Page 21 of Vine

CHAPTER 8

CASPIAN

A live TV studio moved fast. Budgets, props, lighting. Contract clauses, such as the one stating Leigh preferred his left side to camera, not his right. Mine stipulating long-sleeved shirts. Social dynamics were complex, fluid, and hierarchical because time cost money. No one had patience for you to forget your lines or need five takes to warm up.

Low-budget outside broadcasting such as ours, on the other hand, moved as languidly as the vines pushed out new growth. If you didn’t knock your performance out the park first time, there was always tomorrow. And the day after that. For nine solid months. Plenty of time for bickering, for discovering your companion’s worst habits as well as their finest, for plotting their grisly demise as they plotted yours, safe in the knowledge none of you would (probably) ever go through with it.

Most of my time, when I wasn’t doing manual labour, was spent avoiding Leigh and Jonas or watching the riggers bash cables into the ground, then stand around scratching their collective chins discussing electricity generators. Only when thelighting was just so, the rain a mere drizzle, and the wind a laughable force 7 did we finally film a few pieces to camera.

Leigh revelled in it, like always. The gossip, the theatrics, the bloody self-importance, as if we were filming from a bunker in the Great War, instead of a paddy field in southwestern France. His enthusiasm carried through off camera too, at least when other folk were around, moulding his personality into whatever an audience wanted it to be. He made self-aggrandization sound humble; he knew everyone in the industry by six degrees, yet was still a fanboy. Not above flattery to get a leg up, he made every interaction with every single person on set matter, on the off chance they’d mention him favourably on their next project. Each new outfit sported by the tech supervisor was the coolest he’d ever seen, even if it was basically an anorak. Each set-up the slickest, each makeup artist the finest he’d worked with, each runner the most efficient.

Or perhaps he was just good at his job.Ourjob. At being a social butterfly, not an antisocial caterpillar like me. Like a hand in a glove, how easily I’d slipped into that role, sheltering in my new (snake-free) hexagonal home between takes, or finding escape buried deep in a thicket of woven vines.

I hadn’t forgotten my saviour, Max, but what with starting filming proper, nursing my painful eye, my shitty cold, and a general feeling like I’d been flattened by a truck, time had run away with itself without space to visit. A couple of times, I’d caught sight of him from a distance and waved; Emma joked he lurked around every corner. We still had plenty of segments to fill about the island locals. Maybe I could get to know him and ask him for an interview. His oddness intrigued me.

The following Saturday, Emma and I had a free morning to indulge in some shopping. Given that most of the tourist boutiques were closed for winter, we found ourselves in the bigLeclerc supermarket a few miles down the road, seeking gift inspiration along the uninspiring grocery aisles.

“Shaving foam? I think he ran out about six years ago.” Chuckling, Emma picked up an aerosol. I smiled too; my saviour did have something of the caveman about him. So what if he had a peculiar line in small talk? Those rugged shoulders more than made up for it. And he’d tucked me into a warm bed, watched over me, and fed me hot liquids and paracetamol. He was hot himself, in a primitive, I-spend-my-free-time-camping-in-a-hedge kind of way. Anyone who could pull off a beard as luxuriant as that should have no trouble pulling off other people’s underwear.

“No.” Firmly, I returned the shaving foam to the shelf. “The beard stays.”

Buying gifts for men was renowned for being hard, doubly so when limited to perusing the meagre pickings of an out-of-season supermarket. The first time I’d bought Leigh a present, I hadn’t a clue what he liked. Turned out to be other men. Ah, well.

“Beer?” Emma suggested. “We know he likes it; he was drinking a pint in the bar.”

“Nah.” I shook my head, recalling snippets of dull conversations with straight friends. “He might be one of those fussy real ale drinkers who only buys beers with stupid names, like Dirty Tackle or Piddle Slasher, or Hauling Oats. And, hard to believe, but none of those are made up.”

I scratched my head as we turned a corner and found ourselves in front of an endless shelf of condiments. More varieties of coffee than the Starbucks menu graced the row above. Was Max a coffee drinker? Fuck knows. What did you buy a man who had a fondness for blue rubber, cute dogs, and had already stripped you naked?

“How about replenishing his hot chocolate supplies?” Emma suggested. “With a big pot of something fancy? An organic brand, maybe? And a mug to go with it? We walked past a load of crockery on the way in.”

Not a bad shout. And a better suggestion than a bottle of cider vinegar, malt vinegar, rice vinegar, red rice vinegar, balsamic vinegar, sherry vinegar… what the hell did people do with it all?

In the end, I purchased a bumper pot of Twinings finest hot chocolate powder and two mugs, on the basis that turning up with one and then being offered a drink would feel awkward. As if the whole thing wasn’t awkward enough already. The mugs were the same bright shade of blue as Max’s rubber waders and his bedroom walls, which kept Emma amused until we were back in the car.

As we drew closer to our temporary home, past our neighbour’s perfect rows of knotted vines and our less-perfect ones, my temporary levity faded, replaced with a familiar deep gnawing. Naturally, I still had no fucking clue where I’d find myself eight months from now. The ghost of future Caspian had taken up residence on my shoulder, and he was a chatty bastard. Needling me with anxiety and with a direct line to Libby. The tentative job she had lined up for me and Leigh sounded promising—breakfast telly stand-ins for the main couple’s weekly day off and holidays. Waiting in the wings to take over when one of them fucked up. Rumour had it the news anchor washed down his early morning bacon roll with neat gin, so it was bound to happen sooner or later. She mentioned a producer I’d met and liked. No Jonas.

But would spending all my waking hours with Leigh stop me from moving on? It was working like a dream so far. Anxiety had become an ingrained habit. Cutting, a shameful reflex.

Moving to the gatehouse helped somewhat, as did being in the fresh air, even if it was a little too fresh most days. At least I didn’t have to hear Jonas shagging any more.

Emma had been unusually quiet too. “Have you heard from Sexy Stella?”

She glanced over. “Yeah.”

“And?”

With a drawn-out sigh, she drummed on the steering wheel. “She’s coming to Europe next month. To some sort of horticultural buyers’ convention in Amsterdam. It’s a whistle-stop tour, but she’s asked me if I’m free to meet up for a couple of nights.”

“Oh.” It hadn’t been the most enthusiastic of responses. “And are you?”

The riggers, techs and the rest of the production team dipped in and out, half of them juggling other outside broadcasts and home lives elsewhere. Only Jonas, Leigh, and I were chained to each other for the entire nine months—mostly because the budget was too small to pay for people to actually assist with the manual labour, and also because Jonas bizarrely insisted that we had to really immerse ourselves in an environment to produce authentic telly. Like we were befriending polar bears clinging to shrinking ice caps, not, you know, chatting up the barman down at the local pub and wheedling the residents' discount in the launderette. Understandable with the intensive training required for the Broadway show, coupled with America being the other side of the Atlantic, but this felt a tad excessive.

My point being that while I was stuck here with the nauseating lovers, Emma was perfectly entitled to a holiday break.

She frowned. “I think so. Amsterdam would be easy to get to for a weekend—there are two daily flights from Bordeaux.”

“Not that you’ve checked or anything. So why aren’t you already booking yourself in for a back, sack, and crack, or whatever lesbians do to maximise their chances of a quality shag?”

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