‘Right!’ Cory says with surprise and a laugh, ‘Puffing Billy, the steam train! So we’ve spoken to Jack about the incredible reaction to your audition, what it’s done for him and the show. I can’t imagine what it’s done for you. Are you glad that you entered the show, after the reaction you’ve received?’
‘I am,’ she says. ‘It’s been overwhelming, but everybody has been so kind and coming here’ – she makes the sound of the seatbelt clip, the call button, the camera shutter – ‘has been a fantastic experience. My life has utterly changed.’
‘What are you hoping for from this experience? Your own show? TV work, stage work? What kind of career comes from this ability?’
She thinks about it. Too long for air time, because he follows it up: ‘Why did you enter? Did you know of Jack? Were you a fan?’
‘No.’ She shakes her head and the audience laughs. Jack holds his head in faux comedy embarrassment.
‘You wanted your life to change,’ he says, trying to wrap it up, hoping for a good and swift end.
‘My life had already changed,’ she replies. ‘My dad died. My uncle didn’t want me to live on their land any more, my mother and grandmother passed away many years ago. I had no choice. I had to move with the change. I had to start my life.’
This seems to touch the host, and he fixes her with a more rooted look, a look that shows he’s not only listening to the voices in his ear.
‘Well, Lyrebird, on behalf of Australia, we wish you the best of luck and hope that your life soars.’
‘That was flawless,’ Jack says, hugging her backstage. ‘You see how smooth that ran? By the time you’re in the studio for the semi-finals, you’ll be an old pro.’
Jack, Curtis, and the team all go for dinner. Jack wants Laura to meet some more people at the dinner, but she insists on going to her hotel. She needs sleep, she needs isolation, she needs to retreat. She doesn’t know how Jack can stand to be around so many people all the time, always on. It exhausts her, giving all that energy away. She’s so jet-lagged the ground is moving beneath her, as though she’s on a boat.
She rushes to catch the elevator and is surprised when she sees Bianca inside.
‘Are you not going out with the others?’ Laura asks.
She closes her eyes and groans. ‘I escaped. Do you ever feel if somebody asks one more thing of you, that you’ll scream in their faces?’
Laura looks at her in surprise.
Bianca laughs. ‘I don’t mean you.’
‘Oh good,’ Laura says relieved, she was thinking her and Bianca were getting somewhere with their relationship today.
‘I’m tired. And I don’t like being around lots of people.’
Laura looks at her, confused. ‘But you’re so great at being around people.’ Despite Bianca’s aloofness, she has spent the day organising, greeting, arranging everything for Laura.
‘For a time,’ she says, ‘then when they’ve sucked the energy from me, I have to recharge my batteries.’
Laura looks at her in shock. ‘So I’m not the only one who feels that way.’
‘No you’re most definitely not,’ Bianca says with a yawn. ‘My mom says it’s because I have empathy. I feel other people’s energies and it drains me. But I think she’s just being nice.’ The elevator stops and the doors open. ‘I think it’s because I’m a bitch.’
The way she says it makes Laura laugh. Bianca giggles too as she steps out to her level. ‘Night.’
Laura sits naked on the enormous hotel bed, stripped of the clothes she’s been told to wear for her new life. The new clothes feel like a uniform, and the clothes she wore in her old life no longer feel appropriate.
She reaches into her bag for her schedule and the extra page Bianca had given her hours previously falls loose.
Interview with Cory Cooke.
Q1. Lyrebird, how was your trip to Australia?First time on a plane?
Lyrebird: airplane sounds. Seatbelt, call button.
Q2. How was it meeting a real lyrebird?
Lyrebird: kookaburra, camera shutter, magpie, cockatoo, whipbird.
Q3. Are you glad you entered the show?
Lyrebird: It’s been overwhelming but everybody has been so kind and coming here has been a fantastic experience. My life has utterly changed.
She crumples up the page, feeling disgusted with herself. Like a performing monkey. Jack had pitched it to her as honing her skill, but it makes her think of the honing rod Gaga used to sharpen the carving knife for Sunday roasts. It always frightened her as a child, the sound, the image and the look on Gaga’s face as she ran the blade over the steel rod – especially as she knew what everybody thought about Gaga.
The phone on the bedside rings and the intense pain returns to her head, behind her eyes. These migraines are getting worse. She ignores the phone, thinking it’s StarrGaze with something else for her to do. She doesn’t know or sense that it’s Solomon, as his morning begins, desperate to know if she’s okay. She climbs under the covers and buries her head with a pillow to block out the ringing. No more sounds.
She falls asleep, naked in her bed, to the sound of Gaga honing the knife, realigning the edge of the knife blade over and over again, and that intense look on her face.
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