Bite The Wax Tadpole Read Online Free Page B

other parts of the brain: what sort of witless, cretinous producer programmed such appallingly cheerful music for this time of the morning? Hanging, thought the cerebral cortex, was too good for people like that. They should be transferred to community radio in Mount Druitt.
    With a groan like that of a brown bear waking from hibernation only to discover spring was late this year, Malcolm opened his rheumy eyes. So... he was still alive. Good start to the day. Cautiously, he moved his head from side to side and found that the usual morning headache, the dull, distant pounding of a small country foundry, was somewhat abated this morning. This seemed to prove, to his satisfaction at least, that alcohol didn’t have any adverse effect on whatever it was that was causing the recurrent pain in his skull. Still, he was glad he hadn’t finished the bottle last night. There were a few big scenes coming up today and, at his age, the words were increasingly likely to come out in the wrong order or not at all if you weren’t in mid-season form. And he badly needed to hang on to this job. His glory days, such as they were, as a film and theatre actor in constant employment, were long gone. For the last ten years he’d survived on the occasional forgettable parts in less than memorable plays, a series of TV advertisements for nicotine replacement patches and the odd shift at Liquorland. But there was no reason why the Network wouldn’t extend his contract. He’d been doing a good job as Dr Morris, even if he said so himself, bringing a certain old world sophistication to the part in the manner of a latter day Doctor Kildare or Finlay. Not like today’s tele-doctors with their designer stubble and raunchy sex lives rushing from a leg-over in the sluice room to an emergency tracheotomy without even a quick dab of Dettol on the finger tips.
    Licking his dry lips he discovered the stubby end of a Camel velcroed into place. God, yes, he’d sat up in bed last night smoking and studying his lines for the live episode. Not a habit he should really be getting into. He’d prefer to be cremated after his death.
    With a further groan and a few creaks, he swung his skinny legs – the varicose veins looking more and more each day like a relief map of the Nile Delta – out of bed and reached for the Zippo lighter on the bedside table. He lit up, inhaled deeply, blew out a satisfied smoke ring and then coughed for three minutes like the starter motor on a pre-war Bedford truck.
    Ah, that’s better, he sighed as his throat and lungs stopped protesting and he set off towards the bathroom for the first encounter of the day between his prostate and the porcelain. The doctor was probably right in telling him to give up the fags and the booze. But he was worried that, at his age, the shock to his system of suddenly improved health might prove fatal.
    He stood over the toilet bowl and waited patiently while his thoughts returned again to his current situation. He’d had the sneaking suspicion from his first day on set, when the director had called him Gordon, that he’d only got the part due to a mix up following the audition but the impending live episode would, he hoped, prove to the show’s producers, should they harbour any lingering doubts, that he still had whatever it was he once had. Sometimes, mostly when maudlin drunk, he pondered on where whatever it was he once had had gone. Did it start to drift off when his hair began to thin and his waist to thicken? Did it break into a trot when wife number three left him for an older man with a steady job? He knew for a fact it started to gallop like a horse with a bunger up its backside when the stage manager of the Bell Shakespeare Company had found him drunk in the wings when he should have been opening the castle gates for Macduff. From there, the only direction he’d taken had been down. The wilderness years of self-doubt, self-pity and self-medication.
    Yes, the more he thought about it,