF JILL: ‘FEAR OF FLYING’

THE PREATURES: ‘IS THIS HOW YOU FEEL?’

THE DONNAS: ‘WHO INVITED YOU’

CHAPTER 15: ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME

HOLLY AND THE ITALIANS: ‘TELL THAT GIRL TO SHUT UP’

BELLY: ‘NOW THEY’LL SLEEP’

DUM DUM GIRLS: ‘WRONG FEELS RIGHT’

CHAPTER 16: THE AMERICAN TOUR

LADYHAWKE: ‘BACK OF THE VAN’

MARTHA AND THE MUFFINS: ‘ECHO BEACH’

ELASTICA: ‘WAKING UP’

CHAPTER 17: INTERVENTION

NEKO CASE: ‘HOLD ON, HOLD ON’

CONCRETE BLONDE: ‘TOMORROW WENDY’

THOSE DARLINS: ‘SCREWS GET LOOSE’

CHAPTER 18: I TOUCH MYSELF

STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE: ‘SINCE YESTERDAY’

BLONDIE: ‘IN THE FLESH’

THE MOTELS: ‘TOTAL CONTROL’

CHAPTER 19: TAMWORTH

BOW WOW WOW: ‘GO WILD IN THE COUNTRY’

SAVAGES: ‘HUSBANDS’

THE PRETENDERS: ‘NIGHT IN MY VEINS’

CHAPTER 20: SOAP SCUM

LUCINDA WILLIAMS: ‘KING OF HEARTS’

ADALITA: ‘BLUE SKY’

RONNIE SPECTOR: ‘NEVER GONNA BE YOUR BABY’

CHAPTER 21: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

LUSH: ‘HYPOCRITE’

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES: ‘THE ENGER’

MAZZY STAR: ‘FADE INTO YOU’

CHAPTER 22: BOSS

M.I.A.: ‘PAPER PLANES’

THE SLITS: ‘SO TOUGH’

GOSSIP: ‘HEAVY CROSS’

CHAPTER 23: TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP

JUNK HORSES: ‘I PHONE, NO ANSWER’

WARPAINT: ‘ELEPHANTS’

LYDIA LUNCH AND ROWLAND S. HOWARD: ‘ENDLESS FALL’

CHAPTER 24: NO NO NO

METRIC: ‘DREAMS SO REAL’

TRANSVISION VAMP: ‘SISTER MOON’

CATCALL: ‘THE WORLD IS OURS’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing is a solitary pursuit, but no woman is an island. Hearty thanks to Jessica Adams, Trevor Byrne, Susie Cavill, Esther Coleman-Hawkins, Claire de Medici, Nick Dent, Kelly Doust, Ben Eriksen, Sara Foster, MJ Hyland, Emilie Johnson, Jade MacRae, Anneliese Mackintosh, Kate McMahon, Jo Paul Taylor, Tiffany Reichert, Elizabeth Russell, Roberto Seba, Tamara Sheward and Sheridan Wright for their input in varying ways. All at Allen & Unwin, especially Jane Palfreyman, Kathryn Knight and Jane Symmans. Thanks also to Mum, whose voice I heard in my head throughout, patiently explaining the rules of grammar. (This was particularly awkward on p. 253 and p. 318.) And to Justin Healey, for his understanding and during a year in which my mind was off in some other deranged dimension.

JENNY VALENTISH grew up in an unlovely satellite town of London, where she learned the art of escapism through music. At sixteen she started interviewing musicians and has done so ever since for a variety of magazines and newspapers, becoming editor of Triple J magazine and now Time Out Melbourne. None of those musicians wound up in this book, obviously. She has also been in a bunch of bands herself, but you wouldn’t have heard of them.

Author photograph: Roberto Seba