13

SAM

Wrangling annoying extras, trying to keep children warm and having to be polite to their overbearing parents was difficult enough on an average day. It was even more difficult when a girl felt compelled to check her phone every half hour, without anyone noticing. It had been three whole sleeps since our date and the text he’d sent about how gorgeous it was to see me. My patience was almost broken enough to contact him. I wasn’t going to though; I’d promised myself I wouldn’t be that weak. I would have some fun, like Claudia said, without throwing myself at him. I did have some pride. I’m not completely sure where exactly . . . Anyway it was hard to check for text messages when everyone was meant to have their phones off. Especially when I’m essentially another set of eyes and ears for the first – who had to have a quiet set.

Today I was working on a commercial for an insurance firm. Most of it was inside, in a pretty grand house in Highgate, but there were a few set-ups on the driveway outside. The script went: family (the children overexcited, the parents looking harassed) are leaving a children’s birthday party, they pile into their car and then the father reverses – crunch – into the fence. The ad ends with the rest of the children spilling out of the house when they hear the noise, yelling in unison, ‘You should have insured with Carsure!’ It was riveting stuff.

All morning there had been much umming and ahhing over the weather, which had completely buggered up the proposed schedule. We were meant to shoot the exterior scenes last but as it had been threatening to rain all morning, the decision had been made to push on and get the outside shots done before the rain made it impossible. Unfortunately for me this had meant keeping fifteen extras, all aged around eight years old, plus their parents, quiet and happy inside all morning, while they waited for the scene when they were all due to emerge from the house, yelling about insurance – obviously the first thing on every eight-year-old’s mind. Whatever bright spark had written this script and thought they needed so many kids at this party (couldn’t they tell it with, say, six kids?) had obviously never been a third. And the extras! They weren’t the usual, well-behaved lot from an agency or a drama school or whatever – they were the children and friends of the client. A few of them were plugged into screens of one sort or another but most of them were horsing about and looking at me with an insolent eye, while the mums (with a couple of exceptions) gossiped and flicked through magazines.

‘Come in, Sam, over.’ The radio crackled on my hip.

‘Receiving, over.’ At last, the first! That had to be the call for my extras to stand by for their scene surely. Or, even better, we were wrapping for lunch. I glanced at my watch – one o’clock already, no wonder I was hungry. I watched a heavyset boy get up onto a chair and prepare himself to jump off into an area of floor littered with discarded shoes and toys, most of them with wheels.

‘Stand by for updated schedule. We’re stopping now to discuss, over.’

‘Roger, over.’

Crap. I shoved my radio back into its holster and reached the boy just before he jumped off, taking him by the arm and guiding him firmly to the ground.

‘Ow, that hurt!’ The boy shook off my hand. I looked at his flaccid face and saw a boy who didn’t get enough exercise or the word no. I sighed noisily – it was either that or scream.

‘I want Dad!’ he demanded, rubbing his arm some more.

A pretty Asian woman appeared then. ‘Don’t worry, Henry. Daddy’s busy being big man outside right now, you see him soon.’

Big man? Did she really just say that without any irony at all?

‘But I want him now!’

‘Come on, Henry, come and see what Nanny Chu has for you in her bag, it’s your favourite,’ and she took him out of my reach, thankfully, before I banged their heads together.

Taking a chance that no one would come looking for me, I quickly popped out of the back door of the house (the extras and I were holed up in the family room slash conservatory at the back of the house, out of the way of the camera at the front) and walked quickly to the corner of the building to peer around. The camera base was under a pop-up gazebo on the driveway at the front of the house, a good thirty yards from where I stood. Even from this distance I could tell that the tension on set had moved up a few notches from edgy (fuelled only by adrenaline) to unpleasant (fuelled by fear). Overhead, the clouds loomed darkly, while on the ground, the director, DOP, first, gaffer, producer and client were huddled together. Ridiculously, the producer still had his ‘client smile’ plastered on his face, although the stress had frozen it into a frightened rictus. He would look so much more convincing if he just frowned. But who would have the balls to tell him that? I watched the gaffer break away to peer at the sky through a gaffer’s glass, looking for the position of the sun behind the clouds. My heart sank. That would indicate they were discussing the next shot, not lunch. My tummy rumbled.

I turned to go back to the conservatory of hell when a boy shot past me, running straight for the gazebo. It was Henry. I was wrong about the lack of exercise – he could move.

‘Henry! Come back.’ Nanny Chu staggered past me in her heels, her hands pawing the air in front of her, looking a little like she was practising her doggy paddle in what I can only assume was an attempt to make herself go faster. Henry wasn’t listening; he was hell-bent on reaching that gazebo in record time and he was going so fast he looked like he was going to run straight into the meeting without stopping. My hand reached for the radio but wavered, not sure if a message on the radio would serve to warn my first of the incoming spoilt missile or distract her. As it was, it all happened too fast for me to stop it. Henry went to barrel into his father from behind but in the second before he made contact, his dad must have heard him – or more likely the squawking from the nanny – and half turned, just as Henry made contact, his dad’s elbow fitting neatly into the socket of Henry’s right eye. Henry reeled back, clutching his eye and screaming. Only then did my feet get into gear and I ran over to join the chaos. As I pulled up short of the group, the first fixed me with an icy stare.

‘Get back to the extras, Sam,’ she said, before motioning to the runner to fetch an ice pack from inside. I turned to go but she said my name again. It was really noisy with Henry going on and on, the producer flapping about apologising to the client and no doubt bitterly regretting his poorly thought-out ‘sure, what a great idea to have your son and his friends as the extras – he’ll love it!’ But I heard her all right. I could probably hear her 100 yards away, just speaking in her usual voice. There was something about firsts that always made you hear what they had to say. Something to do with consequences and all hell breaking loose, and being ever so slightly terrified of them at all times – something like that.

I turned back. She wasn’t looking at me but at the ground. There, just behind Henry’s anguished stomping feet, was my phone, the screen all lit up and blindingly bloody obviously on. Oh crap.

I scooped it up, fumbling to press the off switch.

‘Oops,’ I said, cringing. The first didn’t say a thing; she didn’t have to. Her look, cutting straight through my flaky ex-boyfriend-stalking bullshit was cold and clear. Sort it out, Sam. Now.