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lost my temper. I was a terrorist. And like terrorists everywhere,
I was screwing things up for everyone, not least my own side . . .
And blah blah f.ing blah.
Sheena looked at me across the seat.  Dunno why I pulled you
off him, she said.
 Eh?
 I should ve let you go him.
 Ah. Probably best that I let him off with a warning.
She shook her head.  Do you think you could have . . . killed
him?
There was an excitement in her voice that I loathed. Sheena
was getting off on all this death. Her inside knowledge excited her,
enthralled her. Already knocked off balance by what was happening
with Rod, she was going completely crackers. She loved me more for
what I was doing. She loved being with a killer. She d seen me on
TV at Brock s funeral, playing the part, selling the show.
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 We ve got to get Rod into this trial, was all I d say. I wasn t
going to gratify my wife s bloodlust. We d been down that road
before.
Rod was in a terrible state, all blown up like a bag of red onions.
They had him on a drip and were feeding oxygen into his nose. His
sparrow s chest was rising and falling under the hospital blanket.
I sent Sheena home with Rosie and sat by Rod s bedside for the
rest of that day. To say something, I crapped on about the funeral
and how impressive I was. I put on the television and there I was,
Rod s dad, living up to the role at long last. But in Rod s dull eyes
there was no recognition and no pride. I saw something deep and
durable in him, something unimpressed by this little ant s game
I was playing. But he should have been impressed, shouldn t he?
This was a father pulling out all stops to save his life. Can t I tell
Rod that, one day? That I did it all for him?
The horrors cornered me again. My mood was veering every
few minutes. Like contractions. Like a bad acid trip. I couldn t take
the swings. I could take being depressed, up to a point, and I could
sure take the highs. But I couldn t take the swings. It was like I
didn t know where I stood with myself.
Late at night, I left Rod at the hospital and went home. I watched
TV with Sheena and couldn t sleep. I hadn t really slept for weeks
now, not properly, since this whole nightmare had started. An eel
cruelled my sleep. I couldn t deal with this much sleep deprivation,
and was scared that it might drive me to some indiscretion. Only
today I d been a whisker from throwing poor Don off a balcony;
then a hair s breadth from blurting it all out to him, confessing my
crimes. Sleep deprivation and mood swings can do that to you.
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But when this is over, I told myself, when I ve finished with
Deano and got my series up and running with Pioneer, everything
will come good. No more insomnia, no more depression, no more
darkness. No more allergies for my boy. No more sadness.
No worries.
The truth was, I could only ever fall asleep when I unspooled
the past.
So here s what happened, here s what you ve been waiting for.
Okay? Why Julie Lamington and I were so undeserved. Shove it.
Sheena got pregnant with our first baby, a cashew-sized Rodney
Kenneth Westlake. And as she changed, so did Mick. This was 2002,
when his fame hit its peak. It s little known about Mick that most of
our receipts have been flat lining since 2002. There was a high-water
mark, and we didn t know that we d passed through it. Nobody
ever knows.
Except for Mick. He had an instinct for the audience like no
other. He could be BS.ing and gladhanding and all the rest of
it, but it was an act. Just like I had ears for the wildlife, Mick had
ears for the audience, and he sensed the din starting to die down.
He was still big, and seemed to be getting bigger because now all
the celebs and the politicians and the other Johnny-come-latelys were
hopping on the bandwagon, but that was a diversion. The real hard
numbers were wheel-spinning. Massive population movements.
Hollywood and Mick was Hollywood by now is willing to get on
its knees and give a BJ to the entire population, if only it could be sure
of a result. And Mick could feel the slippage before anyone else.
We d sit at the computer and go through his fan websites, most
of them unofficial, and Mick would pose as an anonymous punter
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trying to chat up some girl who d been raving on about how she
wanted to boink him and loved him in his short shorts and all that
palaver. And if you saw him, you d think here was a man at the
peak of his powers. But if you knew the truth, it was a man who
was scrambling to stay on top of a moving heap, and the heap
was moving on, moving on, ever so slowly, but that s fame, that s
population, it s like the animal world, in a constant state of migra-
tion, death and renewal; even if you can t see it happening with
individuals, it s happening with the population.
Why shouldn t Mick have been content with what he d achieved?
In barely five years he d gone from a sideshow attraction in Towns-
ville to Australia s most famous man; his net worth had gone from
two or three million to, according to Fortune magazine, one hundred
and twenty million (if you took into account the Kangazoo Trust).
He really did have everything he craved, right down to the beauti-
ful wife and the adoring nippers. Ranger was thirteen at this stage,
Hunter four or five, and Dad was a deadset legend.
But by 2002 Mick had got hooked on it all, and what he sensed
was not his size but his momentum. He was huge, yes, but he wasn t
growing any more. Phil had hatched a plan to have him do thrice-
weekly shows in Las Vegas, of all places. One of the gaming owners
was planning a big new casino with a jungle theme, and Mick was
going to be there as the in-house Siegfried and Roy, pretending to
wrestle with tigers and giant snakes. But you can only stretch the
elastic so far. Mick was all for it, and so was Julie, but the Pioneer
people put their foot down: his image was all to do with kids,
attracting kids, and there was a serious image clash between kids
and gambling houses. At least in American heads. So Pioneer talked
the deal off, and it s the only time I saw Mick almost blow up against
Americans, or the American way of doing things. He was furious,
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losing it, letting the old Mick, the pre-Kangazoo guy, show through,
ranting on about  political correctness and so on. Never mind that
the Vegas thing would have been a disaster, probably ending up
with Mick back on the drugs and caught whoring around with
topless dancers, or locked in his hotel until he paid up his black-
jack debts. It was a setback, and Mick was starting to take setbacks
hard. Unhealthily hard, even a bad review in a newspaper. He was
getting brittle. With the famous, you ve got to be aware of this. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]