Oh Matilda: Who Bloody Killed Her? Chapter 14

Turns out Matilda Meadows nearly died once before — and lived to tell the tale. William McInnes takes up our story

 

This is ‘summer reading’ like nothing you’ve read before: a diverse field of writers collaborating on a novel that will captivate you through summer.

Each author had just three days to write their chapter, with complete freedom over story and style; it’s fast, fun and very funny.

Tune in over the summer to see how the story unfolds.

Today, actor and author William McInnes continues the story with Chapter 14.

By William McInnes

The Sound of Music and the scent of death hung in the air. He heard the tune before he smelt the lingering acrid sniff of something … lethal. The singing had the strange, slightly vibrato quality of a cyclone warning. Enthusiastic, but shrill and off-key, it warned of danger. Though there was no need for any warning now for Garfield. He was beyond all warnings, he would pay no heed, as if he ever had.

Chopper looked up and saw a face he knew. The face belonging to the human who’d sometimes throw him a sly treat. Kamikaze Kev looked down at the lifeless form of Garfield and his latest idiot hound who in turn looked up. Their eyes met.

Kev muttered softly: “Your master’s dead, you stupid mutt, and you expect a scrap of food from me.”

Out of habit Kev knelt down and patted the dog. He fished for something in his chef’s chequered trouser pocket and found a piece of last night’s duck. He fed it to the mutt.

He looked at Garfield’s head resting against the small tombstone. Dead all right. Dead as only a dead thing could be.

What sort of man had he been? Did it matter? It had once, he supposed, once he had loved Garfield as a brother in arms, a comrade who had saved his life but then hated him as someone who had held him in a vice-like grip of fear and control.

It was Garfield who’d given him the name of Kamikaze Kev and then, later, had insisted on him inhabiting the character of that name.

He should be happy, something awful is over. He was free. Yet there was a sadness that bordered on panic, he knew within he was rudderless. Alone.

He thought of The Sound of Music and remembered the first time he had seen it. With his mother at a drive-in in her VW Beetle.

Three hours cramped in a tiny car listening through a tinny speaker to half-arsed nonsense in the Bavarian Alps, because his mother had wanted to see Christopher Plummer.

“Oh, that look he gives Julie Andrews in the moonlight? Like he wants to slap someone … lovely.”

He liked Rolf the blond boy who had helped sing “I am sixteen going on seventeen”, even though he had run off and joined the Nazis.

Really, he had liked Rolf’s uniform. He liked any uniform and he loved cooking.

When Christopher Plummer had taunted Rolf, and Rolf had run off in a huff, tears had fallen, his mother had held his hand and soothed him: “It’s all right Gilbert. Be a good boy.”

She had said it with the French accent, Gilbert. That was his name. Gilbert Kevinour.

And then she had stepped out of the Beetle, opened the bonnet, which was the boot, obscuring the drive-in screen for a moment, then closed the bonnet and stood there before him, holding a suitcase in her hands.

She smiled slightly, got into the car next door with a man who Gilbert realised was their next-door neighbour and they drove off. He would never see her again.

Alone in the passenger side of the Beetle, he looked at the screen and saw Christopher Plummer staring back, a hint of a smile on his face.

Yes, Gilbert Kevinour had loved uniforms and he had worn many, bedecked with colours that told of his bravery.

It was in the battle uniforms of elite forces he’d been bestowed that nickname, Kamikaze Kev.

He was preparing a dazzling breakfast made from scraps of rations when his platoon came under attack. He took out multiple enemy combatants, somehow survived a mortar blast which hit him directly, saved half his troop and still managed to produce a sumptuous teriyaki breakfast dish, cooked to perfection and enjoyed by his comrades in dawn’s early light.

As they finished the last delightful mouthful and he was being airlifted, swathed in bandages Garfield gently held his hand and smiled: “Here’s to you … Kamikaze Kev, the man who loves cooking, killing and the uniform.”

The damage was at first thought to be irreparable. Rehabilitation followed, then discharge and years that were a cross between a mirage and a nightmare, where he honed his skills as a soldier of fortune and culinary master. These skills, especially when combined with the creation of a range of tasty and yet extremely lethal poisoned and toxic dishes seemed to be his only purpose.

Be it a short-order cook, mercenary, head of security as well as personal chef to a sultan or drug lord, cook, first mate and games and activities officer on a tramp steamer – he staggered through life in search of a cause and … a uniform.

Somehow, though, as anonymous soldiers of fortune do, the tides of life washed him to shores of the Australian film and television industry.

Gilbert began as a standby in a tiny unit job shooting a series of “Where Do You Get It?” John Singleton “Tuckerbag” commercials and then stepped into catering when a TV caterer fled to take up the sniff of a better job in the Channel 10 Ryde canteen.

The show was a pastoral detective drama that had proven incredibly popular overseas, in the remnants of Cold War countries and various strongman dictatorships through Europe.

“Langton Cassidy, Vet Detective” concerned itself with a country veterinary surgeon who solved crimes as well as neutering animals and inseminating various livestock.

It starred John McCredden, and Gilbert, so long without purpose in life, had lapped up the praise heaped upon his food by the charismatic, charming leading man.

He even created a special dish for McCredden, “Don Lane’s Coffee Table”, named after an unspeakable urban myth McCredden had delighted in retelling during a break between filming on set: a concoction of vegemite, soft-boiled egg and a tomato salsa all served on a glass plate.

John McCredden looked at this dish with an arched actor’s eyebrow. There was, Gilbert had to admit, a hint of Christopher Plummer about McCredden and he felt vaguely excited, hoping he would be slapped.

His career as a caterer continued to rise and even though his tendency of dressing in varying uniforms while serving food had at first unnerved various cast and crew – Sigrid Thornton and Judy Davis, it was said, had found it slightly odd that Gilbert served a delicious savoury pavlova in a full-face balaclava and night-fighting kit – this behaviour was soon laughed off as an eccentricity of a truly talented creative.

Then Garfield had stepped back into his life.

Gilbert’s talent with tastes was not matched by his discipline. He had nobody to direct or to command him, to guide him.

Various actors, especially slightly sluggish or rounded veterans or those that craved a chiselled body and bright alert eyes, had become so dependent on Gilbert’s Special Smoothies, packed with a sparkling cocktail of various illicit herbs and spices.

Many a Marvel-type body had relied on those smoothies.

He grew careless. He sent two Oscar winners, a theatrical knight, two dames and a host of peer-voted Logie winners into ICU with vital organ failure.

And the nadir came when he nearly killed an emerging precocious talent named Matilda Meadows who was playing the young Dame Edith Cowan in the TV miniseries Edith Cowan, Enigmatic Educator.

She was incorrigible, Matilda not Edith, imploring for a special smoothie. He had lost count of how many he had given her. All he knew was they were mixed to perfection.

Her life was only saved by a set nurse, two key grips and a quickly assembled impromptu stomach pump. “Thank god for gaffer tape,” Bryan Brown was heard to say in almost unimaginably animated tones.

Garfield appeared from the shadows. He was, he said, a fixer for those in strife in the “business”; one of the many irons in the fire he had.

“Someone says it’s time for you to disappear, champ.”

So, Gilbert Kevinour became Kev Kamikaze, trapped in indentured service on Garfield’s Paradise Island – on the orders of who? Gilbert had no idea.

What he did know was some of the special smoothies he’d made on the sets were lime cordial compared to the gear he gave Garfield’s island clients. Especially Scottish backpackers; they seemed disturbingly unaffected by the smoothies.

Then came the arrival of the actors and crew.

Gilbert prayed they wouldn’t recognise him and a COVID face mask, he found, was the almost perfect camouflage, though a part of him half-wished they would remember him. His cheek burned with an imaginary sting as he served John McCredden a breakfast with a hint of “Don Lane’s Coffee Table”.

“Now that looks familiar,” McCredden richly intoned.

Then came the late-night phone call and he heard that voice. That practised, kittenish imploring purr from Matilda. She wanted some special smoothies. She laughed and then another voice had said something heavily unintelligible, although there was a discernible hint of some Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

Matilda purred again: “We both need special smoothies, just like old times.”

So, he had made them, perhaps setting in place a chain of events that to …

… something sharp bit his hand.

It was Chopper.

Stupid dog. He was about to strike it but what was the point?

For they were both bereft now.

Too much murder, too many musicals. Not enough uniforms. He picked up the cigar and knew this smell, detected under the burnt hard tobacco. He had used this very toxin before. Marvellous for a ripped body and fine cheekbones in the right dose when counterbalanced by the correct enzymes but, laced through an old stogie, it would stop a Sherman tank.

He wrapped the cigar in a cooking glove and thought for some reason he should give it to someone in command.

Who?

His head hurt.

Suddenly, he remembered a scene from Langton Cassidy, Vet Detective where John McCredden had solved the mystery of an inheritance while inseminating a prize dairy cow.

How gracefully he had stood, shoulder deep in a Friesian’s rear end, smiling like Christopher Plummer and saying drolly as he withdrew his gloved hand, holding a small parchment: “There you are, inspector. The will to the Winslow fortune.”

Authority. Grace. Command. You can’t act that.

Kev/Gilbert smiled, patted the cigar in his pocket, then Chopper, and walked to the resort in the rain.

To start Oh Matilda from the very beginning — a very good place to start — go to Chapter 1 or ohmatilda.com.au

William McInnes is an actor and author whose career, work and life is best summed up by this appraisal by a critic: “If Humphrey B Bear could talk he’d sound just like William McInnes.”