Cherry Bomb

by Jenny Valentish

  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 grown-up. ‘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 remembered, 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 admit 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 who
ever 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 admit 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 terms, 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 remembered 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 plast
ic 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 remember. 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.