Cherry Bomb

by Jenny Valentish

  •

  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 pass. 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 passively, blinded by the light, out of my head. Wasn’t that what I should be doing, instead of riding around in the passenger 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 compass 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 passive 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, dressing up 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 remember, 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 joint,’ 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 about us 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 passed 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 pass—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 join 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 whe
n 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 passengers 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 join 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’ ex-girlfriend 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 remember 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 supporting 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 f
ound 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 non-judgemental 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.