Bite The Wax Tadpole (20 page)

“You”, said Norman to Malcolm who was eating a far from hearty breakfast, “if you screw your courage to the sticking place.”

Rob chewed on a bacon and egg roll and watched the promo on the monitor in the Writers’ Room. “If you only see one episode of drama this year, make sure it’s this one. Tonight, at the special time of 7.30”

For the life of him he couldn’t figure out what was so special about 7.30. 10‾³² seconds after the Big Bang, now that was a Special Time. Fundamental particles whizzing about at relativistic speeds, quarks and leptons winning out over anti-quarks and anti-leptons, temperatures of a billion degrees, the beginning of the process that led to the formation of the universe, the solar system and life on earth. 7.30 on a Thursday evening just didn’t cut it.

The phone rang. It was Leo.

“You need to come down, mate, we’ve got a crisis in the rehearsal room.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on my way.”

Leo obviously detected the lack of urgency in his voice. “I mean it. The director’s tearing his hair out.”

This was unlikely to be literally true as, given Crispin’s degree of hirsuteness, he would have to be using tweezers and a magnifying glass.

“I’m flying out of the door right now.”

Rob finished his roll and wiped the egg and grease off his mouth with the front page of an old script. He could do without this. It was probably some actor needing reassurance that, yes, his character really would say that line. Did Shakespeare have to put up with this sort of rubbish? “I’m sorry, Will, but I’m really not comfortable saying “country matters”. My mother’s in the audience.”

He found Cris and Leo with Josh in a corner of the rehearsal area. Cris was pacing, Leo sat at a table drumming a devil’s tattoo and Josh, hands thrust deep in pockets, shuffled from foot to foot while looking intently at the floor. Scott, the trainee director, hovered uncertainly.

“So”, said Rob, smiling at Cris and trying to at least sound positive, “bit of a crisis, eh? What’s up?”

“Besides my fucking blood pressure, you mean?”

“Well...”

Cris, the high colour of his heavily jowled face seemingly confirming his self-diagnosis, scowled in Josh’s direction.

“Seems that Josh here got a little nervous about doing the live ep, didn’t he? A bit edgy. So instead of an early night with a mug of Milo he went out on the town with his mates, to calm his nerves. Didn’t you?”

“Oh, no, not more drugs! Bloody hell, Joshie!”

“Oydoon’tdodwugs. Theywuzplantedonme”, said Josh, looking up, his face pale, his eyes bloodshot.

“Pardon?”

“Zemdwugswuzplantedonme.”

Rob had the same helpless feeling he had once had when asking for directions in downtown Tokyo.

“What’s he saying?”

“Go on”, said Leo. “Show him.”

Josh puffed out his cheeks, took a deep breath, opened his mouth, poked out his tongue. Which must have taken quite an effort as, sticking through it, was a barbell topped with a large, spiky titanium ball. The tongue itself was horribly red and swollen. Rob blanched. The trendy fetish for body piercings was as much a mystery to him as tattoo mania. He knew the Aztecs used to pierce their tongues but they also practised virgin sacrifice and mass slaughter which showed how these things can get out of hand.

“No drugs”, hissed Cris, “but he does get himself as pissed as a brewer’s fart and lets his mates persuade him that it would be such a hoot to get a mediaeval battle hammer driven through his tongue.”

“YethbutIknowdelines. I’mwudperfik”.

“Can you write him out?”, asked Cris though it was actually somewhere between a demand and a plea.

“You have got to be joking!”

“Could we get someone to say his lines off-camera, do you think?”, offered Leo.

“Maybe”, said Scott, “we could arrange for subtitles.”

They all gave him a look that sent him back to hovering uncertainly.

“Look”, said Rob, “we’ve got until the special time of 7.30. If he practices until then he’ll be fine. I mean, that’s what they do in elocution lessons, isn’t it? Make you speak with a mouth full of marbles.”

Cris shook his head and walked off towards where the rest of the cast lounged around waiting for direction. “Just sort it out will you. Christ on a bike, what a shower of shit!” Rob took this as confirmation that his policy of it’ll be all right on the night even though that night is tonight was the way they would go.

“Anybody else mutilated themselves?”, called out Cris. “Anyone cut off a leg or taken their own appendix out with a soup spoon.”

Scott was still hovering uncertainly. “Cris is a good man in crisis”, Rob told him. “You can learn a lot from him.”

Scott took this as a signal to move off though he did so, as one would expect, uncertainly. Josh was the one now left hovering. It seemed to Rob that his own role was to play Geoffrey Rush to Josh’s Colin Firth; that he had to devise, in a very short space of time, a way of treating Josh’s self-inflicted speech impediment so that he could broadcast to an expectant nation.

“Repeat after me, Josh”, he said. “How now brown cow.”

Phyllida watched her sister finishing off the tomatoes on toast. There was, in fact, very little else she could have been doing, as she was tied to a chair facing in Melissa’s direction. She still held on to the slight hope that she had indeed suffered a brain haemorrhage and this was some sort of hallucination that she would soon wake from. She’d cheerfully put up with the possible drooping face and incontinence. But it was a hope that was fading with each minute that ticked by on the faux Gare du Nord kitchen clock.

Twins. How could twins be so different and dislike each other so much? Did something happen in the womb, some pre-natal difference of opinion that had soured their relationship forever after? Of course, it had all probably started to go wrong with them at the conception. Had people, as Phyllida often thought they should, be forced to take a Potential Parents’ Test before being allowed to procreate then their parents would still be doing remedial classes. To say they were unfit for the role was a little like saying a ring-tailed baboon is unqualified to fly commercial aircraft. Given their parents’ intake of alcohol and their date of birth it was likely that she and her sister had been the result of drunken fumbling behind the local pub on Melbourne Cup night. Alcohol could also have been a factor during their gestation as Phyllida couldn’t see Ma giving up the booze just because she was pregnant. Perhaps, through some gynaecological quirk, all the alcohol, not to mention the nicotine, had been absorbed solely by Melissa’s foetus. It might account for her subsequent behavioural problems and possibly for the awful squint. Of course, normal parents would have had that fixed but Ma and Pa couldn’t be arsed with taking Mel to see doctors and visit hospitals while there was a pig farm to ruin and drink to be drunk.

Mel licked her fingers and pushed the plate aside. “I’ll deal with the washing up later.”

She got up from the breakfast bar and stood in front of the stove. “This really is an excellent cooker you’ve got here, sis.” She turned a knob, pressed it down and a blue-yellow flame leapt out of a gas jet. “Wow, look at that!” She clicked on all the other jets and the flames roared in concert.

“You probably won’t believe me, just like the bloody jury didn’t, but I never really meant to kill Ma and Pa. I genuinely, genuinely thought they was still down the RSL. How was I to know the drunken buggers were sleeping it off in the rumpus room. It was just the flames I liked.”

She picked up a tea towel – hand printed in Italy - twirled in into a tightly knotted length and dangled it over the flames until the end caught light. Smiling, she turned towards Phyllida. “Jeez, the way the old place went up! Whoosh. Org-bloody-gasmic. Still, that was the Old Man’s fault for keeping them half-empty gas bottles in the laundry.”

Like a demented hypnotist, she swung the burning tea-towel in front of Phyllida’s eyes. Of course, given her strabismus Mel would have struggled to make a living in the mesmeric arts so the analogy never occurred to Phyllida whose mind was filled, anyway, with absolute terror. The sweat on her brow was not entirely due to the heat of the flames swaying in front of her.

“But I’m over that now. Cured. Well, pretty much.”

Laughing, she dropped the tea-towel into the sink where it fizzled out. “That’s just the pyromania, mind. They’re still working on whatever else is wrong with me. I’m on release, supposed to report to a probation officer every day until they’re satisfied I’m no danger to the public at large. And I’m not, not really. You, on the other hand, are not a member of the public.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

After spending half an hour reciting “Moses Supposes” , “Round the Ragged Rock” and other tongue untwisters Josh still sounded as though he was reading the telephone book while chewing on a breeze-block. Luckily, Leo had managed to contact Anna, the network’s occasional drama coach, and persuaded her, in the sense of offering her a large amount of money, to come in and work with Josh.

Rob wandered dazedly back towards the Script Department and paused at the snack machine to buy some quick release energy. As he was washing down the Mars bar with a slurp of V he realised he was outside the set where “Hopalong Jim” was being shot. Well, why not, he thought. Why not deliver some good news for once?

In his bush hut of rather untypical bright reds and yellows and anthropomorphic tables and chairs, Hopalong Jim was singing to a small group of four and five year old human progeny.

“I’ll be sad to see you go, it’s been fun, don’t you know But all good things must end; So just be brave and give a little wave And say ooh roo to your hopalong friend.”

Gerry, aka Hopalong Jim, gave a cheery wave as the children made their way out of the door. “Bye, children, see you all again sometime soon.” He continued waving until the AD called cut, Thanked everybody and released them from their duties. He then took off his head, closed his eyes and took a gulp of freshish air. “Jesus”, he sighed.

“Have you ever thought of doing Australia’s Got Talent? You could be the Susan Boyle of the Outback.”

Gerry opened his eyes. “Rob, mate, hi!” He was immediately apprehensive. Part of him had been waiting confidently for feedback on his script. The other ninety eight point six had been dreading it.

“I’ve been reading your script.”

“Oh, yeah?” Even if you’re a NIDA graduate it was hard to act nonchalant in these circumstances so Gerry was well aware that his response sounded rather like the reply to a doctor’s diagnosis of terminal cancer.

“What can I say? It was excellent. One of the best first scripts I’ve seen.”

Gerry’s cerebral cortex was unsure how to deal with this statement. Was the doctor now saying: only joking, you’ve really only got a slight head cold. Words, as is so often the case with writers when they’re asked to speak, failed him.

“Needs a bit of touching up here and there”, continued Rob, “ but, yeah, it was good. I’ll see what I can do about fixing you up with another one.”

Choking with emotion, Gerry shuffled forward and hugged Rob in his mangy arms. “You don’t know what this means to me, mate.”

Rob instinctively recoiled. Apart from the embarrassment of being embraced by a man in a kangaroo costume, there was also the smell, that heady concoction of stale alcohol and sweat.

“Steady on. Is that a joey in your pouch or are you pleased to see me?”

Gerry slapped him on the back. “Told you I wouldn’t let you down, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?”

“You or somebody remarkably like you. Which seems unlikely.”

Rob managed to back away without seeming to be too impolite. The thought of imposing a dress code for script conferences had never occurred to him before but perhaps an e-mail advising smart-casual sent out to all writers, including Gerry, would be a subtle way of getting him to ditch the roo cossie. “Million things to do, as per usual so... I’ll be in touch. Meantime, keep hopping, eh?”

“Yeah.”

Rob left and Gerry stood as transfixed as an arthritic Western Red caught in the glare of a roo shooter’s spotlight. And then he smiled. “Bloody hell. Wow!” Having checked that no-one was looking he reached into his pouch for a celebratory rum. He took a quick nip and was lowering the bottle when he noticed the small boy looking inquisitively up at him. Drinking on set and in front of a five year old was quite possibly grounds for dismissal.

“It’s an expectorant”, he told the boy who continued to look blankly up at him. “Ask your mother.”

Rob went the scenic way back to the Script Department, the scenery in question being the loading dock, the motor pool and the back of the cafeteria where two fat, unshaven blokes in smeared chef’s whites sat smoking in the shade of wheelie bins and empty cooking oil drums.

“Heard back from the clinic yet?”, Rob heard one say as he passed by.

“Nah”, replied the other flicking his fag end off the no smoking sign into the rhododendrons. “It’s not suppurating no more, though.”

There’s pressure, thought Rob totally ignoring the potential for a fiery end to the studio complex, and then there’s pressure. The young Graham Greene had written two books at once, he recalled. A serious one in the morning, a thriller in the afternoon. Or vice-versa, it hardly mattered. And he was broke at the time, living in a run- down cottage. His wife was probably barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen but he couldn’t remember all the details. Point was, it was the sort of hard, hand to mouth lifestyle that made a writer. It probably broke a few writers, too. More than it made in all likelihood. So why did he envy Graham Greene and all the writers like him, the ones who’d suffered properly for their art; not suffered half-heartedly like he did? Not being a psychologist he had, of course, no idea. And even if he had been a psychologist he guessed he’d only be guessing. Anyway, if he truly wanted to know what it was like to be an impoverished writer all he had to do was tell the Network which orifice they could insert their job into, tell Gloria Thanks but no Thanks and break it to Alison that they were downsizing to a shack in the Blue Mountains. Too easy, he sighed.