by Ray Cluley
“You’re alive,” was all I could think to say. “And you’re a good man.”
At this he nudged me aside.
“A man?” He laughed a hard sound. “A man? Look at me; I left most of myself over there. I’m not a man. I’m barely anything.” And then he looked at me, an up and down that remembered how I looked beneath my clothes, how I felt, and he said again, “I’m not a man.”
At first I thought he simply meant by comparison, a comment of self-pity, but the way he reddened afterwards told me he regretted the words and I realized he’d meant something else. He was not a man, not a real one, not because of what had happened to him years ago on the battlefield but because of what had happened only recently. His embarrassment, or his anger—whatever it was that made his skin flush—highlighted the parts of him that were still human. There wasn’t much.
“Goodnight, John.”
He at least had the decency to call out, to try to stop me from leaving. But he called the wrong name. He called the man he’d have preferred beside him.
He called the man I’d have liked to have been.
S
I have not seen General John Smith since that evening, though I keep up with his progress in the papers and the gossip keeps me informed as to his private life. At least, it speculates. I doubt anybody knows much about him really. Brave man, I hear. Terrible business.
Some of that I can agree with.
I may not have seen him since then, but I hear him almost every night. I dream of a desert I have never been to, thunder-blasted beneath an ashen sky and a cool horned moon, and I see machines destroyed by what they carry. Metal corpses litter the sands, empty shells that smoulder with a fading heat, and it’s John’s voice I hear calling from them, screaming out his pain between echoes of artillery as I squeeze my fists around handfuls of sand. Sometimes he gives it a name, this pain. It’s not mine. Even so, I run to find him and the sand falls away quicker than in any hourglass. Time runs out, and all the cannons erupt my way, belching flame, raging with fires that roast those caught inside, and I’m hit with thousands upon thousands of letters. A barrage of folded envelopes bearing the same name in his neat cursive script. And I’m buried beneath them feeling a deep pain of my own.
Sometimes, when I wake, it’s like the nightmare has just begun and all I had worth keeping, all that was real, I left behind in my dream. These are the days when my hands seem filled with sand, slipping through my fingers however I try to hold it. These are the days when I cannot pull myself together, dwelling instead on all that was said and unsaid. Dreams within dreams. Things that were, and things that could have been. I think of John, a haunted man in pieces, and I think of the range of friendly fire.
Even awake, I hear his voice, calling from a broken machine.
Shark! Shark!
We’ll begin right away with the title.
“Shark! Shark!”
We’re on a beach in the summer. I could tell you about how beautiful and clean the stretch of sand is, and how the sea is calm and bright and blue beneath a sky that’s just the same, but you won’t care about that now, not when someone’s calling, “Shark!” The cry comes from a blonde woman in a bikini, her hands cupped around her mouth, looking around the crowd. “Shark!”
But it’s not what you think. She’s a director, one of two directors actually, calling for the shark man. The shark man is just some guy, no one for you to worry about. Here he comes, with a big ol’ fin on a board, making his way through the crowd of extras. He’ll be swimming with that above him in a minute and not only is that the only part he’ll play in the film but it’s the only part he plays in this story.
That’s a lot of onlys, I know. Forget them. Look at the directors instead. They’re a husband and wife team. The wife looks Scandinavian but isn’t. You’ve seen her already. She’s the blonde in the bikini, of course, making it look good even in her late thirties, body streamlined and supple. Not your typical director attire, perhaps, but this is California (although, for the sake of the film it’s Palm Beach, Florida). Anyway, bikini or not, her baseball cap has “director” printed on it, only without the inverted commas. The husband’s the big man with the curled greying hair and the scraggly beard. Nothing neat and Spielbergy for him, oh no. This guy could be a lumberjack. But he’s not, he’s British, in his forties, and he’s a director. His cap says so, just like hers, but he never wears it, just lets it rest on the canvas seat that also has “director” printed on it (without the quotation marks).
“I want you to swim out to the raft and just circle it a coupla times, ’k?”
The shark man nods at her while looking at her breasts, thinking that because she wears sunglasses she can’t see him looking when actually that only works when it’s the other way around. He’s stupid. He won’t go far, not even in movies.
“Jesus,” she says as shark man heads for the sea.
Her husband says, “Will I do?”
She swats at his butt, what he would call his arse, because they still have that kind of relationship. Even on set they are very firmly husband and wife.
“Seriously, what is it?” He’s looking at her breasts, but that’s okay because he’s her husband and anyway, they’re good breasts.
“Shark guy was doing what you’re doing right now.”
“Well, they’re good breasts.”
“Thanks.”
“Real, too. And so much in this business isn’t.”
“You’re so deep.”
“Deep as the ocean, baby.” He flashes her a smile that’s bright in his beard and it’s the same smile he caught her with all those years ago, although the beard is different now. More grey. She smiles back and he sees this as encouragement, as men trying to be funny often do, and so he continues. “The people in this country of yours aren’t used to seeing anything real. Except Coca-Cola, of course. That’s the real thing. You gotta cut him some slack.”
“Can I just cut him?”
“Sorry.”
The two of them look out to sea where extras hold their position in the shallows.
“You think if we use that Coke line in the movie it will count as product placement?”
“Can you see him yet?”
The wife has one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun, even though she’s wearing sunglasses. The light on the water dazzle-flashes her as it moves with breeze and tide.
“There he is.”
“Swimming?”
“Yep. Unless it’s a real shark.”
The wife, who deserves a name really so let’s call her Sheila (although she’s not Australian, just like she’s not Scandinavian), cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, “Action!”
Bobby, that’s her husband, says the same thing into a handheld radio and they are filming, baby. Making movies.
S
The film began as a conversation in a bar about Jaws. (The film they’re making doesn’t actually begin that way. It begins with a water-skier discovering a body. She hits it, in fact, and there’s a tumbling splash and then she surfaces and it’s floating right at her in the wake of the boat and that scene alone will probably get them an R rating but we don’t care about that.) The film doesn’t begin with a conversation in a bar about Jaws, but the making of the film begins that way. The idea, which turned into a script, which eventually became casting and all the rest of it, that began in a bar with a conversation about Jaws.
Glad that’s clear.
“Seriously,” Sheila said, “has there ever been a decent shark movie since?”
“Can there be? I mean, it’s kinda difficult to top. Even the man himself couldn’t do it, no matter how many times he tried.”
“Be fair, he didn’t do the sequels.”
Her husband supports that statement as a good point by raising his glass and toasti
ng it. He’s drinking something that’s red and orange and yellow, a sunset in a glass, and it has some fruit stuck on the rim. Little details like that are important. Not to the story so much, but the general sense of atmosphere. Exotic, sunny, fun. You’re meant to like this guy, this couple, and if you’ve ever been on holiday with a lover and had drinks at a bar near a beach then you’ll know the feeling I’m going for here.
“I want to make something scary that isn’t all dark and stormy with vampires in it. Something scary in the sunshine.”
“Good title.”
“Thanks.”
Bobby uses both hands in a gesture that’s meant to represent words appearing on a screen or the bottom of a promotional poster. “Sunny Florida—it’s a scary place.” He smiles his smile at her and drinks again. See? He smiles a lot. He’s likeable. “Actually, this whole country scares the shit out of me.”
“Yeah, well, it’s warmer.”
“True, and I do like a warmer climate. But I still feel like a fish out of water here. Get it? Fish out of—”
“I’m serious. That movie scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.”
“Yeah, when you were a kid. Now it’s a rubber shark and a head rolling out of a wrecked boat.”
“It’s got good shots, good story.”
“Good music.”
“Good quotable lines.”
“Good monologue.” Bobby rolls his sleeve and points to a tattoo scar that isn’t there and slurs, “‘That’s the USS Indianapolis’.”
“Exactly. And it’s scary.”
“Which is what you want.”
This time she toasts his point because it’s accurate. She’s drinking something in a classic martini glass to suggest she’s cooler, not as frivolous, but still a drinker and therefore fun, like you and me maybe.
“So, scary summer film. With a shark.”
She frowns and nods and says after a moment’s thought, “Yeah, I’m thinking so.”
“Okay.”
“I like sharks.”
“I know you do, baby.” He smiles, and drinks.
“But we’re not just throwing a load of pretty teenagers into the water to kill them off one by one.”
“Heavens, no.” He signals for a couple more drinks with one of those friendly gestures that says they come here often, theirs is a good marriage, and to prove it he takes her hand in his other one without even thinking about it.
“Although we’ll have to have a significant number of deaths.”
“Of course.”
“And none of that false alarm scream crap either. None of that oh-my-God-it’s-a-shark-but-no-it’s-not-it’s-my-boyfriend-messing-about-underwater crap. In fact, I want the boyfriend screaming, fuck the girlfriend.”
“Fuck the girlfriend?”
She gives him the look that couples have for each other when one of them is being silly at the wrong time.
“Because that’s a different film entirely,” he says anyway.
“It needs to be something different.”
“Unless you mean he’s screaming ‘fuck the girlfriend’. Is that what you mean?”
The look has evolved into a look with raised eyebrows.
“A mutation maybe?” he says to compensate. “Genetic experiment?”
She wrinkles her nose at that.
“A feeding group brought close to the beach thanks to climate change.”
“Too many, keep it simple.”
“One big giant shark then.”
“No, something different.”
He raises his hands to the heavens in mock exasperation and then suggests “Vampire shark?”
“Keeping it real, remember.”
“When so much in this business isn’t.”
“Exactly.”
“Open Water tried to keep it real. And that sucked.”
They both toast to that point, tipping their drinks back together.
S
Right, back to the movie business.
The good-looking man, slouched on a towel, reading from a sheet of paper clutched in one hand while a finger on his other hand follows the words, is an up-and-coming movie star. He moves his mouth when he reads, but to be fair to him he might be practising pronunciation or delivery or something else actors do. His name is immediately forgettable for now until you’ve seen it lots of times on posters and movie credits, something like Tom, Brad or Colin (but if you’re thinking of another Tom, Brad or Colin currently working in the movie business then stop because he’s younger and more surfer-dude type, and I only used those names in a Tom, Dick or Harry kind of way). Phil. That’s his name. Probably Philip if he wants to be taken seriously, and he desperately does want to be taken seriously, although he never will be.
“Who’s that?”
She only means to glance over to see who Bobby means but she lingers a little because although their marriage is good, the man on the towel reading his lines is a damn fine-looking specimen of a man. “That’s Phil.”
“I mean, who is he in the film? I don’t remember any surfer-types that actually have lines.”
“He’s our Dreyfus.”
“Hardly.”
“He’s our shark expert. You know, our way of telling the audience things they need to know about sharks so they can be properly scared.”
“Who isn’t scared of sharks?”
She shrugs.
“Stop staring at him.”
“But he’s a damn fine-looking specimen of a man.”
“Bit too good-looking for a shark expert, isn’t he?”
“What, they’re all ugly?”
He shrugs. “Anyway, sharks are on Discovery Channel all the time. People know it all already. And they’ve seen that movie. You know, that other one about a shark.” He clicks his fingers, feigning memory loss.
“I think I’ll change into my bikini.”
“Don’t you dare, or I’ll change into one too.”
“Gross.”
“Gross is cutting open a shark and seeing everything spill out, like a fish head and a licence plate. Is the beautiful Phil going to do that, too?”
Sheila frowns at Bobby.
“You know, the autopsy scene? He pulls all that crap out of—”
“We’re not just ripping off Jaws.”
Bobby knows he’s gone too far because they really aren’t just ripping off Jaws and she’s sensitive about that.
“Phil is actually Bodie,” Sheila explains. (I know Bodie is a bit like Bobby but I’m trusting you won’t get confused. It’s also a bit like body, which might give you some idea of his role in this movie, and this story for that matter.)
“Okay,” says Bobby (not Bodie) as he remembers the script.
“He was a surfer once until a narrow escape from a . . . tiger shark? Bull? Not sure. Anyway, he doesn’t surf anymore but he’s been obsessed with sharks ever since.” She peers over the top of her sunglasses at her husband. “Maybe he watches Discovery Channel.”
Bobby holds up both hands and backs away with that smile we’ve seen a few times already although this time it seems a little strained. And if this was a movie instead of a story, the bunch of girls in bikinis that come running in now would do it as part of the same shot, appearing behind him and running past with shrieks of laughter, giving us a smooth transition from him to them. They frolic in the shallows which is just about the only time you can ever use the word frolic (unless Sheila and Bobby were making a film about lambs in the spring, which they aren’t). Bobby turns his head to watch them run by so when they splash each other and scoop up handfuls of water to throw, the view we have of them is his view.
“Hey!”
Sheila’s voice brings us back to the director couple and she stabs a
t Bobby’s eyes with forked fingers. He closes them and covers them with his hands and turns away before she can get him, not that she really would have.
“Good,” she says, “stay like that.”
“But they’re damn fine-looking specimens.”
“Shush.”
He peers at her from between his fingers, probably smiling but we can’t see that because of how his hands are up. What he sees is Sheila watching the girls kick water at each other and turn away shrieking. It’s a sound she’ll segue into a scream when they actually put it in the movie but for now they’re getting too wet for a rehearsal.
“Girls, no nipples until we’re rolling! Stay dry up there please!”
Sheila looks at Bobby and shrugs. “Gotta have something for the trailer.”
“True. True.”
“I figure we’ll get a view inland from the jetty crane,” she makes a sweeping gesture with her arms, “get them all frolicking with the store in shot behind them.”
The store she means is a actually a set. They’ve already filmed the inside shots at the studio, two couples buying supplies for a doomed fishing trip.
“Funny word,” says Bobby, “frolicking.”
“We’ll get that ‘live bait’ sign across the top of the shot, girls underneath.”
“Subtle.”
“After that, we’ll kill them all.”
Bobby claps his hands together and rubs them with maniacal glee. He’s allowed to rub them with maniacal glee because this is a horror story about a horror film and I may never get the chance to use the expression again.
S
Alright, rewind again. Flashback.
“The shark’s gotta be more than just a shark,” says Sheila.
“Like I said, vampire shark.”
“Asylum have done that already, surely.”
“You’re thinking octoshark.”
“Really?”
He shrugs, and drinks.