Bite The Wax Tadpole Read online

  Rob put the phone down. “Good old Nev, as succinct as ever.”

  “The Ice Man calleth, eh?”, said Leo.

  “Ice Man?”

  As they made their way through the swooshing magic doors that separated the lino and concrete of the production and studio areas from the highly polished executive area known as Mahogany Row, Leo, still chewing furiously, explained the sobriquet.

  “He’s been on crystal meth for months, mate.”

  “That would explain a few things.”

  As the Light Brigade found when charging the Russian guns at Balaclava, there were functionaries to the right of them, functionaries to the left of them, functionaries in front of them, volleying and thundering away at whatever it is they do that is so vital to the running of a modern TV network. In a glass-fronted office, a cabal of shirt-sleeved executives sat hunched over their agendas. To Rob they looked like the sort of blokes who would do a powerpoint presentation at their daughter’s wedding and get buried offshore for tax reasons. The corridor was lined with photos of the stars of the Network’s fondly remembered shows of the last fifty years. How amusing, not to mention educational, it would be to add a line or two to the legend underneath the smiling faces. Alcoholic... wife-beater... died in a loony bin... stacking shelves in Coles...

  “Bloke’s a mess, mate, close to cracking. Two ex-wives to pay off, property investments gone down the gurgler.”

  “Now I come to think about it, his car was full of smoke this morning. I thought he was just having his usual spliffing start to the day.”

  “I don’t think he smokes it, mate. Nah, he does it the executive way.”

  Rob hesitated to ask but he did so anyway.

  Nev Beale checked that all the toilet stalls were empty before entering one and locking the door. He dropped his trousers, as is the usual drill in such situations, before reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a small plastic bag. From out of the bag he produced a small crystalline rock. He then squatted, reached behind himself with the rock and inserted it where, as the saying goes, the sun don’t shine.

  Rob and Leo sat and waited in Leo’s outer office under the baleful gaze of his PA who was known studio-wide, with no trace of affection or irony, as the Rottweiller. She was totally unaware of this, of course, and could never understand why packets of Smackos would often be left on her desk.

  Leo leaned in confidentially towards Rob. “Bloke’s had more ice up his arse than a one-legged figure skater.”

  Rob winced. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “Buggered if I know”, replied Leo as Nev returned from the washrooms. “In you go”, he commanded Rob and Leo who jumped dutifully to their feet. “Coffee, cakes and no calls for the next half hour”, he continued for the Rottweiler’s benefit.

  Nev’s office was all that Rob’s was not. It positively gleamed with the finest timber and steel and glass and the walls were hung with top quality art works bought as investments by the Network Board who, to give them their due, may not know much about art, may not even know what they like but do know how much per square centimetre a Brett Whiteley is worth. The room even had windows. Rob and Leo sat in the tubular steel chairs on the subordinates’ side of the huge, gleaming paper free desk while Nev trekked to the far side where his leather and rose-wood executive throne awaited. He winced as he sat down and Leo and Rob exchanged knowing looks.

  “You do realise we were up against Davis Cup tennis last night, don’t you, mate?”, said Leo getting in an early defensive shot.

  “Who gives a stuff about Davis Cup tennis? This is what you guys ought to be crapping your nappies about.” He picked up a remote control and pointed it at the giant plasma screen that dominated one wall in much the same way that Leonardo’s Last Supper dominates the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Black and white countdown figures appeared on the screen before it burst into life with a shot of an ambulance racing along the streets of a busy city and in through the gates of a large hospital. A voice over said: “ Het onthaal aan Wie Gaat Volgend” just before a smartly dressed man with a stethoscope round his neck stepped into shot and said: “Het spel van het leven en dodo”

  “It’s in Dutch”, explained Nev.

  “Thank god for that”, said Rob. “I thought I’d had a brain haemorrhage.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The studio canteen, imaginatively called The Studio Canteen, afforded diners a splendid view of parklands and bush. This helped to take their mind off the food which was prepared by a chef with a diploma in reheating . Malcolm and Phyllida sat in a booth next to the window watching a magpie peck at a dead rat next to the barbecue area.

  “Remind me not to have the kebab at lunchtime, will you”, said Malcolm as he popped a couple of paracetamol into his mouth and swigged them down with a gulp of tepid coffee.

  “Are you all right?”, asked Phyllida. She’d noticed over the last few weeks how tired he’d been looking, how grey he’d become, how he fluffed his lines more often.

  “Yes, yes. Bit too much vino collapso last night, that’s all”, he replied, shaking his head in an attempt to exorcise the taste of the tablets. She decided not to pursue the matter and stirred her tea. God forbid that she’d end up like Malcolm or Norman Tubby but, given the nature of her chosen profession, it was a definite statistical possibility. And what if the parts stopped coming in? What if she couldn’t act, couldn’t pretend to be someone else? She couldn’t go back to being herself, not full-time.

  “Did you read about poor old Norman Tubby?”, she said. “ Lovely man, real old fashioned gentleman. He sexually abused me once in an episode of Blue Heelers.”

  The clouds that lowered on Malcolm’s house dimmed still further. “Yes, and look how he ended up. Dying alone in a one room flat in the unfashionable end of Darlinghurst. There but for the grace of He who doesn’t exist...”

  Phyllida frowned. “Are you sure there’s not something else bothering you?”

  Malcolm shrugged. “Is it a myth, do you think, that your hair and fingernails grow after you’re dead?”

  “Sliut me aan bij nos oz volgende week voor ene and ere episode van “Wie Gaat Volgend?”, said the smart young presenter as he sat on the edge of a bed where an old man, face as yellow as a newspaper announcing The Abdication, sat with a multitude of tubes entering his body through orifices both natural and man-made. The program’s theme tune, a slightly jollied-up version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, started and the credits began to roll as Nev hit the stop button.

  “What was that?”, inquired the stunned Rob. “The Dutch entry in the Eurovision Crap Contest?”

  Nev swung his chair round to face Rob and Leo. “It might be crap but it’s the crap that floats on top of the other crap, the crème de la crap. Highest rating show in Holland, Germany and Belgium. You got the gist of it?”

  “Basically”, offered Leo, “guessing which poor sod of a terminally ill patient carks it next.”

  Nev took a long swig of Red Bull and stood up, restless after viewing the DVD. “ “Who Goes Next?” Brilliantly simple, eh? Clever bastards, the Dutch. I was in Amsterdam last week, you know. Guess what for?”

  Despite his best efforts Rob couldn’t rid himself of the awful vision of Nev bending over with his Reg Grundys round his ankles while one of those ladies famous for standing in well-lit windows in the red-light district shoved jagged little crystals up his...

  “Fascinating canal system? Van Gogh exhibition? Anne Frank’s house?”

  Nev picked up a pair of dumb-bells from the Execo-gym in the corner of his office and began a set of biceps curls. “Negotiating with the ZVP Network about buying the rights to a local version.”

  “And you’re telling us this because...?”, asked Rob who had the same uneasy feeling in his stomach that he had when going over the top on a roller coaster. Leo had stopped in mid-chew, his lower jaw set in a westerly direction.

  “Because the writing is on the wall for “Rickety Street”. Know what I me
an by the writing on the wall?”

  “It’s in the bible”, said Rob unthinkingly, “Balshazer’s Feast. Mene, mene...”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, fucking writers. No offence. Yeah, the writing is most definitely on the wall for you guys.”

  Leo scraped the gum off the roof of his mouth with his tongue and set his jaws in motion again. “We’re getting canned?”

  Nev took a deep suck of air as the curls started to burn his biceps. “Re-zoned. We’re still finalizing the deal but if it goes through, and why the hell wouldn’t it with the dosh we’re offering, Who Goes Next? gets your time slot and you get moved to 1030. I mean, come on, look at the ratings. They’re shit.”

  Leo looked at Rob with a raised I-told-you-so-eyebrow as Nev continued. “Another six months and you’ll be down with the SBS news in Serbo Croat.”

  YOU guys... YOU get moved... YOU’LL be down? So much for Cabinet solidarity. Rob seemed to recall it being “us” when the TV fan mag awards and Logies were being given out. Nev replaced the weights, downed another slug of Red Bull and started lapping the desk, punching his left palm with his right fist for emphasis as he talked.

  “The live ep’ll get the figures up; the stupid bastards out there...”

  By which Rob assumed he meant the viewers who paid his and all their wages by watching the programs and then rushing out to buy dog food, cars and slim-line sanitary towels as instructed during the ad breaks.

  “... lap that sort of thing up. Like dogs and their own vomit, you know what I mean?”

  Another delightful image to run alongside anally delivered recreational drugs.

  “Your mission, should you choose to remain in employment, is to keep the figures up there. Do that and if “Who Goes Next?” goes tits up you could get your old spot back. But you’ve got to give us something different, something edgy, something...” He waved his right arm in the sort of gesture Julius Caesar might have used when addressing the Senate. “Something... out there. Know what I mean?”

  Rob followed the line of the outstretched imperial arm out through the window. “Something Parramatta-ish?”

  “ We’ve done surveys, asked people what they want. And they want something warm and comforting, you know, like an old sweater. But at the same time they want something exciting, something arousing, something... something...”

  “Not like an old sweater?”

  “Yeah, something...”

  “Edgy?”

  “Yeah, something...”

  “Out there?”

  “Edgy and out there. You got it.”

  Warm and comforting... old sweaterish... exciting... edgy out there... Parramatta-ish. Rob let the concepts roll round his brain for a moment or two.

  “They weren’t more specific, these viewers, were they?”

  “You could start by getting rid of some of the dead wood on that writers’ list of yours.”

  Rob locked his teeth together in a dental death-grip in order to stop his lips saying something his bank balance might later regret and the urge to indulge in personal abuse passed. “Well, actually, as a matter of fact, I was going to have a word with one of the writers today.”

  “Yeah? Well I hope the word’s goodbye.”

  “Golden Brown” , the Stranglers melodic paean to heroin or possibly a nice suntan, burst forth as Nev’s mobile started dancing drunkenly about the desk. Nev grabbed the phone, looked at the caller ID.

  “Okay, you blokes can scram. And this is strictly, strictly confidential, your eyes and ears only, got it?”

  “Wild hearses wouldn’t drag it out of me”, said Rob as Nev indicated the door in the manner of a referee sending off a player for ungentlemanly conduct. As the door closed, Leo inquired of Rob: “Still got any contacts at TAFE?”

  Nev accepted the call. “G’day, mate, how’s it going?” Outside – obviously - the Network helicopter rose from its pad and hovered above the quivering trees before angling away towards the City. Nev watched it go as he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone. “Everything’s sweet, nothing to worry about it. The deal’s going to go through. Relax, have a good time. You tried the Bridge climb? Be pretty damn exciting for someone from your part of the world, I should think.”

  In another part of the city, near the airport, in a drab, concrete building seemingly designed by an architect who had not been informed that the Window Tax had been repealed, a Technician in the employ of a major telecommunications company noted Nev’s conversation in an electronic log before turning back to his Facebook page and updating his profile.

  Malcolm and Phyllida strolled back towards the set. Malcolm was still eeyorish. “Doesn’t help having my ex constantly asking for more money.”

  “Good grief, Malcolm, I thought you told me you’ve been divorced for ten years. It’s about time that woman stopped looking on you as a meal ticket for life.”

  “I rather think she looks on me as providing the after dinner mints and liqueur of life. And then there’s the tax man after his pound of best liver.” They stopped outside the Green Room beside the cast’s pigeon holes. Letters and cards were crammed in or jutting out of the spaces allotted to the younger and sexier members of the cast. Malcolm’s slot contained a single, green script. He took it out and glanced at it. “Not to mention more amendments for the live episode. Saints preserve us!”

  Phyllida took out her own copy along with several fan letters. “Come on, Malcolm, it’ll be exciting, a challenge. Think of the adrenaline rush. Did I tell you I’m doing the “Vagina Monologues?”

  “No, no, you didn’t. You know, a friend of mine went to see it thinking it was some sort of adult ventriloquist show. He was very disappointed.”

  He cast his eyes towards a group of young actors huddled round the coffee urn. “Anyway, I’m not worried about my own performance. When you’ve had your trousers fall round your ankles in the middle of Lady Windermere’s Fan, a live performance no longer holds any terrors. No, it’s our young friends I’m worried about. Some of them have trouble remembering the words to Happy Birthday. An entire script? Hah! It’s going to be a complete disaster. I can feel it in my water.”

  A young man with a beard on the thin end of the Wispiness Scale slapped down the corridor in his Venetian suede loafers and stood breathlessly in front of them. “Where have you been?... I’ve been looking... there’s a new schedule out... you’re wanted on set.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead and handed them copies of the orange schedule.

  “You’re the trainee director, aren’t you?”, asked Malcolm receiving a nod and a gasp in reply. “You know”, he continued, “I’ve worked with some of the top directors in the business in my time and I never once saw any of them running round like a blue-arsed fly looking for missing actors.”

  With the Hounds of Impending Doom snapping at his heels, or at least the Shi Tzus of Possible Unemployment humping his legs, Rob trudged back towards the Script Department in a state of shock or bewilderment or possibly both. He was bewildershocked, that was it. It was one thing to want to jump from the ship, sinking or not, it was another thing altogether to be pushed overboard by the sick-minded Dutch inventor of a morbid reality TV show.

  So what to do? Should he bite the bullet and mix his metaphors by staying with the sinking ship trying to replace the leaking deck plank by plank or bite a different bullet and abandon said ship by leaping boldly into waters unknown? It was a dilemma, all right, a big, black, snorting, Argentinian Fighting Bull of a dilemma. On the one horn...

  Fearing that he might look as white as the ghost of someone who’d died of anaemia, he slapped himself across both cheeks and forced his lips into a mirthless smile before he stepped into the Department. Adam, staring intently at his computer screen, said: “Neil called, he’ll be a bit late.”

  “Right.”

  “Impotence Australia want to know if we can do a story to tie in with Erectile Dysfunction Week”, said Sally.

  “Don’t see why not”

  “I’l
l let them know we’re up for it then, shall I?”, quipped Adam lugubriously, causing everyone to groan in the time-honoured manner. Everyone except Rob who merely asked for the dates.

  “Are you all right?”, inquired Sally.

  “What? Yeah, fine, just... that was a joke, wasn’t it? Erectile dysfunction... let them know we’re up for it. Very good.”

  Hope stepped forward proffering a yellow stick-it note. “An Avril Pollard wants you to call her back when you’ve got a minute.”

  “She’s not the mad woman from Dubbo, is she?”, he asked, taking the note.

  “She said she was a literary agent. I think. It was something about a book, anyway.”

  A little of the glow that had been physically drained from Rob’s eyes returned. One door closes and another one slides silently open. He hurried into the Writers’ Room and grabbed the phone. In his limited experience of phone conversations with literary agents, limited to the one he was about to have now, they didn’t call you personally to tell you your book was shite. But don’t get too excited, he told himself, don’t make a complete twat of yourself. He brushed down his shirt, blew out his cheeks and rocked on his heels as he waited for a connection.

  “Avril Pollard”.

  “Avril, Rob Jones here, returning your call.”

  “Rob, hi, great, Thanks for calling me back. Just thought I’d let you know how much I enjoyed your “Prick!” ”

  CHAPTER TEN

  It hadn’t turned out to be quite the literary deal of the century. And he might have come over a little churlish when he asked if Tim Winton also got $6,000 as an advance. It was some way shy of being enough to enable him to tell Nev to shove his show the same place he shoved his metamphetamine crystals. Still, what was he expecting? A bidding war and a studio deal with Steven Spielberg? Well, actually, that’s exactly what he had fantasised about when having trouble sleeping. And why not? If “The da Vinci Code”, for all its failings, could become a worldwide phenomena then why not “Prick!”? Perhaps the world was waiting for a literary thriller set in 17th century London. His hero was Kit Marlowe, whose faked death was the precursor to his career as London’s first Private Eye under the alias of Zacharias Bounderby. His Marlowe, alias Zac, was just as hard-boiled and wise-cracking as Chandler’s Marlowe and Elizabethan London made 1940s LA look like the House at Pooh Corner. For one thing, Philip Marlowe didn’t have to watch out for plague rats and pisspots being emptied out of upstairs windows. Yeah, six month, a year, two years, it could make his fortune. There was the small matter of actually finishing the book, of course. As instructed in the Writers’ Guide he’d sent in the first three chapters and a story outline to Pollard’s Literary Agency. Which was all he’d so far managed to write. So when Avril said that she looked forward to seeing the rest of the manuscript what he should have said was: I’m a bit busy at the moment and what with one thing and another it’ll be about six months before I can get a complete first draft to you. What, in fact, he had said was: no problem just needs a bit of polishing, that’s all. A bit of polishing! Hell’s teeth!