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 throat TV industry. Mackelroy was wholly ambitious as far as BKS was concerned. Kant’s considered reserve was a crucial counterbalance for his director’s impulsiveness.
Over the two years the two men had become accommodating friends, almost by default, spending more time in consultation about the show than was probably healthy, drinking gallons of perilously strong coffee together at the station whilst debriefing after each new contestant had run the gauntlet. It was an alliance constructed primarily on Mackelroy’s steely belief in the show’s controversial format, and his absolute confidence that Kant played a huge part in its success.
One reviewer had compared Kant to Michael Parkinson, whose smooth interviews “were undemanding because his guests are all celebrities”. But Barry Kant “has the uncanny ability to make distraught individuals feel at ease about articulating their worst nightmares, degrading abuses and horrific losses to an anonymous studio audience and hundreds of thousands of home viewers. Or is that millions now? On the small screen Barry Kant’s kind face, altruistic brown eyes and luxuriant mane of silky grey, somehow seem to make broken souls feel worthy and at ease in his presence, as if they are alone in private consultation with a judicious oracle” .
Life for James Mackelroy, single but never short of nocturnal female company, was all about BKS, his baby, and basing it in Hobart rather than Sydney with exclusively Tasmanian contestants kept a perverse edge on the show. It seemed to reflect the dark passages of the island’s history. Mackelroy liked to crow about discovering Kant and grooming him for the position. BKS had injected the success serum into Mackelroy’s veins, transforming people’s misfortunes into dollars, lots of them.
‘BKS! You can’t buy this sort of marketing. It’s pure adulation. We’ve created a popularity avalanche in the suburbs with your smile and Rex Harrison good looks. Well, your own good looks really. You really are The Man BK! Don’t get me wrong, you prick, but this is the height of … it’s a fucking triumph! We’re up there now,’ Mackelroy, exuberantly drunk, had rambled, while pointing to some mythical nirvana in the ceiling, his zeal exploding like firecrackers at the celebration drinks after the second series had finished.
BKS’s first two seasons had made a devastating impact on the TV ratings of the conventional current affairs programs with their banal, repetitive social docos. And after the third ten week season, several reality shows, with their puerile, mind numbing activities, were sent scuttling back to their drawing boards. Nobody had expected it, least of all Kant, who never forgot his humble beginnings reporting for the Mercury news paper at sheepdog trials, country fairs, traffic accidents and the court of petty sessions. That life was now an impossible solar system away.
‘It’s just like CNN, FBI and NYC; the letters are planetary institutions!’ Mackelroy had rambled on absurdly, foaming bottle of champagne in hand.
‘Don’t