Bite The Wax Tadpole (3 page)

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.

Licking his dry lips he discovered the stubby end of a Camel velcroed into place. God, yes, he’d sat up in bed last night smoking and studying his lines for the live episode. Not a habit he should really be getting into. He’d prefer to be cremated after his death.

With a further groan and a few creaks, he swung his skinny legs – the varicose veins looking more and more each day like a relief map of the Nile Delta – out of bed and reached for the Zippo lighter on the bedside table. He lit up, inhaled deeply, blew out a satisfied smoke ring and then coughed for three minutes like the starter motor on a pre-war Bedford truck.

Ah, that’s better, he sighed as his throat and lungs stopped protesting and he set off towards the bathroom for the first encounter of the day between his prostate and the porcelain. The doctor was probably right in telling him to give up the fags and the booze. But he was worried that, at his age, the shock to his system of suddenly improved health might prove fatal.

He stood over the toilet bowl and waited patiently while his thoughts returned again to his current situation. He’d had the sneaking suspicion from his first day on set, when the director had called him Gordon, that he’d only got the part due to a mix up following the audition but the impending live episode would, he hoped, prove to the show’s producers, should they harbour any lingering doubts, that he still had whatever it was he once had. Sometimes, mostly when maudlin drunk, he pondered on where whatever it was he once had had gone. Did it start to drift off when his hair began to thin and his waist to thicken? Did it break into a trot when wife number three left him for an older man with a steady job? He knew for a fact it started to gallop like a horse with a bunger up its backside when the stage manager of the Bell Shakespeare Company had found him drunk in the wings when he should have been opening the castle gates for Macduff. From there, the only direction he’d taken had been down. The wilderness years of self-doubt, self-pity and self-medication.

Yes, the more he thought about it, the more the live episode seemed like a godsend. For him, at any rate. It would sort the men from the boys, the pros from the ams, the actors from the cardboard cut-outs. Another twelve month contract and he’d be debt free, able to move away from this damp, depressing apartment with its cracked walls, peeling paint and unappealing view of the “Whipcrackaway S and M Sauna and Massage Parlour” at the end of the alleyway opposite. Although, admittedly, it did help pass the occasional sleepless night watching blokes nipping furtively in and then limping slowly out, bowlegged, an hour or so later.

Ablutions completed, he sat in the kitchen contemplating a bowl of muesli. In his hand he held a carton of low fat milk. He’d conceded his breakfasts, at least, to his doctor’s stern advice. But his gaze was drawn ineluctably to the uncapped bottle of merlot staring back at him from the opposite side of the table. There was a good sized glass still inside it. He hesitated before opening the flaps of the milk carton. If the wine had been standing all night it wouldn’t be at its best by this evening and possibly undrinkable which would be waste even if it was only a cleanskin. Putting the milk down, he reached for the bottle and poured. Hmm, gave the muesli a rich, fruity, welcoming colour. Delicious.

Terry Bolton wiped the mud spot off the FJ’s wing mirror with his whiter-than-white handkerchief and stood back to admire the chrome gleaming in the morning sun. The old auto still looked in the same sparkling condition as it had the day he and Marge had bought it second hand from the one-eyed corn chandler in Balmain all those years ago. A classic, well-maintained motor standing on a well swept driveway next to a closely, clipped weed-free lawn with its neat borders of roses and camellias. Perfect. Marge had loved the garden, loved spending hours watching him digging and planting and mowing, giving him advice from the shade of the deck as she sipped her gin and tonic. “You’ve missed a bit”, she’d say. Or: “sorry, darl’ I think that apple tree’d look better a couple of feet to the left.” He chuckled to himself. Happy days.

He climbed into the car and settled into the gently distressed red leather seat. The engine purred into life like a lion stretching after a big feed and a good, long kip. As he turned out of the drive he squinted up at the sun beaming down from the firmament and waved to the couple of old dears in their straw hats and white uniforms off to the bowlo for a couple of early morning ends. Jimmy Barnes and Cold Chisel launched into “Working Class Man” on the Classic Hits station and Terry joined in with them. Another beaut day. God was in his heaven, the Aussies were two up in the Ashes and all was right with the world.

In the fastidiously furnished lounge room of her luxury apartment, accompanied by Michael Buble, who was “Feelin’ Good”, Phyllida Lovatt, blonde, beautiful, dressed loosely in a D and G track suit and Stella McCartney training shoes, was going through her morning Pilates routine. With the grace of a dancer she stretched and balanced, controlled her breathing, zipped up her core and, as she draped herself elegantly over the purple gym ball, farted. With her studiously well-developed sense of decorum she ignored the noise of this sudden eructation but her toy poodle, Rupert, woke up with a start and crept guiltily off to the kitchen.

Exercise over, Phyllida dabbed the light glow of perspiration from her forehead with an organic, natural fibre towel before preparing a breakfast of rice crackers and avocado. She followed this with a mango-flavoured psyillium shake before settling down on the sunny deck with her well-fingered “Vagina Monologues” script. Something a little more classical would have been preferable but actors with limited CVs cannot be choosers. She knew it was only her TV profile that had got her the role but she could live with that. Besides, the play was but a stepping stone away from the drudgery that Rickety Street had become. Three years as a strait-laced police constable with relationship issues was not the dream that had inspired her when she’d first dressed up in her mother’s clothes and stood in front of the mirror pretending to be Elizabeth Taylor in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”. She instinctively put a hand to the back of her head, remembering the whack her mother had given her when she’d reeled in from Happy Hour at the RSL to find her pouting at her reflection, repeating lines that she only vaguely understood in her best, sultry thirteen year old voice: “ If I thought you'd never ,never make love to me again... why, I'd find me the longest, sharpest knife I could and I'd stick it straight into my heart. I'd do that.”