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  ‘Another red carpet! We’re on another red carpet!’ she marvelled, as people melted away into their rooms.

  We stopped outside our door and Rose rummaged in her handbag: a bread roll, a fork, a stoved-in packet of Marlboro Lights, a room key. She found the slot in the door and blundered in. As soon as she activated the lights with the key card and gave a crow of satisfaction, I pulled the door shut behind her.

  Out in the corridor, I fronted up and kissed John Villiers hard, against the wall.

  At first he didn’t respond, but then he kissed me back. Of course he did. For ages. The surge between us pulled me under and fused us at the hips. I touched my fingers to the seamed coarseness of his neck, smelled the faint tang of shaving foam. We broke for a second and grinned at each other in delight.

  ‘Stupid thing to do,’ he whispered, but I’d dosed him up on dopamine. He came at me again and I locked him in close. I could feel his hard-on pressing against me and I ground into him to double-check. It felt like it had been there all night. His thumb brushed my nipple through my dress. Usually when it came to sex I liked to feel like I was being forced, so that I couldn’t be held responsible for anything. With John Villiers, it was more fun to coerce.

  ‘Can’t.’ He gave me one last slip of the tongue and pushed my hands gently away from under his shirt, where they’d been roaming.

  ‘Why not?’

  He didn’t answer. The look between us as we parted was like a tendril, thinning and finally breaking. But as I turned and fumbled my key at the door I was smiling. I knew that I would swirl around and around his head all night.

  7

  IT’S ON

  First rule of drinking: always order a triple vodka with a splash of tonic, in a tall glass with a straw. That way, nobody can prove it was anything but lemonade. Wine? Beer? Champagne? Crème de menthe? Sure, behind closed doors. Otherwise, you only drink vodka now.

  POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

  Much hoopla has been made about my weird pronunciation over the years. I’ve been called a ‘banshee’, a ‘siren’ and a ‘mental Medusa’ (Rose gets ‘songstress’, ‘songbird’, ‘chanteuse’), but the truth is, I have to turn my ‘ee’ into ‘eh’ and chew on my vowels a bit, or I sound like Julie Andrews. That’s what years of after-school classical training will do.

  Seducing John Villiers—who left the hotel the next morning before I could make meaningful eye contact—was the second-most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, after the ARIAs, but coming in at number three on the list was our first review. Over the years our write-ups would fall into one of two categories—fatherly advice from journo creeps ogling us through the bottom of their beer glasses, or bombastic, superlative-driven rants about our fuckability—but this first review of our live performance confirmed everything we had suspected to be true.

  THE DOLLS, DINGO’S SALOON 19/10/07

  Word around town is The Dolls are the second coming. They’re the saviours of pop, beamed down to deliver us from ponderous boys with sludgy guitars. They’re also riding high on the coat-tails of their aunt (eighties wild child Alannah Dall) and have even recruited her producer, John ‘The Ears’ Villiers, to work on their forthcoming album, but as yet they’ve managed not to dishonour her fantastically sordid reputation.

  Certainly Nina and Rose Dall are deliberately provocative—the sort of girls who’d hang upside down from the monkey bars at school with their underwear on show—which is a shot in the arm in an era of simpering pop debutantes and lisping folkies. It’s all thrashing hormones and freewheeling riffs as the teenagers test boundaries and push buttons. Case in point: ‘Flip the Script’, with its tirade against a puppeteer who needs them more than they need him: ‘I made you what you are today / And I can take it away,’ sings Rose, feet firmly planted in the classic rock gait.

  While you’ll hear all kinds of speculation at the bar at a Dolls show, something people forget to mention is what knockout singers the seventeen-year-olds are. Some of my rather more obvious colleagues here at Score Towers fall firmly into Team Rose—citing her Stevie Nicks sass and the histrionic explorations of a young Kate Bush—but for me it’s Nina Dall who’s got the goods. One moment she’s honking and yelping like the Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett; the next she’s affected the leathery roar of punk wench Brody Dalle.

  A band such as The Dolls will always have their denouncers (essentially they peddle garage pop in front of a faceless backing band), but I, for one, can’t wait to see what they’re capable of once they come of age. The Bone Doctor, 4/5

  THE SCORE

  Hank swatted the paper through the air a few times, as if to flick off imaginary drool. ‘I think you got The Bone Doctor’s panties wet,’ he said. I shrugged off his arm. I couldn’t stand it when he smelled like stale beer or smeared his stubble over my face. It brought back the spectre of Tony.

  ‘Don’t be too surprised,’ was Alannah’s advice when we rang her later to tell her about the review. ‘Women always have to suffer comparisons. They kept comparing me to bloody Bonnie Tyler.’

  I didn’t mind those sorts of comparisons, when on toilet walls we were always compared to skanks, whores and puppets. John Villiers was still a way off being the puppet master I fantasised about, but he sent flowers of congratulations. Rose was feeding apples into the juicer when they arrived and when Dad wasn’t looking she poked her tongue in her cheek. But if John Villiers were here I could probably have begged him to take me roughly from behind at the breakfast bar and Dad wouldn’t have noticed.

  Whenever I thought of John Villiers at the ARIAs I felt like punching the air in victory. I remembered him as a Picasso: one giant eye. I’d been writing reams of masochistic lyrics about older men in his image, trying to come up with things to rhyme with ‘gerontophile’, ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ and ‘captor’, none of which were sexy words in isolation. I’d gone out and bought a bunch of over-the-knee socks and new silk undies for inspiration.

  ‘There’s no way he could rock a singlet like Hank does,’ Rose said, determined to take the higher moral ground. But Hank and I had a complicated thing going. Neither of us would admit to being in a relationship, and we studied each other like chess players to see what strategic move would be made next and how we should counter. I liked the thrill of the chase, and we were as fast as each other.

  •

  Later that night I lay sprawled with Hank on his bed, his unsheathed doona beneath us, the bottom sheet tangled around our feet. I waved my cigarette end at the ceiling, which flickered from the light of the TV.

  Hank’s favourite movie, which he’d put on and from which he could quote religiously, was Valley of the Dolls. It was about an actress who succumbs to pills and booze. I’d adopted it as my favourite movie too, and we’d quote bits at each other in accents, in bars. Tonight we watched Neely O’Hara stagger from scene to scene. I wondered if that was how Hank liked his women: so scuppered by their issues that they eventually cartwheeled tragically out of his life without any awkward adult conversations. He was proving to be quite the feeder when it came to pouring me red wine.

  ‘It’s like The Bangles,’ I was trying to explain, spilling claret all over his doona. ‘If you weren’t Susanna Hoffs, you were nobody. In The Dolls, I have to be Susanna Hoffs.’

  After a while, Hank fell asleep, so I circled his room for a bit, picking up his things and putting them back in roughly the right place. I scrolled through my phone contacts looking for someone to talk to, then called Alannah. I enjoyed our occasional late-night conversations, which felt quite thrillingly like I was cheating on Rose.

  A moment after Alannah answered I heard the ignition of her lighter, which meant she was going to grant me an audience. ‘How was the weekend?’ she asked.

  ‘Okay, I guess. It’s such a comedown being back from the ARIAs, though. You know, like being back in the ’burbs.’ I tried to whine, but eliciting sympathy from Alannah was like getting blood out of a stone.

  ‘
There’s no room for victims in this world, Nina,’ she said. ‘If you don’t stand up for yourself in this industry they’ll chew you up and spit you out.’

  ‘You say in your book you were really shy,’ I said, changing tack. ‘You’ve never seemed that shy.’

  I really wanted her to test me on the book.

  ‘I just decided one day that I was going to be confident,’ she returned. ‘If you show people weakness, they won’t feel sorry for you, they’ll go for you. Sometimes they’ll try to destroy you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just because they can.’

  ‘But then you’ll be known as a bitch.’

  ‘Big deal,’ she laughed derisively. ‘Your decisions won’t always make you popular, but people who haven’t been in your shoes won’t understand you anyway.’

  I wondered on what day Alannah decided to be confident; if it was the day she signed her deal with Grandiose Records; or the day Bono kicked her off the U2 tour for getting booed off stage three nights in a row. She was only nineteen then, two years older than I was now. Her twenties were like one long act of defiance: shouting ‘Fuck!’ on Hey Hey It’s Saturday in protest at having to mime; forgetting to wear knickers on Top of the Pops; putting her foot up on the monitor at Drought Aid so that every snapper in the pit rushed to take a shot up her skirt. Even though she afforded the tabloids a glimpse of skimpy black panties slicing between her thighs, it was her face above it that drew everyone in: bleary, cheeks smeared with make-up. Had she been crying? Did she just pash someone’s face offstage? You could write your own script.

  ‘Once you put yourself in that spotlight,’ she expounded, ‘something has to kick in. It has to, in order for you to survive. Call it fight or flight. The problem is, over time your new persona can turn into a monster. People shouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘We always live our lives like we’re being watched,’ I said. There was a blank silence.

  ‘Like you said, in TV Week,’ I prompted, wrapping my toes over the bottom rail of Hank’s balcony and regarding my knees. I could see the late-night stragglers of King Street roaming around between my thighs.

  ‘Did I say that?’ she wondered. I heard her clanking around in the kitchen. It sounded like the construction of a cup of tea; probably Earl Grey. I couldn’t cope with the idea of Alannah buying Lipton down at Aldi. ‘Well, are you going to live your life worried that people are observing you, or are you going to dance like nobody’s watching?’

  I frowned. This was a new Alannah-ism to absorb, and we’d had seventeen years to process the last one. My aunt exhaled noisily—the end of the cigarette.

  ‘Just watch out for the people watching you,’ she advised. ‘Be careful of releasing too many songs like “Can’t Say No”. And don’t mistake being a victim for a valid art form—it’s not sustainable.’

  It’s not an art form, I thought in irritation, it’s the way I’m wired.

  ‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘the messed-up-little-girl stereotype eventually clicks over into the tragic old lush.’

  She gave a raspy laugh that turned into a hacking cough so awful I had to hold the phone away from my ear. When I returned it she was saying, ‘And there’s no need to hurry into that.’

  TOP 10 PIECES OF ADVICE FROM ALANNAH

  1. Pay your taxes.

  2. Don’t screw the crew.

  3. Take care of your teeth.

  4. Don’t work with anyone from Trunk Backline, Lester & Brown Legal Services, Crunk Records, Persephone Publishing, On the Clock Studios, Decadent or the BBC.

  5. Do dust if you must but turn down the brown.

  6. Don’t sign anything without independent legal advice.

  7. Use a condom. Use two if you do screw the crew.

  8. Keep a ledger of journalists that tried to destroy you, and their hobbies and the quotes.

  9. It is your job to be a spectacle, not a cog in a well-oiled machine. However, always wear undergarments.

  10. If you can’t be nice to the people you pass on the way up, make sure they’re dead on your way down.

  •

  It was Alannah’s opinion that now John Villiers had done the legwork with the basic tracks, we should get some brand-appropriate names on board to add to the cache. Over the next few weeks her publisher, EZO, sent us to work with Tomkat in Sydney and Ben Noakes at his retreat in the Blue Mountains.

  Until now it had just been Rose and me writing together, lying on her bedroom floor. Rose wrote in a concise, measured manner, sticking to the paths of big choruses, dramatic key changes and fail-safe couplets. I riffed and roiled all over the page, writing reams and reams, and scratching most of it out to leave just the curious gems that would stick in people’s minds. I was the Robbie Williams to her Gary Barlow. No, the Richards to her Jagger.

  Showing the fruits of our labour to these producers was intimidating, particularly when our favourite parts wound up scrapped. On our home demos we’d multi-tracked our voices to infinity, but Tomkat reckoned less was more. We were already much better at laying down tracks, though. John Villiers had taught us how to cut our vowels short and not sound too singerly, and he’d corrected Rose’s pronunciation so that she stopped singing ‘sh’ for ‘s’ the way the Americans do. ‘That just shounds shtupid,’ he’d said. Tomkat didn’t have any good advice for us, but he did heap reverb on our vocals to make us sound better to our own ears. Then we’d sing better.

  I never tired of watching Rose sing; the look of concentration on her face when she had the cans over her ears. When we sang together, for that suspended moment, we were on the same team, invincible.

  Tomkat wound up reworking our lavish demo of ‘Can’t Say No’ into a techno killing machine, acknowledging my prodigious talent at barre chords, but then taking them all out. I had to admit that it sounded better. Wasn’t it actually rendered more punk-rock by having the punk-rock taken out? We didn’t want to be too obvious.

  By the time we were done with Tomkat and Noakes we had seven more songs in demo form for Ian Essence to peddle to record companies. We had a few lunches with label managers, with Alannah on speed dial as our ring-in advisor.

  Ian Essence: We’re going to have to take a hard line here. The Dolls are not a disposable commodity. They’re about longevity and product development, one hundred and ten per cent.

  Label manager: Of course, of course. How old are you two?

  Ian Essence: They’re seventeen.

  Label manager: Hm.

  Rose Dall: We’ve got more than five thousand friends on Facebook.

  Nina Dall: We’ve been reviewed in Rolling Stone.

  Label manager: Because we’re definitely looking to develop some new talent. Think Australia’s answer to Duffy and Lily Allen.

  Ian Essence: I see where you’re coming from. But Nina and Rose have done the hard work and already have a grassroots live following.

  Label manager: Sure. Then, what’s your strategy? They’re already seventeen.

  Ian Essence: Well . . . in essence our strategy is to—

  Label manager: How do you feel about club music? We’re looking for someone who can get dance floors pumping. A multi-tasker who can deliver DJ sets and sing. We’d get them opening for all the major international acts.

  At that point we’d put Alannah on speakerphone like we were laying a Magnum 44 on the table in a Tarantino film. It seemed as though everyone had a different vision for us, but there was one opinion I trusted more than any other. He was under my thumb, right there under ‘J’.

  •

  Isolated in the vocal booth with the cans clamped snugly over my ears, I could hear myself heavy-breathing like a creep. I was waiting for John Villiers’ voice.

  I’d called him after our last meeting with Ovine Records, to tell him about the trouble we were having getting signed. He invited me into Glasshouse to re-track some vocals and talk about it, because he had the rest of the afternoon free. Rose was not invited, so this was code-speak for sex.

&nbs
p; I wore: black lace dress with brogues and white ankle socks. A little bit riot grrrl, a little bit schoolgirl, a little bit Manga girl. You wouldn’t want to bend over in it. Or would you?

  John Villiers wore: flannel shirt, jeans, aftershave. I was ninety-nine per cent certain he had not worn aftershave up to this point.

  At first we kept up the pretence in the low-lit studio—I did a bit of singing; he pushed some buttons—but the inevitable outcome was etched into a smirk on my face. It was on.

  I studied him through the control-room window, watching him concentrate on the faders or stroke his chin as he contemplated me contemplating him. I’d dimmed the lights in the booth, so much so that I could hardly see the lyrics tacked up on the wall, but I could see him, lit up by the glow of his computer. When I heard his talkback button crackle, I had a Pavlovian response.

  I was seventeen. My brain had yet to develop an impulse-control mechanism, so there was nothing I could do to stop nature from taking its course. John Villiers said go, and I sang a verse—‘Suck it and see / I called it from the other / Side of the street’—but really I was wondering impatiently if this was my moment to go into the control room and trap him against the mixing console, my hand snaking down between us as I held his eye . . . or whether it was this moment now, as he came into the booth yet again to adjust the mic, to urgently pull him up against me, firmly putting his hands on the smooth, warm skin of my back, feeling his cock straining valiantly against his jeans and pushing at the hot groove between my legs—

  ‘Okay, that’s enough,’ crackled John Villiers in my ears. I trailed off. ‘I think we’ve got it.’

  The spell broken, we packed up in silence, dragging it out. We were leaving things dangerously close to the last moment. John Villiers would have to get back to his big house way out in the Shire, and at this rate nothing would happen, again.