to follow him through the dark to the wings that they knew for sure they’d been abandoned.
Huddled in the velvety blackness, they twined their arms around each other’s waists and swayed to a silent hymn. Just metres away microphones were illuminated in celestial spotlights. Meredith was suddenly reminded that this was how people described a near-death experience—you were drawn towards a blinding radiance that was the font of all love and understanding. Then, if it wasn’t your time to go, you were sent back to earth, with gratitude, to live again. At least, that is what Meredith hoped it would be like—she had no desire to die out there and end up in cabaret purgatory. Each woman prayed to her own god for deliverance.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ announced the MC, resplendent this evening in a powder blue velvet suit with embroidered lapels, ‘please welcome seven—’ Meredith hissed at the stage. The MC turned and peered under the brim of his black cowboy hat to see her upheld fingers—‘no, six women tonight with heavenly voices. Melbourne’s favourite gospel choir . . . Sanctified Soul!’
Two
It was Nina who picked up the phone and rang Meredith and Annie to suggest the three of them should have dinner to honour the twentieth anniversary of the night the group disbanded. She’d only put the dates together when she was sitting at the dining table sorting through a box of photographs. More raw material to feed her latest mania for scrapbooking. She’d found a poster, gnawed by silverfish, advertising their performance at the Athenaeum in April 1987. There was Sanctified Soul, listed in a stellar line-up of comedians, singers and bands. Nina recognised all the names. Some of the comics now had respectable jobs working on ABC radio, while others had become actors, writers or were in the ‘where are they now?’ file. The musical performers had likewise met various fates—one of them was in fact teaching Nina’s eldest son guitar on Saturday mornings.
The keeping of the Sanctified Soul mythology had fallen to Nina, Annie and Meredith. As the three of them went about their business in the city they would sometimes drive past a pub, restaurant or town hall where they’d performed. Some of the spaces had been rebirthed as poker machine lounges or cocktail bars. Once Annie had been standing at the cash register of a Prahran noodle shop and suddenly remembered they had played a gig in the spot now occupied by a despairing giant crab in a fish tank.
When Nina, Annie and Meredith had last met—was it a year ago?—they shared a guilty laugh about who had made the least fortuitous escape. They choked on blueberry brioche as they realised the joke was on them. They were the ones still living in Melbourne. All these years later and they still lived within a fifteen-kilometre radius of where they’d sung that final night.
There had been seven of them back then—a goodly number for a heavenly choir. Genevieve had long since been claimed by a heroin overdose; Briony was now hostage to the tourism industry in Cairns; Jaslyn was working with UNICEF in Afghanistan. And Corinne? Corinne Jacobsen was in Sydney and was the one who had apparently ‘made it’. After years of hosting morning television she was now a ‘household name’—in the same way you knew the brand name of your favourite bench wipes and chose them at the supermarket, someone had cattily observed. How many of the performers from that night, Nina wondered, had walked out of the theatre and never, ever appeared on a stage again? Like Nina, Annie and Meredith.
A week after that phone call the three of them were sitting around a linen-covered table in a quiet corner of an Italian restaurant in East Melbourne.
‘Remember the time the sprinklers came on at that crappy motel in Shepparton and drenched us just before we were supposed to leave for the gig?’ asked Nina.
Annie and Meredith laughed. They did remember. And a lot more besides.
‘It can’t be twenty years ago.’ Meredith shook her head in disbelief. It was the fifth time she’d said this since they sat down. ‘You were a baby then, Annie. A baby. I can’t believe we took you on the road with us when you were, what? Eighteen?’
‘Nineteen. Yup! Fresh off the farm.’ Annie grinned. She reached for her wineglass and scraped back her trademark tumble of amber curls. ‘I came to the city to “find myself” and I found all of you instead. I never knew women