The Summer of Kicks Read online

  ‘Miss, I can do it,’ pipes up brown hair.

  ‘You can?’

  ‘It’s Grease, Miss. Everyone knows it,’ she says. ‘That OK?’

  ‘Sold!’ says Miss Kellaway, happy to have a solution. And the show will go on.

  So now, instead of spending six hours Summer Lovin’ up close and personal with Candace McAllister, I’m Stranded at the Drive-in with random brown-hair-and-braces girl.

  Wella-wella-wella-ooh.

  Dinner’s sitting happily in my stomach, and even though it’s the non-homework end of the year, there’s still stuff to do, so I’m out in the lounge room with everyone else, the TV a blurry background to my Grease script. I’ve read over the thing maybe a dozen times already, and I think I’m doing OK. Rue and the Tool are sitting half on top of each other on the floor, individually staring at their phones, scrolling and swatting at them as if what they’re doing is actually important. Nan’s snoozing in the flip-out chair, eyes closed, feet up. Her heart pills, a half-eaten Monte Carlo and an empty teacup are on the coffee table, and the sudoku book is in her lap, at the mercy of her drool.

  I switch out of the script for my sketchbook, and a four-headed zombie-alien thing is starting to take shape on the page. It was completely unintentional, but on second glance, the last head I drew looks kind of like Meryl Streep. I quickly scribble the beginnings of a guitar into one of its claws. She might be Meryl Streep, but at least now she rocks.

  ‘Oh, honey, I forgot to tell you,’ Mum says as an ad comes on. ‘Your father came round this morning, sans-Desiree, and dropped off those records you wanted to look at.’

  ‘Awesome,’ I say. ‘Where are they hiding?’ Mum tells me that she’s put them in her walk-in wardrobe, so I get up from the lounge, leave the post-dinner blobs to their CSI or NCIS or RPI or whatever it is that’s blasting at Nanna volume from the TV, and head down the hall towards Mum’s room.

  Three average-sized boxes, stacked side by side. They don’t look heavy, but I struggle to carry them to my room, even one at a time.

  It’s just me. Me and the vinyl. I set the last of the three boxes down onto my bed and I can’t help but think, as I take the first album out – The Stones, Exile on Main St. – that this is the actual record from the early 1970s. When this piece of plastic was made, people were wearing flares on purpose and watching Young Talent Time like it was a good thing. There were no Macs or mobiles. No YouTube. No Xbox. Back then, the three biggies were TV, radio and music. The rest of the world has moved forward, onward and upward, but here it is – a simple disc of vinyl with the potential to be so out of place, but somehow it’s survived, and is still relevant. Back then, Mick Jagger was cheesing on about rather being dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when he was forty-five, and yet there he is, four decades on, still touring, still singing ‘Satisfaction’ to packed houses. Truth is, no one really knows what the future holds. Except, of course, for my nan.

  ‘Big day for you tomorrow, Starrphyre,’ she says, stopping at my doorway. She’s holding her teeth in her hand, which is such an attractive look for a sixty-eight-year-old woman. So surprising she’s single.

  ‘What’s that now?’ I look up from the track listing on Thick as a Brick.

  ‘I want you to look out for the letter L,’ she prophesies. ‘It’ll be a game changer. You mark my words.’

  Chapter 15

  Dressed for success

  ‘Hey, nice choice of shirt, Ernie,’ Scene says. I’ve found my Houses of the Holy T-shirt, and for day one at Vinyl Analysis – day one of my first job besides taking the bins out on a Sunday night – I’m looking the part. My stomach is a fist: anticipation, excitement and uncertainty clenched into a tight ball, and I’m walking a little strangely because of it.

  ‘OK, these are glam,’ Scene says, and quite unceremoniously it seems we’re working already. There’s no welcome, no tour of the store. Just straight into it. He points to a spread of twelve-inch records on the counter. All early seventies: Gary Glitter, The Sweet, T. Rex’s Electric Warrior. ‘When they come in, I do my thing with them, and once they’re sorted and priced, you put ’em where they need to go,’ he says. ‘So where do these go?’ It’s a test, but it’s round one and the answer is almost a given.

  ‘Seventies,’ I say. I’m confident, but it’s too early to know how cocky I should be. I progress to the next round.

  ‘That pile of records there is classic rock,’ Scene says.

  A girl is carrying a large box towards a door at the back of the store. I watch as she stops to balance the box on her knee. It looks heavy. She searches her pocket, pulls out a key attached to a blue lanyard and jiggles it into the lock.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh,’ Scene says. ‘New Guy – Box Girl.’ Then he shouts across the store. ‘Box Girl?’ She lifts her head, offers Scene a sarcastic smile. ‘New Guy.’ Box Girl tries to give me a quick wave, but the box is sliding from her grip, threatening to become one with the floor. She aborts the waving attempt. Even with both hands back on her bundle, she struggles to open the door, but Scene offers no help.

  ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ Scene says, motioning to the girl. ‘We’ve got a strict no-screwing-the-staff policy. That is unless they’re hot. Then the policy can go screw itself.’ He smiles. His lips are black today, as are his fingernails. He’s doing some kind of post-emo goth thing. If I tried it, I’d look like a total idiot. Like an op-shop drag queen. But on Scene the black lip-finger combo seems to work.

  ‘All right, this pile is classic rock: sixties,’ he says. ‘They live over there.’ He points to the wall nearest the door that just swallowed up Box Girl, but he doesn’t need to point it out. The décor and signage do the work for him.

  ‘There’s a lot of sixties. Classic rock – that’s just the biggies, you know. Doors, Beatles, The Who. Then there’s general rock, obscure rock, psychedelic rock, prog rock, punk rock, radio rock …’

  ‘Is it all rock?’ I ask.

  ‘Read the sign, man.’ Scene points above to a sign on the wall. If it doesn’t rock it, we don’t stock it. Straight and to the point. Just like Scene. He goes on to explain, ‘When the records come in, the first thing we do is sort them into decades. From there, they’re filtered into their sub-categories, then beyond the sixties, there’s seventies, eighties – not a whole lot in nineties, ’cos everything started turning into CDs, but under “New Vinyl” there’s the recently released stuff, from when bands started to realise that vinyl was the new not-vinyl.

  ‘You’ll notice there’s no freaking Lady Gaga or pissy little boy bands or R&B rap crap in the mix,’ Scene says. His jeans are hanging low. Probably lower than the Retail and Customer Service Board would be happy to consider appropriate, but I’m not going to say anything to him about it because it would probably highlight to him that I was looking at his ass, when all I did was notice it in passing, and there’s a big difference between looking and noticing. Noticing’s OK. It happens unintentionally. Looking, however, might indicate that I was scoping him out for other purposes. I say nothing.

  ‘We just sell music, dude,’ he says. ‘Real music. You get little phlegm-wads coming in here asking for that top forty crap all the time, but I just tell ’em we don’t stock it because it reeks of ass. End of story.’

  It’s almost twelve. For the past two hours I’ve been working. At my job. At Vinyl freaking Analysis. I’ve sorted a few albums, but for the most part I’ve been straightening and tidying. I’ve swept the floor twice, turned the music up. Down. Up again. I’ve been to the toilet, gone out for a round of Cokes, re-thumbtacked a falling poster, answered the phone with the aid of the staff-training note stuck to the handset that tells me, Hello, don’t forget to say ‘Vinyl Analysis’, and half served my first customer. She wasn’t so much a customer as a panicked old woman who had somehow lost the bank. I pointed her in what I assumed was the right direction, but who
knows. If you can lose a bank, there’s not much hope for you.

  And I’ve thought about Candace and how her dog died, and I hope that she’s OK.

  All this time, Box Girl has been baristarising the coffee-swilling morning tea squad, but Scene is strapping on his apron, telling her to beat it (with what I’m assuming is no intended reference to Michael Jackson), and to come on over and give the new sperm a hand, while he tackles the lunch crowd.

  The store is divided fairly evenly into two halves – music and coffee. As you walk in, the coffee section with its rustic, mismatched collection of round tables and recycled vinyl and chrome kitchen chairs sits to the right, while the left half of Vinyl Analysis is solidly dedicated to music. Album bays stand waist-high in the centre of the music half – three back-to-back rows, as well as one that stretches the length of wall that separates Vinyl Analysis from its retail neighbour, Fat Tradie – plus-sized working gear for men.

  There’s a merchandise section with T-shirts (mostly black), belt buckles, a glass case with some figurines, bobbleheads and limited edition box sets. But the records are what the customers come in for. Plenty of teenagers and people in their twenties, but a lot of the customers are guys in their mid-thirties and forties. Old dudes who want to re-live the glory days, I guess, when you could watch the music play, rotate, and listen to it, grainy and wholesome under the needle.

  ‘This is for you,’ says Box Girl, tapping a pile of twelve-inch discs. She’s pushed a table on wheels towards me, bearing two sizeable piles that need to go out to the shelves. ‘Eighties hair metal,’ she says, and thanks to the branch I swing from on my family tree, I know the genre well. ‘It’s a borderline category, hair metal. Most of it was really just cleverly disguised pop music. The only reason a lot of the bands even existed was because of the record execs. As they do, they were looking to turn cash with the next big thing, and from the early eighties to around ’88, hair metal was it.’

  Nice. Box Girl knows her music. And just like that, this girl I know nothing about, besides the fact that she can make and serve coffee and that she struggles with heavy objects, scores several cool points.

  ‘So why do they stock it?’ I ask. ‘I mean, if it’s pop and Scene says there’s a serious no-pop policy.’

  ‘I guess because the bands played their own instruments, hair metal makes the Vinyl Analysis cut,’ Box Girl says. ‘Plus, I think he has a thing for hairspray and spandex.’ She smiles at me.

  ‘Hey, safety first,’ she says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Laces, newbie.’ She points down at my feet, at my undone left shoe, so I kneel on the spot and begin twisting and looping my laces back into a functional and recognisable pattern.

  ‘You know that your shoes are what saved you.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your Chucks. Scene was telling me about it yesterday,’ says Box Girl. She places a couple more LPs on my file pile – a Skid Row album leading the pack. ‘He said they were your only redeeming quality. Just think, if you’d had anything else on your feet you wouldn’t be here at all.’

  The hair metal section is alphabetised A to Z, and as I look to my sort pile – albums by Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Poison – I thumb my way to the back first, searching the W section for Waxxonn, but not surprisingly the stack jumps from Warrant and Whitesnake straight to XYZ. I find the Bs and begin to flick through them.

  ‘The laminated cards are a nice touch, too, you’ll notice,’ says Box Girl. ‘Uncle Spike – the guy who owns the store – he’s big on arts and crafts, it turns out. Give the man a laminating machine and a little free time and as you can see …’ She pulls out one of the cards, holds it up and runs her fingers over it like a product model on a big-budget TV ad. ‘… anything is possible.’

  The laminated cards are for the more prominent artists to make it easy for the punters to find what they’re looking for. The Bon Jovi card sits up waiting to be noticed. To further the experience, the laminated card has been bedazzled with images of each of their albums – in release order – available on vinyl. I carefully slide Slippery When Wet between 7800º Fahrenheit and New Jersey, and move on to the Ds. Def Leppard surprisingly has no laminated card, but I find a copy of Pyromania and tuck Hysteria neatly behind it.

  ‘So, how long have you worked here?’ I say to Box Girl, trying to make conversation. Trying desperately to sound cool. I would have thrown her name in too, but although the name badge pinned to her Boys Don’t Cry T-shirt has a long white rectangle above the words works here, handwritten into that rectangle is simply the word She.

  ‘Me? About six months. Maybe four.’ I’m trying to guess how old she is without looking at her too often or for too long. I can’t really tell. She’s confident and with the cut of her hair and the way it crowds her face, I’d say she’s seventeen. Maybe eighteen. I think back to Scene’s comment about shagging the staff and file it under ‘things that are never likely to happen’, along with the return of the dinosaurs and Justin Bieber being considered a serious musician.

  ‘So when do you want me to come and play with your shitty little band, Ernie?’ Scene is behind me. Right behind me, pushing a stack of LPs into my back, wedging me hard against a bay with an outward-facing Ratt album. Pin the new guy against the record bays. An initiation of sorts, maybe? He chuckles to himself as I wince. It’s a great joke in Scene Land.

  ‘You’re in a band?’ asks Box Girl.

  I’m hesitant to say yes because technically we’re just the idea of a band, rather than an actual band, but I have to be convincing enough that Scene doesn’t pick up on that little detail.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You know. Covers and stuff.’

  ‘Covers of what?’

  She’s expecting me to say something cool, but my mind has gone blank. Completely blank. If I was at home in the sanctuary of my room and this situation was playing out in my head, I’d be able to come up with something witty, something charming and intelligent to say, and the obliging people in my mind-scenario would laugh out loud, tell me I was spectacularly funny, cool, good-looking even, but here in real life where the rest of the humans live, my ability to think on the spot has fallen into a deep black hole. I have nothing. I don’t want Scene to know that we’re not a fully functioning band, and I don’t want Box Girl to think I’m a total idiot, so I find myself eyeballing the general vicinity for ideas. Something to spark an answer to her question. I look to the album in my hand. It’s not eighties hair metal, but it is in my hand, and without the luxury of considering the consequences, I allow it to inspire my response.

  ‘Nickelback?’ she says. She reaches for the album and I surrender it to her. ‘You’re in a Nickelback covers band?’

  ‘Yeah. No. Um … not entirely,’ I say and I find myself in a corner, wet paint in all directions. ‘I mean, we do mostly … other stuff. Better stuff. It’s just one Nickelback song on our list. Maybe not even one. Anyway, we’re thinking of dropping it. I don’t even like Nickelback. I mean, do you like Nickelback?’ I sound like an idiot. I should have just kept my mouth shut – silent and broody. Let my Led Zep shirt do the talking. Nickelback. Could I have chosen a lamer band? I’m half expecting Robert Plant to burst into the store and demand his T-shirt back.

  ‘You know, Ernie,’ Scene says, ‘studies have shown that listening to Nickelback will shrink your goolies and slowly turn you into a woman,’ he says, and Box Girl links into his joke with a laugh. ‘True story.’

  ‘Actually it’s Starrphyre,’ I say. Scene looks at me with a face that reads like a blank menu. He has no idea what I’m talking about. It’s not his fault. I’d have no idea what I was talking about either, so I clarify. ‘That’s my name.’ He’s still staring, not saying anything. This guy with his dyed black hair and eyeliner and his super-cool edginess – he’s intimidating, kind of scary, and he makes me feel like I’m about nine years old, and I don’t know what to say to him,
because what could I say that would be of any interest to a guy like him? There’s not a single other situation in which he and I would ever be talking to each other if I wasn’t here working in this store. My social circle is pretty much made up of gamer nerds, my mother and my nan, and doesn’t include tough-guy punk guitarists and alternative unknown-age box-carrying girls. It’s only day one, but I just don’t feel like I fit in here. The music part is great. So cool, but the people – him with his whole attitude and her with her … I don’t know, but she’s different, too. They’re both staring at me now, no doubt wondering what the hell the dorky new kid is talking about, so I keep babbling. ‘You can call me Ernie if you want to, man.’ I’m hoping that my ‘man’ on the end there sounded really cool and not forced. ‘Ernie’s fine. I don’t really care, but my name’s Starrphyre. You know, if you want to put it on a name tag or anything. There’s three r’s, too. In Starrphyre. Two together, one at the end. So three, really. You know, just in case. In case you’re wondering.’

  ‘What the hell?’ Scene says, his blackened lips spreading into a smile.

  Box Girl brings a hand to her mouth, but it can’t contain the laughter that bubbles out. ‘Starrphyre?’

  I nod, mentally setting fire to whatever the hell baby-name book my parents found Starrphyre in.

  ‘That is one stupid name, dude,’ Scene says, shaking his head, black hair flicking wildly. ‘It is a good name for a band, though. Eighties hair metal?’

  Box Girl nods.

  ‘I’ll get Uncle Spike to make up a laminated card,’ he chuckles, a deep, throaty laugh, like he’s drunk whisky since he was a toddler and smoked a shipping container full of cigarettes.

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘It’s not such a bad deal,’ says Box Girl. ‘I’ve had to suffer through life with a slightly left-of-centre name, too.’