Читать книгу Melt - Lisa Walker - Страница 7

My secret goal has its own soundtrack.

Drum-roll please.

Are you ready, chorus?

Chorus (to the tune of ‘Paperback Writer’): Oo oo. She wants to be a famous scriptwriter. Scriptwriter.

Yes, that’s right. I am a closet scriptwriter.

Chorus: Oo oo, scriptwriter.

But it is not the Academy Awards that beckon, it is soap opera.

Oo oo – soap opera?

You got a problem with that, chorus?

I don’t suppose many people remember Dynasty. While I missed its heyday – it last screened in 1991, the year I turned one – my dear Aunt Patsy gave me a box set for my twelfth birthday. She thought I could use some glamour in my life. While mud was plentiful, glamour was in short supply on our commune in the hills.

‘Happy birthday, Summer.’ She placed a gold-wrapped present with a shiny bow on our rough wood table. ‘Enjoy.’ Her scarlet lips drew up into a naughty smile. ‘You’ll have to watch them at my place.’ She glanced at my mother. ‘We’ve moved out of the stone age there.’

Aunt Patsy lived in a neat brick house in Lismore. It was close to my high school and I got into the habit of visiting her after school. It was a novelty to sit on a leather couch in a house with walls that weren’t made of mud-bricks.

From the moment I slipped the first video into Aunt Patsy’s player, Dynasty filled a gap I hadn’t known was there. I inhaled the sheer glory of the settings, the dresses, the beautiful women, the dashingly handsome men, the intrigue, the bizarre but excruciatingly addictive plot lines …

The first wife, Alexis, returns!

The illegitimate half-sister departs!

The husband leaves his wife for another man!

The hotel is set on fire by the amnesiac wife!

The wife has a torrid affair with a business rival!

There’s never been a soap opera to touch it. I’d pull on my mud-stained boots in the morning imagining they were stiletto heels and arrange my daggy sunhat as if it was a milliner’s creation.

‘What are you walking like that for, Summer Dawn?’ Marley would yell as I flounced down our weed-infested path to the school bus. Only Marley called me Summer Dawn. It was a joke, but it stuck.

‘Call me Sophia, darling,’ I would murmur, languorously.

‘Wait for me, you vixen,’ he’d call after me.

Marley. I gaze out the train window. For the last few days the sun has been reddish – a light haze of smoke blankets the sky. The firefighters will be out in force.

Only Marley knew about my secret career goal.

‘Go for it, Summer Dawn,’ he said. ‘It’s what you were born for.’

If I was born to be a scriptwriter, my twin brother Marley was born to be a firefighter. His number is there on my phone. I touch my finger to it. They say we’re in for a hot, dry summer – a treacherous summer. ‘Stay safe out there,’ I murmur. ‘Don’t forget to look up.’ Falling trees are more dangerous than flames, Marley always said.

Marley never got what I saw in Dynasty but he was happy to take part in my role plays. Under duress, he would be Blake to my Alexis but he preferred being the gunman at the royal wedding. The Moldavian Massacre was one of the great moments of Dynasty. Dead bodies were strewn like confetti in this season finale. Viewers had to wait six months to find out if their favourite characters had escaped unharmed. What a cliff-hanger! What suspense! I can only hope to emulate this amazing scene one day.

I don’t suppose Marley would understand what I see in project management. Or Adrian. He wouldn’t like my apartment or my new life. He wouldn’t understand why I need certainty. Why I plan everything now. Why I live in the city. Why I refuse to come home. I guess there are a lot of things Marley wouldn’t understand about the way I am now. But there’s nothing I can do about that.

Before I went overseas, Marley gave me his tattered old copy of Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery, the one Mum had given him on his tenth birthday. ‘Leave it behind somewhere when you finish it,’ he said. He’d got a new version of the complete works of Jules Verne so he didn’t need it anymore.

An Antarctic Mystery was Marley’s favourite book. When we were kids we used to sit on a log out the front of our house and he’d read from it. I can still hear him:

Great flocks of royal and other penguins people these islets.

These stupid birds, in their yellow and white feathers, with their heads thrown back and their wings like the sleeves of a monastic habit, look, at a distance, like monks in single file …

When it was Marley’s turn to control our games, we would get in a tree and pretend we were on a ship, making our way through a sea of towering icebergs. Sometimes he’d make me be a penguin, while he was an Antarctic explorer. Marley didn’t know that while he was visualising icebergs, in my mind I was in front of a roaring fire in the Carrington family mansion.

I glance at Marley’s number again then put my phone away as the train pulls into Town Hall station.

Despite what people may think, project management and soap opera are not poles apart. While soap opera is designed to give the appearance of surprise and unpredictability, in fact nothing is more tightly controlled. That is how I know soap opera is my destiny.

Adrian doesn’t have much time for soap opera. I know this because he sprung me watching Dynasty once when he came back from a run unexpectedly.

‘What are you doing, Summer?’ He sounded horribly disappointed. ‘I thought you were going to do yoga while I was away, not fritter away your time on rubbish.’

I flicked the remote, changing stations. ‘I was watching Philosophy Now, it had an excellent interview with Peter Singer, but there was an ad break, and I didn’t want to waste my time so I …’ I hit the off button before it became clear there was nothing on the box but trash.

Adrian thinks soap operas and the people who write them are an unnecessary evil. But we’re so compatible in other ways I’m sure he’ll come around if I introduce him to it in the right way. Once I’m an ace project manager and Bikram yogi in a red bikini, the fact I want to write soap opera won’t matter as much.

I know soap operas are not high art – that doesn’t matter to me at all. There is something about the love triangles, the family feuds, the bitter business rivals and the dark secrets, that reaches out and grabs me. I love how whenever the action flags, you throw in a brain tumour, a long-lost son, or an evil blackmailer. I even love the way the characters talk to each other in a way no real person ever would – how whole conversations take place where they tell each other stuff they already both know. In soap opera, villains always get their come-­uppance. In soap opera, things always make sense in a way they never do in real life.

The train stops and I get out. On the way to the office I see a guy I know slightly from his appearance on a Channel Five sports show. I wave. ‘Hi, George, that was such bad luck you didn’t make the football team. You’ve been training for ages and I know you wanted to make your father proud of you because he’s always thought you were a sissy, not like your older brother Michael who plays for Australia.’ My head is so full of scripts I sometimes sound like an extra in Neighbours. It’s an occupational hazard.

George is a silent type. He smiles vaguely. ‘Hot day.’

I stop at the corner and buy a copy of The Big Issue as always. ‘Hey, Bill, this issue looks great. I loved the story in the last one about the woman who met up with her brother after thirty years. The story about the Titanic was excellent too.’

‘Hot day,’ says Bill as he pockets my change. He is obviously a silent type too.

Bill and George are right. It is a hot day. The sun beats on my head as I walk the last block to the office. State is a tinderbox, screams the headline on a newspaper stand. But they always say that, don’t they?

My fingers itch and I reach into my bag. I try to restrain myself to once a week but today, although it has only been three days, I touch Marley’s number on my phone. It rings, and I hear him: Hello, Marley here, please leave a message. ‘Hey, Marley, it’s Summer here, I miss you.’ I press ‘end’ and suck in a gulp of hot air as I drop the phone back in my bag. That is it. That is definitely it for another week. I have got to stop calling Marley. I have got to stop.

The glass doors swish open and a delicious cool envelops me as I step inside the foyer of Channel Five. Twenty-three degrees. Perfect. A huge bunch of red roses decorates the reception desk. As Jacinta the receptionist is a hipster, these must be an ironic statement of love from her boyfriend, a lank-haired indie muso. They only just got back from a holiday in Iceland where they had a ball writing doleful poetry in bars. For short breaks, they usually do the same thing in Melbourne. Melbourne, according to Jacinta, is much hipper than Sydney, but nowhere near as hip as Reykjavik. Hipness appears to be inversely proportional to sunshine. Hobart, Jacinta says, is about to become the hippest city in Australia.

‘Hi, Jacinta,’ I say. ‘Wow, is that bunch of flowers from your boyfriend? I’m so glad you’ve finally got a nice guy. You’ve been going from ratbag to ratbag for ages and you deserve much better, especially now you’ve dyed your hair that gorgeous colour and ditched those heavy glasses.’

Jacinta tucks her fire-engine red hair behind her ears. She is used to it. All the scriptwriters speak like that. ‘Hi, Summer. Maxine’s in a state. Harry from Up and at ’Em got a better offer at Four.’

‘Damn. They can put him in a coma, can’t they?’

Jacinta shakes her head, her teardrop-shape retro glasses shining in the down-lights. ‘Jo’s already in a coma.’

Jo is Harry’s screen wife, who in real life is currently getting married in Hawaii, hence the coma. ‘It could be contagious?’

‘She was in a car crash.’ Jacinta puts her head on one side.

‘True.’ I consider this. ‘Hospital bug?’

‘Maybe. But there’s still the long-lost uncle plot.’

I wave my hand breezily. ‘Let him stay lost.’

‘You should be a scriptwriter, Summer.’ Jacinta flicks through her notes with her long, black fingernails. ‘Production meeting for In the Wild is in meeting room two.’

In meeting room two, Maxine, my boss and Channel Five’s creative director, is looking anxious. Consequently, the rest of the team are even more anxious. This is nothing new. People are always anxious in production meetings for In the Wild with Cougar.

Maxine has perfectly coiffed flaxen hair and large blue eyes. While she looks like a fifties-style Stepford Wife she is in fact one of the most feared people in television. I have seen large men weep after meetings with Maxine. Even in an industry rife with neurotics, divas and power-hungry stress-heads, Maxine has a reputation.

When I first joined Channel Five Jacinta took me aside. ‘There’s something you need to know about Maxine.’

I waited expectantly.

‘Never say can’t, only can. If someone says can’t, it sends her berserk.’ She drew her finger across her throat. ‘I’m not joking. There was a meeting once, it was before my time, but I’ve been told about it.’ Jacinta’s eyes darted around the room and she whispered, ‘She sacked everyone in the room. On the spot.’ I must have looked doubtful because she added, ‘You can ask anyone. Just mention Charlie’s Adventure. You’ll see.’

I thought Jacinta was exaggerating until I saw a set designer tell Maxine he couldn’t find a live elephant for a dream sequence in Up and At ’Em. It was horrifying, like that scene in Alien where a fanged monster bursts out of John Hurt’s chest and tears its victim to shreds. So far, I have managed to avoid being on the receiving end of that attack.

In the Wild with Cougar is one of our highest-rating shows. This makes it high stakes in the ratings war against Channel Four, our closest competitor. We put it up against their popular Kitchen Talent show at seven-thirty on Thursday night. So far, In the Wild is thrashing Kitchen Talent but far from making our team cock-a-hoop it has the opposite effect. The problem with In the Wild is that it all rests on the dynamic, beautiful, charismatic, highly intelligent and unpredictable Cougar Gale.

This is problematic for two reasons. One being that a star performer can so easily be lured away. Two being that Cougar Gale is poison to work with and only becomes worse as each TV poll shows her to be one of the biggest stars in Australian television. Cougar has cross-­demographic appeal. Both men and women love her tough-girl sexiness while kids are drawn to her can-do attitude to wilderness survival. Cougar is that rare star who families, singles and, it is rumoured, even the Prime Minister, love to watch. Hence, as I walk into the production meeting, right on time, the anxiety in the room hovers as palpably as the smoke haze outside.

I take my seat at the table and open my laptop. ‘Is Cougar coming?’

Maxine takes a sip of her coffee, leaving bright red lipstick marks on the paper rim. She gestures with her chin. A glass of freshly squeezed mixed vegetable juice sits in front of an empty, expensive, ergonomically-designed chair with a knee rest but no back support. Cougar believes the human race started declining when we discovered chairs.

‘Fill us in on the details for the next series while we wait, Summer.’ Maxine’s voice is controlled, but I sense the monster stirring within.

Can, not can’t. I call up my spreadsheet. The next series will be filmed in Antarctica. It’s ground-breaking and all very hush-hush. Anyone who breathes a word about it outside the walls of Channel Five will be found the next morning with their throat ripped open. It has been rumoured Maxine lists hit-men as a deduction on her tax return.

We’re calling our new show Cougar on Ice and it’s going to blow Channel Four out of the water when it goes to air in the peak ratings period. It will be the first Australian commercial TV series to ever be filmed totally in Antarctica. There have been one-offs before, but this is different – seven episodes with major product placement. The advertising people have been working their butts off pulling in new clients and the publicity team are glassy-eyed with excitement. It’s been made clear to me that I am honoured to work on logistics and I’d better not stuff it up.

‘Right.’ I clear my throat. ‘We have four seats confirmed on a flight departing from Hobart on the nineteenth of December. Cougar will be travelling with cameraman Rory Fleming, producer Mary Hogan and stylist Alicia Waring. Her Antarctic liaison is Lucas Nilsson.’

Lucas Nilsson. Thank goodness I’m not the one who’s going to be stuck in Antarctica with Lucas Nilsson. Good luck to Cougar, is all I can say. Dealing with Lucas, who is based at the Australian Antarctic Division in Hobart, has been beyond frustrating. If there was ever a man with no concept of project management, it is him. I make a mental note to check that he’s got my latest spreadsheet and continue. ‘The trip to Antarctica takes four and a half hours—’ A rumbling noise interrupts me.

Cougar skateboards into the room. Instantly everyone is on full alert. Cougar radiates star power. An aura moves with her, lighting up her long, tanned limbs, her bouncy black hair. She flicks her skateboard with her toe and carries it to the table, drains her vegetable juice in one gulp. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she perches on her chair.

She glances at the clock on the wall. ‘Okay, guys, let’s move it. I’ve got a date at the rock-climbing gym in half an hour.’ She manages to sound as if we’ve kept her waiting for hours.