Breaking Her Rules

Chapter 38

Late into the night at Johnny Rousham's party someone puts a mellow Two Soap Dolls song on the speakers to wind down the party. There's still a decent crowd left but we're much more subdued than the beginning of the night, with most people sitting around in groups and talking.

'What song do you think they're going to open with?' Julian asks me.

'Who?' I ask.

'TSD, of course,' Julian says.

'Oh, right,' I say. 'Brunswick Street, maybe?'

'Obvious choice.'

'What song do you reckon our parents used to open with?' I ask.

Julian chuckles. 'I think they always opened with Battles out to dry. See, I was thinking about it the other day because it's a song George wrote about having a fight with a girl, and I realise now that that must have been my mum.'

'Well that's fantastic,' Findlay says. 'Now that song is ruined for me.'

Ainsley smiles. 'Mum has all these old folders with all these written lyrics, some of them weren't ever produced. They're all handwritten, too. I don't think she likes to look through them much though. She held onto them because she was band manager, and I think George would have wanted her to have them. There are even a few songs he wrote after the band broke up, I think.'

'Really?' I ask. 'How many songs did George write after they broke up?'

'Only a few,' Ainsley says.

'Where are those folders?' I ask.

'In Mum's study,' Ainsley says. 'If you sleep at mine tonight you can have a look at them if you really want.'

The party wraps up as people get tired and call cabs. Julian drops us home.

When we get to Ainsley's house Julian turns down the music and says his goodbyes to us. Ainsley and I sneak into the house.

In the spare bedroom, I take off my shoes and all my jewellery so I don't make any noise. Then I sit. After exactly twenty-seven anxious minutes of watching my clock (I can't wait for thirty), I tiptoe down to Karen Shepherd's study.

Karen Shepherd, like her daughter, is immaculately minimal and neat. The room is almost empty, with only a desk and laptop, and a bookshelf that is mostly for displaying large hardcover editions of psychology textbooks and decorative sculptures. On the wooden desk is a single framed photograph of Ainsley as a child wearing a pink tutu, beaming proudly into the camera. Even the shelves above the desk are mostly empty.

I can't see anywhere that Karen would store a lyric book from her time as a manager of Dime's the Limit. But I notice three stacked white boxes tucked underneath the desk. I pull the desk chair back, gritting my teeth as it rolls across the hard wood floor, and then I sit cross-legged underneath the desk and pull the first white box off the pile.

The first box contains tax documents and receipts, so I close it and place it on the floor and pull out the second box. This box has an array of cords for devices, and an old camera that looks like it hasn't been used in a couple of years.

The final box contains the treasure. It's marked simply "DTL", and from that I know I'm sure to find something important. When I pull off the lid, contents spill from inside. I arrange photos, pieces of paper and ticket stubs around my feet. I couldn't imagine Karen could be this disorderly sentimental.

There's a photo of Karen and Ivan at their school ball, dressed in formal attire. Then I find one of Nicoletta and George, looking so cosy next to each other. Nicoletta is wearing a bold red dress and her wild black hair is barely tamed and flung over one shoulder. George has classic rock star messy hair, but he looks neat in a suit and tie.

I find a photo of my dad with a girl I don't recognise. His attempt at a mullet and moustache is embarrassing and I cringe and throw the photo under the pile. That's when I see the folder that must be full of song lyrics. I pull it open and leaf through lyrics that I recognise and lyrics that I don't, with scribbles of chords and lines underlined or scratched out. The raw evidence of a band in its infancy strikes me, and I'm suddenly so overwhelmed that my dad and his friends were once my age, writing shitty songs and hoping to be famous.

Most of the songs are written in the same messy scrawl which I assume is George's handwriting. Some are edited in a neat cursive, some have notes in all sorts of handwriting all over them. I read the first lyrics to songs that I've known since I was a baby, and my heart catches when I recognise my father in a particular phrase or Ivan and Karen's relationship through a verse. But then I find the last song they ever produced, and after that the songs become unrecognisable to me. A lot of them are just written in George's handwriting, with absolutely no input from anyone else in the band, which suggests to me that he wrote these alone. There are pages and pages of songs about a break up, but each one seems more careless than the last, and then I start to recognise substance references in the lines. I can trace George's final years in these songs, and it's heart breaking. He went from someone with such wild and exciting views of the world to someone who saw everything through a veil of cynicism and malice.

I've almost reached the end of the folder when a new handwriting catches my attention. It's a block letter script that definitely doesn't belong to any of the members of Dime's the Limit, but it starts to appear in a few of the pages towards the back of the folder, in the most recently written songs, after the band broke up.

I scan through the lyrics, looking for clues about this new writer that has joined in writing with George. There is just one hint as to the identity of the mystery musician. In the top corner of one of the sheets of music are the initials, "A.P."

A noise somewhere in the house startles me, and I hastily pack away Karen Shepherd's box of memories and tiptoe back to the spare bedroom, my mind racing.