Bite The Wax Tadpole (11 page)

Never, he thought, think that a bad day cannot get any worse.

“ Niobe!”, he said with as much brightness as he could muster.

She sat down opposite him smiling softly and rather sadly. It was, he had to admit, a beguiling smile. In fact, there was much about Niobe that was beguiling - her long buttered popcorn hair, her blissfully blue eyes and clear, rosy complexion, her full lips and slim and alluring body, her intelligence and the things she did in bed that were dismissed as flights of fancy in the Kama Sutra. Her major drawback as a mistress or long-term partner was that, in Rob’s judgement, she was a teensy bit barking mad. Of course, that was just a lay diagnosis and a more medically trained person would possibly conclude that bi-polar would be a more helpful label.

He’d been vaguely aware for a while that she was a writer on one of the children’s shows but they’d first become aware of each other in a more meaningful sense at last year’s Network Christmas Party. The theme, for some reason, had been the Wild West and they’d met, both wearing Stetsons, in the queue for the Bucking Bronco when she’d turned suddenly and hit him in the eye with a beer bottle. Apologies had turned to studio gossip and mutual acquaintances before she asked: “Have you ever read “Madame Bovary”? It’s my absolute, absolute favourite novel of all time.”

He told her, truthfully, that he had read it. But it had been so long ago that all he remembered was that Emma married some drip of a doctor, had affairs with a couple of cads, got into debt and topped herself by drinking rat poison or Harpic or something similar. It wasn’t an HSC topping summary but by winging it the way he winged it in script conferences, he made it seem that he was a fully paid-up member of, and possibly Founder and Secretary of, the Sydney Branch of the Gustave Flaubert Appreciation Society. Big mistake. He’d assumed that once she’d had her quick buck she’d be on her way and that would be it. When it came to her turn he’d held her beer bottle and she’d held on to the mechanical nag with determination and rode out her time with flair and to great cheers. As she climbed off and he walked forward for his go he’d said without really thinking it through: “You must have terrific thighs.” She’d laughed and said: “Thanks very much.”

“No, no”, he’d said, reddening. “I mean for riding, for holding on...” He gave up while he was behind and climbed up onto the saddle. A few seconds later he was face down in the sawdust and she was there to pick him up and help him limp to the bar. They’d drunk the free and freely flowing beer and talked about literature and writing and modern philosophy and a few hours later, in an apartment in the fashionable end of Darlinghurst, Rob found himself taking the role of the mechanical horse as she reprised her earlier triumphant ride. Afterwards, as he lay bathed in the cold sweat of post-coital guilt and fear, she’d played with the hairs on his chest and expounded at great length on the metaphysical poets and Dostoevsky’s role as the founder of existentialism. Naked, she’d then sat cross-legged on the bed and read him the opening pages of her work in progress, a novel set during the Russian Revolution. The plot, as she briefly told him, involved a feisty young girl from Cootamundra who finds a position as a governess in Moscow, falls in love with a handsome count, helps him escape the clutches of the Bolsheviks and flees with him across the snowy Urals before they finally set up Sydney’s first blini restaurant.

He’d got home at two in the morning resolved never to go near a rodeo horse, alcohol or blondes ever again. Next day, she’d come up to the script department, given him a copy of Anna Karenina to read and invited him round for supper. He’d gone along solely in order to tell her firmly, decisively and unequivocally that what had happened had been a mistake and must never happen again. He’d got home at one o’clock in the morning with his resolution concerning rodeo horses still intact.

It’s a truth not universally acknowledged by most men that most men just aren’t cut out to be Lotharios. It’s too much bloody hard work for a start. The deceit isn’t pleasant to live with, the excuses for late nights and weekend meetings increasingly hard to find and you get a crick in the neck from constantly looking over your shoulder. Plus, this particular affair came with a reading list.

No, he really had to end it. He couldn’t see what she saw in him anyway. If he was her he’d have dumped himself long ago. And he really shouldn’t be stringing her along. He should set her free to find someone unattached, preferably a saint with a degree in psychiatry.

“What have you done to your shirt?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s just. So... how’s your day been?”

How’s your day been? How’s your bleeding day? Why wasn’t he cutting straight to the chase and telling her that they shouldn’t be seeing each other any more?

She pouted, cast her eyes down. “I had another rejection letter this morning.”

“Oh, no! That’s...?”

“Twelve.”

“Twelve. Goodness.” Perhaps not a good time to tell her about “Prick!”

“It’s hopeless. I’m rubbish. Maybe I’m only fit for writing crap for television.”

“It’s a living”, he said, surprisingly defensive.

She cupped her hands over the top of his causing his shirt cuffs to dip into the chicken sauce and his eyes to dart about the room to see if anyone was watching.

“Just because you write crap for TV doesn’t mean that’s all you can write”, she said earnestly. “You just need the time and space to feed your creativity. Which is why we should go and live in Greece.”

Greece held a strong attraction for Niobe despite her being named after one of the less fortunate of mythological Greek ladies and her forebears being ten pound Poms from Huddersfield. She had visions of the two of them living on a sun kissed island as peasant-novelists in a white-walled shack overlooking the Aegean. It did have a certain romantic appeal but Rob had been to Greece and the plumbing on your typical Greek island left a lot to be desired. Such as the capacity to deal with anything larger than a Malteser. A couple of days of flushing with a bucket would be enough to kill any romance stone dead. They’d end up going through the motions. Anyway, even if they were given the use of the Onassis family mansion he still wouldn’t be going.

“Have you thought any more about it?”

Rob took a deep breath. He was going to tell her now, tell her it was all over and risk her screaming and stabbing him with a blunt, greasy knife. But just then, a DA from “Neighbourhood Hospital” came skidding up to the table where the gore-covered extras were eating.

“Sorry, fellers”, he said, “they’ve brought the schedule forward. We need you on set now.” He looked across at Rob’s crimson-stained shirt. “You too, mate.”

“Be right with you”, replied Rob.

“What? You’re an extra on Neighbourhood Hospital?”

He stood up. “They were a bit short and well...”

“Are you going to the Writers’ Guild thing on Thursday? Jimmy Gardner’s talking about writing the Hollywood blockbuster.”

Rob remembered Jimmy when he was a writer on Ricketty Street and thought that the second act climax was something to do with premature ejaculation. In Rob’s opinion he’d had little talent but that was outweighed to a monstrous degree by his outrageous self-belief. And in Hollywoodland, apparently, outrageous self-belief got you in through a lot of studio doors. For starters, it saved producers the bother of finding out if you were talented if you just told them yourself, upfront. Which is presumably how Jimmy came to get a sole screen credits on “Chopped Liver Three” and “The Decapitator” both of which, in Rob’s opinion at least, used expletives instead of dialogue and severed limbs in place of plot.

“We could go back to my place afterwards and re-work my plot narrative.”

“Possibly”, he said firmly and decisively before scurrying out of the door after the real extras.

Pausing only at the wardrobe department to buy a cast-off shirt, Rob returned to the script department with all the enthusiasm of a one-armed goalkeeper facing a penalty. Sweet Jesus in the morning, wouldn’t it be nice to be somebody else.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Malcolm swirled the flat ginger beer round the whiskey tumbler and watched as Ivor, the rugged, ex-boxer barman, grabbed the tattooed drunk by the collar of his flannelette shirt and propelled him towards the pub door.

“Get out, you mongrel”, growled Ivor, “We don’t want your sort in here.”

“You wait till my brother hears about this”, whined the squirming drunk. “You’ll wish you’d never been born.”

“Out!” With a final thrust, Ivor chucked the bloke out of the door and turned back towards the bar. Suddenly, he stopped, his face a mask of pain. He clutched at his chest. He sank to the floor. Malcolm knocked his glass over as he rushed across to the figure now lying inert on the floor.

“Someone call an ambulance. Now!”, he commanded as he started to search for vital signs.

“And cut”, yelled the DA. “If that one’s okay we’re moving on to the deli.”

Malcolm straightened up, knees creaking. The sudden change in blood pressure sent his head spinning like a Hills hoist in a hurricane. He steadied himself on the back of a chair as Ivor, known to the membership office of Equity as Fred, also picked himself up. “Ooh, I do like a good heart attack. And now I get five weeks flat on my back in ICU being poked and prodded by that lovely Doctor Gavin. Who’s a lucky camper, eh?”

“Just so long as they don’t decide that you catch MRSI and cark it.”

“Wouldn’t bother me if they did. Gerald and I are thinking of chucking it all in and buying a property up the coast anyway.”

“Good for you and Gerald.” Malcolm slumped down on a chair. He was pale and sweating and a swatch of gauze seemed to have floated in front of his eyes.

“Are you all right?”, asked the concerned Fred. “It was me who was supposed to have had the coronary.”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine. I just...” He took some deep breaths, shut his eyes, let his shoulders slump. Relax, relax, relax. Ah, that was better. Puffing out relieved cheeks he opened his eyes.

“Good god, who’s that?”, he said in a manner that a Victorian novelist might have described as an ejaculation.

Fred followed Malcolm’s pointing finger. “Tim the props feller.”

“Not Tim. I know who Tim is. There, there... by the camera.”

The camera operator having deserted his post, Fred could only report that he saw no-one. Malcolm screwed his eyes shut, waited for a breath or two, then tentatively raised his right eye-lid. He, too, saw no-one.

“I think you should take a bit more water with it”, advised Fred as he headed off for his next scene. Like Sir Lancelot looking at the Lady of Shallot, Malcolm gazed at the camera and mused a little while. He’d seen Norman Tubby, plain as a pikestaff, dressed in doublet and hose, peeking into the camera lens. Not in his mind’s eye, not a half-glimpse out of the corner of his eye, not somebody bearing a passing resemblance to the dead thespian but the dead thespian himself. He’d read about some woman who’d had a minor stroke whose only lasting effect had been to make her speak with a Scottish accent. Was the same sort of thing happening to him? Had he suffered some sort of mini-stroke that was going to lead to him seeing apparitions of people whose picture he’d seen in the paper? Poor old Norman Tubby he could take but what if he turned a corner and found himself face to face with Tony Abbot or Posh Spice? It didn’t bear thinking about.

It was a sultry night. Cicadas belched, frogs burped and the humidity was as heavy as a marathon runner’s sock. To the west, thunder rumbled and the sky sparked. Rob, wearing only boxer shorts and a singlet, slumped in his study under the largely ineffective fan. Perspiration covered his body as well as leaking out of the back of his head and dribbling down his neck. The first gulps of the several frosty beers he’d already downed took the edge off the heat but by the time he’d smacked his lips and wiped his forehead the ale was already halfway to becoming tepid. It was the sort of night on which Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner would have done their best work as they chronicled the sweaty goings on in the sweltering South.

He sat back in his chair and looked along the dusty shelves full of, mostly second-hand, books lining the room. It was one of the pleasures of life, coming across a previously undiscovered second-hand emporium and stepping out twenty minutes later with a plastic bag full of slightly foxed and highly eclectic books. Not that he’d read them all, of course. It was enough to know they were there, waiting for unemployment or retirement (or possibly some ghastly, physically debilitating illness) to afford him the time to indulge himself.

Sometimes, tonight for example, it seemed that the names along the serried spines of the books mocked and reproached him. Dickens – taken from school and dumped, terrified, into the boot blacking factory; Dostoevsky – lined up in front of a mock firing squad (did they all shout bang at the same time and wet themselves laughing as Fyodor cacked his pants?); Laurie Lee – walking from his little village to London and from there to Spain to fight against the Fascists; George Orwell – living down and out in Paris and London; Solzhenitsyn scribbling away in the freezing Gulag. There was “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” dictated by the French bloke blinking his left, or possibly right, eyelid, the only bit of him left working after a stroke. And then there was him, with a well-paid, if slightly tentative job, and only a pregnant wife, a mistress, a mortgage and mould in the hallway to worry about. Writing a great novel should be a walk in the park.

Sighing, he turned back to the manuscript of “Prick!”. Marlowe, alias Bounderby, was trapped in the courtyard of the George Inn by a couple of Spanish assassins with poison-tipped poignards. How to get him out of this rather tricky predicament? He wondered what Hemingway would have done.

He sat and waited and the thing with the story never happened.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The police car, lights flashing, siren blaring, skidded to a tyre shredding halt outside the old factory. A female Police Officer jumped out of the car as a man in a hoodie ran out of the building and ducked down an alleyway. The Officer gave chase. She sprinted round the corner into the alley and yelled out: “You’ll never get away, Tony. Give up now.” Tony’s response was to pull a gun out of his pocket, turn and fire. The bullet ricocheted off the wall by the side of the Police Officer’s head, showering her with brick dust. Tony raised the gun again and she went into a diving roll while, at the same time, unholstering her gun in one fluid movement. She came up into a kneeling position, her left hand supporting her right in a perfect firing position. “Drop it, Tony or I’ll shoot.”