Chapter Text
1997
“What’s this?”
Billy glances down at the sky-blue envelope that lands spinning across the kitchen table towards him and back up at his daughter, her arms folded tight and eyes firmly on him.
“Open it and find out.”
He doesn’t like that tone. It’s the tone of voice that says it’s losing patience with him and he has a lifetime of moments to know what that sounds like. It’s Camila’s voice in the mid-eighties after he turned down the chance to go back in the studio to produce a big band and she asked him what was wrong without digging any further for the truth. It’s Graham’s voice when they spent a month arguing about money that Graham wouldn’t accept even though his business was circling the drain and the bank were sending crimson letters exclusively about foreclosure. It’s Daisy’s voice when he wouldn’t commit to anything and forced her to decide his future for him.
It’s his voice when he tells himself to stop feeling so fucking sorry for himself.
Julia has taken to wearing her hair as her Mother did in the late eighties and it throws him when he’s not expecting her and she walks through the door, his heart turns a little and for just a second he thinks it has all been some great mistake and that he will wake up, but he never wakes up. He shakes his head just to show some hint of the annoyance she expects from her Dad but keeps it light with a smirk. He reaches out for the envelope and freezes at the sight of the handwriting on the front.
‘For Julia Dunne’
He drops it back onto the table like it’s infectious and takes a deep breath. It takes him what feels like a full minute to compose himself and look at his daughter. The wide loops and the random cursive he’d seen in notebooks and scratched across his hoarded lyric sheets. Making things better.
“I thought we had agreed….”
“No, Dad,” she says bluntly. “There was no agreement.” She pulls out a chair and sits down, crossing every limb with their opposites. It’s the body language of a daughter spelling out ‘fuck you” in semaphore without needing the flags. “You know there hasn’t been any agreement, just you being stubborn as usual.”
He scrapes his top teeth against his bottom lip, tries to stay silent and fails miserably.
“Julia,” he warns, but she either isn’t listening or doesn’t want to.
“It’s been six months, Dad. Nearly seven.” It’s not soft, and the one good thing is that it isn’t the sound of unrelenting kindness and sympathy that he’s come to hate more than anything. It’s a statement; the headline on the front of the newspaper in giant bold lettering that says that the war is over. Even Graham had absorbed a volley of anger last week on the phone. Julia can see through most things, and the fucking documentary that caused all of this….. chaos has given her what she thought was the right to wade into shit that she really shouldn’t be wading into. And yes, it had been six months, but it was six months since the end of it. The beginning of it all required a different treatment entirely, one that still hadn’t been prescribed and whatever this was, folded and dangerous in an envelope, wasn’t going to be the first dose.
“I know how long it’s been.”
Julia sighs and looks up at the ceiling. “Dad. Mom is gone. She wanted you to do this. It was important to her…..”
"Jules, please stop," he says, holding up a hand. He contemplates how much further he should delve into his daughter's grief. It often illuminates her eyes, cutting him deeper than his own horrors. He doesn't want to add to her pain, but repeatedly being ignored when he says "no" leaves him with few options. "Your Mom shouldn't have done that," he adds quietly.
“What?”
“She shouldn’t have done that. Jesus, she had no right to do that. I don’t need permission for things and if it was so important she could have had the conversation with me and not our daughter.” He taps his hand twice on the table to stop himself from saying too much and it hurts. “Look, I’m sorry. I am. I don’t know if you had this idea of a fairytale thing going on here but I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to be a part of that Julia. It’s not fair on me and it’s not fair on….” He glances out of the window and tries to control himself. It was the first time he had said anything negative about Camila for a long time. It still feels slightly blasphemous.
“Dad you can’t keep hurting yourself.”
“I’m not.”
“Really? You think if Mom had said to you about Daisy you would have had a civilised conversation with her about it?”
He contemplates saying yes but can’t even bring himself to lie anymore. The capacity for any kind of effective deceit seems to have faded along with his wife. Memories of discussions about Daisy linger except they weren’t conversations at all, they were sharp little words masquerading as small artillery that they lobbed at each other whenever the topic came up. Lately, he's realized that just when things seemed to be going well between them, old ghosts would resurface through the floorboards – tracks on the radio, pictures in magazines, updates about old bandmates, and his gradual, miserable withdrawal from the industry. Viewed from an unpleasant distance his marriage feels like a fifteen-year argument with five years of relative peace thrown in when he least expected it. The heart of the matter lies in the things he still can't confide in Julia. When her mother brought home a dark ochre hand-woven rug from the market, his first thought was that it matched Daisy's notebook, and she knew. The guilt that weighed down his eyelids revealed his secret. Now, he spends his days reassessing his life and marriage, a process that might not be healthy. Returning to therapy would likely divert that, but he feels a pressing need for it. It serves as a channel for his anger, even though he's uncertain about its source, as it seems to shift daily.
“She wouldn’t have given me her number if she didn’t want you to call. Mom wouldn’t have given her permission…”
“I don’t need fu…” He composes himself, ”I don’t need permission, Julia.”
“OK, OK. I’m just trying to help.”
“I know you are sweetheart, really but this isn’t helping me right now. Look, the film you’re making? You know things about me, about us all that we maybe didn’t want to tell. You’ve got to understand that.”
“Why did you then?”
“You asked. And then your Mom talked me into it.” He lets the silence stretch, competing with the ticking of Camila's family clock, a relic from her grandparents. Rising, he stands by the window, much like a year ago, pondering the world outside as he meticulously arranged Camila's pills in their blue and green pillboxes. The house remains adorned with her memories and keepsakes—things he can't bring himself to erase. “It was difficult to say no to her then.”
Julia sighs and looks at her hands. “It’s only concert tickets, Dad, she sent them to me. For us to go together.”
He chews at the side of his cheek, knowing he can’t keep going like this. He feels like something in him is gradually disintegrating into dust and he hopes it’s not his heart.
1984
In the year since Teddy’s passing, he had felt himself drifting and sinking into some sort of hole that he was struggling to climb out of. Every time he got a hand on the top the earth gave way and he tumbled back deeper until it was easier to just stop trying. He, no, they, had been in a good place at the start of the decade, entering a new phase akin to teenage courtship. He dedicated himself to the studio, working his ass off producing and writing songs, and everything moved on. No drama. No distractions. Julia became a full-on miniature version of him complete with the same personality and opinions. Then Daisy became another sort of icon in a second fucking decade and was everywhere. Television, newspapers, tours, glossy magazines. Her face spread over massive billboards so wide you could have taken a stroll between her eyes. It was mind-blowing. Then she was pregnant. Then Teddy died.
There were a multitude of “thens” marking that timeline when it all went fuzzy. He mechanically escorted Julia to school, then returned to bed, fixating on the ceiling for three hours. A sporadic beard sprouted, adorned with initial grey hairs on his face. He smiled at whatever Camila said to him but he didn’t hear her words unless she repeated them and only then did it get him out of the daze. Food tasted the same, no distinction no matter what was on the plate. It echoed the perpetual haze of being stoned and nineteen but the memories he had locked away started to squeeze through the bars and it got harder to keep them at bay. The unravelling was subtle to start. Initially it was a fixed gaze during Camila’s pouring of a glass of red one Friday night. He kept going to the fridge, mechanically picking at some crackers and carving a piece of cheese, catching his distorted reflection bent and misshapen around the neck of the bottle standing on the kitchen counter. Over the next week, it spawned and evolved into something deeper.
It felt like the worst, this need. It gnawed at him with sharp teeth. It resembled the smell wafting from a newly broken whiskey bottle in the store’s parking lot. It was the sting of smoke hitting his face from a passerby's cigarette, or the woman in front of him at the pharmacy asking for the same industrial-strength painkillers that he used to chew down on every hangover-laced morning. The urge lingered as he passed every bar on every street. The tension persisted from predawn to the moment his head hit the pillow, offering no respite in sleep. Even then he couldn’t sleep. It was wading and trudging in packed, deep mud and every day it got harder to lift your leg in front of the other. It was Julia laughing and fresh with the promise that every road was available to her and it was there, on the edge of the bath, he'd turn on the shower, attempting to drown the ache, struggling to hold back tears for ten minutes straight while she played snap with her Mother, her laughter at getting caught cheating bouncing and resonating through the house.
Why am I still like this?
His Mother turned sixty in the chestnut Autumn of 1984 and she came out west for a week to celebrate. She went shopping at the packed craft markets on boulevards with Camila and Julia to pick out a gift while he sat on the porch under rust skies wondering what would happen if he just got in the car and drove; no map or purpose. Could he make it to a different place? Would anybody be worse off? Later that afternoon he goes to the store for milk and instead keeps on driving. He had never truly gotten to know and understand the roads and streets of California, it had remained something of a mystery to him, like a half-finished song with no chorus. When he thought things were leaning to the right it turned out more often than not that he was supposed to be headed left. So he drives through the afternoon, and every time he looks in the mirror and catches his eyes he wonders who is staring back at him. Before he knows it he recognises a stretch of road and without missing a beat yanks the steering wheel clean across his body. He stands on the beach, their stretch of beach , he tells himself. It’s different now, neater and brighter as if someone had taken cleaning fluid to a painting that had been hung for too long in an old curtained-off musty room. The ocean is coming back in and the wind swirls around his ears and the dusk is rolling in like it’s nearly showtime. He tries to visualise it, that night, facing her and telling her the truth, but he can’t, it’s almost like false memories had been planted and he couldn’t push past them. He bends and picks up a flat rough pebble the size of a silver dollar and puts it deep in his pocket. Something that can pull him back when he needs it. He had spent at least six years convincing himself that he didn't love her anymore. Now he was scouting a beach for something she may have walked over. He recognises failure but understands it's not always permanent. Over the next month, he starts to run again in the morning as it gets darker with the coming of Winter. He pushes himself through the cold and away from the warmth of the house, sees his breath turn to mist and realises he is still alive. Every time he thinks of Daisy Jones or the band he rubs at the roughness of the pebble. By Christmas Day it’s halfway smooth.
His cousin Maria dies in a hit-and-run in El Paso and Camila nonchalantly tells him Graham’s plans for the funeral while they otherwise silently pass each other dishes to dry.
"It involves a road trip, you know," Camila mentions casually, handing Billy a plate.
"A road trip?" Billy raises an eyebrow.
"Yeah, a few days away. I think it could be good for you two. You haven't been spending enough time together lately," Camila suggests.
Billy, sceptical about the potential chaos, nods and absentmindedly rubs the pebble, lost in memories of the tour bus in '77, Graham flip-flopping between him and the party.
Camila takes Julia to a classmate’s birthday party in some hell-hole fun park and gives him a half-hearted peck on the cheek goodbye. Graham pulls up a half hour later in a rented Dodge and says, “Well if it isn’t the ex-world-famous rock star Billy Dunne,” and it goes downhill from there for the next hour. They argue silently about the radio. ‘ Have You Ever Seen The Rain’ comes on the AM but that’s a Karen song, so Graham starts relentlessly flipping stations and eventually Billy, clearly irritated, just reaches across and turns it off. Graham calls him a dick under his breath but Billy lets it slide. Eventually, Graham folds in the stone-cold silence and asks him with an exasperated sigh just what the fucking problem was.
“There’s no problem Graham.”
“Hmmm.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Hmmm.”
“Graham. Man. Don’t.”
“I’m just wondering what the plan is.”
Billy turns to the window and then back again. “What plan?” The heater blows out hot air towards his face and he turns that off as well.
“Well, you seem to insist on pushing everyone away right now and being a complete dick. I’m just wondering if you’re hoping that everyone gives up on you and leaves you to wallow.”
“You don’t know shit about me, Graham, we’re not kids anymore. Let’s keep it that way for this trip, can we?”
“Camila is worried.”
He gives a humourless little laugh at that. “Makes sense. The road trip. Nice of you to be having conversations behind my back.”
“We’re all worried. Mom came back……upset.”
He leans back against the headrest and closes his eyes. He wonders at the levels he can continue to sink beyond to make his own Mother cry. Again .
“There’s nothing to be worried about Graham. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” He reaches for the pebble but instead switches the radio back on and they listen to it cut in and out as they navigate a stretch of old forest with patchy reception. Graham eventually gives up and starts talking about Pittsburgh and they fall into old-fashioned stories, extended tales of things that maybe happened but probably didn’t. He starts laughing again and he remembers Graham’s face in LA. Not much different. Keener and slightly more alive but he’s missing something in his eyes now, perhaps the spark he used to have whenever Karen was near. He knows he wasn’t the only one to lose something. Maybe it was just the difference he was seeing.
“I’m getting married,” Graham smiles wide.
“Married? Woah. Congratulations man.” This is good news and he feels he could do with more of it.
“Thanks.”
“When’s she due?” he jokes.
“Asshole.”
“Just assuming you were following family tradition, Graham. It is practically policy.”
“Yeah, well. Fuck you.” Graham is laughing.
He feels something akin to pride for Graham. Pride and relief, that he would have someone to lean on. It was good.
“She's due in June,” says Graham quietly and they both roar at that. “Fancy doing best man duties?”
“Of course. It’d be my privilege. And congratulations man. Seriously. I'm happy for you.” He wonders how many friends Graham has. He thinks of how few he has. Life in a rock and roll disaster band had the unwanted bonus of fuelling an inability to make concrete friendships. Everyone was wary and fragile and eager to stab you in the back as soon as they looked at you. He's going to be an uncle though, there is that, and Graham seems happy.
Through the third hour in the car they stop at a gas station and he picks up some snacks Camila would tut at and a litre of Pepsi. When they set off again he takes a deep breath.
"You know," Billy confesses to Graham, "I never really said a proper goodbye. Not to anyone."
Graham doesn't answer right away, allowing the weight of Billy's admission to hang in the air. Eventually, he responds with a quiet nod and a simple, “yep.”
"When Teddy passed, I started noticing that people... just drifted away. Or maybe I was the one doing the drifting. Now, it feels like I can't fix that."
"Not everyone is gone, Billy."
"I know. Maybe it wouldn't hurt as much with a proper goodbye."
"Perhaps. Perhaps it's time to ease up on yourself, too," Graham suggests.
He's not sure when he'll reach that finish line so he lets the words settle and zones out to the engine sound.
At the funeral, he watches the rows of people with heads bowed and tears dripping into handkerchiefs. He hears the melody from the hymns rise to the rafters and their hope and clarity startles him. He starts to hear different harmonies and chords underneath it and sings a solid fifth quietly above the main melody line. Like the harmony Daisy came up with for Aurora .
1997
The fucking envelope still sits amongst the ‘to-be-paid’ bills and the non-important legal shit in the kitchen like a single forget-me-not, goading him every single time he leaves by the back door for a run. Julia had informed him in no uncertain terms that she was going to the concert whether he was planning to or not so if he even thought about throwing them out he would be in trouble. She was finishing up work on the documentary, waiting for some mythical bootleg footage someone had promised her that she said was ‘super exciting’ and a ‘game changer’ whatever that meant. What truly floored him was the avalanche of stuff she'd amassed. He'd always considered Camila and Mom a bit nuts for hoarding tickets, snipped interviews, and ragged fanzines, but that was child's play compared to the influx from a hasty public plea. Tapes upon tapes, ancient Super 8 footage of rehearsals, careening in from some sound engineer, tour photos, relentless interviews, and even some forgotten pro gig recordings. Chuck, in his treasure hunt, even unearthed some ancient rehearsal tapes from the garage. Surveying it all, meticulously boxed and cataloged, he marvelled at the stamina he must have once possessed. He doesn't delve into any of it too closely; the thought of it feels like wandering into a maze with no exit. Julia mentioned that everyone in the band spilled the beans about the whole story, but they each had their spin, turning the quest for a cohesive narrative into a colossal fucking pain. He's not sure if that makes it any better — the band and his life imploding due to crossed wires and misunderstandings. Then, there's a sudden mental snapshot of Daisy backstage in Chicago, legs wound around him, soaking in his darkness. In that one poised moment, he'd entertained the wild idea that it might just work. But misunderstanding? Nah, it wasn't even on the same planet as reality. It was teetering so far into delusion it could pass as a tragicomedy.
He sticks to his regular meetings and tends to the petunias and dahlias Camila planted along the backyard borders. Dealing with illness and the inevitable, she faced it all head-on, treating it like just another obstacle to overcome. At first, he resisted sharing the burden, keeping everything to himself. She insisted on having company and discussing what would happen at the end, a way of living that bothered him until he decided to push the discomfort aside and submerge it with everything else. Beyond the flowers, daily tasks become a lifeline. There was a certain comfort in the routine—the precise arrangement of the table, the repetitive motion of the vacuum across the kitchen floor, the constant hum of the washing machine. The fact the chores were once shared but aren’t shared now is a nagging reminder of the loss. There’s also some horrendous guilt that erupts every now and then. And shame, deep shame as well. Her quirks and idiosyncrasies, the things that grated on him—the too-loud laughter, the way she never closed the fucking kitchen cabinets resulting in him smashing his head off of them, the incessant chatter during his favourite shows. In these moments, he grapples with a mix of nostalgia and frustration, trying to reconcile the memory of her with the imperfections that persist in his recollections.
Julia brings Thai food on Friday night and manages to coerce him into watching fifteen minutes of the rough-cut documentary with her. It's an attempt to gauge how the project is shaping up and if she's unintentionally made a fool of herself and her parents, not to mention one of the biggest stars on the planet. He's sceptical about his ability to endure it, but the prospect of another passive-aggressive argument looms, and he’s starving so he reluctantly settles on the couch, clutching the hand-woven throw for dear life. The documentary is a jumble of timelines, a mishmash of faces that somehow form a modern day pitch headed to the networks next week. Seeing those familiar faces again is bewildering. Chuck realizing what he'd tossed away elicits a laugh. Graham, uncomfortable and staring at the camera, perplexed by their success, is even funnier. Eddie, King Fuckface himself, the perennial complainer, remains true to form, still blaming everyone else. If Eddie won the lottery, he'd probably hire someone to follow Billy around, berating him through a loudhailer.
Then there's a lost concert film from downtown Detroit, and Billy finds himself staring in bewildered disbelief at the multitude of people who paid to see them. The sheer scale of it all is a shock. He'd forgotten everything, wondering how he'd answered Julia's questions with any kind of truth without fully embracing that memory. He knew they were big, given the enduring popularity of their songs, but the level of adoration surprises him.
A quick cut takes them to an interview with Daisy talking about their collaborative writing. Billy tightens his grip on the fabric, feeling Julia's eyes on him. The scene shifts to him, and he winces at the weariness grief had carved on his face. He can't recall smiling like that when discussing "Let Me Down Easy" with Julia, not like that. Yet, the game-changer is when Daisy beams at the same memory. It's still important. Over the years, he had convinced himself that the things they'd created and felt together would fade like a message scrawled in the sand. He'd embraced the belief that it wasn't love, just a fever tied up in words and melodies, now melted away like the echoes of an old worn out record. But there she is, beaming, and his heart pounds. Maybe broken things could be rearranged. Perhaps some peace could be made.
Interviews with Rod and other Ellemar folks, old Teddy snippets, and Saturday Night Live footage play out, but his mind craves more. More of them.
"What do you think, Dad?"
"You could've given me a heads-up about the straight hair thing," he grimaces.
"Mom liked it."
"She did." He pats her hand. "It's good. I'm proud of you. But I still doubt anyone will care about this stuff, Jules. Just be prepared; it's all younger kids in charge now. Nostalgia doesn't sell." Memories of frigid interviews with kids fresh out of high school asking about recent work flood back.
The next morning, he showers, lets his hair dry naturally, and searches for his old Swiss railway clock watch. Failing to find it, he rummages through drawers, discovering old baby photos of Julia and scattered combinations of Camila's jewelry. In a bureau in the guest room, he finds the pebble in the letter drawer. Standing with it feels like an eternity.
He can't quite recall peeling the sunflower yellow post-it with an address and phone number off the cork notice board and he certainly can’t remember getting in the car, but suddenly he's standing at someone else's door, having knocked three times.
He can’t help himself smile when she answers the door and when she smiles back like she did on the video tape it feels like his heart has started beating again.