FROM MY CORNER
With Ann Brunswick
I had
been visiting my former editor at his “retreat” almost weekly since he was sent
there for “evaluation” after this newspaper suspended publication some months
ago.
Sure, I wasn’t on the payroll anymore – not that I ever
got paid much – but I’d always found the silly old bugger to be quite
sweet in his own eccentric way so I never minded the trip across town to say
hello. Besides, I thought my regular visits seems to cheer him up no end.
For quite some time it was not a pretty sight. No, I don’t
mean the asylum – er, the retreat – itself. It was grand in its own way, with a
lovely gothic main building set in beautifully manicured lawns and so forth.
The staff all had lovely uniforms and even the strait-jackets were colour
co-ordinated.
No, it was my former boss. It was sad to see him sitting
outside on a bench, a blanket over his legs, his left eye occasionally
twitching and this strange “Hmmm. Hhmmm. Hmmm” coming from between trembling
lips. Behaviour, I’ve suddenly realised, not all that dissimilar to the facial
tics and twitches that Inspector Dreyfus used to display in those Pink Panther
movies years ago.
But over time and a handful of visits, he came to a certain
calmness that I took as some form of closure to his years spent as a media
mogul wannabe. This had been helped in part by the doctor in charge pleading
with me never to mention the 11 long years that he had spent running The
Independent into the ground.
That was until the other month, when I made
the mistake during one of our weekend visits of mentioning, just as an aside,
that City News – my boss’s major competitor in all those years of publishing –
had closed down.
“Closed down, you say,” he said. No sooner had those words
been uttered then I detected what I thought was a small twitch of the left eye.
“Yes. Ceased publishing last Thursday.”
“Hmmm. Hmmm Mmm. Mmmmmmmm.”
“Obviously it wasn’t making enough money,” I added as I
watched his lips purse and repurse.
We were silent again for a while and then he said simply: “I think
I’ll start the paper up again. See how I go.”
The left eye all of a sudden looked like it was
short-circuiting.
“But, boss,” I protested. “You were bloody hopeless at
running a business all those years, so why should you be any better now?”
For readers who might be shocked by the bluntness of that
comment, part of the charm of our relationship was my ability to be brutally
frank with my employer when ever that was required, which was often. Relatively
harmless he might be but he is also a right royal twit.
“You’re right, of course, but with City News out of the way,
who knows? The ad revenue might start to pour in.” Twitch. Twitch. Lip tremble.
As opposed to the trickle of ads when he used to do the job
himself was a thought I kept to myself. This bloke couldn’t sell a book of
heavily discounted brothel vouchers to Craig Thomson, so I tried
a different tack.
“Can’t we look at the closure of City News another way,” I
suggested, keeping a wary watch on eye and mouth movement.
“Instead of a potential opening, the closure of City News
could be, well, an omen. And a bad one at that?”
Another twitch. A staccato of lip purses. The gentle, soft
hum of a series of “Mmmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmms.
“Boss, you always said the City News had all these pretty
young things with really big...
“Sales targets to fill?”
“Well, yes, that too. But you see my point, don’t you?”
A full 12-second eye twitch was followed by the loudest
sequence of Hmmms Hhhhmm Hmmmmms I’d heard from him since he was first
admitted.
“No bugger it,” he shouted, flinging aside his security
blanket and jumping to his feet.
“Let’s give this another shot,” he
declared, both eyes now twitching in perfect harmony and his lips almost a blur
of uncontrolled movement as a trumpet blast of Hhhmmmms escaped from between
them.
“What have we got to lose, eh?” he shouted.
Your sanity, for one, I thought. Or what was still left of
it.
• Got something you’ve got to get off your chest and would
like Brisbane’s favourite columnist to investigate on your behalf? Email Ann
Brunswick at
ann@theindependent.com.au
