The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  I came out of the booth, dried myself quickly, and pulled on my shorts. A pair of white, rather shabby sandals stood on the bricks: on the bench, neatly folded, was a dressing-gown of dark green satin, embroidered with roses. It seemed silly to say goodbye, and she didn’t speak again.

  I had an intense desire, going back to my room, to know who she was. It seemed unlikely that I’d ever find out.

  That afternoon, I phoned Martin Gadsby, the senior producer in ABS Drama. He’d had enough time to digest my letter of recommendation, I thought.

  His voice on the phone was small and cold and elderly, and he didn’t offer to meet me immediately.

  ‘I’m impressed that Rupert Jones thinks so highly of you, Mr Miller, and of course you’re welcome to apply for the vacancy here. But you must understand we’ll have a lot of highly-qualified people interested. Are you going to do some acting up here? Good. I’ll contact your agency, and book you for my next suitable show. That way, I’ll see what sort of talent you have, and we can discuss other possibilities afterwards. Goodbye.’ Abruptly, the voice was gone.

  The next two weeks were spent waiting in vain for Gadsby’s office to give my agency a call.

  The agency got me two commercial radio jobs — small parts in soap operas — and the rest was emptiness, while my savings began to dwindle. I walked the streets of the city, calling in at the offices of the commercial radio producers to remind them of my existence. I seldom got past their secretaries; but it had to be done. The rest of the time I waited for the phone, which stood upstairs in the front hall. Mr Beaumont usually answered it, darting out of his nearby office; down in my room on the distant arcade at the back I couldn’t hear it ring, but he’d promised to bring me any messages.

  There was no other way than this, no alternative to waiting, day after empty day, not just for Gadsby, but for other acting calls. The first step on the road to failure was to take a part-time job; I’d learned that when I started in Melbourne. But Melbourne had been easier. The pool of actors was smaller, and there were no agencies. Sydney was the only city in the nation where enough radio and television was produced to keep a legion of actors fully employed, and a number of agencies going full blast; so it was all more impersonal. You had to have an agent or you weren’t considered. There was a hard core of relatively famous full-time professionals, and a fiercely jostling outer circle, whose ranks were constantly thinned and replenished; I must join this outer circle, and then bore in towards the centre. But if I got into ABS Drama, I said, I’d be doing the hiring; a whole different story would begin.

  Meanwhile, I had to survive, and every other day I went in to Metro Casting in the city, to be told by the secretary that ABS hadn’t yet phoned. She was always hopeful for me, though.

  ‘You mustn’t get downcast, dear. I’ve known young actors to take months to get their first job. There’s so many hammering at the doors, in this town. It’s lucky you can still do juve parts — there’s a shortage of good juves.’

  Middle-aged, with greying, upswept hair, upswept spectacles and a motherly veneer that totally disappeared during certain steely phone calls she made, Miss Morton seemed to me like Fate, seated in her cubby hole over her three phones and her huge typewriter, surrounded by casting lists, and publicity shots of Sydney’s famous and half-famous actors.

  ‘If Martin Gadsby said he’ll use you, I’m sure he will,’ she said. ‘He’s the king, in ABS Drama, and ABS Drama is what matters.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Most of the actors hate him, of course, he can be such an old swine. You’ll just have to get on the right side of him.’ Mouth pursed as though sucking back a smile, hands poised over the keys of the machine, she looked at me slyly. ‘I’m sure you’ll manage that, Richard — you’re young and good-looking.’

  I stored this up, as she meant me to. And I waited for Gadsby’s call, in the city of heat and daydreams.

  Provincials from the bush or small towns arrive in the great city of Australia with a projected world in their heads: a world they believe stretches in wait for them outside their rented rooms; an impossible cityscape of ethereal encounters, which fades eventually, to be replaced by the real one. The real one is no less strange; but who’s to say that the other city doesn’t exist somewhere — that city glimpsed in the mind? In those first weeks of my arrival, there were two Sydneys: a mythical Sydney lay somewhere in the heat, out beyond the verandah’s arches.

  Slowly the real one would begin to reveal itself; but for now, boredom and imaginary excitement squatted side by side on the deserted arcade: two shabby, heraldic beasts. Soon enough, footsteps would sound on the tiles out there; my visitors would begin. But this was hard to believe, just now.

  The only human being I saw frequently besides Bela Beaumont was a tall old man who looked like a Russian, with a white moustache, a shock of white hair and blue-tinted glasses. He would often pass me in the verandah or the front hall, carrying in his arms a crippled boy of about twelve, whose rubbery legs dangled uselessly. Each morning a minibus would pull up in Elizabeth Bay Road outside, with other disabled children smiling at its windows; then the old man would appear, pushing the boy to the gate in a wheelchair, and would lift him into the bus. That this was an event in my day was a measure of its emptiness.

  But the evenings were the emptiest time, especially Saturdays, when the world was preparing to go out. Then the party was held in Berkeley Towers.

  This was a tall apartment building next door. Like so many apartment blocks in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, it had been built in the Jazz Age: one of the last periods to allow whimsy and story book fancy into the design of large buildings. Built of gleaming clinker brick, it had arched windows with brick sunbursts above them, and was topped by medieval-looking turrets; and although only sixteen stories high, its lines were so dramatic that it seemed like a skyscraper, dominating Elizabeth Point. At exactly eight o’clock, and not before, the Saturday night celebration would begin there; and it always began with an explosion. I would be shaken in my room by sudden and thunderously amplified rock and roll music.

  I began to wait for it; always, without fail, it was ‘Twist and Shout’. The first time it came it seemed to me to emanate from somewhere in the upper levels of the air — shocking, in this otherwise peaceful district — and it continued, with a counterpoint of exultant party voices, for an hour. Then, just as suddenly, the music stopped, though the voices continued.

  The next Saturday night, staring up from the verandah, I located the source: an open window on the fourteenth floor where figures moved to and fro and lights were already on, although the fast sub-tropical sunset wasn’t yet completed, and gardens, buildings and water were all sunk in pink. When it was over, at about midnight, the sounds of the Harbour came up with greater distinctness than before. Gulls fought over food-scraps down there, and their explosions of angry screaming startled me; eventually they settled down, and quiet returned.

  But late in the night, lying almost asleep, I was disturbed again.

  A woman’s voice and a man’s began to murmur to each other through the wall, and I sensed that they were in bed together, quite close by. I still had no idea who occupied the room next door, never having seen anyone enter or leave, and I strained to distinguish words. The talk was too muffled, and I could make out nothing; now and then there was soft laughter, and eventually they relapsed into silence. I began to sink into sleep; but suddenly I was jerked back to wakefulness by the woman’s voice; and this time, although the words were indistinct, I believed I could make them out.

  ‘No. No, don’t make me do that.’

  This was followed by what sounded like a moan; but perhaps I was mistaken. Then there was silence, and I slept.

  I now entered my third week of waiting; and still no call had come from Martin Gadsby. Apart from Miss Morton, Bela Beaumont, and the actors I’d met in the studios, I’d spoken to almost no one since my arrival. I began to feel unreal; I was in a sort of Limbo, and my hopes were draining away. I’d been f
oolish, to think I could crack ABS as a producer, I said; I didn’t have enough background. I could see myself struggling to survive here as just another actor; perhaps I’d even be driven back to Melbourne.

  I’ve said that I knew no one in Sydney; but of course I knew Deirdre Dillon. This fact loomed larger in my mind with each drifting day. In the hours when I lay in my room, my thoughts kept turning to her; and I was tempted again and again to dial her number in wealthy Point Piper. I’d looked it up in the phone book; even seeing the name there, Dillon, had made my heart beat unevenly and my mouth go dry. But I wouldn’t ring; it was futile and I knew it, as I’d known it all these nine years; I hadn’t attempted to contact her since her final letter, and I wouldn’t do so now, I said. But I grew intensely curious. She would be thirty-seven: almost middle-aged. What would she be like? She was here, quite close by, in these eastern suburbs on the Harbour; and yet she was less real than she had ever been.

  Finally, on an empty Saturday afternoon, I walked out to Point Piper and searched out the Dillon house in Wolseley Crescent, which proved to be on the very tip of the Point.

  It was a childish expedition, and I wouldn’t have made it had it not been for my unnatural isolation; had I not been endlessly in waiting on the arcade. And I wasn’t merely waiting for the possible, any more; I was waiting for things that could never materialise. I wasn’t quite normal, in that third week: the true and deceitful were merging; present and past blurred into each other.

  It was a lovely, blowy day of sun and shadow and fast-riding clouds: the big Saturday racing yachts were out, bending and tacking beyond the rich gardens. I could see the tiny figures of the crews working on the sheets; hear the flap of the giant sails. Green, choppy water; pale gold sunlight coming and going in waves, filtering through the sails like white wine. Everything moving, like the yachts and the clouds; yet nobody moving in the houses. On the other side of the Harbour, miles off, were grey-blue headlands and the north shore suburbs. Green Shark Island was close off-shore, at the bottom of the Dillon garden, the white dome of the beacon off its rocks like the temple of a dwarf race.

  As is so often the case in wealthy suburbs, there was no sign of life in this cul-de-sac of mansions: no one on the footpath; no car on the road; no face at any window. A sign said, no through road, and I stood in the silence like a burglar, on the other side of the street.

  Deirdre was here, after all these years: thirty-seven years old. She was somewhere inside this white, imposing two-storey villa, whose style was Sydney Spanish Mission. I studied its every detail: its big, steep roof of terracotta tiles; its barley-sugar columns and arches; its black iron grilles that protected the windows from intruders like me. A stand of palm trees rustled near the front door. At the back, I could just glimpse a high, dream-like terrace and a formal garden dropping in stages to the water’s edge. Lawns; a pool; a few thin rosebushes; a tamarisk. The gardens were sparse here, struggling against the harsh salt air. A Jaguar purred by, and turned into a driveway.

  What should I do?

  I did nothing; I walked away up the hill.

  Monday afternoon. I lie on the makeshift divan in my shorts, felled by the heat. Not a breath of air comes through the glass doors. Gadsby will never call, I say, but it doesn’t matter; nothing matters but the heat, and I enter a state of stupefaction.

  Before I came to Sydney, I imagined the sun as a luxurious bath; like all natives of cold climates, I daydreamed over pictures of palm trees and tropical sunsets, longing to escape into such images. But the reality isn’t like that; the heat isn’t a bath, but a burning, wheat-coloured force. The temperature is in the nineties, and going through the streets is a test of endurance.

  But at four o’clock, something begins to happen to the burning world outside: a change.

  Below the verandah’s arches, the jacarandas, camphor-laurels and ragged palm trees have all begun stirring and hissing, as though coming to life. And with queer suddenness, a human voice sounds close to my open door: the voice of a middle-aged woman.

  ‘The Southerly’s arrived!’

  Another woman’s voice answers. ‘So it has. Well that’s a relief.’

  The Southerly has arrived. Patron sea-breeze of Sydney, for which this marine city waits every afternoon, it blows at the curtain of heat. Its first delicious breath strays through the doors and cools my flesh, and the voices of the invisible women, exchanging remarks I no longer take in, recede down the arcade; one youthful and faintly foreign, the other middle-aged, pleasantly nasal and Australian — touching me with a nostalgia for familiar things, for a life with calm and steady connections. I resist a ridiculous impulse to run out and see if they are real.

  But I needn’t feel so desperate. These have merely been the first players strolling on to the deserted stage outside; already the hissing shoes of an important envoy are approaching my room.

  ‘Excuse me, Commander. Good news!’ His loud tones make me jump; as he speaks, he raps on one glass door. ‘A message has come,’ he announces. ‘Your agency.’

  I get up and pull on a shirt, intending to come upstairs to the phone, but he holds up a peremptory hand, his fast voice rattling on, speaking in exclamations.

  ‘Don’t worry, Commander, you can rely on me — I am an old theatre man myself! You have a part in an ABS radio play! Mr Gadsby is the producer! You must be at the studio at seven o’clock on Thursday evening! Pick up your script from the ABS office! Congratulations! Now you can pay my rent, can’t you?’

  This time when he laughs I join in; and he lingers, delicately refraining from crossing the threshold. ‘Now you are in work, you will be able to socialise,’ he says. He looks masterful. ‘Do you know that right next door to you lives a beautiful young woman who is very lonely? Yes, a girl of style and character. That’s right, Commander — and Bela will introduce you! Ta-ta!’

  He disappears abruptly, as though jerked away on a wire, and I stare at the doors in pleasant bemusement, and burst out laughing. The world has speeded up at last.

  4

  The studios of a big broadcasting organisation at night have the hush of a deserted church. But underneath this is a low, thrilling hum, like that of a ship at sea; the corridors are empty, but you know the organism is alive.

  On the hot January night of Martin Gadsby’s production, the dim little foyer of the ABS building in William Street was deserted. The commissionaire was away from his desk, on which he had left his girlie magazine and a packet of cigarettes, and I pressed the lift button with a sense of trespassing. Someone had thrown a cigar butt into the ashtray by the lift and the smell lingered. Down a corridor, an illuminated globe of red glass glowed above a door, lettered ON AIR. But that wasn’t the studio I wanted; the big drama studio was on the second floor.

  The lift was an ancient one; I could hear it groaning and wheezing down to get me like a peevish old man. My hands were sweating and I wiped one on my trousers, my script clutched in the other. It would be nice to recall that night simply as one which rewarded me with success after years of struggle. But it’s coloured with someone else’s pain: that of poor Phil Desmond, who would die some two years later of the overdose of sleeping pills so clearly in his destiny.

  Pretending to study my script, I sat on one of the tubular-steel chairs against the studio wall, keeping an eye on the window of the control room opposite. The place smelled of stale cigarette smoke and clean carpet. Screens stood about, and the odd equipment of the Sound Effects man: an electric buzzer; plates to rattle; a door in a frame, on wheels.

  We were doing Rattigan’s Ross, so the cast was all-male; and none of the other actors seemed particularly disposed to be friendly. Having found out which agency I was from, they ignored me — except for a man with a bitter upper lip who asked me suspiciously if I belonged to Actor’s Equity. On finding that I did, he resumed the study of his script. The talk and laughter was muted and flat in this sound-proofed chamber, and I was glad not to be drawn into the talk, since I wanted to eavesdrop
on these voices — many of which I’d first heard on the little Bakelite radio in the Red Room. I took a private pleasure in the fact that I was joining their owners at last: the best pros in the country.

  There, leaning on the grand piano, was Dr Fu Manchu, who had laughed maniacally from behind the glowing dial when I was ten years old: lanky old Eric Mawby, with arched black eyebrows and avuncular glasses, whose rich, melodramatic bass I recognised instantly. But what he was saying now, instead of uttering frenzied Oriental curses, was: ‘Beatrice? Beatrice was pissed out of her mind. Someone had to get her outside and give her three black coffees before she could go on. Afterwards, she had no idea whether she’d played Lady Macbeth or Little Red Riding Hood. She did it beautifully, of course.’

  A plump man standing at the piano bent slightly at the waist, going pink with laughter. He was about forty-five and had wrinkled, thinning red hair and a snubby, good-natured face. ‘But of course,’ he said. ‘Poor Beatrice. Eventually she will play Little Red Riding Hood, I’m afraid. Only Children’s Session will hire her.’ His cool, beautifully modulated voice was familiar as a relative’s, and I realised I was looking at boyhood’s lean-jawed hero with the steel-blue eyes: this was Bulldog Drummond, and the Saint, and every Nick and Simon and Ralph who had ever mastered danger — whose real name turned out to be Ronald Porter.

  The voices and the laughter began to become spasmodic, in the private, motionless air. There was no air-conditioning in this aged studio; instead two giant electric fans on standards as tall as men revolved full blast at either end of the room, and as the silence took over I became conscious of their humming. People were glancing at watches; rustling scripts. It was now nearly fifteen minutes over starting time for the rehearsal and obviously this wasn’t usual. Cautious glances were cast at the control room window.

  Motionless at the producer’s desk, Martin Gadsby sat bulkily hunched in there, a cigarette between his lips, surveying us with a sulky expression. He was somewhere in his early sixties, with a clipped moustache that made him resemble a British Army officer, an effect that was partially negated by dyed blond hair worn in an artistic fringe. He turned to speak to the panel operator, while the Sound Effects man stooped over his line of turntables like a chef preparing sauces. Because of the soundproofing it was all in dumb-show; under the fluorescent lights of their cabinet, the three looked super-real: wax figures in a showcase. But it was we who were in the showcase, since the control room could hear us on the stand mike, while we couldn’t eavesdrop on the control room. That was one of the ways in which Gadsby’s power was defined.