by SR Silcox
She pulled the microphone stand closer to her, and as the drummer started playing, Maddie looked back over to Tess and said, “And we’re not going anywhere.”
EPILOGUE
Tess found a table in the corner of the uni coffee shop and sat down, dumping her shoulder bag to the floor. She pulled out her notes, placed them onto the table and checked her watch. She couldn’t believe that in a couple of hours she’d be done with her first year of uni, and in two days, she’d be back in Chesterfield setting up for the Crush Music Festival and spending some down time with Maddie. Finally.
The year had been a roller coaster ride of lectures, tutorials, parties with Maddie and Lizzie and setting up a flat with Will. They’d had mountains of fun looking for furniture at garage sales and second-hand shops, though they had yet to find the coffee tables they were after to replace the cardboard boxes they were still using. Even though it was a pokey little two-bedroom flat, it was set in a triplex and came with a huge backyard where they spent most of their time.
Will hadn’t landed the job he’d applied for the year before, but he’d found a casual labouring job with a drummer he’d met at last year’s festival which kept him busy. He was also volunteering with Conservation Volunteers and had applied for a short term contract to help build a walking track in one of the national parks near Chesterfield. He was as happy as Tess had ever seen him, and he’d even started dating a girl he’d met when he volunteered for a project out in Western Queensland a few months back, much to Lizzie’s distaste. Though she’d only met her a few times so far, Tess thought Peta was okay. She was a bit of a hippy and a vegetarian, which Tess found amusing since Will couldn’t have a meal without eating meat. Will liked her a lot though, and that was enough for Tess.
Lizzie, on the other hand, just thought of Peta as a groupie, and though Tess pointed out that Peta hadn’t known about Will’s band until after she’d met him, Lizzie wouldn't change her mind. Thankfully they didn’t run into each other much, because Lizzie had spent the last year flitting between Brisbane and Sydney, using Will and Tess’s flat as a base when she was in town. After the success of the Crush Festival last year, Maddie had asked Lizzie to come on board as their social media guru, and while Lizzie still insisted she wanted to pursue a career as a serious journalist and was studying journalism part-time, she found the offer hard to resist. Especially when she found out she’d get to tour with the band and help them rebuild their fan base from the ground up. Because of Lizzie and her hard work, Three’s Company had picked up a deal with a smaller record company which suited them and their music a lot more than the bigger companies did.
On top of that, Lizzie’s blog had been voted in the top ten music blogs of the year, and she’d been turning down offers to write articles for other music sites ever since. Even though Maddie and the band said she could still maintain the blog, Lizzie had decided to give it up since she now had inside information no-one else would have. Though whenever she did have exclusives, her old blog was the first place they were announced. Lizzie was now also the official President of the Official Fan Club, and managed a select group of loyal fans, hand-picked by the band, who got access to new music and freebies like shirts and backstage passes for the band’s appearances in return for spreading the word about the band on social media. In just over a year, Lizzie had increased the band’s fan base ten-fold, and it was still growing.
Though they hadn’t been able to see each other much lately, Tess knew that the four of them would be back together at the Crush Festival in a few days. She couldn’t wait to get back to the farm to see her grandparents and check out the modifications Pop had made to Chitty. Despite his initial misgivings on the new direction of the festival, Pop had enjoyed the resurgence. Especially since they didn’t have to rely on the council anymore for funding. Despite leaving early last year because of the noise, he’d decided to stick it out this year, which Tess was excited about. He hadn’t heard Maddie’s band play yet, and would get to hear them for the first time. Andy was especially excited. He’d been brushing up on his Slim Dusty songs, just to impress Pop.
Gran was relishing helping Mrs Brannigan in the bakery since they’d become unofficial partners in the business. After Mrs Brannigan had her fall, she didn’t know how she was going to keep the bakery open without a qualified baker. Gran had asked a few months before Mrs Brannigan's accident if she could use the bakery to make her now-famous cupcakes because the orders had outgrown her kitchen. It was only natural that she’d taken charge of the shop while Mrs Brannigan recovered after her hip surgery. The cupcakes were sought-after all over the district and tourists dropped in on their way through Chesterfield just to try them, as well as Mrs Brannigan’s cream buns.
Tess couldn’t wait to get back to her Gran’s cooking, and she knew Will was looking forward to it too. No matter how hard he and Peta had tried to teach her, Tess just couldn’t get the hang of cooking much else other than spaghetti, though her new favourite meal was pesto pasta. Especially if the pesto came in a bottle. Will hadn’t given up on her though, and every Saturday night before they went out, he tried to show Tess how to cook something different. He’d banned Tess from cooking steak after the char grill disaster a few months ago, but she was starting to get the hang of stir fries. Will said they didn’t really count since you just had to cut the veges and toss them in a sauce that came from a bottle.
Tess had managed to impress Maddie with a stir fry the last time she was in town, and Maddie would definitely have told her if it was bad. That was a little over two months ago when Maddie had managed to take some time off after spending months in a studio in Sydney. Things had started to get crazy busy for Maddie and the band around then, because they'd finally finished their new album and had started doing interviews and promotional tours to get the word out about it. It had been tough getting used to being the girlfriend of an up and coming music star, but thanks to the blurry picture that had made it around the country before last year’s festival, no-one was really sure what Tess looked like. It meant that Tess could go to functions with Maddie as her publicist or personal assistant without anyone batting an eyelid, and as long as they managed to keep their hands off each other, no-one caught them out. She knew the time was coming when her identity would eventually have to be revealed before someone noticed them sneaking off to a quiet corner together and getting cosier than an assistant should with her boss. It was general knowledge that Indiana Rose had a girlfriend and that she was from a town no-one had heard about until last year, but Tess dreaded having another photo in the paper of her kissing Maddie, but with a headline like “Rock Star Cheats on Country Girlfriend” or something else just as sordid.
Despite that, Tess still found herself getting overwhelmed at the attention Maddie received when they went out in public, and she found it hard to step back and not get overprotective. Thankfully though, Jo had been a pretty constant companion and had stepped in whenever she needed to. Which was her job, of course, but that didn’t make Tess any less grateful for it.
The big bonus for Tess had been getting to know Freya and Andy. They’d all started becoming good friends, and Freya had even been getting knitting tips from Gran. Just last week Gran had sent a package of knitting patterns to Tess to pass on to Freya when she saw her next and she knew Freya would be excited to get them.
And Andy was just about the furthest thing you could get from a spoiled rock star. His favourite thing was to drop into karaoke bars unannounced and sometimes in disguise and belt out one of his own songs. He hadn’t been caught yet, and Tess thought that his penchant for karaoke was what had caused Lizzie to fall head over heels for him. Andy had no idea, of course, but everyone else did. Lizzie, being the ultimate professional, desperately tried to hide her feelings, but she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Maddie and Freya had both been doing their best to get Andy to notice Lizzie’s affections, without Lizzie knowing of course, but unless it had something to do with music or surfing, Andy was far too clu
eless to notice much at all.
Tess opened her business law notes and started to skim, and someone in the cafe turned on the radio, just in time for a repeat of the interview Maddie had done last night. Someone said, “Turn it up,” and Tess smiled. She’d heard the interview a few times already, but the campus radio was replaying it for the afternoon crowd. She still had an hour before she had to sit for her final exam, so she sat back and listened to it again, just to hear Maddie’s voice.
∞
The university radio studio was just like the hundred or so other studios Maddie had been in over the last few months - a small glorified cupboard with electronics equipment stacked wherever they could fit it and wires running all over the floors. There was a small window on one wall where a growing crowd of people were gathering. Maddie gave them a smile and a wave and tried not to think about how many other thousands of mouths had been up close to the same microphone that sat on the desk in front of her. The best thing about this interview was that it was the last one she had to do before she got to see Tess. She wished she could see her tonight, but Tess had her final exam tomorrow and she didn’t want to distract her from studying. Tomorrow afternoon, she had a marketing meeting with Andy and Freya and then there was the merchandise they had to sign first thing in the morning so it was ready to send up to Chesterfield in time for the Crush Festival in a few days. She could probably fit in a quick visit but she didn’t want Tess to just be a short appointment in her schedule. She’d been so busy with promoting the new album that she was looking forward to a few down days with Tess back at the farm before the festival preparations kicked into gear.
“Ready?” the DJ said, snapping Maddie out of her daydreaming. She nodded. He counted her in and after the introductory music he said, “Welcome back to BU radio. We're here with the lead singer of the band Three’s Company, Indiana Rose. Welcome Indiana.”
Maddie leaned into the microphone and said, “Thanks Ben. It’s great to be here.”
“So this last year has been a bit hectic for you and the band.”
“Definitely, but I think we’ve come through it relatively unscathed.”
Ben nodded. “A new direction, a new album and a new management team. A lot of bands would have folded under the pressure. How did you manage to get through it?”
“Freya, Andy and I just love our music. We wouldn’t have given that up for anything.”
“But you fired your own dad. How did that go down? Was there like, groundings threatened or anything?”
Maddie laughed. “No, nothing like that. Dad’s great at the business side of things and he’s actually just come on board as an adviser for us. He just got too involved in the music side of things last time and that took us in a different direction than we wanted to go in.”
“So no big family feud then?” Ben raised his eyebrows.
“No. It’s all good.” Maddie replied. She took a sip of water.
“Great. So tell us about this new direction the band has taken. I don’t need to tell you that your second album tanked. Can I say that? That’s not too harsh?”
“It certainly did tank and I’m the first to admit it.”
“What happened?”
“It wasn’t the kind of stuff we’d imagined we’d be playing when we started out in Andy’s garage. We let a lot of outside people influence our choices and it stifled us.”
“Anyone in particular?”
Maddie shook her head. “I won’t name names. The music business is extremely small, and we still want to sell our records.”
“Of course. So no insider gossip. Tell us about the new stuff then.”
Maddie shifted in her chair. “We’re going back to our roots. Back to when we were busking and sneaking into clubs to gig. We wanted to go back to our acoustic sounds. We really love the raw sounds of fingers slipping over the guitar strings, you know?”
Ben put his hands up. “Now you’re getting too technical for me.” He held up a CD and turned it over in his hand. “You sent me through a copy of the new album to have a listen to before you came on the show, and I have to say, it’s some of your best stuff. If you take your second album out of the equation that is.”
“Thanks,” Maddie said. “We love it and we’ve had some great feedback from some of our fans who’ve had the opportunity to listen to it before anyone else. Freya wrote a lot of it herself, though Andy chipped in with a Beach Boys-inspired ballad. They’ve both been powerhouses over the last few months, and we've already got a lot of stuff to think about for the next album.”
“Wow, that’s fantastic. Getting back to this one, which is the appropriately named ‘Back on Track’, the official launch is taking place at a new little music festival up the coast. Is that right?”
“That’s right. We were invited to a new music festival in Chesterfield called the Crush Festival last year, and the timing was right for us to test the waters on some stuff we’d been playing around with. We had such a great time up there that we’ve decided to go up again and use it to launch the new album. And we want to hit the bakery while we’re there.”
“I hear it’s fantastic.”
“The best,” Maddie agreed, smiling.
“We’ll have details of the Crush Festival on the website for anyone who wants to get up there.” Ben looked up to his producer for confirmation, who gave the thumbs up.
Maddie said, “There are some great bands going up this year. A new rock group called The Trojan Kings will be playing too. They’re a crowd favourite since they’re local boys.”
“Sounds interesting. Talking about Chesterfield, you had another, shall we say, life changing moment up there? Can we talk about that?”
“Oh yes. Gran’s famous cupcakes,” Maddie said. “Once you try them, they’ll change your life too.”
Ben laughed. “That’s not exactly what I was talking about.”
Maddie smiled and had a quick drink of water. She said, “Sorry, Ben. Yes, I guess we can talk about it, but I’m sure everyone’s sick of hearing the story by now.”
Ben grinned. “Oh come on now. No-one ever gets sick of hearing a little love story. Can you tell us anything?”
“Only a little,” Maddie said. “She’s a country girl so she's not used to the spotlight yet.”
“Do you get to see each other much?” Ben probed. “I mean, the rumour is that she attends our very own BU City Campus.”
He paused and Maddie decided to give him the exclusive was itching for. “Yes, she does actually.”
Ben grinned. “You heard it here first. One of our very own BU students is dating a rock star.”
Maddie laughed. She promised Tess that she wouldn’t embarrass her, but they were getting to the point in their relationship where they probably should be more open about it.
“Getting back to my question,” Ben said. “So with you recording and working on the new album and your girlfriend going to uni, there wouldn’t be much time in between to see each other.”
“It was hard to begin with, but we’ve worked it out,” Maddie replied. “Besides, I think not having me around to distract her lets her study better.”
“I wouldn’t call love a distraction.”
Maddie laughed. “It is when you’re trying to study for exams.”
“So this is a serious thing then?”
Maddie replied, “Aren’t all relationships serious?”
“Not the ones I have,” Ben said and they both laughed. “I’m getting the cue to wrap it up. Indiana Rose, it was fantastic to chat to you.”
Maddie smiled. “My pleasure, Ben.” She relaxed back into her chair and watched as Ben flipped over the CD as he wrapped up the session.
“So, the new album is ‘Back on Track’, out in a couple of weeks. We’re lucky enough to have an exclusive listen to one of the new tracks, ‘On the Road’, which we’ll play straight after the break. You can check out Three’s Company on all the usual social media channels, and be listening again to the replay of this intervie
w to have the chance of winning a signed copy of the album.”
Maddie leaned forward and added, “And don’t forget to check out the Crush Festival up in Chesterfield in two weeks’ time.”
Ben smiled and said, “For sure. It sounds great. And that’s it from me. Tune in next week when we’ll be chatting to Matty Hughes from Fox Hole.” He nodded to Maddie and she took off her headphones. As she stood up he said, “Thanks so much for that. We really don’t get many guests as famous as you on.”
Maddie shrugged. “No problem. Any time.”
Ben smiled. As Maddie reached for the door handle, Ben said, “Oh, before you go, could you sign my CD?”
Maddie turned and smiled and said, “Sure. Make sure you give it plenty of air play.”
Ben nodded. “Most definitely.”
When Maddie finally made it out of the studio after signing other random objects including a coffee mug and two phone cases, she dropped into the back of the car and sighed.
“All done?” Jo asked from the drivers’ seat.
“All done,” Maddie replied. “Let’s get to that meeting. The sooner that’s over, the sooner I get to sleep. And the sooner I get to sleep, the sooner I get to see Tess.”
∞
Tess left her final exam wondering whether she’d actually manage to retain any of the stuff she’d learned that year by the time she started again next year. She was pretty sure she’?d passed Info Tech and the business subjects, but Business Law, which she’d just completed, was an entirely different story. With any luck she’d just scrape through so she didn’t have to take a summer class.
As she rounded the corner of the library building, a now-familiar figure in a black shirt and dark jeans stood up from the concrete wall she’d been sitting on. “Hi, Jo,” Tess said as she walked past.
