A chance meeting with her best friend from schooldays gives Dove Larren the opportunity to step back into her comfort zone more than thirty years in the past. With Jags, she need not be the CEO of Rosa Columba, or dodge speculation about her personal life. Jags has no idea of Dove’s status, and Dove knows nothing of Jags’ current life.
The weekly meetings at Sydney’s O-Quay Café are relaxing fun, but one day the old friends start speculating about names. The inspiration for Jagger Michaela Stone’s name is easy to spot, but why would beer-and-football-loving Eric Larren and his comfortable wife Barb choose to call their child Dove Rose?
With urging from Jags, Dove calls her mother to give her the third degree. When Barb Larren finally admits the source of the name, Dove and Jags are off on a quest to find out the truth about a mysterious forebear and how the Larren family is linked with a chateau in France.
At first, it seems an ordinary story of a French émigré, but things take an unbelievable turn.
Dove thinks she has found an answer, but how can she be sure when Barb has no idea and Eric isn’t around anymore to ask?
It took me decades to pin Mum down about my name. The subject came up again last year when I was sitting in a café talking to my old friend Jagger.
Jagger, despite what you might think, was and is my friend’s real first name. If I tell you her second name is Michaela, you’ll see her mum and dad were massive Rolling Stones fans. As Jags said one day, back then when we were leaning against the school fence waiting for our buses to take us to our homes at opposite ends of the school catchment, it could have been a lot worse. They might have tagged her with Roller.
“Pity they didn’t,” I said when she told me that. “We could have both been birds together.”
Jags looked blank under her over-length black fringe, then she got the joke.
“Gotcha! You’d be a white pigeon and I’d be one of those birds that rolls about in the sky.” She drew barrel rolls in the air.
“Coraciidae,” I said.
“Yeah, those.”
Jags read the same books as I did, about birds, and rocks, and wolves and Vikings and mummies and feral children and things. I’d have felt peculiar if I hadn’t had Jags to talk to.
Her parents were a bit embarrassing, so we felt well matched.
“Why not Michaela Jagger Stone?” I asked Jags.
Yes, her surname was Stone.
She shrugged.
“You could ask them.”
She gave me a weird look. “It would encourage them. They might think I was interested.”
“Aren’t you?”
She shrugged again. “Yes. I’d love to know the mindset that can saddle a girl with Jagger. Only I don’t want to set them off doing Mick Jagger impressions. It’s so embarrassing.”
“I could ask for you,” I said, though the idea of Jimmy Stone strutting in tight leather pants and pouting was a bit disconcerting.
“No need. I already know, more or less. I mean, ask if you like. Be my guest.”
She didn’t sound enthusiastic, so we didn’t really ask—then. We just got on with the business of getting ourselves through school without being turned into good girl, bad girl, or dull girl clones.
We saw one another through measuring skirt hems, and cuffing jeans, shaving our legs, and getting highlights and showing up at our Leavers’ dinner together. Jags wore a tux, and I had a sparkly pink dress I designed and made for myself. We were being consciously ironic, I think...
After school ended, we... I’m not sure what happened. We didn’t have a fight, but we didn’t get to catch up every day at school anymore. We lived a half-hour bus ride apart.
I kept on thinking of Jags as my best friend, but one day I realised we couldn’t be best friends when we’d had no contact for seven years. I didn’t have the faintest what she was doing, or who she was doing it with, whether she’d gone on to higher ed. or got a job and a flat share the way I had.
That bothered me, so I asked Mum on one of our Tuesday night phone catch-ups how Kay Stone was.
Mum, in typical no-straight-answer form, said... How should I know?
“You’re friends,” I said.
Mum shrugged. I know she did, even though I couldn’t see her. “Not really friends, love. We used to chat while we waited for you at netball. She never stopped talking about rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Acquaintances, then. How is she?”
“No idea. Haven’t seen her in years. I think they moved,” Mum said. She called out to Dad, “Eric, the Rolling Stones shifted, didn’t they?”
Dad’s voice floated in, “Dunno,” followed by a roar from the telly. Then he said something else... maybe about gathering moss.
So that was that. I asked a couple of people from our area, and looked up J. Stone in phone directories, but after I rang six of them and they were all Jane or John or Jess or James, or never-heard-of-her, I gave up and consigned Jags to the childhood memories pile.
Later, I looked on social media sites, but I couldn’t find a profile for Jagger Michaela Stone.
I’d remember her now and again, maybe when I saw a model with long black hair, but then I’d think, well, she could always find me.
I did have a social profile, under my real name, as well as a business one, though of course Tim runs that these days.
