Brian: Faded
By Lynne Tashi
Copyright 2012 Lynne Tashi
Brian glanced over his shoulder, saw her preening in her smartphone mirror, and knew he was in with a shot. She fluffed her hair with her trimmed, kohl-coloured nails and pursed her coral lips into the reflection. She was younger than him and was probably not even a teenager when she first became a fan. He always had the best luck with old fans. They liked being able to fulfil a lifelong fantasy. He sucked his belly in and smoothed his sweaty shirt over his leather pants. Even if the fantasy was a little pudgier and wrinklier, he still had something they wanted. He’d considered Botox for the lines around his eyes a few months ago but instead got a spray tan, hoping to disguise the pasty look he got from being inside studios all day and night.
Backstage at the festival everyone was squirming uncomfortably on plastic chairs, drinking from the rider and picking at the sandwiches that had now been sitting out too long and looked like dried-up, pale caricatures of their former selves. Brian picked one up and surveyed the tent.
The kohl and coral woman had put down her phone and was trying to wedge her way into a conversation with Sarah. Brian watched her body language as he pretended to listen to his manager tell a gossipy story. The woman was the fresh meat Sarah had promised him in exchange for tickets to the show. Brian was optimistic about this one for reasons he was too suspicious to analyse.
Brian’s phone rang and he picked up. It was his wife. He went through the usual roll call of responses: show went well, good crowd, James was still being a tosser about playing the hits everyone wanted to hear. His wife wished him a good nights’ sleep, said the kids missed him and hung up. With that tricky obligation out of the way, Brian excused himself from his manager’s prattle and walked over to Sarah through the muddy mess of the backstage grass. His feet stuck in the mud and his shoes were nearly suctioned off with every step. His cursed the cheap-arsed event organisers for not putting down more wooden boards.
‘Brian, how are you!’ Sarah exclaimed, without a hint of a question in her voice.
‘As always, Sarah. You?’ Brian kissed her on the lips and let a cheeky hand slip a little too far down her slim back, leaving it to rest on the curve of her rump. Sarah wiggled his hand away and elbowed him lightly in the ribs.
‘Brian, this is Rain, Rain, this is Brian.’
Brian put out his hand to shake Rain’s.
‘Rain?’
‘My parents were hippies, what can I say?’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you. I’ve always been a fan.’
‘Now don’t say “always”, it makes me feel older than God.’
‘OK, how about since I was twelve? Does that make you feel any better?’
‘Well that’s just creepy!’ said Sarah.
Brian didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking, he felt his chances slipping away with each mention of his age and his long-gone halcyon days.
‘So Sarah, how do you know Rain? Your parents didn’t live in a commune, did they?’ he said.
‘No, indeed they did not,’ said Sarah who was born into money and turned her back on it in order to aggravate an already treacherous relationship with her family. ‘But when I left the college, they insisted that I had to go to school, any school, so I went to Rain’s school. In the commune. Alternative education. God how that pissed them off!’ she said gleefully. ‘No writing, no reading. Just sitting around creating things with our hands and having philosophical discussions.’
They laughed at the hysteria teenage Sarah caused her buttoned up parents, and watching Rain’s head-thrown-back raucous cackle, Brian decided to make a move. Never one for the subtle, he crossed the circle and slid his arm around Rain’s back, resting his hand on her rump in the same way he had with Sarah. Rain did not wriggle away.
‘How was the show tonight? Did you like it?’ Brian could not keep the neediness out of his tone.
‘I was glad you played the old songs. They’re my favourites,’ Rain said.
Brian grimaced. Everyone always like the old songs. The ones he wrote when he was eighteen or twenty. After that it was all downhill. It was depressing to think that you’d done your best work as a child and nothing after that mattered to anyone. His felt like a life lived in reverse -worldwide fame as a teenager followed by obscurity and irrelevance as an adult. Surely it should have worked the other way? No one deserves that kind of accolade as a kid. Nothing he did back then was so damn important. He was prouder of his achievements since, but it was just that nobody cared about him anymore.
He decided to change the subject.
‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘Sure, thanks. A beer.’
With his arm still around her back, Brian guided Rain over to the ice boxes.
‘Looks like the beer’s gone. Will this do?’ he held up a bottle of wine.
‘There aren’t any glasses,’ Rain said.
Brian cracked open the Stelvin cap and took a swig directly from the bottle before handing it to Rain. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t,’ he said.
Rain smiled and took the bottle from his hand, eyeing him solidly as she drank.
Brian still had his arm around her and he guided her to a small, low vinyl couch where they sat, forcibly close, hips and shoulders crushed against each other.
‘So what have you been doing with yourself since Autumnal Days?’ Rain asked.
‘Oh, this and that,’ Brian said, ignoring the sting he always felt when someone referred to that album – the last one to chart well, the one he wrote when he was twenty. ‘I own a studio now, mostly I record other artists.’
‘Anyone I’ve heard of?’
‘Maybe,’ he pulled out his phone and showed Rain a photo of an album cover for a young artist he’d worked with last year.
‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard that on the radio!’
Brian flicked through the photos on his phone, noticing that Rain didn’t offer a comment on whether she liked the artist or not. He quickly skimmed past the shots of his wife and kids, and stopped at one of him on his bike.
‘Do you ride?’
‘Never. You?’
‘I used to. Last year my friend got killed when we were riding in the Blue Mountains. I held him in my arms for an hour while we waited for the ambulance. He died before they got there. Haven’t been back on the bike since then.’ Brian didn’t care that he sounded deliberately, falsely sombre. It was the truth and he didn’t care, even if countless retellings had dulled it for him, just like the countless performances had dulled his songs. He cultivated melancholia he felt about Mike’s death.
‘I’m sorry, Brian,’ Rain let her hand fall onto Brian’s leather-clad leg. She gently rubbed it up and down, warming the skin underneath.
Brian never felt ashamed that this trick worked so easily. Mike would have approved, he thought. Mike was not one to shy away from any technique that might get him laid.
He snuggled closer to Rain and let his hand rest loosely over her shoulder, hovering over her breast ever so carefully, so that when she took a deep breath his fingers gently brushed against her. Brian noticed with satisfaction that Rain seemed to be taking deeper and deeper breaths and holding them in for longer than was normal. Brazenly he allowed his fingers to stretch out a little further so that her breathing didn’t matter so much. He took her other hand, the one that was not on his leg, into his lap, palm facing up, and started to trace the lines on her palm.
‘You have beautiful skin, Rain,’ Brian said. He almost hated himself for using such a pathetic line, but he decided to wait and see if it worked before he would truly hate himself for it. In his experience, nothing was truly determined to be good or bad until the popular verdict was out. He was used to being judged publicly and had lost all sense
of his own personal judgement.
Rain laughed. ‘You know you don’t have to work so hard, Brian. We can just be honest with each other.’
In a moment that fell short of epiphany, Brian realised that this was his to lose. Rain had come here wanting to sleep with him. All he had to do was not stuff it up.
‘Did Sarah tell you I have a big dick? Really big. It scares some women,’ Brian said.
Rain looked at him squarely now, searching his eyes for a strand of humour, but there was none there. Brian could sense her desire sliding away, runny jelly through his clumsy fingertips.
‘Now why would you tell me a thing like that?’
‘Just being honest. I thought you wanted to sleep with me. I didn’t want to, you know, get to that point and freak you out.’
As Rain glanced sceptically down at Brian’s leather-clad groin, his phone rang. Rain saw the photo of his children and wife pop up on the screen. They were sitting on his bike.
Rain raised her eyebrow.
‘You’d better answer that,’ she said.
Brian pressed Answer and spoke to his wife in hushed tones. Midway through a sentence, Rain grabbed the phone from his ear and spoke to his wife.
‘Hello, my name is Rain. Brian wants to sleep with me, but he’s warned me he’s kinda big. I was wondering, you know, woman to woman, if you could give me an honest assessment.’
Rain nodded and ahemed and Brian dropped his head into his hands.
Rain hung up and passed the phone back to Brian.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he said.
‘Oh, you know. Just wanted an honest opinion. And it seems your wife doesn’t like you sleeping around.’
‘My wife and I don’t share a bed anymore. We share a house and we share custody. We are not together. Did she tell you that?’
‘She said you were trying to work it out.’
Trying to work it out. That was an optimistic way to put it. Brian lifted his gaze from his mud covered shoes and surveyed the room. Most of the crowd had headed back to their hotel rooms or out to clubs for the night. Sarah was the only woman left and she was obviously hanging around waiting for Rain to either dismiss her or ask her for rescuing. Brian would be going home alone.
‘Well, it’s been nice knowing you, Rain,’ he said as he stood and walked away.
Rain watched him swagger out of the tent, bottle of wine still in his hand, her childhood fantasy muddy and fallen, fading into the smoky festival light.
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About the author
Lynne Tashi is a short story writer and digital evangelist from Australia.
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