Bite The Wax Tadpole Read online

  “And what time did you get in last night?”, inquired Rob in an unconvincing impression of a stern paterfamilias.

  “Late, late-ish, you know, not really late but not, sort of, early.”

  “Don’t you have a lecture this morning?”

  Something seemed to stir in the pimply youth’s woolly memory bank. “Do I? Oh, yeah, I do. Ta.”

  With what could have been the start of a smile or a scowl, Toby disappeared into his room. Would that have been me, thought Rob, if I’d have made it to university? Drinking too much beer forgetting to go to lectures, reading detective novels when I should have been studying the Great Vowel Shift of the Middle- Ages? Probably. On the other hand he might have become a model student, working conscientiously towards a double first and a tweedy career in academia and mid-brow literature. Never know now. If the old man hadn’t become ill, if he’d retaken his A Levels, if he hadn’t gone to Vienna... Anyway, Dickens, Hemingway, DH Lawrence, none of them went to university and they managed to string the odd zinging sentence together.

  Good god, what was that? Something fuzzy and black was growing on the skirting board. He knelt down to get a closer look and, although he was no Alexander Fleming, he was fairly certain it was mould. A thick black mould crawling its way up the wall. Not a total surprise, of course. When the sun wasn’t peeling the skin off your face, the rain was coming down in coal buckets. It was possible, of course, that this was a new strain of anti-bacterial that he could sell to a large pharmaceutical company thereby saving the lives of millions while, coincidentally, making him stonkingly rich but it was more likely to be the same old strain of gunge that grew in wet football socks and would cost a fortune to get rid of.

  Behind him, a door was wrenched open and a teenage girl in school uniform, hat askew above a small-scale riot of blonde hair, erupted into the hallway.

  “Have you seen this?”, he enquired of his daughter. “It looks like...”

  The back of Nikki’s hastily slung backpack smacked the side of Rob’s head as she swept past like Boadicea on her way to tackle the Romans.

  “Ow!”

  “I don’t have time, Dad. I so, so need a car. Is it really too much to ask? Really?”

  Yes was the simple answer but he didn’t bother to articulate it. Nikki’s school had recently built a multi-storey car park to cope with the students’ cars and their “Stop Global Warming” and “Save The Environment” stickers.

  “What about breakfast?”, he shouted after her knowing he’d get no response. He turned back to the skirting board. Mould. Something else to worry about.

  The bathroom was as dark as the hallway, one of the few rooms in the house which the sun couldn’t get its hands on. He relieved himself and then, as he opened the medicine cabinet, caught sight of himself in the mirrored door. Having to stare at his reflection was another reason for not shaving. Was it Dr Johnson who said that every man over forty has the face he deserves? Him or Oscar Wilde. And if it wasn’t either of them it was... someone else. The corners of his mouth drooped like a melancholic beagle, his cheeks were red and puffy and beneath his chin was the beginning of another one. And those bags under his eyes – they could have been daubed in with a heavy palette knife by Van Gogh in one his more intense moments.

  He took out the HomeDoc Digital Blood Pressure Device and wound the rubber cuff round his upper arm. It had been an odd sort of birthday present but Alison had insisted that with his lifestyle (“sitting on your arse all day”), his diet (“I know the crap you eat when you’re at work”) and the approach of his fortieth year to heaven (“Jill’s father died of a coronary and he was only forty one”) he needed to be more aware of his health. Now it was part of his routine, his morning ablutions. After some fiddling with the Velcro he managed to get the cuff as snug as a hangman’s noose and hit the on-button. The device buzzed into life and then, as he’d foolishly balanced it on the narrow ledge of the sink, it fell sideways detaching itself from the rubber tubing which remained dangling from his arm. It cracked against the porcelain and then splashed into the toilet bowl. Sometimes one didn’t have to look too hard for a metaphor for life.

  He dragged the machine out of the bowl and dried it on a towel. All credit to the HomeDoc people, their machine still worked after its tumble and immersion. 150 over 85 didn’t hit the AMA’s prescribed bull’s eye but at least it was consistent. As was his cholesterol level. Consistently bad. But that was another story. And, besides, if you looked hard enough on the internet you could find plenty of proof that the risks from high blood pressure and cholesterol were medical myths spread by rapacious drug companies who’d invented drugs for which there was no known disease.

  Padding into the kitchen, he flicked on the kettle, slipped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster and switched on the portable CD player. Its effect, so far, had been somewhere between nothing and negligible but he was happy to continue with Randy Pratt’s Dynamic Therapy Course – Unleash the Creative Beast.” After all, it had cost him nothing. He’d found the CD in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in the Script Department along with a couple of others – “Laugh Your Way Out Of The Madhouse” and “Freud For The Jung At Heart”. No-one had claimed them. Either the owner was too embarrassed or they belonged to some previous writer/editor/script assistant. The turnover in the Department was, after all, second only to that of the Taliban Suicide Bombers’ Social Club.

  He still thought of a writer, a real writer, as a bloke hunched over a sit up and beg typewriter, Gauloise hanging from a moist bottom lip with a tumbler of malt whiskey sitting beside him in a pool of lamplight on the dark mahogany desk. Cool jazz would be playing softly on the hi-fi while, across the lake, the green light flickered at the end of the dock. Female writers, on the other hand, were pale souls writing in neat copperplate in soft leather-bound notebooks who occasionally popped out to dead-head the roses or have a nervous breakdown. Creativity itself was a matter of lying down in a darkened room or going for long walks while ideas took shape and the actual writing meant strapping yourself to a desk and typing yourself into a coma. But if you could get your creativity delivered in a box like pizza, he was willing to give it a shot.

  Randy’s deep brown, Californian voice trickled out of the machine like a trail of honey seeping from an upturned hive. “Welcome to Track Three. Did you know you have something magical deep inside you?”

  “Bet you say that to all the boys.”

  “The power of your imagination. It’s a power we all have but with some of us it takes time to bring it to the surface. So let’s try some exercises to help free it up. Guys, next time you’re shaving why not keep your razor still and move your face about?”

  He was in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

  Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration. Ten minutes walk away there were pleasant suburban streets and air-conditioned malls with coffee shops and nail parlours. But that ten minutes was through steep, rocky bush and either side of him, as the car inched along the freeway, were sheer, honey-baked cliffs hewn and blasted out of the sandstone. On good days you sailed through them; on bad days, like today, you were becalmed between Scylla and Charybdis, feeling that any moment they might clash together. On really, really bad days you hoped that they would.

  The climate control system whispered cool air around the car but the sensation of heat was all pervasive. The sun bounced off the roofs of the cars ahead, the road shimmered like a desert mirage and if Omar Sharif had come riding towards him on a camel Rob wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. The radio traffic reporter had recently informed him that a truck carrying building supplies had overturned and caused long southbound talkbacks though Rob assumed he meant tailbacks. On the opposite carriageway traffic streamed haughtily northwards and far ahead he could see what looked like an angry dragonfly hovering above the road. The traffic helicopter. Or possibly pol-air or even, God bless it, the Network chopper. How ridiculous it was to be worried about not getting somewhere you didn’t want to be. A
nyway, it was either sit and fume and think about having words with Neil or take Randy’s advice and use the downtime creatively. From out of his briefcase he took the dog-eared script that had been his bed time companion the night before.

  A hundred and twenty grubby-thumbed, coffee-stained pages full of crossings out, alterations and hieroglyphs he could no longer understand. On the title page, under “Bleak City” by Robert E Jones, he’d written: “Trellis. Who is G?” Who indeed? He bent the script back over the top of the bull-dog clip and rested it on the steering wheel.

  “Bleak City”, the movie. Charles Dickens and the Melbourne Gangland Slayings. The film of the novel of the future that Dickens didn’t quite get round to writing. It was also the film of Dickens writing the novel of the future that he didn’t quite get round to writing. Moving back and forth between Victorian London and modern day Victorian Melbourne. Up to the minute technology with Dickensian characters and dialogue. Rob had high hopes of it. Great Expectations, in fact. Great Enough Expectations to carry it through to a fifth draft. The fourth draft had garnered some slight interest from the production company that had cornered the market in Australian gangland drama. Interest but no money. Not quite what we’re after but go away and make some changes and we’ll talk again had been the message from the producer. He wasn’t, of course, specific as to what those changes might be.

  Rob looked down at the white space which is mostly what scripts are. Like polar explorers, scriptwriters have to learn to cope with this blankness or risk losing all sense of direction, of going word blind. A drop of blood fell from his chin onto one of the white spaces and he gingerly pressed the tiny plaster back into place. He had an answer to Randy’s question about shaving.

  The blood trickled slowly down the page, zigging and zagging between the speeches and big print. It was fascinating to watch. Drops of what kept you alive being absorbed by fibres that once grew in a Scandinavian forest. A bit of you drying out and dying... a part of you...

  Oh, bollocks, he shouldn’t be doing this. When the sun was in the ascendant he should be working on what he was paid for not on what he had high but remote hopes for. Only when the sun was slinking towards the western horizon or the moon rising over Hornsby should he be working on his own stuff. Which brought him to yesterday’s forward planning meeting and this week’s batch of scripts. They’d been hovering around his head, just out of sight since he’d woken up but now they suddenly jerked into sharp focus, minor demons swooping out of the sun.

  The meeting had been a muted disaster, the Twin Towers falling silently, the tsunami hitting the coast with a plink-plonk. Whereas most disasters require something to happen, a forward planning disaster requires nothing to happen. Three hours had passed like a Quaker prayer meeting. Long periods of silence interrupted by random, ill-thought out ideas that faded into the ether. Of course, he recognised the difficulty of coming up with new stories for a show after twenty years. They’d done fire, flood, car crashes, plane crashes, infected the characters with most diseases known to modern medicine and made their love lives as complicated as Byzantine inheritance law. Sometimes it seemed that the only storyline left was to have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gallop into town with the Seven Plagues of Egypt in their saddlebags. Only Adam had come prepared. A family of extra-terrestrials move into the abandoned abattoir. It was the most ridiculous storyline ever pitched to him but it did have the merit of covering three sides of closely typed A4.

  He knew it was his own fault. He shouldn’t have had the meeting so close to the Christmas production break. They were all tired, storied out. Then he thought back to last year when he’d held the forward planning meeting after the Christmas break and...yes, well...

  There were also the scripts for this week’s block, the block he should be over-editing right now, to consider. Dull as last week’s ditchwater, all of them. Scene after scene of talking heads saying the same bloody thing. Which wasn’t how he remembered the stories developing in the script conferences so whose fault was it? The writers? He’d like to think so but as Script Producer he’d be the one shouldering the blame, carrying the can and dodging the flak. Which, unless you were a weight-lifting contortionist, could make life a little uncomfortable.

  Oh, well, along with shouldering the blame, carrying the can and dodging the flak he’d have to bite the bullet. The week would have to be re-replotted. He should be fuming, raging and swearing like a gouty archbishop who’s stubbed his toe on a hassock but instead he sighed. Was it the effects of the tapes or was he was dissolving into his old man who’d come home whistling “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kitbag” the afternoon they’d discovered the spot on his lung. Anyway, it wasn’t too late, not yet. He could still save himself from one of Nev Beale’s spittle fuelled rants. Not as though it was the first block of scripts in the show’s history to be less than workmanlike. He started turning the stories around in his head so that they rolled about in the tumble drier of his creative unconsciousness. Yes, the “who’s been wearing my underwear story” would work much better if... Thud!

  Rob lurched forward as the car stalled. He closed his eyes, knowing that when he opened them he would see something unpleasant. Sure enough, the lids went up to reveal that the driver in front was already out of his ute and stomping towards him. Six foot twelve of pissed-off plumber.

  By the time heads had been shaken, dents examined and insurance details exchanged, the traffic was beginning to move at a reasonable speed. Rob took deep calming breaths as he pulled back into the flow. The hulking tradie had turned out to be one of the “don’t worry about it, mate, it’s only the work’s ute” types. He’d even given him his business card and offered him a ten per cent discount should he ever need his U bend unblocking. Although grateful for not being added to the road rage casualty statistics Rob was now even later, would have to fill in some arse-aching form from the insurance company and find time to get the car to a garage to have the headlights fixed. Time, the ever rolling stream, true to form, was babbling and burbling over razor-sharp rocks.

  “The Ride of the Valkyries” suddenly blasted out of his trouser pocket and he scrabbled around among loose change for his mobile while keeping his eyes on the road.

  “Yes, hello?”

  “Could you please, please, stop writing in bed! Or at least put the bloody top back on your pen when you’ve finished. And why, for God’s sake, do you use red ink?”

  “Is a red stain worse that a black one? Anyway, it’ll wash out. Won’t it?”

  “That is not the point!”

  “Isn’t it? What is then?”

  “You writing in bed. You spend the whole day writing. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s serial television, soap. It’s not real writing, it’s choreographing the commercial breaks.”

  “It pays the bills.”

  Rob’s attention was taken by a car gliding past him, a car with blue lights on the roof and “Police” written in an arresting shade of red on the side. A police officer wearing jet-pilot sunglasses was pointing at the mobile and shaking his head.

  “Oh, bollocks!”

  “What? What did you say?”

  He closed the phone and smiled at the policeman while looking sheepish and mouthing the word “sorry.” Had he been an attractive blonde or the officer’s maiden aunt the ploy might have worked but as it was the police car moved in front of him, “Pull Over to the Side of the Road” flashing on its digital sign board.

  Taking deep breaths, trying hard to remember the calming advice of Randy Pratt, Rob indicated to pull in to the breakdown lane. All those bloody zigzagging P-platers and speeding utes and tailgating trucks and grey-haired blokes in soft-top sports cars who should be arrested just for buying the bloody thing and they pick on him! Christ on a bike, what is wrong with the world?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Somewhere far, far away, or so it seemed to Malcolm, one of the Seven Dwarves, possibly Tuneless, was sitting inside a toilet bowl singing “The Sun Has
Got His Hat On.”

  On the other hand, reasoned that part of his befuddled mind that dealt with the increasingly difficult task of bringing him round each morning, it could very well be the radio alarm. Simultaneously, the synapses in his cerebral cortex angrily fired off the rhetorical question to the other parts of the brain: what sort of witless, cretinous producer programmed such appallingly cheerful music for this time of the morning? Hanging, thought the cerebral cortex, was too good for people like that. They should be transferred to community radio in Mount Druitt.

  With a groan like that of a brown bear waking from hibernation only to discover spring was late this year, Malcolm opened his rheumy eyes. So... he was still alive. Good start to the day. Cautiously, he moved his head from side to side and found that the usual morning headache, the dull, distant pounding of a small country foundry, was somewhat abated this morning. This seemed to prove, to his satisfaction at least, that alcohol didn’t have any adverse effect on whatever it was that was causing the recurrent pain in his skull. Still, he was glad he hadn’t finished the bottle last night. There were a few big scenes coming up today and, at his age, the words were increasingly likely to come out in the wrong order or not at all if you weren’t in mid-season form. And he badly needed to hang on to this job. His glory days, such as they were, as a film and theatre actor in constant employment, were long gone. For the last ten years he’d survived on the occasional forgettable parts in less than memorable plays, a series of TV advertisements for nicotine replacement patches and the odd shift at Liquorland. But there was no reason why the Network wouldn’t extend his contract. He’d been doing a good job as Dr Morris, even if he said so himself, bringing a certain old world sophistication to the part in the manner of a latter day Doctor Kildare or Finlay. Not like today’s tele-doctors with their designer stubble and raunchy sex lives rushing from a leg-over in the sluice room to an emergency tracheotomy without even a quick dab of Dettol on the finger tips.