Roadside Sisters Read online

  Praise for Farewell My Ovaries

  ‘Cleverly crafted . . . as warm and light and welcome as a doona.’ The Age

  ‘Witty and wise . . . with a down and dirty sense of humour when it comes to life and love.’ Geelong Times

  ‘[Harmer] expertly portrays the rollercoaster range of emotions found within a marriage.’ Sunday Mail

  ‘Harmer makes a grand job of her first novel, pioneering a warm and welcome Australian chick-lit genre about beautiful, interesting and intelligent women who aren’t invited to 30th birthday parties any more. And don’t really care.’ Newcastle Herald

  ‘Harmer has written a sexy romp with an underlying core of morality and an overlay of the ace comedienne’s characteristic wit and humour.’ Sunday Telegraph

  Praise for Love And Punishment

  ‘Harmer’s new novel is sharp, witty and insightful.’ Sun Herald

  ‘Love and Punishment . . . might make you reminisce about acts of revenge you have taken or fuel the fantasies you harbour about taking a coin to the side of your ex’s sports car. Whatever effect it has on you, it can’t fail to make you laugh.’ Good Reading

  ‘One of Australia’s favourite comediennes has written a hilarious account of the dark side of love.’ Notebook

  ‘A fast-moving, funny, poignant novel about love, loss, revenge and punishment.’ Herald Sun

  ‘Love and Punishment is a quirky, painfully honest yet hysterically funny account of one woman’s journey towards relationship closure.’ New Idea

  Wendy Harmer is one of Australia’s best-known humourists. She has enjoyed a highly successful thirty-year career in journalism, radio, television and stand-up comedy.

  She has written for newspapers, been a regular columnist for magazines and is the author of five books for adults, two plays, three one-woman stage shows and a libretto for the Australian Opera. Her bestselling children’s book series ‘Pearlie in the Park’ has been translated into ten languages and is the subject of an animated television series.

  Wendy lives on Sydney’s Northern Beaches with her husband, two young children, and (at last count) two goats, fifteen chickens and three ducks.

  Wendy

  Harmer

  Roadside Sisters

  First published in 2009

  Copyright © Wendy Harmer 2009

  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 Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Lyrics on p. 307 are from ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ by Carl Perkins © 1956 Carl Perkins Music Inc/Wren Music Co Inc. For Australia and New Zealand: EMI Music Publishing Australia Pty Limited. (ABN 83 000 040 951) PO Box 35, Pyrmont, NSW 2009, Australia. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:

  (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax:

  (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email:

  [email protected]

  Web:

  www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Harmer, Wendy.

  Roadside sisters / Wendy Harmer.

  ISBN: 978 1 74175 165 9 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  Set in 11.5/18 pt Sabon by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my three fellow travellers—

  Brendan, Marley and Maeve

  One

  ‘This is your half-hour call. Technical crew, performers, front of house—theatre doors are now open. This is your half-hour call.’

  The announcement from the tinny speakers on the walls of the dressing rooms at the Athenaeum Theatre stirred everyone into frenzied activity. Meredith leaned towards the make-up mirror and attacked her black spikes of gelled hair. ‘Has anyone seen Corinne yet? Where the hell is she?’

  ‘I’ll check the other dressing rooms,’ Nina volunteered. ‘Oh God! I feel sick. I’ve been to the loo five times already! And wearing this thing . . .’ she flapped the purple batwings of her gospel robe, ‘it takes twice as long. You want anything from the Green Room? I’m getting something.’

  ‘White wine. Thanks.’ Annie, sitting on the threadbare carpet, held up her plastic cup for another refill. Nina took it and hoisted her hem. She stepped over Annie’s splayed legs.

  ‘Haven’t you had enough already?’ Meredith gave Annie an evil-eyed reverse squint through the illuminated mirror. ‘Tonight’s not a rehearsal! Every one of us has to be on-song, note-perfect.’

  Annie rolled her eyes. Praise be to Sister Meredith for restating the bloody obvious. ‘Wait, Nina, I’ll come with you.’ She leapt into the hallway and sniffed the air—a lean-limbed whippet at the entrance of a rabbit burrow.

  ‘ANNIE! I want everyone back here in five minutes!’ Meredith bellowed after her.

  Backstage was a dimly lit labyrinth connected by narrow wooden stairs. The sounds of last-minute rehearsals issued from every dressing room door Annie passed by. She noted the odd tootle from a trumpet, the chorus of a song accompanied by a strummed guitar, stray punchlines to half-heard set-ups—and judging by the anatomical detail of the gags, it sounded as if a good many of them tonight would be about Ronald Reagan’s colon surgery.

  In the mid-eighties it seemed as if everyone in Melbourne wanted to be up on stage to be a part of this ‘New Wave’ of entertainment. Almost overnight, a crop of stand-up comedians, sketch comedy ensembles, punk magicians, circus acts and tap dancers (with or without small dogs) had sprouted from fallow suburbs to perform with rented sound systems set up in every empty corner of the city.

  And if the organisers of the ‘venue’ wanted to call the night a ‘cabaret’, they also booked a musical act. Hundreds of musicians and singers formed and re-formed into groups, like mounds of tzatziki on a plate shovelled by grilled flat bread at a Greek café. A jazz ensemble was piled into a big band, then separated into a ukelele, polka or cowboy band, a musical parody duo, trio or quartet (often with hilarious costumes), and finally what remained was scraped into a gospel choir. If you couldn’t play an instrument, weren’t funny or a natural performer or had no charisma whatsoever, you could always find yourself a place in a gospel choir.

  In the Green Room Annie shook the cardboard box of Coolabah to drain the last drops of riesling into her cup. She sidled up to Nina, who was piling her paper plate with wholemeal pita bread and brown rice salad.

  ‘I’m going for a smoke,’ she whispered and headed for the stage door. There would be comedians and musicians out there in the laneway—cigarettes, filthy jokes and laughter. She vaulted up the stairs in high-heeled boots, dragging her Drum Blue tobacco out of the back pocket of her jeans as she went.

  ‘Don’t be long! Meredith says . . .’ Nina’s voice trailed away as she saw Annie disappear. She turned her attention back to her towering plate and saw, with some guilt, that she had enough food to feed a family of starving Ethiopians. She crammed cold rice into her mouth. Nina always ate when she was nervous. Or depressed, or happy, or bored.

  On the way back to her own dressing room, Nina knocked on the door of the cub
byhole next door and peeked inside. She saw, through a thick, silvery haze of dope smoke, Genevieve and Jaslyn sitting back in plastic chairs with their bare feet up on the bench. Jasyln’s silver toe rings glinted, catching the light as she crossed chunky, hairy ankles. Genevieve idly picked at the threads of tobacco on her tongue.

  ‘You seen Corinne?’ Nina fanned at the pungent cloud. They shook their heads in reply. Nina groaned. ‘Bloody hell! Meredith will have a heart attack if she doesn’t get here soon.’

  ‘She needs a manipulation,’ drawled Jaslyn. ‘Her Vishuddha chakra is blocked. Or I could give her a reflexology massage.’ Nina dutifully returned to Meredith and relayed the message.

  ‘The last thing I need now is Jaslyn’s hippie bullshit!’ snapped Meredith. ‘We’ve got twenty minutes until showtime. The biggest agent in Australia is going to be watching us out there. We’ve got no Corinne, Annie’s half pissed, Briony’s still sticking those damned anti-nuclear leaflets on windscreens in Collins Street and I can smell Genevieve’s joint from here!’

  Meredith reached for the garish-hued gown hanging on a coat hook. It was an appropriate enough garment for tonight, she reflected. If they screwed up their performance they might as well be singing at their own funeral.

  ‘Just go and get Annie. She should be dressed by now,’ Meredith instructed as she pulled the voluminous shroud over her head.

  Nina flew out the door and wondered why it had been left to her to round everyone up . . . again. She located the stage door, shoved it open and fell into the laneway. She found Annie there doubled over with laughter in the middle of a group of blokes in scruffy tuxedos whom she recognised as members of the comedy tuba quartet, also on tonight’s bill.

  ‘Annie,’ Nina flapped her robes in urgent semaphore, ‘Meredith wants you to come now.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Annie, pointing at Nina’s improbable get-up. ‘Mother Superior’s calling me for vespers. I’ll catch you guys later. Have a good one!’

  Annie paused at the doorway, turned, crossed herself with a grand comic flourish and sang loudly: ‘Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.’ She blessed those assembled with the tossed remains of her ice cubes.

  With five minutes until curtain-up, the six of them were now squeezed into one dressing room. Meredith paused, mascara in hand, and checked her watch. She hurled the brush at her reflection. ‘We’ll just have to assume Corinne isn’t coming.’

  ‘No!’ gasped Briony, pausing with her fingers plunged up to the second knuckle in a jar of glitter hair gel. ‘She’s got all the solos and—’

  ‘I know that!’ Meredith interrupted. ‘We’ll have to share them around. I’ll take the first one. Nina, you can take—’

  ‘I couldn’t. I just couldn’t!’ wailed Nina. Her curling wand clattered onto the bench. ‘Ohmigod! I have to go again . . .’ Nina pushed her way through to the door and hurtled into the hallway.

  ‘We’ve got two options,’ said Meredith. ‘We either get out there and give it a go, or give up.’

  ‘Let’s just fucking do it,’ came Genevieve’s muffled reply from inside the bundle of fabric Annie was now forcibly dragging over her nodding skull.

  Meredith poked at the spikes of hair which were threatening to slump into flat, soft petals. The second last thing she needed was directions from Genevieve. She reeked of marijuana and would be lucky to find her way to the stage, unless they all held hands like preschoolers and led her through the dark.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen . . . Welcome to the Athenaeum Theatre for this night of stars . . .’ the PA system popped, crackled.

  The activity in the dressing room stilled and became a religious tableau painted by Caravaggio. Each head turned to the speaker on the wall, as if the Voice of God was to be heard there. With the first round of applause from the capacity audience in the auditorium, the tiny dressing room erupted in a riot of elbows, knees and metres of noxious purple polyester. Nina returned and squashed in. They jostled for space to peer at their reflection by the stark light of the naked globes.

  ‘SHOOSH!’ commanded Meredith. She turned and raised her arms to her small congregation. ‘Look, we’re the last act in the first half. That gives us thirty minutes to get it together.’

  ‘She’s right,’ declared Briony, still red-faced from grappling with a thousand windscreen wipers and her canvas bag of fluorescent orange A4 flyers. ‘We’re wimmin! Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves!’ She sang the Eurythmics hit they all knew from FM radio.

  Jaslyn shook out her dreadlocks and slapped two large hands on her thighs. ‘We can do this! Yes we can! I threw the I Ching this morning and it said—’

  ‘Let’s just find a place to rehearse,’ Meredith ordered, and charged out the door with her robes flapping behind her like the wings of an avenging angel.

  The six of them stood outside on that cold April night and did their best to ‘get it together’, even as they kept an eye on the stage door, hoping that the apparition of Corinne would appear and lead them to salvation. It was not until the stage manager gestured for them to follow him through the dark to the wings that they knew for sure they’d been abandoned.

  Huddled in the velvety blackness, they twined their arms around each other’s waists and swayed to a silent hymn. Just metres away microphones were illuminated in celestial spotlights. Meredith was suddenly reminded that this was how people described a near-death experience—you were drawn towards a blinding radiance that was the font of all love and understanding. Then, if it wasn’t your time to go, you were sent back to earth, with gratitude, to live again. At least, that is what Meredith hoped it would be like—she had no desire to die out there and end up in cabaret purgatory. Each woman prayed to her own god for deliverance.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ announced the MC, resplendent this evening in a powder blue velvet suit with embroidered lapels, ‘please welcome seven—’ Meredith hissed at the stage. The MC turned and peered under the brim of his black cowboy hat to see her upheld fingers—‘no, six women tonight with heavenly voices. Melbourne’s favourite gospel choir . . . Sanctified Soul!’

  Two

  It was Nina who picked up the phone and rang Meredith and Annie to suggest the three of them should have dinner to honour the twentieth anniversary of the night the group disbanded. She’d only put the dates together when she was sitting at the dining table sorting through a box of photographs. More raw material to feed her latest mania for scrapbooking. She’d found a poster, gnawed by silverfish, advertising their performance at the Athenaeum in April 1987. There was Sanctified Soul, listed in a stellar line-up of comedians, singers and bands. Nina recognised all the names. Some of the comics now had respectable jobs working on ABC radio, while others had become actors, writers or were in the ‘where are they now?’ file. The musical performers had likewise met various fates—one of them was in fact teaching Nina’s eldest son guitar on Saturday mornings.

  The keeping of the Sanctified Soul mythology had fallen to Nina, Annie and Meredith. As the three of them went about their business in the city they would sometimes drive past a pub, restaurant or town hall where they’d performed. Some of the spaces had been rebirthed as poker machine lounges or cocktail bars. Once Annie had been standing at the cash register of a Prahran noodle shop and suddenly remembered they had played a gig in the spot now occupied by a despairing giant crab in a fish tank.

  When Nina, Annie and Meredith had last met—was it a year ago?—they shared a guilty laugh about who had made the least fortuitous escape. They choked on blueberry brioche as they realised the joke was on them. They were the ones still living in Melbourne. All these years later and they still lived within a fifteen-kilometre radius of where they’d sung that final night.

  There had been seven of them back then—a goodly number for a heavenly choir. Genevieve had long since been claimed by a heroin overdose; Briony was now hostage to the tourism industry in Cairns; Jaslyn was working with UNICEF in Afghanistan. And Corinne? Corinne Jacobsen was in Sydney a
nd was the one who had apparently ‘made it’. After years of hosting morning television she was now a ‘household name’—in the same way you knew the brand name of your favourite bench wipes and chose them at the supermarket, someone had cattily observed. How many of the performers from that night, Nina wondered, had walked out of the theatre and never, ever appeared on a stage again? Like Nina, Annie and Meredith.

  A week after that phone call the three of them were sitting around a linen-covered table in a quiet corner of an Italian restaurant in East Melbourne.

  ‘Remember the time the sprinklers came on at that crappy motel in Shepparton and drenched us just before we were supposed to leave for the gig?’ asked Nina.

  Annie and Meredith laughed. They did remember. And a lot more besides.

  ‘It can’t be twenty years ago.’ Meredith shook her head in disbelief. It was the fifth time she’d said this since they sat down. ‘You were a baby then, Annie. A baby. I can’t believe we took you on the road with us when you were, what? Eighteen?’

  ‘Nineteen. Yup! Fresh off the farm.’ Annie grinned. She reached for her wineglass and scraped back her trademark tumble of amber curls. ‘I came to the city to “find myself” and I found all of you instead. I never knew women like you existed!’

  ‘So, you must be coming up to the big four-oh—’ Nina had been doing her sums—‘and you’ve still not remarried. No kids. That’s a shame.’

  ‘Knock it off, Nina, you’re sounding like my mother.’ Annie drained her glass and poured herself another. Nina registered the rebuke, but couldn’t help noticing that Annie had hardly touched her veal cutlet. But she’d drunk most of the bottle of Barossa red. Was that how she stayed so slim? What a shame to see all that good meat going to—