Bite The Wax Tadpole Read online

  Phyllida tossed the Earl Grey tea-bag into the garbage bin conveniently situated next to the trestle table conveniently situated outside the set on which coffee, tea and biscuits were conveniently located for the convenience of cast and crew. Angus, who played Sergeant Black in the show and her occasional lover off it, dunked a Scotch finger in his coffee. “I can come round and stay the night, if you’re really worried”, he said apropos her concern over the possible stalker. “ I’ll wear my uniform, if you like.”

  “I thought we were going to try a fireman next time?”

  “No, no, to frighten off the stalker.”

  Josh, blond ex-underwear model and, according to the Daily Tele, the “teen actor in drug bust”, threw a script down on the table, conveniently situated for such occasions, and spooned three heaps of coffee granules into a polystyrene cup. “Man, this live ep thing, it’s, like, far-out. All these lines and, like, one chance to get it right.”

  “You’ll be right, mate”, grinned Angus. Just don’t think about the million viewers waiting to see you fall flat on your arse.”

  “Yeah, right, cheers.”

  “And if you get nervous don’t go sticking something up your nose to help you relax.”

  “Hey, man, those drugs were planted on me.”

  He filled the cup from the urn and walked off, muttering. Phyllida and Angus began to drift towards the Green Room. “I could get a fireman’s outfit from wardrobe”, he offered.

  Neither of them took any notice of the props assistant, dressed in jeans, shapeless top and a beanie pulled down low, carrying a potted aspidistra. She stopped by the conveniently situated table and picked up the script which Josh had conveniently tossed aside. Rolling it up into a tube she walked unhurriedly on. The casual observer might have casually observed that she had a rather pronounced squint.

  Rob wished he’d had the foresight to order a packet of extra-strong mints along with the coffee. As it was the script meeting seemed to take only slightly less time than the Versailles Peace Conference. He hoped that the long term ramifications would not be as devastating.

  “If you can get your scene breakdown in by next Wednesday that’ll be fantastic”, he said as Gerry packed up his notes in his pouch which seemed as capacious as Mary Poppins’ Gladstone bag.

  “No worries, mate, no worries. And thanks again. You’re a life saver, mate, a real life saver.”

  Rob didn’t think he’d feel half so grateful after his script had been edited but said nothing as Gerry pulled his scraggy roo head on and shook it into place. “You know my wife left me.”

  “No, no, I didn’t.”

  Gerry laughed bitterly. Is he back in character now, wondered Rob? Is that how a disgruntled roo laughs?

  “Yeah, left me for a younger bloke.”

  “His name wasn’t Joey, was it, by any chance?”

  “Joey? Nah, Oswald. Asian bloke came to fix the washing machine. Still, blessing in disguise, eh? Means I’ve got plenty of time to write.”

  Plenty of time to write. A frisson of envy ran down Rob’s back as Gerry plodded out although it could equally as well have been a shiver of horror at what he’d just done. He wasn’t one hundred per cent sure but he thought that he had detected the whiff of cheap rum breaking through the general malodour surrounding his newest writer. A crackpot actor with a drink problem. What was he thinking of? Ah, well, when you’re up shit creek why not make your day complete by putting a pick-axe through the bottom of your kayak?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Some days, and this was one of them, Leo hated his job with the passion some people felt for saving the whale or Grand Opera. Most of the time it was a good job. He enjoyed solving the problems that daily came a line producer’s way. Actor breaks leg, main location burns to the ground, pages missing from scripts and no bugger notices until half way through shooting – all in a day’s work. He took a handful of cashews from the packet on his desk and smiled unconvincingly at Malcolm who looked back uncomfortably. Did he know? Did he have some inkling? Did he answer the summons to the producer’s office with the resignation of a veal calf invited on a day trip to the local abattoir? Or was it going to hit him like a cartoon safe falling on Bugs Bunny?

  “Remember when we worked together on ‘Dog’s Breath Bay’?”, Leo said by way of not getting down to the task in hand.

  “I’ve tried to sublimate the memory but yes”, replied Malcolm. They’d shot 48 episodes of ‘Dog’s Breath Bay’ before it went to air and it was cancelled after two episodes. It was still talked of in reverent tones whenever discussion turned to the worst Australian dramas ever.

  Leo chuckled. “Remember that episode where we had you out swimming and you got sucked up by the water bombing helicopter?”

  “And unceremoniously dumped in the sewage disposal facility? As if it were yesterday.”

  “Classic, absolute classic”, laughed Leo, picking out another handful of cashews, blissfully unaware of the slim dagger being pointedly pointed at his neck.

  “He’s prevaricating”, said Norman Tubby. “Out with it, you prick-eared Icelandic cur or I’ll slit you open from nave to chops.”

  It was, naturally, disturbing to Malcolm to have this figment of his imagination a seemingly constant companion but what he, or possibly it, had said was pertinent. He’d decided apropos the “thing” inside his brain to postpone telling Leo about it until after the live ep. Once that was out of the way and he’d proven his worth to the show he could ask for extended time off with a fighting chance of getting it. Leo couldn’t have got wind of his medical condition, could he? There wasn’t a mole in the hospital who’d sold his MRI scan to “TV Week” was there?

  “Yes, pleasant as it is to wander down memory lane with you, Leo, I do have a scene coming up shortly.”

  “Yeah, yeah, right. Thing is, Malcolm... Mal...”

  “Hah!”, declared Norman, throwing his arms out wide. “He’s going to shaft you.”

  “Shaft me?”, said Malcolm.

  “What?”, said Leo.

  “I thought you said something.”

  “I did but... well, the thing is...”

  “Up the fundament with a red hot poker”, continued Norman, moving round the desk to stand behind Malcolm.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”, asked Malcolm looking over his shoulder somewhat to Leo’s discomforture.

  “Sometimes it’s not easy being a producer, you know...”

  “Just like Edward the Second”, said Norman putting his face next to Malcolm’s and glowering at Leo. “ I played Mortimer in the Brecht version at the Theatre Royal, Perth.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, stop wittering on, will you?”, said Malcolm, pushing Norman away. Leo was beginning to think that he’d inhaled too deeply when he’d passed Nev Beale in the corridor that morning. He needed to get this over with.

  “Okay, thing is, the powers that be have been having a think about the show’s structure and what have you and they think things are a bit, how shall I put it, skewed. Skewed in the sense that too many of our core cast are, not to put too fine a point on it, the wrong side of forty. Or... or in some cases the wrong side of sixty. You sure you don’t want a cashew? Very good for the cholesterol, apparently.”

  Norman, now standing in front of Malcolm, held his dagger low then thrust it violently upwards before giving it a juddering twist. “Hope you’re clenching your buttocks, old boy.”

  Rob sat staring at his lap top, at the dancing, swirling fractals that had been his screensaver for as long as he could remember. What he couldn’t remember was what a fractal was. Something to do with Mandelbrot, iteration, recursion, that sort of thing whatever that sort of thing was. Frost crystals were fractals, weren’t they? Were frost crystals like snowflakes? No two ever alike? And how did they know that? Did the big research labs retain the services of itinerant snowflake collectors who, every winter, shipped back frozen containers of snow- flakes for research assistants and doctoral fellows to put under micr
oscopes and write research papers on? Was there some mega database wherein snowflake was matched against snowflake? And what if the unthinkable happened? He thought of Crick, or possibly Watson, dashing into a pub in Oxford, or possibly Cambridge, and shouting out at the top of his voice that they’d discovered DNA, the secret of life. Would the scene be re-enacted with a wild-eyed academic running into a bar screaming: “my God, we’ve found two identical snowflakes, break out the champagne and make a space for the Nobel prize on the mantelpiece.” What was the point of...

  His mobile rang, jerking him back from his intellectual displacement activity. He checked the caller ID. “Geoff, old buddy, how’s it going? Thanks for getting back to me.” He and Geoff had once worked together on a series called “Crims”, tales of a true blue, honest to goodness Australian working class family of thieves, vagabonds and assorted ne’er do wells. Geoff had since gone on to be one of the top dogs in an independent production company. “Oh, just checking out the market place in case I fancy a change... nothing at the moment, eh?... children’s TV? You mean animation?... yeah, I’ve done a bit... “Old Macdonald Had A Pharmacy? No, can’t say I’ve heard of that one...”

  Leo dripped into the room and poured himself into a chair.

  “... sounds a bit different, yeah. I’ll check it out – eight o’clock Saturdays. I’ll get back to you... No, no, Thanks again. Speak to you soon.”

  He ended the call. Animation is okay, animation can be fun. And if nothing else came up...

  “I hate this fucking job sometimes”, said Leo.

  “You’ve told him then”, said Rob who, like Henry the Eighth when he got fed up of Anne Boleyn, knew the axe was going to fall. Leo nodded; something Anne Boleyn had difficulty doing once Henry had finished with her.

  “How’d he take it?”

  “Good actually. Yeah, like a real pro.”

  “Bastards! Bunch of ungrateful, short-sighted, talentless bastards!” Malcolm hurled a pot plant at the grimy white wall of the Green Room. Even before it shattered the young actors lounging about reading and gossiping were heading for the door. “Yes, go on, get out and keep going if you’ve got any sense”, Malcolm called out to their disappearing backs. “Go to TAFE and learn hairdressing, get a job on an oil rig, beg for spare change outside Town Hall Station. Just don’t bloody act for a living!”

  “Hmm”, reflected Norman, lying back on the suddenly vacant lounge, “reminded me a little of Peter Finch in that film, what was it, “Network”. He won an Oscar, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, marvellous, glad to see I haven’t lost my touch. Just my sodding job!”

  Like two traumatised survivors of a U-boat attack, Rob and Leo clung to the edge of the table as though it was a piece of flotsam.

  “Anyway”, said Rob, “we’ll probably all be out of a job soon.”

  Leo shrugged. “Wife and I are thinking of opening up a B and B in the mountains.”

  “Right, well, if you need anybody to sweep up the dishes, wash the leaves...”

  Leo stood up. ”Oh, yeah and another thing, did you know it’s been pissing down all morning?”

  Rob spread his arms, reminding Leo of the windowless nature of the room. “We’re a weather free zone in here.”

  “OB’s shot to buggery. You’ll have to rewrite all the fun fair stuff for studio. Catch you later.”

  The temptation was, of course, to kick a hole in the wall whilst yelling obscenities and frothing at the mouth. Instead, Rob cast his mind back to DVD 1 and Randy’s advice on what to do when setbacks, as is their wont, set you back. “Close your eyes, imagine you are on a beautiful desert island. Fragrant palms flutter in the gentle breeze, clear blue water laps at the edge of the white sands and the sun shines forth its glorious, bounteous rays.”

  Rob closed his eyes...

  A monstrous wave reared up out of a cold, dark sea, crashing upon jagged, snarling rocks. A howling wind tore at his thin clothes like the claws of a crazed tiger. Rain spat and spume leapt. Darkness closed about him...

  Rob opened his eyes and shook his head. “Hope”, he yelled. “Get me block 890 and editor! Now!”

  An Old Testament rain bucketed down on Luna Park. Huge tears cascaded down the bulging cheekbones of The Face, the wide-eyed, cherry-lipped thirty foot high grinning but slightly sinister mask that welcomed one and all, on sunnier days, to the fun of the fair. Water cascaded off the Ferris wheel and plunged from the Wild Mouse Roller Coaster while Commander Baldock’s Galloping Horses and Racing Cockerels hunched forlornly under leaden skies. The rain-jacketed “Rickety Street” crew hurried towards the OB vans, rolling up cables and packing away monitors and cameras and booms. A day wasted.

  Rosanna stood under a sideshow awning as her car splashed slowly along the Midway towards her. Thinking only of getting home and into a relaxing bath she was unaware of Karl tiptoeing up behind her carrying a broom. The car halted and the driver leaned over and opened the passenger door. Rosanna stepped forward into the gap twixt awning and car and, as she did so, Karl hit the bulging canvas above her head with the head of the broom. The deluge that hit Rosanna took her breath away. Shocked, she held out her hands in disbelief. Her hair hung lankly around her face and shoulders. And then something else hit her - this was not a natural disaster. She spun around. Karl was marching away, broom over his shoulder, like a Guardsman on parade. The word that sprang to her mind, and the one she shouted at his retreating figure, was imbecile. An utter, utter, total imbecile. And she was going to pay him back for this one. Big time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “What if... oh, no, maybe not”, said Sally, who then went back to chewing her pencil.

  “We could move... oh, no, we can’t”, said Hope who then went back to blowing out her cheeks.

  Rob sat with his fingers clamped to the side of his head, staring down at the script that stared back, taunting him to do something to it. “Come on, give me your best shot, make a scene, shift a scene, be a little creative.” In fact, he’d had more challenging re-writes. The time, for example, when campylobacter had gatecrashed a cast barbecue and left half of them rinsing their hair in a toilet bowl. He’d risen to the challenge with alacrity and re-wrote three episodes overnight thereby saving the Network a rather large wedge of money. By way of recompense he’d received a crate of Moet. The way things were going at present he was looking at receiving a cup of hemlock with an arsenic chaser.

  “We could make thirteen sixteen, fifteen fourteen, put seventeen and eighteen into the video store and...and...” Hope’s dangling sentence was picked up by Sally.

  “Move the commercial break to Jade finding the bra in Tim’s lunch box.”

  “Brilliant!”

  Rob sighed. “Yes, yes, all very good but we’re avoiding the rather large pachyderm in the room. How do we move a fall from the Big Dipper in Luna Park to something similar happening indoors with the same dramatic consequences?”

  They lapsed into a long silence until Hope said: “My Uncle Dave fell off a chair changing a light bulb...”

  “Did he die?”

  “Not really.”

  Silence returned. Usually these replotting exercises were just a matter of moving scenes around like the squares on a Rubik’s cube until they all matched up and then rewriting to make sure they all stayed in place. Today it just wasn’t happening. The question running through Rob’s mind involved less the ramifications of moving OB into studio and more the consequences of what would happen if he walked out of the door and moved to Broken Hill. Dry heat in Broken Hill. Romantically remote. Just the place for a failed novelist to live out his days in a alcoholic daze. He could grow a beard, stroll around the dusty streets in stubbies and singlet and a g’day cobber hat.

  His phone rang and he answered it irritably. “Yes?”

  “Christ, you’ve got a bloody awful telephone manner. Anyone in my department answered the phone like that they’d be out on their arse.”

  Rob reeled as Gloria Beek’s voice thundered out of
the phone and he held it well away from his traumatised ear. Had she been around at the time, Joshua would not have needed all those trumpets when he re-pointed the walls of Jericho.

  “Gloria! How nice to hear your dulcet tones. How’s the wonderful world of Channel 5?”

  “Blissful. Can you talk?”

  “About anything in particular?”

  “Who Goes Next? in particular.”

  “Who Goes... how did you... umm, just a minute...”

  He hit the mute button on the phone.

  “Sorry, ladies, have to take this call. I’ll... carry on.”

  He hurried out of the room, scurried through the Script Department, out along the corridor and shut himself in with the photocopier. Only then did he feel safe in un-muting the phone.

  “Gloria? Sorry about that. You were saying...?”

  “Don’t be coy. I know all about “Who Goes Next?” taking your slot and you getting moved to the graveyard shift which, as we know, is only a short step away from the graveyard itself. You’re going to get canned, darling, no two ways about it.”

  This was ridiculous - the Head of Drama at a rival network knowing what was happening before almost anyone at this Network knew. What was going on? How could she possibly...

  “And if you want to know how I know, when Nev Beale gets shickered on whatever it is he sticks up his nose...”

  “Arse.”

  “...he’s about as discreet as a hippo in a Jacuzzi. Bumped into him at the Screen Producers’ Guild fandango the other night and he told me all about it. In the strictest confidence, of course. But don’t despair. Aunty Gloria’s got a proposition for you. We’re piloting a new show and we need a head writer. You up for it?”

  Was he up for it? Was he up for leaving a sinking ship for one that hadn’t even got its keel laid down? And even if it got the green light and left port, there was a Sargasso Sea full of rotting hulks ahead, Titanics that never finished their maiden voyages. Still, the show could be in development for a year, eighteen months. It would give him enough time to examine other options. Busking, for example. Or hostage negotiating. Was it too late to become an astronomer? He’d always been fascinated by...