Madame Bovary's Haberdashery

by Maurilia Meehan

  In Dragan’s enchanted world, the only stuff-up was that he had to constantly find new ideas. But the charm of this apparently tedious task of script assessor was that it solved that problem.

  It enabled him to establish what the current morphogenetic sphere was throwing up. Amazing, wasn’t it, the way everyone would write about the same topic at the same time? He knew from a radio show that it was because the data from our brains swirled around us like a gas, forming the morphogenetic sphere. We swim in each other’s ideas. Nothing is original. No such thing as plagiarism.

  So he was willingly ploughing through this pile on his desk, voice recorder to hand, racking up points for his selfless service to the industry. After all, no one would do it just for the money, a mere three hundred a script, an hour a script.

  Over at the Fund, he was obliged to work harder, to have a two-hour meeting with the writer. Feedback, he had it down pat. A writer always thought that their work was brilliant and shit at the same time. He played on this. A little praise. A little criticism. And if it had more than three useable scenes, then he might say that he would like to keep their particular script. They never refused, because they thought that he might show it to someone important. Actually, it just saved him the cost, thirty dollars at Officeworks, of photocopying it. He could never use the free service provided for him with the job because, well … never knew what might get jammed in there, left as evidence for future lawsuits. Anyway, someone in the copy room might have stolen his ideas.

  So here he was, glasses on the tip of his nose, feet on the mahogany Hollywood desk, entering on his voice recorder a character note from one script, a sight gag from another, and above all, special effects for a Big Finish.

  After ‘print-following’ – his coinage for the outdated ‘reading’ – the scripts of the day, he would take home the rejects to his Lovely Lady, who would use them to start the open fire, as she was into recycling, bless her. She liked the fireplace with its ten thousand dollar etched glass Victorian surround that he’d bought her. She liked the huge kitchen table around which ten children could have eaten.

  Not that they could have afforded children, now that his washed-up lawyer friend had let him down with his investment tips about those dud Docklands apartments.

  Their supposedly golden colour, which was meant to attract superstitious Asians, had turned out to be too yellow for them, and the red doors not quite propitious enough to please the Hong Kong crowd. To top it off, the address was Number 4, that figure meaning ‘death’ in Chinese.

  So his apartments were still untenanted, and were costing him money. He had given one to Lovely Lady.

  Nothing was too good for her.

  Lovely Lady was an actress of some repute, entre deux âges, as the French so kindly put it, or her fatigue was beginning to show, as the French also said. He did not kid himself. One reason she stayed with him was that his immense generosity supported her between her diminishing jobs. The other was that she knew that he was always looking out for that perfect role which would lift her profile again. A sexy yet mature female lead in a hilarious romp.

  Hard to find.

  He felt no telltale thrill pulling him towards Cicely’s script, now lying exposed and unprotected on the top of the slushpile-next folder.

  It would resemble, after all, the other scripts in the morphogenetic sphere these days, finessing, as they did, imaginative ways of torturing and killing. This went for those written by women too, although in these, he could be sure, the victims, grotesquely mutilated, would always be men. What was happening in our society, he wondered, as he flipped through the predictably gory pages of the tenth script he had assessed that morning.

  ‘Where is the love?’ he muttered, flicking faster and faster through the scenes of hate.

  Where was the script he was looking for, so he could give Lovely Lady what she desired? He hadn’t seen her love for years, ever since he had contracted a minor but recurrent disease from one of the many delicious perks of being in the industry. The bodacious young starlet in question, the cunning tart, had got a part in one of his soaps before he’d been diagnosed, and Lovely Lady had refused to touch him since.

  She stripped for him, however, on demand, trusting in his ability to arrange the most flattering spotlights and smokily suggestive music. He wasn’t complaining. He worked 24/7, smoked three packets a day and the prescription painkillers he took for his sensitive gums kept him pleasantly woozy. If Elvis was still in the building, he certainly had not been performing.

  Did Lovely Lady get up to no good when she was away on her rarer and rarer shoots? He knew folks were wondering. But they were a mature couple. She had shagged her way to jobs, he knew that, and he didn’t mind, really, as long as each bedding was a solid career move. But it would be better for him if a job came through his machinations.

  Hence, his simmering anger at these lousy scripts, their stifling remix of movies he had seen and half-forgotten. He pitched the one he was currently print-following into the corner of the room, and shouted, so that the whole building echoed with his familiar, noble cry,

  ‘Where are all the good parts for mature sexy women? Where is the love?’

  He then listened, allowing himself a minute of rest, sipping more coffee from the percolator and swallowing a few more pills. He could hear no response to his dramatic scene, from the corridors outside his office. Swivelling his executive chair around to look out at the dismal view of the bay, he wondered if they would put up with this poky office in Hollywood.

  If only he had been born on Sunset Boulevard. Then he would have been able to say asshole instead of arsehole. Suddenly inspired, he turned to his voice recorder and began to make notes to self for Excuse Me? His future groundbreaking work of staggering genius. The dialogue would be pared down to his favourite Hollywood phrases. Asshole would feature. He would perhaps use that most brilliant scene in The Player, where the producer says,

  I’m an asshole. It goes with the job.

  Not plagiarism, mind, but the morphogenetic sphere.

  For Dragan, this scene contained superb irony, because of course, everyone knew that producers were not assholes at all. But everyone thought they were.

  And how about the way in Hollywood they said you fuck? So much more concise that the local you fuckwit. This too would find its way into Dragan’s film. In his dreams, Dragan lived on Sunset Boulevard. He spoke Hollywood. He spat out you fuck and asshole and his other favourite, come here baby.

  You just couldn’t say come here baby with an Australian accent. He’d tried it. Women laughed.

  There was no role as yet for Lovely Lady in Excuse Me? He found it hard to write a big part for a female character. In fact, the script was stalled. Was she holding him back with her demands? Was she the reason his name had not reached Hollywood yet? Was he being too considerate of her needs?

  He caught himself introspecting, and smiled. He was indeed a deep thinker. He liked to imagine a hidden camera, a witness only he knew about, giving his life meaning. He was constantly performing for someone who mattered, a shadowy blonde watcher.

  At home, he organised the spots in the lounge room. There was one over the telly, so that he was cast in contemplative gloom. One over the dinner table, forty watts, so that he and Lovely Lady couldn’t see what they were eating, usually Indian takeout, as neither of them had time to cook.

  In the bedroom, tall red candles in silver candelabra flickered over the thousand-thread-count linen and Pashtun tribal rugs on the bed where he would sprawl to watch Lovely Lady, his own private dancer. Later, as they smoked and chatted in bed, the same candles threw a sensuous shadowy fire over their tired flesh.

  Lighting was everything. In a house. In life. When he entered a room, he played to the light. He was aware if he was in silhouette as he spoke to someone. Aware if the backlit window flattered him. It was a power thing to see the other person squinting against the light.

  With a deep sigh that surely someone would hear, he sw
ivelled back around to the slush pile awaiting his ministrations and reached out for Cicely’s script.

  Sausages, but also omelettes

  Having proudly served Uncle Bill the perfect egg – a skill that even Martha had not yet mastered – in his chair in front of a TV quiz show, Cicely was now in the kitchen, cooking an omelette for herself.

  She chopped parsley and spring onions on the wooden board, listening to a radio report about an impoverished woman who had stowed away on a luxury cruiseship. Winning Thatsarap would be Cicely’s equivalent escape.

  If Cicely had heard more clearly what Miss Marple, with her eyes like stars, had been whispering to her that night, she was sure it would have helped. But the lady detective, with the wrong faces, had just kept knitting her giant red heart, on her armchair in the sky. Bigger and bigger that heart must be getting, like Cicely’s own increasingly bizarre crochet work.

  What on earth was it becoming? It now had tunnels of purple wool, ripples of magenta and one section seemed to have an eight fingered glove emerging vertically out of a sea of bumpy aqua coral. Nothing that she could possibly present to Miss Ball. But she loved letting the crochet have its mysterious way, pulling her along behind it, using up all the odd bits of wool in her stash pile.

  If only Miss Marple would come closer, so that her words would become more distinct. She would know what had happened to Odette. And if Odette had forgiven Cicely yet, for writing about her in Last Chance.

  But surely Miss Ball would have had more right to object to the licence Cicely had taken in the novel with her mysterious life? The old lady had been given a first name, a life of exotic lovers, trips abroad. Anyway, a novel was only ever about the author. Madame Bovary, c’est moi. After all.

  Frances Trollope had said, when asked if she based her work on real people, yes, but you would never recognise a pig in a sausage.

  She cracked eggs on the rim of the bowl, took up the whisk, and beat the fluffy eggs for the omelette so severely that her wrist ached.

  How to get a film up

  Until the moment that Dragan picked up Last Chance from his slush pile, Cicely had been fast becoming, as James Joyce had put it, a writer with a great future behind her.

  Dragan thought the title was familiar. Was it pinched from somewhere? But it was not only the title that rang a bell as he print-followed the script.

  He abandoned the rest of his pile and took Last Chance home that night.

  He moved towards Lovely Lady’s bookshelf, into its flattering shadows, and reached for a slim volume with the same title as the script. He enjoyed the moment, saw himself, an intellectual, glasses perched low on his professorially generous nose. He flicked through the book and it fell open at that certain scene which Lovely Lady had read to him in bed because it had a role for a mature yet sexy woman.

  He saw that the author’s name, in tiny print on the cover, matched the one on the script. He flicked through the pages to find the same scene that Lovely Lady had read to him, on that memorable evening when as a result, Elvis had actually stirred.

  Lovely Lady as Emma Ball. Love scenes with a younger man in expensive locations throughout Europe. Much travel, many costume changes.

  He would option it for Lovely Lady.

  The wedding cake

  Martha, Uncle Bill and Cicely had just munched greedily through yet another supper of thickly iced chocolate cake. Uncle Bill’s dietary peccadillos seemed permanently settled by Martha, and he now ate anything she put in front of him, lamb roast to caramel cheesecake, then slept soundly.

  Regretting her own large helping, however, Cicely lay awake in bed, propped up on pillows.

  Her bowels were just not working any more for some reason. She took two tablets, then re-arranged her pillows. She dragged her heavy, multicoloured crochet onto the doona. The words of Marvell’s poem, about his ‘vegetable love’ growing and spreading, came to mind as she dug the hook into the most recent loop, wondering where the next one would take her.

  And she was making no progress with the hundred possible suspects in Odette’s Inbox. She had even tried a few of their mobile numbers, but they had been disconnected, or answered by women. Those few who had given home addresses lived interstate, feeling safer perhaps, and she would want to do a bit more research before flying off and landing on their doorsteps, hoping that they were home. Anyway, how was she to afford plane flights? If only all the suspects lived within walking distance in an English village.

  How did Agatha Christie solve mysteries? Could it really be as simple as making a shortlist, suspecting the least likely?

  Her head full of Miss Marple, she selected some more lilac wool from her stash and, linking it into the general chaos that she was constructing, fell asleep by the third row.

  The regular chug-chug of steam-train wheels.

  The dining car of a well appointed train, of a type which Cicely was sure no longer existed. The table was set with Devonshire tea.

  Cicely noticed her own reflection in the carriage window, saw that the lilac cloche hat with the bobbing flowers really suited her, and that her lank hair tucked up under it very neatly. In the glass, she could make out a woman, wearing a remarkably similar hat, sitting opposite her. Observing her. Hoping that her neighbour would not think her vain, inspecting herself like that, Cicely turned to face her.

  Miss Marple herself, with her real face, the one with the eyes like stars, was dressed in a knitted lilac suit. She was so close this time that if Cicely reached out her hand she could touch her. Or would her hand pass straight through her, as through a cloud? Their knees were almost touching, so Cicely moved one of hers surreptitiously. It briefly connected with warm flesh. Satisfied, she moved it away again. Looking around, she saw that there was no one else in the carriage.

  ‘You really are getting tangled up in your own wool, aren’t you? The Christie Method is a fraud, my dear,’ she said, tersely, while carefully smearing specks of jam and cream onto a scone. Cicely dolloped hers, inspecting, from beneath lowered eyelids, the tiny lady with the long, fragile neck, her grey hair piled up high on her head with the aid of tortoiseshell combs.

  ‘You see, Agatha, astute as she was, was so jealous of my inspiration.’

  Not daring to speak in case she took offence, for her voice seemed much sterner than she had expected, Cicely watched as Miss Marple paused to nibble her scone, dab her lips with a stiff linen serviette, then take another sip of tea. The lilac clad woman then wiped her finger tips delicately, and produced her knitting from a cavernous crocheted bag.

  Cicely did not lose heart, knowing that a woman knitting, though deemed fully occupied, was actually more likely to communicate. And yes, soon, looking up from her seeming knitting trance, the lady detective gazed at Cicely from the depths of blue eyes sharp enough to solve all puzzles.

  Was it the right moment to ask about Odette? But Miss Marple spoke first.

  ‘But how could she have been expected to understand me, my dear, when she had no idea of my method, acclaimed though she was – especially by herself – as a detective writer? She was an accomplished woman in other ways, I’ll grant her that. A gifted photographer. Even made a film about the excavations at Tell Brak, you know. And skilled in her love life too. She managed to marry that Max Mallowen. Logical pair really. A detective in his own field of archaeology and twenty years her junior. Always off together to digs in Mesopotamia, you know, Ephesus, Nimrod …’

  ‘But what is your inspiration?’

  ‘You see she and I started to drift apart after my little joke at the wedding,’ she chortled, opening a side-pocket of her crocheted bag. She extracted a packet of lemon drops, and offered Cicely one. A thin, sweet, old-fashioned taste.

  ‘I just whispered to her that it was very clever for an older woman to marry an archaeologist. She was serving me a slice of that ridiculous wedding cake, shaped like a Mesopotamian temple, and I saw her hand tremble slightly. But I went on. ‘Because the older you get, the more fascinating he will
find you.’ Well, it was quite funny don’t you think? But she went quite pale and dropped the cake all over my good lace-up shoes. I don’t believe we were ever close again, though we kept up the Sunday afternoon teas at my cottage. She loved my Russian samovar. Brought it back from my travels. Have you ever had tea the Russian way, my dear?’

  ‘Like a metal urn?’

  ‘Charcoal or wood is burned in a vertical pipe through the centre of the samovar and this heats the water …’

  ‘But Miss Marple, what does lie at the centre of your …?’

  Why did old ladies talk so much? Because they feared time was running out?

  ‘Mortally offended at my little joke, apparently. Although she did continue to write about me in her books, I remain in them a very private character, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose in that genre character is not really …’

  ‘Yes, a certain fascinating mystery still surrounds the inner life of Miss Marple,’ she interrupted, gesturing dramatically, ‘and my amazing method. Anyone aware of my possibly ill-judged remark over wedding cake could see that it may explain this authorial reluctance to highlight me further.’

  Miss Marple paused for effect, straightening an already straight hair comb.

  ‘As for the Christie Method, it is a red herring. Five suspects. The least likely. Poppycock. You try it and see how far it gets you … and anyway, what about the multiple murderers in Murder on the Orient Express? No she didn’t know how I did it, that was the truth … Still my dear, I am glad she never revealed my other secret, which the papers might call … of a scandalous nature.’

  This arrow, clearly meant to distract Cicely, did not reach its target.

  ‘But if the five suspects thing is no good, please tell me about the real …’