Read Online The Greenwich Apartments by Peter Corris - Free Book Online

pulled the chair closer so that our knees touched.
    â€˜Crummy dumps,’ she said. ‘One good one but it costs the earth.’
    â€˜D’you have to do it?’
    â€˜Of course I do. Look, you’re going to watch a dead woman’s film and then go out to get yourself beaten up or have some depressing conversation. What am I supposed to do?’
    I drank some wine and didn’t speak.
    â€˜You hardly worked at all the last time I was here.’
    â€˜That’s the way it happens sometimes.’
    â€˜How long will this job last?’
    I shrugged. ‘A week. A month.’
    Helen drank some whisky. She sighed, looked at her book and then threw it on the floor. ‘I just don’t want to be a pain,’ she said. We reached out for each other and hugged awkardly, sitting in our separate chairs. We held the hug for quite a while until it turned into something else which we finished off in bed.
    I made sandwiches and took them and some wine upstairs and we ate in bed. Helen told me about the fifteen real estate agents she’d visited and the dozen or so houses and flats. Then she fell asleep.
    It was after nine but still way too early to go to the Champagne Cabaret. I made coffee and put the cassette in the VCR.
    The screen filled with an expanse of water; still, silver water that was suddenly broken by the leaping, cavorting bodies of what looked like thousands of dolphins. They jumped and flapped and the sound of their squeaking, barking calls filled the room. I turned the sound down. The word ‘Bermagui’ came up in deep blue over the fractured silver of the dolphins at play, and some music, mostly strings and drums, accompanied the credits. The film was written, edited, produced and directed by Carmel Wise.
    I’m no movie buff; I’d see about six or seven new films a year and catch another dozen or so on TVand video. I like them fast and funny—Woody Allen, anything with Jack Nicholson, that sort of thing. Carmel Wise’s picture was nothing like Woody Allen, and her hero, a thin, toothy character, was more like Donald Sutherland than Nicholson. But it was a marvellous film. I forgot I was watching for professional reasons: the simple story of a schoolteacher in love with one of his students against the background of a quiet town, caught in the annual tourist rush and under pressure from the moneyed people of Canberra who were buying up the beach, grabbed me and swept me along.
    The acting was fine—underplayed, done without the usual clangers and dead lines that disfigure films made by inexperienced people. The supporting cast were virtually silent which was another plus; they rapped out dramatic interjections while the main players wove the story. Most of all, the filming was terrific: Carmel Wise had resisted the clichéd shots and had got the hard ones—the old house, crumbling and wisteria-covered, but still looking strong and appropriate; the beach party, slowly getting out of hand as the booze flummoxed and confused the kids, turning them from sharp and funny to slow and dull.
    The 90 minutes passed quickly. I felt like applauding when the film finished and I ran the tape back to watch bits again to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. But it was all there—the sure touch, the wit in the use of the camera, the low-key emotion and the economy of the whole thing. As the final credits rolled again—brief, with a lot of the same people doubling up on the jobs, I reflected that Carmel Wise was a real loss to the city, to the nation. I was also sure that she wouldn’t have been interested in pornography. What else? I tried to grab the impressions quickly: strong social conscience, political radical with a sense of humour, morehumanist than feminist, scourge of the rich … the name Jan de Vries came up on the screen—‘thanks to Jan de Vries for criticism and coffee’.
    After eleven, time to go. I got my Smith & Wesson. 38