‘Give me to Duncan?’
‘Not in the biblical sense, dear, don’t look so alarmed. No, I thought I might set up a meeting between you and Duncan McAllister’s people – you’ve heard of Duncan McAllister, no doubt.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he’s the fellow on the radio, the one with the magic tonsils.’
‘Platinum.’
‘Oh yes, platinum. So what sort of help does he need?’
Loreli smiled at me. ‘Where do we begin, dear?’
*
‘Duncan’s a great bloke,’ one of the men in the restaurant told me.
‘He’s very energetic, very on the ball, it’s a lot of fun working at 3KPG with him, never a dull moment.’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ said the other one, who was called PJ or JP, something with initials anyway, and who clicked his fingers at the waitress.
I hated people who did that.
‘So where is he?’ I asked.
‘Duncan?’
‘Yes, I just think that if he is looking for a PA, wouldn’t he need to interview the candidates himself?’
‘Lulu,’ PJ said, ‘it’s midday. Duncan does the morning show which means he’s been up since about three am, and right now he’ll be home in bed, having a well-deserved rest. But I’m very much Duncan’s right-hand man, and he trusts me with these sorts of decisions.’
In the six years I worked for the man with the platinum tonsils, first as his PA and then as his producer, I never saw JP, or PJ or whatever his name was, again.
Duncan McAllister.
King of the airwaves, darling of the talkback set, smoker, red wine drinker and serial ex-husband with three former wives – Kiki, Kerry-Anne-with-an-E, Karen, and another one, Kimmy, on the way – his only criteria for marital bliss apparently being that the bride’s name begin with ‘K’.
Besotted father to Duncan Junior (Kiki), Rhees (Kerry-Anne), Jasmine and Jarrod (Karen) and owner of Barney, an enormous dog of uncertain origins and highly questionable dietary habits.
An original.
An old fraud.
An unholy mess.
*
‘You cannot be serious, Lulu,’ Simone had said when I told her who my new boss would be. ‘Duncan McAllister, what the hell is Loreli thinking?’
‘Do you know him?’ I asked.
‘Everybody knows him, Lulu,’ she said. ‘He’ll eat you alive, Little Red Riding Hood.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why is everybody so afraid of this person?’
‘Because, Lulu,’ Simone answered, ‘he is the most powerful person in the media, therefore he is one of the most powerful people in the country, therefore he is a first-class wanker.’
‘I heard he once set fire to a waiter’s hair because he thought he was ignoring him,’ Beth said, coming in from the bathroom.
‘I’m sure it was an accident,’ I said, already displaying a portentous level of loyalty to my unseen employer.
‘It was pubic hair, Lulu,’ Simone said.
‘Oh.’
‘Anyway, if you survive, you’ll have to have him over for dinner, it would do my career no harm at all if Platinum Tonsils became a personal friend of mine.’
‘You said he was a wanker.’
Simone smiled at me. ‘It’s the media, Lulu,’ she said, ‘we’re all wankers.’
*
On my first day at 3KPG, I pulled my car into the visitors’ car park, the security guard not appearing to understand when I explained I was a new permanent employee – personal assistant to Duncan McAllister, actually.
‘They all are, love,’ he said, slapping a purple visitor’s sticker on my windshield.
I walked up the half-lit hill to the studios, hushed and still in the early hours of the morning, wandered around its labyrinthine halls by myself and eventually found Duncan’s office – hard to miss with the glittering microphone painted on its door.
‘Right,’ I said to myself, borrowing one of Mattie and Sam’s childhood expressions, usually used when they were poised on the edge of some sort of danger: ‘Let’s do this thing.’
I took a couple of deep breaths and knocked on the door, which was swung open moments later by a man with a red face, a red wine stain on his upper lip and a red shirt patterned by giant hibiscuses with all of its buttons undone.
‘Please tell me you are here to deliver my very late morning coffee, because if you are not, you can fuck right off,’ he said, hibiscuses swaying.
Duncan McAllister, I presumed.
Determined to remain professional, I held out my hand and smiled. ‘I’m Tallulah de Longland,’ I said. ‘Your new personal assistant.’
‘Really?’ he said, ignoring my outstretched hand. ‘How very exciting for you. Now, Tabitha . . .’
‘Tallulah.’
‘Tallulah – my apologies to both you and Miss Bankhead. Now, do you think you could possibly make me a coffee or would you prefer to fuck off?’
He swayed a little more on his feet, and behind him, the beginnings of a little fire sparked in the ashtray on his desk.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Oh, wonderful, they’ve sent me a deaf person – MUNGO!’ he suddenly roared. ‘Get me a fucking coffee and get rid of this person from the sheltered workshop.’
Then, a wolf attacked me.
It came from somewhere behind Duncan, a great lolloping beast bearing down on me like a shaggy freight train, barrelling into my knees and wedging its head firmly between them.
Then it backed out from between my legs and in a surprisingly fluid and graceful leap, pinned me against the corridor wall, one great paw on either side of my chest.
‘Oh dear God,’ I said as its breath assailed me from all angles, ‘what on earth have you been eating?’
The beast nuzzled me, his wet nose poking at my neck, its tongue dripping drool, and its owner clearly not in a hurry to call it off.
‘Could you tell it to get down, please?’ I squeaked to Duncan, now sitting back at his desk, making a great show of going through some papers and ignoring the fire now raging in the ashtray beside him.
‘Pardon?’
‘Could you call it off?’
‘It has a name – Barney,’ he replied. ‘He is a dog, and for some strange reason he seems to like you, Talisa.’
‘Tallulah,’ I said again, this time through gritted teeth.
Duncan whistled and Barney released his paws as my knees buckled beneath me.
‘Now that you’ve finished playing with my dog,’ Duncan said, continuing to shuffle papers from one side of the desk to another, ‘do you think you could possibly personally assist me by making me a fucking coffee or should I send out for one?’
‘You should send out for one.’
‘Pardon?’
‘You should send out for one, Mr McAllister,’ I said, picking up my handbag off the floor where the wolf-dog had knocked it out of my shaking hands and heading for the door.
I could not, I realised, work for this person.
Not because of his rudeness – although no-one had ever spoken to me as he had – or his swearing – I had heard it all before and then some on building sites – or even his questionable taste in shirts.
It was because I was a plumber’s daughter.
Specifically, I was Harry de Longland’s daughter, a man who plumbed the depths of excellence day in, day out, with one of Rose’s handkerchiefs crisply folded in his pocket. Harry, who spent his life up to his elbows in other people’s U-bends and got into his ute every morning with a smile and a wave; Harry whose office was always tidy, and whose apprentices were taught to be courteous and interested in what little old ladies living in apartment buildings with blocked drains had to say.
I looked at the squalor of Duncan’s office, with its overflowing ashtrays and
growths on top of scattered coffee cups, the bulging in-trays and papers on the floor, and I could see he didn’t give a damn about any of it.
I looked at Duncan and thought of my father, sitting at home late at night, using a pencil to fill out the rosters so he could carefully erase any trace of mistakes, standing on a ladder on his bandy legs repainting the sign that stood outside our house every year or two, and I knew I was in the wrong place.
‘I’m sorry, Mr McAllister,’ I said, ‘but this isn’t going to work out. I’ll go straight to the agency and explain. I’m sure they’ll send you someone, um, better.’ I started to walk out the door.
‘You’re leaving? Even for me that was quick,’ he said, looking faintly pleased with himself. ‘Could even be a personal best.’
I kept walking.
‘Geez, that was quick,’ the man at the sentry gate said, echoing Duncan’s words. ‘I think you might have set a new record.’
‘Mmm,’ I replied, handing in my visitor’s card and leaving the studios of 3KPG far, far behind me.
Pity.
I quite liked the dog.
*
Later that night I was sitting on the floor with a glass of wine, resting my head against the sofa and described my encounter with Duncan to Simone and Beth when our doorbell rang.
Simone went out through the kitchen then came in again with Duncan behind her, his hair brushed, his shirt ironed, his white shoes tasselled.
‘Good evening.’ He nodded to Beth and me, then addressed me directly. ‘Tallulah,’ he said, articulating every syllable of my name, ‘I have come to apologise to you for my oafish behaviour this morning.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, getting to my feet, my thoughts scrambled. ‘Come and sit down, Mr McAllister.’
‘Duncan.’
‘Duncan – would you like a drink?’ I said, stupidly pointing to the bottle in my hand as an illustration.
‘No, thank you, Tallulah,’ he said, ‘stomach feels like it’s been licked out by a rabid Afghan, so no, I’ll just grovel a while, if I may.’
‘You may,’ said Simone, clearly delighted.
‘In private, perhaps?’ Duncan said.
We sat in Simone’s kitchen, Duncan eating some of Rose’s sultana scones I had heated up for him in the oven.
‘Mmnff,’ Duncan said through a mouthful, ‘these are very, very good.’
‘My mother’s,’ I said. ‘There’re about two hundred more in the freezer if you’d like to take some home with you – gem scones too, if you like those.’
‘Gem scones?’ said Duncan. ‘I didn’t even know people knew what they were anymore.’
‘My mother does,’ I said, and told him about Rose’s baking.
I told him about Harry, too, because he asked what my father did and if I had any siblings and about the town I’d grown up in until I looked at the clock and realised that at least one of the reasons he was called Platinum Tonsils was because he was very good at asking questions.
Duncan glanced at the clock too, nudging eleven, and straightened on his stool.
‘Now, Tallulah,’ he said, dabbing at sultana scone crumbs with a serviette. ‘I want to apologise sincerely for this morning, it was very rude behaviour, even by my standards.’
I nodded, wondering if I should tell him he had one sultana still hovering on his nostril.
‘The thing is Barney likes you, and he’s rarely wrong about people, although he liked my second wife Kerry-Anne-with-an-E too . . . God, she was a pain in the arse about that, always going on about it whenever some poor bloody hotel clerk had to write down our names: “It’s Kerry-Anne – Kerry with a Y, Anne with an E”,’ he mimicked, then mused, ‘mean of me, really, to spell it out that day in the divorce court . . .’
‘Duncan.’
‘Oh, yes, getting off track, the thing is, Barney likes you . . .’
‘So you are here because your dog likes me?’
‘Yes, exactly,’ he beamed, then he caught my expression. ‘Well, not entirely. The thing is, Tallulah, well, the thing is I’m a bit of a dickhead, really, and a lot of that is unquestionably me, but some of it is because I’m surrounded by other dickheads – you see?’
I nodded again, not quite knowing what else to do.
‘I’ve been in the media for a long time and it’s been marvellous, but it does tend to turn us all into little monsters, and then I meet you and I think you might be just the person to help me be less of a monster, you see?’
‘I don’t know if that’s in the job description,’ I smiled.
He smiled back, a little world opening between us.
‘All right,’ I said, finding myself agreeing to work with this strange person. ‘But we have to clean up your office.’
‘Done!’ he beamed. ‘We’ll start fresh on Monday, bright and early, the curse of morning radio, I’ll pick you up just after five – I live quite near here, you know.’
He stood up, grabbed his sports coat, another scone, and beamed some more.
‘We’re going to have the most wonderful time, Tamara.’
*
We settled into a friendship, Duncan and I: one that began that first morning he picked me up, his green station wagon rumbling up my driveway with Barney sprawled along the length of the back seat, happily dribbling on the car mats.
Duncan kept his word, and after he came off air, we cleaned the office, people stopping to gape at Duncan McAllister on his knees with a dustpan and brush, and waltzing around the 3KPG hallways with the feather duster between his legs.
It was, I suppose, an unlikely friendship, but it suited us and the only way I can think to describe it was that I taught him not to be too much and he taught me not to be too little – ‘Go on, Tallulah, do it, what’s the worst thing that can happen?’
He was, I learnt, a good man, and if his demons sometimes rose and turned him into a bad one, shouting and railing his way out of restaurants, smashing glasses and spluttering, ‘Do you know who I think I am?’, nobody felt worse than the protagonist, shuffling into the studio the next day saying, ‘Don’t look at me, Lulu, I’m wearing the cloak of shame.’
It helped, of course, that we didn’t find each other remotely desirable, Duncan once explaining he could never be attracted to someone with freckles: ‘They’re like little red crabs marching across people’s faces, aren’t they, Lulu – oh, shit, sorry.’
But with our own sexual dynamic sorted out, it still bothered him I wasn’t actually having any, and I would regularly catch him eavesdropping on my calls, hoping there was a man at the other end of the line.
After I had worked for him for about six months, he wandered into my office and said, ‘Tallulah, I have something to say.’
‘You’ve always got something to say, Duncan, that’s why you’re a talkback host.’
‘Very funny, Lulu, now listen, you’re a good-looking girl, you really are, you remind me a bit of my second wife Kerry-Anne, before she went off.’
‘Duncan!’
‘Sorry, sorry – before she grew old gracefully. The thing is you’re a good sort, and I just can’t understand why there’s no bloke in your life, and I think it’s about time you had some fun, got back on the horse.’
‘What horse, Duncan?’ I asked, to annoy him.
‘You know what I’m talking about, Lulu – Simone tells me you haven’t had a canter in years.’
‘What? Oh, Duncan, that’s disgusting, I can’t believe Simone would tell you that,’ I said, even though I could.
‘Calm down, Lulu, I’m only trying to help. And I think you might be blocked.’
‘Blocked?’
‘Yeah, I think it’s been so long since you’ve done the deed, you’re terrified you’ve forgotten how to do it.’
‘You’re insane,’ I said.
Duncan looked at me s
eriously.
‘Would you like me to have a go?’
‘What?’
‘Would you like me to have a crack at you, get things moving again?’
‘Oh God, Duncan,’ I said, ‘that’s disgusting, that’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘Only trying to help, Lulu,’ he said, shuffling back into his studio, and I couldn’t be angry with him because I knew in his deeply misguided, completely unacceptable, totally repellent way, he was.
Duncan was right, though. I hadn’t saddled up for years.
Hadn’t wanted to.
Wasn’t ready to.
Too busy to.
Still aching somewhere.
I kept busy.
I was up early and at the studio, home in the afternoons to potter around the flat, or to meet Simone for coffee. Stella and Billy had moved not too far away and I’d visit them too, playing Red Rover with their kids in the backyard, rubbing Stella’s tired feet and staying for macaroni and cheese. I swam one night a week at the local pool, went to yoga on Saturday mornings and to the markets with Beth on Sundays, until she announced she was moving back to the small town she had fled from.
‘It’s my Dad,’ she told Simone and me. ‘His heart.’ Packing up her kimonos and Silk Cuts, she explained, ‘I’m the only daughter, comes with the territory, brothers won’t do a thing – don’t want to face it, you know men.’
‘Not really,’ said Simone and I simultaneously, but for different reasons.
We waved her off. ‘See ya, Simone, see ya Warrior Woman,’ she yelled through the window, and she was gone, in a little white puff of smoke.
The day Beth went back to the small town streets she grew up on, she left behind much more than the lingering pall of smoke that seemed to hover for years afterwards in Simone’s apartment, or the half-empty packets of cigarettes we kept finding in pot plants or behind saucepans, soft-pack mementos of a girl who thought she could give up her vice by hiding it from herself – she left a question mark in the air.
Maybe it was the ripple of change her departure caused, the slight shift in my small world, but whatever it was, almost from the moment her little car disapanished at the top of the hill, I began to feel restless.
Walking on Trampolines Page 11