Cherry Bomb

by Jenny Valentish

  ‘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 passed 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 admit 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 one-woman 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 remembered 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 ex-boyfriends’ 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 postage-stamp 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 wrot
e 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 admired. 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 underpass—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 remembered 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 multi-dimensional 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 record-company 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 account 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 support and headline acts that should never, ever have been booked. Such as:

  Har Mar Superstar supporting Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  Mercury Rev supporting Coldplay.

  Powderfinger supporting Pantera.

  Bumblebeez supporting Radiohead.

  The Sunnyboys supporting The Go-Go’s.

  Tinie Tempah supporting The Script.

  Machine Gun Fellatio supporting 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 time-wasting 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.’