Episode 1: Stranger In Demi-Paradise

Episode 1: Stranger in Demi-Paradise

     Close-up: heavy front door, old-fashioned with some small panes of glass in maybe mahogany frames? Track right to one of those voice-box gizzmos and a row of buttons with name-tags beside them. To keep the burglars and rapists out, geddit?

    Well, presumably this is It, because that was a real London taxi with a real London taxi driver, like on that programme about the Knowledge. That was good. They screened it twice back home, well, maybe more than twice but I only saw it twice, well, parts of it. I know he did the Knowledge, I asked him. He was quite an old driver, I dunno if they still have it, I didn’t ask him that. He said this was It, so it’s gotta be. I never saw any of those voice-box things in real life, before. When I was helping out Joslynne with her cleaning jobs because she’d taken on too many and the clients were getting ratty because she had to keep ringing them up and saying she couldn’t manage today, there were some really fancy flats that had those key-pad things where you have to input a secret number known only to all of Rabbit’s friends and relations and the sixteen generations of cleaning ladies and their friends and helpers that you’ve sacked before you took on Joslynne. That was in Sydney, maybe they only have these voice-box gizzmos in London?

    What you do, see, you press the right button and then the voice-box thingo crackles and if it asks you who you are, then you speak into it. You do if you haven’t got a hang-up about speaking into mechanical devices to someone you can’t see. Which is why I gave up languages after doing three years of French and Italian at uni. Because my language lab work was so rotten I was obviously never gonna get more than a mere Pass however good my written work was. It was quite good, only I never agreed with any of the critics they set us and after three years of it you get fed up with writing totally hypocritical crap into which not one original thought is allowed to creep. So to speak.

    Track back, back, back and pan slowly to view of large, fancy brown brick apartment building with these, like, portholes and a kind of arch over the front steps. It must have been the Style when it was built, it’s really weird. They’ve painted the windowsills and whatever they are when the windows are round not square in white, and it’s sort of horribly spick and span, and I dunno what I expected a block of London flats to be but it wasn’t this. There’s trees all up and down the street, too, I never expected London to have trees. Further down the road there’s some houses with neat little brick garden walls, brick must’ve been In when this street was built, that’s for sure, and tiny pocket-handkerchief gardens. I did know they have gardens in some places in London because I’ve seen that sort of house on TV. Not on The Bill. This area must be more middle-class. That figures, Joanie’d be middle-class, because Dad certainly is. What I mean, his background was, only when he came out to Oz he started work as a bookie’s runner, I dunno if it was legal or not, but after a bit he got a job with a legit bookie and never looked back. These days he’s Grant & Marshall, Turf Accountants. Grandpa Marshall was a solicitor, you can’t get more middle-class than that, eh? I never met him or Grandma, they’ve been dead for years, but Aunty June, she’s Joanie’s mother, she’s always kept in touch. After Dad married Mum it was always her that wrote back, but apparently that was quite the expected thing in that socio-economic bracket. Well, it must’ve been, Aunty June kept right on writing. I thought it was interesting, I wanted to do something on it for my M.A. thesis but my sociology tutor, he said there wasn’t enough in it. Even though it wouldn’t have been a proper thesis, not like for your Ph.D., because you had to do papers as well. That was Kevin O’Connor, he was a dill.

    These bricks are very brown, back home you get reddish bricks and some places horrible pale yellow bricks are really popular. Aunty Kate and Uncle Jim, she’s one of Mum’s sisters, they live in Adelaide and it’s full of horrible pale yellow bricks, not a pretty yellow, kind of a dirty yellow… If a person stopped wittering on about bricks and pressed the right button possibly a person’s Cousin Joanie would speak out of that box and open the front door. –How do those things work?

    Oh, well, nothing venture, nothing win, and having come all this way on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again, it’d be bloody stupid to be put off by a voice-box gizzmo. Push. Nothing. Push again. Nothing. Fuck. Maybe she’s out? Maybe her bell’s not working? Maybe I’ve got it wrong and all you have to do is give this ruddy great mahogany front door a good— No. Maybe she’s in the bath? A watch that’s been reset five times since leaving Kingsford Smith, at least twice in the middle of the night over something that was possibly something in the Middle East or maybe India, is probably not all that accurate any more, but it’s probably not impossible for English cousins to have baths in the middle of the afternoon. I’d say, Maybe she’s at work, but she doesn’t do ordinary work, she’s an actress and she swore she was gonna be in. Only maybe she’s got an unexpected thingummyjig. Um… you know, where they have to read a bit and the director says “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” or something even ruder like in Tootsie where that poor girl never got the part. I didn’t think he sounded in the least like a woman, he sounded like a male Hollywood actor camping it up, but I already know I’m alone in the universe in that opinion, because Mum and Joslynne and all the dumb girls we were at school with have already shouted me down about it. Audition, that’s it! An audition. –Can you get galloping Alzheimer’s at twenty-six, nearly twenty-seven with a brand-new Ph.D. and a fellowship at London University? Well, you can get galloping stage fright, that’s for sure! Ring—it.

    Crackle, crackle, yes, who is it?

    Jesus!

    “Um, hullo. It’s Rosie.” Boy, that sounded wet.

    Crackle up, I’m on the top crackle. –Clunk.

    Shit, now what? Try the door. No go. I must’ve done something wrong, I knew I’d do something wrong, it’s my technological hang-up! Not to say being all thumbs, as Dad’d say. Shit, now she’ll really think I’m a nong. Ring again.

    Crackle, crackle, yes?

    “I think I did something wrong, it won’t open! I’m—”

    Crackle, crackle down.

    “—sorry.” I think she said she’d come down, well, if I stand here like a nong for the next three hours we’ll know, eh?

    … Interminable pause during which nothing happens except that Lily Rose Marshall stands here like a nong.

    All of a sudden it opens and she says: “Hullo: it is Lily Rose, isn’t it?”

    “Yeah, um, Rosie.” Crikey, she looks exactly—ex-act-er-ly—like those fancy photos Aunty June sent! Mum and me thought they must’ve been re-touched.

    “Yes, of course, Rosie for short, isn’t it?”—We saw her in a BBC serial thing, she sounds just the same so that must’ve been her real accent and not put on for the part, Mum and me thought it was put on because Dad doesn’t sound that la-de-da and Mum reckons he never did. Dad wouldn’t watch it, he said it was crap, so we couldn’t ask him. Kenny wouldn’t watch it either, but we wouldn’t’ve asked him anyway.—“I’m Joan Marshall.”

    “Um, yeah.” She isn’t, she’s Joan Potts, but it’s clear even to a Wild Colonial Girl that Marshall’s a much more up-market name than Potts. “Hi.”

    If it was left up to L.R. Marshall this inane exchange could go on until Christmas or possibly the next millennium but fortunately Joan (Potts) Marshall has five zillion times more social nous and she manages the pair of us and the luggage inside, her making the right sort of socially acceptable noises and L.R. Marshall uttering “Um” and “Yeah” at intervals, and into the, gulp, lift. One of those awful open ones where you have to close the door by hand, it isn’t a real door, it’s like a grille, and thank God she did have to come down and get me because there is no way—No Way!—you woulda got me in one of them by myself. I can just remember them in Grace Bros when I was really little, only they always had a proper lift operator. This one’s miles worse, it’s very small and it’s all kinda open, like, grille-work all round, see: technically we’re going up inside this tube of wrought iron and it’s just like what the Eiffel Tower must be and nothing on God’s earth is ever gonna get me up that, I can tell ya!

    She must’ve noticed something because she says: “Is something wrong, Rosie?”

    “No, I’m not very good at heights, that’s all.”

    She’s obviously got a cast-iron head for heights like the rest of my ruddy family, because first off she says blankly “Heights?” and then she gives this sorta kindly superior little laugh and says that lots of people don’t fancy the lift but she’s on the top floor. Yeah, right. It’s not real high, Joslynne had loads of clients in proper high-rise apartment blocks back home. As it turns out it’s only the fifth floor and she then explains really kindly how they count floors here. Maybe at this stage if I was as ignorant as I look I’d just gape at her but I give up pretending, it must be the jet-lag, and just say: “I see. Same as us, not like the Americans.” And suddenly she gives me a genuine smile instead of the bloody social ones she's been dishing out and agrees: “Not like the Americans, no!” And unlocks the door and in we go.

    She must’ve shown me into a bedroom because I’m waking up in one that to my knowledge I’ve never seen before. But there’s an awful lot of brown so it must be her place, I do remember that on the way up those clearly-visible corridor walls were very brown, on the far side of the sodding lift tube.

    Ooh, I’ve got my pie-jams on, I must’ve got into them automatically. I’ll have to remember not to call them that, I’m ninety-nine percent sure, though admittedly I haven’t done a double-blind trial to prove it, that only the nuclear Oz section of the extended Marshall family calls them that. Well, Joslynne and the rest of the dumb girls at school didn’t, that's for sure. Bugger, I called her dumb, I promised myself I never would, she is my best friend. Well, sort of. As much as a divorced mum can ever be the best friend of an unmarried, unattached person of nearly twenty-seven in a society where a permanent relationship before twenty-four is the norm for both sexes. Not that we ever did have much in common, except that we lived next-door to each other and in spite of our differences we really liked each other. For a while, like after we moved there the year me and Joslynne started at St Agatha’s Putrid Academy for Putrid Young Ladies, I thought it was only because she wanted me to do her maths and English homework for her, but it wasn’t. What I mean, she did want me to do it but we’ve been best friends ever since.

    Very, very bravely L.R Marshall stops mooning on about the past and puts on her dressing-gown, very new shocking-pink quilted nylon because Mum was convinced London’d be freezing, and goes in search of Cousin Joanie and/or the dunny. Joanie’s in the kitchen and apparently it’s afternoon again and I’ve slept for twenty-two hours!

    After I’ve been to the bog I manage to totter back into the kitchen and utter: “I didn’t know a person could sleep for twenty-two hours.”

    “Nor did I. I was quite worried at first, but you were breathing quite naturally, so I decided you must need the sleep.”

    “Um, yeah.” –I didn’t dream that accent, it is as posh as it was on that crapulous BBC thing. The dresses were nice, mind you. And the settings: country houses and that sort of stuff. Kenny reckons that they film them in about six different places and then they stick it all together, you see, so it’s even more fake than it looks, but me and Mum didn’t wanna know. Well, Mum really didn’t and I flattened him as part of my sisterly duty.

    Then she asks if I’m hungry.

    “Um, yes, thanks, I am quite hungry.” –Fifteen actual people and one cretinous brother warned me about the meat in Pongo. Fifteen. Nothing to do with mad cows: because the helpings are incredibly mingy and it costs a bomb. Words to that effect, depending on the socio-economic status of the speaker. Funnily enough I had heard that particular popular myth before, and, indeed, was aware that it was such; because, appearances to the contrary, L.R. Marshall is not your absolutely typical dumb Colonial Girl, nor completely uneducated and/or cloth-eared, likewise has not gone about with her head in the sand for the past twenty-six years. Or, in the cases of Mum, Aunty Allyson, Mrs Franchini from down the road, and Joslynne’s Mum’s friend Mrs Giorgopoulos, fifty-odd. Joslynne’s Mum didn’t warn me, but then, on top of the on-again, off-again vegetarianism (usually to spite him), she’s a bit vague. Of course, over the last thirty years or so meat prices in the Land of Oz have also reached near-astronomical proportions, but that doesn’t stop them, apparently.

    Interestingly enough, however, it was only the older generation that warned me not to drink the water: to wit, Grandma Leach, she’s Mum’s Mum and a bit gaga, she’s in a home, old Mrs Patterson who’s Joslynne’s Mum and Dad’s other neighbour, old Mr Hickey who does the lawns for half the street, he’s into that Seniors group, not Grey Power, it’s more like a franchise operation, they do gardening and carpentry and odd-jobs and stuff, old Mrs Hickey when I took his money round the week Mum had her bad cold, Great-Aunty Stella—Mum’s aunt, eighty-five and all her wits about her, as witness her refusal to take Grandma Leach in—and even very old Nonna Franchini, she’s Mr Franchini’s mother and still hardly speaks any English even though she’s been in Oz since 1955.

    “Um, I’m awfully thirsty,”—not admitting that it’s probably the effect of that second dose of travel-sickness pills round about Bahrain, better safe than sorry, not to mention not admitting they could’ve been a factor in the twenty-two hours’ sleep.—“Do you think I could have a drink of water?”

    Why am I not surprised when it comes out of the tap and looks and tastes better than Sydney water? Not to mention having to boil every bloody drop for a couple of months at a stretch, a couple of years back, because it was, read my lips, C,O,N,T,A,M,I,N— Yeah, well. Joslynne’s Mum’s still boiling hers and it’s driving her Dad bats but personally, I don’t blame her. And what will happen, just by the by, should it occur again during the ruddy Olympic Games which, thank God, I shall miss? –More than twenty people said in tones of unalloyed horror: “But you’ll miss the Olympics!”, words to that effect, but I gave up taking statistics at twenty. Figured it was a valid sample, geddit?

    Joanie then kindly produces breakfast even though it’s mid-afternoon and, pace the friends and relatives, it may be English but to one brought up on toast and Vegemite plus Kellogg’s cornflakes, or muesli if Mum was feeling conscientious, it’s also pretty ordinary. Toast and English marmalade, she’s not much of a cook, quote unquote. Nor am I: good. The coffee’s only weak brown dust and water, good, that’s all I can make, too. Though Mr Franchini did try to teach me and Joslynne to make real coffee when he was teaching Tanya and Joe. (I don’t think Tanya’s an Italian name but as Joe isn’t Giuseppe, he’s Joseph, can it matter?) Only Joe actually grasped it, so they got all male and superior. Which as far as I could see was merely chromosomal and, never mind the popular myths, nothing whatsoever to do with being Italian.

    After that we go into the lounge-room, Joanie calls it the sitting-room, and she makes polite enquiries about the rellies, not calling them that, and reports on Aunty June and Uncle George. That’s funny, I thought they were divorced, but being now old enough to have learned a little sense, I don’t say anything. Just as well, because she then explains they’re back together, sharing the house. Like Fergie and Andrew! I must look as blank as I feel, because she explains that.

    “Crikey. Wasn’t she the one that had her photo taken having her toe sucked by someone else? Or was that some other English Royal? Or an American Royal, of course,” I add hastily—it must be the jet-lag because as I say, I have learned some sense over the years.

    But oddly enough it isn’t A Mistake after all, because Joanie goes into a helpless giggling fit—no, more sort of wheezing, really, and she has to wipe her eyes. “They’re all the same,” she admits feebly.

    “Yeah,” I agree with a silly grin.

    “Well, Mummy and Daddy haven’t given me all the sordid details because I’m the younger generation, but they’re certainly under the same roof. And frankly, I haven’t asked, because I’d rather not know.”

    “Yeah, right, being the wrong generation,” I agree in a sort of awed horror.

    At that we both go into sort of wheezing fits and I then feel brave enough to say—still cautiously, mind you—“We saw you in that BBC thing.”

    She must be feeling more relaxed, all right, because she lapses into what I can see is her native vernacular, though the accent remains in place, and gasps: “Darling, wasn’t it dire?”

    “Too right. They repeated it straight away on Saturday afternoons, in Australia, and then re-ran the whole thing in prime time six months later.”

    We both collapse in sniggers and then Joanie tells me eagerly about the horrors of making the thing. Even though I sorta woulda expected it to be almost as bad as it was, I listen with pretty much open-mouthed attention. Finally admitting: “I always thought Coralee Adams must be a proper bitch.”

    “Did you really? Most of the world apparently thinks she’s a cross between Mary Poppins, Saint Di, and Edith Evans.”

    “Not Edith Evans, surely!” –Betraying my smattering of an education, oh, dear.

    “Well, yes. It’s the voice, you see.”

    “Of course! ‘In a handbag?’”

    Well, that’s really given the game away, hasn’t it? Fortunately Joanie seems pleased rather than the reverse, not to say on the same wavelength, and she goes on for ages about the acting scene in London, and the parts she’s had, and the frightful directors she’s known, and the cows of actresses and the bitches of actors of both sexes. Even though I don’t know all of the names by any means, I listen pretty well open-mouthed.

    Eventually she breaks down almost entirely and admits: “I must admit, Rosie, I thought you’d either be a hearty Aussie sportswoman, or something frighteningly intellectual and severe.”

    I'm five-foot-two in the old measurements, that is, against the kitchen door at Mum and Dad’s, plumpish, blonde, and totally unsportswoman-like in thought, word and deed. Which is pretty self-evident. Uh—severe? Where did that come from? Oh! It’ll be partly the Ph.D. and partly Germaine Greer. The only wonder is, she didn’t say horse-faced.

    “I dunno what I thought you’d be like, Joanie. I was just plain shit-scared. Well, English and—um—a bit like your character in that serial,” I mutter, clearing the throat a bit.

    Instead of throwing me out of the flat forthwith she gives a yelp of laughter and gets out the gin. After I’ve admitted I don’t mind it with tonic but since there isn’t any I don’t mind just gin, we really get down to it, and by the time it’s too dark to see she’s got her albums out and is giving me the complete low-down on Coralee Adams et al. Cor, to use the local vernacular.

    “I thought we’d eat in tonight,” she says, drawing the curtains and switching the lights on.

    “Rather than expose London to me without warning? Right.”

    “Something like that! Er, do you eat meat, Rosie?”

    “Yes, I eat anything except parsnips.”

    “Oh, good. Well, chops, mash, frozen spinach, carrots?”

    I concur, not revealing that the Oz nuclear Marshall family doesn’t eat frozen spinach, it’s apparently a sin to buy it frozen, though you’re allowed to buy frozen peas, corn, or carrots, not to say mixed frozen corn, peas and carrots, and frozen stir-fry mixtures that’ve got minute quantities of broccoli and/or cauliflower as well, plus frozen pastry, whole frozen pizza and pies, and of course frozen chooks and at Christmas time frozen turkey. And frozen chips round about the time Kenny was going through the football stage and grew out of three shoe sizes in four months, and Mum was desperate. But not frozen spinach, geddit? No, I don’t, either.

    We go into the kitchen where I fail to help and she has to explain how to work the gas stove. Don’t we have gas in Australia? Lots of people do but not the particular Marshall nuclear family in question. We definitely don’t have terrifying gas grills, either, which she is manipulating To the Manor Born. –One of her stories concerned Coralee Adams’s efforts to get cast in that instead of that wonderful lady that was in it—I always forget her name but I know who she is, of course: Margot, from The Good Life. The story was probably actionable, but good. Very good.

    “I usually just fry chops,” I admit glumly.

    “Can you? I’m hopeless at anything in a pan. Well, that seems a fair division of labour, then, Rosie: you do the pan things, and I’ll do the grill things!”

    I agree, the more so as there aren’t any pan things tonight. The mash—we never call it that back home but I don’t reveal that the phrase is not, contrariwise, strange to me—comes out of a packet. Bless you, Joan (Potts) Marshall. That was Sin Number One in Mum’s eyes all the time I was growing up. Aunty Allyson always used to do mashed potato out of a packet and even though Dad was earning miles more then Uncle Harry and we could’ve afforded it ten times a day and never noticed the difference, it was condemned as extravagant. And clearly understood to be feckless, though I don’t think the word was in Mum’s working vocabulary.

    “Um, can you do chips, Joanie?”

    She laughs. “No! They require a pan! And I absolutely can’t do anything deep-fried: when I was on the road when I was just starting out in the Business, a friend of mine set fire to the landlady’s chip pan in deepest Shuddersford.”

    I understood all that. Maybe coming to Britain wasn’t A Mistake, after all. “Goddit,” I concede, grinning back.

    “Can you?”

    “Um, maybe shallow fried.” Not saying oven chips because no way am I gonna put my head or even my arm in a gas oven.

    “Good, we’ll buy some potatoes.” At that moment the phone rings, she’s got an extension in the kitchen, pale blue. She answers it: “Joan Marshall speaking” so it begins to dawn that maybe the Australian vernacular “Joanie,” like what we’ve always called her for as long as I can remember, is All Wrong Over Here. Bugger.

    “Um, should I call you Joan?” I say, duly going red, when she’s hung up and is verifying that the mashed potatoes have absorbed all the hot water.

    “Mm? No, no: Joanie in the family, Rosie!” she says with a laugh.

    I sag all over the brown kitchen. –The whole flat’s brown, it’s appalling. This, like, panelling or something to about four feet, no, more than that, ear-level on me, in every room. –Omigod.

    “What’s the matter?” she gasps.

    “Um, it’s wainscoting, isn’t it?” I say, very, very faintly.

    “What? Oh—yes. Don’t you have it in Australia?”

    “N—Uh—” Feebly I manage to admit: “I think we do have the concept, Joanie, though its manifestation isn’t very common. But we almost definitely don’t have the word.”

    Joanie promptly has hysterics all over her Goddawful brown wainscoted kitchen and we bung the stuff on plates, grab up some mismatched cutlery, and stagger through to the lounge- or sitting-room to collapse in front of the box. Phew! And to think I thought she’d be awfully up-market and— Well, I dunno. But flowery hats were in there somewhere, all rightee. Must’ve been the fell influence of that serial. That or twenty-six years of cultural brainwashing, yep.

    Joan Marshall, born Potts, most recently seen by the Great Australian Public as Lady Celia in that frightful BBC costume thing, is thirty-six years old but definitely passes for twenty-nine in daylight and much less under the lights. One of those pinkish-blonde, very English skins. Exactly like mine, right. By the time I’ve been infesting her flat for about three months she’s worked up the courage to tell me that she thought I’d be frightfully tanned—her cultural brainwashing, right; not to say the courage to tell me all about her ruddy Seve. (Not him! It is the same name: Severiano, isn’t that pretty? Almost impossible to pronounce, true.) Not only is he Spanish, a recipe for disaster as far as pink-skinned, blonde Anglo-Saxon females are concerned, as she freely admits, but married. Spanish and married? Ye gods! She’s admitted cheerfully that that’s her all over, and by now I know her well enough to see that the cheerfulness is not assumed: she’s got a terrifically sunny temperament. Added to which she grew out of any impulse to set up a nuclear family of her own at the age of about twenty-two, as she freely admits. I can see that this isn’t one hundred percent true, in fact I doubt if any hetero Western female could escape her cultural brainwashing to that extent (and even the Lesbian ones, come to think of it, usually indulge in frantic nesting behaviour with each other), but never mind. Ninety-five percent. She can’t stand kids and one of the reasons that she took this flat, which is actually a sub-let from an acting friend who’s gone to Hollywood, is that they won’t allow kids in the building. I quite like kids but on the other hand it is quite good not to be woken at six-thirty by them shrieking in the garden (my teenage years, the neighbours on the Joslynne-less side were Catholics), or turning the bloody TV on (later, when staying in Joslynne’s spare room).

    Joanie’s got a lot of charm, which is quite natural, not put on. I’m not sure if you can put on charm, but I’ve seen enough ageing actresses try to do it on Parkinson when I should’ve been finishing off my essays. The charm means that she’s very popular with her fellow actors, and also with the “crews”. It took me a while, but then I got it: they’re the technical bods that do the cameras and lighting and stuff for the TV shows. And what with being very well liked and the charm, and being the sort of person who almost never loses her temper, she’s in pretty regular work, even though her range isn’t very wide, as she freely admits herself. I can see that, actually.

    At the moment she’s got a part in a play, it’s almost identical to Lady Celia. She only has to smile a lot and wear lovely dresses and be charming in a ladylike accent. The play’s not costume, though, it’s a sort of horrible drawing-room comedy, I thought they went out with Googie Withers and white gloves, but apparently not. They don’t make it to the box because even the BBC doesn’t chuck megabucks away on filming drawing-room comedies that only grannies in twinsets, according to Joanie, want to see. There must be an awful lot of grannies in twinsets in Greater London, because it’s doing very well. No, well, add the Australian tourists that go to it partly because they’re in the twinset socio-economic bracket, too, and partly because their travel agency’s got an arrangement with the theatre management, and the American tourists that go to it because they think it’s very English (it’s that, all right) and because their travel agency’s got an arrangement with the theatre management… Also busloads of OAPs (pensioners to some) apparently get trucked to it daily from places like Bognor Regis or Leamington Spa. –Don’t ask me, that's what she said. It got very, very rude reviews in the respectable Sunday papers so according to Joanie it was bound to go a bomb.

    She gets all of the Sunday papers, it’s wonderful. Practically all we do on Sundays is read them. To be precise, take turns to nip down to her little corner grocery-cum-newsagent’s, then share out the papers and have breakfast in bed. Unless Seve’s here, in which case I nip down and get the papers and have them all to myself. Dad gets The Observer sent out airmail, but it usually arrives at really weird times and it isn’t the same. Mum reckons it’s an extravagance but as it’s his only one, she lets him. Joanie asked me what good papers we have in Australia but the only possible answer to that one is, “Don’t ask”. Dad gave up his subscription to The Age about ten years back, he said it had become populist crap, whatever it might have been in its heyday. I grant you he’s an unusually educated man for a bookie, also I grant you that Grandpa Marshall is reputed to have had ten fits when he went into it, but popular opinion to the contrary, there is no actual law that says a bookie has to be illiterate.

    Joanie isn’t the leading lady in the drawing-room comedy, she’s the second female lead. If you’ve done three years of French Lit. before the language labs won, you’ll know that the rôle is largely what technically was once known as that of confidante, but as I now know that Joanie went on the stage when she left school at seventeen (predictably almost breaking Aunty June’s heart and driving Uncle George absolutely ropeable), I haven’t said so. It isn’t that she’s ignorant, but she’s almost entirely self-taught. Autodidacte, yeah. And while a lot of knowledge can be picked up from assiduous reading of the better sort of English Sunday paper when not occupied with amorous Spaniards, it isn’t the sort that gets stuffed down your throat in a pretty traditional literature course at what was still a pretty traditional university when I was an undergrad. –Scottish style, not Oxbridge, or so they tell me.

    The leading lady is definitely the Coralee Adams type, though somewhat older than Miss Adams. You may not have heard of her unless you’re at least Mum’s generation. Gaynor Grahame. The rôle is that of a merry widow of only just old enough to have a daughter who’s old enough to leave school and go to what used to be debs’ dances. (The thing’s a cross between The Merry Widow and The Reluctant Debutante, as you’ve probably guessed.) Her dresses are ace. Fab. She looks stunning in them. Corker. The actual Gaynor Grahame, I kid you not, is sixty-nine. Sixty-nine. When you get up close, which I was privileged to do, you can see it’s all paint and face-lifts. Bloody impressive, mind you. She’s had almost entirely a stage career, almost entirely in this sort of drawing-room tripe, but if you’ve managed to keep awake until very late on a Sunday night in spite of having work or uni or school the following day, you might’ve seen her in her heyday. Mid-Fifties: those Goddawful B-movies the Brits were churning out in the nadir of the British film industry. Its best efforts being represented by Dirk Bogarde as God’s gift to womankind in Doctor In The Captain’s Anything. She did, in fact, have a part in something with Dirk Bogarde in it, but not as the girl who got the man. I think it was as the boyfriend’s girlfriend. Face very rounded, hair very sternly controlled in a horribly neat bob, and quite dark, not the pale toffee shade it is these days. Very pointy bras, not that they all didn’t, then. And a very, very, very artificial, high-pitched Pommy voice, almost impossible to listen to. She’s since dropped it about two octaves, you can only admire her for it. In fact, you can only admire her.

    She is, of course, an even greater bitch than the famed Coralee, and the rest of the cast is terrified of her. Once Joanie had explained to me what upstaging is, even I could see that she does it unceasingly for every moment of the time she’s on stage. The girl who plays her daughter is genuinely young, this is her first London rôle, and Gaynor Grahame’s turned her into a sort of body-slave: always sending her out to buy her a new pair of tights, and screaming at her when she buys the wrong brand or shade, that sort of thing. But when she tried to stand up to her, some time in the early days of the thing’s run, Miss Grahame cut her best scene by the simple expedient of giving with the speech that follows it instead of the cue for it, regardless of anything approaching the Three Unities let alone sense. The audience didn’t appear to notice, and poor little Bridget was made to endure it for a whole week. Until it sank in and she crawled to the cow.

    The leading man hasn’t actually got a blue rinse, he only looks as if he ought to. He's supposed to be a terrifically handsome, terrifically rich, terrifically well-dressed divorced tycoon only just old enough to have a son old enough to be suitable engagement-fodder for poor Bridget’s part. Well, forty-five max’, geddit? Up close, add a good ten years to that. Still makes him pretty well the next generation from Miss G.G., doesn’t it? Michael Manfred, don’t all scream at once. No? Admittedly that cops-and-robbers series he was in wasn’t a fraction of the success of Minder: but that vintage? The hair was in a sort of Beatles cut at the time, but a very shiny light brown and slightly waved; enough to make you want to spew, surely that recalls it to your mind! No, well, of course I never saw the originals, they must be about as old as I am, but I’ve seen the repeats. Actually I think they were on Seven, not the ABC, oddly enough. Skinny legs, very tight flares? Oh, well. Does “Micky Manfred” ring any bells? No? You do surprise me. Little Micky Manfred. (Not Basil Brush, no!) When I was about eight they were still repeating it on the ABC for yet another martyred generation of Aussie kids: Baffit The Badger. Michael Manfred, or “Little Micky” as his millions of not-fans called him, was Baffit’s human. Kenny and me loathed and despised him, but Mum used to make us watch it, she thought he was lovely. Neither of us had the faintest idea what a badger was, mind you, until Dad discovered our ignorance, shouted at Mum, and got a book from the library for us. I think that’s why I remember it so clearly.

    These days Michael Manfred is so up-himself he doesn’t notice tousled-haired sociologists in baggy old jeans and huge daggy black sweaters, but according to Joanie this is Just As Well, because if you’re female, under forty and fated to act with him, he’ll unfailingly give you the tongue. Blaach. Like that blue-rinsed character in Tootsie, remember? Yeah. Likewise if he thinks you’re tongueable and you happen to be introduced to him. Which I guess proves he isn’t gay, though that was certainly the impression I had from the only recent thing of his that ever reached the shores of Oz, to wit, What The Butler. Yet another intended-to-be successor to To The Manor Born that died the death after one season. –No, not “what the butler saw”, What The Butler: pretty well guaranteed it’d be crap, eh? He wasn’t the butler, that was another old ham. He was the youngish father of the three grown-up daughters who were still living at home and although nominally employed, never actually seen to do anything more taxing than hurry in breathlessly—jigging the tits, right—with a large vase or a swatch of cloth in one hand. One of them, at least I think it was only one, was supposed to be an interior decorator. Daddy was struggling to pay for his very old Roller, his very new Yamaha, his flaming deer park and his hand-sewn tweeds by occasionally letting out a bit of the Stately Home as a time-share holiday apartment. The sort of people that took it usually being the Hyacinth Bucket type. Remember? Nope? I’m not surprised. The impression one got was that he and the butler were a couple of ageing queens avidly maintaining a love-hate relationship in their wee nest, though I concede the actual plots never indicated this.

    Joanie had a part in one episode of it, she wasn’t a time-share person, she was an upper-class friend of one of the daughters whom, how dreadful, the butler takes for an applicant for the position of cook. No wonder it sank like a stone. I missed that episode, it was on the month before my viva, but funnily enough Mum taped it for me, Joslynne taped it for me even though in the throes of trying to get maintenance out of the unmarried father of her second kid at the time, Joslynne’s Mum taped it for me even though in one of her vaguer fits, induced by her husband’s refusal to support Joslynne and both kids and the bloody toy poodle the up-market ex-husband left on her hands, and, just fancy, Aunty June sent Mum a tape of it all the way from England just in case we’d missed it! So I had to bloody well watch it, didn’t I?

    The actor who plays Michael Manfred’s son is about forty. Stretch a point, thirty-nine. Definitely older than Joanie. He’s been playing young lovers on the stage for twenty years, he’s one of the big draws as far as the twinset set are concerned. Though they love Michael, too. Though not as much they adore Gaynor Grahame. Rupert Maynarde. I didn’t think you could spell it with an E, though doubtless there are stranger things in heaven and earth. The rest of them call him “Rupy, darling” most of the time. Of course he’s gay, I should think you would almost have to be to go on playing young lovers for twenty years, wouldn't you? One of those very smooth, elegantly-boned faces. Close up you can see a few little lines but he hardly ever does TV or film stuff, so it doesn’t matter. I like him, he’s been very sweet to me, and took me and Joanie and Bridget out for a drink after I’d seen behind the scenes and been looked at down Miss Grahame’s nose and ignored by Michael Manfred. He was kind enough to say I could be the Marilyn Monroe type with a little effort, but as I’d already had this from bloody Joslynne, her gran, her mum’s friend Mrs Giorgopoulos, and Mrs Franchini from down the road, I managed not to laugh in his face, thank goodness. Well, flaming Norah, it is practically the 21st century, who wants to be like Marilyn Monroe? Even Madonna gave it up yonks back.

    When you come to think about it, maybe it isn’t surprising Joanie went and fell for bloody Seve when he made the Spanish pass, because if all she meets in her working life are types like Michael Manfred and Rupert Maynarde—!

    Gee, and I thought I was badly off having to put up with Kevin (Wandering Hands) O’Connor, married with five kids before his poor wife was thirty, creepy Doctor Bruce Wagstaff, the very married and unattainable Prof. Hallenstein, and bloody Jonno Palmer. Mum thought I ought to marry Jonno and settle down, needless to say Grandma thought I ought to marry anything that’d have me and settle down, and even ruddy Joslynne, in spite of her track record, thought I ought to make Jonno marry me and settle down. None of them explained how to make a bloke offer, in the almost-21st century. And manifestly getting up the spout no longer works the way it did back in Marilyn Monroe’s day, as Joslynne’s second kid can bear witness. Added to which, though I told myself for years I was madly in love with him, I wasn’t really. Well, on one level I was, but on quite a few I wasn’t. I dunno if that makes sense, but that’s the way it was. I did the sweet little girlfriend thing for ages, and at one point almost had myself convinced I was. But the trouble was—well, one of the troubles—that I was a damn sight brighter than him. And when it dawned I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to go on and do my Ph.D., he started to get all huffy, not to say, going out to the pub of an evening with his bloody mates like a ruddy retarded teenager, or, ninety-nine percent of the Australian male population. Stupid sod. So I gave him up. There was no point in going on with it, I needed to be able to concentrate on my swot. Looking back, I should have just told him to sling his hook, but I made the mistake of trying to be kind. So then he tried to get me into bed and do it without a condom, and that was really it, I,T, It. Enough. Finished. Kaput. AIDS apart, no-one makes a sneaky attempt to get me up the spout and chain me to their kitchen bench without ever having so much as broached the subject of marriage and kids! Or even with, actually.

    At one point—well, after a lovely afternoon at the zoo with Joanie, Rupy and Bridget on a day they weren’t having a matinée—I said to her: “Aren’t any of them male?” So then she took me to see Adam McIntyre (you’ll remember him, all right, in that not-quite-Bond thing about ten years back) in actual person on actual stage in tights. Oh, it was very respectable, they were Shakespearean tights, but gosh! Apart from the tights the men just wore collarless white shirts and the ladies wore longish dresses, kind of the waif look, which in my opinion did nothing at all to suggest the Forest of Arden, but then, I’m only a dumb Colonial Girl. So is his wife, she's a New Zealander, Georgy Harris, you’ll have heard of her. Clouds of dark mahogany curls, right? And she looks really good in the waif look. Maybe I ought to try and lose some weight… Maybe I’ll suggest to Joanie that we ought to give up mashed potato. And chips.

    Then she said we could go to something else, since I liked Shakespeare, and had I seen any of Branagh’s films? So at that I had to admit that while not positively anti-Branagh I would have to be dragged across the street, because in the first place he is not Laurence Olivier nor even Adam McIntyre and most certainly hasn’t got the latter’s bod, and in the second place his New Age, Nineties interpretations of wot Shakespeare actually rote drive me RABID. Joanie gave a sort of weak laugh and said to tell the truth they drive her rabid, too, but she’d never have the guts to say so to anyone in the Business. And if I didn’t want to, we needn’t go. So I said Thanks. And we met up with Aunty June and went to the new Tom Cruise movie instead. It was stupid but at least it wasn’t flaming artistic.

    Of course life doesn’t stand still even when you’re in pathetic drawing-room comedies for the twinset set, and over the last three months Joanie’s had auditions for four telly parts, none of which she got, one small part in a film which might come off if the film comes off, and another second lead in another drawing-room comedy. She was offered that, and she’s thinking about it. Bridget Herlihy has also had a lot of auditions: she’s a serious actress, really, and Rupy and Joanie have already urged her not to get type-cast in crap like That Symington Woman, which, ye gods, is its frightful title. Possibly in order for them to kill off the husband and write a sequel called That Symington Woman Again, as has been mentioned, more than once, in Michael Manfred’s hearing. She didn’t get a very small part in something very New Age at a theatre I was supposed to have heard of (ouch), and she didn’t get an understudy with K.B. himself, so at least she won’t pick up any bad habits though I didn’t have the guts to say so to anyone as earnest and right-thinking as her, and she didn’t get a very small part in something at Stratford (you only add “Upon Avon” or “On Avon” if you’re a nerd, apparently), for which the entire under-forty female percentile of the British Isles auditioned. Poor Bridget. A friend of Rupy’s is putting on A Chorus Line in York but she rejected very angrily a suggestion that she go for a part in that.

    So to cheer him up I agreed to do tap dancing lessons with him. Well, it might help counter the mash and chips. As far as I can see all of the men are gay and all of the girls are pretty thick, but never mind, me and Rupy and one or two of the more intelligent gays have formed a little sub-group, and while we aren’t the best tappers we definitely go out to the best cappuccino or white wine places afterwards. I haven’t told anyone, certainly not Rupy because that would pervert the study and not even Joanie, or even Bridget, who’s very bright and takes an interest in my work, that I’m writing a little paper on the tap classes. It’s a pilot for a much larger study that most of us in my Department are involved in: The Dynamics of Small Group Behaviour Under Imposed Hierarchical Conditions. Obviously, my little pilot will be on the imposed teacher-student relationship.

    You see, I’m interested in social anthropology. More sociology than anthropology but it’s always seemed to me that to do any decent work in the field you need to have the techniques of both under your belt. Not the teeth and skull crap, obviously, if you’re into sociology. When I did my degree they wouldn’t let me do all the subjects I wanted to, and I had to fit some languages in. Anyway, I got really pissed off, so what I did, see, I arranged with Joslynne, because she was busy getting pregnant and buying a huge house and training the up-market toy poodle not to piss on the Persian rugs, to be her as well as me. I signed on twice, geddit? Anthro, psychology and history, mainly, under her name, and sociology and languages under mine. Normally it would’ve meant she’d have a HECS debt, and if she ever wanted to work the Tax Office would take it off her wages. Of course at the time she reckoned she wouldn’t be working, being so into the Persian rugs and the boat and the two-car garage and having sprogs and all that shit. Not to mention doing the gracious hostess bit. But I reckoned you never can tell. And I did have the money: Great-Aunty Lil had just died and left me the lot. So maybe it was worth being saddled with a name like Lily Rose all my life after all. What was left after the nursing-home and the hospital and the hospice all took their bite was about fifty thousand but at least it meant I could pay for the course. Joslynne tried to talk me into paying it to her instead, but I knew the Tax Office would never see a brass razzoo of it if I did, it’d all go on footling Persian rugs and designer dresses from bloody Double Bay boutiques. And then if she ever did have to work, she’d be saddled with crippling taxes. So I bowled up at uni and signed on as her and gave them a Bank Cheque. The lady at the desk nearly dropped dead of the shock, but she took it. So I went to all the anthro and psych courses as Joslynne and to the sociology ones as me. No-one ever knew except the two of us. She reckoned it’d be far too much work, but it wasn’t, all the undergrad courses were bloody pathetic and the Masters ones weren’t much better, to tell you the truth. I’ve only just started to reap the benefit of it. It gives you much more perspective, having studied social groups within different disciplines.

    They’re a really good crowd in the Department of Sociology here. Well, the usual bunch of old has-beens, but you can just ignore them, they’re into university politics and all that shit and never do any real work anyway. Just put their names to stuff their post-grad students have worked up for them, geddit? The reason I was keen to get the fellowship, though mind you I didn't think I would, all my lecturers back home had told me I was too much of an iconoclast to be accepted by any serious department, was that Mark Rutherford’s with them. I’d read quite a few of his more recent papers and his last book wasn’t bad. His first book, just his thesis worked up a bit, was putrid, but he was under the influence of the old guard then, you see. Anyway, he did that really keen study of group dynamics in a secondary school. He actually taught at the bloody thing for fifteen months, most of it during his sabbatical leave, so that shows, doesn’t it? All my lecturers ever did during their sabbatical leave was swan off to Europe and the States because their wives wanted to go to Venice or Paris or LA or New York. Fortunately for me he was on the interview panel and we got so interested we just talked, it wasn’t an interview at all, really. And I got it. Mum bawled all over the show and ruddy Joslynne also bawled all over the show though considering she’s led her life for going on twenty-seven years without ever once consulting me, that was a bit bloody rich. But Dad said Leave Rosie alone, she’s got her own life to lead. He’s all right. Not that I wouldn’t have come anyway.

    Mark’s got a lot of bees in his bonnet but the one driving him at the moment is the theory that when a person is placed in a position of authority or power, however unsuited they may be to that position, everyone else in the group immediately starts kow-towing to them. And after a while, no matter how determined they might have been to remain egalitarian and just one of the boys (or girls), they become as authoritarian as the rest of the power brokers. That is, they take on the protective colouring of the rôle. But the good thing about Mark is, that even though he’s got this bee in the bonnet, he doesn’t try to force his results to prove it, like ninety percent of them do. He is genuinely interested in the dynamics of groups. He’s from California originally but as he says himself there’s no need to hold that against him. Quite tall, skinny, normally wears Buddy Holly glasses and really keen gear that he buys when he goes home to see his rellies. And there’s one thing you can say about American academics, even the misguided ones are really hard workers. Not like our lot, quite. The rest of his team’s British except for me. Well, Megan Vasanji’s of Indian descent, but she was born in Birmingham, she sounds like Julie Walters. Megan’s a junior lecturer and Paul Short’s a researcher and the rest of them are post-grad students.

    And believe you me, talking of small group dynamics, where Mark sit’s the head of the table. I don’t mind, at least it’s giving me the opportunity to do some solid work. And for the most part, I agree with his theories. And certainly with his methodology, it’s such a relief! When the big study’s over and the book’s come out, I’ll go my own way, but I need to be associated with a solid success.

    We’re all running pilots at the moment: we haven’t finalised what groups we’ll look at for the main study. Mark wants us to focus on workplace groups. Megan’s keen on doing a supermarket. She’s got an aunty in Watford (I’m not sure where that is, exactly) that’s a bit dim and has never latched onto the fact that she’s done her Ph.D. and got a really good job, so she can stay with her while she’s working in the supermarket, and that’ll lend her real credibility. I said What about your mum and dad, what if the aunty writes to them, Megan? But she said she can’t write, much. And her mum and dad can’t stand the aunty’s husband, he’s tried to borrow money off them once too often. The last time, after he’d left her, with no money and four kids, poor woman. The thing is, she’s taken him back and that drove Megan’s mum and dad ropeable, understandably enough.

    Bob Williams, he’s one of the post-grad students, he’s got an uncle that runs a taxi business in a very small town in Wales, he wants to look at that. The uncle won’t be in the least surprised to see him come crawling with his tail between his legs begging for a job, because the whole family’s been predicting doom ever since Bob started university. None of them seem to have latched on to the point that all the grungy part-time jobs he’s had (well, nominally part-time, some of them were full-time, of course), have actually managed to put him through two degrees. He’s the brightest of the bunch by far, although he’s so slavishly attached to Mark’s apron strings that sometimes you wonder if he’s had an original thought in his life. Never mind, a small taxi business is just the sort of thing Mark’s been looking for, especially as the uncle’s getting on and it’s quite on the cards that he’ll put someone else in charge. Probably Bob’s cousin Evan, he’s a real dreep that’s been sat on by Uncle Davey all his life. So that’ll be interesting, won’t it?

    Harry James wants to look at a small jobbing builder, he’s already written quite a decent thesis on group dynamics within the building trade. The fluidity of them is what interested him, but Mark’s more or less got him off that, you betcha. Because he’s got all this experience he can legitimately apply for a job in the building trade. I waited for ages, but none of them pointed out that if he doesn’t watch it his chapter’s going to sound like something out of that really good series that was on a while back, I’m not sure if it was BBC or not, but it was definitely English. You know: they all went to Germany. There was the big guy with the really thick accent, and the little fat guy, he was the leader, he was really good. And the guy that’s Morse’s sergeant in those ruddy Oxford detective things where it’s always full summer in glorious Technicolor, and all these glamorous dames keep falling for Morse, personally I can’t see it. But the sergeant’s a wonderful actor. Eventually, but only after I’d more or less got the dynamics of our little group under my belt, heh, heh, I pointed it out to the group. I didn’t try pointing it out to Harry, in the first place he’d only get all huffy and in the second place he’s dead jealous because he thinks Mark loves me more than he loves him. Only professionally, but with human beings, it’s never really that, is it? –That’s one of my theories but I’ve never voiced it because the emotions are something that us sociologists have to pretend don’t exist.

    Mark hadn't seen it, he was in the States that year, but the rest of them had. He let them have the argument over who’d really been the best. Most of them voted for the little fat guy except Megan, she’d obviously fallen for the tall guy with the accent and the broken nose, which kind of proves she never saw that poncy thing he did later, after he’d got the nose job. Then he asked what I would suggest. He’s good at that. I’m not bad at fielding it, either, so I just said that I didn’t know that I could suggest anything, except to be aware that the comparison might arise. Harry was over the shock, almost, so he said nastily: “To what end?” He’s got a very up-market accent, only half the time he puts on this kind of fake Cockney, it’s maddening, not to say nauseating, but this time he was too mad to stop and think about using it. So I said, looking very anxious and in a very submissive voice: “I just thought people might use it as an excuse not to take your research seriously, Harry.” Which was true enough. No-one pointed out that the submissive thing was just making blatant use of group dynamics, not to say of the male-female thing that none of them admit exists in group dynamics, what planet are they from? –Planet Sociology, right. And they all sort of relaxed, and nodded judiciously, the more so since Mark was doing it, too, and agreed they’d be aware of it.

    All right, I’ve said it, and fortunately Mark’s so super-conscientious he has the meetings minuted, so no-one will be able to say they weren’t warned, come the day when The Observer’s sociology spy rings up Mark, whether or no because Mark’s literary agent or his publisher’s just rung them, and asks can they run a shortened version of some of the chapters on successive Sundays? Which according to Mark’s wife, Norma, who’s a really nice and intelligent woman who’s long since seen Mark for what he is, a phenomenon almost unknown in sociology wives, is one of Mark’s hidden agendas. The telly programme being another. The Howard Goodall of pop sociology, geddit? For the BBC to screen that, he’ll have to change his accent, but if Norma Rutherford hasn’t told him that one yet, I’m quite happy to wait.

    Mark’s very keen for me to study a TV programme in production for the book. (The hidden agenda being a clear influence, there: prime Sunday-paper fodder.) It’d have to be a series, obviously, a one-off wouldn’t give me enough solid observations. Well, not enough for Mark’s purposes. He reckons I ought to be able to talk Joanie into letting me at best be an extra, at worst just trot along to hold her knitting. For this to work, (a) Joanie’d have to actually get a part in a TV series instead of another drawing-room comedy, and (b) she’d have to wangle me in or at least get the upper echelons of the hierarchy to let me come and hold the knitting. However, Mark lives in hope. If it comes to the crunch, it’ll be a drawing-room comedy and sucker poor Joanie into believing—um, well, that I’ve become totally stage-struck? Yikes! Um, started to take a serious interest in the Actor’s Craft? That might work, if I have enough serious conversations in corners with nice Bridget Herlihy.

    Today I’m going along to hold Bridget’s hand at an audition with a company that’s putting on some serious play I’d never heard of that according to rumour is going to have Adam McIntyre in the leading rôle after he’s finished the Shakespeare thing. The audition isn’t in a theatre, it’s in a rehearsal room, that’s like a big empty hall, a bit like the place Rupy and me go to for the tap lessons. I dunno how far they’ll let me go: I mean, will I have to wait outside in an anteroom or a corridor while poor Bridget does her thing? They haven’t sent her a script, she’s too humble for that, they only do that when you’re a Star. So what she does, see, she works on a couple of things that she thinks might be sort of like the rôle she’s trying out for, and then she recites them if they let her. Often they don’t, they just bung the script at you and make you read it, cold. The nicer ones tell you a bit about it first but apparently there aren’t many of those in this neck of the woods. Of course, unknown to her, I’m going to report it all faithfully to my tutorial group tomorrow arvo, so as they can dissect it. (The fellowship conditions don't specify I have to take any tutorials but Mark Rutherford doesn’t let that sort of thing stop him. I haven’t objected, I’d be bloody silly to object to anything at this point, wouldn’t I?)

    It’s a tube and then a bus to her grungy little flat that she shares with four other actresses, make that would-be actresses. Bridget’s chucking up but that’s normal. She washes her face and puts some lipstick on and then we go. A bus, a tube, and then another bus. If it was me, I’d take a taxi and turn up unruffled and relatively relaxed and look on the expense as an investment, but she’s deeply imbued with a version of the Protestant Work Ethic which dictates that taxis are sinful unless you’re earning enough to buy two cars and never notice the difference. As it’s pretty like the version I’m used to from back home, I don’t try to talk her out of it.

    It’s a real scrum; the last one I went to with Joanie was really organised, but this isn’t. About two dozen actresses, all far more glamorous than Bridget, are milling around in a sort of corridor and at intervals a cross man in a black tracksuit with a sweatband pops out and tells us all to keep the noise down and asks if Amanda Grey is here yet? No, always being the answer. Bridget knows some of them and one of the less glamorous ones comes over to us and they have an intense discussion about the interpretation. As they haven’t seen the script this seems pointless. I study the crowd… Finally Black Tracksuit pops out and announces very crossly that we’d better come in. So we do.

    It’s frightful, at least, it’s good for me, but frightful for poor Bridget, because all of us have to go and sit on these chairs set out in rows at one side of the hall and watch everyone reading her piece and making a fool of herself, help! We’re kind of at right angles to the table where the judges are sitting—well, not judges technically, but you know what I mean—and all the candidates have to stand in front of them and do it. So we get a really good view.

    There’s a good half-dozen of them behind the table, every second it reminds me more and more of my bloody viva. The fat man with the black beard that looks like one of those opera singers is Derry Dawlish, the film director, even I’ve heard of him, he did that really foul Midsummer Night’s Dream with Adam McIntyre in blue tattoos and a pearl G-string like a Maori. At least, the tattoos were, the pearl G-string sure as Hell wasn’t. Maybe here in the North they thought it was really exotic but down there in the Antipodes we thought it was total shit, man. Not that Adam McIntyre in nothing but a pearl G-string wasn’t bloody good value, mind you! Bloody good. Why the Hell’s Derry Dawlish here? They’re not auditioning for a film and according to Joanie he hasn’t done any stage work since he had that flaming row with the Royal Court lot, years back.

    Next to him on one side there’s a thin man in oval-lensed gold-rims and a saggy fawn cardy. Bridget says he’s the director. Telling me his name, but I don’t recognise it. Next to Derry D. on the other side there’s an intense-looking lady, even more intense than Bridget, with a rather hawk-like face except that in profile her nose is really ordinary. So the hawk thing is partly cheekbones and mainly the sort of no-make-up-look make-up that emphasises the cheekbones. Very straight, very thick silver hair in a page-boy. About fifty, fifty-five? I’ve seen her in a play on TV, I can’t remember much about it, only that it was intense and everybody ended up dead. Also on Parkinson, come to think of it. She was intense and he was his normal totally blah self. She’s wearing, as far as can be seen for the table, a plain black skinny-rib and black slacks. (So is Bridget: it’s the intense-actress Look.) Next to her at one end of the table is Black Tracksuit, he keeps jumping up and down and giving orders to the candidates.

    On the fawn-cardy-ed director’s other side is something tall, dark, in shades and a five o’clock shadow that after considerable open-mouthed, furrowed-browed staring I realise is the actual Adam McIntyre in person. With a hangover, by the look of him. Crumbs. –And what about all those adoring school parties and up-market twinsets that have faithfully turned up for this arvo’s highly cultural matinée, just by the by? Well, they’ll get the understudy, won’t they? Hard cheese.

    Helpfully Bridget murmurs in my ear that that’s Adam McIntyre and not to judge him by that awful Dream he did for Derry Dawlish. I nod, staring fixedly at him with my mouth open, but the brow no longer furrowed…

    “Huh?”

    “That’s Serena Matthews,” she breathes, nodding at the lady next to him. Apparently she’s done this, that and the other, all terribly intellectual. Yeah, I’ve seen her a couple of times. Once in something on SBS that I missed the beginning of. Apart from overseas soccer they mainly screen intellectual stuff. So arty it makes ya wanna spew: right. Usually foreign-language, mind you. After twenty minutes of the thing I realised that it was based on bits of Shakespeare all strung together by some nong of a director that thought he could out-Shakespeare the Bard. Cretin. She was good, mind you: intense but good. The other thing was on the ABC: not actual Shakespeare, which is too intellectual for the ABC to actually screen (whilst not arty enough for SBS to screen, geddit?), but an English documentary about making a Shakespeare production. She was one of Lear’s horrible daughters and I have to admit she was really, really good. She’s in a black skinny rib and black slacks, too. By the look of it, naturally curly dark hair that she’s had ruthlessly cut off and trimmed into the waif look. On Bridget, who’s small, thin, and white-skinned, with great big smoky grey eyes and huge black lashes, this looks good. On Serena Matthews, forty-five if a day and with a face that if left to itself would be round and totally undistinguished, it looks bloody ridiculous. Added to which, black doesn’t suit her, her skin’s too sallow. After a while she gets out a cigarette case but Adam McIntyre comes to with a jump and says something in her ear and she pulls an awful face which even a Wild Colonial Girl can see is done entirely for effect, and puts it away again. So maybe she did it to make him wake up and notice her.

    On her other side, that makes seven of them, if ya can count—worse than my viva, poor old Bridget—there’s a gloomy, rumpled man with a five o’clock shadow that’s not artful like McIntyre’s, in a grey parka over a very ordinary grey jumper. Vee-necked. Under it there’s a brown and white shirt, very small checks, with a fawnish tie, both of which swear at the grey jumper. So maybe he’s something on the production side, not an actor? Adam McIntyre, by the by, is wearing a black skinny-rib and black slacks, but I bet you’d already guessed that, eh? Derry Dawlish is in a sort of black tent, possibly a suit but with his bulk, who cares?

    Black Tracksuit’s got a clipboard, he jumps up and down about seventeen time and looks it up and ascertains that Amanda Grey is not here, no, but eventually gets the thing going. The intense lady next to him with the silver bob turns out to be Shanna McQuayle, and slated to play the lead in this thing. She outs with a pair of black Buddy Holly specs that are the identical twin of Mark Rutherford’s, it gives me quite a start. –They all waited for her, boy she must be eminent. Except for Adam McIntyre: he was yawning. So either he’s as up-himself as his publicity gives one to assume, or else he doesn’t like her, or, be fair, both.

    Then Derry Dawlish can’t find his pen, and there’s a terrific fuss and several people offer him theirs, no prizes for analysing this pecking order, eh? Adam McIntyre doesn’t offer him his pen, he just looks bored. Then they really do get started.

    They’re all terrible, even I can see that. Even though Black Tracksuit gave them a little talk explaining the rôle before he let them start. The really bad ones get sent away, not before some unbelievably cruel remarks have been passed by both women, the director in the fawn cardy, and Derry Dawlish himself, how encouraging to a young person starting out in her profession. Eventually it’s Bridget’s turn. They’re doing it from Black Tracksuit’s list. It’s not alphabetical, and if it was meant to start with the better ones it was a wasted effort. Maybe it’s just haphazard. Everything else up to now sure has been.

    Bridget’s a little better than the rest, but obviously terribly nervous. When she’s finished Adam McIntyre takes off the shades, rubs his hand across the baby-blues, and sighs. Gee, thanks, Big Star.

    “Is that the last?” says Derry Dawlish glumly.

    There are three more and one of them’s a bit worse than Bridget and the other two are terrible, so they send them off. That leaves five of them, though I wouldn’t precisely call it separating the sheep from the goats, myself.

    “My God,” says Serena Matthews, pitching the voice, it’s rather nice, quite deep, to the back row of the gallery, the bitch. “Where did you get them from, Neil?”

    The director looks sour. “Ask Dick.”

    Black Tracksuit, who, it’s more than evident by this time, is at the bottom of their pecking order, immediately goes into a terrific tizz: I think he’s trying to tell her that he got them through an entirely reputable agent, or maybe it was agents, blah-blah, and they’ve all had West End experience, bah-blah.

    “In what?” says Shanna McQuayle, taking off the Buddy Holly’s and joining in, all bitches together. “The back line of the chorus of Cats?”

    Derry Dawlish has got a pile of papers in front of him which so far he hasn’t looked at, but at this point he riffles through them and reports: “There’s one that’s done something cretinous in lovely evening gowns with that cretin Micky Manfred and good old Gaynor Evening Gowns”—brill’, isn’t he, he’s using it as her surname—“are you claiming that’s West End, Dicky, dear?”

    Poor old Black Tracksuit’s turned puce, and can’t utter, so given that the creep means Bridget and given that my bum’s gone numb on their hard chairs and I’m FED UP with this load of pretentious wankers, I bounce up and say very loudly: “She was the best of them all by far, but I wouldn’t expect you lot to’ve noticed that! And everyone has to start somewhere, weren’t any of you hags ever young?”

    After which I sit down rather abruptly.

    Shit, Adam McIntyre takes the shades right off and puts them on the table and says: “She’s got you there, Derry.”

    And Derry Dawlish looks right at me and says: “Why haven’t you read for us, dear?”

    Instead of saying meekly I’m not an actress or apologising for opening my mouth and interrupting their work, which after all, must be what earns most of them a crust—not Adam McIntyre, he’s got millions from that Hollywood not-Bond thing, he doesn’t need to work—I must really have lost it because I bounce up again and say: “All right, I will!”

    The intense silver-haired Shanna McQuayle at this point is heard to murmur: “What is that accent? Australian?”

    So to spite her I read the whole bloody thing in her sodding accent as a vicious parody of her, though it was a toss-up between her and Serena Matthews for a moment, there, I can tell ya. Giving the intensest rendering you could possibly imagine, so up theirs!

    There’s a short silence during which I have time to perceive that poor old Bridget’s looking as if she wants to die, and to regret I dunnit; and then Derry Dawlish, Adam McIntyre and the rumpled man at the end of the table all burst into roars of laughter. Added to which, Derry Dawlish claps.

    “Gee, thanks,” I say in my despised Australian accent. “Glad you liked it. But I’m not an actress, actually. This black sweater’s only a loan.”

    Derry Dawlish gets out a giant handkerchief and wipes his eyes. “One can see that you’re not a professional, dear, but you have a true gift for comedy.”

    “I’d call it parody,” says the director weakly. “We don’t need anything like that, Derry.”

    “No, but darlings, as she so rightly says, everyone has to start somewhere. And remember Someone’s RADA audition?” he says coyly, giving a sort of horrible wink at Adam McIntyre.

    The Big Star’s been grinning at my humble self, but at this he comes to and says very nicely: “Yes: they told me that a gift for parody didn’t equate with acting, and sent me back to fortnightly rep. in darkest Shuddersford.”

    “After which he never looked back,” Dawlish explains redundantly with a graceful wave of the hand.

    “And neither of them have ever let us live it down!” says the rumpled man in the grey parka, suddenly grinning and looking almost human. Cripes, he’s got the most beautiful speaking voice I’ve ever heard! Not deep like McIntyre’s, which isn’t bad, mind you, but—um—I can’t describe it. Light, I suppose it’s a tenor, and an up-market accent, but it isn’t the accent, it’s the voice. Close your eyes and you’d think it was Sir Lancelot, Mr Right and Mr Knightley all rolled into—Oh, fuck. He was Mr Knightley, it was an old film, they screened it on a wet Sunday arvo in place of the football and Mum and me only caught it by a sheer fluke. He was wonderful, but the film as a whole was really, really bad and the actress that was Emma was terrible, even worse than that blonde lady who did the modern one. (A blonde Emma? What planet are they from? Planet Nineties-and-Lucrative-Bandwagon, yep.) I’m struggling towards the realisation that he must be from RADA, when McIntyre speaks again.

    “Who did you think was the best?”

    “Uh—me?”—Sir.—“Uh—well, the lady I came with.” He goes into a sniggering fit but I eventually rally to say: “No, well, I did think she was the best. Bridget Herlihy.”

    “So did I,” agrees Mr Knightley from RADA.

    “Yes. If I was you, Neil, I’d get rid of the rest of them,” says Dawlish.

    So they do, and Bridget reads again and she’s miles better this time, and she gets it! Hooray! Though Dawlish nearly throws a spanner in the works by suggesting that I have a go at reading it seriously. So I have to say again that I’m not an actress. He’s starting to get really hot under the collar, help, when the door opens and it isn’t the long-expected Amanda Grey, it’s Georgy Harris in person! Clouds of mahogany hair, no make-up except a bit of lip-gloss or my name isn’t Lily Rose Marshall, and, glory be, a tight fuzzy pale green jumper that shows she’s a girl and not an intense waif. And ordinary blue jeans.

    And Adam McIntyre gets up and says in tones of heartfelt relief: “There you are at last, darling! For God’s sake tell Derry that this poor girl he’s bullying is not an actress and has no aspirations to be an actress. –Do you?” he demands.

    “No.”

    Georgy Harris comes over to me and he comes out from behind the table and puts his arm round her and I’m not so dumb that I can’t see it’s not put on, they really are in love and all that bilge the women’s mags publish unendingly about the pair of them must be true after all. Cor. And she smiles at me and says: “Is that true?”

    “Yeah. Um, I’m doing sociology,” I mutter. “I only came with Bridget for moral support.”

    “I see. In that case, Derry, stop bullying her: she’s got a real life!” she says with a laugh.

    Dawlish tries to object that it’s a waste but she shuts him up and takes him and her husband away. Serena Matthews tries to tag along but McIntyre brushes her off, no sweat.

    After that somehow me and Bridget manage to crawl out. Though first making sure that Black Tracksuit’s got all her details and making an appointment to sign contracts.

    “Um, I’m sorry,” I croak in the corridor. “I nearly fouled it up for you.”

    Bridget’s radiant, she looks a different girl. Her cheeks are actually pink. Just as well they can’t see her or she’d probably lose the part. “No, you didn’t, they’d never have given me a second chance without your help! Thank you so much, Rosie!”

    Glad she thinks so. And we totter off to celebrate. There isn’t anywhere except a corner pub so we go there and neither of us can afford champagne so we celebrate on white wine (Bridget) and gin and tonic (me). It’s warmish but never mind. I mean! Adam McIntyre and Mr Knightley in one day? Not to mention Georgy Harris in person, not wearing intense-actress gear and sticking up for L.R. Marshall! Boy, oh boy. Is this living or is this living?

    Then I have to get home on three buses and two tubes and prepare my bloody tute for tomorrow arvo but heck, you can’t have everything, can you? And for someone that three months back was a total stranger in this demi-paradise, set in the silver sea, I reckon I’m doing pretty good!

    When Joanie gets home from the drawing-room thing she reveals the awful truth that Mr Knightley’s gay. Oh, well.