The Thompson Gunner (6 page)

So we had to sit next to each other after that, like perfect new best friends.

We rearranged the seating down in the front row of the crowded theatre, and we sat next to each other and kept up the mean secret laughing, at almost anyone's expense – the host, other comedians, the chunky tumblers from Cirque du Soleil, even the kindly Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta,
a woman who reminded me only of my long-gone grandmother, someone I loved dearly. But Rob Castle and I, in our sly muttering way, were out to take no prisoners. We became quite obviously rude but couldn't stop it, talking behind our hands at inopportune moments, even after he said, ‘You have to understand that I'm not always this impolite, but I just turned twelve and I think I could be about to dive into a very messy adolescence.'

And I giggled, actually giggled.

And he said, ‘You know, I might share my lunch with you some day. You're that kind of girl,' and I told him, ‘Hey, no way, boy germs.' But I don't know if they have boy germs in Canada, since he either didn't hear me properly or didn't get it.

It didn't matter. I'd swept up from my slump, I wanted my turn, I'd become completely fearless and I put in one of the best gigs of my life. I starred, and they didn't know that's not always where I fit in the pecking order.

Then the host called Rob Castle to the stage.

I couldn't believe how good he was, my new friend. Good enough that my first instinct was to feel surprise, and my second was to cry at the instant solemn sadness in his songs. I caught it on the way out and stopped myself, and reminded myself I was still part of the show here, down in the front row. There were eyes on me now.

It was probably just the usual tricks of the singer-songwriter at work, but deftly done. Songs about love and loss, the classic and essential topics, effortlessly poetic but each line true. He made me wonder, for one dumb romantic-moment,
if they all have broken hearts. One dumb romantic jet-lagged moment. I don't lead the life I invent for performance, after all, and I can't expect that singer/songwriters have only their own lives to tell us about.

And when he finished his final song, the last note hung in the air as if suspended or rising on an updraft, and the applause fell on it as loud as four hundred people could make it. Rob Castle smiled a boyish smile, bowed and waved and bounded from the stage for the seat next to mine, his guitar, quite by accident, still in his hand.

The Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta hugged us both on the way out. ‘Oh, you two,' she said, ‘you were wonderful.'

And I blushed fiercely, since I'd been so rude about her during her opening remarks, and because of the way she squished the two of us together in her broad grandmother's hug.

I
N THE CAB
on the way to the second radio interview, Felicity says, ‘I've been meaning to apologise about Adam last night. We haven't been going out that long, and he really wanted to come and . . .' It tails off there, and she stiffens up. ‘It won't be happening again.'

‘Why?
You've had him shot? There wasn't a problem, not as far as I was concerned.'

‘Really?'

‘Really. I think I was the one who brought up the subject of the boning knife.'

‘In the airport. Yes.' She takes a quick laugh at herself for that misguided swipe at Adam, and she gives her head a shake as though it makes less sense this morning. ‘He's probably sulking today. I'm beginning to think he might be a bit of a sulker. I'm not sure how I feel about that.'

‘Oh, a lot of them are. He's got to have that sensitive side to be a novelist, remember? And the difference between sensitive and sulking's only a matter of interpretation.'

She laughs again, at the great creative sulking of her stocky novelist-to-be boyfriend, presently pulling a surly espresso or two nearby in Northbridge. I tell her she should bring him to one of my shows. We should put his name on the door.

‘Well,
I don't know if I can do that,' she says.

‘Maybe you can't. But I can.'

‘Good,' she says, in an ambivalent way that I hadn't expected. ‘Well, he'd love to come. I know he would.' She opens her bag, gives it a shake and reaches into it for her phone. ‘I told him he was kind of banned, so that's how I know. But I can unban him now, I guess.'

She glances out the window, then checks her messages, makes a couple of notes on the itinerary. She underlines something more than she needs to, then puts a box around it.

I can see her going, ‘You are banned, Adam,' with a finger-pointing sternness that he'd have to laugh at, which might make things worse, or better.

We take a detour around some roadworks and come out with a park to our left and the river to our right. We're back on the edge of the city on the way to the ABC studios. I want to tell her that boys like Adam like that kind of thing, some decisive treatment, but only a certain amount of it and it's not always easy to measure it out right. But what do I know? For a start, I don't know Adam.

‘Tell me about this person I'm talking to next.' That seems like a better thing to say instead, and it's what I go with. Back to business. ‘What are they like? What's the story?'

Two interviews
down and we're back at the hotel thinking about coffee, but settling for mineral water. I can't help drinking it with my head tilted to the left, and that provokes another apology from Felicity. She tells me she should have had a dental appointment made for me before I got in last night, an appointment for first thing this morning.

‘You're banned from apologising,' I tell her. ‘Okay? Banned.'

The festival calls her, for at least the third time, and she checks that I'll be okay if she goes in to the office when the next interviewer arrives. It's the last interview of the morning, and she's marked the dentist's address for me on a Perth city mini-map, along with two Internet cafes. Everything's covered, and nothing's more than two blocks away.

‘I might have Richard Stubbs later in the week,' she says. ‘What's he like?'

‘He's fine. He's a good guy. Actually, I think he'd be good company in and out of cabs and all that.'

‘I hadn't expected to be working with you,' she says. ‘I put my name down for you, but I didn't think I'd get you. Technically this is work experience for me rather than fully professional. I hope that's okay. I've got my degree and everything, but it's hard breaking into the business. I've done some freelance stuff though. Mostly I work in the coffee shop that Adam works at.'

‘Well, I wouldn't have picked it.'

‘Really?'

‘No. You don't have the temperament to make coffee.' She stalls,
a strawful of mineral water on its way to her mouth. ‘I'm kidding.'

She swallows and says ‘Oh, good, right' and treats it as the joke it was supposed to be. ‘You had me worried for a second there. I thought arriving in Adam's car was a bit unprofessional, but I don't drive and he really wanted to do it.'

‘That's okay. I don't think I'm really the limo type. Adam's car worked for me. In London I've had drivers with caps. It's all too weird. And I end up in far too many cabs already, and quite a few cab rides here take a bit of a turn when the cabbie starts going, “Hey, you're that comedian, aren't you?” So I sell X-ray equipment. That's the story I tell them, and there's not one cabbie yet who's found it interesting. But it's not the only job that works that way, I guess, in cabs or at parties or wherever. There are plenty of jobs that chase you around when you don't necessarily want them to.'

‘My mother's a doctor,' Felicity says. ‘People are always wanting to show her rashes and lumps and things.'

‘If you're a comedian, every time you leave the house you've got to be ready for people hassling you to say something funny and make them laugh. And they won't laugh. It's a dare. It's a challenge, and you know they'll hold out on you. And then they'll go, “Hey, I'll tell you something
really
funny. You might want to use this . . .” Any time your face is on TV it doesn't help, obviously.'

‘Can I ask about the TV people?' Felicity says, more tentatively than she needs to. ‘The ones Emma was talking about. Are they bringing your show back?'

‘You noticed
my show? That's quite flattering. And, obviously, rare. No, this is different. More acting than that. A series, probably. That's the plan, anyway. A drama. Action. It's a big secret at the moment. It's all this gym and pool time that I'm putting in. I figure I might as well get more out of it than just the cliché of a long and healthy life. I thought I might make it tax deductible, maybe turn it into a paying job.'

Felicity, from the moment I said ‘big secret', has had no capacity to treat what I'm saying in any way other than seriously. She's nodding, and I find myself saying ‘No, really . . .', about to revisit the tax deductibility remark.

I tell her I want to create a dynamic female character who has the brains and also the physicality to do things. Make her powerful, but with a bunch of normal human imperfections. I want her to be real, but I also want to have fun with the role. I want the show to have some subtlety to it. And I guess I want her to be able to be a kind of role model, but not in an obvious way, or a preachy way. Maybe I want that, maybe I don't. Maybe I'd be happy if it's good TV.

These ambitions have been through a lot since they started, I realise that now. Your character starts with a degree in art history and training in forensics, soon enough there's much more to it, much more at stake, and she's being parachuted alone into a rogue state at night, clanking with weapons as she drifts down into the waiting darkness.

One of the staff comes and takes our glasses away. The condensation under Felicity's glass forms a letter C and her index finger connects the ends and makes a circle.

‘This is
a lot more interesting than the office,' she says. ‘You should have fun with that. With a show like that. I'm not very physical, so I'd like to see someone take that kind of character and give her more than just physicality. I'd like to see you do that.'

‘Well, we'll see what it becomes. Once the network and the international co-production partners and everyone else has had their say, I expect she'll be a large-breasted super-spy. And I don't think we can ever have too many of those. I've got a friend who's an actor who says that every script she gets has men described in three lines of detail and women described as “beautiful”. That's why I wanted to focus on creating a character, a fleshed-out character. It's like the assumption that all female comedians can do is “chick stuff” – as someone delicately put it to me not so long ago. Anyway, we'll see what happens with the TV plans. I can already imagine the wardrobe meeting, and it's all cleavage enhancement and grenades and knives and things. Are you getting worried about the subtlety?'

She smiles. ‘I am a bit. I'd still watch it, though.'

The journalist we've been waiting for arrives. She's Alice from a student newspaper, and she gives me a firm handshake and a smile that shows a mouthful of perfect teeth. Felicity checks again that I'll be okay without her, and tells me she'll have her mobile on all the time. She's going to be good at this job.

Alice speaks in a speech-and-drama type of voice, but when I turn down coffee she suggests a beer, if it's not too early in the day.

The
first open bar we find is at the far end of the mall and below street level. The beer smell rises to meet us as we walk down the stairs and into a large room with off-white feature archways and old guys with oily hair settled grimly into boozing. Horse races, somewhere, are running high up on several TV screens.

‘Welcome to Perth,' she says, without overplaying the irony or even turning her head.

The interview is conducted in just the right spirit. She's immediately likeable, an arts student who saw the last show I did here and will be paid fifty dollars for this story. I buy the beers, and have to explain why I'm drinking mine half sideways. I already know how her article will open.

She takes out a notepad with a list of questions, and then an oversized tape recorder she's borrowed from the magazine office. It looks like it was knocked off from a high-school language lab in the seventies.

‘I know,' she says. ‘State of the art.' She clears her throat a couple of times, then presses play and record. ‘Interview with Meg Riddoch, in a hand-picked Barrack Street brunch venue where ambience is not the word. Meg Riddoch, do you see yourself as a role model?'

‘Alice, it's late on a weekday morning, I said No to coffee and I'm making you drink beer in a Spanish-mission style cavern, otherwise inhabited by a group of men wagering on what might be the fourth at Werribee.'

‘So, I'll take that as a Yes?'

‘Of course.'

The
interview becomes a conversation – in the way that only some of them do – with Alice going back to her question list when she remembers to, or when a natural conclusion forms itself. I find out about her brother, her uni subject changes, her father, who hardly understands her at all but tells all his friends she's setting out to do the longest arts degree in the world. She asks the usual questions and others too, student magazine questions such as ‘Club sandwich-yes or no?' and ‘Who are you most like on the crew of
The Love Boat
?' Cable, it seems, has brought back more of these shows than it should have.

We're onto the second side of the tape when she scans down her list and says, ‘Favourite chocolate available in block or bar form?'

I tell her that I used to have a thing for Old Jamaica, since it's at least an answer I can work with. ‘The promise of dark chocolate, fruit and tincture of rum seemed like a hell of a combo when I was a kid. You could gorge yourself stupid on chocolate and feign drunkenness at the same time. Plus, it came with a kind of “pirate chic”, despite the fact that pirates were generally bastards. Actually, the whole experience was: gorge yourself stupid, feign drunkenness and talk in a vaguely Cornish accent about your parrot, and slicing people from one end to the other. Not just a chocolate bar, but fun for all the family.'