Emerald City

by David Williamson

  MIKE enters.

  MIKE: [to the audience] ‘Coastwatchers’? I hated every minute of it, but the writing was the worst. The status difference between us stood out like a hooker in the lobby of the Hyatt Hilton. I sat there, grub-like, over the typewriter while red gum strode up and down dictating the thing word for word. When I got so pissed off I couldn’t stand it any longer I’d throw in a suggestion and there’d be a frozen silence and he’d look up at the ceiling and say, [imitating COLIN] ‘Nooo, I don’t think so’. Then he’d stare at me. We’d eyeball to eyeball for about a sixteenth of a second and I’d go back to my typing. And the subject? Coastwatchers, quite frankly, interested me about as much as going to bed with a six-foot, fourteen-stone lesbian, which I have done under odd circumstances I won’t bore you with. But an odd thing happened. I started reading the words I was typing out of sheer boredom, and found that this arrogant prick, striding up and down like Napoleon plus growth hormones, was telling a story that was getting me in. Guys taking incredible risks under appalling conditions so that fat little babies like myself slept on undisturbed. In the world I see around me where everyone is out for number one, this sort of behaviour gives you an odd jolt. The turd had the odd knack of making his characters live. He didn’t have my visual sense, though, and towards the end I started sneaking in some of my images.

  MIKE exits. COLIN strides up and down the room gesticulating. He’s acting out some of the crucial scenes he’s about to write the next day. He doesn’t speak the lines out loud but emits a curious, high-speed mumble, rather like a tape recorder being played backwards at triple speed. KATE watches him. She’s used to it, but is still irritated by his total absorption in his work.

  KATE: Penny lied about where she was last weekend.

  COLIN: Penny? She’s never lied in her life.

  KATE: Well, she’s just started.

  COLIN: Wasn’t she here last weekend?

  KATE: Colin, as a father you’re a joke.

  COLIN: As a wife you don’t give me many laughs.

  KATE: If you ever give another interview in which you claim to do fifty percent of the household chores and put the responsibilities of fatherhood before your work I’ll ring the bloody journalist and demand the right of reply.

  COLIN: I do the shopping.

  KATE: I pin a series of lists headed ‘butcher’, ‘greengrocer’, ‘delicatessen’ to your jumper which you usually manage to leave at the right shop and which you often remember to collect. I’m the one who does all the thinking.

  COLIN: I’ll do the thinking, you spend an hour a day behaving like a forklift truck. Have you ever had to have a prolonged conversation with Doug the butcher? He’s a great guy, but after the weather it can get tricky. Especially when the only reason he can think of as to why I do the shopping at ten every morning and why I don’t speak like an outback Queenslander, is that I’m the boyfriend of a Qantas flight director.

  KATE: Let him think it.

  COLIN: I don’t want him to think it. I’m not.

  KATE: There’s nothing wrong with being gay.

  COLIN: Nothing wrong at all, except that I’m not. And while we’re on this, will you stop all this nauseating stuff with young Sam about, ‘No-one knows what one’s sexual preferences will be until one grows up, but if one’s sexual preferences do turn out to be minority preferences, one must never be ashamed of it’.

  KATE: You’re just prejudiced against gays.

  COLIN: I am not in the least prejudiced against gays. I just want the kid not to feel guilty if by some odd chance he grows up hetero.

  KATE: You are prejudiced.

  COLIN: It took fifteen million years of evolution for my genes to get to me, I’d just like to see them go a bit further. Where was Penny?

  KATE: At a disco called Downmarket. She was supposed to be studying at her friend’s place.

  COLIN: Disco? When she was in Melbourne the only thing she’d listen to was Mozart.

  KATE: I’d be surprised if Downmarket is noted for its Mozart.

  COLIN: How did you find out?

  KATE: A twenty-three-year-old German tourist turned up on our doorstep looking for our daughter.

  COLIN: What did he want?

  KATE: It wasn’t Mozart. Apparently he felt an offer had been made on the dance floor.

  COLIN: [shocked] That’s terrible. She’s only thirteen.

  KATE: Fifteen, but it’s still a worry.

  COLIN: Those disco’s are where the pushers operate.

  KATE: Our daughter says it isn’t a problem. If you stay out on the dance floor they soon stop bothering you.

  COLIN: We’ll have to do something.

  KATE: I’ve stopped this week’s pocket money.

  COLIN: [agitated] That’ll really strike terror into her.

  KATE: What do you want me to do? Lock her in a dark cupboard for a month?

  COLIN: This is serious. She’s rubbing shoulders—and God knows what else—with pushers and pimps. What’s made her interested in discos, for God’s sake?

  KATE: This is a very cosmopolitan city.

  COLIN: Discos aren’t cosmopolitan, they’re tawdry.

  KATE: I was going to say tawdry, but I didn’t want to be rude about your chosen city.

  COLIN: Don’t sit there being smug. This is serious. We’ve got to take firm action.

  KATE: What do you suggest?

  COLIN: If we let her keep on going like this she’ll end up in William Street hopping into passing Jaguars.

  KATE: If you’re so worried, you take over the problem. And you can handle Sam and Hannah as well.

  COLIN: What’s wrong with Sam and Hannah?

  KATE: Sam’s apparently running a protection racket in his sixth grade—

  COLIN: [interrupting] Protection racket? In Melbourne we couldn’t get him away from his computer.

  KATE: New city, new skills. And Hannah’s teachers say she’s depressed.

  COLIN: Who wouldn’t be in this family?

  KATE: How about taking some of the blame for that yourself? You can go to the schools and hear the bad news next time! I’m sick to death of organising this menagerie. I’ve got problems of my own.

  COLIN: Such as?

  KATE: Such as going quietly crazy because my idiot boss refuses to publish the first manuscript in years that’s got me excited.

  COLIN: That black woman’s novel?

  KATE: I wish you wouldn’t keep calling her ‘that black woman’.

  COLIN: What am I expected to call her? ‘That woman whose complexion is not as ours?’

  KATE: Call her by her name.

  COLIN: I forget it.

  KATE: Take the trouble to learn. You’ve heard it often enough. Her name is Kath Mitchell and her book is called—

  COLIN: [interrupting] I know the name of her book. Who could forget it? Black Rage.

  KATE: See?

  COLIN: See what?

  KATE: The tone of contempt.

  COLIN: It’s a terrible title.

  KATE: Just because she’s a member of a minority who’ve been made marginal in a land they owned for forty thousand years, and a member of another minority who’ve been made marginal by the post-agricultural patriarchy for eight thousand years, doesn’t entitle you to dismiss her or her work.

  COLIN: I haven’t.

  KATE: You’d better not. It gives her work a lot of power.

  COLIN: Whereas mine, being pale and male, is limp?

  KATE: You’re work hasn’t got her power. No.

  COLIN: [hurt] Thank you.

  KATE: [attempting tact, which she’s not very good at] But yours has got certain qualities hers hasn’t.

  COLIN: Of course. It’s more frivolous, less passionate, less committed. You know, I’ve got a certain sympathy for your boss. Why shouldn’t he publish stuff people want to read, instead of yet another frothing-mouthed cry of rage from yet another disadvantaged minority? I hated those bleak Melbourne bookshops full of surly pinched-faced zealots shuffling down c
orridors stacked with envy, anger and hate.

  KATE: You prefer Sydney bookshops? Filled with cookbooks?

  COLIN: If people want cookbooks, let them have cookbooks.

  KATE: I’m not devoting my life to improving the North Shore soufflé!

  COLIN: Of course not. You’re going to keep trying to publish stuff that nobody wants to read.

  KATE: I’m going to keep trying to publish books which prick the consciences of a few thousand people out there and make them aware that under the gloss of affluence there is real suffering. Did you know that rents are so high in this subtropical lotus land that all the women’s hostels are overflowing and five hundred women and their kids are being turned away every week? Families are out there sleeping on golf courses and in car wrecks?

  COLIN: What do you want me to do? Go to my nearest golf course and redirect them here? What do your two thousand pricked consciences actually go and do when they’ve put down the book?

  KATE: Eventually they change the consciousness of this nation. They make it a fairer place for everyone.

  COLIN: Kate, the country isn’t going to become fair because someone in a book says it should be. The unpalatable truth is that we’re an egocentric species who care a lot about ourselves and our children, a little bit for our tribe, and not much at all for anyone else.

  KATE: Where did you pick up that right-wing drivel?

  COLIN: Kate, can you be honest with yourself for a change without posing? Whenever one of those ads comes on urging us to save starving children, we’re shocked by the images of the emaciated kids, we look at each other and murmur, ‘Must do something’, but we don’t even note down the number. But if our young Sam so much as whimpers in the night, we’re instantly awake, bolt upright, staring at each other with fear in our eyes. Face up to this awful equation: one cut finger of Sam’s equals more anguish than a thousand deaths in Ethiopia!

  The logic hits home.

  KATE: Alright. Most of us are selfish. We’re taught to be.

  COLIN: We aren’t taught! No parent is taught to care more about their child than someone else’s!

  KATE: Alright. We are selfish, but we can be taught to change. We can be taught to care about others. Sometimes the process is slow and you don’t think it’s happening at all, but it is. We don’t have eight-year-olds working in mine pits anymore. Perhaps you hadn’t noticed?

  COLIN: [suddenly reflective] No, we don’t.

  KATE: Things can change for the better, but I’m sure you’re not convinced.

  COLIN: I want to be convinced. I hate the thought that humanity is grasping and egocentric, but the evidence often seems overwhelming, and some of it comes from pretty close to home.

  KATE: You mean me?

  COLIN: No, I mean me.

  Pause.

  KATE: I am getting tired of organising this family, Colin. You’re too self-obsessed to ever do your share and I’m starting to feel very, very trapped.

  KATE exits.

  COLIN: [to the audience] That wasn’t exactly music to my ears. I knew the dream behind that threat. A room in Glebe where she’d write short stories for women’s anthologies published by McPhee Gribble. And they’d be about leaving a husband who was so thick he had to have shopping lists pinned to his jumpers and so right-wing he voted Labor. If our domestic harmony was precarious, it became even more so after Kate met Mike.

  MIKE enters the kitchen and reads the morning paper. He’s wearing nothing except a towel around his waist. KATE enters wearing a dressing-gown and stares at him.

  KATE: Good morning. I’m Kate.

  MIKE looks up and then down.

  MIKE: Hi.

  KATE: I was going to pop my head in and say hello when I got home last night, but I thought I wouldn’t interrupt. You, er, stayed overnight?

  MIKE: [not looking up] Raining. Couldn’t get a cab.

  KATE: You’re both working here again today?

  MIKE: [not looking up] Going to work here from now on. Much more room.

  KATE: Ah.

  She looks at the paper MIKE is reading. She has come downstairs to collect it.

  Anything interesting?

  MIKE looks up, puzzled.

  Anything interesting happen in the world overnight?

  MIKE: [looking down] No. Same old shit. Makes you wonder why you keep reading it.

  KATE hopes this means he’ll stop reading it, but it doesn’t.

  KATE: Could you possibly leave the paper there when you’ve finished? I like to glance at the headlines before the children get up.

  MIKE: [still reading] Right.

  KATE gets visibly irritated. She takes an electric jug and plugs it in, banging it down noisily.

  Making coffee?

  KATE: Yes.

  MIKE: Could you pour me a weak one with no sugar?

  KATE: [tersely] Are you married, Mike?

  MIKE: Have been. Twice.

  KATE: But not now?

  MIKE: [still reading] Right. [Pause.] Present lady won’t marry me.

  KATE’s look indicates that she finds this far from surprising.

  [Still reading] Richard Mahony’s collapsed.

  KATE: Sorry?

  MIKE: The movie Tony Klineberg’s supposed to be directing. He’s talking here as if it’s all happening, but the money fell through three days ago.

  KATE: Was it a film of the novel?

  MIKE: [nodding] Thought it would fold.

  KATE: Wonderful novel.

  MIKE: Screenplay was shithouse. Actor mate of mine got me a copy.

  KATE: The novel was wonderful.

  MIKE: Screenplay was shithouse. Doctor’s marriage goes bad, he goes to the goldfields, gets gangrene and dies. Can’t see the crowds queuing in Pitt Street for that little number.

  KATE: I don’t think your synopsis quite does the book justice.

  MIKE: [shrugging] Screenplay was a real downer.

  KATE: What does your friend do?

  MIKE: [looking up, puzzled] What friend?

  KATE: The woman you live with.

  MIKE: [going back to the paper] Not nearly enough.

  KATE: [getting really irritated] She’s not working?

  MIKE: Freelance PR. Gets about one good job a month and usually stuffs it up.

  KATE: Lacks experience?

  MIKE: Lacks grey matter.

  KATE: Does she mind you having such a low opinion of her?

  MIKE: She’s got her good points.

  KATE: I’m glad to hear it.

  MIKE: She’s a woman, which is more than you can say for half the dragons around this town.

  KATE: What exactly do you mean, Mike—‘She’s a woman’?

  MIKE: Looks good. Wears nice clothes. Doesn’t screech at you like a white cockatoo. Funny. Has the occasional tantrum, and she’s so sexy she’s dangerous.

  KATE: That’s your definition of a woman?

  MIKE: Yep. And I’m sticking with it.

  KATE: Don’t you think it’s a little bit limited?

  MIKE: If some women want to be pile-drivers, that’s fine. As long as they don’t expect me to get under ’em.

  MIKE exits. COLIN enters. KATE is not happy.

  KATE: He’s awful! I didn’t believe that men like that still existed. What kind of woman would tolerate him?

  COLIN: I can’t begin to imagine. Some anaemic little scrubber who enjoys being booted around, I suppose.

  KATE: Why are you working with the man?

  COLIN: I’m going to produce this script myself and I need some help.

  KATE: You’re letting him co-write this script with you? What’s he done?

  COLIN: He’s not co-writing. He’s sitting there typing what I tell him.

  KATE: His name will be on it as co-writer.

  COLIN: [cutting in] Everybody’s going to know he didn’t do anything. All he’s done up to now is script edit soapies.

  KATE: So why are you working with him?

  COLIN: He knows where to look for finance.

&nbs
p; KATE: You said you were going to approach Malcolm Bennett. You’ve known Malcolm for years.

  COLIN: [uneasy] Mike gave me the confidence to realise I could produce my own scripts.

  KATE: You’ve never had any complaints about Elaine up to now.

  COLIN: Elaine hated this idea. Right?

  KATE: She still would have done it.

  COLIN: I don’t want to work with someone who doesn’t believe in what I’m doing. She can find someone else to make her rich.

  KATE: Make her rich?

  COLIN: Who’s got that stunning harbour view? She has. Not me.

  KATE: This city’s getting to you already.

  COLIN: I wouldn’t mind a nice view. Is that so decadent?

  KATE: You’re working with Mike so you can buy yourself a nice view?

  COLIN: [tensely] I am perfectly aware of the fact that Mike is a buffoon, but he obeys orders, does what he’s told, and he’s helping me get what I want.

  KATE: [nodding] A stunning harbour view.

  COLIN: Creative control! Deciding who’s cast. Deciding who directs. Making sure the script is shot as I wrote it. And if there is some money to be made, making sure I’m the one who gets it.

  KATE: He’s using you, Colin. Getting co-authorship of one of your scripts means he’s going from nothing to something in one huge jump.

  COLIN: Everyone in the business will know I wrote it all.

  KATE: You think you’re using him, but he’s using you.

  COLIN: [irritated] I can look after myself.

  KATE exits. COLIN sits in an armchair and thinks. MIKE enters and sits poised at the typewriter. Suddenly COLIN bounds up out of his chair and starts pacing around waving a clenched fist as if he is threatening the gods of creativity with physical violence if they don’t start the ideas flowing.