The sleeping pills would make Godzilla sleep, and now she’s still dozy from them, her every move lethargic and heavy.
Keera has not eaten breakfast, has swallowed a handful of helpful pills – uppers and a kiddie coke or Ritalin – with some water and is shuddering at the thought of the day ahead of her.
She is so tired. Tired and weary, wishing she could stay in bed, just today, just for one day. Scroll her phone, watch some old much-loved shows on her laptop, just mentally check out.
Instead, she’s due to tape a pre-record for Channel Seven at ten a.m., before a quarter of the print interviews she would have had two years ago. Luckily, Taniqua, hair and make-up artist, is totally clued in on why there’s no point in coaxing Keera into having her skin officially prepped for TV make-up just yet.
Taniqua is an empath too.
The force of energy that’s Keera’s mom makes Taniqua jump, much the way Keera jumps.
Taniqua is thirty-two, has amazing bone structure and an afro she often wears tightly back from her face. They’ve been working together for six years, are as close as anything, and at the sound of Dr Bobbi’s voice, their eyes meet.
She’s up, get ready to rush! Have we covered everything up all right?
Keera knows her mother has meds that would help with the hangover but she doesn’t want to ask. Bobbi does not approve of Keera drinking in bars. She can do it, but not Keera. Nobody is allowed to see girl-next-door Keera drinking. Pills, however, are fine, according to Dr Bobbi.
Sleeping pills, benzos to calm her, beta blockers before a big TV show and some dexies to give her energy, never too many because it makes her heart rate race if she’s exhausted.
She worries sometimes but Mom says everyone does it.
‘People don’t get addicted to pills if the doctor orders them,’ Mom says. ‘You can’t pick up pills in every grocery store in the country, honey, so it’s OK. It’s not as if it’s Cat Valium, right?’ she says, using the slang for ketamine.
But Keera likes cocaine too, which her mother doesn’t know. Keera’s very careful about it because she knows that Snow is a speedy way of getting rid of money and that if her mother cottons on to her use, Keera will be in big trouble.
The sound of Dr Bobbi’s arrival in the lobby makesLuka, the stylist, who’s been surfing an Instagram high on their phone, and Barb, who’s nominally Keera’s assistant and who’d been WhatsApp-ing her girlfriend, both get to their feet instantly.
Luka’s wearing heels, cream floaty trousers and a see-through crochet top which works wonderfully with their blonde shag hairdo, elaborate eye make-up and androgynous look. Barb wears all black, no matter how hot it is, has inch-long black nails and a pale-blonde Eton crop that shows off an exquisitely shaped head. Barb is Slovakian and has a slightly scary energy to her. Even Dr Bobbi treads carefully around Barb.
Dr Bobbi likes that the team are diverse and talks about it non-stop to show howwith itshe is.
‘We have the full run of skin and rainbow colours here,’ she says cheerfully to everyone, even when Keera hisses ‘Mom!’ at her, in case anybody hears and gets upset.
Mom says that she doesn’t have a racist or prejudiced bone in her body but why then does she need to remind people that Taniqua is Black or that Luka is non-binary? Why aren’t they allowed toberather than represent certaintypesof people? Gen X just doesn’t understand Gen Z.
With Dr Bobbi’s arrival, the team spring to life and hustle their way to the door of the hotel where they slip through with almost no interest at all. A few hardy fans of Keera’s are clustered outside the hotel’s imposing gates but they can see nothing through the darkened windows of the black Mercedes minivan that Charlie, their driver, calls a ‘people mover’.
He and Keera had been chatting when they’d driven from Sydney to Brisbane.
Now he drives confidently through the city and Keera looks at it wistfully as they pass.
She rarely sees any part of any place she visits.
The hotel, her room, the gym if she has time. She sees bars, though. Her mother knows endless people who own bars.
It’s being Irish, Dr Bobbi explains.
Dr Bobbi grew up in Donegal in Ireland, smack bang in a place she called ‘the arse end of nowhere’, a constant refrain which means that Keera’s grandmother, who’s in her late seventies, barely speaks to Dr Bobbi any more. Keera hasn’t seen her grandmother since she was a little girl.
‘Someday we’ll go there,’ Dr Bobbi says, which is her way of saying ‘when hell freezes over’.
When Keera was touring small venues on her tour bus, they stopped at lots of little taverns along the way to bestow a little bit of celebrity twinkle on them. The pubs were almost always Irish bars.
‘Honey, everyone that made good in Ireland had some link to a pub,’ Dr Bobbi would say while she drank with the owners and got Keera to pose for a photo with them and many of their friends.
‘I know them from way back,’ was another of her mother’s favourite lines and meant that many oddballs arrived into the green room or her dressing room in cities around the world, smiling at Keera as if they knew her.
‘Jesus, would you ever smile and say hello, for my sake,’ her mother would mutter when Keera wondered how to behave with these strangers who were happily eating the free green-room food and being stopped from taking photos of any other famous people there by said famous people’s entourages.
