The next morning there was an email from Norway waiting:
In the give and take of producing, this was a good result. I picked up the track they had sent, and I played it. Gunnar could stretch himself to Annaliese’s harmonies, though his voice was thin where hers had been husky and rich. This was the beginning of the new sound of The Splades, the sound that would take them to the UK and beyond. They had gone with my ideas, with everything, except Annaliese’s vocals. I wasn’t certain it was the ‘guy track’ they thought, but it was theirs, and Gunnar’s vocals worked.
I couldn’t see, though, how I’d get it across to Annaliese that this was any kind of good news. That quality work gets cut all the time because someone chooses a different direction. That she had ended up singing guide vocals for Gunnar’s backing vocals and not something anyone but us would ever hear. I hoped I’d got her ready for it, but I wasn’t sure I had. Maybe I had let the moment get the better of me.
I listened again to her singing the chorus of The Light that Guides You Home, and I wished it was a whole song. I wished I could give her that.
‘God, so much for the hair being a disguise. Do you realise how many people look at you?’ Kate said as we manoeuvred past strollers and loiterers and a man struggling under the weight of a boxed plasma-screen TV. She was on her lunch break at Indooroopilly and we were on our way to King of Knives.
‘I try not to notice.’ It was the first time I had been there for years. It was different to buying groceries at Kenmore at ten in the morning. This was hundreds of shops, a city’s worth of people. To see people looking would mean eye contact, and the plan was – always was – to keep moving forward with speed and a sense of purpose and no eye contact. In the absence of Steve Irwin’s teeth and trucker’s cap, it was the best tactic I had. ‘I hear them though. I try not to listen, but you hear your own name. They say it surprisingly loud. It’s almost as if you aren’t real.’
‘What will they think, seeing the two of us together?’ She was in her uniform – a burgundy skirt with a white top and two badges. One said ‘Kate’, the other ‘Manager’. The manager badge hung at a slight angle, as if she’d put it on in a hurry, or been distracted.
‘The harsh reality is they probably won’t see you.’ We passed a bookstore, a stand selling watches, a shop selling art supplies. There were escalators ahead, more people. ‘It’s a strange phenomenon. Publicists, girlfriends, anyone else – in the case of Butterfish even the guys in the band other than Derek and me – all invisible. So if we get stuck and you get snubbed or stepped on, it’s not about you. If they wanted to talk to me, or wanted an autograph, you would be a speedbump. That’s the official term for it.’
It was Jess’s term. Jess, who had taken an elbow in the ribs, a knock to the head, a shove into the gutter, all entirely by accident. Jess, who had been introduced to some industry people by name ten times, and each time they had had no idea they had met her before. When ‘favourite superhero power’ turned up on one interviewer’s emailed list of questions, it was Jess who told me not to put invisibility, since it was altogether too demeaning.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Kate said. ‘I think I’d be happy to leave the autographs to you anyway.’ We passed Kmart and a shop where a vacuum cleaner kept a ball bobbing in the air. ‘King of Knives – what kind of a name is that? I’m surprised they even let them register it.’
‘It was probably a few years ago. There was probably even a time when you could have King of Guns, but those days are long gone.’
‘I think it used to be on the second floor, King of Guns. Just down from Queen of Semtex.’ She stopped, and gave an appalled kind of laugh. ‘I think I just made a terrorist joke. That’s probably very bad.’
‘We’ll have to get you an orange jumpsuit and put you in a cage.’
‘Orange is so not my colour.’ She rolled her eyes, Annaliese-style, and laughed again. Or maybe the eye rolling had been Kate’s style all along, and Annaliese had taken it on.
King of Knives, it turned out, was very businesslike, very culinary. A middle-aged man with big glasses was running a knife through a sharpener and talking to a customer about the technicalities of the edge.
‘Probably not the place for your Queen of Semtex material, I’d be guessing,’ I said quietly to Kate as we stood at a glass cabinet.
‘Don’t,’ she said, trying not to laugh. She punched me in the arm as she said it, then pulled her hand away and pretended it had been somewhere else. She cleared her throat, and stared straight ahead, through the glass at two rows of Victorinox knives. ‘So, what should I be looking at?’
‘Something medium-sized and multi-purpose, I reckon. That way you only need one. And I’m buying, remember. And the idea is to get you a good one.’
‘You don’t have to...’
‘I know. But we had that fight two days ago, over oyster mushrooms, and you lost. So that’s how it is. I’m buying.’
We settled on a thirteen-centimetre Global utility knife, exactly the same as the knife I had in my own kitchen. Mine had been a present, and I hadn’t realised until now how well chosen it was. It had been from Jess, whose fingerprints were all over this shopping trip in a way I hadn’t expected, and it had spent too long in the storage facility down the road. Jess was still a presence, in incidents and small things said, though that was it, mostly. I realised I had little that was stronger to hold onto, not from the past few years. We had become a succession of small details and then, in Louisville, stopped.
Kate weighed the knife in her hand and I could tell the grip felt right. She nodded. She looked closely at the blade, as if she could see its sharpness.
‘I’m buying you lunch,’ she said. ‘If lunch is feasible for you in a place like this.’
‘Feasible? Sure. People might talk to us. Or they might not. They’re better when you’re eating. It’s toilets that are the worst, men’s toilets. “Hey, aren’t you...”’ I mimed the instinctive mid-stream half-turn. ‘And then it’s all over your shoes.’
‘Men urinate on you?’ She looked horrified, and glanced down towards my shoes, as if the tell-tale splatter marks might still be in evidence.
‘Not with my consent. And not at all now that I stick to the cubicles.’ Where, occasionally, you hear them talking about you at the trough. Was that Curtis Holland that I saw in the foyer? Was that that guy from Butterfish? No, that guy’s too fat. Etcetera. How shit was their third album? Yeah, how shit were the other two? Ha ha ha. All the while with one hand on it, thrashing urine messily against communal stainless steel, standing in the piss of previous customers.
‘I know a place,’ she said. She led the way to a down escalator and into the nearest café at the bottom, past diners and the counter and all the way to a booth at the back. ‘Everyone sits at the tables outside. No one sits here.’
We were next to the kitchen doors and I could hear trays clattering, water pounding into a sink. The doors swung open and a waiter came out with two plates of white-bread sandwiches dressed up with alfalfa sprigs. Outside, a spruiker worked the crowd a few shops down, selling discount shoes.
We put our orders in and I fetched us glasses of water from the water cooler.
‘Annaliese came home buzzing last night.’ Kate said it as if it might be good news, or might not. ‘She was singing in her room, probably the song you were working on.’
I thought straight away of the email from Norway. ‘She did a good job. I’m glad you played me that DVD.’
‘I don’t think she got a thing done on her history assignment. But there’s always the weekend for that.’ She was holding her water glass in both hands, like someone about to read tea leaves. ‘I’m glad she got to do it. Could you make a copy for her? Whatever happens?’
‘Sure.’ I planned to already. I would burn her a CD. Gunnar and Øivind were missing a chance for something good, but I didn’t think I would talk them around. That was a conversation I had to have with Annaliese though, not with Kate, not today. It was Annaliese’s singing on there, and she would expect to have it treated as her business. I knew her well enough to know that.
‘Her history assignment’s the least of my worries.’ Kate was following a train of thought. She reached down into her bag and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. ‘This was in the bin. I’m pretty sure it came from Mark’s room.’
She handed it to me to read. The writing was double-spaced Times, and the piece described the brutal killing of a pig using two dogs and a hunting knife. Some notes had been made on it, in small, meticulous, black capitals. ‘Intestines’ had been changed to ‘guts’.
‘Maybe the lesson is that I shouldn’t go pulling things out of the bin. But what if he’s ... what if he’s doing this?’ She was holding her head in her hands now, looking out from under her hands at me as I read. ‘Okay, he’s not doing this. But why is he writing it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s for school. Some kind of character monologue.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, not impressed with the only guess I had. ‘From that Shakespearean play about the guy and his two pig dogs and the knife. One of those king plays, I’m sure.’
‘King of Knives?’
She laughed, and it surprised her. ‘That is particularly lame.’ She was still smiling though. ‘King of Knives...’ Her expression changed again. She gave up the smile. ‘He also – and this was for school – he once wrote a story in which someone...’ She leaned forward. I knew why. ‘...did a shit in his father’s car. A car exactly like his own father’s new one.’
‘I’m sure that’s metaphorical,’ I told her. ‘Unless you know of a shit to the contrary.’
I wasn’t certain why I was going into bat for Mark. He seemed at least as likely as anyone else I vaguely knew to do – or procure the doing of – a shit in his father’s car. I could imagine him laughing his scratchy laugh long into the night, regardless of the consequences, the grounding for life, the binning of his games software, the loss of access to iTunes or whatever source he had for his preferred bone-shaking metal. I could see him fantasising about it being true, and his father forever approaching his fancy yellow sports car transfixed by the idea of the turd that had once been waiting for him on the passenger seat. So he would buy a new seat, a new car, but still the thought would linger and never again would his staff be trooped to the basement for him to show off.
‘He used to teach himself magic tricks when he was young,’ Kate said, re-examining another, long gone, Mark. ‘We still have the book. I found it the other day. It was part of a kit, but most of the bits got lost years ago.’ I could see him, his bent little smile as he guessed the card you picked or drew the coin magically from your ear. ‘And now look at him. I think it’s a divorce thing. He’s seen a therapist, you know. Not recently, but ... He’s borderline oppositional defiant disorder.’
‘He seems okay to me.’ He didn’t, but he didn’t seem a diagnostic distance from okay. He seemed like an archetypal Troubled Teen, but maybe that’s what they were calling them now.
‘Well, maybe you get a slightly different version of him. He thinks he has some kind of rapport with you. He’s not exactly chatty around the house. And that’s just the start of it. I can’t have alcohol anywhere visible because he drinks it. He pierced his own ear with an ice cube and a needle, and then he got that pretend nail to go through the hole.’ She seemed compelled to make her case. ‘He calls his father Fletch, to his face. His name’s Campbell Fletcher, and there’s nothing about him that ever gets abbreviated. No Cam, no Cambo. And Mark calls him Fletch, and not in a nice way.’ She tried not to smile, but failed. Mark had no smartarse name for her. ‘I bet Campbell hates it.’
Our lunch arrived, a sandwich each on Turkish bread. She picked hers up, put it down again.
‘He’s pretty much opted out of parenting, though. Campbell, I mean. There’s no consistency from him. He likes to think he’s still a parent, when it’s convenient. Annaliese was his biggest champion until she was about twelve. Then he just forgot one thing too many. Forgot to pick her up from school, forgot about turning up to a musical she was in, turned his attention somewhere else, yet again. Some new girlfriend. When he turns on the charm, you feel like the most important person in the world. When he turns it on someone else, you know where you stand. Did Annaliese tell you how she got her iPod? She did some filing for him, for about an hour. That’s not parenting.’
‘It can’t be easy,’ I said, and it came out sounding stupid and trite.
I started eating my sandwich. Kate looked at hers. I thought she was going to tell me to try a bit harder.
‘I don’t know her sometimes,’ she said. ‘Sixteen-year-old girls now? They’re predators. More than one person has said that to me. Predators. I was at this party – parents were there too that time – and one of the fathers started talking about them fucking in the bedrooms. He actually said the word, and he said it twice, as though, suddenly, that was all fine and it was just what happened. And apparently they see oral sex as not sex – just a step on the way. That’s what I’ve got to deal with.’
‘Right.’
Did she know I had seen Annaliese topless by the pool? Had she seen her hand on my arm in the studio?
‘With Mark that stuff is fine, or at least it used to be. He used to talk about everything. Once he said he was worried about waking up with erections, so I told him the main lesson from that was that he should never fall asleep at school.’ She laughed, and finally took a bite of her sandwich. It didn’t stop her talking though. ‘With Annaliese there was no easy way. I left books in her room and she stormed out and slammed them down on the table and we had the whole “how dare you” thing. You’ve seen how that goes.’ She swallowed the last of the mouthful, drank some of her water. ‘I’m sorry, I’m ranting like a mad woman.’
‘Well, I’m a couple of bites ahead of you, but...’
‘Annaliese isn’t like that. All those things people say kids do. I’m sure that’s not her.’ She fiddled with an alfalfa sprig. ‘But she’s sixteen. She doesn’t want me to know everything. That’s how sixteen works, isn’t it?’
‘Always has been.’ I remembered the life I had lived in my head, the things no one knew, the need to shut my door and have a place that was just mine. She was waiting for me to say more, to reassure her that Annaliese wasn’t dragging boys off to bedrooms. Or dropping into studios, telling stories, playing a cool kind of twenty-five and an unfinished kind of sixteen, both at the same time. I couldn’t talk about Annaliese and boys, what might happen at parties, or might not. ‘So what do you want to do with your life?’
She had taken a second bite of her sandwich and she stopped, mid-chew, as if she’d heard the question wrongly. She finished chewing, and swallowed. ‘What do I want to do with my life? I’m living it now. I want to get these kids through school.’ She smiled, and shook her head. ‘I unload about my possibly psychopathic son and the sex-crazed world that’s ready to suck up my daughter, and you want me to unload about my life as well? You’re a brave man.’
‘I think I can take it.’ Most of my time was spent moving a cursor around a screen, clicking to make ever-smaller changes to the same songs, contemplating the next meal. I could listen to someone talking, listen to Kate and her stories of this life I hadn’t come close to living. If I hadn’t been in a band, if I had instead studied music and taught it, would Jess be working somewhere across town, telling someone about my disregard for the kids and my misspent charm? Could I have been the other half of this life, the sad, despised man who pinned his virility on his car?
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay. Primary teaching. If you really want to know. That’s what I’d do with my life if I could do exactly what I wanted. But it’s complicated. I’d have to do an exam to qualify for anything, and the only way to do it externally – the degree – would be to do another degree first.’ So, she had looked into it. ‘I’d like to work on literacy with disadvantaged kids. But I don’t know. I don’t see it happening.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? A million reasons why not. Because those degrees don’t fall conveniently out of cereal boxes. Because in the real world I have to have a job. I’ve got two kids with a lot to deal with. Two kids who have been fucked up to varying degrees by the way the divorce panned out, frankly.’ Her own bluntness stopped her in her tracks. She glanced over to the counter, where milk was being frothed noisily at the coffee machine. ‘Or just by being fourteen and sixteen.’
‘Well, I hope the chance comes along. I think it’s something you could be really good at.’ I was so out of practice with real conversations that I had no idea trite was my strong suit. I meant every word of it, even if I had no artful way to say it. It would have to stand as it was.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But that’s not likely.’ She picked her sandwich up again. ‘And that’s life in the suburbs. It’s not like being in a band. Not like spending your thirties flying around having a wild time, getting to be Peter Pan and...’ She stalled there, but I’d caught the thread of her logic.
‘Go on, finish. Peter Pan and what? One of his Lost Boys? I think that’s where that goes, assuming Derek’s Peter Pan. And assuming you’re not casting me as Wendy.’
‘No. I hadn’t thought...’ She stopped, corrected. ‘It’s not what I meant.’ Her look said it was exactly what she meant.
‘It’s okay. You just weren’t supposed to know me that well yet.’ I pitched it as a joke, however true it felt. I couldn’t keep all my secrets from her, I realised. Didn’t want to.
‘Hmm.’ She smiled, looked at her sandwich and put it down. ‘So, what made you come back here, Lost Boy, when the obvious place to keep working with a bunch of Norwegians might be, say, Norway?’
‘It was time.’ My brother. We had no father, no parents. I had no anchor if I didn’t have my brother. Was it as clear as that? Some secrets were still mine, still being worked out. ‘I’d been on tour forever and I needed to sit down.’
‘So, is Derek sitting down too?’
‘Only for lap dances, I’d imagine. Derek bought himself a West Hollywood apartment with a spa for three, and then upgraded to a spa for five. He showed me the catalogue. Romance Two, it was called. It’s his own mini Playboy Mansion. Derek buys Hef’s fantasies off the rack.’
She laughed. ‘And what about you? I can’t see you hanging around in that granny flat forever. What are you looking for from life, if it’s not Hef’s fantasies?’
‘I haven’t worked that out yet.’ I’d had Derek stories ready, but the focus was back on me. ‘This is a chance for me to think about it, I guess. No playmates though, probably no stripper spa parties, and no lounging around in silk smoking jackets with bunny logos. Maybe it’s time for me to embrace my inner Kenmore and see how it works for me.’
‘Hey, don’t sell Kenmore short,’ she said. ‘I’m sure there are spas all over this suburb happy to swing like it’s the seventies at Hef’s place.’ Her expression changed. ‘We used to have a spa.’ She shook her head, as if it couldn’t have been true. ‘Back at the old place. Back in the old life. We had this house at Indooroopilly. It was ... competitive. It was a statement house. If you drove up the driveway and parked at the front and got out, chances are it’d stop you and you’d gaze up at it and you’d think, “They’re richer than me.” That was the look it had. It’s not me to be in that house. I don’t know why it ever was. Annaliese had a friend out where we are now, and it was different, and I had only half the money I’d had before, so...’ She shrugged, as though she’d been backed into the house she was in now. ‘It’s better though. Campbell can have Admiralty Towers. I’m happy.’ She nodded, still testing it in her own mind to see if she believed it. ‘We never had the chance to work out that we liked different things.’
She told me she had started uni after finishing school, but that it didn’t go so well. She began an Arts degree and met no one. Every class was a room full of hundreds of people, and they all seemed to talk to each other but not to her. One day, she caught the bus home, and left her textbooks on the seat, knowing she wouldn’t be back. For weeks she left the house in the morning, pretending. She went to daytime sessions of movies and came home in the early afternoon and watched soaps. She ended up as a legal secretary, met Campbell. Annaliese came along quicker than they had planned. They hadn’t planned, in fact.
‘It’s just like they say it is.’ She was up to the other end of the relationship again. ‘The only people who get rich out of ugly divorces are lawyers. Divorce is a chance to show that it’s possible to divide something in two and both walk away convinced you’ve got less than half.’ She was off in the thought for a moment, then suddenly back, looking at me, stuck for the next thing to say, as if she had stepped somewhere she shouldn’t have.
I was divorced too, and far more recently. She knew about that. She had read it in papers and magazines, earlier in the year. We had crossed over to my story again. Even in this conversation, I was preceded by the two-dimensional more difficult, more fascinating version of myself.
‘I’m sure it’s different with kids,’ I said as our way out. ‘I’m sure there’s more to it.’