Plane Tree Drive Page 14

  ‘Alexander, Dan and I have come to an agreement. He’s moving out. It will just be Ava and me in the house.’

  Jennifer pauses, tries to gauge Alexander’s reaction. He is impassive. Stony. Unreadable. He doesn’t respond and too much time passes.

  Jennifer is becoming agitated, rocking in her chair, afraid her emotion will wake Ava and she will cry before she has the chance to really explain. But she can’t remember any of the speech she’d practised.

  ‘Alexander, for God’s sake, say something. Please.’

  Alexander takes a sip from his espresso and places it on the table. Then he finally says something.

  ‘Do you remember what you did when people called me names in primary school? You stamped your feet and told them off. They slunk away in shame. That’s what you did – you made me feel like I had a friend. You were brave. You are brave.’

  Jennifer remembers herself then, a ten-year-old version of herself stomping her feet and standing up for what she believed in. Standing up against the bullies. That was before she forgot how to be herself, before she forgot she was capable. Before she believed those subtle, insidious messages about being a good girl, not causing a fuss.

  Jennifer stands up, leans over and kisses Alexander on the lips.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For reminding me who I can be.’

  Alexander stands, and kisses her back.

  It’s About Time

  Act 4

  Scene: Alexander’s kitchen – night, now

  Jennifer and Alexander are kissing. Their hands grasp and graze each other’s bodies, their lips locked, noses squashed flat. Wine glasses, full, stand on the bench. No music plays.

  Jennifer stops, pulls back, and takes Alexander’s face in her hands. She stares at him from a slight distance and holds his gaze. Alexander breaks into a smile first and Jennifer follows.

  ‘We’re really doing this, aren’t we?’ Alexander asks her.

  ‘We really are.’

  Fade out.

  Fade in.

  Jennifer and Alexander have moved to the couch, slightly less clothed.

  Fade out.

  Fade in.

  Jennifer and Alexander are naked, hungry for each other.

  Fade out.

  Fade in.

  Jennifer and Alexander are wrapped up, limb over limb, on the couch, their breathing beginning to slow. The wine glasses are still forgotten on the kitchen bench.

  ‘We are becoming a habit.’

  ‘A good habit,’ Jennifer says.

  ‘It’s about time, don’t you think?’

  ‘We’ve wasted so many years.’

  ‘Not wasted. We weren’t ready.’ Alexander says.

  Alexander sits up straight, looking Jennifer in the eye. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘We stop wasting time. We spend the rest of our lives together. I make you safe and you make me brave.’

  ‘I like the sound of that.’

  Jennifer kisses Alexander softly on the mouth. She rests her head on his chest and closes her eyes.

  MAURICE, AMILY AND FARAJ (FEATURING THE SHED DOGS)

  Sunlight Slippery Dip

  He breathes little pieces of his insides into the world and says ‘it’s better to feel pain than nothing at all’. He has conviction on his side, but we are only nineteen. His voice reminds me of sitting around a campfire: someone has a harmonica, there is smoke in his words.

  We lie under the full sized billiard table in his parents’ house, at the good end of the Drive, the opposite end to where my dad lives. If he knew I was so close and didn’t come and visit…well. Right now, sounds come from brown, rectangular speakers that are covered in something resembling hessian. I don’t understand how the vibrations make it through that ugly surface unscathed. Light rolls through high windows, causing dust motes to dance and flicker. A single beam slides over the top of the record player and to the carpet below.

  It’s eleven in the morning. Anthropology text books lie discarded in the shadow of the sunlight slippery dip.

  We are talking about what we would study if we were anthropologists. He is decisive in the way that he can be. Rock’n’roll, he says. Indie acts. He wants to get under their skin. He is exasperated by his lack of skill on guitar and wants to get to the bottom of it. What do they have that he doesn’t? I feel like I could tell him, after all I grew up in the shadow of my dad’s rock’n’roll haze. And it wasn’t so cool. Or even interesting. All any kid wants is to be loved, or even noticed, by their parents. But it was all just fighting and resentment. I don’t want him to know that about me. It will make him like me more, and for all the wrong reasons. Then he will want to meet my dad. The famous Maurice. And he will find out he’s just down the road, but that he now works for a bank and he, this boy, will be lost to me forever.

  I am not as decisive about what I would study if I was an anthropologist. I feel him pushing me to commit to something, to choose a path. But I can’t. The world is big. How do you choose?

  Now he is exasperated with me. He breathes no words; it’s something I feel coming from him like a force field.

  I stare at the underside of the billiard table – a huge slab of slate that is roughly hewn on the side no one is supposed to see – and wonder what would remain of me if it was to fall. What trace would I leave? I haven’t done anything yet.

  I stretch my hand up ‘til my fingertips reach the cold rock. Undulations, ribs left over by tools pushing against the resistance of stone. I fall out of my body, becoming smaller as I sink through the nothingness of air into something unseen. I don’t land. I just leave myself, disorientated as my fingers seek the slate, which is now too far away to touch. I can’t answer his question or have his conviction about anthropology or anything else. I’d rather life wash over me than take a stranglehold on it.

  The Doors spin around the turntable and I still want to kiss him, even though he makes me feel as though I’ve lost my grip on myself. This thought is dizzying and I swirl until his smoky voice brings me back.

  ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,’ he quotes Jim Morrison, who quoted Aldous Huxley, who quoted William Blake. I wonder if Blake was quoting anyone, or if this idea originated with him. Either way, Blake left the first trace.

  He leans over and kisses me and I’m falling again, and it’s not all that different to before.

  An Opera in My Shed

  The gigs didn’t dry up until my skin did and now I enter payroll data for a bank. I sit in my fluoro-lit cubbyhole and tap at keys instead of sitting in the ink of a dimly lit stage, thumping skins. Instead of punters lining up outside the bar waiting to pay their entry fee and get stamped, each fortnight I have a small line-up of folks at my desk, irritable because I’ve typed one wrong digit and they have been underpaid. No one ever turns up to say they have been overpaid. Or to say, ‘thanks, I was correctly paid’.

  When Jacqui left, taking Amily with her, I dusted the remnants of them out of the house she’d always hated and my life by doing a reno job on my back shed. My shed is big. Corrugated iron. I put triple thick egg cartons on the walls, had a sparky come and put in a heavy duty electrical supply. I brought in recording equipment and amplifiers and put padlocks on the heavy pull-down door. I chucked all my tools and accumulated shit onto the back lawn, leaving it to rust, and now I have a studio big enough to be a small bar. I dragged an old lounge in and pushed it against the wall, and in the back corner I plugged in a bar fridge. I fashioned a makeshift stage by putting down cheap shag pile rugs from IKEA.

  Then I put an ad in Derringers:

  Drummer seeking singer, lead guitarist and bass player for tribute band.

  Some clueless kids called, asking what the pay would be. Some classically trained conservatorium graduates called and balked the second I told them what they would be playing – and where they’d be playing it. But then a few calls came through that seemed t
o make sense. Rowena asked, ‘Do you have a rehearsal space because it can’t be at my place, I have a baby. Oh, and is it okay that I have a baby?’ I told her that babies were kind of essential to the human race and it was perfectly fine that she had one. David said, ‘How many times a week will we practice?’ He was disappointed when I told him only once. Miranda said, ‘Is it okay that I don’t know the whole catalogue yet?’ It was the yet that won my heart. And finally, Dalton called. He said, with a tremor in his voice, ‘I get performance anxiety in front of an audience. Is that okay?’ I asked him if he could sing to me on the phone and when I heard him I decided it was my duty to help him. I’d seen plenty of other musos get over performance anxiety. And the world needed to hear that voice.

  I invited them all – Rowena the Mum, David the Obsessive Rehearser, Miranda of the Yet and Dalton with Performance Anxiety – to my shed.

  Dalton arrived first, anxious to check the levels on his mic in an empty room. He stared at his thongs while he spoke to me and while he sang. David and Miranda arrived together, all sly smiles, flushed cheeks and linked pinky fingers – they knew each other. Rowena was late. She rushed into the shed, out of breath and frazzled.

  ‘Hi everyone. Sorry I’m late. Thing is, I have to put her down myself, she won’t do it for Mum, and that takes forever because she is so slow on the bottle, and then she needs to burp – if I put her down without a decent burp she’s always gonna wake up crying – and I have to stay with her and sing her a lullaby while I pat her…it’s…and of course tonight of all nights, she just wouldn’t go down. It’s not always like this, I promise.’ I think she said all this without taking a breath. ‘Oh, I’m Rowena by the way. You can call me Row. Or Rowey. Either really, either is fine.’

  I shut the shed door and we plugged in.

  The sound from our rehearsal went straight through the egg cartons and the corrugated iron. I knew this because the neighbours complained. From one end of Plane Tree Drive to the other. That’s when I remembered some advice I’d been given as a young man: if you’re having a party, invite the neighbours so they don’t call the cops.

  We christened ourselves Maurice and the Shed Dogs and did a letterbox drop with flyers advertising a gig in my shed the following Saturday night. Some of the neighbours knew me by name and reputation, so I hoped the novelty of seeing an old has-been in action might bring in a few stragglers.

  On Saturday night Dalton was nervous.

  ‘Maurice, I don’t think I can do this. I only came along because I thought it would be just us, in the shed. I don’t think I can perform in front of a crowd.’

  ‘Man, you can sing the pants off these tracks. Just close your eyes and pretend you are singing down the phone to me again. No one else in the room.’

  Rowena was tuning her guitar and eavesdropping on our conversation. I could see her bursting with the desire to add something.

  ‘Dontcha think so, Row?’ I said.

  ‘Yep, he’s the real deal, Maurice.’

  ‘Better than the original,’ I added, perhaps laying it on a bit thick. ‘Well, I can say that,’ I said, defending myself, ‘seeing I am one of the originals.’

  Rowena looked carefully at Dalton, dropping her gaze just before his eyes caught hers. Oh God, I thought, they’re falling in love. In my shed. Now there’s two of them – Miranda and David were like a couple of lovesick puppies, and now Dalton and Rowena too. Quickest way to destroy a band, in my experience, was for the band members to fall in love.

  My work week at the bank seemed to fly by with the anticipation of Saturday night. As I sat at my desk inputting data I would think about the set list – was the order right? Was it the right mix of slow and up tempo? What worried me most was whether Dalton would hold it together. I could see him doing a no-show.

  Saturday night came around and a few lonely souls drifted into the shed and sat on the couch. There was Jennifer, with Ava dozing soundly in her stroller. She was with someone new, not Dan, and they held each other close and whispered quietly into each other’s ears. Young love that looked old. There was frail Florence from number 90; she must have left Doug at home, probably realising that the old jazz dog wouldn’t like our relatively new school rock’n’roll material. And Alice, without that good-for-nothing ex-husband of hers, Tim. She had some hippie with her.

  As per my instructions on the flyer, they’d brought their own booze and some had brought a packet of chips. I handed out old bamboo bowls, pointed them to the bar fridge and we were ready to go.

  As the band tuned their instruments one last nervous time, I looked around for Dalton, but he was nowhere to be seen. Then I heard him: vomiting in the yard behind the shed. Not the greatest start – everyone else probably heard him too. But to his credit, he walked in and started to sing. He was looking at his shoes and his voice was barely projecting beyond the mike stand, but he was there and he was singing in front of real live people. This was not nothing.

  After the first song he turned to me with terror in his eyes, looking ready to throw up again. Poor kid had no idea how good he could be if he just got over himself. I could see the meagre audience were fidgety and bored. He was not connecting. I looked at Row and Dalton followed my gaze. Bless her, she winked at him and blew him a shy kiss. He gave her a tiny nod and he looked at the crowd. Judging by their faces, he still had that same look of terror in his eyes. He was scaring the crap out of them. But he started to sing again.

  The next song was pretty upbeat. From the early days of the band, before the singer became maudlin and melancholy, and before the drummer – that’s me – had had an affair with the guitarist. Dalton had to sing that song with a smile on his face.

  The advantage of being on drums is that you have a birds’ eye view of everything happening on stage, from behind of course. I could see Row was watching every move Dalton made. She was worried for him, for sure, but there was more to it than that. This wasn’t about the success or failure of the gig or even the band. The tilt of her head told me everything.

  Dalton was managing to stuff up the chirpy song. The neighbours were getting restless. Something had to be done, but I had no idea what.

  Row knew it too. She stepped up to Dalton’s mic, locked eyes with him, forcing him to lift his gaze from the floor where it had once again slipped, and started to sing. Damn, who knew she could sing? She sounded like an angel. I think Dalton’s shock took him out of himself for a moment and he actually started to sing too. For real. To her, of course. It was only to her. He still wasn’t looking at the audience, but he was finally singing for real. It was like she’d just told him she loved him.

  The audience felt it too. They stopped talking to each other and nibbling chips and started really listening.

  And then it was there; that old feeling. The high of the gig-going-right. The symbiosis of five people playing together, getting each other, tapping into something bigger than the individual, feeling it, taking it beyond the notes on the page. It was all there. All because Row had told Dalton that she loved him. With a song. God, I love music.

  The gig flew by after that and I felt like I was lost in something easy and beautiful. The feeling that I only ever had on stage, that I’d been missing for years now, hiding behind that desk in that cubbyhole cubicle. I never wanted it to end.

  But of course it did.

  At midnight I waved the neighbours goodbye. Some asked if we were putting on a show next week, and that’s how Saturday Night with Maurice and the Shed Dogs became a regular gig.

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

  More neighbours appeared the next week. Grouchy Marg who seemed to be talking to a roaming neighbourhood cat. That old fella Hal who’d hardly left his house since his wife died – he’d forgotten to change out of his pyjamas, but he was there. Jimmy was chatting to Hunni, both of them looking like awkward wallflowers.

  They all brought something – a chair or an esky or a bag of chips. Saturday Night with Maurice and the Shed Dogs became a Plane Tr
ee Drive institution – I knew this to be true and not just some flamboyant dream when the coffee van parked out front of my house one night, followed by a Burger Bar truck. They stayed for an hour, filled everyone with grease and caffeine and headed off. The now fifty or so people who rocked up to my shed were fuelled. Ready for the long haul. And the gigs did get longer, and longer, until we were still playing at three or four am, Dalton’s voice cracking, Miranda’s fingers bleeding and Row’s breasts leaking.

  Summer set in. The leaves began to change colour on the plane trees as more and more people came and started to sit in my driveway, under the stars. The young hipsters came – the rich kids from the big houses at the top of the street, and the young ones from the flats at the bottom of the street. Chaining their commuter bikes to my cyclone-wire fence, they would squat over the gravel in their shorts and beanies and unshaven faces. The first followers – the older neighbours – graciously welcomed them to what had very early become their turf.

  I loved seeing half my neighbourhood in my shed but the truth was that there were only two people I really wanted to come. Maybe I’d done this whole thing for them? I’d sent Amily and her mum a flyer. More than anything I wanted Amily to see this, to see her old dad almost like he was in his prime.

  Months went by and neither of them came. I consoled myself with the growing audience of neighbours. I was left with nothing to do but make the best of what I had. And things were looking up. Dalton had become quite the entertainer. He coated the lyrics in treacle and made them romantic to the point of mawkishness. The reason Dalton sounded like caster sugar cut with white chocolate was that he was singing to Row. David and Miranda ogled each other with thinly veiled lust as the songs bore themselves out, David’s licks on the bass getting quicker and quicker, pushing the pace of the song to its limits, as their blood pressures collectively rose. It was like watching a sexy soap opera in song every Saturday night in my shed.

  After a few months I rang my ex-wife and asked her to come along with Amily one night. There was a lot of hurt in her voice when she said she’d think about it.