Bite The Wax Tadpole (6 page)

The phone rang. He looked around for it. The phone, the phone, where the hell was it? There was the cradle, where was the handset? There it bloody well was - sticky-taped to the wall. The maturity of these young people, really.

He wrenched it free, bringing with it a thin layer of flaky plaster. “Hello?”

“Is that the wonderful Kevin? Gemma publicity here.”

“Hello, Gemma publicity.”

“Just wondering how you’re getting on with that story line for the Sydney Swans. Their people are just desperate for them to appear in the show.”

“Are they? I wouldn’t want to disappoint their people but it’s not easy finding a plausible reason for fifteen blokes...”

“Eighteen.”

“Really? Well, there you go, eighteen blokes, beanpoles to a man, turning up in Rickety Street.”

“If you could let me know by Friday so I can book some dates, I’d be ever so grateful. And a bit of a coup. You know the soldier chappie won the VC in Iraq –or do I mean Afghanistan? – anyway, apparently he’s a big fan of the show and his agent says he’s keen for a walk on part. I thought maybe he could rescue someone from a burning building, that sort of thing.”

“Maybe he could rescue a Swan from drowning.”

“I think a child would be better but you’re the writer. Must go, Kylie’s ready for her interview. Ciao.”

It was hard to imagine Henry Hooke or Fred Hitch or one of the other VCs from Rorke’s Drift appearing on the cover of “Men’s Health.” Or Lieutenant Bromhead on “Dancing With The Stars”. No, back in those days you received your medal from a grateful nation then sailed off to India to die of dysentery. Or you ended up in the workhouse like Jones 593 or blowing your brains out like Jones 716. These days 716 would have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In those days all he got was a backwards facing gravestone. He recalled the medals and the mementoes and the photos and stories from the school trip to the regimental museum in Brecon. For days afterwards he’d imagined himself as a heroic redcoat. Then he got a paper cut and extrapolated it to a Zulu stabbing a spear in his belly.

“Ow, ow, bloody hell!” As he put the phone down the sticky tape took a Randy of his sideburns with it.

“Ah, I was hoping you were in.” Rob, tenderly rubbing the side of his face, looked up to see a woman in police uniform standing in the doorway.

“A blonde police woman”, he said. “Ah, well, it’s a fair cop.”

“Promise me you won’t ever put any of your jokes into the scripts”, said Phyllida.

“Don’t worry. They say you should write about what you know so I’ll stick with tragedy. So, what can I do for you?”

An actor at the office door is not often a welcome sight to the averagely paranoid script producer. As Aristotle advised, or if he didn’t, should have advised, in his Poetics: beware of thespians bearing story ideas. In Rob’s experience, if not in Aristotle’s, their story ideas, although well-meant, were the dramatic equivalent of the freezer packing up in a fish filleting factory. And if they weren’t offering unsought writing advice they came to complain that their character would never say or do what the script demanded of them. “Although I’m a Labor man myself, I feel my character is instinctively a Liberal voter”; “No, no, no, my character would never have a green tea pot”. But Phyllida didn’t seem to be brandishing a script like a battle axe or a wad of research notes so...

“I need a few light blocks in the middle of March. I’m doing a play.”

Rob feigned shock and horror. “A play? On the stage? In front of real people? Have you gone mad? We’ve got the live episode coming up soon. Isn’t that enough insanity for you?”

“It won’t have the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd, though, will it? She could have added that she needed desperately to get away from this turgid little show but didn’t. “I’ve cleared it with Leo.”

“Fair enough. What are you doing?”

“The Vagina Monolgues.”

“Interesting. Did I ever tell you I wrote a similar play from the male perspective? It was called “Talking Bollocks.” So, what do you fancy? Couple of weeks in a coma? Going undercover in a Trappist Monastery?”

“I’ll leave it up to you. You and your peerless plotting skills.”

“I am but an actor’s labourer.”

Phyllida turned to leave, nearly colliding with Hope who was coming through the door with an armful of scripts. Rob eyed them in the way that a security guard in Kabul might view a truck hurtling towards him with the word “bomb” flashing on a neon sign on the bumper bar.

“Production need them over-editing asap. Or sooner. Don’t shout at me.”

She gingerly placed the scripts on the table. Rob stared at them, his bedtime companions for tonight. Bang went another scene from “Bleak City”. “Sometimes I think I’ve sold my soul. Like Faust. Do you know Faust?”

“Of course, he’s that... no, I don’t.”

“Sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for insight into all of human knowledge. Got to sleep with Helen of Troy as a bit of a bonus.”

“Golly!”

“Yes... so nothing like my pact with the Network at all when you come to think about it.”

Rob had never read Goethe, Marlowe or Mann’s tales of the lecherous old clever-dick and had no desire whatsoever to see Gounod’s opera but at least he knew the reference. How can you have a university degree and never have heard of Faust?

Hope could certainly write. The submission she’d done when applying for the script assistant’s post had been excellent. Derivative, of course but what the hell wasn’t these days? Maybe it was genetic; perhaps there was a vein of writing talent running back through her family history that had skipped a generation or two. As far as he knew, her father was a public servant in the State Debt Recovery Office and her mother did some sort of secretarial work in the local TAFE. There was actually something about Hope that made him feel quite avuncular although he stopped well short of any outward showing of such an inclination as, these days, one friendly arm around a young female shoulder and you’d be defending yourself against allegations of sexual harassment. But, still, he felt he should be pointing her in the right direction.

“You know, you really should get a proper job, Hope.”

“But this is a... what do you mean, proper job?”

He leaned back in his chair, swivelled it slightly so that he looked at her from an angle and attempted to exude the persona of a literary maven. It was unlikely that he’d carry it off, he knew, but still.

“You want to be a writer, don’t you? Then go and find something to write about. Travel. Join a circus. Play piano in a Parisian brothel.”

“Brothel?”

“It’s traditional. Well, travel is, anyway. ”

A random image of his own literary pilgrimage to Europe flashed into his mind. It involved vomiting outside Hemingway’s old flat in the Rue Mouffetard.

He had intended that summer of his far away youth to be the start of his novel writing career and had packed a hefty supply of notebooks and pens along with changes of socks and underwear and a copy of Europe on £10 a day. Or was it £5? It felt so long ago it could have been half a groat.

He’d arranged to go travelling with Gareth Jenkins during his, Gareth’s, vacation from studying English at Durham University. He, himself, was taking the time off from being a clerical officer in Merthyr Jobcentre. It hadn’t been a complete waste of a year. He was taking A levels at the local tech with the intention of getting to university now that his dad’s fatal illness had turned into a slight cough. He’d also taken to drinking pints of bitter, cultivating a sardonic look and writing poetry into the small hours. His ambition, not entirely unique to that part of Wales, was to become the new Dylan Thomas. To this end he filled his poems with complex rhythms and allusions, some of which he actually understood. Still, poetry was for the reader to understand, not necessarily the poet who was but a conduit to the Muse. The Bard of Dowlais. Had a nice ring to it. Still not too late.

He and Gareth had mapped out their itinerary via letter (ye gods, it must have been a long time ago). They’d start at Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and end up in Kafka’s Prague, visas permitting, taking in Flaubert’s Normandy, Hemingway’s Paris and Isherwood’s Berlin along the way. Then, a week before the ferry sailed, Gareth had phoned to say he’d met a girl in a Marlowe tutorial who’d invited him to spend the summer at her parents’ villa in Cap Ferrat. He did understand, didn’t he? Of course Rob understood. If a girl had invited him to spend a week in her parents’ caravan in Aberystwyth he’d have cancelled the trip and sod Gareth.

And so he’d traipsed his lonely way across Europe through the dampest, soggiest summer weather in living memory. Rain was not unknown in South Wales so it wasn’t that he wasn’t used to it. Rain was in his blood. His father’s standard reply when some cheery soul remarked on it being a lovely day was: suppose it’s all right if you like that sort of thing. And it wasn’t the volume. Dams hadn’t overflowed, rivers hadn’t burst their banks, Venice had not floated off into the Adriatic. It was a persistent, remorseless drizzle that draped itself over Europe like a heavy tarpaulin. Every youth hostel, every pension had been damp. His clothes were damp, his copy of “Lord of the Rings” turned the colour of a drowned fox and his notebooks were too wrinkled to write in. Well, that was his excuse. Solzhenitsyn had written on scraps of KGB-issue toilet paper in Siberia. Surely he could have written in a moist exercise book in a cafe in Baden Baden? It was there, looking at the funicular disappearing into the mist as it climbed Mount Merkur, that he realised he was not a writer who could thrive on the miseries of life. It’s hard when you’re full of youthful creative zeal to admit, especially to yourself, that you prefer “ The Two Ronnies” to “The Dance of Death”.

And then, in Vienna, he’d sprinted through the puddles in a rain-sodden Prater and jumped aboard an almost empty carriage on the Third Man Ferris wheel. Inside were the ghosts of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton and two girls with backpacks. The one with the long, damp hair and a dimple in her chin had smiled at him and he was immediately smitten. It was an odd word, smitten, but that was the only one that seemed appropriate. His cheeks had flushed, his heart had fluttered like a hummingbird and the Vienna Philharmonic had struck up The Emperor Waltz in the carriage below. The kangaroo on her dripping cagoule, the flag of the Southern Cross on her backpack and her friend telling her that she couldn’t wait to get back to middle of the winter Sydney for some better weather gave him some hope that language wouldn’t be a barrier. What to say, though? Up to that point, his track record with the opposite sex was not encouraging. For inspiration, he’d gazed at the rain falling into the leaden Danube. “Not very blue, is it?”

How different things might have been had the sun shone in Vienna that day. He could have gone back to Merthyr, finished his A levels and...

“Are you all right?”, inquired Hope.

“What?” He snapped out of his reverie. All those memories had coalesced together in a unit of thought that had, like fundamental particles in a cyclotron, existed for only an exquisite fraction of a second.

“Oh, ignore me, you probably don’t want to be the next Hemingway, anyway, do you?”

“Did Hemingway play the piano in a brothel?”

“Quite possibly. If there was a queue.”

The phone rang. “Hello?... Yes, Nev... you’ve already mentioned it...... in the car park?... No? Must have been someone else then... ah, well, actually, I’ve got a script meeting at...” The phone went dead. As dead as the art of conversation, it appeared.

“I’ll just... I’ve got things to, you know”, said Hope turning away.

“Just a minute, young lady”, said Rob. He held out the live episode script. “These are the final, final amendments for the live ep. I need you to type ‘em up and get ‘em out. And please remind your colleagues in the scriptorium that if one word of this – and that includes prepositions, personal pronouns and the name of the show – gets leaked to a certain radio station whose call sign we do not mention, their names will be appearing in the Writers’ Guild Magazine’s obituary column.”

Hope took the script from him as reverently as an Old Testament priest might have accepted a sacrificial lamb. “Absolutely”, she said. “Wild hearses wouldn’t drag anything out of us.”

“Did you say hearses?”

“Yes. Wild hearses wouldn’t...”

“Yes, yes, fine, off you go.”

QE bloody D, really.

CHAPTER FIVE

Malcolm, now dressed in a manner befitting a chap with silver hair and a medical degree sat behind the desk of his make-believe surgery quietly turning over the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. Another pollie caught rorting the system... another train broken down on the Harbour Bridge... more statistics showing that the country was going down the toilet like a well-polished turd... more... Jesus! His hands clamped into tight claws, tearing the edges of the paper. He screwed up his eyes and gasped. The sudden pain behind his eyes made him feel nauseous. Christ, he’d be glad when he got the results of the tests, found out what was wrong with him. Of course, they might reveal that he’d only got six months to live. In which case he’d tell the powers that be where they could stuff the show, gather together his savings, such as they were, and head off to die in Tuscany in a lake of vino and a surfeit of la dolce vita. At least that’s what he liked to think he’d do. In all probability he’d just fade away like the proverbial old soldier.

“Uncle Max, Uncle Max, quick! There’s been an accident. Joe’s been hit by a car and he’s stopped breathing!”

Malcolm took no notice of the raven-haired sixteen year- old in a school uniform who’d dashed breathlessly in through the door and then out again. He also took no notice of her when she dashed back in again...

“Uncle Max, Uncle Max, quick! There’s been an accident. Joe’s been hit by a car and he’s stopped breathing!”

... and out again. He was similarly unperturbed when a slim young man in a polo neck shirt started taking Polaroid shots of the set from various angles, merely continued turning the pages of the SMH. Floods... famine... war... could be any edition of the paper from the last twenty years.