Blue Saturn (39 page)

31.

Damn. What a day. The last eight days have been completely hectic and draining, physically and emotionally. Not just for me, but for everyone involved in this whirlwind tour.

This morning, we boarded our plane at 6.50 A.M. All of us basically rolled out of bed, threw on some clothes and dragged ourselves to the airport.

Once we arrived back at Melbourne airport, we went straight to my house. Gavin and Jasmine were very quick to disappear - eight days without having sex must be some kind of record for Gavin -  and Lyndsay stayed upstairs while the film crew set up for the interview downstairs. They filmed a few shots of me and Mikey playing together before Mikey joined Lyndsay and I did the interview.

It was hard, speaking honestly about my past. The journalist interviewing me, Nadine, made it easy by letting me talk at my own pace. She seemed to mix up the questions a bit, one minute talking about my drug and alcohol abuse and then talking about Mikey. I don’t think she was doing it to try to trip me up, I think she knew it was hard for me to talk about so she didn’t want to dwell on the hard times for too long each time. She told me her favourite song on the record was the last song ‘My Love.’ She asked me who it was about.

“It’s about a woman I love. A woman I will love for the rest of my life.”

“And does she feel the same way about you?” she asked with a grin.

“I don’t know Nadine,” I answered. “But I really hope so.”

Our day has been so busy that Lyndsay and I have not had more than a few seconds alone together. She’s put that damn wall up again. She went about her day in an almost robotic way. She looks tired, her eyes have lost their sparkle – I bet she hardly slept at all last night – and I know she hasn’t eaten all day; all the classic signs of a troubled heart.

But I have the cure for it this time. I’m the bloody cure. And right now, I’m minutes away from giving her the cure. God, I hope she takes it.

The film crew have followed us to Federation Square, where we will be performing to a packed crowd. A camera has been following me around as I prepare to go on stage, so I know I can’t talk to her now.

I’m in two minds as to whether or not I should proceed with my plan. I haven’t asked Gavin for his advice because I know he’ll tell me it’s a bad idea. Maybe it is a bad idea. But when I asked Mikey what he thought, he told me that Lyndsay needs to smile again and our plan will make her smile.

God, I hope he’s right.

The problem with Lyndsay is, she’s strong. Not that that is a problem, but it makes it hard to read her when she always seems so tough and defiant. In the past week, she’s received two doses of distressing news; my confession and then the news of her step-father. She seemed to bounce back from those traumas quickly. But I hope I know her well enough to know that once everything settles down, once everything is quiet and she’s alone tonight, she’s going to crumble again.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my plan works. If it does, she won’t need to be alone tonight.

The crowd’s applause is deafening. We’ve just finished up our final live performance for this promotional tour. Gavin and the boys are leaving the stage, but I’m still standing out front. I’m putting the microphone back into its stand.

“Mike, mate. What are you doing?” Gavin asks me.

“I have one more song to sing,” I answer.

“What are you doing?” he asks again.

I look to the right of the stage where Mikey and Lyndsay have been sitting during the performance. “Make sure Lyndsay doesn’t leave that spot, okay?”

“Dude, what are you doing?”

“I’m getting my girl back, Gav. Now go.”

I signal to the sound guys that I want the microphone turned back on. I tap it twice and then speak.

“This is the part where I would normally run off stage to your thunderous applause. But tonight, I have something I need to do. You see, I have a problem and tonight I’m going to resolve it. Right here, right now.”

The crowd grows eerily quiet. I look to the right of stage and ask that two stools be bought out, along with my acoustic guitar. I see the roadies go frantic backstage and I continue to speak to give them a few minutes to fulfil my last minute request.

“You see, the problem is that I’m in love with a beautiful woman. And as much as I want to ask her to be mine, things keep getting in the way. It never seems like a good time.”

A roadie comes out on stage with two stools and places them next to me. Then another appears with my guitar and a second microphone to put in front of the guitar. While he sets up the guitar, I continue to talk.

“So I’ve come up with a plan. But I need some help from my little man. Come on out Mikey.”

When I look to the side of the stage where Mikey and Lyndsay have been sitting, Mikey gets up and grabs his guitar, but my eyes are on Lyndsay. She’s holding her hands over her mouth and nose so all I can see are her eyes. They’re wide with anticipation. At least I hope they are. It’d suck if they were wide with horror and I was about to be humiliated in front of a multitude of my fans.

Mikey walks out on stage and when he does the crowd erupts in cheers. Mikey, being the natural charmer he is, waves and smiles out at the crowd. He comes to my side, sits on one of the stools and positions his guitar.

I mimic his position with my own guitar on the other stool. A roadie appears again and adjusts the microphone so that it’s between Mikey and I and we’re ready to go.

“This is the deal. Mikey and I are going to play a song.” I strum a chord on my guitar. “This song is Lyndsay’s song. And this is the only time I will ever play it in public. I am asking you, Lyndsay, with all my heart and soul to be mine. I know I’ve stuffed up and I know my timing is really bad, but I can’t be without you for another day.” I strum another chord. “If your answer is no, I will understand and I will never again ask you to be mine. But if your answer is yes, I want, no, I need you to come out here and kiss me in front of all our friends here so everyone knows I’m yours and you are mine.”

It’s killing me not to look at her right now. I’m not even sure if she’s still here. But as they say, the show must go on.

I strum the opening chords and count Mikey in, and then Mikey begins to sing.

“The Indsy Indsy spider climbed up the waterspout…”

This kid is a natural performer. He doesn’t once hit a wrong note, on his guitar or his singing. Once Mikey finishes singing, I strum the final three chords over and over, slowly fading out.

Mikey stands up and walks back to his chair off stage. Lyndsay is still sitting there, in the exact same position, only now, I can see the tears on her cheeks reflecting the light from the stage.

I put my guitar down and stand up. And I wait. There is complete silence. I’m beginning to regret my decision to do this when something unexpected happens.

“Lyndsay...Lyndsay...Lyndsay…” the crowd starts chanting. At least they’re on my side.

I’m nervous as hell. I don’t know what to do with my hands so I put them in my jean pockets and then take them out again and let them hang by my side.

I see Lyndsay’s eyes look toward the crowd and then back to me. She lowers her hands from her face and stands up.

Then…

She steps toward me.

She takes another step and another before she is standing in front of me, on stage, in front of thousands of people who are now cheering and clapping and whistling.

“I’m feeling a little bit of pressure,” she says quietly.

“No. No, I told you there is no pressure.”

She looks out to the crowd who are still cheering and she smiles. “There is a little bit of pressure, Mike. And using Mikey like that, that’s just pure evil.” She laughs and looks back to me.

I relax as soon as I hear her laugh. “Desperate times call for desperate measure,” I say. I take a step toward her and close the gap between us. I cup her cheeks in my hands and look down into her eyes. “Lynd’s, I already know your answer. You already know your answer. Now let everyone else know.”

She’s deep in thought as she searches my face. I don’t know what she’s looking for but the tears which had momentarily stopped start again. “I’m afraid Mike,” she says.

“I know you are.” I drop my hands from her face and reach out for her hands. “Please Lyndsay. Let me take your fear away. Trust me. I promise you I will never hurt you again.  Let me make you happy. Always.”

Those beautiful green eyes are searching my face. If she’s looking for any hint that I don’t absolutely one hundred percent utterly and completely mean what I’ve just said, she won’t find it. “I love you Lyndsay. Like before, I will wait for you. We can go as slow as you need.”

She pulls her hands from mine to wipe her tears and instead of lowering her hands to her side, she reaches out, cups my cheeks, as I did hers, and stands up on her tip toes. “I’ve had enough of taking things slow, Michael Greene.”

Then her lips are on mine and it is the sweetest feeling in the world.

I hear the crowd cheer and sense the lights flashing, sending blankets of light over us
.
I don’t care for any of it though because Lyndsay is kissing me. Her hands have moved from my face and she’s wrapped them around me, pulling me closer to her.

I instantly respond, enveloping her in my arms, and tilting my head to deepen the kiss. I feel her body relax in my arms and I feel the vibration through her body as she moans.

The crowd is still cheering when she pulls away from me, just enough so she can talk. “I love you, Mike,” she whispers to me.

“I love you, too.”

And then she’s kissing me again.

And with this kiss, she is giving me her forever.

Mikey

Epilogue

Mum has been looking at that photo for ages. According to her, the day that photo was taken was the happiest day of her life.

Not her wedding day.

Not the birth of her first son.

The happiest day of mum’s life happened twenty years ago at a promotional concern for Blue Saturn’s fourth album release. In the photo, Dad and Mum are standing on the stage, they’re holding hands and they’re looking at each other. You can tell by the look in their eyes how much they loved each other. Heck, they still love each other. It kinda grosses me out.

Lyndsay isn’t my biological mother, but she’s the only mum I’ve ever really known. I have some vague memories of my birth mum, but most of those memories are sad.

Lyndsay though, she’s loved me like her own son for as long as I’ve known her. And I’ve loved her too. I started calling her ‘mum’ when I was about seven. I didn’t give it any thought; the word sort of just popped out of my mouth. When I said it, Mum quickly looked up at Dad, but Dad just smiled. From that moment on, Lyndsay was my mum.

I walk up behind her and plant a kiss on her cheek. “You were such a babe Mum,” I say to her. I’m always teasing her about how beautiful she was, or is, I should say. “I had the biggest crush on you.”

She laughs and shakes her head. “Shut up, Mikey.”

We wrap an arm around each other and I look at the photo also. “I remember that day,” I say. “That was a good day.”

Mum smiles at me. “It was the best day.”

Dad says even now that that was the day his heart stopped beating for him alone and started beating for Mum also. He knew that when Mum kissed him on stage in front of thousands of fans that their hearts were truly united.

Dad, always such a poet.

Mum moved in with Dad and I that same night. They got married three months later and have not once spent the night away from each other. He says he spent enough time away from Lyndsay during that year after he “stuffed-up” (he told me that entire terrible story during one of his ‘learn from my mistakes’ talks) to last him an entire lifetime. Waiting for her to come back to him was complete torture. He never wanted to be apart from her again.

I can sympathise with him. I had to wait for the love of my life too.

I told Mum I was going to marry Grace when I was eight years old. She was four. It sounds pretty sick because of the age difference, but for us, it was perfectly natural.

We never officially started dating, it sort of slowly evolved. Whenever we went out together, I’d hold Grace’s hand. That started from the moment she started to walk; I’d hold her hand and walk with her. Everyone thought it was cute, but as we got older, people began to worry. No, not people; Gavin. Gavin started to worry. He kept telling me it wasn’t appropriate - I guess a sixteen year old boy holding hands with a twelve year old girl is a little strange - but for Grace and I, it was normal. We’d learned to rely on each other for company as both of us travelled a lot with the band. We went to school for the short periods we were home but when we were on tour, Mum schooled us. It was hard to make friends when you were on the road so much.

I gave Grace her first kiss on her sixteenth birthday. I was twenty. I was a twenty year old uni student saving himself for a teenage girl. Torture, especially when all I heard from the other guys my age was about the girl they’d slept with the night before. But I refused to do it. I wanted to save that for Grace.

A few months before her eighteenth birthday, she confessed to me that she loved me. That was the best thing I’d heard in my entire life. I of course returned her feelings, and didn’t hesitate to tell her. Over the next few months we stole little touches from each other, hugging and kissing each other, I took her out on “dates” and on the night of her eighteenth birthday, we spent the night together in a really nice hotel room. Gavin was beside himself with worry and apparently he spent the entire night pacing the halls of his house.

Well, the laugh is on him. We didn’t have sex that night. We didn’t have sex for another three weeks after her birthday. She was too nervous and there was no way I was going to try to talk her into doing something she wasn’t ready to do. I’d waited so long for her, what was another couple of weeks? Anyway, there are other ways to be intimate without having sex, and we definitely explored all those options.

Now I’m twenty six and Grace is twenty two and no one can stop us from being together.

Everyone expected that I would follow in my father’s footsteps and become a rock star. I definitely have the talent; I have the same voice as Dad and I can play just about any musical instrument, but I seriously lack the drive to be a rock-star. I’ve seen how exhausting it can be, writing and touring and being in the spot light. I decided at a pretty young age that was not what I wanted.

I love music though. So, after I finished high school, I got a degree in music and went on to become a doctor of music philosophy. I teach music history and composition in a highly esteemed university and when I’m not teaching, I’m writing my own compositions and selling them.

I make a pretty good living from it too.

Gavin and Jasmine never got married. They still dye their hair every week and Jasmine still wears the same punk rock fashion (much to Grace’s horror). They never had any more children but they’re still happily together.

They moved out from our house when Grace was fifteen. I think that was Gavin’s way of trying to get Grace and I to spend less time together. If he’d wanted that to happen, he should’ve moved further away than next door. It took about three days for Grace and I to pull down a section of fence between the two houses and to this day, that section of fence is still missing, although neither Grace nor I live at home anymore.

I bought my first home three years ago and Grace officially moved in with me two months ago.

“I don’t remember that day,” Grace says from behind me. I turn and open my other arm to her and she settles in beside me. I have no idea where she got her stunning looks from, neither Gavin nor Jasmine are particularly good looking, but I know she got all her six-feet-one-inch of height from her father’s Scandinavian ancestry. Good thing I’m tall too – six-feet-one-inch. We have a silent agreement that she is never to wear high heels when we go out together. “I don’t remember anything until the first big tour.”

The first big tour. That was crazy but a whole heap of fun. I was nine then, Grace was five and Mum found out she was pregnant in Germany. I remember that day too. Dad and I had been out for a walk through the snow filled streets and when we arrived back at the hotel, Mum was crying. She was holding a little white stick in her hands and she kept saying over and over “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Apparently, Mum and Dad had spoken about having children a little later on in life, once things settled a bit for Dad’s career, but it would seem that life had different plans. Life decided that Mum should get pregnant at the height of Blue Saturn’s fame.

Dad gathered Mum into his arms and held her so tightly I thought he’d break her. Then when I saw Dad’s face; he was crying too. I didn’t understand what was going on so I started to cry as well. Then he started to laugh and Mum looked worried and I still didn’t know what was going on, so I did a weird laugh/cry thing. Needless to say, Dad was ecstatic that he was going to be a dad again. Because of Mum’s cancer and treatment, there was a risk that she wouldn’t be able to have kids and that thought had always saddened Dad. So the fact that she was pregnant, even though the timing was bad, was nothing but the best news for Dad.

Eight months later, not long after the tour finished, Jimmy arrived on the scene.

While I look a dead ringer for Dad, Jimmy looks just like Mum. Only a more masculine version. A ten year age difference means we don’t have an awful lot in common at the moment, but he’s a good kid. He doesn’t give Mum and Dad any grief, and he usually comes to me when he’s got himself into a bit of trouble. But as of yet, I’ve not had to bail him out of jail so I guess I can’t complain.

Jimmy will most certainly be a rock star, but unfortunately the kid can’t sing. He gets that from Mum too. But he has the same talent as I; he can play just about any musical instrument. His forte is the guitar. He’ll definitely play lead guitar for the next big Aussie band.

Then I’ll see about having to bail him out of jail.

“You guys look so young in that photo.” Speak of the devil. That’s Jimmy. He’s standing behind Mum, looking over her shoulder.

“We were young,” Mum says.

“You’re still young,” Grace says. She adores Mum just as much as Mum adores her.

“They’re not young, Dad’s fifty,” Jimmy says. “That’s why he’s retiring. He’s too old to be a rock star.”

“That’s not why he’s retiring,” Mum says. “He’s retiring because he still loves what he does and he wants to go out on a high.”

That’s why we’re all here tonight. The Australian Music Industry is putting on a big farewell to Australia’s most successful rock band. Three months ago, Blue Saturn finished their last world tour. And now, everyone who is anyone is here to say goodbye to them in one final show.

There are posters and memorabilia and photos of the band, from day one right up to their last show a few weeks ago.

It’s going to be a good night.

“You haven’t aged a single bit.” Dad gives Jimmy a little nudge and moves in to kiss mum’s neck.

Mum laughs. “Yeah, right. Can you not feel my spongy tummy?”

“Hmm, I can,” Dad hums into her neck.

They are so gross. But it’s kinda nice to know that love like that exists.

“I have a surprise for you,” Dad says and turns her around. We all turn around with her and when I see who’s standing not too far behind us, a smile comes to my face as well.

Kyle is here with his son Laurie. Kyle rang a few days ago to say he couldn’t get the money together to get here. So of course, Dad paid for his airfare and accommodation. Dad’s really generous when it comes to things like that. And by ‘things like that’ I mean doing things that will make Mum smile. Only now she’s crying - happy tears.

Kyle is her step-brother and they’re really close. Apparently Mum’s step-dad was pretty awful to them growing up. I don’t know the full story, actually I don’t even know half of it, but I know what happened to them was terrible and that Kyle and Mum are really close because of it.

Kyle is a widower. His wife died three months after giving birth to Laurie because of some sort of complication that led to her haemorrhaging. He has dedicated his life to giving his son the best life he can. He quit his job at Globe and became an electrician so he didn’t have to be away from home. They still live in New Zealand. Laurie is eleven and is a pretty quiet kid. It must be hard growing up without a mum. I couldn’t imagine where I’d be if it weren’t for my mum. From what I’ve heard, I’d probably be a drug addicted rock star wannabe. But I don’t like to dwell on the what if’s. All I know is that I’ve had a damn good life and I owe that to Mum.

The event photographer approaches Dad and I know it’s going to get complicated. He wants a family photo, but there have been some disagreements as to who is family.

According to Mum, our family consists of me, Mum, Dad, Jimmy, Grace, Gav, Jasmine, Cherry and Jacob and their tribe, Carey and Bianca (who have remained childless by choice), Granddad (who still barely looks at Dad), Paul, Steve (who are still as outrageous as they were twenty years ago) Kyle and Laurie. Then there’s Aunty B and Uncle M, Meredith and Levi and their two kids.

That’s one huge family and the photographer has been arguing that that’s too many people to fit into a family portrait.

Mum said that if he was a true professional he could make it work. So now we’re going to have to get all those people together for a photo. This may take a while.

Blue Saturn takes the stage for the final time. It’s a sort of sad feeling knowing that I’ll never see Dad performing in this capacity again because he still has it. He can control a room today just as easily as he did twenty years ago. And he’s just as fit and energetic. One of my favourite things to do is run with my family. We do it every Sunday morning, without fail, and then get together for a big breakfast. Mum and Dad still do it a few times a week, the running that is, not the big breakfasts.

They put me to shame.

Blue Saturn leaves the stage and while everyone is distracted congratulating them, I take Grace’s hand and lead her to a door which leads to a staircase which leads to the roof of the building.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

I open the exit and step out under the city sky. I can’t see any stars but from where we stand we can see all the lights and the river. It’s not a half bad view. But the view I get to see is even better.

I fall onto one knee and look up into Grace’s eyes. She instantly sobs and tears come to her eyes. Then she smiles. That is one damn fine view.

“Grace, I have loved you for as long as I can remember and I will love you until I can no longer remember.” I hold out a small diamond ring. “Will you marry me?”

Grace is laughing and crying and nodding her head all at the same time. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me to marry you since I was six years old, Mikey.”