Things We Bury by Matthew Ryan Davies

Author:Matthew Ryan Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2022-05-19T05:48:08+00:00

Josh relocated to the lounge to get away from all the talk about family holidays and how involved Dad was in Dane’s life.

The room was lit by a flickering candle and Ma was on the couch with her teacup cradled in her palm. The scent from the candle sweetened the air—a flower of some kind—and Harry was curled up in a tight ball next to her. It was only then he realised that she hadn’t come back to the kitchen. Maybe it was getting too much for her as well.

‘Finished already?’ she asked.

‘No, I just needed to . . .’ He sat in the easy chair. ‘Dane and Jac know more about him than I do.’

Ma nodded, sitting with her thoughts a moment. ‘We had a good life together, you know, your father and me. You get to know someone pretty well over forty-odd years. You can sense when . . .’ She trailed off. ‘But then you get so used to them that the way they . . . it becomes normal—the ups and the downs—and you don’t . . .’ She shook her head of something. ‘I had lots of boyfriends before I met your father. I could have had my pick.’ She smiled. ‘But I picked him. He didn’t care that I was famous; I don’t think he’d even heard of The Ripleys.’ She held up a finger. ‘“Mr Wrong”—that was the song we had out at the time. Life was one party after another. But then it was nice to get away from it all sometimes. It can be suffocating, you know?’ She looked up. ‘Of course you know. You’re the only one who knows.’ She took a sip of tea then rested the cup on her thigh. ‘So I followed him back to Pent—that was the deal, no negotiation. It was like stepping out of a buzzing nightclub into a quiet street at midnight.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘But it was my choice. I chose to walk away, to give it all up for him.’

Josh was only half-listening because he’d heard it all before. What she wasn’t mentioning, he noted, was that The Ripleys (named after Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien) were on a downward spiral by then. Dennis, the band’s manager and chief songwriter, was crippled with ‘second album’ anxiety and never happy with anything he wrote. So instead he wrote nothing at all. He preferred to spend his nights getting high, waiting for inspiration that never came. None of this was a secret—it was all on Wikipedia.

‘I understand what’s it like, Josh. Your life.’ Her voice seemed to take on a clarity that wasn’t there before. ‘There’s so much going on, people throwing themselves at you. Things get . . . blurry.’

He registered a pause in her monologue and looked up. ‘What?’

She gave him one of those looks where her eyebrows joined up in the middle, as if she was deciding something. ‘Nothing. Never mind.’

He hated when she tried to compare his fame to hers, as if the world hadn’t moved on since the early eighties.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.