SHAUN MICALLEF'S ONLINE WORLD AROUND HIM                                 Back             Home
		Mistle-toadying Author: SHAUN MICALLEF Date: 14/12/2002 Words: 983 Publication: The Age Section: Saturday Extra Page: 2 Bibelots fail me!" she shrieked, opening the trapdoor to the attic and seeming, for the moment I spun around in terror at her voice, like some giant sausage swathed in rakematiz. I reluctantly ceased oiling the ferrule of my Battenburg parasol and planted the most miniscule mou of a kiss I could muster on the raddled harridan's liver-flecked and downy cheek. It was sometime in December; in either the 1940s, '50s or '60s. I couldn't recall having invited M--- to my Christmas party, but then half the guests downstairs currently destroying my furniture and quaffing my liquor I couldn't recall having even met, so I could scarcely be heard to complain - particularly over the din those free-loading beatniks were making. It's why I'd retreated upstairs on the pretext of mending my umbrella. Serves me right for mixing in the circles I do, I suppose. Norman Lindsay, Clive James, Jack Hibberd, Margot Fonteyn, Robert Hughes, Bob Puccetti, Germaine Greer, Joan Sutherland, Bob Ellis, Mem Fox et al all have passed within my orbit at one time or another. Yet this scarcely seemed justification for them and their various entourages to descend en masse on my Glebe bed-sit on this of all nights, when all I really wanted to do was curl up in front of the fire with Bryce Courtney's latest, hurl it in, and watch it burn. Still, I've always been the perfect host, so when the entire cast and crew of the Pram Factory turned up with a half-empty bottle of vanilla essence and an offer to come in and perform a four-hour impro about the first thing that came into their heads in exchange for all the food in my pantry and any loose change found down the back of my couch and in my wallet, how could I refuse? By saying ``No, get out," I suppose; but I guess I'm too much of a gentleman. But even I have my limits. When, more than 12 hours later, the party was still going and I found Zoe Caldwell in the kitchen actually drinking soup out of one of my Martin Boyd ramekins I had to put my foot down. ``But Shane, darling," she protested as I rang for an equipage to come fetch her. ``It's perfectly all right; I checked with Martin." She continued slurping and cocked her head over to the other side of the room. There, lucubrating on a roll of vellum was the world renowned artist responsible for such works as the base-coveringly titled Figures Under A Tree, drunk as a lobotomised whippet and wearing my imitation Bergdorf Goodman dressing-gown tied on his head as a turban, and attempting to improve on some pieces of my Meissen china by spray painting them, and a goodly portion of the wall behind, a shade of green better suited to the mud-guard of a Hillman. This was too much. I decided to exercise my droit du seigneur and announced as much to Caldwell and Boyd. They laughed. Obviously I had no idea what the phrase meant. I stormed out cursing them and my ignorance in equal proportions and ran smack into Sir Robert Helpmann at the turn of the stair. He had just been sick all over my brass-potted simoom, but claimed a passing Max Harris had pronounced it ``an outrageous satire". He then said something in what I assumed was Volapuk and fell over. I was worried about the noise. My neighbours were elderly sensitive sorts and had once complained to the local council about the ticking in my mattress. The police had already been around twice tonight and I could just hear over the racket downstairs the by now familiar sounds of bashing at the front door with truncheons, accompanied by the tinkling of splintered leadlight. When the offending door was finally opened to them by a nude woman on a horse, the coppers beheld if not the cream of Australia's intellectuals then at least it's qurut, surrendering to the muse of Terpsichore in so debauched a fashion that it made the dancing montage in Von Stroheim's Greed look like that backwards dwarf at the end of Twin Peaks. Batons raised, and barging their way past the rearing Andalusian and its squealing ballast, they muscled up to Percy Grainger at the other end of the salon and, by repeatedly bringing down the lid of my priceless Steinway on his talented fingers, successfully discouraged him from playing English Country Garden ever again at any volume other than inaudible. ``You long-hairs ought to be grateful we don't run you all in," the senior-sergeant threatened the now silent and decidedly un-Charlstoning crowd. For emphasis, the junior officer at his elbow raised his nightstick and smashed a Sevres vase that happened to be on a nearby plinth; then, for italics, he kneed a conveniently placed Des Renford in the groin. ``Consider yourselves warned," concluded the senior-sergeant pocketing a bag of kif off the Jules Leleu. M--- stood, appalled, next to me at the foot of the attic stairs and nudged me in the ribs with what felt like an obsidian knife but turned out to be only her manicured finger. ``Go on, tell the filth to back off man," she lisped (quite an accomplishment given the sentence contained no sibilants). I stepped forward and thanked the constables for responding so quickly to my phone call; then I bade them farewell and ushered them to the door, pausing only to splash out an eggnog for them each. As neither had cups I had to make do with their helmets. I turned, bowing to the applause and hearty laughter of my impressed friends. I spent that Christmas in Pentridge with Robert Ryan, proof reading some of his last letters. Jeez, he was a rotten speller.