Bite The Wax Tadpole Read online

  “I might join you.”

  As they moved past her, Charlea looked up from her script, wearing much the same look that the boffins at Bletchley Park wore when first confronted with the Enigma codes. “Who’s Gutso?”, she inqured.

  “Sorry?”, replied Phyllida. “Who’s what?”

  Charlea pointed to a line of big print in the script. “It says here, I eat with Gutso. There’s no Gutso in the cast list or...”

  “It’s a typo. Should be gusto. You eat with gusto.”

  “Oh, right. So who’s Gusto?”

  Terry continued his rounds of the studio collecting footy tips, chatting and occasionally fixing the odd mechanical defect before leaving the bright lights behind, descending several flights of steps, clopping along a dimly lit corridor and entering the boiler room that he’d turned into a home from home. There was a plush sofa souvenired from a long forgotten TV drama, a desk behind which a distinguished newsreader had once sat and, along one wall, all that remained of a disastrous Network foray into the Arts, to whit: copies of Old Masters, Impressionists, post-Impressionists and more modern efforts that looked as though they had been painted by a marmoset with advanced Parkinson’s Disease. Opposite was Terry’s Wall of Sporting Greats, huge action photos of footballers, cricketers, swimmers and tennis players that had been abandoned by the Saturday afternoon “G’day Sport” program. Background music was supplied by a sound system from which the hits of the sixties hummed forth during tea and lunch break. The room also contained, for what would a boiler room be without one, a boiler. And not just any old boiler. The gleaming item that could, from a distance, be mistaken for a model of a Saturn V rocket, was, in Terry’s opinion, the bees’ knees of boilers, the boiler against which all others should be judged. It was a proudly Australian made Adcock and Perkins G-Tech 2000 Vertical Tubeless Steam Boiler. Terry was a time-served engineer by trade and appreciated, as probably no-one else in the entire Network, the G-Tech 2000’s superlative heating surface area, its unrivalled four gas passes and the extensive steam storage volume which gave it such an incredibly large surface release area.

  Its superior design meant that it could run unattended and was virtually maintenance free but Terry still attended and maintained it far in excess of Adcock and Perkins’ requirements. It was, after all, a work of art. He knew very little about art, despite the eclectic collection on the boiler room wall, although he had once visited the Louvre. Travel had never held much attraction to him and for most of their married life he and Marge had rarely strayed farther than her parents’ place in Orange. But then Marge’s sister had talked her into doing Europe by bus. Terry, and Nance’s husband, Bill, had gone along with many misgiving, mostly about the food and the beer, but it had turned out to be a most interesting and informative trip. In Paris, as the tour group trudged up the marble staircase towards the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Mona Lisa, Terry and Bill had fallen into conversation with a bloke in overalls carrying a toolbox. As you do. Turned out that Jean-Pierre was in charge of the heating system and he’d taken them on a fascinating tour of the tunnels underneath the museum while the ladies traipsed through the galleries. In London the men folk had given the British Museum a miss and taken a Green Line bus to the Victorian splendour of the Crossness Sewage Pumping Station where they had gazed in awe at the largest remaining rotative beam engines in the world. In Rome, they’d walked himself ragged wandering from hypocaust to hypocaust. They were right when they said travel broadened the mind.

  Having checked the G-Tech 2000’s valves and run a cloth over its gleaming pipes, Terry settled down with a coffee and the back pages of the Daily Telegraph. Pink Floyd flowed out of the sound system. God was still in his heaven, or reasonably close by, and all was still well with the world.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In an alleyway somewhere in the Outer Inner City, a handsome young man with designer stubble sat in an open-topped sports car. He was dressed in studiedly casual designer fashion and gave off an air of rugged, yet sophisticated, masculinity designed to bring strong women to their knees and have them stay there awhile. He stared through his designer sunglasses into the wing mirror and watched the approach of a beautiful blonde woman in elegant designer clothes.

  She was level with the rear of the car when he opened the door and turned towards her, flashing his perfectly regular designer teeth. “Damian!”, she gasped. “But I thought you’d...”

  He took off his glasses as he finished her sentence. “... Gone to Singapore with Jade? I only got as far as the airport.”

  “And now you think you can just walk back into my life.”

  Languidly, he climbed out of the car and moved closer to her. “I didn’t walk out of it, Roxy, you pushed me away.” She trembled as he put his arms on her shoulders, any lingering resolve fading as fast the interior light in a cheap fridge.

  “Damian, I...”

  He pulled her towards him. “I love you, Roxy, and I always...”

  Splat! A cockatoo, heading in an easterly direction, interrupted the unfolding romantic interlude with a precision strike worthy of Strategic Air Command and landed a bunker busting guano drop smack bang on top of the man-being-addressed-as-Damian’s designer hair cut.

  “Oh, my God... yuk!”

  The woman-being-addressed-as-Roxy put a hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh and Crispin, the man- whose-name-appeared-on-the-credits-under-the-title-of-Director, turned a darker shade of vermillion as his blood pressure soared up into that zone beyond which cardiologists defer to the Almighty. The First AD shouted “Cut!” and the crew, some laughing, some as pissed-off as Cris as they saw the morning’s shooting slipping away, ran towards the two actors. A Wardrobe Assistant started rubbing with a tissue at the impressive amount of lime dripping off Karl’s head, Karl being the real name of the-actor-playing-Damian. “They say it’s supposed to be lucky”, said the Wardrobe Assistant as she wiped away.

  “Getting shat on by a bird is lucky? How do you work that one out? What if an elephant crapped on you? How lucky would that be?”

  “Say cheese.”

  Karl looked up. Rosanna, the-actor-playing-Roxy, was pointing her mobile phone at him.

  “You just dare, you bitch!”

  “Priceless”, purred Rosanna as she dared and turned away.

  “Put that on the internet and you are seriously dead”, Karl yelled after her.

  “Seriously dead”, repeated the Wardrobe Assistant who had an ear for the finer points of the English language. “The very worst sort of dead in my opinion.”

  Cris had, by now, returned to a shade of red on the softer end of the Dulux colour chart.

  “Please, please, children, can we stop fighting? For christ’s sake if not mine?”

  And so the clock was rewound, the actors and crew moving back through time to when a handsome young man with designer stubble etc sat in his car as a beautiful blonde and so on approached. He got out of the car again, she feigned surprise again, he declared his love again. No bird plop interrupted the flow as he took her hand with one of his hands and with the other hand, the one that wasn’t holding her hand, took a small jewel box out of his pocket. As he took the ring out from where it lay on its velvet cushion, the lessons Rosanna had so assiduously learned at the Mary Mackillop School of Performing Arts in Wagga Wagga came archly into play. Her eyes grew wide, her lips trembled and her nostrils flared. It was the nostril flaring that proved an emotion too far. For, as he held the golden ring with its sparkling diamond setting softly between thumb and forefinger she sneezed like a Lascar stoker who’d just inhaled a lump of coal.

  “Jesus!”, cried Karl as the spray hit him. The ring dropped from his fingers and hit the ground with a heart-stopping tinkle. Many of the watchers agreed later that it seemed to pause as if checking its options before deciding to bounce and tumble towards the drain that opportunistically lay just a few yards away.

  “It’s a fake, isn’t it?”, said the hopeful Cris to his Assistant. “Paste. T
en dollars max.”

  “It’s on loan from Angus and Coote. They get a mention at the end of the show. You know, jewellery supplied by Angus and Coote. Shall I call someone?”

  A little while later as, just out of sight, the local council’s crack squad of drainage technicians operated as silently as an SAS squad infiltrating a terrorist cell of Trappist monks, they reached the same point again with Damian successfully placing the Wardrobe Assistant’s engagement ring on Rosanna’s finger. She looked at the stone with the astonishment usually reserved for seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time and opened her lips to speak. Karl stopped her with a gentle finger to her lips. “Don’t say a word, Roxy. I want this moment to last.” And with his hand softly caressing her cheek, the right upper to be precise, he leaned in to kiss her. A soft feathering of the lips at first before his tongue began to probe gently like a honey-bee searching for nectar in a beautiful but delicate rose...

  “Aagh, euh, yuk!”, Karl reeled away from her as though he’d touched an exposed wire on a faulty toaster.

  “Cut, cut, cut!”

  “It’s garlic! She’s chewing bloody garlic tablets.”

  He grabbed a water bottle from an Assistant as Rosanna smiled towards Cris who was sitting with the palms of his hands on the top of his bald pate wondering why he’d failed to take up that offer of teaching at the Film School and why oh why oh why he’d agreed to direct the live episode that loomed on his horizon in much the same way that the Allied Fleet loomed upon the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

  “Sorry, Cris but I had to keep his tongue out of my mouth somehow.”

  Karl swigged from the water bottle and spat on the ground. “My tongue in your... I’d rather stick my dick in an electric blender.”

  Cris turned towards the Vision Mixer. “We got enough, didn’t we? You know, lips touching and... I mean, add a bit of girly music and it’ll be fine, great, terrific, won’t it? Say yes or you’re fired.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Terry, summoned by e-mail, made his way up to the Human Resources Suite, a place that when he’d last visited it, sometime in the 1980s to the best of his recollection, had been the Personnel Department. There had been no reason to visit since then. He did his job, went home at the end of the day, turned up the next morning. He had been, in his own estimation at least, an exemplary employee. Not that he cared to blow his own instrument, of course. And now he sat across the desk from Ms Penny Spender, the HR Manager, who was something of a contrast to the Personnel Manager as Terry recalled him. He’d been a grey-haired ex-naval officer with a moustache that bristled like an echidna who’d just heard bad news from home whereas Ms Spender looked like she’d stepped out of an organic shampoo ad.

  She poured coffees and offered him chilli-flavoured Tim Tams before congratulating him on being the second longest serving member of the Channel 12 family, beaten only by the part-time hunchback, sorry, person with a disability, who helped round the gardens in the Melbourne studio. Terry assumed that the employment was part-time rather than the hunch.

  “And have I got some good news for you”, she beamed.

  ‘Oh, yes?”

  He sat there with his Tim Tam melting into his fingers and dripping onto his overalls as she outlined the Network’s plans to outsource all the maintenance. This was, apparently, a win-win situation for all concerned. Especially, it appeared, for Terry. She pushed a buff envelope across the desk towards him and he’d hurriedly shoved the Tim Tam in his mouth and licked his fingers before opening it.

  “A pretty generous package, I think you’d agree, eh, Terry? Gosh, I’m quite envious.”

  “Package?” Could she saying what he thought she was saying without actually saying it? “You mean you’re getting rid of me?”

  “Not so much getting rid of as enhancing your retirement options. Although, to be strictly accurate, none of the other options involve you actually staying in your job. ”

  The figures danced in and out of focus on the paper in front of him. “It’s all done and dusted then? I don’t have no choice?”

  “The new people move in at the end of the month.”

  “That’s only two weeks away!”

  “Ah, but the really good news is that with leave accrued you can actually finish work this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon!!? Bloody hell, Jesus... oh, sorry, luv.”

  His eyes turned upwards towards the ceiling as his face took on a look of holy contrition for his little outburst. Puzzled, Penny followed his gaze.

  “It’s my wife”, he explained. “She doesn’t like me cursing. She’s dead, not up on the roof.”

  “Oh, good”, smiled Penny. “Well, good that she’s not up on the roof anyway.”

  She slid a small pile of leaflets across the desk towards him. “Yes, I’ve assembled some literature about adjusting to retirement and so on. Oh, look, over 55’s Crazy Golf. How exciting.”

  Leaflets in hand, Terry wandered dazedly back through the corridors looking like the Ghost of Christmas When The Presents Didn’t Arrive. He couldn’t face the boiler room and its memories and made his way outside to where the sun, oblivious to his fate, still sent down its life-giving rays. (On the other hand, or more likely, according to statistics, the head or neck, it also sent down the radiation that gave you melanomas but that was of little account to Terry.) People he passed looked askance at the downward slant of the normally grinning mouth and the gouty shuffle that had replaced the jaunty stroll. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He knew the years were creeping up on him - he’d only to look at the white hairs sprouting out of his ears and ponder the blubbery belly advancing south to remind him of it – but he’d hoped to somehow slip under the retirement radar and die in harness. He couldn’t handle half a day’s notice. It was too much. Well, too little, really. What was he going to do with himself? Not bloody crazy golf, that’s for sure, sorry, luv. He could manage evenings and weekends, they were what pottering was invented for. But seven days a week! It didn’t bear thinking about. The studio was his life. It was what kept him going. And who was going to look after it now? A bunch of cowboys, that’s who. Botch Casually and the Hole in the Head Gang.

  He tossed the scrunched up leaflets into a bin and looked up at the transmitter that towered over the studio in the way that towers tend to tower over smaller, squatter buildings. Maybe that’s what he should do. Climb up to the top and jump. That’d show ‘em. That’d show ‘em they couldn’t just toss him aside like a low-rating game show. On the other hand, given his vertigo, all it would show ‘em would be a gibbering wreck clinging to the railings ten foot off the ground. Still, he’d think of something, think of some way to show ‘em. Bastards, bunch of ... er, sorry, luv.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rob read through the latest batch of scripts with the solemnity of a bishop leafing through a collection of biblical exegesis although it’s doubtful whether the bish would have scribbled “what a load of bollocks” in red pen in the margins before re-writing a passage. He tapped the end of his biro on the desk and pondered. Why did he never write “stunning dialogue” or “brilliant scene” in the margin of a script? Or even “perfectly adequate”? To be fair, he did tell the writers when they did good stuff but being writers, of course, it meant nothing to them apart from the fact that they’d survived another round of editing and would in all likelihood get further employment. Tell a writer that his last ten scripts had been knockouts but that the thirty second scene in the pub in his last one hadn’t quite got over the point that was in the scene breakdown and they’d reach for the scotch or the valium, possibly both, and bemoan their fading career.

  A gust of wind sent several sheets of paper flying through the air as the door was thrust open and Leo stormed in. Leo was a man given to wearing denim and sported the sort of moustache that had been popularly worn over stiff upper lips in wartime British movies. “Have you seen these?”, he blustered, skimming a sheet of paper over the table in Rob’s general direction. “Have y
ou seen these figures?” He paced the room as Rob reached for the paper.

  “And good morning to you, too, Leo. No, if these are last night’s viewing figures, then not being psychic, I have not seen them.”

  “They’re shit, absolute shit. Didn’t win in one city, not one. Again. We’re in the shit, mate, right in the shit. Up shit creek with a fresh turd for a paddle.”

  Rob scanned the sheet which gave the number of viewers per quarter of an hour per channel in all the major cities. He hated the idea of everything being driven by the viewing figures, that a work couldn’t be judged on its intrinsic merits. On the other hand he was wary of making the same mistake as Captain Bligh. He hadn’t cared about the ratings and look what they did to him.

  “Come on, we were up against Davis Cup tennis. We could put Christ coming back to Earth on a shaft of sunlight up against Davis Cup tennis and still lose. Except in Adelaide, of course.”

  Leo continued his march up and down the cheap, cack coloured linoleum. “You know who’s going to get the blame, don’t you? Me. Fucking producer always gets the blame. Always the producer’s fault. ”

  “Of course it’s your fault. The scripts are absolutely perfect when they leave this department. Always.”

  “He’ll start on you when he’s finished with me, don’t you worry, mate. If I end up producing regional round-up in Gosford you’ll be back teaching English as a second language to traumatised reffos.”

  “Oh, those happy days at TAFE.”

  Leo unwrapped a piece of gum, shoved it in his mouth and started chewing rapidly and noisily. “Have you ever thought”, asked Rob, “of taking up smoking? It might help you kick that filthy chewing gum habit.”

  The phone rang and Rob answered it, prepared for another verbal volley from the distaff side or to deal with publicity’s request to find a story line for a recently released serial killer’s guest appearance. But the peremptory voice on the other end merely said: “You and Leo, my office, ten minutes.”