At that, Rhona stood, walked around the table, kissed him on the head and strode off towards her car, the magazine scrunched in her hand. ‘See you Thursday night for dinner,’ she called without looking back or waiting for an answer.
As he watched Rhona leave, Mo slumped further into his chair. He’d let her down. He’d lethimselfdown. He couldn’t let the kids who stood to benefit from Play On down. Time was up on his bullshit. Big changes were needed, and this time, he had to stick to them.
Chapter Five
NETTA
It wasn’t until Wednesday evening that Netta was home alone again, and the notebook hiding under the floorboards had been burning a hole in her brain the entire time; she’d beendyingto pull it out and investigate. Now, with the house finally empty and quiet—Pete at someone-from-work’s birthday drinks—she lifted the notebook from its hiding place for a second time, brushing a new film of dust from the cover.
She took the notebook to her bed and sat cross-legged on the doona.DO NOT READwas emblazoned across the front, partially obscured by a length of red twine wrapped around the cover to keep it closed. To keep itprivate.It wasn’t Pete’s handwriting, so she was sure it wasn’t his, and it looked far too old to belong to either of his kids. It was probably nothing, she realised. She’d built the notebook up in her head since Saturday and was about to have her bubble unceremoniously popped. Still, she set it down in front of her with a thrill of about-to-be-satisfied curiosity, her fingers suspended in a twitchy hover above the cover, held back only by her overachieving guilty conscience. Reading someone’s journal was the ultimate invasion of privacy, and Netta knew all too well how it felt to have one’s privacy invaded. But the book looked ancient. There was a statute of limitations on these things, wasn’t there? She shoved her hands between her thighs and the bed and bounced her knees up and down.
‘Ah, what could it hurt?’ she said, releasing a breath and her hands. Quickly, before her conscience could pull rank, she flipped the cover open to read the inscription.
This journal belongs to Morrison Maplestone, 1994.
‘Surely not.’
Netta ran her fingers over the scratchy handwriting. Morrison Maplestone wasn’t exactly a common name, andtheMorrison Maplestone was famous. Like,reallyfamous. She leaned over to grab her phone from the bedside table and typed the name into Google. Web pages, articles and photos flooded the screen. She clicked on the Wikipedia link. The page generously informed her that Morrison ‘Mo’ Maplestone was forty-one and while he was Australian, he’d called England home since his early twenties. Netta did a quick calculation. If he was forty-one now, he would’ve been eleven in 1994. If it really was his diary, it meant it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume he’d once lived in Pete’s house.
Holy. Shit.
Netta closed the book and pushed it out of reach, her curiosity still outmatched by her integrity. Just. She went back to the Wiki page to see if it held any clues about where he’d spent his childhood, but it focused on his music career and speculations about his private life, which, much to the media’s dismay, he’d been successful in keeping quiet for as long as he’d been famous. He’d never had a public relationship and despite being notorious for being seen with models, the only person he’d ever taken as his date to an award ceremony was his younger brother. This, of course, had only fuelled his unholy sex appeal, because who doesn’t love a mysterious, tattooed singer who’s also a devoted big brother and writes lyrics that simultaneously tear your heart out and rip your knickers off?
Netta picked up the book and cradled it in her hands, turning it over a few times. She was, admittedly, tempted. Very.Surely it was only the scribbles of a little boy, nothing that would need to be secret now, thirty years later, when he was objectively one of the most famous people in the world. He’d dropped off the radar a bit lately though, Netta noted, tapping the book on the doona. There hadn’t been any new Morrison Maplestone songs flogged to death on commercial radio for a couple of years at least. Still, this little book could potentially reveal personal information about him—a commodity he’d always kept in very short supply. And that probably meant it would be worth a fortune. Not that she would ever—No. She would never.
Netta released a captive breath and rubbed her palm over the cover. Her watch caught her eye—she was due at Freya’s house soon for wing-woman duty. She tightly rewound the twine, scooched off the bed and went to the wardrobe, stashing the book behind some jumpers, safely hidden until she figured out what to do with it.
***
‘I’m sorry, what now?’ Freya’s eyes were saucers. ‘Can you repeat that, please? Because it sounded like you just said you’d found Morrison Maplestone’s diary hidden under a fucking floorboard in your house.’
‘You heard right,’ said Netta.
‘Oh. My. God,’ exhaled Freya, leaning back heavily in her chair.
‘It has to be his, right? I mean, what are the chances of there beingtwoMorrison Maplestones?’
‘Slim to none, I’d say,’ said Freya. ‘What did old Petey boy have to say about it?’
Netta paused. ‘I haven’t told him yet,’ she said. ‘I only just found out whose it was before I came here, and he was out.’
Freya pushed her empty bowl away, her eyes lit with excitement. ‘Did you read it? Please tell me you read it.’
Netta’s silence was punctuated by the crackle of the baby monitor and the steady drip of the kitchen tap. She shook her head.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Freya hissed. ‘Why not?’
‘Because it said “do not read” in big letters on the front! I just felt like it’d be a shitty thing to do.’
‘Netta, he’s a grown man now. Whatever he didn’t want anyone to read about when he was a kid would be a weak trickle of piss in the ocean compared to what he gets up to these days. He’s not going to care. He’s Morrison Maplestone!’
‘Exactly!Morrison Maplestone.The guy nobody knows anything about. He’s not even on social media! And you’ve seen how much of a grumpy bastard he can be in interviews. I don’t think he’s the sort of guy who’d take having his diary read lightly.’
‘It’s not like you’d have to tell him you’d read it,’ said Freya. ‘There’s also a pretty major ker-ching factor to consider here. Do you have any idea how much you could sell that thing for? It’d be worth a mint!’
Netta fixed her friend with a weary expression. ‘Freya, I’m not going to sell a kid’s private diary. That would be pretty low.’
‘Whatareyou going to do with it then?’
