Bite The Wax Tadpole (19 page)

In her outer inner city apartment Charlea awoke flushed with excitement. Today was the day when she would show the Harriets and the doubting Thomases and the whoevers of this world that she could act. She flung open the balcony window and lifted up her arms to welcome in the day.

“The quality of mercy is not strained”, she loudly let the world know in perfect pentameter. The Great Iamb...

Niobe, eyes as black and ringed as an insomniac panda, sat in the armchair where she’d been all night with an old shawl pulled about her shoulders reading the last few pages of “Madame Bovary.” She closed the book and sighed. Poor Emma. Driven to her death by a romantic nature and high interest rates.

Yawning, she spooned coffee granules into a Jane Eyre mug and pressed play on the hi-fi. “Il dolce suono mi colpì di sua voce!” sang Maria Callas to the haunting accompaniment of a glass harmonica. “Ah, quella voce m'è qui nel cor discesa!” Niobe could see Lucia staggering from the bridal chamber, wiping the ensanguined knife on her wedding dress.

“Fuggita io son da' tuoi nemici. Un gelo me serpeggia nel sen!”

As the kettle boiled, Niobe grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors, staggered around the kitchen, looking high and low, tearing at her night dress. With her other hand she grabbed a squeezable bottle of ketchup and squirted dollops of the red stuff over herself.

“Presso la fonte meco t'assidi alquanto! Si', Presso la fonte meco t'assidi.” With a small cry, she threw herself to the floor and wept. Mad scene? Hah! She’d give him a bloody mad scene all right.

On edge and sweating, as per, no, possibly more than per, Rob spooned down his muesli while cocking an ear to Randy’s latest chapter.

“You are now nearing the end of this course and we’ve come a long way on our journey. What, for you, has been the biggest lesson that you’ve learned? I’d like you to take a moment and reflect.”

Rob reflected that he’d probably have learned more about creativity from listening to Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits.

“Everybody’s answer will be different, of course but the one lesson I’d like you take away with you is that you have the right to fail. If you fail, let failure be your friend. Learn from your mistakes and you’ll be a wiser person.”

Maybe I could apply for the job of removing the clichés from your books and tapes, thought Rob. That should keep me in full-time employment for a good few years. He was swilling the cereal bowl under the tap when there came a scream from the general direction of the bathroom followed by the slamming of a door and the appearance in the kitchen of Nikki wrapped in a bath towel.

“There’s a frog in the bathroom!”

Alison joined them. “You’re going to have to get this damp sorted out.”

Toby lolloped in, grinning. “Yeah, it’ll be water buffalo in the lounge room next.”

Why were they looking expectantly at him? He wasn’t David Attenborough. Didn’t they remember the time he’d taken them to the Koala Park in Pennant Hills and one of the eponymous and supposedly cuddly, cute and semi-comatose residents had shat down his sleeve? Nature wasn’t in his nature.

“Are you going to get it out or what?”, demanded Nikki.

If “or what” had been a more well-defined alternative he’d have gone for that but as it was...

“Right, leave it to me, doesn’t matter if I’m late for work.”

“For God’s sake”, said Alison as he strode purposefully off towards the garage, “it’s a frog not a nest of Taliban insurgents.”

After a few moments banging around, he returned with a cardboard box and a shovel.

“What are you going to do with that?”, demanded Alison, pointing at the shovel.

“Dig an escape tunnel.” He was still the master of irony. “I’m going to shoo it into this box and then release it into the wild.”

“Just hurry, will you, I am going to be so late”, wailed Nikki.

Sighing, the intrepid Frog Hunter flung open the door and stepped quickly into the bathroom. From outside they heard almost immediately the crash of metal on tile and a muffled “oh, bollocks!”

“Are you all right in there?”

The door opened and Rob stepped back out still holding box and shovel.

“Did you get it?”, asked Alison.

“In a manner of speaking.”

They all looked at the cardboard box.

“It’s your fault”, he said to Nikki, “you shouldn’t have dropped the soap on the floor.”

“What?”

He’d entered the bathroom fully intent on being brave and masculine and doing the right thing but all this had come to nought when he slipped on the soap. The frog didn’t stand a chance. It didn’t even get in a hop before the shovel removed it from the food chain.

Rob turned the shovel round to show them a perfectly laid out specimen of the Eastern Banjo Frog. Its legs were splayed, its eyes bulged sightlessly and its bodily fluids seeped slowly.

Alison put her hand to her mouth, muttered “Oh my...” and rushed into the bathroom from whence the frog had come.

“Murderer!”, exclaimed Nikki, stomping off to her bedroom.

“ Nice one, Dad”, grinned Toby as he moved away.

From the bathroom came the sounds of retching.

Rob looked at the frog as it slid off the shovel and onto the floor. He didn’t particularly believe in portents but he did have an inkling that this could be a bad day for both of them.

Niobe shimmered into her frog-free bathroom recalling, as she did so, Flaubert’s description of Emma doing much the same thing. “The key turned in the lock and she went straight to the third shelf so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue jar, tore out the cork...”

Niobe opened the IKEA cabinet and took out a blue jar. Emma’s jar had been full of a white powder which she’d immediately began eating thus ruining any chances she had of living happily ever after as the mistress of an English m’lord. Niobe’s jar had once contained bath crystals but was now empty. She took it into the kitchen and began filling it.

Phyllida sat in the lotus position meditating – which is about all you can do in the lotus position. Her eyes were closed, her breathing slow, her muscles relaxed and her heart rate low and steady. She felt enveloped in a warm almost amniotic bubble of absolute calmness. Even when the entry phone buzzed, normally an irritant worthy of a curse or two, she merely unwrapped her legs, wafted across the room and pressed the answer button. The screen showed a fuzzy black and white image of someone in a hooded top carrying a large envelope.

“Yes?”, said Phyllida, serenely.

“It’s Kylie from the studio. They sent me over with some amendments for the live ep.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” She started to count to ten and by six some of the equanimity had flowed back into her soul. “Sorry, not your fault. Come on up.” She pressed the door release button. To pass the time while Kylie made her way up, Phyllida lay down on the hall mat and went into the
Pavana-mukta-asana
as it’s poetically know in Sanskrit or Wind Releasing Pose as it’s less lyrically known in English. She’d gone through one complete cycle and was lying back in the shava-asana when there was a knock on the door. Standing up gracefully, she opened the door to Kylie who had her hood pulled so far forward that her face was lost in the shadows. To Phyllida she looked not unlike a character from a Dan Brown novel although, obviously, she was multidimensional. Phyllida took the proffered envelope and smiled, her recent anger forgotten.

“Bloody studio, they keep you on your toes, don’t they?”

“Yeah. Could I get a drink of water?”

“Of course, come on in.” Phyllida led her down the hallway, opening the envelope as she went. “Would you prefer a cup of tea? I’ve got chamomile, mint...”

What Kylie had was chloroform. In a swift action she’d practiced many times she whipped out the bottle, popped the cork and shook a liberal dose onto a washing cloth.

“Ooh”, sniffed Phyllida, “can you smell something f...”. She was cut short as Kylie slapped the handkerchief over her mouth and nose. Whether she was going to say “something funny, fishy or fucking awful” we will never know. As she collapsed gently into Kylie’s arms, Rupert, dozing on the deck, saw what was happening and, overcoming his innate lack of courage in the face of this outrage to his mistress, bounded towards the perpetrator of this foul misdeed. Unfortunately, his atavistic outrage came to nought when his nose hit the closed French window. His legs collapsed underneath him and he slid to the ground to join Phyllida in a state of stupefaction.

As Rob signalled to turn right across the oncoming traffic and enter the studio grounds he glanced up at the huge billboard that stretched above the security hut. Two men, Bill Posters and Bill Stickers as he would probably have called them in his unsophisticated childhood, were standing atop ladders smoothing out the wrinkles from a new poster. Australia’s favourite Master Baker ahd gone and now Karl, all teeth and tan, stood behind a wistful Rosanna, his hands on her shoulders. Big red letters proclaimed: Australia’s sexiest couple – only on Eight. To Rob that rather bold assertion, demanded but a one word retort. And that word was- hah!

The shoot for that shot had taken place a few weeks earlier in a Surry Hill studio. Karl and Rosanna had gone through the usual range of cheesy poses while the photographer had snapped and chirped away. “Great... hold it... think sexy... big smile... beautiful... fantastic...” They, meanwhile, had sniped away between shots.

“You’re about as sexy as a used condom”.

“At least I don’t look like one.”

“Karl”, said the photographer as she changed cameras, “could you move round behind Rosanna. That’s it. Sort of drape your arms around her shoulders. Great.”

“Ugh! It’s like touching a polar bear. God, if your shoulders are this cold makes me wonder how cold your...”

“Cherry muffins and coffee afterwards, okay?” said the photographer as she clicked away again. “ Right, move in closer...”

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Someone seemed to be pulling her eyeballs in and out of focus and her head lolled and nodded like one of those annoying fluffy toys in the back window of a Toyota Camry. Oh, God, thought Phyllida, I’ve had a stroke. This seemed to be confirmed when she tried to move and found herself immobilised. Have I lost control of my bowels? Are they going to find me dribbling and covered in...

“Shit, I thought you’d never wake up. Good morning, Mary, oops, Phyllida. Long time no see, eh? Phyllida? Where the hell did you get that from?”

No, no, no, this couldn’t be happening, this was worse than a stroke. She tried to move again and realised that she wasn’t paralysed, she was tied up, roped to a chair in the kitchen and Kylie was standing over her, smiling. Only, of course, it wasn’t Kylie.

“Yes, it’s me, your evil twin.”

Melissa! Phyllida tried to call out but as well as being tied she was gagged. A surge of adrenaline dissipated the lingering effects of the chloroform and she fought against the ropes that bit into her hands and arms and legs.

“Wouldn’t bother struggling if I were you. Not much I don’t know about restraints. And don’t look so worried. I’m not half as mad as I used to be.” Laughing, Melissa whipped a Sabatier 7 inch Santuko knife out of its wooden block. With the sort of absolute precision she could very well have done without, Phyllida recalled the salesman telling her how good it was for “cutting up carcasses or slicing big joints.”

“Hope you’ve had brekkie ‘cos the gag’s staying on,” said Melissa turning to the work top and slicing into a tomato.

“I was going to have a big farmhouse breakfast, you know, like the ones we never got at home. Eggs, bacon, mushrooms, toast, the works. Only you seem to live on thin air. Bugger all in your fridge. Expect you eat out a lot, though, eh? S’pose I’ll have to make do with tomatoes on toast.”

She put the knife down and popped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster.

“Beaut place you got here”, she said, her misaligned eyes roaming over the Kupperbusch built-in single steam oven, the fingerprint free intelligent fridge freezer with its LCD display, the self-cleaning built in coffee machine. “Real beaut. Bit of a come up from the shithole we was brought up in, eh?”

She turned on the Perrin and Rowe contemporary U spout nickel tap and let the water run. “Remember doing the washing up at home? Had to run the hose pipe in through the kitchen window. And what’s this? Jeez, you got one of them waste disposal things? Yeah, well, we didn’t need one of them, did we? We had the pigs.”

She ran her hand over the polished Italian marble work top. “You know what? I think I’m going to enjoy living here.”

She’s insane, thought Phyllida. Still insane. As insane as the court and the psychiatrists had decided all those years ago. So why was she out, why was she here? How could she possibly have fooled the doctors into thinking she was sane? Were they mad? And what the hell did she mean: she’d enjoy living here?

Terry had been brought up in the era where parents were always stressing to their children the importance of polishing their shoes and wearing clean underwear in case they were run over by a bus and rushed to hospital. (“I don’t think we can save this poor wretch, Nurse but at least his Y-fronts are immaculate which will be of some comfort to the family”.) It was a habit that had stayed with him so that, on this day of all days, after putting on his freshest undies, he got out the Kiwi dark tan and sat in front of the TV polishing his best brogues. He was watching the end of “White Heat” again. Inspirational.

Jimmy Cagney made it once more to the top of the world and Terry hit the stop button on the remote. The picture cut to Channel 8 and a promo for “Rickety Street”. As the camera tracked down the eponymous thoroughfare, an Announcer, his breathless voice full of gravel and gravitas, advised viewers that “it’s must see drama – the explosive live episode of “Rickety Street.”

Terry spat on the toe cap of his left shoe and chuckled. Explosive? It’d be that all right.

In another part of the city another TV showed a hand holding a gun. As a finger squeezed the trigger the Announcer continued his spiel. “It’s going to be a night none of them will forget.”

Flame and smoke spewed from the gun barrel. A woman screamed. “A night one of them won’t survive.”