Hollywood bitch

Rock star life
Turn the switch
Hollywood bitch
So fake that she seems real
- Stone Temple Pilots, 2001

Back at the house, Sam was looking nervously at the door, with a sick look on his face. Today hadn’t turned out like he’d hoped, and it still wasn’t even eight AM.

“Media officer on their way?”

“Something like that,” he replied.

That was enough to give me the same nervous/sick thing going on, but for different reasons. You prepare, but for what? For anything and everything, for the worst, whatever that is. I don’t wanna die. If I’m not back this time tomorrow... carry on, carry on. 'Cos it doesn’t really matter.

“Hell of a long way to come just for a writing credit…”

And with that, in breezed Kate Stratford, with the inevitability of death, taxes and bogan stupidity on Australia Day. Sunglasses over her head, scowl on her face, peroxide blonde hair tugged back into a tight ponytail. She was wearing a teal blouse with some sort of small printed motif, and mid-length black skirt, sensible shoes. Like you’d expect a girl who worked in a pharmacy in a small country town. The prettiest one, so she got to run the perfume counter and stuff. She’d even forgotten to take off her nametag. She was like the hottest girl from your school who never left the small town you grew up in. Or at least that was the role Kate Stratford was playing at the moment. Watch this space for further developments.

“Had to call in sick,” she reported sharply. “I told you this wouldn’t work…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam accepted. “Is everything sorted?”

Kate nodded. “Arrangements have been made.”

“For both of them?”

“Yes,” Kate sighed heavily, “for both of them. Why would it only be for one or the other, Sam?”

Lena walked in on ‘arrangements made for both of them’ and looked a little ill. Particularly as she’d only just been able to convince herself that my ‘last will and testament’ line had been an attempt at a joke. I wasn’t fucking laughing either, at this stage. Whatever was about to happen next, neither Lena nor myself seemed to have an ounce of control over.

“Erm, OK then. Kate, you know Angus, you might have met Lena…”

“If Skype counts,” Kate said, and offered a thin smile. She took a seat on the couch across the way, putting her feet up as if she owned the place, reminding me again why I couldn’t stand her. Same breathtaking arrogance I’d seen in her the day I’d met her as Chastity Chase. “OK, let’s get this out of the way,” she challenged Lena. “What do you want to know?”

“Where your accent went,” I interceded over the top of Lena.

Fair question. Her So-Cal twang had turned out to be fake, as we’d long expected, but it wasn’t Utah Mormon underneath. It was… rural Westralian, if anything. The girl from the country town you grew up in.

“Kate’s an actress,” Sam reminded us.

“And Sam’s a drama queen,” she smirked sardonically, “which makes us a great couple. Anything else?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Lena began, with a surly grimace. “What the fuck do you have over this guy such that he has to pay for your fucking lifestyle?”

“I told you,” she insisted.

“You got the dates wrong,” McCarthy mumbled.

“Really?”

“That lighthouse keepers cottage bullshit… when did I move here again?”

“Oh,” she laughed, her face suddenly lightening. “Fuck. I mean… yeah, fuck, actually. You might have told me this before I came over…”

“Like I said on the phone,” he said, “stuff is getting out of hand for reasons outside my control.” He fixed her with as much of a glare as his anti-anxiety meds permitted. Anger seemed to give him clarity. “I keep falling into holes in your story. So enough holes... enough stories. How about we tell these guys the truth?”

Kate grimaced. “You happy for them to print the truth?”

“I won’t be printing anything,” came a tired, strangled voice, sounding like Lena’s. “I’m not here as a journalist. Just as a friend.”

If I had no further wins today than that, I’d still be happy. That and getting out of here alive, that’d be pretty tops.

“Besides,” he added, “your story was just… fucking…. horrible anyway. I never agreed to that. Never.”

“Well fuck me for trying to protect my family,” she replied sourly.

Stalemate. (It’s what happens when you leave your mates out on the bench for too long.)

“OK then. You know what happened?” Kate Stratford finally spat, once the silence had done its work. “I went to visit this arsehole after everything went to hell at Priddle’s place, and you disappeared, and Priddle got shot to fuck. He was in a bad place…”

“Kings Cross,” Sam nodded.

“You want to tell the story? Anyway it was Woolloomooloo, you just said it was the Cross to try and impress people.”

“He was in a bad place,” Lena recurred, stewing.

“He was,” Kate said. “And so was I...”

She glanced across at McCarthy, who was staring blankly at his hands, maybe trying to remember how they got to be so worn and gnarled. They were his old man’s hands, the sort you’d get from working in a nursery for years.

“...And when you get two needy, desperate, fucked up people in the same room… you do what you need to do to make the pain go away. For that moment, anyway.”

I remembered back to NZ, and Beth’s text about Bear and Lena, and by association Beth and myself.

“So yeah. It was all kinds of awkward, and awful…” Kate was trying to ignore Sam’s hurt puppy-dog expression. “I mean, usually sex is bad enough when one of you is crying, but both… look, it was horrible. And it was wrong. It didn’t work. I couldn’t save him from himself and I couldn’t make it hurt any less for myself. That was me hitting the bottom.”

McCarthy didn’t seem to enjoy being referred to as absolute zero, but that seemed no concern of hers.

“After that, I went and cleaned up, found Jesus…”

“Really?”

“No,” she replied flatly. “For fuck’s sake. But I got my shit together. Came home, back to WA. Started again. Got my life back, cut all ties to my old one. New job and everything. And then a few months later,” she mused ironically, “I started getting morning sickness…”

And for the second time this morning, I was left reeling, thinking ‘why didn’t I see this coming?’ But I didn’t. I just didn’t. I needed more sleep and less FUCKING RANDOM SHIT HAPPENING TO ME.

“So yeah,” she continued sourly, “since you asked ‘what the fuck I have over this guy’… it’s less what I’d call blackmail, more what I’d call child support.”

“You a baby daddy?” I queried.

Sam nodded.

“Motherfucker,” I declared. “Congratulations.”

“Erm, thanks,” he remarked bashfully, “though you’re about four years late…”

“What flavour?” I asked him, before needing to clarify, “Boy or a girl?”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“No,” he nodded. “Boy and a girl. Fraternal twins. Both four and a half. Usually,” he waved a shaky hand, “this place would be covered in photos, but for today…” He offered a rueful smile. “All in the back room. Went with the lonely old hermit décor.”

“Names?”

“Andrew and Magda,” he admitted quietly, after a little pause and an exchange of slightly sheepish looks.

“You pick them?” I asked, suitably set back on my heels. Not every day someone names their kids after you.

“I let him,” Kate conceded. “Thought he deserved some sort of input... he’d already stuck around longer than my father did, actually did something about paying child support.”

She glanced across at him. For what, endorsement? Support?

“And look, really, it’s not a bad situation. It’s not your little white-bread fucking nuclear family, but it’s better than… well, better than what I had. Two single parents are better than one… it’s a better arrangement than two people who hate each other staying together for the kids.” Different to the last ‘arrangement’ they’d had, that was for sure. A smile, almost affectionate. “He’s not a bad father. Has his limitations. Spoils them rotten. But he tries.”

“This is what I get to live with,” Sam observed. “Who got you through PND? Dr Phil?”

“Fair point,” she admitted. “Fair point. Things were pretty awful there for a while. I got post-natal depression… horribly badly. Wanted to kill myself, the babies, pretty much anyone who was around. Just horrible. But Sam looked after me. The last thing I expected. Last fucking thing I expected in the world.” She glanced across at him. “He looked after me. Shared his drugs. Talked me down off the ledge a few times.”

“We bonded,” Sam admitted. “When least expected. Think she almost likes me now.”

“Don’t push your luck. Go write me more songs, baby needs new shoes.”

“Sure thing, I’ll just go rip off some more old shit Angus wrote…”

I could see the funny side. “Make Beef Week Queen into a kids song. Now. Do it.”

“I like it, actually. The writing, I mean. It’s therapeutic,” he told me. “Particularly on black days. And you know, since my head knock…”

“You used to get depression before that,” I reminded him. “Though we all just thought you were massively self-absorbed.”

A gentle smile. “Yeah… that sounds right. But Jesus Christ, since my head injury… no comparison. Just couldn’t sleep… When it takes away your sleep, it owns you. May as well be dead. Sure wish for it.”

Kate understood. She was nodding. Maybe even weeping a little, quietly to herself, but for an actress, you never really knew.

“Got it under control now,” he added. “Know how to manage it. Know my own signs. Know when to get my head down and ride it out.”

“You don’t remember how bad it was before, though,” Kate pointed out. “I do. I was pretending to be your girlfriend at the time. It was pretty awful. Particularly that night at Priddle’s.”

Sam looked at the floor. “I remember enough of that to know I don’t want to remember that.” Then added, almost inaudibly, “Lying on the tiles in the dark for hours, paralysed, choking, hearing all the shit going down and the voices in my head, just wanting to die. Wishing for it. The whole time. Jesus. Hell of a way to discover how shit affects you.”

“I thought you used to get into it yourself?”

“Nah,” he said. “All for show. Impressing chicks,” he said with an ironic nod. “Didn’t really used the shit much. After that night... I remembered why I hated it and everyone who was on it. And remembered what you’d said about Priddle the day we’d met him.”

“When he accused us of pulling rank and I said last time I pulled rank it was his mum and she loved it?”

“Yeah… not that, exactly. More him being the cuntiest cunt in all the cunts. And yeah, you were right. He was. So I rang up and shopped him to the coppers.”

I heard Lena draw breath, but I’d pretty much assumed by now that if it wasn’t Reid Burton, it was Sam. He was the only one with knowledge and motive.

“And as a result, got him killed pretty bad. Didn’t do my head much good.”

“You didn’t pull the trigger mate. He was playing with the big boys, he was naïve as fuck to carry on the way he did. You know the old saying, he who dances with the devil…”

“Yeah,” he nodded, then said, “Nah, actually I don’t know the old saying…”

“Nor do I,” I admitted, “but it’s something about dancing with the devil and the music stopping and bad shit happening if you’re a cunt. Erm, sorry, ladies.”

“Any of them around here?” Kate observed. “Speaking of being a… one of them, have you offered to feed these people who we’ve had flown halfway across WA for a coffee and a chat?”

Watching their interplay, I realised why Kate was here. Not as media manager, or official minder, or any of that stuff. As his partner, for want of a better term. As the person who made him feel comfortable with the world. It was a weird, messed up dynamic, sure. But curiously romantic, in a way. They’d become interdependent on each other. It wasn’t love, and it certainly wasn’t sex, but it was something. I didn’t know what it was, and probably neither did they.

“Too nice a day to do this inside,” he said softly. “Come on outside.”

So we did, Sam fired up the BBQ and made bacon and scrambled eggs - they didn’t start out that way, but never mind, they were tasty as fuck. Bacon and eggs is always awesome, but never more awesome than when done on a BBQ hotplate, chased with fresh bread and more rounds of coffee. He’d certainly made an effort for us. McCarthy baked his own bread, as old people with a lot of spare time on their hands are wont to do. You couldn’t argue with the results, though.

“Found an old breadmaker in an op shop,” he said, by way of explanation as how he got into it. “Well, old, about a month old and used maybe twice…”

“I think that’s par for the course for most breadmakers.”

“You may be right,” he nodded. “Kind of home brewing for old people.”

“Old people do home brewing, too. It’s either dodgy uni students trying to save money on beer or dodgy old geezers having a fiddle about.”

“Thanks for that image,” Sam said, a bit of a twinkle in his eye. A glint of the old Sam and his questionable sense of humour. He was starting to open up a little, too. Finding words more easy to come by now that the day and his brain were beginning to warm up. “Home brew is a lot of hard work for one person,” he pointed out. “But I’m thinking of trying to do a ginger beer. Been collecting bottles.”

“Ah, I was wondering how you ended up with those milk crates full of old Coopers bottles… just figured you were a desperate alco.”

He thought that was most amusing. “Haven’t had a drink since before the kids,” he admitted. “Alcohol don’t go with my meds. No Coopers for me. Old man’s been saving them on his travels.” At my look of moderate bafflement, he explained that his folks had stopped by a few weeks ago on their grey nomad adventures around the country. His mother was particularly pleased to lighten the campervan’s trailer by four crates (two months) worth of Coopers Sparkling stubbies.

“How are the olds doing?”

“Good, real good. Stayed for a week or so, set up the van out the back. Got their fill of grandparenting… I got my fill of having them around… after about a day and a half...” He offered an apologetic grin. “Love them, of course… just I’m not good with people these days. Run out of conversation.”

“The hermit thing kinda suits you.”

“It’s grown on me,” he agreed, absent-mindedly stroking his beard. “Bit bloody scary how much.”

“That’s a hell of a beard,” I remarked. “That’s ZZ Top quality, or near as.”

“I keep suggesting we hire him out as a department store Santa,” quipped Kate, “to earn a bit of extra cash at Christmas…”

“Yeah, me and department stores, that’d end well,” he noted. “Particularly at Christmas.”

“True. Besides, convincing parents to put small children on your knee might be an issue.”

“I get the feeling it’s a bit of a drive to the nearest Westfield anyway,” Lena ventured.

That fell into a slightly awkward pause, while McCarthy looked at Kate for some sort of reassurance - or possibly security clearance - to respond. Kate rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, you could say that,” Kate remarked tartly, well aware what Lena’s leading question had been in pursuit of: our current location. “The nearest town, where I live, is about half an hour’s drive away. Or 45 minutes if you’re Sam. Or if you’re stuck behind Sam on the highway for that matter…”

“No way,” I said. “You? Sam McCarthy, the mobile chicane?”

“’Fraid so,” he admitted. “Take it pretty easy these days.”

“The old Rangie not breaking any outright speed records I guess.”

“Not as such,” he said. “Maybe dropped out of a plane.”

“Even then it’d have the aerodynamics of a block of flats,” I pointed out. “Or a Volvo 240.” I kinda knew the next question was pointless, but asked anyway: “You’ve given up bikes I guess?”

He nodded. “Can’t even get on one,” he said, “even if I wanted to. Which, looking at the photos in that album…”

“Bad idea.”

“That’s it.” He scratched his head. It was a few steps on from hammering his temple with his weatherbeaten fingertips, so obviously the connections were better. “You still riding?”

“Ah, yeah. I share-house with Mick Martin, there’s always something kicking around in the shed.”

“Jesus, Mick Martin.” The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes furrowed as he strained the old memory banks. “How is Mad Mick?”

“Still mad,” I confirmed. “Still single. Taking over Mount Road. Looking to take over the world…”

While Sam and I caught up over coffee and B&E rolls, Kate deflected texts from her mother on her phone, a lit cigarette in her other hand. The ‘arrangements’ previously alluded to had apparently been for a different Andrew and Magda, and basically entailed having Grandma come over and keep an eye on them earlier than originally organised for Kate’s Saturday morning shift at the pharmacy. Unfortunately Grandma was a control freak and wanted clarification on every detail of their prior preparation, from whether Andrew's shirts in the wardrobe had already been ironed (and if so at what level of competence) to whether Kate really thought it was appropriate to have Coco Pops in the house as breakfast cereal, even as a weekend treat.

“I love my mum,” Kate said thinly. “I find it’s more cost-effective than having her bumped off.”

“Well, there’s always those special-ops blokes who flew us out here…”

A derisive snort. “Given that one of them is my brother, I think I’d be pushing my luck there to ask…”

That’d been one of the other handy assets Kate had brought to the negotiating table when the deal with Fyfe had been done, it seemed. Familial contacts with a freelance security ‘consultant’ - the sort of person a person like Daniel Fyfe, with all his myriad interests, could always use. When stuff needed doing, Mr James (or just James Stratford, as I suspected he went by) was best placed to do it. His silent partner, Mr Smith, he’d apparently met while they’d both been serving in Iraq and the ‘Stan. Something told me they hadn’t been serving breakfast at the mess tent.

“Decent bloke,” I offered. “He’s fucking kidding if he thinks Ronchi’s a chance for the Australian side though.”

Sam nodded thoughtfully. “He’s run that theory by you then. I reckon they should just give baggy greens to everyone who plays for NSW, but he doesn’t rate that.”

“Can’t think why.”

“Well, he says they do that anyway.”

Lena had had enough. She’d been pretty good for the first month of 2009, but it’d been a pretty grim and stressful past ten or so hours. “I’d kill for one of those,” she admitted.

Kate offered her one with her usual smirk. “I hope that won’t be necessary,” she remarked.

“Well unfortunately I don’t have people who can do that sort of thing on my behalf…” She caught my eye. “And what are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” I said, suitably chastened.

“For the record,” she declared, lighting up with Kate’s Bic lighter, “I’ve given this up for New Years.”

“You too?” Kate remarked wryly. “I’m blaming the stress of having to look after three small children...”

“Yeah,” Lena said. “It’s travelling with children that’s the real pain in the arse though, isn’t it? This one’s a magnet for disaster. Like when he was trying to get from his house to the airport the other day…”

So while the girls bonded over airborne carcinogens and man trouble (a bit rough considering I wasn’t actually Lena’s man), McCarthy and I went back to the significant issues of the day. Saving the Australian cricket team from its own selective incompetence.

Understandably, McCarthy’s stamina wasn’t what it was. He wasn’t used to the mental effort of conversation, even just the stress of having people around. He started to flag after lunchtime, overdue for his nanna nap, and crashed out a bit before 2. Speaking of overdue, we had our own issues.

“We can’t fly you back until nightfall,” Kate said, on behalf of the organisation she apparently represented. “Sorry if that gets in the way of your plans…”

“Meant to be in soundcheck at 4,” I replied. “We’re going to be missed pretty soon. Phone will be ringing.”

“Which is where?”

“In the chopper,” I said. Which was back from refuelling, apparently, but Mr Smith and Mr James were grabbing a few hours’ shuteye out on the headland ahead of the flight back. Something to do with civil aviation regs. Since they’d been so religiously adhered to on the flight up here, I thought to myself.

“Same,” nodded Lena.

Kate frowned, vaguely annoyed, weighing up the options. “Use mine,” she finally muttered, sliding her iPhone across the coffee table to me. “Just don’t try anything stupid.”

“I’ll have you know that when I try anything stupid I usually succeed at it, thanks very much.” Now if I could only remember anyone’s number… Luckily Lena knew Daniela’s, so we tried that.

“Hey Danno,” I grinned. “How would you be?”

A whole bunch of semi-agitated franticness ensued at the other end. We were missed, all right. Muchly.

“Yeah, there’s a good reason neither Lena and I are answering our phones… we don’t have ‘em. Long story. Is Marty about?”

Marty was more than about, he was standing next to her. As he seemed to be a lot these days. I thought she worked for Exocet, not dB... Anyhoo. He didn’t sound a lot less agimitated either.

“Hey Marty. Sorry buddy. Not going to make soundcheck this afternoon.”

You could hear his response across the room like he was on speakerphone. Largely constituted from ‘come on’ and ‘what the fuck’ and ‘seriously’ in various combinations of increasing antsiness.

“What’s my fucking excuse this time? Well my fucking excuse is I’ve been kidnapped by what appears to be a former SAS special ops team, and have been flown under cover of darkness to a secret location somewhere on the remote WA coastline… Lena’s here too… that’s her you can hear laughing in the background… yeah fuckin’ helpful Lena, thanks for that… Mate, no shit, that’s the truth. I have no fucking idea where we are but I’m assured we’ll be back tonight. No. Don’t know when. No I am not fucking kidding you…”

I looked up. A fairly dishevelled looked McCarthy was leaning against the doorframe.

“Sorry,” he remarked softly, “shouting woke me up.”

“Sorry mate, mine?”

“Nah, his,” McCarthy indicated. Marty still had his rant on and was going for gold. You could probably hear him from the chopper, let alone the other side of the house. “Let me,” he said, and beckoned with his hand.

“Bad idea,” Kate interjected. “Really bad idea, Sam.” But it was too late. I’d thrown him the phone, and even with his fractured fine motor skills he’d pouched the catch at short gully.

Which was how Marty found himself cut off mid-rant by just about the last voice he ever expected to hear again, apart from God and Johnny Meillon.

“Hello Marty,” said Sam. Said pretty much the same to us, too. He really needed to work on his intro material. “Yeah sorry mate, Angus isn’t going to make soundcheck this afternoon. But here’s what you can do. Plug everything in and turn everything up. Then play really really fucking loud. Alright? Talk to you later mate.” Sam hung up and tossed the phone back to Kate with a sly wink.

I burst out laughing. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was McCarthy’s delivery. Or maybe it was remembering McCarthy had been giving the same advice to Marty every soundcheck since about 1998. If he still had that kicking around in the dilapidated wiring of his scone, he was probably going to be alright. As for Marty, some explaining would have to be done. Tomorrow.

So McCarthy went back to his nanna nap - as did Lena, curling up on the couch. It was the sort of afternoon that leant itself to the after-lunch siesta, and the fresh seafood marinara McCarthy had whipped up with homemade tagliatelle for lunch had very much hit the spot. He’d become a hell of a chef since I’d seen him last; then again he’d had a lot of time to practice. Gave Kate a reason to keep him around. For her part, Kate co-opted the old iMac on McCarthy’s recording setup in the spare room (a converted laundry, which was brick and had the best acoustics in the house) to catch up on her emails, Arsebook and whatever else she had to do on her impromptu day off (which I suspected was always going to be on the cards anyway). Me, I just went for a walk around the garden. It was either that or lie around in the sun and sleeping off that gorgeous feed of pasta and garlic chilli marinara, and I had a svelte rock-and-roll figure to maintain, dammit. For one more show, at least.

Fuck me, he’s alive.

That realisation kept popping up and smacking me in the mouth, just when I’d thought I’d got the struggling-to-comprehend phase out of the way. He’d done OK, I recognised. He’d survived. Found a niche. Probably had no right to be doing as well as he was, really. Second chance, and all that bollocks. And I really, honestly, couldn’t have been happier for him. And if protecting that meant walking back into civilization and maintaining the premise that he was dead - whether that meant answering to a TV camera or a phalanx of coppers - then that was fine by me. If that’d been the reason he’d got us up here, to secure that sort of assurance in return for being let in on the true story, then mission accomplished. How we’d manage Marty (and Danno, and anyone else Marty had spoken with in the interim) would be a problem, but it’d be a problem for tomorrow, just as my shitstack of other personal issues (trashed house, no girlfriend, person-of-interest in GBH on an off-duty copper, etc etc etc) were a Monday problem. I wasn’t looking to solve them today.

A rustling ahead, in the path through the heathy scrub that led to the headland. A figure in black emerged from the heat haze - Mr James’ offsider, Mr Smith. He didn’t look that thrilled to see me. I wasn’t going to take it personally, he didn’t look that thrilled with much of anything. He also had the conversation skills of Vinnie Jones in Gone In 60 Seconds. I was scratching my head to remember if he’d said anything this morning. He didn’t say anything to me as we approached each other, just looked a bit doleful. Embarrassed, even.

“Come on,” said a tetchy voice. Not his, unless he sounded like a chick. I suddenly realised there’d been two sets of footsteps, one lighter and off-sequence with Mr Smith’s gravel-crushing boots. And I suddenly realised - as soon as I heard it, of course - that it was a voice I knew. Under a fringe of crazed black hair, two intense blue eyes regarded me sharply. But not as sharply as the point of the speargun she was ushering Mr Smith down the pathway at the end of. The speargun which appeared to be duct-taped to the blue fibreglass cast on her lower right arm, like some kind of bizarre bionic killing machine from the future.

We all froze. I looked at the girl, and the girl looked at me, and Mr Smith looked for a hole to crawl into. Presumably if the lads back at the SAS Old Boys Club heard about this he’d be laughed out of the secretariat. That was if he finished on the positive side of the fifty-fifty on whether that harpoon was destined to become embedded in his back, or my front. Judging by the barely constrained, strung-the-fuck-out fury in Beth’s eyes, his chances of remaining unpunctured suddenly looked better than mine.

If only my Monday problems had been polite enough to respect the scheduling I’d put in place for them.