The Paradise Stain. Nick Glade-Wright

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СКАЧАТЬ kind persona that the public warmed to and most ended up adoring. At the end of the first series viewers bombarded the station with texts and phone calls, even the odd proposal of marriage.

      There were also the inevitable expressions of outrage. The show was callous and exploited suffering. Simply unfair! One retired Liberal MP had even described it as unAustralian. One mainland newspaper commented that ‘The Barry Kant Show is a blatant manipulation of the already down trodden, particularly the poor souls who put themselves through the wringer to come out at the end, flattened and with nothing’.

      Of course, the poor souls who found themselves in the public spotlight were often from a luckless under class who the rest of society had previously not wanted to admit existed in such great numbers in charming Hobart town, and further afield in the broader Tasmanian tourist haven of outstanding beauty. And so it gathered momentum, the ratings soaring higher and higher with the thud of every outrage and the splash of each tear.

      Chapter Three

       4.30 am Sunday

      Kant woke to the clattering of his alarm clock.

      The night’s storm had run out of spite. No excuse now not to have that jog he’d promised himself before visiting Melinda and Rosie. It would be an invigorating start to his birthday and the last day of his holiday. Tomorrow, BKS would encircle him once again. He raised himself onto an elbow.

      His glasses had fallen into the creases of the doona over night and become twisted. He tried to straighten and match one arm to the other side. Damn. Inspecting the line of the burgundy toned stainless steel, a shade lighter than his new car, he began to wonder why he’d needed to buy the latest model Audi. ‘Wretched thing spends most of its life parked,’ he mumbled out loud as he changed into his jogging gear.

       And when was the last time I wore shorts, with no shirt, and wandered carefree along a beach, bare footed on cool sands?

      Apart from visiting Melinda and Rosie during his break Kant had dithered around, never quite organising to do anything substantial. He hadn’t been able to clear his head of the Afghan woman, lugging her pain around with him like a sea anchor, and now it was almost time to go back to work. Abrar Abdullah hadn’t won, and the least Kant thought he could do was drive her back to her home, a three hour trip back to her empty flat. She’d sat silently, insisting she’d sit in the back seat of the car, and on arrival had told Kant he was a good man. As he drove back to Hobart his tears had been acidic with guilt.

      The Domain was quiet when he arrived on foot half an hour later.

      ‘Where the hell did it go?’ he yelled at a row of whispering poplars. ‘No, not the holiday; the last sixty bloody years!’

      Kant jogged up towards the tennis centre and back down through the wooded hillside, crowded with pines, spruces and cypresses, like an industrial walkout from the Botanical Gardens on the other side of the hill. Fingertips tingling he caught his breath by the rusty bicycle racks near the Cenotaph before heading down towards the docks, emitting pasty puffs like an aged dragon unsure of what to do with any fire that might still be in his belly.

      The apartment felt oven hot. Kant threw open the balcony doors to a cool sea breeze that barged past him and into the interior’s cloying warmth as he watched three sleek cyclists below glide by effortlessly. He glanced down at what was the miniscule beginning of a paunch and huffed, ‘You’re thirty years younger!’ to the swishing blur of colourful body lycra.

      Kant showered and changed.

      In the kitchen he made coffee, tutting at the granite bench, like his mother used to whenever anyone spent money extravagantly. A pang of something flicked him as he ran his hand over the highly polished surface, a lump of coarse rock once, in a Bulgarian quarry, its rudimentary origins now forgotten.

      Is that me? he wondered, his thoughts pressing into the stark back streets of Lutana where he was brought up. He smiled, impressed with his analogy.

      It wasn’t so much the soulless rows of cheap government housing where his father Desmond still lived after a lifetime that got to him, but that the old man’s scope of desire was embedded in a way of life that neither allowed the new in or the old to be reinvigorated. Many applauded this as being happy with one’s lot . But, inside, Kant cringed at the utter waste of potential for his father’s lifetime. Kant’s fabulous new home, not fifteen minutes’ drive through the city, might as well be situated on the pinnacle of Frenchman’s Cap on the wild West Coast for all the times he’d had a visit from his father.

      Desmond had visited only once, coerced into coming for drinks when the show started two years ago. One of Kant’s cameramen had gone to pick him up.

      ‘You done all right for yourself,’ his spindly old dad had said, intimidated by the marvellous world his son now inhabited. He had gingerly caressed carefully positioned ‘objets’, palmed the warm floor tiles in the bathroom, counted the number of colour coordinated pillows on his son’s bed, and inspected the kitchen work surfaces, with disbelief at the unmitigated extravagance.

      Life was a procedure for Kant senior, like the smelting of aluminium, a malodorous process he knew all too well from his forty eight years’ labour at the Electrolytic Zinc Company, just a short walk from his home. Sarah’s death was ‘spilt milk cobber’. Not as an insensitive summation but fathomable like an inconvenient factory mishap. Almost Buddhist in its simplicity Barry had tried to rationalise positively at the time. After the young Barry had graduated with honours at the university in journalism and political science, his father’s wisdoms, which had been the family’s mainstay, carved from a myopic existence, seemed to become obsolete as academia shoved a wedge between father and son’s capacity to converse at any great depth. Any paternal offerings became safely wrapped, clichéd ingots, excusing him from any uncomfortable intimacy that might arise between them, something Desmond had never experienced with his own father. Besides, it was unmanly.

      Three Message Received s had come up on Kant’s iPhone display while he was in the shower. The first was from Vashna, who sang in a high pitched southern accent the first line of a Neil Young song, ‘Old man look at yourself’, omitting to sing the second line, pointedly distancing himself further from his friend’s age. The next was a voice message from Rosie, who giggled whilst Melinda endeavoured to coach her as to what she could say. In the end she managed, ‘Gampa’s birth day …’ before the rest of the message became swamped in chortling.

      The third text read, ‘woch your back fagot’. Kant instinctive ly deleted the message.

      Misspelled or ‘text’ spelling? he pondered, intrigued by this deterioration of language. Negative calls and anonymous malicious pranks were usually the method of choice for denigration of BKS. He put it down to an inevitable consequence of success, never quite bad enough for the police to get involved. But these messages felt personal and always left a scratchy residue at the back of his mind.

      After the success of the first series, the rapid adoption and hip use of the BKS acronym by the public was ‘a gift from a greater power’, Mackelroy had elucidated, as if he’d had a direct line to the Creator. It wouldn’t have surprised Kant if his self possessed director had.

      James Mackelroy’s head wasn’t shaved as a reaction to a receding bald patch. No way. His cranium was a faultlessly sculpted classical manifestation, tanned and polished like his self opinion, positioned elegantly on a lithe body that would have mingled effortlessly in an Olympian athletics squad of marathon runners. Quick witted and shrewd, qualities he’d sharpened in Sydney’s cut СКАЧАТЬ