Bite The Wax Tadpole (2 page)

THINK OF THE TRAFFIC, YOU’RE GOING TO BE LATE.

The fly, having exhausted all options settled on the dressing table mirror. Must be interesting looking into a mirror with compound eyes. Like being in a fun house. Perhaps the fly was taking the opportunity to reflect, metaphorically, on its own life. “Ah, well, I’ve had a good innings - four weeks come Tuesday. Been around a bit, seen something of the world. Compost heaps, toilets, fruit bowls. Passed on a bout of bacillary dysentery up the old folks’ home, too, if I’m not mistaken. Mated forty three times but who’s counting? Must have had 20,000 kids at least. No wonder I’m so knackered I can’t find my way out of this poxy room.”

JUST GET UP!

He glanced across at Alison’s tangled hair, the only part of her visible above the doona she’d wrapped defensively around herself. At least she had a biological excuse for her swelling stomach.

The fly, revitalised, started buzzing around the room again and shot through the narrow gap between the open door and frame. Lucky old fly.

To say that Alison’s pregnancy was a surprise to them both was an understatement not unlike that uttered by the Duke of Wellington’s second-in-command at Waterloo who, upon looking down at the result of being hit by a passing cannonball, had baldly stated “Gad, sir, I think my leg’s been taken off”. Or was it Nelson’s second-in-command at Trafalgar? Anyway, point was, although he did have a hand, so to speak, in the conception Rob felt the blame was really down to his brother-in-law. More specifically, his home brewed parsnip wine. Why on earth Alan spent his evenings making plonk out of root vegetables like an impoverished peasant when his corporate salary was way north of the national average was a mystery beyond Rob’s ken. The Chateau Woollahra had seemed a relatively innocuous tipple when he and Alison had settled down with a bottle to watch “Poirot”. But its earthy mellowness had hidden powerful amnesiac and aphrodisiac properties and the morning after they couldn’t remember whodunit or havingdunit. They had to figure events out with the aid of a calendar following the doctor’s shock diagnosis of the cause of Alison’s recurring nausea.

FOR CHRIST’S SAKE MOVE YOUR ARSE!

Pushing himself slowly into a semi-recumbent position, he considered the first vital question of the day. To shave or not to shave? It was a dilemma easily solved by using the philosophical device of asking another question – why bother? Besides, he now didn’t have the time. If Alison didn’t constantly compare him to Yasser Arafat’s ghost when he grew a beard and if that beard didn’t itch like buggery after a week he’d never shave again. Anyway, he really, really had to get on. Get up, get out and get on. It didn’t much matter whether he wanted to or not. As he slowly rotated his neck, raised his eyebrows and stretched his arms in an effort to coax more blood and oxygen into his brain and limbs he saw, in the middle of the bed, the manuscript of his book that he’d fallen asleep over the night before. He really ought to print it out again as it now had more dog ears than a pack of fox hounds. As he reached out to pick it up he saw the red pen he’d been using to make corrections. With its top off. And next to the red pen with its top off was a red spot on the white doona similar in size, to his appalled eyes at least, to the one on Jupiter. With a guilty glance at Alison he folded the doona in what was, he knew, a futile effort to cover up his crime. Climbing silently out of bed, he quickly pulled on his silky kimono-type dressing gown and tiptoed towards the door.

“Don’t forget we’re going to mum and dad’s for dinner tonight.”

Shit!

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“I said: don’t forget. Between now and this evening. Come home at a reasonable time.”

“I will.”

He opened the door.

“And we need chlorine for the pool.”

Ah, yes, the pool, the pointless pool in which no-one swam anymore. If only he could put it on e-Bay.

“Right.”

He was into the hall.

“And get someone to fix the garage door.”

“What’s wrong with the garage door?”

“It sticks. It’s stuck. If you bothered to put your car away you’d know.”

“I don’t have time to put the car away. In fact, I’m thinking of leaving the engine running all night for a quick getaway.”

“Call someone.”

“Yes”, he said irritably, almost adding: “dear”. But that sort of bravery had died out with his grandfather who’d fought at Tobruk.

The hallway was dark and cool. He liked the hallway. As he scuffed along the uneven but highly polished oak floor the toilet flushed and a pimply, greasy haired youth in boxer shorts and a T shirt advising of his membership of the Gobi Desert Surf Rescue Team flopped out of the bathroom and plodded towards him raising a limp hand in greeting.

“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. Anyway, 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.