Tigerland

by Sean Kennedy

  “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  That shocked him more than anything—I never turned down coffee. But I hope he saw it as it was meant: a subtle refusal to act like Fiord.

  As the door closed behind Coby, I leant back in my chair. “How can I help you?”

  “Let’s not kid ourselves.” Fiord grinned. “We all know we’re doing you the favour here.”

  “Really?” I asked, idly wishing that my life was like a wua-hua film so I could throw my letter opener at him and stab him in the forehead.

  “Come on. You’re a non-rating community television show with a limited audience. We have every media production company calling us wanting an interview.”

  “We didn’t,” I reminded him. “You called us.”

  I finally scored a point. Fiord’s eyes widened, surprised at my attack.

  “You didn’t refuse us,” he said, finally.

  “Correction. My bosses didn’t refuse you. If it had been my decision, I would have been quite happy to remain a non-rating show without an exclusive.”

  “Is that the way you like to run your show?”

  “Well, it is my show,” I said, even though that sounded pretty egocentric.

  “And that’s why I thought we should meet before Greg’s interview. I know you have personal issues with him.”

  “Not exactly. If anybody does, it’s Declan. And that was so long ago, I doubt it’s an issue.” I knew I was lying through my teeth, but there was no way Fiord was getting any personal information out of me.

  “If that’s true,” Fiord asked, “why would you want to turn down the interview if it came down just to you?”

  Damn. He had me there. But I just shrugged. “Just because we don’t care doesn’t mean we want to be his friends, either.”

  “We’re not expecting you to be friends. We just want an interview.”

  That didn’t assuage my suspicions. “Then you answer this. Why us?”

  “You’re also the only queer-related sports show on television.”

  I didn’t like the word queer coming out of his mouth. He had no right to use it, as he wasn’t “family”. He was just the manager of that “family” that you wished you never had to see. “So, really, you’re just using it for positive publicity to gain the support of the gay community?”

  Fiord laughed. “He doesn’t need support from them. Didn’t you see in the papers on the weekend? He’s already signed up for being the face of the Midsumma Festival.”

  “But you think this will help cement it.”

  “If you want to be that cynical, yes.”

  “I’m always cynical,” I said. “It keeps me healthy.”

  Fiord sat and appraised me for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t get it. You see, Heyward and Declan? I get that. You and Tyler? I don’t.”

  That was like a knife in the gut for a moment, but I knew he was trying to get at me. I smiled. “Love is strange. I don’t think Heyward gets that.”

  He glowered at me. “Are you sure there isn’t going to be a problem tomorrow?”

  I shook my head. “Not on my end.”

  Fiord slammed his hands down on the arms of the chair and jumped up. “Fine. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “What about your coffee?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll just get some real stuff downstairs.”

  I felt like laughing, but I stopped myself. “We get used to the fake stuff. Peanut shells and a hint of sawdust, you can’t tell the difference.”

  “Huh?” Fiord asked, but shrugged it off. Just as he was leaving, Coby appeared with his coffee. He did another double take as Fiord swept past him.

  “What about this?” Coby asked me.

  I took the coffee from him. “Beggars can’t be choosers.” I took a sip and grimaced, as it was too sweet for me. Fiord must have had it that way to improve his disposition.

  It obviously wasn’t helping.

  “I THINK you should cancel the interview,” Dec said, looking unhappy.

  “He was just trying to unnerve me. It didn’t work.” I added a liberal amount of red wine to the pasta sauce I was making and swigged from the bottle.

  “I can tell.”

  “No, seriously. I’m not looking forward to meeting Heyward tomorrow, but I’m not going to let Fiord’s mind games make me worse.”

  “You’re fantastic, you know that?”

  “And here I was thinking I was the one chugging down the wine.”

  “Seriously,” Dec came around the counter and pulled me into him. The wine bottle hit his back with an awkward thud. “But I think I should come watch tomorrow.”

  I pulled out of his embrace and went back to the sauce. “Uh, really? Why?”

  “Just for moral support.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Oh.” He looked a little stunned. “I’d want you there if it was me.”

  “Well,” I said, drawing out the word, “when it did come to that, you didn’t.”

  “You mean when I met him for coffee? Simon, that was completely different!”

  I knew it was, but it didn’t stop me from feeling like it wasn’t. “I’m not saying that to get back at you or anything, Dec. It’s just… I’ll have enough to stress about tomorrow without stressing about you sitting there and being part of it all.”

  “Do you really think something’s going to happen?”

  I stirred the sauce vigorously. Tomato spattered the wall like blood. “I just think it’s best to expect the worst.”

  “So you can then be pleasantly surprised?”

  “No, just so I’m prepared for the worst.”

  Dec reached for me again. “Babe, come here.”

  I turned the sauce down and let myself be hugged, more for Dec’s sake than my own. I was motoring along on righteous anger, while he was being fuelled by what seemed like a constant state of confusion. I’m not sure which one was healthier. I was ready to burn up like Jean Grey consumed by the Dark Phoenix, and Declan was straddling the fence between wanting to defend us but also not give anything away to the public at large.

  Okay, maybe I needed the hug as well. And I would probably need it tomorrow too. Good thing hugs were free and easily given by the guy I loved.

  “YOU look like you’re going to ralph,” Coby said.

  “Charming.” I didn’t tell him I had the rubbish bin close at hand in case I did. I wished I could carry it with me when I actually left my office to go down to the studio.

  “I have some Gastro Stop in my bag,” Coby said. When I gave him a look, he said defensively, “What? I have a very weak stomach.”

  “Gastro Stop is more for diarrhoea. It’s vomit I’m worried about.”

  “Is this the kind of thing you guys always talk about?” asked a familiar voice.

  Fran and Roger were standing in the doorway.

  “Hey!” I was happy to see them. I had wanted Dec to stay away, even though I really wanted him there. So seeing my friends instantly made me feel better and, truth be told, distracted me from my self-induced desire to vomit. “What are you guys doing here?”

  “Dec sent us,” Fran said, coming over and kissing me. She was dressed to kill, which could come in handy depending on how the night turned out, in black trousers and a peasanty top that Stevie Nicks had probably worn in her Rhiannon video.

  Roger hugged me, and even he was dressed well. And shaved. It was disconcerting, to say the least.

  Of course Dec had sent them for me. I should have sent them to him, had I thought of it. And of course, that was broadcast on my face, because Roger immediately picked up on it. “Abe and Lisa are with him.”

  The gang was pitching in, as always.

  “By the way,” Roger said, dropping his voice as if he thought Fran or Coby couldn’t hear, “what’s going on with those two?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I sighed. “It’s a mystery to everyone but themselves. We’ll just have to wait for the press release like the rest of Melbourne.”

  �
�If anyone knows, it would be Fran,” Roger said, quite happy to throw his wife in the deep end. “She and Lisa stayed in contact the whole time you didn’t.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said, wanting to stay away from the topic.

  As did Fran. “Is Heyward here yet?”

  “No. Coby will hit the alarm for me to head for the panic room when he does.”

  “You have a panic room?” Roger asked, impressed.

  “No!”

  Miffed, Roger picked up the Wonder Woman action figure off my desk and seemed fixated on her boobs. “It’s not that hard to believe, you know. I’ve seen a few buildings that have them.”

  “We don’t even have secure parking,” I said, snatching Diana Prince back away from him. “So I doubt they’d build a panic room for us.”

  Roger seemed edgy tonight, possibly even more edgy than I was. It wasn’t that surprising to me, as we often shared a psychic connection forged through over twenty years of friendship. I hated to think what I would be like when Fran was in labour sometime in the future.

  Coby knocked on the glass of my office wall, waved at Fran and Roger and mouthed, “He’s here!”

  Oh crap, there went the lining of my stomach.

  “He’s in hair and makeup,” Coby said as we rode the elevator down to the studio.

  Hair and Makeup sounded a lot grander than it actually was, as it was little more than an old broom closet with a cracked mirror stuck on the wall and some mismatched IKEA furniture before it. Community television budgets for the talent’s green rooms could only go so far.

  Fran and Roger were looking around themselves with awe. A studio truly is a magical place, and I had to remind myself of that every now and again whenever I saw it through somebody else’s eyes—someone who had little to no experience with the industry. It was like they were stepping into Wonka’s chocolate factory, except our little wonderland also laid the artifice right out for you to see, thus diminishing the power of the magic the more you stuck around. Sets always looked smaller than they appeared on the television screen, exposed lights and rigging made everybody sweat more than they would doing a workout at the gym, and the pancake makeup used to stop the talents’ faces from appearing shiny on camera also made them slightly orange, which was remedied by the aforementioned lighting system. But Fran and Roger hadn’t been exposed long enough to see the artifice, and I thought that I should try and see it from their point of view a little more often—or why else was I doing this job?

  Because it certainly wasn’t for nights like these.

  The door to the small hair and makeup room was ajar, and I could see Heyward sitting in first chair in front of the mirror, his hulking, muscled frame squeezed into the constraints of the chair. Unlike most lithe, lean AFL players, Heyward had the stocky built-like-a-brick-shithouse build of a rugby player. He could easily snap me in half if I met him on the grounds of the MCG. Even Dec and Abe, in comparison, seemed to appear weedy. And there it flashed again, on my personal cinema screen from hell, Heyward writhing in ecstasy over Dec, Dec returning the favour—

  “You’ve gone pale,” Fran remarked.

  “Fine,” I replied, not even managing to spit out the I’m before it. My stomach was in violent disagreement with me.

  “He looks more green than anything,” Roger said.

  I left them to debate what shade of Dulux colour shield I apparently was, and made a beeline for the room in which my nemesis sat. This was it, this was the moment I had been both expecting and dreading.

  “Hello,” I said as I hovered around the doorway. There really wasn’t enough room in there for me to fit.

  Heyward swung around in his chair, and Tina, our hair and makeup artist (in community television you often had to multitask on roles because of budget; she also shared catering duties), had to scoot around him so she could finish with his hair. Tina didn’t have her usual bubbliness going for her. Her mouth was set in a straight, unforgiving line. This was the expression she normally had for difficult talent. My stomach gurgled again in distress.

  Surveying me, my nemesis asked, “Who are you?”

  Fucking arsehole. He was already playing the game. He knew exactly who I was—just through being Dec’s partner I was visible enough to the public.

  “The producer,” I snapped, refusing to play along and give him the name he was pretending to need.

  “Are you done?” Heyward asked of Tina.

  She snapped her brush into its case. “Yep.” It was forced from her, as terse as the clip sounded when it shut.

  “Can you leave us, then.” Heyward said it, rather than ask courteously.

  Tina looked at me, mouth agape. I mouthed sorry, and she pushed past me, eager to leave but still angry at being made to do so.

  “You know, Tina’s not the hired help,” I said, in as calm and level a way as I could muster. “She’s a valued member of our production team. So you could treat her with more courtesy.”

  Heyward laughed. “You’re not exactly a shrinking violet, are you? I guess looks are deceiving.”

  “No, I’m not a shrinking violet. And for the record, you know perfectly well who I am.”

  “Yeah, Simon Murray, the love of Declan’s life.”

  Him saying it so mockingly unnerved me for a moment, with the fact that he was so openly hostile. And then, strangely, everything changed for me. Up until this point, deep down, I had been afraid of this moment. And besides the fact that Greg Heyward could bench press me with one arm, now when I saw him in front of me being such a childish dick, my fear evaporated. Of course, it was now replaced with annoyance, but that had to be a healthier option than fear.

  “No doubt about that,” I replied with my newfound confidence.

  “Of course, it all could have been very different.”

  I didn’t know whether to ask him what he meant or just to shrug it off. Either way, it was now too late. My hesitance gave him the advantage, and I didn’t know how he was going to use it because Coby appeared in the doorway in full professional mode with his headset on.

  “We need Mr. Heyward on the set now.”

  I heard Bruce, the director, yell out in the background, “Five minutes!”

  “Coby will take care of you now,” I told Heyward.

  “Will he?” Heyward smirked, and Coby actually recoiled. This in itself was unusual, because although happily partnered, Coby didn’t mind a bit of harmless flirting with the talent. He thought it was part of the job, although I didn’t recall writing it into his contract.

  “I think you look like you can take care of yourself.” Coby had carefully worded that, so it could either be taken as a put down or a compliment about Heyward’s build.

  Heyward grinned at him and then turned to me. “You’re going to be watching, yeah?” he asked as he got out of his chair.

  “It’s what my job involves.”

  “Well, I hope you find it interesting.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all, but I didn’t respond. I also didn’t drop eye contact with him as he squeezed past me in some futile show of nonchalance.

  Coby gave me a quick who does this guy think he is? look, and I shrugged.

  I suspected even Heyward didn’t really know the answer to that question, which made his coming out even harder to fathom. Dec was outed, and he chose not to bury it. But what was Heyward’s reasoning? He didn’t even seem happier for it, and his bravado was so over the top it didn’t come across as genuine.

  I was beginning to understand why Dec never knew what was going on in their relationship. I knew I had my moments of stubbornness and obfuscation, but even at my worst I had nothing on Heyward.

  I hope you find it interesting. Fuck, that sounded like the Chinese curse of living in interesting times. But Heyward wanted to wound his prey so they would be easier to take down later, and I wasn’t going to be like that.

  Even if my legs were a little shaky as I went to find Fran and Roger again.

  We were almost r
eady to go into lockdown mode, but my friends still managed to fire out an astounding amount of questions about my meeting with Heyward before Coby started counting down the seconds to live transmission.

  The regular hosts on the panel were seated on the couch that was the same shade of red as the Sherrin footballs used on the field. The guest usually got a chair to themselves, and in Heyward’s case his large frame definitely needed all of it. Our drag queen regular, Emcee Gee, seemed to be a little beside herself as she leaned in closer to Heyward. It also appeared that Heyward didn’t mind the attention, which probably accounted for the sour expression on cohost Lachie Fulworth’s face, as he already felt Emcee stole too much of the limelight. That wasn’t too hard to do when you wore a beehive adorned with all the football club badges.

  And… we were on the air.

  Just a normal night, I said to myself, and it would become my mantra.

  I gestured for Fran and Roger to follow me, and we made our way to the soundproof production room up a small flight of padded stairs. It was next to the control room, and I would usually be in there with the director, but I knew we all couldn’t fit and Roger and Fran wouldn’t be able to stay quiet long enough for the whole hour. They bombarded me with their still unanswered questions from before as I turned on the television that had a direct feed from the three cameras below. One was focused on the hosts and the other on the guests, with the third being a wide shot including all of them.

  Heyward came across as much more personable on camera, which really pissed me off. The public, which already seemed to love him, were going to love him even more with each new wave of publicity he did. And I was helping contribute to it.

  “Your lip is bleeding,” Fran remarked.

  I didn’t even know I was chewing on it. It was a habit I had picked up from Dec over the years, except his modus operandi was chewing on his cheek. Fran handed me a tissue, and I dabbed at the sore spot.

  “Maybe you should call Dec,” Roger suggested.

  I shook my head, not taking my eyes off Heyward on the screen. “Best not to.”

  Even though I couldn’t see it, I could feel Roger and Fran looking at each other.