Bite The Wax Tadpole (10 page)

Neil was dressed, as usual, like a poster boy for the NSW Homeless Society Clothing Bins and carried the same scuffed leather satchel that he’d probably stuffed his school lunch into way back when. The snowy whiteness of his hair, tied back in a pony tail, contrasted sharply with his florid face on which the lines of time seemed to have been etched with a carelessly controlled power tool.

“Unscheduled stop on the Freeway” continued Neil. “Irritable bowel syndrome. I’ll sit here, shall I?

“You did say sit, didn’t you?”, inquired Rob blandly. Hope put the cast list and set list and updated notes in front of Neil as he firtled around inside his satchel bringing out crumpled tissues, a banana skin and a copy of “The Idiot’s Guide to the Colon”..

“Saw your episode of Neighbourhood Hospital the other night”, said Hope as she set up her laptop. “It was, you know, like, really, really good.”

Neil had found his inhaler and took a deep suck before replying. “Re-written. Bastards changed almost every word I wrote. I’d have my name taken off the credits if I didn’t need the residuals.”

Oh, god, thought Rob, that doesn’t make what he was going to have to do later any easier. “Right”, he smiled, “if you’re all sitting comfortably, we shall begin.”

“Sorry, sorry”, said Neil, “I’ve not had time to look through the plotting notes. Computer trouble. Virus or something. You know what it’s like.”

“No problem. Still on Windows 98 are you?”, smiled Rob through teeth as gritted as a Canadian logging road in mid-winter. He felt a tremendous loyalty to Neil as he did to all the writers on the show but there was a limit and poor old Neil had exceeded it several scripts ago. For the first, and he hoped only, time in his life he envied Donald Trump. If only he could just call writers into his office, tell them: you’re fired and then dismiss them from his thoughts as well as their jobs. But he couldn’t. There were other ways of sacking people these days, of course. As Oscar Wilde might have put it had he lived in the IT age: a brave man does it with a sword, a coward with an e-mail. But, tempting though the thought was, Rob couldn’t quite let himself fall that low. And so the meeting went on the way it had been foreshadowed - slowly and frustratingly. After an hour they’d crawled along to the approach to the first commercial break.

“Okay”, intoned Rob, “scene nine, The Park, afternoon. I thought we’d come in on Sam and Billy lying in the long grass, locked in a romantic embrace,”

“Sam and Billy?”, questioned Neil.

“Sam and Billy”, confirmed Rob.

“They’re new gay characters, are they?”

“Gay? Samantha and Billy?”

“Oh, Samantha and Billy. Them. Right.” Neil paused as the mills of his mind ground on. “It’s an incest story then. Very good. Very brave of you. Well done.”

“You’re losing me now, Neil.”

“They are brother and sister, aren’t they? Samantha and Billy?”

“No, no, they were pretending to be brother and sister, remember? So Mrs Grobelaar would take them into the foster home together.”

Anyone who has tried to explain the Theory of Relativity to a Labrador would have recognised the blank look on Neil’s face. “Really? I don’t... I must have missed an episode or two. Sorry, carry on.”

With his heart slipping into his boots, Rob couldn’t face carrying on. “Maybe we should take a break, eh? Hope, could you get us some coffees from the canteen.”

“No coffee for me, Thank you, Hope”, Doctor’s orders. Blood pressure.” He underlined the point by taking a bottle out of his satchel and popping a pill into his mouth. “Weak tea, please, dash of skimmed milk, no sugar.”

Hope made a note on her pad. “Rob?”

He knew from this morning’s reading that his own blood pressure was not in the ideal zone and that his bad cholesterol was triumphing over the good but what the hell? “Double strength cappuccino, full fat milk and a Mars bar. King size.”

Hope left on her mission and Rob was left alone with Neil who was now popping a pill from another bottle. “How was my last script, by the way? I altered the structure a bit. You didn’t mind, did you?”

“Actually, Neil”, said Rob, putting his big toe into the Rubicon. “I was going to have a word after the meeting...”

The long drawn out “actually” and the flat delivery were enough to tell Neil that the word, whatever it might be, was not going to be one he wanted to hear.

“Oh, God...”

Melissa stabbed a finger at the photo in “TV Week” and said: “I want it done like her.” She was sitting in a high-back leatherette seat in a hairdressing salon called “Split Neds” where she was being attended by the eponymous owner himself. Ned’s own jet-black hair was gelled into what looked like a minor tsunami about to break over his left ear and he wore a black, close-fitting T-shirt through which his pectoral muscles and biceps bulged like walnuts in a novelty condom. He stared at the photo, gave it his professional once-over. “Can do, no probs”, he said as he swirled the plastic cape round her like a matador executing a veronica. “If you’d just like to take off your sunnies, I’ll make a start.”

With some reluctance Melissa removed the sunglasses. Ned fluffed up her hair and looked at her back to front features in the mirror. “Just need to trim a teensy-weensy bit off the back. Is that all right?”

“Just do what you have to do”, was the reply. Didn’t seem she was that interested, thought Ned, as she was looking out of the salon window rather than into the mirror. He looked at her again and then at the magazine now lying open next to the sink. Funny...

“Did you know you look a dead ringer for...”

“No I don’t”, snapped his client, “I just want my hair like hers, okay? Do you have a problem with that?”

Well, thought Ned, that’s me in my place and no error. “I see Sweeny Todd’s back on at the Theatre Royal. Have you seen it? Fantastic. ‘Course, he was a gents’ barber but still, you can dream, can’t you?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A passing psychologist would have made much of the way Rob twisted the pen around his fingers and tapped it on the desk as he spoke while his other hand constantly played with the damp collar of his shirt. Neil, meanwhile, was taking a mighty gulp from his inhaler.

“See, the thing is, Neil, what I’m trying to say is...”

“You’re giving me the flick, that’s what you’re trying to say”, gasped Neil.

“No, no, no, not at all, not the flick. No, more, more a chance to recharge your batteries. Think of it as a sabbatical. Travel... read... go the theatre...”

Having sucked the inhaler dry, Neil now retrieved yet another bottle from his travelling pharmacopeia. “Do you know how much medicines cost these days? Some of the ones I’m on aren’t even on the PBS.”

“You’ve got other work”, said Rob. “Neighbourhood Hosp... or have they...?”

“Bastards”, confirmed Neil as he threw down a couple of tablets from what he hoped was the right bottle.

Next time, if there is a next time, thought Rob, web-mail wins out over self-esteem.

Underneath her new hairdo, Melissa strolled through a shopping mall and into JB Hi-Fi. She noticed from behind her shades that quite a few people seemed to do a double-take when they saw her which was very encouraging. She found the DVD section and browsed along the shelves until she came to the R section from where she plucked a copy of “Ricketty Street – the Must See Again Episodes” with the smiling face of a female police person on the cover. Perfect.

In retrospect, if ten minutes is considered long enough to have formed a contemplative view of the past, Rob knew he should have left his little talk with Neil until the meeting was over. Neil could well have stormed out in high dudgeon, whatever that was, or, given his various medical conditions, burst a blood vessel. As it was, the meeting continued.

“Right”, said Rob, “let’s knock this scene off, shall we?”

“Can you speak up, please?”, asked Neil.

Rob did the things with the pen and his shirt collar again. “Look, Neil, mate, are you sure you’re all right down there?”

From below the table where he sat with his pen, pad and inhaler, Neil replied in the affirmative.

“Fair enough”, sighed Rob. “Where were we? Yes, right Sam... Samantha and Billy in the park canoodling under the shade of the old apple tree. They’re...”

Hope looked up from her laptop. “Canoodling? What’s canoodling?”

“Kissing in a canoe.”

“A canoe? We don’t...”

“Just put snogging. And it doesn’t actually have to be an apple tree. Any tree will do – native, hardwood, deciduous, doesn’t matter as long as they’re under it and locked in a passionate embrace from which they look up and see Felicity and Brendan looking furtive near the duck pond.”

“Who’s Brendan?”, asked a disembodied voice.

Lunchtime. Melancholy wrapped itself around Rob like a sodden beach-towel. He knew he should be out jogging or playing squash or reading improving literature but he only had the energy to drag himself to the canteen, choose the least unappetising meal from the hotplate and slump into a booth with a ragged Daily Telegraph for company. He felt as drained as those German dams after the bouncing bombs had done their work. If Nev Beale wanted more new blood on the writers’ list it would mean spilling some more of the old blood and more mornings like this one. Neil had left the meeting with as much dignity as he could muster after crawling out from under the table. “I want you to know”, he had said, declaimed almost, framed in the doorway, “that although I have been condemned without a chance to defend myself I hold no malice towards anyone and I shall endeavour to provide you with a script commensurate with my talents and experience.” He had then swept out of the office like a Napoleonic general leaving his tent before sweeping back a few seconds later to retrieve his inhaler from under the table.

Rob ran his fork tentatively through what the menu board had called a fricassee de frango and from which he had deduced that “frango” was Portuguese for “beige piece of meat (may once have been chicken)”. Next to him sat a group of extras from “Neighbourhood Hospital”, the other drama that was shot in the studio. From their bloodied and ripped clothes they were either survivors of some horrific accident or there’d been one hell of a party in the Nurses’ Home. He’d thought about calling Damian, the script producer on NH to see if there were any free writing slots but that was problematic as he’d still have Neve Beale to deal with. Still, he could try Neighbours and Home and Away and if he could get on their lists he’d make enough to survive and possibly have enough spare time to work on “Prick!” and even the sequel which he’d tentatively titled “Bodkin!”. He’d read that it was important to convince publishers you had more than one book in you. Then there was “Hill End”, his embryonic movie script set in the New South Wales gold rush days, which he was hoping would attract some development money from Screen Australia. Butch Cassidy and Sundance escape the shoot out in Bolivia and head Down Under. It was a good one-liner but that was about all he had at present. Research. When did he have time for research? And, of course, there was “Bleak City”. He was spreading himself too thin, he knew that, but how the hell did you know which idea had the legs to go the distance?

He looked down at the gloop in which the maybe-chicken slid about. Tomorrow, he promised himself, I’ll start on the salads and the fruit and cut down on the carbs and the fat and all the other flavour. Maybe going through such a purification ritual would be good for his mind and soul as well as his body. He might become more aesthetic, gain fresh insights, start writing with a revitalised intensity. Or he might just end up craving Mars bars and chips at three in the morning.

No, no, have to be positive, start practising what Randy Pratt preached. How much danger was there really from this Dutch show? The Network was on a bit of a roll at the moment. The show pitting midwives against obstetricians– “I’m a Foetus Get Me Out of Here” was going gangbusters as was “Master Baker”. Would they replace a show with a wobbly but reasonable viewing audience with one that only had a fifty-fifty chance of making it to week three? Well, yes they would seeing as how they were as clueless as the crossword in “Psychics Weekly”. Which meant he and the team really had to get their collective organs working at full throttle with every stop pulled out.

Then there was the baby to consider. He’d long ago accepted, regretfully, that he might have to, at some point in the future, occasionally attend to a grand-child’s lumpy nappy. But, come the going down of the sun, grandkids can be handed back. The prospect of a hallway permanently full of pampers and endless nights full of wailing from inside and outside the nursery filled him with dread. What if he grew to resent the poor bloody child? And what if it was disabled in some way? Wasn’t that more likely with older parents? Autism. He’d seen a documentary about autism in kids with older parents. Or was it Downs’ Syndrome? Hapsburg Lip? Whatever it was, he’d cope badly and end up hating himself for it.

He was also worried about the Muse, whose visits were already beginning to look more and more like duty calls on an aged and not much-cared for relative, never popping round again. Rob had no regard at all for UFOs, astrology or homeopathy but he did have a deep-seated belief that artistry flowed from the intervention of ethereal Greek ladies who gathered on Olympus and, during girly chit chat over ambrosia and nectar, decided who got to have inspiration blown up their nostrils and who got smoke blown up their arses. There was probably a more scientific explanation for creativity, a defective gene most probably, but being visited late at night by a ringlet-haired goddess in a wispy peplos was infinitely more appealing than relying on a particular sequence of nucleic acid to kick in.

He took a tentative bite of the chicken and immediately decided that the flavour would be improved, or at least disguised, by a liberal slosh of tomato sauce. As is almost invariably the case, the easy pour spout of the bottle was plugged with crud. With an accompanying shake of the head and a “tch tch” he unscrewed the top and aimed the sauce in the general direction of his lunch. Just before he smacked the bottom of the bottle he unwisely happened to glance towards the door. Oh, God! She was just coming in, looking around hopefully. Splat! A thick dollop of tomato sauce hit his shirt front, and hung there for a brief moment before sliding towards his crotch. And now she was coming towards him. Bloody hell!