Ten years gone

Changes fill my time, baby that's alright with me
In the midst I think of you, and how it used to be.
- Led Zeppelin, 1975

If you’re going to retrace your steps, best start at the beginning. Lena pulled the Elantra into the carpark of the Byron Bay Services Club, guiding into position beside an unwashed white Subaru Forester, which had been not so much parked as abandoned.

“Beck’s parking technique hasn’t improved over the years,” I observed. Lena nodded, with a wry smile.

We climbed out and surveyed the scene. Like most modern (or modernised) registered clubs, the Services Club at Byron looked like a cross between a Las Vegas casino in miniature, a one-third scale model of the Taj Mahal and a particularly dysfunctional Sizzler. Reaching the door, Lena signed in as a visitor, giving her address as a terrace in Glebe; I fished through my wallet for my Point Lookout SLSC membership card, eventually gave up and signed in as a visitor as well.

I felt a weirdly thrilling sensation of trepidation; I think Lena felt it too. I hadn’t seen Jeff and Rebecca in months, the Duffer in years, and the Artist Formerly Known As Artemisia… well, we’d barely shared a word since our last night on tour in Airlie, over ten years earlier. Sure, we’d caught each other’s eye at the occasional local industry get-together or just chance meetings in the street, but she’d just blanked me, and me her, without a flicker of recognition. She knew why, and I knew she knew why. Furthermore, you know I know you know, and I know you know I know, as Tex Perkins once put it.

We wandered into the club, past the cheerfully amateur band poster advertising Spam Filter's show on Friday October 17th (that would be tonight folks) through the dining area towards where I vaguely recalled the main stage was positioned. Of course, renovations had since moved the stage to two other locations in the building, then back to the original, so I ended up being right first time despite my complete ignorance of the facts. Shadows up on stage were unpacking boxes, checking leads, taping cables to lighting gantries - the familiar sights and actions sent a slight shiver through me; I tried to recognise them from their silhouettes. Jeff – who I’d not seen in six months or more, though we yarned every couple of weeks on the phone or by email - was on the left of stage, chatting with what would have to be the still wild-haired (if even greyer) Jack White. Someone, presumably the Duffer, was putting the boot into a bassdrum again and again, presumably for the benefit of the guy who was doing front-of-house and trying to get the levels right. As for the others, no idea. In particular, no girls I’d loved (in the physical sense at least) with long black wavy hair. Which was probably just as well. I was nervous enough as it was.

At which point I heard an ungodly squeal behind me. Could only be one person.

“Angus, what the hell are you doing here!” Beck screamed in an octave hereto unknown by human ears, as she enveloped me in a hug.

“Snap inspection,” I said. “I believe you know Officer Kryz..”

I didn’t get a change to get to have a bash at the rest of Lena’s thoroughly unpronounceable surname (which was probably just as well) as just as soon as Beck had grappled me, she’d flung me aside, delivered herself of an even louder squeal of recognition, and leapt all over my co-pilot. Quite apart from this being my first outing in public for quite some time, Lena hadn’t seen Beck in years, or vice-versa - they’d kept in intermittent contact by email, I’d gathered, but nothing more. The years peeled back pretty bloody fast, as near as I could tell, as Beck sat her straight down and they plunged headlong into a million mile an hour conversation about careers, babies, houses and partners. Lena had one of the former, Beck all of the latter. I wasn’t sure which was called as trumps.

The commotion had brought the Jeff vaulting down from the stage. I proffered a hand and a big grin. “Fuck that you big poof,” was his grinning response, as he gave me a big hug. In the intervening years, Beck had turned the Jeff into a ‘hug’ person, and the pair of small affectionate humans who’d followed had apparently encouraged the transition. I wasn’t sure this was an improvement, but it wasn’t for me to judge.

“Where’s the little people?” I asked him once the formalities were complete, and he’d put me back on the ground.

“On-site child minding facilities,” he reminded me with a grin. “One of the pluses of having the folks just down the road.”

“Has to be one, I guess…”

“Ah fuck off, when was the last time you came down to the farm to see them anyway?”

“Christmas last year,” I said.

“Christmas the year before,” he corrected me. “Had to come up to yours last year because you’re too fat and lazy to get off your island, Dr Moreau.”

“Yeah, and staying at a beach house on Straddie for free had nothing to do with it.”

“Free? Bollocks, we paid rent…”

I laughed. The Jeff had been a regular guest at Chateau Dodgy and SOD-Off back in the day, and clearly recalled our exchange rate for guest payment of ‘rent’: never by cash, only by carton, and home brew didn’t count. As I reminded him.

“Fuckin’ philistine. What do they call it when populations get inbred because they’re trapped on islands?”

“Convergent evolution?” I was pretty sure that was wrong, but third-year evolutionary genetics had been a bloody long time ago. 1996, for anyone counting. And I was mostly preoccupied with working in the motorbike shop, sinking piss, chasing girls and not shagging Lauren to be overly concerned with actually absorbing any of that knowledge I was regurgitating on cue in exams.

“Was actually thinking Tasmania.”

“Anyway,” I said, jabbing him in the chest of his Hayabusa Skunk Works tour T-shirt - which he’d stolen from me, as he said, because I’d become too fat for it - “why the hell didn’t you tell me you’d started a band?”

“You never asked,” was his tongue-in-cheek reply.

“Now look, don’t get smart with me, son…”

“Yeah, yeah, settle down you fat bastard. I dunno,” he observed, “maybe it had something to do with your absolute hatred of all fuckin’ music ever since your last band died in the arse. What were they called again? Fridge Casket?”

“He’s still a little smartarse, ain’t he?” declared a gravelly, slightly uneven voice behind him, under a mop of floppy brown hair, two bloodshot, possibly THC-affected eyes, and a big idiot grin. The last time I’d seen him, I’d wanted to punch him right between his bloodshot, definitely THC-affected eyes (not to mention the crystal meth, the MDMA, the cocaine, and the Draino which had been used to cut the smack), and I figured he’d wanted to smack me one just as much. No need to worry about any residual resentment though, apparently; as though he didn’t care, or more likely, didn’t remember, the Duffer just slapped a hairy hand into my palm like I’d never been away, and said in that typical Duffer way, “G’day, how’s it goin’?”

By his own account, the Duffer’s last couple of years had been pretty much as Lena had guessed: a bit of producing work at Firstlight, a bit of session drumming, a bit of teaching - finally those hard-won bits of paper from SCU were being put to use impressing the parents of potential clients - and over the past few months, a belated comeback to playing live, after the Spam Filter thing had come together based off a chance meeting with the Jeff in Lismore. I had to admit, he looked OK - better than when I’d last seen him, when he was ingesting mind-altering chemicals by the fistful. Probably back to just the four or five cones a day, I figured. Even par.

Spam Filter were on soon, and Phil had to get back to sorting his kit out – in one of those funny little ironies, the desperately disorganised Duffer had always been a perfectionist when it came to engineering his mike setups, and would take hours if you let him - but pledged to catch up in the set break. Jeff, still slightly thrown by my appearance, slapped my back, and dashed off to say hi to Lena and bye to Beck before he was due to depart on-stage to kick off their first set, presuming he could get a word in edgeways of course.

It wasn’t just the Jeff who was a bit confused. Things were happening a fair bit faster than me and my hungover, road-wearied head could comprehend, and I wasn’t sure I was enjoying it. And the list of people I’d wanted to smack in the face the last time I’d seen them was growing by the moment, as a familiar shiny head was illuminated by a stray floodlight beam. I pointed straight at him, and snapped my fingers loudly. It was some form of deep basal programming I didn't even realise was still wired into my system.

“Is this a ghost I see before me?” Chris Kurtin remarked.

“Yeah mate, the ghost of shite gigs past,” I said. “Haven’t they run you out of this industry yet?”

“No such luck,” he replied sharply. “Not quite as much excitement since you and Sam were around, but then again, the legal settlements for slander aren’t as prodigious.”

Kretin was the first person tonight who’d dropped McCarthy’s name into conversation, so I figured on casually asking what he was up to these days. Kretin hadn’t heard, and sounded surprised I didn’t know myself - he’d lost touch, pretty much as we all had (particularly the Duffer, but he’d just lost touch generally, not simply with McCarthy). However, on the topic of legal settlements, he admitted he really had to thank me after all these years. Basically, he admitted what I’d suspected all along since we’d signed our very first deal with Seek: that he honestly had no idea what the clauses in his old ‘standard management contract’ actually meant, or how far they reached. Thus informed by Disco Stu’s analysis, he went back and screwed more royalties out of the few performers on his books who’d had any success and made any money in the past. Um, sorry about that, folks… Razorslash, sadly, weren’t among their number, as they’d never made any money to begin with.

“They’re still kicking around,” he remarked. “Old metal bands never die, they just…”

“Rust?” I suggested.

By now it was nearing nine, the lights were down and a scattering of punters were seated around tables in front of the stage, with an empty dancefloor between, spasmodically circled in coloured spotlight beams.

And now Covers Bands 101, with guest lecturer Dr Yobbo: Your first set at a RSL is more about getting people’s attention, rather than dragging them away from the bar, the TAB, the pokies and the bistro. It’s about saying, ‘Hey, we’re over here, we sound pretty good, we play cool shit, you’ll like us; we’re happy if you just come over for a drink and watch for now, because later on you’ll be as pissed as a bastard on cheap drinks and ready to get up and gyrate arrhythmically like you’re in need of a hip replacement, bellow the wrong lyrics out of key, pester us to play Khe Sahn, and tell us in all sincerity we’re the greatest band in the fuggen universe, ay.’

I found a seat (there wasn’t a shortage of them) next to Lena and Beck; I even found a nice cold Cascade Premium planted on the table in front of me. And not even a Light, either. Must be a special occasion.

“Don’t say we never look after you,” quipped Beck.

I replied that she never looked after me, glanced up at the stage, performed a quick head-count, then back to Beck.

“Aren’t they down one?”

She shook her head. “They always start with just the boys,” she began, but was drowned out by the band, starting with just the boys and cranking into a vaguely familiar riff. Once you’ve played in a covers band for a bit, a lot of riffs are vaguely familiar.

“Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight,” declared old Jack, in his nasal twang. “Ah got the feeling that something ain’t right…”

I hate it when songs talk to me.

Disproving Duncan Duff’s thesis that my brother couldn’t hold a tune if it had handles, the Jeff took ‘backing vocals’ duties - I guess it was going to have to be him or the Duffer, and Phil genuinely couldn’t sing, as anyone who’d heard Flange Gasket studio out-takes or seen the original Spam Filter, the Duffer’s first side project, in action could attest.

“Which is it closer to,” posed Lena, “the Steelers Wheel version or the Eagles of Death Metal version, d’ya reckon?”

I looked at her blankly. She explained that Steelers Wheel had done the original, which I knew, and that the Eagles of Death Metal had also done a version which was kinda like countrified punk, if you can imagine that - they were a side project of Josh Homme from the Queens of the Stone Age. Amazing what you can learn about music (particularly my recent years of indifference and/or ignorance, say late 2003-present) when you have your own ex-Rolling Stone music journalist on hand. Lena was available for weddings, children’s parties and bar mitzvahs.

As friends, family or non-specific hangers-on for a performing band, it was our duty to cheer proudly between each and every song, get up and dance when the ‘real’ audience started to flag, and generally be as helpful and supportive a rentacrowd as possible. We applauded appropriately as Stuck In The Middle/Metal concluded. The Jeff rode the love into the intro to the next song - sounded a bit Superjesus to me, maybe Secret Agent Man - surely you needed a spunky little Sarah McLeod type for that? Even Leah McLeod would have done, come to think of it. For the purposes intended anyway.

From side of stage appeared tonight’s designated McLeod’s daughter, in slinky black pants and a black top that emphasised her cleavage, without drawing undue attention to the swell of her belly; with my exacting knowledge of developmental biology from my honours research, I would have said she was between two and nine months’ pregnant. Her hair was short and slicked down - I was reminded vaguely of Anne Parillaud in Nikita - still with that jet-black shine. And that same soulful voice, too. But no long black wavy hair, and no flowing Kate Bush frock. Yeah, this girl was definitely a Jen… not really an Artemisia, whatever one of those was. Spunky, not ethereal. But she still had that captivating presence on stage. You couldn’t look anywhere else when she was in the spotlight. Unless you were gay or dead, and I was pretty hopeful I was neither.

Between songs, I asked Beck, our resident baby expert, how many months pregnant Artem… uh, Jen was. Five and a half, was the answer. It was the third for Jen and her husband, David. Further explanation was lost as an old Beatles song swelled to fill the room. Hmmm. Two kids, a third on the way, and a husband called… David. A little voice in the back of my head rather cynically wondered how many of them were his. Another, more nervous voice posed a more troubling query for yours truly: given the goings-on at the first Tour de Pants, exactly how old was her eldest?

Not something I really wanted to think hard about. I busied myself studying the band as a unit. Despite their relative newness as a collective, their individual experience shone through - they were tight, they were comfortable with each other, they fed off each other and read each others’ cues smoothly and seamlessly. Jack and the Duffer were very much the band’s engine room, driving the groove along; the Jeff carried the weight of sole guitarist as well as he’d ever done on his short tour of duty with ACME; while Jen’s vocals were more versatile than I’d remembered. She’d never been called upon to sing any Green Day as part of Sagittaria, in my recollection anyway.

She seemed much more amenable to small talk, as well.

“It is so difficult,” she began, pulling up a seat next to me, “to order anything at the bar that is actually OK to have when you’re pregnant. Take out caffeine and alcohol, and what are you left with?”

“Mount Franklin mineral water?”

“Very observant,” Jen smiled, making me feel vaguely more at ease. “So how have you been?”

“I’ve been there or thereabouts,” I said non-committally. “How about yourself? I understand you’re all domestic now…”

“Afraid so, hubby and kids… actually, hubby is with the kids at the moment, putting them to bed at my parents’ place - he’ll be along later.”

I wasn’t sure whether that was meant to warn me off, or just as small talk.

“Ah, so you guys take advantage of the cheapest babysitting service around too.”

“You’ve got kids?”

“Not that I know of,” I replied, a bit too quickly. “I meant Jeff and Rebecca, they seem to park the kids with our parents fairly regularly. I guess it helps when you’re playing.”

“We’re lucky like that, I guess,” she said, sipping her mineral water. “We’ve also got a great support structure between us, we tend to look after each other.” By ‘we’, I later learned, she meant herself, Beck and Andrea Kerr (nee Barnard) from the Star. “We ended up in the same pre-natal classes when I was due with my first, and it basically developed from that.”

Jessica had been right: it’s a small world after all… particularly around here. Mental arithmetic time. Jeff Beck’s kids were four and six. Hence Jen’s eldest was no older than Beck's oldest, i.e. six. Hence, bluntly, it wasn't mine, circa Airlie Beach, 1998. It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no fortunate one. Whether it was David’s or not was his problem; that also wasn’t mine. I felt relieved. I also felt lousy and petty for feeling relieved. It’s not all about you, Young.

Jen was open and chatty in a way her alternate personality had never been. Andrea? Going well, she said. No, she hadn’t been at the Star the whole time, she’d moved down south and worked for the Illawarra Mercury and the Telegraph in Sydney before moving back here to settle down - she’d married her accountant boyfriend Tim, had popped out a couple of kids, and was working part-time, basically in her old job, at the Star. But to be honest I wasn’t that interested in Andrea’s intervening couple of years, not that I braved-up and offered that opinion to Jen. I don’t tend to hold grudges, but Andrew had done a series of things back in the day which still pissed me off. She’d overreacted monumentally when McCarthy had made friends with Brigitte the bounteous Belgian barmaid - for Christ’s sake, he didn’t do much more than kiss her; others on that trip did far, far worse (*cough*). Then, over the ensuing months, she’d gone out of her way to try and make his life miserable, dating a string of random guys in the Star office right in front of him, to try and rub his nose in it. And thirdly, as the Star’s entertainment writer, she did everything possible to give us as little coverage as possible in our home territory through the back half of 1998, until she fucked off to the 'Gong to work for Rupert - and the coverage we did get was snide and patronising, making it very clear that in the view of the Star, we were a joke band and a joke of a band at that. Unfortunately for Andrea, we outgrew our small-town roots a lot more rapidly than she’d ever managed to do. Still, it seemed everyone else was long since over it, so it was probably time for me to do likewise. Seems I was carrying more baggage than an airport carousel.

“So you’re not playing anymore?” Jen asked me.

“Only for the kids,” I said. “Just doing it for the kids.” I’d mentioned in passing that I was teaching music at a school in Brisbane. Slightly selective, but she didn’t need the details; she’d never been interested before, I couldn’t see why she would be now. “Nah, I just lost interest in playing live. Lost interest in music altogether, really.” I hated it when Jeff was right, but he was. The novelty had worn off in a great big fucking hurry.

According to Lena, who’d filled in the blanks on the drive down, all the bands who’d put out great so-called ‘new rock’ albums the last time I was paying attention (call it 2002-03) - the Hives, the White Stripes, the Datsuns, the Strokes, Jet and the Vines - had put out rubbish follow-ups and had managed to kill off the ‘new rock’ movement pretty stone dead. Of those much-hyped acts of those fine few years, only Hayabusa and the D4 (both from Aotearoa, though we felt more by an accident of birth than anything) had managed to punch out decent follow-ups to their respective rockin’ debuts - and the D4 had pulled stumps the year after that. The ‘new rock renaissance’ had died in the arse midway through the nominal Decade of Gasket, to be replaced by a bunch of ‘80s-revivalist bands who sounded like the Cure meeting Joy Division at a meeting of Depressed Pricks Anonymous - the Killers, Coldplay, Bloc Party, a large swag of Franz Ferdinand’s catalogue closely followed by a whole bunch of soundalikes such as the Kaiser Chiefs, and a weeping skipload of floppy-haired emo sooks. Regurgitator recorded an album in a glass box, trying to be David Blaine. Green Day recorded a rock opera about the ills of modern society, trying to be Pink Floyd. And nearly all our contemporaries, all those bands we’d toured with in our formative years, were gone, split, lost to the industry, disappeared into the ether. The Superjesus ran out of guitarists (at least one of which had a hankering to Do It With Madonna), recorded an album entitled Rock Music which contained none, and split. Despite a couple of minor ad-theme and video game hits, the Casanovas went overboard with the ‘80s cheese on their heavily overproduced album two and were never heard from again. Even had been dumped by their label. So had You Am I, but they’d been picked up by EMI, released a blistering riposte of a comeback album, then went back to the self-indulgent toss which got them dumped in the first place. Spiderbait scored a number one with a cover of Black Betty and promptly disappeared, presumably to the pub. Grinspoon were struggling with Phil’s drug problems, Magic Dirt with Dean’s health issues (which sadly took him out midway through ’09). Frenzal Rhomb ended when their front pair got breakfast radio gigs that paid better. The Auld Enemy deusexmachina lasted no longer than we did, and went out just as messily. Regurgitator, TISM and the Fauves – the infamous Caveat Emptour lineup of ’98 – were no longer going concerns. Of the Aussie bands we’d overlapped with with, only Powderfinger – whose last album had been fairly grim – and Eskimo Joe – who’d gone navel-gazing Nova FM girlie-pop on us – were still kicking on with any sort of success. And the Living End, but you couldn’t kill them by mortal means.

So basically, I surmised, I’d missed bugger-all.

“I don’t know about that,” Jen said, “there’s still some good stuff around. Wolfmother?” she smiled. There was just a flicker of Artemisia in that smile of Jen’s, I felt. “I seem to recall you were into the old Led Zeppelin stuff.”

“The girl I love, she got long black wavy hair,” I quipped, “that sort of stuff, you mean?”

Don’t know why I said that. Wished I hadn’t, the moment I had. She contemplated her drink, not looking at me. “Now why would you have to go and bring that up, Andrew?”

Jack White appeared, said a brief hello, and touched her shoulder; their set break was over, and she left with him without a word.

Good question. Why did I have to go and bring that up?

I wandered back to Lena and Beck’s table. They were still in conversation, now with another head at the table - none other than the Star’s entertainment reporter. I said hello. She said hello. That was about the extent of our small talk. I tossed up between getting another beer and lobbying Lena for a swift getaway. Figuring the latter was as likely as the Second Coming of Elvis - Beck had already told us we were both staying at their place tonight (it wasn’t a suggestion) and Lena insisted she still had to ‘interview’ the Duffer for her piece - I went back to the bar, dwelling on how utterly busted-arse fucking rubbish I was at this sort of thing. At least I had the mild amusement of watching Andrea in oblivious, cheery conversation with ‘McCarthy’s stupid bitch ex-girlfriend from Sydney, Layla or whatever the fuck her name was’.

I was beginning to remember why I tended to spend a lot of time on an island far away from these people, or any people I knew well at all. I wasn’t very people-compliant.

But the Filter of Spam were a decent enough outfit, pulled a good and knowledgable crowd and played a good spread of material from old favourites to enthusiastic reinventions of otherwise-turgid Top 40 pop. They did good. And I even recognised a couple of old Gasket ‘transitions’ from back in the day when we were primarily a covers band - Green Day’s Longview segued into Paul Kelly’s Dumb Things; they played Deep Purple’s Strange Kind Of Woman as a bridge within the Angels’ I Ain’t The One - and a few of our own reinventions, like our infamous ‘Motorhead remake’ of Lady Marmalade. Then again, we liked doing ‘Motorhead remakes’ of a lot of old pop songs. We just liked sounding like Motorhead.

It was funny what you ended up noticing. The way the Jeff still played the way he’d learned from watching our brother Matt - head down over his work, nodding intently in concert with his left hand as it wriggled up and down the neck of his sunburst Gibson Les Paul, certainly the nicest bit of kit he’d ever had the distinction of demonstrating his art on. The way Phil’s shaggy hair still flopped up and down almost in perfect rhythm with his hi-hat cymbal, recalling (to my mind anyway) Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The way Jack White had perfected the art of channelling John Entwhistle from the Who – head down, elbow up - without seeming to try. And the way that the eyes of every man in the room were drawn almost magnetically to the slick-haired girl with the mike, despite the prominent bulge in her midriff which suggested someone else had got there first.

An elbow in the arm disturbed my reverie. “Hey, cheerful,” Beck grinned. “Talkative tonight, aren’t we?”

“This is why we don’t allow him out in public,” Lena suggested.

Beck had just been outside to call headquarters on her cellphone and check on the little ones; apparently all was well. Reminding me, once again, that I’d forgotten to call Bethany today.

“I couldn’t borrow your phone?” I asked.

“Luddite,” she smiled, and handed it over. “You remember how to use these things? You enter the numbers in here using these buttons, and then you talk into this bit.”

“I’ll manage,” I winced, and jogged outside into the cool of the night. I’d stopped using a mobile years back - there was so little point, with indifferent coverage around my place unless you were on CDMA, which was on the verge of being shit-canned anyway - and in any case, noone needed to reach me 24/7 these days anyway. Bethany was a possible exception; she usually managed to find me when she needed to, other than the times I didn’t necessarily want her finding me anyway.

I fished a slip of paper out of my wallet - this Luddite’s solution to not having a SIM card to record the few important numbers useful to me these days. By the dim light of a nearby streetlight on Jonson St, I checked the number - one of those you realise you remember just as soon as you check it again, but can’t recall until you see it - punched it into Beck’s phone and pressed the Call button.

A surprisingly long pause as Telstra tried to get their shit together. Then, her voice, breezy and bored. “Hi, this is Bethany…”

“Hey Beth, it’s…” I began cheerily, before realising she was still talking over me, telling me she wasn’t able to answer her phone just now, but if I left a message she’d get back to me.

“Hey Bethany, it’s Andrew,” I said, a little more subdued. Talking to machines wasn’t my deal. “Just wanted to let you know I’ve headed down to Jeff and Rebecca’s for the weekend. Bit of a sudden thing… sorry I couldn’t reach you earlier. This is Beck’s mobile, if you need to reach me… otherwise I’ll see you again on Monday. Miss you babe, see you soon. Bye.”

I hit the red button, and winced a little. I did miss her, or at least the certainty she represented. The displacement I felt here didn’t help; I didn’t belong here, it was all about babies and families and playing in bands. And let’s be honest, I’d been exiled from polite company for good reason; I didn’t play well with others anymore. I had that vaguely familiar, vaguely sick feeling of just wanting to get out of here; just burn down the shopfront and take my business elsewhere. For previous reference, please see most of calendar year 2003.

“Hey,” said a female voice. “You OK?”

“Yeah, just called my fiancee.” I realised it wasn’t Lena, first by the silhouette, then by the voice. The piercing green eyes told me it was Jen. Must have been set break again. I'd been out here staring off into space for a lot longer than I'd thought.

“Hey look, I’m sorry,” I found myself saying. “It was just a shit attempt at being funny which didn’t work. No offence intended.”

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She gave the impression this wasn’t limited to storming off earlier, either. “I guess I don’t like being reminded about the sort of person I was back then.”

Hence the name change, the image change, the husband, the kids… presuming the kids belonged to the husband.

“You weren’t all evil,” I said, trying to be concessionary. “Just a little manipulative.”

“Manipulative? How so?” she queried, with a little annoyance. Okay, maybe she wasn’t so apologetic after all. Well played idiot. “We were two people, unattached, who happened to be together, right place, right time. I’m sorry we didn’t work out, I’m sorry I avoided you afterwards, but I’m sorry, I don’t see how that was manipulative, or evil.”

“Did your boyfriend David see it the same way?” I asked.

“Okay, here we go. I see where this is coming from.”

“Look, it’s a long time ago, and it doesn’t keep me up nights - but let’s be honest. You knew neither of us was single at the time.”

“I said, we were unattached,” she replied tightly. “Not single.”

“I don’t see the difference, Artemisia.” It kind of slipped out - I was trying to call her Jen but it kept kinda sticking in my mouth, like trying to tell yourself that red object in front of you is an apple when you know very well it’s a Ferrari Enzo.

“Look, Andrew… don’t try and spin this revisionist history on me. Your girlfriend was leaving, we all knew it, weeks before the tour. For God’s sake, David had suggested I move into her room when she left… but things didn’t work out that way, did they.”

“And what about David?” I insisted.

Jen shook her head incredulously. “You missed a few things in your time, didn’t you - or was it just Jessica who wasn’t very quick on the uptake? How well did you actually know David?”

“Not so much,” I admitted. Wouldn’t have known him from a length of PVC downpipe, in truth, but no need to elaborate on my lack of knowledge. “Jess knew him pretty well, I think you’ll find.”

“Not as well as you’d think,” Jen replied mildly. “She missed picking up the point that David was very, very gay.”

My eyebrows tried to vault halfway across my forehead. “You what?”

“Yeah. He was gay. He tried to hide it, even from me to begin with, even though it was pretty damn obvious, but he eventually told me,” she responded. “I knew he loved me, or thought he did… just not sexually. And... he was so sweet, and so caring… I just couldn’t blow his cover. He used to get so distressed when he found out about other guys I was with - it hurt him so much that he couldn’t go through with that side of it - so I tried so hard to keep it from him, but felt so guilty about keeping anything from him, because we were so close…” She looked to be regretting confessing so much. "I’m not proud of it, anyway.”

“So you were basically an elaborate façade, that’s what you’re telling me?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” she conceded. “A fairly blunt and obnoxious way, but one way.”

“Fairly blunt and obnoxious is my stock-in-trade,” I said.

“I know,” she said coolly. “I heard the song you wrote about me.”

I hadn’t written any songs about her, I said.

“What was it called? Ode to Joy or something?”

“Ode to Joy from Lennox,” I confirmed. As previously discussed, Ode to Joy from Lennox (first performed in third-quarter 1998) was a fairly ribald, if somewhat caustic, tale of a girl in the local music scene with very low moral fibre, who’d liked making friends from the waist down with every guy in the industry. Trouble was, as I told her, it wasn’t about her. And I hadn’t even written it. “It was actually McCarthy’s,” I explained.

Furrowed brow. She was cute when she was confused. “Who’s it about then?” she wanted to know.

“A gentleman never tells,” I offered, despite the fact that I was as much a gentleman as Philip Duff was a opera singer. “Oh, OK. I’m led to believe that Joy is the middle name of a certain music journalist who may have been parked next to you in the maternity ward.”

“Andrea?” she said, a little too loudly. I pressed a finger hurriedly to my mouth, shhhing her.

“No way! Really?”

“He was pretty bitter and twisted at the time,” I confirmed.

“But my folks are from Lennox, I just figured you knew, and were…”

I shook my head. How the fuck would I have know that? I didn't even know Artemisia wasn't her real name. “Lennox was thrown in pretty much at random. We made him change it - calling it Ode to Joy from Cessnock would have been an absolute giveaway.”

“But what about the line about her ‘serving more than McDonalds’ or whatever it was?” she bridled. “Don’t pretend that wasn’t aimed at me. I knew Jessica used to say that, David told me.”

“Yeah, that was one of mine, I stole it from Jess. But only because it sounded good and fitted the rhythm. ‘Hot chilli woman's served more than Maccas; accepted more organs than Kerry Packer…’” Actually it didn’t fit that well, but it had us sniggering in a suitably juvenile fashion. I still don't know how we didn't get sued by PBL.

“I’m so glad I didn’t know those were the lyrics,” she said. “You guys are horrible.”

“Were horrible,” I said. “We were more than a little evil, much like yourself.”

“Well, you tell me, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave him, and I couldn’t get what I needed from him. What would you have done? What if your girlfriend was gay, how would you react to that? What would you do?”

I considered this for a moment.

“Most likely,” I mused, “I’d invest in a decent quality digital video camera.”

Jen giggled a bit at that. “Bad example,” she recognised.

“What I don’t understand,” I continued, “is why you went on and married him.”

She giggled even more at that.

“I’m serious!”

“Oh God, Angus,” she laughed, “you think it’s the same David?”

“It’s not?”

She shook her head with an ironic smile, her eyes sparkling. “You silly bastard, you’ve been judging me all night on the basis that I’m married to little latently gay David from Lismore? God no. He left me in the end - he finally came out, and dropped me like a stone. Accused me of being a ‘fag hag’, would you believe? Last I heard, he’d made himself very much at home in the gay community around the Valley up in Brisbane.”

“Settle down,” I suggested as she broke down laughing again at my expense, “You won’t be laughing if your waters break.”

“I can’t believe you thought… anyway. Sorry.” And started giggling again.

“So who’s David then?”

“You don't know him, he’s originally from Murwillumbah. He’s a dentist at our practice.” Amongst the small talk earlier in the evening she’d detailed her employment as administrative coordinator, client accounts and records manager, human resources representative, OH&S compliance officer and receptionist at one of the larger dental practices in Lismore - by her account she did everything other than wrangling of the actual teeth. Being referred to merely as their ‘receptionist’ evidently set her own teeth on edge. “We only met when he joined our practice after coming back from uni, so yeah, definitely a different David to the other one…”

“What’s his surname?” I inquired, with the kernel of an idea.

“Burrows,” she replied carefully. “I’ve kept my maiden name, but the kids take his name.”

Hmmm. “He didn’t happen to get his degree up at UQ, by any chance?”

“Not sure, I think so,” she said. “Why?”

A toot of a horn, and two headlight beams, captured Jen’s attention. I realised she was primarily out here to meet hubby, not necessarily to set me straight on a few things. What seemed to be a silver Nissan Maxima (the model with the cool alloys off the 350Z) pulled up in the carpark, and out stepped Dave Burrows. At six-four with angular features and a solid looking jawline, he always looked like he should be jumping in a rugby lineout, but he preferred leaping at the basketball hoop. Being the studious type (which is how he’d gotten into dentistry in the first place), Dave Burrows from Murwillumbah wasn’t quite as interested in pissing it up furiously and chasing women as the rest of us on our floor at college, but he was a decent, worthwhile, genuine bloke - quietly-spoken, self-disciplined, and liked by everyone. And when he did get some beers into him, he was a funny bastard. Given that Jen was likely to be the one driving them home tonight, there was a decent chance we’d find out if that was still the case.

“Dave Burrows. Bugger me.” It wasn't meant as a direction, and I was fairly confident it wouldn't be taken as one.

“Andy Young?” was the incredulous reply. He emerged from the darkness, and shook my hand like a long-lost mate. Hey, survive a year of college together with someone, they’ll always count as a mate, long-lost or otherwise.

“Dave and I were at college together,” I explained, and he nodded. “If anyone would have the ability and self-discipline to bring you into line, Jen Bailey, I’d have said it’d be Dave.”

“You might be right,” she smiled, her eyes twinkling, but not for my benefit. “I’m told I need a firm hand sometimes…”

Jessica had been right. Altogether now: It’s a small world after all…