Bite The Wax Tadpole (7 page)

“I don’t get this”, the raven haired sixteen year- old in school uniform said, returning more slowly this time and studying a blue script. “This whole story line with Joe and the hit and run guy. It’s weird, doesn’t make any sort of sense.”

Malcolm turned to the end of the paper – obituaries, the crossword and the TV guide.

“Word of professional advice, Charlea, my sweet. Don’t try and follow the plot. Therein lies madness. Just learn your lines and look pretty. That’s what I do. Good lord, Norman Tubby’s dead!”

Charlea was still looking for enlightenment in her script. “Who?”

He held up the obit page with its headline: “Actor’s Tragic Death”, for her to see. The article was illustrated by a photo, obviously taken some little while ago, of the deceased as Hamlet, doubleted and hosed, staring into the empty orbits of a skull. Charlea gave it a perfunctory glance.

“Never heard of him.”

“Before your time. Great actor, great actor. I remember seeing his Hamlet at the Balmain Hippodrome in nineteen hundred and frozen to death. They certainly knew how to belt out blank verse in those days, I can tell you.” He took in a breath and declaimed as though to the Gods. “Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.”

“What?”

He sighed and continued to read on through the rest of the article outlining Norman Tubby’s life from birth in Indooroopilly to war time service to treading the boards in the West End to his return to Australian theatre to bits and pieces of work in TV to obscurity to ... good God almighty! Had his jugular been ripped open by a carelessly tossed chainsaw the colour could not have drained from Malcolm’s face any faster. He read the sentence again, aware that his tongue might well be lolling and his lips moving, as he slowly followed the words, the terrible, chilling postscript to the late actor’s mortal existence. “His body lay undiscovered in his rented apartment for over three months.” Three months! In the middle of summer, a summer, moreover, when record books had had to be rewritten! Christ, he thought, if you left a pork chop out uncovered for a couple of hours in this heat it’d look and smell like Beelzebub’s backside. It said in the obituary that he was survived by a son and daughter. Where the hell were they? Come to that, where the hell was the bloody landlord? What sort of rackrenter was it who didn’t hound, unmercifully, a tenant who was more than five minutes late with the fortnightly reckoning? Didn’t he come round banging on the door demanding his pound of flesh and sniff its decaying odour seeping under the door?

Malcolm shuddered at the thought and folded the paper closed as Terry sauntered onto the set, toolbox in one hand and a notebook covered in sporting stickers in the other. “G’day, Malcolm, mate. Got your footy tips for me?”

Malcolm gave him the sort of look the Duke of Wellington gave the man who asked him if his name was Smith. Of what consequence was football in the great scheme of things, when death and decay had formed an alliance and were marching towards him with hideous grins and lengthening strides?

“No, not yet. I really don’t know why I bother. Last tip I recall getting right was Balmain Tigers against Newtown.”

“It’s summer, mate, we’re doing the English Premier League.”

“Soccer, league, synchronised dwarf throwing, makes no difference. If you asked me to tip the date of next Christmas I’d balls it up somehow.”

Terry chuckled. He was a lugubrious one was old Malcolm. “Come on, mate, cheer up. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” This statement succinctly summed up Terry’s approach to life in general and though, as a philosophy it was a little lacking in depth when compared to, say, existentialism or Buddhism, it did have the advantage of being easier to understand than heterophenomenology.

“I’ll come back later then. Be seeing you.” He went on his merry way passing Phyllida who, entering stage right, as it were, immediately took in the lack of action. “Why aren’t we shooting?”

“Because”, replied Malcolm, “Josh, the darling of the nation’s pre-pubescent female population is running a little late due to his having been arrested.”

“Arrested? What for?”

“Possession of some sort of pharmaceutical substance, I believe.” He eyed the pink sheets of paper she carried. “You might as well hang that shooting schedule in the dunny. At least it might be of some practical use there.”

“They ought to do something about that boy. Even when he’s here he’s not here if you see what I mean.”

“No, he’s hardly the consummate professional, is he?”, agreed Malcolm. “ But what can you expect when he only got the part because he looked good modelling Big W’s autumn range of adolescent underwear.” He nodded towards Charlea who had her head down, studying the script. “And didn’t young Charlea get her role by winning a competition in Bimbo magazine.”

“Runner-up”, corrected Phyllida as she stuffed the schedule into the pocket of the old dressing gown she now wore over her police uniform. “If anyone wants me I shall be in the canteen.”

“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. Ten 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.