The Thompson Gunner (8 page)

‘Or,' I said to him, ‘we could dress me in khaki and bring in some
biiiig
reptiles and . . .' And that's where I stopped it, before the bit that went ‘a female Crocodile Hunter', because we all know how badly wrong that might have gone.
Would
have gone. Crikey.

I think it was Elliott's doing. Elliott who lapped it all up when I put my concept to him, Elliott who said, ‘I think she's a new kind of woman for TV, a new kind of character, and it's all in how we craft it.' Elliott who somehow trimmed that sentence to ‘an Australian Lara Croft' when it came time to pitch it to the network.

So I got Emma to go back to him the first time they mentioned Lara Croft, and I got her to say ‘Meg's thinking of something a bit more subtle than that' and she said that Elliott's response was something like ‘Oh, sure, sure, yeah'.

And
she told them no guns, and they came back talking martial arts, as if we were haggling over a contract clause. So then we
were
haggling over a contract clause, since I wanted ‘no guns' stipulated and then they wanted ‘martial arts' stipulated in case I might change my mind on that one.

‘Martial arts is great,' they said in the meeting they flew me down for the next day. ‘And it's not off the track. It's fine. It's a good idea, women having self-defence skills. We know you like martial arts.' And I told them only for fitness, and they said, ‘Cool – it starts off being for fitness, but there's this buffed guy she works out with, he's kind of her assistant . . .'

It's so pretty when they think on their feet.

I wanted to go, ‘Yes, but really it's all a trap, and the buffed guy-assistant's brain has been hollowed out by the Evil Doctor Zoron and replaced by a genetically engineered super-smart hamster that peeps out through his nose and controls his every move using a series of gears and pulleys . . .'

But, by the time I'd thought of that, hours had passed and I was pacing Emma's office blowing off steam and the TV people were nowhere to be seen.

And Emma said, ‘Oh, Mega, the bigger they talk and the more knives you have strapped to your thigh, the richer you'll be. It's TV – full-on commercial TV – remember? It's not that you can't have subtlety, it's just that the subtlety can't be very subtle. And it'll give you a break from touring. It'll give you that home time you've been looking for, if the deal holds together and they make it at the Gold Coast and in Brisbane. This is ninety per cent what you want.'

‘Every time
I look up your nose I see a hamster,' I told her. ‘Oh faithful assistant . . .'

‘No really,' she said, and her head rocked back as she laughed. I leaned forward for a closer look, and she flung a hand up to cover her exposed nostrils and then said, still laughing, ‘What am I doing? There's no hamster. Trust me, Mistress. I haven't seen Doctor Zoron since he stopped bulk-billing.' And she rocked forward again in her seat and laughed at her own joke for some time, ignored the phone when it rang and then said, ‘I'll get back to them and say No to the knives if you want me to, but they say they just see them as an extension of martial arts and part of the look. You wouldn't have to go stabbing people.'

Not in the first draft anyway, but it wouldn't shock me if some stabbing snuck in there at some stage. Backed up by a dodgy set of statistics, if it needs to be, to show that our target demographic would like stabbing, or expect it.

Emma promised me she'd go in hard for a ‘no super-hamsters' clause, and might even push for one about genetically modified rodents in general, but I told her not to worry. I'd bust Evil Doctor Zoron right in the monocle, rodents or no rodents.

‘I want you to know that I'm fully committed to your vision,' Elliott said later when he took me out for a drink to make sure that everything was back on track. ‘Fully committed to
our
vision. And committed to getting this thing made.'

Emma's email is still on the screen, telling me about the lovely Elliott and his plan for us to do something. I click on Reply, and then I don't know what to say.

Elliott,
the lovely Elliott, the past month. It's the past month that I really need to deal with, but I don't know where to begin – or when, or how – and that gets in the way of me coming up with a remark that's glib enough to do justice to Elliott King. All the gory details – that's what Emma said she wanted. And usually there's no one happier to oblige than me.

I wanted emails from Murray and Elli. I had an idea that I'd log on and there they would be, full of non-gory detail. Murray on how he's now heard enough Avril Lavigne to last a lifetime, but if his major parenting issue is persuading his daughter to spell ‘skater' without a number in it, things aren't too bad. Elli on Murray's Sunday morning French toast going badly wrong, and how he had to stand on a chair to put a plastic bag around the smoke alarm.

The person at the terminal next to me laughs at an email she's just opened. It's a big backpacker place, this Internet cafe, but definitely one of the better ones, neither as soulless as a Kinko's nor as much of a cyber sweatshop as plenty of others.

The one down the street was all war-gaming boys when I looked in – rank with late-teenage pheromones and overrun with the clamour of machines. You leave those places feeling like you've been sprayed with Essence of Boy's Armpit. The air's so thick with it your instinct is to keep your mouth shut in case it'll coat your teeth.

If cyber war is like this, what does real war smell like? You'd have to hope there was a breeze or the collateral damage from boy smell could be grim indeed.

I'm killing
time, sitting here dreaming about emails I'm not going to get and the blur that Internet cafes become as the cities go by. I'm killing time and paying for it, at the rate of about a dollar for each quarter hour.

My hands are sweating on the plastic armrests.

The X-ray is ready within minutes, and the dentist shows me the image, holding it between two fingers in front of my face and pointing out the deep intact root system that will allow the job to be done in one go, and this afternoon. There's so much of the tooth below the surface and, by the looks of it, even in the jaw that the X-ray suggests I've done no worse than clip three corners off the top of it, though my tongue tells me almost all of it's gone.

‘So, this is good,' he says. ‘We knew too much of it was gone to simply fill in the space, but we'll make you a crown. It'll be porcelain. Porcelain looks good but the main thing is it gives an excellent long-term result. I don't imagine you'll feel much at all when we get to work, but we'll make sure you don't. You might get a bit bored, though. In which case, you might as well watch a movie.'

I assume he's kidding, but he pulls an overhead TV monitor around and his assistant holds a folder up in front of me.

‘Recent releases are at the back,' she says. ‘This'll take a couple of hours, so pick anything you like.'

The list runs to a dozen pages or more, sheets of names of movies and TV shows in plastic sleeves. I ask if there's anything they haven't watched, as if we're three housemates standing in front of the new-to-weeklies at Blockbuster before we order our pizza.

‘I'll
probably be concentrating on the tooth,' the dentist says. ‘But I've seen Mister Bean enough times, if that's all right.'

I pick
EDtv
. I missed its cinema run, since I was on tour at the time. I've heard it's pretty good but, really, if it's a crap movie and Matthew McConaughey gets his shirt off a few times, all is not lost.

The assistant straightens my bib, and fits a pair of massive sunglasses of the kind worn over regular glasses by people who are past caring. The dentist applies topical anaesthetic, then injects the local, which stings once or twice but never badly. A firm grip on the armrests gets me through. He keeps testing and testing to see that it's all properly numb, but I don't give in lightly and I jump at the merest hint of sensation.

‘We'll make a start,' he says matter-of-factly. ‘You can let me know if there's a problem.'

He pushes a blue rubber dental dam into my mouth and clips it around the tooth. The drill whines and goes to work, and the sucker that's hooked over my lower front teeth pulls water and saliva out noisily.

He laughs at something in
EDtv
, right when I'm sure he's working the drill down deep into my tooth. It's not one of the more slapstick moments, not even a great line. I think he's laughing at the nuances of a Woody Harrelson facial expression that is surely happening somewhere beyond his right ear, so what the hell's he doing to my mouth?

I manage to say ‘Uuh' which had more to it in my head
but comes out in the language only dentists know, and he explains that he's seen the first part of the movie a couple of times, and he particularly likes this scene.

‘Don't you think it's what he's best at?' he says. ‘Playing this kind of character? Woody Harrelson, I mean.'

He keeps working, I fall for the movie more than I expect to. Matthew McConaughey takes his shirt off. The dentist finishes drilling, and then we wait as the computer gets to work designing my crown.

We've got fifteen minutes, the assistant tells me, and she points me in the right direction for the bathroom. I'm dizzy and I lurch to the door with my bib swinging loosely on its chain, the enormous sunnies still in place and the blue rubber dental dam hanging out of my mouth. Which is still jammed open with the hardware that fixes the dam in place, so I'm slurping up saliva as I go. On the way past, the receptionist pushes tissues into my hand. I head off down the corridor, as instructed, turning right and then right again, saliva, I'm certain, flapping from the free edges of the dental dam.

When I get there, it's a relief to be alone in the cubicle, and to know that the worst of the procedure is behind me. The window is frosted glass but I can hear noise through the vent at the top, the sounds of human traffic in the nearby mall, people with the time and opportunity to shop in the mid-afternoon.

I'm sure I smell sweaty, and the right side of my face is numb from the cheek down. I wipe my forehead with the tissues. Time to go back.

I turn right into the corridor and keep going until I reach a door. It must have been open when I was on my
way down here, though I don't remember it, open or closed. I go through it and it shuts behind me. Shuts behind me, with a disconcerting locking kind of sound.

There's another door ahead, and noise beyond it. I have come the wrong way. I have come through the fire door, and it has locked behind me.

I wipe some saliva from my dental dam onto my sleeve, as if that's a better place to put it. I'm by myself here, in what must be the ground floor of the fire stairs. I'm by myself, surrounded by unpainted concrete walls and with the door that I have come through carrying a prominent sign that reads ‘This door to remain locked at all times'.

I try the handle anyway. It moves up and down five millimetres. It doesn't open the door. Somewhere, back in the building, a computer is about seven minutes away from finishing a porcelain crown. My team is waiting.
EDtv
is paused and waiting too.

The best I can do is take a cautious look out of the other door and into the mall. If I'm near the main entrance to the building, I can perhaps sneak back in that way. I open the door, just a crack. I recognise nothing. I stick my head around it, my hand holding back the big piece of wet blue rubber hanging out of my mouth. Still nothing.

I have no choice here. I need help.

I step outside, and I take off one shoe and use it to wedge the door so that it won't lock me out. I will quietly ask someone where I am, and if they know a way back in. For the first time, saliva runs down my neck.

‘Hey, Meg Riddoch!' someone shouts out. ‘It is you, isn't it?'

I am
standing wearing one shoe, sunglasses with lenses the size of TV screens, a bib that I'm drooling on and a sheet of blue rubber that's hanging out of my mouth. Not even my own mother . . .

‘It
is
you,' he says excitedly. ‘Oh, hilarious. I'm John and this is Liz.' He waves in the direction of the woman next to him. ‘And this is our friend Paul. What is this? What are you doing?'

‘We saw one of your shows in Melbourne a few weeks ago, a month ago,' Liz says, rushing to get it out and grinning as if she's just stumbled upon Christmas out of season. ‘We live in Melbourne, John and me. We're here visiting Paul.'

‘Um,' Paul says, a welcome confusion on his face. ‘Is this part of the comedy festival – because I wouldn't put it past them – or are you actually having dental work done?'

I nod vigorously and, for some reason, point to him, as if it's a game of charades and he's just guessed what I've been miming. I tell him I'm in the middle of a dental procedure, and it would be great if he could help me find my way back to the dentist. Except I forget to factor in that half my tongue is numb, half my face is numb and there's machinery in my mouth, so when I go to speak it comes out as ‘Uh uh uh uh-uh uh uh uh-uh uh-uh-uh' and I don't even get to the part where I ask for help because John's saying ‘Hilarious' again and laughing raucously. ‘As if it'd be part of the comedy festival.'

‘Well, it might have been,' Paul says. ‘It's the kind of stuff they do at festivals. They had the Angel Project here a few years ago. They had people hidden all over the city in angel costumes.'

‘So
what would this be?' John says, all too ready to start workshopping. ‘If it was performance art with all that rubber hanging out of Meg's mouth? The Gimp Project?'

I gag on my dental dam when my next breath sucks it into my mouth. I sound like a failing pool filter drawing in water and air at the same time. All three of them are laughing now. I point to the door I've come through, and tell them I've got to go. The words make no sense, but the meaning should be clear.