Cherry Bomb

By Jenny Valentish

Nina Dall is one half of Sydney pop-punk band The Dolls. Have they got what it takes to stay on top or are they just a one hit wonder? Told through the eyes of a young singer who's seen it all, this is celebrated rock journalist Jenny Valentish's debut novel - a wild ride into Australia's music scene.

'Nina Dall is as singular and mercurial a character as I've ever been charmed and terrified to meet.' TIM ROGERS

Nina Dall has seen it all by her twenty-first birthday, including her own meteoric rise to fame and its inevitable aftermath. She created teen band The Dolls to escape suburban hell. Now she needs to prove she's not a one-hit wonder and convince veteran producer John Villiers to be her own personal svengali. But he's got his own problems.

Rose Dall craves adoration, and through The Dolls, she gets it. But with the band's every move coming under media scrutiny and cousin Nina going off the rails, she's pushed to breaking point. Can The Dolls survive each other?

Alannah Dall had a pop career in the 1980s before disappearing from public view. She's resurfaced to steer her nieces away from the same scandals, but with her own comeback on the cards, The Dolls start to become a threat.

A mesmerising ride into the heart of love, fame and rock'n'roll. You have to risk everything to get to the top-and even more to stay there. But how do you get back what's been lost along the way? Cherry Bomb is a brilliant debut novel that will grab you tight and never let you go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Jun 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781743437773

Jenny Valentish

Jenny Valentish is an author and journalist who has written for The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Saturday Paper, Vice, and Rolling Stone. She is the author of Cherry Bomb, a novel set in the music industry, and the research-memoir Woman of Substances, the coeditor of the anthology Your Mother Would Be Proud, and the creator of two blogs, New Age Guinea Pig and Hey Man, Now You're Really Living. Valentish is a board director of SMART Recovery Australia and has acted in consultancy and ambassador roles in the drug and alcohol field. Previously, she served as editor of Time Out (Melbourne) and Triple J's Jmag, worked as a music publicist and freelance writer, interviewing rock stars from Jack White to Joan Jett, and was a board member for The Push, a nonprofit music organization that connects young people to the music industry. She has taught memoir and nonfiction writing at universities, to drug and alcohol workers, and to writing organizations. Raised in the outskirts of London, England, Jenny currently resides in Melbourne, Australia.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR CHERRY BOMB

‘Though the coating is rock’n’roll, the tough interior is about the capricious, bewildering whims of adolescence and young adulthood. Nina Dall is as singular and mercurial a character as I’ve ever been charmed and terrified to meet.’

TIM ROGERS

‘Valentish has nailed the desperate, sociopathic scramble to reach the dizzying, depraved heights of rock’n’roll, where if you don’t hate your bandmates on some level, you’re doing it wrong. I laughed, I blushed, I actually guffawed. I couldn’t put it down.’

ABBE MAY

‘Jenny Valentish is hands-down one of my favourite writers in Australia. Her first novel, Cherry Bomb, is full of punch, charm and sleek observations.’

ADALITA

CHERRY

BOMB

JENNY VALENTISH

9781743437773_0003_001

Author’s note: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental . . . with the exception of Molly Meldrum.

First published in 2014

Copyright © Jenny Valentish 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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from the National Library of Australia

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ISBN 978 1 76011 081 9

eISBN 978 1 74343 777 3

Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

1 KINGS CROSS SHANGRI-LA

2 REMEMBERING THE BAIN MARIES

3 MEN

4 BAD MANAGER

5 DUMMY

6 AWARD FOR BEST PASH

7 IT’S ON

8 THE GOLD COAST

9 THE BIG CHEESE

10 THE UTE MUSTER

11 CHEAP TRICK

12 FIGHT LIKE A GIRL

13 LOS ANGELES

14 TALL POPPIES

15 ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME

16 THE AMERICAN TOUR

17 INTERVENTION

18 I TOUCH MYSELF

19 TAMWORTH

20 SOAP SCUM

21 WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

22 BOSS

23 TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP

24 NO NO NO

CHERRY BOMB SOUNDTRACK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PROLOGUE

An hour before the biggest gig of our career, we sent a roadie on stage and instructed him to stretch a silver line of gaffer tape down the centre of it.

Rose and I watched from the wings.

‘That’s my side,’ she said pointing to the left, which was always her side. ‘Do not come over that line.’

Less than forty-five minutes after that I tried to strangle her in the people mover. Then I strapped on my guitar and walked out into the lights.

1

KINGS CROSS SHANGRI-LA

At dusk, I waited for Rose outside Glasshouse Studios and smoked a Marlboro Red. I smoked Marlboro Lights in private and Reds for public appearances.

Kings Cross was lit up like a kids’ party under the Coca-Cola sign. It tugged at something inside me. If we weren’t in the middle of recording a song with John Villiers, I’d beat a path down Darlinghurst Road towards the El Alamein fountain—the scene of many of our early photo shoots—past the sex shops and bars full of dead-eyed groovers, to duck into my favourite twinkling bottle shop. I’d been drinking for three years but I still couldn’t get over the marvel of going into a bottle shop whenever I wanted and knowing there was nothing anybody could do about it; unless they checked my ID too closely.

But no, we were working, working. I squinted down Bayswater Road, along the trails of red tail-lights, towards the bouncers on the strip. Watching them watching me. I shifted my posture. My cousin Rose (vox, bass) always reminded us that we should act sexy at all times, as if a TV camera were constantly following us. The way I rested the sole of my boot against the wall made my skirt fall slyly across my thigh, but if anyone saw the curl of my mouth with my cigarette in it, no hands, they’d realise I was daring them to even try.

Lately I’d started telling everyone that I was from Kings Cross. The western suburbs, where I was really raised, were so boring that you were duty-bound to become an underage binge-drinking statistic. The trick was not to stay there. I was always appraising and eradicating my flaws, from embarrassing lyrics or eyebrows plucked into apostrophes to being identifiably from Parramatta. I watched the greats on YouTube—your Courtneys, your Gwens, your Stevies—and I learned.

I didn’t know it yet, but one day my Wikipedia entry would begin thus: ‘Nina Dall is one half of Sydney pop-punk band The Dolls. Since forming the group as a sixteen-year-old with her cousin Rose Dall under the guidance of veteran producer John Villiers, she has written and recorded one gold album, It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns (2012), and one platinum album, Tender Hooks (2014), and has taken home six ARIA awards.’

There will be more photographs of me in existence than of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and any visiting dignitaries put together. I will only stay overnight in suburbs with a Park Hyatt.

Rose was still inside Studio A on the leather lounge, trying a new lip gloss that created a chemical reaction with lips to make them swell. I knew she was really snatching extra look-at-me minutes from the band who were loading in, probably asking who their manager was and if they were signed yet.

I was always waiting for Rose, mainly because she was obsessed with her hair and not mindful of other people’s needs. I don’t want you to dislike her, though. A lot of her behaviour was probably due to the meds; specifically the anti-anxiety pills she’d been on since starting high school. I wasn’t sure if it was her four-bedroom (plus games room) house or the lustrous shine of her inky hair that made her anxious, but those pills could really make you mean.

My hair never kept anybody waiting. I could see it then in the screen of my phone, because I’d set the camera function to reverse. It was home-bleached blonde with black roots, and I parted it in a curtain to one side and messed it behind my ear on the other. It was waif, but, like, hobo waif. My tits were small, but in the style of Kate Moss.

When Rose finally slunk out the front of Glasshouse with a million bag straps, bra straps and bangles clanking around her elbows, she was holding the lip gloss in front of her, as if to fend off an argument. Her nails were Sportsgirl sea-foam blue.

‘I can feel it tingling, but there’s nothing happening,’ she reported as I pulled myself away from my phone screen. She was blocking me with her sunnies, so I fronted her and pulled a stray hair out of the sticky smear on her mouth. We’d been grooming each other since we could remember.

I wore: slouch T-shirt over aqua bra, Catholic-schoolgirl skirt (for the record, I went to a mixed public school), baseball boots.

Rose wore: the same, but pink bra and Doc Martens.

We liked to stay at the forefront of developments in cosmetics and fashion, and Rose had cultivated for The Dolls a distinctive look: one coloured bra strap hanging down, plum lips, cruel cat’s eyes, beauty spots. It was a bit retro. A bit Countdown 1985, when everyone else at our school was all about 2010. The eighties and nineties were a more romantic time for music.

Nowadays record companies had exclusive deals with TV shows that fed the winners straight into their mincing machines. Shows such as Australian Idol, the primetime slot in which people were recognised for being special and were airlifted out of their provincial predicaments.

‘I once drank a tequila that made my lips swell up like lilos the next day,’ I told Rose, pushing myself hips-first away from the wall and stubbing my cigarette under the toe of my boot. ‘Or like Li-Lo’s.’

Rose wasn’t listening. She was grimly fluffing her hair in the reflection of the window and popping her lips to ensure even application. She finally shot me a direct look. ‘You don’t have to come on to every guy we work with, you know. There’s going to be a lot of them.’

That was really why we were here. We had come outside specifically to talk about John Villiers—and how we would have to be very careful, vis-a-vis John Villiers and Alannah Dall.

•

There’s some footage of Alannah Dall back in 1986, looking annoyed outside the Parramatta Stadium. Her band shuffles behind her, holding their instruments, out of focus. She’s being interviewed by Molly Meldrum from Countdown. I’ve watched it a million times on YouTube. He says, ‘First the Queen of England opens the stadium, now it’s graced by the princess of Parramatta herself. Does this feel like a special place to you, Alannah?’

Special place, I’d always think at this moment. I’d have made a joke about that.

‘I shouldn’t think so, Molly,’ she says, her eyes scanning his cowboy hat down to his pointy shoes. ‘But no matter how far you run, they’ll always try to drag you back to where you came from.’

I knew that everyone in the music scene wanted me to admit the Dall connection, so I’d just come right out and say it. Mum’s older sister was Alannah Dall. Everyone knew who Alannah Dall was when you started singing one of her songs or pulled out your iPod. Everyone had heard the smash hits about Pink Camaros and High Maintenance, which was actually about drugs. Everyone knew she’d dated the dude in Roxy Music, and was arrested for indecent exposure in Toronto, and flew into Drought Aid in a helicopter with her own wind machine in tow. I could pull out my wallet and show you a family snap to prove it, of Rose and me at just five years old, with our mothers frowsy and tight-lipped next to this exotic bird with the big hair. When we got studio time with someone as hot as John Villiers as young as we did, people wanted an admission of nepotism.

Alannah was a stunner in an era when it was acceptable for a pop star to look like a plumber’s apprentice, or a sequined dinner lady, or a girl next door with a poodle perm and buck teeth. She was flawlessly glamorous, as though she’d risen from the cover of a Dungeons & Dragons manual, the sort of vision spray-painted on the hood of a Valiant Charger. Her dusky-rose pout and blonde wings of hair were given a soft focus for ballads, and she needed nothing more. ‘The Alannah’ was the second-most requested cut after ‘The Princess Di’.

Rose and I grew up studying our aunt’s videos and coveting her safari suits with chunky orange jewellery, her satin jumpsuits, rubber bracelets, lace hair bows and stilettos. Some of it wound up in our dress-up box. That outrageous net outfit she wore to shake the hand of Bob Hawke; there were photographs of us both modelling it, draping ourselves over each other in Rose’s parents’ kitchen with the microwave still in the shot.

1 TOP 5 HAND-ME-DOWNS FROM AUNT ALANNAH

1. Frame your face in videos by slicing your fingers through the front of your hair. Look sideways through your arm disdainfully. Sing.

2. Tilt your head back and bare your teeth—but only after applying a slick of red lip gloss. Stroke the curve of your throat, down to your chest.

3. Do a double take at the camera at a dramatic point of the song.

4. Live your life like a camera is watching you.

5. Maintain mystery in the press.

Being the blonde, I fancied I should look more like our aunt and searched my stupid face nightly for the evidence. My inner critic had already set up shop in my ear, busily reviewing everything I did, far less forgivingly than any journalist I would come to encounter.

Face: an eclectic collection of detestable features. Zero out of five stars.

Alannah’s peers—TV personalities such as Molly Meldrum, rock stars such as Danger Michaels, production gods such as John Villiers—became as engrained in my psyche as she did. Nobody at school even knew who Molly was, but each night in front of the bathroom mirror—appliquéd in my denim shorts and bra top against Mum’s authentically vintage avocado-green tiles—I imagined being interviewed by him. He asked me questions that cracked me wide like a coconut; revealed my tender meat to the world.

And at what age did you realise you could rely only on yourself?

Seven.

Seven. Molly scanned the studio audience to make sure they understood the gravity of this. But still you managed not to let on that anything was wrong; not to anyone.

I met my eyes solemnly in the mirror and absorbed his admiration.

Not to anyone, Molly. I am a vault.

Since Dad disappeared to be all hard-done-by in a different shit suburb, the focus on me at home had intensified like I was an ant under a microscope. At weekends I removed myself from the gravitational pull of Mum’s grief and spent as much time as possible a few train stops away at Rose’s house, in a part of Westmead the other side of Pazzamazza that real estate agents called ‘leafy’. We prepped our career by writing out Alannah’s lyrics on our ring binders and scouring her 1997 memoir, Pour Me Another. Just as pubescent girls in decades past had read Judy Blume’s Forever, we folded over page corners that signalled cocaine use and sex in radio-station broom cupboards. It was so inspiring. She was our Shangri-La.

It was Aunt Alannah’s lack of interest in us that turned her into even more of a legend in our eyes. We relished the slightest flicker of approval like starving dogs thrown a scrap, never tiring of asking when she would next visit. It had been six years since she’d come to Taronga Zoo with us. She and my mother had a fight while we were watching the falcon display and we were marched out to the car before we could even get to the ice cream. ‘I could only hope to be as frantically busy as Alannah,’ Mum was liable to sneer, ‘but I am just a single parent with a job to hold down.’

The need to stake my claim on Alannah ahead of Rose was intense. After Dad left, Mum and I went back to her maiden name of Dall, and then Rose Rogers started calling herself Dall too, even though she had no legal right.

When I was a little kid I hoped Alannah would adopt me, but upon turning fourteen I decided to be more proactive. I wrote her countless letters in pink curlicue with pictures in the margins and tried everything to get her to write back: queries about what hair product she used in the video for ‘Accidents and Incidents’; wild hypotheses about what Michael Hutchence would have been like, which begged correction; bright observations that I’d better be careful cutting my arms because I once nearly hit an artery; despair about being anchored to my mother’s gloom; witty remarks about Rose’s character compared to the character of those rather less obvious than she.

It was my pondering about contacting a local producer named Vince Rice to work on our demos that finally provoked a response. Such was my inability to grasp who Alannah might really be, I read her email in my head as though she were Nigella Lawson.

Nina, she purred.

Vis-a-vis your demos. Please don’t go anywhere near that ridiculous cowboy Vince Rice, or ANYBODY ELSE who works out of that studio. They are thieves and crooks and they WILL rip you off.

You need somebody with a solid reputation and an ear to the ground. I’ve booked you into Glasshouse Studios in Kings Cross for seven days with John Villiers, a producer I’ve worked with a lot. He will take care of you. Don’t worry about $$—he owes me.

I hope you work through your other problems.

A.

•

Vis-a-vis John Villiers and Alannah Dall . . . I could tell that Rose was pained that I went home with the engineer a few days into tracking, even though he was cool and never mentioned it to John Villiers. I was thankful for that, because it turned out John Villiers was exactly my type: much older, steady blue eyes, able forearms, faded flannel shirts, kids, divorce pending. He winked at me when I accidentally dropped my Coke all over the floor and from that moment on he was a marked man. (If you’ve bought our albums you’ll have sung along to my exaltations to John Villiers on ‘Svengali’ and ‘El Capitan’, and been none the wiser as to who they were about.) He was inside the studio right now and I could practically feel the heat through four inches of brick wall.

One acquired a certain studied indifference towards recording studios over time, but at first Rose and I had been cripplingly shy around the moody engineers and mysterious bands passing in and out. We’d head straight for the safety of the couch of Studio A and sit staring at our phones like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

‘Bring some things in from home to help you relax,’ Alannah had suggested, down the line from somewhere glittery on the Gold Coast, where she lived these days. Alannah once caused massive fire damage to a studio in Sydney while tripping heavily. Legend had it a tapestry draped on the wall for ambience was ignited by a candle. ‘Make it your space. Candles, incense, wine; whatever it takes.’

John Villiers (no one ever said ‘John’; it was always ‘John Villiers’) had his name on the back of every great Australian album since the late eighties, including my aunt’s last ever release before she mysteriously disappeared from public view. I’d been working on him all week, leaning against the vocal booth with my back arched between takes or folding languidly over the desk next to him, letting my curtain of hair drop like one of the seven veils. Once, I started lisping into the mic like Gossling or Julia Stone, just so I could hear him laugh through the cans. You got a good sense of someone by their laugh. I’d come up with a new, husky one like Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation.

John Villiers was doing incredible things with The Dolls’ songs, preserving their vim while revving them up like a Mack truck. He said it was all about capturing the unbearable urgency of being a teenager; that sense that everything comes in limited supply with a short window of opportunity. He said it revolved around the cause and effect of hormonal impulses and bad decisions. Since the fifties, old songwriter creeps had tried to bottle it, but it came most authentically from the horse’s mouth, he said: ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones, ‘Alright’ by Supergrass, ‘Can’t Say No’ by The Dolls.

John Villiers remembered that urgency, and he reckoned we had it locked deep inside us, like a glowing gemstone in our bellies. He actually got us to touch our bellies as we sang, to feel our diaphragms expanding. Between takes of ‘Bad Influence’ he put his hand on my throat and got me to drop my larynx.

THE DOLLS: THE GLASSHOUSE DEMOS

‘Bad Influence’: The first track we recorded, which took approximately eighty-five takes. (Alannah was said to refuse to do more than one.) Rhymes ‘rock’n’roll’ with ‘filled a hole’ and ‘this old town’ with ‘what a let-down’. And that’s after John Villiers tidied it up.

‘Can’t Say No’: Sets the tone, albeit clumsily, for a lot of my later work on the subject of culpability, such as ‘Rue the Day’, ‘My Dark Places’ and ‘(The Way) I’m Wired’. Mixes metaphors a bit, but not bad. You can detect the beginnings of what will become my trademark cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof yowl.

‘Your Street’: Rose puts on a saccharin tone Taylor Swift would baulk at, over a vaguely ska rhythm and hideous synth chords. (Do synth chords have any place in a Dolls song? I would argue not. I’d told Rose nobody ever looked hot playing keys.)

‘Dish Served Cold’: Marking the start of a long career of passive-aggressive revenge songs for Rose Rogers-Dall. (‘It just happened, so you say / And you didn’t mean to hurt me anyway . . .’) Awesome detuned guitar assault from John Villiers.

After John Villiers scratched his chin at all our other suggestions, we decided to call ourselves The Dolls, which he reckoned had more ‘longevity’ than The Bain Maries and was less ‘subversive’. We chose it partly because it was a pun on our surname—my surname—and partly because we called each other ‘doll’, like gangster molls or gum-snapping waitresses on Route 66. Anyway, it was too late to turn back now, because I’d stencilled it on my guitar case with spray paint and created a Facebook page. Mysteriously, it was also starting to find its way onto the toilet wall of every rock venue in the inner west.

Rose texted her mum to let her know we were done for the day, then turned back to me.

‘It’s all right,’ she said about the engineer, because she knew I couldn’t help it. I had a compulsion to sleep with people; it helped me to get a grip on a situation. She pulled me next to her against the wall and took a photo with her bejazzled phone, pursing her new lips.

‘Just be careful,’ she went, examining the shot. ‘We’ve got to keep John Villiers on side. Just stick to the plan.’

2

REMEMBERING THE BAIN MARIES

Everybody liked to think they discovered me, as though I simply didn’t exist until they wrote out a cheque. But long before anybody had heard of Alannah Dall, the hallways lined with platinum records and the kidney-shaped swimming pool were as real to me as this book you’re holding now.

POUR ME ANOTHER—ALANNAH DALL (SABRE BOOKS)

Before we were The Dolls, we were The Bain Maries, and it’s worth acknowledging the impact that cult three-piece had on our career. It was the only time Rose and I took on an additional band member—and it explains why we were reluctant to do so again.

Erica Riley.

One of the Year Ten scene kids. Blue streaks in her fringe, leopard-print stockings under her school skirt, a colourful mouth. The teachers always ragged on her to take off her tiara, which she would place elaborately on her desk and then refurnish in her fluffed hair when the bell rang.

Even more than wanting to be a drummer in our band, it was Erica’s burning ambition to be a Hooters Girl. Parramatta was the first city (it calls itself a city) in Australia to open a Hooters Restaurant, but Erica wasn’t the first girl from our school to aspire to wear its orange satin shorts. She reckoned you could get all the wings you wanted.

Word got around that in lunch break I’d said they’d never have her, not even if they found some shorts big enough. It was only a joke, but then when I turned up late to double maths after my extra music tuition, she pronounced me a stuck-up bitch in a show-stopping voice. It went ignored by Mrs Thompson, and by me, and so the trolling escalated. Dirty looks in a sweltering demountable classroom would not satisfy her ire.

After school, on the netball court, the boys made monkey noises as the girls crowed in their little packs. All I wanted to do was go home, untie the damp jumper from around my waist and drop it on to the floor on my way to the shower, where I’d raid Helen’s Body Shop supply and soap the day off me—but Erica was rounding me off at the goal circle.

‘Sing us a song!’ some toolbag yelled, bursting into a bit of vintage Alannah and pulling his regulation blue shirt into two points away from his chest.

The injustice of the situation stung more than Erica’s crack across my cheekbone. I fished the hair out of my face and shielded my eyes from the sun.

‘If that had hurt . . .’ I said.

I knew I wasn’t the horse the crowd was backing and I couldn’t understand why. Everyone knew that Erica begged all her mates for money for an abortion and then turned up to school with a new phone. Where was the baby? What baby? It was forgotten almost immediately. Yet, dare to command the spotlight in the annual school concert and you were marked for life.

The trick to being in a fight if you were a girl was to not fight like a boy. Boys needed to rein their fists in tight and stay boxy. Girls needed to extend their arms and keep their hair tilted out of reach. Whether you had clips or a proper expensive weave, the sight of a raccoon’s tail of synthetic pink hair on rubberised asphalt was a great leveller.

I grabbed hold of the chain around Erica’s neck as she dug her nails into my arms. She was a big unit, but we managed to drag each other in clean arcs, eyes locked. Erica had the unfair advantage, because I’d sprained my ankle jumping out of the bathroom window tipsy a few days earlier. Before I’d even hit double digits I had learned to plot escape routes, wherever I went. Like now: across the oval, into the bushes, over the fence, away. Sometimes I’d do proper dress rehearsals, rolling up clean socks and stuffing them in my pockets, sticking my ATM card down my bra and putting on three pairs of undies. I might sit on the bathroom window ledge, poised, for half an hour, or for as many cigarette stubs as I had to smoke. Then I’d take everything off and put it all back again.

The world funnelled down into Erica’s face—like the freckles on her nose that I’d never noticed before. I gave her one last heave to the left and her chain broke in my hand. I heard the little rip in my pencil skirt as I was skittled. I stood up quickly, like nothing had happened.

The broken necklace gave Erica the opportunity to cry foul and brush the gravel off herself with laboured concern as her friends gathered round. You’ll be paying for the skirt and my necklace both, was the suggestion of that gesture.

‘Bitch,’ she actually said.

‘Whore,’ I countered.

How embarrassing was that on a scale of one to ten? Molly Meldrum asked, as I watched everyone disperse across the oval, dwarfed by their schoolbags.

Ten.

•

Rose had held my coat the whole time and said nothing. We both said nothing until we pushed through her front gate twenty minutes later and she unlocked the front door. Its panel held stained-glass roses, and when we were little I managed to convince Rose that her parents had named her after the door.

‘I’m starving,’ she announced, slinging her bag down in the hallway under the ornate mirror and coat hooks. I hung mine on a hook so that Rose’s mother, Dee, would be pleased with me.

It would take me years before I realised that everyone has a story, even Rose. This truth would be reiterated to me by a series of professionals whenever the record company packed me off to rehabilitation retreats with names like Dry Cedars to ‘refresh’. I should have been refreshing, but instead I’d wind up festering between stiff sheets that had an unbearable texture beneath my thumbs. Flanked by bottles of expensive mineral water and sentimental cards adorned with cautious floral designs, I would contemplate how intolerably perfect my cousin’s life was.

For example, while I might hang out of the bathroom window and smoke of an evening, planning escape, Rose would be eating dinner in the bosom of her family, at this kitchen table under the low wicker lightshade that threw little rectangles all over the walls. I sat down in one of the chairs, just picturing it. She’d be served proper homemade lasagne, because Dee made decent meals with incredible ingredients like nutmeg and chives. I loved dinner at Rose’s house. I had to put up with visits to church if it was a Sunday, but I could pretend I was their favourite daughter and they’d play along.

2 SEPARATION BY NINA’S PARENTS

The question on everyone’s lips with this new direction for the beleaguered Dall family is simply: could Separation be too little too late after the epic disappointments of recent years? Hopes waned after Nina’s Parents’ first effort, Your Father and I . . . (2007), failed to ring true with its depressing refrains including ‘You’re just going to spend a few months with your grandparents’, and so this follow-up must quit all the backtracking and forge ahead. I fear we will never again have the halcyon days of, say, Nina’s Fifth Year or Nina’s Favourite Christmas, but already things are sounding more harmonious. Separation could be a bold move in the right direction. 4/5

MOLLY MELDRUM

Dee and Tim weren’t home yet, though. Rose put vintage No Doubt on the stereo and I hopped on the counter and picked gravel out of my palms as she made sandwiches. Gwen Stefani really was the ultimate. It was uncanny how alike we were. She had a mezzo-soprano range; so did I. She paired platinum blonde hair with pink lipstick; so did I. She liked bra tops; I liked bra tops.

In Rose’s bedroom we lay on the bed and ate our sandwiches with the windows cranked open. Rose drew eyes on my arm. She never drew anything but slightly feline eyes, colouring the pupils in blue. She’d Tippexed her nails and then coloured them in black with a Sharpie.

‘Don’t eat the bread,’ she said. ‘Or just eat one slice.’

She wriggled up next to me and slipped a thin arm through mine. Rose was tactile. She’d reach out and touch my hair or pat someone’s thigh, without worrying about whether they thought she was a pervert. And because it was Rose, they didn’t.

‘You’ve got such beautiful eyes,’ she mewed with her mouth full. I could tell she was practising her voice for boys. We had the exact same colour eyes, so I was just a walking mirror to her half the time. Rose was the sort of girl who’d look at a sunset and think, ‘That would look nice on me.’

She had a silky warmth that made me envious, but Rose was the master of the put-down buoyed up like a pom-pom shake.

My mother, who had asked me to call her ‘Helen’ as of this year, reckoned: ‘If Rose were any smarter, she’d be dangerous.’

And also: ‘She’s knows she’s boring. She’s so boring she can’t even bring herself to finish anything she says.’

And: ‘She’s so highly strung you could play Twinkle Twinkle on her’—which was unkind, because Rose had been picked on at private school, which was why she’d downgraded to my school. You couldn’t blame her for never daring to have my back.

Helen was more of an unsentimental, pull-your-socks-up sort than most. There was no talking to her: everything you said got filed away and used in future evidence against you, after she was done being defensive about it. I didn’t want to be like her, bunched up with bitterness. Rose and I had spent hours hanging out in Parramatta Park at dusk with just a goon bag and a few possums for company, speculating on what vexed her so much. I knew all about the adultery stuff, because since he moved out Dad used me as his confidante whenever he’d had a few beers—and I’d get a few beers out of it, too. It was just hard-done-by talk as he stared sightlessly at the TV in the corner of whatever pub he’d treated us to. His revelations rarely surprised me. Men always wanted me to bear witness to their sexiness, for some reason; it didn’t matter what their relationship to me was.

Nothing got Helen madder than mentions of Alannah, though. We put it down to jealousy. Helen had been Alannah’s personal assistant back in the early eighties, but it hadn’t lasted more than a year. ‘She was my rock,’ Alannah explained in her memoir. ‘But we were too close, if anything.’

Rose had a careless disdain for her own mother, Dee, but despite Dee’s