About Ariadne, I Love You:
Jude is dragged out of Alt-Country obscurity, out of the dismal loop of booze and sadness baths and the boundless, insatiable loneliness, to scrub up and fly to Australia for a last, desperate comeback tour. Hardly worth getting out of bed for—and he wouldn’t, if it weren’t for Coreen.
But Coreen is dead. And, worse than that, she’s married. Jude’s swan-song tour becomes instead a terminal descent, into the sordid past, into the meaning hidden in forgotten songs, into Coreen’s madness diary, there to waken something far worse than her ghost.
Excerpt:
Night. The sky a blue-black dome, untinged by the orange glow of the city, unbroken by any risen moon. Down in the gully, black silhouettes strained against a deeper darkness, blacker than black. Country dark.
I didn’t like it. It felt bottomless. It looked back at me.
I was slumped in a camp chair by the gully’s edge, a mug of red in one hand, Coreen’s copy of The Birth of Tragedy open, unread, in my lap. An unlit head-lamp dangled from the chair’s arm. I didn’t like the dark, but the light was worse, made the world small, stifling, cast shadows that moved among the trees. I lit one cig with another, the orange glow tracing arcs as I raised hand to mouth and back again. I couldn’t see the picture of Coreen, but could feel it against my palm. I caressed it with my thumb, the tiny bumps and folds like imperfections on bare skin.
I should have been practicing. The show was barely a week away and I was drunk in the dark, smoking myself to death, five-hundred miles or more from the venue. I should have gone to the car to grab my acoustic, sat out here in the dark and worked on my set. But my acoustic wasn’t in the car. It was up in the window of Happy Hockers, Darlinghurst, where I’d cashed it in for three hundred and fifty dollars; a tenth of its real value. I’d get it back—of course I would. When Mack arrived in Sydney, we’d go straight over there and buy it out. Then the practice would really start. But until then I was in free-fall.
Just ten years ago I’d been on top of the world, cresting the alt-country wave that washed through the early Noughties. My second band, The Ride Me Highs, signed a four-album deal with Rough Trade, licensed to a Nashville major. Our first album was a critical smash, the second went gold in the US. We toured Europe with Wilco, the States with Son Volt, headlined in Japan, then back to the UK to do it all over again. When we weren’t touring or in the studio, I was playing sessions, flogging songs to Country royalty. My mojo was un-fucking-breakable; I knocked out heartbreaker after heartbreaker.
But then it all turned to shit. The magic that powered those first years fizzled. I looked for it in any bottle to hand, but it was never there. No golden ticket, just another rock’n’roll cliché. What a joke. I got too pissed to write, too pissed to play, then the fucking band went and fired me. Fired me! I woke up one day in a Glasgow townhouse; I’d been drunk for three years, shacked up with the last of the great Coreen lookalikes, a blue-eyed black-haired Goth chick half my age. Next I knew, I was at Glasgow Central, about to step in front of a train, but I bottled at the last minute and got on instead, slunk back home to Mum.
I figured I’d never hear from our manager again. Hiding out in my childhood home, my life had become a loop of insomniac nights and unconscious days, of booze and sadness baths and boundless, insatiable loneliness. But there was Mack, on the phone, years later, telling me to scrub up and get ready for a comeback tour. No band, no baggage. Just me and a guitar and a fistful of alt-country hits.
He was exaggerating, of course. Troubled Heart had been Triple J’s album of the whatever ten years ago and some bright spark had sold Mack on the idea of a retrospective gig. The “tour” was a one-off solo show at the Sydney Enmore, with supports to be arranged. Hardly worth getting out of bed for.
Only it was in Australia. And Australia meant Coreen.
I’d not seen her in ten years or more, but the old wound still sang. Some part of me still nursed the memory, understood that whatever magic I’d channeled at my peak had her as its source. Even in my decline the ghost of her lingered, animating every blue-eyed, black-haired lookalike who shared my bed. The thought of seeing her again was enough to lead me back to the guitar, to let those old songs come falling out, scratchy at first, uneasy, but familiar, and somehow better than I remembered them. With the promise of Coreen before me, the music was flowing again and I couldn’t wait for the show to come around. A month ahead of Mack’s schedule, I tapped my mum for cash and hopped on a plane. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. I wanted it to be a surprise.
I found out Coreen was dead the day I touched down in Sydney. I emailed to say I’d arrived, what I was doing, that we should catch up. My message bounced straight back with an out-of-office set up by Ben. He replied to me himself just a few minutes later, told me the news, said it was great to hear from me, that I should come round and see them some time. Him and the girls.
The news sank deep inside me, like a secret tied to a heavy stone. It came to rest on some abysmal ledge and lay there, emitting wave after wave of indistinct pain. I floated around Sydney like a ghost, blowing cash I didn’t have on hotels and expensive meals, on boozing and taxis and drinks-are-on-me. Within a fortnight, I’d maxed out four credit cards, spent close on twenty thousand dollars I didn’t have and couldn’t possibly repay. It was only then, once my bridges were all burned, that I truly began to feel her loss, to see the pointlessness of everything I’d done, and was doing, without her to do it for.
#
The moon was just beginning to peek through the trees, but the gully below was still in total darkness. Something skittered nearby, some sharp-nailed creature scaling a eucalypt trunk. I couldn’t see it, but I heard its progress, the gruff shout as it paused between boughs. My heart flip-flopped, began to race, but the instinct to run screaming was dulled by the booze. I clicked on the head-lamp and swung the beam up toward the sound.
Where the bough met the trunk, two diamonds shone then disappeared as the light went past. I moved it back, held it steady. The eyes were still there, glinting, frozen, a possum clinging motionless to the bark, pretending like mad that it didn’t exist.
“Don’t worry, mate,” I slurred. “I’m not gonna eatcha.”
I tossed the head-lamp down beside me. The beam lurched, then winked out as the battery casing popped open on a rock. Time for bed.
“G’night,” I said, pushing against the arms of the camp chair. “G’night, li’l matey.”
But I was too shit-faced to stand.
I went cross-eyed, collapsed back into the chair, stared down into the gully, past the outlines of trees too faint to be certain, past unknowable silhouettes, past all the different shades of black to that deeper black beneath everything, a black so deep I felt myself sink into it.
At first, I thought I was seeing things. But when I blinked, it was still there. Only closer. The small, blue-white light hovered eerily, darting this way and that, as though searching for something, flickering as it vanished and reappeared from within the trees.
The light twisted and turned in a convoluted dance, making its way up the gully. Straight toward me.
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About J. Ashley-Smith:
J. lives with his wife and two sons in the suburbs of North Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires.
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