Bite The Wax Tadpole Read online

  “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “Sorry, sorry, I was just... yes, yes, I think I might very well be interested.”

  “Good. Then get yourself over here for three thirty. I’ve got a creative with the genius who came up with the idea.”

  He looked at his watch; he thought about Hope and Sally struggling with the re-writes.

  “No problem. See you at three thirty.”

  He snapped the phone shut and walked slowly back towards the Writers’ Room feeling slightly nauseous. He’d always prided himself on being a man of honour, the Philip Marlowe of the TV world walking tall through these mean, plywood streets. What he was doing now was bordering on, if not actually stepping over the boundary of, the treacherous.

  “Something’s come up”, he announced as he re-entered the Writers’ Room. “Bit of an emergency. I’ve got to go.”

  “But we haven’t finished doing this”, said Hope, pointing at the scripts.

  “I have every faith in you, Hope”, he said charitably, stuffing papers into his briefcase. “Bit of lateral thinking, that’s all it takes.”

  He took a fifty dollar note out of his wallet and let it flutter onto the table. “Pizza, coffee, amphetamines, whatever you need.”

  Channel Five’s executive operations were housed in an ultra-modern, high-rise complex in the CBD. Emerging from the lift on the 24th floor Rob was almost blinded by the light. He squinted at the pearly waters of the Harbour and its doughty bridge. The Opera House was in full-sail despite the lack of breeze. Container ships cut towards their docks, yachts danced at their moorings and the Manly Ferry plied its way towards the open sea that it never reached. He had to admit that it beat the view from the top of Merthyr Town Hall, which he’d once been privy to during a school trip, into a cocked hat.

  He found the door marked Head of Drama, knocked lightly and pushed. Gloria was, if not the most talented woman in television, at least the largest and loudest. She’d been a writer or script executive on more serials than you could shake a microphone boom at over the years including “Cows”, the groundbreaking series set on a farm run completely by women. Famously, it had depicted the first inter-species kiss on Australian TV. Her reputation for being difficult to work with was legendary. But, for some reason, she’d taken a shine to Rob when he’d written for “Above The Station”, a short-lived cop show that she’d headed. As he opened the door she was sitting behind a shiny oak desk the size of a small SUV eating a cream cake.

  “Here he is, the Dylan Thomas of serial TV”, she boomed, spraying gobbets of cream onto the shiny desk. In her time, and Rob had seen the photos to prove it, she had been a blonde bombshell in the Marilyn Monroe/ Diana Dors mould and had got through a good many husbands, some of whom she’d been married to. Now, there was no other word for it, she was blousy. Hair was piled high on her head like a disused anthill and her features had coarsened and spread. She wore a high-necked, frilly blouse and reminded Rob of the seaside landladies of his childhood holidays at Rhyl or Prestatyn who, arms folded, advised you that breakfast was eight o’clock sharp and the downstairs lavatory was not for solids. But Rob reckoned that beneath that unlikely exterior she had a good heart, albeit one clogged with cholesterol.

  “Take a pew. This is Julian. Julian, Rob.” She indicated the man sitting to her left.

  “Good to meet you, Rob. Gloria’s been singing your praises all morning.” Julian’s handshake was firm, corporate; manly without being aggressive.

  “Julian’s the creative genius behind the show.”

  Julian, Rob couldn’t help but notice, had high cheekbones. His faded T-shirt and jeans were either from the Salvos’ Shop or they were damned good, very expensive imitations. His arms and neck were decorated (poor choice of word) with tattoos. Rob had a thing about tattoos. His grandfather had had a desert rat graven on his forearm but that spoke quietly and discreetly of war service and old comrades. Julian’s tats spoke loudly of a slavish and unthinking adherence to popular fashion. It was as though, back in the seventies, you’d bought a white suit with wide lapels and flared trousers and found yourself committed to wearing them for the rest of your life. What were these people going to be like in their fifties when they stopped going to the gym, when their flesh started to sag and the ink began to fade? Body art, my arse, they’d look like a retarded four year-old’s colouring book. Tattoos on women especially troubled Rob. If they had dragons and serpents crawling up their arms and round their legs what on earth did they have sliding up their...

  “Creamy doughnuts?”, said Gloria, holding up a selection box of cakes. Rob reached in and took one but Justin shook his head. “I’m a vegan”.

  “Sorry, what part of a cow does a doughnut come from?”, inquired Rob as he took a sugary bite.

  “They’ll be made using animal fats.”

  And all the better for it, thought Rob but said nothing. Creative geniuses, or possibly genii, of whom he had previously met none, might well be highly strung and sensitive; even the ones having what looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon rising out of their T-shirts.

  “What have you written for before? Haven’t seen you round the traps.”

  Julian opened up his gleaming, scarab-black laptop. “Oh, I’m not a writer. I’m in marketing.”

  “Okay, give Rob the five minute tour, young Julian”, commanded Gloria, sucking down another lump of animal fat, pastry and sugar.

  A sinking feeling accompanied the pastry down Rob’s gullet.

  Gloria had her hand back in the cake box. “Good aren’t they? This is a concept, Robert. Bloody good one, too. Ready, Jools?”

  Julian hit a button on his laptop and the lights dimmed. A screen at the far end of the room lit up with the image of a large, urban shopping centre. This was then overlaid with the legend: Bayside Mall.

  “Just a working title”, said Julian. “I’m sure you’ll come up with a better one.”

  More images and corporate logos flashed onto the screen: supermarkets, electronic stores, clothing stores, even, God bless it, a book store.

  “All these are on board and we’re hoping to sign up several more exciting brands in the next few days.”

  “Sign up?”

  “As sponsors. Our characters will work in fictionalised shops but the scope for product placement is enormous. For example...”

  On the screen a teenage couple were kissing outside a jewellery shop with its name hugely visible.

  “Diamonds are still a girl’s best friend, eh? Or this...”

  A group of surfie dudes were hanging loose outside a branch of a well-known chain of surfing outfitters.

  “I think I get the picture”, said Rob. “What about the characters, the stories?”

  “Story and character are where you come in, Robert”, said Gloria as a dollop of cream fell down the front of her blouse. “Oh bugger!”

  An hour later he exited Channel 5’s revolving doors with images of frying pans and fires swirling around his head. He switched on his mobile and it immediately began to bleep. He checked his messages. There were five, all from Alison, all saying: “Where the fru?” What the hell was “fru”? Fruit? She wanted to know where the fruit was? Ridiculous. What else could fru be short for? Frustration, certainly. He hated stupid mobile text-talk, took pride in using semi-colons and quotation marks in all his texts . Fru... fru... oh, my god, where the F are you? He’d forgotten, completely bloody forgotten. She’d kill him. If he was lucky. He ran, if an elongated shuffle could be classed as running, through the muck-sweat after storm humidity of the late afternoon to where his car flamed like the greaves of bold Sir Lancelot under the still strong sun. Inside, it was like a fan-forced oven and his sunglasses steamed up as he pulled out into the traffic. A few challenging lane changes later and he was heading north, his heart rate and blood pressure beginning to subside. Fortunately, the hospital was not far away. The hair at the back of his neck had once again begun to resemble a barmaid’s apron. Why was that? Were there e
xtra sweat glands at the back of the neck? And why was your arse designed to collect all the sweat that ran down your back? Evolution should have provided little ridges just above your buttocks to channel it all away. If he’d have been in charge of designing the human body there were a few changes he’d make in that area, anyway. Some things just shouldn’t be in such close proximity. Take, for example, the male...

  His phone rang. He knew he shouldn’t answer it but it was bound to be Alison and it would be better to start his grovelling apologies now while he was still several miles away. He opened the phone up, hit the speaker button and held it close to the steering wheel, out of sight of passing gendarmes.

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming, I’m coming”, he yelled.

  “That bring back memories”, said Niobe with a smirk in her voice.

  “What? Oh, Niobe, I thought you were... oh, move over, will you? Sorry, I’m in the car.”

  “Are you sure you can’t come out to play tonight?”

  If he could have seen her he would have realised the sort of mood she was in. She was freshly showered, lying on the bed in something that could only be described as flimsy with an open copy of “Anna Karenina” beside her. Nineteenth century literature, particularly Russian literature, sent sexual hormones racing through her body like so many corpuscular Ferraris.

  “I’ve really, really, really missed you, you know.”

  He could see the signs to hospital ahead and signalled left. “I’ve missed you, too”, he mumbled, looking for the entrance to the car park.

  “You know what I’ve really missed the most?”

  “No, no, I don’t.” Brilliant! There was a free parking spot on the road. He slammed on the anchors in a cloud of Mr Goodyear’s finest rubber and started to reverse. His mind on the tricky manoeuvre he put his phone on the cup holder in front of the gear lever so wasn’t fully aware that Niobe was recounting her erotic memories in alarmingly graphic detail. Crash, tinkle! Oh, god.... He hastily and badly completed the park and leapt out of the car, grabbing his mobile almost as an afterthought. Yep, there it was – a Holden Barina with a broken headlamp. What to do, what to do?

  “You remember that time”, continued a distant Niobe, “when we went on to the set and there was no-one about and you...”

  Run! It was a headlamp, twenty bucks, big deal. If the Barina was still there when he’d finished he’d write the owner a note claiming full responsibility. Meanwhile, he had a hospital to navigate his way around. He sprinted towards the entrance and stopped in front of a large directory his breath coming, as the poet would have it, in large pants.

  “And that day you were sitting at your desk and I was underneath giving you...”

  “Yes, yes.” Where the hell was he supposed to go? Was it maternity? Alison was pregnant, obviously, but what department did ultrasounds come under? Radiology or... there it was in big red, helpful letters. Ultrasound. He was off running again, holding the phone in the general vicinity of his ear.

  “... and Leo came in,” she laughed.

  “Yes, yes”, he panted.

  “Wow, you’re getting a bit excited. You’re not driving one handed, are you?”

  The glass doors slid open and he skidded into the foyer looking for further directions. He saw another helpful arrow and set off to follow it, failing completely to notice the low table used by New South Wales Health for ridding itself of out of date copies of Hello Magazine. His shins, however, made direct contact. “Aagh, aagh, God, oh... oh!”

  “You have missed me, haven’t you?”, cooed Niobe. “I hope you kept your eyes on the road.”

  “On the road? No, I’ve... yes, I’m just going into the Lane Cove Tunnel so we might lose...”

  He snapped the phone shut and limped onwards.

  “Where the hell have you been?”, said Alison as he was shown into the ultra-sound suite. She was lying back as the sonographer ran a pad over her gelled and protuberant belly.

  “I am so sorry, I’ll explain later.”

  “Oh, well, you’re here now. Look, isn’t it exciting?” She nodded towards a screen which seemed to be showing radar images from a black and white World War Two submarine movie.

  “Oh, yes”, he said, taking Alison’s hand. He moved closer to the screen, smiling. The picture was actually remarkably clear when compared to the last time he’d seen one. But you’d expect technology to have moved on in sixteen years. Yes, very clear. He could see... he narrowed his eyes. Could he really see... he was obviously no expert but...

  “Excuse me”, he said to the sonographer, “but is that... are there...?”

  She smiled back. “Absolutely. Congratulations.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Rob slept restlessly and dreamed again of airports and flying although in this dream the plane never got off the ground, just taxied endlessly through a maze of hangars. The scenario was made even more improbable by the walls of the hangars being about arms length from the windows leaving no room for the wings. It was all about flight, in the sense of fleeing, of course but impossible flight. Like the ravens at the Tower of London he’d had his wings clipped. Though, from what he recalled from his school trip to the Tower, the ravens had quite a nice life, lucky bastards.

  At seven thirty in the morning he was standing in the already sun drenched garden sipping coffee while a man named Gary walked around the perimeter of the house shaking his head and making little tutting noises as he made notes on a clipboard. Earlier, the man named Gary had inspected the inside and the underneath of the house while shaking his head and making little tutting noises as he made notes on a clipboard. The man named Gary had an alias that was printed boldly on the van parked in the driveway: Mr Damp Course.

  “Right”, said Gary aka Mr Damp Course, tucking his pencil into the breast pocket of his overalls. “Basically, mate, in a nutshell, your damp course is compromised.”

  “Compromised in what way exactly?”

  “Compromised is bullshit builders’ talk for completely buggered. You’ve got rising damp, falling damp, lateral damp and condensation due to substandard ventilation.”

  Rob was aware that the house was damp in some sense but now it seemed it was damp in every sense. If it had had a cellar there’d probably be firedamp as well.

  “Doesn’t sound good, does it? How much to put right?”

  Gary shook his head and made little tutting noises while he did some calculations on his clipboard. He turned the clipboard around and showed it to Rob.

  “How much!!? I think I’ll leave it as it is and turn it into a mushroom farm.”

  “Oh, yeah, and you did know you had white ants as well, didn’t you?”

  Time seemed to stand still. Randy’s voice rose up from a deep chasm somewhere in Rob’s cerebral cortex. “At times of crisis take deep breaths, fill your lungs with good, clean air, let the inflow of oxygen banish those negative thoughts. That’s it... deep, deep breaths...”

  When making the recording, Randy probably thought it superfluous to add that when taking deep, deep breaths it is also imperative to exhale from time to time. Rob started to turn blue and his eyes began to bulge slightly.

  “You all right, mate?”

  It had been unwise, reflected Malcolm, to open the second bottle of merlot last night. He felt as seedy as a watercress farm as he slowly pushed the wonky wheeled trolley round the supermarket. Early morning shopping did not usually form part of his daily routine but he had slept badly and woke early to find the apartment even more oppressive than usual. A yearning for bright lights and stimulating company had brought him to his local food emporium where he now gazed at the bewildering array of tuna on offer. Dear God, how was it possible to do so many things with a piece of fish? Japanese style, Spanish style, Moroccan style, with herbs and spices, with lemon pepper, with cracked pepper. Pepper? Were people these days incapable of sprinkling pepper over their lunch? He finally found a tin that contained more or less only tuna and reached out for it.

  “You’ll en
d up living on Pedigree chum and crackers, you know. I did.”

  Norman Tubby, as ever, was at his shoulder.

  “I’ll get other work. There is life after soap opera, you know.”

  “For some, perhaps, but you’re no Kylie Minogue, are you?”

  As Malcolm piled tins of no name beans into the trolley, Malcolm, belying his age and status as a deceased person, danced and skipped ahead. “I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, I should be so lucky...”, he trilled.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, stop that, will you!”, boomed Malcolm. A lady in the next aisle who had taken the top off a bottle of deodorant in order to assess if it really did smell of Alpine meadows, snapped it shut and looked around guiltily.

  “Sorry, old boy”, said Norman. “I’m merely advising you not to make the same mistake that I did. Go out with a bang, not a whimper.”

  A few minutes later Malcolm exited the store with Norman standing upright in the front of the wonky trolley, arm raised like Lenin addressing an excited crowd in Red Square. “Blow wind, come rack; At least we’ll die with harness on our back.”

  If ever Yves St Laurent decided to launch a range of male fragrances called “Gloom”, Rob, that morning, would have been odds on favourite to be the face of the campaign. He sat in the Writers’ Room with a small, dark cloud of gloom hovering over his head like smoke over a guttering barbecue. Could it only be a week or so ago that his life, if not exactly glittering with expectation, had, at least, a scintilla of mid to long term predictability about it? Right now, he yearned for predictability. Excitement and journeys into the unknown are for when you’re young and you haven’t signed your first mortgage. When he’d arrived in Australia he’d done some research into his family history and discovered that in the nineteenth century a chap on his father’s side of the family had borrowed a horse from a neighbouring farm and found himself transported to the colonies for forgetting to ask the owner’s permission first. By dint of hard work and keeping his nose clean he’d become a free man. How galling it would have been for him to know that succeeding generations would be shackled by credit cards and mortgages for the terms of their natural lives. The worst of it was that debt and domesticity had stripped away his, Rob’s, courage and sense of perspective. If “Rickety Street” got canned and he didn’t take the “Mall” job then he’d almost certainly end up bankrupt and living in a housing commission flat with drug dealers and insomniac rap artists for neighbours. Fat lot of use he’d have been at Rorke’s Drift.