by Natasha West
Close Ups and Mess Ups
By
Natasha West
Copyright © 2017 by Natasha West
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Chapter One
‘Allie, I don’t know why you did this, but I can’t have this sort of thing going on’ my boss, Richard (‘Call me Dickie’, no one ever did) cried out as he paced back and forth behind his desk. ‘It’s… It’s… It’s abusive!’ he cried out, finally deciding what it was that bothered him about my crime.
I was sat on a chair, strangely calm. It had felt awful, getting called in like this. At first. But the longer it went on, this tirade, the more I relaxed. It was only going to go one way and I couldn’t do anything about it, even if I wanted to. I was getting fired.
I was prepared for it, in a way. Or at least, I wasn’t incredibly surprised. Maybe I’d been hoping to make it happen. Because I hated my job. It was a waking-up-with dread-crying-in-the-toilets-hoping-to-get-hit-by-a-car-on-the-way-in kind of a job.
It wasn’t the work itself, although that was absolutely rubbish. I was an order picker for a catalogue shop. You know the type of place. You look for the thing you want online or at a screen in the shop, but you don’t actually see it until you’ve paid for it and it comes out the back, by mysterious means. I was the means. I was in the back, in the warehouse, waiting to see a number pop up on the display. And then it was my job to run around to the relevant shelf, grab the item and put it on the conveyor belt to slide through to the front, where it would be handed over by the front of house staff to the customer. Boring work but fine. I was twenty-two so crappy jobs were the only kind I’d ever known. Before this, it was fast food and before that it was cleaning and before that, my paper round. So I didn’t mind the work itself, even though I was on my feet all day long and they wouldn’t let me wear my Converse sneakers, insisting on shoes, even though no one ever saw me. But sore feet and a bad back, you can live with that. If your colleagues don’t make the situation any worse. And mine did. They were a collection of the most miserable bastards ever put on this earth and they all seemed to hate me. Maybe they just hated their lives and I was a convenient scapegoat because I was young and people thought I was uppity. In their very particular ways, they made the job a lot worse.
There was Sheila, who picked with me. Fifty years old with a moustache that gave her a vague look of Che Guevara, she didn’t have any direct power over me but she’d been there for god knew how long and I’d been there for a year, so she tended to behave as though she were my boss, which meant yelling at me when she felt I wasn’t moving quick enough. Then there was my actual boss, a passive aggressive dick who liked to tell me, with that light, fake laugh that people seem to think hides the fact they’re being shits, that my ponytail needed to be tighter or that my shoelaces were a health and safety accident waiting to happen - or whatever other minor uniform infractions he could pick on - and he liked to do it with an audience, to really get his kicks. Bernie, sixty, always offering me shoulder massages. I had to suppress a shudder every time he looked at me. And then there was Jenny, who wasn’t malicious, only very, very dull. She’d been there five years and loved the place and was so content that it made me feel bad for both of us. Sad for her because she felt this was as good as it was going to get and me because I’d probably never be as gratified as she was with life’s simple pleasures.
But my malaise wasn’t all about the job. There was another reason I was unhappy. About a month ago, I’d been rejected from film school. Not just any film school, but THE film school. The British School of Film. I’d gotten through to interview stage and I was amazed. It had seemed within my reach, if I could nail the interview. But I’d done the unthinkable. I’d cried during the interview. A panel of three looking at me from across a table and one of them, a woman named Kim Gray who taught there (a hard faced forty with a severe black bob, the hallmark of a villain) had started to tell me exactly what was wrong with the film I’d submitted as part of my application.
It was shot on my mobile, the best camera available to me at the time. Not really up to professional standards but I’d found a way around that by leaning into its failings, making a found footage horror movie about a young guy (played by an old friend of mine) who thinks he’s seen something disturbing through his neighbour’s window and makes a video diary about it.
But Kim Gray didn’t think much of it.
It’s not like I’ve never received criticism. But never quite like this. She seemed personally offended by its apparent failings and she attacked it viscously.
‘It’s not a real movie, it’s a collection of ideas ripped off from other movies strung together to make what I could only call a horror pastiche.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far’ another teacher, Pete, had interjected. ‘And I actually think there’s some merit in learning by imitation.’
But all I really heard was Kim’s harsh words. Despite my shock at how mean she was being, I tried to make my case. ‘I realise there’s a nod to Rear Window…’ I began to say but Kim shook her head at me, unsatisfied. ‘It’s more than a nod’ she told me flatly. ‘It’s almost completely ripped off and splashed with The Blair Witch Project.’
I’m not the kind of person to blub all over the place just because someone doesn’t like my work. I’d come to this interview, expecting it to be tough. But as this woman, who held my future in her hands, went on a tirade that detailed every technical and story failing, I felt my throat go tight and my eyes well up.
One tear was all that managed to leak out, but it was enough to feel humiliated. I quickly wiped it away and gathered myself, trying to answer her with as much dignity as I could muster. When I was finished, Kim simply smiled and nodded. And then it was over. I walked out feeling like I’d been hit by a truck.
When the letter came to say it was a pass but thanks for coming, we enjoyed meeting you, blah, blah, blah, I wasn’t at all surprised. What other way could this really have gone?
It had been plan A. There wasn’t really a plan B. So now I was stuck in this shit job and I didn’t have anything else. I wondered if I should give up on the idea of being a film maker, place my dreams in a box in the back of my wardrobe with all the other junk, and get on with adult life, in all its disappointing glory. Buckle down and do the best I could with the hand I had.
But I didn’t quite do that. Instead, I did something else, something strange and pointless. I started making a film about my workplace. I began to capture the work day on my phone, secretly, snatching every moment I could, unobserved. I filmed the banal, the irritating, the casually monstrous, editing it together at the end of each day, making some sort of fly-on-the-wall documentary. Needless to say, it was not complimentary.
I wasn’t planning to do anything with it, no one but me could have been interested. But I kept doing it because it was saving me somehow. It was a reason to get up and come here, to keep going. It made me feel like I was being myself, doing what I could do in the way only I did it. I was still doing what I loved, even if it didn’t matter, even if no one cared to see it.
Over the course of a month, I ended up with hours of ra
w footage, cut down to twenty golden minutes. And on the day in question, the day of my sacking - on my lunchbreak, I was taking a look at it while I nibbled a sandwich when Sheila walked up behind me and saw her own angry, moustachioed face on my screen.
‘What is that?!’ she cried and I jumped up, trying to close the phone down. But I was pushing the phone to the limit and it was a cheap thing to start with and froze all the time, so as I tried to close down the film it just kept running. ‘Is that me? Have you been filming me?’ Sheila demanded.
I turned the phone over and put it face down on the table in panic, but the sound kept playing, Sheila’s angry voice spilling out of the tinny speakers.
‘Sheila, it’s just…’ I tried to explain. But I couldn’t think of one reasonable cause to be looking at Sheila on my phone.
‘This isn’t right, you can’t do things like that!’ she cried and went straight to the office. She was telling Richard.
I sat there and did nothing for several minutes. I was as frozen as my phone. What would this mean? Would I get in trouble? What exact rule had I really broken?
But as the afternoon progressed, I realised the rules didn’t really matter, not in my position as a lowly picker. Richard demanded to see what I had on my phone. I considered arguing for personal property and privacy laws. But in the end, I simply started the film up and handed him the phone, letting him watch it from the beginning. It was a self-destructive act but my god, it was satisfying. My first and only audience for the film was a man seeing himself acting like every dickhead boss in the world. After a few minutes of his personal lowlights, he gave me back the phone, yelled at me for a few minutes and then told me to go.
Did he break employment law by sacking me on the spot? Yes. Would I fight it, go to my rep, take a stand? No. Because I was mostly relieved. I didn’t know how I was going to pay my bills, but that worry would have to wait. For now, I was getting the fuck out of this place and that felt good.
‘Alright, Dicky’ I said, finally using the nickname he’d begged us to use, at a moment that would probably ruin it for him forever. ‘See you around.’ I left his office, clocked out, threw my clocking card in the bin and walked out.
When I got home, it was about 2PM. I lived in a shared house with three other girls but they all worked, and the place was empty. That was a mercy, because I didn’t want to commiserate with them. We weren’t friends. They were the type of girls who spent a lot of time thinking about how their hair looks and counted the hours till their next drunken night out. I was a film nerd who wanted nothing more than to sit in a darkened room and watch movie after movie, until the small hours. Our lives didn’t have much overlap.
But they weren’t here, which meant I had the big screen in the living room to myself. I was going to climb onto the sofa, fire up Netflix and start up the next thing in my watch list. It was a big list, full of classics so I never had to scroll through, looking for something good. I was too busy educating myself with a carefully constructed playlist. But as I settled in with a cup of tea, the remote in my hand, my phone rang.
My first thought was that Richard had cooled down and decided he’d been too rash, that maybe he shouldn’t have just outright sacked me, that he was calling to ask me back, probably with some caveats. And what could I do if he did? I’d have to go back. I wouldn’t be able to turn down a paying job, not if it was handed back to me. It was a depressing thought, that my freedom was about to be revoked.
But as I looked at the number, I didn’t recognise it. It wasn’t even local. It was a London number. Probably a spam caller. I cancelled the call.
I started up the movie, and my phone beeped. There was a message. I was going to ignore it but for some reason, I didn’t. I paused the movie, called the answer service and listened as someone coughed and then said, ‘Hi, my name’s Jenny Cole, I’m an administrator for The British School of Film. You recently applied for a place here and I know you didn’t get in first time, but someone has dropped out of the film-making course and you’re our first alternate; it was a very close race before, so we’d like to offer you a place. The course has started now, but we’re only a few weeks into term so you should be able to catch up. If you’re interested, call us back as soon as possible.’ The message ended there.
I briefly thought it could be a prank. This couldn’t be happening, could it? The teacher had as good as told me she thought I was talentless and in response, I’d cried like some little kid who’d dropped their ice cream. On top of that, I’d gotten the sack today. I was a loser, going nowhere. That narrative made sense to me. But getting into a top film school, even as a runner up? That didn’t track at all. It wasn’t part of the Allie Parker story. Not as it had been told to me so far.
I played the message again. It sounded legit. I played it one more time, now beginning to accept that it was real. I was in.
I stood up and began to pace around the room. My head felt like it was on fire. I needed to speak to someone, talk it through. I thought of Hannah but quickly decided that probably wasn’t a good idea. We’d been seeing each other on and off (probably more off than on) for about six months and she wasn’t really my girlfriend in the true sense. She had a pretty short attention span and I was fairly certain I was only one of many women she had on rotation, although I never asked because I didn’t really want to know. She was training to be a firewoman and she liked movies in the way most people do, but she never really seemed to connect with any of my short films. She wasn’t someone to share this moment with.
I decided to call the only person who could make sense of this. ‘Robbie!’ I cried as my younger brother picked up the phone.
‘What’s up, are you alright?’ he asked, obviously alarmed by my tone.
‘I got in! I got into BSF!’
‘Hold on a sec’ he said and then I heard him say to his teacher, ‘It’s my sister! It’s important!’ I heard his teacher complain that he shouldn’t be taking calls in class and I realised I’d forgotten that he was at school. Robbie was sixteen, after all. Too young to be anyone’s guru but still, he was the person I’d thought of in my panic. He was sensible, not like me at all. I’d buggered about all through school, too interested in my own projects, making my films. Robbie was Mr Grade A. And he was getting himself in a rare spot of trouble because I’d phoned him in the middle of the school day and because he was the best fucking brother on the planet, he’d picked up.
‘Robbie, sorry, this can wait’ I told him.
‘No, it’s alright’ he told me, ‘I’ve left the room now so she can calm her tits.’
‘She wasn’t actually teaching the class, was she?’
‘Nah, independent study. So you got in?!’
‘Yeah. Someone else dropped out so I get their place. If I want it.’
‘What do you mean, ‘If’?’
This was the point. I was in, but it was still up to me to choose to go. Right now, this was great news. But once I got there, that was when it could all go south. I could really mess up, realise I was a hack, be worse off than I was now. Because it was one thing to suspect you were talentless. It was another to spend a whole year and thousands of pounds to know it with perfect clarity.
‘I’m not sure if I should go…’ I started to explain. But Robbie exploded. ‘Are you crazy?! Of course you’re going! This is going to be awesome for you!’
‘It’s expensive, Robbie. I’ll have to get a loan and I’ll have to move to London…’ I told him, talking around my real problem.
‘Then get a loan and move! You’ve got to do this!’
‘What if I hate it?’
‘What if you love it?’ he countered.
I sighed, not sure what other excuse I could come up with to explain why I shouldn’t go.
‘What do you think Dad will say?’ I tossed out.
Robbie laughed. ‘I think we know what he would say and I think we know you don’t care.’ He had me there. If it mattered to me what he thought, I’d be studying busines
s or accounting or fucking dentistry. Anything with ‘A real future’ as he liked to call it. To him, a creative career was like hanging onto a ledge with the tips of your fingers, moments away from plummeting to your death. He was a financial advisor and he couldn’t understand why I wanted to make movies. To him, it was a silly pipedream. And in the last few years, all I’d achieved so far was proving him right. I’d been in dead end jobs, making zero budget shorts and getting nowhere. Still, I couldn’t seem to let the dream go. That’s why I’d moved out at seventeen. I couldn’t take the hammering I was forever getting from him. I’d rather be poor and working in shit jobs than have to listen to lecture after lecture about financial stability.
But before I could navigate the finer points of Dad’s credo with Robbie, he said exactly what I’d unknowingly called him for. ‘You can do this, you know. I think it’ll be tough, but you can do it. Because you want it.’
I bit my lip.
‘If you don’t do this, you’ll regret it’ he informed me ominously. Sixteen and he was a wise man. He was right. I would.