Free The Evil Inside by Philip Taffs Page B

department?’
    ‘Wassup?’
    ‘Wassup with you, slacking off up there in the boss’s tax dodge?’ His humour sounded forced. Given the unfortunate circumstances that had taken me out of the office, it was difficult for Bill to be his normal shit-shooting self. But I wished he would.
    ‘Well, we’ve tried to get by in your regrettable absence, Kangaroo Boy,’ – Bill frequently goaded me with this nickname, along with references to
The Crocodile Hunter
, as he knew how I felt about clichéd Australian stereotypes – ‘and I admit it’s been difficult. I’ve got a writing friend in here – Jay Spiller, ex-DDB – but unlike you, he’s actually quite good at his job so we finish all our work by noon.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Really. Oh and he doesn’t insist on repeat-playing maudlin pukey Aussie yodellers over and oooover again, so the quality of in-office music has improved one hundredfold.’
    Bill had a great antipathy for Stephen Cummings, my favourite Australian singer-songwriter. He called him ‘Mr Sob Stories’.
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Yeah – Jay’s been a blast, actually. Much more fun than you. Which wouldn’t be hard. Hey, do you even have to come back? I might have to have a quiet word to Anthony about that.’
    I laughed. It was a sensation I’d missed lately.
    Bill then filled me in on all the latest office gossip, starting with the fact that his beloved coffee machine in the Brave Face kitchen had broken down so he’d had to schlep over the road to Café Europa four times a day for his hits of ‘black heroin’, as well as the slow but steady progress on the coolcams campaign.
    Apparently the client had now rejected the initial TV concept we’d pitched – a kind of contemporary
Candid Camera
with people being caught doing crazy or embarrassing things through a webcam – as ‘not slick enough’. Since they’d got second-round funding, the kids were hyped-up, cashed-up and demanding we came up with something ‘super-cool’.
    One of the new concepts Bill and Jay had been tossing around involved editing some pre-existing footage from Hitchcock’s
Rear Window
and then cutting in some new scenes featuring a coolcam.
    Their idea was that Jimmy Stewart’s character – the wheelchair-bound Jeff Jeffries – has a coolcam installed in his apartment. He trains his camera on the apartment across the courtyard and witnesses the bad guy snuff out his wife via his computer screen, rather than through binoculars as per the original film.
    But that was really as far as the boys had got. The idea needed a nice ironic twist that made the coolcam more of a hero but in a more subtle way. And maybe
Rear Window
was simply too dated to appeal to today’s uber-sophisticated Generation Tech? Plus, what seven-figure sum would it cost to buy the rights from the copyright holder?
    ‘Yadda, yadda, yadda,’ Bill said after I’d voiced my concerns. ‘We already know all that. And we agree. We just wanted to prove we’ve been working on something since you’ve been away. Plus, we’ve got some other stuff and it’s not all puke. So don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Anyway your friend and mine, Terry the Terrible (a Brave Face account man we didn’t like), is pacing the halls, threatening us with another fortune cookie masquerading as a brief – I gotta go.’ He hung up.
    The work discussion about
Rear Window
had whetted my appetite for a good holiday movie to watch that night.
    There was an interesting collection of old film noir videos neatly racked up in the shelves above the TV:
Kiss Me Deadly
;
Out of the Past
;
Criss Cross
;
Double Indemnity
;
The Lost Weekend
;
Night of the Hunter
.
    I really wanted to see
Hunter
again. I pulled the box down. There was Robert Mitchum, insanely menacing in his black-rimmed hat with the word ‘love’ ironically tattooed onto the finger joints of his right hand. (Ironic because we know he also has ‘hate’ tattooed on the left hand we can’t see.)
    I