Chapter Seventeen #2
But Keera likes cocaine too, which her mother doesn’t know. Keera’s very careful about it because she knows that Snow is a speedy way of getting rid of money and that if her mother cottons on to her use, Keera will be in big trouble.
The sound of Dr Bobbi’s arrival in the lobby makes Luka, the stylist, who’s been surfing an Instagram high on their phone, and Barb, who’s nominally Keera’s assistant and who’d been WhatsApp-ing her girlfriend, both get to their feet instantly.
Luka’s wearing heels, cream floaty trousers and a see-through crochet top which works wonderfully with their blonde shag hairdo, elaborate eye make-up and androgynous look.
Barb wears all black, no matter how hot it is, has inch-long black nails and a pale-blonde Eton crop that shows off an exquisitely shaped head.
Barb is Slovakian and has a slightly scary energy to her.
Even Dr Bobbi treads carefully around Barb.
Dr Bobbi likes that the team are diverse and talks about it non-stop to show how with it she is.
‘We have the full run of skin and rainbow colours here,’ she says cheerfully to everyone, even when Keera hisses ‘Mom!’ at her, in case anybody hears and gets upset.
Mom says that she doesn’t have a racist or prejudiced bone in her body but why then does she need to remind people that Taniqua is Black or that Luka is non-binary? Why aren’t they allowed to be rather than represent certain types of people? Gen X just doesn’t understand Gen Z.
With Dr Bobbi’s arrival, the team spring to life and hustle their way to the door of the hotel where they slip through with almost no interest at all.
A few hardy fans of Keera’s are clustered outside the hotel’s imposing gates but they can see nothing through the darkened windows of the black Mercedes minivan that Charlie, their driver, calls a ‘people mover’.
He and Keera had been chatting when they’d driven from Sydney to Brisbane.
Now he drives confidently through the city and Keera looks at it wistfully as they pass.
She rarely sees any part of any place she visits.
The hotel, her room, the gym if she has time. She sees bars, though. Her mother knows endless people who own bars.
It’s being Irish, Dr Bobbi explains.
Dr Bobbi grew up in Donegal in Ireland, smack bang in a place she called ‘the arse end of nowhere’, a constant refrain which means that Keera’s grandmother, who’s in her late seventies, barely speaks to Dr Bobbi any more. Keera hasn’t seen her grandmother since she was a little girl.
‘Someday we’ll go there,’ Dr Bobbi says, which is her way of saying ‘when hell freezes over’.
When Keera was touring small venues on her tour bus, they stopped at lots of little taverns along the way to bestow a little bit of celebrity twinkle on them. The pubs were almost always Irish bars.
‘Honey, everyone that made good in Ireland had some link to a pub,’ Dr Bobbi would say while she drank with the owners and got Keera to pose for a photo with them and many of their friends.
‘I know them from way back,’ was another of her mother’s favourite lines and meant that many oddballs arrived into the green room or her dressing room in cities around the world, smiling at Keera as if they knew her.
‘Jesus, would you ever smile and say hello, for my sake,’ her mother would mutter when Keera wondered how to behave with these strangers who were happily eating the free green-room food and being stopped from taking photos of any other famous people there by said famous people’s entourages.
The actual famous people never complained.
As Keera knew, they all understood that any complaint got them labelled ‘difficult’ or full of themselves. This was more fatal than a meltdown on TV.
So Keera and the other singers and actors just smiled at the oddballs and pretended they were delighted that some idiot was watching them with his mouth open as he drank free gin/vodka/whatever was on offer.
‘Let Taniqua fix your hair before we go in,’ instructs Dr Bobbi now, as Charlie says: ‘We’re here, ladies and gentlemen,’ as the minivan arrives at the studio.
Dr Bobbi has been on the phone for the entire trip, flipping through messages and emails, flicking them into delete with ultra-long, coffin-tipped gel nails. This week’s colour is Undead Red, a deep plum, a name which made her shriek with delight when she saw it.
‘Undead Red and me are perfect! I’m channelling the Morticia look!’
Dr Bobbi’s hair, the same pale mouse as Keera’s natural colour, is shoulder-length, dead straight and now coloured inky black.
She’d dyed it that colour when she’d first arrived in Los Angeles from Ireland back in the Triassic Period before Keera was born.
Dr Bobbi’s personal fight for stardom as a singer/actor had given her the tools to make her daughter succeed where she hadn’t.
The night before Keera’s first audition for a commercial, when she’d been nine years old, Dr Bobbi had looked at her daughter’s glowing little face with its freckles.
Keera had huge eyes the colour of smoky-green quartz, a hypnotic colour that could make her look infinitely sad or wonderfully inquiring or anything else that Bobbi told her to look when reading a line for a part.
To Bobbi’s critical gaze, Keera’s nondescript mousey plaits took away from the glittering eyes that stood out even in her adorable little pixie face with its snub nose and pointed chin.
Everything she’d done for Keera – and this Keera had written down in her journal because it all seemed pivotal – had been for this moment. Keera’s very name had been Americanised so that the Irish ‘Ciara’ had been translated into the far more easy-to-say ‘Keera’.
The legend was born that Dr Bobbi had found a ‘wash-in’ black colour because she didn’t want to hurt her precious daughter’s little head and had applied it.
Nine-year-old Keera had felt the adult dye sting her delicate scalp but by the time it was growing out, Keera was on her way.
The next day, newly black-haired Keera got the job. Got the television sitcom role, got the chocolate advertisement, the tween lip gloss deal, got the career.
The story about using gentle wash-in dye was the stuff of the Keera-and-her-mom legend: fantasy as fact in the career-building world.
She was a child star and child stars were not like ordinary kids. If they needed nose jobs, they got them. Needing professional hair dye when they were nine? No problemo.
‘Gimme a look at you.’ In the back of the minivan, Dr Bobbi now scans her daughter with a laser eye. Keera puts her head sideways and adopts the cute expression that had won her so many fans on her second sitcom, The Keera and Cat Party House.
It had been fun making the series at first, Keera thinks suddenly, remembering. She’d been thirteen when it started, sixteen when it ended and, by then, it was just her.
Cat had been a wonderful friend, her first and closest best friend: very quirky, e-boy-ish, almost, with her blue sparkly eyeliner habit, genuine fondness for boy’s trousers, button-down shirts, and her nerdy but expertly cut short haircut.
They’d been so close and had so much fun.
Nothing was fun any more.
Was it normal to be twenty-seven and feel burned out?
Keera gets out of the minivan and says thanks to Charlie, but her head is swirling.
What had happened to Cat? She’d left LA when she was written out of the series. Keera had meant to stay in touch and they’d messaged all the time, but then Cat had sort of disappeared from view. She’d stopped returning messages.
‘She’s probably busy and you remind her of how badly her career worked out,’ Mom had said at the time. ‘Who has time for friendship when you’ve got a career? And never forget, jealousy is a real thing in this business.’
Cat would never be jealous, Keera thinks.
Mom was rarely wrong but perhaps she had been in this case?
She and Cat had sworn to be friends for ever. Cat had never had her head turned by the Hollywood machine, never stopped being the funny girl from New Mexico who loved showbiz but loved her family more.
‘We have to keep our feet on the ground, Keera,’ she used to say, when they were just thirteen, sneaking into each other’s hotel rooms during filming weeks.
‘One day, the show will tank, the money will stop and we’ll be off the radar.
Gotta face it. It’ll be OK, I think. My pops says nobody can do this for ever, right? ’
Cat had been the nearest thing to a sister Keera had ever had. It was years since she’d tried to talk to her.
The thought makes Keera ashamed.
Just because Mom believes people will try to use Keera, doesn’t mean that everyone is a user.
Her mom’s narrative doesn’t have to be hers. It makes her think of all the normal things she’s lost out on because of her career. Like ordinary friendships.
It’s a lightbulb moment – the blog she’s reading for her journal work talks about lightbulb moments.
The lightbulb moment has another angle: Mom isn’t always right.
They reach the studio front door and Keera knows it’s time to turn on her magic.
Dr Theatre, as an actress once said to her.
‘You hit the stage and Dr Theatre appears inside you magically.’
‘You look fabulous, honey,’ says her mom, patting her cheek affectionately. ‘Stay off the snacks if they offer them, OK?’
Keera looks at her mother. Sometimes things feel really good and then Mom says something to smash her self-esteem into pieces. At these moments, Keera hates her.