The Life You Choose and That Chose You Read online

  young singles might have been an exception

  he briefly lectured

  behaviour and graciousness eventually attracted a

  military raid

  on his stronghold courteous denials

  were extraordinarily prolific

  the classical music-loving seaman tried to forget

  a pre-dawn to post-dusk job

  interpreting foreign news broadcasts most progressive

  winter temperatures

  can fall to minus 35 degrees

  stylised and violent

  punched to the ground

  never enough of a bastard

  a brain aneurysm was an accommodating gesture that

  was nervously received

  who survives him on the beach

  in large canvas tents which he built up over twenty years?

  mostly colourful jazz pianists

  an exceptional man of vision

  as well as an old so-and-so

  who failed to spot 270 errors

  failed to witness the rise of a hard-to-catch jungle worm

  threatened to shoot the owner with the gun he carried

  the train service was his father's disgust

  an expansion of the program ended in a valley choked

  with lantana

  the stupidest kid's pathetic charm cast a binding spell

  on part of a group recruited to negotiate

  the difficult path to the first girl born to a free settler

  a bottle of Bollinger under her arm

  and pennies to buy cream cheese

  the international rice hybridisation program was

  suspended temporarily

  she gave it a pat to send it home

  Call to arms

  we will be marching

  I'll bring you a cupcake

  an obnoxious duck

  cricket in the spare bed

  room slug in the kitchen red

  back in the pool

  even good Sunday morning Shirley Bassey

  with us to demand partial nudity

  if there's no pie BYO drinks

  no there's no pie

  it's locked away sotally tober

  heart-shattering Saturday will restore your pallor whilst

  drenched in rain

  I don't get it

  everywhere I go

  all I hear is ‘wild ginger’

  is this the new black?

  but I thought that was me?

  is this too good for a standing ear yank?

  already dressed space braved the rain just for a toasted

  tea cake

  Postcard to a man who I once knew, but

  no longer have an address for…

  Beats’n’peaces on the night train to Amsterdam

  mullet with egg timer headlights will miss you

  tons the end of almost eight months of stupid

  bouncers blowing up ‘$5 Paris for students’ balloons

  I'm tired of following my dreams, I'm just gonna ask

  where they're going and hook up with them later.

  Hope the US don't find my weathered passport and

  terrorist-like appearance a problem

  I love you and…pfft

  ‘It's not what I'd imagined. It's not like, you know. The bush.’

  ‘Actually it's very much like the bush. It is the bush.’

  ‘These trees, the scrub. It's scrubby. There's no sense of. I mean, it's so bushy.

  ‘Very much so.’

  This was Rob and Mike, the director and first AD, both American, inspecting locations the day before we started shooting.

  ‘It's bush-y, but it's oh I don't know, fuck. What am I trying to say? Wild. The bush is meant to be wild. A wilderness.’

  ‘This is a wilderness. This is the bush. This is what the wilderness looks like in the bush.’

  ‘It's not right. You know what I'm getting at, Mike. We've gotta get the sense that there's some challenge involved here, some dwarfing of the individual. Scale. Humility before nature. That's the concept.’

  I swatted at something that touched my neck. An insect or plant.

  ‘So, more openness.’

  ‘Openness for a start. How we even get cameras in here, all the gear, I don't know. Can't even see more than a couple metres. Also this dryness, it's incredible. You anticipate this level of dryness?’

  ‘Australian bush is dry. This part of it, at least.’

  ‘I mean, sunburnt land, sure. Red earth and so on. But this? It all just looks so incredibly itchy. You know that's what I'm feeling right now just looking at it, is itchiness. You getting that?’

  ‘You want rainforest, we can move. You want red centre, we can move.’

  ‘No, no, no. No moving. Access is good here, climate's good. Good light. We've paid up the hotel. Plus Andy's pissed as it is, time we're taking. I call to say we're moving, you watch.’

  ‘So we change it.’

  ‘I'm listening.’

  ‘We find a clearing somewhere back up near the road. We pull up some of these native plants from down in here, assemble them back up there as we like. We still get the view in the deep background—probably better, factoring in elevation.’

  ‘And the dryness? People are itching themselves in the ad breaks, right as the thing for laundry softener comes on, you know how Andy's gonna love that.’

  ‘There's nothing we can't do.’

  It was already a week later than when we'd been meant to start shooting, on account of some delay with Doogan, which I hadn't been able to get any solid details on yet. I'd tagged along into the bush because I was trying to exercise some creative input, but it was too hot to really think about much, and Rob and Mike spent the whole entire time just talking and walking and walking and talking, like they thought they lived in an ep of The West Wing or something, which obviously I didn't find half as entertaining as they seemed to. ‘Ep’ is an industry word for episode. Also we'd been walking for like an hour-and-a-half along this thin dirt trail, so my feet were real sore. Plus I didn't get the impression Rob had been crazy about my coming along to begin with.

  There was this weird silence. Even the birds I could hear were part of it.

  ‘How're you feeling about this, Jake?’ Mike asked, turning to me, remembering I was there.

  It looked like bush to me. The flies looked like flies. The sun looked like the sun. The heat was hot. I slowly turned three-sixty degrees, taking everything in, squinting the way I do when I'm thinking real carefully about a question.

  ‘Well,’ I said, finally, ‘so far as veracity goes, I think that, Rob, you're spot on. I mean, Mike, sure, this is bush, in that yes this is where bushes are. The state of nature et cetera. But really it's a question—to my mind, at least—of can the audience believe this? And if they can, well great. My job's been done. And that's really all I'm concerned with, is serving the project. Which I see as a collaborative process. And about your vision, Rob, which I am one-hundred-plus-per-cent committed to. And so if you're happy, Rob, then basically that's how I know when I'm happy.’

  Rob ran his hand over his stubble and seemed to shake his head a little.

  ‘I mean,’ I went on, ‘I get where you're coming from, Mike. But this is really Rob's baby.’

  ‘Great,’ said Mike. ‘That's great, Jake. Thanks for your input.’

  And then the silence came back.

  Upshot was, we'd have another day off. The crew went in there late that afternoon and began tearing the bush apart. They were going to work through the night with a generator and floodlights, making these modular sections of bush on wooden bases with wheels. The idea was that the sections could be moved around in the clearing where they'd finally settled on shooting, which was back up on the side of this wide fire trail, with a big view out over the valley.

  Back in my room at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, I picked up the phone and dialled Belle's number. I knew it by heart, even though I'm usually not good with nu
mbers.

  It rang a couple times. I was feeling pretty nervous. Then there was a click.

  Hey, you've reached Belle's phone. I'm not able to take your call at the moment, but if you please leave your name, number and a brief message,

  I'll g—

  I hung up.

  I've never fully gotten what you're meant to say on a recording like that.

  I'd just turn up. Tomorrow afternoon, after the time her work always used to finish.

  I'd just turn up and she'd be happy to see me.

  When I beat Tampax® Jenny Elkins and won the premiere season of Idol II: Encore! ten months ago, the judging panel said I looked like one of the most promising new voices to have graced the show's stage in their memory.

  Having grown up in the outer Blue Mountains, you might say that I wasn't prepared for the excitement. After finishing high school, we'd all moved down to the city—me and my group, and Belle. Living in the city was pretty exciting after growing up in the mountains. There was this sudden sense that we'd joined the fast lane, that we'd finally been swept up in the world. And it was a kind of surprise, in a weird way, that there really was a world to get swept up in. More or less everyone who grows up in the mountains and then leaves for the city at eighteen will tell you the same thing. You hear it the whole time you're at school, from people's older brothers or sisters. It sounds like they're living in a movie—clubs, drinking, festivals, warehouses. You get a taste of it every now and then as you get older, fifteen, sixteen, when you are able to go down the hill by yourself. But you can't know until you've done it for real how good it really is. And we were doing it. We were living in this old terrace in Newtown, down near Sydney Park—Belle and me and two other mates. Working retail, making money for rent and beer.

  And then Idol II happened. In the papers it said how a hole had opened up in Channel Ten's programming and at the last minute some hot young producer had swooped in with an idea for rebooting the old franchise with a new sponsorship concept. Each contestant would be sponsored by a different company, and so the competition wouldn't just be between individuals, but between the companies behind them. Once the contestants had been selected for talent, corporations were invited to come in and choose which one they wanted to back as their ‘voice’. Then there'd be opportunities throughout the season, as viewers got to know the contestants, to also get to know the companies—their philosophies, their charitable ventures, their human side.

  Except for in the shower maybe, I'd never even sung before. Belle was the singer. Everything about her whole personality was tied up in it. She had a million notebooks of scrawled lyrics, a lot of them not so secretly about us, about her and me, or just about me and how handsome I am, but how the fact that I'm handsome means that there are things I don't think of or see. Only she liked indie music, so her word for ‘handsome’ was ‘beautiful’, and it was always said sadly. She had this old steel string Takamine her dad had owned before he died. Its neck was too fat for her hand. It always took her a few seconds to find her way between each of the three chords she knew, and her strums were either slightly muted or kind of plinky and twangy—often a bit of both. She was always blaming it on the guitar's action, whatever that means. But so anyway, when we saw the ad for the reboot of the Idol franchise, the call for people to try out, everyone in our house was like, ‘Go Belle!’ She refused and refused. But then, after we'd all basically given up, the morning of the audition, after she and I had had this really random romantic night where we said how we totally believed in each other, she suddenly got a burst of something, and said she'd do it, she would do it, but only if I'd go along with her to the audition. For moral support. I was hung-over, but I said of course I'd go.

  But then it was so weird. At the front desk, where you signed in, put your name down, the girl asked if I'd like to sign in too.

  ‘Nah,’ I said, ‘I don't sing.’

  ‘Don't or can't?’

  ‘Don't I guess.’

  ‘You're a good looking guy.’

  ‘Doesn't mean I can sing.’

  ‘Puts you a bit more than halfway there.’

  I looked at Belle. She was so nervous. I figured if I did it, if I did it just for a goof, maybe she'd be less worked up. If I just made an idiot of myself, maybe she'd relax.

  ‘Come on,’ said the girl. ‘Give it a crack.’

  And so I wrote down a name.

  Jake Smith.

  And it was weird too how, at the urging of the producers, months and months later on the show's final ep, I sang the track Belle had sung that day at the audition, when they laughed her out of the room. A what do you call it, a coincidence. She'd been going to sing one of her own songs, one about me and my eyes being like semi-precious stones, but at the last minute her nerves had gotten the better of her and she'd gone for one of her favourites. One she thought she knew too well to fuck up. It was ‘Pictures of Me’ by the late, great Elliot Smith, who stabbed himself to death.

  And it wasn't my choice that it then became my single. For about two months after the final show, you could hear me, auto-tuned, on high rotation, chanting ‘see nothing wrong, see nothing wrong’ against a kind of blippy upbeat electronica loop on every major radio station in the country. And every time it played, afterwards you'd hear me doing this little half-sung bit, ‘This so-ong was brought to yo-o-ou by Daguerreotype Photographic Prod-u-ucts—Daguerreotype: Instantly Authenti-i-ic!’

  It was around then, after I'd been living in the Idol contestants’ house for nearly twelve weeks, that Belle and I stopped talking altogether.

  Apart from that, though, I'd thought everything was going okay up until the night of the ARIAs. I was there to co-present an award with Nikki Webster just a few weeks after the track came out. We were preparing to go onstage, me in my suit with the Daguerreotype logo on the back. The guys from Powderfinger were also backstage, wearing a variety of neckerchiefs and undone bowties. They'd broken up about three years earlier, and at the start of the night I'd overheard them telling a reporter about how this year they were embarking on what was an emotional and long overdue reunion tour. Now that the reporter had left, they were just leaning around in the wings, smoking cigarettes, waiting to go on and play.

  ‘We, uh, we like your um, your stuff, man,’ said Bernard Fanning, who's their lead singer.

  The rest of them snickered.

  ‘Yeah,’ said another guy, maybe the guitarist. ‘Totally love it. Don't you totally love it, Rai?’

  Rai Thistlethwayte, who isn't in Powderfinger but was there anyway, was pinching sweat from his hair and using it to corkscrew his moustache ends, sort of dancing absently on one spot nearby, staring at the floor. I'd heard it was in Rai's contract that he had to keep the moustache. It looked really good.

  ‘The vocal track was really, what's the word?’ said Bernard. ‘Interesting?’

  ‘Really interesting,’ said the guitarist.

  ‘Was that what, a ribbon mic?’

  ‘I think so, yeah,’ I said. ‘A ribbon mic.’

  ‘A Shure, probably.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah definitely, man.’

  ‘So cool, man,’ said Bernard. He paused for a second. ‘Probably the KSM353. Sounded like the 353 to me. That's what I used on the last album. But was it the KSM353-A, or the KSM353-B?’

  I thought for a second. The guitarist pulled out a tobacco pouch and rolled another cigarette with one hand. He lit it up and blew the smoke at me.

  ‘The B,’ I said. ‘Definitely the B.’

  ‘The B? The Shure KSM353-B? Are you positive?’

  ‘Are you shure?’ said the guitarist.

  ‘Um, yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Really? Well that's just so funny, said Bernard. ‘Because there is no KSM353-B.’

  ‘Come on, guys. Leave him alone. We're all musicians,’ said Russell Crowe, who was standing a few metres away and had obviously overheard. He was here with his band, The Ordinary Fear of God, who had just released a new double album of Gre
atest Hits. He was wearing yellow aviators above a big full beard and had a Maton acoustic slung over his back. He had Danielle Spencer with him—her arm looped through his, his thumbs hooked in his front belt loops. Danielle looked up at him, her eyes big as he spoke.

  ‘Musicians?’ said Bernard. ‘Musicians? He's not a musician. Can he sing? No. Can he wail on a gnarly riff? No. He said Shure KSM353-B! We have a whole philosophy as a band. He's just a pretty face for flogging shitty cameras. He's a fake, a phoney. He's styrofoam.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Rai Thistlethwayte.

  ‘Oh, but that's right—he won Idol II,’ said Bernard, flicking his cigarette butt away into the heavy folds of the backstage curtains, his eyes now angry and wide, not blinking. ‘Well let's just pin the badge on him then, shall we? Musician. Let's just sign him into the Hall of Fame, yeah?’

  ‘Tch!’ The guitarist.

  ‘I've heard they don't even really get the public to vote on Idol anymore,’ said Bernard. ‘The phone lines don't even go anywhere.’

  ‘You know what he looks like?’ said the guitarist. ‘He looks like what Hugh Jackman would look like if Hugh Jackman were a girl.’

  ‘Shows like Idol are good for the industry,’ interjected Russell Crowe, who genuinely seemed to be a really nice guy. ‘Sure, Bernard, blokes like me and you mightn't like the music, but it allows kids in homes across Australia to dream. And isn't that what really matters?’ he said, looking down at Danielle. ‘Dreams?’

  Powderfinger laughed as one.

  ‘Dreams? More like dream on,’ said the guitarist, and without turning to look, Bernard slapped him a high five. Russell looked hurt but he didn't say anything, just pouted and what's it called. Glowered from behind his sunnies.

  ‘You think you're a muso, pussy?’ Bernard said to me, stretching to full height. He seemed to be flexing his pecs under his shirt. ‘You really think you're here because of your music?.’’

  I couldn't hold his eyes. I looked at my shoes. I wanted to just go on and present the award and get this lousy night over with.

  ‘You guys are such meanies,’ said Nikki. ‘Just totally ignore them, Jake. I wonder if I have time to go to the torlet.’