Bite The Wax Tadpole (27 page)

“What on earth are you babbling about?”

“The accident you had this morning. Your car ran into a power pole in Randwick. Don’t you remember? Well, you had concussion so possibly you don’t but...”

Malcolm unfurrowed his eyebrows and firmed his grip on the gun. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes, camera two.”

“You’re hallucinating again. You’re in the bowling club. There aren’t any cameras.”

“Saints preserve us! This is a TV show. Those are the cameras.” He pointed the gun towards the audience at home then swung it around the set causing much ducking and cringing. “These poor benighted wretches are all actors. And he...” Here he aimed the gun at an empty space intermediate between himself and Rob. “He is a dead actor.”

“Alas”, agreed Norman.

Rob felt confident enough to take a step closer to Malcolm.

“When you were at the hospital you thought you were a brain surgeon, tried to perform a lobotomy on one of the porters with a ball point pen.”

Norman adopted his thoughtful pose. “I think he’s trying some sort of psychology. They can be quite clever some of these writer johhnies.”

Nev’s escape plan would not have got off the ground, literally, had not Vince left the keys in the ignition. Which he had thoughtfully, or unthinkingly, done. Getting the engine turning over was, therefore, not a problem and the blades were soon spinning. What next? Ah, yes, the stick thing by his left hand. This controlled going up and down... and the bent stick thing in front controlled your direction. And the pedals? What the hell did they do? They must do something, he reasoned, so while his hands jostled the sticks, he moved the pedals up and down. The engine roared and the body of the chopper started to vibrate violently. And then it started to rise.

CHAPTER THIRTY

In homes around Australia, heads were being shaken and scratched. The voice-over bloke with the raspy larynx had told them this was the one episode they shouldn’t miss and although they heartily agreed with him they were confused. Phone calls, texts and tweets were sent. “ U watching R St?” Channels were changed and the viewing figures soared.

In the Control Booth, Leo thumped the table. What the hell was Rob doing in there? The bloke was just about to shoot himself and he steps in and ruins it all! It would later occur to him that he was, at that moment, advocating that a man take his own life for the sake of the television ratings. It would be a very sobering thought. But he was able to console himself with the figures that showed that 68.2% of viewers shared his lack of concern for Malcolm’s continued existence.

Rob was warming to the role. A doctor from the Psych Department at St Somebody or Other.

“You’ve got what we doctors call Traumatic Delusional Amnesia. You’re actually a doctor yourself but you think you’re an actor playing a version of yourself in a TV show. Surprisingly common delusion, actually.”

He took another step closer. He knew what his next line should be: “Give me the gun.” He held out his hand. “Give me the...”

“There you are, you bitch!”

Phyllida strode through the fourth wall like the avenging angel she felt she was. Rupert, teeth bared like a canine Count Dracula, growled beside her. There were gasps and double-takes as she flew at Melissa who instantly grabbed a chair and threw it into her sister’s path. It hit Phylidda mid-thigh. She avoided the worst of the blow by sidestepping into the bemused Malcolm , sending him spinning. Melissa seized the chance to grab the gun from his weakened grip. She stepped back, aiming at, or at least waving the gun in the general direction of, Phyllida.

“Oh, dear”, said Norman, “the plot unravels.”

“Okay, bit of a change of plan, no problem”, snarled Melissa. “I was going to do for you anyway so why not do it on prime time TV, eh? Say your prayers, kiddo. Aagh!”

She screamed as Rupert the pissed-off poodle sank his teeth into her leg. “Get off me, you fucking little cotton bud!” She swung around like a one-legged dervish, trying desperately to fling the suddenly savage dog aside. Instantly, Kevin and Malcolm both made a grab for the gun. Their hands locked round Melissa’s wrist and all three of them spun round in a lunatic version of a Highland fling. A sword dance sans sword avec gun. Round and round they whirled.

“Let go of me!”

“Give it here!”

“It’s mine, I paid for the bloody thing.”

Phyllida joined in, jumping on her sister’s back and pulling her hair. Melissa fell backwards and the scrum collapsed. Three hands hit the floor at the same time. And the gun went off. Instinctively, Roy the Wrangler hit the remote control button.

Bruce’s chest exploded. He flung out his arms and staggered backwards, slid down the wall and lay there.

“Oh, my Christ, we’ve killed him!”

The scrum picked itself up slowly. Rupert crawled behind the bar, his heroics over for the day. The camera panned in on the body as it oozed life. A bucket full of cold reality had been thrown over the frenetic farce. An innocent man had been killed. For a second, perhaps slightly more, no-one moved. Then one of the extras who’d been a road crash victim on “Neighbourhood Hospital” called out: “Quick, we need something to stench the bleeding.”

“Staunch”, said Rob. “I think you’ll find the word is staunch.”

“Don’t matter either way”, said Bruce, sitting up and plugging a finger into the gory bullet hole. “Not really shot.”

Cheered by this news, Phyllida and Melissa instantly grabbed hold of each other and restarted their fight.

“Bitch!”

“Mad bloody cow!”

Norman pointed to the gun on the floor. “Take two, old boy. “

Seeing Robert bending down for the gun, Rob dived for it, sliding across the floor like the action hero he wasn’t. He grabbed it, rolled to the side and jumped to his feet. He could have been James Bond after all.

“Sorry, Malcolm. What the hell were you thinking? There’s five years olds watch this sh...”

He was probably going to say “show” but we will never know for at that moment his attention was taken by the entrance of Niobe ripping off her raincoat to reveal the torn and bloodstained nightdress. The gun lay limply in Rob’s hand. Malcolm grabbed it. Rob looked from the old actor to the young woman taking the top off a blue bottle and emptying powder into her mouth. Oh, Christ, decisions, bloody decisions. He ran towards Niobe.

A couple of people ran towards the rearmed Malcolm but he pointed the gun at them and they backed off. “Thank you. Now then, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted? “

“Camera two, I think, old boy.”

Niobe was foaming at the mouth as Rob tried to tear the bottle from her grasp. “Farewell, my love”, she bubbled. “If I can’t have you, I shall have no-one.” Their arm wrestle was brief. Rob staggered back with the bottle in his hand and some of the powder sprayed into his face. He spluttered and spat, desperate to get whatever it was away from his lips.

“It’s icing sugar, bloody icing sugar.”

Niobe sighed. “Of course it is. Where the bloody hell am I going to get arsenic from, eh?”

A large restraining bolt flew off the G-Tech 2000 and smashed the champagne flute as Terry raised it to his lips for a final sip. “Bloody hell!” By now the alcohol had done its job and Terry was as anaesthetised as a newt. He knew the end would be quick but he still didn’t want to be completely compos mentis when the boiler exploded. The G-Tech 2000 was now vibrating so hard that he couldn’t make out its outline. Another bolt shot out and pinged off the wall behind Terry. Any second now and he’d be gone, just like his dad and Jimmy Cagney.

“You take the high road and I’ll take the low road”, he began to sing. And then the bottom blew off the boiler.

Malcolm, facing camera two, had the gun to his head again. This hadn’t been quite as straightforward as he’d hoped but the world had got his message and who needed another long drawn out farewell speech?

“Nothing”, said Norman, standing proudly beside him, “in life so became him as the leaving of it.”

“There he is, there he is, my old mate, Rob”.

Malcolm shook his head. A kangaroo, a talking one at that, had wandered onto the set. Was this another figment of his diseased brain? The kangaroo was hugging the script producer and sobbing. Time to go. His finger tightened on the trigger.

As Terry watched in drunken, open-mouthed awe the last restraining bolt flew off the G-Tech 2000. Steam spread across the floor like the escape gases of a Saturn V sitting on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. With its bottom gone and nothing to hold it down the G-Tech 2000 could do nothing but obey Newton’s Third Law of Motion. It began to shoot rapidly upwards.

Malcolm adjusted the angle of the barrel. He most definitely didn’t want just an extra crease in his forehead...

Phyllida and Mellissa were rolling round on the floor in a tangle of hair pulling, face scratching and general name calling...

Rosanna was rubbing her back up and down against a pole at the end of the bar in what a late tuning in viewer might have taken to be, well, a pole dance.

Karl raised his head from the bar, yawned and slipped sideways onto the floor...

Niobe vomited up a stomach full of icing sugar...

... and Rob was trying to disentangle himself from the embrace of a very tired and emotional kangaroo as...

... the floor exploded.

It was the complete and utter disorientation that Rob most remembered afterwards. It went without saying that the situation in the studio that evening was far from normal but the sight of what appeared to be some sort of strategic missile suddenly bursting through the carpet took things into the realms of the stratospherically supranormal. The noise was ear-splitting as concrete shattered and pinged around the studio like shrapnel. People screamed and dived for cover. Malcolm pitched forward as he pulled the trigger and the bullet passed straight through Norman.

“I say, have a care, old chap!”

Rob found himself lying with his face buried in Greg’s pouch, his nostrils assailed by the fumes from a broken bottle of rum. He lifted his head up just in time to see the missile crash through the ceiling.

In the Control Room, Leo watched with appalled fascination.

“Jesus Christ, beat that for and end of episode!” Little did he know.

Nev was somewhat disconcerted to find himself flying straight towards the studio building but his instinctive pull back on the control stick lifted the front of the chopper upwards and over the roof. Piece of cake. Isn’t that what the Spitfire boys used to say during the War? He laughed a little insanely in the way that all good theatrical villains do as their nefarious plans unfold. He’d figured that he’d fly for ten minutes which, and this was the great thing about escaping by helicopter, would take him many miles away from the studio, land and then... and then... well, he’d do some more figuring when he got there. What, of course, he hadn’t taken into account in his figuring thus far was the likelihood of a G-Tech 2000 boiler flying up at him through the studio roof and smashing into the cockpit. Which it did.

On the set floor, people began to pick themselves up. Once more, Malcolm put the gun to his temple. God, the way things were going he’d die of old age before he could commit suicide.

“Reminds me of a rather avant garde production of Coriolanus I was in back in the seventies”, said Norman as he picked his nails with the point of his dagger.

There was a lot of dust and debris about and it was eerily silent. Staring up at the hole in the roof, Rob wondered about the finer points of the AWGIE rules. Clearly, the script that had gone, was going, to air was not the one that he wrote. Would he have to write a note to the Guild President explaining the situation?

Above the studio, the helicopter exploded. Fragments of twisted metal, razor sharp Perspex and Network Executive flew out in all directions including, unfortunately for the cast and crew of Rickety Street, downwards. The last thought that passed through Rob’s mind before it all went dark was: Christ, you wouldn’t believe this is in a Dan Brown novel.

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

The FJ Holden purred through the Gothic entrance to Mandrax House observing strictly the 5k per hour speed limit. It was a glorious day, the sun was shining and the Aussies were 2 for 260 against South Africa. Terry wound down the window as the car drew level with an old man, flies undone, scuffing through the crisp leaves by the side of the road.

“Morning, Arnold.”

“Shittenfickingpricking”.

“Yeah, too right”, agreed Terry. “Get your footy tips off you later, mate.”

“Shittenfickingpricking Manly”.

Terry parked neatly between the gleaming white lines in the car park, lines he’d touched up the previous day. Lightly humming the Toreador’s Song from Carmen he strolled across the closely trimmed lawn, a lawn he’d mowed the day before yesterday, and unlocked the shed marked “Maintenance”. Inside the coolness of his new domain he flicked on the kettle and spooned instant coffee into his Sydney FC mug. Yes, life was good again. After he’d recovered from the effects of being trapped under the rubble in the basement for two days with a hangover the size of Bengal, the authorities had decided that treatment rather than punishment was the order of the day. Besides, no-one could decide how much his misguided attempt at suicide-by-boiler had contributed to the destruction of the studio vis-à-vis the falling helicopter and ensuing fire. So they sent him to the Barking Institute where, during his first consultation, he’d fixed the broken drawer on Professor Winkelman’s desk and pointed out to her that the roses outside her window needed deadheading. She’d prescribed anti-depressants and a course of counselling before calling Human Resources and seeing if there were any maintenance jobs going.

The kettle started to whistle and Terry opened the sports –stickered bar-fridge to get out the milk. Which he promptly dropped on the floor.

“Oh, bollocks”, he said, looking down at the milky lake widening and flowing under the fridge. But he didn’t look up and he didn’t apologise.

Charlea climbed the dark, uncarpeted stairs slowly and nervously. From the open door at the end of the corridor she could hear relaxed chatter and laughter. She’d never been to Woolloomooloo before and had had difficulty finding the Bucket of Blood pub where the rehearsals were due to take place. Late on her first day. They’d have her down as unprofessional already. But she painted on a smile and walked breezily in. The rest of the cast were sitting in a circle on uncomfortable looking plastic chairs, drinking coffee, copies of the Arden Macbeth open in front of them. Alex, the director sat at a small table to the side.