Chapter Seventeen
Keera thinks she might be an empath. That’s what she is, it makes so much sense.
She’s always tried to work out why she’s different – and not just because she’s famous – but this could be it.
She’s an empath. She has all the traits: she connects with other people, feels their pain, can always read the room, jumps at loud noises. These are common empath traits, right?
Her mother, or Dr Bobbi as everyone calls her because Mom is a chiropractor by training and chiropractors get called Dr, is definitely not an empath. She’s more of a force of nature, Keera thinks with a smile, but is this a category?
She has written this new discovery down in her journal.
Me: empath.
Mom: force of nature, poss?
The journal is a new thing: in an NBC green room in Chicago, she met a woman who had just written a memoir and who started journaling.
‘This has saved me from myself,’ she told Keera as they sat on too-low couches – the couches were always designed for really short people so that people got stuck in them – and the woman drank honeyed tea to save her voice from doing so many back-to-back shows.
‘I was lost. Trying to be someone I wasn’t.
I started journaling and this came out of it.
Of course, Rose Talisman started me off.
Do you know her? She’s been off the scene for a while but she was amazing.
One of her things is to start people journaling and then she picks the journal delicately into pieces and examines all the clues.
Sort of Sherlock Holmes but with your heart. ’
That sounded a bit radical but, since then, Keera’s been journaling and she’s ordered Rose Talisman’s book.
Making Lemonade: What to Do When Life’s Lemons Appear.
It hasn’t arrived yet but the current tour takes them all over the place and it’s hard for the mail to catch up. Now they’re in Australia, so who knows when her precious book will arrive.
Her current journal entry is about identifying people in her world. If she can’t designate Mom as a force of nature, and nobody’s talking about this online, then what is she?
She keeps the journal with her all the time and has tied it up with lots of mysterious knots in the ribbons around it, in case anyone finds it and tries to read it.
When you’re famous like Keera, lots of people want a piece of you and her diary would be a fabulous piece of saleable merchandise.
Despite her years of climbing the fame ladder, she still can’t understand what happens to people’s sense of personal morality in that they want to steal absolutely anything that belongs to a famous person.
She’s personally had a hairbrush taken, her special suede Converse high-tops with the furry stuff inside that she loved on the tour bus, and once, memorably, a piece of paper on which she’d blotted her lip gloss in a bar bathroom and had thrown into the trash.
That had been two teenage girls who’d giggled as they reached into the trash and pulled the tissue paper out, then run out of the women’s room. Keera had been sixteen at the time and a minor star on a kids’ TV show.
Not Lady Gaga or anything. People are cray-cray.
Keera doesn’t go into public washrooms any more unless she has another person for security, although she hasn’t had a big hit since ‘Firebird’, so there’s less of a chance of random fans haunting her.
She keeps her personal belongings in a soft leather rucksack she picked up in Four Corners on her twenty-state tour when she was a big name.
Straddling Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, Four Corners is an important site full of facts about the tribes of First Nation people who’d once been the only residents before the colonists drove them out.
There had been no time to see anything on the tour, as per usual, but Keera had made the tour bus stop at one First Nation shop and bought her rucksack with its yellow colour and grey-and-red triangle design.
She now keeps it close, not least because it contains her precious journal.
Journaling makes her look at things differently.
She notices that her mom is never aware of the feelings in any room she walks into.
Instead, Dr Bobbi spices the whole room up, the way she’s doing now, striding into a slightly hidden area of the hotel in Brisbane where the team are congregated.
The team is much smaller than it used to be.
Keera no longer travels with her own musicians.
It’s often just her on her electric guitar, a few local session musicians and backing singers hired by the tour manager.
‘Where are my favourite people?’ asks Dr Bobbi loudly. ‘Are we full of energy and bursting to go, folks?’
The team – Team Keera on paper but actually Team Bobbi because everyone knows that Bobbi runs every part of Keera’s career – have found a quiet corner where they’re waiting to get picked up by the people carrier to take them to the TV station.
It’s just eight a.m., everyone is clutching big takeaways of coffee in this, the land of coffee, and Keera’s trademark long black hair is its usual unruly mess before Taniqua gets her hands on it.
Keera had started off in showbiz age nine as the kooky kid with the long black hair and, nearly twenty years later, she still has it.
‘You can never cut your hair,’ Dr Bobbi reminds her at least once a week and Keera nods agreement because nodding agreement is what wise people do in the presence of her mom.
But this, like so many other things about her life, is weirdly beginning to annoy her.
Really Mom? Don’t cut my hair because it’s one of my trademarks. I’d have never figured that one out. Duh. Cos twenty-seven-year-olds don’t have a brain, right?
Dr Bobbi thinks she knows absolutely everything and, once upon a time, her omnipotence had been a fact of life. She’d been Keera’s secret weapon but what worked for a nine-year-old who liked singing and posing in front of the mirror with her hairbrush as a microphone was working way less now.
Keera is sort of tired of other people saying they know more than she does.
She’s keeping these feelings to herself, though.
Disagreeing with management – her mom – would cause arguments and, above all, Keera hates arguments.
Because it’s a whistle-stop tour of small venues, every day counts.
Today, she has a jam-packed schedule and it’s making her feel tired at the thought of it all.
She’d overdone it last night on the cocktails.
Mom had seen her drinking wine at the mind-numbingly boring dinner with the local record company people and the show promoter.
Keera had merely pretended to go to bed with the rest of them at half ten.
Instead, she’d found a snug corner in the hotel bar, and pulled her Namaste Bitches baseball hat low on her head with her hair coiled up under it in disguise.
A gorgeous bartender had mixed up a thing called a Starward espresso martini for her and he said this drink was ‘red hot’.
Either he didn’t recognise her or he was being cool, which was definitely a thing in Australia. They allowed famous people, or even once-famous people, to exist and did not wish to grab a piece of her. It was a relief.
With her drink, Keera had curled up in her hidden corner, her fake-glass tortoiseshell glasses on and her hair hidden under the cap. Nobody noticed her and she played happily with her phone, being normal. Numbing out, an inner voice told herself.
But everyone numbed out, didn’t they?
Six of the Starward espresso martinis did not induce sleep, as it happened.
The bar had remained blissfully quiet till two in the morning when Keera had carefully made her way to bed.
That’s when the espresso part of the martinis had done their stuff. It took two lorazepam and some of her mom’s nuclear-grade sleeping pills to help her sleep and she only got four hours of rest.
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.