by Robert Drewe
Showered and re-shod an hour later, his sanguinity returned, he sauntered out into the hotel gardens in order to have his customary end-of-the-working-day Camel and Jim Beam, to plan the next day’s schedule, and to see what the night might bring. Seeing what the night might bring was Tyler Foss’s favourite part of the day. Mostly the night brought nothing but a hangover, of course, but he was an evening-optimist by nature, perhaps unusual in someone thrice divorced. Ever since he was sixteen, a short, pimpled boy showering before a movie date at the neighbourhood Rialto, this magic time of day had filled him with hopeful anticipation.
Anything could happen, especially in hotels; especially in hotels in foreign parts. As he well knew, when people were overseas, or on ships or islands, they did things they would not do at home. It was something to do with the sudden separation by water, the partition from their ordinary lives. And watching the last pink streaks of sunset fading between the coconut palms, and the deft fingers of the cocktail waitress adjusting a frangipani in her hair, he felt the old anticipative frisson.
As he sipped his drink, Foss became aware of some activity involving ladders and wires at the far end of the hotel gardens. A local film crew was bustling about and setting up under the palms. What was this? Already he felt a territorial imperative: this was his film location. He collared a passing gaffer and discovered they were shooting a beer commercial the next day. He tapped the loose shreds from a Camel, lit up, and through a spurt of smoke magnanimously informed the gaffer, ‘I’m in the business myself.’
When the crew finished setting up, he invited them to join him for drinks. He was loudly convivial, as if he and they really were in the same industry, as if these Aussie TV-commercial makers and Universal Studios were even on the same planet. But they seemed amiable company, quite awed by him, in fact, and as far as he was concerned any film crew in the world held more possibility of night-time action than a garden of tourists.
Meanwhile the production assistants kept consulting clipboards and frowning at their watches, on the lookout for the commercial’s director, producer and art director, and eventually there was a dramatic clattering in the darkening southern sky and from the direction of the Gold Coast came a helicopter. It hovered for a moment before landing by the swimming pool, discharging the people Foss’s drinking companions were expecting, plus an attractive woman in a short banana-coloured skirt that accentuated her legs.
‘That’ll be her,’ remarked one of the production assistants, with respect in her voice. ‘That’s the octopus stylist.’ And it was. The octopus stylist had multihued bird’s-nesty hair, a chirpy manner and a confident pointy chin reminiscent of the actress Reese Witherspoon. Tyler Foss was an old hand but he couldn’t recall ever meeting an octopus stylist before, or even considering the possibility of their existence. From the moment of their meeting, however, when she generously joined the crew for drinks and ordered a mango daiquiri, he imagined that for the rest of his life whenever the subject of octopus styling came up, he would think of her.
Her name was Mia McKenzie. On the crew sheet she was listed as ‘cuisine art director’ but her bailiwick was seafood and her forte was cephalopods. Octopus, squid, cuttlefish. Her job was styling them to look attractive on camera. Apparently, she was in great demand for television, magazines and coffee-table food books. Her professional brief this time was to turn a smorgasbord table of molluscs and crustaceans into an artistic display to sell more beer.
This TV commercial was intended to change the image of beer drinkers as sweaty, blue-collar pie-eating men with bulldozers and cattle dogs. (Those people drank lots of beer already.) The nation’s middle-class women needed to be shown what a sophisticated and natural image a glass of beer could give them. Hence the presence of six lean-waisted extras in a tropical island party setting, all wearing white, raffishly crumpled natural fibres while enjoying glasses of beer in the vicinity of tastefully designed fresh seafood. Hence Mia McKenzie’s octopus styling. It had nothing to do with eating. It would be an exhibition, however fleeting its eventual moment on screen, to illustrate the sophisticated yet natural world of today’s beer drinker.
All this Tyler Foss gathered as he competed with the crew for her attentions. For once his own range of impressive and scandalous Hollywood anecdotes was forgotten; he was tongue-tied by her rainbow hair, endless legs and vivacious manner. ‘Lobsters are a cinch,’ she was declaring. ‘A spray of glycerine and they look fabulous. And crabs, too, once you’ve oiled them. Prawns, whole fish, oysters – any smelly old fish shop can style them. They’re all a cliché.’ She was waving her arms for emphasis. Chopping the air. ‘The shiny red lobster, symbolising passionate life, although actually boiled to death. The dramatic aggression of crab claws. The pink excess of a mound of prawns – just an invitation to gluttony. The oyster’s sexual associations. Give me a break. Old, old hat. It’s the octopus that stretches your imagination.’
‘I can see how it would,’ he said. ‘All those legs. Or are they arms?’ Oddly adolescent and awkward in her company, he gave a snorting laugh which accidentally turned into a tobacco cough.
Her look was suddenly wary. ‘Yes, there are those to consider,’ she said.
‘What about squid?’ he asked. He couldn’t believe he was labouring this conversation. ‘There’s no way a squid looks edible,’ he stumbled on, self-consciously. ‘Very ugly suckers.’ His accent, thickened by bourbon and cigarettes, rumbled in the night air. ‘I don’t think I could style a squid,’ he heard himself say. ‘I guess I’d be more of a beef stylist.’
Mia McKenzie was staring at him now, squinting slightly, as if she normally wore glasses and wanted to really register his presence. The grey ponytail with its tinge of nicotine yellow, the elderly white stubble, the chunky turquoise and silver Navajo bracelets, the ageing-rocker garb. ‘Yes, I’ve met a few homely squids,’ she said, and turned her attention to the young assistant director on her other side.
Last drinks were called then. ‘Nightcaps in my room!’ announced Tyler Foss, ever optimistic.
‘We’re shooting first thing,’ someone said firmly, and within a few seconds the film crew had swept up the octopus stylist in their tide and surged out of the gardens. Alone, Foss stubbed out his final cigarette, sighed, stretched out his feet in their mineral-yak Nature-Grits. So much for comfort; without his cowboy boots he’d lost height and panache. He’d mislaid his humour and banter, and his successful way with women in foreign places. Wearily, he got up from the table. Apart from some night creatures rustling in the bougainvillea, the distant throb of surf and the sudden hum of the pool filter, the hotel garden was silent.
Rising at dawn as always, Tyler Foss washed down some aspirin with orange juice and set out along the western shoreline to take more reconnaissance shots. The tide was out, a light fog blurred the horizon and his eyes watered in the sudden sharp sea air. A pale flurry of ghost crabs parted at his approaching steps, panicked back and forth, scattered into three groups, then re-formed and continued to bustle alongside him. For perhaps twenty minutes he strolled along the shore, occasionally snapping photographs, before he reached the eroded dunes and collapsed trees. This was what he was looking for. This tortured beachscape would seal the deal. Already he could visualise the stark scenes on-screen. And then he sensed he was being followed.
He turned quickly. There was nothing there. Only the dead fallen trees and twisted roots and the sheer sand-cliffs rising up behind them. The morning’s only sound was the soft, wheezing rattle of the restless ghost crabs, like an asthmatic’s breathing. He resumed walking. Again there was the feeling of being followed. Again he turned sharply. Nothing. He felt foolish and childish, like he was playing Grandmother’s Footsteps or What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?, reliving the suspense of those childhood games and feeling his heart beating faster. But this time he noticed prints in the damp sand, eerily close behind his own. Paw prints.
Tyler Foss stood completely still and eventually a thin, ochre-coloured dog emerged fro
m a tangle of tree roots. Then an identical second dog. The dogs, both males, started silently circling him. He waved his arms and growled at them with all the throaty timbre of 200 000 Camels. The dogs kept circling, as if judging their opportunities. Foss wished he had one of his shotguns with him. The Browning 525. He recalled something from an African location foray and took off his T-shirt and stretched it above his head to make himself look bigger and more threatening. Apparently, it worked with leopards, animals unfamiliar with shirts, but the dogs didn’t appear the least threatened. Soon another dog, a bitch, joined them. Foss threw stones and driftwood at them but the dogs took no notice, allowing his stones to bounce off their ribs as they slunk towards him on their bellies.
Then a flash of inspiration, born of survival, struck him. Fumbling with fear, thick-fingered, he undid one of his yak-skin sneakers and threw it to the dogs. Instantly, two of them fell on the shoe, fighting over it. The third dog kept coming for him. Foss tossed it the remaining sneaker – a mineral-yak, his last piece of footwear this side of the Pacific. He left them then, the dogs so busy tearing and devouring their yak meal that they ignored him.
Standing breathlessly at the counter of the general store an hour later, purchasing the only available footwear on the island, a discounted pair of pink rubber thongs, Tyler Foss learnt that he had encountered dingoes.
He began the day’s drinking far earlier than usual. Sheltering under a Cinzano umbrella in the hotel gardens, he was shrinking from all contact, human and animal. He was scared to leave the hotel grounds, much less to wander freely around the island. The dangerous dingo problem; the footwear setback: he had much to consider. How could he recommend setting the film here, or indeed in Australia? Four weeks of scouting and nothing to show for it except the career-ending image of a cringing Halle Berry or a pale, shoeless Tom Cruise being bailed up by dingoes.
Under the palms, the beer-commercial shoot was under way. Foss was on his third bourbon, keeping his distance from the goings-on, when he spotted her bright hair bobbing and glimmering and was drawn by a sad mixture of desire, alcohol and curiosity to the smorgasbord being arranged by Mia McKenzie. That hair of many colours was hard to resist; she was the centre of attention as she prepared her display for filming. There was no doubting her status. Compared to her artistic endeavours with octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, the ministrations of the other food designers seemed insignificant, merely cheap craft. Even the usually superior ice carvers looked faintly ashamed of their melting dolphins.
Passing women – tourists and crew members alike – were shaking their heads in admiration as they spied the octopus stylist’s presentation. Men, of course, hung in besotted fashion around her busy limbs and parrot hair. Wielding cans of canola oil, glycerine and hairspray, her fingers a blur of motion, dabbing here and there with pastry brushes, spraying and anointing and smearing, rearranging errant tentacles and erecting complex cephalopodic structures with hidden toothpicks, she was sculptor, engineer, architect and painter.
‘Your feet!’ she yelled suddenly. ‘Love your feet!’
She’d spotted him. Tyler Foss flinched, waved an embarrassed hand, and on his $3.50 ladies’ thongs began to flip-flop back to his sheltering umbrella.
‘See you at the wrap party tonight!’ she called out.
So of course he turned up at the party. And inevitably the octopus stylist was being swamped with male attention. All evening she was trailed by some infatuated actor, electrician or assistant producer. But she handled every overture as deftly as she’d managed the day’s suckers and tentacles. At two a.m. her laughter still trilled from the hot tub. Beside her in the warm bubbles reclined Tyler Foss. Mia McKenzie put down her daiquiri, laid a hand on his arm, and eased closer. Tonight the distant party buzz and the surge and gush of the hot tub drowned out the pulsing of the surf. The gardens were quiet. Even the four dingoes bolting down the seafood display under the palms made no sound.
‘You make me laugh,’ she was saying to him. ‘The pink thongs, fracturing your image, turning it on its head. I love that.’ One thing Tyler Foss was good at was reading the signs. So he went with the flow of the evening and kept the outlaw-rocker dude more or less under control.
Next morning the helicopter came for her ridiculously early. But, as she said to him, there was no time to waste. There was calamari to be arranged in Noosa.
The Cartoonist
OF COURSE ADAM was nervous on his first day at the new school, a north-coast high school that seemed to be populated entirely by surfers and swimsuit models. Everyone had the blond confidence of teenagers from TV soaps, whereas at thirteen he was a thin, ginger boy with indoor-looking skin and a tendency to do an odd thing with his mouth when he was anxious or focusing on something.
His mother called it ‘Adam’s concentrating face’. His tongue stretched unbidden over his top teeth and settled there under his lip, the underside displaying thick purple veins, until the moment of anxiety or absorption passed, or until someone laughed at him. He did the mouth thing when he was on the computer, when he sharpened a pencil, or peeled an orange, or tried to catch a ball. Then if he missed the ball (a sixty/forty chance) he did it out of shame and embarrassment. When he made the concentrating face most intensely, however, was while he was drawing.
He had a talent. Whenever he was bored or nervous, or just filling in time, he drew cartoons. Mostly cartoons of people, humorous or grotesque caricatures, although he’d drawn a serious pencil portrait of his mother sitting on the sofa when they first arrived up here – when they were sort of bonding, just the two of them together now – which she’d stuck on the fridge, and one of his father, from memory and an old photograph, which he kept in his room. Sometimes, in the privacy of his bedroom, he was also compelled to do sexy drawings, which he immediately tore into shreds and flushed down the toilet. Once or twice a scrap of voluptuous breast or mysterious inky black triangle had bobbed to the surface to mortify and panic him hours later.
Less guiltily, perhaps because his own nose had suddenly grown into a bit of a honker, pink and often pimpled, and the rest of him showed no signs of catching up, he specialised in noses. If he could get noses right, he reasoned, the rest of professional-grade cartooning would follow. So he slavishly copied the nose styles of popular cartoonists and comic-strip artists, noses in direct left and right profile, half profile and front-on. (The Phantom’s nose was his favourite model, a Roman nose combining strength and nobility.) He’d start with the nose and then flesh out the particular face and body around it. He drew nose-based people on the covers and in the margins of his schoolbooks, on his desk, everywhere. As he drew them, his own face – the concentrating face – would unconsciously turn itself into a sort of cartoon, too. When he did the mouth thing it stretched his nose even further down his face and bared his nostrils to the world.
Naturally he’d been made aware of the concentrating face; kids had been laughing at it ever since kindergarten, calling him ‘Monster Face’ back then. Unfortunately, focusing on not doing the mouth thing brought on a compulsion to do it. In a new place 900 kilometres from his old inner-city haunts, at a new school, and living now just with his mother, he was concentrating especially hard on not making the concentrating face. It was preying on his mind.
He stood out anyway because he was the only boy wearing the school uniform. To get the starchy newness out of it, he’d made his mother wash it, but he hadn’t expected everyone else to be dressed in scruffy surfwear. And there was his hair problem. Old people sometimes ruffled his hair nostalgically and called him Bluey. On the bus coming north an indignant old codger had announced to all and sundry, yelling down the aisle as if Adam weren’t there, ‘You know why you don’t see much red hair these days? It’s been bred right out of Australians. Blame all the wogs with their black hair.’ Then he’d winked at Adam, handed him a dollar and said, ‘There you go, Blue, buy yourself an ice cream.’ He didn’t want an old man’s dollar; anyway what sort of ice cream could you get for a d
ollar these days? He was feeling strange in any case because of the way they’d left so abruptly, his mother believing her wedding anniversary an appropriate date to flee north to ‘find’ herself. The old man on the bus didn’t have any hair at all, red or otherwise. Adam wished red hair had indeed been bred out of his family, and the freckles and pink nose that went with it.
In this new classroom he was too nervous to attempt any public drawing just yet. However, by fiddling with his hair – dragging it over his ears in hopeful imitation of the other boys’ salty and stringy surfer hairstyles – and staring out the window at the ibises stalking sandwich crusts in the playground, he was confident he’d managed to avoid doing the concentrating face during morning classes: double maths and geography. It was probably a good sign that by lunchtime no one had spoken to him or paid him any attention. They were very deadpan kids up here.
At the canteen he queued for a meat pie. The jostling could almost have been accidental. In any school, bigger boys shoved and bustled you and trod on your feet; he was used to it. He bought a pie and eventually found a seat by the toilets next to a girl with smeary glasses and a hearing aid. Unfortunately the pie was one of those deceptive ones: coolish crust outside and molten gravy inside – and, for all he knew, molten buffalo eyelids, camel tendons and pig snouts. One bite and his tongue instantly bubbled and his lips blistered. But he supposed it kept him on the right path for the afternoon. His mouth hurt if his tongue even brushed his lips, and so prevented him from doing the mouth thing.